The usefulness of very old animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging, gerontology, longevity

This old fellow, assuming he isn't one of the patriarchs in Genesis, is probably half as old as the tortoise. Among terrestrial mammals, humans have the longest lives. Among all land animals, giant tortoises are probably the longest-lived. It is likely that "Darwin's tortoise" wasn't really brought back from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, to live to age 175 in a zoo. But it is known that these big tortoises can live at least 150 years, and possibly as long as 200.

No human (at least since the time of Moses) is known to have lived longer than 122 years, the known age of Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997. The second-longest, in the past few centuries anyway, seems to be a living woman currently aged 119. No (recent) man is known to have exceeded 113.

A side note on the great ages reported for Biblical patriarchs. The progression of ages tells a story, which may be more important than whether anyone actually lived 900+ years. What is commonly called "The Fall", the sin of Adam and Eve, is the first of four Falls. Here I'll focus on the longevity of the generations, the story within the story:

1. The first couple disobeyed God and were exiled from the orchards of Eden. Lifetimes went from "undetermined" (potentially endless) to mostly 900-969 years.
2. Cain killed his brother and fled from the presence of God. No lifetime of any of his descendants is recorded.
3. The earth became "filled with violence", motivating God to bring on the Flood, saving only one family. Noah was the last person to live more than 900 years (950). His son Shem lived 600 years, then 3 generations lived 433-464 years.
4. The tower of Babel ("to make ourselves a name") motivated God to confuse the languages. The next five generations lived 148-239 years, ending with Terah (the father of Abram), who lived to age 205.

Each Fall was followed by a reduction in life span by about half. Then Abram/Abraham lived 175 years, Isaac lived 180 years, and Jacob/Israel lived 147 years (his brother Ishmael lived 137 years). Thereafter, a few others including Moses lived to ages of 110 to 120, no more than that. In Psalm 90, composed shortly after God called Moses to return to Egypt, Moses, age 80, declared that the usual life span was 70, or as much as 80 years, "according to strength".

The progressive shortening of life span in Genesis drives home that disobedience to God leads to a shorter life.

Now to the book: Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives, by Steven N. Austad. Dr. Austad is the first professor at his university (Alabama) to hold the Chair in Healthy Aging. His central theme is that nearly all our laboratory studies are of dismally short-lived animals: fruit flies (weeks to months) and mice (less than a year in the wild, less than 3 years in the lab) predominate; but we should be studying animals of exceptional longevity. At least some of them may have something to teach us about living long lives with good health.

Animals with short lives do have a little bit to teach. A mouse in the wild is most likely to wind up being eaten by an owl or a fox. It's well known that larger animals live longer, if only because there are fewer predators that can overcome them. But in a protected laboratory environment, a 3-year-old mouse is positively geriatric: thinning, graying hair; cataracts; feeble gait. Whatever aging is, mice do it fast, like everything else.

The book is full of stories of the unexpectedly long lives of certain animals. It opens with a bird called a fulmar. No firm conclusion is drawn about the longevity of fulmars, but we are introduced to one that might have been nearly as old as the ornithologist pictured with it in two photos taken 35 years apart. The bird outlived the scientist by a year or two, and may have lived 60 years or more. Fulmars are the size of seagulls. We have better information about other birds. A particular cockatoo lived to age 83.

Life in the slow lane can be longer. Tortoises are one example. I have a friend whose pet tortoise, about the size of a softball, was thirty years old the last time I saw him. Giant tortoises live longer, at least the aforementioned 150-175 years. Their heart rate is six beats per minute. Being exothermic (not self-heating like birds and mammals), they have low energy needs. It is said that we each get a potential 2-3 billion heartbeats; for humans that's from 60-90 years. For a giant tortoise, with a heart that beats at 1/10th the rate, maybe they can actually live 600-900 years!

I was intrigued by the animals that don't seem to get feebler with age. Old fulmars and old cockatoos don't have menopause in females (or E.D. in males). Neither do old tortoises. Other long-live mammals and birds do seem to end their lives with a number of years of infertility. I hope there is something useful to learn about genetic (or something else) differences between animals that age and animals that seem not to. It won't come easily or cheaply. Scientists study mice because they don't live long. It's at least 100 times as costly to study lifelong matters with naked mole rats that seem to live 50-100 times as long as field mice. Such studies would be multi-generation endeavors…multi-HUMAN-generation!

Then there's cancer. We don't yet even know the cancer rate for elephants or whales. A bowhead whale, weighs more than 1,000 times as much as a human, and one might naively think they ought to get cancer 1,000 times as frequently. Nope. They live more than 200 years, but we know little more than that. There are a few genetic clues about the cancer-avoiding (not quite cancer-proofing) of huge animals, such has their possession of multiple copies of certain cancer-suppression genes, where humans have one copy only. But our ignorance is typically as colossal as their size.

Even more mysterious are small animals with extraordinary longevity, such as a one-ounce bat that lives 40+ years, or centuries-old mollusks no larger than a teacup. One concept dwelt on throughout the book is Longevity Quotient, LQ. If most one-ounce mammals live at most 3-4 years, and a one-ounce bat species can live 30-40 years, that is an LQ of 10. Humans have an LQ of about 4, although Jeanne Calment's 122-year life indicates an LQ of 5.5.

It is still not known whether there are two intermixed human populations, one with a typical longevity of about 85 years, and another that can make it routinely to 100. I have numerous ancestors who lived into their 90's, and an aunt who died last year at age 101. A friend of mine, who is 65 years old, is already older than everyone in his family tree that he knows about; his parents both lived about 60 years. Maybe there's a third population of shorter-lived humans.

Whatever our ultimate life span may be, recent trends in longevity seem to be based more on health span. Just keeping us from "untimely death" has been a triumph of public health measures including clean water systems, at least in some countries, and vaccination for many former scourges of humanity such as smallpox, measles, and polio. Most of the long-lived ancestors of mine that I mentioned above lived in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, when such public health measures weren't even dreamed of.

The author makes an important point about "life expectancy", which is different from longevity. Life expectancy is the average age that will be reached by a cohort of the population born at the same time. If infant and child mortality is high, even if some will reach ages greater than 100, the AVERAGE will be low. Population pyramids show this, in part:

A rectangular population pyramid like the one on the left shows that the death rate is low at all ages, until one reaches age 70, and then increases. A triangular distribution, or a "scooped triangle" such as the one on the right, shows a high death rate at all ages. The life expectancy for the US is about 78.5 (average of both sexes). One might initially guess that the life expectancy for DRC is below 30, but we must remember that each horizontal tier is a different cohort. This pyramid shows high death rate, but also high birth rate. The WHO figure for life expectancy of the DRC is 62. That is for the cohort in the bottom tier only, and it takes a lot of actuarial calculation to determine it. Regardless, the more triangular a population pyramid is, the lower the life expectancy. Both charts show a very few people living to 95 and beyond; fewer in DRC than in USA, of course. But there are some. The ultimate longevity in both countries is similar.

This just scratches the surface of a book full of information, well presented. Just finding out how long some animals can live is very time-consuming (decades to centuries!) and can be very costly. The author hopes we will soon begin to learn why some animals live so long. Will learning that help humans become bicentenarians (200+ age)? Perhaps. That makes it worth doing.

One small error I wish to correct. On page 186 it is stated that carbon-14 decays to carbon-12. No, it decays to nitrogen-14, by emitting a beta particle—a high-energy electron—which changes a neutron into a proton. The rest of the analysis in that chapter is correct.

