A Bible lost and only partly found

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, bible, manuscripts

Interested in translating the Hebrew Bible for yourself? Step 1: learn the Hebrew of the Sixth Century BCE. Then get access to a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, preferably the Leningrad Codex. This clip is from Exodus. Links to biblical texts are found at this Brandeis University page. That is step 2. Step 3 is to begin translating.

What is a critical edition? It is one that contains the most accurate compilation from all earlier manuscripts (see an example below), plus apparatuses that help a translator. For Biblical Hebrew, these include headnotes, footnotes and indications of the frequency of special words, and most importantly the diacritical marks above and below the letters, which indicate pronunciation and even the stress or emphasis to use while reading aloud. This helps a translating scholar determine the precise meaning of a word.

Think of the English "word" display. It is actually three words. As a noun or a verb, it is stressed dis-PLAY, but as an adjective most people say DIS-play. Then there is dove; to refer to a lovely, cooing bird, we say duvv, but the past tense of dive is pronounced dohv.

This situation is tougher in Hebrew, which has only one explicit vowel (aleph) and one semivowel (yod). SPPS NGLSH WR WRTTN THAT WY? (and without the question mark, either…nor any spaces between words!) How could you tell the difference between meet, met, mite, meat, and mete?

The self-chosen task of the Masoretes was to gather a compilation from the best manuscripts such as the Second Century CE one shown here, to produce an edition such as the Eleventh Century Leningrad Codex shown above. It is not known whether the original books were written this way, or whether there were word separations and punctuation, at least. All surviving early manuscripts look like this one. But the Masoretes had centuries of oral tradition and scholarship regarding how every word was to be pronounced during public reading, knowledge of which words were unique or used but twice (even if a certain string of consonants did not appear unique; its vowel sounds did differ).

They also developed methods to ensure faithful copying. A sheet of parchment was prepared by scoring with a grid. Each grid cell was to contain one letter. Every page of the entire Bible was gridded and thus would be identical to that in every other Masoretic copy.

The Leningrad Codex, dated about 1008, is the earliest complete Hebrew Bible, and the best. There was once a chance to make it second best, as we read in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible by Matti Friedman. The 500-leaf (1,000 page) manuscript that became known as the Aleppo Codex (more here) was produced in the same generation as the Leningrad Codex, but in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, rather than in Cairo. It was the work of a single scribe, supervised by the chief scholar of his generation, and double-checked by the scholar and other skilled copyists to ensure that every letter, every vowel point, every item was perfect.

Mr. Friendman is currently based in Jerusalem, where the surviving portions of the Aleppo Codex are housed. By his account, during several years he crisscrossed the world to track down the manuscript's story. The book is part historical chronicle, part whodunit, but the "who" remains obscure, right to the end. It is hard to interview sources when most of them are dead.

The Aleppo Codex looks a lot like the Leningrad. This portion, from the end of Deuteronomy, shows purple stains at the page corners that have been touted as burn marks, but are actually fungus.

The manuscript was intended to guide scholars and copyists. It was used by Moses Maimonides, who was its custodian in the late 1100s. Sadly, he was the last scholar to use the book for its intended purpose. During later upheavals, it was taken first to one place, then to another, and eventually to Aleppo, in Syria, to the oldest Jewish community in the area (the Jews of Aleppo were there before the Syrians). It was kept safely in Aleppo for 600 years, until the day the UN voted to divide Palestine, setting up the state of Israel for the Jews after nearly 1,900 years as a stateless people.

In the rioting that followed the announcement, in late 1947 (just three weeks after I was born), the Great Synagogue of Aleppo was burned, and all the manuscripts scattered, including those in a doubly locked box. What happened next is a great mystery, one Friedman has largely solved, but not entirely. For months it was thought that the manuscript, called the Crown of Aleppo, had been burned. But it was not. That was a cover story. It was taken first to Turkey and then to Jerusalem.

At some point, about 40% of the leaves went missing, including nearly all the Torah, and the portion at the end that contains much of the Prophets. The remaining portions have been photographed (finally!) and images may be found at the link above.

The pages have a rather distinctive look, as this image shows. While all Masoretic texts are identical in layout, including where each letter is on each page, the handwriting is distinctive. The entire Aleppo Codex was crafted by a single scribe. Many others are in the hand of more than one scribe. Experts can recognize the handwriting. Even I can see that this scribe wrote more regularly and precisely than the scribe who wrote the Leningrad fragment shown above. It is the nearest thing to a machine-printed page produced in manuscript history.

Author Friedman set himself to peel back the layers of a very deep onion, to determine the true story of this manuscript's travels, and if possible to determine what became of the missing portions. He had the very great help of at least one or two of the principal players who were still living. He was also able to obtain documents that had been kept hidden for half a century, and it is likely that his narrative is accurate. His first objective was thus achieved. But not the second. When did the missing parts go missing, and who is responsible? Suspicion falls on a certain person, but much documentary evidence that could corroborate the suspicions of the remaining players has been lost, destroyed, or was never produced. A 4-year trial in the 1950s led to more obscurity, requiring much detective work to pick out the story from misdirection on nearly everyone's part.

We could have had a perfect Bible, in Friedman's opinion. The opportunity was squandered.

Making zombies possible

kw: book reviews, horror, fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction

After finishing the prior book, I spent a couple of hours with Deadline by Mira Grant. That was about all I could take. The book is based on an "explanation" for people becoming brain-eating Zombies because of a virus infection. The other theme is that with everyone staying indoors (or else!), more media entertainment is needed, so zombie fighters wear all sorts of cameras to go out and kill them by the dozens.

I had my fill of gore by about page 20, so I flitted about, reading portions of another several pages, and the conclusion. This being the middle book of a trilogy, it was not surprising that the book ends with a hint that the virus may be one day overcome. I mean, if you aren't going to at least try to "solve the problem", why raise it? Downers don't sell.

Anyway, good writing skills, but the author isn't someone I'd want to hang out with.

Oh, by the way, there is a preview of the third book in the end papers. Somebody gets cloned. I wonder how the clone gets the memories of the original? Not enough that I'd want to read it.

When both are right, but not all right

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, social psychology, morality

"Our God's better than your god!" That is the hidden motto of many religions. Substitute the word "candidate" for "god", and you have the basis of political parties, at least in "democratic" nations. This also demonstrates that Atheism and New Atheism are religions, with the over-individualized Self substituted for a Deity.

I have belonged to a number of clubs and groups over the years, in addition to my church. Whether it is a stamp collecting club, the Boy Scouts, or Toastmasters, every group has a similar structure, whether official or not: a large number of "members" and a small number of "leaders". Usually the "leaders" group is supported by a middling number of devotees, for whom, I have observed, the group is their "church"; they are its fanatical evangelists.

"No Man is an Island" is not just a nice poem or song. It expresses that humans are not just a "social animal". Nearly all of us are obsessively groupish. Yet we are also selfish, which leads to trouble with our groups. Biologists and psychologists don't like to admit it, but this tension must have an evolutionary basis.

Once in a while a book comes along that explains so much, it seems to explain everything. Jonathan Haidt's new book seems to come close: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Dr. Haidt's thesis is straightforward, as in the preface he states that "…an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition." (p xiii). He uses two great analogies throughout:

• Elephant and Rider – The Elephant is our intuition or "gut reaction". The Rider is our reason. As any howdah knows, the rider serves the elephant. Thus, the first section of the book has the subtitle Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. We primarily use reason to justify our beliefs, not to determine what they ought to be.
• Taste Buds – Through research, he and his colleagues have identified six "Moral Foundations" (more on them later) that shape our attitudes toward events, and the kinds of reactions we will have, including the kinds of groups we choose to adhere to.

The author calls Plato's idealized Philosopher-King a "rationalist delusion", and demonstrates that the notion of "Philosophers Behaving Badly" (the title of a book by Rodgers and Thompson) is well supported by both casual observation and detailed research. In PBB we find, for example, that Bertrand Russell was called "Dirty Bertie" by those who knew him, and with good reason. In The Righteous Mind, the author calls upon research that shows philosophers are really a cut below "the common man", probably because their education has made them experts at rationalization. And in truth, a foray into the "Ring of Gyges" story in The Republic shows that we value a good reputation much more than actually being good.

Late in the book Dr. Haidt makes a strong case in favor of group selection, or multi-level selection, which is disparaged by many biologists, but without it, the theory of natural selection is too weak to explain relationships among social animals (and most are!). Among primates, humans are the most social, even compared to Bonobos. We are ultrasocial (the author's synonym for eusocial, but allowing for a much broader range of expression and cognition than found in eusocial insects such as bees or termites). Even a complete psychopath cares about reputation, if only to be (initially) attractive to victims. I'll leave it to you to read his 4-pronged defense of multilevel selection and how it supports grouping behavior.

