Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Can we be replaced?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, christian perspective, polemics, gospel

What is your attitude towards AI? Do you fear it or yearn for it? I looked up poll results online and the "AI Summary" offered by DuckDuckGo is:

"Surveys show that the American public is generally more pessimistic about artificial intelligence, with 52% expressing more concern than excitement, while only 17% believe AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. in the next 20 years. In contrast, AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 56% expecting a positive impact from AI during the same period."

Let's look closer at the numbers. More than half of Americans had "more concern than excitement", and only one person in six expects mainly good. Even more telling, 56% of "experts" (not otherwise defined) are optimistic, but that means that, even among experts, 44% are not so optimistic. I suspect their attitudes range from mild concern to utter pessimism.

It was with much anticipation that I obtained the book 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future by John C. Lennox, one of my favorite Christian advocates. In speeches he has made regarding the subject, I note that he often prefers the term "simulated intelligence," a term I also prefer. Wherever I can, I write of SI rather than AI. There is another attribute that is very meaningful to me, which I'll get to later on.

Dr. Lennox is a mathematician, so he is an orderly thinker. Below, I quote more from this book than I have done previously. He begins by surveying the history of totalitarianism, for this is the clear direction that technology is leading. Thus, in Part 1: Mapping Out the Territory, Chapter 1 is titled "Developments in Technology." Two early thinkers wrote novels that forecast authoritarian use of technology: In 1931 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World and in 1948 George Orwell published 1984. Both books forecast the destruction of the human character, but in different ways. The year after 1984 had come and gone, in 1985 Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which we find, as Dr. Lennox quotes, 

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture."

I will return to the subject of the populace welcoming the agent of their demise, which is Postman's point.

In Chapter 2, "What is AI?", the author asks how we define or recognize intelligence. He lists a number of terms that are associated with intelligence: perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving. A word I find missing: wisdom. In Chapter 6 ("Narrow Artificial Intelligence: The Future is Bright?"), the author points out how most agree that technology is developing faster than the ethics needed to guide it. He quotes Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." As much as I appreciate Dr. Asimov, and I have read at least half of the 400 books he has written, I sadly observe his own rather marked lack of wisdom. In fact, among the very intelligent people I know, who are very competent in their fields of expertise, I have observed a near-universal lack of intelligent understanding in other areas. It seems that, just as the current AI tools are said to have "ANI" or "Artificial Narrow Intelligence," humans also tend to exhibit "Natural Narrow Intelligence." Furthermore, there is no hint that any SI tool so far developed genuinely embodies any of the 11 items listed above. Let me be clear:

SI (ANI at present) does not present intelligent results. It presents an amalgam of various bits of human intelligence found in its databases, with no comprehension of their meaning.

The real issue is this: Will ANI ever develop into AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? Or will there instead be some kind of agglomeration of dozens (thousands?) of ANI tools into a seeming AGI? And how would we know that this has been achieved? How can we define success in this enterprise, when we don't know how to define its goal?

Thus, it is well to consider that we do not yet have any idea how to define, let along unerringly recognize, the other psychological attributes that surround intelligence: emotions, senses, empathy, sympathy, a sense of purpose or meaning, will and willfulness, and others that are often gathered under the rubric "qualia".

Part 2 is titled "Two Big Questions", comprising Chapters 3 and 4, "Where Do We Come From?" and "Where Are We Going?" Clearly, to Dr. Lennox, these are theological questions, not philosophical ones, and I agree. I will not comment on these chapters beyond saying that by this point the subject of transhumanism has arisen and is woven into the entire narrative; here the author narrows the point further. Thus in the middle of Part 3 ("The Now and Future of AI"), in Chapter 10 ("Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda") he points out that the goal of transhumanism is to make humanity obsolete. Further, the whole enterprise has come under the sway of the deception of the serpent recorded in Genesis 3, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." Human history demonstrates that the result of receiving this deception has been a deep descent into intensive, personal, subjective, heartfelt knowledge of both good and evil, in a way that we cannot adequately handle. Sadly, the evil has typically far outweighed the good.

Consider a bit of wisdom from Solomon, Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and it is the glory of a king to search out a matter." The lesson of the early chapters of Genesis is that we are worse off for having searched into "the knowledge of good and evil." When we understand that the more a ruler can know about what his (or her) subjects are doing, the more thoroughly they can be controlled, we see that the universal surveillance society that the whole world is rushing towards is a most pernicious enterprise. 

I remember a story from 1951, "And then there were none," by Eric F. Russell. A society develops in isolation, and is found (when later discovered) to have a very strong privacy ethic, such that the people tend to reply to most questions with the mysterious word, "Myob". This is found to mean "Mind your own business." Would that we could develop more of this!

Chapters 12 through 17 comprise Part 4, the last section of the book, titled "Being Human." They constitute a gospel message. Based on superintelligent mechanisms, the transhumanists wish to produce a Homo Deus, a god-man. Dr. Lennox demonstrates that the true superintelligent being is already quite involved with the human race: The LORD God, who is called by some, including myself, Jehovah God, in a more literal way. The name Jesus is the Greek translation of Jeho-shua, which means "Jehovah the Savior". Jesus is Jehovah, who came in the flesh as a human to live among us and to die for us, and to resurrect to release His life to those who believe in Him. He already has a plan to make His people into the real Homo Deus, in resurrection, not by some mechanical process but through divine power, which we can no more comprehend than we can discern the makeup of our own minds.

While AI is seen by some (probably no more than 1/6th of us, by the polling mentioned above) as a pathway to increased freedom and eternal prosperity, a much larger number of people fear a boundless increase in machine intelligence as the most destructive force the human race has yet encountered. A generation ago people loved ET. Today many profess love for AI. Beware: it does not love you. It cannot.

The last chapters of the book are a summary of the likely wedding of computational intelligence with the final program of the great dragon, Satan, who will empower a fateful human to be the Beast of the book of Revelation. Dr. Lennox calls this being The Monster, a terminology I appreciate and have decided to adopt (this is the second item I mentioned above). 

I note that the term "antichrist" is not used in 2084, except in a reference to an anti-Christian diatribe by Friedrich Nietzsche. The vast majority of Christian teachers call the Beast of Revelation "the antichrist," but the term is never used in that book. It is used by the apostle John in two of his letters, where it refers to certain heretics who deny the deity of Jesus. The Greek word therion means "wild beast", where "wild" means uncontrollable. The word is used 37 times in Revelation to refer to this personage or the False Prophet, while in nine other instances it refers to dangerous animals like lions or venomous snakes. To yield the emotional force that Greek readers of John's books would have felt, the term "The Monster" is appropriate.

In contrast to the technical deification offered by transhumanists, the Bible presents a genuine theosis, being "transformed by the renewing of the mind" (Romans 12:2), by which the people of God grow to full sonship and conformation to the image of Christ. They are then qualified to reign with Him in the kingdom of God in eternity. This is infinitely better than the best that technology will ever have to offer.

I should note that when the Monster takes control of some kind of world government, to most people it will come as a relief. He will be seen as s superior statesman or diplomat, able to unite warring factions; the number Ten may be literal, or perhaps it is symbolic for "all", the way 10 is used in scripture to mean completion in human affairs. Of him it is written that he will "change times and laws," apparently overruling the legal codes of all the (former) nations under his sway. Many will profess that they love him. Perhaps children will be named for him, in the brief time (less than four years) of his suzerainty over the world. Whatever the "mark of the Beast" refers to, it will be gladly accepted by nearly everyone.

