Pro Commerce

Koko and Penny

This blog has three parts.  It is about Penny Patterson, who as a graduate student at Stanford in 1972, began working with one-year-old Koko, a western lowland gorilla.  I met Penny a few years later when she had trained Koko to use American Sign Language and a specialized computer to communicate nearly 400 words. The story is here.

Part of Penny’s project is revealed by the name of one of her chimpanzees.  He was Noam Chimpsky.

She believed that Noam Chompsky was wrong that language skill was an inherited human characteristic. 

Penny didn't succeed in over turning Chomsky’s linguistic theories.  Koko never formed any meaningful sentence structure, though Koko could string many words together in a meaningful way that was understandable. Academic papers are here.

The first point I want to make is that the languages Koko was taught were human languages related to human needs, desires and functions.  Koko might have developed syntax with appropriate conditions: if her language developed around other gorilla’s.

The second point is that that kind of development would have required several gorillas including a male and female parent who had been raised with American sign language.  In that case several infant gorillas would be introduced into the experiment. This would have been a fairer test of whether syntax would have been developed if adult gorillas had been teaching human type of language to a juvenile gorillas. The juveniles would then have a chance to develop gorilla syntax.

The third point is that when I look a syntax in English I see an evolutionary pattern.

Let’s start with my son Scott’s view of the human mind.  As it forms, it creates categories, evolutionary categories such as the category of ‘dangerous’ with sub categories of ‘dangerous enemies’ and ‘dangerous inedible substances’.

As learning proceeds the world and words are put into the appropriate or relevant categories.  That is pre-adult learning which includes ‘thinking’.  Thinking means creating new categories, merging categories and re-defining categories. By the time adulthood is reached nearly every human has categories fixed.  Subsequent adaptation to the world is done by using the existing stable juvenile-formed categories.

The great syntactic categories that are used to modify an English noun are, in order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun

As in this example: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Any other order doesn't sound 'right'.

I think these categories are evolutionary in order to provide reliable emergency warnings. Such as: Watch out a brown and black poisonous snake.  Or: Be careful of a large mature brown angry raccoon.  Change the order of these words and the warning becomes confusing.

I think we have evolved a standardized syntax to make sure warnings make sense and are effective as warnings.

Gorilla’s would have to develop their own syntax for their warnings to be reasonable. They would have to do it evolutionarily.

The late Dr. Hawking

I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Hawking’s contributions to cosmology and astronomy were as important as he is given credit for.

I only want to comment on three elements of the late scholar-celebrity’s life.

First, I suspect that a great deal of his notoriety was due to his ALS.

There is something about a disabled man with a supposed brilliant mind that is synergistic.  The person becomes more important and brilliant the greater the disability. Call it the ‘wounded bird’ thesis as a close friend of mine who is a leader of the disability movement called it.  

I told her I found her attractive but she is in fact quite the opposite curled up in her wheelchair.  She said she gets that all the time from men. They have some inner need to protect and nourish a wounded bird.  

I think some part of the Hawking fan base felt this way toward him, regardless of his intelligence or talent.

Second, I think his ALS combines well with a popular sense that really intelligent men are not really so much more outstanding than ordinary people.  That their intelligence is offset by some accompanying failure. Hawking with ALS unable to speak would be a perfect example. Another popular scientist was John Nash who gained fame with the film A Beautiful Mind.  He was severely disabled with paranoid schizophrenia. Got a film made about his genius.

These two men are in sharp contrast to Richard Feynman who is beloved by most real physicists for his genius.  But Feynman was a prankster, drummer who loved good looking women. In other words a real man with a great mind.

My third point is that brilliance in science is subject to celebrity-hood. But comparable genius in the general world of knowledge is usually unrecognized.

Science has the advantage of the metaphor of steady linear progress, so a scientific contributor can be placed on a timeline of progress from others such as Galileo, Newton, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg to Bohr….etc.

No such timeline exists for other greater geniuses such as Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Max Weber,  George Orwell, John Cage and Mary Douglas.

These geniuses operated in fields where few people have the broad knowledge and context to appreciate the great leaps of understanding involved.

I am particularly conscious of this later group since my own original ideas are in fields that are relatively empty with few other people thinking about the subjects where I have been a pioneer.

The real history of modern cuisine

I happened to be in all the right places in the development of the modern food palate.  I knew nearly all the people involved. It bothers me to see the history of modern cuisine written, incorrectly.

