Iceland, Day One

Innocents Abroad--Whale Watching in Reykjavik.
              We had left Minneapolis Intl at 7:30 PM and arrived at Keflavik Airport 6 hours later.   I can never sleep on airplanes, so I was just starting to get sleepy when we arrived.  By then it was 6:30 AM Reykjavik time, so it was to be many more hours before I would get to bed.  And at noon, we had tickets to go on a whale watching cruise.  The hotel let us into our rooms so we could deposit our luggage there, eat our free breakfast, freshen up, and catch a short nap.

            Our whale watching boat was about 100 ft long, 25’ across the beam and 2 decks high, and had a humongous diesel engine.  It was fairly calm, and we did not ride the waves—we blasted through them at 40 mph--so it was smooth as glass.   After 40 minutes of this, after we had nearly lost all sight of land, the pilot cut the engine to a low idle, and we gently bobbed on top of the waves, quietly looking for signs of whales.  Of course, the boat now pitched and rolled with the waves, and I expect a few became seasick. 

            They look for whales by looking for concentrations of sea birds above the water.  The whales involved are baleen whales—filter feeders. Though they eat zooplankton, they can also feed on very small fish, which the sea birds also eat.  So any crowd of birds usually means a crowd of whales. There are 11 kinds of whales in Icelandic waters, but we were looking for minke whales, a 30’ long baleen whale about a yard in diameter, which weighs several tons.  Minke whales are solitary animals, but often gather around a rich food source.  These whales are taken for food, and many restaurants in Reykjavik serve minke whale steak.  After about a half hour of bobbing around like a cork, we still had seen no whale. I was beginning to get discouraged, thinking my bonus whale watching cruise would amount to a “carnival ride.” But then the whale spotter, on a platform above the top deck, shouted, “Whale at two o’clock, at 200 meters---whale at nine o’clock at 75 meters…..etc”  I had hoped to get pictures of them, but soon realized this would not happen.  You have no idea where they are going to surface, and when they do, they are only visible for about two seconds. By the time you get the camera aimed and focused, they’re gone.  

            What does a minke whale look like, at least, what does the part you are likely to see look like?   Imagine that you have a huge black rubber inner-tube.  And imagine that you glue some fins, like the dorsal fin of a shark, around the edge so that if you rotate it, it would look like a big saw blade.  Now take all but 3 of the fins off, and make sure they are evenly spaced.  Then take this thing and hold it under water, with it slowly rotating-- and every now and then lift it to where about a third of it is out of the water.  Leave it there till the people watching see a fin rise gently out of the sea, and in a graceful arc, plunge back down.  Then jerk the whole thing back under. That’s what a minke whale surfacing looks like. You see this black, arched back of the whale rise out of the water, and you see a fin rise over the top of the arch and plunge back into the sea.

            As interesting as the whales were the sea birds.  There were gannets, the largest sea bird in the North Atlantic. They look almost like gulls, but have a wing spread up to two meters.

When they hunt, they do not skim along the surface snatching up fish.  They hover about 70 ft above the water, and when they see a fish, they fold in their wings and do a power dive straight into the sea, breaking the surface at 30 or 40 mph.   It’s a pretty majestic show!

            We continued watching whales till about 4:00 o’clock, and then the captain returned us to port in time for supper.  (It was an adventure—but it did not make us late for supper.)

Face Blindness

In The New Yorker, Aug 30 issue is a piece by Dr. Oliver Sacks about prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.   I was interested, since I have a mild case of this problem.  My problem is just severe enough to be annoying, but not debilitating.  Dr. Sacks has the same problem, but much worse.  He wrote of an incident where he had spent an hour with his psychiatrist, and then took the elevator down to the lobby.  The psychiatrist had taken another elevator and arrived there first, and had taken off his white coat.  Dr. Sacks walked right past him without recognizing him.   Dr. Sacks has been classified as autistic, but does not believe that he is.  He thinks that his inability to recognize faces merely makes him appear autistic.

