Residents of a parallel universe

 kw: see list at the end

Consider what these creatures might be:

They "live within their own universe...a universe that is both dazzling and complicated. Its existence is within a different time scale than ours, visible only on close inspection by those interested enough to look. [They] live their lives just as we do, surrounded by loved ones, competitors, and enemies, seeking to find harmony and health; and hoping to leave behind a legacy of well-adjusted progeny capable of carrying on after their demise."

Consider a time scale between 100 and 10,000 times slower than ours. Depending on species, "they" may reach maturity in a year or less, as many familiar animals do, or it may take many centuries. Communication is nearly always soundless, and it is slow. To converse with one would entail waiting hours to days between, "How are you?" and "I can't complain." For most, communication is chemical, via air-wafted molecules or waterborne ones. Each "word" is synthesized on-the-spot.

We are used to animals, including ourselves, that move at the speed of gravity, or a little faster at times. To reach out, or to throw something, is done in fractions of a second. "They" make motions that take hours to months to complete. Usually: some can grasp or throw even more quickly than we can, under the right conditions*. But usually not.

What are "they"? Plants. A central theme of the textbook for gardeners, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction to How Plants Work by Craig N. Huegel, is that plants are as complex as animals, and do nearly everything animals do except move from place to place (usually!), but on slower time scales (usually!!), and typically in different ways.

The Nature of Plants is not a book of stories, it is a compendium of facts, ranged in subjects from Light, Water and Soil to Reproduction, Hormones and Communication. The quote in the first paragraph above is from the Conclusion. 

The book has one tremendous lack: a Glossary. One needs a good memory to read more than a page or two into the book, because one will learn new botanical and chemical terms on nearly every page. Perhaps you are familiar with xylem and phloem, the fluid-bearing tissues that, respectively, bring water (and its contents) from the roots, and transport "processed water" throughout the plant to supply sugar and nutrients. It's less likely that most folks know what is a prothallus (the sexual generation of a fern; the fronded plants we see are asexual), or the cell types parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma that make up all the tissues of plants. Then the parts of a flower: receptacle, sepals, petals (the flower's "clothing"), stigma, style, ovary, ovules (female parts), stamen, anther, and filament (male parts). Those aren't too bad, but then for ferns (the asexual spore-bearing generation), analogous parts are indusia, sporangia and sori. And on and on it goes. I felt lucky that I studied botany early in my college years; still I learned several new terms. If you intend to keep the book, take notes: Make your own index of terms and concepts you want to remember; the book's index is sketchy.

As I said, this is a book for gardeners, written as a textbook to make us aware of all the needs a plant has. For example: When buying a shrub or tree for your yard, do you know how to check if it is root bound? If the roots are growing in spirals, around and around the pot, and you plant it in the ground without doing a little spreading and even root pruning (carefully!), then as the plant grows and the roots increase in diameter, that clot of spiraling roots will become a roadblock to growth beyond a few years. Perhaps that is okay if you got a dwarf tree in the first place, but it will be less healthy than a dwarf tree that didn't spend very long in the pot before being planted out.

Do plants think? There is some research that indicates they do have something similar to nerve impulses, even electrical communication within (an electric signal is used in the leaf of the Venus flytrap, for example). Some scientists think the roots are the "brain". If we learn to communicate with them (very slowly), perhaps they will tell us.

To repeat: plants do everything we do except move about the landscape. I read in a different book, years ago, that a shrub or tree is analogous to a colony of tiny animals, with the growing tips of the twigs being the "animals". Over time, the growing, branching tips gain genetic differences, similar to the way successive generations of animals are genetically different from their ancestors. There are also some vining plants that do move slowly about, by growing into new territory, and rooting periodically, and when the oldest roots die the plant has actually moved to a new place. Over long spans of time, the vine can migrate surprisingly long distances. But these are not mentioned in this book, which is for gardeners. We have trouble enough with English ivy and Virginia creeper and even Kudzu; they may not abandon old roots, but any of them can fill a yard if we let them, as can Wisteria (There is a Wisteria plant in Sierra Madre, California that has destroyed the house it grew all over, and covers the entire one-acre building lot).

