Animals and Law

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, laws, legal system, humor

Mary Roach make serious subjects both interesting and humorous. In Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, she writes of animals who cause problems to people (besides ants at picnics or in the kitchen), and the various officers who must deal with them. We're talking serious problems here, from killings to theft, and, in later chapters, "invasions" such as the imported rabbits in Australia and rats in New Zealand.

On the scale of danger:cuteness ratio, bears rank right at the top. A young cub like the one shown here is probably just curious. However, the mother is likely to be nearby, and will object to her baby being this close to a dangerous human. It seldom occurs to us that bears consider us a risk; we're big enough to do them damage, and too big to be worthwhile prey. I wonder what followed this moment. Most likely, the mother made a "Whuff!" sound, at which the cub ran to her, and they trotted off together. I hope so.

Bears are too smart to be predictable. They are also loners, and get cranky if someone gets too close without permission. A cranky bear can slap you as he or she would another bear, and it'll take your head right off. Then, surprised at the result, after some thought, the bear could opt to take advantage of the free meal. Now we have a "killer bear". What is a forest ranger to do with it? There's a chapter on that. Guess what: relocating, whether bear or squirrel, just makes room for another to move in…and so does killing the offender.

Bears are most likely to kill unintentionally. Not so carnivores such as leopards, nor elephants. Each rates a chapter, and the stories range from quirkily funny to spine-chilling. While in India learning about leopard attacks, one evening the author heard a ghastly scream that she concluded came from a leopard's prey being killed. She and those with her decided to wait, to check it out in the morning, leaving matters to resolve themselves overnight. The villagers called it a case of demon possession, which she took for a double entendre, because the villagers had also told her that any leopard that had killed at least two people was considered a demon. Well, whoever died that evening was definitely "possessed" by that leopard at that point!

I haven't been the subject of an attack by anything bigger than a jaybird. But that can be painful enough! I found a blue jay chick in the driveway once, and picked it up to put in a nearby bush. A parent bird bombed me. Had I not been wearing a hat, it would have drawn blood. I've managed to avoid sea gull attacks by eating only inside at the beach! This fellow, according to advertising copy, was trying out a gull repellent method that obviously isn't working. I did note that two species of gull are shown here. That's typical at almost any American beach.

A lot of the book deals with the futility of not just trying to eradicate unwanted species (such as invasive rats on islands), but even counting them to know how big the problem is. Cougars (AKA pumas or panthers) are so elusive that animal "control" officers' most effective method is scanning an area for feces, called "scat". Unlike domestic cats, cougars just "drop and walk off". With experience, the officers can estimate how old a scat is, so with a little knowledge of scat-dropping frequency and a bit of math, they can estimate how many cats frequent a certain parcel of land.

The next-to-last chapter gets into humane killing. It's not quite an oxymoron, but killing most animals "so they won't notice" is nearly impossible, and anything less abrupt than the killing bar on a classic mousetrap will entail a period of suffering, from seconds to minutes to hours. Thus the last chapter deals with genetic methods. The scariest is the gene drive. Scientists working on this have figured out how to "fix" the genes in a female mouse so she will have only female offspring. Ordinarily, releasing a lot of such mice is self-limiting, and won't eradicate them. But the gene drive somehow guarantees that all her daughters will have the same trait. Thus, any male mice remaining will get older and older, as few males get born, and eventually none. A generation later, the oldest females die, and Presto!, no mice. (At least, I think that is how it works. I may have something backwards. Anyway, they all eventually die out.)

Very late in the book, the author writes of a farmer who has a more phlegmatic attitude: Do your best to keep from spilling food all around, and live with a little "shrinkage", just as stores know they can't eliminate all shoplifting, but reduce it as much as they think reasonable, and adjust to it.

Animals don't know they are breaking human laws. I suspect if they could know somehow, they wouldn't care. After all, they were here first. We're the invaders, breaking "their" laws! The cynic's Golden Rule applies: Them that has the gold, makes the rules.

A food book to put you off your feed

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, history

On occasion I eat alone. When I do, I read while eating. If you do the same, I suggest you accompany your meal with something other than The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat, by Matt Siegel.

The book gets into the background of many—but by no means all—different kinds of foods, from pies, to the ubiquitous corn ("maize" across the pond), honey, and nightshades such as potatoes and tomatoes. (Fun fact, not from this book: you can cut a plug from a potato and graft a tomato plant into the hole; put the combined plant in a large container or raised bed with loose soil, and you'll have a harvest above ground all summer, and below ground in the fall.) However, the background the book gets into leans strongly toward the unpleasant bits, such as the amount of bee parts you are likely to ingest with your honey, or the relationship between "holiday season" feasting and the gluttonous "conspicuous consumption" debaucheries hosted by medieval and earlier "nobles". "Turducken" is a modern, pale shadow of the squab-pullet-goose-lamb-hog barbecues that were accompanied by inedible "desserts" garnished with gold dust.

