Why we need insects

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects

I suspect that the subtitle was the author's original choice for a title, and that the punchier title came via the publisher's marketing arm. In Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (translated by Lucy Moffatt), we find nearly nothing about buzzing, stinging or biting, and a great deal about the role of insects in nature, and most particularly that vast portion of nature that we humans appropriate for our use.

For example, we are familiar to the point of boredom with the need for honeybees to pollinate many crops. And you may be familiar with the giant industry of trucking millions of beehives to central California to pollinate almond flowers—and of the need to truck them right back out again to somewhere they can get food when the almond bloom is over. But I didn't now that tomatoes taste much better when pollinated by bumblebees, which are big enough and rough enough to do a thorough job of it; nor of the few species of midges that are the only pollinators of cacao flowers—and that they are endangered so, if they go, so goes chocolate. And if you think you'd never, ever eat a wasp: you do, every time you eat a fig or fig bar. Tiny fig wasps are essential to fig production, and they die in the fig after laying their eggs, but I'll let you off the hook on this one, because the tiny bodies are mostly (but only mostly!) consumed by the fig as it matures.

Insects are the vanguard of the clean-up crew worldwide. Without dung beetles the plains of Africa would be knee-deep in the dung of elephants, rhinos, wildebeests, giraffes, and antelopes, to say the least. Similar beetles feed dung to their young in the steppes of Asia and both South and North America. Insects also lead the way when disposing of carcasses, or their remnants when the bigger predators have eaten their fill.

There is something worth learning on nearly every page.

• That the most colorfast red dye, carmine or cochineal, is produced by a bug that feeds on cactus. Fortunately, prickly pear cacti are in no danger of extinction. Not only were those old, red 1¢ postage stamps made with carmine, so were and are the red coats of British soldiers, the "redcoats" of revolutionary-war-era fame. We still use tons of carmine yearly. 
• That certain fly larvae excel at cleaning wounds, removing dead tissue and bacteria but never touching live tissue—and that Genghis Khan (probably) had a "maggot wagon" along for his armies' battles. 
• That insects may be the food of the future even in the West; they are already on the menu in many parts of the world. To produce a pound of protein, certain insects require much less feed and produce much less methane and carbon dioxide than beeves or swine.

The key takeaway: we cannot get along without insects, but they can get along very well (or even, much better) without us. Rather than wax long, I'll leave it to you to read the book. Much recommended!

The spiders of unknown origin outnumber all

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Earlier today, preparing to enter a book review, I captured these activity indicators:

That big spike yesterday was all from "Unknown Region", and was accomplished in a few minutes. The 200+ from Russia spanned 2+ days, and is seen as the broad hump, just above the weeds, from Dec 13-15. I find it interesting that all 182 "Unknown Country" hits came via Bing, and none others. Bing does seem to have the best protection for someone browsing Incognito. Apparently, either Bing allows bulk browsing, or there were a bunch of browser windows involved, all triggered at once (whether on one fast machine or on a botnet, I don't know).

Universes by the quintillions

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cosmology, multiverse, history

There is a corner of science in which I have much interest, cosmology. I usually avoid peeking into one corner of that corner. The various attempts to go onward from "What happened?" to "How did it happen?" and even "Why?" have been getting more and more strange for most of my adult life (50+ years). But I could not pass up the new book by Tom Siegfried, The Number of the Universe: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos.

I was quite entertained, and my history itch was well scratched by the author's thorough coverage of how the meanings of "world" and "universe" have morphed through the ages, at least since Aristotle. The early atomists were at odds with Aristotle, who embraced the Continuum. The atomists pointed to things like the hand of a bronze statue that had gradually become quite worn because people always touched or rubbed the fingers on their way by it.

Considering that this could equally be taken as evidence that the statue's material was continuous and thus could be removed in quantities as minute as one liked, their contentions held little water. They didn't convince Aristotle, who also declared that there could be no more than one world. The world as he understood it was equivalent to the universe, and consisted of a series of nested spheres; the outermost held the "fixed stars", the innermost consisted of the Earth, and those between carried the Sun, Moon and five planets in their pathways around the sky.

For reasons that escape me, the atomists also considered that there could be, and should be, something "outside" the outermost sphere. Perhaps other worlds like ours. Camille Flammarion in 1888 published a wood engraving that illustrated one such idea, but it is based on a flat earth, not the sphere that the Greeks understood for the earth's shape. It isn't known whether the original illustrator was displaying a true belief, or lampooning it.

Sixteen centuries were to pass until a clerical edict in 1277 threatened "natural philosophers" with excommunication if they continued to take Aristotle's anti-atomist and anti-multi-world pronouncements as truth. It is odd that, 350 years still later, Galileo was placed under house arrest for writings that contradicted Aristotle.

Mr. Siegfried takes us through the various twists and turns of the various meanings "world" and "universe" have taken on, from Aristotle onward. The "universe/world" of Ptolemy, complete with epicycles, was not far removed from the Aristotelian model. The "revolution" by Copernicus mainly caused the Sun and Earth to switch places, allowing only the Moon to keep orbiting Earth. We call it the solar system, but Copernicus called it the World.

After the telescope was invented, and rather large ones were produced, the Milky Way, or the Galaxy (from γάλα, or gala, for "milk"), was thought to be the whole universe, and the solar system including Earth was just a tiny part of that; the Earth was now "the world" and the rest was "the universe". Still later other galaxies, some found to be larger than the Milky Way, were called "island universes", but now "universe" means "everything". Now there are those who say the universe is "everything we can observe," and posit multiple universes, the multiverse.

The author points out several times that the arguments being put forth now against modern hypotheses of a multiverse are the same as those advanced time and again over the millennia. While reading the book I came to understand these comparisons as political framing. The point of the book is to defend the concept of Multiverse, even though there are between six and nine versions thereof being bandied about.

I will discuss only two of these. Firstly, what we can observe with our instruments reaches to 13.8 billion years ago, and a naïve concept of its radius is 13.8 billion light-years (Gly). However, back-calculating relativistic effects allows us to estimate that the "edge" of what we observe is actually now at a distance of about 75 Gly. That's how far cosmological expansion has carried things. But how big is the "rest of the universe"? We still have no way to know. Ignoring accelerated expansion (the dissension against this idea continues to increase, so I discount it), let's first guess that Alan Guth's inflation popped things open to such an extent that we can observe at most a percent of the whole. Even "inflation" didn't produce an infinite bubble of spacetime. One hundred times the volume is a little over 4.5 times the radius. Let's round that up to a radius of 350 Gly. That's the size of "our bubble universe".

The number of baryons (protons, neutrons and their kin) in the observable universe is thought to be about 10¹⁰⁰ (one Googol), and their number in "our everything", this bubble, may be 10¹⁰² (100 Googol).

One version of the multiverse hypothesizes that there are multiple bubbles, perhaps with differing values of the "natural constants" such as the ratio of mass of the proton/electron. In our universe, or at least on our lab benches, that ratio is 1,836 and change. If the ensuing multiverse is truly infinite, containing an infinite number of such bubbles (200-400 Gly across on average), it is thought that any particular configuration of particles and their motions will be repeated exactly an infinite number of times. Well, that's a lot of infinity. And all of it quite beyond the reach of any possible instrument.

I don't know how big the number of permutations and combinations each bubble consists of, but we can tinker with a few numbers:

• The coordinates of each particle and its velocity consist of six numbers. The position must be known with a precision of about the Planck length (1.6x10^-35 m), and similar precision for the velocity, to obtain a functional match.
• A complete specification for the state of a bubble at any point in time consists then of 6x10¹⁰²  numbers. Call this Nu, the "state number of a universe".
• The permutations of Nu are roughly its factorial: (Nu)!, a number with about 600 times as many zeroes as there are particles in "our" bubble. That's a very rough estimate based on Stirling's Approximation.

If there are at least that many universe-bubbles out there, then at least one pair of them will match exactly, at least at some point in time. Quantum effects may result in immediate divergence. It's a bit like the statement that the formulas for Earth's atmospheric interactions require that, at any one point in time, there are two antipodal points at which the temperature and barometric pressure and wind velocity and direction are exactly matched. But where those points may be, nobody can determine, and where they are a few milliseconds later, is anyone's guess. However, this hypothesis of a multiverse is one I can consider is at least possible. Highly unlikely—perhaps one chance in some number with a Googleplex of zeroes—but possible.

The other multiverse worth considering, if only as a straw man, is the one formulated by Hugh Everett III. Rather than accept quantum randomness, his model states that for every quantum "choice", both or all possible paths are taken, just in different universes. If I understand Dr. Everett correctly, every quantum event causes the splitting of the universe into two or more universes, each one holding one of those outcomes. He is quoted as stating that a "stupendous number" of parallel universes are thus produced every second, separated from one another by unknown mechanisms or materials. "Stupendous" is the understatement of the century.

