Book Review: The Gentle Subversive

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement.  Mark Hamilton Lytle, 2007. Oxford Univ. Press.
Bug Rating: (with some caveats)

I have written quite a bit about Rachel Carson, mainly because I am baffled at the amount of vitriol still spewed over her book Silent Spring nearly 50 years after it’s publication.  It’s turned out to be my own personal mini-crusade, since everytime I mention the name of this woman people come out of the woodwork to say…well, ill-informed wing-nutty things, frankly, including people who should know better.

I find Carson fascinating not just because she is the focus of a modern dis-information campaign, but because she was a scientist that could write. And I mean REALLY write, not just to communicate, but to bring the beauty and love of the natural world that she saw around her alive.

In all the DDT hoopla, it seems people have forgotten that Carson wrote beautiful prose about science.  She wrote well enough to win a National Book Award, and to have her science book stay #1 on the New York Times best seller list for 86 weeks:

“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

I was interested this short biography of Carson, and picked it up.  I’m really glad I did, because it helped me gain a better understanding of this woman and the huge challenges she faced.  And there were a lot of challenges.

Carson did not come from a wealthy family, and much of her life was occupied in chasing enough money to support herself and her extended family.  Carson moved her mother, her brother and sister, and her 2 nieces into one house–and became the primary financial support for all of them during the Depression.  In 1929, women did not commonly apply to Johns Hopkins, or gain admission to graduate school at Woods Hole.  Carson did both of those things successfully, and recieved a Masters in 1932.

She skipped pursuing a PhD in order to seek work, and was lucky enough to find a home in the Department of Fisheries.  She began writing radio scripts, and progressed to writing USFW publications and magazine pieces.  Carson published her first book in 1941–which was promptly eclipsed by a world at war, and did not prove to be very profitable.  In 1950, she got her big break with The Sea Around Us, which did bring enough income in to allow her to purchase a home in Maine and become an independent writer.  In 1950 Carson also had her first cancer tumor removed from her left breast.

Reading her story now, I can’t help but think of my many freelancing writer friends, and how they struggle to support their families and to try to make a living. It doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier in the last 50 years to be an independent writer.

Carson had a demanding family life. Her mother wanted to be connected and involved in Rachel’s life in a way that…well, I found kind of creepy.  Rachel’s niece (who was, remember, living with her and diabetic) had an out of wedlock child.  Carson became the primary caregiver for both her elderly mother and disabled niece, and could not afford to put either of them in a nursing home or have home help.  That Carson could write well under those conditions is pretty amazing.  And that doesn’t even begin to cover how much stress she must have been under when writing Silent Spring.

In 1958 Carson began work on what would become Silent Spring–her last book.   She had a radical mastectomy in 1959.  Early excerpts of the book attracted vitriolic criticism, and lots of gendered slurs.  ”Shrill.” “Emotional.” “Unscientific.”

In 1960 Carson developed secondary tumors and blood poisoning, and was confined to a wheelchair for many months.  In 1961 she developed an infection that caused her to loose her sight for several months, and was unable to read what she had written. In 1962, as Silent Spring was going to press, more tumors were found in her abdomen.  She wore a wig to testify in Congress, hiding her loss of hair from radiation treatments.  By late 1963 compression fractures in her spine from radiation treatments made walking difficult and painful. Carson died in Spring 1964.

This woman had ovaries of brass.  I am in awe of how tenacious and determined she must have been to finish this last project.  Her letters show she was hanging on by her fingertips, determined to see it through.

As for this book—how does it compare to other Carson biographies? It is short, and a quick read, and has enough footnotes you can be fairly sure of source material. I was very happy that the author chose to not speculate about the nature of Carson’s close friendships with other smart, sciency women of her time, since we don’t know for sure if they were or were not platonic or romantic.

The book itself sort of falls into two parts: things jerks said to Carson while she was alive, and things jerks say about her now that she’s dead.    It’s not comprehensive, but for a quick dip into the issue and a history of what Carson endured, it’s a good read.  I don’t think the author covered modern attacks on Carson very well, but much of the documentation of who paid for the “hit” on Carson  came out in late 2007/2008, so that’s understandable.

