Book Report 2020, Book Groups In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing

In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing, I am part of more book groups than ever in my life. Most of the discussions are on Zoom, but also on the phone. Zoom is not as much fun as talking in person, but distance does not matter, so I can connect with people in Germany as easily as here in Lancaster. 

ESL Book Group 

Four years ago, I volunteered with a local ESL (English as a Second Language) group run by Andrea Bailey. While volunteering I met Sarah Gingrich and Emily Burgett. We talked about books sometimes and asked each other about books we read or wanted to read. We ended up reading the same books, then getting together to talk about them. We became with a book about a Russian Holy Fool. The book is a novel titled Lazarus. 

From there we have read books about faith, the plague, and many other topics. Other people have joined depending on the book. In the past two years, Andrea moved to Wisconsin and Emily moved to Massachusetts then joined the Army, but with Zoom we can still meet. This summer, in the midst of the pandemic, we discussed Decameron.  For that discussion, we were joined by Chelsea Pomponio, a professor whose research is in Medieval Italian Literature focusing on Boccaccio. After Decameron our book was Love in the Time of Cholera.  As part of that discussion, Sarah Reisert gave us an impassioned critique of that book as beautifully written sexism, racism, child molesting and promotion of patriarchy.  It was delightful. I love a negative review. In October we talked about Free Will by Mark Balaguer.  The next book is Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. It is not a book about sharing Avacado Toast with Zombies. 

The World Conquest Book Club 

This summer I talked with a former co-worker who returned to the library and museum where we both worked as a director. We were talking about leadership and decided to start a monthly book group to prepare Michelle to go from director of the library to ruling the entire world. We settled on six books that would be the basis of world domination. Naturally, the first was The Prince by Machiavelli. Next was The Art of War by Sun Tzu, followed by Plato’s Republic and a critique of Republic by Karl Popper called The Open Society and its Enemies. In November we will read Lioness a biography of Golda Meir. I have been promised a cabinet position in the Michelle World Government. 

Writers in Residences 

This is a monthly book group organized by the Jewish Community Alliance in Lancaster in cooperation between local Synagogues. This month we are reading Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger. It will be the first time I am participating in this new format. We will discuss each book with the author. So Ariel Burger will be on the Zoom call. In February I will be introducing the author Raffi Berg as we discuss his book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Diving Resort. 

Pre-COVID, the Hillel group on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College had book discussion group during the normal academic year that I would attend when I could. 

The Evolution Roundtable 

This group has met Monday’s at Noon on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College since the early 1990s. Most regular attendees are retired professors, along with some current professors, and members of the community like me. I joined about a decade ago. Each semester the group reads a book about some aspect of evolution. The current book is The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Consciousness. In past years we have read books on many aspects of evolution including The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and, of course, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the late 90s Stephen Jay Gould joined the group for one of its meetings. 

Virtual Reading Group: The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Like the Evolution Roundtable, this group meets weekly to discuss books by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We are currently finishing Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism 1930-1954. The 90-minute discussions have a lot of context and background and different interpretations. The group will start again in January looking at The Promise of Politics followed by the book I most admire of all Arendt’s works The Human Condition. I have written on every page of the copy I read in 2012. 

Torah Study 

Each Saturday morning my Synagogue has Torah Study. The book each week is The Torah. We go through in a cycle determined by the Hebrew calendar. This group is very different on Zoom than in person. In the Synagogue, Rabbi Jack Paskoff clarifies points in the Torah using his white board and explaining often ambiguous Hebrew. On Zoom the Rabbi has to manage the discussion much more than in person. 

The New York CS Lewis Society 

I joined the NYCSL Society in 1979. Since 1980 I have been able to go to monthly meetings once or twice a year to the meetings in NYC. Last year I went to the 50th anniversary celebration on Long Island. I have not been to a meeting this year but hope to join the Zoom meeting this month. It will be a discussion of books by Lewis and G.K.Chesterton written in wartime.

 

Books with Friends

I am also reading books with friends on topics we agree and disagree about. A very sincere friend from Greece who is living in Germany asked me to read a book with him about Trump: Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?

I like Dmitri, so I read the book. I hated the book but discussed why with Dmitri and with our mutual friend Cliff. Following that book, Cliff and I are reading a book on abortion titled Beyond the Binaries by Thomas Horrocks. We will be discussing it next week.     