Remember the nursery rhyme about "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"? Today, pies are mainly desserts, with flaky crusts you actually enjoy eating. Pies used to be quickly-baked meat-and-veggie concoctions (again, the chicken pot pies I hated as a child are a pale shadow), with very heavy crusts that were either thrown away or used as makeshift plates. 

It is a bit interesting to learn how many products, including a huge number that have nothing to do with food, are made from or include corn or corn oil or corn starch. But then we read of the back-and-forth "recommendations" of various authorities about eggs, or meats, or almost anything (today it'll kill you; two years later, it's superfood); all have a germ of truth, but little useful guidance.

Our ancestors survived all kinds of noxious things. The plants we eat, of course, don't "want" to be eaten, so they produce insecticides and other chemicals to deter herbivory. We call them spices. Animals also don't want to be eaten, but they tend to fight back more directly, although, for example, the puffer fish and other sea "foods" that contain tetrodotoxin are deadly to eat. We can survive a lot, and we thrive. I remember being told the difference between an American mother and an Italian mother. The one said, "Eat this, it's good for you," and the other says, "Eat it, it's good!" Is it good? Eat it.

Aaand, that's plenty, because I frankly don't recommend this book. The author writes well enough, but I wouldn't want to invite him for dinner.

Volcanoes, more common than you might guess

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, volcanology, volcanoes

My uncle, a geologist and geology professor, had a "volcano fund". He was ready, on short notice, to go wherever a volcano was erupting, to see it and study it. I have since learned that his fund was really just for "interesting volcanoes", or else he'd have seldom been at home. At any one time, at least twenty volcanoes are actively erupting, more than thirty have erupted within the prior week or month, and more than forty are considered to be "in continuous eruption status", according to the Current Eruptions site of the Smithsonian.

This map from the website shows the volcanoes in that status as of December 9, 2021

The symbol in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is for Kilauea in Hawaii, which erupted continually for 36 years, ending in 2018, and then started up again after a two year lull. The symbol near Africa is for the volcano Cumbre Vieja on La Palma in the Canary Islands, which erupted for 85 days, ending Dec. 13, 2021. It is considered in current eruption status because seismic rumblings haven't yet settled down, and it could erupt again in the near (very near) future.

At the peak of its eruption, the Cumbre Vieja volcano was amazingly active, as seen here. I think my uncle would have gone there, and perhaps stayed for most of the 85 days.

Whenever the map above is next updated, there is likely to be a new symbol for the eruption off Tonga that began just a day or two ago. It will be between the symbol at Hawaii and the next one to the southwest.

I learned much of the above from reading Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond by Robin George Andrews. This book surveys several kinds of volcanoes on Earth, including the largest of them all, totally hidden from view, that is the 40,000-mile-long system of mid-Ocean ridges. These are the "spreading centers" of plate tectonics, where bloops of magma are burped from the central crevasses of the ridge system to form "pillow lavas", and magma that cools against the sides of the world-circling slit below the crevasses forms sheet lava, which is brand-new oceanic crust.

At the opposite ends of the major plates, oceanic crust either dips below continental crust, such as off Japan and South America, or pushes one chunk of continental crust against another, raising mountains in between, such as north-moving India forcing up the Himalayas and the nearby mountain belts, which are still rising. The "ring of fire" around the Pacific Ocean is the volcanic expression of magma formed from the upper part of down-thrust oceanic crust and its burden of sediments, deposited during the tens of millions of years that the crust was crossing the ocean from the spreading center to the subduction trench.

The author doesn't dwell on the different kinds of volcanoes and their eruption styles to any great extent. That is a good subject for a different book. Rather, he aims to show how volcanoes are ubiquitous not only on Earth, but all over the Solar System. In many cases, such as the Moon and Mars, the heat engine inside the body has shut off, and the lava fields are old, very old. While there is a little evidence that tiny volcanic eruptions might be continuing on the Moon, the dark lava fields that form the "seas" (and the face of the Man in the Moon) are more than a billion years old.

He does spend a chapter on a curious volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, which is currently the only active carbonatite volcano on Earth. Carbonatite lava, a combination of lime and the silicates that form more ordinary lava, is less hot (only about 550°C or 1,000°F) than the "fast" lava at Kilauea, which is more than 1,100°C or 2,100°F. You still can't swim in it!

