Nothing funny about feldspar

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe.

Am I the only person who found the academic relationships in this book so distracting as to make the thing unreadable? It’s a fluffy book, with lots of characters expositing so the reader is as smart as they are about Colonial American history, and specifically the practice and fear of witchcraft about the time of the Salem Trials. But the problem is, by trying to make the reader smarter, Howe makes the characters just seem dumb.

For example, the protagonist, Connie, is a Harvard PhD candidate who has just passed her orals in Colonial American History. I infer, then, that she has taken a lot of classes in Colonial American History (likely some of them specialized to the point of absurdity). In one scene, she’s reading a Probate document for a woman (Deliverance Dane) who she later decides is probably an undiscovered Salem witch. One of the listed items is a “receipt book.” It only took dear Connie half a page to figure out that “receipt” is not about running a store, but is a “recipe” book. Has Connie never taken a class in the domestic life of America? There were certainly plenty of books published before 1991 using the word “Receipts” where today we might use “Recipes”. And yes, I’m aware that Amazon.com wasn’t around then, but she’s at Harvard. They have a big library. Worse even, is that later as she’s discussing this with her advisor, she has to explain to him the transition from “receipt” to “recipe”.

Later, in another character’s diary from the 1700’s, she reads that “the Almanack” was given to somebody, and then proceeds to annoy us for I don’t know how many pages because I stopped reading before she figures out that “the Almanack” and the “Receipts” book are the same thing. I didn’t last long enough to know for sure because of this:

Connie has a meeting with another mentor, who is describing a paper given by Connie’s advisor at a conference only year before now, and Connie had no fucking idea that her advisor gave a paper nor its content. That was the last straw.

I’ll probably skip to the end and see how Mary Sue, er, Connie manages to come into her true powers and save the world. But unless you or any one you’ve ever known has never been in academia, or unless you have a higher tolerance for stupid “smart” people than I do, I don’t recommend the book. Or maybe you should just skip the bits with Connie. Nah. Don’t bother. Just read some of the glowing reviews to get the good bits of the story.

Edited to add: Ok, so I did finish it, and I’d like to revise my response a little. It was a pretty good story — not as inventive as some of the reviews would have you believe; if you’ve ready *any* urban fantasy or *any* witchy novels, it’s pretty familiar ground. There were some moments when it seemed as though there was an adult, literate novel trying to get through the fluff. Too many “details” seemed to be important, but then they were never used again. As a mystery, it wasn’t much of one. As a thriller, it wasn’t much of one. As a romance, it defintely wasn’t much of one. As historical fiction, that wasn’t too bad, but it was history-lite, much like you’d get in a middle-school book. As a feminist tome, it could have been so much more, but the protagonist only gets a little peeved once while her advisor calls her “my girl” over and over. As a story of academia it was laughable. All in all, I wish Ms Howe would have picked one genre and really stuck with it. I felt she continually took the easy way out, the fluff over the substance, like deciding to make a cake all out of different kinds of frosting with a few raisins tossed in. (For the record I dislike raisins. In this metaphor, raisins are the academic bits.)

On the plus side, Ms Howe gives Connie a wonderful interior vision (undoubtedly we are supposed to decide her facility with imagining what people are doing is related to her powers), and writes well enough to make me finish the book, even though I threw it away in the middle in disgust.

Ok, so I installed snocat on my MacBook, knowing full well that there were likely to be issues.

Heh.

As far as the various improvements/enhancements/refinements/whatever go, it’s ok. I like the new QuickTime, but I’m not enamored of the new Preview. Safari is Safari, and I suppose being able to change the size of icons in windows would be more interesting if I actually used icon view in Finder windows.

But as nice as all that stuff is, what I’m more concerned about is the applications I use every day. And so far, they are all broken (or at the very least damaged) in some way.

TextMate, my most used app after Safari, had to be updated to make the arrow keys work properly. There have been some changes with Ruby in snocat, and not all of the bundles work properly. I use the TODO bundle a lot, and it keeps failing with Ruby errors. I had to delete my old TODO and download a new copy. It works now, but I have several other Ruby-based commands that I have yet to test. I hope they work.

Cyberduck won’t even try to start. Luckily they’ve been working on this and have a beta version ready, which I have downloaded. It seems to work OK.

