In the same way that people value fantastically complex mechanical watches ever more as electronic watches get cheaper, people may well come to value expensive hand-made books even as bookstores vanish, shelves get dumped into landfills, and reading becomes a wholly digital experience. The pick-up line of the future may be “would you like to come up to my apartment and see my … book?”

Via Neatorama I learned about Johnny Carrera, the owner of Quercus Press, a printer in Waltham, Massachusetts. That puts Quercus more or less in my back yard, which makes them pretty cool already as far as I’m concerned. Even better, Quercus has published the Pictorial Webster’s, which consists of all the illustrations from the 1859, 1864, and 1890 editions of Webster’s dictionary. Sure, you can buy the Trade Edition for $35, but Good Heavens! wouldn’t you be the man about town with your own hand-tooled Full Leather Goat Binding edition. All yours for $3500.

There’s a great story about how the project came about. Nothing makes me salivate like tasty jargon, and sentences like this just suck me in:

While I was repairing the paper, re-lining the spine, and backing it with an extended alum tawed lining which I used to attach new split boards, and covering the book with alum-tawed goat, a classmate showed me an article about the Merriam-Webster Co.

Alum-tawed goat! This is a man who owns a working 1938 Model 8 linotype machine. And knows how to use it. Now watch this movie, and be sure to at least watch the old Model 8 chugging away at around 1:40. It’s thrilling. It’s horrifying. This is the way the world used to work!

Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

“Hey, babe, want to come up to my apartment and take a look at my Full Leather Goat Binding?”

When we look back at this episode, Galileo is always our friend. We sit next to him on the bench and chuckle. Grinning and pointing at the Aristotelian dopes, we ask him: How can all those people be so stupid?

Galileo is right not to be so impressed with us. Now as then, it happens all the time.

To choose a more recent example, why are Americans getting so fat? The answer is obvious. We’re rich, lazy, and overfed. Case closed. But the data doesn’t support the story. Exercise and caloric intake don’t correlate with weight gain. And perversely, sometimes malnutrition, poverty, and obesity appear to be best friends. What’s going on? Science writer Gary Taubes has taken on this important subject in his book Good Calories Bad Calories. Here’s a lecture of him talking about his book.

My brother Paul is an endocrinologist who is especially taken with the book. He talks about it all the time. He talks about it so much that I asked if he’d be willing to write about the book and why it matters. Happily, he agreed, and here is the result…

Good Calories, Bad Calories

by Paul Gulley, MD

Regarding Good Calories, Bad Calories and 35 years of probably bad dietary advice

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
— Mark Twain

Disclaimer- this brief article is an attempt to summarize a large volume and must be viewed not as definitive, but as a starting point. I would heartily recommend reading the entire book. It explains the science and the politics of current and past USDA/HHS recommendations, and how they have gone awry.

Often a book or an idea will turn your world and your beliefs, cherished beliefs, upside down. Suddenly everything you had counted on and all the advice you had given is shown to be if not false, at least tainted. Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is such a book.

As an internist I try to advise patients with what I believe to be a healthy diet. Over the years the diet mantra has been low fat and low calorie along with exercise. And if a person did not achieve their goals then it was their fault, a failure of will.

This advice was based on the ubiquitous and what I thought was the well-researched Food Pyramid. The Food Pyramid had its origins with establishment of recommendations from the USDA. The original guidelines came out in the 1890s and have been revised over the years to tell Americans what they should and should not eat. The 1970s version of the guidelines came out of the McGovern Hearings with the dawning realization that cholesterol and fats were found to be elevated in people with coronary heart disease. At that time, the seemingly logical conclusion was made that fat on the plate equaled fat in the blood stream and fat in the gut. The recommendations flowed from several assumptions: 1) all calories are equal and are handled in the same way by the body, 2) thus eliminating a gram of fat, which contains 9 calories per gram, gives you a better return on investment than eliminating a gram of carbohydrate at 4 calories per gram, 3) fat calories are fattening and 4) exercising can burn up excess calories. The Food Pyramid emphasized low fat diet. There were some dissenting voices at the hearings, which thought that a causal relationship had not been established and recommended further studies. But these were voted down and the food Pyramid became the law of the land and the official advice given by doctors and dietitians (and it still is).

All food comes in three categories: fat, carbohydrate and protein; thus if you encourage a low fat diet then it will necessarily be a high carbohydrate diet. Over the last 35 years people have done what they were told and have consumed a relatively low fat diet. Every label in the grocery store screams “low fat” and “reduced fat.” But calorie consumption has increased – primarily in form of carbohydrates. Coincidently over last several years there has been explosion in the rates of obesity and diabetes.