Measuring my metabolism…crudely

 kw: analytical projects, weight, metabolism

For decades we've had a bedroom scale, the kind with a spring. Over the years I found that the weight it showed was a little variable if I leaned one way or another. Naturally, being overweight, I soon learned how to lean so the weight shown was as small as possible, without me falling over. I finally realized I was fooling myself, particularly because my weight in the doctor's office, adjusting for clothing and shoes, was about five pounds greater than my "home weight". That made a big difference to me, emotionally, because it pushed me over a boundary: I am just six feet tall. At home I would get a weight of 215-216 pounds, for a BMI of 29.2-29.3. That's near the top end of "overweight". A couple of years ago the medical scale showed 226 pounds, and with shoes on and my cell phone in a pocket I had five pounds of "accessories", for a naked weight of 221. That's a BMI of 30, which is "obese". Boo-hoo!

Over a period of about a year I did my best to eat more moderately, and my doctor said one day, "Oh, you've lost a little weight." I weighed 224 clothed, or 219, a BMI of 29.7. My "home weight" was 213-214. Better, but not good enough. Then I caught Covid-19, to which I reacted by fasting for several days (low blood sugar reduces the chances of getting pneumonia). That brought my "home weight" below 210 pounds.

I bought a digital scale. Its reported accuracy is 0.2 pounds, which is 3.2 ounces. This scale helped me calibrate the old spring scale, which is actually surprisingly good. If I stand straight on the spring scale I get the same reading, within a pound, as the digital scale. Of course, I am rather enamored of that extra digit, and the digital scale is much easier to read.

I had read enough of recent literature to realize that it is eating sugar and "fast carbs" like potatoes that cause weight gain, not eating fat. I went nearly full-carnivore for a while. When I had eggs for breakfast (I typically fry 3 eggs in olive oil), rather than buttered toast I had breakfast sausage: two of the little links, which each have the same number of calories as a slice of the bread I'd use for toast. I quit having sandwiches; just some lunch meat and cheese, which I'd take to work in a baggie, or prepare on the spot when I ate at home (I work 3 days/week). I began losing about a pound weekly. My present morning weight is 195 pounds.

I've been weighing myself morning and evening for some time, and I took note of a certain regularity. After a morning pee, I weigh a pound less (plus or minus 0.2 pounds) than in the evening before bed. Then for a few days I checked my weight in the morning before visiting the toilet, and found it was either 0.4 or 0.6 pounds less, and another 0.4 to 0.6 pounds would go into the toilet. I thought, "I am losing half a pound overnight just by breathing!"

I realized that I was measuring my metabolism, in a crude way. That 0.4-0.6 pounds (6.4-9.6 ounces, or about 180-270 grams) represents glucose being oxidized and its oxidation products being exhaled.

If you have had any exposure to biochemistry, you'll find this formula familiar:

Glucose, the primary sugar in grapes, is the energy currency of life. Plants use photosynthesis to add carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to water brought up from the roots, producing glucose and releasing oxygen to the atmosphere. Animals consume plants, from which they obtain glucose (and lots of other chemicals); they add oxygen to the glucose to break it down to water and carbon dioxide. This simple chemical formula hides the complexities of the Krebs cycle, and the energy input by ATP to keep it running during respiration, or the production/activation of ATP during photosynthesis.

To see where the weights come and go, here are the atomic masses of these molecules:

• glucose - 180
• oxygen - 32 (a 2-atom molecule)
• water - 18
• carbon dioxide - 44

In chemistry, a mole is the weight in grams times the molecular weight. Thus a mole of hydrogen atoms weighs one gram, and a mole of carbon dioxide, which has a molecular weight of 44, is 44 grams. If we multiply the last three numbers above by six, to correspond to the equation above, we find this:

In respiration, 180 g of glucose combines with 192 g of oxygen to produce 108 g of water and 264 g of carbon dioxide. In photosynthesis, the opposite happens. The two gases outweigh the sugar and water.

These are the gram weights appropriate to the oxidation of 0.4 pounds of glucose. For those of us who are not as familiar with metric, I'll take advantage of the fact that all the weights in the prior paragraph are divisible by 12, and use somewhat greater actual weights, for the following:

In respiration, 7.5 oz of glucose combines with 8 oz of oxygen to produce 4.5 oz of water and 11 oz of carbon dioxide.

7.5 ounces of glucose is 0.47 pounds, so this is similar, and gives me a feel for what is going on.

How much energy does this represent? We are told in nutrition tables that a gram of sugar has four calories (the dietary calorie is a Kcalorie, or the amount of heat that must be used to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water 1°C). I found that the oxidation of a mole of glucose releases 280 calories. One mole of glucose, as above, is 180 grams, almost exactly 0.4 pounds, so at the low end of my nightly weight loss (before urination), my metabolism has produced 280 calories. When I sometimes get a reading of 0.6 pounds, that converts to 420 calories. I suspect that the actual amount is the same each night, but when I have a bedtime weight of 195 pounds, it might really be anywhere between 194.9 and 195.1. Then, if the actual amount of glucose "burned" is 0.5 pounds, my morning weight would read either 194.4 or 194.6. Half a pound of glucose converts to 350 calories.

I sleep 6-7 hours. Let's use an average of 6.5. Dividing 350 by 6.5 yields 53.8 calories per hour. Multiply by 24, and we find 1,292 calories per day. That seems to be my basic (not basal!) metabolism when at total rest. A Basal Metabolic Rate calculator tells me 1,628 calories per day. Further, for an entirely sedentary man my age, daily caloric need is 1,989. Explanatory text points out that "body maintenance" for most people is about 70%. If I understand that correctly, let's see what I get by dividing 1,292 by 1,628: 0.79 or 79%. And then 1,292 / 1,989 = 0.65 or 65%. So it seems to be in the right range.

There is a second factor to consider, which is nitrogen metabolism. Small amounts of protein are discarded daily. They are the source of the nitrogen in urea, the main non-water component of urine, and creatinine. The urine of a healthy and properly hydrated person contains 9.3 g/dL of urea and 0.67 g/dL creatinine. The latter can be ignored for practical purposes. I don't have a general molecular formula for protein, so I'll just do a simple "bonehead" analysis.

Molecular weight of nitrogen: 28
Molecular weight of urea: 60

Thus a half-pound of urine (one cup or about 120 ml, or 0.12 liter) contains about 11g of urea, or 5.2 g of nitrogen. Roughly speaking, protein is 16% nitrogen, so that represents the discard of about 32 g of protein. That is insignificant compared to the amount of glucose metabolized, at least in terms of energy/calories.

Daily urine production for a man my size is about 1.4 liter, and it will apparently contain about 130 g of urea, which contains 61 g of nitrogen, derived from the discard of 380 g (13 oz) of protein. This emphasizes that we need to consume at least that amount of protein daily, because it can't be produced by converting either carbohydrate or fat; they contain no nitrogen.

These numbers are quite at variance with the recommendation that adult men need 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight. That converts to about 70 g/day for me (195 lbs = 88 kg). I need to do more research, because the discrepancy between 70 g and 380 g is huge. This could take a while…

Bottom line: Someone who weighs about 200 pounds can expect to lose a half pound of glucose overnight, expelled in the breath as water vapor and carbon dioxide. In addition, about an ounce of protein is lost overnight and expelled during the morning pee.

Behavior is as behavior does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, animals, behavior, evolution, nature-nurture debate

A fellow showed up half an hour late for his regular poker game with friends, and found they'd started without him. For a fourth, they'd recruited the host's dog. The man told the host, "Wow! That's some talented pup!!" "Oh," he replied, "Old Groaner isn't so great. Whenever he has an ace he wags his tail."

