Emotional exhaustion

I don't write about my emotional struggles very often. When I do write about them, I don't do it very well. It's not something that I'm used to doing. It often seems pointless because the specific things that get me upset are often so odd and divorced from the everyday world that putting them in writing just makes me look like a complete moron. Lately, though, I've been going through a pretty difficult period. It's one of the reasons why I haven't been reading or posting much lately. Frequent mood swings and going back and forth in my mind about questions like whether I have good reasons to be happy and whether my emotions are justified or not is just something that gets exhausting after a while. It takes a lot of time and effort, and my productivity in all of the normal, external parts of my life suffers for it. It also leads to a lot of erratic behavior, and makes me pull even further into myself than normal.

I read the blogs of a couple of people who are very eloquent about describing their emotional struggles and the reasons behind them. I don't have any such ability. All I can say is that when I'm in a certain mood, I can find an almost limitless number of reasons to hate myself.

Random comments

The good news: The temperature outside around 70 Fahrenheit and relatively dry.
The bad news: The air conditioning in my office with non-opening windows is busted, leaving current office temperature at about 82 degrees and humid, probably to rise over the course of the day.

The good news: I'm getting in about 3 miles of walking every day to and from the train station to work.
The bad news: I've fallen back into the habit of pigging out on junk food in the evenings, which more than nullifies any benefits from the extra walking as far as weight loss goes. I'm sure that the walking is still good for my health, though.)

On an unrelated note, I am tired of wiping up after folks who can't hit the toilet accurately in the men's room. People would be well-advised to remember the following little jingle from my childhood:

If you sprinkle when you tinkle
Please be neat, and wipe the seat

(I apologize if this was a case of TMI.)

Going to seed

The garden that I take care isn't looking so hot these days. It has an abundance of plants that flower in spring and early summer. It doesn't have nearly as much that thrives in mid to late summer. When you add in the fact that it's been relatively hot and dry for the past two months (at least by Massachusetts standards), and that I prefer to avoid heavy watering unless the plants look like they are in danger of actually dieing - it all adds up to a garden that looks somewhat wilting and ratty, in addition to lacking many flowers.
In the picture directly above, half of the green comes from weeds (mostly goldenrod, the tall ones with numerous small leaves). I don't have the heart to rip them out when they provide greenery and little yellow flower spikes as well.


A big patch of tradescentia plus heat and lack of water plus neglect equals a matted mess of dried up old tradescentia plants.


Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), with its lush leaves scorched brown by too much sun and not enough water. The yellow fruit has matured, though - the entire plant, including immature fruit, is poisonous, but the mature fruit is supposedly fine to eat (I haven't tried it myself). This is really a shade plant, which I unwisely planted in almost full sun. It does great in the spring and very early summer, then gets scorched as the weather gets hotter and drier. This has happened every year for at least 5 or 6 years - this year is just a little worse than usual.


Purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea), mostly past their prime and starting to go to seed. These may be the best self-seeding garden flowers that I have ever seen. Each individual plant seems to live about 2-4 years, but no new plants have been added to the garden for probably 15 years or so. All of the plants growing there now are self-seeded.


It may be a "lazy gardener's technique", but I have no problem with letting weeds that I consider attractive grow in parts of the garden that are thin on proper domesticated plants. This is a clump of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), with not yet opened seedpods near the top of some of the plants. It will come as no surprise to most gardeners that the weeds, whether desired or not desired, have tended to cope with the heat and low rainfall better than most of the cultivated plants!

Yes, I'm still alive. I just left blogging for a while because 1) I felt like I had nothing meaningful to write, and I couldn't even think of decent comments to make, and 2) I was growing obsessive about reading other peoples' stuff and was spending way too much time on it. I may not have much of a life, but even I have other things that I need to spend time on.

