The ultimate cog life

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, social insects

Humans are social animals, but we limit our sociality, and fear overdoing it. Dystopian scenarios sometimes postulate the human race reduced to a hive-like existence; we may speak of being "worker bees", particularly those with assembly-line jobs; people angrily protest against being treated as "cogs" in some huge machine (think of the old film Metropolis). We put a face on these fears with the image of the bee hive, with thousands of workers serving an all-powerful Queen:


For a real queen bee, the reality is somewhat different. She is a slave as much as the others, condemned to lay tens of thousands of eggs over a life span of a few years. I hope egg-laying is pleasurable! Whether it is or not, she must lay an egg every few minutes, a few hundred daily.

Reading The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, I found that a queen bee is a piker. The ant queens of certain species of leaf-cutter (fungus-growing) ants lay an egg about every three seconds. That is ten million eggs yearly, almost a million eggs per month.

By the way, if you saw The Lion King (and who didn't), you may recall an early scene showing leaf-cutter ants walking on a limb, then a refocus to gnus running across the African savanna. Oops! There are no leaf-cutter ants in Africa; they are all to be found in the Americas, from southern New Jersey in the U.S. to about midway down Argentina.


This National Geographic photo (from their animals pages), shows a typical species, possibly of Atta, the type genus of leaf-cutters. It is following a chemical trail, and we typically see all kinds of ants following such trails. By adopting agriculture and having incredibly fecund queens, ants of Atta and related genera produce huge colonies with millions of members, and "anthills" the size of a house, underlain by a tunnel system that required the removal of several tons of soil. These colonies typify what Hölldobler and Wilson mean by "superorganism."

Another characteristic of the larger, more complex ant colonies is several sizes of workers. These supermajor (or supersoldier) workers, next to minors, their "little sisters", are members of a Pheidole species. The mass difference can be 200:1. In many species there are also one or two intermediate-sized "medial" worker types. Ant species with smaller colonies tend not to have more than one size of worker.

These points together comprise the characteristics of those social insects the authors call Superorganisms: a special reproductive caste, large numbers (dozens to millions) of individuals working together with considerable levels of cooperation, and communication methods for holding a colony together.

There are a very few species other than insects that have similar social systems, most notably naked mole rats, but the book concentrates on bees and ants, with just a nod to wasps. All these insects are members of the Hymenoptera (meaning "membrane winged"), but practice sociality at different levels: a few wasps are social (hundreds of species out of more than 200,000); many or most bees (30-40,000 species total) are social; and all ants (20-30,000 species total) are social.

The book takes up nearly a hundred topics in ten chapters, so I'll barely scratch the surface. Many topics are investigated with evolution in mind. For example, a line of weaver ants will pull leaves together, sometimes forming living chains to reach across a gap. When the leaves are near contact, other ants bring larvae and move them back and forth like shuttles as they emit silk to hold the leaves together. The evolutionary underpinnings of such a complex event are no simple matter to understand, and I don't claim to have grasped the point; I do understand that it is emergent behavior arising from simpler actions that are a part of other, ordinary ant behavior patterns. In fact, most aspects of social insects' collective behavior is emergent, in which each worker, operating by simple rules, does a part of a larger whole that has no particular architect.

This is particularly evident in the way swarming bees choose a new nest. Scouts from the swarm investigate various sites, and each returning scout performs a waggle dance upon the surface of the hanging swarm. The better the site they are advertising (size, location, orientation, security), the more energetic the dance, and the longer a bee will dance. Those who don't dance very long wander about, and may choose to co-dance with some who seem to have come from a better site. Such bees may go there and return, to dance more. Within a short while, often less than an hour, a large number are promoting the best site, a collective decision is made, and the swarm takes off for the chosen site. Considering bees as analogous to single neurons, this is possibly how you and I make decisions inside our own heads, when we have several options.

Ants also need to find, or dig, homes. Many species with smaller colonies, and smaller needs, can decamp routinely. Others need more elaborate accomodations. But have you ever wondered what lies beneath that anthill in your yard?

Compared to the massive nests of leaf-cutter ants, this is a cast from a relatively modest nest: the anthill was about half a meter across, and low. Walter Tchinkel, who stands 178 cm (5'-10"), studies ant nests by pouring thin cement down all the holes of a hill, then excavating the hardened concrete a few days later. The species producing this nest was Pogonomyrmex badius, the Eastern Harvester ant. You'd be unlikely to tolerate a nest of these in your lawn!

But even the little (hand-width) hills we often see can have rather extensive burrows, often going down a meter or more. It is in the construction of such nests that we see how an ant colony is really more like a single organism, a superorganism.

The morning clears my head

kw: observations, astronomy

I awoke a couple hours earlier than usual, and fell right into one of those paranoid thought-spirals. It isn't worth trying to get back to sleep when that happens.

