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When I started reading this book, Propitious Esculent [esculent: suitable for eating; edible] I first thought I had made a mistake - it was history, not how to grow potatoes. But I ploughed on and soon become engrossed in this idiosyncratic history, a history of the world according to the discovery, development and spread of potatoes as a major food crop.

Potatoes come originally from South America, from the high lands of the Andes, and had then spread through the continent, enabling the growth of the Mayan and Inca Empires. The arrival of Spanish explorers, who became invaders, resulted in the destruction of the local empires and their being supplanted by an European-controlled empire.

One of the aims of the Spanish Conquistadors was to find a more efficient place to grow staple foods for the population in Spain, suffering from repeated famines caused by a fickle climate and crop failures, as well as marauding armies trashing the countryside. With the gold and silver, the Spanish also sent barrels of potatoes back to their homeland, potatoes which had been found often to grow better than wheat and beef animals on the poor Andean soil.

In Europe, potatoes were first better known as a curiosity, and for their flowers. Generally, the potato was regarded as poisonous, rather than a source of food. But Spain was not the only European country with poor harvests, or farming land ravaged by wars. Gradually, potatoes were grown for food in more and more countries.

Antoin-Augustin Parmentier was a French prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War, being fed almost exclusively on potatoes for three or so years. Parmentier was so impressed by his continued good health on such a diet that, that when free again, he made a series of nutritional studies on the potato. He won a prize for proposing the potato as a nourishing substitute for other food during times of famine. Later, Parmentier persuaded the French King, Louis XIV, and his wife Marie-Antoinette, that potatoes were worth eating.

But the general population, however hungry they were in the years before the Revolution, required more than charm to forget their suspicions, if not fear, of potatoes. To win them over, at harvest-time, Parmentier set guards around fields growing an experimental crop of potatoes, chasing away the curious. The locals believed the crop must be valuable to be thus guarded; so when the guards were withdrawn at night, the fields were raided and potatoes became a favoured food. Parmentier received one of the first Légion of Honneur medals for his work, and is commemorated in the name of the French version of cottage pie - Hachis Parmentier.

Potatoes were introduced to Ireland when a Spanish ship with a cargo including potatoes was wrecked on the southern Irish coast. Some of the six hundred captured Spaniards taught the Irish peasants who rescued them how to cook and cultivate the vegetable, all were then massacred by the English authorities. Potatoes grew well in the peaty humidity, and soon became the staple, and almost only, diet of the Irish rural poor - allowed little land to grow food, and earning a pittance working for English landlords. A hard-working farmer would eat at least fourteen pounds of potatoes in a day, flavoured with milk or whey. And this diet had helped Ireland’s population to increase from 1.5 million people, in the early 1600s before the potato was introduced, to 8.5 million in 1845, of whom more than ninety percent were completely dependant on the potato.

Then, the Irish potato harvest failed abruptly in 1845, when the entire harvest turned black and rotting from potato blight. The problem continued because there were then no seed potatoes to plant - the famine deepened. Within a few years, Ireland’s population had reduced by over 2 million - at least one million dying of starvation and another million emigrating.

Because prohibitive tariffs were imposed in Britain on importing foreign grain, in order to protect wealthy English landowners, imported grain was always more expensive than home-grown wheat, barley or oats. These tariffs were regulated by the Corn Laws [corn being a collective term for food grains]. But local supplies were in no way sufficient to help the millions starving in Ireland. It would be necessary to import large amounts of Indian corn (maize) and wheat from the USA.

At this time, Parliament was heavily populated by landowners who benefited greatly from the Corn Laws keeping prices artificially high. Eventually, Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, persuaded a reluctant House of Commons that the Corn Laws be repealed, winning by a narrow majority.

“Are you to hesitate in averting famine which may come, because it possibly may not come? Are you to look to and depend upon chance in such an extremity? Or, good God! Are you to sit in cabinet, and consider and calculate how much diarrhoea, and bloody flux, and dysentery, a people can bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them with food? The precautions may be superfluous; but what is the danger where precautions are required? Is it not better to err on the side of precaution than to neglect it utterly?”