Another friend, Christina Hu, and I are talking about creating a podcast. This summer we discussed basing the podcast on books about America, its place in the world, and its effect on the world.  We read Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Band of Brothers.  We are now talking about something different than a book-centered podcast.  But the books led to some really good discussions.

                   

Captain George Gussman on Motivating Americans

1st Lieutenant George Gussman, US Army, 1943

My Dad, George Gussman, grew up in Boston. He was the fourth of six sons of a Russian Jewish couple who fled to America in 1900 to escape murder and oppression.  My grandparents quickly assimilated in their new country.  They named the first two boys Abraham and Immanuel. The next four were Ralph, George, Lewis and Harold.  

Dad enlisted just before World War II, almost too old to enlist at age 34. When the war broke out, he was sent to Officer Candidate School and commissioned.  His fist command was a Black company in the then-segregated Army.  He later commanded a Prisoner of War Camp for German Afrika Korps prisoners.

Whether running a warehouse, or an Army unit, Dad said the best way to motivate Americans was to tell them they could not do something.  "Tell 'em they can't and they will show you they can," Dad would say. "Tell a driver there's too much snow to get to a load New Hampshire and he'll be there ten minutes early and calling to bitch they haven't plowed the unloading dock."  

If Dad were alive today he would be 114 years old. But he is still right about Americans. Tell us we can't and we will.  

America kept the world from falling into tyranny by defeating Naziism and then defending the world against Soviet Communism.  I have been terribly worried about tomorrow's election, but right now I am thinking about the poll workers in 3,000 counties who are being told by Trump forces that they can't do a fair vote count and they can't protect their polls.

They've been told they can't. 

They will. 

They are Americans. 

r   

My Top Ten Favorite Trump Memes and Cartoons, Plus One

 

Reliable Randomness Makes Air Apparent

Every yard or meter that a bicyclist or pilot or runner or driver or anyone else travels through the air means passing through trillions and trillions of molecules that together make up what we call air. The faster the rider, runner, pilot or driver travels the more molecules per second bang into their body, bicycle, car or plane and spin off in another direction. The first philosophers called air a single substance.  Reality is quite different. 

Each molecule of oxygen, nitrogen and water, as well as fart smell, scent of lilac or Corona Virus moves with through three dimensions in any possible direction depending upon all the physical forces acting on it. Each molecule of what we call air moves freely. Heat speeds them up, collisions with other molecules and with bicyclists send it off in another direction, gravity keeps individual molecules from favoring the up direction but with a mass of a few or a few thousand atoms, gravity is not a huge influence. 

In describing the motion of these molecules and the forces affecting them, I did not include wind resistance. Together the molecules of air are wind resistance, but they are so small that the forces on them are heat, gravity, and collisions. They move in what is effectively a vacuum. The effect of trillions of molecules per second smacking into a rider from random directions at varying speeds is completely predictable in its total effect--a surprising and wonderful reality.

If a rider maintains 20 miles per hour in still air, that same rider will reach the same speed at the same effort an hour or a month or a year later. And assuming the same air density, the same effort will achieve the same speed in Belarus, Borneo, Botswana, Bosnia or Belgium. The random motion of molecules in air has the effect of totally predictable wind resistance. 

When the air moves collectively, when there is wind, the effect is exactly, predictably the same. Uncountable trillions of molecules of varying sizes and shapes moving in unpredictable directions with different speeds will cause exactly the same amount of friction on a car, bicycle, runner or airplane everywhere there is air. 

Wind resistance is both invisible and unavoidable. When I feel strong, I leave my house and ride with the wind knowing that the exhilaration of riding 25mph in a 20mph tail wind will turn into a 12mph slog on the return leg. When I don’t feel so great, I ride into the wind first and give myself the tailwind at the end of the ride. 

So much of the history of science is discovering that reality is not what anyone guessed or expected. Few of the ancient scientists could wrap their minds around the idea of atoms in a vacuum. Even some of the alchemists who provided the first experimental evidence for atoms could believe what they demonstrated. 

Before atoms, air was considered a single substance. The discovery of atoms showed air is a complex mixture of molecules. Physicists then showed that the individual molecules of air, moving randomly, together became, in effect, that single substance the ancient scientists believed in. All that randomness taken together is as predictable as the motion of the moon. And at the same time any single molecule can and does move as randomly as a toddler in a room full of shiny toys. 

