Intertwined biographies of man and fish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fishing, tuna, fish tagging, biographies

What a title to begin with: Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, the new book by Karen Pinchin, chronicles the life of Al Anderson, the most prolific tagger of tunas and other fish, along with the natural history of bluefin tunas and the life of one particular fish that oceanographers named Amelia. In Mr. Anderson's website about the tagging of bluefin tuna, the fish in this photo is said to be Amelia, a fish that was first caught and tagged as a juvenile (the tag is the orange thingy hanging below the forward dorsal fin), then caught three more times; the records of her catch locations, and locations logged by a data logger upon her second "encounter" with oceanographers, robustly demonstrated that bluefin tuna range right across the Atlantic Ocean. This blew a big hole in a decades-old "two populations" convention that governed the catch quotas of fishing fleets. There is only one population of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

There! How's that for a spoiler? This lovely book winds together the lives of Al Anderson, his love of fishing, his eventually greater love of using tagging to gather scientific data about tunas, and the lives of the tunas themselves and Amelia in particular. Bluefin tunas went from being considered trash fish to become nearly the most valuable sea animal, on a dollars-per-pound basis. When big money is in play, old laws that permit or encourage overexploitation become deeply entrenched and unchangeable.

In the middle of the book the author notes in passing that bluefin tunas have chromatophores in their skin, and they can exhibit color and pattern changes similar to those of a squid. Note the skin pattern on Amelia in the photo. In most pictures showing a bluefin tuna, the blue-above-white color scheme is smooth, usually because the fish is dead. Amelia appears agitated, as a fish out of water ought to be! She lived another dozen or so years, and by her final capture and death in Portugal she weighed perhaps 600 pounds.

The book's title mentions obsession. Everything about fishing touches obsession: Al's obsessive love of fishing as a young man; his equally obsessive tagging program that began not that much later; the obsession of sushi-lovers for bluefin nigiri; the obsession for money that drives the entire bluefin fishery… The list goes on. Few people consider the tuna's obsession with staying alive.

Funny side note: We once met an elderly woman in South Dakota, who asked if I liked to fish. I don't, but I've done it whenever someone asks me along. I replied to her that I had fished a little, but I wasn't good at it, and that catching fish seemed to cost me more than going to the store to buy fish. She snorted, "Nobody fishes for economic reasons!" She loved to fish. I have my own obsessions, just not fishing!

In this case, a cluster of obsessions is driving the bluefin tuna to extinction. The future is bleak for this species.

They are all around us, essential to us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, gas, gases, vapor

This is a mercury barometer of a type one could buy in the late 1800's. In 1843, Evangelista Torricelli first filled a meter-long tube with mercury, held the end closed, and inverted it into a bowl of mercury. Some of the mercury ran out, but about 3/4 of a meter of the tube remained filled with mercury. This was the first demonstration that air has weight. It took some testing to verify that the upper part of the tube held a vacuum.

Torricelli showed that the pressure caused by the weight of about 76 cm of mercury in the tube equaled the pressure caused by the weight of the entire atmosphere, many miles in height. Under what a physicist calls "standard conditions" the height of the column of mercury is exactly 76 cm (29.92 in.), because that is part of the definition of standard conditions. The other parts of the definition are 25°C or 77°F, elevation at sea level (mean high tide), and zero humidity.

When a weather system moves through the area, the actual barometric pressure will differ, so that a barometer you may have in your home likely has a scale that runs from about 72.5 to 80 cm (~28.5 to 31.5 in.). It is really amazing that atmospheric pressure has more than a 10% range. Sometimes even more: in the eye of a hurricane it can be as low as 67 cm; the record is 66.9 cm, or 26.34 in.

The density of air under standard conditions is 1.2754 kg per cubic meter. Mercury is just over 10,000 times as dense as air, at 13,600 kg/m³. If air were incompressible and didn't thin out with altitude, the atmosphere would then be 10,660 times 0.76 meters, or 8.1 km thick (about 5 miles). But air does thin out with altitude, so a barometer can also be used as an altimeter: at an elevation of 8.1 km, air pressure does not suddenly drop to zero, but is 56.2 cm of mercury, or about 74% of sea level pressure.

Here is an interesting calculation: What is the volume of air that weighs one tonne (1,000 kg, or 2,205 lbs)? 1,000 ÷ 1.2754 = 784 m³. The dimensions of a travel bus such as a Greyhound bus are typically 13.5 m long, 2.6 m wide, and 2 m high; this amounts to 70.2 m³. An empty bus is carrying around about 1/12th of a tonne of air, which weighs some 90 kg or close to 200 lbs. A bus driver driving an empty bus has a hidden extra-large person along for the ride. By contrast, a suburban ranch house with an area of 1,600 sq ft, or 148 sq m, with 8-foot (2.44 m) ceilings, has a volume of 362 m³, so the air's weight is 0.46 tonnes, or 460 kg or a bit more than 1,000 lbs. It takes a pretty big house to contain a tonne of air. So air has weight, and moving air can move things, including sailboats and dandelion seeds, for example.