The work of the False Prophet (the "other therion") to "give breath" to the image of The Monster may be accomplished via something akin to deepfakes, which are already quite sophisticated, or perhaps by animating a compelling robotic construction. Either way, the driving anima will be whatever passes for AGI at the time.

It will be only those with spiritual understanding who will see the Monster for what he really is: the incarnation of Satan. Whatever the seven heads and ten horns represent, they are best seen with the eyes of the heart, where we have spiritual understanding. 

The last few years that this world experiences before the manifestation of Jesus Christ at His coming will be terrible indeed; Jesus called it a time of "great tribulation".

May we be among those who repent, who declare to God that we know we are sinful and ask His forgiveness, a forgiveness given so freely because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. May we be counted worthy to escape the terrible events of the closing of this age, to be among those who "follow the Lamb wherever He goes." Those who belong to Jesus, the Lamb of God, have nothing to fear from mechanical intelligence of any level.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Beautiful Spiders

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, natural history, spiders

James O'Hanlon loves spiders, particularly jumping spiders. Seeing these beauties, it isn't hard to understand. I gathered these pictures of peacock jumping spiders from several sources. They are astonishing!

Depending on your display, these pictures are about two to three times life size. They show a female's eye view of the male spiders' mating dances. To attract a female, a male peacock spider will raise his flattened abdomen and two legs, and wave and bob about and dance for her.

In O'Hanlon's book Eight-Legged Wonders: The Surprising Lives of Spiders, we find that a chance photo of such a spider taken by Stuart Harris completely changed his life. Before, he had a rather good life, but unfocused. When he saw a colorful little spider, photographed it, and posted the photo, he was soon hailed as the discoverer of a new species. To confirm it, a spider expert (arachnologist) asked Harris to find and capture a specimen. It took him three years! Now, the new species has been described and given the designation Maratus harrisi. And Harris has become something of an arachnologist himself.

For perspective, I must note that more than 53,000 species of spider are known so far. About 6,000 are jumping spiders, but only about 100 species are peacock jumping spiders. That narrows the field, since Stuart has added 1% to the list of known peacock spiders (In proportion, finding a new species of monkey would add only 0.3% to the known 334 species of monkeys). Nearly all of these pretties are found in Australia.

With this book, O'Hanlon hopes to reduce spider phobia. Many people find spiders both horrifying and disgusting. Popular culture, which usually depicts spiders as venomous monsters, hasn't helped. While it is true that nearly all spider species are venomous, most of them are too small to bite through human skin. Of those that can bite, a spider bite is usually milder than a bee sting. A big spider, like this tarantula I caught in my garage in Oklahoma about 40 years ago, can inflict a more painful bite, but it is not dangerous (In Oklahoma, male tarantulas are on the move, looking for mates, in late summer). Only a very few spiders have a bite that is dangerous to humans, and the only really deadly one, the Sydney funnel-web spider, is native to Australia, though international shipping has begun to spread them around.

Some people keep tarantulas as pets. A formative experience for me was when I was in kindergarten; one kid's dad visited, bringing the family tarantula. The father lifted the spider out of its cage and let it walk on his hand and arm. I was fascinated, as were most of the kids, but some hung back in great fear. Fortunately, nobody screamed.

I understand that some people's spider-phobia is so great that they will be distressed just seeing the photos in this post. I hope such folks can look, first from a distance, then gradually closer, and desensitize themselves at least a little. Along with the author of Wonders, I would like for people to appreciate what spiders do for us. They live in every environment on earth except the extreme polar regions, including in our houses. The ones that come indoors specialize in eating insects. When you find a cobweb with a multitude of insect bits in it, ponder for a moment how many insects the spider has eliminated from your home, so you didn't need to use a fly swatter nearly so much.

Spiders may do more for us in the future. You may know that silk, from certain moth caterpillars, can be woven into a bullet-proof fabric. Kevlar was inspired by such silk. So was nylon, but for a different reason: silk is not only very strong, it is soft and beautiful. Chemists wanted to duplicate these characteristics in a cheaper material. For many purposes, nylons (there are several varieties) have proven "good enough".

Dragline silk, one of the silks most spiders produce, is much stronger than silkworm silk, and apparently more luxurious. A few people have been industrious enough to gather thousands of spiders and "milk" them for their dragline silk, and a few garments have been made. Such textiles are exceedingly costly, and it is hard to "farm" spiders. Put a number of spiders in any enclosure smaller than a back yard, and it will soon contain only one spider. They are indiscriminate cannibals. But a spider silk fabric is very glossy, soft, and yet strong, although you don't dare get it wet. Sweat a bit, and an undergarment would become a sticky mess! Research continues. Perhaps one day…

The book is filled with great facts and information. Spiders live among us, they very rarely do any harm. I suspect more people are hurt because they jump when they see one, than directly hurt by spiders. Let's get rid of the jumping reaction and save ourselves some pain and distress. Few people will come to love spiders, but I think most of us can learn to appreciate them and react more calmly when we encounter them.

Normality without spider scanning

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I have this browser set to show Blog Stats when it opens. Preparing to review a book, I noticed that the excessive scanning of past weeks had settled down. At about 9:30 local time (EDT), this blog had 34 views, and 209 the day before. This chart shows progress over the past week:

Expected activity without scanning going on is less than 100 per day, so 209 is "getting normal". Here is the picture for the 24 hours ending at 9am today:


Counting back to reach 34 views I find that the "day" counted by the Blogger software began about 7pm the prior day. That means a five-hour offset. If I understand how time zones work correctly, that places the "zero point" in Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands. Counting the rightmost twelve hours on this chart I find 27 views in 12 hours, or 2.25 views per hour, average, a total of 54 views per day. The figure of 97 a the top of this chart indicates a little excess activity, which ended about 16 hours ago (counting from 10am local time). Here is the world chart for the past 24 hours:


This looks a lot like near-normal activity. If this lull continues, I can get a better handle on "the usual."






Thursday, July 10, 2025

You gotta love bats!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, bats

Why does this bat have its mouth open? It's not in anticipation of biting the moth. Rather, it is shouting! Most bats navigate with echoes, and they make chirps and clicks at very high frequencies to "see" in the dark. They also use echoes to locate and hunt prey. On this final approach, the bat is "shrieking" a very fast series of clicks to track every flutter of the moth, so as to scoop it into the tail membrane (you can see the membrane is already cupped for the capture). Then it tips its head in and bites.

This incredible image is credited to Michael Durham on a FaceBook page of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This is a Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, the most common bat in North America.

I spent a month in Nevada one summer. There was a bright light on a tall pole near the campground. Moths and other insects would fly around and around in the light, and bats would swoop through to catch them. From time to time my friends and I would toss a small rock up there. Often, a bat would swoop in, then dodge aside once it got close enough to discern that it wasn't an insect. Now, many years later, a schoolyard near our house has a running track alongside a patch of forest. In spring or autumn, if my wife and I take a walk on the track in late twilight, we will sometimes see bats flittering about overhead. We don't see the insects they are hunting, but the bats are obviously able to detect them.