Lancaster, a Blue city, Inside a Red County, Inside a Red State

The polls in Pennsylvania say the Keystone state will vote for Joe Biden by a narrow margin in the election in November.  But since 2016, Pennsylvania has been a red state. Republicans control the state legislature. Both the house and the senate delegations are split between Republicans and Democrats. 

I live in Lancaster City, a 7.5 square-mile blue dot in the middle of Lancaster County. The country is a 984 square-mile red triangle in south eastern Pennsylvania. About 59,000 people live in the city and vote nearly 70% for the Democratic Party. Including the city, Lancaster County votes 80% Republican. Nearly of the Democrats among the 545,000 people in Lancaster live in or near the city. 

On my street in the northwest corner of the city, Biden signs outnumber the Trump signs and flags by a lot. But when I ride out of the city several days a week I pass almost nothing but Trump signs. 

 One of my favorite roads to ride is Snyder Hollow, nine miles south of Lancaster city. All of the signs on that three-mile hill are Republican.  Two weeks ago, after the debate, one of the signs was missing. Two-thirds of the way up the hill there was a big Trump 2020 sign all summer.  Then the sign was gone and a little American flag was in its place on the tree stump at the edge of the road. I passed that stump three more times and the little American flag is still there. Alone. No sign. 

I am hopeful, but not crazy.  If Lancaster County elected the President, America would be fucked.  Every sort of crazy lives here, including Klan rallies and the occasional cross burning in southern Lancaster County.  

I will be up all night on November third watching the returns and hoping 80 percent of my fellow Lancastrians are big losers.

I am officially in love with Strava.

I am back to riding and in the absence of racing I am going up and down hills and and comparing myself to other riders on Strava--socially distanced competition. 

Some places have way more riders than others. Strava compiles riders and ranks them by their best times on a hill, stretch or road, etc. Anything from 100 meters to several miles. 

Recently, I rode Bear Mountain NY, a place I had always wanted to ride and never did. It has lots of other riders. I did three repeats of Perkin Memorial Drive, the main climb. My best effort put me in 14,609th place of 17,836 riders. Younger, skinny riders are much faster. But going down the hill, my gravitationally enhanced self is in 1,238th place. 

There is a hill 3-mile climb 9 miles south of my home in Lancaster PA called Snyder Hollow. I have ridden that hill more than sixty times since I returned from Europe and dropped into the Corona Virus crisis. Strava has been my riding companion for the last six months.

The Physics of Descending on a Bicycle

When a solo rider or a group of riders descend any hill, particularly a steep hill, why are some of the riders so much faster than others? 

The fastest descenders, whether by experience or instinct or learning, are the ones that sense or know the laws of physics and do everything they can to use them. 

When a rider descends, the motion of the bike is governed by a series of variables: 

--The grade of the hill 

--The total frontal area of the bicycle and rider 

--The air speed of the bike 

--The total mass of the bike and rider 

--Momentum: the combination of ground speed and mass 

--Spoke count of the wheels 

--Rolling resistance 

The grade of the hill is the most important variable. I have descended eight percent grades in the Alps and in the eastern US and never hit 50 mph, even after two or three miles. But I have gone 55 to 59 mph on half-mile hills with 15-20 percent grades. 

 

The frontal area of the bike and rider determines the top speed on any given grade. Wind resistance increases by the square of the speed. Double the speed, quadruple the wind resistance. At 11mph a rider is mostly pedaling to move the mass of bike and rider. To maintain 22mph, the same rider is putting 80% effort into moving air. The riders who descend the fastest, especially above 40mph put their crotch on the top tube and their sternum on the handlebars and pull their elbows and knees in. 

Related to wind resistance is air speed. I worked seventy miles east of my home for many years. I would ride to work once a month between April and September. I would wait for a day with a 20mph west wind and ride that 70 miles in under four hours, under 3.5 hours on the best days. When the wind was exactly behind me there were times it was quiet. I was going 22mph in a 20mph tail wind. My air speed was 2 mph. I was flying. 

I am the wrong size to be a bicycle racer. At nearly six feet and 185 pounds, I am 20 pounds heavier and several inches taller than many top racers. But descending, every pound is to the good, because… 

Mass plus ground speed makes momentum. The higher the speed and the greater the mass, the more force pushes the bike down the hill. When I pull out of the draft and sail past a 160-pound rider, momentum is my friend. 