At one time I was pretty actively writing about Carson and DDT, and trying to combat the misinformation campaigns put out by various astroturf groups.  I eventually stopped, mostly because the people that comment on that topic scare me.  I have gotten many, many threats over those posts, most of them threats of sexual assault. Those posts about DDT and Rachel Carson are the reason that comments on posts close after 40 days on this blog, since that way I don’t have to go in daily and remove nasty spittle-flecked comments.

I can’t be intimidated into believing their lies about a brave woman and a wonderful writer, but I was intimidated enough that I stopped writing about Carson to stay under their radar.   I think I need to take a lesson from Ms. Carson herself. In the face of terrible pain and opposition, she WON with good writing and truth.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”   Rachel Carson

I wonder if sometimes I feel driven to defend Carson because I see so much of my sister in her.  Both women are talented, had breast cancer much too young–and neither one seems able to catch a fucking break. Anything that could go wrong does seem to go wrong.

And by God, if you mess with my sister, you mess with ME.
I got your back, Rachel. I got your back.

Additional Reading:

• If you haven’t read Carson’s  “The Sense of Wonder” you should.
• How well have claims in Carson’s 1962 book held up? Pretty well, actually!
• A collection of things I and others have written to try to set the record straight about Carson and DDT
• PBS Carson Documentary
• Audio Interview with the Biography Author
• Interview with the Biography Author at Oxford Press Blog

ScienceOnline2012 Postmortem (and a book review)

When I got back from ScienceOnline, my boss asked me how it went.  (I was sort of AWOL from the first week of class, and she was not real thrilled about that.)   “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life” was my response.  That’s what I feel–but I’ve been trying to figure out WHY.

You can see the full list of attendees here–it’s a really fascinating bunch.  To name check just a few:  Wired. BoingBoing. Nature. Science. Ed Yong. Carl Zimmer. Museums. And, uh, independent blogger/social media types like me.  And so here I am, feeling like a little bug scuttling among giant writers. And I discover…that people actually read my shit. And know who the hell I am. Whoa.

Everyone was geeked about science and about communicating science.  IT WAS AWESOME.  But Why was it so awesome? I think Ed Yong nails it in his summary–we “knew” everyone before we arrived. Even though I hadn’t ever met 447 of the 450 folks attending in meatspace, I had chatted with them online, commented on their blogs, and read their books. From further discussion in the comments from David Dobbs:

“The steady message, via the unconference idea, that it’s a relatively level playing field — or, as someone put it on Twitter, that it’s not experts and non-experts, but different people all bringing different experiences in areas we’re all interested in. It’s a steady insistence that it’s not a producer-consumer model, with the audience full of consumers, but rather a conversation.

The other key, it seems to me, is that it’s a fairly balanced mix of mainly-scientists and mainly-journalists/communicators, so it’s not a single peer group, as it were — not a single discipline. There’s always this chemistry of excitement, of mixing with another tribe. To me that’s an important part of what distinguishes ScienceOnline. And I think it helps create the sense of humility and egalitarianism: Prominence in one area doesn’t make anyone top dog at this conference, because even the most distinguished people in one area are among not just their own discipline’s peers but amid those of another discipline in which they have little expertise or distinction.”

Just before I went to ScienceOnline, I read a book called Cognitive Surplus.  And it kind of blew my mind.  Shirky’s central thesis is that the web and the relatively large amount of leisure time in the first world (i.e, time not spent working for the man, or raising our food) has created an amazing opportunity.

We kill a lot of that free time in very unimaginative ways.  Americans spend 200 BILLION hours each year watching television. What if all that brain power was directed toward something?  Shirky posits a surplus of creative energy exists, and is only beginning to be tapped.  For example, take the humble LOLcat:

“Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average LOLcat has the social value of a whoopie cushion and the lifespan of a mayfly.  Yet anyone seeing a LOLcat gets a second unrelated message: You can play this game too.”

