The Online Photographer

Heat? (OT)

It's been quite a day and a half! No sooner had I written about Lulu's health than she had an apparent crisis—she was staggering and falling and seemed unable to control her body. She could hardly locate her food to eat. And although she's normally a tough old broad who brushes off life's vagaries, she was looking at me with imploring eyes as if she didn't know what was happening to her and needed reassurance. I thought she had suffered a stroke or a seizure, and of course due of her age I was immediately concerned that her death might be rushing up to greet her. I've never been through end-of-life with a dog before, as primary owner and decision-maker. I've been trying to prepare (not least by trying to forgive myself in advance for making an imperfect decision, which I probably will do. I can do no better than the best I can).

It turns out not to have been so dire. It was something called "canine idiopathic vestibular syndrome," a transitory episode that often passes and often doesn't return. She "healed herself" overnight and after some time (and the usual wad of cash) at the vet's today she is back to her normal, aged, crotchety, slow-moving self, but a bit more attached than usual—she's resting at my feet under my desk right now (note her paw resting on my shoe).

Heat
I had to smack my forehead when I saw I got several informed comments about my plan to heat my pool shed, from people far more knowledgeable than I am. How could it not occur to me to ask TOP readers for advice about something I know so little about? The brain trust (TOP's audience) is collectively savvy about anything.

So, heating a one-room shack: If anyone has any more thoughts about the most efficient, effective, and elegant way to heat and cool an approximately 3,000 cubic feet (86 cubic meter), 320 square feet (30 square meter) insulated shed building, I'd love to hear. I did get some good suggestions already.

Start with a strong foundation
As far as the foundation goes, here's the story: as I understand it, the base of the shed is five 4x6-inch "skids," or girders, made of larch, which resists rotting. Notches are cut into the top of this and 2x6s are laid in perpendicularly as floor joists. Plywood is nailed on top of the joists and Bob's your uncle. People sometimes use such sheds as garages, so they handle the weight of cars.

The joists are usually 16 inches on center, but I'm having them laid 12" on center in the middle eight feet of the floor to better support the pool table. Plus, I'm having top quality 3/4ths-inch plywood substituted for the rougher sort of 5/8ths-inch the builder usually uses.

If you have expertise or knowledge to lend about the heating problem I'm all ears, and thanks.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Chip McDaniel: "You will know when it is time for Lulu. She will tell you with her eyes. Your vet will confirm. Don't hang on too tight and make her linger past when it's time. It's the heartbreaking downside of pets, but they give us so much during their lives that we owe it to them to do right by them at the end."

Joe Holmes: "All I can tell you is that investing a considerable sum in a split ductless system was the best money we've spent on our house in years. Almost silent, almost maintenance free (clean the filters every few weeks). We've used it almost exclusively for cooling in the summer, but I wish we'd had it a couple years earlier when our heating system died on Christmas night."

Brian Small: "If you want a ultra-reliable, self contained, heating system then direct-vent kerosene units work very well."

Open Mike: 'Detour,' the Quintessential B-Movie Film Noir

This essay contains spoilers. I'll be assuming you know the noir classic B-movie Detour already—after all, you've had since 1945 to watch it. If you'd rather not know the plot, don't click through.

Green Beans and Griffin's Falls (Life in the Finger Lakes)(OT)

Yesterday was what Mother used to call a red-letter day. This Summer has been an old-fashioned Summer, with many cool days, and dry air, and towering bright piles of clouds in blue skies. Before I go on, I should tell you that green beans are one of my favorite foods. Which would be a minority choice, but I love 'em. And the waterfall in the gully in my backyard got christened yesterday, which seems like a special occasion.

I went up the hill at about 8:30 in the morning to see if the Sauders had any green beans. At the little farmstand by the road across from their all-but-falling-down barn where they keep their buggy, there were none set out, but Lydia, the matriarch of the family, went around the far corner of the house to look for Naomi, her daughter, who she thought might be out in the field even as we spoke. She came back with a smile and said, "She's heading in with the beans right now." A moment later, Naomi, wearing a black bonnet (showing she is unmarried) and a brick-red apron over her ankle-length dress, came around the corner of the farmhouse. It was a beautiful morning—as it has been all Summer, the air was very clear and carried a lovely fresh scent, and it was not yet hot, and the morning sun still seemed to tinge everything with a touch of gold. Naomi carried a wooden basket full of freshly-picked beans and I paid her three dollars for a quart container. Plus a dollar for a ripe peach, for dessert.

I decided to have them for breakfast. I usually fix half one day and half the next, but I was hungry so I cut all the beans I bought. I indulged myself—I'm not supposed to eat butter, but I love my green beans with butter so I break the rules a little. I still have more than a stick to go on my first pound of butter for this calendar year, so I don't eat much. I steamed the beans and ate them with the butter and not quite enough salt to taste. They were lovely, soft, and with a delicate flavor I just never taste in week-old green beans from the supermarket. It's possible I've eaten beans as good in years long gone now, but I am also willing to believe there is no such thing as beans that could ever taste better. A treat of the season.

Naming rights
Later, throwing the ball for Mr. Handsome—he must be the only dog who will sometimes walk out to get the ball when I throw it and then walk back—I heard some children shouting in the gully, which is dark and shrouded with leafy trees in the Summertime, so I walked over to see what was up. There were four little kids climbing around in the creekbed, two girls and two boys, none older than about ten, all cute as could be (I'm sorry I don't have a picture, but I wouldn't put up a picture without their parents' permission anyway). They were discussing frogs in bright voices. I hailed them from the bank, which took them by surprise—people of any age almost never look up on their own—and said hello. They said they couldn't believe that there was so little water this Summer, because sometimes there's more, and I told them that sometimes, in the early Spring, there's so much water that you can't see any of the rocks—the rocks that surrounded them, that they were standing on and walking over. They were politely amazed by this. Soon the older girl asked me, "Did you know it has a name? This waterfall?" I said I didn't, and she said, "It's Griffin's waterfall! That's what we call it!" I asked her how it had gotten that name, and she indicated the sturdy, shirtless, smiling boy in red shorts standing next to her. "This is my friend Griffin," she said, "and they came to visit." Griffin looked to be eight or nine. "It's Griffin's waterfall because he found it!"

Well, I thought on it some, and this seems perfectly reasonable to me. Discoverers get naming rights; if he found it, then Griffin's Falls it is. At least if I have anything to say about it.

Or in case anyone ever asks.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thor D.: "Thank you for sharing this little slice. This was the most pleasant thing I have read in a while."

Rich Szmyd: "You made me really hungry for green beans! I'll have to look at the farmer's market this weekend to see if they have any that are as fresh as yours. Yum."

Dillan K: "I am bombarded by a steady stream of partisan politics, anger, fear and misery. I think it's terribly important for all of us to remember the really important things in life: the innocence of childhood, the taste of fresh green beans, playing ball with the dog, and the shy beauty of an Amish farmer's daughter. There is good in this world. Thank you for the reminder."

Open Mike: Two Heads (OT)

"And you know two heads are better than one."

—Annie Ross, "Twisted," 1952

I raised my son alone. The short (short-short) version of the story is that his mother was a girlfriend who got pregnant by accident and opted not to have an abortion. Unfortunately, she also decided not to tell me. She broke up with me out of the blue, successfully kept her pregnancy secret up to the last minute, and put her baby—which turned out to be my baby—up for adoption. By a far-fetched chain of frankly unlikely circumstances, I got wind of all this right before my son was born. First I had to figure out whether I had anything to do with it, then I had to decide what to do, then I had to do it—and then I had to bring a newborn home, to a brown paper sack of hastily-bought diapers and formula and other baby supplies sitting on the living room floor. All this across the span of just a few days. In the end, plans hurriedly put into place fell apart anyway, and the motley cast of characters—me, her, her mother, the adoptive couple, everyone's lawyers, everyone's friends, a judge at a dinner party, and a newborn baby boy—barreled headlong into full-fledged crisis mode culminating in a dramatic denouement worthy of a movie. Most people have nine months (more or less) to prepare for the arrival of a new baby. I had nine hours.

I mean, I never see things coming anyway. But that was ridiculous.

In those chaotic early days as "the Dad without a clue"—the neonate daycare provider's nickname for me—one of my standard jokes was, "There's a reason God gave parents two heads and four hands. It's because that's how many you need." Believe me when I tell you, my brother, my sister, because I know: one head and two hands often falls short of the minimum required.

I'm feeling that way again lately. I have difficulty making decisions. I'm comfortable keeping decisions open until the last second, and I dislike closure. When people ask me if I might be free at such-and-such a time at some date months into the future, I realize my brain works differently than theirs. I can hardly plan for next week, much less November. People able to plan years ahead sometimes seem like Martians to me.

I'm also an "idealist type," able, with breathless ease, to envision the way things "should be." The downside of this visionary ability is that I'm impractical. I walk around with ideas in my head that really should be "brought into relationship" by being shared with others, so those others can but a brake on the thought patterns that are far-out and essentially fantastic. Bringing others into the loop helps me sort plausible ideas from implausible ones.

Lately I'm having a tough time planning. I've made a series of steps to shed some of those illusions I was just talking about and to view my situation with cold-hearted realism. Trying hard to see things as they really are. 

But you know what the biggest problem is for me, really? Too few heads!

I know that a lot of you out there are married. And a lot of my friends who are "old marrieds" sometimes talk about their spouses with a casualness that seems, to me, to almost border on contempt sometimes. It startles me when I hear it, if "shocks" is too strong a word. I know being married can be routine, sometimes boring, that sometimes it's easy to take the other person for granted, all that.

But from where I sit, y'all ought to be grateful every day! At the very least, every thought in your head stays "in relationship," because you can put it out there to your spouse and he or she can weigh in. It's one thing we humans need—another perspective. It's a steadying hand on the tiller.

And it's just a heck of a lot easier to make decisions with two people than it is with one. I've worked and worked, but I can't figure out logically what I ought to do to further prepare for the years I still hope are waiting in my future. Stay where I am? A local move? An interstate move? Retrain for a new job? (I've been looking at the Nutrition Certification program at Cornell. Should I do that? Danged if I know.) Refinance?—this bugs me, but I cannot even figure out if I should refinance my mortgage. I cannot for the life of me sort out all the numbers. There are too many aspects to all these decisions vectoring in from every which way—including intangibles like sentimentality (I love my house), proximity to loved ones (I'm far away from my son), the possibility of future disabilities (and who ever knows about that?)—on and on goeth the list. Everything interlaces and interferes with everything else. I can't sort everything out.

Well, haven't yet, anyway. It's been distracting me. "Driving me crazy," as the expression goes.

If you have two heads to help guide you on the voyage through life, wake up every morning grateful, is all I can say. Never take that gift for granted. Singletons like me get storm-tossed.

The great husband-and-wife Broadway thespians Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who always worked as a team and wouldn't take parts solo, used to work out their performances by sitting on the floor facing each other. They'd lock legs and read through a new script until they both understood their own and each other's part, and until they both agreed how every line, every movement, and every scene between them was going to go. Some things you just can't do alone.

It's not like being single is the worst thing in the world, and I'm not complaining. I was talking about it with a same-age friend a few weeks back. He's been through long stretches alone and long stretches married, and he thought for a few moments and said, each one has advantages and disadvantages. That's probably right. But if you happen to be partnered, count your blessings, that's all. From this side of the fence, your grass looks greener than it is over here.

I'll get over this confusion. And, yeah, I'll probably [heaves sigh] make another bad decision. As I say, I have trouble with decisions. I do wish someone else was in it with me.

When I heard the original version of that song, Annie Ross's, on XM Radio the other day in the car—the song was later made famous for my generation, of course, by Joni Mitchell—that line at the end suddenly had a whole new meaning!

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. When everything is going according to the prearranged plan, it appears on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "Familiarity can of course lead to taking people for granted, but that is certainly not the case for me. My wife and I met in college and this will be our 40th year of marriage come December. We have never been apart for longer than a week...until this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been in South Carolina since early May watching our two little grandchildren while my daughter and her husband work full time. Initially day care and schools closed due to the virus. They are now reopening, but the pandemic is still burning out of control through most of the South, so I have advised my daughter not to send her kids into harm's way, but to keep them safe at home. I visited South Carolina the first week in June; since then my wife and I have been physically apart for two months while I work as a family physician not too far from TOP World Headquarters. We talk every night on the phone or via face time, but the separation has been utterly traumatic. I feel like I'm missing half of my person."

Steven ralser: "We can relate to your nine hours. both our children are adopted. With our oldest we got a phone call at 9 a.m., and the adoption agency said they had a three-day-old boy available for adoption. They also said if you all get along (us and the baby's mother) the baby can go home with you that day. We were an hour and half from the hospital. Before we left we got another call asking if we had a name picked out. So there we were driving north thinking about names.