I am much more taken by the statement that we are 90% Chimp and 10% Bee. Chimpanzees are quite social, but also very selfish, to a level akin to psychopathy in humans. Not having language, their only method of resolving disputes is physical force, somewhat modified by a group's dominance hierarchy. I recall reading an account of New Guinea tribesmen meeting in the forest. They spend a few minutes discussing their relatives, to determine if perhaps they are related to each other, and thus not duty bound to fight to the death. I believe language arose to facilitate such negotiations. Those who can talk and live will outbreed those who instantly fight and thus are more likely to die.

So, OK, we can talk, we can negotiate. Favor based on relatedness is understandable from an evolutionary viewpoint. But how about a Crip meeting a Blood in downtown Los Angeles? If they negotiate at all, it is to determine if some kind of truce is there, otherwise they fight. A Crip meeting another Crip "out of uniform" (not wearing gang insignia) may chastise him, but no deadly fight ensues. Yet they are probably not related. Individual selection cannot explain this.

Dr. Haidt frequently invokes Emile Durkheim, who seems to have "got it right", that humans live on two levels. Our Chimpish selfishness rules much of our daily activity. When we are with a group we belong to, however, we are driven by the need for good reputation. But there is more. Groups all have rituals, and participating in them often triggers a "hive switch". Under its influence, we become more Beeish (hivish?), ready to propagate the group, defend the group, and possibly kill or die for it. A threat to the group can also trigger the hive switch. For many Americans, the 9/11 attacks did so. Dr. Haidt, a proud liberal, found himself wanting to wear a flag pin on his lapel (he didn't, but he wanted to).

Group activities, whether "team building" games at a company retreat or the rites of a church, trigger the hive switch and foster powerful, and very enjoyable, feelings of group unity and connectedness. Thus we read on page 257 that "…the very practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship." It is not yet proven that this is a direct product of evolution, but I suspect it will be found to be so.

In the second section of the book, the motto is There's more to morality than harm and fairness. Looked at in a simple way, American Liberals seem to be motivated primarily by the desire to "help the helpless" and to promote "fairness", while American Conservatives care more about tradition. A deeper look led the author to discover the six moral "taste buds", which he also calls Moral Foundations, and to consider their origin and present expression:

• Care/Harm - evolved to motivate child care. Now it underlies the Welfare State and all kinds of "white knight syndrome".
• Fairness/Cheating - evolved to permit coordination and cooperation and reduce exploitation. Now Liberals exhort us to "soak the rich" and overtax them (further than we already do).
• Liberty/Oppression - evolved in response to bullying. Now underlies opposition to all kinds of societal restrictions as "oppression", and supports rebels against Authority (see below).
• Loyalty/Betrayal - evolved to support forming coalitions. Now it is the Circle the Wagons response to every question, legitimate or not.
• Authority/Subversion - evolved to regulate hierarchies. Now it tends toward Fascist overcontrol, or reacts into "Off the Pig" rebellion.
• Sanctity/Degradation - evolved to prevent poisoning (chemical or bacterial). Now disgust is used to condemn everything your political faction disagrees with (but be sure to circle the wagons if "your guy" is accused of any kind of degradation).

In 1972 I went to a Republican rally for President Richard Nixon, where he spoke. We were really revved up. Everybody's hive switch clicked full on! Within two years, I was mad as hell and deeply disappointed. He betrayed us all. If Bob Woodward was correct in All the President's Men, Nixon deeply despised the law and its restrictions. Nixon had nobody to write a book in his defense, at least not right away, but his later "rehabilitation" was based on some good things he had done (like opening relations with China), and did not address the Watergate matters, so "his side" was apparently no side. He remains a betrayer in my mind…or, perhaps, actually, in my heart.

This chart was prepared rather early on, when only 5 of the 6 moral taste buds had been chosen. It is found on p 161. The political Left relies for moral guidance on Care and on Fairness, with little regard (or active contempt) for Loyalty, Authority or Sanctity. The political Right relies more equally on all the taste buds. Later the Liberty/Oppression Foundation was split out from the Fairness/Cheating Foundation. Liberty has been found to trend with Care.

Note that, as befits those of a traditionalist mindset, among Conservatives the Authority Foundation is slightly the strongest. I took the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) found at www.yourmorals.org, and found that I rely on all the Foundations about equally.

Political partisanship and religion are discussed most fully in the third section, with the motto Morality binds and blinds. It is actually in this part that the hive switch is introduced and discussed in detail. It operates to temporarily overcome the effects of our WEIRD socialization: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic as we are throughout the West. In less WEIRD societies, collective tendencies are more pronounced, and the hive switch is even more effective at eliciting group feelings. Although, it is hard to imagine a greater example of hivish activity than we see in a sports stadium. This is the Bind part.

Those who are the WEIRDest tend to see the trees and not the forest. The author was fully of this mindset until a few months in India opened his eyes to a different kind of socialization. Outside the West, relationships trump individual "self determination". They may have something there. For example, most of my friends from India have had arranged marriages, where total family compatibility is an important part of choosing marriage partners, a matter much too important to entrust to the young "eligibles". They do tend to have stable and happy marriages, more so than here.

I find it interesting that the chart above has seven gradations of Left to Right. I have noted elsewhere that such gradations tend to correspond to a statistical standard deviation, and that differences greater than 2 standard deviations (2 sigma) render people mutually incomprehensible. This is the Blind part. The Left is at best indifferent to Loyalty and Authority, and openly disdainful of Sanctity. The lesser reliance on Care, Fairness and Liberty by the Right induces the Left to disparage them as "heartless" or even "cruel". And both ends hate the Moderates in the middle, even though the central three categories describe 90% of Americans.

I think it is clear that Conservatives are in better balance. They do not neglect any of the Foundations. It is a realistic stance. I also note that this study did not result in Dr. Haidt's becoming conservative. That would be going too far! But he is now a rare Liberal, being at least somewhat sympathetic and understanding of conservative motives. He probably remains an atheist also, though he disparages the New Atheists, who are actually anti-God (only Nontheists are genuinely indifferent to whether a god may exist).

Yet he records the results of a study of communes (Sosis, R. and E. R. Bressler, 2003. "Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion." Cross-Cultural Research 37:211-239) in which it was found that 6% of secular communes had lasted 20 years or more, compared to 39 percent of religious communes. And he quotes another study (Robert Putnam and David Campbell, 2010, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us):

By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.

We can compare this with the Biblical book of Judges. Twice in the book we find, "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes", written in connection with some horrifying story of anarchy and chaos. Three other places in the Bible we find injunctions against doing "right in your own eyes."

All this just skates over the surface of a wonderful book. We are moral because morality is needed to succeed as a species. A final statement by the author sums it up: "Morality is, in large part, and evolved response to the free rider problem." (in a note on p 349)

Our marvelous kluge

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physiology, brain, evolution

For the handful of people who actually follow this blog, the past nine days without a post indicate the difficulty I had finishing the latest book. While I enjoyed it and learned much, it was rough sledding, which I'll get into. I also find that, having retired, I am busier than when I was working, so for these few months at least, I have only written to review a book.

This common illustration of the Ascent of Man represents what most people think of as Evolution. As described in The Brain: Big Bangs, Behaviors and Beliefs by Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall, evolution works more like one of those massive multiplayer quest games. Imagine the players being all species of animals, from flatworms and beetles and clams and fish to birds and frogs and squids and primates and cattle. As the "players" move through the game, this one will encounter some new charm or tool or whatever, and that one will encounter something else. "Picking up" the new gewgaw may increase the survival of that kind of animal. After some time passes (lots of it!) some players will have gathered a number of such items, more might have gained one or two, even more have nothing new, and many have in one way or another "lost" and vanished from the game.

But what, exactly, is winning? Attaining the greatest percent of the biosphere? Certain species of termite seem to have won that hands down. Of course, in the context of The Brain, the biggest brain is thought of as the "winner", and many folks confidently expect humans to get brainier in the future.

The authors emphasize repeatedly that there was no preordained big brained "winner" of the "smarts lottery". Looking further back than the ape in the picture above, many of us learned that there is a "lizard brain" deep in our skulls, covered over with a "mammal brain", and finally covered over with the famed "gray matter" that makes us human, but with certain lizardly and "primitive mammal" mental quirks. Not really.

True, we are the current expression of 3.5 billion years or more of biological evolution. However, so is every other species on Earth! Your pet dog or cat, the robin in the yard, the worms in the dirt, the ants invading your kitchen, and the bacteria that help all of them digest their food, all have the same 3.5 billion-year evolutionary descent. Every leaf on a tree can be traced back to the same root. Humans are, as regards brains, the "lucky ones". If we succeed in bombing ourselves to smithereens, though, "lucky" isn't really the right word for it.

Well, the above is my take on it. The authors' take is detailed and comprehensive, showing (as well as we may know) how many features of the brain were developed and appended to what came before. The jargon gets a bit dense at times, but it seems the authors' attitude must be, "The readers are adults. They'll catch on, or look up what they must." We even find an occasional long chemical name, for no good reason I can determine. Lazy readers won't get far.