The internet bridges the gap between doing nothing and doing something.  Creating a LOLcat is more than passive consumption of pre-packaged TV shows…and opens the door to doing other original things.

Time and space are not a constraint to community formation–ideas or passions now bring people together, rather than physical locations.  Scientists that blog online–even when it’s looked down upon by fellow scientists? We are modeling positive deviance.  It’s not so much what we write that is important, but THAT WE WRITE AT ALL.

We are creating a model for a new way of science communication.  And we are having a bitchin’ time doing it, which invites new people over to have fun with us.  You can play this game too.   We are showing lots of different ways to share science online to our friends, our friends’ friends, and to the random strange people who keep searching my blog for “sex with insects.”

It’s a kind of nerdibacter called social contagion.  The internet creates social change among total strangers. Think it’s too sparkly-kumbaya to really work?  Just look at an example from earlier this month: A shark researcher calls out a company for sponsoring a shark hunt.  He manages to mobilize an amazing network via Twitter, and the company not only pulls the promotion, but blacklists the person from ever posting with them again.  And that all played out within the space of one day.

Small individual creative acts (tweets or blog posts) can become a thing of lasting value.  Shared and unmanaged effort can produce useful and meaningful results.  No one is in charge, and that’s OK. The beauty of the web is that we don’t all have to have the same motivations, or skills, or professional level of skill. We don’t all have to be working toward the same goal.  We can still make change happen simply by putting our ideas out there.  And the value of that work isn’t from professional production values; it’s from the sharing.

A lot of the attendees at SciOnline were people like me–folks who don’t get paid to write about science. We do our thing (write, podcast, tweet, whatever) simply for the love of it.  And we are wearers of many hats–as Bora reports in his ScienceOnline2012 wrap-up post:

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers, 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Even though the US is clearly falling apart politically, in a lot of ways SciOnline left me more optimistic and hopeful about the future than I’ve been for a long time.  All these people doing something because of a passion for science–it was wonderful.

Kevin is right:

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet….Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”

I will totally be up at 1AM next year trying to get a seat for ScienceOnline2013.  But you know what? If I don’t get a seat?  Or if I don’t have the time or energy to keep blogging/tweeting/whatevering at the same rate I do now?

It’s ok. The kids have it covered.

The Bee’s Knees

I love books, and I love words, so I was excited to find an website that specializes in breaking down the origins of common catch phrases.  Today’s phrase: The Bee’s Knees.

According to that site (and a few other sources), references to “bee knees” occasionally occurred in the early 1900′s:

 ’Bee’s knees’ began to be used in early 20th century America. Initially, it was just a nonsense expression that denoted something that didn’t have any meaningful existence…..That meaning is apparent in a spoof report in the New Zealand newspaper The West Coast Times in August 1906, which listed the cargo carried by the SS Zealandia as ‘a quantity of post holes, 3 bags of treacle and 7 cases of bees’ knees’…… Zane Grey’s 1909 story, The Shortstop, has a city slicker teasing a yokel by questioning him about make-believe farm products:

“How’s yer ham trees? Wal, dog-gone me! Why, over in Indianer our ham trees is sproutin’ powerful. An’ how about the bee’s knees? Got any bee’s knees this Spring?”

Pretty much everything I’ve read, though, agrees that the likely popularization of the phrase really occurred in the 1920′s, the period of the flappers.  ”Bee’s knees” is part of a fashion for nonsense rhyming slang from the Roaring 20s. The common feature of the slang expressions was mention of an animal part with some alliteration thrown in.  Some of my favorites:  ”elephant’s adenoids”, “caterpillar’s kimono”, “gnat’s elbows”, “kipper’s knickers”, and “eel’s ankle”.  You have probably heard another phrase that’s survived from that period:  ”The Cat’s Pajamas.”

All of these phrases generally translate to what, today, would be said as “Awesome!”  (Although I suspect there is a newer word for that, but I’m just too old and un-hip to know about it.)