Let's consider a very simple quantum event, the interaction of a photon with the surface of a sheet of glass. If the refractive index of window glass is taken as 1.5 at some wavelength of choice, then, for normal or near-normal incidence, the photon has a 4% chance of reflecting. Otherwise it passes into the glass. The Everett Multiverse works this way. Each such photon-glass interaction splits the universe into two. In one, the photon reflects, and in the other, it passes through. Or maybe there has to be a split into 25 universes; one of them gets the reflected photon and the rest get the transmitted photon. Let's go with the simple version.

I have a laser pointer with a beam that is nominally "less than 5mW", so I'll call it 4mW. I'll point it straight at my window. What happens? Here are the numbers:

• 0.004 W beam power
• 670 nm beam wavelength
• 6.242x10¹⁸ eV (electron Volts) per Joule (J); 1 W = 1 J/sec
• photon energy at 670 nm = 1.85 eV (proportionality constant 1240 eV-nm)
• 1.35x10¹⁶ photons/sec in the beam

The number of photons striking the near surface of the glass is 13.5 quadrillion per second. (In American units, a quadrillion is a million times a billion.) A slightly smaller number, 96% of 13.5 quadrillion, strike the far surface of the glass. Most of those that reflect inside the glass (about 54 trillion) pass through back upward, but a few are reflected downward again, and so forth. We can say that 27 quadrillion quantum interactions are happening, every second. That is not counting the quantum events that go into creating the laser beam photons in the first place.

I don't know how many universes were being created each second beforehand, but during the time I shined my 4mW beam at the glass, 27 quadrillion new universes were created, that would not have been had I kept the beam off. About every 37 seconds, I "create" a quintillion universes.

And some people think it incredible that God created one universe! Is it any surprise that I consider the Everett hypothesis of the multiverse as the sheerest nonsense? It violates Occam's Razor by the hugest, most incredible amount I have ever encountered.

Do I have an alternative? Indeed I do (and not the theological one)! Keeping my physicist hat on, I'll point out that I find superstring theory less incredible than the Everett hypothesis. These curious entities, if they exist, are something like a Planck length in size (see above) and vibrate at furious rates, at least as great as the frequency of the most powerful gamma rays. The "fundamental particles" that we call quanta, including protons and photons, would then be vibrational modes of one or more superstrings.

If the above is true, quanta have "fuzzy boundaries" with a lot of "buzzing" going on inside, and quantum randomness is then something related to Brownian motion caused by molecules striking tiny items such as pollen grains, in random clusters that don't quite balance out.

Consider the interaction of a photon with a piece of glass. The glass, volume-wise, consists mainly of oxygen atoms held together by covalent bonding with much smaller atoms of silicon, sodium, and a few other elements. The oxygen atoms are slightly ill-defined spheres or spheroids with a diameter of about 0.3 nm. A photon from my laser has a wavelength about 2,000 times as large. I don't know how "wide" a photon is, but the "wavicle" model indicates its "physical" length is probably 2-3 wavelengths. Suffice it to say that the photon interacts with a large number of oxygen atoms, or at least the electrons in their outer orbitals, while taking some fraction of a nanosecond "deciding" whether to turn tail (reflect) or slip past the surface (refract). During that interaction the vibrations of the superstrings involved cause a few trillion (or trillion trillion) jitters of this or that "part" of the photon against various numbers of electrons. Predicting which way a casino die will roll would be infinitely easier than determining beforehand what the photon will do (just bet the odds: 24 out of 25 times, it'll go through).

That is my superstring-Brownian-motion hypothesis for quantum randomness. I ought to copyright it (and I did, just by publishing it in this blog post).

P.S. This shows one concept of a wavicle that I found on zazzle.com. To this scale, the oxygen atoms in window glass would appear about 0.012 mm across, about three times the size of E. coli cells.

A new Eurasian spider pattern

kw: bloggins, spider scanning


I haven't posted for about two weeks. I read parts of two books, found them unsuitable to continue, and now I am partway through another that I ought to complete in another couple of days.

Anyway, I checked into Blogger and saw this: Starting some time on Friday (the 13th!) the majority of the action came from Russia and the Ukraine, with the U.S. pulling into third place.

As usual, normal hourly activity is the "grass" in the leftward 2/3 of the chart.



This is only mildly interesting. I have yet to hear from, or hear of, anyone who is keeping track of the activity on their blog, whether they notice the visiting Russians. It may be that the amount of activity is equally spread over lots of blogs, so only for low-popularity blogs such as mine can anyone even see that something a bit unusual is going on.

Spiders taking advantage of our food coma

kw: blogging, spider scanning

A week ago I briefly checked, and saw a sudden, but rather modest, uptick in usage originating in Russia. Here is what I saw today:



Just after I logged off on the 28th, Google Analytics recorded a 160-hit day. Then two days ago, a 200-hit day. At the left end of the chart we see the tail of the small "hit storm" from a week ago, about a tripling of ordinary usage over two days. The 29th and 30th is the current storm of hits from Russia and Ukraine.

It makes me wonder: are there Black Friday shoppers in Russia who use searches general enough that blogs like mine log lots of hits which are incidental? Yeah, let's call it that…this time.

What is best - depends on the editor

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

Looking for some lighter reading I picked up The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and the series editor John Joseph Adams. If there is a theme for this volume, I'd guess it is "Pouring out their pain." Even in the fantasy stories, all but a few of the twenty offerings, there are few positive endings.

Most of the authors are members of groups that are currently or formerly marginalized (and, I must say, members of most "formerly" marginalized groups still think they are marginalized, big time, whether they are or not). I'd say that gives the bunch of them the right to complain. It is interesting how some of them sought to couch their complaint. Most notably, Brenda Peynado in "The Kite Maker" places us inside the head of a human who is sympathetic to space alien refugees; they are not invaders, but fleeing a destroyed planet. The aliens resemble dragonflies, very fragile, and even though living in refugee camps—thinly disguised versions of the internment camps of the 1940's—and quite inoffensive, they are thoroughly hated by a great many. The trouble is, the story goes nowhere. The POV protagonist loses his business, but nothing is improved.

The most poignant is "On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon: meditations and ruminations while a beloved dog is being put to sleep. As touched as I was, I couldn't help noticing that the three-injection cocktail described is the one used for capital penalties by lethal injection, that is, "putting to sleep" for humans. Animals are typically euthanized by slow injection of a large overdose of an opioid or anaesthetic. It would actually be more humane to euthanize humans the same way.

I got no more than a page into some of the stories; I quickly discerned that they were going somewhere I didn't want to go. The rest left little impression. And that got me thinking. Who decides what is "the Best" for one of these compendia? The editor(s) of course. Thus the quality of the editor determines the quality of the volume. There are several other "the Best" collections being published on a more-or-less regular basis which I esteem more highly than this one.

Avian athletes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, migration, bird migration

Have you ever seen a blackpoll warbler? If you have, unless you are familiar with warblers, you may have mistaken it for a chickadee.

From this picture (from All About Birds), and the one below (same site, different page), you can see that they are similar. The warbler's body is strongly patterned, while the body of a black-capped chickadee is more uniform in color. We notice the black cap with a broad white lower face on both birds. They are so active, we seldom have time to see the differences.


But they don't sound the same. The chickadee is named for its call, which we often "spell" as "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee". The warbler's call is a series of very short, quick notes about an octave above the highest note on a piano.

Their migration habits differ dramatically. Chickadees don't migrate, except in the extreme north or south portions of their breeding range. Blackpoll warblers migrate 5,000 to 6,000 miles (8,000 to 10,000 km), each way, every year.

Both are endurance champions, just in quite different ways. Both are very small birds; a blackpoll warbler weighs 14-15 grams (~0.5 oz) most of the year and a black-capped chickadee weighs a little less at 11-12 grams (~0.4 oz). Except in the far northern reaches of its range, a chickadee stays year-round, braving winters that, in my experience living in Ohio, are about as miserable as I can imagine. The warbler, along with most warbler species, is a snowbird. I winters in the tropics and summers in or near the Arctic. Actually, our term ought to be "anti-snow bird"!

