Reading and Writing: Dewey Decimal System 600 Science

Reading and Writing: Dewey Decimal System 600 Science

600 Technology

Speaking of humans, we might go up to space just for fun. Right now space tourism is so expensive and so controlled that (as far as we can tell) all the private space flight people are slightly crazy, very nerdy billionaires. We’re happy they’re doing their thing, but it might be nice if a mere millionaire could get in the game. The possibilities for space tourism are probably pretty sizable. The few space tourists who’ve been able to hitch a ride havespent around $20 million for the privilege. Not bad considering most people spend a lot of their time in zero G puking. Yes, puking. As we discussed earlier, astronauts experience “weightlessness” because they’re in free fall. Another time you experience free fall is when you start zooming downward in a roller coaster. Your caveman ancestors didn’t have a lot of experience with satellites and roller coasters, so you aren’t evolved to deal with it very well. Your stomach isn’t used to food floating around in every direction, and your sense of balance isn’t used to a world where you somersault every time you lean back. This is why the International Space Station keeps a ready supply of barf bags, even for trained space professionals.
-Kelly Weinersmith, Soonish

People who build time machines tend to love science, as they generally tend to be scientists by training, or at least well-intentioned amateurs who have no idea of the powers they are about to unleash until a bunch of their future selves come back to warn them.

And now that you have accepted the fact that you are stuck in the past, we would like to offer a suggestion. Since you can no longer go back to the future . . . . . . we invite you to bring the future back to you. Allow us to explain that intriguing ellipsis-filled sentence. The rest of this guide contains all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, writing, culture, facts, and figures that are required for one human— without any specialized training— to build a civilization from the ground up. This guide will allow you to create a world like the one you left, but better. It will be one in which humanity matured quickly and efficiently, instead of spending 200,000 years stumbling around in the dark without language (Section 2), not knowing that tying a rock to a string would unlock navigating the entire world (Section 10.12.2), and thinking disease was caused by weird smells (Section 15).

We make no assumptions about what period you’re trapped in or what you already know. Everything you need is built from scratch, making this text nothing less than a complete cheat sheet for civilization. We at Chronotix Solutions are excited to have accidentally provided you with this opportunity and wish you all the best.
-Ryan North, How to Invent Everything 

Other than the sky and some trees, everything I can see from where I now sit is artificial. The desk, books, and computer before me; the chair, rug, and door behind me; the lamp, ceiling, and roof above me; the roads, cars, and buildings outside my window, all have been made by disassembling and reassembling parts of nature. If truth be told, even the sky has been colored by pollution, and the stand of trees has been oddly shaped to conform to the space allotted by development. Virtually all urban sensual experience has been touched by human hands, and thus the vast majority of us experience the physical world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.
Henry Petroski, (2010) The Evolution of Useful Things 

610 Medicine & health

Phlegm, snot, spit, boogers, sputum-all different varieties of the same thing. These terms are used to describe different forms of mucus, a slimy material that lines various membranes in the body (called of course, mucus membranes). Mucus is composed chiefly of mucins (lubricating proteins) and inorganic salts suspended in water. Mucus aids in the protection of the lungs by trapping foreign particles that enter the nose during normal breathing Mucus also makes swallowing easier and prevents stomach acid from harming your stomach wall.
^^^^^^^^^^
In Australia, the “poo fairy” comes at night to take a dump in your mouth. In England, they say a long night at the pub leaves your breath “tasting like the vulture’s dinner.” And a Scottish friend with a new Hawaiian bride reports that a late-night fridge-binge of haggis and poi will leave you with the worst morning breath of your life.
So, given all these tales, we should probably start with the anaerobic bacteria, the xerostomia (a fancy word for dry mouth), or the volatile sulfur compounds (which are actually waste products from the bacteria). All these combine to give you that wonderful get-up-in the-morning feeling of garbage mouth.
-Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D., why Do Men Have Nipples?

611 Human anatomy

Human anatomy is the study of the shape and form of the human body.

It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest road map to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are often simpler versions of ours.
-Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish

612 Human physiology

Human physiology is the study of how the human body functions.

“IN THE 1930S a zealous French surgeon called Pierre Barbet became passionately fascinated by the details of crucifixion. To test whether the hand could support the body’s weight he experimented by nailing cadavers to a wooden cross. Making a guess at Jesus’s weight and the position of the arms with respect to the torso during Roman crucifixion, he calculated that the nails must have been hammered through the small bones of the wrist rather than the palm. Those wrist bones – the “carpus” – are held together very tightly by ligaments; Barbet found that if he nailed his corpses by the wrists rather than the palms, they didn’t tear out. Pierre Barbet published his experiments on the nailing of a human body in the 1930s, but in 1968, in a burial cave near Jerusalem, a skeleton was found of a young man who’d been crucified during the Roman period.”
― Gavin Francis, Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum

