Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

The air remains smoky today in NJ thanks to the vast forest fires in Quebec. It has a very woodsy aroma, and so is not unpleasant but for its density. In fact, it is triggering a desire to fire up my own barbecue grill. Maybe I’ll wait for a day with better air quality outside, but a few home-grilled burgers would be mighty tasty. I prefer using charcoal for the smoky flavor. There are some localities (not mine fortunately) with ordinances against charcoal, but not for being a fossil fuel, which charcoal is not. Burning wood and wood products is regarded as carbon-neutral since wood grows back thereby reabsorbing the carbon. Arguably it is superior to letting wood rot naturally, since that produces more methane, which is less desirable than CO2. The reason for restrictions is smoke. Yet, without smoke it’s not really barbecue – grilling, maybe, but not barbecue. Smoke is an essential ingredient. My neighbors are far enough away in any case for us to not notice any smoke from each other’s grill.
 
Grills and barbecues are prehistoric. Braziers, fire pits, and purpose-built outside fireplaces were the most common tools for the task. They are mentioned in some of the earliest writing. We have Egyptian and Sumerian barbecue recipes dating back 6000 years. Slow-roasted smoked pork in China dates back similarly and remains popular today. The word barbecue comes from 16^th century American Spanish barbacoa which meant a framework of raised sticks – which is to say a grill. This in turn came from Arawak (Haitian) barbakoa; the West Indians used these grills over hot charcoal to smoke meat, i.e. barbecue.
 
The whole process became much simpler and more popular only a century ago, however. In the early 1920s Ford motor cars still had a lot of wooden parts including the wheels. Consequently, there was a lot of scrap wood left over from manufacturing. Not a fan of waste, Henry Ford readily backed the idea of his relative E.G. Kingsford to turn the scrap into charcoal briquettes and sell them at Ford dealerships. The briquettes caught on and soon were sold by various stores. To this day Kingsford has 80% of the US charcoal briquette market. Grills continued to be a mix of braziers, ad hoc constructions, or outside brick fireplaces however. These have never disappeared and have been supplemented by high-end smokers. But the classic easy-to-use portable backyard grill came along in the 1950s.

A fellow named George Stephen worked at the Weber Brothers Metal Works. His job there was welding steel hemispheres together to make buoys. The idea struck him that these hemispheres with legs and a few air holes would make good lightweight grills. Weber backed his idea. By the end of the 1950s Weber grills were a common backyard sight. The brand remains a dominant one. The devices make it very easy to say to oneself on the spur of the moment, “I think I’ll grill a few burgers this afternoon.”
 
I think I’ll grill a few burgers this afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow.
 

Johnny Horton – Smokey Joe’s Barbecue

Slippery

I took my Chevy to the local lube center yesterday for its second oil change. It took 20 minutes. For me it would have been a day’s project. I’m not a competent grease monkey though I admire anyone who is. I’m fine performing the monkeyshines of rough-and-ready carpentry: rebuilding my exterior wooden steps, reroofing sheds, replacing a basement window, and so on. When it comes to maintaining or repairing machinery however, I’m aware that anything I do will most likely put someone else to the trouble of undoing, so even for simple things I hire a professional from the start.

The notion of lubricating sticky moving parts is apparently an intuitive one since it dates back to prehistory and the earliest and simplest machines. Not until the time of Leonardo de Vinci did the underlying science of friction coefficients begin to be formalized, but ancient mechanics and engineers learned by trial and error what worked and what didn’t. The wooden axles of chariots and wagons, for example, quite quickly would char or even seize up the wheels without some slippery intermediary between wood and wood. Not even the shift to metal parts entirely solved the problem. In the third millennium BCE, Sumerians and Egyptians opted for leather loops greased with animal fat when mounting wheels. One chariot from an Egyptian tomb used a mix of fat, lime, and soap. Bitumen also sometimes was used but in the absence of refining this kind of raw petroleum varied a lot in viscosity and quality. The ancient Chinese used similar methods but also frequently opted for vegetable oil blended with lead.
 