We are amused by pictures or stories of animals doing "human" things (or the converse!). Yet until recently, while most people with pets seem to easily understand that the animals have feelings and purposeful behaviors, scientists have been slow (by centuries!) to come around.

Marlene Zuk's new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters, drives lots of new nails into the coffin of the Animal-as-Automaton view. Let me state at the outset that, for two good reasons I hold that animals, even the rather elementary ones we call "bugs", all fit along at least three scales (none of them is the scala naturae, the "natural ladder" so beloved of ignorant biologists). Firstly, as to consciousness, one end might be called "Human-level self consciousness" (assuming it's truly the end point; maybe toothed whales are beyond us, for example); the other end we can call "barely conscious of more than the basic drives of hunger and the 'urge to merge'". Secondly, as to emotion, just as some animals have abilities we don't, there ought to be some that can have feelings we don't have. Thirdly, considering behavior, which is often divided into "purposive" (the scientific jargon for "purposeful") and "instinctive" (which really means "purely genetic"): everything living behaves. Animals are practically defined by behavior. It is what they ARE. "Lower animals" are the product of 4 billion years of evolution, the same as humans. So are the things that they DO.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have the seminal volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men by E.C. Tolman, published in 1932. This book is not referenced by Dr. Zuk, more's the pity. If she's not an intellectual descendant of Tolman, she's at least a grandniece. He was far ahead of his time, as witness the still-nearly-pervasive use of the canard "anthropomorphism" to discredit much work on animal behavior.

My two reasons: To hard-line creationists, many of whom also hold the Calvinist position that God has no emotions, I would say, "Are we not created in the image of God? Did our emotions and behaviors come from nowhere? Are they not part of that image?" Of course, some would double down to say that all such things are part of "original sin" or whatever Protestants call it. (Though I am a believer, I am neither Catholic nor Protestant.) They are fools. To take a further step, "If we have feelings and behaviors that are something other than automatic, why would God deny such abilities to animals?"

To hard-line Skinnerian scientists I would say, "I subscribe to evolution, as carried out by natural selection. Do you? If so, you must realize that our feelings came from somewhere. Where? Of course, from our nonhuman ancestors. We emote and behave because they did." So much for anthropomorphism. And as I said before, animals that are attuned to greatly different environments than humans could survive (without costly technology) are likely to have feelings and behaviors that are so foreign to us that we are unlikely to recognize them as such.

So, a bit about the book—which I urge everyone to read!—what is the Dead Man Test? Some, wishing a less macabre moniker, call it the Teddy Bear Test: If a Teddy Bear can do it, it isn't behavior. Substitute Dead Man for Teddy Bear if you prefer. Definition by exclusion.

How does behavior evolve? Just like anything else! Behavior is a physical attribute. It is just as real as height, eye color, and whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your middle finger. These things, plus all other "genetic traits" are influenced by environmental factors. This is the central emphasis of the book. Genes alone don't determine anything. Neither does environment alone. Everything is a mix, an intertwining of the two. She has to say it over and over, because many folks won't get it otherwise!

For an example of this intertwining: One of my great-grandfathers was prone to drink. The family was Methodist, and Methodists were, until the 1960's, required to sign a Pledge that they would not touch alcohol. Great-grandpa Joe fought his addiction mightily, but he would go on a bender on occasion. His daughters kept their Pledges; it helped that they never tasted "the sauce" as young people, and that they took their father as a cautionary example. Having a strict mother helped. My mother was also raised to be a teetotaler, as was I. But in college some friends persuaded me to have a beer to celebrate my 18th birthday (I lived in a state that allowed 18-year-olds to drink "low beer"). I soon found a way to get harder stuff, and I was off, headed for a life as an alcoholic! Except, I couldn't afford it. Also, returning home after the school year, back in a teetotaling home, I took a hard look at myself, and decided not to use "anything that hinders thinking clearly". At that time I didn't know about Joe. Later one of my brothers became more of an alcoholic than I had been. His own story is fascinating, but won't fit here. He and I are both "recovering"; one never fully "recovers".

Why weren't my mother and her mother alcoholics? In a different environment they'd have been so. We have a kind of protein that turns ethanol into a heroin-like addicting substance. Fortunately, it is kind of rare. Yeah, I know there are lots of alcoholics; some of them have this same genetic situation. But they are a small fraction of the whole of humanity.

I'll leave it to you to get the book and allow Dr. Zuk to lead you down many a lane and garden path, with her stories of dancing cockatoos (do they have something to dance to in nature? Neither do elephants, and I've also seen videos of them responding to music); of octopuses punching fish, apparently out of irritation; of how animals from flies to flying foxes vary in their behaviors based on still-inscrutable combinations of their genetic endowment and their past and present environment. This sure is an enjoyable book!

The conscience of the world

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, jews, israel, jewish american relations

At the suggestion of a friend I read The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. I read the e-book, which contains 661 "pages", although the main text is 590 pages, and the Illustrations, listed as one page in the Table of Contents, spans 20 screens. Anyway, it's a big, big book, full of big ideas.

I made 21 bookmarked notes, about one per chapter. When I finished reading, I realized that my bookmarking was much too ambitious. I don't have the competence to provide a comprehensive review. I must pare down my intentions.

Let me state at the outset that I am a Christian who honors the Jews as elder brothers in the knowledge of God. I didn't start that way. Before coming to Christ I had the typical Midwestern background, complete with casual antisemitism. That has changed. I have come to realize that the continued existence of the Jewish people, in the face of more than three thousand years of determined efforts to either exclude them or exterminate them, and the very existence of global antisemitism, prove that God exists.

(Note: This image shows a Hanukah menorah. The menorah in the Tabernacle and Temple had seven lamps, not nine.)

Antisemitism is alive and well in the good old US of A, and it seems to be gaining ground. Who hasn't heard that "the Jews" own or control Congress, or are the "hidden hand" behind world banking system, and so forth and so on. The first major topic of the book is to expose and debunk what the author calls "planet Vulcan theory". He uses an analogy, the decades-long hunt for a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which was predicted because the orbit of Mercury has a small deviation from what would be predicted by the orbital calculations of Newtonian mechanics. Astronomers could calculate the orbit of an inner planet, which they named Vulcan, and on a few occasions reports were published that it had been observed. Alas, it was all wishful thinking. The real explanation for Mercury's orbit is found in the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Since 1923 it has been known that there is no planet Vulcan. The "Jewish lobby" is an imaginary planet.

The continued support for Israel by the US, and the earlier welcoming of Jews to our shores (usually) has been taken as evidence of a "Jewish lobby" that bends both the domestic and foreign policy of America to "the Jewish will." The calculations seem to support the theory. However, it just isn't so. The first few chapters of the book prove that.

Quick question: Who supplied the weapons that enabled the infant nation of Israel to defeat a half dozen Arab nations in 1948? Most people (in America at least) would say, "The US!" True answer: The weapons were supplied by Czechoslovakia with the blessing of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's motive was not to help the Jews, whom he was dreadfully persecuting inside Russia. It was to bollix up American foreign policy, even to weaken America on the world stage. It worked. In fact, the US was at best a weak and neglectful ally of Israel until after the 1967 six-day war (after which Moshe Dayan joked that he'd obtained a special one week rate from Hertz Rent-a-Tank). That's two decades of America ignoring Israel.

The book is really a history of Jewish-American relations. If there were a "Jewish lobby" pulling our strings, the author makes it clear that many, many things which American Presidents and American Congresses did would have been quite different. I found it fascinating that the driving force behind American favor toward the Jews prior to 1948, and toward Israel its establishment, has been American Evangelical Christians. I happen to be one. (By the way, in case you're prone to getting offended, here is some mud in your eye: I consider the term "Evangelical Christian" to be a redundancy.)