Hippies started the revolution that led to modern cuisine.  They started it with the communes they were living in that needed to be supplied with food.  In the first communes that I saw in San Francisco, in the mid-1960’s; members were looking for reduced food prices.  Unlike other institutions looking for lower prices in food, the hippies had a few prejudices. They didn’t want to buy from large commercial businesses (even if they could have) and they weren’t trying to impress the people they were feeding with packaging glitz.

The consequence was that hippie commune food shoppers went to wholesale markets and directly to farmers.  This is first visible in hippie food stores where all the produce was sold from open bins and boxes. A style that remains to this day.  The food was also often ‘imperfect’ and occasionally still had dirt on it. I saw it. I was a business consultant to some of these hippy food stores and I saw how busy they were.   

The first one that was well managed was Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, run by a religious collective at the time.  It moved twice to bigger quarters and is still thriving.

Rainbow and similar hippy businesses throughout the country were a first step in increased local sourcing and farm to table food.  As hippies began developing all the sources for this food, they also began commercial trucking of food from California to the rest of the country.  Radically changing the diet of young Americans everywhere. Tomatoes and squash in January in Aspen Colorado.

At about the same time a fellow named Ed Brown, arrived on his motorcycle, at the bottom of a canyon near Carmel-Monterey.  It was 1967, the new Zen retreat center of Tassajara was fully underway. Ed joined and was soon working in the kitchen. Zen meals were simple and never heavily seasoned.  But the bread Ed was baking became known around the world. It became a motif of Tassajara and a few years later became a bakery coffee shop in San Francisco (on Cole and Parnassus) and a bread cook book.

I was at Tassajara often because the abbot, of the zen community, Dick Baker was a close friend of mine. Other than the great bread, it is hard to pinpoint the way Tassajara influenced the food movement.  Nearly every important person of the period visited the resort. The food was always vegetarian, simple and delicious with a Japanese influence, imagination and brown rice.

Great bread became a staple of the Bay Area food scene and a dozen good breads flourished, commercially from the late 1970’s. They are still here and still good.

One of the key outgrowths of the hippy communes and open wooden box groceries was the cheese selection.  Cheese was a key source of food experimentation that grew out of the hippie food explosion. Hippie cheese buyers bought and displayed a wide variety of cheese and many retail stores opened, focused solely on cheese.

One significant retailer and maybe the most important was the Cheeseboard on Shattuck Avenue Berkeley just across from what would become Chez Panisse and a block away from a coffee store long before its fame, Peet’s, the source of Starbucks coffee.  The Cheeseboard had plenty of exciting cheeses and wonderful breads. A magnet retail store (and coop of workers) for the entire U.S.

The Cheeseboard was one corner of the axis of what was to become the 'Gourmet Ghetto'.  The other end was the Buttercup Bakery on College Ave.

Buttercup Bakery (and later Pizzaria) started as a breakfast place.  Nice decor with good food. By the early 1970’s it was famous for the high quality of its breads, other baked goods and the hippy food.  That meant a wide range of garnishes, ground roasted sesame and the beginnings of organic non-bacon substitutes.

The hippy era also had the macrobiotics of Michio Kushi as part of it. Kushi emphasized grains, seaweed, miso soup and very careful selection of vegetables.  It was one of dozens of exotic focuses on food by the hippy culture. All of which encouraged local, exotic and fresh foods.  Of course local and exotic are antonyms.

This is a good place to point out that radical food exploration was part of the great earlier baby-boom post-civil war.  By 1900 the Kastania Commune near Petaluma California had opened the People’s Bakery in Oakland.

The significant part of the 1960-85’s hippy food exploration is that many successful businesses grew out of it and the growth of commerce turned hippie exploration into a popular movement.  Commerce was the key ingredient and hippies loved business (small business). The most famous business was Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse. Bakeries abound as did grocery offshoots including Whole Foods.

A good example of commerce as the hippie promotional vehicle was Bill Shurtleff and his partner Akiko Aoyagi who wrote the book on tofu and traveled the hippie paths of the U.S. promoting the book and tofu in hundreds of hippie stores and restaurants.

Beer craft breweries must be considered part of the movement, an outgrowth of Fritz Maytag’s early 1960’s Acme Steam brewery in San Francisco.

Another notable was Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, run by the San Francisco Zen Center. (It was my idea, I organized it, starting at Buttercup Bakery). It was the first high end veggie food, still thriving. The first chef was Debbie Madison who was trained by Alice Waters.

I personally know or knew all these people and all the people involved as well as consulting with the businesses and many of the organic farms.  Each of these innovations in food and many related to them were personal to me.

I have spent 45 years visiting Japan for months at a time, annually.  That is the source of my food tastes. I had Parisian bread early in my life in the late 1950’s and never forgot it; either.

