Tea light of another color

kw: analytical projects, lamps, spectroscopy

Recently a friend gave us a goblet she made that she calls Tree of Life. Perhaps there are 12 colors on it to match the 12 fruits mentioned in the book of Revelation (I didn't count). She also gave us a candle to put in it, but the candle was in a large jar and didn't illuminate all of the goblet. So we tried a tea light candle, which worked nicely. However, we don't usually burn candles, and we wanted something safer (the cat might knock it over). So we tried an amber-colored LED tea light. That was a poor choice! We had a different kind of LED candle, with a whitish-yellow colored light, so we tried that, with mixed results. Here is the goblet with the three lights inside in order: flame, whitish LED, and amber LED.

These are the lights in the order shown above. The flame is clearly the best all around. The whitish-yellow LED candle is too tall to illuminate the whole goblet, but it show the colors well. It also uses a moving reflector to make a flame effect, but that blocks most of the light that would go out the back. The amber LED tea light, while it illuminates the whole goblet, has no range of color! (There are blue reflections in the second and third photo from a nearby computer monitor.)

It is clear that the amber LED has a narrow spectrum. How narrow? I determined to find out. Here are the results of spectroscopy of the three lamps, and also an incandescent lantern bulb.

While the flame (second spectrum) is whiter than the whitish-yellow LED, it has a broader color spectrum, though not as broad as the incandescent lamp shown first. The bright peak at the blue end of the third spectrum is normal for an LED using phosphors to add the red through green and light blue colors. LED lamps for home use use the same principle.

The amber LED (fourth spectrum) does not use phosphors. It is a low-voltage LED that has a color peak in the orange-yellow area (near 590 nm). Its bandwidth is similar to that of the blue excitation band of the other LED that does use phosphors. There is just a trace of red and a bit of green, but they are overwhelmed by the yellow-orange peak. So all the colored blobs on the goblet just look yellowish.

The lantern bulb has a full-width spectrum, from below 400 nm to beyond 700 nm; the visible portion is 300 nm wide. The candle and the whitish LED have bandwidths nearly as broad. But the amber LED's bandwidth is a mere 75 nm, and the brightest portion is no wider than half that. It mostly just makes amber-colored light and nothing else.

I plan to carry a hand spectroscope with me the next time I go to buy LED tea lights, to find a brand with a broad spectrum that'll illuminate this goblet properly!

Seeking inner peace underneath

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, caves, mines, subways, tunnels, catacombs

From a distance the book proclaims boldly, "UNDERGROUND WILL HUNT". After a moment of cognitive dissonance, thinking "Hunt" was a verb, I realized the name of the book's author had to be Will Hunt. The full title is Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet.

Will Hunt stumbled across an abandoned tunnel system when he was 16. When he found an old map, he realized that the tunnel ran right under his family's yard. This led to his lifelong fascination with the places beneath our feet. Over the years he has explored subway tunnels—in use and not—, catacombs, mines, a few caves, and underground cities such as that in Cappadocia, Turkey. He writes also of Burrowers, those who excavate as a hobby, though he missed Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Computers, who excavated tunnels under his property, by hand, for about forty years. The labor relaxed him whenever he reached an impasse in computer design.

I can't pass up the chance to mention a few of my fondest underground memories. I was an active spelunker in the 1970's. I used a carbide lamp, which meant carrying in extra "loads" of carbide and plenty of water, because a "load" lasts no more than 4 hours, and a typical day underground lasts 12-16 hours. Three events from that period:

1. Helping with an NSS (National Speleological Society) re-survey of a portion of Lilburn's Cave, a rare cave in marble rather than limestone. It is near Three Rivers in California. At the time, seven miles of passages had been mapped. The current total is 21 miles. It remains the longest cave in marble in the world (the longest cave in limestone is more than 10 times as long). In one long, high-ceilinged passage that needed re-mapping, we couldn't find the earlier survey markers, dots of colored spray paint. Finally looking upward, we realized that 15-20 feet of sand had been washed out of the passage since the prior survey. We had to chimney-climb up to the survey points and do our work while braced high above the floor.
2. Mineral collecting in the Red Cloud Mine in New Mexico. (The NSS, that same year, had only taken me as a member after I affirmed that I never collect minerals in natural caves, just in mines. But they never entirely trusted me.) At one point, deep inside, my lamp went out. A girl sat nearby to afford light while I changed the carbide load in my lamp. Then her lamp went out! Everyone else was too far away for any light to reach us. She began to panic. I talked to her calmly while I finished working on my lamp by feel, and got it lit. Then I changed the carbide in her lamp also, and we were good for another 4 hours.
3. While I was a geology student, the Mineralogy class went on a field trip to the Pine Creek Tungsten Mine in central California. This is essentially a hollowed-out mountain top with miles of tunnels blasted from the rock. It is unique, so far as I know, in that the lowest level of the mine is where you enter via a mine train that goes 2 miles into the mountain. The mine workings go upwards from there. With gravity to help, getting the ore out of the mine is much less costly than in any mine where you have to lift it out. We were helped to collect a few rare minerals that occur only in that mine. This is the only underground experience that I used an electric lamp (provided by our hosts).