I think it is likely that a large aim of Leftism in America today is to silence Evangelical Christians and to destroy Evangelical churches, and so reduce or eliminate support for Israel in the US Federal government. The root is antisemitism. "Wokeism" is a big part of it, but I'll take up that mess on another occasion; to be Woke is to be anti-Semite, among numerous unsavory attributes.

I half expected the author to offer policy advice. He does not. He is providing information, very valuable information. That alone will change attitudes. In my case, it increased my respect for serious, observant Jews (and my sorrow over the many Jews who have forsaken their God). God's purpose for the Jews is to teach Torah, to activate the conscience of the world. He doesn't want you to become a Jew. He wants you to be wise and good, and only in the Jewish Torah and the rest of the Bible that grew from it can wisdom worth having be found. People hate a "do-gooder", which is why a world full of godless people hates the Jews.

Whether you love Jews or hate them, this book is very well worth reading.

Computer-aided artistry

 kw: experiments, reviews, art, dall-e, artificial intelligence

I can't draw, or paint, or sculpt. All the manual artistry in my family resides in my younger brother, who is a professor of art history. However, I can think creatively, which any child can do, as can many adults, if the skill hasn't been educated out of them. Perhaps if I had taken art lessons, long ago…

But now, AI can help! I read a review of three "art generator" applications and decided to try them. Rather than write a blow-by-blow account, I'll present my progress and conclusions. The three applications are 

• DALL-E 2, the first and currently the best.
• MidJourney, which runs on a server within the Discord environment.
• Stable Diffusion, also in Discord, but a beta version of an improved product is in DreamStudio.

I planned to use three prompts. A prompt is a text instruction, which can be up to the size of a tweet. The longer and more detailed, the better the results (usually). Two of the three applications return four small images; you can pick one to edit. The editing tools depend on the application. Quite frankly, the tools in MJ and SD are obscure and apparently limited (more experienced folks can correct me on this; just comment). The tools in DE2 were easier for me to comprehend and to use, so I did a lot more with that one.

I used only one prompt with MJ and SD, and then gave up. The first prompt:

Mountainous Landscape in the style of the Hudson School

DALL-E:

I selected the second one to edit. I first downloaded the image, a 1024x1024 pixel PNG file nearly 2 Mby in size. Converting to a JPG reduced it to 475 Kby. This panel is shown about half size. I'll discuss the little bit of editing I did below.

MidJourney:

I selected the first one to (try to) edit. Saving the 1024x1024 image produced a 662 Kby WEBP file. Converting to a JPG reduced it to 517 Kby. This panel is shown full size.

I couldn't figure out whether extending the image (I'll get to that shortly) is even possible, so at this point I stopped and didn't send MJ any more prompts.

Stable Diffusion:

This single return seemed odd. It must be two halves of a panorama. Saving it produced a 1024x1024 PNG file (though I had to select the size at the outset; a slider runs from 512 to 1024). 

I couldn't do much with this. I tried a different prompt, which produced slightly better results, but not too pleasing to me.

I returned to DALL-E 2. I primarily wanted to extend the image. I'm interested in images big enough to use for screen saver wallpaper (1920x1080). In the edit toolset, you extend an image by adding a Generator Frame (AKA a Marquee), moving it where you like, and clicking Generate.

I first put the marquee next to the image and clicked Generate. The marquee filled with a different take on the prompt, independent of the image next to it. I clicked Reject, moved the marquee to overlap about 1/8th of the image and clicked Generate. Much better. I clicked Accept. This is the image I kept, 1920x1024 in size (a bit panoramic, but I like that). I reproduce it here half size.

You might have noticed that all DALL-E images have a little color bar at lower right. This is to be used if you want to print an image on canvas, to guide the color-rendering software; you'd hide the lower edge behind the frame. To make an image for use on the screen one must extend it enough to crop that lower edge out for the finished image.

The editor lets you erase part of an image and paste in other stuff. You can also start by downloading an image and editing it, rather than using a prompt.

I used the second and third prompts at this point. I'll show the final, extended images (half size).

Second prompt:

Still Life with apples, pomegranates, and bananas in the style of Paul Cezanne

This image is 1984x1280. The original 1024x1024 extends from the middle of the blue ewer to the end of the top banana, and to a little below the edge of the table.

Third Prompt:

Futuristic city on hilly alien planet with violet sky and two moons

This panoramic image is 2624x1024; the original square is about the middle 40%. The added moons showed up during extension.

DALL-E 2 gives a new user 50 free credits for the first month of use, and 15 free credits per month thereafter (use 'em or lose 'em). Each time you click Generate you consume one credit. Credits can be purchased, $15 for 115. Using this program can consume a lot of time, and some funds. It can easily become addicting. I have read of online artists who produce images and sell them as NFT's. That's one way to fund the addiction!

At this point I had 35 credits left. I couldn't resist trying one more prompt:

Desert landscape with mesas and saguaro cactus

The 4 returns:

These look like scenes near Tucson. I chose #3 and extended it, to both sides and below:

This image is 2624x1664, plenty big enough for me to use as wallpaper. It consumed 8 credits, leaving me with 27. Yo-ho! What to do next? Stay tuned!

The real cycle(s) of life

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biochemistry, krebs cycle, citric acid cycle

Sorry, Lion King, the circle of life is actually something hidden from most of us. There are powerful wheels that turn inside every cell in our bodies (and in all bodies, from bacteria right on up). The most important of these has a name that strikes fear in students of biochemistry: the Krebs cycle. Hans Krebs received (with Fritz Lipmann) the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his elucidation of the citric acid cycle, which is usually called by his name.

This illustration, from Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by biochemist Nick Lane, shows how the cycle produces ATP, the energy carrier used by all living beings (on Earth at least). The steps after ATP is produced (lower left) regenerate molecules used for the next go-round. Citric acid (in the form of citrate when in solution) is the master of ceremonies.

For those interested in the structural chemistry shown here, the black balls represent carbon, the small gray balls are hydrogen, and other atoms such as oxygen or sulfur are represented by open circles with a letter inside. The dashed lines with a - sign attached to all the COO groups indicate that the electronegativity is not localized to either of the oxygens.

This book is a loving biography of the Krebs cycle and related biochemistry. Dr. Lane does his best to explain the reactions within it, and in the reverse cycle, and the environment in which this chemistry is active: on both sides of the membranes of mitochondria. These cycles are the machinery that runs our cells.

A common understanding of the Krebs cycles has what we call the forward cycle transforming energy into a form we can use (ATP), and the reverse cycle gathering energy from the environment, such as the electrons pumped by photosynthesis, to make energetic molecules, mainly sugars. But there is a whole lot more to it than that.

Other crucial parts of these metabolic cycles include "red protein" or ferredoxin, which catalyzes reactions that run too slowly otherwise, forcing electrons onto many of those COO- groups seen in the diagram, or onto intermediate chemicals that pass them onward to COO-. Another is shown as CoA here; it is "coenzyme A", a somewhat larger chain of atoms and small rings, including some phosphate groups and amino (nitrogen-hydrogen) groups. The body makes CoA from vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid). Every cell on Earth needs it to function.