The phrase occurs in print in several places in the US in 1922; Newspapers published “Flapper Dictionaries” to explain the strange and baffling lingo of those damn kids.   There is a reference to the term in a Flapper Dictionary from Missouri in 1922; The Newark Advocate, (Ohio) in a 1922 piece printed:

“That’s what you wonder when you hear a flapper chatter in typical flapper language. ‘Apple Knocker,’ for instance. And ‘Bees Knees.’ That’s flapper talk. This lingo will be explained in the woman’s page under the head of Flapper Dictionary.”

Alas, while the concept of the phrase referring to the collection of pollen on actual bees’ knees is appealing, it appears not to be the case.
If you want to have a fun 20′s flashback, here’s some Harold Lloyd driving around NYC.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Since 1983, when the first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic was published, the Discworld novels have been a place for me to dive into that will leave me laughing and happy.

A confession: I like puns. 
There. I’ve said it. 
So does Terry Pratchett.

So when I noticed that The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was available at the library, I pounced on it.  Pratchett won the Carnegie medal in 2001 for this, his first young adult novel.  It is a delightfully screwed-up reworking of the Pied Piper.

If you are a rat foraging in the University of Wizards’ garbage dump, there’s bound to be some side effects. Like…suddenly talking and reading.  Add in a cat with the usual moral sensibilities of a cat, and a kid that can play a flute, and you have the ingredients for a great scam.

Roll into a town, the rats run around and widdle everywhere (and occasionally tap dance across a pudding), and then the piper arrives and the rats follow him out of town.  For a quite reasonable fee.

The cat is the mastermind, of course. He doesn’t actually do any work.

It’s all told with Pratchett’s love of wordplay, skewed humor, and keen eye for personality–here is the cat not really explaining why he talks:

“So, you really are a magical cat, then?” she finished, pouring the milk into a saucer.  It oozed rather than gushed, but Maurice was a street cat and would drink milk so rotten it would try to crawl away.

“Oh, yes, that’s right, magical,” he said, with a yellow-white ring around his mouth.  For two fish heads he’d be anything to anybody.

“Probably belonged to a witch, I expect, with a name like Griselda,” said the girl, putting the fish heads on another saucer.

“Yeah, right, Griselda, right,” said Maurice, not raising his head.

“Who lived in a gingerbread cottage in the forest, probably.”

“Yeah, right,” said Maurice. And then, because he wouldn’t have been Maurice if he couldn’t be a bit inventive, he added: “Only it was a melba toast cottage, ‘cos she was slimming.”

Pratchett is a genius at creating personalities–his mice and the cat have truer voices than the majority of the human characters I read in books.  One of the things that makes Pratchett’s books so very enjoyable is that his characters inhabit a universe in which they are all basically good, even the crooks.  They are true to themselves in a way that makes us like and care about Maurice, even though he has the moral compass of Gordon Gekko.

Rather than spoil the ending, I’ll just tell you that there are many far larger themes being explored in this book.  The rats construct a religion around Mr. Bunnsy, a rabbit in a waistcoat from a children’s book–and are then confronted with the truth that their theology is based on fiction.  A young rat learns what it means to be a leader.  There are scary bits, heroic sacrifices, and a lot more widdling.

It’s all done without any of the ickle-sweetness that could so very easily be part of a book about talking animals and making ethical choices.  In fact, that’s part of what Pratchett is poking fun at.

I finished the book, happy that all’s well that ends well.  And suddenly, I was crying.

Pratchett was on BBC this week, in a documentary about assisted suicide.  He has Alzheimer’s, and knows that soon he will be unable to write, or take care of himself.  He is planning to go early via suicide.   Pratchett can no longer type, so is dictating what will probably be his last novel–entitled “Snuff.”

I don’t really think I was crying for me, and the loss of the books he certainly would have written–Pratchett’s only 63, and has been a very prolific writer.  I think I was just sad for my inability to FIX things.  It is so wrong for this disease, of all diseases, to strike this person, of all people.