I like bats. Alyson Brokaw adores bats. In her book The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats: Demystifying These Often-Misunderstood Creatures, Dr. Brokaw brings us as close to bats as she can, without actually handing one to us (which I suspect she would do if she could). The fourteen chapters of the book describe as many aspects of bats' natural history, from their voices to their other senses such as smell and vision, to their flight and how their design makes them such maneuverable flyers, to their long lives and memories, and the kinds of places they prefer to roost. It is a lot to cover, particularly because among the 1,400 species of bat, all these characteristics are quite variable. For example, not all species of bats roost in caves; perhaps less than half do. Some like to tuck up under the eaves of houses. Some make little tents of leaves in large-leaved trees.

I began thinking about echolocation as a substitute for sight. Our vision is sharp because light has a short wavelength, around 1/2,000th of a millimeter. By contrast, when we hear a sound off to the side, we can point in the general direction, but even when the sound is high-pitched, like a gunshot, our apprehension of the direction is not as accurate as if we saw the puff of smoke, for example. The high frequencies of a sharp "crack" are in the 10,000 to 20,000 Hz range. The speed of sound is 343 meters per second, though that varies a little with temperature and humidity. The wavelength of 20,000 Hz is about 17 mm, or about 2/3 of an inch. The distance between our ears is about 7 inches, some 180 mm. Thus, the angular accuracy of our hearing, when a high-pitched sound is sort of in front of us (or behind, but not to either side so much) is a little under three degrees. By contrast, the sharpness of human vision is mostly in the range of 1/30 to 1/60 of a degree, hundreds of times more accurate.

Bat voices range from 10,000 Hz to 200,000 Hz, but few species make chirps or clicks higher than 120,000 Hz. We can hear the "lower" frequencies, and I have heard bat chirps. But I was hearing only a small fraction of the sound. The wavelength of a 120,000 Hz sound is just under 3 mm, or about 0.11 inch. As it happens, with their ears only 12-25 mm apart, bats' angular discrimination is also in the range of a couple of degrees. But there is another aspect to this. Sound with a 3 mm wavelength will efficiently bounce off an insect as small as half that dimension, which includes mosquitos. While it is not true that a little brown bat catches 1,000 mosquitoes every night—the author debunks that item effectively—, on average the bat will eat a few hundred insects nightly, including mosquitoes. It just depends on what is available. So, as a bat homes in on an edible target, by the time it is within a half meter the 3-degree discrimination angle means the bat knows where the critter is within a "circle of confusion" of about an inch (~25 mm), a distance that shrinks rapidly as it gets closer. It can scoop it right up and snack away!

Near the end of the book we learn what it takes to put up bat boxes, the bat version of bird houses, so they have more places to roost. Just as only a few bird species will use a bluebird-sized bird house, so we must do a little research, perhaps with the help of a naturalist at a nearby natural history museum or agricultural college; once we know what the local species are, we can determine what kind of box to make or purchase, and where to put it. I was surprised to learn that bats that like to use bat boxes don't like them to be attached to trees. That makes sense; too many bat predators can climb trees. A bat box on a tall pole or just under the eaves above a smooth wall will be more popular.

There is a lot we can do for the sake of bats, which do a lot for us, particularly insect control. The first step is to learn what they are really like. This book is a good first step. Most of us saw too many monster movies, where bats or batlike beasts influenced us. To a bat, a human is a big, noisy monster, and they keep their distance! You or I may never love bats the way Dr. Brokaw does, but it is worthwhile to like them, at least a little!


Wednesday, July 02, 2025

A lesson we are slow to learn

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, epidemiology, airborne pathogens

When I saw the title, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life we Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, I imagined a survey of the microorganisms that make their way into the air. Instead I found a historical survey of certain attitudes that the medical establishment has held, primarily a stubborn denial that bacteria and viruses and other micro-pathogens can travel long distances along with the air. By the end of the book, it appears that this denial persists to this day alongside an ever-strengthening view that airborne spread of disease is of paramount importance. I say "appears" because in the political climate of the past five years, the great majority of clinicians and epidemiologists have judged it prudent to say as little as possible about it. Political matters are so hyper-polarized these days that they taint or contaminate every aspect of national life.

The term "Covid-19" does not appear until the fifth of five sections of the book, on page 350, eight pages into the chapter "Disease X". Beginning on page 345 the virus is called SARS-COV-2. This is a curious inversion of time: I don't remember learning the name SARS-COV-2 until more than a year after the WHO (as reported on p 350) announced that the name of the disease would be Covid-19.

The first 340 pages of Airborne present a blow-by-blow (-by-blow) history of the small number of researchers who studied airborne microbes for decades and yet died or retired without their findings being recognized as at all relevant to the prevention or treatment of disease. This in spite of the fact that non-medical folks (darn near everybody on the planet) recognizes that, just as dust and smoke can be carried miles and hundreds of miles by wind and even breezes, so must the microbes which are ever-so-much smaller and lighter.

These days, I sometimes marvel at how clean the air in my house is. When the sun shines through a window, I'll see scattered specks of dust in the sunbeam, but I recall that in my childhood a sunbeam was really a beam, so dense it appeared solid. This was considered normal in the 1950's and before. We dust areas like the top of the piano weekly or monthly; it used to be a daily task. When I would catch a childhood disease such as measles, mumps or chicken pox, my mother would say, "Well, if you can see a sick kid, his germs can get to you." Forty years later, before an effective vaccine for chicken pox was developed, we sent our son to visit a friend who was sick with chicken pox so he could catch it. That is one disease that is deadly to adults but kids just shrug it off (and scratch a little).

It was almost laughably predictable that Mr. Zimmer would make Anthony Fauci into a semi-hero. On my part, I count President Trump's second greatest mistake to be his failure to either fire or sideline Dr. Fauci after their first televised appearance together, when the doctor contradicted nearly everything the President had to say (…and the greatest mistake was initiating the practice of "stimulus"; it gave his successor's administration "permission" to "stimulate" us into a 30-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt). I began to designate "Dr Fakey" from that press conference. And when he said, "I am Science", he proved that he had lost connection with reality. Mr. Zimmer partially redeems himself by noting that Dr. Fauci was shunted aside by the Trump administration, months too late, and he does point out that Dr. Fauci and much of the medical establishment was motivate initially by the shortage of semi-effective masks, to tell the public not to mask. Later lies, however, are ignored.

Just by the way, I got N-95 masks from a hardware store; they are excellent dust masks! But no matter what masks people used in the 2020-2022 time frame, I never saw another person wear a mask correctly. I know what it takes to make a mask fit so that I can mow the lawn without choking half to death; I am very sensitive to grass clipping dust. But it happens that viruses such as SARS-COV-2 and influenza and the common cold are in these masks' "sour spot" (the opposite of a sweet spot!): too small for pore size to catch them and too large for electrostatic capture to be highly effective. N-95 means the "sour spot" still can stop 95%, but that means 5% gets through, which is enough for most people to get sick anyway. And an ill-fitting N-95 mask is really about an N-10 mask, or worse. OK, enough of that diatribe.