BOOKS HAPPEN. You read something or a friend says something or you’re walking down the street and you see something and you say to yourself, that’s interesting. Then everywhere you look you see something about the something, and sooner or later the something turns into an idea and the idea turns into a proposal and then, if you’re lucky, into a book. One August morning in 2011, as I was lacing up my sneakers, I looked down at my underwhelming, underreported, and completely indispensable human feet, and thought, “That’s interesting.”
So I started to put it on paper, and four months later, I had two chapters and Phyllis said, “Who knew feet could be this interesting.” Actually, I did. And so, it turned out, did the authors of the Old and New Testaments, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and virtually every single twentieth century anthropologist who wandered through Africa, Asia, and Europe in search of the first primate to stand up on two legs. The only body part completely exclusive to human beings is the chin (more about that later on). Everything else— else— eyes, ears, nose, heart, lungs, liver, arms, and legs— can be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. That includes our hand with its famous opposable thumb. Apes, giant pandas, raccoons, and opossums also have an opposable thumb; koalas have not one, but two opposable thumbs on their front paws (the back paws have only one). Koala hand with two thumbs (left) vs. foot with one thumb (right). But like the chin, the homely foot with its adducted big toe, firm arch, and plantigrade sole, different in design from every other foot and hoof on earth, is unique and much to our advantage, powering our movement and, throughout history, enabling our cultural, political, and scientific development.
Carol Ann Rinzler, Leonardo’s Foot: : how 10 toes, 52 bones, and 66 muscles shaped the human world (2013)

612.6     Pregnancy/Child Birth

“Researchers have found that a woman’s brain-cell volume actually decreases during pregnancy (which could explain why you won’t remember what you just read about in that last paragraph). And—for reasons unknown—women pregnant with girls are more forgetful, on average, than those carrying boys (who would have guessed?). Fortunately, the pregnancy brain fog (similar to what many women experience premenstrually, only thicker) is only temporary. Your brain will plump back up a few months after delivery.”
― Heidi Murkoff, What to Expect When You're Expecting

Oh, the joys of pregnancy! There’s the gassiness, constipation, quesiness, and exhuastion; the forgetfulness, crankiness, and the constant worry. No woman is spared these discomforts and humilations, but most are too polite to complain or to embarrawed to talk about them.

Not Jenny McCarthy!

Most mothers won’t tell you how hard pregnancy (and then child-birth) can be. Let me tell you, it is. It’s brutal sometimes! But if I did it, ANYONE can do it. I mean, I always knew I was meant to do something really BIG in my life, and now I know that this was it. Screw winning an Academy Award someday… I GAVE BIRTH! In my eyes, women should be adored and thanked on a daily basis for their strength, endurance, and willingness to give birth. If it were up to men to do so, Adam and Eve would have been the only humans to walk the face of the earth.
^^^^^^^^^^^
It would be great if we lived in a world where strangers weren’t strange. In civilized society, people don’t just come up to you and touch your stomach. If they did, you might have them arrested! So why do people think it’s okay to come up to pregnant women and pet their bellies?
― Jenny McCarthy, Belly Laughs: The Naked Truth about Pregnancy and Childbirth

It is astonishing to me that we can touch the moon and predict the weather, map the human genetic code and clone animals, digitize a photograph and send it from Tokyo to Tehran with the touch of a button, but we can’t figure out how to give birth in a way that is—simultaneously and  consistently—safe, minimally painful, joyful, and close to nature’s design. As you will see, if history is our guide, we never will figure out the ultimate way to give birth. And we probably will never stop trying. For no matter that birth is the most natural of events, the arrival of a healthy baby is truly a miracle.
-Tina Cassidy, Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born 

612.821 Sleep Science
Consider, for a moment, how absurd the whole idea of falling asleep is in a world of finite resources where living things resort to eating each other to survive. A sleeping animal must lie still for long stretches at a time, all but inviting predators to make it dinner (and not in a good way). Yet whatever sleep does is so important that evolution goes out of its way to make it possible. A dolphin, for instance, will sleep with half of its brain awake at a time, giving it the ability to surface for air and be on the lookout for predators while the other half is presumably dreaming.
 Before the discovery of rapid eye movements, our understanding of sleep hadn’t undergone any dramatic revisions in more than two thousand years. The Ancient Greeks believed that someone fell asleep when the brain became filled with blood, and then woke up once it drained back out again. Beyond that, they found the whole experience kind of spooky. Sleep was considered the closest a living being could come to death and still be around to talk about it afterward. The immortal family tree made this clear: Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, was the twin brother of Thanatos, the god of death, and their mother was the goddess of night. It was probably best not to think about this too much while lying in a room on a dark and lonesome evening. Two-dozen centuries later, doctors put forth the theory that blood flowing through the head put pressure on the brain and induced sleep, a concept Plato would have readily agreed with. Philosophers in the nineteenth century introduced the novel idea that a person fell asleep when the brain ceased to be filled with stimulating thoughts or ambitions. The supposed link between sleep and an empty head fostered a suspicion of anyone who slept too much or seemed to enjoy it. In certain high-pressure jobs today, admitting that you sleep for more than five or six hours each night still looks to be a sure sign that you are not a serious person.
David K Randall,. Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (2012)  