I got up, dressed and went outside. Our extraordinary weather along the mid-Atlantic is holding: cool and clear, very refreshing. As I walked about, I noted that the Summer triangle (Deneb-Altair-Vega) was almost right overhead. These stars are high in the early evening sky all Summer. Jupiter was near the past-full Moon, and I noted that Venus has now joined Mars as a morning star. Both were a few degrees above (Zenith-ward from) Aldebaran.

I missed the conjunction of Venus, Mars and the crescent Moon just over three weeks ago. Though I hope I sleep better this Thursday, that morning Venus and Aldebaran will rise together.

Such thoughts and the cool morning air were sufficient to "clear the air" inside my head also, and I was ready for an early breakfast.

Becoming the archetypical Wizard

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, legends

The brief version is this: In about the year 540 AD, twins were born near where Glasgow lies today. Their names were probably Langoureth, a girl, and Lailoken, a boy. The twins were scholarly kids, very bright. In her teens, the girl was married to Rydderch (sometimes called Roderick), who became king of Strathclyde, an area from Partick (now a suburb of Glasgow) northward. At about the same time, the boy was sent into battle, where he did not distinguish himself, but at least survived. He was a scholar, not a fighter, and came under the training of Druids, who were the intellectuals of the time. Though his sister became an outward Christian, he never strayed from the "old ways".

A turning point in Lailoken's life was his participation in the disastrous battle of Arderydd, 573 AD. He is said to have gone mad with grief, and at least he self-exiled to the woods north of Partick for about seven years. During those years, his sister, now queen, met him a few times in the woods, and eventually he was persuaded by emissaries of king Rydderch to return to court. Among those emissaries was one Mungo, a "Christian" priest (I use those quotes advisedly), who was nothing if not a psychopath in his hatred of the Druids and the old way. It must have galled him to "make nice" to the king's Druid brother-in-law. The two fought one another for decades.

One attempt by Mungo to surmount Lailoken's opposition was to accuse the queen of adultery. Though the accusation was true, the king was tolerant and unwilling to judge her. Her brother brokered a deal to save her and shame Mungo. Mungo, now revered as St. Kentigern, patron of Glasgow, went for about thirteen years to Rome, from which he returned with great authority and riches bestowed by Pope Gregory the Great. In his absence, Strathclyde prospered.

By the year 600, the twins were sixty years old, the "Mungo Christians" were gaining in power, and Lailoken retired, a pensioner of the king, to a hilly area west of Partick. There he had built, among other things, what people thought of as a great hall with seventy doors and seventy windows. It was probably a wooden henge, built in a circle, used by the old Druid for astronomical observations. He had a large staff to keep his records and assist his studies. During this time he was again considered a madman.

In 612 AD Mungo died, the king died, and the queen retired to her brother's complex. A rival king, known today as Mordred, had taken over the Dunipace area next to Strathclyde in 596. Rydderch's younger son Constantine was briefly king of Strathclyde, but turned out to be the Scottish Caligula and was deposed.

War with the Angles was looming, and Mordred summoned Lailoken to Dunipace to arrange some kind of truce between the Christian forces and those of the old way. He was briefly imprisoned and starved to induce compliance, but did not submit. He tricked his way to freedom and returned to Partick. However, in about 618 AD he was asked to return to Dunipace, and along the way, was assassinated at Mordred's command, instigated by his wife, who hated the old Druid even the more. He was hastily buried near the place he was ambushed, on a hilltop some 30 miles from Glasgow. The hill is no longer there. It was gradually removed in the 1830s to make a quarry for road building stone. A single grave was discovered during the excavation, containing bones and, oddly enough, rotted papers in a jar.

We don't know this man by his given name today. For much of his life he was called a madman, and the nickname stuck. A common Gaelic word for madman is Myrddin, with the "dd" having a soft "th" sound. Over time, that sound shifted to an "L" sound, and we know him today as "Merlin."

This is a summary of the content of Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind the Legend of the Great Arthurian Mage by Adam Ardrey. Historian Ardrey had a hard job: a thousand years of labor to hide Merlin's true nature and history, and to move both him and Arthur hundreds of kilometers to the south, have yielded a written record in which reading between the lines is a bit like uncovering Troy; the archaeologists had to dig through a dozen later cities to get a few artifacts of Homeric age, and the author of Finding Merlin had to dig away religious romance, hagiography, anti-Druid prejudice, and sundry miracle stories to unearth the sparse facts that limn the remarkable old Druid.

Sadly, I must comment that the author uses terms like "this sound like that" and "it must be supposed" in such profusion that the book would be a quarter shorter without them. I'd prefer that he state once, like Sherlock Holmes, "Once you have excluded the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth," then get on with straight narrative.

Why have I written nearly nothing about Arthur? Primarily because Ardrey is at work on the title Finding Arthur, and the only clue I can offer at this point is that Arthur, a military genius of Napoleonic stature, lived but 37 years before being betrayed by Mordred and killed in 596 AD. The modern portrayals of both Arthur and Merlin are composites, as are most of the other figures in the stories.

