Malcom Gladwell: John Rock’s Error

Now this was a fascinating story!  I don’t even know what insight to draw from this story. Mostly it’s just fascinating and I think more people should know about this stuff.  It’s the story of the Pill, women’s birth control.  This story has it all – science, fiction, politics, and betrayal.  As with Gladwell’s other articles, this weaves together several plot lines: of the Pill inventor, John Rock, the religious perspective (of the inventor and the Pope), the science of menstruation, and cancer.  Trying to summarize this succinctly will be a challenge, but here it goes.

John Rock was a devout Catholic and wanted to help people utilize the rhythm method, a natural form of birth control condoned by the church.  His solution was a “natural” one, the use of natural hormones in a pill that allowed for predictable periods of fertility.  Somehow he and his coworkers decided on a 4 week cycle.  This is curious because it raises the question of how frequent menstruation is naturally.  An academic spent a few years studying the Dogon people of Mali, in Africa who were determined to be, for all practical purposes, unchanged by the modernization of the rest of the world.  Women from this culture rarely menstruated as they spent most of their time either pregnant or breast feeding (which inhibits menstruation).  To cut to the chase, The Dogon women averaged one period per year until age 35, then four per year until menopause for a lifetime total of about 100 menstruations.  This is roughly 25% of the average contemporary Western women who menstruates some 350 to 400 times per year!

Ok, enough about menstruation.  Why does this matter you ask – cancer.  Every period corresponds to the production of huge numbers of cells.  More cell growth and production means more chances for cells to wrong.  American women are six times more likely to have breast cancer than corresponding Japanese women.  Why?  The fact that Japanese women started menstruation two years later (16 years old rather than 14) accounts for 40% of the difference.  Throw in higher weight at menopause and lower estrogen production (which could be due to their lower fat diet) and there is no difference.  Fortunately researchers are working on other forms of birth control that work to reduce lifetime menstruations. 

To finish the story is the perfect twist, only possible in real life: that John Rock, the devout Catholic, questions his faith as the Church bans all forms of oral contraceptive.  After working so hard to help humanity in a accordance with his Catholic religious beliefs, the rules change and deem what he created against the rules.  Did he leave the Church, or did the Church leave him?  Question the status quo.  Follow your gut.  Make a difference!   

The book:  Malcom Gladwell's What the Dog Saw.

Malcom Gladwell: The Ketchup Conundrum (or Lord of the Recipes)

The Ketchup Conundrum (or Lord of the Recipes):

This was a fascinating story of the development of the phrase and underlying idea that when it comes to food, there is no single perfect recipe, but rather there are a set of perfect recipes.  Essentially, a clever guy in the food science industry, Howard Moskowitz, developed a code that, given the input of taste test groups and their preferences, could optimize the (in this case) spaghetti sauce recipe to maximize the score for each of 4 groups that were recognized.  This was revolutionary in that it challenged the idea of a perfect recipe that would please everyone.  Well, with one exception:  ketchup, there is only one and like a black hole or singularity, it has its own rules that no one understands.  What other “single recipes to rule them all” ideas do we have in our daily lives?  Perhaps politics – each group has an idea on how to solve a problem, perhaps a plan to please each group rather than one plan that pleases only a few (obviously there are issues with maximizing funding and mutual exclusivity of ideas). 

The idea was revolutionary to the food industry, but it seems mundane from an engineering perspective:  choose the number of sauces you want to make and then choose your optimization criteria.  The food industry chose 1 recipe and optimized to 1 testing group.  That would be like designing one type of motor for all vehicles:  everyone could still get around, and a lot of folks would be happy.  But by understanding specialization (trucking vs. commuter cars vs. luxury vehicles), one could modify the one design and please each individual group more.     

The other cool thing to take away from this:  the basic taste of Umami.  Sure, we've all heard of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, but I'd never heard of umami before.  Cool!

Malcom Gladwell: What the Dog Saw and other adventures

Perhaps I will get around to re-reading “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” and continue on to “Outliers.”  But in the mean time, I’ll focus on my current read, “What the Dog Saw.” 

The book is a collection of his articles from The New Yorker.  In many of the articles, Gladwell weaves together seemingly unrelated stories, into a coherent story that challenges the conventional mindset.  It seems as though the book is much the same, that while each topic is different, the way he approaches the problems is similar and there is some larger message to take away.  Its hard to describe what it might be other than “out of the box” or “lateral” thinking, but its something.  How does one better describe that and apply it in the context of their own life? 

With 25 very unique and interesting chapters, there is a bit too much to review in full detail, so I’ll cherry pick.  Over the next posts, I'll share my thoughts on select chapters from the book.  My brief summaries are an injustice to the book.  Buy it.  Or at least check it out from the library.  Nothing you read here will detract from reading the book yourself, there is much more than I mention here.  