"Everything worked out and we left the hospital with our son. As we said we would adopt a child up to five years old, we had nothing prepared. Some people knew we were adopting, so first stop was some friends in Albuquerque who had been saving baby clothes for us. We made a call to a friend in Socorro (where we lived at the time)—he had an old crib for us; and we went shopping for baby supplies in the local supermarket (on the sly because no one else knew what we had planned, and in a small town everyone knows everyone). So there we were, new parents with less than nine hours notice."

Peter Wright: "It had not occurred to me before I read this, but I am essentially at the other extreme. I make my decisions, including the important ones like which country to live in, where to buy a house, who to marry, which job to take, etc. very fast; usually only a few days. Luckily, I have never regretted any of these decisions. (Looking back, when I have made mistakes it was because I was just drifting and not realizing that a decision actually needed to be made, and I was too dumb to know.)

"I remember some years back being astonished at a colleague who could not decide whether to take a position in the company we worked for that would involve moving to another country. He thought about it seemingly endlessly. 'Don't you just know?' I kept saying to him in exasperation—it didn't seem to help."

"Minor (very minor) case in point. Did you get your audio streaming sorted out? I was expecting to see a post on it by now. When you posted on this about four weeks back, I thought it seemed a good idea, but digging into it I discovered I didn't know a toslink from Twonky, or a dBPowerAmplifier from a Raspberry Pi with a hat. But...I have now had my system up and running for about two weeks and I'm giving Tidal a good workout. Very much enjoying it all! So thanks!"

Mike replies: Yes, people have expressed the same sort of exasperation with me sometimes. Even when the decision is simple I sometimes can't help second-guessing myself. I wonder if children can be helped to learn how to be decisive?

The Cambridge CXN v.2 from B&H is still sitting right here in a box in my office, unopened. I can't decide whether to open it or return it. So, good case in point!

UPDATE Friday: I sent the Cambridge CXN v.2 streamer back to B&H. Not only that, but I made a resolution to never spend another dime on stereo equipment in my life. I listen to music sitting at my computer; my computer system is already extremely good and wonderfully enjoyable; I really just don't need to dabble with anything else. Simplifying involves being happy with what you have—when you can! I am very happy I learned about Roon and Quobuz (similar to your Tidal), though. Both those usefully kicked my enjoyment up another notch.

Terry Burnes: "Well over half of us are going to be alone at the end. Singles certainly but also half of married people. You might be better prepared for that than most of us, especially than a married man who has come to rely heavily on a spouse no longer around. And while you might wish for a partner to help you though the future, the simple truth is that you could end up being the partner who has the burden of helping his spouse through a long difficult demise. Talk about challenging and unpleasant decisions. I try to spend more time appreciating what I have than wishing or scheming for something better."

John Camp: "One of the unusual things about being a novelist is the decision-making process. A reader usually reads a novel straight through and the book looks like one piece. But it's not. You maybe write a thousand words or even a few thousand, representing dozens of decisions about plot, character, tone, balance between dialogue and narrative, and so on. Then you revise, throwing out old decisions, making new ones. Then you write forward again, and revise again, often going back to the first chapters and reworking to account for decisions you made about plot turns and characters later in the novel. I've rewritten the first few paragraphs of a couple of novels as the last thing I did before submitting the manuscript to the publisher. That's after months of work and revisions. I don't consider that an inability to be decisive, I think of it as 'mulling it over.' And I think that applies to life as well as novels—you're sort of groping your way forward, because you really don't know what's coming down the road at you.

"I worked for almost 20 years for a very large newspaper corporation. A huge premium is placed on an editorial manager's ability to make good accurate decisions on an hourly and daily basis, and then doing it again the next day. That carried upward into the top levels of management. To get ahead, you had to be quick and decisive even if you were wrong—in that kind of atmosphere, nobody much remembered the mistakes made a few weeks earlier. Nobody was mulling things over, looking for complicated changes in culture. There just wasn't time...the managers believed. You gotta be tough and decisive, you gotta get on with it. The company never saw the Internet coming. Never saw the cultural changes going on around it. The company no longer exists."

Your Shot of the Day: Drag Shot (OT)

This is actually a miss, which is unusual for Your Shot of the Day, but it's an excellent visual tutorial on what a drag shot is. First, you'll watch Han Yu of China, who is comfortably leading Shane Van Boening of the USA at Gibraltar, miss a safety shot. But then watch the slow-mo replay very closely. You'll clearly see the cue (white) ball spinning backwards, then skidding, then picking up forward roll before striking the yellow 1-ball.

China's Han Yu

That's a drag shot, which is used for covering distance with the cue ball while at the same time striking the object ball at a low, slow speed. It's among my favorite pool shots.

To watch pool you generally need to know what the response of the cue ball is telling you about how it was struck. Precise striking of the cue ball is where an important part of the physical skill of cue sports resides, but it's mostly difficult to impossible to see with the naked eye where the cue tip hits the cue ball. So we look at setup and at results to see how the player put spin on the cue ball. After contact, the white ball usually tells the tale.

The game is not so much about sinking object balls—most players can do that most of the time. It's more about "moving the white ball around the table." If you ever see a pro miss a ball that you would have thought should be easy, it's not because they can't pocket the object ball. Ninety-eight percent of the time it's because they're trying to do too much with the cue ball.

Get in position
A bonus: you can also use this same match to see a nice demonstration of position play. Start at the 18 minute minute mark, as Shane tries to notch his first rack. It takes less than three minutes. Pay close attention to where the cue ball comes to rest after he pockets each ball.

If you'll look at the bottom of the video frame you'll see a graphic showing the balls left on the table in the order in which they need to be potted (actually any ball can be potted; but the lowest-numbered ball on the table always needs to be struck first). Pro players have the entire runout mapped out in their heads as they play. They might need to revise that plan if something goes awry, but if a nine-ball player thinks she can run out and is shooting at the 3-ball, for instance, she already knows where she needs the cue ball to be four shots later to sink the 7-ball.

And note that a "perfect" shot on the next ball, i.e. dead straight on, is not what a player wants from position play...on each shot, Shane needs to land on the next shot to give himself an angle to get to the shot after that. You always need the angle in order to move the cue ball. So planning position on any shot actually needs to account for the proper angle for two shots into the future. The only ball you might want to be straight on is the last shot of the rack—and note where Shane ends up on that ball here.

On to the action. Shane starts out with a difficult shot on the red 3-ball—a rail shot is tough because you can only strike the cue ball on its crown, which makes the shot more difficult and also takes away a lot of cue-ball control. The pink 4-ball to the orange 5-ball is a particularly impressive positional shot. From the 3 to the 4 to the 5 here is masterful position play.

Despite Han Yu's success, she takes a long time in this match to get used to the speed of the table—a beautiful, very high-end Chinese Rasson—which is playing slow. Dozens of her shots in the first third of the match are underhit and come up short of position. Pros are better at adjusting to fast tables than they are to slow ones. It's the opposite for amateurs.

She's also overcoming a shorter shot clock. She has 30 seconds for each shot, and she's accustomed to being a deliberate, methodical player within the limits of the 45-second clock the women use. You'd never know it by her languid, laid-back manner, but she's being rushed throughout the match. But good shotmaking, smart planning, and her steady, even temperament, along with some outstanding safety* play (she wins at least two of her racks with wickedly good safeties), plus the addition of a little good luck here and there and a few misses from Shane, carry her to an impressive showing. The match goes hill-hill, meaning the winner will be decided by the last rack.

Mike

*A safety is when you put your opponent in a bad position instead of putting yourself in a good one. It's the mark of a rank amateur when someone thinks a safety shot is "cheating"!

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
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tom: "Did you post this to the wrong blog?"

Jeff1000: "I learned more about pool in that short essay than a lifetime playing eight-ball. Outstanding!"

The Virus Is a Hawk

[You can share this essay with friends by mailing or texting them this link: https://tinyurl.com/y228evwn ]

Guest essay written by Ctein

Outside of our bedroom window, at the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean, is a very large fir tree* that is home to an unkindness** of ravens. Some years ago it hosted two ravens, then three, as ravens are inclined to make more ravens. Now there appear to be eight or nine; I've lost count. Come trash-collection day they wander up and down the street, methodically checking out trash bins for ones that are overflowing. Ravens are extremely opportunistic omnivores.

They are also carnivores and predators. As such they compete for the same eco-niche as the local red-tailed hawks, and there is little love lost between them. (It's also possible that the hawks attempt to prey on the ravens' chicks, so even less reason for endearment.)

Periodically they also compete for airspace, because the hawks' favorite updraft from the sea is not all that far away from the ravens' tree. For birds, it is not good fences but great distances that make good neighbors. This distance is not great enough.

The hawks and ravens are similar in size (red-tailed hawks are among the largest hawks) but there is no question that ravens are stronger, smarter, and more aerobatically adept. They've also got considerably more attitude. They initiate the aerial conflicts.

Two or three of the ravens will soar above the hawk and swoop down on it, sweeping to one side of the very last moment. Neither species wants actual physical contact, which could prove fatal. It's all about intimidation.***

Sometimes the ravens whirl and loop. There is considerable vocalization. In action and words they say to the hawk, "Look, we are superior in every respect, physically and mentally. You are overshadowed. Take a hike."

The hawk's sole response is to slide to one side in the updraft, issuing an irritated "keeee." The ravens regroup, soar up, and swoop down on the hawk again. They repeatedly demonstrate—in terms that even a groundhugging human could understand—that the hawk is outclassed and should relinquish its airspace. Repeatedly the hawk slip-slides to one side or the other, issuing annoyed cries, and continuing to focus its limited attention and prodigious eyesight on the ground. It is looking for prey, and nothing else is on its tiny mind.

This can go on for as long as 20 minutes. By raven—and human—sensibilities, it shouldn't be any contest. The ravens win on style and points. They are clearly the superior predator, and deserve the win. The problem—for the ravens—is that while the ravens are challenging the hawk to a duel and demonstrating unquestionably superior prowess, the hawk is only thinking, "food, hunting for food, quit bugging me, hunting food."

Finally, the ravens give up—they get frustrated and, worse, bored. They go off to find some more entertaining mischief, and the hawk continues doing what it's been doing all along.

The hawk wins every time because it isn't even playing the game!

I feel like the ravens do. I am tired and I'm bored and I'm frustrated and depressed and, most of all, exhausted by four months of navigating through this Brave New World, of living in Plague Times. God knows I've done my part, more than my part. I need a break.

Unfortunately, the virus is a hawk. It doesn't care that our only ways of suppressing it are socio-political, it doesn't care that some people are wrapping themselves in the flags of politics around this. It doesn't care that we, individually and collectively, are frustrated and bored and figuratively sick of it all, and really badly in need of a f*ckin' break.

COVID-19 is not a raven. Our only tools may be sociopolitical, but it's not a political opponent. Just because we're tired doesn't mean it's tired, or that we've worn it down one bit. It's the same hawk it always was, doing the same hawkish things.

If we go back to "old normal" because, well, we've put in a Really Good Fight, it will reassert itself just as vigorously as it did in March. Incidence doubling times of 4.5 to 5 days. Compound interest being what it is, that becomes a ten-fold increase in two weeks, a hundred-fold in a month. The consequences of that, in humanitarian and economic (both!) terms are so catastrophic that they make the last four months look like a cakewalk.

Well, we're not being quite that stupid; we're not going back to the old normal. We're going to a "new normal." It makes a big difference; these days we're looking at doubling times of 3–4 weeks. That's a whole lot better, except—compound interest! Caseloads don't increase by tenfold in two weeks, but they do in three months. By year's end we're back to catastrophe: humanitarian, economic.

Exponential growth is a bitch. Mongo no like exponent > 1.

We don't have the luxury of letting down our guards and relaxing our extraordinarily inconvenient and uncomfortable protections because we are exhausted (and, make no mistake, we are exhausted). The hawk just hovers in the updraft, thinking its minimal, hawkish thoughts and waiting for hawkish opportunity.

Topic Two! How to tell good science from bad, revisited

I wrote a couple of columns some years back about things that laypeople could do to figure out if the information they were being fed was good science or not, even if they lacked expertise in the area. I offered textual, contextual, and meta- tools that would help sort the wheat from the chaff. Here are links to those two columns:

Bad Science vs. Good Science: A Guide for the Layperson (Part 1)

Bad Science vs. Good Science: A Guide for the Layperson (Part 2)

I'm going to add an additional tip that wasn't in those columns: good scientists will not intentionally lie to you.