Out among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, however, one finds cryovolcanoes that erupt warm (and sometimes downright freezing-cold) salt water. You might be able to swim there, as long as you can survive the surrounding vacuum! The "lava" erupting on Jupiter's moon Io is hotter stuff, or rather, several kinds of hotter stuff. Some is mostly molten sulfur, propelled by sulfur dioxide gas, with a temperature of a few hundred degrees. More "earthly" silicate lavas are also found there, with temperatures ranging up to 1,300°C (2,400°F), equal to the hottest eruptions on Earth.

What keeps Io hot? It is equal in size to the Moon, which has long been cold and dead (or very nearly so). Io zips around immense Jupiter every 42½ hours, and is in a resonant orbit with the next two moons, Europa and Ganymede, which have orbital periods of 85 and 172 hours. While all three (and the fourth major moon, Callisto) have orbits that are very nearly circular, as they swing by one another, tidal forces flex the moons. Io's crust rises ten meters or more each time, a few times weekly, causing internal friction that keeps it boiling hot and makes it the driest known body in the solar system. The smaller tides on the other moons seem to have kept them warm enough to have liquid oceans up to 50 miles deep beneath icy crusts. Europa in particular has a crazy-quilt surface that shows it is still active.

One very interesting (and reassuring) chapter describes the supervolcano known as Yellowstone. Or, according to the author, "former supervolcano". Yellowstone and Kilauea share this characteristic: both sit atop mantle plumes, which are apparently stable features of Earth's mantle, dredging up material from an area nearly as deep as the core-mantle boundary, and depositing it atop the crust. There are about twelve plumes known, and the one under Hawaii is the most active at present. As the Pacific plate moves along, the plume pops through from time to time ("time" meaning a million years or so), to produce a new Hawaiian island. The chain of islands and former islands (seamounts) stretches all the way to the Aleutian Trench off Alaska. 

As the North American plate moves along, the Yellowstone plume does something similar. There is a chain of old calderas stretching at least as far as Idaho, and possibly much farther. The author thinks the current round of Yellowstone volcanism ended more than half a million years ago, and if the plume busts through again, a couple of hundred miles to the east, it will have some pretty tough, old continental crust to punch through. It may instead just "plate" material against the bottom of that section of crust for a dozen million years, which will gradually raise the elevation of the northern plains. Just wait about 350,000 generations and we'll see what happens!

These are just tidbits from the flood of information in this book. When I saw the book's title, I thought it would have a lot more sensational stuff to say about Yellowstone. I didn't consider that the main title is two words. But they are apropos: Volcanoes are indeed super! They keep the planet interesting, and their role in releasing heat from below, and also gases such as water and carbon dioxide, moderate the atmosphere and oceans in favor of most living things, at a tragic cost to a smaller number of living things that happen to be "too close" when an eruption begins. 

Is Omicron the new Cowpox?

 kw: medical musings, pandemic, omicron, delta, sars-cov2, covid-19, omicold

These data from Worldometer show Covid-19 cases and deaths from about Memorial Day 2021 to today, January 5, 2022, for the US as a whole. The scale lines on the left represent 250,000 and 500,000 cases per day. Those on the right represent 2,000 and 4,000 deaths per day. The solid lines are 7-day running averages.

Wave 5, mainly from the Delta variant, peaked at about 167,600 cases on Sept. 2, and just over 2,000 deaths on and around Sept. 18, 2021, 2½ weeks later.

Wave 6, transitioning from Delta to Omicron, recently rose through 615,000 daily cases around the turn of the year, but the recent death rate is about 1,200 per day.

Clearly, the Omicron variant is quite different from Delta. The Wave 6 death rate is hard to estimate with the case rates rising so rapidly, but it appears to be in the range 0.1% to 0.25% of known cases. That is very similar to the average death rates for recent strains of influenza. 

The Wave 5 death rate was 1.2% of known cases. A complicating factor is that between 25% and 40% of the cases in Wave 6 are Delta, and it is likely that most of the deaths can be attributed to Delta. I sincerely hope so, because that would mean that Omicron is less than 1/10th as deadly as Delta, maybe less than 1/100th. It may be no deadlier than getting a cold!

It may take a few more weeks for Wave 5 to crest, if it hasn't already. Prior waves took two to three months to crest. A cautious forecast puts the crest in mid-February, with a peak rate of 1.5-2 million new cases per day. The Omicron variant could infect half the US population by the middle of March. If it infects less than that, it will most likely be because the mRNA agents being touted as vaccines provide robust cross-variant protection. About 2/3 (62%) of American adults are "fully vaccinated" (I don't count "booster" shots as adding anything useful), and another 15-20% have had at least one injection. Another thirty million (9%) have recovered from Covid-19; they were "vaccinated by God." That doesn't leave very many "unvaccinated" Americans. This implies something very hopeful!