I watched American food improve steadily in San Francisco until 1994 when Thomas Keller opened at the French Laundry north of San Francisco in Yountville.  I ate a Saturday lunch there which was an order of magnitude better than any American restaurant food. I ate there every 60 days (minimum time until the next reservations opened up) for the next six years.  

In 2001 I went to eat in New York to compare the food.  I chose the four favorite restaurants of Ruth Reichl who had just quit as the food critic of the NYTimes.  Except for the Japanese, Nobu, none of the other three compared to the best of San Francisco. New York has long been over rated for food related issues.  And New Yorkers like gravy on their food.

In 1994 I walked from the Chelsea district to the Metropolitan Museum and never found an espresso coffee shop.  At the same time Au bon Pan was expanding from Harvard Square West and Starbucks was expanding East. They met in Washington D.C.

No discussion of modern cuisine would be complete without the mention of another man I met at Tassajara in 1995.  I don’t remember his name and can’t find it in Google. He had just succeeded in finding a polymer film to package vegetables that could hold nitrogen gas for long periods.  This is important because eight years later his polymer made it possible for Walmart to ship fresh Romaine lettuce from Salinas California to Ft. Lauderdale Florida for a fresh shelf delivery in February.

Fresh lettuce and other vegetables everywhere in America have been the third great revolution in cuisine in my lifetime.  (Local organic, French Laundry, fresh veggies.)

I saw everyone of them first hand and up close.  

I forgot to mention I regularly had an espresso from an Italian espresso machine in 1960 at a tiny Italian shop on the corner of Columbus, Kearny and Pacific Ave, San Francisco. along with most of the beatniks of the era.  I got to know the woman who ran the shop 35 years later over dinner at Greens, the Zen Center restaurant. There was a brown rice monks bowl restaurant a few hundred feet away on Pacific.  

Because the Beatniks, unlike the hippies, didn't embrace commerce they didn't have a comparable impact on American society.

Translations on the phone

Occasionally I remember some contribution I made to society, a long time ago. I write about it on this blog, which I assume will someday be the reference source for my biographers. (I’m too old to be humble any more.)

A friend recently described a deposition of some women I knew to speak only Spanish.  I asked how they were translated to the court.  I was told that it was done over an AT&T phone service.

I am responsible for starting that service.

Back in the mid 1980’s my minority clients complained that the phone operators were useless in helping to make long distance phone calls to Mexico.  As plaintiffs, my clients pleaded with the California Public Utility Commission to order the phone company (Pacific Bell at the time) to create a Spanish speaking operator service.  The phone company complained that it would cost over $100 million to create the service.  More than their profit in calls to Mexico.

As an expert witness I testified that I could set up the operator service in San Bernardino County for under $50 million and make it profitable.  The Commission ordered the creation of the Spanish operator service.

I suggested to the phone company that it would be cheap to add operators with other languages.

The phone company followed my suggestion and opened an office in Monterey which grew to handle 115 languages.  

Police and emergency services everywhere in the U.S. use these services when they encountered people who don’t speak English.

You’re welcome.

We need vigilantes

My regular readers know that I have a generally rosy view of life especially since Trump arrived to save the world of modern commerce.  However since my beat is commerce I need a pragmatic view of the world to understand commerce.  That pragmatic view also shaped my experiences in politics.

The question arises: how was rampant violence in America kept under control before the demise of the American hereditary elite in the early 1960’s?  

* First of all, blacks did not comprise 50% of all crime before that, largely because the KKK operated in most of America until the mid-1950’s.  The KKK and its remnants were effective against crime.

* The second reason is that everywhere in America we had a fairly invisible police vigilante squad.  I knew several of these guys in San Francisco and their leader in the 1960’s.  The leader, xxx (he is still alive and active), left to be the Sheriff in a nearby county in the late 1970’s.

Vigilante police identified the ‘very bad guys’ and disabled them (in many different ways).  They planted evidence and created charges with long prison terms.  They did what was necessary, and occasionally shot the bad guys, to keep them off the streets.  The District Attorneys and everyone else, on a need to know basis, maintained the small group of vigilantes.  The bad guys knew what they faced.

The whole system of police vigilantes disappeared a decade after the hereditary elite disappeared.  

A group of police in Oakland, later known as the ‘Riders,’ were tried in 2000. In LA the group was known as the Ramparts Division.  They were broken up a little earlier than the ‘Riders’ and some civil suits followed later.

Our cities would not have the current horrible homeless messes and wild gang activity if the society weren’t so uptight and pussy whipped that we no longer have a class of police vigilantes.