So, starting with the lowliest animals—and even with plants, which have some rudiments of cell-to-cell communication—we are led through the development of nerve nets, nervous systems, clusters of ganglia, brains, and the higglety-pigglety addition of features and structures to brains of all types, insofar as they tended to improve the lot of the animals possessing them. Along the way, we learn certain principles of evolutionary study, such as the importance of an out-group to clarify how to structure a portion of an evolutionary tree.

Natural selection is strict. Every feature of every creature has to be adaptive or it (the feature) will vanish. It can take many generations, but just as the human race is evolving toward having 28 teeth instead of 32, and losing our appendix, stuff we don't need is being done away with. That goes for the many parts of our brains. We have 'em because they are useful. At the end, the singular new feature that is, so far as we know, not present in any other Earthly animal, is our capacity to create and manipulate symbols.

Yes, I know that certain great apes have been taught to communicate using Yerkish or ASL, but the level of discourse possible with any of them is very, very limited. None of them created something like Yerkish; human experimenters did so. And transcripts of "conversations" that go for more than two or three exchanges make it clear that apes' intellect stops well before the level of a human 2-year-old. Abstract reasoning is beyond young human children, and much further beyond apes. Not only so, the behavioral clues gathered by anthropologists indicate that symbol manipulation, that is, language skills that we take for granted, were probably not present in our cousins the Neandertals or the earlier Homo heidelbergensis. The Neandertals (the book uses the word Neanderthals), though their average brain size was slightly larger than ours, apparently had a qualitatively different brain. They were very, very bright and capable, but there were no Neandertal Spinozas or Mozarts or Picassos or Feynmans. Hey, I just thought of a title for a great book for someone competent to research and write it: Did Neandertals Dance? I am betting they didn't.


At this point, I am going to chase another rabbit. I like the book and recommend it, but it does show marks of overspecialization on the part of the authors. They needed some more broadly-based scientists to check it. I hope this doesn't sound like sour grapes or piling on, but here goes:

• In the second half of the book, where the authors are wholly comfortable with the material, there is only one deficiency. They do not mention the Mirror Test. Humans over the age of 18 months, the great apes, one or two species of monkey, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants, and at least one species of bird, the European Magpie, can all recognize themselves in a mirror. This indicates a level of self-awareness that might be called consciousness, though many bridle at that notion for nonhuman animals.
• Working back to front: on p. 174 in an illustration of the limbic system in 3 animals, the Olfactory Bulb in the 3 labels is called the Optic Bulb in the main caption. Proofreading needed.
• On p. 142, we find the sentence, "Many bacteria have light-sensing cells that help them orient…" Bacteria are single-celled. They don't have cells, they are cells. They have light-sensing chemicals, perhaps even localized within the cell.
• On p. 135, they state that magnetotactic bacteria sense up and down magnetically, because the natural magnetic field is horizontal. The key sentence is "The magnetosomes allow the bacteria to orient North-South, so theat they are parallel to the earth's surface." Not so. Earth's magnetic field is horizontal only at the magnetic equator. Everywhere else it dips. Throughout most of the U.S., and at similar latitudes in Europe and Siberia, and in South America and southern Africa, the dip is in the 40°-60° range. The dip is vertical at the geomagnetic poles. The bacteria can follow the dipping field either toward or away from light. Bacteria from very near the geomagnetic equator would find the field useless for guiding vertical motion.
• On p. 105, an unusual typo appears: "A micrometer is one billionth of a meter…'. No, it is a millionth of a meter. I don't know if this was an author error, but since most folks do their own typesetting these days, I think it was.
• I find two problems on p. 85. Firstly, the reason creatures that molt are called Ecdysozoa is stated "…because a hormone called ecdysone is involved in the molting". The two "ecdy" words are related, but in this way: εκδύομαι, or ecdyomai, is the Greek word for "undress". Secondly, it is stated that Barnacles are Bryozoans. Whoo, boy! These are in different phyla. Barnacles are arthropods, essentially like crayfish hiding in a cone-shaped shell, without claws. Bryozoa are "moss animals", more similar to sponges.
• Now for something truly extraordinary. On p. 58 it is stated that the number of connections in a human brain is about 100 trillion (10¹⁴). That's right. Then we find, "Using the area of axons as a guide, the number of potential connections in a human brain has been estimated to be more than 10 to the 76th power. That is a 1 with 76 zeroes after it, a number in the same range as the number of particles in the known universe." I must conclude that the authors are entirely ignorant of both astronomy and physics! Whoever did this "estimate" is worse. Brain connections are made via synapses, and a synapse has a volume of about one cubic micron. That means a cubic millimeter could contain a billion synapses. So far so good. A small, 1,000 cc brain contains one million cubic millimeters, so if that brain were nothing but synapses (no room left for axons, dendrites and so forth), there would be a million billion of them, or 10¹⁵. The largest human brains are about 2,000 cc in size, so at most, the number of connections must be quite a bit less than 2x10¹⁵. This error, a factor of about 10⁵¹, is in magnitude the largest error I have ever encountered in print!

Enough of that. I have a chemist friend who is pretty unaware of anything except chemistry. Chemical IQ: 180; all other kinds of IQ: about 80. A little more thoughtful proofreading would have helped The Brain a great deal. It makes me wonder if the 5 people who wrote the blurbs on the back book jacket actually read the book. Maybe they're equally over-specialized and just didn't notice.

Ways we think about medical care

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine

Considering the number of times I have had to be my own doctor, one might expect me to be quite skeptical and resistant to doctors' advice. So when I saw Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You by Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband (both MD's), I hoped two things. Firstly, that they would refrain from telling me what I think, and secondly, that I would find how rare or common my experience and medical thinking style is. I was pleasantly gratified on both counts.

In the second chapter, both Jerry and Pam (who are husband and wife, but they play it down) present their own histories. In their own ways, both were strong "believers" in medicine who became more skeptical as time passed. They have learned to think about a suggested treatment: sometimes they will go along, and at other times ignore the recommendation or modify it. It quite much parallels my own path. Because of a few instances, I am very, very glad to benefit from 21^st Century medicine. Yet I have learned just how fallible doctors are (about as fallible as I am, and that has grown on me also!).

Some people by nature and perhaps upbringing are very much believers in medicine and not only take all their doctor's recommendations, they may be quite proactive and push for more care. Others are doubters and push back if they push at all, but more frequently ignore most medical advice and only partake of medical care in the most dire circumstances. I don't know if the split is 50-50 or skewed. But I think of my grandmother. She had her first child in a hospital, in 1918. She was not at all pleased and vowed not to enter a hospital again. She had her second and third children (my Mom was #2) at home on the kitchen table, assisted by her husband. At age 81, she hosted me for a couple of months when I moved to her town and was apartment hunting. She was strong and witty. The next year she had a stroke and died a day later without regaining consciousness. My mother said, "It is a good thing she didn't wake up in the hospital. She would have died anyway, of fear or rage, I am not sure which."

The book's chapters center on stories, of a patient wrestling with the decision whether to take a statin for moderately high cholesterol (a twin of my wife's dilemma); of Jerry regretting allowing a back operation and Pam deciding to skip an MRI for a sprained ankle because it was prescribed earlier than usual; of a man brought back from death's door by the transplant of a nearly discarded liver; of treatments that didn't work, and those that did.

One amazing chapter shows how people's thinking evolves once they fall ill. In a typical case, a healthy person in middle or late-middle age might write a Living Will or Advance Directive. I have helped my father do so, not in late-middle age, but at the age of 89. One frequently hears, "Oh, I don't want any heroics. I wouldn't want to live with (horrible disease of your choice) anyway." Then when (horrible disease) arises, many people change their mind. They find that, if you live with a condition for a while, you adjust, and can still find much to enjoy. Only in cases of chronic agony do we find people demanding a "Kevorkian remedy". The authors state several times that a person in good health simply cannot imagine what he or she might think once major illness occurs. I liken it to the way we tell our kids, "Just wait until you have kids." We know they can't imagine it; they can only live it.

I found it no surprise that the authors recommend a balanced attitude: take everything with a grain of salt, but be wise and don't reject your doctor's advice out of hand (what did you see the doctor for, otherwise?). My own attitude is that of a contract foreman. My doctor is hired help. He (my current doc is male) has knowledge I don't have, and knows a gaggle of experts who have more specialized knowledge, and can do things he and I cannot do. I seek their advice, but make them talk me into any treatment they think I need. When you need a doctor, you really need one!

I am sure glad for the surgeon I was directed to in 2000, for my cancer surgery. He brought me back from death's door. He was a "contractor" to whom I trusted my life, and whom I empowered to make decisions when I could not (because I was anesthetized). He faithfully discharged his task (it took him 5 hours). Surgery is the prime example of our occasional need to empower another to temporarily control our life.