Loosing your words and memory is a terrible punishment for…nothing.  It’s one of those things that strikes down with no rhyme or reason.  Which is wrong, the same way it was so horribly wrong for my sister to get cancer, or for a million other crappy things that happen to good people to happen.

And I can’t fix any of it.

So I cried.

Book Review: Thripz and Dust

Thripz (Author: Robert Farley)
Bug Rating:

Dust (Author: Charles Pellegrino)
Bug Rating:

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a book, and it seemed like these two go together.  They are both stories of tiny animals gone horribly wrong, but they are also quite different.

I’ll start with Thripz, which reads very much like a SyFy Movie of the Week Script:

“Scientists deduce the creatures are thrips, a kind of common yard and garden pest. But these have been altered at the genetic level. Now they are able to metabolize pesticides and to reproduce at incredible rates, effectively being born pregnant.   Within twenty-four hours, more than a dozen deaths have been attributed to the abnormal pests.”

Yep, Genetically modified thrips that attack people and have a toxic bite. Created by a mad scientist in the pay of North Korea, hiding out on Hawaii.  Fortunately, a semi-psychic newspaper reporter has a (literally) tingling nose for news, and investigates.  Also, there are dueling agribusiness interests, a hot Denny’s waitress with GMO thrips “larvae” implanted in her abdomen, and shoot outs.  Oh, also pheromones, a 300lb Ukelele player, a corrupt graduate student, and incendiary ladybugs.

Yeah, it’s a bit over the top.

Which is a shame, because had it not had the entire kitchen sink of literary devices tossed into it, it could have developed into a good story.   If only tension had been developed by actual elements of the story, rather than a convenient psychic sense telling the reporter that something bad was going to happen.

Dust, on the other hand, also has a lot going on plot-wise, but holds together better.  It’s name comes from a plague of carnivorous dust mites that (again, literally) eat Long Island.  It has what may be one of my favorite dust cover blurbs:

“They’re dead, I tell you! All the fungus gnats are dead!” screams a famous entomologist just before his protective suit is ripped apart and he’s devoured by millions of vicious mites.”

How could I NOT read this book?  It’s built around a central theme–what would happen if all the insects on earth suddenly and mysteriously disappeared?  A whole bunch of scientific and economic concepts are woven together to make flesh-eating-mite mayhem.  There are some very recognizable characters as well–”Edwin Wilson” the “Ant Man” is clearly modeled on E.O. Wilson (and is the famous entomologist that is eaten alive in that blurb above.)

Unfortunately, this book too suffers from an excess of ideas, and the text often gets bogged down in explaining some of the details. There are a lot of details.   It’s not often that evolutionary biologists and ecologists get to be the stars of a disaster epic, though, so it was worth a read just for plain entertainment value.

I mean, vampire bats become vectors of mad cow disease, which somehow….eventually…. leads to a military captain breaking down in classic Dr. Strangelove style and shelling Hoboken with Thor nuclear missiles. Because he hates Sinatra.  (Best line? “You mutinous dog! You Sinatra-loving sack of shit!“)

Things devolve quickly into a post-apocalyptic world, with desperate attempts to clone pre-historic insects to bring the things back into ecological balance.  This book is alternately horrifying, silly, suspenseful, and turgid.  But if you enjoy trying to guess which of your real world colleagues are the ones being eaten alive by various tiny creatures run amok, you might have a good time with it.

Mantis Fratricide?

It appears someone found the giant mantis mentioned earlier this week. The description sounds like classic cold war stuff:

“Dilke had been miniaturized, first man in a daring experiment to solve Earth’s hideous overcrowding. He was just quarter of an inch high and there was no going back.

Now Dilke, a microagent for British Intelligence, was on a mission to South America tracking down the source of a horrifying poison gas.

And in the tropical jungle Dilke was hunted…by Mamoth-fanged wolf-spiders and the ferocious praying mantis.”

Also, why is this dude wearing ugg boots?

Evolution Comic Book

NCSE just announced the release of a new comic book about evolution!

Evolution: the Story of Life on Earth. Jay Hosler (text), Kevin and Zander Cannon (illustrations). This book will be released January 4th, 2011.