In the West, animal fat continued to be the preferred lubricant for everything from wheels to ballistae to man-powered cranes throughout the Classical Era. New technologies did slowly get adopted however. In 330 BCE Diades, one of Alexander’s military engineers, developed roller bearings for battering rams. Bearings soon found their way into civilian uses in mills and potters’ wheels. The roller and ball bearings needed lubrication too, of course, and bitumen sometimes proved suitable for them.
 
The next big change came in the early years of industrialization in the 18^th century. New mechanisms – steam power in particular – were built to tighter tolerances and needed better lubricants. The industrial revolution would not have been possible without them. Whale oil was the solution but there were limits to the supply. The breakthrough came in 1859 when William Drake struck oil in Titusville Pennsylvania. Within a few years fractioning and refining of petroleum became a major industry. Synthetic oils from coal and other sources were invented in 1877 by Charles Friedel and James Crafts.
 
Today’s machinery uses up much less lubricant than earlier models. When I was a kid as long ago as the 1950s, a road trip from NJ to Florida required an oil change and lube before the return trip. In the 1960s and ‘70s I checked the oil on every vehicle my parents (or I) owned at least once a week and frequently had to add a quart. Nowadays cars are scheduled to go 6000 miles between changes – and that schedule is a conservative one. Out of habit I still check the oil levels from time to time, but I haven’t had to add oil to one of my vehicles between regular changes for 15 years. Besides, the information centers of my car and truck now would bray at me were the oil level to drop.
 
The oil change remains indispensable to keeping one’s vehicle roadworthy. If only preventive maintenance of my own body’s machinery were so easy and reasonably priced.
 

Jeff Beck – Grease Monkey

Getting High

In last week’s post I made a bit of a fuss about mowing the lawn, which is not a terribly inspiring display of athleticism and derring-do. While I’m satisfied to do such ordinary things myself these days (especially since it seemed for a time that I couldn’t), I enjoy tales, whether real or fictional, of other people doing the extraordinary. Extraordinary for them, that is. They needn’t be Olympic athletes, though those are fun to watch too. If they simply and credibly push beyond their own usual limits, that by itself is impressive enough. Mystery/suspense writer Harlan Coben, for one, successfully creates relatable characters for whom one roots, and so he is a favorite author of mine. Typically his protagonist is a largely unremarkable suburbanite who pushes himself (or sometimes herself) to extremes, though not beyond plausibility, in order to rescue a kidnapped family member or resolve some other crisis of similar personal importance. Coben has a recurring character named “Win” (Windsor), however, who is much too good at everything all the time to be believable. I don’t mind when he is a secondary character who rapidly smooths some plot wrinkles, but the only occasions when I don’t much care for Coben is when Win is central to the tale. Win is not a relatable human, and so it is hard to care much about what happens to him. I prefer humanly flawed characters in movies, too.
 
One movie I happened upon last week had just the right mix of relatable humans and extraordinary efforts. Fall was in theaters in 2022 and is now available on DVD and for streaming. It is a mix of suspense drama and female buddy picture. This is not one of those recent films where a female protagonist discovers she just happens to be awesome with a sword or discovers she has superpowers and faces no obstacles but boorish men who don’t take her seriously despite those obvious superpowers so she is still a victim. Those are not empowerment stories. They are fantasies. Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with fantasy. Coben’s “Win” character mentioned above is of a similar ilk, and apparently some readers want to be him. It is just that if, as a viewer, you don’t happen to be the target audience for the particular fantasy on the screen or page, it is hard to care about the character or the story. More rounded human beings with human flaws (regardless of “identity”) work better for general audiences.

 
Fall delivers on this. Becky and Hunter are well-rounded imperfect human beings who nonetheless push themselves to do something exceptional. I was invested in the characters early in the movie – so, yeah, I cared that they might fall. The movie begins with Dan, Becky, and her friend Hunter rock climbing a scary cliff face. Dan dies in an accident leaving Becky to grieve. For the next year she simply does not get past it. She is an ass to dad, she drinks too much, and is borderline suicidal. Hunter meantime has become an Instagram minor celebrity with the tag Danger Girl. She puts herself in harrowing situations (usually involving height) and posts selfies. She has over 60,000 followers. Becky’s dad reaches out to Hunter to help his daughter. Hunter challenges Becky to face her fears and get past them by climbing an abandoned and rusty 2000 foot (610 meter) TV tower with her. Excitement and terror ensue.
 