A little history: The word "vaccine" traces back to the Latin word vaccinus, meaning "cow". The word "vaccination" was coined in 1800 by Edward Jenner to describe his method of injecting people with the virus that causes cowpox, and this protected them from the much deadlier disease smallpox.

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins calls the current variant "Omicold," saying its effect is similar to a common cold caused by several other coronaviruses that have been circulating for many years. The Omicron variant, being similar to the Alpha and Delta variants, but much less virulent, is likely to be a "cowpox clone", philosophically speaking. I know twelve people, including my son and his wife, who have contracted Covid-19 during the past month. I presume they all caught the Omicron variant, because all have told me it is like a bad cold: a day or two or three of mostly bed rest, with lots of fluids, had them up and about again, and in another day or so their symptoms were over.

I pray that this pandemic has nearly run its course. The Omicron variant is likely to break the back of more damaging variants. Only time will tell if it will also break the back of the totalitarian impulse shown by many in government who have assumed draconian powers by taking advantage of our fears.

The billion-decade pie recipe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, cosmology, astronomy, nucleosynthesis, cooking

This chart was mentioned in How to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, From the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang, by Harry Cliff. The book's title, indeed its raison d'être, is a humorous aside by Carl Sagan on an episode of Cosmos: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider, specifically the experiment/detector called LHCb. The "b" means "beauty", for the Beauty Quark, which most physicists now call the Bottom Quark (the "t" and "b" quarks were initially called "truth" and "beauty"). The short answer to "What is 'scratch'?" would be, "Something smaller than a quark." Quarks are what we call the (possibly) indivisible bits that make up protons and neutrons, which with electrons, form atoms.

I think of the book as a microscope that uses higher and higher powers to probe the makeup of the universe. Dr. Cliff actually began his investigation by obtaining an apple pie and pyrolizing a few grams. That gave him a rough estimate of the phases present, gas/vapor, liquid, and solid. The final product of pyrolysis is charcoal, although he found later that he didn't cook it hot enough; his charcoal still had some volatile stuff in it. It matters little: the end product was mainly carbon, the "gateway element" to producing the entire suite of elements from hydrogen and helium. The chart above shows the various "ovens" in which the elements were made.

Much of the book is history, the history of the discovery of the chemical elements during the Enlightenment, then the discovery of subatomic particles a bit more than a century ago. Although I've read the stories again and again (because writers seem compelled to cover it all every time), I find it enjoyable to rehearse the way alchemy became chemistry, and experiments with "cathode rays" and pitchblende came together to discover that atoms (from "a-tomos", "un-cuttable") are actually cuttable, and the "easy" sub-parts are further cuttable.

The book skips over the range of magnification available to a light microscope. There is nothing about the plant cells in the apples, or the microstructure of a perfectly baked crust. We go from some burnt pie right to atoms, which can only be distinguished when the magnification exceeds 10,000,000X, the magnification of this STM image. The best electron microscopes are hard pressed to deliver magnifications greater than 1,000,000X. Thus STM, or Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, has to be used. The white spheres here are atoms of lead, on a silicon surface.

The reason for this omission is soon apparent. The author's quarry is smaller compared to an atom of lead than that atom is to a sports arena.

An ordinary light microscope "maxes out" when viewing items smaller than half a micrometer (or micron, or µ). An E. coli bacterium is about 2µx6µ. The photons of green light, with a wavelength of 0.55µ, have an energy of 2.25 eV. One eV, or one electron volt, is the energy of an electron that has "fallen" across the gap between an anode and a cathode when the voltage is 1V. Photon energies in the range 1.75 eV to 3.1 eV are used by the retinas of our eyes to detect "light". Things smaller than about 0.5µ, or 500 nm (nanometers), can only be studied using "light" of a shorter wavelength. And here is the important principle: shorter wavelength means higher energy per photon (or other particle).

Why is it hard to "see" an atom? It is because they are so much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The lead atoms in the image above are about 0.35 nm across. That's 0.00035µ. The silicon atoms in the surface below them are much smaller, with an interatomic spacing of 0.078nm. An electron microscope with beam voltage of a million volts uses electrons with energy of 1 MeV (million eV), and a wavelength of 0.0012 nm. However, such an electron beam simply blows off most of the electrons from the atoms you want to look at, while a more "modest" beam of about 16,000 volts, and a useful magnification of a million, can produce images without causing total disruption. The STM technique sidesteps this by using atomic forces to get higher-resolution information, with a limit in the range of 10 to 20 million X magnification.