Yes, scientists will get things wrong. Science is only an approximation of our universe and one way to think of it is as an ongoing process of error correction, where every step of the way we try to reduce our misunderstandings and ignorance. But it's not like we've found the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything (actually, I live at that address****), so sometimes they will tell you things that turn out to be incorrect.

But, they will never outright lie to you. If you catch someone lying to you, really lying to you, they are not doing good science. Doesn't matter what degrees they hold, who they are affiliated with, what reputation they have. They are not Good Scientists, they are Bad.

There are people out there telling you that you should not wear masks to reduce the spread of COVID-19. That wearing a mask is, at the least, ineffectual and at the worst, dangerous.

They are liars. This is not a matter of opinion; it is not a matter for debate. There are not "good people on both sides" of this question. Saying masks aren't effective is like saying the earth is flat or that HIV doesn't cause AIDS or that vaccines cause autism. It is a blatant lie, contradicted by real medical knowledge.

Some people are saying this out of woeful, misinformed ignorance. Others are saying it with conscious, malign intent. Irrelevant. Either way, what they are doing is lying to you. If they are lying about something this obvious, there is a good chance they are lying about other things that will not be so obvious. They are untrustworthy and you should not be relying on them for information.

Cut them out of your life. Close the browser tab, delete the bookmark, don't read them ever again. Any information they present that's correct you'll be able to find in a dozen other places. You won't lose a single thing of value and you will reduce your risk of being lied to further.

In the meantime, wear the %^$#@! mask when you go out. Yes it's annoying, and mildly uncomfortable, and a nuisance, and a constant, extremely unpleasant reminder that we are living in Plague Times, like a little finger incessantly poking you in the face repeating, "Don't forget, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget." I hate that!

Well, I don't know anybody who likes it. But, y'know, on the scale of inconveniences and annoyances that this pandemic has subjected us to, it's way down on the list.

This hawk is very single-mindedly focussed on being a hawk, but a mask makes its life considerably more difficult.

That is your Public Service Announcement for this time. In next month's newsletter I will return to less fraught and contemporary matters.

Probably.

pax / Ctein

[Ed. note: Originally published in "Ctein's (New and Improved) Occasional Newsletter," July 9, 2020.Seems Ctein noticed a rush of signups for his newsletter on Wednesday, suspected TOP, came here, and found my mention of his essay. Last night he kindly offered to allow me to republish the essay here. Thanks to Ctein, and I hope you enjoyed this. You can sign up for his future newsletters at ctein.com.]

[ADDENDUM Sunday morning: If this article didn't go into enough specifics about masks for you, see Ctein's reply to Gerard in the Comments section. Both together are a bit long to be Featured Comments but there is useful detail there.]

*Paula says it is a Monterey Cypress. I say if it's got little pointy leaf things and cones, it's a fir tree. OK, not a botanist.

**Yes, that is the collective noun for ravens, in contrast to a "murder" of crows. I'm not sure why; perhaps someone considered ravens—unsupported by observation—to be more genteel.

***I did consider describing it as a game of aerial chicken, but that seemed too groan-worthy. So I didn't, he said contradictorily.

****Ed. note: Ctein's address is 42 Skyline Drive. He is, among many other talents, a writer, lecturer, and fan of science fiction a.k.a. speculative fiction, and the number 42 has implications amongst fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Thanks to everyone who supports TOP through Patreon!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Andy Holman: "A great piece on COVID and corvids!"

Aashish Sharma: "This article made my day! Reading something new from Ctein usually does, and this one was no exception. Love the clear and direct writing with a hint of humor. I only want to say thanks for the advice on masks, and that I'm delighted to know you are a Douglas Adams fan like me.  :-)  I will eagerly wait for the next one."

Scott: "Living in an area where I watch 'our' crows do this all the time, I was rapt (sorry, had to say it) by your article and then loved the pivot to talking about the virus. A superbly written article in my opinion and also the truth. The virus is truly the hawk. I know this from my pertinent scientific background and also deep study of medical history. Bravo."

Open Mike: Thank a Nurse

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. vents opinions. It appears on Wednesdays.]

-

I just had a conversation "offstage" with a reader who's a nurse. Thoughtful guy. And it just struck me that, for all we like to thank military people for their service in this country, right now it's nurses, doctors, and other health professionals who have been on, and are on, the front lines. It would not seem out of place to say to an ER doc or nurse or EMT, "thank you for your service."

Where would we be without them?

Cuomo comes through
Here in New York State the news has been very good and getting better. A world hotspot just a few months ago, with massive infections, mounting deaths, and hospitals and health providers under enormous strain, New York on Monday had just 860 COVID-19 hospitalizations throughout the entire State. The State conducted 60,045 tests on Monday, of which 912 (1.5%) were positive. Six New Yorkers died on Monday of the disease.

That's from yesterday's "NYS Coronavirus Update," which I get in my inbox daily.

The State has done this the hard way: by assiduously doing mostly the right things, following the recommendations of health experts, and through good, consistent, firm leadership. Many people here might have thought our Governor, Andrew Cuomo, was distant and kind of hard, a bit of a cold fish. But he has risen to this occasion admirably. For the most part he's done a thoroughly excellent job throughout the crisis here. He came through when it counted. We had leadership at the State level which is so sorely lacking at the national level.

Here in my county—the third-least-populous in the State, and largely rural—we haven't had a new case identified in several weeks. There have been 48 known positives (probably many more unidentified). Six deaths in total so far. But there haven't been any additional deaths lately. (We do have some "anti-maskers" here and there—citizens behaving badly. There's no room for personal interpretation: wearing masks in public and at group functions is mandated.)

Curiosity
I want to get the COVID-19 antibody test. I'm just curious. I was sick last Winter with a very strange malady unlike any I've ever had before. It was definitely respiratory, with a dry cough that would come and go. Several times I had coughing fits so bad I thought I was going to have to go to the Emergency Room. Twice I spiked a fever which then went away abruptly. The sickness hung on for more than six weeks, also a first in my life. I went to the doctor's office twice during that time, and the second time, my primary care physician, who's a good diagnostician I believe, said it looked like I had gotten one sickness on top of another one.

As soon as we heard about the coronavirus, my first thought was "aha, so that was it." Then I did the timeline and thought, no, that couldn't have been it, because I was sick too early. But later they began saying that maybe the coronavirus was here a lot earlier than they first believed...and I remember what the doctor said about it being one sickness on top of another. I've ended up thinking that there's a non-zero chance it was what I had. So, mainly because I'm interested to know, I'm going to go try to find out. I have to pay for it myself, though. (Curiousity doesn't make it medically necessary.)

My son who tested positive has had no further complications, thank God. He quarantined for two weeks after being diagnosed, but he was already feeling fine when his quarantine started. No further symptoms in the weeks since.

Ctein and the unkindness of ravens
Lastly on this subject, if you receive Ctein's Occasional Newsletter, be sure to read the essay "Birds and Bad Science" in the July 9th newsletter. I loved it. One of the best things he's written in my opinion. (Not on the Internet, so no link, but you can sign up for the newsletter at his site.) I loved the bird story. It might be the most involved analogy I've run across in some time, but it's great.

Mike

[ADDENDUM Thursday morning: I need to acknowledge that several readers have taken strenuous issue with parts of this post (one to the point of cancelling his Patreon support for this website). My view of them is that they have fallen for a false narrative from fake news, namely a right-wing meme that Fox News picked up from the partisan New York Post; they, on the other hand, think they are in possession of facts and I am not, that something very close to a crime has been perpetrated by the Governor, and that my judgment is extremely poor. So, okay. I did label this post "opinion" right from the top, but maybe we have something more elemental than a difference of opinion here—closer to conflicting beliefs. A microcosm of wider disunity. We are not going to fray everyone's nerves in an attempt to hash out the details in the Comments section, but to be fair I thought I should acknowledge their dissent.]

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fred Haynes: "I totally agree with this post on all levels! Add to the list those underpaid, largely foreign-born women and men who work as nurses aids, and clean and comfort the patients, and help them with their personal needs. In 2018 I was hospitalized for two months, and thank God for them all. There’s a special place in heaven for these people, I am sure."

Jamie Pillers: "I'd add public school teachers and administrators to this list of fellow citizens going above and beyond during the mess. They are having to deal with an amazingly tough array of problems right now, trying to make sure our kids get something even close to quality education. They're trying to deal with major problems around distance learning technology, social distancing, food service, etc."

Stephen F Faust: "The American Red Cross is testing all blood donations for COVID-19 antibodies (and of course letting the donor know the results) so if you are eligible and willing to donate, this is an excellent way to have the antibody test (at no cost) while at the same time doing enormous good for the community."

David Lee: "I agree with you on Ctein’s piece on birds. I actually copied and shared it. Just don’t tell him please...."

Rene: "Just a note of support for your opinion piece. Cuomo made some mistakes in the beginning (as did many others), but quickly corrected himself. Sure, he can look, and be, arrogant but he did the hard stuff well. I live in a State next door to you and am thankful for the actions he took which I'm sure influenced our Republican governor to move in the right direction.

"I say all this as a retired public health and health care professional with 40+ years of experience, not that such experience would matter to your former supporter. A lot of the work I did was in both infectious disease (started with the US Public Health Service in 1968) and in health education and, as I quickly learned, 'There are none so blind as those who will not see.'"

Sunday Support Group: Ah, July (OT)

A quote for you. The usual disclaimer here—I'm not an expert on this subject. Just talking about the latest book I'm reading. It's by a gastroenterologist and it's about gut health. The study of gut microorganisms is a new field that's really only gotten going in earnest since about 2005, and one stated aim of the book is to bring laypeople up to speed with what's been going on in the field. Here's the quote:

Diversity of plants is the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiota
At this point, you probably don’t need me to explain why the Golden Rule of plant-based diversity matters. You’ve heard it throughout this book. This is our anthem. Our core philosophy. We no longer need a laundry list of food rules, we only need to remember to eat a diversity of plants. When you walk into the supermarket, remember: “Diversity of plants.” When you’re at the salad bar, trying to figure out what to add, remember: “Diversity of plants.” “Diversity of plants” should cross your mind whenever you’re thinking about what to eat.

—Will Bulsiewicz MD, Fiber Fueled (p. 181)

(The heading is part of the paragraph from the book.)

The Hadza tribe, a modern hunter-gatherer society in Northern Tanzania whose members eat no processed foods and not even any foods originating from farms, might not have a lot of wealth in the way some of us think about it, but they have something very precious that most of us Westerners don't: they enjoy very good gut health. The typical Hadza gets an average of 100 grams of fiber a day, eats thirty different kinds of plants in a day, and has 30 to 40% more different kinds of microbes and bacteria in their guts than average Brits or Americans do. (More being better.) That's versus a paltry 15 grams of relatively poor-quality (i.e., low-diversity) fiber daily for Americans on average—38 grams being recommended daily for adult males.

Here's an interesting thing I learned from the book. It turns out that when you think you have an intolerance for some variety of plant food, you're right—you actually do. But you're very likely to draw precisely the wrong conclusion from that.

Let's say you think you can't eat beans. Beans make you bloated and gassy. Your stomach burbles and gurgles, and you're uncomfortable. So you very logically think, whew, beans! Bad for me. Never eating those again.

Wrong conclusion. What's really going on is that you have an unhealthy gut—your gut bacteria are depleted, starved out, limited, and your system lacks the flora needed to digest beans easily and comfortably. Why? Because you never eat bean fiber and you have a low level of microbial diversity in your gut. But the solution to that is not to avoid beans...that's what led to the problem in the first place. The solution is to go "low and slow to grow" in Dr. Bulsiewicz's words, and steadily reintroduce bean fiber to your diet to repopulate your gut with the microbes that are missing.

So you get a can of organic beans and dole out just a teaspoon of them on to your salad each day. Start with a very low dose, go very slow, and begin to build up the variety of your gut flora again.

Eat them regularly—a big problem with food intolerance is that we never eat something and then we eat a large amount of it all at once, bombarding our system with something it's not used to dealing with. Go slow and go steady.

After a few weeks you'll be able to digest beans comfortably, and your gut will be that much stronger and healthier.

So that's what people mean when they say "we're all different" when it comes to diet and food. In fact, we all are: it's because we all have a different profile of microorganisms in our intestines.

Enthusiasm
As a read, Fiber Fueled starts rather awkwardly and tentatively. But as soon as Dr. Bulsiewicz gets to the science he perks right up and all but overflows with enthusiasm. He works with patients who have serious gut issues of all kinds, so naturally he goes through all those issues. He makes a convincing case that most of us have guts that are badly damaged by antibiotics, alcohol, and our number one type of malnutrition, namely the critical shortage of fiber in our diets. (The majority of Americans think there's fiber in steak! No. All fiber comes from plants.)