What has made Lailoken/Merlin the prototypical wizard? Why is he not forgotten like the rest of the Druids? In spite of the best efforts of medieval Catholic writers, his character could not be completely hidden. None of them can make a credible claim that he ever converted, though there are a very few overly fantastic stories to that effect. But as the brother-in-law to a powerful king, and for a short while an advisor to a great general who is now thought of as a king also, and as a leading scholar of the first two decades of the Seventh Century, he became a figure that could not be ignored.

Yet he was no lightning-throwing mage. People tend to think of Merlin these days as a cartoonish figure like the one shown here. Many even profess to wish that such things could have some reality. I don't know about you, but I am very, very glad such powers are beyond the reach of mere humans.

The powers of the medieval-romantic Merlin were much more restrained: primarily a facility with herbal remedies and the ability to prophesy, though he had the Cassandra-like curse that he was seldom believed.

The real abilities of Lailoken were founded in scientific knowledge and a keen understanding of human nature. When he retired, a few years after the death of Arthur, he could see the writing on the wall; fanatical "Christians" were growing in power, the king was aging, he himself was weakening and had never been much of a warrior anyway, and the likely successor to the king was a psychopath as evil as Mungo. By retiring away from the citified areas, he placed himself in the protection of a popular majority of non-Christians, who revered him as a scholar of the old ways.

So, by one means or another, once the story of Arthur was romanticized (and moved a lot closer to London), his trusted advisor had to become a figure of similar majesty, and the romantic wizard "Merlin" was created (the "madman" meaning had been forgotten).

In reality, I suspect Merlin/Lailoken looked a lot more like this old photo of John Muir. He enjoyed the woods as much as Muir did, and for similar reasons he opposed the encroaching cities that have, in the centuries since, seen the removal of all the old forests.

The popular imagination has turned Merlin into a Gandalf or Saruman, or even an avuncular Dumbledore. Were he around today, Lailoken would be a professor of geology or astronomy, dragging telescope or gravimeter hither and yon in an unending quest to find out what makes the universe tick. It's nice to see a scientist make good.

I just had a by-the-way thought: The new PBS series, "NOVA ScienceNOW", stars a favorite writer of mine, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who likes to wear a vest with alchemical and astrological signs on it. He, a real scientist, is taking advantage of Merlin's image also, and I reckon he knows it. I wonder if he knows just how deep his kinship with Merlin really is.

Here a henge, there a henge...

kw: observations, monuments, folk art

I stumbled upon an account of Carhenge, tried a search on "*henge", and found quite a collection of things people have "henged" since Stonehenge became famous (again) with the publication of Stonehenge Decoded a generation ago. Eventually I came across the Clonehenge web site, dedicated to "The 47 Large Permanent Replicas". A few of the images below are from that site; the others from sundry spots, mainly in the blogosphere and photoblogs. There are many more.

Carhenge was one of the first large installations, and has inspired other henges of castoff large, boxy things, such as refrigerators and toilet stalls and empty cable spools:

Large installations like these tend to be permanent, though I imagine a half dozen cars full of enterprising collegians could descend on almost any town dump and produce a Fridgehenge or Washer/Dryerhenge in a pretty short time. They'd probably be required to dismantle it pronto, if they didn't vamoose!

More ephemeral henges can be produced from whatever is available, such as split wood or beach stones:

I imagine little circles like these are fun and quick to build, and much less threatening to property values.

I've spent many an hour collecting beach stones for various reasons, such as piling up into walls, decorating sand castles, or painting as "pet rocks." I'll have to try a henge out at the next rocky coast I visit.

The most ephemeral of all are built with food (here, cheese, Twinkies, and potatoes). These no doubt vanished soon after being completed:

July tumbler yield

kw: observations, photographs, gemstones

Over the weekend I unloaded the tumbler from the last run, which took five weeks. When I bought this tumbler, a Thumler Model T-100, it came with just over a pound of mixed agates and similar stones. Most were of rather ordinary quality, grab bag stuff. I added a pound of jasper from Lavic and a few pieces that a friend gave me, which did come from a grab bag he got at a rock show (I gave them back, polished) . The images below are close-ups showing about one square cm of two of the polished stones.

Lavic Jasper is a moss jasper, or filamentous jasper. The best specimens have these little blue "stars", tiny fortification agates, that fill vugs in the original rock. They represent a later stage of development, an agate filling of an initially soft, filamentous material.

The scattered white spots indicate that the polishing is not complete. I'll get out a leather lap and hand finish the piece.