When the biggest constituents of atoms were discovered, electrons, protons, and neutrons, they were soon found to be a whole lot smaller than the atoms. One analogy states that an atom of hydrogen magnified to the size of a stadium (a magnification of two trillion) would be "seen" to be an electron cloud with a speck at its center the size of a small pea, perhaps 6mm diameter: the proton.

How do you "see" a proton? Since it is about 50,000 times smaller than the atom, you would need 50,000 times the energy. At a minimum, 16,000 eV x 50,000 or 800,000,000 eV, just under a billion eV (GeV). Now, let's think a minute. A million-volt power supply needs a lot of insulation. In radio, the rule of thumb is that in dry air a spark will jump about a centimeter per 10,000V. So a million-volt potential can jump at least a meter. I remember seeing a picture of an early million-volt electron microscope. It was eight feet high. What do you do with a billion volts? Such a voltage can jump a few miles. Indeed, lightning has voltages in the billion-to-ten-billion-volt range.

Here it gets fun. Particle accelerators finesse the situation by using magnets and rhythmic pulses to take a bunch (that's the scientific term) of electrons or other charged particles from an "easy" energy of 10,000 eV to higher and higher energies. It's sort of like swatting a tetherball again and again to make it go around faster and faster, except these "tetherballs" are soon going 99% of the speed of light, or more.

When I worked at Cal Tech (as a machinist), I worked part of the time in a room with a dismantled synchrotron about 30 feet in diameter. Energetic electrons or protons lose energy when you turn them to go around in a circle, so the more energy you want, the bigger the circle has to be. The LHC, where Dr. Cliff works, is about 8.5 miles in diameter. It produces beams of protons with energies that exceed 10 trillion eV. It also runs them in both directions, and steers them into head-on collisions, so you get enormous penetration. All that to "see" the insides of particles a few thousand times smaller than protons, which is what it took to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson (but not see into its insides…if it has any).

Chapters and chapters earlier, the author discussed where the atoms came from. The chart that begins this article shows where. Things we can eat, and we ourselves, are primarily CHON, that is, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the weight of the matter in the universe. Or, at least, of the matter that is either visible or potentially visible because it can respond to electromagnetic energy ("light"). We need to ignore dark matter and dark energy here, because we still have no idea how to interact with them. Most carbon and nitrogen are made in "dwarf" stars, main sequence stars smaller than 1.25 times the mass of the Sun. The jury is still out on whether the white dwarf stars that result from the demise of a main sequence dwarf star have to be blasted apart to release carbon and nitrogen, or if the red giant phase releases enough to amount for what we see in the sky. Most oxygen, at least most of it that gets into the interstellar medium, is forged during supernova explosions. So at an atomic level, that's where the basic ingredients of the apple pie arise.

The reason for using big atom smashers like LHC to dig into the protons for their smaller bits (quarks and gluons, mainly), and into the quantum fields that modulate (or create) their properties such as mass, is that we aren't really back to "scratch" yet. By the end of the book, if we have understood it all (I am not quite there yet), we have the beginnings of matter traced back to the end of the first one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. 

Does that sound pretty good? Not to a cosmologist! The Big Bang is thought to have begun with everything we might call space and time located within a radius of about the Planck Length, which is about 1.6x10^-35 meters. The initial "Bang" got rolling in Planck Time, or about 5.4x10^-44 seconds. Let's just call it 10^-45 sec., and compare it to a trillionth, or 10^-12 sec. There are about 10³³ Planck Times in a trillionth of a second; a little matter of a billion trillion trillion of them. A lot happened that we will be hard pressed to probe. The author describes the ultimate particle accelerator, wrapped around the center of the galaxy (where it has a chance of being gravitationally stable), with a diameter of several thousand light years. The biggest we have a chance of building might wrap the Earth at the equator. The particle bunches would circle the planet seven times per second, so we have long enough lives to do experiments with it, with energies as high as perhaps 50,000 TeV. That's still a long way from the Planck Energy, but it might be close enough to be "interesting".

Future beings with very long lifetimes—because each experiment takes a million years or more—might probe the Planck Length using the Galactic Collider. But beyond a certain level of energy, the only output of the experiment will be tiny black holes. According to Hawking's principle, such a black hole would soon explode into a shower of energetic particles, but they would carry no information about what was going on inside, so the fancy machine would simply be a huge fireworks generator.

The book ends with a description for beginning from scratch, to the point where matter exists, including a middling size planet with apple trees and wheat fields and such. Then it ends with a pretty good recipe for making an apple pie. There ain't a quark anywhere that can explain the great taste of fresh apple pie.