Diversity of plants is his mantra for gut health. Although in 400 pages he goes a little further into it than that. For the most part, I was already doing a lot of what he suggests. For quite a while now I've been in the habit of adding all sorts of different plants to whatever I cook. Little of this, little of that in everything. When I read that part about the Hadza eating thirty different kinds of plants a day, though, I heard that little voice in my head go, thirty! I'll never get to that. So I actually counted. If you allow specific spices to count, as well as different kinds of greens in a salad, I actually ate 28 different kinds of plants yesterday. So I might be doing better than I thought.

Of course, it's high produce season here in the Finger Lakes, so eating plant-based is easy right now. Not to mention very pleasurable. (It's kind of weird to be eating all I can stand to and still be losing weight.) Even though I was already full, I gorged myself on a bowl of locally-grown raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries for dessert a few hours ago—all high in gut-friendly fiber. They melted in my mouth. Heavenly. And there are more for tomorrow.

This season actually makes me a little sad because I can only eat so much. I stuff myself to the scuppers until I can't take another bite, and there's still a cornucopia of fresh produce lined up waiting its turn. I had yellow squash and mushrooms in my salad today, along with about a dozen other things, but the fresh peas are going to have to wait till tomorrow.

So much plantatious goodness abounding, so little room for it all. Ah, July.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Open Mike Followup: Streaming Music (Off Topic Except at the End)

So as far as Tuesday's music post goes, I was overthinking things. Way overthinking things. Needed to take a step back.

I had been struggling with how to set up a good-sounding (n.b.) stereo (i.e., two-channel) music system, not connected to my computer, using a streaming service as a source. I had been looking at various cunning and involved audiophile solutions requiring things like Gustard DACs and $895 network players like the Sonore UltraRendu, a category of device I had not had an inkling existed only weeks ago. I was rather fixated on using Amazon Music HD as a source, mainly because I've tried that and I like it. To access Amazon Music HD, I was halfway home with plans to use my old Mac Mini as a source. I was going to have it converted to use DC power so I could use a linear power supply, and I was planning to get a Gustard U16 as a USB buffer, and...

...Whoa, hoss. It was all getting pretty...complicated. Not to mention expensive. I think I finally caught myself when it dawned on me that one day I was going to have to deal with reselling items like the Gustard U16. Given that I didn't even know what it was three weeks ago, and that I had never heard of Gustard (a manufacturer of Chifi allegedly owned by an otherwise mysterious "Mr. Huang"—the company doesn't even have a website) prior to that, I figured that I might be in for a pretty hard resell. (I'm a little obsessed with Gustard stuff, which you can see at Apos Audio.)

Time to take a deep breath.

All I actually need is something like a Cambridge CXN v2 streamer/preamp, and a regular ol' stereo amplifier. That's it.

You can send the Cambridge CXN v2 signal either via ethernet or WiFi (using a supplied dongle, an option they chose to avoid having that stubby little antenna sticking up from behind the thing), and you can use it as a preamp to control volume and run its outputs straight to your amplifier. Of course, it doesn't support Amazon Music HD, but it does support Qobuz, among other things. So I have resolved to be...flexible, and go with Qobuz (pronounced ko-buzz) rather than Amazon Music HD. The latter is really for computer-connected systems, which mine will not be, and lower-fi outputs like Echoes (which makes the UHD pretty pointless, but never mind).

Control freak
The CXN v2, which Cambridge calls a "network player," is Roon-ready, too. More about Roon another day.

There are three ways to control the CXN v2. You can use the buttons and knobs on the front of the unit; you can use the remote control; or you can download the free StreamMagic app and control it remotely with your smartphone or tablet. The only glitch I've heard about is that apparently the touchscreen volume control on the phone doesn't work very well. The workaround is to use the phone's (or the tablet's) up/down volume buttons for volume instead.

The ongoing costs for this, which people fret about and argue over, are laughably tiny. Roon costs ten bucks a month. Qobuz costs fifteen. Are you kidding me? I started buying CDs like a madman in 1982, and have five figures invested in iTunes tracks. $25 is the cost of two CDs or 20 iTunes songs. It's been many, many years since I've spent less than $25 a month on music. Many years. It's a line item in the budget. I listen to music half of every day. It's a consumable, like clothing or food. I'll get my money's worth out of Qobuz within days, if not hours.

Perseveration
To perseverate means "repeat or prolong an action, thought, or utterance after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased." Like, continuing to read reviews after you've already read enough reviews. Sooner or later, with anything like this, you need to dive in and get hands-on. It's that way with all manner of photography products too. There comes a time when further research is actually counterproductive. You're just confusing yourself. What do they call it? Paralysis by analysis. Yeah. You can't make a perfect decision with no actual experience. (I chose my current car by going to an auto show and sitting in a bunch of cars. The one I bought hadn't even been on my radar until I got into it and had a visceral "this will do fine" reaction.)

I've ordered a Cambridge CXN v2. There's a good review of it from John Darko, and another one from Andrew Robinson (if you increase the playback speed to 1.5X, Andrew will talk as fast as Doug Demuro). The Cambridge is on backorder at B&H Photo, so it's going to be a wait before it gets here.

But my system will be bone-simple at first: streamer/preamp > power amp > speakers. If I want to add CDs, there's even a matching CD transport** from Cambridge I could add.

So I'll just "get my hands dirty," figuratively speaking of course, and set things up and see how it works. If I like the CXN v2, I'll tell you about the experience at some future date.

Thanks for all the help and the good links the other day. Especially, but not exclusively, to those who recommended the Cambridge or who sent me to primers or what I used to call "backgrounders" on digital streaming. I also bought File Based Audio aka. [sic] Streaming Audio by Hans Beekhuyzen, another YouTube star.

And I'm feeling a little better today.

Mike

*Amazon calls CD-quality files "HD" and hi-res files "UHD," the U meaning "ultra." Normally, HD means higher-than-CD quality. Amazon Music HD, which is a great choice for your computer-connected headphone or desktop system, provides UHD files as well as HD, and everything is at least HD.

**A "transport" is the part of a CD player that has the drawer and spins the disc. The other part of a CD player is the digital to analog converter, or DAC, and the CXN v2 already has a DAC in it.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Patrick Dodds: "Well, I didn't understand a word of that but you seem happy which is the main thing."

Mike replies: I certainly sympathize. I was going to lampoon the "information" sites on this topic by extracting several quotes and replacing every word I don't know with "[verb]" and "[noun]" and every unfamiliar acronym with "XXX," to try to communicate how opaque and obscure most of this sounds to me...it's been a struggle, as I said earlier, getting up the steep first part of the learning curve. I'm getting there, but it's been painful. "The world of 'things,'" as Benjamin Marks's brother put it (from his comment in the Comments section), was certainly simpler to suss out.

[Ed. Note: Someone said in the comments that musicians don't get very much income from streaming. I've looked and looked for the comment but I just can't find it, and I'm giving up. However, by chance, the intensely chipper young couple at Two Cents have done a video about just that question, called "What's the Best Way to Support Musicians?" Here it is.]

[...Also, don't forget Zoe Heller's famous interview with Mick Jagger, which might be the "last word" on the topic. There's a short, easy-to-digest summary at Mises and you can link to the full article from there if you like.]

Electric Cars (OT)

This is neither here nor there, but falls under the category of News of the Weird: yesterday, Tesla surpassed Toyota as the world's most valuable car company.

I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming.

My Indiana-built Acura currently has 77,000 miles, is paid for, and has no current problems—knock on my wooden head (one of my dad jokes is to say "knock on wood" and rap my forehead). So it's going to be my ride for the foreseeable, for hard-headed (ahem) practical reasons. But I hope my next car, wherever in the hazy future it may be, will be electric. At least a hybrid.

My great-grandmother owned an electric car—they were popular in America circa 1890–1922. Demand was high in 1910. Thomas Edison thought electrics were the superior technology. My grandmother said that when her mother's car came up the drive, all you could hear were the tires crunching on the gravel.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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JH: "Electric cars have a lot in common with nuclear power—environmentally clean until you realize you have to deal with the toxic waste. Think all cars should be electric? Well we better get hopping on recycling batteries or we will have auto scrapyards full of batteries that will make Love Canal look tame. Tesla presents a couple of more problems. There is no independent dealer or service network. You are totally dependent on the manufacturer for support. The cars are even more dependent on software than most and are creating problems actually 'wearing out' memory chips. Tesla sells you a new CPU module for $2,500 when it happens. Batteries have cooling problems and catch fire. NHTSA is looking into these problems now. [Tesla's] 'Autopilot' has killed quite a few drivers who think it really is an autopilot, but in fact its response is too slow for normal freeway traffic. That seems to be the reason they keep running into stopped vehicles and stationary objects.

"As for the stock price, all stocks are crazy right now —70–90% of all trades are done by computers in microseconds and algorithms can be tweaked to make money under virtually any circumstances. Notice how the US markets hiccup then go back to growth. Just reprogram those trading computers overnight. So I would say not that Tesla is the most valuable car company but the one that the stock market can manipulate the easiest."

Mike replies: Yes, two things would have to happen for electric cars to be a solution on a large scale: the energy source would need to be solar, and there would need to be strong central oversight for regulation of battery recycling. Unfortunately, the latter would require a strong and healthy government, which we once had but have no longer.

TC: "The misinformation in these comments about Tesla is baffling. Why all the hate for an innovative American car company and all the support for a stodgy foreign car company that seems to be innovating at a much slower rate? I'd thought that most of TOP's commenters were Americans, but I must have been mistaken."

Mike replies: Kevin Phillips, in his great book American Theocracy, makes the argument that declining superpowers have trouble moving on from the energy sources that helped them in their rise. He predicted that America would cling to oil even after it was no longer to our advantage to do so. I've thought of that book a hundred times since 2006. The first 96 pages, a section entitled "Oil and American Supremacy," is the best essay I've ever read on energy politics (I read hundreds of political books during the Bush years). I thought he should publish that section alone as a separate little book. It explains so much, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Highly recommended.

jerry: "Wow, tons of false information about Tesla in the comments (yes, I own a 26-month-old Tesla Model 3). Tesla was the most shorted stock in the world for years (no longer) because a lot of hedge fund guys though they would never survive and placed shorts as a result. Those hugely rich and successful investors then did everything possible to malign Tesla to drive the stock prices down. All those guys lost billions (yes billions) betting wrong. There are 550 car fires in the US every day. Have you ever heard any model mentioned but Tesla (for the four or five that have made the national news)? Tesla cars crash at 1/10 the rate of other cars. Don't hear about that! Idiots that let their Tesla drive without paying any attention have crashed a few times.

"Tesla (Space X) just sent two astronauts to the Space Station. Tesla will become the largest supplier of solar panels. Tesla Powerwalls are being bought by electric utilities all over the world to store electricity. Tesla has sold over a million cars now. They are building a factory in Germany right now to supply half a million cars a year to Europe. The factory in the US is building 400,000 a year, the Chinese factory is building 2,000 a week and ramping up to 10,000 a week. A Tesla costs the environment about 25% of what a Toyota Corolla costs, over the life of the car. That includes the build of car, not just the gas not burned. I've put 71,000 miles on my car and only replaced the tires at 65,000. No other maintenance costs. Batteries are supposed to last 500,000 miles, motor one million miles. And I can outrun your Ferrari."

Mike replies: Ctein bought a Tesla (I tried to talk him out of it), and, as you might expect, has strong opinions on the subject. But you've touched on some of his arguments here.

Andrew J.: "Tesla produced 370,000 cars last year. Toyota produced 10 million in the same period. Bloomberg has calculated that at its present value, Tesla should have margins like a company such as Apple and should have sold more units than Volkswagen, the largest world company in number of cars sold. This seems like stock exchange manipulation. Don't buy an electric Car. Keep your Acura until the real future is here: the hydrogen car. Cheap, clean, fills up in 2–3 minutes just as a gasoline engine. Wait and see."

Mike replies: I hope I get to! One of my hopes is that I get to live to see what replaces the internal combustion engine.

Keith: "I believe that remarkably soon, maybe even within a decade, the idea of burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine for a private vehicle is going to seem quaint at best. It will be considered like lead in paint or gasoline, CFCs in the atmosphere, dumping sewage in rivers or lakes, and many other things we know are bad ideas."

Jason in Hawaii: "There’s a lot of FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt —Ed.] in these comments about Tesla. Say what you will about their valuation; they also passed Exxon Mobil in market cap. I would challenge anyone thinking Tesla is a flash in the pan to take one for a test ride. I did, and now I have two Model 3's in my garage. And as for the batteries, not only will they last a few hundred thousand miles, but they’re about 95% recyclable. Big oil has put out a lot of misinformation about EV's. When you corner a pit bull, it usually has a reaction. Again, Tesla surpassed Exxon Mobil; guess who feels threatened?"