            But prosopagnosia affects not only faces, but also our ability to classify visual images of any kind.  I had planned to take up fishing as a hobby when I retired.  But I realized that this would not work unless I took someone else along to examine each fish I caught and tell me what species it was and whether I could legally keep it.  When I tried to explain this to my friends, they said, “Oh no.  When you buy a license, they give you a little folder which shows pictures of each species.”  I said, “Unless it was a catfish or a sturgeon, I don’t think that would help."  When I visit the DNR aquarium in Guttenberg, they have every game species in the tank, and on the wall they have beautiful drawings and descriptions of each.  But I have never been able to completely match one with the other.  Whenever my wife and I drive somewhere, I’m content to let her navigate.  Unless I have driven the same route several times, I have no memory of it. I always assumed that these problems were related to my face blindness.  Turns out I was right.

            Dr. Sacks says that once he walked around his neighborhood in the rain for two hours, looking for his house.  He walked past his own house 3 times before a kindly neighbor told him where he was.  While Dr. Sacks has a more serious case than mine, some of his patients are still worse.  He writes of patients who cannot recognize their own children.  And of course, his most famous patient was “the man who mistook his wife for a hat.”

            The particular area of the brain involved is a long narrow area in the underside of the right occipital lobe, extending from the visual cortex to the pre-frontal.  And there may be a gradient of functions from one end to the other.   The functions may range from identifying shapes, to classifying faces versus objects, to remembering whose face it is, or to reading the emotional content of faces.  Dr. Sacks says that there is a bell curve distribution of these abilities.  And for every person born with poorer than average face recognition abilities, there is probably one with greater than average.  He mentioned people who can recognize the face of every person they have ever met. 

            I know of such a case, and the person involved used this facility to his advantage.  When I worked at the John Deere tractor works in the late 1950s, the manager, Harley Walden, had a legendary ability to remember faces.  Once a year, he would walk slowly through the plant, walk down every aisle, and stop and introduce himself to every worker, and speak with them a few minutes.   It took him a few days to do this, because there were 8,000 workers there.  The next year, he would do it again, and he remembered them—all 8,000 of them.   He’d walk up and say something like, “Well, how’s it going Jim?  Is your boy still wrestling for East High this year?"  People were astounded.  But most workers interpreted this to mean that Harley Walden had taken an interest in them personally.  This bought him a lot of respect and loyalty.  But the strange thing about prosopagnosia is that if this part of the brain is ever damaged, no adjacent area ever takes over this function.  When you have face blindness, you have it. 

Physics Professor Becomes Apprentice Electrician

     The Electrical Worker,  the official journal for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has an interesting piece in its Aug issue.  It's the story of Cindy Krysac, a Toronto physics professor who applied for and received an apprenticeship to become an IBEW electrician.  She is now in her third year of this apprenticeship, and is quite happy with her choice.

            Most people would find it surprising that a 50 year old physics PhD who has taught at a college level for many years would trade this life to be a construction electrician. But having worked at the electrical trade for nearly forty years, and having been married for nearly forty years to a woman who just retired from a professorship at a local college,  I’m less surprised than most.

            Those who work at the skilled trades are sometimes attracted to the academic track—and vice-versa.  In my own local union, over the years, I’ve seen two Journeymen resign their positions to accept jobs teaching electrical skills at community colleges; and I’ve seen two people give up teaching careers to become apprentice electricians.  Other applicants for apprenticeships have included a general foreman at a major avionics factory, a recent graduate with a BA in philosophy, and numerous others with some kind of academic credentials.   Yet a few journeymen have returned to school to seek engineering degrees.   It has always been a two way street, with a small but equal flow in both directions.   Between the skilled track and the academic track, both have their rewards and disappointments, and neither is quite what it appears to be.

            Cindy Krysak says she enjoys the hands-on involvement and real world problem solving, the chance to get away from a stifling desk job, and the loyal and protective support of the “bright, friendly, and creative” people she works with.   She says some of her friends in academia envy her new life “mucking about with wires and using cool new tools.”

