Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Find in library • DRM-free audiobook • BARD

As I hoped back in December, last month I found enough brain to tackle An Immense World by Ed Yong. I was convinced by pauraque’s extensive summary and review, and the 24 days I spent reading were a pure delight. Ed Yong is a great narrator: he fluently pronounces the Neo-Latinate species names as well as the international assortment of human researchers. He somehow manages not to giggle at his own (frequent) jokes.

He wildly succeeds at explaining the distinctive sensory worlds of many of our planet’s inhabitants. Along the way, he explores how scientists design experiments to pin down how, for example, a scallop sees or a leafhopper senses vibrations. He tells the truth that our current understanding is not necessarily the whole answer — that science means change. So much of the current state of the art began as theories mocked by the scientific establishment.

Yong is keenly aware of human as well as animal variety. When addressing the senses, he fluently acknowledges that not humans all have a standard complement—for example, his researchers are described as sighted when that’s relevant. He consciously seeks out women and non-binary researchers, as explained in his 2018 Atlantic article "I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories -- Here’s what I’ve learned, and why I did it.".

Most importantly, he’s such a good writer. He clearly loves his subject, and he plays with formal and informal registers. He provides enough detail to enthrall while lightly alternating between technical explanations and emotional delights. He organizes the books by sense, and each one almost stands alone. It helped that I gave myself permission to read for enjoyment, not trying to remember the details because there is no test. I'm looking forward to rereading it.

I do recall some stunning facts:

• Scallops have many eyes — from a dozen to more than 200.
• Owls have asymmetrical ears, enabling them to locate sounds both horizontally and vertically.
• Some creatures use the Earth’s very weak electromagnetic field to navigate—but we don’t know how. The signal is so subtle that it’s not contemporaneous: the whales, birds, and turtles must travel several miles before they can know if they’re headed in the right direction.

He starts with dogs, guaranteeing sympathy from half his readership. (I was charmed by references to his own Corgi pup, Typo.) In this 350-word excerpt, he introduces the canine olfaction expert, Alexandra Horowitz, and her dog Finnegan:

( Read more... )

In eight 50-minute episodes, the CONTAINERS podcast producer Alexis Madrigal explores how global transport changed from humans putting individual things in ships and airplanes to putting things into train-car size containers, which are loaded via huge cranes onto huge boats. Containerization is why cheaply-made goods have flooded the world. The series examines how this change, started almost by accident during the Vietnam war, has affected billions of people in small and large ways. The series is sponsored by Flexport, who are in the container business—and it is definitely not a puff piece.

I’m pleased that Madrigal has posted transcripts at medium.com/containers and you can listen from there or from CONTAINERS’ audio on Soundcloud

Containerization is why my supermarket stocks frozen, peeled and boiled Vietnamese soybeans, even though I live in Wisconsin, a soybean producing state. Alexis Madrigal (a writer for The Atlantic) asks what happens to the dock workers and the handful of sailors who move these huge container ships around the globe. He tells how Oakland residents fought back against the concentration of diesel fumes from the new container ports where thousands of trucks idle daily.

Episode 6 begins:

This is a story about heroes in West Oakland like Margaret Gordon. This is a story about people who stood up and said, “No, not on my watch.” This is not a story about the health department. And this is not a story even about the port. This is a story about people coming together to fight for justice. And they won. And they won big. And they won in a way that had influence on what’s happening in ports all over this country. And in fact ports all around the world. I think those are the true heroes, the Margaret Gordons … They drove this change and they deserve the credit.

The series digs in to the origins and beginnings of containerized shipping.

For a beautiful and informative demonstration of containerized shipping 2012, visit ShipMap.org. There’s an autoplay audio overview, and an animated interactive map showing all the container ships on the planet and what they’re carrying.