What I hoped to see in the "Disease X" chapter and its successors was an even-handed history. Sadly, too much was left out. The Chinese doctor in Wuhan who worked on gain-of-function research into coronaviruses, and published the results in prestigious journals such as Science, is never mentioned. Ditto the fact that her research was bankrolled by Dr. Fauci, using an accounting trick to get around a prohibition by President Obama. I do not mention the doctor's name, since doing so is a sure ticket to "cancellation", even today. The five state governors who required nursing homes to take in patients infected with the virus are never mentioned. The illness and deaths caused by their policies form the bulk of the First Wave of Covid-19. No mention is made that the Wuhan Wet Market doesn't have bats for sale. I could go on…

Even though I saw where the book was going by the 50th page or so, I read it all. Carl Zimmer writes very well and I generally consider him, if not a wholly honest journalist, one of the better ones. This book falls short of his usual standard. I don't consider the time wasted, however. Though the book's main text is 414 pages, at least 340 pages of it contain interesting and useful history.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Another naturalist, more yards

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science, cities

When you think of Picnic Guests, what do you imagine? This image probably doesn't come to mind. Ants are the more likely thought. The third chapter of Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild, by Hanna Bjørgaas (or the fourth if you count a long "Introduction") considers ants. Ants that invade the author's city apartment, ants that drive her to consider chemical warfare. Discussions with a couple of scientists dissuade her, and she simply pays more attention to keeping things clean and outwaits them.

In the meantime, she uses a magnifier to get a closer look at one. At 20X, it looks quite fearsome. Ants are well fitted for living in a great many environments. They may be the primary ubiquitous animals. They live on six of the seven continents; none are native to Antarctica (the only insects that live there, in a few coastal areas, are a couple of species of midges that can survive being frozen for half the year). They abound everywhere else, and probably outweigh the sum of all mammals, humans included.

Ms Bjørgaas lives in Oslo, Norway. Her book was translated from Norwegian by Matt Bagguley. The nine titled chapters touch on living things she paid attention to during nine months of the year. She begins the year with crows, the most intelligent birds most of us are likely to encounter. Crows in the city, like many types of city birds, are less skittish around humans than their more rural cousins. They may not be as human-adapted as pigeons—sometimes you almost have to step on a pigeon before it flutters away—but they seem to have a keen sense of how far you can reach, should you be so inclined.

In the Introduction, though, which takes place in Antarctica where she worked briefly as a tour guide, her focus is not so much on penguins as on a particular species of lichen that caught her eye. Both crows and lichens appear later in the book also. The November chapter focuses on lichens, and is titled, "The Written Language of the City." This is because, among the great variety of lichen species, some are more sensitive, and others more tolerant of the polluted air of cities, particular when it includes sulfurous (stinky) gases. 

This picture shows at least three species of lichen on an old branch, in an area with rather clean air. Using citizen scientists to help collect observations, researchers have developed a "lichen scale" to measure the level of air pollution in and around cities. One may then map concentric rings that surround sources of more egregious stenches such as paper plants (Sixty years ago I remember the smell of paper plants near Newark NJ, which my cousin called "the armpit of New Jersey". It's been cleaned up a bit since then).

The author did an experiment in soil fertility. She bought nine pieces of cotton underwear and selected three locations, one in a desiccated city lot, one in a park, and one well outside the city in the forest. In each, she dug three holes and buried a garment a spade-length deep in each hole. Months later, there was nearly nothing left of her "offerings" in the forest, and the parkland holes yielded semi-composted cloth bits. The third location had been paved over since, which demolished that part of the experiment. I expect that the cloth may have been darkened a bit, but would have been otherwise almost unchanged, and I suspect she would agree. That's what others have found.

If you find the spectacle of a woman digging holes in a city park amusing, consider coming across her prone upon the ground, examining the contents of a shallow scrape with a strong magnifier. She did a little of this, as she tells in "August: Stories from Underground". With a bit more discretion, she visited a soil scientist, who showed her the life beneath our feet with a video microscope. A tiny springtail (the size of a comma) was a hideous monster compared to protozoa and other small denizens of the soil. And, of course, it must be said that the number of bacteria in a teaspoonful of soil will typically exceed the entire human population of the earth, perhaps ten times over. Even the dry, sandy soil of a trampled path in a city may contain a billion bacteria per gram.

This book is a delightful contrast to nature books that tend to concentrate on, for example, birds, or beetles, or some other focus. There is room in the concept of "naturalist" for anything living. I wish the book had an index. Still, it is fascinating and it opens one up to some of the variety to be found in any environment, if we will simply slow down and look, and listen, and observe.

Monday, June 16, 2025

The naturalist in the yard

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science

I took this picture in 2010, the first year I participated in the Great Sunflower Project. It is a sweat bee of a species common in the mid-Atlantic area, gathering pollen from a Lemon Queen Sunflower, the flower designated in the Project for attracting pollinators, primarily native bees. For those who like to be involved with natural history in their own surroundings, GSP is one program that Thor Hanson recommends in Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door.

According to directions, I planted sunflower seeds in early spring, and once the flowers began to bloom, I stood nearby for 15-30 minutes a few times weekly to record what I saw. The project organizers don't expect us backyard naturalists to identify the species of every bee. They supply a simple field guide to several broad types of common bees, and participants report how many of each type appears during each session of watching.

That year I saw very few honeybees, at least in the late summer when the sunflowers were blooming. But as summer cooled toward autumn, I saw a few more, not just on the sunflowers, including this one on a flower of garlic chive, near a smaller bee that I don't recognize (it is near upper left).

I participated in the project for several years, then stopped. Standing around on a hot August day is rather hard on me. But we have plenty of fare for pollinators in all seasons, as seen in the pair of pictures below:


On the left, three tiny bees (about 8mm) are picking over Sedum flowers that bloom in the spring next to our front walk. Oh the right is a flower bed with flowers for all seasons. A Hellebore is almost hidden beneath late-spring-blooming evening primroses. The Hellebore blooms from February until June. We have a few in other parts of the yard, to keep pollinators supplied while they await other kinds of flowers. In mid-June the Echinacea begin to bloom, and carry on for a month. Lavender and heather flower later, and several other flowering plants push the season almost to first snow. This garden is next to a crabapple tree, that flowers in mid-spring, and across the yard, an apple tree flowers in early spring.

One more creature we recently began to try to attract is the Monarch butterfly, with these milkweed plants. There is a schoolyard nearby that has a big patch of milkweed, but this is just the third year for us. We started with a single plant we grew from seeds we collected in the schoolyard. So far we haven't seen any butterflies, but these plants attract many more honeybees than I've seen in ten years or more. They also become infested with milkweed bugs. When they are very small, the little red nymphs must have honeydew like aphids do, because ants tend them.

Early in the book, Thor Hanson uses the term "backyard biology." Later he says it might be better to speak of "yard biology," though it is less euphonious, because nature doesn't just hide out behind our houses. It is all around us. The ten chapters (plus an Introduction and Conclusion) reveal the manifold riches of his own yard. Of course, he does live on an island in Washington state, with a yard that's bigger than average…multiple yards, from the sound of it. However, any of us, if we're willing to slow down and observe, can see a lot.

Thinking it over, we can gather quite a list of the variables that lead to quite a variety of creatures making themselves at home in any yard: variations of light and shade; warmth on cooler days and shelter on hotter days; foods that appeal to this or that sort of creature; shelter for the shy ones (such as little songbirds) and open spaces for the bold (rabbits, squirrels, and foxes; even deer when apples are falling).