This book is worth reading through once, and then keeping on hand to look up helpful things. It deals in principles, not in advice about specific plants. With that in mind, it's worth having.

*The Venus flytrap has leaves that can close on a small insect in a tenth of a second. A number of plants have seed pods that build up tension as they dry, and then erupt to throw the seeds several feet away from the parent plant. The leaves of the Sensitive Mimosa close in less than a second after being touched.

kw: book reviews, botany, gardening

Testing a USB digital microscope

 kw: product reviews, microscopes, digital microscopes

From time to time I see ads for digital microscopes, and I decided to get one. I have two microscopes and I had camera equipment for use with them, but since my last film camera broke down, I don't have a convenient way to take photos through them. My digital cameras don't have an adapter to mate them with a microscope's eyepiece tube. 

The ad I clicked on was for a no-brand device, made in China and shipped from China. It came in a box labeled just "Digital Microscope" that has a table of specifications on its bottom:

"Image Resolution" is a key piece of information. 640x480 barely counts as digital imaging these days, but it is OK for a $35 instrument.

"Focus Range" is actually greater than that shown, as we will see below. Also, there is no indication of the zero point, so I had to define one. I suspect my "0" is their "15mm", or close to it.

Though it says it is compatible with Android, you would have to obtain a USB-to-MicroUSB adapter.

The weight, 200g, must include the box. I found that the microscope plus cord weighs 74g, and the stand weighs 46g, for a total 120g.

Red Flag: the stand weighs barely an ounce and a half. For stability it needs to weigh more than twice as much as the microscope. I dug around in a junk box to get three 30g tire weights, and tied them to the top of the base of the stand, for a total stand weight of 164g. That made the setup much more stable.

On the side of the box is another table with check boxes, checked to indicate this is a "X4" model with 1,000X magnification.

Installation did not go according to the little sheet of paper that came in the box. The instructions mention only a website to go to and an installation file to run. That installed the HiView software, but HiView wouldn't connect with the microscope. There is a small CD in the box, and one of its files is a driver loader. After I ran that, the microscope would connect with the HiView software. With that in mind, I don't know how you would get this instrument to connect with an Android phone.

With some fiddling around, I found that with shiny objects at low or medium magnifications the LEDs are too close to the objective lens and make strong reflections that spoil the image. I had made a light stand for use with my inspection microscope, so I tried that out. This is how the setup looks. The card the microscope is looking at is one of my calling cards.

This image is close to life size. The lamps are work lights that were being given away at Harbor Freight a few years ago, and later were sold for about $3, so I bought several. The base is a sheet of steel, curved to shape and painted white. On the stand behind the microscope parts of the tire weights are visible.

The microscope has a thumb wheel for focusing, and at certain distances, it also sets magnification range. Just above the plastic holder from the mounting are two buttons. One turns the lights off and on, with three brightness settings. The other is labeled "Snap", to take an image, but actually using it would jostle the 'scope. Use the software icon in HiView instead. The standoff tip is clear plastic, which is convenient for seeing what you are lining up, and letting light in.

When you run the software and connect to the microscope, you are always given a selection of image resolutions to use. I experimented with this, and found that the microscope indeed takes 640x480 pixel images, but the resolution can be set much higher. However, when you select a different resolution, the software interpolates the pixels, but there is no added information. The sensor is apparently 640x480 pixels. There must be a range of microscopes that HiView can use.

How does the microscope perform? Here are some early images:

This is at a rather low magnification, a midge. The long filament from the head toward the tail is not part of the insect. The microscope's clear standoff tip was about an inch from the specimen. When I put the tip in contact with the paper the insect was on, and shifted the focus to the higher-power area, I got this:

The magnification here is about 12 times greater than the image above. It shows the "hair" on the "knee" of one leg. Both of these images were taken using the LEDs supplied with the microscope.