In Kenn Kaufman's new book A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, he describes a blackpoll warbler's yearly trek at length. A condensed version:

The spring migration is less of an ultra-marathon and more a series of medium-length "hops". Beginning from a winter range in Venezuela or Brazil, a bird destined to nest near Denali or Nome, Alaska flies a few hundred miles to the northern coast of South America. There it rests a day or so and fattens up for a crossing of the Caribbean, which it crosses by island-hopping until it reaches Florida. The next hop may be to Georgia or thereabouts. Then it fattens up for a longer trek, nearly nonstop to western Alaska. The winter migration is a pair of ultra-marathons. The bird begins by crossing North America, which takes about three days of nonstop flying, until it reaches New England, perhaps Massachusetts. There, it eats until it weighs about a full ounce (28 grams or more). Then it flies south, out to sea, not to see land (except perhaps Bermuda in the distance) until it reaches the coast of Venezuela, weighing less than half what it did just four days earlier.

Every living blackpoll warbler is descended from ultramarathon champions! They are not the only ones. Hundreds of species of birds, many no larger than your thumb, yearly migrate hundreds to thousands of miles. Just in body-length terms, it would be like me (a six-footer) traveling halfway to the moon and back, every year…if there were somewhere halfway to the moon to stop for a few months.

One matter the author takes up in the book is the notion of "flyways". For ducks and other water birds, there do seem to be "highways in the sky" that they tend to follow. Not so for other birds. Recent technology shows this dramatically. Here is a national radar image from NEXRAD taken in May of 2016:

NEXRAD (Next generation radar) was developed to see rainfall. Birds are lots bigger than raindrops, so they are easily seen. As it happened, there were several large storm systems over the central and eastern U.S. that day. One stretches from southern Texas to eastern Nebraska, another just east of the Mississippi River into Indiana, and a smaller series of storms from Florida north to North Carolina. These all show up as green, yellow and red. The blue blotches with green centers show where the birds are during their spring migration. The black areas between blue blotches are areas not covered by the radar. The birds are spread out over the whole area; there are very few concentrations. One is visible at Lake Erie in northern Ohio. From about Cleveland, around the shore of Lake Erie to Toledo, birds that don't wish to cross the lake turn west and fly around it. If there are any "songbird flyways", this area is one of them. Its western portion is not covered by NEXRAD, so it isn't as prominent in this image as it ought to be.

A decade ago or so Mr. Kaufman moved from Arizona to Ohio, not far from the Magee Marsh refuge (and premier bird-watching boardwalk). The book focuses on events of a few springtime migration seasons. From the big eagles, vultures, and hawk, to blue jays, to little vireos and tiny warblers, hundreds of species of migrating birds fly through and stop over at or near Magee Marsh in the springtime. The author's lyric descriptions of these marvelous creatures and their travels are utterly captivating.

Here and there throughout the narrative, he tells the tale of a struggle he and his colleagues in northwest Ohio undertook to prevent the construction of an "experimental" wind turbine, right in the middle of the area, on a military reservation. It's worth considering just how dreadful big windmills can be for migrating birds.

A 2-megawatt turbine has a rotor about 90 m (~300 ft) in diameter, with three blades, atop a tower that places the top of the swept circle as high as 180 m (~600 ft). A stiff breeze of 20 m/s (~45 mph) is about midway in a turbine's power curve. When the wind is this speed aloft, it is about half that speed or less near the ground. In this breeze the blades rotate at 16 rpm, with a blade cutting through the air 48 times per minute, or about every 1¼ seconds. In that slice of time, a parcel of air 25 m long passes through the blades. For big birds like eagles soaring on this wind, there's one chance in 15 of getting hit by a blade. The speed of the blade tip is 75 m/s or 170 mph. They can't see it coming in time to react. For a duck-sized bird, the chance of getting hit are one in 35, and for a tiny warbler, "only" one in 165. But while only a few eagles pass along the Lake Erie shore daily, and a few dozen ducks, tens of thousands of warblers and other small songbirds do so, up to a few million each season. The daily "catch" of small birds can be hundreds. Not only so, one wind farm reported that more bats were being killed than birds. Think about this: every bat eats from 100 to 1,000 mosquitos and similar insects every day. How many can we afford to wipe out? There is one wind farm in California that is known to kill 100 golden eagles every year. Whatever happened to the Endangered Species Act? Big money, that's what.

Sadly, wind turbines aren't as eco-friendly as they are billed, and not just because they kill birds and bats. A big turbine contains a lot of metal, both steel and aluminum, which required a huge amount of energy to produce, and the coke (refined coal) needed to make the steel resulted in the release of a great amount of CO₂. What holds up a big turbine? Many tons of steel-reinforced concrete in a hole the size of a garage. How does the turbine get moved into location? Several trucks per turbine, driving hundreds of miles. Much of the energy needed to produce the metals, particularly the aluminum, comes from hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. So I have called the wind turbine industry "a scheme for turning hydropower into aluminum and steel, moving it across the country, and turning the metals back into electricity…at a net loss." A turbine has a finite lifetime. I have yet to see a full econometric analysis of wind turbines that demonstrates how you get more out than you put in. If every bit of energy used for the mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, erecting, and operating of every wind turbine was required to be derived exclusively from wind power, I think the whole enterprise would shrink away to nothing in pretty short order.

Just by the way, now that solar cells are routinely produced that exceed 15% efficiency, the industry is operating at a net energy gain. We ought to be pushing for more solar, and leaving the wind to the birds.

The turbine project on the military base that the author and others were working against was eventually cancelled. Good news, temporarily.

I lived in Sandusky, Ohio during my high school years. One spring morning I was up early, and I hung a microphone out the window to record the dawn chorus. I wish I still had the tape. It was amazing and glorious. At the time I knew nothing about bird migration. I had no idea that I was living right along a concentration of migrating birds like none other. I could recognize no more than five or six bird calls (robin, chickadee, crow, jay, and hawk, at least). But I could tell that the morning birdsong had at least fifty species of singers contributing. Even if I didn't know what they were, I could tell one from another.

I hope Mr. Kaufman's books reach a wide audience. The more of us who care about wildlife, including birds, the more likely that youngsters a generation or three in the future can wake up to a morning chorus as glorious as the one I remember.

Losers getting loster

kw: book reviews, short stories, fiction

I got two stories into Fly Already by Etgar Keret, and decided to try only one more before giving up. That story, "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot out of a Cannon" is a rather grimy dream sequence, but not the kind of downer the first two stories provided. So I started another and that was that.

No I am not glad I read any of those four stories. If someone is such a loser that reading about other even worse losers gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, go for it. I prefer reading about people who have at least a ghost of a chance of learning from their mistakes, or even better, from the mistakes of others.

Can we bring the Dodo back?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, species restoration, rewilding

So your children or grandchildren visit Yellowstone in the year 2040. A year or two previously another step in the "rewilding" of the Park was taken. Information on the "Guide to Yellowstone" app has a prominent section on "Safety in the Park". The newest arrivals, ten healthy Smilodon (saber-toothed cats), have begun taking over territory from one of the wolf packs. Special safety precautions are required. Nobody is permitted to drive their own vehicle in the area, but must be squired around in special Safari vehicles with added armoring of the doors and top, and extra-thick windows of Lexan. Nobody is permitted to leave the vehicles for any reason. So far, it is still OK to be outside in the Old Faithful Geyser area and some hot spring areas. So far…

Saber-toothed cats. How cute. They once roamed widely in North America, and were a principal predator of the over-sized elk of the time, those too big for a wolf pack to reliably prey upon. A male Smilodon would weight more than twice as much as a cougar (AKA puma). Its 5- to 6-inch (12-15 cm) fangs made it the top predator of the Pleistocene. In a head-to-head encounter, a lion would stand little chance.

At the moment, nobody is proposing a re-creation of this cat. However, as we find in The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals, by Torill Kornfeldt (translated by Fiona Graham), there are serious efforts afoot to restore the Woolly Mammoth, the Passenger Pigeon, the Aurochs (the ancestral bovine), and the Northern White Rhino (very recently extinct). Other researchers are experimenting with chicken DNA, attempting to "bring out the inner dinosaur" in them.

Of course, chickens are dinosaurs, don't-you-know, but we like "real" dinos, with long snouts, teeth, and long tails. How about a flock of chicken-sized toothy dinos to chase down the moths and mice in your back yard? Would you want one for a pet? Considering how impossible it is to house-break a chicken, I don't relish the thought of cleaning up dino poop all over the house.

Perhaps half the book's chapters return again and again to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are working to restore large herbivores to the steppe landscape. The residents of a large enclosed area there include musk oxen and a bison. A herd of mammoths to accompany a much larger number of these grazers, in a much larger area (fenceless?) would complete the picture, because elephants and their kin do something smaller herbivores can't: they knock down trees, which opens up the landscape for the grasses to grow. The activities of all these animals together produce a much richer landscape for animals of all kinds. The Park enclosure is a much more various and interesting habitat than the surrounding area. To knock down trees, the Limovs employ a Soviet-era troop carrier. They have to be their own "virtual mammoths" for the time being.