Some basic physiology is necessary. Insulin is the key hormone in carbohydrate and fat metabolism. The pancreas produces insulin primarily in response to carbohydrate stimulus in the diet. Insulin then facilitates the uptake of glucose into cells. It also stimulates fatty acid production in the liver. Insulin then blocks the release of fat from the fat cells or adipocytes. So insulin is a double whammy for fat cells: it encourages production of excess fatty acids and inhibits the breakdown and release of fat stores from fat cells. So fat accumulates but it can’t be used.

So as our nation, encouraged by the recommendations of the USDA, forged ahead with the low fat diet, the epidemic of obesity and diabetes became inevitable. It was further pushed by the agricultural policies that encouraged the planting of corn and food science that produced massive quantities of high fructose corn syrup, which turns out to be a very potent stimulator of insulin.

How do we reverse course and try to reestablish balanced recommendations for how people should eat? We need to go back to the basics and study the effects of different diets on different populations. This had been recommended in the 1970s and had been voted down as needlessly expensive. This needs to be done because all of the insulin/carbohydrate/fat interactions are driven by genetics and we do not understand the genetics well. That is why there are people who seem to be able to be able to eat anything and not gain weight and there are people who almost literally have to starve in order to lose weight.

This explanation also helps in the understanding of obesity. Until recently obesity has been viewed as a failure of will. If only these people could control their appetites and exercise sensibly then they should be able to lose weight. But a more complete understanding seems to be that obesity is a genetic disorder of fat accumulation uncovered by exposure to concentrated carbohydrates (particularly sucrose and high fructose corn syrup). Also hunger seems to be driven by carbohydrate intake. So carbohydrates makes you hungry and fat.

Okay, what are we supposed to do until the population studies are done (if ever they are done)? The primary recommendations are to avoid concentrated carbohydrates- white things: bread, pasta, potatoes, rice and sweets. These are foods that stimulate insulin and begin the cascade of fat production and storage. Diet aficionados reading this may recognize these same guidelines in the Atkins Diet. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s Dr Atkins advised a low carbohydrate diet for weight loss. However a low carbohydrate diet is necessarily at high fat diet. In the 1970s fats were anathema to the gurus of the day and Dr Atkins was vilified and denounced in official literature as a quack. But this diet appears to be closer to the best recommendations. So it is not how much you eat but what you eat.

It seems probable that we all have a tolerance for carbohydrates that is likely genetic. Obese persons have a very low tolerance for carbohydrates and should try to avoid them altogether. Others can limit to achieve the goals of weight and metabolic parameters. I have not discussed glucose toxicity and the metabolic syndrome and its consequences for risk of vascular disease. But obesity is only one of the risks involved with carbohydrates.

Again this is a very complicated subject and much more can be said and is said in the book. The concepts of homeostasis and the pathology of the metabolic syndrome are discussed in detail. Importantly, the book also elucidates the politics of science and public policy. The book demonstrates that the obvious explanation just might not be the true explanation.

The whole question of diet and policy recommendations leads to a larger question of other “truths” that just might not be “true.” How and what is ”scientific certainty”? How do we establish societal “truths” for general consumption? These problems become concrete, as I have to explain to patients that the advice I have rendered for the last 24 years was not the best advice. Yet many still refuse to concede that the concepts are valid since they don’t make “sense.” As my father-in-law said when I tried to tell him that his cherished low fat diet might not be necessary, “I don’t care if it’s true, I just don’t believe it”

Finally, I want to convey the bewilderment this book awakened. Delighted by a fresh approach to the evidence I had thought codified and unchanging, I feel renewed. I hope others share in this same sense of wonder. It is good to be reminded that there is no such thing as absolute scientific certainty. Additional research may one day contradict the conclusions of this book, but that would be science working, as it should.

For our purposes here, one of the fun things about it is Alan’s list called The Best Graphic Novels. I didn’t know Alan was a fan of graphic novels, but I see he’s picked some of my all-time favorites too. American Born Chinese was a recent lucky find for me, and was part of my omnivorous search for a better understanding of the crashing surf between Chinese and American cultures.

I was thinking of adding a list on books about numbers: pi, e, i, phi, zero, infinity, and one. But I’ve only read two of those so far, and at any rate, Flashlight Worth is still in beta, so it doesn’t support automated book list creation yet. But it looks like a fun place. Check it out.

Studying the history of human development has typically drawn on things buried in the dirt: paleontological/biological artifacts like the fossilized bones in Olduvai Gorge for one example, and archaeological/cultural artifacts like the ruins of Nineveh and Route 66 for another. The problem is that stuff comes out of the dirt… very… slowly, putting a real damper on our ability to learn quickly. Wade’s book focuses on a new kind of ore, which is the living information buried in our genes and in our languages. Genetic data in particular is a fabulous gold mine for those trying to work out our past.