            At one time, back when manpower was in short supply, I was given the task of talking to high school guidance counselors in the area about recruiting apprentices.  In nearly every case they would suggest something like, “Well I’ve got a few guys who were never any good at math or science, but they’re good with their hands. Maybe they’d be good construction workers.”  Then I would patiently explain that any applicant who would not be accepted at Iowa State or some other fine engineering school would probably not be chosen for our program.  And if they were accepted into our program, they’d never make it past the second year.   In short:  the admission requirements for an IBEW apprenticeship are about the same as for any good engineering school.

              Actually, I felt that some of the guidance counselors already knew this, but had their own ax to grind.  A counselor’s job performance rating is based on the percentage of graduates who are admitted to four-year colleges.  If some bright young kid, who could easily be admitted to M.I.T., chooses a community college or an apprenticeship instead, this is chalked up as a failure for the counselor.  Even if such a person obtains a rewarding and remunerative career, and does so without impoverishing his parents, the counselor failed.  So when counselors try to aim every student they possibly can towards a four-year college, it may be their own careers they are trying to promote—not their students’ careers. 

            I wish Cindy Krysac the best of luck.  I have no doubt that a 52 year old woman can become an electrician.   I had an apprentice who was a middle aged woman, and she became an excellent electrician.  My only concern with her being 52 years old is that in ten years she’ll be  62 years old, the same age I was when I took early retirement because my body just wouldn’t take it anymore.  There is both a cerebral and a muscular-skeletal dimension to what electricians do.  When an apprenticeship committee interviews an applicant, they ask two questions:  "Did you get high grades in math and science?"  and "Did you do well in sports?"

How NAFTA Imperils the Corn Genome

                            

                  In the July 5^th issue of Nation Magazine is an article by Peter Canby entitled “Retreat to Subsistence,” which lays out in detail how NAFTA is destroying Mexico’s indigenous corn farmers, and also destroying the genetic diversity of the corn genome which these farmers are preserving.                    According to Canby, corn worldwide now produces more food than any other crop. About 9,000 years ago, Indians in the highlands of southern Mexico began deliberately selectively breeding a wild grass called teosinte, and over several millennia coaxed it into the plant we call corn (maize) today. 

                   Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero are where corn was domesticated, and where its wild ancestors still survive. The Indians who accomplished this feat, mostly Zapotecs and Mixtecs, still live there and still practice the plant science of their ancestors.  Farming tiny family plots by hand, their standard of living has never been high, but until NAFTA, the Mexican government subsidized them.

                  But in the 1990s, the Government of Carlos Salinas De Gortari decided to slash the safety net and throw Mexico open to free trade. The thinking was partly economic and partly anti-indigenous politics. They asked, “Why should the rest of Mexican society support Indians in a life of primitive agriculture that will never really free them from poverty?”  So they deliberately pulled the rug out from under these people, first by ending all subsidies, and then allowing imported corn from the U.S. , under NAFTA, to undermine the price of local corn.  The idea was to force peasants off their tiny plots of land and into the cities where they would all be employed in the bonanza of industrial jobs which NAFTA would provide.  But it didn’t work.

                  A few maquiladora plants were built by corporations who then abandoned them for China. Even if these jobs had stayed in Mexico, it is unlikely that the jobs created could have fed the 15 million people forced off the land, and the Mexican government surely knew this. What happened is that 500,000 Mexicans per year illegally entered the U.S., and that may have been part of the plan.  David Barkin, author of Sin Mais, no Hay Pais, an essay critical of NAFTA, at that time spoke to a political scientist specializing in Mexico, and was told, “They have no clear idea where all these people will go.  My guess is they’re thinking Los Angeles.” The government figured, “Who cares?  Once they’re out of Mexico, they’re somebody else’s problem.”  