Mike replies: That's what Ctein said, too. He drove a Tesla and that was it.

emptyspaces: "I think it’s important to address some misinformation I see all the time regarding the relationship between CO2 emissions from power plants and electric cars. It depends very much of where you live. You can plug your state in here to see where your power comes from. This article has an easy-to-follow map showing a state-by-state breakdown. I’ve heard it said more than once that driving an EV is worse than a gas-powered car, but it just doesn’t make sense. EVs are far from perfect, but it’s pretty clear they are a cleaner solution right now. I hope they can get even cleaner as the technology progresses."

Mike replies: Here in rural New York State, I can opt for household electricity that comes from a solar field. The rates fluctuate, and sometimes it can be a little higher than the regular grid, but neither are bad. I just paid a monthly bill for $108.

An electric car would not require much in the way of extra infrastructure for me, and my utility actually offers a "Day/Night" rate for people who will be charging electric cars at night.

I could easily use an electric vehicle for local trips—I drive a lot, because "everything is far away from everything" here, but the longest local trip I make (infrequently) is a round trip to Rochester, which is a 108-mile round trip. Add 20 miles for doodling around in Rochester and I'm at ~130 miles—easily within the range of many electrics these days. Most of my trips are shorter—shopping and errands (minimum 15 miles for those), and attending AA meetings which are scattered hither and yon. The farthest of these is a 60-mile round trip, but we usually carpool most of the way (in formerly normal times, pre-COVID-19).

Actually, given how infrequently I drive on long trips, it would make perfect sense to lease a plug-in electric as a daily driver and simply rent a car for long trips.

I would guess I'd save money (not factoring in the cost of the car), but even if I didn't it would be better for the atmosphere. In the words of the second article you linked, "the average EV driven in upstate New York has emissions equal to a (hypothetical) 231 MPG gasoline car." My current car gets 31 MPG combined (actual, not calculated).

In fact, I might be in one of the best-case scenarios for EV's...private garage, limited long-distance driving, in an area that's transitioning to solar and has an enlightened utility with sympathetic policies.

Open Mike: Stereo, Circa 2020 (Very Off Topic)

I wonder if anybody could help me with this. I've been on a veritable odyssey trying to put together a new stereo system—my last, perhaps. Streaming seems to be the wave of...not the future, of now. But I'm biased against it because I don't understand it. Really, it fits the way I consume music—I love to engage with music, but then I typically move on. I don't want to listen to the same recordings for the rest of my life. Most of the vinyl records and CDs I own I might as well not, because I hardly ever revisit them. Except as fond memories.

Can anyone recommend a good site or book or source for understanding streaming? I'm an old fashioned vinyl-to-preamp-to-tube-amplifier-to-stereo-speakers audiophile, so the newfangled ways don't come natural to me. Now I'd like to set up a streamer-based two-channel stereo using Amazon Music HD (and note that Amazon's own WiFi solutions don't support HD) as a source. But I'm having a lot of trouble researching streaming because I just don't understand enough about it. I don't get what a lot of the terms mean or how streaming works. Ideally I'd like a streamer with no DAC and no hard drive (because I won't be ripping CDs and I don't want to get tied to one DAC), and a way to use my iPad as a controller.

Any help would be much appreciated. I'm usually a pretty quick study, but I'm drowning in jargon and pretty lost. An uncomfortable feeling. I need a leg up past the steep start of the learning curve.

—Muddleheaded Mike

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Anthony Smith: "John Darko is currently doing a series of 'back to basics' videos that may cover what you are looking for. He aims his stuff at the 'music-first audiophile.'

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

"A lot of the streamers that are available have digital as well as analogue outputs so you can always add a better separate DAC at a later date. My favourite all-in-one streaming solution is Roon. however this doesn't currently support Amazon HD streaming. It is also possible to connect a USB DAC to an iPad/Phone via the camera connection kit. I use an Audioquest Dragonfly Red for this. It also doubles as a nicer headphone amp.

"I find the various internet audio forums are even more unpleasant than the photography forums so I tend to avoid them."

JIM BELTZER: "Just installed a Bluesound Node 2i streaming device. It has a DAC which can be bypassed and it can output to two-channel analog stereo. At $550 it is a deal. Connect the Node to the internet and sign up for a music streaming service (the links are built into the Node). Tidal and Qobuz are two of the more popular services they each have large libraries (Tidal claims 60 million tracks) of all genres. For $20 and $15 a month respectively you have access to all the music and it can be controlled from your smartphone. Hope that helps."

Nick Rich: "Dear Mike, First, thanks for TOP. It has informed, inspired and entertained me for many years. I am wholly in favour of your cars, audio and pool posts, by the way!

"I may be able to be of some help with streaming concepts.

"A streaming device is conceptually no different from any other audio component...it's a source, like a tuner. In this instance, it's a digital source. And just as with any digital source, at some point you need to convert the digital signal to analogue, (that's the DAC bit) so that you can pass it to an amplifier and speakers.

"But just as with an other audio component, you can buy an all-in-one box, which contains streamer, DAC, amp and speakers, or just the streamer, or the streamer and DAC, or the streamer, DAC and amp (this is therefore equivalent to a receiver).

"To the extent that your Mac is a.) connected to the internet and b.) connected to your amp and speakers, it is already a fully functional streaming device.

"Many people (including me) fall prey to the delusion that they can improve the sound by bypassing the (very good) DAC that's built into your Mac and passing the digital signal via a USB cable to an external DAC and thence to amp and speakers. (I have just acquired the FiiO K5 DAC/headphone amp to plug my (high impedance) headphones into, for example.)

"But assuming you want a separate system from your Mac, you first need to decide how much built-in functionality you want. Standalone box? Or hi-fi component?

"Then you need to check that whatever you acquire is compatible with Amazon HD—notice the 'HD' bit—no point paying for CD quality music if it's going to be downsampled and compressed by your device.

"That would hopefully give you a range of options (and prices) to choose from.

"One pitfall of streaming is the lack of control over availability. I have tens of albums in my Apple Music playlist where one or more tracks is no longer available, presumably because licensing deals came to an end. So I see the streaming service as an (excellent) musical discovery tool, but when I find something I like I buy the CD.

"I hope this is of some help."

Sunday Support Group: Doggie End-of-Life Decisions (OT)

[A day late! But not a dollar short. —Mike the Ed.]

-

Several readers have asked recently about Lulu the Elder Dog, noticing that I seldom show pictures of her.

Here's an interesting thing about mutts: you really don't know what to expect with them. If you get them as puppies, you don't know how big they're going to get. And while you have a range of reasonable expectations for life expectancy if you buy a purebred dog—for example, a St. Bernard usually lives eight to 10 years, while a normal lifespan for a Jack Russell terrier is 13 to 16—you really don't know how long a mutt will live. You might get lucky, you might not.

Gray girl

Some time next Fall Lulu will turn 14, which is getting up there for a mid-sized (~60 lbs.) dog. She seems to be changing fast as she ages, which has caused me to continually adjust to her changing needs. For example, she went largely deaf over about a three-month period last year (she can still hear a little). I had a stone step built for her a couple of years ago—cleverly disguised as a step humans might use!—when she could no longer jump up to the deck, but now she can't always manage that, so I patiently "herd" her around to places where she doesn't have to negotiate changes in level of more than a few inches. (Even that much causes her to fall down now and then.) And I no longer toss treats to her, because she can no longer see well enough to catch them in her mouth. I throw them on the ground in front of her, in places where she'll be able to see where it lands. There have been lots of little adjustments like those.

Of course she has a nice soft bed, where she spends a lot of time sleeping. Nobody sleeps like an old dog.

Tough choices
We're charged with potentially—okay, probably—having to make end-of-life decisions for our animals. The question is how to hit the proper balance. You don't want to extend their lives needlessly if you're only prolonging suffering, but you also don't want to give up on them too soon. I'm aware that there's no such thing as a perfect decision, so I've already forgiven myself for making a less-than-perfect one. At the same time, I want to do the best I can for Lulu, so I'm reading articles about doggie end-of-life issues. I'm preparing myself to make the best decision I can when the time comes.

Lulu was a rescue, a foundling from a park in Chicago, and we learned something of her history. She escaped from a man who was probably engaged in breeding fighting dogs; her most likely fate if she hadn't escaped by leaping his cast-iron fence would have been to be a "bait dog." Look up the term if you have the stomach for it, but beware—it's a nasty, brutish business. I always figured she needed to live a good, safe, cared-for life to help make up for what might have happened to her poor littermates, who I suspect did not end up in loving homes with caring owners. "A dog's life" is not automatically a good thing.

The thing I'm most worried about is her hind legs. Lulu was prodigiously strong as a young dog, and she had an amazing vertical leap. She was not naturally fleet like a whippet or a greyhound but she ran with great heart and determination, pounding the ground like a horse. She had a TPLO operation at about five years of age, in which a steel plate is used to stabilize the stifle joint after a rupture of the CCL (a ligament analogous to the ACL in human knees). It was a hard pill to swallow at the time—it hit me during a nadir in my fortunes, and the nearly $3,000 the operation cost was a very large part of all the cash I had in the bank at the time. But the logic was persuasive. If a dog has a torn or severed CCL in one leg, they naturally put more weight on the other leg, increasing the chance of a CCL rupture in that leg as well (Lulu had CCL tears in both legs). And while a dog can get by on three good legs, it's in big trouble if both hind legs are compromised. For one thing, it makes it much more difficult to recover from an operation on one leg if the other one isn't functioning (and the recovery is arduous anyway). There was no way I could have paid for two TPLOs, but I had to find a way to pay for one. I'm glad I managed it.

But the vet told me at the time that Lulu would have arthritis in her back legs when she was older, and that prediction has come home to roost. She manages, but I suspect she's in a fair amount of pain sometimes. It takes her a long time to "get her legs underneath her" when I roust her for "last outs" at 9:00 or 9:30 every evening. I continually admonish myself to be patient with her, knowing that dogs instinctively seek to hide their pain. If she doesn't want to move, I don't push her. So far, surprisingly, I'm doing a good job of being patient. It's a quality that, in general, is becoming more natural with practice.

The boss
Beyond that, the most important thing I can do is take time to give her love and comfort every day.  I take time with her every day to give her affection and tell her I love her. Her stepbrother the attention hound gets jealous easily, and tries to horn in, but I don't let him distract me when I'm giving Lulu her fair share.

And whenever I take Butters out to play, Lulu comes too. Often she doesn't want to stay out for very long, and all she can do is bark for a few treats, but still, she gets excited at the prospect of venturing outdoors and I don't want to leave her out. I think it's important for her to have something to look forward to. We have to be careful now, though. Her legs are so weak that she occasionally spontaneously collapses, and it's usually worse when she gets excited. Maybe she momentarily forgets she's not young and strong any more.

She's still the boss come feeding time, though, same as always. At dinner time, she's the one who gets to come to the barn to get the food with me. It's the one thing she and I do alone together. We leave Butters in the house despite the blow to his ego. It's not always easy for her to cope with a rambunctious younger dog; sometimes I separate the two of them so she can get a respite when I sense that Butters is getting on her nerves.

Look at the individual in front of you
Mostly I try to observe, be patient, and look for clues. With both kids and dogs, general rules are just that—what's most important is to look at the individual in front of you and try to divine what he or she needs. I'm trying to be aware of changes in her behaviors and her physical state so I can adjust. At her age you can't make assumptions.

I've never seen a dog through to end-of-life before, so I'm on uncharted territory. But then, so is she. I'm just trying and hoping to be up for the challenge. So far, so good.

And Summer is a good time to be a dog. It's warm, it's light, life is easy, and there's plenty of lazy time for an old gray girl to zonk out, sleep, and dream.

Mike

P.S. All three of my favorite pictures of Lulu can be seen in this old post.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Brian Chambers Photography: "As a Veterinarian and someone who just went through this with our dog this certainly is an all too familiar story. If you haven't tried yet I strongly suggest you call your vet to discuss arthritis medicines. There are tons of good options with strong evidence of effectiveness ranging from antioxidant fish oils, NSAIDS, to stronger narcotics etc. The change can be dramatic and many times dogs that seem at the bitter end can rebound and have excellent quality of life."

Nigel Ladkin: "You have done the best for her until now—why should anything change at the evening of her life? The decision is agonising. But let it come to you and you will make the right decision at the right time and be at peace with the decision when it comes."

Jnny: "We are struggling with the same issue in our household, almost to a T. The big difference is our pup is 120 lbs. So when we assist him to his feet, it puts our musculoskeletal health at risk too. We've decided that when he can no longer walk unassisted, that the end has come. It will break us, because his loving heart is at least 110 of those pounds."