613 Personal health & safety

Health/Fitness:
“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

613.2 Diet (food hygiene, nutrition, diet, nutritional value of food and beverages)

FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS, I’ve been assembling a list of things I need to do to improve my health. It’s an intimidatingly long list. Fifty-three pages. Here’s a sample: • Eat leafy green vegetables • Do forty minutes of aerobic exercise a day • Meditate several times a week • Watch baseball (lowers blood pressure, according to one study) • Nap (good for the brain and heart) • Hum (prevents sinus infections) • Win an Academy Award (A bit of a long shot, I know. But studies show Oscar winners live three years longer than non–Oscar winners.) • Keep my apartment at sixty-two degrees, which makes my body burn more calories a day • Buy a potted Areca palm plant (filters dirty air) • Lift weights to muscle exhaustion • Become an Okinawan woman (another long shot) And on and on. By the way, I’ve printed this list in nine-point Papyrus font, because I found a study that says hard-to-read fonts improve memorization. I want to do everything on my list because my quest isn’t just to be a little bit healthier. My quest isn’t to lose a couple of pounds. My quest is to turn my current self—a mushy, easily winded, moderately sickly blob—into the embodiment of health and fitness. To become as healthy as humanly possible.
― A J Jacobs, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection

The food we eat is like fuel. It gives our bodies the energy they need to function well. If you don’t make sure that the fuel you pump into your body is of the right quality or quantity, you just won’t feel as healthy as you could.
We all have up to 100 Trillion cells in our bodies, each one demanding a constant supply of daily nutrients in order to function optimal. Food affects all those cells, and by extension every aspect of our being: Mood, Energy Levels, Food Cravings, Thinking Capacity, Sex Drive, Sleeping Habits and General Health. In short, Healthy Eating is the Key to Well-Being.
-Gillian McKeith You Are What You Eat: The Plan That Will Change Your Life (2004)

So your longevity is paradoxically tied to the fate of these ancient organisms— the oldest parts of you have the power to help keep you young. It all goes back to the bacteria’s need to survive and pass on their DNA. Your body is essentially a condominium for your microbiome or, as I like to call them, your bugs. You are their home. And as you’ll soon learn, if you provide a nice, hospitable home for them, they will be exceptionally good tenants. They’ll keep the utilities running efficiently, the plumbing in tip-top shape, and even the exterior paint fresh. On the other hand, if you feed them foods they do not thrive on, allow squatters to move in and take over, and let the foundation rot, they’ll give up and let the rest of you decay right along with it. Our relationship with our bugs has always been, and continues to be, symbiotic; in other words, their health is dependent on you and vice versa. You take care of them, and they’ll take care of you— for the long term.
-Steven R Gundry, MD, The Longevity Paradox (The Plant Paradox) 

613.4 Cleanliness Care (hygiene and personal cleanliness, personal care)

 ‘Hygiene’ derives from the classical Greek word for wholesomeness and human healthiness,
healthiness, which then became a shorthand term for the Greek natural science of preserving and extending life.

Potentially every part of the world—or any social group—has its own unique profile and history of cleansing, purification, or hygienic practices, and its own cultural mix. Like chess, human hygiene is played out with a set of basic options, giving rise to a very wide variety of situations.

The science of hygiene. Food, water supply, clothing, housing, climate, seasons, geographical location, height above sea level, size of settlement, drainage, building styles, earth floors, occupations, work patterns, immunity levels, age, sex, status, professional medical help, standards of midwifery, maternal child care, and now genes, have all been cited as ‘variables’ which could shorten—or lengthen—the lives of individuals. You could also add handkerchiefs, toothpaste, or soap. Multidimensional, multi-causal, multi-variable—how do you judge a moving bio-system?
-Virginia Smith, Clean 

613.66 Self Defense

Because the body follows the mind, effective combat is all about shutting down your opponent’s most valuable weapon—his brain. A debilitating injury to the body takes the brain out of the equation and destroys any strength, speed, or size advantage the opponent might have. My diving incident was a perfect example. It didn’t matter that I was strong: the injury to my inner ear destroyed my sense of balance and orientation, and forced my brain to deal with the acute trauma to my body at the expense of engaging the body parts I wanted to control both to complete the dive evolution and swim to the surface. I was completely helpless and vulnerable. And if someone like me, who is not just bigger, faster, and stronger, but also tenacious and fiercely mission-focused, can be laid low by injury, so, too, can others who seem to benefit from all possible advantages.
-Tim Larkin, When Violence Is the Answer . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