The author's second chapter is amazing. He writes of making an underground traverse of the city of Paris, along with several experienced helpers. They also got the help of a number of Cataphiles, Parisians who make a hobby of exploring, sleeping, holding concerts and movie events, and dodging authorities, in the Paris underground.

The 7th chapter presents the use of caves and tunnels (the latter are artificial, whether by man or beast) in pre-history, which seems to go back at least 200,000 years, before there were Homo sapiens in existence. Caves everywhere are found to have numerous artworks, altars, pottery arrangements, and sculptures, usually in their deepest recesses. One might think that shallower stuff existed but has been lost, but at least some traces of such works outside the dark zone ought to remain. We don't find them. There is still today some kind of feeling of holiness about the deepest places.

Wherever it is economical to burrow and tunnel, that seems to be a favored way of making use of the third dimension. I recall strolling 200 feet beneath the streets of Tokyo, in a thriving marketplace (ichiba), almost a bazaar. There were at least three such levels above, between this one and the sunlit zone. I don't know how many different subway lines cross, at different depths, under that part of the city. There are ichiba to be found along every one of them.

The author makes a good case in his last chapter for a seemingly universal feeling of awe and humility that people feel for caves and other underground spaces. He thinks it the origin of religion. Perhaps it is, in part. In any case, this very enjoyable book conducts one on journeys in directions we seldom follow.

A spider spike in a quiet week

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Just about 8 hours ago, while I was at the church meeting, a bot in the UAR (or spoofing their URL) snarfed up 114 posts:

This was in the 10:00 AM hour here, or the 6:00 PM hour over there.

A bigger killer than car crashes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, opioids, opiates, addictions, polemics

For most years I remember, the number of people killed in auto accidents in America was about 50,000. Then after about 2000 it got down into the low 40's, and since 2008 has usually been in the mid-to-low 30's. From 2005 until the end of 2018, just over half a million deaths in America have been auto fatalities. Yet, car deaths are on the rise since 2014, with a 10% increase from 2017 to 2018, and I'll get back to that.  But first:

This chart shows data only from 2005 onward, to better focus attention to the crossing trends: In 2009, for the first time, deaths in America from drug overdoses exceeded those from car crashes. Since then, this trend has increased dramatically.

Figures aren't complete for 2018, and they may not have risen as fast as they did the prior year or two. But the fact remains that, from 2005 to 2017, one year less than the sum in the prior paragraph, drug overdose deaths have exceeded 570,000. These two causes together come to about 1.1 million untimely deaths in America in fifteen years.

Ryan Hampton, for one, wants to do something about that, at least the drug overdose part, as he writes in American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis—and How to End it. While I call this book a polemic, in this case I mean that in a very positive way! Nothing short of loud Jeremiads seems able to get through the thick skulls of not just policy makers but the majority of the public.

I must confess that, while Mr. Hampton is a very good writer, it was quite an exercise for me to read through the book. His aim is to pluck heart strings, and he does it masterfully. He is in recovery himself, and pulls no punches about his path from an "innocent" pain prescription, to doctor-shopping (because the "safe" medication he was given wasn't safe after all), to heroin use, and then through several recovery programs to one that has been working for him. Two messages underlie this paragraph:

1. The pharmaceutical companies have tragically underplayed the addictive potential of popular pain-killers. Criminally so.
2. The public and political view of drug abusers is dramatically wrong, and increases their suffering greatly and needlessly.