Next I took a series of images to calibrate the magnification, at least roughly. I used two scales for this, sitting atop my calling card. Firstly, the four calibration images used for low range:

Most photo editing apps let you pick two points, or drag a rectangle, to get the number of pixels of width and height. I used IrfanView to "count" the pixels in one magnified millimeter. In the upper two panels, the scale is a plastic printed ruler with a mm scale. In the lower panels, I used a target that came with the microscope; the smaller lines are spaced at 1/10 mm.

This image shows the highest magnification, with the standoff tip in contact with the card and scale, and the focusing in the high range. The two long lines are 1mm apart.

The standoff distance I used was from the tip of the standoff tip to the object. The four images above were taken at distances of 125mm, 50mm, 10mm, and 0mm (contact).

I made a little table of the results, with effective magnification for two conditions. First, as displayed on my monitors, which are 22", 1680x1050 pixels, and a scale factor of 3.55 px/mm or 90 px/inch. Secondly, for publication, it is recommended that artwork have 300dpi. That means that a 640x480 pixel image will be reproduced no larger than 2.13" x 1.6". 

The microscope can probably be used more than 125mm from its subject, so lower powers than 9x (or 3x) are possible. It appears that the highest magnification possible is about 137x on the monitor, or 40x for publication. That's a far cry from the 1,000x advertised. I intend to test further, and I'll add an update whenever I learn more.

I tried putting a thickish (2mm), small item on the desktop, putting the tip in contact with the desktop, and getting the microscope to focus on it. No dice. It seems that the 0mm setting is at the end of its range, or close to it. The fly leg seems to be at a higher magnification than 137, so I'll experiment further.

I charted the "Monitor" figures, low range only, so I'd have an approximation of how much standoff I need for various magnifications, with these results:

The odd wiggle at the upper left of the curve is an artifact of Excel's low-ball spline used to make a curved line between the points. The curve is good enough for my purposes. A few data points of interest: 

• For 10x, use 100mm
• For 20x, use 40mm
• For 30x, use 18mm
• For 50-60x, use 2mm or less

In the usual case, I'll use it like a zoom lens, putting the subject at a distance such that what I want to see fits in the frame with a little freeboard around it.

I am a little disappointed in a few things, as I mentioned, but this is a workable microscope for (very) general use. One cannot expect high technical quality for $35.

Facing fears

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, social trends

What makes you worry, or at least wonder, "What if THAT happened?" Mike Pearl, with his column in Vice, "How Scared Should I Be?", is the professional worry wart we all need to take a whack at such questions. His book The Day it Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other (im)Possible Phenomena tackles nineteen such questions.

In the Acknowledgements Mr. Pearl confesses to suffering multiple panic attacks while writing the book. For someone who is disposed to think things through, then realize just how plausible many of these things are, the occasional panic attack is justified.

There is only one chapter that touches on a concern I also have, "The Day Antibiotics Don't Work Anymore". The author doesn't delve into the troubles antibiotic resistance is causing already (in the US, almost 3 million resistant infections and more than 35,000 deaths in 2019: on a par with auto accidents). Rather, his focus is what happens when every infectious pathogen is fully resistant, when getting a paper cut becomes a life-threatening event. Every chapter begins with a scorecard. For this one:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 5/5
Scary? Extremely, but probably not the Apocalypse
Worth Changing Habits? Yes

The follow-up question I have is, "Will alternative biocides such as bacteriophages be developed (re-developed) soon enough?" I say re-developed, because bacteria-eating viruses (bacteriophages) were in use and effective, and research into developing more of them was a growing technology when antibiotics were discovered and effectively torpedoed phage research. It is ramping up again.

On another matter of which I am rather fond, the author's take on our getting a confirmed signal from intelligent ET's posits a radio reception from a star 13,000 light-years away. In the early days of the first science fiction boom in America, some 60-100 years ago (the days of "Doc" Smith and R.A. Heinlein and a great many others), the universe was usually imagined to be full of alien species, some vaguely similar to us, and others more like semi-familiar animals, and others quite fanciful. This was almost taken for granted by Sci-Fi readers, but few others gave it any thought. The pendulum has swung in a more pessimistic direction since then, with a brief pro-"lotsa aliens" swing brought on by Star Trek and Star Wars. Pessimism rules at present. More and more people realize that stars are far away, very far; that getting somewhere in less than years to centuries or more is about as possible as learning to pole vault a mile; and that life like that of Earth might be so rare that no other planet in the Milky Way is likely to have living things bigger than E. coli. This is actually a pretty good time for an alien signal to be intercepted and verified.