Let's suppose George Church and his colleagues produce a furry baby pachyderm some day. Would it be a mammoth? At first, only a little bit. Not having a good understanding of the full sequence of mammoth DNA, the workers are gathering one trait after another, to see if they can be spliced into the genome of Asian elephants. One result could be an elephant that is more cold-resistant, increasing their "natural" range (the elephants in places like the Oklahoma City Zoo, or the National Zoo in Washington, DC, can't spend more than a little time outside in the winter, and require hours and hours indoors to warm up afterwards).

Making one mammoth look-alike doesn't produce a mammoth act-alike, because that requires a herd. The herd somehow has to regain tribal knowledge that was lost thousand of years ago when the last mammoths died. It has proven arduous and very costly to properly socialize zoo-born Condors. Nobody is sure they really know all that a Condor must when they are returned to the California mountains. Some live, some don't. How do you socialize a mammoth? Taking a few hundred of them to Siberia for the Limovs to oversee would be by far the easiest part of the matter!

I was quite amused to read of one fellow who wants to bring back the Passenger Pigeon. Their legendary flocks, of millions of birds, would certainly be a sight to see. So would the foot-deep guano they'd leave behind after they ate their way through a chunk of landscape...or a suburb. In the West and Midwest, and to a lesser extent out here in DelMarVa, I've seen flocks of starlings that number in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is enjoyable to watch a swooping cloud of them swirl through the sky and suddenly drop onto a cluster of trees, and then burst into the sky again. In suburban neighborhoods, they are a pest, such that some neighborhood associations employ retired folks to use special guns that shoot whistling bottle-rocket-like projectiles into the trees and drive them off (to a different neighborhood). Now, multiply that by 100. Passenger pigeons were 3-6 times the size (weight) of starlings.

By the way, to reduce starling populations, make it legal to kill and eat them. They'd be a lot easier to wipe out than the passenger pigeons were. They are an invasive bird here; European natives. But it takes a lot of them to make a meal; they weigh about 2.5 ounces each. "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", singing or not, is a good indication of their size.

Scientists are very divided about restoring extinct species, and about rewilding, a separate topic. You can restore a landscape's wildness by simply moving all the people out, and perhaps trucking certain animals in. Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone has made great changes in the way the elk and other grazers behave, and in the vegetation of the landscape. If a cold-resistant elephant is produced, woolly or not, is it a good idea to release a bunch of them in central parts of the USA? We would also need to import a bunch of Thai and Indian elephant trainers to teach the people who live there how to live alongside them! Lack of success in that area would be marked by the critters being poached back out of existence.

Maybe Siberia is big enough, and remote enough, for a true Pleistocene Park, the size of Pennsylvania or more. There's hardly anywhere else on Earth that mammoths could be re-introduced in any meaningful way. That's not the author's conclusion; she doesn't draw one. It is my conclusion.

Putting the X in eXaggerate

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, how to, humor

Troubled by drones? Maybe you want to sunbathe without being on camera. If so, lookee here:

In this drawing "from life", we have Serena Williams downing a drone with her ace tennis serve, as drawn by Randall Munroe. The tale is told, and illustrated, in Chapter 22 of how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems.

Mr. Munroe doesn't tell us how he got Ms Williams and her husband to help with this phase of "How to Catch a Drone"; it seems they were already on speaking terms. That's not all there is to the chapter, however. A lot of things can intercept a drone, most of them illegal, all of them (including a Williams serve) rather dangerous...to the recipient!

The cover of the book shows someone changing a light bulb while standing on two drones. I hope they are the ultra-high-capacity (and ultra-high-stability) kind. Curiously, there is no chapter on lightbulb-changing. That is probably just as well. In Chapter 21, "How to Take a Selfie", after discussing things like focal length, field of view, and the popularity of Selfie Sticks, Munroe takes us farther and farther afield: selfies with big towers, in which you and the tower appear of similar heights; selfies with the moon, or even the sun (ditto); and on to using other planets as backdrops, which requires bigger and bigger telescopes to image the celestial orb in question.

To use Venus as a "selfie companion", for example, you need to use the Palomar Telescope as the camera lens and stand on a mountaintop in an appropriate location four miles away, after doing the calculations to determine when Venus rises over that mountaintop. Considering that the angle Venus makes on the sky when it is in a good position to show a crescent is about one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and the apparent motion of Venus (and stars and everything) is 15°/hr or 15 arc-minutes per minute, so you'd have no more than two seconds in which to take the picture. Hmm. Make a hi-res video instead, and you can pick out the appropriate frame later. Miss the shot? You can try again in eight years.

The author gets into throwing things, and discusses the possibility that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River. At the location of the event, the river is 372 feet wide. A strong thrower, throwing the dollar with a flat spin, can send it upwards of 450 feet, so it is quite possible. Washington liked throwing things, and he was good at it. I had to figure out, though, did he have a silver dollar to throw? I looked up the history of the Philadelphia Mint. It first manufactured the "flowing hair" dollar in 1794, five years before Washington died. So, yes, silver dollars were available. Cool. The chapter "How to Throw Things", however, gets into a lot more kinds of throwing, going to extreme limits, as is done in each chapter (like, how far could Carly Rae Jepson throw George Washington?)

It's obvious, the book is great fun. It takes things a big, big step beyond the Mythbusters, but with the same motto: "Don't try this at home". Some of the things really could cook your goose (like the lava moat).

No kidding, it really is the very best of the best

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections, anthologies

I noticed that I haven't posted anything for nearly two weeks. I have't been idle. The book I just finished has 686 pages of first-rate science fiction stories. Even being engrossed, day after day, it took that long to finish them all.

The book is The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. I believe it set a record for me: of 38 stories, I liked 29 well enough to record the authors' names on my "lookup list" for getting books. That exceeds 70%, totally violating Sturgeon's Dictum, "90% of everything is junk". But then, not only was Gardner Dozois a great editor, whose tastes largely coincide with mine, but he was a great re-editor. The book is the last of three; there's no way to get all of the "very best" into one book, even one pushing 700 pages. There won't be a fourth, since he passed away in May, 2018.

I considered delving into a handful of the stories, but the breadth of ideas is just too great. I'll just have to keep this volume on hand for selective re-reading later on. Just this: nearly every story takes a viewpoint from the side or behind a familiar trope, or introduces something from far outside anywhere SciFi has taken me before.

Spiders on the home front

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Well, I left a comment about this on the prior "spider" post, but I had to show the image!

That's 129 hits in 8 minutes. The one- and two-hit "grass" is normal traffic. I'm hardly popular, but it's interesting that at least a few people per hour stumble across this blog.

To get this view, you have to look at your stats within two hours of the activity.

Hamilton's doctor and his plants

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, doctors, history, horticulture, botany, botanists, early united states history

On the left, Manhattan (except the north end) in 1811. On the right, the same view in 2018. The 1811 image is from the book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson.

Who was David Hosack? He was the most famous doctor I'd never heard of. If I heard the name in an American History class, I didn't retain it. Two items in the 1811 view indicate his importance. The first, a spot that matches the location of Rockefeller Center, which is marked in the 1918 image, is a tiny rectangle labeled "Botanic Garden". The second, across the Hudson River and farther north, is a spot labeled "Monument of Gen. Hamilton". The monument marks the spot where, on July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel over Hamilton's opposition to Burr in his bid to be Governor of New York State. The attending physician was David Hosack. Though he failed to preserve Hamilton's life, he had saved many lives that other doctors considered lost causes.

David Hosack (a Scottish name pronounced "Hozzick"), born in 1769, had studied both medicine and botany, and spent time in his late twenties in Scotland, where he first encountered botanical gardens in Edinburgh. he developed a passion for learning medical uses for plants. He already knew how to cure, or at least alleviate, symptoms of malaria and other fevers using "Peruvian bark", which contained quinine; the few effective medicines besides mercury were all plant parts or plant extracts.

After returning to New York and establishing a medical practice, Dr. Hosack bought 20 acres of land on the Middle Road in the middle of Manhattan Island where he established Elgin Garden in 1801. In just the ten years he had the garden, he gathered plants of all kinds, trained numerous medical students to recognize and use the medically useful ones, and corresponded with numerous botanists and botanical-medical men all over Europe and the American colonies. He corresponded with Jefferson, who had some interest in botany. He became the most famous doctor of the time, and his garden inspired others to set up gardens and arboreta that became the network of horticultural establishments found all over the U.S.