613.71 Exercising, sports (aerobics, sauna, appearance surveillance and physical form)^[6]

“At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“Today, of course, there’s no need to forage and hunt to survive. Yet our genes are coded for this activity, and our brains are meant to direct it. Take that activity away, and you’re disrupting a delicate biological balance that has been fine-tuned over half a million years. Quite simply, we need to engage our endurance metabolism to keep our bodies and brains in optimum condition. The ancient rhythms of activity ingrained in our DNA translate roughly to the varied intensity of walking, jogging, running, and sprinting. In broad strokes, then, I think the best advice is to follow our ancestors’ routine: walk or jog every day, run a couple of times a week, and then go for the kill every now and then by sprinting.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

613.79 Relaxation, sleep^[7]

Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.”
“Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs has all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep 

614 Public Health

In the latter part of the twentieth century, some believed antibiotics and vaccines had led to the conquest of most infectious diseases, and we could then turn our full attention to non-infectious, chronic conditions. Later, alarming experiences with HIV/AIDS, SARS, a virulent strain of influenza, multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis and other newly-recognized maladies corrected that misimpression. We now recognize that the struggle between humans, microbes and other aspects of our environment is long and ever-changing, but never ending.
Donald R. Hopkins, M.D., M.P.H. Vice President, Health Programs The Carter Center

Terrorism aside, some of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today are from microbes that develop drug resistance—like tuberculosis or staph or strep bacteria—and from new microbes that emerge unexpectedly from animal reservoirs, like the viruses that cause AIDS, SARS, and pandemic influenza. Because these diseases are new, we do not always have tools to treat them or prevent their spread. I remember the shock and disbelief I felt in 1983 when a young man I knew, a lively, charming graduate student in his late twenties, died within a few weeks of falling ill with a rare fungal pneumonia, now known to be an opportunistic infection of AIDS. His doctors’ helplessness recalled the days before antibiotics and vaccination, when deaths from infectious disease were common. I imagined what it must have been like in 1923, when my own grandfather, a doctor in New York City, died of bacterial meningitis contracted from a patient. There was no vaccine and no treatment. This is what we potentially face—even today, in the 21st century—with each outbreak of a new or newly drug-resistant disease. What type of person is ready and able to pit his or her wits against the endless inventiveness of infectious microbes?
Alexandra M Levitt, Deadly Outbreaks: How Medical Detectives Save Lives Threatened by Killer Pandemics, Exotic Viruses, and Drug-Resistant Parasites (2013)

616 Death, Diseases, and Sickness

“People don’t gather after a death to mourn, but rather to reaffirm why life matters and to remember to exult in the only one we’ll ever have. We hold funerals, memorials, celebrations—whatever you want to call them—to seek and to find the heart of the matter of this trip we call Life.”
― Heather Lende, Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer

“Though their doctors dutifully record such distinct entities as stroke, or cardiac failure, or pneumonia, these aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this. On July 5, 1814, when he was seventy-one years old, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams, "But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Documentation of patients affected by epilepsy can be found dating back to the beginning of recorded human history. During the Vedic period in India, as early as 4500–1500 BC, epilepsy was described as “apasmara” or “loss of consciousness.” The ancient Babylonians recorded accounts of as many different seizure types as we recognize today on tablets that date back to 2000 BC. Considered a divine punishment for sinners, the Babylonians were one of the first cultures to claim a supernatural nature to epilepsy by associating each seizure type with an evil spirit or god. In the 5th century BC, the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, coined the term “seleniazetai” to describe people with epilepsy because they were believed to be affected by the moon god, Selene, and the phases of the moon. Hippocrates’ term inspired the Latinized label “moonstruck” or “lunatic” that later arose to describe epileptics.

However, Hippocrates was the first to attribute the etiology of epilepsy to brain dysfunction. He called epilepsy the “great disease,” thus creating the origin for the term “grand mal.” While Hippocrates believed that epilepsy had a physiologic cause, the perception that epilepsy was something beyond a spiritual problem or a curse wasn’t accepted until the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite the historical view that patients with epilepsy were dysfunctional and unable to lead productive lives, there were multiple famous historical figures who lived with epilepsy. Julius Cesar, Peter the Great of Russia, Händel, Berlioz, Pope Pius IX, and the writer Fodor Dostoevsky were all reported to have had epilepsy. George Washington’s stepdaughter, Patsy, had a history of seizures. The success and prominence of these few, however, did little to change the public perception that epileptics were to be feared and avoided.
Kristin Seaborg, The Sacred Disease: My Life with Epilepsy (2016)  

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.
Rebecca Skloot , The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks  (2010)

When I'm jumping it's as if my feelings are going upward to the sky. Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is enough to make my heart quiver. When I'm jumping, I can feel my body parts really well, too--my bounding legs and my clapping hands--and that makes me feel so, so good.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