It has now been about a year since I last collected at Lavic, as I reported last March. I have one piece that weighs more than a pound, consisting if this fine red-and-blue jasper. I am loath to break it up for tumbling. It is nearly spherical, so I may hand grind and polish it into a roughly spherical "quasi-tumbled" piece. That'll have to wait a while, until I have time to join a rock club that has equipment I can use. I don't really want to buy a Genie or similar setup for one project.

This piece is moss agate, the best piece of the ones that came with the tumbler. It is more multi-hued than most moss agate, and more finely filamentous also. Classic moss agate consists of mossy green filaments in milky chalcedony, so that it looks like a plant trapped in the rock. The green color is from reduced iron, just as red is from more oxidized iron. In the piece shown here, there is more than one coloring mineral present.

Sad to say, in both these cases, the areas pictured are the best area in a stone that is overall much less attractive. While I could cut them down, the resulting gems would be rather small. Jasper and agate look best when at least 2cm across. It is hard to see the charm in polished bits the size of a little fingernail.

The next tumbler load will be all jasper again. I'll wait to start until after vacation season; I don't like to interrupt a tumbler run, which needs 4-6 weeks of daily care.

The tenth Tesseract

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, story reviews, collections

The Canadians are at it again. The Tesseract anthologies have been going on for about twenty years, so I was glad to come across Tesseract #Ten: A Celebration of New Canadian Speculative Fiction, edited by Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom. Packed between two short essays, there are twenty stories and poems.

Threshold of Perception by Scott Mackay – A warm, evocative alternate history in which Percival Lowell predicts that Halley's Comet will hit Earth, and it does.

Frankenstein's Monster's Wife's Therapist by Sandra Kasturi – A cute, short poem with a rather expectable twist.

Puss Reboots by Stephanie Bedwell-Grime – I suspect the title came first. The story revolves around a computer worm that spreads via a modem-sound.

Au pays des merveilles by Wendy Warring – A library really is a land of wonders…

Donovan's Brain by Allen Moore – An oft-repeated theme of someone really getting into his work.

The Undoing by Sarah Totton – An unpleasant story; so far as I can tell, a convict is punished by slow dismemberment. "Eye for an eye, hand for a hand", et cetera.

Blackbird Shuffle (The Major Arcana) by Greg Bechtel – I decided to read this story in sequence, which was a bit of a challenge; some of the sequence indicators are not numerals.

Ideo Radio Poem by Jason Christie – It isn't a poem, I don't know what "Ideo" is, and it ends abruptly. Did I get the point, or not?

Women are from Mars, Men are from Venus by Michèle Laframboise, translated by Sheryl Curtis – Did this title also come before the story? Doesn't matter. A bit of wish-fulfillment, where hidden ingenuity is finally revealed and given its due.

Closing Time by Matthew Johnson – In this story's universe, ghosts hang around for a while so they may be properly mourned. This can pose a problem, or the solution to one.

Go Tell The Phoenicians by Matthew Hughes – The technical point is, imagine an alien species that grows up reversed from our way: the young mature mentally decades before they mature sexually, and the adults are mindless adolescents. The political point had me pumping "Yes!": these "natives" weren't satisfied with one-sided "trade" and had the means to do things their way.

Buttons by Victoria Fisher – A ghost story set in the French revolution and la Terroir. The buttons represent memories.

Findings at the Dump by Nancy Bennett – A poem that Tom Lehrer would love (think of his song "Garbage").

The Girl From lpanema by Scott Mackay – More wish-fulfillment, this time in a computer-generated intelligence. But who is exploiting whom?

The Intruder by Lisa Smedman – Human-size visitors to the planet of the shrews…and that almost gives it away.

Angel of Death by Susan Forest – Apparently a fight-to-the-death story; it starts out rather ugly, so I skipped it.

Transplant by Yvonne Pronovost – I almost skipped this one also. Plants are used to grow organs for transplanting. But the side story is "GAG".

Phantom Love by Rene Beaulieu, translated by Sheryl Curtis – Another one I skipped. Starts out as a visit to a whore.

Permission by Mark Dachuk – What plant could be so valuable as to buy one passage off-planet? This one draws a fellow in.

Summer Silk by Rhea Rose – I stopped about halfway. The mother figure is changing into a spider. I assume she begins eating her mate or offspring at some point.

Some quite lovely stories. Some, well, with the exception of "Permission", the final quarter of the book could have been left on the cutting room floor.

Choices we can afford

kw: fireworks, independence day, musings

Saturday, July 4, Independence Day 2009, was a (nearly) nonelectronic day for me. I work with computers, so spending time at home on the computer sometimes seems like the "busman's holiday". We slept in late, did some reading, scared up a little grub for a potluck lunch and went to see friends midday. These were church friends—a family whose house we hadn't visited before—and a number of other families came over, so we spent some time singing and talking before we ate. Then we talked some more, sang some more, and went home.

I napped, and I suppose my wife was either reading or watching TV. We stepped out at dusk to look at some of the illegal fireworks displays going on all around us, then watched "A Capitol Fourth" on PBS and turned in. Rather strange that this symbol of our freedom is restricted in so many states now.