                  But as peasants flowed out of Mexico, corn flowed in—including hybrid, genetically modified corn.   Though intended as animal food, some of this corn was planted all over Mexico, including areas where corn originated, and where the plant’s only reservoir of genetic diversity is preserved.  Major Goodman, professor of plant science at U. of North Carolina and a leading expert in corn genetics, says that there is very little genetic diversity in commercial corn. He says, “We’re basically looking at about seven in-bred lines and the derivatives of those lines.”   He believes we are with corn about where the Irish were with potatoes, just before the famine.

                   As climate changes, changing moisture conditions will give rise to all kinds of new blights and fungus assaults, and none of our commercial varieties will have any resistance to them.  We will need to crossbreed our corn with strains that confer resistance, and only one place on Earth has a storehouse of genetic diversity broad enough to be of any use.  That place is the highlands of south Mexico where corn originally grew wild, and where traditional farmers still preserve 59 distinct cultivars, (landraces.)

                  But the Mexican government deliberately encouraged farmers to abandon traditional cultivars and plant modern hybrids. Even those who refused now have neighbors planting these imports, so the pollen mixes these genes into their corn anyway. The studies done in the United States on keeping GMO corn isolated really do not apply to the kind of corn farming done by the Zapotecs. Here, we plant hybrids, and next year, we plant more hybrids. Any mistake, even a disastrous one, only has effects which last one plant-harvest cycle.   But the Indians plant open pollinated corn and save seed for next year’s planting. A Zapotec farmer is not a seed company customer; he is a highly skilled plant breeder, and an heir to a 9,000 year culture of plant breeding.

                    A Zapotec farmer examines his whole crop—plant by plant—ear by ear—to identify those plants with superior qualities.  He not only saves seed, but exchanges it with neighboring farms.  So any foreign genes which invade a single field can become permanently and irremovably intermixed with the corn genome of the entire region.

                  In the late 1990s, Zapotec farmers asked Ignacio Chapela and David Quist, of the University of California at Berkeley, to test their corn for GMOs.  The tests were not only positive, but indicated that the inserted genes were not stable but had fragmented and were migrating to different parts of the genome than where they had originally been inserted. Chapela and Quist published a paper in Nature, and a firestorm ensued.  And the fact that the department which employed them had accepted millions of dollars from Novartis did not help matters.

                  As more studies began to confirm Chapell and Quist’s findings, Mexican environmental groups petitioned The Commission for Environmental Cooperation to study the matter. The CEC’s report; Maize and Biodiversity: The Effects of Transgenic Maize in Mexico appeared in 2004, along with 10 beautifully written background chapters.  This background material examined the social, political, and ecological value of Mexico’s indigenous cornfields, and how genetically modified genes might flow through those fields.  Timothy Wise, of Tufts University says this study “….is the best study of gene flow to date.”

                  The report said that we really don’t know what might happen, but that it could easily be a catastrophe for the genetic diversity of the world’s corn.  The commission recommended that, as a precaution, all corn entering Mexico should be ground at the border, but this has never been implemented.  The Bush administration was furious with this report.  Judith Ayers, a Bush appointee at the EPA appended her own negative comments to the report, and completely suppressed the background chapters.  However, the article in Nation provides a URL where this information can be seen.

                  Since NAFTA, to the surprise of the government planners, many indigenous farmers have elected to withdraw from the economy, stop buying fertilizer, and subsist on corn grown for their own table and bartering. But this retreat into subsistence will leave them in absolute poverty.  In 2003, the World Bank said that 40% of Mexicans live in poverty, but that in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, 70% live in extreme poverty.  Now, with the U.S. economy in deep recession, some displaced farmers who came illegally to the U.S. are returning home.  Yet with no subsidy and the price of corn still depressed by cheap imports, subsistence is the only kind of farming they can go back to.  Life was never easy for these people.   But NAFTA has managed to make it worse.

Peak Potassium: The Next Resource War

            According to an article in Aug 19, Wall Street Journal, this week saw a hostile 38 billion dollar takeover bid by Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP-Billiton for control of Potash Corp of Saskatchewan.   This shocked investors around the world, because this event might be the opening gun of the next global “resource war.”