Thoughts such as these arose as I was reading It's a Gas: The Sublime & Elusive Elements That Expand Our World by Mark Miodownik. I had a slight qualm upon reading the title: most gases are not elements, at least in the chemical sense. The author is a scientist, so I figured he ought to know that. Perhaps "substances" or another semi-synonym for "elements" was deemed too clumsy by the editor. Alliteration before accuracy. But it put me on alert for other scientific solecisms, which I found (sad to say) and will mention later on.

It was soon apparent that the book has a cultural aim rather than scientific. There is a chapter on the "noble gases", helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. That's the most scientifically oriented chapter in the book. These are the only gases that are actually chemical elements. All other gases that make it into our atmosphere (and all of them do) are molecular, starting with hydrogen, oxygen, fluorine and chlorine, which are diatomic molecules (H₂, O₂, F₂, and Cl₂) whenever they are not chemically combined with something else. The three most common triatomic molecules are ozone, carbon dioxide, and water vapor (O₃, CO₂, and H₂O). There are lots of gases!

This introduces the need for a definition. What is a vapor? In chemistry, a vapor is a gas that emanates from a substance that is a liquid at ordinary temperatures. At a high enough temperature, many liquids are entirely gaseous, and water becoming steam is the most familiar example. If it is too hot for water to exist as a liquid (at an ordinary pressure), it is too hot for us to live, being hotter than 100°C or 212°F. At lower temperatures, water vapor has a "vapor pressure" that is less than atmospheric pressure, so that at temperatures humans like, there is a little water vapor in the air, but only a small percentage. Another example is bromine. It is a liquid at room temperature, but its boiling point is 59°C or 138°F. Thus, it has a higher vapor pressure than water at any temperature below that.

Some gases are quite toxic, so-called "poison gases". Some, such as chlorine, were used in warfare—fortunately, more than 100 years ago, and not since. Others are mildly toxic but also reduce pain and have been used as anesthetics. In the past, ether vapor was a common anesthetic; it was used to knock me out for a tonsillectomy in 1952. Nitrous oxide is called "laughing gas" because it makes a person delirious, but doesn't make someone unconscious, while it makes them insensitive to pain. It is still in use. For most surgeries, other synthetic gases such as halothane work better than ether and are less toxic…but not totally nontoxic!

About 60 years ago I was a chemistry major. One thing we did, supervised, which probably isn't allowed these days, was to take a whiff of various vapors and gases. This probably saved my life. It was during the antiwar protests of "the sixties", and protests occurred regularly on campus. I would sometimes heckle the speakers at such rallies. One day when I opened my car I smelled the very distinctive odor of cyanide gas (HCN). I stopped breathing (without gasping!) long enough to open the door on the other side, and then I backed off and let the breeze de-gasify my car. I am thankful that "someone" was fool enough to try something tricky, rather than just wait for me with a gun!

Throughout the book there is an increasing emphasis on climate change and the role of CO₂. Interestingly, in one place, the author states that in the distant past, when the CO₂ content of the air was 5,000 ppm (half a percent), global temperature was about 10°C warmer than it is now. The current level is about 430 ppm. It is clear that he fully buys into the contention that rising CO₂ is an existential crisis.

Let's look at those figures, and add another. Pre-industrial times: 280 ppm, baseline temperature. Current: 430 ppm and 1°C warmer. Distant past, 5,000 ppm and 10°C warmer. The first two points define a straight line with a slope of 0.00667; the second and third points define a straight line with a slope of 0.00197. This is strongly nonlinear, so I tested this as a log-linear relationship. I find that it is quite a good fit. This allows me to interpolate that a level of 600 ppm is needed to add another °C, and 800 ppm would add one more degree. But that assumes that there were no other factors that contributed to the temperature in the distant past.

A different analysis, based on spectroscopy, one I first performed fifty years ago, indicates that at 400 ppm, the optical density of CO₂ is already about as high as it can get in the thermal infrared parts of the spectrum. In other words, it is already optically saturated, and the temperature is unlikely to rise even by one more degree. I conclude that we know too little about the situation when CO₂ content was 5,000 ppm.

Either way, that is not what I call an existential crisis.