A lot of my mental energy over the past few weeks has been spent wrestling with my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, my old "friend" that has dominated my mental outlook for most of my life. If anyone reading this has an anxiety-type psychological disorder, or even another kind of psychological disorder, there's a good chance you'll know what I'm talking about when I mention how exhausting it can be to wrestle with my OCD. Obsessive hopes and fears swirling around in my brain, the same things over and over again but not losing their emotional force and power, me sometimes trying to fight it but often just giving in because I don't have the mental energy to constantly fight. They are a constant distraction through all my waking hours from thoughts and activities that might actually be useful to me. I would go into more detail, but I don't have the time or energy.

One upshot of my OCD is that driving has become a very anxiety-inducing activity for me (long story), so I have been looking for ways to reduce the amount of time I spend behind the wheel. One such way is taking the train into the town where I work, even though it isn't that far away. Taking the train actually takes twice as long as driving, but it does cut down on the anxiety. It also gives me exercise walking about 1.5 miles to and from my workplace from the train station.

The garden's looking a little ratty - I haven't been doing enough weeding. Of course, the lower than average rainfall and higher than average temperatures for the last month and a half or so haven't been helping its appearance either.

Yet more garden photos

One of these days, I'll make a post that requires more thought, but for now, more garden photos will have to so ...

Here you can make out yellow Coreopsis in bloom in the center, and several foxgloves
with their long spikes of purple flowers above then and further from the camera

A self-seeded Rose Campion (Lychnis coronaria) with small magenta-colored flowers
is growing on what should be the walkway to the left of center near the bottom of the picture. I decided not to pull it up because I have a general policy of not removing nice flowers that are kind enough to grow without even being deliberately planted.

Self-seeded foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea, I think)

Hostas with a Japanese painted fern kind of squashed between them

Common Milkweed (Asclepius syriaca) - another self-seeded plant, and a native. As the name implies, it is generally considered a weed, but IMHO it's a pretty and not-terribly-aggressive one that is conveniently filling in a spot that was bare before, so I decided that it's welcome. Behind it is a large clump of Oregano - first planted a decade ago by mom as a source of fresh spices, it quickly spread far beyond our puny needs for cooking, and now there are probably 15 clumps of it growing in various parts of the flower beds, which need to be partly torn out every year of two to prevent them from pushing out neighboring plants. It stays from a combination of my inertia and the fact that the flowers, while tiny, attract lots of insects, including butterflies and occasionally some odd orange and iridescent blue-colored hornets that I have never seen near any other flower in the garden.

Civilization and science

I'm currently reading a fairly short book about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life (The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). I just reached a section that especially got my attention, even though it's only tangentially connected to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence. As Davies discusses the various things that would have to happen in order for intelligent extraterrestrial life capable of communicating with humans to exist, he also discusses what we know about how modern human civilization emerged on earth. When he reaches the question of the development of modern science and technology (which would be necessary for any intelligent civilization to communicate over very long distances), he discusses the prerequisites for the development of the scientific method in human civilization over the past few centuries, and it is here that he gives what I'm sure is a fairly controversial opinion.

It is certainly fashionable, partly for reasons of political correctness, to assert that, here on earth, any human society would be bound to discover science and technology in the fullness of time. To say otherwise seems to be implying the superiority of European civilization, where science as we know it began, and this is regarded by some people as racist and chauvinistic. Personally, I have always been sceptical of the claim that 'science is inevitable'. The problem is that science works so well, and is so much a part of everyday life, that people tend to take it for granted. ... The 'obvious' view of science is seen to rest on flimsy foundations when placed in a historical context, however. Science proper emerged in Renaissance Europe under the twin influences of Greek philosophy and monotheistic religion. The Greek philosophers taught that humans could come to understand the world by the exercise of reason, which achieved its most disciplined form in the rules of logic and the mathematical theorems that followed therefrom. They asserted that the world wasn't arbitrary or absurd, but rational and intelligible, even if confusing and complicated. However, Greek philosophy never spawned what today we would understand by the scientific method, in which nature is 'interrogated' via experiment and observation, because of the Greek philosophers' touching belief that the answers could all be deduced by pure reason alone. The Greeks' remarkable advances in reason and mathematics were nurtured for centuries during the European Dark Ages by Islamic scholars, without whom it is very doubtful that science and mathematics would have taken root in European culture in medieval times. An echo of the Islamic phase survives in modern terms like algebra and algorithm, and in the names of familiar stars such as Sirius and Betelgeuse. In spite of the importance of the Islamic phase in the lead-up to science, for some reason (possibly political or social) Arab scholars did not go on to formulate mathematical laws of motion or carry out laboratory experiments in the modern sense of the term. (Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence, p. 72-73)