I remember being asked, every year until 9th grade, to write something like "What Freedom Means to Me." At any age less than about forty, I don't think I ever had any idea. I sure am glad nobody preserved those meaningless essays! Even today, I reckon my ideas in that regard are repetitive and perhaps trite. I boil it all down to one word: Choices. In five words, "Am I free to choose?" In a few more words than that:

• I blog on Blogger. I don't have to; there are several free blogging services that work equally well. If I want to pay, there are several fee-based ones with features some writers desire. But, I am free to blog.
• Among all the social networking sites, I use only LinkedIn. I don't have time for Xanga, Facebook, or MySpace (though my son does), let alone Twitter, which I consider terminally inane. I have several cousins, all Mensa members, who must spend a third of their time Tweeting. But, they are free to tweet, or post on multitudes of Walls, as am I if I choose.
• Searching using Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, or Bing yields uncensored results. This is not so everywhere. At least here, search servers are free of censorship.
• The internet is not available everywhere. And it is quite costly in some places. Everywhere that advertisers are free to support it, the internet can be used at minimal cost. I use it heavily. My father almost not at all (just a little e-mail), but, we are free to do so.
• I met with the church today. It is a nice little congregation, meeting in a rented office space. Maybe some day we'll own a building. We don't have any secrets; we don't have to hide. We are free to meet together.
• My house is air-conditioned. I earn enough to keep it any temperature I want. Being a bit frugal, I keep the thermostat at 78° when I am home. My even more frugal wife sets it to 80°F when I am not home. Winters, we have a different set of negotiated temperatures. There was, at one time, a proposal to mandate by law the temperatures you could set. It was defeated, more than once. So far, we are free to set our thermostats, which have no recording or reporting devices attached.
• The cars we own were bought from a huge array of choices. We chose economical cars, but big enough to fit me comfortably. We weren't forced to choose American makes, and our cars are of mixed "ancestry" (designed overseas, built stateside). So, we were free to choose the most reliable brand.
• Don't get me started on food! We shop at least four supermarkets and a specialty store or two. Because we can. An elderly friend (now passed away) from China was visited by his sister after China eased visitation restrictions, some twenty years ago. They had not been able to meet for decades. She was full of propaganda, that she'd heard all her life, about how everything in China is better. One day he took her shopping. She stepped into the food store at the Produce end, looked around, and burst into tears. America is the best-fed nation on earth because farmers here are more free than anywhere else. Sadly I had to say "more free" because that freedom has been eroded for some fifty years, but it is still the best that exists.

That's enough. Point made.

I, alien

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, space aliens, space fiction

Continuing and concluding Tuesday's review of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, the book finishes with five stories and a novelette:

• Just Peace – One one level, a set piece contrasting three cultures that have arisen on a remote colony planet. It explores, just a little, the alienness we can feel among our own species. On another, the archetypical "I have to deceive you to save your life" story of love and seeming betrayal. Written with William Rupp, this is one of Vinge's rare collaborations.
• Original Sin – How do you define "sin" when your life cycle requires murder and cannibalism? Does it help or harm to bring human-style religion to you?
• The Blabber – One of the more delightful treatments of a multi-bodied entity, sort of a "secret princess" tale.
• Win a Nobel Prize! – A story in the form of an advertisement, published as part of a series by the journal Nature. Another treatment of the brain enhancement theme that so fascinates the author.
• The Barbarian Princess – Is this young girl, who becomes so skilled at portraying a warrior princess, a real goddess?
• Fast Times at Fairmont High – The newest piece in the volume, written in 2001 and first published here. Vinge, who is also fascinated by the prospect of an imminent "technical singularity", brings us close to that point with a gaggle of eighth-graders who find multi-layered connectivity in an intelligent environment as normal as today's youngsters find life with smart phones, Facebook and Twitter.

This collection particularly showcases the author's ability to get inside aliens of all kinds and give us a glimpse of life from inside their skin. Yet perhaps the most alien, to each other, are the two extreme cultures of "Just Peace", one much stiffer than early American Puritanism, and one a few steps more hedonistic than Rome in the depths of its moral collapse. Clearly, we already know a lot more about "alien contact" than we are willing to admit.

The selfness of the alien

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, space aliens, space fiction

Continuing yesterday's review of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, I've had time to read four more stories:

• The Whirligig of Time – A deep-time riff on the theme, "What goes around comes around," with a nicely spun ending.
• Bomb Scare – Possibly the first treatment of magically powerful aliens who aren't quite as grown up as they seem. At least one episode of Star Trek, starring Liberace, made use of the idea.
• The Science Fair – Centauroid beings who inhabit a free-wandering planet (it takes a while to determine this) are about to pass by a normal star.
• Gemstone – I've read this at least twice before, in different collections. Always a joy. One of those alien stories that sneaks up on you.