617 Surgery, regional medicine, dentistry, ophthalmology, otology, audiology

The brain is soft. Some of my colleagues compare it to toothpaste, but that’s not quite right. It doesn’t spread like toothpaste. It doesn’t adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does. Tofu—the soft variety, if you know tofu—may be a more accurate comparison. If you cut out a sizable cube of brain it retains its shape, more or less, although not quite as well as tofu. Damaged or swollen brain, on the other hand, is softer. Under pressure, it will readily express itself out of a hole in the skull made by a high-speed surgical drill. Perhaps the toothpaste analogy is more appropriate under these circumstances. The issue of brain texture is on my mind all the time. Why? I am a neurosurgeon. The brain is my business. Although I acknowledge that the human brain is a refined, complex, and mysterious system, I often need to regard it as a soft object inhabiting the bony confines of a hard skull. Many of the brains I encounter have been pushed around by tumors, blood clots, infections, or strokes that have swollen out of control. Some have been invaded by bullets, nails, or even maggots. I see brains at their most vulnerable. However, whereas other brain specialists, like neurologists and psychiatrists, examine brain images and pontificate from outside of the cranium, neurosurgeons boast the additional manual relationship with our most complex of organs. We are part scientist, part mechanic.
-Katrina Firlik, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe 

620 Engineering   

“Concrete is an invention as transformative as fire or electricity. It has changed where and how billions of people live, work, and move around. Concrete is the skeleton of the modern world, the scaffold on which so much else is built. It gives us the power to dam enormous rivers, erect buildings of Olympian height, and travel to all but the remotest corners of the world with an ease that would astonish our ancestors. Measured by the number of lives it touches, concrete is easily the most important man-made material ever invented.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

629 Space Exploration:

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
— Neil Armstrong

“In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success.

In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

629.045 Navigators –
 “Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us

630  Farming: Agriculture 

“No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving urban pig farmer was in their midst. In fact, I came to learn that the restaurant industry was filled with other obsessive freaks like Samin, who would never buy a factory-made pickle. I was just another one of those freaks.”
― Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

“‎A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love


635 Garden crops (Horticulture)

Gardening:

AS LABOR DAY APPROACHED, Anne and I were flush with excitement. We had signed a contract, made a down payment for the construction phase, and spent our idle minutes running our fingers over the smooth blueprints and poring over seed catalogs. One moonless night in August, we grabbed some blankets and lay on our backs in the tall grass in the garden-to-be, touching hands, looking at the constellations, discussing what to plant. We were going to have a two-thousand-square-foot garden next year! To a couple of former city dwellers, this seemed like a small farm. No more agonizing decisions over whether to plant squash or lettuce. We could plant everything. I fancied myself a small farmer, self-sufficient in vegetables for at least several months of the year, and longer for storage crops like potatoes and winter squash. With the occasional shooting star shamelessly egging us on, Anne topped my ambitions with her romantic dreams of canning, making the garden’s bounty last twelve months of the year. I responded with homemade sun-dried tomatoes, tasting of sunshine and acidic sweetness.
“Fresh blueberries,” Anne moaned, “that turn your lips blue.”
“Cherry tomatoes,” I countered. “Popped whole into your mouth.”
Before long we were rolling in the summer grass, our way of saying farewell to the baseball field with its little vegetable patch and welcoming the kitchen garden. With these tantalizing visions dangling before us, we didn’t mind sacrificing the last few late tomatoes of the year, ripping out the plants and disassembling the beds in anticipation of Big Machinery that would be arriving any day.
Labor Day arrived. No Big Machinery.
-William Alexander, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

“Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities.”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

636 Animal husbandry

I encourage you to take the time to watch and listen to your chickens chattering as things are happening. Repeat what you hear back to them and watch their response. At first some will stop in their tracks, and like dogs, cock their heads from side to side as they stare at you with their intense chicken eyes. They’re surprised that you can speak chicken! Keep on copying them. Repeat the sounds they make as you open the coop, listen to what they say when you throw out scratch, follow them around the yard as they explore, and even follow them into the coop to say good night. Repeat the coos and clucks and buk-gaws, and before you know it, you too will be fluent in chicken speak. Who knows, you might even find out that you have a chicken name!
― Melissa Caughey, How to Speak Chicken: Why Your Chickens Do What They Do & Say What They Say

639 Hunting, fishing

“When I was done plucking the birds, the blood and the scattering of white feathers gave my campsite the appearance of a pillow fight gone horribly wrong.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“While I was heading into the woods in order to put fur coats into stores, they were heading into the woods to put food on their plates. It was an utterly simple equation. For them, the value of an animal was fixed. It did not change according to markets and trends. A 110-pound deer provided about thirty thousand calories of energy and five thousand grams of protein. Of course, that deer has a potent spiritual significance as well, but that potency was supported by the universal usefulness of its flesh. We need to eat to survive. We need to kill to eat.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