One variable every rider can control is spoke count. Every revolution of the wheel, from the perspective of the wind, whips the spoke from no speed to twice the speed of the bike and back to zero. Low-spoke-count wheels with thin or bladed spokes reduce the wind resistance and the turbulence of spokes. The faster we ride, the more wind we whip through the spokes in our wheels. 

On a road bike with fully inflated 23 or 25mm tires, rolling resistance is negligible, but not zero. 

In summary, to go really fast downhill, find a steep grade, make yourself as small and narrow as you can, ride low-spoke-count wheels with fully inflated tires and hope the wind is behind you. I love going fast. My Strava KOMs are downhill, not up.

Rural Drivers Hating Bicyclists is Nothing New

In 2004, a bicycle hater with the unlikely name John F. Kennedy threw tacks on the road when he knew bicyclists would run over them and get flats and possibly crash. 

He did it twice. The second time, I saw him do it. I got his license number and harassed the local police until they arrested and charged him. Here’s the story: 

From the mid-1990s until March of this year, I rode two or three times a week with a daily training ride group led by a former National Champion named Scott. Monday through Thursday at 4pm and Friday at 1pm, riders join the group from the west side Lancaster, Pa., and follow an unvarying route of 35 miles by the time the riders return to the city two hours later. 

The ride is so predictable, that I and other riders would join the ride at several different points knowing within two minutes when the riders would pass a given intersection or landmark. The ride goes southwest of Lancaster to Safe Harbor Park near the Susquehanna River, then turns north toward Columbia, and back to Lancaster through Millersville. 

Just before Safe Harbor Park is Conestoga Boulevard, the place where pickup trucks are most likely to pass too close, blow their horns or occasionally yell their displeasure at sharing the road—a nearly empty road. One day in 2004 passing over the crest of a half-mile hill, several riders got flats. 

There were tacks on the road. Recently a man in an old red pickup truck had yelled at us several times as he passed. The ride crests the hill at 4:40pm and that was when he was headed home to the apartment where he lived south of Safe Harbor Park. Apparently, he got ahead of us, threw tacks on the road and drove away. I thought it was him. 

Two weeks later he passed us yelling as we neared the top of the hill. I sprinted as hard as I could down the hill wanting to see where he went at the next intersection. As I neared the bottom of the hill, I saw him on the side of the road throwing tacks. He saw me, got in his truck and took off. I got his license number. It was a level road and he was speeding so he was gone in moments, but I did see that he went south. 

Two other riders had followed me and seen what happened. Now we had witnesses and actual tacks. I called the Conestoga Police Department and got little cooperation, but I insisted, and they relented. John F. Kennedy was charged two misdemeanors. I told the officers that I had witnesses and we would all be happy to testify. 

On the day of the trial, Kennedy arrived in the pickup truck I had identified. We learned later he had another vehicle. It turns out he did not have an attorney. Criminals, when you get to know them, are stupid. Those of us who were witnesses showed up at trial in suits and ties. 

Kennedy wore work clothes and had his sunglasses on top of his head. If he had a lawyer, the lawyer would have known that the judge had a son who was a Lancaster City police officer, a member of the bicycle patrol. The lawyer also would have known that one of the witnesses was a bicycle patrol officer and a veteran. But Kennedy was too arrogant to think he needed a lawyer. 

The judge presented the evidence. The witnesses said what they saw. Kennedy spoke in his own defense saying he did not throw the tacks on the road, but bicyclists should not be blocking the roads and we deserved what happened. After the testimony, the judge gave a summary of the evidence and the defense. He was so calm and impassive, I thought Kennedy would get the case dismissed. The police officer who rides with us and was a witness knew better but said nothing. 

When the summary was complete, the judge told Kennedy to stand to receive the verdict. He stood and smirked, also thinking he would get off. The judge exploded. Kennedy stood straight. All of us sat up straight. The judge lectured Kennedy for ten minutes, gave him the maximum fine of $880 dollars and said he would be in jail if every penny was not paid on time. 

Four of my kids were at the trial. They all rode bicycles and they knew all of the riders who were endangered by Kennedy. Like us riders, they sat very straight and still when the judge charged Kennedy. I was glad they could see justice served. 

Kennedy never bothered us again. I never saw him again.