It may surprise those who haven't studied biochemistry that so very many of the chemicals of life are acids. In popular culture, "acids" are powerfully corrosive chemicals such as sulfuric acid (battery acid) and hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid or swimming-pool acid). We may know that the sour taste of vinegar is due to acetic acid, and that lemons are sour because of citric acid. So not all acids are that fierce! Surprisingly, every cell in your body is powered by a cycle that begins and ends with citric acid. It's about a whole lot more than oranges and lemons! The COO- group in an organic molecule is called "carboxylate", and when the minus sign is satisfied by an attached hydrogen, the COOH group makes the molecule a carboxylic acid. These are not corrosive. Rather, they are necessary for metabolism to function. Also, a protein is a long chain of amino acids, and all amino acids contain the compound group NH2-COOH. We are built of acids!

How are these molecules built? Their building blocks are produced by tools created in the Krebs cycle. This cycle has so many uses, it has to be regulated so as to avoid conflict between producing ATP for energy and producing molecules for body construction. Dr. Lane likens a cell to a city, with lots of activity going on. At the core of all the processes to run the city are motors, and the motors all have the same brand name: Krebs. A motor is a good metaphor, for as energy flows through a motor, the motor spins. In one quote from biophysicist Harold Morowitz, "Energy flows, matter cycles."

Once the opening few chapters have described the Krebs cycle in sufficient detail, and provided examples of how the "motor" runs, later chapters delve into the question, "Which came first, genetics or metabolism?" A fundamental fact about all the reactions in the cycle are that they are reversible. We learn in early Chemistry classes that when you have a reversible reaction, it can be driven either way by changing the concentration of other chemicals in its environment (typically by adding one of the products or reactants to a solution in a beaker).

Recent experiments—usually meaning in the last 5-10 years—have shown that these reactions can proceed most of the way around the cycle with very little "driving". Having a metallic or metal-oxide substrate for the acids to temporarily attach to also seems to facilitate matters. Even more recent experiments have shown that pressure and heat—here meaning pressures of several tens of atmospheres to several hundred atmospheres and heat around boiling or not much above boiling—facilitate these reactions chains, and if certain products are removed, they are like conveyor belts or assembly lines to produce the kinds of molecules that are necessary for life. This has led to the hypothesis that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean deeps.

It occurred to me as I read this that hydrothermal vents should have been much more active a few billion years ago than they are today. When I was taking geochemistry, I remarked to the professor one day that radiogenic heating (heating caused by elements such as uranium breaking down) must have been six times greater than now, four billion years ago. This would lead to much faster plate tectonics (He was surprised; he had never thought of that). At that time the deep sea "black smokers" and other hydrothermal features had not yet been discovered. Eons ago submarine vents would have been correspondingly greater in extent and activity. It seems the immediate post-Hadean era could have been ideal for biologic life to begin.

Nearer the end the book turns from life and life's origins to disease and death. It is no surprise that, if our mitochondria age and wear out, the cycling of metabolism is affected. I have been wondering for a long time, if our mitochondria age, and their DNA accumulates SNP's even faster than the DNA of our cells (nuclear DNA), how do babies get born with brand-new mitochondria? Is there a corrective mechanism? There is! And it is not quite described, but briefly outlined on pages 140-141. The author calls it a "clean-up operation in the female germline" to prepare the half-million of mitochondria that fill each oocyte (egg cell).

Also, mitochondria, and the metabolic cycling that spins endlessly around their membranes, are implicated in cancer. This metabolic cancer origin hypothesis is not yet well known, and is controversial where it is known. But it makes more sense than the chain of oncogene disruptions posited by the earlier hypothesis (and it is no more than a hypothesis, not a theory).

Further, dying and death are metabolic in origin. I can't say I grasped the entirety of Dr. Lane's description, but it made sense as I read it. We really are a lot like "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" of Holmes's poem, that was constructed to have no weakest part. If nothing external goes wrong, we may live to great age, and then rather abruptly suffer general organ failure, when everything seems to go wrong at once: "He died in his sleep." My great uncle, having outlived his wife by a few years, at the age of 102 was working a field on his farm. He stopped the tractor and walked to one of the hired hands to say, "I feel a little tired. I'll take a little nap." Inside, he lay down and passed away peacefully. I can't think of a better way to go.

The epilogue is titled "Self". It reconsiders the question, "Which is primary, genetics or metabolism?" The conclusion (stated at the outset and then supported by evidence): "Genes never supplanted the deep chemistry of cells. They conserved it, and they built on it." The primary difference between the Krebs cycle of four billion years ago, and now, is the cluster of enzymes (built by genes) that catalyze the reactions, facilitating energy flows hundreds of times more rapid. Otherwise animal life would not be possible, and plant life couldn't have produced bamboo that is able to grow a few feet per day.

The book made me wistful. I started college as a chemistry major because I wanted to become a biochemist. Three changes of major later, I graduated as a geologist. I had a great career, but I miss chemistry. This book has become my new favorite for the year.

Where are the Millenarians?

 kw: longevity, multiverse, musings

Among those who are so unwilling to die that they will try anything to circumvent the inevitable, I find a strange bunch who pin their hopes on the Multiverse.

The reasoning goes like this: the Multiverse has uncountable numbers of alternate universes that differ from the one we inhabit in numerous ways, from negligible to minor to rather major. They say (this is an approximate quote), "When someone in this universe is faced with death, so are many 'copies' in similar universes. Suppose you die in this universe, and so do many of your 'copies', but some of your 'copies' don't die in their universes. Can it be that your consciousness somehow traverses between universes, so that you find yourself in one of those where you didn't die? This can happen again and again. Therefore, nobody really dies, they just get a transfer to a place where they didn't die."

Let us consider for the moment that this supposition is true, and one may, just before (or during) dying, transfer to another universe where life goes on. If this can happen again and again, can it keep happening for a long, long time? If "nobody really dies," why is it that our universe doesn't seem to have anyone in it who has hung on for hundreds of years?

This couple recently celebrated their 81st anniversary. They are 98 and 102. Shouldn't there be someone out there celebrating anniversary #100, 200, or 1,000?

How is it that our universe isn't at the receiving end of lots of transfers? Further, if you get a transfer to the universe next door, what happens to the consciousness of your 'copy'?

Where are the thousand-year-old people?

Salt and Vinegar explored

 kw: experiments, vinegar, salt, acidity, ph, photo essays

Kitchen chemistry: putting vinegar on an oxidized penny doesn't seem to do anything. Adding table salt makes the penny shine right up. Also, I get lime deposits in the ceramic cup holder in the bathroom. I've tried the same method. Adding salt to vinegar on the lime makes it much easier to clean off.

Question: Does the salt make the vinegar more acidic?

I have some pH paper that I bought when I was a chemistry major many, many moons ago. Here are a couple of pieces on a salad plate, initially dry, near the paper dispenser with its scale. The pieces have a pH near 5 because of carbon dioxide in the air, which makes any moisture in the air shift from a neutral pH of 7 to about 5.6, the natural pH of rainfall.

The color bars on the scale are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11.

I next added a couple of drops of vinegar to each piece of paper. They became a little more red, indicating a pH near 4. Then I put some salt on the lower one. These pictures show what happened (not much!):

The salt is visible in the pic on the right, on the lower paper. If I try hard, that piece of pH paper may look slightly redder than the other. But really, there is no measurable change in the pH after adding salt.

So why does vinegar with salt added clean pennies, and help remove lime scale more rapidly?

I think the effect is due to kinetics. Adding table salt, sodium chloride, causes an equilibrium reaction such that some of the acetate ions in the vinegar solution shift their "allegiance" to sodium ions, and some of the hydrogen ions are then free to "work with" chloride ions. Hydrogen chloride, or hydrochloric acid, is a stronger acid than the acetic acid in vinegar. "Stronger" doesn't mean it has a different pH necessarily. It refers to how strong the reaction is when it encounters a material it can attack, such as copper patina or lime scale.