At first glance, it looks like a crazy mix of real science and imagination.  I especially liked this coverage of how wing folding opened new niches for insects:

Download your advance chapter here

Brian Dunning’s DDT Fail

A few weeks ago, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid posted a podcast that made a variety of claims about DDT and Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring that were poorly researched and factually incorrect.  For a while Dunning refused to admit his error; the podcast page as of 11/23/10 now has a box at the bottom in which he distances himself from the DDT claims he made by saying “Skeptoid is not here to tell you what to think.”

I and a few other people have been writing for several years about the way in which right-wing groups have been promoting DDT and attacking Rachel Carson. I could easily do a point-by-point fisking of Dunning’s mistakes (which others have done ably; see links at the bottom of this post), but I think the most useful thing to do would be to examine why a prominent skeptic fell so hard for a bogus manufactroversy.

“Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē).  A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.”

You see manufactroversies all the time in the media– “Teach the Controversy!” “Global Warming is a hoax!” “Vaccines are poison!”  The common thread is creating a controversy even though a clear consensus exists within the scientific community.

Media likes to frame issues as a debate: if you can get two talking heads to argue, that’s great TV. The problem is, presenting both sides of an argument is silly when there is no actual lack of consensus.

Dissent is manufactured by using information out of context and/or finding a scientist that opposes the prevailing view. That lone scientist’s opinions are then given equal weight to the majority of scientists who don’t think using DDT indiscriminately is a good idea. Or that Global Climate Change is a real and major threat to ecosystems.  You get the idea.

Manufactroversies also exploit the way in which scientists are constrained to speak in probabilities, not absolutes.  It’s part of the language of science to say that something may be true, almost surely IS true, but there are caveats on the conditions under which something is true. Scientists also have to make statements open to revision based on new information.

That’s part of what Skepticism is all about, too–forming opinions based on the available evidence.  New Evidence? Re-assess your conclusions.  This is not, alas, how many major media outlets–or politicians–operate.

The primary source Dunning seems to have used for his DDT fiasco is a website called Junkscience.com. Junkscience has an amazing history, and a little follow the money helps to connect cigarettes, lobbyists, anti-environmentalism, and an astroturf group called Africa Fighting Malaria.  Why didn’t Dunning pick up on those red flags? I don’t know.

The reality of DDT and malaria is that it is an incredibly complex problem.  There isn’t only ONE species of malarial parasite (Plasmodium). There isn’t only ONE species of malaria mosquito. There is not just ONE kind of ecosystem in which birds, mammals (including people) and malaria interact.  There is not just ONE political and health care system in areas where malaria occurs that is optimal for managing treatment.  In fact, in some areas where malaria occurs, there is no effective political or health care system!

Each system is different, and that is why blanket statements that portray DDT as a panacea for solving malaria problems are false and, frankly, stupid.  The issue of insecticide resistance is not trivial. We have many tools in our insect control toolbox; we need to choose each chemical carefully based on the best chance of control within a particular context. Making the wrong choice can have serious consequences if resistance occurs, and we loose the use of a pesticide.

When people espousing careful examination of data before making an insecticide choice are attacked for promoting “genocide”, you have to know something else is going on.  There is a political agenda at work.

I can guarantee you that within 24 hours of this post, there will be at least one, probably more, commenters that will accuse me of racism (“you want to kill brown people in Africa!”) or of lying about DDT.  They have shown up all over my blog whenever I bring up the topic of DDT and Rachel Carson.  Their primary methodology is copy/paste of the same old tired arguments over and over.

These are not people interested in nuance or conditionality of conclusions. They are people that find information that fits with their already existing world view, and then adopt it. Because it supports what they already believe.

Carson’s principal thesis was that broadly biocidal chemicals should not be carelessly introduced into the ecosystem.  She also said this: “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used.”  I don’t think many here would disagree with those statements.