But in the more usual cases, I find myself in long-term negotiations with my doctor over blood pressure—to medicate or not—and my weight and level of exercise. In such things, I am more comfortable being able to have a say in how I am treated. Absent a life-or-death scenario, continued negotiation is a great kind of relationship to have with a doctor. You just need to have one who is comfortable with that. If your doctor is a "My way or the highway!" sort, take the hint and take the highway. Get a doctor who will negotiate, but also knows when to say, "Hold on, there, this one can kill you quick. Let's do something NOW!"

I sure love it when doctors are not only good physicians, but can also write so well. Kudos to this couple.

Ten legs and a hard shell

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, crabs, arthropods

Meeting a crab this size would take the edge off my desire for crab cakes. What must it be like for this fascinating creature to live in the depths of the sea, without enemies (except humans, of course)? The Japanese Spider Crab, Macrocheira kaempferi, can get 12 feet (3.7m) from claw to claw and weigh 20 lbs (9 kg) or more. There is a crab species that can weigh twice as much, but is nowhere near as spectacular as the 9-footer (2.7m) "Big Daddy", seen here in Blackpool, England (image from FoodBeast.com). You can see from the small size of the claws that Big Daddy has little to fear in his native habitat.

At the other end of the scale, little, semiparasitic Pea Crabs grow up to measure about 2cm (females) or 0.8cm (males). They live in the gill chambers of mussels and other shellfish, mainly in the northern hemisphere (Image of a species found in California, Fabia subquadrata, from the RaceRocks website).

With almost 6,800 known species, the crabs number about a tenth of crustacean species. As a child I was surprised to find out that the little pill bugs in the garden are more closely related to crabs than to millipedes. They are formally called woodlice, and are also crustaceans.

Not all crabs walk sideways, but the familiar ones do, so Walking Sideways: The Remarkable World of Crabs is an apt title for a new book by Judith S. Weis. The ten chapters present the full range of crab knowledge and lore, and 23 vignettes scattered throughout add associated subjects, such as lobsters, festivals related to crabs (mainly as food), their use in medicine, and as pets.

Presenting crabs and inducing us to sympathize with them is a harder sell than telling us what life is like for birds (see this review from last month). Crabs are just too strange. Compared to ours, their internal body plan is upside-down: The main nerve bundle, comparable to our spinal cord, runs down their front, while the digestive organs are in back. Our skeleton is internal, theirs is external, and needs to be replaced frequently. Hmm, I'd sure like to replace my skeleton, with some of its creaky joints! We have two jaws; they have two or three pairs of claw-like mouth parts, and can taste their food before it gets into the mouth. Their eyes are usually on stalks, and are more closely related to the eye of a dragonfly with its wonderful geodesic-dome shape, than to our liquid cameras. They have gills, that take up at least as much of their body cavity as our lungs do of ours. Their blood is blue, and they have arteries but no veins: the blood just leaks out of capillaries and sloshes back toward the heart.

For all that, they are intensely fascinating. Many years ago, when it was allowed to visit tide pools in California, I got the biggest kick out of finding some crabs and watching them. Starfish and snails are cool enough, but they move slowly. Crabs scuttle right along, and aren't afraid to challenge an intruding human child, ready to give a sharp nip if needed. I wasn't afraid of a nip from a crab up to perhaps an inch across the shell, but any bigger, and they could Hurt!

The author packs so much information into the book's 214 pages that it has to be read rather slowly. It is dense reading, and I hope it does not put people off. The author would clearly like to tell us everything about crabs, but had to limit herself. There are so many, which occupy so many different habitats, that a large encyclopedia would not suffice. And new things are being
learned constantly. At the current rate of a new species found every few months, they ought soon to surpass 6,800 known species. It is thought that we have found only a tenth of them. This purple crab from the Philippines (image from Mother Nature Network) is one of four new, purple crab species discovered just a year ago.

Another ambiguous whack at the origin of J.C.

kw: book reviews, science fiction, political fiction, moon, apollo program, conspiracies

After reading The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick, two writers whose work I admire greatly, I gave myself a while to think. Then I did something I haven't done before: took a look at other reviews. I wanted to see who, if any, shared my concern about yet another "ancient alien" explanation for the Christian religion. Didn't find anyone, as expected. Very few Christians read science fiction anyway. Sorry if that's a spoiler, guys.

But it is no spoiler to guess, without opening the book, that a novel by McDevitt and Resnick is going to bring in aliens in some way. I do wonder about the title, though. Other than connecting the plot with ancient Greece, it makes little demand on the reader, and actually seems irrelevant.

For the record: In the Iliad, Cassandra was a prophetess who spurned the advances of Zeus (he had more conquests than Wilt the Stilt). He angrily cursed her to be always right and never believed. Turns out to be a big factor in the demise of Troy. I never figured out how it connected with the 50-year-old alleged conspiracy in the book. I guess they had to name it something.

There is one bit of nonsense that I didn't expect from writers who are known for hardheaded science. During the return trip from the Moon:

"It's raining out."
"Raining?"
"Meteors."
Bucky looked out the window and watched a cloud of rocks sweep past.

Now, that's a bit of supreme silliness. Any "rocks" sweeping by will be going about 30 km/s, with respect to the spacecraft, which is moving something like 7 km/s toward Earth. A piece the size of a golf ball would be in sight no more than a millisecond or two; if you knew exactly where to look, you'd still miss it. Bucky, by the way, is a billionaire (he claims $3B) who is funding a commercial venture to return to the Moon. He must have some powerful aces up his sleeve; in 1969 dollars, each visit to the Moon cost about $4B; multiply by 8 for current dollars.

All that aside, the book is a great read. While it is pretty clear quite early that the "conspiracy" is going to be validated, precisely what it is, and why, are kept just out of reach until very late. That's a prime piece of plot management. The writers make a reader care about, not just the "hero", Jerry, but his erstwhile antagonist and then employer, Bucky, and several others. While I had to suspend more disbelief than usual, I enjoyed the novel.

The early evolutionists

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, evolutionary theory, short biographies, history of science

The fundamental divide between the facts of evolution and the theory of evolution has been at the root of both the scientific and theological debates about "transformation of species" for centuries. In Charles Darwin's correspondence he once referred to "us transformationists", using the word derived from ancient speculations about species change. As Rebecca Stott brings out in Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, some early attacks upon On the Origin of Species were accusations of plagiarism!

Poor Darwin was assailed from all sides. The religious censured him for impiety (as many still do), and most scientists either decried his theory of natural selection or denied his priority. Claimants to priority put forward by various "correspondents" included Aristotle, nearly 2,200 years earlier, and Jahiz of Basra "only" 1,000 years before Darwin's publication. As Professor Stott shows, these first two at least are bogus claims. Anything that either man may have written about mutability of species served only as a foil to clear statements on their eternal fixity. Aristotle in particular may have been curious about the apparent ambiguity of sponges, but seems to have concluded that they were rather peculiar plants. It was not until the 1820s that the motile larvae of sponges were observed, giving the first clue to their animal nature.

However, numbers of earlier students of natural history did speculate about species change. Such speculations were based on observations that the boundaries of "kinds" were not as fixed as one might like. Certain hybrids were known, for example, some sterile and others not. In the 16^th to the early 19^th Centuries, however, just to speculate in print could get you in serious trouble with the theocratic governments of Europe. There were notions that all species might have somehow been derived from a "primordial filament". Those who published such views were at great risk.

Prior to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1800, though, nobody put forward a theoretical explanation for a mechanism of species change. His theory is called "Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics", and the best-known example is the giraffe, which is imagined to have arisen as ancestral forms stretched their necks to reach the leaves of trees; those which could stretch the best passed on longer necks to their descendants. Charles Lyell effectively demolished this view before Darwin had developed his own theory.

As the mini-biographies in Darwin's Ghosts show, those who published "transformationist" views prior to 1840—including Erasmus Darwin—and thus risked censure, persecution and death, laid the groundwork for Darwin to publish Origin and survive with his skin intact. The only person who clearly enunciated a theory of Natural Selection, independently of Darwin, was Alfred Wallace. The gentlemanly way both Darwin and Wallace and the scientists Darwin consulted handled the priority question is a highlight of scientific history.

The priority question arose only because the theocratic risk had induced Darwin to spend some twenty years gathering added examples and refining his arguments, so there would be no refuting his theory (so greatly did he underestimate the persistence of Pharisaical creationists!). Had he published his theory soon after he had confirmed it, Wallace would likely have known about it, and possibly had the book in hand during his expeditions in the Malay Archipelago. Think what a different route his collecting activities might have taken were he searching for further confirmation of the theory! However, his independent derivation of Natural Selection, based on Malthusian theory for both him and Darwin, strengthened Darwin's supporters when the debates heated up in the decades after 1860.