Americans need to face that fact that drug addiction is a disease. It doesn't resemble other diseases such as cancer or tuberculosis, because the causes are more hidden. They are buried in brain chemistry and the way it is so easily hijacked by certain chemicals. We are also somewhat jaded by hearing numerous radio ads that mention "the disease of addiction", in which it is applied properly no more than half the time. It is not proper to speak of compulsions toward sex, gambling, or chocolate as "addictions", and particularly not proper to treat them as diseases. They are in a different category, even though they do affect the reward circuitry of the brain. Yes, they do so, but not nearly as powerfully.

Let me mention at this point my musing about the 10% rise in traffic deaths last year, and a similar rise a couple of years earlier. How much of it is because the current recreational drug of choice, marijuana, is being legalized?

When I was actively involved in drug rehabilitation programs, some 45-50 years ago, heroin and its relatives was being pushed into the background by psychedelic drugs. LSD was popular, followed by PCP and Meth. Kids I worked with weren't all that likely to OD on LSD. They were more likely to walk out a 4th floor window thinking it was a door to paradise, or fall into a creek and drown, or to have a bad trip or even a flashback and find a way to kill themselves. I was never involved in heroin recovery efforts. And there is a new factor in the OD picture. Heroin is no longer the strongest drug (closely followed by cocaine). Its synthetic cousin Fentanyl is therapeutically effective as a painkiller at doses of around 1-1.5 mg, compared to 2.5-5 mg for morphine; however, its therapeutic range is narrow; 3-4 mg of Fentanyl can kill. There are much worse versions out there, such as Carfentanil. A few mg of that can kill an elephant or rhino.

Thus, I can't really speak intelligently about the author's experiences in recovery. He did not overstate the case. It is grim. If you aren't rich, you can't afford rehab. It's still rare for insurance to cover any part of such programs. The "affordable" rehab programs are so inadequate that they actually set people up for overdose. It works this way. A single heroin dose of 30 mg will usually kill someone who has never used it. The therapeutic dose of morphine (heroin is metabolized into morphine) is single doses in the 2.5-5 mg range, and no more than 30 mg/day. Someone who has abused heroin for a couple of years is using 60-100 mg per "hit", and a total of between 500 mg and one gram daily.

Suppose you are such a user and want to get rehabbed, and you manage to get into a program. It typically ends in four weeks, and you are returned to the street with no more than a "Good luck". If you have at least a little emotional support from peers or parents, you may hold out for a few weeks or months. Then you enter a low spot, emotionally, and go for "just one more hit". But much of the habituation to the drug has been lost. The "nickel bag" you were used to using is now enough to kill you. Many OD deaths are recently rehabbed young people, found with the needle still stuck in, they died so fast.

In a later chapter of the book, the author describes a few programs he found that are working better, because they abandoned old thinking and old ways of treating drug abusers. I think it better to leave it to you at this point. Read this book.

Count yourself lucky if there is absolutely nobody among your family, friends, and acquaintances who has not used a hard drug. We have a lady friend in her late 70's who was successfully weaned from prescription painkillers, just barely! It was costly and pretty hard on her and her husband. Luckily, she had not graduated to heroin!! It is likely that you do know someone, even if you don't know about it yet. So, get this book and read it. Consider Mr. Hampton's call to action in the last chapter. Our voices are needed by those whom society formerly forced into silence.

The unexpected down side of better public health

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, public health, demographics

First impression: Thomas J. Bollyky should have employed a co-author. His book Plagues and the Paradox of Progress is very difficult reading, not just because of the emotional weight of the subject, but because he writes for PhD-level readers (I subjected certain paragraphs to the Gunning Fog Index algorithm, which yielded numbers of 19 and greater. That's worse than most legal contracts!). Yet the subject is very important. So much so, that I read through it anyway.

A thousand years ago, life expectancy at birth, almost anywhere on Earth, was in the range of 25-30. This was still true just 150-200 years ago, but that was beginning to change. Nonetheless, this picture of a cemetery in Missouri, where my ancestors are buried, is instructive (Payne is a family name). When I took this picture I inadvertently recorded the basic demographic fact about life prior to 1880 in America: half of these tombstones are half-size, indicating children five years of age or younger. The larger tombstones commemorate people who typically lived into their fifties to eighties. Even a millennium ago, if a child survived at least five years, remaining (average) life expectancy could exceed sixty years.

The advances in public health have been very uneven. As described in the book, the countries of today's "first world", mainly the U.S., Europe and Japan, began making changes to infrastructure and health practice that reduced infant and youth mortality, and the spread of infectious diseases in general, more than 200 years ago. Progress was slow and not always steady. But the one big effect of all this was a gradual "younging" of the adult population. More children survived childhood and grew into young workers. Because the changes occurred over decades or even a century or more, employment for this glut of young workers grew at a rate that employed most of them. Much of that employment was in the growing cities, which grew into many of the mega-cities of today.