Without doing experiments for which I don't have the equipment, I can't go further. The hypothesis, "Hydrogen chloride attacks susceptible materials more effectively than hydrogen acetate, in low-pH solution" will do for now.

Senses - a Baker's Dozen

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, science, senses, physiology

I discovered something shocking about Chinese soup. At a church potluck dinner we all enjoyed a bowl of soup from a big pot one Chinese sister brought. It had an intriguing taste, similar to soups made with Star Anise, but subtly different. In my bowl I found a black pod. I was told it was the seed pod of water chestnut. I bit into it, and had quite a surprise! Suddenly the soup tasted awful. Water tasted like battery acid. Every taste was distorted, in quite unfortunate ways, for about a day. When I told this to the cook, she laughed and said, "You aren't supposed to eat Chinese spices!" I couldn't stand to eat or drink anything until the next day.

I found out that this seed pod goes by many names, including Devil's Pod. You can get them from two sources: Chinese food stores, and Etsy, where they are sold for use in crafts (not as a food item).

The words "taste" and "flavor" have different meanings. For a physiologist, "flavor" includes both taste and smell. That is but one tidbit I find in Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins. Another is that the five kinds of taste we know may actually number seven. In addition to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory ("umami", triggered by glutamine from protein), some researchers have found hints that our tongues have sensors for calcium (a different kind of salty) and fat.

We all learned that the "five senses" are sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. These are the senses that have visible organs. However, we also have senses of balance, hunger, and a host of others that may number more than 20. Indeed, our eyes sense two different regimes of light. When the only light in a room is a candle, but we can still see colors in all except the gloomiest corners, our sight is near the threshold of photopic vision. Light bright enough for us to distinguish colors is sensed by the color-selective cones in our retina. Moonlight, particularly when the moon is a few days past full, or a few days shy of full, is sensed by the color-blind (actually blue-green sensitive) rods in our retina, and we can see rather well by scotopic vision.

There is actually another network of light-sensing cells in our retina that connect to our body clock, so that day/night cycles reset it daily. Long-term experiments with people in caves and bunkers have shown that without this daily resetting, our body clock tends to run on a 25-hour cycle. Thus, in addition to color vision and night vision, our eyes have a third function related to our sense of time. Body temperature, blood pressure, and alertness run in daily cycles; the "afternoon sleepies" aren't just because of that big lunch you ate.

The 12 chapters in Sentient each focus on a different sense. Eleven of these are known in humans: 

• color vision
• night vision
• hearing
• touch (but this is a multi-modal group of senses with different receptors for each)
• pleasure and pain (two levels of stimulation of one set of receptors)
• taste
• smell (by itself, or as bundled into "flavor" with taste)
• desire (pheromones)
• balance
• time
• proprioception (required to touch your nose with eyes closed)

The twelfth (Chapter 11) is direction, which we'll get to shortly. There is a bonus chapter on a 13th sense, the electric sense in the bill of a platypus. Sharks and other aquatic predators also have it. Humans don't; getting an electric shock stimulates nerves directly, but there is no sensor that allows us to know the subtle electric fields around moving animals. That's probably a good thing. If we had an electric sense it would be overloaded by the pervasive 60- (or 50-) cycle hum found everywhere except unpopulated areas and Amish homes, and by the multitude of electromagnetic signals that bring our favorite programs to AM and FM radios and TV antennas.

The iconic animal in each chapter is renowned for excellence, or exceedance, in the chosen sense. For example, the Mantis Shrimp of Chapter 1 has, not just the three color sensors that we (and most primates) have, but a total of TWELVE, including one or two that see ultraviolet. Apparently, in the extremely colorful environment of a coral reef, it is thus better able to discriminate specific prey by their colors. Chapter 6 on Taste tells of a large catfish. Catfish are known to have numerous taste receptors all over their bodies; one researcher calls a catfish a "swimming tongue". The Goliath Catfish is the largest; think of a ten-foot tongue swimming around.

I was quite interested in the directional sense that some people exhibit (Chapter 11). Many animals including migrating birds are found to have pieces or chains of magnetite crystals that let them sense, and perhaps even see, the magnetic field of the earth. When migrating, they follow the direction of the force, or go at an angle to it; at the end of the trip, they may sense the steepening angle as they approach the magnetic pole, and finish their journey when the angle reaches a certain degree. Do humans have a magnetic sense? Many experiments include quite a number that seem to say "Yes", but some seem to say "No" and others are equivocal. If humans do not have a magnetic sense, that'll be odd, because so many mammals do have one, and members of nearly every other group of animals have it. We do have something, or some of us at least, for there are those who always know which way is north, or home, or another chosen direction, even after being taken somewhere blindfold.

This is so far my favorite book this year: Fascinating, packed with very interesting information, and easy to read.

I'd like to end with speculation about a fourth sense that may be located in our eyes. It is something I've noticed after I turn out the lights in my bedroom. In the dark, with my eyes closed, I seem to be able to see my hand and arm move, and also the blanket, when I rearrange the covers. This is not scotopic vision somehow seeing through my eyelids. The rods are sensitive to blue-green light peaking at 500 nm (normal green-sensitive cones peak about 540 nm). Rods cut off on the longwave side at about 600 nm, but hardly any light shorter than 600 nm gets through our red-colored eyelids, because of the blood in them.

By my bedside is a clock radio with bluish LED numerals. I have a pink filter over it so it doesn't light up the whole room (the radio is poorly designed). It is plenty bright enough for me to see the blue color. I can't see it at all through my eyelids, even when fully dark adapted. But there is a little reddish light in the room from a couple of pilot lights on equipment, and a pinkish light that comes through the windows from skyglow. When there is still enough light in the room to see faint colors it looks like this (picture edited to look like what I remember):

On moonless nights, after my eyes have become dark-adapted, it looks more like this:

The slight bluish hue is typical of scotopic vision. A scene by moonlight looks bluish, even though the moon's actual color is brown. Although rods outnumber cones 20-to-1 (120 million rods and 6 million cones), they are ganged together for greater sensitivity, which greatly reduces the sharpness of the scene.

Now, here is what I noticed about a year ago. I typically turn out the light around 11 or a little later. Even before I am fully dark-adapted, when my eyes are closed and I readjust the covers or move my hand, I can see the movement of my hand and the covers, and if—still with closed eyes—I look around the room, I can see the outlines of what is in the room, a little more faintly than if I open my eyes, but distinctly. The windows seem the brightest. Further editing of the photo from above yields this, which matches what I see:

It is perhaps twice as blurry as scotopic vision, and the light and dark areas are a little different. If I hold up my hand and wave it about it seems black. If I raise my head and look at the clock radio, with its dim blue numerals, I don't see them at all.

Is it possible that I am seeing right through my eyelids? If so, it must be by sensors that see by the pink light from the windows, and/or the faint red light of the pilot lights. It could be something else entirely.

I have considered that my brain may be conjuring a dim memory of the room, as part of a normal vision function that anticipates what is "normal", priming the visual system to detect any differences. My brain knows where my hand is; it knows how the bedcovers move when I shift them; it knows where the windows and furniture are. It could know enough to meld proprioception (knowing where my head is pointed and where my hands are) with this calculated scene so that the scene "stays put" when I turn my head.

I cannot decide at present whether I am actually seeing, or constructing, what I sense.

