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.