Fall once again shows that good directing and a good script with appealing characters outweigh large budgets and outlandish special effects.
 
Thumbs up for a simple suspense drama done right.
 

Trailer

Inhaling

A year ago a lingering aftereffect of COVID (yes I was vaccinated and boosted) was a serious sapping of my energy. The illness itself in February 2022 had been relatively mild and over in a week. Afterward I felt fine when just standing or sitting but became extremely tired and utterly out of breath from walking no more than 100 paces. I expected this energy drainage to dissipate quickly but it didn’t. Despite my efforts to exercise, it lasted through the summer. Things slowly improved after that but didn’t get back to “normal” (which is to say immediately pre-COVID level) until after my second bout with COVID in January of this year. Unlike my first experience with the virus, this one hit me hard for a few weeks. Yet, weirdly, afterward my stamina and oxygenation snapped back to January 2022 levels. I have no explanation for why this happened, but was happy to feel normal again regardless.
 
Of course, normal at 70 is not what normal was at 50, much less 30 or 20. Assuming no change in physical activity, the Harvard Medical Center notes that after 40 strength can decline 1.5% per year. Yes one can combat – even reverse – this with additional exercise and training, but these weren’t necessary before 40. The Harvard site adds, “Fast-twitch muscle fibers shrink and die more rapidly than others, leading to a loss of muscle speed. In addition, the capacity for muscles to undergo repair also diminishes with age.” Charming. I had just assumed earth’s gravity was increasing.
 
Perhaps more important than strength per se, however, is stamina – or so it seems to me after last year. While, once again, I’m happy to have recovered the endurance I had in January of last year, I still sorely miss what I had in, say, 1978. This is largely related to VO2 max. This is the maximum rate (V) of oxygen (02) your body can utilize during exercise. A high VO2 max is what keeps one from tuckering out when shoveling, running, hiking, rowing, or whatever. As with strength, VO2 max declines with age holding all else equal. Our lungs simply get less efficient.
 
According to Healthline, “good” V02 max numbers are for men

Age  20–29  30–39  40–49   50–59   60–69 70–79
         45.4       44        42.4     39.2     35.5      32.3
and for women
         39.5       37.8    36.3      33         30          28.1
 
Nonetheless, again as with strength, one can counteract the decline to a significant degree with exercise. High-intensity training (HIIT) is the preferred method: exercise hard for a short amount of time, rest for a short period, and then repeat multiple times. A recuperative day following each HIIT day is also recommended. This is more effective at raising VO2 max than slow-and-steady break-free exercise, though of course both help.
 
By dumb luck (and by being too cheap to hire a landscaper) rather than by plan I follow a HIIT schedule in spring and summer. I have a lawn suited in parts to a mountain goat. The sloped areas must be cut by hand because a tractor would tip over. This slip-and-slide task was not easy for me in 1978 when this was my parents’ property. In 2023 it is arduous in a way to which level mowing doesn’t compare. Every two passes I need (not want, need) to stop and catch my breath. It takes a dozen passes. In back of the house above the retaining wall there is another similar slope. They should be enough to get me literally to breathe easier.

My front lawn

Beatenberg – Stamina

Another Change of the Guard

Dr. Jean Twenge is at it again. She has studied generational differences for the past 30 years and has written several books on the subject, notably Generation Me (about Millennials) and iGen (about Generation Z). There is always a new generation on the rise, however, so there is always room for a new book. After all, even Generation Z is now able to shake their heads and sigh “These kids today!” as they look at Generation Alpha (called “Polars” by Twenge but by hardly anyone else) who were born after 2012. In Generations she chooses not to focus on a single generation but to compare and contrast all six currently existing in significant numbers in the US. Though her book is very US-centric in part because of the large data sets available, she notes that there are close similarities in other Western (especially Anglophone) countries. There is always some question about the boundaries of generations, but one has to draw the lines somewhere, and Twenge’s choices are pretty conventional:
 
Silents (Born 1925–1945)
Boomers (Born 1946–1964)
Generation X (Born 1965–1979)
Millennials (Born 1980–1994)
Generation Z, aka Zoomers (Born 1995–2012)
Polars, aka Alphas (Born 2013–2029)
 
The parents of each group usually belong to one or two generations earlier. Boomers, for example had either GI Generation (gone now but for a handful of centenarians) or Silents as parents.