I tend to favor insects because many of them ignore humans if we move gently and don't breathe on them. They're easier to photograph than birds. One acquaintance of the author uses a lighted sheet at night to attract moths, which he photographs obsessively. He has catalogued hundreds of species in his yard. One can do the same for beetles; many will also come to a lighted sheet. The beauty of a light trap is you don't have to catch and kill to identify most species (sometimes it's necessary, though).

Dr. Hanson speaks much of birds, and advises getting not just "a birdhouse" but a dozen or more, of various sizes, because there are many varieties of bird that prefer to nest in cavities. There just aren't enough abandoned woodpecker holes to go around. During my last few years at my company I was on a team that monitored birdhouses scattered around the property. All were sized for bluebirds, which also made them ideal for swallows (2 species), wrens (3 species) and chickadees. On occasion we would find a birdhouse in a more sheltered location that had been taken over by a pair of starlings, which are rather large; they had pecked the hole a lot bigger. At the end of the season we would take that birdhouse to the company shop to be fitted with a new door, this time with a metal collar in the hole! On another part of the property there were much larger boxes designed for wood ducks. My wife and I have talked it over a little. We may get (or make) a few birdhouses.

Another project recommended in the book is iNaturalist. It is a phone app, with an accompanying website, where I find it helpful when I want to edit an entry. TIP: The GPS on my phone is not as accurate as I'd like, so I go into the website later and edit the location if it is too far off. The minimum "native" accuracy of an iNaturalist geolocation is four meters. That's usually sufficient; for us Yanks, that comes to a radius of 13 feet. On the website, if you remember accurately where you were (it shows you a detailed aerial photo), you can enter a value as small as one meter.

Here I have focused on the "what we can do" suggestions. The book is also chock full of stories about various animals of all sizes found in the author's yard, or discussed by his friends and colleagues. Getting closer to what goes on outdoors is good for us. We need to slow down and, typically, just look and listen. It is good to recognize that we are part of nature.

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Spiders continue to spread

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After a week of lower activity, scanning of this blog has leapt up again in the past two days. Here's the list of actors for the past 24 hours (as of ~4pm Tue, 6/10/25):


I haven't seen the US drop to 12th place before. The heavy hitters today are Vietnam and Brazil, but nine other rather unexpected countries followed, above the US. I surmise that today, and recent heavy activity cycles in general, are driven by AI training. Good luck, folks; this blog is rather specialized.

Monday, June 09, 2025

Poorly-known life in the largest habitat

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, marine biology

The Blue Sea Dragon is a beautiful creature, a type of sea slug. You wouldn't want to handle one, in spite of their tiny size, around 3 cm at most (1¼"). They are armed with stinging cells similar to those of the Portuguese Man of War, which they obtain by eating small animals related to the Man of War and "appropriating" their stingers!

They are rather rare, found at or near the surface of warm oceans. This Wikipedia article has much more about them. They are also described on pages 147-148 of Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth by Sönke Johnsen, where they are presented as an example of small pelagic animals that avoid being eaten by being, not just noxious, but venomous. Sea slugs in general are tasty treats for many oceanic predators. Not these!

"Pelagic" is from a classical Greek word meaning "of the open ocean." By definition the pelagic zone is nearly all of the world ocean, all of the salt water that is far enough from the coast to be unaffected by surf action and is also above the bottom (by a rather poorly defined distance; at least several meters). The upper kilometer of this is of special interest to Dr. Johnsen, being the zone in which at least a little sunlight penetrates, making photosynthesis possible, and also making sight hunting possible.

The book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part catalogue, a catalogue of the attributes needed by the animals that live in the upper pelagic zone, never approaching land or the sea bottom…at least not voluntarily. The book is illustrated by Marlin Peterson; his depiction of the sea dragon, Glaucus atlanticus, is shown here for comparison with the photo above.

To study pelagic creatures is costly and difficult. Operating an oceangoing ship costs thousands of dollars daily, and the extra crew needed to handle a submersible or an ROV, or both, must be paid, and such equipment is worth millions. So, a dozen scientists and a couple of dozen crew may spend half a month of a month at sea, and get a smattering of photos via the ROV or in a submersible, but sometimes they return without sighting anything at all!

A large majority of pelagic animals avoid being seen by being transparent. The author writes of being on "blue water" SCUBA dives, knowing that thousands of finger-sized salps are all around, and seeing nothing. Animals that are not transparent are typically counter-shaded, and those that reside a little deeper down, where there is no upward-welling light to reflect off a silvery ventral side, have arrays of controllable bioluminescent organs that make their underside match the light coming from above. The "arms race" between predators that don't want prey to see them, and prey that don't want predators to see them, makes them hard to detect, even by each other! Thus, many can also shine their own bioluminescent flashlights to find a mate, for example, at the risk of attracting a predator.

Past knowledge of mid-oceanic life was gathered by trawling. One may thus learn of the existence of numerous animals, at least the slower ones. Not many oceanic squid, for example, are brought up by trawling. The fragile beings caught in a trawl usually arrive as clumps of unidentifiable sludge. By analogy, imagine studying London by dragging an anchor on a chain from a fast dirigible, to try to learn how the British live. More useful and appropriate methods are continually being devised.

An interesting contrast is presented in a section on Navigation. A pair of scientists the author knows uses a large, boxy tank surrounded by electromagnets to test juvenile sea turtles. They appear to have a magnetic sense, which helps the females navigate to their favored beach for laying their eggs, for example. Now consider elephant seals. The females come ashore to meet their mates, give birth, mate again a month later, then head out to sea. It is known that they travel thousands of kilometers to good feeding grounds, then return to land to give birth. It is also known that they swim a couple of hundred feet down (50-80 meters), so they can't be navigating by the stars. But a female elephant seal weighs a ton, and though she is less fearsome than her four-ton mate, she is still more dangerous than the average lion. You aren't going to get one of these in a magnet-bounded tank! As the author writes, with better-than-average scientific humility, he and others have studied elephant seal navigation for several years, and so far have learned nothing!

Such studies would be so much simpler if these animals—at least the smaller ones—could be brought into the laboratory and "put through their paces." But animals in the lab may not exhibit any of their in-the-wild behaviors, and the things they might do in a tank are likely to bear no resemblance to what they do in the open ocean. Scientists labor to devise more clever and less intrusive instruments, hoping to observe natural and normal behavior. Really, the study of this immense habitat, that covers 70% of the surface of the Earth, has just begun.

Thursday, June 05, 2025

Artificial aliens?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, physics, cosmology, genetics, first contact

To put Sara Imari Walker's last question first, will first contact with a true alien occur in a laboratory? Dr. Walker's book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence is a heady brew of ideas. She has a wonderful kind of mind that looks at things from angles others would never imagine existed, and she has managed to find a number of kindred souls with a similar talent.

Dr. Walker and her colleagues propose Assembly Theory, a new view of evolution in which technology has become an agent of evolutionary change, and "selection" takes on a meaning that would mightily bemuse Darwin. Her explanations make sense. I don't yet understand enough about assembly theory to attempt an explanation. I must content myself with a few bullet points gleaned from the third chapter ("Life is what?"; intended to be pronounced with a distinct upward lilt, as, "Life is WHAT??"). These items do not describe life, but rather objects. Objects as the new theory envisions them:

  • Objects are finite and distinguishable
  • Objects are breakable (I would have said, "can be disassembled")
  • Objects exist more than once
  • Objects are lineages
  • Objects form via selection

Some objects are living things. Some are not. A wooden table of the kind I built long ago to hold my mouse pad next to my desk is an example. I constructed it using nine pieces of wood, eight large wood screws, 24 small nails, and some glue. The top is plywood, which itself was fabricated by someone else before I bought it from a lumberyard and cut it to size. We can inventory the statements. 

