Boston. Musings on rock on rock; a walk in Boston; a poem, and Hitting the Earth with large objects; and a new scam

View 762 Thursday, February 14, 2013

It’s cold in Boston, and I do not really recommend the Westin Hotel. The staff is nice enough, but there are no vending machines on the floors – I guess it’s considered too snooty for that – and the only source of anything is the gift shop. There is no coffee shop. There is a Starbucks at which I had a Blueberry Scone while sitting at a rather rickety table outside the Starbucks sort of in the hotel lobby, sort of in a corridor to some other area of the hotel. The scone was made about the time the table was last cleaned, which was probably after the last inaugural but I can’t be sure. The nearest drug store is said to be a 20 minute walk, which I will dare in a few minutes. At least I won’t get lost. The weather is perfect if cold, sunny day, walks cleared, residual snow on the ground but in well behaved piles off out of the way. Boston seems very efficient in digging out of snowstorms, even one of record intensity as happened last weekend.

The convention starts this evening and I have scouted the route to the area where things begin, so I will have no problems finding that. The gift shop was out of the Wall Street Journal, but a very nice porter found me a copy somewhere backstage in the hotel desk area – which was curiously devoid of people when I went looking to ask for a Journal. The depression has made service workers very helpful and nice but their employers are short handed. We’re all just trying to get along.

Regarding last night’s musing,

Flint without steel firestarting

Jerry,

No doubt by the time of Lewis and Clark the North American tribes had access to steel but prior to that they could have used Iron Pyrite or Marcasite. Here is a link to a video of folks starting a fire with “rock on rock”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_DX_BL57jc

Mike Plaster

Which I suspect I should have known about. I have a friend who does knapping – making tools with flint – but I have never seen fire made with rock on rock before. Of course fool’s gold is iron, and it seems reasonable that striking it with flint would produce a spark.

As to the most reasonable explanation of the fires which shaped the ecology of pre-Columbian North America, the author of 1491 explains that in the Mississippi Valley lightning, which causes most forest fires, is accompanied by rain, which generally puts out the fires. East of the Mississippi much of the land was forested, because forests tend to take over from grassland if left to themselves. It is the thesis of the book that much of that area including the large forests of chestnut and hickory nut trees was tended, so that the way of life there was a combination of agricultural and hunter/gatherer. An interesting thesis. The book’s contention is that the Mississippi Valley was thickly inhabited, but Europeans had only a slight glimpse of that, because plagues, particularly smallpox, ran ahead of the explorers and conquistadors and missionaries. I remember in grade school Tennessee history that De Soto noted large abandoned villages along his route. This book (1491) contends that they had only recently been abandoned, and the cause was plague, spread as much by hogs who roamed ahead of their European importers as by anything else.

Also on fire before iron

fire starting

Jerry,

The Inuit of Northern Canada had iron about 1000 years ago during the Medieval Warming Period when there was a brisk trade of walrus ivory for iron with the Norse in Western Greenland across the Baffin Strait. It’s plausible that some of that iron was traded to the south. Also the Fire Piston is an ancient means of fire starting which predates ‘flint and steel’.

Lightning is a common source of forest fires, and it’s quite likely that fire was taken from that natural source and ‘preserved’ as glowing coals when traveling.

cheers,

JG

I am aware of some Inuit legends, and on reflection recall the trade in Viking times – steel weapons and tools would have been obvious trade items. The Inuit were dairy farmers until the cold came back and they learned to live entirely out of the sea. I don’t know of any records of trade with the Huron and other lake/river/forest tribes, but after 1300 the ice came back with a vengeance so it’s likely most steel tools left over by 1450 would be well used up.

All of which reminds me that there were American Indians at the court of Charlemagne (crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800 A.D.). They appeared in a large open boat paddled not rowed apparently on the Rhine and lived their lives out in Europe, as something between courtier/guests and hostages. And of course there are Irish legends of trade with the West before the Iceland settlements.

Anyway that clears up the fire starters. Whether there was as much intentional burning of the plains (which of course never reforested because of the fires) and the Northeast as 1491 contends I don’t know. The evidence is pretty good, though.

The cleaning people are here for the room so I will brave my way to find the CVS.

14:30

I left the hotel at 12:20 intending to find a drug store.  I asked a porter in the lobby if there was one within walking distance.  He said it depended on what I meant by walking distance.  Since he was a fairly young man very likely of East African descent his idea of walking distance is likely to be different from mine, but then I tend to forget that I am damned near 80 and the last time I walked anywhere in downtown Boston was probably during the Carter Administration.  (I’ve been to Harvard and MIT many times since then, but not walking in downtown Boston.) He said it would be about a 20 minute walk. That seemed like a pleasant stroll. Assuming his pace wasn’t all that different from mine. I forget that I am damned near 80.

Anyway I set out from the Westin at 1220 on Summer Street heading with the Sun to my left. The first thing I noticed was a pair of large sea gulls. Considerably larger than the San Diego gulls I am more familiar with. I don’t know if this was an unusual pair, but since I saw very few and part of my walk was not far from the harbor, and I didn’t see more gulls, it may be that these are unusual not only in size but in that they didn’t fly south for the winter, or they stay around the hotel and are  big enough to drive the others off.  Anyway they were the only gulls I saw, and they were still in the hotel area when I got back.