There is another influence besides the rationalism of ancient Greek philosophers that Davies believes was essential to the development of modern science, however. This is monotheistic religion - a surprise given the modern disputes between monotheistic religion and science.

Meanwhile, monotheism increasingly shaped the Western world view during the formative stages of science. Judaism represented a decisive break with almost all contemporary cultures by positing an unfolding cosmic narrative based on linear time. According to the Judaic account, the universe was created by God at a definite moment in the past, and developed in a unidirectional series (creation, fall, trials and tribulations, Armageddon, salvation, judgement, redemption ...). In other words, Judaism has a cosmic story to tell, of a divine plan revealed through historical sequence. This was in sharp contrast to the prevailing view that the world is cyclic: the rotation of good times and bad times, the rise and fall of civilizations, the revolving wheel of fortune. Even today, the unidirectional linear-time world view of Western civilization rests uneasily with other cultural motifs, such as the dreaming of the Australian Aborigines or the cyclicity of Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies.

The concept of linear time, and a universe created by a rational being and ordered according to a set of immutable laws, was adopted by both Christianity and Islam, and was the dominant influence in Europe at the time of Galileo. The early scientists, who were deeply religious, regarded their work as uncovering God's plan for the universe, as revealed through hidden mathematical relationships. What we now call the laws of physics they saw as thoughts in the mind of God. Without belief in a single omnipotent rational lawgiver, it is unlikely that anyone would have assumed that nature is intelligible in a systematic quantitative way, mirrored by eternal mathematical forms. The scientific method itself verged on being an occult practice at the time of Newton, and was conducted after the fashion of a secret society. Writing coded symbols on pieces of paper and subjecting matter to 'unnatural' experimentation in the sanctum of special laboratories is an arcane procedure by any standards. So science, though considered natural enough today, was little different from magic when it was first established. (Davies, p. 73-74)

Davies is pretty sure, in fact, that no other civilization besides early modern Europe had the intellectual tools to come up with the scientific method - even civilizations that were just as technologically advanced.

Suppose an asteroid had hit Paris in 1300 and destroyed European culture. Would science ever have emerged on Earth? I have never heard a convincing argument that it would. It is often remarked that in medieval times the Chinese were technologically far more advanced than the Europeans, which is true. So why did the Chinese not go on to become true scientists? Part of the reason is that traditional Chinese culture was not steeped in the monotheistic notion of a transcendent lawmaker. Outside the monotheistic world, nature was perceived as ruled by the complex interplay of competing influences in the form of gods, agents and concealed mystical tendencies. In medieval China, no clear distinction was drawn between moral laws and laws of nature. Human affairs were inextricably bound up with the cosmos, forming an indivisible unity. For the pagans of Europe and the Near East, who were in competition with Christianity and Islam at their formative stages, knowledge of the cosmos was to be gained through 'gnosis', a mystical communion with the creator, rather than through rational enquiry. Could gnosis eventually lead to science? I don't think so. Unless you expect there to be an intelligible order hidden in the processes of nature - fixed and analysable by mathematics - there would be no motivation to embark on the scientific enterprise in the first place. (Davies, p. 74)

I suspect that Davies' claims would strike many people as being culturally chauvinist, as he noted himself. Is there any historical evidence that could be used to show that they are true or false? History is notoriously inexact and unclear compared to the physical sciences, and there is no way of applying the strict experimental method to history ("... in group B, we will eliminate European civilization in 1300 CE and compare the rate of development of a scientific worldview with the control group that includes European civilization ..."). Still, there might be some way of evaluating these claims in a very limited way ....