  • My little mouse-pad table is finite (less than a meter tall) and is distinct from other items of furniture in this room, some purchased (and thus built by someone else) and others built here, by me.
  • It can be taken apart, by removing the fasteners and breaking the glue joints (no doubt tearing wood in the process). I don't plan to do so.
  • I have made other similar tables, which I suppose qualifies at "exists more than once." Worldwide, there are many tables of many designs, but all related in general shape and function.
  • Is it a lineage? The idea of "table", generalized from "supporting platform" is certainly a lineage, going back to the first table or table-like platform built by a human or prehuman creature.
  • "Selection" in such a case means that the I selected to make a table rather than a cantilevered shelf hung off my desk, or other possible means of supporting my mouse pad.

Consider a screwdriver. The author writes, "An evolutionary chain of objects is necessary to assemble screwdrivers into existence." In other words, the forebears of screwdrivers include machine shops, mining and metals productions facilities, and creatures like us to think them up. In the case of living things, the "lineage" of everything alive today goes back about 3.9 billion years. All known life comes from life. What came before?

This is the crux of the matter for assembly theory. The theorists use these concepts to imagine life as we don't know it, life as no one knows it.

Side question: Can objects be produced by other objects that are not living? They can, which is apparently where all nonliving and never-previously-living things arose. For example, a planet such as Earth was assembled from dust, rocks, etc., under the influence of gravity and electromagnetism and sundry other possible forces. Also, natural, nonliving actions produce raindrops and snowflakes in clouds, sand and gravel from rocks, and so forth. 

However, the production of objects by nonliving processes yields objects with very few unique parts. Living objects tend to be much more complex, as do many of their products. Thus this conjecture, stated at least a couple of times in the book, "Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects with many unique parts." The author notes that many kinds of minerals don't form in the absence of life. I recall taking a class in minerology, in which the professor stated, "There are about 1,000 mineral species known in the earliest rocks, before there was much life on Earth. There are now more than 4,000 minerals, and most of them can only form because there is life on Earth." Today the number of catalogued minerals is almost 7,000, and that may grow to more than 10,000 as busy geologists keep finding new stuff.

This principle yields the basis of the author's "assembly index", a measure of the minimum number of steps needed to produce an object. This gets us away from looking for life that is too chemically similar to "Earthlings" (from microbes and viruses to whales and forests, with us in the mid-range). If the assembly index of numerous objects collected on an exoplanet is large enough, we could conclude that life most likely produced them. The critical number is, according to the author, fifteen.

Frankly, I don't know how assembly index is calculated. I read that the assembly index of the molecule ATP is fifteen. This molecule has 47 atoms. Perhaps the calculation allows the synthesis to begin with smaller molecules that natural processes have already produced: water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, phosphorus oxide, and perhaps even small hydrocarbons such as ethane (ethane can result from abiotic, or nonliving, processes, but in the presence of a living biosphere we never observe it).

Therefore, the number 15 seems to be a good "filter" to discern objects produced by life.

A second prong in the approach by proponents of assembly theory is the development of a "chemputer", a semi-automated way to sort of "3d print" molecules, designed to have certain properties, in an attempt to produce a chemical system that takes on the attributes of life: reproduction, ingestion of supplies, elimination of wastes, relationships (very broadly construed), for example. Were such an effort to succeed, using large numbers of chemputers to explore the "assembly space" of small-to-medium sized molecules, there might indeed be alien life produced in the laboratory. It would be as alien as anything we might find on a planet far away, perhaps even more so. 

The key to grasping assembly theory is the claim that all things life can build are historically contingent. We can see this in the visible relatedness between the wide range of animals known as "tetrapods". They all have four limbs. The mythical flying horse Pegasus cannot evolve from a horse, because to do so would require adding two new limbs (to become wings) to a body that already works well with four limbs. The intermediate steps required don't make sense (and let's ignore the physics of wings long enough to support a half-ton animal). In fact, mammalian hexapods in general aren't likely to arise, because the competition from extremely well-adapted tetrapods has already pretty much filled all available ecological niches for critters bigger than a cockroach…on land, at least.

Historical contingency is a key concept. Finger-and-toenails didn't evolve all at once. They descended from claws. Claws came from something else. All living things trace back to a single-celled creature called LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA may not be the first cell. At one time other living things could have existed alongside LUCA that may have had quite different chemistry and cellular mechanisms. But only LUCA has descendants: us, and every living thing in the biosphere of Earth.

Our chain of imagined forebears stops with LUCA. Our knowledge is further constrained, because it is extremely unlikely that any creature now living is descended without change from LUCA. When I say "extremely unlikely", that middle E needs to be drawn out, "Extreeeeeeeeeeeemely!" Meaning, utterly impossible unless the universe is truly infinite, with an infinite number, not just of planets, but of biospheres. Even if we somehow track back the chain of biochemical contingency to "show" us a robust model of LUCA, the chain stops there.

I like the idea of the chemputer. But I don't hold out much hope. The assembly space of "small molecules" is too big. For example, if we "restrict" ourselves to the twenty most common elements, all of which are found in known life, and all of which are likely to be in any possible kind of life, and further, we call a molecule "small" if it has fifty or fewer atoms (just a tad bigger than ATP), the number of possible chemical species (most of them quite chemically unstable) is close to ten-to-the-power-of-65. A 66-digit integer. How large is that number? The number of stars in the visible universe is thought to be a 22- or 23-digit number. Could the average number of planets be as great as ten? Even if that were so, the number of planets in all the galaxies in the visible universe is no larger than the largest 24-digit number. It is hard to think about 66-digit numbers in any useful way. 

Dr. Walker dreams of being the researcher in the cartoon above, "meeting" the first true alien in the laboratory. I hope her dream comes true. But I think it more likely that we'll come across something, somewhere, soon, that proves life as we don't yet know it does in fact exist.

Friday, May 30, 2025

Spiders multiply and spread out

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After a lull, activity—views of my blog posts—has ramped up. I consider a view rate between 50 and 100 per day "normal", or at least ordinary. Let's look at the totals for the past week, on the world map:


The total for the week is more than 16,400, or an average of about 2,300 per day. Just for the 24 hours prior to about 10:00 am EDT, when I captured the view below, the sum is 2,670. But there's quite a difference in where the viewers are reported to be. For the week, Singapore topped the list, followed by Brazil, Vietnam, and the US. For the 24-hour period, Brazil moved to the top, with Vietnam close behind and Singapore a more distant third, with the US about where I'd expect it to be. Now that VPN's are nearly ubiquitous, it isn't even clear that more than one big spider is actually doing all this.

I hope they are all having fun reading nerdy book reviews.