Fresh water's best expression

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, limnology, lakes, natural history

This is a picture of me walking (well, standing) on water. It's easy when it's frozen! This was taken at Pactola Lake in the Black Hills of South Dakota during my graduate school days. In the background waterfowl are taking advantage of the unfrozen part of the lake. Pactola is not a natural lake but a reservoir, a combination of water supply for Rapid City and flood control for Rapid Creek. The lake's area is about 740 acres (300 hectares), which makes it a middle-sized lake. While it is several miles long, it is at most just over half a mile wide, which makes it perfect for canoeing. That's something some friends and I did a few times.

According to John Richard Saylor, in Lakes: Their Birth, Life, and Death, there are about one-and-a-quarter million lakes on Earth, of 10 hectares (24.7 acres) or greater extent. Some limnologists count lakes larger than 1 hectare, saying there are some 8.5 million.

Right away I am going to fault the author for utterly ignoring metric units. I suspect many readers will wonder, "What's special about 24.7 acres?" A simple foot note or parenthetical note could clear that up. Of course, 10 hectares is arbitrary, but nearly everywhere except America it's at least understandable. There isn't a well-agreed-upon way to distinguish a lake from a pond, so a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Limnology is the study of fresh water in all its forms, although glaciology has its own niche when studying frozen water. However, this book says little about rivers, except as feeders or drains of lakes. The book follows a simple classification scheme. Glaciers produce the most lakes by far, either by gouging out basins or by depositing moraines. 

A few years before moving to South Dakota I spent a few weeks doing geology in an area called 20 Lake Basin, above Yosemite in the Sierras. This image from Google Earth has 15 labels, but two of them are "...Lakes", and there are several lakes visible with no label. Most of them are gouged-out lakes. The basin is surrounded by glaciers. I swam in nearly every one of the lakes shown.

Landslides sometimes form lakes by blocking a stream. Such lakes seldom last long, but there are a few that have persisted for centuries. Then there's Quake Lake near Yellowstone in Montana, formed by an earthquake in 1959. It's about six miles long, and seems to be here for the long haul. Time will tell.

I don't know if people make more dams than earthquakes and landslides do, but there are thousands of artificial dams and their attendant ponds or lakes. Some are huge, such as Lake Powell (half dried up at present) on the Colorado River: 25-40 miles wide, with an area around 160,000 acres (65,000 hectares).

There is a kind of allure about damming up a stream. As a child, I was like many of my friends, in that we sometimes dammed up a narrow spot in a local creek, to see how high we could get the water to rise. It was typically no more than an inch or two. I spent a few otherwise idle hours moving stones and sand into place to patch up first one, then another, "escape route" the water would take as it rose.

On the Wikipedia page for Lake Powell, it is noted that sediment with a volume of 11 billion gallons settles in the lake every year. Since 1969, capacity has been reduced 7%. This is part of the ordinary life cycle of any lake. Once formed, it will be gradually filled with sediment. During its "active lake" phase, a lake will host wildlife that varies according to the local climate. 

All lakes eventually fill up, or are drained in some way (often by human activity in recent centuries). Given time, a lake that avoids being drained turns into a marsh, then a bog, then a meadow, and in time, it may leave little trace. 

The author points out a few lakes that are millions of years old (Lake Baikal in Russia comes to mind). He does a quick study with us about what it takes to get a lake to last so long, or longer. While some areas of Earth are up to a few billions of years old, the erosion cycles they have been through would have erased any lakes that formed in that time. It's likely that a tenth of a billion years is about the limit.

It's an enjoyable excursion into the subject. Much recommended!

Crime and ambiguity

 kw: book reviews, mysteries, anthologies, crime fiction

I took a break from a steady diet of nonfiction to read The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021, edited by Lee Child.

The phrase "murder mystery" evokes the most common subgenre of mystery and crime fiction. Fortunately, not all good mystery stories involve murder, and these are the ones I prefer. Some stories and story series, set in small towns, involve so many murders that one is left wondering whether the town will soon be uninhabited. I like a clever crime with a clever solution, or even a banal crime that requires cleverness to be solved.

A mystery story usually needs a resolution, meaning most mysteries are also problem-solving or puzzle-solving stories. Come to think of it, nearly all satisfying stories, of every genre, involve problem solving. Stories that don't resolve are rarely satisfying; the few such that make it into print (or are published online) draw few positive reviews.

Enough philosophizing! The last story in this volume, a "bonus story", "My Favorite Murder" by Ambrose Bierce, is one of the very few engaging stories that doesn't resolve, but the story-within-the-story has an ending of sorts, leaving the "outer resolution" up to the reader. Bierce exaggerates so dramatically that he can be considered an honorary member of the X (for "eXtreme") generation. Prior to reading this story, I had only read a few bits of The Devil's Dictionary, which exemplifies why he is called "bitter Bierce."

Of the 20 stories of 2021, I read 19. A story by Stephen King is included, but having read one short story by King a long time ago I decided that he takes a reader to places I don't care to visit.

A few of the stories involve crimes other than murder. One that deserves special mention is "The Adventure of the Home Office Baby" by David Marcum; he is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes, and writes new Holmes stories with great verisimilitude. I believe Conan Doyle would be flattered. A stillborn baby is the only death in the piece, which is much more about international intrigue, meaning Mycroft Holmes is involved. Saying any more would be too much. This is my favorite of the 19.

A few other stories don't involve murder, but most do. All are very well written and I enjoyed them. I'll leave it at that.

Another week, another world to conquer

 kw: book reviews, semi-fiction, nonfiction, empire building, supervillains

Want to take over the world? You'll have to wait in line. Firstly, and more seriously, you'll have V. Putin, J.R. Biden, and J.P. Xi, at the very least, to elbow out of the way. More tongue-in-cheek, the number of aspiring globe-controllers may soon take a sharp rise, with the publication of How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain by Ryan North.

Indeed, the schemes are at least borderline practical. Mr. North knows what he is talking about; he creates supervillains in his day job with Marvel. I have but one quibble with the way the book begins: Chapter 1 is titled "Every Supervillain Needs a Secret Base." It needs to be bumped ahead to become Chapter 2, and Chapter 1 ought to be, "Amassing Your First Billion." 

Secret bases don't come cheap. Particularly now that every curious person with Google Earth can scan around, zooming in on anything suspicious. So first, you need to gather sufficient clout to coerce Google to fuzz out the area of your interest in both GMaps and GEarth, the way sundry world governments have had "areas of national importance" fuzzed out or blacked out (This site outlines 15 of them). Then you need to obtain title and control of the place (those don't always go together).

A few folks have tried making "new land" near existing land, "Seabases". Sometimes it even works for a while. Then the nearest country takes it over. It seems the first billion you can gather would just be seed money to work toward something more like a trillion, so you can buy your own country. That's a better beginning. The illustrations and the villainous character in them are the work of the author's friend Carly Monardo.

I seem to remember that L. Ron Hubbard lived aboard ship for decades to avoid extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion. The "Sea Org" of Scientology funneled supplies and personnel to the ship. I don't know what it does now that Hubbard has joined the Thetans. 

In one chapter—I forget which—we learn that the perfect crime is the one people thank you for. It might have been Chapter 4, "Controlling the Weather…", related to "solving" climate change. That's where I realized that the author's "supervillain" just might be a super-superhero in disguise. I like his take in Chapter 7, "Time Travel": as soon as he gets it, he'll come back and rewrite this chapter before the book goes to print.

Then Chapter 9 pulls out all the stops, "Ensuring You Are Never, Ever, Ever Forgotten." The time frames go by powers of 10: 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, etc. The 1,000-year memorial involves bronze items in shallow water. Costs rise with the time frame. The billion-year memorial requires getting it off Earth, and the 10-billion-year one? One must move it to the outer Solar System, at the very least. Beyond that, we learn of the times, in billions, trillions, quadrillions (we're just getting started) of years until the heat death of the universe, the decay of protons, and the evaporation of black holes via Hawking Radiation (that one has 100 zeroes after the 1. It seems the author found a use for Googol, different from Google!). I guess that has to count as "Ever".