Ms Johnson's book outlines all this, with a wealth of fascinating details about life in and around New York two centuries ago, when Manhattan was mostly farmland. Only later, but in Hosack's lifetime, was Middle Road renamed Fifth Avenue. In 1810, after a few years of lobbying effort, Hosack sold Elgin Garden to the State of New York, though the state took its own sweet time to pay him. He could not continue the massive financial burden of maintaining the garden and its workers. It wasn't but a few years before the state divested itself, turning the garden over to Columbia University, which later sold the land to the consortium that began to build Rockefeller Center, which almost exactly covers the footprint of Elgin Garden, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Whenever you see paintings by members of the "Hudson River School", some of which depict scenes in and around Manhattan and the other areas that now comprise New York City, take a moment to reflect upon the lovely scenes that once filled the area before it all became paved over and built to the sky with monuments to corporate power. And remember to be thankful that only a few percent of this nation has been paved and built upon, that large areas were set aside to retain their natural splendor. Also remember to be thankful for scholars such as David Hosack, whose passion for learning from nature inspired many of the medicines we take for granted, bestowed by the plants that grow all around us.

More spiders visit from Russia

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

So I logged right in, and what did I see? Bunch'a Russian spiders, lookin' back at me!

At my present rate of activity, any hourly spike above about 10 is suspicious, as is a daily total greater than 50. And in "Pageviews today", the total shown is for less than half the day, which is counted in PDT.

Below, the weekly country splits are on the left, and for today on the right. I do have a worldwide readership; I just hope that, outside of Russia, they are actually reading!

Humidity balance in older guitars

kw: essays, musical instruments, maintenance, humidification

I have a few vintage guitars. One, a Takamine that I bought new in 1973 in California, became so dried out it began to come apart by 1980, so I unstrung it and stored it and bought another (which is now also vintage!), a Sigma Anniversary Edition. By then I was living in South Dakota, which is even dryer than southern California. I later learned of humidifiers for acoustic guitars, such as the one shown here. I got one for the Sigma.

The sponge can hold 20cc of water. In a closed and latched hard case it can keep a guitar from drying out for a month in pretty dry weather. However, it doesn't regulate the humidity, it just raises it, sometimes close to saturation, which can make a guitar body "fat", raising its pitch; it gets sharp and the tone changes, getting "hollow". And then, if you leave it outside the case to dry out, it goes flat. It's hard to find a balance.

Before my Mom died she sent me her guitar, the one I'd learned on some 60 years ago. She didn't know what brand it was, and the paper label was missing. Her dad had bought it used when she was very young. It had suffered some damage over the years, so I loosened its strings and just stored it for a decade or so. Then in 2016 I decided to take it to a luthier to see if I could afford to have it repaired and set up for playing.

The price was a bit steep, but affordable, so I had him go ahead with it. He did all kinds of things to it, and was also able to determine, from penciled and stenciled notations inside, that it is a 1905 Gibson Artist. He talked to me a long time about proper care once I took it home. He said a humidifier like the one I was using on my Sigma could ruin it, and recommended a 2-way pack such as the Humidipak by D'Addario.

The kit comes with three packs that contain a special mix of salts (probably mostly magnesium nitrate) and a gel, in an osmotic membrane. They can both raise and reduce humidity whenever it strays from 48%. The optimum humidity for an acoustic guitar is 50%, but anything in the range 45%-55% will keep it "healthy".

Two of the packs go in a 2-pocket bag and are hung between the strings; the other one is put in the neck compartment of the case. The box says each pack can release as much as 26cc of water in dry conditions. There is no indication of how much they can absorb when the environment is humid.

The luthier recommended that I get a room-size humidifier to use in the wintertime, to raise the humidity, and a digital hygrometer. From the readings on our thermostat, I already knew that the house humidity gets as low as 30% in winter. We run a humidifier in the basement, set at 50%. It regulates the whole house in summer, keeping it below 55%. Without it, humidity gets into the seventies and stays there for at least a couple months.

The humidifier I got needed daily attention, and even putting it in a closed closet with all the guitars, in their hard shell cases (by this time I also had a Fender 12-string), it needed filling daily. We were worried that all the humidity was going into the walls and ceiling and floor, and could induce mold, even though my digital hygrometer reported the closet's humidity stayed below 60%.

After a year of that, I thought things through and made a big change. The luthier had said that the speed of the Humidipaks to dry out humid air was slower than when they were humidifying dry air. I decided to do in-the-case regeneration of the Humidpaks, using the humidifiers I already had, and a few more I bought.

I made record sheets like this one, one for each guitar. I have a digital kitchen scale with a sensitivity of 1g (the weight of 1cc of water). I figured that if the Humidipaks can release 26g each, it would be OK for them to absorb 10-20g from the humidifiers.

Last October I began. I usually checked about twice monthly to see how things progressed. I would decide each time whether to add water to the humidifiers ("restoration packs"). The "+20" or plus-whatever records how much water I added. I used distilled water.

I noticed that each time I added water, the guitar would get a little fat after a day or two, then dry back out in another day or two. I figure that is the time it takes for the Humidipaks to absorb most of the water in the humidifiers. I didn't want to interfere too much by weighing daily.

Perusing this record, I can see that I had to add a lot of water from December through March. Middle and late February was warmer and wetter, so I tried not adding water for about a month. The humidifiers released their water quite slowly, and the Humidipaks kept their weight or even gained just a bit.

The bottom line shows measurements I made today. I added no water over the summer, after the final summer record on August 1. I only took this guitar out to practice, usually daily, because I used the 12-string to lead church singing. I had been using the Takamine for that the prior year or two.

I was told that Humidipaks will last about three years if a guitar spends most of its time in a closet with a small-room humidifier. Rather than burning through a gallon of water almost daily, I used about ten ounces of water for the whole year. This kept the Humidipaks a little over-full and the guitars all keep their tuning when not in use, and they only needed a little tweaking after being used for an hour or two. I'll find out if these last longer than three years after another couple of years.

This short story collection took me by surprise

kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, collections

The local library finally wised up and began putting the collections of short stories in its New Books section all in one place. Their Dewey Decimal code is SS, after all. So this and the prior two books were easier to find, and allowed me to indulge my enjoyment of short stories, which I usually prefer to novels. The recent trends in science fiction novels are not to my liking.

The collection is The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, edited by Larry Dark. I pay so little attention to mainstream fiction that I didn't know about the Story Prize until now. It is given to award books containing exceptional writing in short format. In the Introduction the editor waxes eloquent about the difficulty of the short format, and of how gratified he is to find many authors who still publish books full of short stories, even though "the money is in novels." After fifteen years of conferring the award, Mr. Dark gathered for this volume the best story of each year (minus one).

When I have dipped my toe into the mainstream I have usually come away dissatisfied. Many times I have stopped rather early on in an apparently aimless book or story, skipping to the ending "to see if it goes anywhere". If it does not, that's that, I am done with it. Sadly, this is more and more true of speculative fiction, particularly longer works of science fiction or fantasy (yes, I also enjoy well-written fantasy, but my standard is high, and no more than a few books per decade pass muster).

Most of the stories in The Story Prize were top-notch, to my way of thinking, so I can mention only a few. One, the longest in the volume (76 pp), is actually science fiction: "The Memory Wall", a novelette by Anthony Doerr; a way of recovering the experiences of memories has been developed, but it only helps dementia patients a little, and there is a dark side to the existence of memories outside the brain that made them. Another, "Saleema" by Daniyal Mueenudin, shows the nearly-universal experience of poor women world-wide, who have no currency but their own bodies, and does so without making the reader feel slimed. And finally, the last story, which initially seems to be going nowhere, about a man keeping a private epiphany a secret for decades; when in old age he heals an old rift with a neighbor, but also begins to harbor doubts and tells his wife, she is unsurprised, saying in effect, "Why not?"

Though a few stories were indeed "flyover country" to me, most were worth reading, and quite enjoyable. Even a couple that made me squirm (e.g. "Saleema") were stories I am glad I read.

On the in-between state of matter

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, materials science, liquids

Mercury is the only element of ordinary experience that is a liquid. These days, though, now that electronic thermometers have replaced medical thermometers containing mercury, and fluorescent tubes have been mostly replaced by CFL's and LED's, it's hard for someone to obtain a large enough bit of mercury to play with. But mercury is not the only element that is liquid at "room temperature", if you count the temperature of a southern house in July without air conditioning:

• Mercury, symbol Hg, melting point -40°C (-40°F). A silvery metal, all of whose compounds are toxic to varying degrees (methyl mercury is one of the worst).
• Bromine, symbol Br, melting point -7°C (19°F). A brown liquid, hard to extract from its compounds, very toxic as an element. In a bromide salt it is used medically.
• Gallium, symbol Ga, melting point 30°C (86°F). A silvery metal, solid at comfortable temperatures, but will melt when held in your hand. In compounds such as gallium arsenide it is the basis for LED's and certain very high speed semiconductors.
• Cesium, symbol Cs, melting point 28°C (83°F). A slightly yellowish, shiny metal, it will also melt in your hand, but it would be dangerous to do so unless it is in a sealed glass vessel. Cesium will draw water from your skin and explode, much more violently than potassium or sodium do when dropped into water.
• Francium, symbol Fr, melting point 27°C (81°F). A brown semi-metal, extremely radioactive (half life is 22 minutes), it can only be produced in quantities large enough to be seen and experimented with using a nuclear reactor.
• NaK, an alloy of sodium (Na) and potassium (K), is liquid at or below 25°C (77°F) when the proportion of sodium is between 10% and 60%.