Here's one for keeping Digital Natives awake at night: "The Day the Entire Internet Goes Down." Here is the scorecard:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 4/5
Scary? About as scary as it gets
Worth Changing Habits? It would be a disaster. How up-to-date is your disaster preparedness kit?

The only thing he finds more scary is the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Plausibility 2/5), to which he devotes 20 pages, the longest chapter. The "Internet" chapter and one about the closing of the last slaughter house (also 2/5) are tied for second, with 18 pages. He dwells at length on the way the Internet works, and what it would really take to bring it all down. One of the next books on my reading list is 2034 (Stay tuned), about WW3 (or 4?), with China, which reveals just how dependent we are on the Internet, even the military (BIG mistake, Generals!): in the novel China selectively "blinds" the U.S. This leads me to consider that an attempt to destroy the Internet is the most likely scenario at present for triggering a nuclear attack or exchange.

Personally, total annihilation is less scary than almost-annihilation. My wife, born just after WW2 ended, can tell you a thing or two about growing up in a country whose capital (and hundreds of square miles around it) was fire-bombed into oblivion. I have read quite a number of post-apocalyptic stories and novels. None of them seems grim enough to be realistic. I guess I'll leave that right there…

I'm not the sort to fret nearly as much as Mr. Pearl. Reading his treatment of things that must represent his greatest fears was enlightening and enjoyable. Really! He is clearly laboring to allay his own fears and in so doing he makes each of them, if not less fearful, a bit more comprehensible.

Russian spidering going on as I write

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I signed in to write a book review, and saw that the number of views, so far today, exceeds 1,200. I had to look further. Here is the graph for the past 24 hours:

And this chart shows the sources:

The non-Russian views represent the usual level of activity. I checked the "Now" version, which has minute-by-minute views over a two hour span:

The Russian activity is shown by the spikes of 20-30 views in a minute. Even the 5-hit spike at 2:23 is probably the Russians. Наслаждайтесь просмотром, ребята!

Enjoying space rovers

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

In addition to the books on paper that I usually read, I keep a few e-books in my phone's library (Google Play Books). That gives me something to read when I am not at home or when it is inconvenient to carry a book. I recently encountered the Megapack series, a collection of more than 300 compilations in numerous genres, including many classic science fiction collections. I took advantage of a promotion to get a few books for a dollar or two each.

The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack contains 23 stories by Silverberg, mostly from the 1950's plus a few from the 1980's, in 460 pages. Page 460 is a gigantic "page" (30 screens) of Megapack advertising.

I recognized a few of the stories, but most were new to me. This is mainly because most of them predated the time I began reading science fiction in 1967. Silverberg wrote more novels and fewer short stories after about 1960, and gave much time in the 1970's and onward to editing anthologies.

Reading these stories brought me back to why I love science fiction, particularly prior to the 1990's. Space Opera is my hometown. A spaceship, to Silverberg and his ilk, was a special kind of automobile, one that could cross a galaxy the way we might cross a continent in a multi-day road trip. Little attention was given to how a rocket might cross light-years and light-decades in a matter of hours or days. Sometimes one finds mention of "subspace" or "hyperspace", but usually there is nothing about that. These "space cars" run on some kind of super-gasoline. There is even mention of an "auxiliary fuel tank" in at least one story. It reminded me of the special lever in my 1962 VW Bug, that connected a one-gallon reserve tank, so I could go 20 miles or so to find a gas station when the main tank emptied.

The focus of these stories was not really technology of space flight, but the relationships between the humans in the stories and between them and sundry alien species. This is similar to the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, with numerous aliens of many types (but most of them are "humanoid", making it easier on the actors).