The debates continue, sad to say. While proponents of Judaism don't seem to care much, both Christian and Muslim apologists decry all aspects of evolutionary theory, from the great spans of time it needs to the notion that human dignity is denigrated (We're apes, folks. Get used to it). Now that millions of fossils and their stratigraphic relations have shown that extinction and evolution are factual, many are forced by the evidence to admit that "life has changed through time", which is how evolution is defined. But the Theory of evolution! Now, that's where the Shinola "hits the fan". The Theory is Natural Selection. Its outline is simple:

• Most individuals of all species die young and thus do not reproduce.
• There is variation among the members of any species.
• Certain variations tend to help an individual survive and reproduce, while others tend to hinder or prevent survival and reproduction.
• There is a mechanism that leads to increased variation within a species, nowadays called mutation.
• Over long periods of time, variations that promote survival and reproduction increase, even as others decrease.

All this together is also called Descent with Modification, a term Darwin first used. By contrast, in the prior theory, Lamarckian evolution,  modification precedes descent.

The matter of mutation was unknown to Darwin and his contemporaries. So was the digital nature of inheritance. When I was young, "mutation" in popular culture was thought to be some sudden, monumental change, such as the radioactive spider biting Peter Parker to turn him into Spider Man. Actual mutations are tiny, tiny variations in DNA. Every one of us contains between 50 and 100 such mutations that make each person genetically different from being exact replicas of the parental mix that produced the egg and sperm that fused to form the embryo that became him or her. Even "identical" twins are different in this way. Most mutations have no effect. Of the very few that do, some cause the embryo to die very early, some lead to birth defects or other debilities, while a few may be beneficial. These last are most likely to help us or our descendants survive better.

In a later edition of Origin, Darwin was persuaded to add a Historical Sketch, to outline the ideas of his predecessors. This Sketch is included as the last chapter of Darwin's Ghosts. So what is the secret of this Secret History? That Darwin and Wallace really did produce an entirely original theory. Natural Selection has been called the most successful scientific theory (proponents of quantum electrodynamics or the general theory of relativity notwithstanding). It has been said that without Natural Selection, none of biology makes any sense, but with it, everything does.

For me, the book placed a solid stamp on the originality of the theory of Natural Selection. Those who accused Darwin of plagiarism were mistaken. No theory of descent with modification preceded Darwin and Wallace. No substantial variant theory has stood the test of time. Subscripts such as "punctuated equilibrium" add details that explain the effect of sudden shifts of environment, for example, without changing the essential nature of Darwinism.

A face for all occasions

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, typography, type faces, fonts

I have a few methods of locating new books of interest, but I missed this one when it came out a couple of years ago: Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. Take a brief look at the book title. Why is slanty type called "Italic"? And why is the text typeface called "Roman" (though a growing number of publications use "Swiss" typefaces)? You'll find answers in Garfield's romp through the history of typeface design.

And what a romp it is! Helpfully, it starts in the middle and runs both ways through time. It would be a bit boring to just plod along the timeline from Gutenberg's Fraktur faces, what my parents called "Old German", through serifed faces based on Roman inscriptions of the Imperial period (particularly Trajan's Column, still the standard-bearer), to sans-serif faces that were more "modern" some 100 years ago. Instead, he starts by discussing what makes a typeface more or less likeable and useful.

The 22 main chapters are interspersed with 12 short chapters on individual typefaces, or groups of them (or, in one case, a very particular symbol). The first of these is the much-used but much-hated Gill Sans. Loved because it is legible, hated because Eric Gill offended nearly everybody, primarily by his Satyric tendencies.

To any who don't now, a "serif" typeface is one like Georgia, which I chose for this review. A serif is the little blip or hook such as the hangy-downs on the capital T or the feet of a capital A or small n. Fonts without these, such as Verdana, a very common Web font, are called "sans-serif", "sans" being French for "without". Also, Fraktur is a lot like Old English (look both up in Google Images; the differences appear minor until you really look), but with the extra letters needed for German typesetting. Both are also called Black Letter; they use a lot of ink on the page. Finally, a font was originally a specific style and size of a particular type face, such as "Georgia Regular 12 point" or "Headline Bold 48 point". These days, with TrueType and OpenType standards for re-sizable glyphs, a font file contains the glyph definitions for a specific style, and several files are needed to make full use of a particular typeface. Thus "Georgia" refers to a typeface, while "Georgia Bold" refers to its boldface variant. Many typefaces intended for text have four variants: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. But many commercial fonts have 20 or 30 variants, including light, heavy, and hollow versions, plus condensed or extra-wide, even "fat".

Certain typefaces have become so widespread they seem part of the furniture. In England, for example, most road signs used a typeface named Transport, a sans-serif face using both upper and lower case. Its promoters established that a sign reading Watling 4 km is easier to comprehend at a glance than WATLING 4 KM. The Transport face is found on English language road signs around the world. This bears on a point Garfield makes repeatedly. Numerous typeface standard-bearers have stated that if you notice the typeface, it interferes with the message. Thus fancier or prettier faces are to be reserved for special uses.

Still, the number of very useful typefaces is large. This clip from Camdon Wilde's Periodic Table of Typefaces shows just a few of the 100 most popular types (at this point in time). If you're curious, #2 is Futura, also sans-serif, and #3 is Bodoni, a hugely popular serif font.

I have collected font files for my own use for many years. Though I am discriminating, still the collection numbers 1,840 files. For convenience I have them in 9 categories and 54 sub-categories. Text fonts make up a large part of the collection, with serif and sans-serif faces categorized along a wide-narrow continuum, from ultra-condensed to ultra-wide.

I also have a careful selection of decorative faces, including 200 specifically useful for initial capitals (drop caps), that I like to use to spruce up a text document.

Here is a glimpse at just a few of the 200:

Among those seen here, Goldstone and Genzsch are the most useful. The frilly ones are easier to comprehend in larger sizes. A 3-line drop cap in 12-point text is about 40 points, depending on the ledding (now spelled leading, but pronounced with a short "e", not the "ee" sound), which refers to the extra space between lines of type that improve readability.

Type design went through several stages of mechanical production, but computer design is now ubiquitous. Punch cutting is practiced only by a few gluttons for punishment. A multitude of typeface design programs makes the craft accessible to all, and the existence of more than 100,000 electronic typefaces testifies that it isn't that hard. Making a face that will last, though, that's hard. Someone I expect to make a lasting mark on typeface design is Ray Larabie, who has designed hundreds of typefaces. I have obtained several that I like very much. There are others designers who are equally prolific, something quite impossible in the days of punch cutting in metal.

The book just scratches the surface of the wonders of typefaces and their design. I seldom mention a book's bibliography, but I recommend it for those interested in the subject. There is also a fine list of useful web resources. And by all means, if you've a hankering for type design, there is plenty of freeware available. I am partial to FCP, which has a free version, but the "good" version is not too costly. Try your hand at type design. Of course your first effort will be junk, but you'll learn something. And you'll learn a lot from the book!

Don't envy the bird its flight

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, natural history

Helen Macdonald wrote that, because a falcon has such "high-speed sensory and nervous systems ... their world moves about ten times faster than ours." I would turn that around. Events that seem very fast to us would seem much slower to a falcon. Very rapid senses characterize many birds. For example, our instruments show us that some bird songs which seem to us to contain just a few notes, really contain many very quick notes that we don't perceive, but other birds do. Where we hear a buzzy chirp, a fellow bird will hear a complex and perhaps beautiful melody.

Tim Birkhead has written Bird Sense: What It's Like to be a Bird to help us understand the sensory lives of birds. The speed of reaction noted above relates to at least sight and hearing, and possibly to touch. These are three of the seven sense areas that the book's seven chapters evoke: Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, Magnetism, and Emotions.

About sight, there is little controversy. It is well known that many birds' vision is much sharper than ours, while others see in smaller time slices, and that many see ultraviolet light, which we do not (Actually, someone who has had their lenses removed can see UV, which was filtered out by the yellow lens. Our blue receptor can see quite a bit deeper into the UV if given the chance. But birds have a fourth, UV-sensitive receptor that we don't have). Is any of these "better" than human sight? No bird has the full Monte. Each is fitted for the life it leads.

The chemical senses, taste and smell, have been much more troublesome. For one thing, they are harder to test for. To most people a bird's beak or bill is little more than a specialized fingernail sort of thing, and they do not consider whether it can feel or taste anything. Actually, it is full of nerves and several types of receptors, including taste buds, though in a bird, the majority of taste buds are farther back in the mouth. But how else will a bird know, when just the tip of its beak begins to pierce a bad-tasting caterpillar, that it is inedible? Yet it does know, and typically releases the insect before injuring it much.

What would it be like to directly sense the Earth's magnetic field? To always know where North is (unless you live near one of the magnetic poles)? Something the book doesn't bring out is that the magnetic vector changes its vertical angle as you approach or recede from the pole. I do recall reading about a study that showed how many migrating birds know by the magnetic dip that they are far enough north to land and nest.

I should like to have seen a chapter on the body-kinesthetic sense of birds, and how it compares with ours (this is sometimes called proprioception). Their physical reactions are so swift we can't see, for example, how an owl actually closes its attack on a mouse unless we film it at high speed.