All other liquids with which we are familiar are compounds or mixtures of compounds. A baker's dozen (including Hg) are discussed in an enjoyable book, Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances that Flow Through Our Lives, by Mark Miodnownik. Dr. Miodnownik is a materials scientist, and while most materials science deals with solids such as metals and ceramics, liquids are definitely materials, and fascinating materials at that.

Other than mercury, the half-dozen liquids listed above are not discussed. They are outside ordinary experience. The author uses the framework of an airline flight from London to San Francisco to tell us of familiar liquids such as kerosene (jet fuel), water, alcohol, and a few near-solids such as tar (it flows about a million times more slowly than water) and the "rock" of Earth's mantle, which flows slowly (a few inches per year) in a convection pattern that pushes the continents around and creates earthquakes and volcanoes.

Discussing "alcohol", which for most of us is ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, he tells how we use its moderate toxicity to fuddle our thinking to various degrees. He just touches on other chemicals that are also alcohols, such as methanol. I didn't know before that fermentation of grains produces both ethanol and a little methanol, and that the various post-processing steps used to prepare beer remove the methanol, making it safer to drink; also that distilling raw beer into whiskey has to be done properly to discard the methanol so we don't get "blind drunk" from methanol-laced moonshine. We are also a little familiar with rubbing alcohol, a mixture in water of a different, slightly larger molecule called isopropanol. A chemistry professor once talked of the toxicity curve of the alcohols, that methanol (with one carbon) being very toxic, ethanol (with two carbons) being less so, low enough for us to imbibe, propanol and isopropanol (3 carbons) being much more toxic, and that the toxicity continues to increase as the carbon chain gets longer, but then decreases. He speculated that a long enough "alcohol", maybe with 15 carbons, would be no more toxic than ethanol, and might provide the basis for a different kind of befuddling beverage. Since long-chain alcohols are rare in nature, it is unlikely that our bodies would have the right enzymes to dispose of them.

I could babble on, but it's better to leave it at that and encourage you to read the book. From ballpoint pen ink to saliva, and freon to ketchup, it is likely you'll learn something new in every chapter.

SF - other planets heard from

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, marginalized groups, anthologies

I need to preface a review of A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and Joseph Adams, with a brief statistical excursion. I begin with a concept I first read about in "The Outsiders" by Grady Towers, who was writing about IQ and social acceptance. First, a look at the Normal Curve, a graphical representation of how much some quantity varies around an average called the Mean. It is also called the Gaussian Distribution:

The symbol µ ("mu") refers to the Mean, the arithmetical average, and σ ("sigma") refers to Standard Deviation, a calculated  measure of how spread out the distribution is.

The Normal Curve is an ideal frequency chart of any quantity that is composed of additive influences, such as adult height (either for males or females, but not both together).

Where σ is small, a distribution is tightly clustered. Thus, for example, in the U.S., including all the genetic diversity of various populations, µ and σ are 70" and 4", respectively, for men and 65" and 3.5", respectively, for women. Thus, out of 10,000 men, chosen by some randomizing method (many giant books in statistics discuss just what methods of randomization work best!), about 9,972 will be between 58" and 82" tall; out of a sample of 10,000 women, about 9,972 will be between 54.5" and 75.5" tall. For both men and women, a very tiny minority, roughly 14 at each end, will be taller than these maxima, or shorter than these minima. The smaller σ for women's heights indicates that the distribution is a little more tightly clustered.

Considering that 82" is "only" 6'-10", we see that men with heights of seven feet and greater are very rare. The NBA selects for these extreme ones!

When applied to IQ, the curve was standardized a century ago with µ and σ set at 100 and 15, respectively. Thus a "three-sigma" high IQ is 145, and only about 14 out of 10,000 persons have an IQ that high. Grady Towers investigated the results of social isolation on persons having IQ's ranging from 140 to 180. Only one person in a million has an IQ greater than 180. He added a sociological observation, which I'll paraphrase thus:

Two people whose IQ differs by more than 30 points (2σ) will have difficulty communicating, and will have different interests.

The central band in the chart above represents the 2/3 of everyone whom we might consider "normal folks". Someone with an IQ of 145 will just barely be able to hold a conversation with people at the smarter end of "normal", but with anyone further over toward the "low IQ" end, which is a total of about 84% of the human race, it is rather hard, and gets harder the greater the difference is. Similarly, someone with a very low IQ of 55 will also be just barely able to converse with more "normal" people.

Grady Towers generalized this to other areas. Along any spectrum of human experience or understanding, there are about seven "positions". Using a modified curve to illustrate:

Section C represents just over 2/3 of us, who could be considered "centrist", whether the issue is political opinion, employability, or attitudes toward the issues of the day. Sections B and D represent smaller cohorts with more one-sided views or experiences, but they are able to communicate or empathize with those in section C, and to some extent, each with the other. Sections A and E represent extremists, typically only a couple of percent each, and the Fringes, AA and EE, are the tiny number of those with extremely rare experiences or attitudes at either end of the spectrum. For example, if this is a spectrum of employability, I am not sure what EE might represent, but everyone from about the middle of section B through E and EE ought to be able to find work whenever the unemployment rate is less than 6%. That rate has to drop to about 2% before anyone in sections AA and A, the "chronically unemployable" will be able to find steady work.

Let's take a different example, a sadly practical one, abortion-on-demand. Where the spectrum is one of opinion, and the issue is contentious, sections AA and EE take on special meaning. Statements that represent views in each section might be (first for A through E):

A - "We must vigorously fight for a woman's right to an abortion for any reason."
B - "A woman has a right to get an abortion."
C - "I say, live and let live. I do/don't like it, but it ought not be legislated."
D - "There should be legal restrictions on abortions; they shouldn't be done for just any reason."
E - "We must vigorously fight for legislation banning abortion for any reason."

Concerning section E, I have recently read of a number of doctors who contend that abortion is "never medically necessary". That's a different wrinkle, and maybe those doctors are in the EE section. In A and E above, "fight" is seen as a combination of lobbying and protest for or against an issue. As we have witnessed in recent years, Fringes AA and EE are willing to kill to "support" their viewpoint. Interestingly, on this issue, I haven't heard of anyone willing to die for it.

A similar spectrum, not so clearly defined, was presented to me in a Civics class about 50 years ago, when the meanings of the following terms were not the same as they are today:

Radical - Liberal - Moderate - Conservative - Reactionary, with the fringes, again, being those willing to take action, including killing. Remember Congressman Steve Scalise, who was shot by James Hodgkinson a few years ago, simply because the Congressman supported "conservative" issues that the Mr. Hodgkinson was rabidly against.

Now, how does all this apply to People's Future of the U.S.? The scale above can also be applied to xenophobia and our attitudes toward various "marginalized groups." This is the era of the victim, and equally, the era of expressing outrage, in a way much sharper than the protests of "the 60's", which ran from 1967-1975. Occasional news pundits decry the "polarization" of America, but much of America is actually fragmented, and more closely resembles the Italian Parliament, with dozens of special-interest groups vying for the public ear and for votes: I count at least 55 political "parties" in Italy, with new ones popping up and others vanishing, almost weekly.

The writers of the stories in this anthology are primarily members of, or strongly sympathetic to, the "special interest groups" among the American public who produce or provoke the loudest voices against the status quo. Many of the stories express their fear of what the country might become in the next few years or so. One even bases its drama on a turn in legislation to revoke the 13th Amendment and resume slavery.

Those who have more-or-less recently received more official protection, particularly the variously gendered and some immigrant groups, are still fearful of losing the rights so recently gained. Thus, nearly all the stories are post-Apocalyptic dystopian tales, with varying amounts of optimism. A number of them posit a kind of right-wing takeover, reversing all the social changes of the past six or seven decades, from the sexual revolution to the legalization of various recreational drugs.