Six to go.

The alienness of self

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

In my short list of all-time favorites, Vernor Vinge has become my second-most-favorite SciFi author. As his writing career gets into its 45^th year, he continues to write stories of space, time and aliens that probe our humanness and our understanding of reality more keenly than anyone else alive. The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, edited by himself, brings together stories from throughout his career, from 1965 to 2001, the date of publication.

Vinge's ideas range wide, and he seems to have a unique new idea for each story:

• "Bookworm, Run!" – At a super-secret installation, a chimpanzee is coupled with computer hardware and a massive database, and becomes nearly superhuman. What will a human become, given the same treatment?
• The Accomplice – Vinge correctly extrapolated Moore's Law for three decades into the future, leading to computer animation techniques much as we have them today, though a little different socially. Also anticipated that we'd all have the power of a supercomputer at our fingertips after ten or so more years…and we do.
• The Peddler's Apprentice – Written with his wife Joan, this story partakes a bit of the "Highlander" theme, or "Brigadoon" writ small: a man skipping through time, experiencing a month or so in one millennium, then on to the next. But this time he has a huge, unexpected shift in the social system to cope with.
• The Ungoverned – Can actual social anarchy work? A possible way to an affirmative answer.
• Long Shot – To get to Alpha Centauri in 100,000 years, an average velocity of about 6 miles per second is required. Keeping a computing device operating over that time is a significant problem; keeping a biological payload viable even more so.
• Apartness – Several of Vinge's stories are set in a post-Northern-apocalypse world. Here old hatreds take an interesting turn.
• Conquest by Default – Aliens have arrived in this same world. The "assimilation" of the Cherokee provides the model, and an attempt to do things differently illuminates the "American ethnic cleansing" that took place. Told from the point of view of an alien anthropologist.

This is a little less than half the book, and has included stories as late as 1985.

If all myths die, what do we have left?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, theology

I must confess this one is simply too intellectual for me. I could not finish Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World by Vinoth Ramachandra with any expediency. In ten days of reading I got halfway through. I'll review what I did read, and finish the book at a more leisurely pace, reading others in parallel. I really don't want to miss any of it.

The first three of six chapters discuss myths of Terrorism, of Religious Violence, and of Human Rights. The basic question to ask about Terrorism is: "Why is the terrorist always the other guy?" In the author's eyes, "shock and awe" are simply terrorism writ large. After a discussion of the basis for war, and whether there can ever be a "just war" (No), the author points out that self defense is sometimes required, if suboptimal. But "national defense" always seems to be carried out as "the best defense is a strong offense". As my Dad taught me, "Never start a fight. Just be sure you finish it."

In the second chapter, as the author makes refreshingly clear (and why are so few saying this), while "religious" violence does occur, by far the most heinous acts of mass violence were perpetrated atheistically, and frequently against the religious. According to what I know of "church history", the great abuses of Medieval Catholicism were perpetrated for political, not religious motives, by Popes who mouthed religious slogans but were themselves atheistic. But their abuses pale against the three greatest mass murders of history, perpetrated by Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Not many know that the Christian holocaust in all three cases exceeded that of the Jews or any other identifiable group, or that half of Christian martyrdoms exceeding a million victims each occurred since the year 1900.

In the third, rights are seen to be rooted in the Biblical truth that humans bear God's image. Liberal language notwithstanding, without belief in God, there is no reason to suppose the rights of all ought to be equal. Indeed, attempts to skew or remove the rights of the poor come from both right and left wings of the political spectrum, those for whom their adherence to a political ideology exceeds their devotion to any faith.

In time, I hope to complete reviewing the rest of the book. Although I am more conservative than the author, I find myself powerfully affected by his strong, if difficultly worded, theological views.

Maybe aging can be stopped, if that is what you want

kw: observations, medicine, aging

This little girl is sixteen years old. I saw a TV special about her last evening. Brooke Greenberg is a wholly unique person, so far as is known. She hasn't aged significantly since shortly after birth. She weighs about 15 pounds (7kg) and has the physical and mental development of a 6- to 9-month old. An ordinary sixteen-year-old has learned to drive; Brooke cannot walk or speak.

There is a ton of material available about her, which I don't need to repeat here. On the TV show her father expressed the hope that something about her might unlock the secret of aging, and perhaps lead to a "fountain of youth." I find this most intriguing. If this is the fountain of youth, I am not sure it is worth having: to be unable to grow means to be unable to learn. I am sure if Brooke were capable of understanding things, she would prefer to be a more ordinary 16-year-old. Her family evidently agrees; a doctor they contacted tried dosing her with human growth hormone. The astonishing thing is that it had no effect at all.

That, by the way, may be the clue staring us in the face. If she lacks receptors for that hormone, then her body and brain just aren't getting the signal to develop further. A single defective gene or a small cluster of defective genes, needed to form the HGH receptor, could do the trick.