All this high speed stuff got me to thinking. The speed of nerve impulses in humans ranges from rather slow to 100 m/s or more. In the brain, 40 m/s is more common. Our brain is larger than that of any bird. The longest axons in the human brain are about 16 cm. It stands to reason that a brain with fibers no longer than 1-2 cm can complete a thought about ten times as fast. Come to think of it, most birds and animals are smallish. The reflex arc between your fingertip and the ganglion in your spine that signals "Ouch! Pull away!!" totals more than half a meter in length. At 100 m/s, you can't possibly pull away in less than 8-10 ms, and most of us react in about 20 ms. A robin's longest reflex arc is no more than 0.15 m, so it could conceivably react to a nip on a toe or wing tip in 2 ms or less.

And back to the (possibly) beautiful melody. Do birds have an aesthetic sense? I have learned to turn anthropomorphism around. Of course they do. We have emotions because our vertebrate ancestors had emotions. If we can sense beauty, it must have preceded us. I suspect that any brain big enough to register pleasure and fear and anger can also register beauty. That would include all mammals and birds, and octopodes/octopuses (which are known to play), and perhaps squids and cuttlefish.

These are just a scant few items I found interesting. Bird Sense is fascinating, full of great anecdotes (Dr. Birkhead has been many places most of us have never heard of) and the results of an immense volume of research. I'd have gobbled up a book twice the size.

Malice on the Moon

kw: book reviews, science fiction, astronomy

Many years ago I read the compilation Venus Equilateral, by George O. Smith. For the first time I felt a strong disconnect between the wonder of the technical ideas and the overdone social duality between the "good guys" and the "bad guy". The notion of using the L-4 and L-5 points in the orbit of Venus as communications relay stations was enthralling. But the badness of the bad guy, in particular, was too melodramatic and rung false. I may have been socially backward and awkward at age 22, but even I already knew that people are complex creatures, a mix of good and bad. However, it served a purpose for me: I began to consciously expand my social horizons, to grow out of my youthful nerdiness.

Reading Farside by Ben Bova, I felt a sense of déjà vu, a kind of "here we go again" feeling. In the midst of a wonderful setting—the creation of a large optical interferometer on the outward-facing side of the Moon—the human story is a jarring contradiction. As the drama of politics-of-revenge, fueled by sexual jealousy, played out, I felt it was just too much. There has to be a better human story for Bova to put in this setting. But I thought over his prior novels, and I realized it is the only kind of politics he uses, perhaps the only kind he understands. So let's put all that aside and glance at the interesting ideas:

1. An astronomical puzzle: A planet has been found circling Sirius A, the Dog Star, a class A star about 8 light years distant. Single-instrument observations have yielded tantalizing hints of an atmosphere, and it is a twin of Earth in size, in the habitable zone about its central star. The puzzle? Sirius B, now a hot white dwarf, is known to have novaed in the last few thousand years. It ought to have stripped off any atmosphere from Sirius C, as the planet is being called. The "hints" come from observations of transits; the orbit of Sirius C is lined up so that it transits Sirius A, and the shadow disk has an unexpected fuzziness. More about this momentarily.
2. An interferometer of three 100-m diameter telescopes placed at many km distance, in an equilateral triangle I presume, around Farside Station, located as exactly opposite Earth as possible.
3. Traditional methods of mirror-building have produced one mirror as the story opens, but it has been damaged. The option is explored of using nanotechnology to either repair or replace this glass dish quickly. By the end of the book, nanotech has triumphed, and the observatory is in operation.
4. Nanotech plays a bigger rôle than this, however. For the chief of the nanotech operations, nanomachines in her body are keeping her healthy, and a chief engineer who must spend much of his time outside, where radiation exposure is damaging, is offered the chance for nanotech repair. That he takes the offer could have become a more interesting story than what we have in this novel. Instead it becomes a red herring during detective work to uncover who is using nano-gobblers to sabotage the telescope-building operation.
5. The goal of the interferometer is to image the planetary surface of Sirius C and get spectra of its atmosphere, to determine just how Earth-like it may be.

I just had to figure out what it takes to observe details on a planet that is 8 light years distant. Let's first remember that the moon's diameter is 3,476km, so an interferometer has to be smaller than that. A part of the story in which it takes about 30 hours to drive from Farside Station to one of the mirror locations in some kind of Moon buggy sets the scale at about half that, maybe more. One crater identified is Mendeleev, from which I conclude that the size is about 2,500 km, each telescope about 1,250 km from Farside Station. The triangle configuration makes the effective diameter closer to 2,000 km.

Eight light years is about 76 trillion km. A telescope that can see Sirius C (diameter close to 13,000 km) as something more than a 1-pixel dot at such a distance must be at least 3.3 km in diameter. There goes the hint about fuzziness during a transit, using a single telescope of more "ordinary" size such as 20-40m (what we might expect in a few decades). Also, the transits would be 10 years apart. Sirius A is a hot class A star, so the habitable zone is quite a distance away, 8-9 AU.

To see features as small as 10 km on Sirius C, the interferometer's effective diameter must be 4,160 km. With about 2,000 km, the smallest features visible would be a bit over 20 km across. If the full lunar circle were used, you could get below the 15 km range. That's it. It isn't too bad; it works out to a planetary image 600-800 pixels across. This image of Earth is about 800 px across, though this presentation is about half that; click on the image to see it full size.

That is actually an impressive amount of detail. If we could see detail like this on a planet 8 light years away, we'd have a good first impression of its habitability. The biggest clue would be the presence of water and oxygen, or perhaps a different indicator of an atmosphere strongly out of chemical equilibrium. Equilibrium equals sterility.

Just to be a squidge about it, though, we'd really like to see such images out to much greater distances. At 80 light years rather than 8, the earth would appear like this to the Farside observatory. At 800 light years, the image would be a mere 6-8 pixels across. Of course, farther out than about 20 light years, if we were to find a sister Earth, and it were inhabited, conversation with the inhabitants would be a decidedly long-term matter, with decades between "Hello, I am John of Earth" and "Hello, I am Rover, how are you?".

Bova's writing skills are great enough that the book is a quick read, in spite of my discomfort with the melodrama. I keep hoping we, or someone, will regain the gumption to return to the Moon and set up a more permanent presence there. Perhaps someday a Farside Station Observatory will become a reality.

Everything affects everything

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quantum mechanics, quantum theory, entanglement

A couple of quotes are in order:

"Entanglement is not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics." —Erwin Schrödinger

"The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." —J.B.S. Haldane

Mathematics professor Amir D. Aczel, whose books illuminate the mysteries of science and mathematics for "the public", has tackled the fundamental scientific mystery in Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics. He has taken on the unenviable job to explain something nobody can understand to everybody else. This is truly to unscrew the inscrutable!

"Entanglement" has a specific meaning in physics. Certain processes, such as the mutual annihilation of an electron and a positron, or the two-photon cascade in the decay of "excited" states of many kinds of atoms, produce a pair of photons that have exactly opposite values of certain quantum properties such as spin or polarization. Then, if you measure the property of one of them, you know that the other one has the opposite property. This is most of the aforesaid meaning; to make it complete, two provisos are needed: firstly, that entanglement is possible between more than photons, but also electrons and any other kinds of particles that can be produced in such linked pairs (for example, the Cooper Pairs of electrons that make superconductivity possible); and secondly, that the actual values of the property to be measured exist in superposition on both particles, until a measurement is taken on one of them, and then in some way the other particle takes on the opposite property, instantly, with zero delay. This last proviso, the core of the Copenhagen Interpretation, is what so bothered Einstein, and he went to his grave believing it could not be so. He called it "spooky action at a distance".

Dr. Aczel uses twenty chapters filled with stories, mini-biographies, explanations, and an occasional formula, to tease out the development of the ideas and experiments that have led to the inescapable conclusion that entanglement really occurs, and that there are not some "hidden variables" that determine the values we will measure at the time of our choosing. This is a subtle point, and one I find hard to imagine, let alone describe.

However, superposition of states is not confined to entanglement. It is everywhere. It is the reason we cannot see with infinite clarity. We call it diffraction. Most people never encounter diffraction to any bothersome extent. But anyone who owns a microscope or telescope knows about it. However, you don't even need one of those. A pinhole will do.

Try this. Take three pieces of aluminum foil a few cm in size. For ease of handling, make suitable holes in cardboard and tape the foils over the holes. Pierce one with a 3-penny nail or a sharpened piece of 14-gauge wire. If carefully done, you get a 2mm hole (what works best for me is holding the foil against a piece of Styrofoam to pierce it). Pierce the second with the thinnest pin or needle you can find. With luck, you can make a hole in the range 1/2-3/4 mm in diameter. With the third, hold it against a piece of glass, and just barely poke it with the tip of your sharpest pin. You may need to twist the pin to get the point to just go through. With luck, you will get a hole 1/10 mm in diameter. In a darkened room, shine a flashlight through the largest hole, holding it about half a meter from the wall or a light-colored surface (such as a piece of paper taped to the wall). The light spot will be about the same size as the hole. Then shine the light through the middle-sized hole. The spot will be dimmer, but nearly the same size; definitely larger than the hole itself. Now shine the light through the third, tiny pinhole. You may not see much at first. Move the hole closer to the wall until you can see the spot. Even with it held rather close to the wall, the spot will be much larger than the pinhole, and may be as much as 5mm across.