That's oversimplified, but the major and obvious effect of better public health is a demographic shift. If a country or region has a growing employment base, which typically means growing cities and more manufacturing, the economic benefits multiply. A major problem with citification is that crowded conditions foster the spread of infectious diseases, so for a generation or two (or three), the burden of disease shifted from early childhood to the working years. Many of the major cities of the Western world grew only because in-migration exceeded the appalling death rate from cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases of crowding. Further public health measures, such as quarantine, and later, effective medications (beginning in the early 1900's), reduced the toll of plagues and other infections. Thus the "first world" has average life expectancy at birth in the range of 80 years!

A second demographic effect has been that families got smaller. A couple didn't need to have five or more children to ensure that a few would survive to become their parents' "retirement plan". Of course, some couples just like to have a lot of kids anyway; a neighbor of ours has 18 siblings, all from the same mother and father! But few Western families have more than two or three children, a great many have only one, and among Millennials, the trend is toward having none.

The "third world" (is there a "second world"?) has had it different. And worse. Rich nations began helping poor nations with medical and financial aid around a century ago. So the life expectancy in most countries exceeds 70 years (160 out of 223). I looked up a few in the CIA World FactBook: Albania, 79y; Bangladesh, 74y; Thailand, 75y; Libya, 77. However, other places still lag: Angola, 61y; Ethiopia, 60y; Laos, 65y; Botswana, 64y. The lowest life expectancies are to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, ranging down to the mid-fifties.

The book describes what has happened. Death rates among infants and children, and generally from infectious disease, have been dropping. As a consequence, there is a glut of younger people trying to make a living. The mass migrations, for primarily economic reasons, that began in the 1700's and 1800's, are accelerating as the poor countries of the world struggle to (and usually fail to!) employ their teeming millions.

The last chapter has a "what do we do about it?" message. The answer: much more...but what? So far, there is a little hope here and a little there. Malaria and AIDS and cholera and TB get all the press. Even though there is still a ways to go, progress to date has led to a demographic crisis that is being mainly ignored by the various bodies that have been addressing the diseases. Nobody has broad-based plans to address the resulting glut of young workers.

Well, that just presents the problem. Who will solve it? We're at risk of many good trends of the past few centuries being reversed. At this point I'd usually say, "Read the book." But many won't be able to, unless they are ready to cope with prose that you need 19 years of education to read without difficulty. I hope someone takes this book and its deficiencies as a challenge to write a better one, a more accessible one.

The real masters of the planet are underfoot

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, termites, technology

This interesting aerial view in northeastern Brazil is a portion of an area the size of England all covered with this kind of patterned landscape. The bumps are termite mounds; there are millions of them, each about 30' (9m) wide and 8' (2.5m) tall. They have had their ages measured: between 700 and nearly 4,000 years. This is just one major area occupied by just one termite species. The area of Britain is 122,000 square miles. The amount of the earth's surface that we humans have covered with roads and buildings and other infrastructure comes to 2 million square miles.

It is safe to say that our "underground footprint" is smaller than our surface works. Not so for termites. Even mound-building termites have substantial subsurface workings. Of course, mound-builders are not the subterranean termites that plague suburban homeowners in the US. Their nests around here are entirely below ground, plus inside the wood of our buildings and of dead and fallen trees. Mound-building termites gather grass or other plant material and return it to the mound, where they either digest it directly or use it to make compost to grow a fungus that they consume.

Here is another view, of an area in Australia, populated with termite mounds, of a different genus and species from those in Brazil. These can be 15' (4.5m) tall.

There are about 2,000 species of termites. Added together, the world's termites weigh ten times as much as the entire human population. For all that, termites are little critters. Typically half the length of a grain of rice, they are similar in size to the little "sugar ants" and "grease ants" that might invade your kitchen (not the big carpenter ants that occasionally come indoors).

This is what Eastern Subterranean Termites (Reticulitermes flavipes) look like, magnified about 10x. The big soldier (with the orange head) is 5mm long, and the workers are mostly 3mm long, although you can see at least one extra-small worker that is no more than 1.5mm long. This image is by Gary Alpert of Harvard University, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License; see more images at bugwood.org.