I think writing is a lot like fishing, especially when it’s about fishing, as most of mine is. Both take curiosity, patience, persistence, lots of time, some skill, a willingness to put things together in odd ways, an appreciation of the process itself (regardless of how it turns out), and faith that it’s all somehow worthwhile. What sane person would spend a whole day writing a paragraph that reads like it was dashed off in thirty seconds? The same kind who’d fish for one big trout all morning just so he can look at it and release it. I like to think I was born to be a fisherman.
-John Gierach, Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly-Fishing Treasury (John Gierach's Fly-fishing Library) 

641 Food and Drink:

I think, occasionally, about the worst candy bar I ever ate, purchased on an overnight bus trip from Istanbul to Izmir back in 1986 and which had a picture of a donkey on the wrapper (this should have been a red flag) and a thick strip of cardboard to make it seem bulkier and which tasted like rancid carob and had a consistency similar to the sandy stuff Dr. Gulevich used to blast between my teeth. More often, though, I think about the candy bars of my youth that no longer exist, the Skrunch Bar, the Starbar, Summit, Milk Shake, Powerhouse, and more recent bars which have been wrongly pulled from the shelves—Hershey’s sublime Cookies ’n Mint leaps to mind—and I say kaddish for all of them. And when I say I think about these bars I am not referring to some momentary pulsing of the nostalgia buds. I am talking about detailed considerations of how they looked and tasted, the whipped splendor of the Choco-Lite, whose tiny air pockets provided such a piquant crunch (the oral analogue to stomping on bubble wrap), the unprecedented marriage of peanuts and wafers in the Bar None, the surprising bulk of the Reggie!, little more than a giant peanut turtle, but round—a bar that dared to be round! Or, at the other extreme, the Marathon Bar, which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn’t resist the gimmick.
-Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America 

 “The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.” In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.”

 “Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”
― Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

If you’re interested in ice cream, you eat any and all ice cream you can get your hands on (preferably while watching old sci-fi and monster movies). You read ice cream cookbooks, cookie cookbooks, cake cookbooks. You walk up and down the aisles of the grocery store, studying ingredients. You borrow peanut butter from this flavor, honey-bacon cornbread from that one. You experiment. You play around with it until it belongs to you, and hopefully tastes somewhat fresh and new. When you create a new flavor of ice cream, when you start a new screenplay, or do anything in the arts, you draw on your life experience … all the way back to childhood. Often, when I’m making new flavors, I’m aware of an innate desire to transport myself through cooking, through ice cream back in time … to make that connection to the kid I used to be. So I can experience a little of the wonder, the awe of first times again.
Brian Smith, Ample Hills Creamery: Secrets and Stories from Brooklyn's Favorite Ice Cream Shop

“The birth of the fast food industry coincided with Eisenhower-era glorifications of technology, with optimistic slogans like “Better Living through Chemistry” and “Our Friend the Atom.” The sort of technological wizardry that Walt Disney promoted on television and at Disneyland eventually reached its fulfillment in the kitchens of fast food restaurants. Indeed, the corporate culture of McDonald’s seems inextricably linked to that of the Disney empire, sharing a reverence for sleek machinery, electronics, and automation. The leading fast food chains still embrace a boundless faith in science—and as a result have changed not just what Americans eat, but also how their food is made.”
― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Mealalt

I marvelled yet again that a simple cup of tea had cleared the mind and braced the heart so that what had seemed intractable became more manageable. What pharmacological cocktail could have that effect and how did people know that it would? How could the simple infusion of a few dry brown leaves in boiling water have become the world’s most common drink after water itself? Why and how had tea drinking come to play so significant a role in the religious rituals and meditative techniques of the East? How did tea then become such an important – but purely secular – drink in the daily life of the West?
John Griffiths, Tea: The Drink That Changed The World (2011)

641 Cooking:

Nerdy Nummies combines two things I love with all my heart: geek culture and baking. Video games, science fiction, math, and comics were just a few of the things people considered “nerdy” when I was growing up; now they inspire every recipe you’ll find inside this book. From a Periodic Table of Cupcakes to Moon Phase Macarons, there are plenty of sweet treats for the geek in all of us!
The internet is a truly amazing place and I feel incredibly humbled by the outpouring of support I’ve received over the years. Having a direct connection with people all over the world is incredible and it’s why I enjoy doing Nerdy Nummies so much!
Astrophysicist and fellow baker Neil deGrasse Tyson lived long and prospered with an awesome Star Trek cake; friend and digital pioneer, Michelle Phan, created a batch of Super Smash Brothers cupcakes; fitness guru Cassey Ho made healthy black bean Superhero Burgers; and comedy duo Smosh enjoyed Vegan Mini Donut Holes.
-Rosanna Pansino, The Nerdy Nummies Cookbook: Sweet Treats for the Geek in All of Us