There is some evidence that HGH is part of the signaling network that forms memories. Cut the hormone off, and you may not age, but you won't remember anything new either. If that is the case, the price of "eternal youth" is too high.

We are made of poison

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, chemistry, toxins

I would call The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being, by Nena Baker, required reading on a level with Silent Spring. We are no longer dependent on the "canaries in the coal mine" to indicate our risk; we are ourselves losing our "song".

The developed world has had a hundred-year love affair with chemical conveniences, and now we can see that they are false lovers. For a window into your own risk, go to CDC's biomonitoring project and download the Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, or its summary; both are free downloads in pdf format.

Ms Baker is wise enough to focus on just five bad actors that are currently found in the environments, and bodies, of nearly every American resident: atrazine (an herbicide), phthalates (plasticizers in cosmetics), PBDE's (fire retardants), Bisphenol A (main component of polycarbonate food containers), and perfluorinated chemicals (surfactants).

Her treatment is the same in the chapter devoted to each of these classes of chemical: a saga, that gets repetitive, of the attempt by scientists to publicize alarming, even scandalous results about the risks of a chemical material, and the heavy-handed lobbying effort by manufacturers to discredit them and persuade regulators that "Nothing is wrong; just trust us." Amazingly, regulators in the US do so with numbing regularity.

There is a ray of hope in Europe, which two years ago legislated REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and restriction of CHemical substances). Other areas of the developed world are taking their cue from REACH, including Canada. The U.S. is suddenly the lagging black sheep! I wonder if even shame can reach the shameless at this point. Because the problem is, carrying out these regulations will make the prices of many things go up.

Let's take a quick look at two toxins we all carry. The average Western person has a "body burden" of about 20 parts per trillion (ppT) of a perfluorinated chemical called PFOS. It is found in the older version of ScotchGuard. This stuff has the chemical formula C₈HF₁₇O₃S, and a molar mass of 500 (keep this number in mind). What does 20 ppT mean?

The number of somatic cells in a human body is between 100 trillion and 200 trillion. The average cell's mass is half a nanogram, or 5x10^-10g. The number of nucleons (protons and neutrons) in a gram is just over 6x10²³. Multiply these two, and the number of nucleons in an average human cell is about 3x10¹⁴, or 300 trillion. Thus one ppT of the human cell would be the mass of 300 nucleons. If a substance has a molar mass of 300, and exists in you at a level of one ppT, then on average each cell in the body contains one molecule of that substance. With me so far?

Now we can puzzle out PFOS: 20x300/500 = 12. Every cell in your body contains about twelve molecules of PFOS. That might sound like a lot, but it probably isn't doing much; there are millions of copies of many enzymes in each of your cells.

But let's look at another bad actor that the author doesn't mention: OCDD, the most common dioxin. Dioxins are the most toxic small molecules known. According to the Third National Report mentioned above, the amount of OCDD in the fat cells ("lipids") of Americans ranges from 1,000 to 1,600 ppT, or 1-1.6 parts per billion (ppB). OCDD has a molar mass of 460, so there are 655 molecules per fat cell, though many fewer in other kinds of cells.

I realize that even 650 molecules of a dioxin isn't really very much, but numbers like that are a tad uncomfortable. Though I work in the chemical field, I am all for my company and others finding alternatives for the worst chemicals in use today, alternatives that are less risky. What will drive up the cost is not the work to find the alternatives, but the work to test them. That's where we need national backing for REACH-type regulations in America.

In my indexing I use the term "polemic". A polemic is not necessarily bad; Silent Spring is a polemic also. Polemic language is intended to wake people up and stir them to action. The Body Toxic can do so, and I hope it does.

Don't dump old drives!

kw: observations, recycling, computer security

A local PBS station, WHYY in Philadelphia, had a segment on Frontline/World last evening about e-waste and electronics recycling. When old electronics go to a "recycler", they are likely to wind up in a place such as Ghana or southern China, where two main industries flourish on our waste.

Firstly, the metals are reclaimed. This is done by burning the plastics off the metals and reclaiming iron and copper. Magnets from old speakers are used to sift through debris for iron bits that would otherwise be missed. Circuit boards usually get special treatment: they are cooked to remove the chips, which often contain gold in their traces (internal wiring) or contacts.

Secondly, the disk drives are put up for sale. Some are used to upgrade local computers, but many are plundered for their remaining data. Even if the files have been "erased", their content is still sitting on the disk, and "file recovery" or "unerase" programs can reconnect the data with the file's header in the folder. There was a disturbing sequence showing how easy it was for a technician to read personal information from a discarded hard drive.

People, if you are going to discard an old computer, first go to fileshredder.org and download FileShredder. Run it against everything it will let you shred. Then it might be safe to discard the hardware. If you want to be really sure, remove the hard drive and either keep it or remove its top and pour in a spoonful of Comet® cleanser (abrasive)…or just smash the platters with a hammer.