Termite are practically ubiquitous, living nearly everywhere except in areas of permafrost. Lisa Margonelli became interested, then fascinated, then obsessed with termites. In particular, she wanted to know what the latest termite research had to say. As she writes in Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, most termite research, being funding-driven, is focused in two areas. Firstly, knowing that termites can digest wood, scientists want to know how it is done, with the goal of replicating the feat to make woody and grassy plant matter into fuel. The general term has morphed from "biofuel" to "grassoline". Secondly, termites and their mound-building skills are studied to inform the technology of swarming robots. It has been calculated that the amount of neural matter in a large termite nest or mound is comparable to the brain of a Labrador Retriever. Can multitudes of nearly brainless critters carry on a kind of collective cognition? We are not talking self-awareness here, just calculating power.

Now, guess who funds the latter effort the most. The Military. Midway through the book, a researcher opines that if millions or even billions of tiny, flying robots can be 3D printed for $1 each, and each can carry a tiny shaped charge weighing 1g, capable of piercing the human skull, they might be able to wipe out an entire army without any of "our" folks coming in harm's way. It occurred to me that it might take a rather sophisticated CPU to be able to reliably recognize foe and friend. And now that we're at the limits of Moore's Law for single CPU power, it's unlikely that a robot "brain" lighter than a small cell phone's motherboard could do the trick, now or years into the future. To make such a 'bot fly, you'd need wings large enough that it would be the size of a seagull rather than a big wasp. It's hard for a seagull to sneak up behind someone so as to crack their skull. But then, if it is that big, you could give it a bigger bomb.

Ms Margonelli spent nearly ten years visiting and working alongside scientists in Namibia, Australia, South America, and a few places in the US, being instructed tirelessly by them as she struggled to grasp the concepts. In this image the bent-over witch's hat shape is not random. The angle and its direction optimize the mix of sun and wind exposure. Though one theory has such tall mounds acting like chimneys to facilitate the flow of gas and vapor, the research she witnessed did not bear that out. It is still a mystery, but millions of mounds throughout Namibia have the same shape and orientation. The more vertical mounds in Australia (second picture above) must operate differently, perhaps partly because they are at a different latitude.

So far, grassoline cannot be efficiently produced. The metabolic pathway for digesting cellulose and lignin includes a huge assist from bacteria and protozoa in a termite's gut. There are a great many steps, and yields are low. Consider: If you can only produce a gallon of liquid fuel by also producing 100 gallons of unusable waste—stuff nothing will eat and that can't be burned—is that worth it? In recent years, Americans consumed on average a little more than one gallon of gasoline per day, each. Nearly 400 million gallons daily, more than 110 billion gallons yearly. What do you do with 1.1 trillion tons of waste? In addition to what we already produce…

No matter what we do with termite research, rampantly increasing pollution of all kinds, including "heat pollution" caused by greenhouse warming, will make the future less pleasant than the present. Will we be driven back to a new "stone age"?  That is quite unlikely, but there are certain to be disruptions. One side finding from all the termite research is that the land above termite workings is more fertile and grows more vegetation. The little critters may have a hand in saving the planet for us, for they work steadily to make it better for themselves, with too little brain to indulge in politics.

To make fake languages you need to know real ones

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, linguistics, language creation

Languages, mainly written, and linguistics, have been a hobby and sometime obsession for my brother and me since we were children. He made a career out of it, becoming a calligrapher, including spending time in Japan to learn Japanese calligraphy (with a brush) and also the carving of netsuke. He eventually became a professor of art history and a Mayan archaeologist, one of a few people who can read and paint the Maya script. Not having a good artistic hand, I became more an observer than a doer.

Having gone into coding from an early age (about 50 years ago, now), I occasionally studied formal languages, as I call them; not only computer coding languages (FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, C) and scripts (Perl, JavaScript), but also the broader scope of symbolic languages such as the standard sets of drafting details used in piping, architecture, and electronics design, for example. More recently, I had some interest in the icons used to launch programs (apps) on small-screen devices, but there is no grammar; they are all nouns (or, perhaps, imperative predicate phrases of the form "Do X!"). Also, there is an effectively infinite variety of them: 32×32 pixels ×256 colors, as the exponent of 2, comes to about 10⁷⁸⁹¹³ possible color patterns, and even if only a trillionth of a trillionth of them would "look like something", what remains is a truly incredible number (10⁷⁸⁸⁸⁹). Then there are the Emoji, which  seem to be settling down to some kind of standard, complete with a review board.