I want to stress that Grace Before Meals is truly our movement. It takes you and me to spread this simple but profound message of strengthening relationships around the dinner table. At first, some of my brother priests teased me about the movement being a “schtick.” But, as soon as they hear the theology that supports our movement, they begin to realize that perhaps bite-sized theology is a great way to teach people about faith, hope, love, and life. There’s an information overload in our world. When do we have time to discuss and digest all that’s being crammed down our throats? Well, God gives each of us an almost sacred place to be disciples (students) and to learn the way Jesus taught his followers—around the dinner table!
-Fr. Leo Patalinghug, Grace Before Meals 

Fictitious Dishes has challenged me to cook outside of my comfort zone. An almost-vegetarian, I never dreamed I’d find myself at my local butcher, asking for a pig kidney (for Ulysses) or pulling apart a week-old chicken carcass (for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). I cooked bananas eleven ways (for Gravity’s Rainbow), including several failed attempts to mold them into the shape of a lion rampant; learned how to make Turkish delight from scratch (for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe); and made my first apple pie ever (for On the Road). Though I’m generally quite squeamish about old food, I collected weeks’ worth of rotting scraps (for The Metamorphosis).
Dinah Fried Fictitious Dishes, (2014)  

You might be wondering why I’d spend eighteen months getting coached by a bunch of pinstripe-wearing bottle pushers. After all, aren’t sommeliers just glorified waiters with a fancy name (somm-el-yay) who intimidate diners into splurging on wine? That was pretty much how I saw them, too, until I handed myself over to an elite clan of sommeliers for whom serving wine is less a job than a way of life, one of living for taste above all else. They enter high-stakes wine competitions (sometimes while nine months pregnant), handle millions of dollars in liquid gold, and make it their mission to convince the world that beauty in flavor belongs on the same aesthetic plane as beauty in art or music. They study weather reports to see if rain will dull their noses, and lick rocks to improve their taste buds. Toothpaste is a liability. I liked wine the same way I liked Tibetan hand puppetry or theoretical particle physics, which is to say I had no idea what was going on but was content to smile and nod. It seemed like one of those things that took way more effort than it was worth to understand.
Bianca Bosker, Cork Dork (2017)

My mom, Jackie, made the best spaghetti this world has ever tasted. She made a chop suey with more moves than Jet Li. Her fried chicken would literally put on tennis shoes and run the [fudge] into your mouth. But like I said, we grew up poor, and my mom worked nights and my stepdad worked days. When I wanted hot food, I had to figure it out for my damn self. Seeing that I was too young to use the kitchen, I’d sneak around and cook [crap] when I didn’t think anybody would find out. One day, I don’t even know what happened, a pot jumped out of my hands and I burned the carpet. I waited for my mom to come home like I was on death row and it was my last meal. When she finally came back after a long night of work, two things happened:
1. I got a whooping I wouldn’t forget for a long time.
2. After I healed, Mom said, “Okay, smart ass. You want to learn how to cook? All right, you’re gonna learn how to cook!”
 From that day on, I never ate a meal I didn’t have a hand in. I was chopping onions, mincing garlic, dicing tomatoes, peeling potatoes. Man, I was a sous chef in my momma’s own version of Hell.
Coolio, Cookin' with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price (2009)   

643 Home Improvement:

A building permit is your formal permission to proceed with your renovation. A permit outlines what the owners are doing to their home, from changes to structure to how many electrical outlets they’re planning on installing to where the plumbing will go and how it’s going to be run. Having a permit does not mean the work is going to be beautiful, it does not mean it is going to be level, and it does not mean it is going to be square. What the permit shows is that your planned renovation or upgrade complies with the building code and local planning ordinances.
-Mike Holmes, Make It Right

 “The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.”
― Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Dear Home Improvement Honey, banish the brutal level of light emanating from the lanterns hanging near your front door. When did Escape from Alcatraz become the inspiration for the light levels outside our homes? What part of a prison yard do you find attractive? Dangerous and ugly, blazing bare bulbs emit enough light to force visitors to confess to any manor of crimes. I can’t tell you how many flower beds I’ve stumbled into while shielding my eyes from a painfully incandescent glare from too much and too strong outdoor lighting. Even more upsetting, I’ve gouged the leather on a pair of gorgeous Prada shoes when I misjudged a step while blinded by spotlights beckoning me along a walkway.
-James Swan, 101 Things I Hate About Your House: A Premier Designer Takes You on a Room-by-Room Tour to Transform Your Home from Faux Pas to Fabulous

Real men don't use instructions, son. Besides, this is just the manufacturer's opinion on how to put this together.
-Tim Allen, Home Improvement

649 Child rearing; home care of people with disabilities & illnesses
"This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period. "
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

In so many ways, I’m a seeker of things I don’t understand, but at the same time, I’m afraid to ask the questions that might help me find a meaning to the end. I have regretted not asking my brother Don more in-depth questions about his life. He wanted to share, but I was afraid to listen. He had a dimension that is hard to explain and a life enriched with the friendship of so many different types of people.