Surprisingly, it’s not just human DNA that’s useful. It’s possible, for instance, to work out approximately when humans started wearing clothes by genetically dating when human lice split into head-dwelling species and clothes-dwelling species. Clever! And we’re starting to get a remarkably accurate story of how humans migrated out of Africa and populated the world.

Happily, Wade is not the least bit gun-shy in talking about evidence of evolution currently under way in humans. There is good evidence that our behavior is pacifying with remarkable speed owing to the powerful adaptive advantages of law-abiding socialization. But just as evolution selects for the important, so it forgets the unimportant. Sadly, we’re shedding our sense of smell with alarming speed. A good nose makes your dinner taste good, but it’s not especially selected for. Rats can synthesize their own vitamin C, but humans lost that ability long ago. As long as you take your Flintstones vitamins, who needs to synthesize the stuff?

Obviously this all leads to the big question: what’s next? Wade doesn’t speculate much, but I will. It seems clear that modern medicine is going to allow our onboard health maintenance to get weaker and weaker. Just to pick one example: accurate, timely vaccines mean our native robustness won’t be put to the test, and that which isn’t selected for drops away. This may appear disturbing, but really what we’re doing is evolving an outboard immune system. We are offloading many heretofore intrinsic biological tasks to the next level of abstraction: the community.

This includes the outboard brain. Networks are the nervous systems for the big bug, the communal organism that we are becoming. Just as individual cells had to make some dramatic accommodations in order to form multicellular organisms, our native behaviors will be ever more conducive to hive action. We’ll sure have to get rid of all the errant terrorism genes before we can manage long term space colonies. It only takes one crazy person to wipe out a space village.

Don’t tell me you need more information… just answer the question. Which is more important? And which is more powerful? They clearly have a tangled relationship. Science fiction authors and scientists are always quoting each other. Arthur C. Clarke, quoting himself, famously conflated magic and technology: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I just finished reading a gift from my sister-in-law, an odd little book called Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler. Actually, the book isn’t so odd… it’s the book’s topic that is odd: The Museum of Jurassic Technology. The cabinet of wonder is the museum, a bizarre and disordered little museum on a nondescript street in Los Angeles. But the more nonsense you read about it, the more sense it all makes. Wonder is the fountainhead of reason.

Wunderkammern, or rooms of wonder, were the sixteenth century predecessors of museums. In modern terms, they were eccentric collections of tchotchkes and oddities from the natural world thrown together with, ideally, a sense of style.

Like this: Athanasius Kircher takes us from here to here, where we learn about these and this which eventually takes us to Arthur Ganson’s Machines (make sure you watch Wishbone Man walking, that tiny tireless Sisyphus). And from Wishbone Man it is a short stroll to here.

The amount of activity undertaken by the U.S. military in World War II is truly staggering to contemplate. Germany had to fight on both eastern and western fronts, but America fought on eastern and western fronts each separated by thousands of miles of ocean from the homeland. This meant mastery of the seas was imperative. Morison managed to talk President Roosevelt into giving him, as a working historian, a naval officer’s commission and assignment to various warships throughout the conflict. His book does a thorough job sketching out the scope and drama of U.S. naval operations in the war, and since he was literally on the scene at the time, he adds a welcome journalistic touch from time to time. For instance, he tells us that nobody in the service called Admiral William Halsey “Bull” Halsey. It was just Bill. Now you know.

Its subtitle is “Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” and in it the author travels through the modern South talking to people about the Civil War, what they know of it and what it means to them. Horwitz, who spent years as a war correspondent in places like Bosnia and Iraq, is surprised to find so many people (eccentric and otherwise) who are intensely passionate about that ancient conflict. They aren’t interested in seceding anymore so much as they are interested in remembering and romanticizing the Lost Cause of the Old South. I admit I’m a sucker for Civil War books, but this is a great read.

I am a Southerner, and I’m glad the South lost that war. It fought for the wrong reason and lost for the right reason.

But what a story!

It’s damn near impossible to read about the run-up to Gettysburg or Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg and not be swept up by the drama of it. And I’ll tell you one thing the South has that the North does not: we know what it means to have lost a war. And I’m not talking about any Vietnam did-we-lose-or-didn’t-we ambiguity. We were whupped fair and square, invaded, defeated, and occupied. Strangely, there is a perverse comfort in that. The South stood up for what it believed and was pinned to the floor. The burden’s off. All Southerners, eccentric and otherwise, are welcome to relax in the warm and weathered lap of humility. It makes it a little bit easier to kick back and live a life.

You want some bourbon? Drink some bourbon. You want a smoke? Light up a goddamned cigarette. A little blustery Uncle Sam is all well and good, but it helps to be able to chuckle.

The Cause is Lost, but the memory endures. I’m glad the cause lost, but I’m glad the memory endures.

This week, we are grateful to St. Frank for sharing a word with us about cigarettes and enduring memories.