It is strange that, over a hundred and sixty years later, the United Kingdom, and the world, is having similar cold feet about acting to prevent another human disaster: the complete destruction of our civilisation, and even the world we inhabit, because global warming might not be happening. As with alleviating the Irish Famine, working to reduce global warming and the environment is a win-win situation, except for a few greedy business magnates.

Although I have not yet finished Propitious Esculent, I am happy to recommend this book as an interesting social history of many parts of the world. I shall look elsewhere for information on the details of growing potatoes.

Propitious Esculent, the potato in world history by John Reader Heinemann, 2008, hbk ISBN-10: 0434013188 ISBN-13: 978-0434013180 £13.29 [amazon.co.uk] / amazon.com

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stumbling towards better descriptions and refining measurements
A review of The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter by Helen R. Quinn & Yossi Nir

I have read many popularisations of physics published over the last century, from Bohr, Heisenberg and Planck to Einstein and beyond.

Every year, as the onrush of knowledge increases, so also does the understanding, and thence the clarity of expression improves every year . Almost every year now, another and better summary is published. And thus it is with The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter.

This book is rather more advanced than most such popularisations, but is written with an almost religious avoidance of mathematical models, illustrations and definitions. While these details may be easily looked up in other sources, I would have preferred, at the least, an appendix devoted to these matters; especially since the writers understand their topic with much greater clarity and depth than popularisations by talented reporters. Quinn and Nir would have been very able to continue that clarity into such an appendix. (There is a very useful appendix giving a short history of physics from 1800 to the present.)

This book is highly recommended to intelligent but busy people trying to keep abreast of the modern world. It is much more clear than most popularisations and, in particular, does not disappoint by retreating into waffle and hand-waving when the authors are skating on the edge of their knowledge. These authors are obviously working scientists on the very forefront of present research. As with any serious scientists, they are quite prepared to say they do not know, or where present knowledge is still hazy.

I would also consider this book as a useful present, or necessary background reading for any promising 15 to 22 year old presently in physics or mathematics education. In my view, the background clarifications would help such young students to gain a more rounded understanding of these sciences and of what lies ahead for them in these areas.

The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter by Helen R. Quinn & Yossi Nir Princeton University Press, 2008 ISBN-10: 0691133093 ISBN-13: 978-0691133096 £17.05 [amazon.co.uk] / $19.77 [amazon.com]

This linked item from sciencenews.org may give yet another warning of caution:

“But that scenario violates the Copernican principle, a notion near and dear to the hearts of physicists and cosmologists, including Caldwell and Stebbins. Named after the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who made the then heretical proposal that Earth does not have a favored, central position in the solar system, the principle states that humans are not privileged observers in the universe, but have just as good — or bad — a vantage point as any other observer in the cosmos.

“ “Although the Copernican principle may be widely accepted by fiat, it is imperative that such a foundational principle be proven,” Caldwell and Stebbins assert in the May 16 Physical Review Letters. The researchers suggest a concrete way to check once and for all whether our neck of the cosmic woods is different from other parts of the universe. Their test relies on observations of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang that bathes all parts of the universe.”

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understanding statistics

Economic facts and fallacies uses a variety of examples in social science to teach greater caution and perception of errors in statistical reasoning. Statistical reasoning is, generally, very poor in the population at large, even among those who may be considered ‘well-educated’.

The book is, therefore, highly recommended and would serve as useful background reading and support for any useful course in reasoning ability and scientific understanding. I have even purchased a few copies and sent them to people I think can profit from the book.

“Throughout history, the world has abounded with differences that are today called "disparities" or "inequities," even in situations where they cannot be explained by discrimination. At one time, in czarist Russia, nearly all of the members of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences were of German ancestry, even though people of German ancestry were only about one percent of the population of Russia. Today, more than 40 percent of all the billionaires in the world are in one country--the United States. The list could go on and on, until it filled a book. But, however common such statistical disparities have been around the world and throughout history, many continue to reason as if any statistical differences between any groups and suspicious, if not sinister.