It's a tremendously fun book. I don't care to partake of supervillainy, but if anyone is inspired by this book, I may know what to look out for.

A scientist - up by the bootstraps

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, scientists

Psyche is asteroid #16, the 16th to be found, discovered in 1852. It's the largest metal-rich asteroid, so intriguing that NASA, in a project initiated and led by geologist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, intends to send a spacecraft to have a close look. No collision is intended! The hammer is a metaphor for the actual instruments that will be used (next paragraph).

Psyche is about 226 km (140 miles) in average diameter. The instruments that will peer at and into the asteroid include a magnetometer, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and a dual-camera multi-spectral imager. All for just under a billion dollars. Launch was initially set for this year, but is delayed a year while an instrument that was delayed is finished and tested.

Dr. Elkins-Tanton's memoir A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman outlines the paths that led her to a scientific career and sufficient prominence to become a Principal Investigator (PI) on a NASA mission.

She writes of several threads: childhood and growing up but having different interests from many others;  a very brief and concealing sideswipe at the childhood sexual abuse she suffered; education at MIT and elsewhere, where she was sometimes informed flatly that she didn't belong and was there "on sufferance"; a courtship, marriage, childbirth, and breakup (fortunately not a bitter one but any divorce is traumatic); renewed love with a more compatible husband; a growing career dogged by continued symptoms of the "glass ceiling"; field work in Russia, where they are openly dismissive of women in science; building a leadership-facilitation business with her husband and her son; growing leadership roles, one of which led to the Psyche mission with NASA; and her growing leadership in fostering a scientific culture that is more welcoming of women and others formerly left out.

If you didn't just think or say, "Wow!", I don't know what it takes to impress you. For myself, I am overwhelmed. This is one admirable woman and a scientific rock star. For me to write much more than this would be a disservice. Get the book!

The physics of life and living things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biophysics, dna, biomolecules, self-assembly

A friend of mine is a biophysicist. I asked him once what he does. He said he wasn't working in biophysics, but was writing computer code for a government agency. I didn't press further. When I saw that a book about biophysics I decided to read it: So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World by Raghuveer Parthasarathy. The book's title opens a key sentence in the last paragraph of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

I was a physics major in 1969 and 1970. While physics deals with phenomena on all scales, from the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that can span the universe to the Planck Length, the smallest possible "useful" unit of length, most physicists at that time worked with subatomic particles, smaller than an atom by a factor of about 10,000, but still very large compared to the Planck Length: If a proton were enlarged to span the distance between Hartford, CT and Providence, RI, about 100 km, the Planck Length would become about the size of a proton.

If we move up in the scale of things to the nano-realm, from the size of an atom (an iron atom's diameter is 0.26 nanometers) and that of a DNA molecule (~10 nm in diameter, but very, very long) to the size of bacterial cells (500 nm to 10,000 nm), and further to the cells of animals and plants (10,000 - 100,000 nm), we are in the realm of biophysics.

The author first presents four physical principles that govern living things:

• Self-assembly – biological things typically "build themselves", such as the "liquid membrane" of a cell or a cell's nucleus, or a soap bubble as seen here. The electrochemical properties of all biomolecules facilitate their roles.

• Regulatory Circuits – phenomena such as the expression of a gene involve feedback loops with several elements.
• Predictable Randomness – this is the basis of statistical inference, and underlies Brownian Motion, which is the "motor" of many actions within cells.
• Scaling – relationships between length, area and volume regulate what is possible at different sizes, and underlie the dramatic difference between the kinds of legs that work for a rhinoceros beetle, compared to those of a rhinoceros, for example.

The book contains many illustrations drawn by the author, such as the ones shown above. 

The author proceeds from basic facts about atoms and molecules to the molecules need to operate a living cell, primarily DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars and lipids (fats). Examples of self-assembly introduce the ways these molecules' properties facilitate the construction of all the organelles in a cell. Certain operations require more specialized machinery; an example is ferrying certain products over longer distances (clear across an animal cell, which is 10-100x as wide as a bacterium, for example), because Brownian motion is too slow. This is carried out by special kinds of molecules that "walk" along the fibers that form an internal skeleton of the cell. Shorter range transport is typically carried out quite efficiently by relying on Brownian movement to jostle molecules around until they latch onto their targets. When a motion of a micron or so is needed, transport time is around a microsecond.

The four principles listed above are emergent properties of biomolecules in an environment warm enough for Brownian motion to help them go where they need to go, at least inside bacterial cells. Over evolutionary time, mechanisms have been developed that facilitate larger-scale things and operations, right up to the size of a blue whale or redwood tree. This was apparently a hard problem. The "boring billion" refers to a billion-year period during which bacteria and archaea, having developed quite a lot of sophistication, including the ability to aggregate into large assemblages such as stromatolites, didn't do much at all. Finally, eukaryotic cells arose, and things got a lot less boring. Animals, plants, fungi and protozoa are composed of eukaryotic cells (the word means "cells with a nucleus"). The largest eukaryotic cells are the neurons that run end-to-end in large animals such as whales or giant squids. The largest bacteria or archaea are 1/100 millimeter long (well, there are a very few species of bacteria that are 10-20 mm long and 3/4 mm diameter. All the rest are microscopic).

The last section of the book deals with the genetic revolution, first in reading ("sequencing") DNA and now writing it, or editing it. The prospect of "designer babies" and "clone armies" emphasizes that these matters have moral aspects. We have to work out "who decides what is moral" (particularly because most genetic scientists are atheists and so have no external moral compass). The author is optimistic that this can be carried out without much drama. 

I am less optimistic. The author discusses Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who announced having used CRISPR/CAS9 to gene-edit twin embryos. The girls were born in 2018. The Chinese government, partially under outside pressure, reacted strongly, shut down He's lab and jailed him. I suspect the next researcher who decides to give it a go won't announce anything. This may have already happened. Not everyone is willing to wait for consensus. The technique of "gene drive", which can rapidly send a species, such as a noxious sort of mosquito, into extinction, is an even scarier prospect. There is no guarantee that a gene drive that works in the Anopheles mosquito only will not mutate into one that crosses into another species, and eventually spreads and spreads. Think of "Ice-Nine" in Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

On another note: In the present technical environment dominated by Big Data, the author presents a good case for understanding—based on hypothesis, experiment, synthesis, and theory—wherever possible. He uses the example of making numerous experiments with a ball, rolled down a ramp and off the table, and measuring where it hits the floor. One could prepare a table based on thousands of such experiments. Then someone could use that table to determine, based on a ball's velocity and height from the floor, to predict where it will land. But a smaller number of experiments can underlie the development of a formula by which one can calculate the landing distance, without needing to interpolate from a table. The formula is based on understanding what gravity does, and experiments to confirm the strength of gravity. It isn't too extreme to say that Big Data is often used blindly. Physics, including biophysics, leads to understanding and removes the blinders.

I probably haven't demonstrated a great deal of my own understanding of biophysics. I have a lot to think over. This book is a marvelous introduction to the subject.

Errata: On p.266, illustrating how gene drive works, the example is a species of mosquito, gray in color. Sometimes a mutation occurs, yielding a black insect. In mid-discussion this sentence occurs, "Suppose just one individual has the gray mutation." It should be "…black mutation", as is clear from the accompanying illustration and the rest of the discussion.