Jim Arthur: "The only dog I’ve known as an adult was one I helped rescue when my brother’s rental neighbor lit out in the middle of the night. My brother knew the owner so we walked over to check out the house and found that it had been trashed and a note taped to the door stating that the pound would pick up the pup at noon. We didn’t know the dog was there until we saw the note. She never made a peep even though she had been penned up in a small courtyard for days with no food or water.

"Sandy went home with us that day and turned out to be an amazing dog. My brother did a great job of training her and she quickly became part of the family. One of my favorite shots of her is a 140mm grab shot made with my very first digital camera. We were hiking in the mountains at 9,000 feet (as we often did) and I was carrying my Olympus C-8080 set to shoot JPEGs when I saw Sandy the Wonder Dog jumping from boulder to boulder along a ridgeline. I turned, fired from the waist, and got a great picture. The compression of the distant mountains makes it look like she's on top of the world.

"As the A Team used to say, I love it when a plan comes together. While I didn’t plan this shot, I was ready for anything with my newfangled digital camera. Sandy lived to be 12, so I have many RAW files of her taken with more expensive cameras that are not extreme crops and which are technically better…but this shot shows her in her prime doing what she loved best. It really captures her spirit."

Sunday Support Group: Diet Experiment Update (OT)

[Ed. Note: This week's "Print Crit" will appear tomorrow, and I'll be moving that feature to Mondays from now on. "Sunday Support Group" has been something of a hodgepodge, not very well planned or thought out, but I like it, and I'd like to continue writing it on Sundays.]

-

Some while back I promised an update on my experiment with "time-restricted eating." This is long, so I'll tuck it behind a page break so those who don't want to read it won't have to scroll past it. You're welcome!

Followup (Sorry!)

I apologize for continuing on this subject, the one from yesterday. Sometimes I get in a groove and it becomes a rut.

Basically, I'm uncomfortable arguing from suppositions. I find that even a lot of objectivist statements about sound quality have, couched within them, some purely faith-based premise. ("To conduct a double-blind test, we hung an acoustically invisible curtain between the speakers and the listeners, and in our test we found...." Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up there, hoss. Acoustically invisible? Who says it is? How did you arrive at that? How did you test it? What, does Igor say, "yes Boss, that sounds the same"? An "acoustically invisible" curtain is a faith-based premise if you ask me, sitting right there out in the open. It renders questionable every conclusion that depends on it.

But if I shoot each such statement down, it would only be from from the baseline my own suppositions, which might be partially faith-based too, and we end up with nothing but argumentation.

My old speakers from 2012 are up from the basement and
seeing daylight for the first time in five years.

Here's the best I can do. I'm setting up a sort-of new system in my bedroom, which happens to be the largest room in my house except for the combined kitchen/dining room. Once I get it set up and get familiar with it (assuming it sounds any good at all, which is still up in the air), just for fun I'll try a few different speaker wires and tell you what I think I hear. That'll be the best I can do; I get uncomfortable making claims about things I'm not familiar with. If/when I do write about that, you'll know all the parameters yourself so you can accept my conclusions, or accept them with provisos, or reject them, as you deem appropriate.

That's all on this subject from me for now. Back to common ground!

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

JG: "Just because some sonic differences can't be measured/quantified using today's technology doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist or their effects are not potentially audible to careful listeners. Remember that science (and by extension, the measurements and experimental evidence it relies upon) always trails behind nature and never runs ahead of it. That the sonic signature of an audio cable cannot be explained by measurements made today doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or the reasons why it exists will not be adequately and accurately explained by other and/or better measurements made tomorrow. Or that someone who claims to hear the sound of a cable today, in advance of measurements and a scientific explanation confirming its existence, is delusional. Mind you, this is not to say that some—perhaps even many?—of the claims made by some cable designers for their products aren't out-and-out bunk or the performance of their cables justifies the high prices being asked for them."

Mike replies: I don't recall the story of IM, but wasn't that a relevant example JG?

Stephen Scharf: "Here's my advice, having been in this 'hobby'/avocation for some time now:

"Don't fall prey to the whole 'Double-Blind/ABX testing' thang promoted by 'objectivists.'

"It's a pit of snakes and it will prove to be a waste of time and possibly, depending one's orientation and sensibilties, a source of exasperation.

"As professional scientist, I'm all for data and measurements. Hell, I'm probably the only guy that has conducted a statistically valid Design of Experiments to effectively incorporate my REL sub into my 2-channel system.

"With respect to audio, all the great audio designers I know of (Nelson Pass, the late Bill Z Johnson of AR, Mssrs. Conrad and Johnson of Conrad-Johnson, Jurgen Ries of MBL, Caelin Gabriel of Shunyata Research, etc) use measurements during the design and engineering process, but conduct the 'refinement and optimization' of their products by conducting subjective listening tests.

"Personally, I use measurement and data analysis to provide direction for my own system. but 'data and measurements' are only a start; you have to listen to complete the task to putting together a system that creates an engaging and beguiling listening experience. Measurements alone will not get you there.

"Here is what is reality: different materials, different metals, wires, power cables, signal cables, DACs, and yes, even Ethernet cables...sound different.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Why do Vishay metal-film resistors sound notably better than carbon comp, or god forbid, sand-cast resitors? They all measure the same.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Why do Ediswan, GE/JAN, or Amperex Bugle Boy 6922s sound completely different? They all measure exactly the same. However, they sound virtually nothing like each other.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"In some forums, when I've posted reviews of different cables, DACs, and some other products, I always get the line, 'Prove it by conducting a double-blind test.'

"I counter with, 'Show me a statistically valid DBX test with Alpha set to 0.05 and Beta set to 0.10 that fails to reject the Null Hypothesis.'

"And you know what I hear back from the 'objectivists'? Crickets.

"The bottom line is: Different gear, components, metals, materials, tubes, binding posts, tonearms, step-up transformers, etc, etc. sound different.

"Nobody knows why, but they do.

"Reductionist scientist can't explain many things we know to be true: Why our dogs or cats are waiting for us when we come home, or the sensation of being stared at, to provide just two examples.

"The best scientists in the world can't unify General Relativity and Quantum Physics, fer crissakes. Hell, they can't even solve 'the measurement problem.'

"So, here's my advice: Don't worry about it and don't fall prey to it. Your job is simple: just go with what creates an engaging and beguiling listening experience for you. You will be happy and content.

"With respect to different speaker wires...sure. But, my recommendation would be to 'rent in' a Shunyata Delta NR v2 C15 power cable from The Cable Company, and power your amp, integrated, whatever is your main amplification component, with it. Power cables have a bigger impact than speaker cables. Trust me on this.

"Have fun!

"PS—Nice speakers, BTW."

Mike replies: It made no effing sense to me that power cables should affect anything. It doesn't seem logical. But then, that's based on my it's-a-sunfish conception of how electrical circuits work. If I hadn't heard it to the extent that I couldn't deny it, I never would have believed it.

Here's a short couple of forum posts by Caelin Gabriel, who you mentioned. For anyone who understands engineer-speak. Which does not include me.

Neil the Wheel: "Mike...photography please?"

Mike replies: Gotta catch up with all the comments first. For something nobody want to talk about, people sure want to talk about this.

Trevor Johnson: "I have been following this fascinating series of discussions as one who not only listens to music, but also has a track record of recording for commercial release (classical). Although my A77 is a few feet from me, my current setup uses a new Sound Devices digital recorder and microphones from AKG, Rode etc. Good quality, oxygen-free balanced mic connectors with Neutrik connectors.

"Professional recorders/mixers/engineers have solved the speaker cable/amplifier/speaker issue by moving almost exclusively to active speakers, (active speakers contain their own power amplifiers, usually one for each speaker in the cabinet). The signal is provided by a balanced cable from the preamplifier/monitor controller/mixer, etc. Generally, rercordings are made using 24bit, because that gives you the extra dynamic range to record cleanly up to –12dB below 0dB. Exceeding a 96Khz sample rate has no advantages, but can cause problems of its own. A well recorded and mastered 16/44.1 CD is excellent. Can I tell the difference between my original 24/96 recording and the final 16/44.1 CD? Yes, my mastered CD is better. Incidentally, in the past I also had vinyl LPs mastered and released. In those instances, the original recordings were inevitably better!

"All I can say is that it is all rather fun but the chances of a consensus are highly unlikely. I belong to neither camp: measured performance is interesting, but my hearing/brain always has the final say."

Ulf A: "I think engineers oftentimes miss the point when they try to measure sound quality (or image quality for that matter). It is not obvious that accuracy is the goal. It can be, but it is not for me. I would choose lively, entertaining sound over accurate reproduction any day. As for what that is, I suppose everyone is different. This does not however mean that measurements are useless. It is just that the unit of measurement should match the consumer‘s reason for using a product. Only when this is defined clearly, and the construct validity is tested, so that it is clear that what is measured is what was intended do measurements make sense. Otherwise you can have the most sophisticated testing for something that nobody cares about.

"Also, I don't think testing needs to be blind. If I enjoy listening to beautiful speakers from a brand I like, it's part of the experience. It doesn't make sense to discount some dimensions of the experience just because they aren't based in function. Some people think you're a sucker if you pay for non-functional benefits. I'm not one of them."

Open Mike: Sit and Listen (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. goeth a-rambling. When the moon's in phase and the stars aligned, it appears on Wednesdays.]

-

Permit me, if you will, to backpedal, and apologize for that untoward "shut up" in the second footnote of the "Music at a Higher Level" post, which offended one reader. I don't usually depart from decorum even by that much. —Although I do wonder how I got to be a poster child for polite behavior; that wasn't my nature when I was young and drinking, or when I first got on Internet forums in '91. I used to be, shall we say, argumentative. But never mind that.

Anyway, just a little story about magical thinking versus science. This is actually a rant, if I'm honest, and it requires a Bloviation Alert. So I'll tuck it behind a page break.

Sunday Support Group: Music at a Higher Level (Off-Topic) (Music Notes)

We look where we can for consolations in isolation: reading or looking at books, projects like organizing and printing our photographs—and of course, music.

Just wanted to register how very happy I am that Robert Pillow mentioned Amazon Music HD (AMHD) in the comments section the other day (see the Featured Comments to the "No More Vintage Audio" post). I'm sure various mentions of it had flown like darting swallows through my field of view since it came on the scene, but none had penetrated my consciousness until Robert mentioned it. Anyway, I signed up for the free trial and and have been happily listening to CD-quality and higher res files since.

I'll note that implementation matters more than format with recorded music—I'd rather listen to a well-recorded and transferred CD-quality file from a 1940s original (check out the Lester Young playlist, for example, which I had to listen to all the way through before turning in last night) than a poorly recorded, compressed modern file at 24 bits/96 kHz, the highest resolution my aging (but lovely) DAC will decode*. AMHD goes all the way to 24/192**.

If you don't know what those numbers mean, there's a very good explanation of the basics of digital audio from Mark Furneaux. He originally recorded it for a particular friend, but later published it for everyone. As you may know, I think that targeting content as though you're doing it for a friend is an effective stance for presenting information and opinion.  :-)

Note also that there are various ways to stream AMHD to an existing stereo system without it coming directly from your computer, but in all such cases I can decipher, it downrezzes the files to CD-quality 16 bits/44.1 kHz. Although Amazon calls CD-quality "HD," for high-definition, because no other streaming services have it for all their offerings, most other humans call higher-than-CD-quality files "HD," and you give up those high-res capabilities if you use Bluetooth or something like the Echo Link.

However, just replacing MP3 and MP4 with 16/44.1 in my desktop system makes a decisive upgrade—I re-sorted my system and reset the sub, and have been enjoying music even more than usual in recent days. One discovery: Rejoice, the swan song of the late South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekala and the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Fela Kuti's former music director. A lovely tribute to the two friends and a superbly good-sounding recording too.

Amazon says AMHD has over 60 million cuts in CD-quality 16/44.1, and millions more in higher resolutions and bit depths. The cost is $12.99/month for Prime members or $14.99/month for Amazon customers. Existing Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers (Individual or Family Plan) can upgrade to Amazon Music HD for an additional $5/month. I can't quite suss this out, but I believe the AMHD trial period is 30 days if you're already an Amazon Music subscriber and 90 days if you're new to Amazon Music altogether. Go to this page and be sure to click "Learn More" to explicitly see the duration of the free trial period you're going to get.

My lifetime fave classic-rock musician, despite being the quintessential hippie and an old folkie, is also an outspoken champion of high-resolution audio***. Neil Young says this of Amazon Music HD: "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."

Good by me. Highly recommended! Try it for yourself.

