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Today’s Pickings turns to another review of Bloodlands the story of the lands where Hitler and Stalin clashed. Before that we have some lighter fare. First is David Warren’s look at Vladimir Nabokov and his scientific pursuits. Yup, the author of Lolita was an accomplished naturalist who studied butterflies and in the process expounded theories that have just been proven with DNA testing.
… You make money however you can, and Nabokov also obtained a research fellowship at Harvard, proving so proficient that he was ultimately left in charge of the university’s butterfly collections. There he found the materials to speculate on the evolutionary descent of the whole range of New World “blues,” and to concoct the “imaginative” hypothesis that they were derived from Eurasian species, which had been “able to see Alaska from Russia,” and began crossing the Bering Strait during a warm spell in the Earth’s climate history, 11 million years ago.
In five major waves, corresponding to falling temperatures, successive butterflies crossed, then spread, finally advancing all the way to Chile. The proof that speciations within South America had not been the result (as previously assumed) of the separation of groups by the rise of the Andes, was a demonstration that butterflies on either side of that young mountain chain were more closely related to proposed ancestors in Southeast Asia, than to each other.
Enter the Harvard biology professor, Naomi Pierce, who has had the honour of telling the world this last fortnight, that Nabokov’s fanciful hypothesis is true, down to the most provocative assertions. Using the most advanced current molecular technology, she has tracked the whole history through DNA, confirming Nabokov dead right through fine details on five out of five. …
Pickerhead visited a blog named TreeHugger and learned of 500 year old “living” bridges in India.
Some of the smartest, most sustainable engineering feats were discovered hundreds of years ago, and many have gone unacknowledged. For evidence, take the bridge growers of northeastern India. Planning 10-15 years in advance, they build what may be the most sustainable foot bridges in the world — by literally growing them out of living tree roots. These bridges are extremely sturdy, reach up to 100 feet long, and many are at least 500 years old. …
… In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction–say, over a river–the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems. The thin, tender roots of the rubber tree, prevented from fanning out by the betel nut trunks, grow straight out. When they reach the other side of the river, they’re allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.
Sure, “enough time” isn’t exactly expedient by today’s standards — each root bridge takes between 10-15 years to grow strong enough to be put into use. But strong they are — evidently up to 50 people can cross the heftier bridges at once, and many bridges are over 100 feet long. And they only become stronger with time, as the roots continue to grow. …
The NY Times has an interesting shipwreck story.
In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s.
Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”
Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.)
Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket.
And then, that ship sank, too.
On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers announced that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors. …
The Economist tells us how electrical transmission lines can be less ugly.
… The pylons in question have been designed by engineers at TenneT, the firm that runs the Netherlands’ national electricity grid, in collaboration with KEMA, a Dutch research company. Instead of a single lattice tower, the cables are supported by two elegant steel poles up to 65 metres high. There are no arms. The six cables that pass from one pylon to another are each borne by two insulators attached to the poles. The resulting arrangement, though hardly invisible, is reasonably elegant. As much to the point, though, it has technological advantages. Though no harm has been proven from them, conventional pylon cables, which transmit a three-phase alternating current, generate a strong electric field and a continuous buzz of low-frequency radio waves which some people who live near them fear might be detrimental to their health.
TenneT’s pylons should help allay that fear. Carrying all the cables in a “stack” between the poles, rather than hanging them separately on outward-facing arms, allows them to be arranged in a way that causes the individual fields generated by each cable to cancel each other, weakening the overall field around the pylons. The result is far less low-frequency radiation. The combination of being less of an eyesore and producing less electrical smog should, TenneT hopes, soften objections to the construction of new overhead power lines. …
Slate’s review of Bloodlands provides this;
… There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin’s has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.
Here is where the shock of Snyder’s relatively few pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder’s carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.
The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.
The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a “mixed economy” with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to “collectivize” the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.
I’ve read things as horrifying, but never more horrifying than the four pages in Snyder’s book devoted to cannibalism. In a way I’d like to warn you not to read it; it is, unfortunately, unforgettable. On the other hand, not to read it is a refusal to be fully aware of what kind of world we live in, what human nature is capable of. The Holocaust taught us much on these questions, but alas, there is more to learn. Maybe it’s better to live in denial. Better to think of human history Pollyanna-like, as an evolution upward, although sometimes I feel Darwin spoke more truly than he knew when he titled his book The Descent of Man. Certainly one’s understanding of both Stalinism and human nature will be woefully incomplete until one does read Snyder’s pages.
Here is an excerpt: …