Monday, May 26, 2025

DuPont and the Irish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, historiography, dupont company, irish, immigrants, gunpowder, sociology

Reading Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th-Century America, 20th Anniversary Edition, by Margaret M. Mulrooney, I obtained a view into the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants, not only in northern Delaware, where I now live, but in the industrial Northeast of the United States. I knew I would find no ancestors or even cousins among the gunpowder workers and other Irish employees at the du Pont facilities along the Brandywine River. I am about 1/4 Irish, but my Irish ancestors, upon arriving in the young U.S., made their ways to New Hampshire, Virginia and Pennsylvania. One family did settle in Salem, New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from New Castle, Delaware.

The book's first edition of 2002 was published about the time of the Dupont Company's 200th anniversary celebration. It was an expansion of the author's PhD dissertation at the University of Delaware. The 20th Anniversary Edition is updated with a little new material; the original scholarship is sound and has been supplemented but not reworked. The Introduction and first chapter ("Mutual Interests") summarize the history of the du Pont family, the original company founded by E. I. du Pont in 1802, and the managerial attitude and practices of Mr. du Pont and his successors during the 19th Century.

The title "Mutual Interests" introduces the vital distinction between the du Ponts and the leaders of many other industries in the area. Being of the French aristocratic tradition, yet with originally humble origins, Pierre S. du Pont and his sons, particularly Éleuthère I. and Victor M., had a keen sense of noblesse oblige, the "obligation of power", that induced an attitude of caring for their employees not just as paid labor but as quasi-family members. Some trace of that still remained when I was working for "Uncle Dupie", from which I retired in 2013: I saw on my manager's bookshelf the title How to Recognize and Reward Employees. This same manager was willing to explain business terms that I didn't understand well, and once said, "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it." That sounds harsher than it was, and I was a great fan of this manager, and most of the managers I had during 30 years with the company.

In the environment of the gunpowder yards of the four connected properties that made up the E. I. du Pont de Nemours company throughout most of the 1800's, Irish immigrants thrived. Though the work was dangerous, a point possibly over-emphasized by Dr. Mulrooney, the company's generous caretaking—free or low-cost housing, widows' pensions, higher pay than the norm, company-held savings accounts, and apprenticeship programs, for example—made "the powder" an attractive livelihood.

The company had initially hired mainly French-speaking immigrants, but wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland soon led to near-dominance of the labor market by the Irish. While most histories of Irish immigration to America focus on those who fled the potato famine of 1845-1852, the workforce at du Pont was roughly half Irish even in the 1820's and 1830's. It is on these people that the book initially focuses.

Irish were discriminated against in 19th Century America, because they were visibly "not English", predominantly Catholic, and poorly educated. However, E. I. du Pont soon found that the men could learn as fast as anyone, and their performance overcame his early reluctance to hire Irish workers. He had a practice of all new hires working as laborers for two years so he could assess their attitudes and work habits. Promotion to work as a powderman resulted in a significant increase in pay. He also favored married men for their stability and likelihood of a better attitude toward work.

In spite of discrimination, the Irish mostly knew they had it better than they'd had it in Ulster, where most were from. Consider: prior to the potato famine, some Ulstermen were prosperous but the more typical dwelling was a one-room cottage with a packed earth floor, little or no wood in the construction of mud or sod or peat walls, and a leaky roof. A single man working for the du Ponts would be in a dormitory, or boarding with a family, in a wooden structure with a wood floor, windows and doors that worked. A family would be in a two- to four-room house. The company's liberal benefits allowed a worker or couple to save a little, part of which they used to sponsor relatives in the "old country" to come to America, and chain migration was carried out for more than 100 years.

In time, the Irish Catholics could afford a little stipend for a circuit-riding priest, and later, they built St Joseph's on the Brandywine. By the end of the century, the church sponsored a school for the Catholic children, as seen in this photo from 1887. For much of the 19th Century, children from the powder yards were instructed on Sundays at the Brandywine Manufacturers' Sunday School, where a child's instruction was concordant with the family religion; the deist du Ponts accepted and supported the religious upbringing of the students.

The Irish families also struck a solid compromise between their traditional ways and the Mid-Atlantic culture, with is where the "White Lace" part of the book's title derives. They didn't fully enter the "melting pot" that we may often hear of, which was honored only in the breach anyway. They didn't "assimilate" but they "acculturated," making as much of the benefits of hard work and thrift as possible, while in part acceding to the consumerism that was a continually rising force in industrializing America.

The book's chapters cover in some detail the cultural traditions they kept, and didn't, their dwellings, their use of yards and dooryards and kitchen gardens, and the niceties of life that they obtained. They knew many luxuries were out of reach, but they craved a certain amount of gentility. Having been landless, they knew the value of land, and strove to save enough to buy houses or farms. Over all, the Irish along the Brandywine, and elsewhere in America that they encountered favorable work environments, overcame stereotypes and thrived.

Their stories induced me to hark back to family research I have carried out most of my life; fourteen years ago I wrote a summary of the immigrants in my own family tree. I found a few "ice age immigrants": I am between 6% and 12% Cherokee. Of the rest, 24% were born in Ireland, 9% in Scotland, 39% in England, 16% in Germany, and a smattering of other parts of Europe. It's interesting that Ancestry.com's DNA analysis didn't show a trace of Cherokee, and pegged my English roots at 70%. That's the conundrum of small number statistics. We think of getting 50% of our DNA from our father and 50% from our mother. But the vagaries of "crossing over" that produces eggs and sperm can shift these proportions one way or another, so one child could be 60-40 and another 25-75! Pity poor Senator Elizabeth Warren, who grew up being told she had "substantial" Native American ancestry. Her DNA test results, released in 2018, showed "between 1/64 and 1/1,024" Cherokee ancestry. Actually, I count her lucky. My DNA results cannot demonstrate even that much, yet family records show a minimum of 1/16. That's life.

After retirement I worked for three years as a volunteer docent at the Machine Shop at Hagley Museum, on the grounds of the du Pont powder mills (see the picture). I learned a lot of company and du Pont family history, and Dupont company history. There was much in this book that I'd never heard before. It was great to re-connect with the stories of the powder mill, and to learn of an immigrant population that I had heard only a little about.

A word about safety. The Dupont Company had a strong tradition of safety all during the time I worked there. I learned that the number of gunpowder explosions during the 118 years that black powder was manufactured there exceeded one per year. But a typical black powder factory in America of the time had five to ten times as many explosions. Dupont powdermen had a much greater chance of living long enough to retire, compared to the rest. This is the only quibble I have with Powder & Lace; otherwise, it is a marvelous book.

Thursday, May 22, 2025

ZEUS's thunderbolt

 kw: articles, lasers, record setting

An article yesterday in earth.com reports on a record-setting power level for "the most powerful U.S. laser," named ZEUS: 2 petawatts peak power in a pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second. The click-bait headline states "over 100x the global electricity output." Let's unpack this a little for us mere mortals.

The author helpfully states that 2 petawatts is 2 quadrillion watts. Firstly, assuming a "square" pulse (it isn't, but probably close enough), 2 quadrillion watts times 25 quintillionths of a second results in 50/1,000ths, or 1/20th, of a watt-second. A watt-second is also known as a Joule, the standard unit of energy. The night light in my hallway uses 0.25 watts, continuously. The energy of this laser pulse would keep my night light shining for…one-fifth of a second. Barely the blink of an eye! What gives?