Had Dunning actually READ Silent Spring, he might have realized his own words were wildly incorrect: “Silent Spring’s principal thesis was that DDT harms bird populations through eggshell thinning.”  In fact, the evidence for eggshell thinning was not published until after Carson’s death from breast cancer in 1964. (Also, when writing a critique of a book, it helps if you actually read the fucking book. But I digress.)

Dunning clearly got his information second-hand. And it was bad information.  This should be a lesson to all of us to check our sources carefully, and ask questions about “Who Profits?” and “What’s the Motivation?” about everything we read.  And to be willing to own it when we screw up.

Suggested resources:

The Science:

• Dunning DDT Fact Check (part 1)
• Dunning DDT Fact Check (part 2)
• Did Rachel Carson kill people by DDT whistle blowing?
• Mosquito resistance to DDT and other insecticides
• DDT primed bedbug populations to be resistant to insecticides (video)
• Bedbug insecticide resistance
• How well have claims in Carson’s 1962 book held up? Pretty well, actually!

The Politics:

• Who put the hit on Rachel Carson?
• Follow the money
• Bate and Switch: how a free market magician manipulated two decades of environmental science
• Rehabilitating Rachel Carson
• Africa Fighting Malaria 2007 Tax return (PDF)–all their money seems to go to salaries, rather than actual…..malaria fighting. Huh.

Shellac: also not a beetle

I got Bill Bryson’s new book “At Home” from my library, and have been happily reading about the history of houses.
Except.

When I got to the chapter “The Drawing Room”, I discovered a rather depressing mistake:

“Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle.  Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading.”

Those of you who have been privy to my previous ranting about cochineal will know the refrain to this song:
IT’S NOT A BEETLE.

Shellac is made from Laccifer lacca, the lac scale.  Scale insects look quite different from typical insects. Tiny, with no visible legs or antennae, they kind of look like plant pimples. Like many of their relatives (mealybugs, for example), Lac scales secrete a waxy covering for both protection and waterproofing.  That’s what’s harvested to make shellac; it is not a happy process for the insects.

I tried to figure out how Bryson got the wrong end of this taxonomic stick, but wasn’t able to sort it out.

The reference listed in Bryson’s book does correctly identify the insect as a scale; although it also talks about larvae.  A lot of internet stories use the name Coccus lacca, or suggest that it’s an insect that has a pupa and full metabolism.

Scale insects don’t undergo complete metamorphosis, so they don’t have larvae and pupae.  In fact, scales have their own special freaky system of growth and reproduction in which the females loose their legs and turn into a sort of tiny insect Jabba the Hutt, and even tinier males fertilize them and die.

Clearly, there is a need for a short epistle on Shellac, it’s insecty creators, and its many uses!  (including your food!)

Look for it soon!

[image from Project Gutenberg]

Operation Gadfly: Bug Minions, Activate!

I have a cunning plan (with apologies to Baldrick).  I’m applying to this job with LibraryThing:

“LibraryThing is hiring a bookish, social-media savvy employee. We want someone passionate about books and about book lovers, and excited to take social cataloging and bookish social networking to the next level.”

Like all scientists everywhere, I’m borrowing and refining a proven technique.  If you would like to help LibraryThing hire an ÜberNerd (i.e, ME), please tweet this:

{removed since Operation Gadfly ended successfully}

This is an experiment (science again!) to see if I can socially engineer an interview

I haven’t quite figured out what I can do to thank you if you participate–feel free to post your demands in the comments.

You all have been so incredibly kind to me over the last 5 years, as you’ve read about my battles with random wingnuttery,  shared my love of our creepy crawly brethren, and (hopefully) watched my writing improve.  I am humbled by your support.  (and don’t worry, I will only do this ONCE.  It might be an experiment, but I won’t replicate it.)

Thanks everyone!

EDITED 11/1/2010 TO ADD: Holy Crap! I thought this might be a neat way to make LibraryThing know who I was and that I knew about social media. I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations! (See the comments for some links to screen shots).  I am, once again, so grateful and humble for your help.  I sound like a bumbling Miss America contestant, but…*sniff*

I LOVE YOU GUYS! GROUP HUG!