In conclusion, the book is interesting and entertaining. It is really half memoir, half info-dump. A good combination! But I cannot pass by a few instances that reveal a bit of sloppy thinking:

• Discussing weather systems, on page 130, these sentences stood out, "Because of its lower density hot air expands, creating high-pressure regions. Cooler, low-pressure air moves to equalize the pressure and this air flow is what we call wind." This requires careful thinking. Warm, rising air causes lower pressure. Cold, falling air causes higher pressure. At the surface, the air moves from high to low. The only correct phrase is the last eight words.
• On pages 151 to 154, the discussion involves lighter-than-air ballooning using hydrogen and helium. The term "helium molecules" is found near the bottom of page 151. Helium does not form molecules. Under extreme conditions helium can barely be induced to react with fluorine, but this is not found in nature.
• Then on page 154, we read, "…hydrogen, a gas with an atomic weight of 1 atomic unit: it is 50 percent lighter than helium." An essential fact was left out. Helium is always monotonic, with an atomic weight of 4. Hydrogen in our atmosphere is diatomic, therefore, while the atoms have an atomic weight of 1, the diatomic molecules of hydrogen have an atomic weight of 2. That is why hydrogen is 50 percent lighter.
• On page 188, after a long dissertation on the search for "luminiferous aether", confusion suddenly arises when the author brings in Einstein. Aether was not "banished" by Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, it was Maxwell's Equations, published in 1865, that demonstrated that electricity and magnetism together (as electromagnetism) propagated each other through free space, and so no medium is needed for them to propagate through. A further statement about "how gravity works" is similarly anachronistic; gravity is dealt with in Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915.
• A diagram on page 197 shows a portion of the solar spectrum, with Fraunhofer absorption lines, and certain ones prominently marked. The caption states that the lines are "associated with hydrogen." The C and F lines marked are indeed from hydrogen, but the D line pair is from sodium and the E line is from iron. Other lines also marked are also not from hydrogen.
• The diagram of the periodic table of the elements printed on page 205 is terrible! In particular, the shading in the18th period (inexplicably called VIIIA in the caption), the noble gases from helium to radon, is too dark to see the lettering. And this in a section in which the noble gases are the subject of discussion!
• Finally, on page 209, the work of Svante Arrhenius and his predecessor Eunice Foote is discussed, and simply bowdlerized. I'll leave out the detail. The thrust of the discussion is again inverted, leaving out the more important conclusions.

Might I say also, in discussions about the greenhouse effect caused by water, carbon dioxide, or other gases such as methane, I have never seen the point made that when the earth warms and radiates infrared into the atmosphere, these gases warm and re-radiate infrared in all directions. Thus, half of the re-radiating is downward and half is upward. This half-and-half phenomenon is important. Consider: CO₂ absorbs a few percent of the IR radiated by the warm soil. It warms up and sends some IR back to the soil, and an equal amount into space. Soil and atmosphere both get warmer, until the total radiation upward matches the total radiation downward. One must understand this point to accurately calculate the warming effect of a greenhouse gas. It is no simple equation, because the percent of absorption by the gas varies with wavelength. Search in Google Images for "carbon dioxide infrared spectrum" to see what I mean.

Spin – hard to avoid, hard to understand

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, spin, rotation, angular momentum

Imagine a universe that consists of two identical objects. They can be single atoms such as helium (hydrogen prefers to exist as H₂ molecules, which complicates matters). Imagine further that these two atoms are some distance apart, initially with zero velocity with respect to each other. The only force acting on them is mutual gravitational attraction. Finally, consider that the same quantum mechanical laws apply to this universe as to our own.

Right away there is a puzzle. Quantum uncertainty, or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, requires that the position and velocity of these atoms cannot be known with certainty. Therefore, as they begin to approach one another under the influence of gravity, it is not certain that they will collide. Some component of their velocities is bound to be off-center, and it is almost certain that they will miss. At the instant of closest approach, from the point of view of an imaginary observer exactly between them, they are moving at almost (but not exactly) equal speed, in opposite directions, at right angles to the direction of the line between them. Thus, they are in orbit about their common gravitational center. This universe now contains spin: a pair of neural helium atoms rotating about a common center.

To be sure, their orbits will be rather elongated, and at their greatest extent, they will be nearly stationary. But following their orbits, and doing the calculations, you would find that their combined angular momentum is constant throughout their orbits.

What is angular momentum? For two identical objects rotating about a common center, angular momentum is the product of the total mass times the velocity of each object relative to the common center, divided by the distance of each object from the center of rotation (the radius). For spinning solid objects such as tops or planets or Frisbees the definition (and calculations) are more complex, but similar in principle.

Now we can look at our universe as it is. The current cosmological theory states that after the initial expansion from a primordial singularity (the Big Bang), followed by "inflation", once the universe had expanded enough for its general temperature to allow atoms and molecules to form, all the universe was permeated by nearly uniform gas, about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by weight. Quantum fluctuations led to broad volumes having a range of densities. I have usually read that the variation in density was around one part in 10,000. That was enough to cause the denser areas to begin to condense under mutual gravitational attraction. After billions of years the result is a sky full of stars, clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, and most likely even larger structures that span large proportions of the entire universe.