(In the near future, I'll give my off-the-cuff evaluation ...)

Plants and history

I love history, and I love botany, so I especially like reading about plants in human history. Here's a few odd facts and stories that I've learned about a few local plants over the years, illustrated with a few of my own photos.

White Pine (Pinus strobus)

This conifer can grow to be the tallest tree in eastern North America, with some specimens in the old-growth forests of colonial times supposedly topping 200 feet (about 60 meters) in height. The large size, plus the wood's combination of strength, softness, flexibility, and low amount of resin (for a pine) made it ideal timber for some uses. The trunks of larger specimens were used for ship masts because they were strong but could flex when under great strain. The largest trees of all were officially reserved for use by the British navy in colonial times, and were sometimes branded with a symbol that marked them as so-called "King's pines" (reserved for use of the King's navy). The fact that they weren't allowed to cut them for their own ships or other use was another in the accumulating list of grievances that the colonists of New England developed against the British government.

By the later 19th century, most of the old-growth white pines had been logged, but the white pine certainly didn't become a rare species. The trees adaptability to a variety of conditions and fast growth rate meant that it was often the most common tree to grow on farm fields that had been abandoned. By the late 19th century, a lot of farms in New England were being abandoned as many farmers moved to land in the midwestern and great plains states that had richer soil with fewer rocks, or else moved into the towns and cities to find more profitable work. By the early 20th century, a second wave of logging swept over New England, cutting down the second growth of white pines for a new use - shipping crates. It turned out that white pine wood was ideal for making crates for shipping a wide variety of items by rail, ship, and truck - and the trees didn't have to be especially big to furnish timber for crates.

By the mid 20th century, the development of cardboard among other things undercut the market for white pine crates, and the pines regrew a third time. Some of the pines and other trees of this third generation of New England forests since European colonization have been cut down in their turn for housing developments and malls and other features of suburban sprawl, but many remain because suburban sprawl actually involves less clearing of land than the farming and lumber industry of earlier time. Today, Massachusetts has far more forested land than it did at the time of the American Revolution - though hardly any of it is fully mature old growth forest. Perhaps at least some of it will be able to grow uncut for centuries and allow some of the relatively young 50 or 60 foot tall white pines common today to grow to the 150, 175 or even 200 foot giants that were once far from rare.

The white pine has also been a symbol for both Native American nations and the European-descended whites who displaced them. The Haudenosaunee or Iroquois people who lived in what later became New York State used a white pine as a symbol on their modern flag, which is based on much older designs. For the Haudenosaunee, the white pine represented peace and the unity of the several nations who united to form a confederacy. One possible reason for this symbolism is that the white pine grows its needles in bunches of five, and the original Haudenosaunee or Iroquois confederation was made up of five nations (a sixth joined later).

When the English settled in New England, the white pine became a symbol for them as well, as the pine tree flag used during the American Revolution indicates.

Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

Europeans introduced many terrible diseases to the natives of North and South America, but America only gave the "old world" a single significant disease in return - syphilis. Still, it became common enough in Europe during the 16th century that Europeans were desperate to find a cure. One theory was that since the disease came from the Americas, only a plant from the Americas could provide an appropriate remedy. A number of different plants from different parts of the American continents were tried, none with much success. One of the most popular plants that was tried was the sassafras tree, a native of much of what is now the eastern USA. Some of the very first Europeans to land on the coast of what later became New England at the beginning of the 17th century - more than a decade before the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth- came primarily to cut down Sassafras trees and dig up their roots to extract the oil. Both the fruit and the roots could be used to produce an oil that had painkilling properties (this was probably where it got the reputation of being a good "cure" - for most infectious diseases at the time, the best treatments alleviated the symptoms rather than helping much with the disease itself). The oil also had a distinctive smell that many found attractive and that repelled insects to boot. Settlers later found that parts of the plant could also be used to make flavorful teas and a distinctively flavored beer known as "root beer" because the extract that gave it a distinctive taste came from Sassafras tree roots (yes, the original root beer was an actual beer).