It is a matter of ratio. The width of the spot divided by the distance between the hole and the wall is the same as the diameter of the hole divided by the wavelength of the light. A 1/10 mm hole is 100 microns. Yellow light has a wavelength of 0.6 microns, so the ratio is about 160:1. If the hole and light are held 500mm from the wall, the spot's size will be about 500/160 or 3mm. Now, why are tiny photons, with a wavelength of 0.6 microns, disturbed as they pass through a hole so much larger than they are? Amazingly, even the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting above the blurring atmosphere, with a mirror whose diameter is 2.4m, disturbs the photons entering its aperture such that it cannot see with infinite clarity, but has a "figure of merit" of about 1/25 arc second at visible wavelengths. It cannot record an image with details smaller than that. Thus, when it looks at a galaxy a billion light years distant, the smallest features seen in the images it records are nearly 200 light years across.

The quantum mechanical explanation for diffraction is that the photon (or any other moving particle) has a rather diffuse "edge". Though it's wavelength is less than a micron, it has an extension and can "feel" the size of a hole it is passing through. The full consequence of diffraction is that there is no limit to the size of the "hole" that a moving particle can "feel". This has also been confirmed with electrons. An electron microscope makes much sharper pictures, and thus can be used at much greater magnification, than an optical microscope. However, even electrons with a wavelength (called the de Broglie wavelength; it depends on mass and velocity) of 1/10,000 micron are diffracted as they pass through the aperture in the magnetic lens of an electron microscope, so it takes rather clever (and large) design to make an electron microscope that can directly see atoms. But this has been done.

Suppose there were no diffraction at all? Then, even a small telescope could see to the ends of the Universe. The Hubble, being above the atmosphere, would be able to see aliens walking on the surface of planets anywhere in the visible Universe, depending only on the cost of making lenses that could increase its angular magnification by a factor of a few million or billion. In fact, your 1/10 mm pinhole could be a telescopic camera. Just put film a meter or so away from the hole (in a dark box), put it on a stable mount (with a clock drive if you are looking at stars), and expose for a long, long time, because you are gathering so little light. No matter how far away you put the film from the pinhole, the spot would be 1/10 mm across, so for higher resolution, just go longer. But even a "pinhole telescope" one meter long would have an effective f/ratio of 10,000. It would take a very long exposure even to make an image of the sun! That's the main reason professional telescopes are wide, to gather more light.

Diffraction implies that every moving particle is affected by everything in the Universe! On page 127 of Entanglement, an illustration shows an electron passing by a closed cylinder. There is a magnetic field inside the cylinder, but not outside. Still, the electron's motion is affected by the magnetic field. Some part of the electron's wave nature still enters the cylinder, even though it may pass by some distance away (the distance used in the experiment is not stated, but is likely to be a few mm).

I think you can see from the above discussion that I view the essence of quantum mechanics to be non-locality. Every photon, every electron, every atom or molecule in an "atomic beam" experiment, even every Buckyball (C60 molecule) in an experiment Aczel describes on p24, is "spookily" connected to the entire Universe!! Entanglement is simply one rather puzzling embodiment of such connections.

OK, why doesn't a jogger's direction get "disturbed" while running between two buildings? The jogger's de Broglie wavelength is about 10-³⁶m. The ratio is so huge, that the runner, aiming for the middle of the sidewalk half a block ahead, will only "miss" by a trillion-trillionth of a mm. Not enough to notice. And the jogger will take a few dozen steps in that same half block. The disturbance of each step, and ensuing corrections by the jogger, make the only effective difference.

There is another large-scale effect that shows why Star Trek teleportation is unlikely. Quantum entanglement makes it possible to "teleport" certain quantum properties, such as spin or polarization, from one particle to another, effectively making particle #2 identical to particle #1 (while destroying that property for #1), but in a different location. In effect, particle #1 jumps from the first location to the other, instantaneously. What about multi-particle systems, such as a human body? The number of protons and neutrons and electrons in a human body of, say 50kg mass (my wife's size), is about 6x10²³ times 50,000, times 1.7 (for the electrons), or about 5x10²⁸. That is, 50,000 trillion trillion particles. You have to measure not just spin or polarization, but identity (proton, neutron, or electron), location (to the nearest nanometer, or maybe to the nearest femtometer, I am not too sure), and velocity for each and every one of them, and take no more than about a millionth of a second to do so, then perform the quantum transportation to that number of particles at your target location. The measurement operation would effectively focus many quadrillions of quadrillions of watts of energy on that 50kg body, and vaporize it in much less than the millionth of a second it takes to make the measurement. It would be greater than a multi-megaton nuclear explosion. Neither the Enterprise nor the planet you were sending Captain Kirk to visit would survive intact.

The explanations in the book are clear, or as clear as possible for our limited mind to take in. To be sure, the experiments that confirm that entanglement really takes place do not give us any indication how or why it occurs, they just confirm that it does. Practically speaking, "why" is a theological question anyway. Science describes, and to some extent it can predict (that is what theories are for). And, to a lesser extent, it can enable technological achievements. Will a "quantum computer" or "quantum encryption" become practical, using equipment smaller than a battleship, or perhaps a kitchen stove? Possibly. Unlikely in my view.

Decline and fall of the last American hospital

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, hospitals

From the word hospital, derived from host, we get the word hospitality. Sadly, as shown in a recent Time article by Steve Brill on the Chargemaster system and hospital administration practices, there is precious little hospitality to be found at any American hospital. Put that together with a flood of anti-doctor and anti-medical-establishment books in the past ten years, and I find my attitude towards "health care" in America is pretty bleak. Thus, I was cheered to read about Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the last Almshouse operating in the U.S.…at least, I was cheered for the first third of the book God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Dr. Victoria Sweet.

Nearly every hospital throughout Europe and America began as an Almshouse, a charitable organization usually connected to a monastery or convent. (Side note: The Roman Catholic church canonized Mother Teresa a few years ago. During the late Twentieth Century she was nearly unique, but prior to about 1930, there were thousands of Mother Teresas in Almshouses around the world and across America.) And until recently, the 2/3 of hospitals that are private, non-profit entities were low-cost facilities where doctors could provide more specialized care for major conditions. They took advantage of economies of scale, sharing the cost of operating theaters and later intensive care wards.

Then two trends collided. Technology produced "imagers"—CT (formerly CAT) scanners, MRI (formerly NMR) scanners, PET scanners, EBT scanners (e.g. HeartCam) and other multi-million-dollar imaging machines—and then "Gamma knife", daVinci robotic surgery and an increasing number of high-tech "procedure" devices. And the number of tests that can be performed on a blood or urine sample continues to multiply. All are very costly. I also count the huge pharmaceutical industry as a segment of technology. No longer an enterprise devoted to finding natural chemicals that kill bacteria or amend hormone imbalances, the drug trade is now all about designer substances intended to increase the cost of treating a growing array of symptoms (many are now just "marketing illnesses" that were once considered normal variations), primarily for the benefit of their stockholders.

Perhaps starting a little before the technology trend that began in the 1920s, the "efficiency" trend promoted by Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth gained sufficient steam by the 1970s to totally transform medical "care". Today, the "health care" establishment—both hospitals and insurance companies—primarily cares for continually increasing stockholder value. Doctors' time is squeezed, so that many feel pressured to see between four and six patients (increasingly called "clients") per hour. Nurses' time is squeezed, so that paradoxically, nurses are being laid off (and new nurses can't find jobs) at a time when the Baby Boomers' need for health care is rising rapidly.

As God's Hotel shows from its middle chapters on, a third trend, of "rights" for everybody except those who are supposed to know what they are doing (doctors and nurses), has collided with the other two, demanding ever increasing "services" while ignoring their costs.

Dr. Sweet began her career with a double ambition. Of course, she was a newly-minted M.D. with her residency completed, and wanted to practice medicine, brim-full of allopathic training. She had also experienced things that seemed to go beyond Twentieth Century medicine, and at a propitious time, encountered Hildegard of Bingen's Medicine, written in the Twelfth Century. This epitome of "premodern medicine" had an entirely different view of the human person, well or ill, than "modern medicine". It also described quite a variety of treatments known to be effective, many of which are still used. Think Aspirin for minor pain: you can make it yourself by extracting willow bark with vinegar, as people did for centuries. Think "eyeblink" diagnosis (also called Augenblick, from German): when you've seen a syndrome, you will recognize it again in an instant. See many and sundry sick people, and you'll "get an eye" for this. My uncle was a master at this, as was his father. Dr. Sweet was able to pursue a PhD in premodern medicine while carrying on medical duties at LHH. Her experiences there, and a 4-year pilgrimage she undertook with a friend, form the framework of the book.