In my mid-twenties I got a little interested in the scope for creation of new languages in fiction by reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read somewhere that he invented five languages for Middle Earth, complete with scripts in at least two cases (I am sure many folks out there know better than I). So I was primed, with a slow-burning fuse, to thoroughly enjoy The Art of Language Invention, by David J. Peterson, when I came across it recently; it has been in print about four years.

The focus of the book is the creation of new languages to be used in fictional settings. The author was hired to create two languages used in Game of Thrones, for example. One might think, "Why create languages out of whole cloth? Aren't there languages enough already, something like 6,000? Couldn't one of these, which the right sort of 'soundscape', be used?" Perhaps. One significant problem arises, though: in the current legal atmosphere, intellectual property laws would require the permission of a language's speakers, and they might not like having their mother tongue used on the "lips" (or whatever) of tentacled villains from Aldebaran. Also, while we might use a human language for fictional humans, in the distant future perhaps, other languages are intended to be "native" to various kinds of aliens. Modern filmmakers are doing their best to put the era of aliens-as-humans-in-weird-suits behind them. If we ever encounter genuine space aliens, will it even be possible for them to make the sounds used in human languages…and vice versa? Most of all, though, for those so inclined, creation of a new language is great fun! The fun comes through in the author's writing, again and again.

The book turns out to include a powerful introduction to linguistics. Thinking about it, I realized it has to! Natural languages give a language designer the parameters of what languages can do, and ideas for how to stretch the limits as needed. The four sections of the book are Sounds (a lot more involved than just a discussion of "phonemes"; he also gets into sign languages and possible alien sound systems), Words (choices like inflected or not, cases and the presence or lack of case agreement, etc.), Evolution (history of a language and its sibling and offspring languages), and Writing (scripts and how they support the spoken word…or don't).

I'll just touch on a couple of items of interest to me. One is alien sounds. We have "alien" creatures aplenty around us, that make sounds we typically can't make: birds and dolphins—and whales in general—are best known. But also: Just how much symbolism is in the waggle dance of honeybees? How articulate is the postural language of a wolf or a bobcat? Is the Brown Thrasher, with its repertoire of 2,000 songs, each including many sounds, saying anything more than, "This land is my land"? More to the point on the bird: are the murmurings and cooings between a mated pair or Thrashers, Doves, Robins or whatever, more meaningful than the "comfort sounds" they are usually thought to be?

Another is the written scripts. In an appendix we find a phrase book for eight constructed languages (conlangs), six of which have scripts. I picked out a potentially useful phrase from each:

Dothraki and High Valerian are from Game of Thrones. The producers apparently didn't set the show up to require scripts for them. The others are from other projects. Some would be rather hard for any of us to write or draw. Indojisnen, in particular, is predicated on an alien species that went for genetic modification in a big way, including the development of hand skills that exceed those of any other species by a large margin. So the written language they invented, once they could write it, is intricate and hyper-regular.

I rather like Kamakawi. In both script and sounds, it is like a cross between Japanese and Korean. Some of the others may seem too loopy or whatever, but if you look in the front of an old Gideon's Bible, with John 3:16 translated into dozens of human scripts, you'll see just how loopy many human languages can be. The ones shown here are not at all out of line (except Indojisnen!).

I thought I knew a lot about variations of grammar. The Words section showed me how little I knew about it. I was fortunate to learn Latin at a young age, and French later. A friend who speaks these, plus Romanian and Russian, says, "French grammar is endless". It's true. Even though English has less than usual in the way of conjugation (of nouns) and declension (of verbs), some friends and I once figured out 48 verb tenses that are possible in English, if one takes account of moods and everything (of course, few of us use more than five or six). Then we tackled French, and we sort of ran out of steam when we'd racked up 256 verb tenses. There might be more; we couldn't be sure. Funny thing, even though there are inflections (word endings) to distinguish most of them in written French, most of them just sound like a cross between "-ei" and "-ee" in spoken French. That goes for the "-it" in conduit ("conduct", the verb, when "I" is the subject), as well as "-aient" in effectuaient ("were conducting", when "we" is the subject).

I can't figure how the author crammed so much linguistic knowledge into a book hardly exceeding 260 pages (in paperback, at least). If you want to try your hand at inventing a language, this book is a very good starting place for learning what you'll need to succeed. So much to learn, and presented very enjoyably.