Unfortunately, parts of the sassafras plant also contain the chemical safrole, which is potentially carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, sassafras isn't used for medical treatment anymore, but dried and ground leaves (which don't contain significant amounts of safrole) are used as a seasoning in some regional American cuisines, especially cajun and creole in Louisiana.

Grapevine (Vitis genus, unknown species)

European explorers overseas often looked for evidence of something familiar as they surveyed an unfamiliar environment, and in North America one familiar thing that they often saw was grapevines. One Viking saga tells of how Norse explorers who reached North America around 1000 AD found grapevines there, but did not recognize them because they did not grow in their own homelands of Scandinavia, Iceland, or Greenland. Instead, it was a servant who originally came from the Rhineland of Germany and who was familiar with grapes who recognized the American grapevines and pointed them out to Norse fellow explorers. There is some controversy about this legend, because the only place in North America where the Vikings are known to have landed is northern Newfoundland, which was too far north for grapevines to grow even during the unusually warm early medieval period when the Norse crossed the north Atlantic. One possible explanation is that the medieval Norse word for "grapes" might also refer to other kinds of berries that did grow in Newfoundland. Another possibility is that the Vikings set up a base in Newfoundland, but explored much further south, reaching Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and possibly parts of New England. In these places, they would have found plenty of native grapevines. What is certain is that when Europeans returned in larger numbers to temperate North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, many of them remarked on the grapevines. Giovanni da Verrazzano, leading one of the first European expeditions to explore what is now the eastern coast of the USA in 1524, noted:
We noticed many wild grapevines climbing up the trees, as they do in the north of Italy. If these vines were to be cultivated, they would surely produce some excellent wines. I tasted the grapes on several occasions and found them flavourful and sweet. That the natives consider the grapes important can be seen from the fact that they clear the weeds from growing around them, so as to facilitate their germination. (From this website.)

In fact, North America has a larger number of grape species than any other part of the world. In spite of this biological diversity, and in spite of Verrazzano's optimistic prediction, none of these species have ever been able to rival Vitis vinifera, the old world grape native to the Mediterranean, as a source of either wine or table grapes. Still, the native grape species Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia, and Vitis rotundifolia have all been developed into several varieties of wine and table grapes, even if they will never match the traditional V. vinifera in popularity.

Virginia spiderwort (Tradescentia virginiana)

This plant was one of the first native plants of North America to be brought back to Europe for mainly aesthetic reasons - as a garden plant. It was introduced to England by John Tradescant the Younger, a 17th century English scholar and botanist who served as chief gardener to King Charles I of England and who personally traveled to Virginia in the 1630s to find interesting plants for the gardens of the King and wealthy English nobles.

Common Plantain (Plantago major)

This plant is a common weed in fields, lawns, and roadsides in the northeastern United States. It also was (and is) a common weed in Europe, and this weediness lies at the root (no pun intended) of its spread to North America. Because it was a common weed in fields of wheat and other grains, its seeds inevitably got mixed in with seeds of wheat and barley and forage grasses that the early settlers took with them from Europe to sow in their new fields in what became the eastern USA and Canada. Wheat, barley, and other plants were sown, the seeds of the common plantain were unwittingly sown with them. A number of other weeds came over from Europe with European settlers in the same manner - the best known of these is probably the common dandelion. The common plantain, though, became so common around English settlements that the Native Americans in New England took a special notice of it. They referred to it by a phrase which translates as "the white man's foot", because they said that wherever white settlers went, this plant, unknown before they came, seemed to appear almost as if by magic.