Mike

*There are better DACs for less nowadays. Again, I try not to recommend things I haven't actually heard, but you might want to investigate the Topping brand.

**There's a strong strain of "you can't hear a difference" people in hi-fi—all amplifiers sound the same, all wires sound the same, loudspeakers are identical as long as their response curves are flat, etc.—and not only can they not hear a difference between Redbook CD resolution and anything higher, but they say, with the conviction available to True Believers, that no human can. I say those folks are damn lucky, because they can buy any old amp and any old wires, and also, please shut up. [Edited later to: ...please have more tolerance for people who don't share your beliefs.]

***He even launched his own crowdfunded high-res streaming service, Pono, in 2015, but had to pull the plug on it in 2017.

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Sunday Support Group: Catastrophizing

"Catastrophizing" is the tendency to make a catastrophe out of any eventuality. I have that tendency.

In the time of COVID-19, it's surely bedeviling people everywhere. A correspondent from Italy said the virus is like a sniper. What if it draws a bead on you? What if a loved one falls under the crosshairs—worst possibility of all, one's child?

They say "worry is wasted emotion." You're spending energy fretting about something that hasn't happened yet, and might not! So what's the point of all that worry if the thing you're worried about never comes to pass? You've bathed your brain in stress 'n' strain over naught.

Catastrophizing in its elemental form is embodied for me in old New Yorker cartoons. The New Yorker will turn 100 in 2025, and was old when I was young. When I used to go visit my grandparents, in their elegant 1920s French Provincial mansion in Indianapolis, I would sleep in "the office," a charming and protected corner room which was apparently never otherwise used. Maids changed the sheets every night, and there was a mother-of-pearl button on the wall by the bed in case you needed to call a servant in the night. For the amusement of potential guests such as my wee self there were several bound volumes of old New Yorker cartoons on the nightstand, and as an inveterate reader of comic books I read them all several times over. One trope that recurred was the bearded and long-haired crazy fellow dressed in flowing Biblical-style robes standing on the busy city street corner holding a sign that said, "THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END."

Catastrophizing!

Chicken Little is another paragon, of course. A scant page and a half long, and overly repetitive even so, it's a horrifying little tale about murder most fowl, and bears rereading. At four my eyes widened when poor Henny Penny's squawks and feathers came from the fox-hole. Awful.

Mind control
Catastrophizing is the perfervid, even fevered belief that something is worse than it really is. Empirically, we must admit that humans are remarkably poor at predicting the future; so why do we believe we know in advance how things will end? On the other hand, humans also have their heads in the sand, and sometimes realists simply more clearly see the truth. For instance, with those New Yorker prophets of doom, the old men in robes on the streetcorners with the placards, even my pre-teen self had the wit to think, well, of course the world is coming to an end for you—you're old and you're gonna croak. What's the point in worrying? The world ends for us all, save maybe for one wandering Nazarene rabbi two thousand years ago. Although there are rationalist skeptics of that account too.

I can't claim to have enough control of my thoughts to not worry when worrying things happen to me. But one of my antidotes to my catastrophizing tendency is to think of Stefan Zweig. The most translated writer in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, born to great wealth, he shifted himself hither and yon as if he never felt quite...safe. "A friend once remarked that, no matter where you met Zweig, his manner suggested a half-packed suitcase in the next room," writes Leo Carey (in, well, The New Yorker).

Stefan Zweig (standing) in 1900

Despite having escaped Hitler, despite fame and fortune and a beautiful young wife, Zweig was so shaken by Hitler's evil and so beset with anxiety at the carnage rampant in Europe and the world in 1942 that he ate poison in that year, taking his beautiful younger wife with him—and so, in effect, played the fox to his own Henny Penny (you might call Nietzsche his Chicken Little). One writer (I can't find the citation) noted that by the act of his final decampment, Zweig deprived himself of the opportunity to witness Hitler's downfall and death and the slow restoration of Europe to a state of orderliness and normalcy. It was a catastrophe, absolutely. But things pass. Zweig last saw the world when all was upended, and he could have lived to see things put right again, his Nietzschean fears allayed.

CATastrophizing—get it?
When I was in my early twenties, I lived on a horse farm in Vermont, and aside from helping with riding lessons and trail rides and writing short stories for hours on end, I had little to do. The tenant of the farm (her father owned it, but I never saw him with my own eyes) had five cats, one of which was a gentle and superbly athletic short-haired grey female called Tweedles. She was the Simone Biles of cats—capable of astounding feats of agility. She was easily three times as adroit as Coach, her boon companion, a scruffy amber tabby male. We devised a game together, Tweedles and I, that involved a large cardboard box that was open at the top. I'd put her in the box, and wiggle a finger over the edge or through a hole in the box; she would leap or pounce at my wiggling finger, and I would withdraw it just in time. Or not; sometimes I wasn't quite quick enough.

Some time after that, I discovered a large lump under my armpit. My mind immediately leapt to one word—cancer!—a word which was even more of a death sentence then than it is now. Set my heart to thumping. Convictions of catastrophe flooded my brain. I was so convinced I had cancer that I glumly refused to go see the doctor for a week. What was the use? During that week I stewed in my own doom, certain I was soon to die. Finally, though, I did go to the doctor, who scoffed at my worries and diagnosed something called "cat scratch fever"—a swollen lymph node caused by all the tiny wounds inflicted by Tweedles with her lightning quickness. He told me to put a hot washcloth under my arm three times a day and stop playing with the cat.

I did not, on that occasion, perish. But I can still conjure the needless feeling of dread, and the great but pointless grief over my imminent loss of the whole world, that I inflicted on myself during that week.

And I still struggle with my tendency to assume things are worse than they are. We joust, my worries and I, and sometimes, like recently, it gets the upper hand. But then sometimes I do. I'm making progress. I see the tendency now as merely a character defect, a habit of mind I should shed.

Try not to worry until you know you need to. It's a tall order, but a worthy goal.

Mike

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JimF: "Don't watch, listen to, or read any news. Their business seems to be catastrophizing everything."

Mike replies: Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I'm quite sure our attitude used to be exactly the opposite of what it is today. To name a trivial example, I distinctly remember when I was a kid in that we took snowstorms in stride and only grudgingly closed schools. A really big snowstorm, like a foot or more, could close things down, but not for very long, and, to your point, nobody made a big deal of it. Decades later, if a weather system is coming, the news will work everyone into a froth of dread and alarm over it...and then we'll get six inches, or sometimes three. I saw this happen more than a few times.

Open Mike I: Introverts and Extroverts

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. goes a-ramblin' on topics diverse and sundry.]

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Holed up
As of yesterday evening, more Americans have died of COVID-19 since February 1 of this year than died in Viet Nam. Casualties in Viet Nam spanned approximately 19 years, whereas COVID-19 has inflicted the same number of casualties so far in three short months.

Remember, anything that you can do to help slow the spread of the contagion helps everyone, so hang in there if you're able to. I've been holed up here for months, not socializing and only going out for necessary errands. But then, I'm very lucky: I work for myself, I already worked online, I have savings, and I have a pleasant place to shelter, with plenty of room. And I'm an introvert anyway. I'm acutely aware that many people are not so fortunate and that "sheltering in place" is a hardship for them. These include: people who were living hand-to-mouth, dependent on their next paycheck for cash to live on; people who have lost their jobs or seen dramatic slowdowns in their work; extroverts, who find being alone for extended periods of time draining and discouraging; people in jails, old-age homes, and homeless shelters; people with too many people confined to too small a house; people with various physical, mental, or emotional deficits who have lost part or all of their support structure; people who are stuck away from where they want to be and find it difficult to travel; and people whose necessary jobs place them in harm's way. There are other difficulties. I have a friend whose mission in life, you might say, has been almost entirely stripped away. He seems to be adequately sustained in terms of his physical needs, but losing his sense of purpose, his sense of usefulness, is proving challenging for him.

The thing I regret about my own situation is selfish and trivial: I wish I had my own pool table here. Because, man, I'd be practicing four hours a day during this b*tch. It would have been the perfect thing to keep me entertained, occupied (preoccupied too, instead of thinking too much), and on my feet. You know what they say: Oh well.

I'm not dwelling on that, certainly. As I say, I know I'm among the lucky ones.

376 masks?
I still don't have a #@$! mask, which is a problem, since the Governor has mandated that everyone in our State has to wear a mask in public. I wear jury-rigged ones made of the sleeves of T-shirts, which are very likely substantially useless except that they provide the appearance of conformity. I have ordered—get this—376 masks(!) online, but none of them have arrived yet.

That high number can be explained. Two months ago, I got online and ordered two lots of N95 masks, 160 per lot, and directed that they be shipped to my nurse friend. I thought I was being pretty clever. Later I was notified of a little catch—the delivery date would be as late as June 1. Even that date, I realize now, is probably dubious. I could have cancelled the order, but what the heck—I let it stand just in case it ends up working. She works in an intensive care unit, so the purchase won't be depriving medical personnel of the masks. Then there's a set of five masks I ordered off Etsy a month ago—the owner of the company has been in touch, and they're backlogged, of course—and the 50-pack of paper masks I ordered and are supposedly en route, and finally a reusable mask I ordered from MaxMax yesterday. Dan says he will mail that one today, but cautions that the mail has been taking longer than usual.

Carl Jung 101
My 86-year-old Mom's memory unit in Cambridge has seen two cases of COVID-19 so far, one a patient and one a staff member. My doctor brother is cautiously optimistic for her: her residence is pretty high-end, well-staffed and well-funded, and they have a reasonably spacious facility. They're taking appropriate cautions.

For many years my mother was a career counselor. Halfway through, she realized that many people get stuck in their careers because of unresolved psychological issues (an example might be someone who gets into conflicts with his bosses because of underlying resentments toward authority figures), so she got a certificate in counseling from the Washington School of Psychiatry so she'd be legitimately credentialed to counsel people with such problems. One of the tests she administered measured introversion and extroversion, which must be among the psychology pioneer Carl Jung's best-known concepts. She used to say that the best description of an introvert was somebody who "charges their batteries" when they're alone and expends energy when they're with other people, whereas an extrovert is the opposite, someone who charges their batteries when they're with others and expends energy when they're alone. Being an extrovert doesn't mean you don't like being alone; it's just that you probably don't want too much of it. As an introvert, I like being with other people a lot, but I definitely have my limit. If I have to socialize intensively for three days I'll be running on empty by the end of that time and desperately need some alone time. (Photo Shows used to be hard on me when I was an editor: I'd be energized the first day, maintaining during the second day, and thoroughly depleted and tired of the crowds by the end of the third day*.) Extroverts feel relaxed and comfortable in company. They can spend time alone, and might even enjoy it, but they reach their limit at some point and need to seek out others again.

The danger of introversion is that you live too much in your own head, too much in "your own little world" as the saying goes, and thoughts, impulses, and preoccupations can turn into obsessions because there's no one else to provide reality checks. The danger of excessive extroversion is that you can lose yourself—you see yourself only as others see you; you're defined by relationships. It's important for strong introverts to force themselves to make contact and create intimacy as a corrective, and it's important for strong extroverts to engage in introspection once in a while and get to know themselves away from the context of their many relationships. I always wanted to be a teacher, and it would have been the perfect occupation for me: I would have had a certain amount of forced contact with people, but within the context of structured relationships. It would have counterbalanced my natural introversion and any tendency to isolate.

Extroversion to introversion appears to be a spectrum rather than a state. You can actually be in the middle, neither one nor the other, in which case you probably think the whole concept is bogus. Or you can be a mild introvert or an extreme one, a mild extrovert or an extreme one. Finally, we can change over time. I'm not sure anyone could go from one extreme all the way to the other, but I've definitely gotten less introverted over the years: I used to be further from the midpoint and now I'm somewhat less so.

Stay-at-home and stick-in-the-mud
Even so, I'm finding "sheltering in place" to be almost...enjoyable. I've ratcheted up my attention to what you might call life hygiene—housework, living according to schedule, cooking—and I've made an effort to call and talk to someone at least once a day, or socialize with random neighbors on the road in front of my house where it's easy to stand eight feet apart. But I'm very mindful that some people are not finding it enjoyable, at all, but are suffering because of their apart-ness and alone-ness. For them, it can rise into the vicinity of an existential crisis...or descend into depression.

One last fun fact on the topic: introverts tend to understand extroverts a lot better than extroverts understand introverts. Some extroverts just think there's something wrong with introverts, and can tend to not like or trust them. Boo on that! God made all kinds of us, and there's nothing wrong with introverts. Where else would the tribe gets its solitary mountain men, its toll-takers (yes, even seeing thousands of people for four seconds at time, that's still a job that requires strong introverts), its spelunkers, its lighthouse keepers, its space-station astronauts—or, ahem, its writers? There are lots of occupations and activities that require people who can stand to be alone.