 
Analyses of this kind always bring objections about generalization and stereotypes. Twenge acknowledges that we are talking about overlapping bell curves when discussing generational characteristics. Every generation has its prudes and libertines, slackers and workaholics, communitarians and individualists, and so on. There are always outliers. Yet the averages – the centerlines of the bell curves – really do differ from one generation to the next and are worth noting. For example, a 20-y.o. Zoomer woman getting married in 2023 is widely regarded as too young; her friends and family likely will try to talk her out of it. Yet 20 was average for a Silent in 1960 when nearly half of all brides were teenagers. This difference profoundly affects life courses and personal outlook for most members of each group – even ones who are not average.
 
Silents are underrated. Nearly all the major political and cultural changes of the late 20^th century for which Boomers often take credit were instigated by Silents: Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, and the Beatles just to mention a few players were all Silents. The Boomers embraced the changes and made them mainstream, which counts for something. Generation X, the latchkey kids generation, was the last to grow up with relatively light supervision. Millennials were the first not to remember a time before the internet. The oldest of the Zoomers were only 12 when the iPhone was introduced. Alphas don’t remember a time before smart phones.
 
Twenge argues that changes in technology (TV, computers, and phones primarily) are a major cause of generational differences – more so than general world events.
 
Twenge makes use of the enormous amount of data collected by government and non-government sources to track and chart marriage rates, birthrates, crime, mental health, income, home ownership, employment, drug use, alcohol use, political affiliation, sexual orientation and “fluidity,” education, and more across time. If there seems to be a constant trend, it is that each generation gets off to a slower start at what is now called “adulting” than the one before. Adolescence keeps getting extended. In part this is because more people go to more school for longer, but there is more to it than that. Millennials and even more so Zoomers have delayed everything from driver’s licenses to sex to alcohol use. Parents are probably OK with that, but it seems odd to someone whose youth is best depicted by Dazed and Confused.
 
Those looking for political red meat will have to tease it from Twenge’s charts themselves. She is inclined to report trends rather than judge them one way or the other. All-in-all Generations is a well-documented overview of the current generational divides.
 

The B52s – Song for a Future Generation

 

Wearing the Crown

Today I get to spend spend an hour in the dental chair for a replacement crown. I need either a new one or a replacement every year it seems – sometimes two. I have all 32 teeth, or at least the roots and cores of them but 20 are capped. So, a dozen uncapped teeth remain at risk while any of the existing crowns could potentially need to be reworked, though a couple (both gold) are over 40 years old and fine. No one has fun in a dentist’s chair, but the greatest pain is paying the bill on the way out. “You can split the bill into two or more payments,” the young woman at the desk always helpfully offers. I decline and write out a check (yes I still have a checkbook rather than going all digital) for the full four figures while telling the story of the boy who cut off his dog’s tail a little bit at a time so it wouldn’t hurt as much. (I stole that story from my old high school math teacher Mr. Andre; he probably would have preferred I remembered how to do integrals.)
 
Prehistoric peoples by and large had excellent teeth from what we can tell by the skeletons we dig up. So do modern Inuit with an almost pure carnivorous diet; so do the few remaining modern pure hunter-gatherers (i.e. no farming or trade for farmed goods). However meritorious or foolish the paleo diet may be in other respects (I have no opinion on this), it seems to score on this count. Farming and consequent high grain diets changed everything. Grain mixed in saliva turns to sugar and attacks enamel, so ancient Sumerians and Egyptians had terrible teeth. Unsurprisingly, they invented dentistry as a specialized profession. Mostly dentists pulled teeth and fashioned bridges and dentures – often from human or animal teeth. Yet, fillings were an occasional thing. Remains of Etruscans dating to 700 BCE have been found with gold crowns on teeth.