AND EVERYTHING IS SPINNING (but not real Tasmanian devils)

In the book The Science of Spin: How Rotational Forces Affect Everything From Your Body to Jet Engines and the Weather, author Roland Ennos begins, not with the scenario presented above, but with an early airplane that was prone to crashing because of the angular momentum of its engine. The original Sopwith Camel was too powerful for its own good. How the WWI pilots and flight engineers solved this problem introduces the book's subject.

The book has twenty chapters, and thus twenty subjects. More than I thought there would be. The first five chapters (Part I) deal in detail with Earth. Rotation of the gas-and-dust cloud that condensed into the solar system allowed planets to form around the nascent star. The tides that follow the rotation of Earth under sun and moon, coupled with the temperature-evening-out effect of Earth spinning, made the planet habitable.

There is a thorough discussion of Coriolis phenomena, often called Coriolis forces, which result from initially linear motions across the surface of a spinning planet. In the absence of planetary rotation, air heated at the equator would rise, then move poleward, replaced by colder air from the pole that descends and moves equatorward along the surface. There would be a perpetual north wind in the northern hemisphere and a perpetual south wind in the southern hemisphere. Earth's rotation causes the upper-level air that begins to move northward to be deflected to the left, leading to east-to-west winds by about 30° N latitude, which then descends and is deflected as it is returning to the equator. This is the Hadley Cell. Two more bands form, one in temperate latitudes and another in the Arctic. A similar pattern is mirrored in the southern hemisphere. I note that the striped pattern on Jupiter reveals that this huge planet, more than ten times the diameter of Earth, but spinning more than twice as fast (in RPM terms), must experience much greater Coriolis effects, since there are apparently 30-32 zones of alternating higher-speed and lower-speed wind.

Eight chapters make up Part II, regarding the development of technology, and in particular the role played by rotating machinery. The history is fascinating, but rather overwhelming; there is so much of it. There is a little about conversions between rotatory motions and reciprocating motions; think of the rotating crankshaft in an internal combustion engine, coupled to the piston, which moves up-and-down or back-and-forth. Such conversions and similar themes are more the subject of Part III and its five chapters about the human body. To me, the culmination of the section is the discussion of throwing. 

The human shoulder joint is made for strong, accurate throwing, in contrast to the shoulder joints of all the other apes. This is why no chimpanzee or gorilla could become a baseball pitcher. Shoulder, elbow, wrist; each contributes to increasing the velocity of a throw, and each equally allows increased control for accurate throwing. By itself, the forearm is a sling pivoted on the elbow from the upper arm. The hand, pivoting on the wrist, is a secondary sling with an extra function: It allows a thrower or pitcher to spin the projectile, which stabilizes it in flight.

There is a great discussion of the mechanics of the trebuchet, or counterweigh catapult. This image is from the Ancient Technology website.

The throwing arm is driven by the heavy counterweight. The rope sling, with one end firmly attached and the other on a slip peg for release at the correct angle, adds great acceleration to the projectile. Take note of the angle of the counterweight in each diagram. The length of its attachment to the throwing arm determines when it "cocks", suddenly slowing the arm and facilitating release of the rope sling at the proper angle. This also facilitates accuracy.

I have made several small trebuchets for demonstration purposes. I helped our son and a friend of his build one for Science Olympiad on two occasions. The Olympiad had a "Storm the Castle" event for a few years. A catapult had to fit in a one meter cube when ready to throw. This is a view of several competing catapults awaiting the competition. Ours is at front and center.

The last two chapters, that make up Part IV, are a review of some historical point, and a backhanded complaint about the use of "spin" as a political term for biased reporting. Physically spinning may make you dizzy and confused. Being politically "spun" has a similar effect on one's understanding of current events.

It becomes clear that, while the mechanics of a single rotating object such as a planet or a top can be described with great exactness in an equation or two, the mechanics of a sports throw or the action of a trebuchet have no "closed form" mathematical treatment. Growing up in a physical body, we learn how certain aspects of spin work, in an intuitive and bodily way. We understand things "in our gut" far beyond what the math can discern. I am concerned for a generation of "digital natives" that have never gone outside to throw a ball around, or swing on a swing.

Amidst reading, I was sometimes irked at the length of explanations. But each time I had finished a portion, I realized I had learned something that a shorter treatment might have left unrealized. I am glad I read this book.

Errata: 

• On page 8: "Neptune … spins on its side." It is Uranus that is tilted almost parallel to it orbital plane.
• On page 38: Discussing the effect of Earth's spin on solar heating, "…alternately heated by the action of the sun during the day and allowed to cool when on the far side of the sun…" The last few words need to be either "on the far side of the Earth" or "on the far side away from the sun". The "far side" of the sun itself is just as hot as the near side!

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.

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.