Summer reading is, to me, about the same as reading any other time of year. Newspapers, health letters, gardening magazines, The New Yorker, collections of short fiction and essays, and novels on audiotape for the road.
Unlike those who take the summer months to read or reread “War and Peace,” Proust and the like, my seasonal preference is, if anything, lighter. To go with my warm weather mood.
My sister arrived for a few days with a canvas bag full of library books, novels mostly, and the current issue of Scientific American. She is not trying to impress anyone here. As a teacher, this is her way of keeping current on all matters scientific.
I put aside Barbara Kingsolver’s new book of essays, “Small Wonder,” to check out the jazzy graphics, the headlines, the “News Scan” briefs, which I figure are about all I can handle: “A Philosopher’s Stone” (subtitled: Could superconductors transmute electromagnetic radiation into gravitational waves?) Light summer reading? I don’t think so. On to the big stories. A six-page article on AIDS vaccines. An eight-pager, “The Life Cycle of Galaxies.” Four pages devoted to “Disturbing Behavior of the Orangutan,” not counting a dynamite double-page photo. Half a dozen pages of Spintronics. You hadn’t heard? I hadn’t either. Microelectronic devices that function by using the spin of the electron are a nascent multibillion-dollar industry that may lead to quantum microchips. Really. Who knew?
I’m ready to give up when, on page 86, I discover a story I know something about whose title doesn’t intimidate me, “The Complexity of Coffee.” I learn that the alluring aroma that makes it impossible for me to pass up a Starbucks is the product of a “profound chemical complexity,” and that the “quintessential expression of coffee is espresso.” I couldn’t agree more. Then it starts to get technical. A single imperfect bean will taint the whole sufficiently to be noticeable because “human olfaction [I think they’re going for smell here] and taste senses originated as defense mechanisms that protected our ancestors from rotten-hence unhealthy-foods.” What follows is a comparison of robusta and arabica beans.
Roasting these guys is “a pyrolytic process that greatly increases the chemical complexity of coffee.” Explanation: “The aroma of green coffee has 250 different volatile molecular species, whereas roasted coffee gives rise to more than 800.” And this is what lures me into Starbucks? It gets worse. “Aroma science … analyzes the fragrances evolved during coffee bean roasting by gas chromatography coupled with olfactometry … Mass spectrometry is frequently then applied to identify the chemical composition of each odor.” Okay, they lost me.
I flip to an essay titled, “No Truth to the Fountain of Youth.” It warns that no anti-aging remedy on the market today has been proved effective. No duh. Authors Olshansky, Hayflick and Carnes think of aging as “the accumulation of random damage to the building blocks of life.” Damaged DNA, attacked by free radicals, generally gets repaired, but not always.
The depressing part is that even if science could eliminate diseases killing off old folks, “different maladies would take their place” and one crucial body part or another would eventually fail. “It is inescapable biological reality that once the engine of life switches on, the body inevitably sows the seeds of its own destruction.” How drear.
But I’m not giving up on diet and exercise. Messrs. Olshansky, Hayflick and Carnes point out that “we do not possess genetic instructions that tell our bodies how to age or when to die.” They go on to debunk most therapies and supplements, advising, “Good nutrition and regular exercise do reduce the risk of various diseases and may extend the duration of life for many people.” I’ll drink to that.
Cheered by the prospect of eating and jogging my way to healthier brain cells, not to mention the skin thing, I turned to a piece about speech-recognition software.
“Your voice is the computer’s command.”
Oh yeah? I’ve been talking at my computer for years. In language unfit for print. Which may be why the printer pigs up regularly. The keyboard freezes, I curse the cursor, which is unmoved by keystrokes, even reboots. It turns a deaf ear to voice commands.
Oh, you need the software. IBM’s ViaVoicePro may, some day soon, allow me to dictate my musings without inflaming my carpal tunnels. And without overtaxing my remaining brain cells.
I hope I’m genetically programmed to live long enough to see this. Or even to read the next issue of Scientific American.