In my life, though, I think this is the first time that being an introvert has ever been socially advantageous. About time it came in handy.

Although I wish it had never happened, and I hope it will be over soon.

Hang in there my friends, and be safe and be well,

Mike

*I've related this story before, but I love it so I'll tell it again. At the Photo East show, my predecessor, the late David Alan Jay, who was a more extreme introvert than I am, would get intensely tired of being "on" for all the people who were chasing him for one reason or another and making demands on his attention, whether it was readers or authors or friends or manufacturers' reps (everyone wanted a "minute" with a magazine editor back in those days at the shows). So he would go to the Darkroom Innovations booth, where our friend Fred Newman had his gigantic 20x24 view camera on display. David would get under the dark cloth behind the enormous camera as if he were taking a look through the groundglass...and then he'd just stay there! Half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour—he just periodically needed to be alone for a while. It was his hideout right there on the show floor. You could be standing ten feet from him and not realize he was there. Makes me laugh, thinking back. R.I.P. David.

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Open Mike: Paul Has a Nice Stereo (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. sometimes peregrinates in fields not his own. It appears on Wednesdays, and surprisingly often has something to do about music.]

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Here's my stereo, that I listen to every day (listening to Gil Scott-Heron belting a song about Lady Day and John Coltrane right now):

This is a recycled illustration, so I won't tag everything. Labeled 7 are a pair of AudioEngine A5+ wired speakers (here's the wireless version, and the A2+'s also sound fantastic and are much smaller), and 12 is an AudioEngine A8 (here's the current version) powered subwoofer. Or should I say "sub"-woofer, in that it's "sub" only in that it's sited under everything else. Actually it's just a woofer, to go with the tweeters and midrange drivers in the satellites. Sounds great for a desktop system, even pretty loud. Near-field listening (where your ears are very near to the speakers and the speakers are near to each other, largely taking the room out of the equation) makes up for a host of audio sins. A nearfield setup should be thought of as about halfway between whole-room speakers and headphones. Or a third of the way to headphones at least.

Also relevant here is number 3, a PS Audio Power Plant AC regenerator. It's not necessary here in the boonies—my incoming AC is pretty clean—but I owned it, so it's in there.

Always relevant around TOP World HQ is number 13, the Attention Hound.

The PS in PS Audio stands for Paul and Stan—Paul McGowan and Stan Warren. Stan is long moved on, but (after an interregnum at Infinity [Correction: See Edwin Leong's Featured Comment below]) Paul still runs PS Audio, a maker of high-end audio components. Its products include the famous DirectStream DAC, which Wikipedia says "brought unique technologies to a DAC field crowded with similar chip-based solutions. Designer Ted Smith created a DAC based upon an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) which would allow owners to download and install no-cost firmware/OS upgrades which improve the unit's performance over time, and ensure that it does not become obsolete." Handmade the good old-fashioned way, in the U.S. of A.—Boulder, Colorado, to be exact, where the room in the video below is situated. Recently the company has become a leader in Class D topologies (i.e., switching, or digital, amplifiers. If you want a basic explanation of what that means, here you go) and has released a line of products designed by Bascom H. King, one of the great names among high-end audio designers.

Paul is also one of us. He's a photo enthusiast, and he used to read TOP. I haven't seen any sign of that lately, but I know how that is—when you have one enthusiasm that consumes you, the secondary ones come and go. For Paul that top enthusiasm is pretty clearly music reproduction!

Just thought you might want to take a gander at Paul's stereo—especially his old, near-vintage in fact, speakers:

This is the final video in a series about building his dedicated listening room. You know how we all like Roger Cicala so much, who is a successful businessman but at heart a happy hobbyist...well, Paul McG. is much the same, only in the field of high-end audio.

Enjoy.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP is being kept alive now by Patreon supporters

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Edwin Leong: "It was actually Genesis that Paul spent his time in between the first and second stints at PS Audio. Genesis is the company Paul founded with Infinity’s founder, Arne Nudell, after Arne departed Infinity under somewhat acrimonious terms post takeover by Harmon International (Mark Levinson, Proceed, Revel, AKG, JBL). When Paul heard what Ted Smith had done with his prototype DAC, Paul hired him to develop the DirectStream DAC, which was given final voicing by Paul and Arne. Paul is now developing a line of speakers in honour of Arne, who passed away a few years ago."

Bill Poole: "Well, Mike, I bought those speakers and the woofer the first time you recommended them, and have never been sorry. This is a wonderful set-up. I am also lucky enough to have a real CD player in my 2011-era iMac (long may it live!) and am at the moment listening to Itzhak Perlman playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Off-topic posts related to audio always welcome."

Khürt Williams: "I feel so poor now."

Chris: "$27,500 for a pre-amp. Time for a reality check, anyone?"

Mike replies: I made the decision to leave the audio hobby about a decade back. Cancelled my subscriptions to the magazines, stopped reading reviews. That was after a lifetime of enthusiasm, starting when I was 14 when I worked all summer cutting lawns so I could buy my first stereo. The "last straw" as they say was an issue of one of the magazines in which two of the main reviews were for single components that each retailed for $45,000. I disremember now, but I think the cheapest product reviewed in that issue cost $12,000...or maybe $8,000. Which was touted as "reasonable" in the context that the magazines have conjured, but which was still absurdly out of reach to me. I just decided it was no longer a hobby for people like me, and no longer had anything to do with me. I occasionally still dabble here and there, but nothing like I used to do. I didn't leave with a resentment; I just left because it had become clear that I no longer belonged.

jeff: "Love Paul and his crew. I'm rocking their DAC Jr and a pair of M700s (amongst other gear) in front of a pair of B&Ws. When I picked up the amps (I live 30 minutes from PS Audio), I spent a good half hour sitting in Music Room 2 lost in Neil Young coming through the ISRVs as if he were in the room (loudly)."

JG: "Back in the day, I was at a party and started talking with a couple when the subject of our professions came up. She was a nurse and he was an attorney, and I was the Technical Director of a high-end audio magazine.

"I went on to explain exactly what my job entailed, at which point he said: 'We've been thinking about upgrading the stereo system we've owned since college. We are doing fairly well now and able to spend as much as $5,000 for a new system...what would you recommend we buy?'

"I paused for a moment then somewhat sheepishly replied: 'I have no idea, because, truthfully, I'm not very familiar with entry-level equipment.'

"They were stunned. The look on their faces was a combination of shock and horror. But then he paused for a moment, smiled, and clarified: 'I meant to say $5,000, not $500. If I said $500, then I was mistaken.'

'I sighed and explained to him that, yes, I heard him say $5,000, but in the part of the audio world where I [then] live[d], $5,000 was entry-level system money and just barely at that.

"And that was in the mid '80s!

"Needless to say, the couple was embarrassed by having to publicly admit to their relative poverty and/or quickly decided I was some kind of nut, so politely sidled away to mingle with other people.

"That was the precise moment when I finally realized just how far out of touch with reality both high-end audio and I had become.

"It's been several decades since I left the industry and while I am aware that budget-friendly equipment has improved a lot since then, I understand that the situation at the top of the pyramid is now even worse that it was back then.

"P.S.: I am probably one of the few readers of this blog who has a significant amount of experience listening to the IRS speakers in Paul McGowan's video. (Actually they were the previous version, because the Series V version was released shortly after I'd left the magazine, but same difference, eh?)

"Although they were not without flaws and I never would bought a set myself even if I could afford to do so—of which there was not even the remotest possibility!—they were utterly mesmerizing in that particular installation.

"P.P.S.: Art Dudley recently died of cancer. He was a great guy and an even better writer, and his demise is a great loss for those who knew him, personally and professionally."

Mike replies: I was very sorry to hear about Art Dudley. I admired his writing skills.

To Your Health: Grow Your Own Sulforaphane! (OT)

Most Americans are malnourished. We suffer both from excesses (of calories, fats, sugars, cholesterol, oil, and sodium, sure—but too much protein is bad for you too, and most Americans, males at least, eat way too much) as well as deficiencies, which are in some cases severe. Only 3% of us get the minimum of dietary fiber, contributing to all sorts of pernicious health maladies, and on average we don't get a minimum of the minerals potassium, magnesium, and calcium, or of vitamins A, C, D, E, and K in whole foods.

One of the things we should get more of is sulforaphane (spelt with another "ph" in Britain). Sulforaphane is one of the superstar nutrients that helps with all kinds of things, including brain health (it's actually an intervention for autism, for one thing). If you're following a "best practices" diet, it's something you want to make sure you get enough of.

So what does sulforaphane help with? It has significant anti-cancer properties. It's an antioxidant and contains detoxification enzymes. It's good for your heart and your arteries; it helps fight inflammation (many if not most Americans suffer from systemic, chronic low-level inflammation); it helps reduce blood pressure; it has antidiabetic effects; it's used to treat certain symptoms of autism, helps protect the skin against sun damage, and improves recovery from brain injuries. Wow. And it helps with constipation.

It's in cruciferous veggies (family Brassicaceae) such as broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, and brussels sprouts—and my fave, watercress. Population studies show that people who eat the most cruciferous vegetables have an all-cause mortality (excluding accidents) that is significantly lower than average. Cruciferous vegetables provide sulforaphane in the form of inactive glucoraphanin, which is activated by myrosinase enzymes, which are released hours after the plant is damaged—as it is by cutting, chopping, or chewing. It can also be activated with ground mustard seed, which is why I sprinkle a little mustard powder on my steamed broccoli, of which I eat a lot.

One of the most concentrated and easiest-to-eat ways to get sulforaphane is by eating broccoli sprouts. You can buy these at the store, of course, but they're expensive and unusually not very fresh. If they're fresh when you buy them, they may not be before you've consumed them all. Not to mention that storebought sprouts can be contaminated with bacteria and make you sick.

An easy, fresh, safe alternative is to grow your own. I think it's cheaper, too, although I haven't costed it out. Here's how:

Start with one of these simple, inexpensive lid kits, which consist of two stands and four stainless steel lids that fit on any Mason jar or Ball jar or other standard canning jar. Then you'll need the jars if you don't have them already. They're available at most supermarkets. The purpose of the sprouting jar is to keep the wet seeds drained but keep air circulating. These lids, and of course the jars, go through the dishwasher just fine.

Then get some broccoli seeds, like these. (One caution from Dr. Greger: don't sprout alfalfa seeds. He says the seeds are difficult to digest and can get caught in your colon, potentially causing infection.)

Then you need a window.

It's pretty simple:

1. Put a spoonful of seeds in the jar.
2. Fill the jar with water. Place a towel over the water-filled jar to keep it dark, and put leave it out of the way for 12–24 hours.
3. Drain and place the jar by the window on the stand, with the screened end down, as shown in the picture above.
4. Water 2–3 times per day by filling and emptying the jar twice, swishing the seeds around.
5. A day or two after most of the seeds have sprouted, you might want to empty into a mixing bowl filled with water and separate the sprouts from the un-germinated seeds. There's no need to be particularly thorough, as broccoli seeds can be digested. I use the lid to scoop up the floating sprouts.
6. Add to salads and eat!
7. Continue the above until gone.
8. Repeat.

That's it!

If you want to know more about sulforaphane, it's a deep dive, so I'll leave that up to you. I've been growing my own broccoli sprouts since last Fall, and eating them most days in my salad. I always have two jars going. It's easy and doesn't take much time. I don't even notice it any more.

Just one of those things you should get a little of each day. Oh, and by the way, another benefit: no negative side effects.

So what else are you doing, all cooped up in the house all day? Give it a try!

À votre santé,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Graeme Scott: "Are you sure about the alfalfa seeds? [no. It's what Dr. Greger recommends. I updated the post to reflect that. —Mike] We've been sprouting and eating them for years. We also sprout green and brown lentils, dried peas, and, believe it or not, chickpeas/garbanzos. The chickpeas are supposed to be much more digestible when sprouted. We gave up on mung beans as there was always one rock-hard unsprouted seed lurking among the beansprouts, and dentists are expensive.

"We add these sprouted seeds to salads or on top of toast spread with tahini and a splash of soy sauce. An old jar, elastic band and piece of netting (net curtain is OK) make a perfectly good sprouting setup.

"Re COVID lockdown: We've noticed that most of the people we know who might loosely be described as self-employed creatives are coping perfectly well. I've furloughed myself from our business but my partner is still working. I'm using the time to fix up our house, which is what I actually feel like doing at the moment. (I have little or no work ethic anyway). Stay Safe."

Mike replies: I'm going to try sprouting chickpeas. Do you have any specific tips or tactics?