            In his 2001 book, Hubbert’s Peak, Geologist Ken Deffeyes points out that peak oil is merely the first of many resource peaks.  He observed that in the future, many vital commodities will see production peak and then enter a long, slow, irreversible decline as consumers across the globe scramble to grab their share of a diminishing supply.  He cited potassium as the next commodity in line after oil.

            We will not actually run out of potassium---it’s fairly plentiful.   What we will run out of are deposits that are sufficiently concentrated that they can be mined efficiently.    The richest such deposit is in Saskatchewan.  According to Deffeyes, the known reserves worldwide could last up to 200 years at the present rate of extraction.  However, as world population expands and as the “green revolution” replaces traditional agriculture, the amount of potassium fertilizer consumed will not remain constant—it will expand exponentially.

            And a potassium shortage will be much more serious than an oil shortage. We can develop substitute strategies for energy, but potassium is a part of our bodies, and part of the plant tissues that feed our bodies.  The next time some moron tells you that we needn’t worry about running out of our natural resources because we humans are infinitely clever and can find a substitute for anything,  ask him how he will maintain the electrolytic balance in the tissues of his body (essentially, the sodium/potassium balance) without potassium.  Without this mineral, we die.   Modern commercial farmers add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, (and calcium in the form of ag-lime) to their fields.  No modern food crop is possible without them.

            About the same time as I was reading Hubbert’s Peak, I came across something by Dr. Joel Wallach, a naturopathic physician who had written a series of lectures about the mineral-deficient American diet, and the probable health consequences of this mineral insufficiency.  Wallach is a controversial figure with an interesting background.  Before getting a license to practice medicine he was a very successful veterinarian.  As part of an environmental study, he performed autopsies on thousands of zoo animals who had died for no apparent reason.  He discovered, to his horror, that in almost every case, the cause of death was a diet insufficient in some critical mineral.  But the animals were being fed unsold produce from the local supermarkets.  They were eating what we were eating—and it was killing them.

            Before Dr. Wallach had become a veterinarian, he had been an agronomist, specializing in soil fertility. This gave Wallach a better perspective on the causes of the decline in the mineral content of our diet. Wallach explains, “Every plant is a little mining machine.”  Its roots suck minerals out of the soil and send them to the rest of the plant.  If the plant is then eaten by animals whose droppings fall back to the soil and whose bodies decay into the soil, then the minerals remain in place.  If the ground is farmed by subsistence farmers who live on the land and consume everything they grow, and who spread both human and animal wastes on the fields, then the result is the same. The minerals never leave the farm. But with the rise of urbanization, crops are consumed far from where they are grown.  Sewage is treated and then flows into rivers, and to the ocean--and the cycle is broken. 

            Wallach says that you only have to farm the same field for about 15 years before most of the minerals are gone.  Most American crop and grazing land has now been used for over 100 years, and some land has been used nearly 400 years.  Farmers add nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and lime---and that seems to make the plants grow.  But according to Wallach, we need at least a couple dozen other minerals for optimum health.   Dr. Wallach cites a government document (U. S. Senate Document # 264, 74^th Congress, 2^nd session, 1936) which warned even in 1936 that all of our crop and grazing land was seriously depleted in minerals.    It concluded that eventually every American would need to take a multi-mineral supplement every day, or we would suffer an epidemic of mineral deficiency diseases.  But this study was forgotten, and no action was ever taken.  What of the predicted epidemic?  Wallach says it’s here.   He cites the growing problem with type II diabetes and obesity as an example.  He says chromium and vanadium are needed to properly metabolize carbohydrates.  Without adequate chrome, the body has to make additional insulin, which eventually triggers insulin resistance.  He points out that farm animals also get type II diabetes, but about 30 years ago we began adding chrome and vanadium to their feed, and the problem completely disappeared.

            But even if we take our multi-mineral pills, we will still need to grow plants to produce carbohydrate and protein--and massive amounts of potassium will be needed to do this.  As world supplies become radically more expensive, third world farmers will be priced out of the market, and will have to retreat back into subsistence agriculture. Unfortunately, these countries have allowed their population to expand far beyond the numbers that this kind of agriculture and its low yields can support.