The dictum of John Campbell was, "Pose a problem, and then solve it." Silverberg's earliest stories included an opponent, either someone who was the problem, or one who wanted to prevent the solving of the stated problem. Later stories are more sophisticated, but the problem always gets solved. In a few cases, a protagonist may lose his life in so doing, but most stories have a "happy ending".

I will limn just one story: "Valley Beyond Time" (12/1957) puts a few humans and a few aliens, a total of nine persons, in a magical valley, where they are thrall to a "watcher". They grow younger while there. Without giving too much away, this pre-echoes the episodes of Star Trek that feature the omnipotent alien Q.

Space opera may be out of date, but I for one revel in the clever solutions its heroes produced. Science fiction is about exploration of ideas, more than any other genre. That keeps me going.

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Just for the record, spider scanners from Russia hit my blog about 500 times today:

The sum of all non-Russian views is about normal.

The saddest book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, feathers, fly tying, salmon flies, natural history museums, crime, theft

First, some background. Points to remember:

• Salmon very seldom eat during their spawning run upriver. Those that do eat a little have been found to contain only salmon eggs in their stomachs, eggs from salmon that spawned already. This is for reasons to be mentioned below.
• Salmon are protective of their spawning areas. They will snap at something that they think is a threat, particularly if it looks like a large, swimming insect.
  
• They may also bite out of sheer annoyance.
• Salmon can see colors, but mainly in the red-orange-yellow part of the spectrum. Salmon eggs are orange, which is why they might eat a few; they can see them well. A gray "lure" would work no better nor wore than a brightly colored one.
• The so-called "salmon fly" isn't something they eat; it just happens to emerge around the time salmon are running the rivers. See the image:

The upper image is a salmon fly, of the variety found in Idaho and Montana. You can see it's rather big, about two inches; they get up to three inches. It is also drab in color, though the abdomen is kind of orange. These big insects are eaten by large trout, not by salmon.

The lower image is also called a salmon fly, one of the classic designs developed by Victorian fly-tiers. For someone who knows the natural history of salmon, one wonders, "What were they thinking?" These are for people, not for fish!

Trout are finicky eaters. The kind of insect a trout will "hit" varies almost by the week, as various species of May fly, stone fly, caddis fly, and so forth emerge, one after another. A wise fly fisherman will have tied (or purchased) dry flies that mimic the look of each insect that trout are looking for, and use the lure that fits the season. Color is no big deal to a trout; shape is.

Although a big trout looks a lot like a salmon, salmon are not trout. They don't live in the river year-round. They live at sea and eat at sea. Atlantic salmon go upriver to spawn, and they typically survive the experience. On the way back to sea they may eat, but they didn't eat on their way upriver. Pacific salmon die after spawning, and by the time of spawning their bodies have already begun to decay. As mentioned, if they eat at all on their way upriver, they eat the eggs of salmon who stopped earlier to spawn, eggs that didn't stay buried in the riverbed sediment. So they aren't looking for prey at all.

Victorian salmon flies were just artwork. Some self-promoters claimed to have caught salmon with their flies, but it is only because they succeeded in getting a salmon annoyed enough to defend itself. The truly unique attribute of the craft of tying classic salmon flies is the use of colorful feathers. The most colorful feathers come from tropical birds. Beautiful birds such as bird-of-paradise and trogon and blue chatterer.

The Victorian fly above, a replica of a classic, century-old design, was produced either from bits chicken and turkey feathers that were dyed appropriately, or from feathers of rare, endangered, or perhaps extinct birds. Most of the feathers needed for a classic "recipe" are illegal to possess in most Western countries. But guess what? That doesn't stop dedicated artists (some of whom actually fish, but not with their artworks!) from spending tons of money on feathers or even entire bird skins obtained by various means; sometimes legally for a few species, but more often with varying degrees of shadiness in a "don't-ask-don't-tell" industry.