 
Crowns, however, remained rare until 1903 when Dr. Charles Land created and popularized a porcelain jacket to replace the enamel on a tooth. The method spread rapidly though gold became preferred by some for being durable, noncorrosive, and easy on the gums – porcelain sometimes cracked. Nowadays improved ceramics – sometimes fused to a metallic base and sometimes 3D printed of one material – dominate though other types have not disappeared.
 
It has not escaped my memory that my mom and my dad each had a full set of crowns, each completing the set within a year of death. In case this is an unspoken family tradition, I’ll double down on brushing and flossing. I still have 12 with the original enamel, so I might not complete a full set for years.

 
OK, maybe some people have fun at the dentist. Jack Nicholson in the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

No Satisficion

Among the basic tenets of economic theory is that both producers and consumers maximize economic benefits. For consumers this means maximizing satisfaction (getting the most bang for the buck) and for producers (including labor) this means maximizing profit. Yet, we’ve long known (perhaps always have known) this isn’t true. It is a close enough approximation of how people generally behave in large numbers to still offer predictive power, but fine-tuning economic theory requires recognizing the ways we deviate. For example, when contemplating making an investment a coldly calculating maximizer should weight a 25% chance of a $25,000 loss exactly the same as a 25% chance of a $25,000 gain. We don’t. It is a quirk of human nature that the large majority of us are deterred by a potential loss more than we are lured by an equally probable potential gain of the same amount. Hence we fail to maximize our investment returns. The potential upside must be significantly larger than the potential downside before most of us are tempted. (A minority – gamblers – have the opposite problem.) A small business owner might opt to close on Sunday rather than a (normally less busy) Monday even at the expense of profits. A consumer might buy a product due to brand loyalty even if there are alternatives that are better bargains. You get the idea.

All this strays heavily into psychology, and in the past couple of decades there have been numerous studies on how consumers in particular actually behave. It turns out that some people are in fact broadly maximizers while others are satisficers, a term coined 70 years ago by psychologist Herbert Simon from satisfaction and suffice. A maximizer doesn’t rush into buying a car or TV. He will research the brands and features. He’ll read reviews and consumer feedback while comparing prices from different suppliers before making a choice. A satisficer operates by the “good enough” standard. (Voltaire: “Best is the enemy of good enough.”) He’ll walk into the car dealership or electronics store and pick something on the spot that is more or less what he wants at more or less the price he wants to pay. The two personality types do not confine their strategies to consumer goods: they pick jobs, friends, and romantic partners similarly.

 
Which group makes better decisions? That depends on how you look at it. Objectively, the maximizers do. They really do get better products at better prices. A 2006 study showed that maximizers straight out of college also had starting salaries 20% higher than satisficers who presumably settled for the first offer they figured was good enough. Subjectively, however, the matter looks different. Never mind that maximizers have difficulty making up their minds at all. They are far more likely to second guess themselves afterwards and suffer buyers’ remorse. They also regret their choice of their jobs (despite the higher pay) more than satisficers. Satisficers don’t expect their choices to be perfect and so are satisfied with them most of the time. They are happier in life generally. (See Psychology Today article "How Settling Can Be Good for You" by Dr. Janina Steinmetz.) Furthermore, according to a study published just last year (The Maximizing Penalty: Maximizers are Perceived as Less Warm and Receive Less Social Support by Yuqi Chen, Yuhan Yang, and Jingyi Lu) on an “important but largely ignored downside,” there is a “penalty in social cognition wherein maximizers (vs. satisficers) are viewed as less warm and consequently receive less social support.” In short maximizers make objectively better decisions, but nobody likes a smart ass.
 
I’m not sure if maximizers and satisficers can change their stripes. I suspect we tend one way or the other by nature, but that we can change if we try – that the tendency impels rather than compels. That is simply a suspicion however and I could be wrong.
 
I’m very much a satisficer. Has that worked out well for me? Not always. But on the whole it’s been good enough.
 
 

Van Halen – Good Enough