Quickbooks 2009. Oh. My. Gawd. For a company as large as Intuit is, you’d think they’d have an Apple developer account so they could start checking compatibility. But nooooooo. Crash crash crashy crash while doing fundamental tasks (like Receiving Payments!) and the developers think “For most users, the compatibility issues identified will not impact you.” It’s lucky that I held off updating my other QB computer. And of course, no idea when a fix will be coming, or even if it will address the issues I’m having.

Amazingly, surprisingly enough, I was able to start Adobe Photoshop CS2, and some Microsoft Office 2004 apps (Word and Excel). I didn’t put them through their paces, though. Word seemed especially sluggish, however. I’ve mostly switched over to Pages, but I still find labels much easier to set up in Word. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and make a Pages template for labels. I only use a couple of kinds.

I was disappointed that Chax wasn’t working, but there is a new version available (even if it is Alpha, it’s worth it). It just needs to make it possible for me to use it from the menu bar…

I probably have a gazillion apps, some of which I’ve never opened after the first time. It may take a while to get through them all.

So overall, a meh experience. Ah well, at least I didn’t have to pay $130 this time.

Noting without links that somebody is deliciousing a whole lotta links when they should be working on That Certain Document Designed To Engender A Certain Piece Of Paper.

After the events of the last week, I sometimes wonder why we care about things as trivial as marriage.

Cosma has done a little calculatin’ on steel production and the demise of the steelworker.

He concludes

that domestic employment in steel production has collapsed largely because increases in productivity have not been matched by increases in demand.

I think he’s correct, but I don’t think that “lack of demand” is the whole story.¹

Specifically, there haven’t been increases in demand for American made steel. The amount of raw (or crude) steel that has been produced in the US² since 1950 has never been more than about 127 million tons. ³ Worldwide production (a proxy for worldwide demand), on a slow but steady increase in the 1990’s, skyrocketed in the 2000s (until last year) to the tune of 1.3 billion tons per year.

The collapse of the American steel industry in the 1980’s brought about a huge reduction in production capacity. Capacity figures are hard to come by, but I wonder if there is enough physical plant remaining in the US to make 127 million tons of steel.

[brief side trip: Let's see... reading some numbers from Steel Guru, US production in the last week of February 2008 was 2.186 million metric ton, at an estimated capacity utilisation of 91.6%. This means the weekly capacity is about 2.4 mmt, and simply multiplying by 52 (risky, but who cares?) gives a US capacity of 124.8 million metric tons. Yay! What do I win?

For comparison, this position paper from the American Iron and Steel Institute says that China's capacity is over 500 million tons per year, and is expected to soon reach over 600 mtpy. The worldsteel stats say that China produced 500 mmt in 2008.]

Back when I cared about such things, I remember there was a lot of discussion about the rise of “niche” factories — smaller, more computer controlled, less capital intensive plants designed to pump out a limited amount of steel with a minimum amount of labor, simply to avoid the US Steel problem of having to keep great honking machines staffed and running 24/7.

The newer equipment is likely much more productive not only from a labor perspective (takes fewer people to get it going and keep it running), but the control systems undoubtedly do a better job of getting decent steel out the first time. I imagine that scrap and loss is pretty low in a steel mill because everything can be recycled unless some terrible contaminant got in, but if you avoid having to rework stuff, then your productivity goes up for free.

Assuming the economy turns around before all of these newer factories are scrapped, the US steel industry will likely only ever have about 125 mmt of capacity. Factories are not easily built in the US anymore, at least not primary production plants. I could see more finishing plants, where raw steel is turned into stuff, but until the global overcapacity is used up, there’s no reason to build more mills here.

That’s why “demand” is only part of the story — there is (was) plenty of demand for raw steel, but there is (was) no compelling reason to buy US-made raw steel beyond what’s already available, and therefore no reason to build capacity in the US and no need to hire more people.

And that’s the end of my brief analysis of the raw steel industry. By the way, there’s a nice little report at the BLS on the future of steel manufacturing that I found after I’d written most of this.

1. Kind of like saying LOTR is mostly about trudging around Middle Earth.↩
2. I’m using the same USGS table, with some corroborating figures from worldsteel. Note that the USGS table is “raw steel” whereas the worldsteel data is “crude steel”. The numbers don’t exactly match, but I declare they are close enough.↩
3. That was in 1973. Lately it’s been in the mid-90 million tons.↩