Two of the stories are extra-hopeful, "The Wall" by Liz Huerta and "Harmony" by Seanan McGuire. The first, with the background of the US-Mexican border being thoroughly walled-up, has people escaping repression to enter Mexico, and Mexican scientists working on countermeasures or an antidote to a new kind of chemically-induced brainwashing of US soldiers (by the Pentagon). They seek to, I would say, "de-monsterify" them. In the second, people who still find themselves subtly marginalized escape a "perfect" utopian paradise, manage to buy a defunct town, and start over with a whole lot less conformity. I detected shades of "And Then There Were None" by E.F. Russell.

Six stories aren't in a realm I'd call science fiction, but are wish-fulfillment fantasies. However, two of them—"Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" by N.K. Jemisin and "What You Sow" by Kai Cheng Thom—involve dragons, from quite different points of view.

I have mentioned before that I read to learn what and how people think. I believe that far too few people who fall into the "C" section of most social, political, and societal spectra have even the slightest care about what the "non-C" sections experience or think. I admit that some of the stories made me uncomfortable, but I count that a good thing. Just so y'know: Politically I am in section D, close to the boundary with C. In most social realms I fit in about the same. If IQ has any meaning, I am in section EE, but I've worked hard to counteract the "Outsider Effect" of Grady Towers' monograph, so that I can relate to a broader range of people.

I exhort folks of all sorts: Read this collection. It may open a few eyes. Are the scenarios exaggerated? Sometimes, but so what? The pain from which they arose is real enough, real enough indeed.

SF from the other end of the thru-planet tunnel

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, chinese literature

When I was a kid, we "all knew" that if you dug a hole straight through the Earth, you would reach China. Only after we got a globe did we figure out that, antipodal from nearly all of North America, you'll find ocean, except a little bit that is opposite a section of Australia. To tunnel to somewhere in China, I would have to dig parallel to the plane of the equator, at an angle of about 50°, rather than 90° straight down.

Metaphorically, however, the U.S.A. and China really are poles apart. How does this affect science fiction written in China versus that written here? In a word, "dramatically". For one thing, SciFi was banned in the People's Republic of China (PRC) for about half of the Communist era there, roughly 1949 to the present. An essay in Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu, outlines the repeated submergence and resurgence of the genre in China. As I read in "A Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom" by Regina Kanyu Wang, whenever the gate opens, the Chinese SciFi "horses" race off in every direction. This book, a follow-on and companion to Invisible Planets (issued about three years ago), opens a window upon that amazing scene for the English-language reader.

Whatever you might find in Western SciFi, you are likely to find in Chinese SciFi, from space opera to post-apocalyptic dystopias, from time travel to psycho-thrillers. One thing I missed was alien encounter stories, not that they are absent, but seem to be very rare. I suspect that the Chinese think that Westerners are alien enough, and frequently dwell on the consequences of that.

Just statistically, there are about 3½ times as many people in the PRC as in the USA, and nearly twice as many as in the USA and Europe combined. That means there are huge numbers of excellent writers, writing in Chinese, about which the English-language world knows nothing. It is beyond me to survey the field, so I'll just comment on a very few stories I particularly liked.

The title story, "Broken Stars" is by Tang Fei (an indivisible pseudonym), in a genre I can't quite place. A central artifact in the interplay between the narrator and a "pale woman" is an "astrolabe", a "star-taker". Historically, the astrolabe was a measuring instrument that was later developed into the sextant, and then the theodolite, for measuring star positions. This infinitely-unfoldable paper device shows the planets' positions instead, and is for astrology. When the narrator, losing patience with wildly erratic prediction, draws on it, events are changed; cause and effect are tangled up. Is it a parable of "taking charge of one's own life?" Other threads in the story don't back that up, and I was left with an ambiguous feeling.

"What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear", by Baoshu (also a pseudonym), could be said to take a page from "Benjamin Button", but for all of China. This quasi-history of US-China relations and events within the PRC starts with the massacre in Tiananmen Square and moves forward through Premier Deng's era to that of Mao, in the apparent present. It is nearly all in reverse order, limned by the lives of three characters who experience it all.

"The History of Future Illnesses", by Chen Quifan, begins with iPad Syndrome, and runs through variations that culminate in the destruction of language. To say more is to give too much away, but the story could be a taken as a cautionary tale.

I didn't read Invisible Planets, so I'll have to scare up a copy.

Spiders return to Russia

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Nearly a week ago there was a scattered flurry of hits to this blog, totaling about 200, and another 40 in a short time two days ago. As this overview shows, the excess above the "grass" is all Russia.

Revoking permission to make us a victim

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, self preservation, violence, terrorism, mass murder

Dr. Gary M. Jackson has worked in anti-terrorism more than 30 years. Over such a time, patterns become clear. He has distilled his expertise into a very useful reference book, Surviving Mass Victim Attacks: What to Do When the Unthinkable Happens.

If you read through the book, as I did, it develops in you a view of self-preservation as a solemn responsibility. Please do get the book, and read it through, even if some of the repetition gets tedious. Any good educator knows that repetition aids learning. After reading it keep it handy, and go back over sundry items as they come to mind, perhaps prompted by yet another outrage covered in breathless haste by the media.

The author wants us first to understand the commonalities behind mass attacks, from a "going postal" shooting incident to a bombing to a truck/knife attack. He boils down the motive to five categories:

• International Terrorism (usually religion based)
• Domestic Terrorism (religion based or anti-government)
• Self-Radicalized Terrorism (also usually religion based)
• Mental Health Issues
• Hate and Bias

In the three Terrorism categories, the overwhelming majority of religion based incidents are motivated by Radical Islam (read my review of Muslim by Hank Hanegraaf to see why "radical Islam" is a redundancy). However, in all the categories above means and weapons used by the attackers fall into categories that help us better understand ways we can increase our chances of survival:

• Firearms
• Knives
• Vehicles
• Bombs

The news media focus primarily on mass shootings, but cars and trucks are being used more frequently, particularly based on urging by ISIS and al Qaeda, as are knives. Lately, crashing a truck into a crowd is followed by knifing that continues until the attacker is killed.

For the first three categories of attack, the first three rules of survival are:

• Escape
• ESCAPE
• ESCAPE

OK, I know that in the book they are Escape, Hide, and Counter-attack. But the author takes pains to drill it into our brains, that a mass attacker intends to kill as many victims as possible, and seldom intends to leave the scene without either committing suicide or being killed by police or the crowd. Therefore, he stresses many times that we should have no thought except to escape, until it becomes clear that we cannot do so.

We have all likely heard of survivors who "played dead" and were passed over. But all too often, the attacker goes back and puts more bullets into all the prone bodies, to be sure his victims are truly dead. Also, for every report of someone who survived by hiding, there are many reports of a seemingly-good hiding place being found full of bodies later on. So, escape! Hiding and attacking the attacker are kind of Hail-Mary attempts when escape is impossible and you are practically nose-to-nose: dead if you stand still, so why not try something? If you must attack the attacker, do your best to use a weapon, either one you brought with you, or something improvised, like a broken bottle or table leg. The cardinal rule here: there is no such thing as a fair fight, and the mass attacker already has a big advantage.

Only in the case of a bombing is escape not the best. If you survive the blast, running could put you in the path of a second blast. Remember the Boston Marathon bombings; there were two bombs. Running would be a bad strategy. Tend to your wounds and keep hidden.

Later in the book we read how to formulate our own preparedness, so that we know how to get quickly out of a place if it is attacked. A quiet, small restaurant, for example, is unlikely to draw a mass attacker, who will instead look for a target with more potential victims. If we plan to be somewhere amongst a crowd, then, we need to check out all the alternative exits. Even in a mall, it's well to remember that all the bigger stores will have a back exit, but some of the smaller ones may not. That will inform our choice of escape routes if an attack happens while we are there.

There is a lot I could say, but I'll leave that to the book, which says it very well. It is well worth getting familiar with its contents.

A quick spider byte

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

So there were an extra 40 hits a couple of hours ago. The "Posts" view shows 20 of them. In the "by Countries" view, take away the 38 from Russia, and it looks like a pretty ordinary day.

Medicine is becoming chemistry

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, drugs, biotechnology

When I was taking a specialized Geochemistry course, "Crystal Chemistry", I realized that chemistry is mostly geometry. From a geochemical point of view, most of the crust of the earth is a gigantic oxygen crystal, with the oxygen atoms in or near a closest-packing arrangement, held together by covalent bonds with various metal ions.

In biology, the geometric view is even more relevant. For example, enzymes work either by making a lock-and-key attachment, or by making two or more such attachments and then shifting or bending the resulting complex so a different lock-and-key is facilitated. Most drugs that have been discovered, or engineered, are actually little geometric items that either promote or block a biochemical pathway in the body. A few are replacements for necessary molecules that are sometimes present in insufficient amounts, such as insulin, to treat Type I Diabetes.