The breakthrough this article reports is not the sheer power of the pulse. A 0.05 Joule pulse is nothing special. Off-the-shelf metal-cutting lasers operate in the range of 30 J per pulse, ten pulses per second, for an average power of 300 watts. The pulses are short, in the nanosecond to microsecond range, but nowhere near as short as the 25-attosecond  pulse width of the ZEUS laser.

The breakthrough in pulse width is important because it enables the achievement of extreme power levels (such as petawatts), which, I am informed by the Duck Duck Go "AI Assistant", "…enables the study of complex interactions between light and matter, such as astrophysical phenomena and particle acceleration. These powerful lasers are also used in various fields, including medical treatments and material science research."

De-jargonizing that, it says that materials behave differently when hit that hard, and quantum particles such as electrons can be accelerated to extreme energies without resorting to miles-wide accelerators. The "astrophysical phenomena" mentioned include the very high energy environments found near black holes or during supernova eruptions.

Now that scientists have squeezed a modest-energy pulse into one forty-thousandth of a trillionth of a second, I expect further work will lead to much greater total power and peak power.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Doctor Doolittle attainable?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, sociology, communication

How do animals communicate? Why do they do so? What do they have to talk about? What are they saying? Can we eavesdrop? Can we horn in?

The first question has numerous answers, and has motivated a great lot of literature. The answers to the third and successive questions are still elusive at best, and impossible (to date) to answer. But the second question, now: Ah, that's a good one. Why, indeed, do animals communicate? To narrow the focus quite a bit: Why do animals talk?

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum takes up precisely that question. Were I the editor I would suggest adding a word to the title: Vocally. Dr. Kershenbaum states in the Introduction that this book focuses only on auditory communication, to keep the book's size manageable. And while I am making suggestions, may I offer that the cover picture, of a frog nose-to-nose with a snail, is way off the point? Frogs eat snails, and snails are remarkably mute. There's a pair with nothing, but nothing, to talk about!

In the context of biological evolution, vocalizing, in common with all kinds of communication, must serve the needs of the creature in its environment. Take up the question for yourself: what needs to you have? Shelter, food, a mate, and enjoyment. Each of these needs is different in detail from the similar needs of any animal in its own environment. Also, for most animals larger than a limpet, a fifth need would be a sense of purpose, even though that may be largely wrapped up in both providing and securing the first four needs.

The author illustrates the range of animal talk by discussing seven animals: Wolf, Dolphin, Parrot, Hyrax, Gibbon, Chimpanzee, and Human. In each chapter the animal's unique vocalizations are examined with this question in view: Is it Language? And a corollary: Is it a stepping stone towards language?

At first it seem to me that the order is a bit odd: Hyraxes weigh a pound or two, with a correspondingly small brain; dolphins are the heaviest on the list and, after humans, have the largest brain in relation to body size. I finally recognized a specific order, that of successive degrees of verbal complexity. I wondered why Dolphins were brought in so early. Most of us think of them has being closest to having a language. However, their whistles are variable, not repeatable, and nobody has yet been able to discern a vocabulary of "dolphinese". The author stresses in this chapter and others that language does not necessarily require discrete words. I am strongly skeptical about that. I personally tend to put "wordlessness" as distinctive on non-language, but I am willing to withhold judgment for now.

Can wolf howling be considered linguistic in any way? It must be pre-linguistic, as it is a kind of singing. Howling wolves are clearly enjoying the experience; howling is emotional. Considering that, in humans, the brain structures that support song are larger and more deeply established than those that support speaking and speech hearing, it is evident to me that song came long before speech, and perhaps by a million years or more…or perhaps by several millions of years.

The first animal treated that seems to have word-like utterances is the hyrax, a little marmot-sized relative of elephants—they even have little tusks! It may seem a stretch to call their chippy, chittery vocalizations as songs, but the author thinks they are. They are not random strings of the five distinct sounds a hyrax makes; they seem to have a syntax. That is, certain sounds never occur one after the other, while others are usually found in succession. Just as we have words that contain several syllables, it may be that, if hyraxes actually have "words", many are of several syllables. (In human speech, contrast monosyllabic Chinese with polysyllabic Japanese.)

Putting gibbons next in order, we find certain similarities in their "songs" to hyrax "songs" except that gibbons have 27 (or 28, the text says both at different points) distinct utterances, with a much more complex syntax than that of hyrax "songs".

Parrots are a really mixed bunch. While most parrots, and several other birds such as Mynah birds and ravens, can mimic human speech sounds (and doorbells, gunshots and sirens), they don't use these sounds in meaningful ways, with an exception or two. A bird named Alex, an African Grey Parrot, became famous for his ability to hold a simple but meaningful conversation with a human. Getting Alex to this point took a lot of training, of a special type described in the Parrots chapter. Alex has died, and another African Grey Parrot is being trained; stay tuned.

Was Alex an exceptional genius among birds? For one thing, his verbal abilities indicate that the arrangement of a bird's brain might be quite a bit more efficient and economical than that of a mammal's brain. His brain was the size of a shelled walnut and weighed less than a quarter ounce. A typical house cat has a one-ounce brain, and only a very exceptional cat can learn to recognize more than their name and the sound of a can opener. Regardless of Alex's skills, it is evident that parrots in the wild don't use language in any humanlike, or even Alex-like, way.

So, gibbons sing. Chimpanzees don't. What some (stress: some) chimps can do is learn either rudimentary ASL (American Sign Language) or other physical means of indicating a small number of words. Sentences longer than "give banana" seem to be beyond them. The gorilla Koko learned more ASL and was a better conversationalist. But neither chimps nor gorillas have a vocal apparatus that can produce uttered language, and it is pretty clear that they don't have the flexibility of mentation to support humanlike language at the level of a two-year-old human. Somehow, Alex the parrot could hold his own with a six-year-old human.

The author stresses again and again that animals communicate according to the needs imposed by their environments. The complexity of their utterances—and again, he is reporting only on audible communication—generally reflects the complexity of their social environment. It appears that only humans can maintain relationships with potentially thousands of other humans (The number of names in the Picasa face-name directory for my photos comes to about 1,200. There are a few hundred other people I know by name and face and converse with more frequently than yearly, whom I have not photographed). The largest chimpanzee "village" is less than 100. Similarly for dolphins, orcas, and their kin.

How and where and when did humans make a breakthrough that allows an actual infinite range of expression? We may not make many more unique sounds than the sound-repertory of a gibbon (English phoneme lists range from 44 to 46, and Mandarin Chinese requires 88 phonemes, but Hawaiian gets by with 24). We combine them endlessly, and we can distinguish them. Thus, most English speakers can speak and recognize about 10,000 one-syllable words, 30,000-35,000 2-syllable words, and a total of 60,000-100,000 total words, plus all the case inflections and conjugations needed to make grammar work. The author stresses this point: No other animal has grammar, or at least nothing like a grammar that we can recognize.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Firstly, that a great deal of research lies ahead, for us to begin to understand what any particular species of animal "means" by its utterances. Secondly, whether "words" really are necessary for the kind of flexible communication we call "human communication," which is what we usually mean when we use the term "language."

What Dr. Kershenbaum has given us is not the answer to "Why animals talk," but a few foundation stones, of a set of unknown size, the groundwork for learning why they do talk, and eventually, what they are saying (which we may find out is not anything we'd enjoy hearing!).