Walking North on Summer. The area just around the Westin and Convention Center is modernized, as is the bridge just north of there over the roads and traffic below at sea level – there’s another city down there including three story buildings – but once across that bridge things are not so nice. The sidewalks are shoveled clean but they are not well maintained. The next distract is office buildings not well maintained and many for lease, and absolutely nothing for walk in trade. Eventually you come to a cross water bridge, where I expected to see more gulls, but didn’t. I was on the sea side of the street so didn’t look east. By  now I had walked 20 minutes or so and still no sign of any commercial buildings whatever, although the office buildings were in better repair. Not the sidewalks, though, which tended to be not only cracked but actually had a steep slant toward the street, probably something I would not have noticed at one time but enough to make me glad of my cane.

When I first started I noticed that all the street signs had “Do not walk” red hands displayed at all times even when the light was green. I also noticed that no pedestrians paid the slightest attention to those signs, either the pedestrian sign nor the vehicle traffic lights. They just plunged across the intersections looking neither to the right nor to the left, determinedly walking straight on through. After a while I took to keeping up with them, on the theory that I hadn’t heard of too many multiple automobile massacres in Boston, so the pedestrians must know what they are doing, and I recall in my dim past being told by MIT friends that you must not make eye contact with automobile drivers for to do so was to yield the right of way.  So I walked with clusters of people looking neither to the right nor to the left determinedly walking across the streets, and all went well.  A curious custom, but it appears to work in Boston.

At 25 minutes I stopped a couple of pedestrians and asked if they knew of a drug store nearby.  They seemed puzzled. I mentioned I had been told of a CVS, and one said, O yes, of course, about ten minutes walk in the direction you are going. That proved to be an accurate estimate. I plunged on and reached the “New Station” which the pleasant young porter had said would be a sign that I was near my destination.  It proved to be, and inside the CVS I discovered to my dismay enormous – enormous to an Angeleno lke me anyway – lines at the checkout stations. Lots of checkout stations each with a long line. Of course it is Valentines Day.

I got my stuff (over the counter pills I had neglected to pack) and found the shortest line led to an automatic checkout station. Those have not reached Studio City except for one at the Ralph’s and that one has a pleasant assistant manager whose sole job it appears is to assist customers through the so called self help system. When it came my turn I had no problem until it suddenly beeped at me and said one of my items was age restricted and an attendant would be there presently, don’t go anywhere. I offered her a look at my driver’s license, she laughed and did something or another to the machine, and the robot let me give it a credit card.

One of the items I bought was a Mocca Frappuccino, which the hotel gift shop does not sell, probably because there is a Starbucks in the hotel lobby and they have a treaty or something. Anyway I got a bottled Frappuccino and in doing it noticed that unlike California drug stores, this one offered neither wine nor beer, and glancing around the very large CVS drug store I saw there was no liquor department, so I presume that Mass. has more restrictions on dispensing booze than California.  I don’t know whom the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are protecting from the Demon Rum,  but from my viewing of Rizzoli and Isles the alcohol consumption doesn’t seem to vary among New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. I remember state owned liquor stores in the State of Washington, so perhaps Mass. keeps a monopoly on profits from the stuff.  Since I gave up drinking more than a decade ago I don’t think about such matters much, but I wonder if California should try something of the sort, both to cut down on alcoholism and reduce the state deficit.  Typical democratic thinking, of course. I don’t buy liquor. Let’s tax the hell out of it. Don’t tax me—

I got out of the CVS at exactly 0130.

Walking back I did look to the left over the harbor bridge and saw a large sailing ship. No signs identified it but it looked to be about the right size to be the USS Constitution. In my younger days I would have walked over there, but it was just far enough away that I did not. I already regret that. My iPhone map, which I didn’t think to consult while I was walking, thus proving that I really am of an older generation even though Niven and I can be said to have invented the pocket computer with maps and recording abilities and general connection to the world data banks as well as by videophone. We had something like the iPhone (larger, purse size not shirt pocket size) in Mote in God’s Eye. Book holds up well on technology to this day.

Anyway I did not walk over to the Constitution and I got back to the Westin a bit after 1400, making it a half hour walk to the nearest drug store from the Westin.  It goes quicker if you have discovered that no one pays any attention to traffic signals, and pedestrians must never make eye contact with motor vehicle drivers. The trip was shorter too because I was remembering a poem I learned in high school.

 

Aye tear her tattered ensign down
long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;–
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;–
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!’

Old Ironsides by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1830

It was proposed that the Constitution be scrapped as obsolete. Holmes’ poem swept the nation and saved her.

From Today’s Wall St Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324196204578297823983416036.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

A Warning From the Asteroid Hunters

The likelihood in this century of an asteroid impact with 700 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima A-bomb: 30%.

In the game of cosmic roulette that is our solar system, we just got lucky. Earth will get a very close shave on Friday, Feb. 15, when Asteroid 2012 DA14 passes just 17,000 miles from our planet. That is less than the distance from New York to Sydney and back, or the distance the Earth travels around the sun in 14 minutes. We are dodging a very large bullet.

The people of Earth also are getting a reminder that even in our modern society, our future is affected by the motion of astronomical bodies. The ancients were correct in their belief that the heavens affect life on Earth—just not in the way they imagined. Sometimes those heavenly bodies actually run into Earth. That is why we must make it our mission to find asteroids before they find us.

 

And lots more. Jolly good article…

I am off to a Boskone event in a minute but we have this from Peter Glaskowsky:

I got a robocall today from what looks like a new scam targeting AT&T customers.

My call directed me to att820 dot com, but apparently they have a number of related domain names.

AT&T put up a page about the scam a couple of days ago.

http://forums.att.com/t5/Data-Messaging-Features-Internet/Phone-and-text-messaging-rewards-scam/td-p/3426893

The funny part is that they called my Sprint phone.

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