Side effects of drugs result when the lock-and-key match is not perfect, and the matching part on the drug is also a partial match to a critical component of a different biochemical pathway. Side effects also occur when the waste-disposal systems of the body break down a drug molecule: some breakdown products have geometrical properties that interfere with other biochemical pathways.

In Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills have Shaped the History of Medicine, Thomas Hager discusses the discovery and development of ten families of medical molecules. The subtitle tells of three that could stand in for them all:

• Plants – The first chapter tells us the history of Opium, derived from the sap of a particular species of poppy. It also discusses how researchers learned to refine opium to extract morphine, the primary molecule in the mix. Morphine was the first opiate to be discovered; opiates are derived from opium.
• Powders – Heroin, prepared by chemically altering morphine, and opioids (not derived directly from opium or its components, but entirely synthetic) such as Fentanyl, bookend the discovery of painkilling medicines. Heroin came very early (1897), leading to many products, with varying amounts of pain-relieving properties, and all of them very addictive. Fentanyl came later (1959), and led to exceedingly powerful pain medications, which are also powerfully addictive.
• Pills – "The Pill" refers to birth control medication, which changed sexual politics in America and much of the world, and upended social systems in its wake. It also may have triggered the "Feel bad? There's a pill for that" ethos we live in.

In the ninth chapter we find the convoluted story of Statins, the drugs that lower blood cholesterol, which are taken in an attempt to reduce fatalities from heart attack and stroke. For the worst cases of extra-high cholesterol, lowering it does indeed help. But it is still now known if taking statin drugs will actually save (that is, lengthen) the life of the vast majority of those who take them because their blood cholesterol is slightly higher than a threshold such as 200 mg/dl. That value is a nice, round number that is near the center of a broad distribution: Some people with low or even very low cholesterol get heart attacks, and most people with moderately high cholesterol live long, healthy lives. 200 is a kind of break-over point, "because you have to draw the line somewhere."

Let's look for a moment at breakdown products. Morphine, its derivatives, and related opioids, work by stimulating the endorphin system, which blocks pain. This system works naturally to reduce pain, but goes into hyperdrive when opiates and opioids are present. These chemicals also produce a high, the "endorphin rush". Opiates and opioids are broken down to release a small molecule called THIQ. Some of the THIQ avoids further breakdown to re-attach to the endorphin receptors, but then it never is removed. This is at least part of the mechanism of opiate tolerance. It takes a larger dose of the drug to get results. Eventually, the brain can become saturated, and no amount of drug will have a sufficient effect. At this point, some drug addicts die from overdose, and the rest stop using it because they aren't getting a high any more. If someone claims to have used heroin heavily for more than twenty years, they are probably lying. By 20 years, saturation has occurred.

The last chapter of the book discusses monoclonal antibodies, which are a recent innovation (1986). They are as close to a "magic bullet" as we have so far been able to produce. I learned that medicines with names ending in "-mab" are produced this way. These are large molecules, so none of them yet work on problems in the brain or central nervous system, because they are too big to pass the blood-brain barrier. Perhaps that will change, maybe by a means of removing most of the molecule and purifying the "bullet" part.

Where can medicine go from here? Most modern drugs are produced for chronic problems. The low-hanging fruit exemplified by antibiotics seem to be mostly exhausted. The Baby Boom generation now in their 60's and 70's have lots of chronic issues, and drug companies love finding drugs for those. For a strep throat, you take a ten-day course of antibiotics, and you're done. For high blood pressure, you're on a lifelong prescription plan. Pay, pay, pay all the way to the grave. So most of what "Big Pharma" produces is to feed the Boomers' need for more comfort in their dotage. Will this change; will some remaining big problems (malaria, Ebola) be effectively dealt with? The author is guardedly hopeful. But if vaccination for malaria winds up costing $100,000, how much help can that be, when billions of people need the vaccine?

Are there larger and larger numbers of pills and potions in our future? Or will better preventive medicine arrive? I guess we need to stay tuned.

Intelligence or intellect?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philosophy, intelligence, artificial intelligence, history

Short Definitions:

Intelligence – the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills

Intellect – the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively

The first tension that presents itself in Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains, by Catherine Malabou, is that between the use of "intelligence" where most philosophers would have preferred "intellect", in discussions of reasoning ability and its measurement, roughly a century ago. I suspect that the definitions she would use for these terms differ from those shown above. Personally, I care little which term is used.

It took me a good while to get used to the language of the book. It was translated from French by Carolyn Shread. I was not always sure if this or that infelicity of English usage was because of the original French idiom, or from word choices made by the translator, choices I might have made differently. I suspect the former; philosophers, particularly European philosophers, think in ways quite foreign to us hoi polloi. Such is the legacy of a century of Linguistic Analysis (both Ideal and Colloquial) and their sister, Logical Positivism: too much musing on "the meaning of meaning". Once I had my mind in gear, I found the book quite engaging.

The core of the book, explaining the title, surrounds three "metamorphoses" of "intelligence." I would perhaps have used either "manifestation" or even "aspect" rather than "metamorphosis". The three are, in brief:

1. The view of Intelligence as a genetic endowment of learning and reasoning ability, that can be measured. It is what IQ tests purported to measure, and in the literature is called both IQ and g, g being the "general factor" as opposed to a seven (later eight) factor model promoted by Howard Gardner. "Mechanical brains" based on digital computers were the early attempts to simulate mental activity in mechanisms.
2. The more nuanced understanding of epigenetic effects, both those which affect DNA expression and those which affect the "wiring" of neurons and synapses. Recent developments of "artificial neurons" such as the "neuro-synaptic processor" or TrueNorth chip (see Cassidy et al, 2016) make significant advances over traditional digital processing.
3. Future developments are expected to result from "removal of the rigid frontiers between nature and artifice." In other words, the "power of automatism" is expected to yield a constructed system that is a brain in every meaningful sense of the term.

The TrueNorth chip, with upwards of 5 billion transistors, simulating the action of a million neurons connected by 250 million synapses, is intended to functionally simulate 250 cortical columns, of which the neocortex of a human brain has about four million. This is based on measurements made since 2009 that the neocortex contains 16 billion neurons, while the cerebellar cortex (which runs the automatic systems of the body) contains about 80 billion neurons. Clearly, the cerebellar neurons are much more locally connected; much of the greater mass and size of the neocortex results from the great number of longer-distance connections via larger-diameter axons.

Assuming that the constructed neurons in the TrueNorth chip can indeed replicate the full complexity of biological neurons, the construction of a full brain simulation would require 16,000 chips for its neocortex, quite a nest of wiring for the "white matter" that ties the neocortex together, and 80,000 chips for its cerebellum…connecting the cortex to what kind of body, I can't imagine just now. So let's look only at the 16,000 neocortical chips. According to the 2016 article, each chip consumes a mere 65 mw. Times 16,000, that comes to just over a kilowatt (1,040 watts). Not bad. That compares well with a computer system reported upon in a short article in Scientific American a few years ago, which was thought to have capabilities similar to a human brain, and required a 9,000,000 watt power plant.

I suppose we can at least estimate that something similar to Moore's Law applies to these systems, with a doubling of efficiency every two years. Your brain and mine each consume about 15 watts of chemical energy (transformed partly to electrical signals). The neocortex requires a third of this, about 5 watts. 1,040/5 = 208, which comes to 7.7 powers of two (doublings). Perhaps the contention of Ms Malabou is correct, and automatism will prevail. Will it do so in the span of 15.4 years, beginning in 2016? That would be some time in the middle of 2031. Maybe I'll find out, because I'll be 84 that year.

All this I push aside in favor of another thought, one not found in Morphing Intelligence: Of what use is a perfect simulation of the human brain? I am reminded of a story by Isaac Asimov, probably found in his collection The Rest of the Robots. Using science as it was known in about 1960, he describes the endeavors of researchers at U.S. Robotics to make a robot "more and more perfect", as directed by the company president. One day the researchers bring him a robot that he cannot distinguish from a "natural" man. Shortly after this, an alien spaceship lands, and in due time, a delegation visits U.S. Robotics. They are shown the new "perfect human" robot. The company president gushes about the huge amount of research and cost required to develop it. An alien responds, "So, what's the point?"

There is indeed a point. Once we understand brain activity and function sufficiently well that we can simulate it perfectly, we have the basis for producing a true AI that is equal to our NI (Natural Intelligence) in power, but different, in ways we can determine. We can produce variations on a theme, perhaps developing new ways of thinking, a mechanism (or a bunch of them) from which we can learn new ways of perceiving and learning and interacting with the universe. Now, that is interesting!