“Another fallacy, already noted in Chapters 5 and 7, is what might be called the fallacy of changing composition. When statistical categories are, compared over time, the changing relationships among these categories can be completely misleading as to what is happening to the people or the nations in those categories, when the composition of these categories is changing over time. There may be growing inequalities between those categories during the very same span of years when there is a lessening of inequality between the people or nations who constitute those categories. Moreover, important conclusions and decisions can be based on this fallacy.

“For example, the growth of international free trade has been said to increase inequality among nations because the 23-to-one ratio between the twenty richest and twenty poorest nations in 1960 rose to a 36-to-one ratio in 2000. But the nations constituting the 20 richest and 20 poorest were different in 1960 and 2000. Comparing the same twenty richest and twenty poorest nations of 1960 over those decades shows that the ratio between the richest and poorest declined to less than ten-to-one. This leads to the directly opposite conclusion, suggesting that freer international trade may have helped reduce inequalities among nations, allowing some of the initially poorest to rise out of the category of the bottom twenty.

“Whatever the reason for the declining inequality, the fallacy of believing that international inequality had increased, when in fact it had decreased, is similar to that in an old joke about automobile accidents in Manhattan. In this joke, one friend says to another that statistics show that a man is hit by .a car in Manhattan once every 20 minutes. To which the other replies, "He must get awfully tired of that." The fallacy here is that it is obviously not the same man each time. The very same fallacy underlies much more serious conclusions about both personal and international inequalities over time, when it is not the same individuals or the same nations that are being compared, since each moves from one category to another over time. The changing composition of the categories makes conclusions based on comparisons between the categories fallacious.

“Statistics are no better than the methods and definitions used in collecting them. Without scrutinizing those methods and definitions, we cannot assume that comparable people are being compared, whether comparing the incomes of high school dropouts with college graduates, the incomes of members of different ethnic groups who have the "same" education, or the incomes of single women with married women, when "single" women includes women who were married for years before getting divorced. Nor can statistics about the amount of air pollution in populated areas versus open space tell us anything about whether letting people move into unpopulated areas will increase the total pollution over all, since it is people--not their locations--that generate pollution.

“Perhaps most dangerous of all is the practice of not subjecting fashionable beliefs to the test of facts, but instead accepting or rejecting beliefs according to how well they fit some pre-existing vision of the world. The idea that government intervention is needed to create "affordable housing" is an idea that makes sense only in the context of a preconceived notion, while mountains of hard evidence point in the exact opposite direction. The belief that ghetto riots such as those of the 1960s are a reaction against poverty, discrimination, unemployment, and blighted communities simply will not stand up in the face of hard evidence of when and where those riots took place, which were not in the places or times where these factors were worse.

“The entire educational and employment history of women in the first half of the twentieth century is almost invariably ignored, even in scholarly studies, to concentrate attention on what has happened since 1960, which can be made to fit a preconceived vision of the reasons for women's rise. Similarly with blacks, whose rises out of poverty and into middle class occupations are likewise traced almost invariably from some point after 1960, and attributed to the civil rights movement and government actions of that decade, even though the most dramatic rises of blacks out of poverty occurred in the two decades 1960. Nothing is more fallacious than to ignore a trend that began years before some policy or action that is credited with whatever happened as a continuation of a pre-existing trend. Similar fallacies have appeared in discussions of things ranging from automobile fatality rates to market shares of companies after an antitrust lawsuit.” [Pages 217-219]

Economic facts and fallacies by Thomas Sowell Basic Books, 2008, hbk ISBN-10: 04650003494/ ISBN-13: 978-04650003494 £14.24 [amazon.co.uk] / $17.16 [amazon.com]

related material
Why Aristotelian logic does not work
Intelligence: misuse and abuse of statistics

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/review2008.php#sowell_economics_190408

on psychobabble

“On such a flimsy underpinning was the new disorder launched - one of seven new anxiety disorders that were often hard to distinguish, including Schizoid Personality Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder. But as soon as they appeared in DSM III, such shortcomings were all forgotten, and the new disorders rapidly became targets for aggressively promoted drug treatments.”

related material
psychobabble
pharmaceutical corporate corruption

Shyness by Christopher Lane Guilford Press, 2006 £18.04 [amazon.co.uk] / $18.15 [amazon.com] hbk Yale University Press. ISBN-10: 0300124465 ISBN-13: 978-0300124460

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