Book Report: The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose:  (Warning:  Contains Spoilers)

Written by Umberto Eco, an Italian professor of semiotics.  As best I can tell, he is the real life version of Dan Brown’s fictional symbologist Robert Langdon.  The book recounts a multiple murder mystery set in a remote Italian monestary in the mid 14^th century as recorded by a novice monk, Adso of Melk, now in his old age.  The book is written with excruciating detail with regards to church politics in greater Europe.  Reading the book is an exercise in vocabulary; ancient and obscure words are used regularly as are untranslated phrases in a variety of languages (most commonly Latin, but including French and German).  The mystery itself is interesting enough, but is interspersed with longwinded asides detailing religious visions and emotional experiences of the narrator.   While I did not read the post script in its entirety, I did read far enough to see that Eco refused to take out these sections, as was suggested by his editors and test readers.  He saw them as penance the reader must serve, just as the monks do, to partake in the life and story of the monastery. 

Summary:

Adso recounts the experience from his youth as he faithfully follows his master, Brother William of Baskerville.  It is revealed that William is on a mission to establish a meeting between Michael of Cessna and delegates of the newly elected Pope, in order for the terms to be set in a later meeting between Michael and the Pope himself.  Due to various ideological differences between orders and factions within the church and Europe, the unnamed monastery in question is the only place for such a meeting to take place. 

Upon their arrival the monastery, William is revealed to be a wise and clever man, much like Sherlock Holmes, by solving the mystery of a missing horse.  With his reputation preceding him up the hill to the monastery, William meets the abbot Abo, who greets him and quickly requests his help in solving the mystery of the death of a young monk.  As William and Adso start to investigate, they quickly find the abbey has many dark secrets. 

The abbey’s fame derives primarily from its vast library.  However, access to the library is strictly controlled.  Only the librarian is allowed to enter the library and only he decides what books are pious enough for the monks to read.  As a safeguard, the library itself is a labyrinth full of surprises aimed to foil trespassers. 

As each day passes, another monk dies and the mystery deepens.  Eventually, the meeting between Michael of Cessna and the Popes delegates takes place even as monks continue to die.  After the failed meeting, William is coming close to solving the mystery, so close that he is asked to leave by the abbot (so that the matter can be dealt with internally).  Vowing to solve the mystery before departure in the morning, William solves the final riddle of the library where he finds the mastermind and the coveted book that have caused so much trouble.  As detective and crook revel in their glory – the crook in how brilliant and successful his crimes, the detective in piecing it all together – the final act of the crook to destroy the book results in a fight and the burning down of the library and abbey in its entirety. 

Thoughts:

The mystery itself was interesting enough, but had it been written without the longwinded and unrelated background of Church politics and heresy, it would be quickly overlooked and considered generally uninteresting.  The crux of the crime comes down to the hiding of a book, the second book of Aristotle, which glorifies laughter.  The murdering monk, blind old Jorge, sees the book and its philosophy as the downfall of Christianity as it will undermine people’s faith and empower the devil.  This is a somewhat weak premise by which one can justify killing seven monks, but it gains some credence by the books long discussions on heresy.

To me, William is by far the most interesting character in the book.  He is a man of learning.  He speaks many languages, is widely read and can readily quote text as it becomes relevant.  Further, he is a follower of Roger Bacon (why is that name familiar?  Was it somewhere in Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle?) and clearly a scientist.  I was continually left wondering why he was a monk.  The best hypothesis I have come up with is that there was no other place for a man of learning in the 14^th century.  The best he could do was to pursue science and attempt to develop it further, within and by pushing the boundaries of, theological interpretation.  Leonardo da Vinci lived from 1452-1519, a good 100 years after the fictional William of Baskerville, how did da Vinci work around and with the pervasive religion and culture of Christianity?  Or was he close enough to the age of enlightenment (beginning ca. 1600) that the iron grip of the church was loosening?  As the story was published in the 1980’s, it is curious to think how much influence Sherlock Holmes had on the development of William’s character.  Both are from England and have incredible mental capabilities.  However, William’s character remains more elusive than Holmes. 

Much like the Baroque Cycle of Neil Stephenson, this book is longwinded and wildly boring.  Yet I couldn’t put it down.  There is less swashbuckling in The Name of the Rose, but the moments of action are intensified by their contrast to the slow and often boring sections recounting history, visions, and descriptions.  Also similar to the Baroque Cycle is the way this book intermingles fact and fiction to give a sense of the way life was at that time.  It may not be true that any knowledge of optics had developed in Europe, but it is wonderful to see the seeds of enlightenment being planted! 

Overall, this was an enjoyable book, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.  It requires commitment from the reader to wade through the tedium, but the subtle twists in plot and clever mystery, as well as glimpse into 14^th century European monastic life, makes it worthwhile.  

A Fresh Start

I have recently been inspired to restart my blog.  I hope to add to the useful content on the web.  Its doubtful I will have anything new that hasn't already been said.  But here, on my own blog, I can say it in my own words and in my own way.  Perhaps my time would be better spent contributing to wiki's or coming up with ways to integrate the existing content of the web, but I'll leave that to others more interested and capable.  

Since my last post (some years ago), I have grown.  I think I'm more experienced and more interesting than before.  I have ideas worth sharing.  I aim to add a variety of content to this blog:  gear reviews, technical rock climbing and rope work skills, book reports, training regimens, interesting photos, and things I've been looking into (personal finance, car repair, language learning).  Even more than I look forward to sharing with you whats on my mind, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.  

Enjoy.