Sometimes the "eyeblink" can take a little time. Thus the value of sitting with a patient. Late in the book, Dr. Sweet (called "Dr. S" by nearly everyone at the hospital) writes of being stumped by a very sick patient who took a turn for the worse, could not endure a touch without screaming, threw off the bedclothes and her gown, and lay writhing on the bed. So the doctor sat by her bedside and watched. Soon she realized the woman looked like she was trying to drive a poison out of her system, and pondered what the poison could be. Thinking through the long list of medications, she realized that many of them increased retention of Serotonin. She diagnosed Serotonin Syndrome and cut way back on those medications. The woman recovered, fortunately, because the syndrome is frequently fatal and is hard to detect with a blood test. The diagnosis relied on application of modern knowledge together with an ancient technique of simple observation. It took less than an hour, and used no blood tests, indeed no physical contact with the sick woman at all.

What is an hour of a physician's time worth? My family doctor charges $150 for a half hour's visit (he eschews the HMO limits of 10-15 minutes, thus cutting into his income, but providing better care, genuine care). He has rent and utilities to pay, staff to pay, and probably pays himself less than half that, but suppose he is "earning" $150 per hour. That works out to $300,000 per year for an 8-hour day, but I reckon he works longer hours. When I go for blood tests, a simple "metabolic panel" has a retail cost of $300, though the insurance company discounts that to $160. Just a blood count (hematocrit) is $100 or more. The venipuncture by the needle girl is $50. I don't know what kind of blood test can detect Serotonin Syndrome, but I bet it costs more than $150, and I am sure Dr. S was paid less than $150/hr in the year 2002 or so.

The book is full of examples that show how "efficiency" is far from efficient. The paperwork to buy shoes for one patient who had none was taking weeks and weeks, until one doctor bought a pair for $60 and gave them to the patient. He could then be discharged. How many days, at a few hundred dollars a day, would he have been kept in the hospital waiting for the "efficient" service to occur?

Laguna Honda treats (or treated) the poor, the really poor, many sent over from the County Hospital after they had run the course of "acute care" available there. They ranged from very ill to nearly dead. Many were drug addicts. Some had nearly no liver left from heavy drinking. Most were too sick to return home, ever. The Almshouse provided a synergistic mix of allopathic and pre-modern medical care. But, during Dr S's twenty years there, things changed. The Twentieth Century intervened, with its "efficiency", its technological gimmicks and gadgets, and its nannyish "rights" enthusiasts. It was somehow against the "privacy rights" of the patients to have open wards with 30 beds, even though 90% of them preferred the community spirit that resulted, and LHH had a few private rooms for those who really, really didn't like sleeping in an open ward (once they recovered enough to notice). But the nanny-state decreed otherwise.

A 10-year Justice Department review resulted in a scathing report that required either shutting LHH down and paying (by California and S.F. county, of course, not by the Feds) for some level of "care" in their "homes", usually skid row hotels. Even though a number of the patients had been kicked out of such hotels for infractions such as starting fires or having fights (imagine two people too sick to stand, having a fight)…or being replaced by a new, "modern" facility up to DoJ standards. Amazingly, the voters of San Francisco voted in favor of a bond issue to the tune of a third of a billion dollars, and the architectural review began, followed by construction, and finally, moving all the patients to the new place.

The book ends in a way that led me to infer Dr. S left LHH at that point, or soon after. There is no way the former standard of caring could be carried out in the new facility; it is devoted to "modern care", which we must remember, only cares for the bottom line. There is no "hospitality" left in American hospitals. All are mis-named. The book made me laugh a time or two. More often I breathed, "Oh, wow!". Sometimes I wept. During a few months living in Switzerland, Dr. S saw medicine practiced in a way more similar to LHH than to anything else in America. To get caring care, now Americans must travel abroad. Sic transit Miraculum.

A Dyson hemisphere

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space aliens, space travel

In their first collaboration, Larry Niven and Gregory Benford have come to lead that subgenre of Science Fiction that combines hard science, some blue-sky projections thereof, and believable sociology of both human and alien societies. In the case of Bowl of Heaven, the hard science keeps all speeds below that of light and accepts certain other known limitations of physics, the projections (or speculations) push engineering to the scale of a solar system and also posit a ramscoop that uses superconducting magnetic fields a few thousand times greater than any so far known, and the sociology involves a dozen or so humans confronted by not just one or a few quite alien species, but a profusion of them, in a colossal engineered ecosystem.

Most SciFi aficionados know the concept of a Dyson Sphere, the product of a society that captures all the radiation of a star as its energy source. Though Dyson first conceived of a hollow sphere, the concept was soon modified to encompass myriads of large, stellar-light-capturing orbital habitats in a thick shell about the star, sufficient to block all or nearly all of its light, and emitting waste heat primarily at wavelengths between 8 and 20µ (the human body's thermal radiation, at 310K, peaks at 10µ). So far, no deep-infrared stars suggestive of such structures have been observed. The orbital mechanics of such a system are formidable, and collisions might be so frequent as to make the scheme impracticable.

Niven's best-known foray into the partial Dyson Sphere arena has been the famous Ringworld series. Now we have an even more ambitious engineering project: Build a hemisphere centered on a flare star (a late K or early M star that tends to have a strong stellar wind), that supports many (quadrillions, I suppose) steerable mirror segments. Its radius is roughly an AU (150 million km). A wide ring at the equator supports a habitat with the area of many trillions of km², and the structure rotates to produce centrifugal "gravity" in the habitable ring. There is a hole at the center (the rotational axis of the hemisphere) with a special function. The mirrors reflect the star's light to focus on an area at the "rear" of the star (we can presume its axis of rotation), heating it and focusing its stellar wind into a jet that passes through the hole in the hemisphere. This begins to drive the star. Some sort of engines in the hemisphere counteract its orbital instability until the star begins to accelerate sufficiently to closely balance the tendency of the hemisphere to fall inwards. Then the job of the engines is quite a bit easier, or at least less energetic. Now you have a "ship" that is similar in size to the orbit of Earth or perhaps Mars, that can cross interstellar space over a span of millions of years.

This idea by itself could be fodder for a simple high-concept novel. For Niven and Benford it is mainly backdrop. Put it out there, make it a few tens of millions of years old, populate it with a cadre of large, birdlike alien species and an uncountable number of "adopted" alien species whose members they have plucked from star systems as they swung by in ages past. Then add US.

A ramscoop from Earth, bearing colonists heading for a star they've named Glory, catches up with this star-centered Bowl. Now, we all know that paying a visit to aliens who can engineer on such a scale is quite foolhardy. But it happens that the colonists, most of whom are in frozen sleep, have a problem. The small "awake" crew has discovered that the ship's top speed is a few percent low. Low enough that they can't keep a crew awake and alive long enough to get to Glory. They figure the Bowl might be able to supply them with materials they can use to replenish their stores, so they do pay the ill-advised visit, and of course the landing crew is partly taken captive and partly escapes to re-learn their Boy Scout skills as they flee hither and yon, evading capture while they learn what they can about the Bowl and the habitat.

I have wondered in the past just how big a spinning structure could be, to produce about 1g of apparent gravity. It turns out that the stress intensity for 1g of centripetal acceleration increases linearly with radius, such that the strongest known steel could not produce 1g when the radius is greater than a few hundred meters. Perhaps some kind of carbon nanotube assembly could hold together a structure of a km or so diameter. Both Ringworld and the Bowl would require materials with a tensile strength a few million times greater than any known. However, I was able to keep such considerations from marring my enjoyment of the book and its concepts, and I trust so can most SciFi readers.

A great deal goes on in this 400-page book, as we glean insights into the various cooperating "big bird" denizens and some of the Adopted species, and as one human group begins to learn to communicate with their "hosts" while the other searches for understanding and some kind of bargaining leverage. Here, the volume ends. I suppose a trilogy is planned (though the authors promise but one sequel, Shipstar).

The possibilities of quite distinct psychologies that the authors explore in the big birds are fascinating. Is our human Bicameral Mind going to be a handicap or a detriment, compared to their more unified psychology? It makes me wonder if the future volume(s) will explore the possibility that human psychology could become more unified, making our "unconscious" more consciously accessible.

There is a character, Fred, that I found myself identifying with. He is socially awkward but totally at ease with machines and computer code. In a conversation he describes his problem-solving technique, which takes advantage of sleep, and I was saying, "Yes! That's just what kept my programming career going for 4 decades!". I figure that either Niven or Benford must do this, or they know quite well someone who does and has described it. It is comparatively rare as an explicit technique, though many people have experienced waking up with a worrying problem solved.

Now I have my marching orders, to track the progress of the next volume, Shipstar, and any possible successor volumes. I can hardly wait.