            Minerals are the currency of life.  When can we expect the final struggle for these life-sustaining elements to begin?  Apparently, it already has.

Tall Ships and Too Much Food

            I visit Wisconsin whenever I please,

            But there’s way too much food-- and too much cheese.

            I don’t live in Wisconsin, but I frequently visit there--and I can tell you this:  You can approach Wisconsin from any direction and as soon as you cross the border, the food is better, the portions are larger, and the service is friendlier.  And it doesn’t cost any more.

            My friends and I have argued for years as to why this should be true.  The state was settled mostly by the same mix of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Czechs, and Poles that settled the rest of the Midwest. They should have about the same food culture, but they really don’t.  The real mystery is why the tastiest local beer in the state should be brewed in New Glarus.  New Glarus was settled by Swiss Calvinists.  You’d think a really tasty beer would be brewed by Hedonists from New Orleans—not Calvinists from New Glarus.  After all, wouldn’t a beer which is that delicious tempt us to drink too much and lapse into sin?  Go figure.  Since I developed gout a few years back, I’ve quit drinking beer almost entirely for fear that a single glass might trigger an attack.  (Alcohol does not cause gout; in my case it’s caused by the blood pressure medication I take. Yet alcohol can aggravate gout.)   But for a draught of Spotted Cow, I’ll take the risk.

            Last weekend I attended a tall ship festival in Green Bay, WI, sponsored by Baylake Bank and others.   A large flotilla of sailing ships is visiting all major Great Lakes ports this summer, and last weekend it was Green Bay’s turn to host the watery hoard.  I live closer to Green Bay than to any of the other cities hosting the ships, and Wisconsin is a good place to vacation.  The festival was a roaring success and a boon to Green Bay.

            For me it was a mix of delights and disappointments.  Months in advance, we had booked tickets for a one hour ride on one of the ships, the Roseway.  But at the appointed hour, the captain canceled, citing unfavorable winds and currents.    Our money was refunded, and I still got some photos, but only of ships moored at the dock with all sails furled.  I had hoped to get a few close-up shots of ships under sail.  But we boarded several ships, talked with the crew members, so we still had an interesting experience.

            The Europa is the largest and oldest vessel-- a steel hulled barque from the Netherlands built in 1911.  Most of the rest were built since WWII, most are made of wood, and most are accurate historical reproductions of early 19^th Century vessels.  Four are replicas of ships used in the War of 1812.  And of course The Bounty, built in 1962 for a movie, is a replica of the original Bounty.  These 13 ships represent nine different kinds of rigging and vary in sparred length from 64 ft to 198 ft.  Some of the 1812 replicas had masts tilted back nearly 20 degrees from vertical.  I was told that this design allows tacking closer to the direction of the wind, and also allows better speed in light winds. 
   In the foreground of the above photo is the Niagra, a replica of the ship with which Oliver Hazard Perry won the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813.  It has a sparred length of 198 ft, a beam of 32.6 ft, draws 11 ft, and was built of wood in 1988.  It is brig rigged and its home port is Erie PA.

            I asked one captain, “What is it like to own a big sailing ship?”  He replied, “Just sit in a damp cellar and tear up hundred dollar bills."

Norwegians in a Cold Climate

   Yesterday, just for the heck of it, I read Gisli Sursson's Saga.  It's a wonderful read, which is why it's still popular after 900 years.   Then, just after finishing Gisli, I watched "Fargo," my very favorite "cop"movie of all time.  It was quite an evening--all mindless killings and treachery, all done by people who originally came from Norway,  and who have lived in a cold, desolate place since.   In Iceland, they write a Saga about it--in Minnesota they make a movie about it.
   So,  what is it about Norwegians in a cold place?
(Actually, two of my great grandparents were born is Scandinavia,  and they farmed in Northern Minnesota, just across the river from Fargo.   So, is this genetic?  And why am I attracted to wood chippers?)