Naturally, with big money changing hands, thievery isn't just likely, it is guaranteed from time to time. Where can feathers from rare or extinct species be found? All the attics that might have contained articles of clothing from the "feather boom" in the Victorian Era have been scoured. The usual target is a natural history museum. People have occasionally been caught leaving the research area of a natural history museum with a few bird skins in pockets or stuffed into their trousers. But there is one big heist, the one that (temporarily) rocked the fly-tying community. The Tring Museum Heist.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, an activist for refugees until about 2016, is an avid fisherman, finding solace in faraway places where he can stand hip-deep in a river fly fishing, for trout. When a guide showed him a couple of salmon flies (tied mainly to learn how), and then told of the Tring Heist, Johnson was intrigued. Intrigue soon became an obsession, which resulted in several years of travel, interviews, and tracking down a few secretive characters, culminating in the book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

The central character is Edwin Rist, who apparently carried off the theft of 299 skins of 17 species of very sought-for birds, filling a large suitcase that he took into the Tring Museum in England through a window he broke. Had it not been for a thrilling soccer match going on at the time, the night guard might have seen the alarm light (no sound alarm was used), and caught Rist in the act. As it was, it took a month for the museum to realize it had been robbed, when a researcher wanted to study some specimens of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Natural Selection. He found only an empty drawer.

I found the book very painful to read. By the end, it was clear that most "feather hobbyists" are contemptuous of the scientific mission of natural history museums. Many of them wonder why the museums don't support their hobby by "plucking off a feather here and there" and selling them. It doesn't matter to them that in the case of one species (read the book to find out which), the skins Rist stole represented more than half of all specimens ever collected, of a species now extinct.

Two-thirds of the skins that Rist stole were recovered, some when his apartment was raided, and others that were returned by his "customers" (he sold some on eBay, and others through a friend in Norway, whose reputation suffered greatly as a result). But for nearly all of them, the collecting tag or label had been removed and discarded. Without the information about where and when a specimen was collected, it is scientifically useless.

I'll give you an example. I work at a natural history museum part time, as a data manager (I have a minor in biology, which helps a great deal). One day, gathering information about certain freshwater mussels, I came across the drawers of Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), the critter that invaded the Great Lakes in the late 1980's, carried in the ballast water of cargo ships. Its home range is Croatia, Ukraine, and southern Russia. The specimens collected before 1988 are all from Croatia and Ukraine. Later ones are all from Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, except for one from Russia. Besides the definite "invasion started on X date" that flags the invasion, studies of comparative morphology and perhaps DNA can be done to see how the animal may have changed in American waters, and perhaps whether their ancestors mostly came from the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. If all the specimen labels were discarded, it would just be a bunch of boxes of small, striped shellfish, with little more one could glean from them.

Author Johnson ended his research, knowing that perhaps as many as 65 bird skins were still not accounted for, but stonewalled at every turn. He wrote what he could, and that is a fascinating, if saddening, story.

Johnson wonders if he was played by Rist and others. Edwin Rist didn't serve any prison time. His defense lawyer used an "Asperger's defense" to convince the judge that he wasn't "judicially responsible", whatever that may mean. Having confessed to his crime, he didn't have to go through a discovery trial, just a sentencing hearing. He is certainly bright enough to fool the psychologist who pronounced him a case of Asperger's Syndrome. Hmph! If he is, so am I. If the psychoanalyst who counseled me when I was 12 had known about Asperger's, she might have pigeonholed me there; as it was, I was pronounced "socially withdrawn" and encouraged to learn to understand people better. From what I read about Rist, he was, if anything, either never "on the spectrum", or got off it more rapidly than I did (and I did!).

Various figures, in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (or pounds) are found throughout the book. One cannot properly appraise such losses. One cannot go back to 1860 and re-collect a certain bowerbird or trogon. To collect in the same location today, if the species still exists, is to collect specimens of populations that have continued to evolve for 160 years, which is more significant than most folks would imagine.

If you love natural history, plus detective stories, this is a great read for both. Maybe you won't find it as saddening as I do, and that's OK; most people aren't in a day-to-day environment where the rubber hits the road for researchers.