These are some of the old disk drives I've kept. Their sizes are 40Mby, 511Mby, and 2.5Gby, from left to right. I took the top off the 511Mby one to show the platters and reading head. In the closeup below you ought to be able to see that this one has two platters. There are four heads to cover the four surfaces on which data goes.

Back when 40Mby was a lot of disk, I managed to fill the first one pretty full. I haven't opened it to see how many platters there are, but I suspect it is either three or two. I find it amazing that my son just bought, for less than $100, a disk drive that holds a Terabyte; that's 25,000 times the capacity. One drive I don't show is a disk pack from a CDC 6400, a removable pack that holds 50Mby; it is more than a foot in diameter and seven inches tall. I'm pretty safe with it; the drive needed to read it doesn't exist any more.

Before I stopped using each computer, I copied all the data to its replacement machine. We have one more old machine that we will discard, maybe soon. I've already copied the data to a newer machine's secondary drive. I've gotten smarter over the years, and now keep most data on an external drive. Whenever I move a block of files to it, I back them up to a DVD. That way I have all our documents since we began using home computers in the early 1980s. But I don't let copies of old data get out of doors! And neither should you!!

Let's get this epic over with

kw: book reviews, fantasy, anthologies

A cousin of mine calls it "Thud and Blunder", the genre of sword-and-sorcery, impossible quests, mighty heroes, and supernatural conquests. The most recent epic series is the Harry Potter novels. The very word "epic" makes me think of interminable narratives, plots that always have a new twist (that is, a new reason for putting off the ending), and a villain who just keeps getting worse.

A couple of clever editors, David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, have turned all this on its head. Maybe we should blame the editors of Readers' Digest Condensed Books, or maybe those masters of parody who can produce a ten-page piece that skims through all the tropes of a well-known work and renders them in hilarious caricature (Bored of the Rings comes to mind). What if the skimming technique is wielded seriously (or half-)? You get my most recent curiosity pick, Twenty Epics, edited by Moles and Groppi.

The writers of these mini-epics (that's a new oxymoron, folks), not having the leisure of a few thousand pages, seek evoke the atmosphere of an epic fantasy in a handful of pages. Most succeed. Twenty "epics" in 363 pages (minus two pages per item, of title material) leaves about sixteen pages each. The actual pieces range from two to 32 pages in length.

Just one or two actually evoke the environment of a classic epic adventure. Some bring the genre up-to-date with crack-head heroes or microscope-wielding, only slightly magical scientists in place of wizards, and some take it into purported futures. I suppose this could be extended to the X-Files or Men in Black sort of popular series: semi-epics in alien spaces.

Why is there a market for mini-epic treatment of archetypical themes? I think it has to do with Western impatience, coupled with a philosophy recently reiterated by Bill Murray, "Baby steps, dude, baby steps." Just consider the modern versions of education, both academic and martial, compared to their predecessors.

There was a time, lasting centuries, that anyone who became highly educated had begun by learning the ABC's from his (rarely her) father, or sometimes from a hired tutor. Then, using whatever books were available, a long period of self-study would, with luck, culminate with a tenure of several years at some university, usually sponsored by a nobelman. Acceptance of one's thesis brought one the title of Doctor ("teacher"). To this day, acceptance at an institution such as Oxford means one is expected to study on one's own, attend lectures according to a self-chosen scheme, and present a dissertation at some ill-defined date. But in most of the West, we have the the following:

• Primary or "grammar" school (6-7 years), sometimes broken up into K-3 & 4-6.
• Secondary school, usually broken up into 7-9 & 10-12 or 7-8 & 9-12.
• College, often pursued as Junior College leading to an AA, then "real" college leading to a BA or BS.
• Graduate School, usually an MA or MS followed by a DSci or PhD (or MD or JD or LLD).

That is four to eight stages that have replaced a two- or three-stage process. Then, in Japan one used to study Karate or Judo for four to six years before getting the first belt, a first degree (ichidan) "Black Belt". Ichidan is still, in Japan, the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree. But when I studied Judo in the 1950s, a series of belts resulted: green (1-2 years), brown (1-2 more), then black (2-4 more). And now, one dojo I know has the series yellow, light blue, green, dark blue, orange, brown, purple, black. Also, one no longer needs to dwell at a belt level for a year; I know a couple of 11-year-old "black belts", but they are really no more than halfway to the skills required for a genuine Japanese black belt. In this case, the scale has been both sliced into baby steps and dumbed down.

A few of the Twenty Epics make imaginative demands on the reader. One of note is the opening piece, "Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms" by Christopher Rowe. Just two pages long, it evokes a mighty duel with an unexpected outcome, and leaves a tag for future mischief. I came away from reading the story with a growing feeling that I'd read something much longer and more detailed. Now that's great writing.