McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative.
However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World. That was a long slog which, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.
I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.
I'm currently reading Assembling California (California resident, so I've seen all the things he discusses in the book, and wondered, like why is Half Dome so big and grey??). Like you I am rapidly developing a layman's interest in plate tectonics.
In every chapter there is a passage like this:
If you could pull up an acre of abyssal plain anywhere in the world -- lift into view a complete column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base -- you would find the sheeted dikes about halfway down. In contrast to the rock columns you find all over the continents -- giddy with time gaps among lithologies of miscellaneous origin and age -- this totem assemblage from the oceans tells a generally consistent story. At its low end is peridotite, the rock of the mantle, tectonically altered in several ways on departure from the spreading center. Above the mantle rock lie the cooled remains of the great magma chamber that released flowing red rock into the spreading center. The chamber, in cooling, tends to form strata, as developing crystals settle within it like snow -- olivine, plagioclase, pyroxene snow -- but above these cumulate bands it becomes essentially a massive gabbro shading upward into plagiogranite as the magmatic juices chemically differentiate themselves in ways that relate to temperature. Just above the granites are the sheeted dikes of diabase, which keep filling the rift between the diverging plates. Above the sheeted dikes, where the fluid rock actually entered the sea, the suddenly chilled extrusions are piled high, like logs outside a sawmill. Because these extrusions have convex ends that bulge smoothly and resemble pillows, they are known in geology as pillow lavas. Above the pillows are the various sediments that have drifted downward through the deep sea -- umbers, ochres, cherts, chalk. Unlike the rest of the crust-and-mantle package, the sediments may hint at the surrounding world.
...
This guy basically writes in a way that transforms the book I am holding in front of my face, physically into a rock. Like some kind of magic trick. He clearly had so much fun writing this, it's amazing and very fun... if rocks tickle you even a little bit this book is worth reading.
Folks, in case it wasn't clear, I was complaining about people downvoting a critical opinion, I was not myself downvoting a critical opinion. I'm glad to see the trend on the original comment has reversed.
As I recall, Apollo 11 was off by 4 miles downrange, which was considered good but not precise. More work on the guidance / navigation system allowed for a precision landing in Apollo 12 (to touch down near a Surveyor probe).
If you want to read about this in fascinating detail, I highly recommend the book "Digital Apollo" by David A. Mindell.
David's book spends a lot of time dwelling on the tension between highly automated systems and the role of the human in them, and the HCI factors of the Apollo missions. They also recap each landing through that lens, including the major changes done to the Lunar Module UI (physical + software) and the landing script/programs for each mission and how things worked out in practice and how it was debriefed after. If you want the insight look at the decision to go for precision landing, how (and how well) it was achieved and how everyone involved felt about it, this is probably your best one-stop go-to.
And for anyone working in embedded UI, or around automation, etc. it's a wondeful mind-sharpener with many lessons in an inspiring applied context.
The Apollo user interface and computer were so state of the art that many of the problems and solutions remain quite similar today. I work in a similar area (cars, with ever-increasing amounts of automation, driver assistance and connectivity) and some of the debates and on-the-job exchanges and meeting notes cited in the book could be straight out of my day job 60 years later with only minute differences. Some of the "Lessons on Software Development"-type docs penned by Apollo engineers in the aftermath of the program (trade-offs of platform approaches and HW abstractions vs. optimization, how to get a handle on quality and testing, etc.) also still read absolutely modern to this day, almost with greater summarizing clarity than what decades of paradigms and jargon have slathered on top.
Thanks for that recommendation. Mendell's other book is not as exciting but they both are the pinnicle of historic technical writing, and yes, this is a sharepining tool for UI, enough to make it required reading.
Of course his interactions with the Apollo engineers is priceless. I worked for one such engineer, and the strain of perfection was great discipline.
So it was not uncovered by doge? and it is also not simply fraud? „Every year, agency reports posted online document billions in improper payments, which include fraud but also underpayments, duplicate payments, payments to ineligible recipients or for ineligible goods or services.“ (from the article you linked)
I'm wondering if any glass plates were recovered? I'm not sure they were all salvaged at the time, but I don't know how they would fare in the saltwater.
I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.
The other thing that can interfere with the nerves in your jaw is having them extracted. One of my family members has no feeling there because the extraction was bungled years ago.
I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it.
I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with.
As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways (with the tops facing the front of your mouth). The wisdom teeth then hit the rest of your teeth and basically bulldoze your mouth.
I have no idea how true/bullshit that is, but it's what I was told to get me to finally acquiesce to the procedure.
Definitely not all wisdom teeth come in like that: it's possible to have all 4 aligned normally and have have enough room (I do).
But coming in towards other teeth and hitting them, or other forms of impaction, are pretty common. You probably saw (or could have seen) the situation pretty clearly on an x-ray.
That being said, there is/was definitely an air of "this is just what we do, it's easier this way" for removing wisdom teeth, akin to say, what removing tonsils once was.
My wisdom teeth came in like you describe. They meet my back molars at a 90 degree angle. They never bothered me, though - I have had two removed because they got infected, but otherwise they never caused any issues.
I couldn't find any citations that mention molybdenum as a way to increase metabolism of caffeine. However, I found one reference [0] that mentions, "Consumption of broccoli and brassica vegetables in general and absorption of large quantities of vitamin C increase caffeine clearance".
EDIT: It would seem that the vitamin C paper [1] concludes the opposite of what [0] states. "These results indicate that the elimination of caffeine in the elderly is not affected significantly by the concentrations of vitamin C achieved during this study."
A limited number of studies suggested tobacco smoking increases the metabolism of caffeine, an effect possibly mediated by caffeine.
"Caffeine metabolism is increased by smoking, an effect mediated by an acceleration in its demethylation (it also increases xanthine oxidase activity) (Parsons and Neims, 1978). Smoking cessation returns caffeine clearance rates to nonsmoking values (Murphy et al., 1988)."
I have a Hawthorn. My brother-in-law, who is a landscaper, came over to show me how to prune what we thought was a flowering crab. However, on closer inspection, he exclaimed, "Wait, this a Hawthorn bush!"
It has gotten larger over time, and harder to mow around due to the thorns (spine-like protrusions which resemble small branch growths more than true thorns).
It does have one redeeming quality. Every year in early spring, for a brief but dazzling moment, it appears covered in thousands of small, white, lace-like flowers.
The Chinese Hawthorn is used in a few snacks. I really like the fruit leather you can buy in Asian supermarkets. My math teacher from High School got me interested in both math and Chinese snacks, and it was really nice to see him get excited about sharing both with us.
It'd probably work with American haw berries too - but the pitting would be a lot of extra work as they are smaller.
The berries are edible in many if not most species. And the tree is often used as stock to graft pears and apples. Hawthorn species in many cultures have a medicinal history as some sort of "heart tonic". Modern research seems to support its usage for treatment of cardiovascular disease[0]