I turned into the driveway, and in front of me was the old red barn attached to the small stone house my brother had stayed in. I felt a tightening in my chest, a lump in my throat. “Please God, don’t let me cry,” I said aloud. The Abbey was on the right and looked exactly as it always had. There was a beautiful young girl, probably in her late twenties, working in the front garden, dressed in a blue denim habit. Dare I say, “How chic!”? It sounds silly, but I was halfway expecting Julie Andrews to burst open the door singing “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound Of Music.”
-Kathi Koll, Kick-Ass Kinda Girl: A Memoir of Life, Love, And Caregiving (2018)

650 Business: & public relations

“If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“As you enter this place of work please choose to make today a great day. Your colleagues, customers, team members, and you yourself will be thankful. Find ways to play. We can be serious about our work without being serious about ourselves. Stay focused in order to be there when your customers and team members most need you. And should you feel your energy lapsing, try this surefire remedy: Find someone who needs a helping hand, a word of support, or a good ear—and make their day.”
― Stephen C. Lundin, Fish!: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results

If his business demonstrated grace and graciousness, then maybe in the process, people would discover the truth of what he believed. But he was not going to lead with his faith. He reminded us, Chick-fil-A is not a church or a ministry: “I’m not going to put scripture on packaging or on the bottom of cups. We’re not going to put evangelical material in our restaurants. I want people to discover what we believe because of how we treat them. Jesus didn’t say, ‘I expect you to be a bullhorn.’ He said, ‘I expect you to be salt. I expect you to be light.’” Being closed on Sundays was the most overt “pronouncement” Truett would make. When he stood in front of audiences and said, “I have never seen a conflict between biblical principles and good business practice,” he was attempting to live out grace and truth—and grace came before truth. Through his business and his life, he wanted healthy relationships where he could influence a few hundred teenagers, eventually a few thousand campers every year, and then tens of thousands of young team members in restaurants. Those were opportunities he probably never dreamed would happen.
-Steve Robinson, Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A 

670 Manufacturing
China manufactured everything in the world, and along with it, every imaginable smell. Walking through its many factories, you could catch some of those smells: the heady fumes from adhesives used to make leather shoes, the nutty scents of ceramic vases as they were baked in gas-fired kilns, the sour notes of polypropylene plastics as they melted and were injected at high temperatures. Each manufacturing process was its own olfactory experience, and if you worked in export manufacturing long enough, you might be able to guess the kind of factory you were standing in by using your nose alone.
― Paul Midler, Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game

Although the pencil has been indispensable, or perhaps because of that, its function is beyond comment and directions for its use are unwritten. We all know from childhood what a pencil is and is for, but where did the pencil come from and how is it made? Are today’s pencils the same as they were two hundred years ago? Are our pencils as good as we can make them? Are American pencils better than Russian or Japanese pencils? To reflect on the pencil is to reflect on engineering; a study of the pencil is a study of engineering. And the inescapable conclusion after such reflection and study is that the history of engineering in a political, social, and cultural context, rather than being just a collection of interesting old stories about pencils or bridges or machines, is very relevant to and instructive for engineering and commerce today. The important roles that international conflict, trade, and competition play in the history of the pencil provide lessons for such modern international industries as petroleum, automobiles, steel, and nuclear power. This is so because the engineering and the marketing of the pencil are as inextricably intertwined as they are for any artifact of civilization.
The business and technology of making pencils have obscure roots and have evolved in fits and starts out of the unwritten traditions of craftsmanship. The reasons for many of the physical characteristics of the pencil are as lost in those traditions as are the origins of the sizes and shapes of many a common object, but the relatively recent origin and short history of the modern pencil also makes it a manageable artifact to twirl about in the fingers and reflect upon in the mind. When we do this we also realize that for all its commonness and apparent cheapness, the pencil is a product of immense complexity and sophistication. Thus there is much to be learned from the pencil and the story of its development for illuminating the nature of engineering and engineers and, by extension, modern industry. Problems faced over the centuries by pencil makers and manufacturers are not without their lessons for today’s international technological marketplace. Used like the Socratic method, the pencil can draw out of us realizations about things of which we might never have thought.
In the late twentieth century, when there are billions produced each year and sold for pennies, it is easy to forget how marvelous and dear an object the pencil once was. According to the prayer of an old Nubian, recorded in an 1822 journal of a visit to Ethiopia: “Praised be God, the Creator of the World, who has taught men to inclose ink in the centre of a bit of wood.” A century later and an ocean away, the pencil could still evoke wonder, but the manufacture of the artifact was seen to involve a lot more than just “ink in the centre of a bit of wood.”
Henry Petroski, (2011) The Pencil