James L Adams—People and Products

The Attraction of the Small

Why are we so attracted by small things? At one point in our marriage, my wife somewhat wistfully told me that when she was a little girl she never had a doll house. Well, this would not do, so I built her a doll house, complete with furniture and electric lights, and she crocheted tiny blankets and painted oriental rugs. I even had my mother, a water colorist, paint a few pictures at the proper scale (1 inch = I foot), and she loved doing that. Of course, I had a great time with the project and my wife loved it, so it was a win all around.. The doll house still lives in an honored position in our house (see photo), and now all of our woman friends, who tend to be in their 70’s, love it.

What is the attraction of small things. My wife collects folk art, and the next photo shows some tiny examples. But we have full size pots and such things. Why does she like little ones so much?

    

 

 

Gender thing? Not at all. I am writing this in my office at home surrounded by models I have built. The next photo is a British warship, made from plans available from the Admirably Museum in Greenwich, England – hand planked, rigged, and outfitted by me—no plastic. I do not even like oceans and ships that much, but I became entranced with the history of the British navy, decided to build a model of one of their historic ships, and  was hooked. I finally had to force myself to quit (after I built six or eight of them) because they take an unreal amount of time and I was getting behind in life. My insight came from meeting a  model builder who was building wonderful model ships in a glassed-in shop on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. His story was that he was a physician who had a large successful practice, but was ruining his health by staying up all night building ship models. His wife finally told him that if he didn’t quit building models he would have to give up the practice of medicine. To her amazement (and I guess unhappiness) he quit his practice.

I have made models of many other things,. The following photograph is of a shelf in my office and maybe in the middle you can see a small figure of a welder, which I carved years ago when I was working in an oil field. Why? I was surrounded by real welders!

As an extreme example of miniaturization, there are a large number of mostly men in the world making working models of engines, equipment, etc. The photo below shows a friend of mine who has been terminally bitten by model railroading. His train is a perfect replica, down to the stove in the caboose. If you look on the internet for "miniature running engines",  you will see more of the tip of the iceberg.

I have a working full size antique steam tractor dating from approximately 1900. A working model would be worth more than my real one, as well it should be, because it would be rarer and require an absurd amount of time to make. And yes, there are many people out there either owning or building one.

And this love of small things extends well beyond models. For a long time, I could not figure out why I didn’t get better at typing on my iphone. But I finally did a study and realized that my thumb overlapped six keys. I am good at typing with a full size keyboard, okay on a large pad, but still pathetic on my iPhone.   Also its screen size is ridiculously small, so it cannot deliver nearly as much as my desk top. But I like it because it is capable of doing so much for its size Also, it fits in my pocket, so I can break its glass protector with my keys. And flashlights, now that they sport LEDs and ion batteries, are shrinking so that they are easier to lose.

Maybe we like small things because they make us feel big and powerful. I used to love watching little girls reprimanding their dolls. Instant adulthood. And if I become really annoyed at my iphone I can throw it very far away.

2016 Christmas books

As I told you in my last post, I received a ton of books for Christmas and am going through them as fast as I can. But this is a report on one of them that is particularly pertinent to this blog, and one that is good for one’s perspective.

The first is Thank You for Being Late, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2016). If you don’t read Friedman’s books, you should, because they are current, beautifully researched and referenced, and both entertaining and educational. He has spent his life as a journalist, columnist, and book author, heavily in the Mid East (he majored in Arabic in college) and Washington D.C., and has a strong interest in technology and economics, although he spent the last portion of this book extolling the virtues of growing up in a middle class family in Minnesota.

In this book Friedman makes a good case for the fact that technology is accelerating, and we are having trouble keeping up with it. Friedman’s writings includes a large amount of comments from interviews and interactions with people ranging from exalted to victimized, and his title stems from a point in his life a few years ago when he changed from being annoyed by people being late to meetings, to thankful because this gave him a few minutes to think and relax. He has a deep interest in the “digital revolution”, and does an excellent job of describing what it is doing to us, for good as well as evil. He ends by extolling the virtues of units smaller than national governments (he too thinks the U.S. government no longer is covering the bases, partly due to increasing population, expectations, and complexity, and partly because change is occurring at a rate greater than populations, especially large ones, can cope with. His answer is multi-directional, and includes such things as more education and thinking about what is going on, but includes his argument for more action from smaller units (not only states and cities, but parts of cities). A lot of such feelings are going around, but not usually discussed with the breadth that Friedman has.

The other book is entitled I Contain Multitudes, sub titled The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong Harper Collins NT, 2016, also beautifully written and researched, and entertaining as well as educational. It is well worth reading when one looks in the mirror and thinks that what one sees is the center of the world, a member of your culture, your family, or even you

I was an undergraduate at Caltech many years ago, and it was run by physicists, who were then receiving most or the press. As an engineering major, I  definitely did not feel in the front line, and in fact at one point was honored by being asked to visit the president (a physicist), whose agenda was to point out that my grades were quite high and had I considered switching my major to Physics. I had not. But I was flattered.

It has swung to more and more interest in the life sciences and lately has been consumed with what is called the microbiome—the microbes within the body, which number in the trillions (more than the “human” cells we have), and outnumber us in total DNA. I have received so much mention of these in the alumni mail and general media, that I consider myself as a life support system for these microbes, rather than what I used to think of myself (a large single entity). As the book points out, at one point we used to think of these microbes as bad germs, thanks to discoveries of people like Lister and Fleming , and that the goal was to get rid of them all. Consider the modern hospital. And in fact some of them are dangerous, and we have served ourselves well by our attention to getting rid of them. But as you may have been reading, we just may have gone too far. I recently had a bad experience with a bad G.I. microbe, which was finally controlled by a large dose of the drug we know so well that we call it “Cipro”, As those of you know who have gone through this experience know, the Cipro kills the bad bug, but also many, if not most, of the microbes that we need to digest food.

There is presently an evil bug called c-diff moving into the U.S. that likes to take over our G.I. tract while it is in its weakened shape from Cipro, requiring a different drug called Flagyl etc.etc.etc   This approach can eventually lead to death. As my Caltech mags and the media keep telling us, the answer is to quickly re-plant the various necessary microbes in the G.I. tract (there are many varieties, so just yogurt won’t do it). Where is a good source? Heard of the fecal transplant?) So far our overly toilet trained society can’t deal with it (some people call it it a “shit enema”) so we are willing to lose innocent people. But this is the tip of the iceberg. The balance of microbes in our body is being thought more and more to be the key to health, and imbalances responsible for many presently untreatable diseases.

You may know all about it (I thought I knew quite a bit until I read this book), but you will like the book anyway—and go away with a much more realistic self-image.