The Dinosaur that made Dinosaurs cool

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, natural history, paleontology, t rex, tyrannosaurus rex

From left to right: Stan, an exceptionally large skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex ("T rex" to almost everybody), shown just before the auction at Christie's in 2020 where it was bought for $31.8 million dollars by an unknown client, almost certainly from the Middle East; A T rex as seen in the film Jurassic World; and an inflatable T rex costume.

In 1990, due to a flat tire, dinosaur hunter Sue Hutchinson stumbled across a bone; when it was unearthed, it was found to be part of Sue, at that time the largest and most complete T rex to be found. Very public legal wrangling culminated in a court declaring Maurice Williams the owner and in 1994 the bones were auctioned by Sotheby's for more than $8 million (this price and the prior one include the commission of the auction house). Once cleaned and mounted, Sue was put on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Do you wonder why the Arabs waited around to buy a T rex skeleton, ultimately paying four times as much? Arabs are the ultimate male chauvinists. They would never spring for the skeleton of a dominant female predator! I learned the story of how, years earlier, Mobil had to modify their logo for advertising in Saudi Arabia. The logo is a rearing, winged horse, but with a sexless underside. The Arabs insisted that it had to have a visible penis to show it is a stallion. Stan is definitely male.

Long before Sue Hutchinson and others discovered skeletons of T rex that now number about 50, Barnum Brown discovered the first known fossils of T rex in Montana in early August, 1902. He spent nearly two months excavating the bones and sent them by train to New York. In the next few years he found two more T rex skeletons. Brown had already long been known as the best of the bone hunters, a title that was now vindicated in spades.

The fascinating stories that surround these discoveries, and what they meant to science and society, are told artfully by David K Randall in The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. rex and how it Shook the World.

The book traces the history of dinosaurs as known to science, first from the "Bones of Giants" discovered in England: a fish-lizard-like skeleton was dug out in 1811 by Mary Anning, age 12, and caused no little debate and ire among scientists in Britain and on the Continent. The scientific name Ichthyosaurus indicates the resemblance. Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" in 1842. The discovery of immense dinosaur bones and near-complete skeletons in western America led to the "bone wars" of the 1870's and -80's, attached to the names Cope and Marsh, whose fierce rivalry bankrupted both rich men.

Barnum Brown, named for P.T. Barnum based on a whim of his older brother, came along, a few years after the bone war died down. He got into the field of fossil hunting almost by accident. His powers of observation, plus his great physical strength and endurance, came to the attention of Henry Fairfield Osborne of the American Museum of Natural History, which still has many of Brown's discoveries on display. After a rocky start, Brown and Osborne went on to work together for forty years.

Along the way we learn of the many powerful trustees and curators of American museums, primarily in the eastern states, who carried on a more genteel, but equally fierce bone war, mostly at a distance, funding crews to find more and better and bigger skeletons. They are all portrayed by the author as first-class jerks, sure of their superiority, and all of them filthy rich. Perhaps they were infinite jerks, perhaps not.

The first curator of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, R Tucker Abbott, was described to me by someone who once worked for him as "very sure of himself." I guess that's stop one on the way to consummate jerkiness. But he had competition. His boss, the founder of the museum, John E DuPont, kept the museum private for its first seven years. He had no interest in enthralling the public.

By about 1900, a freshly-displayed skeleton of Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus could bring multitudes (of paying customers) into a museum for a month or two, but interest would soon die down. Both scientists and the public came to think of all the terrestrial dinosaurs as giant cows: slow, stupid, lumbering beasts about as interesting as a barn. In murals of the time they are shown half-submerged in swamps, where the water could support their immense weight.

The discovery of a seven-ton predatory dinosaur changed all that. It took years to prepare the first mounted T rex, which was actually cobbled together from parts of all three of Brown's initial discoveries. Once it was put on display in 1916, the public went wild. Fast-forward 106 years: the public is still wild about T rex! Witness the popularity of T rex inflatable costumes, as shown above right. Nobody cares to have a costume of a Hadrosaur (a duck-billed herbivore, and considered a two-legged cow). Predators have more mojo than prey.

As a child I had a set of 20 or so plastic dinosaur models, all about 3-4" long. I loved them all, but I recall that the T rex had a special place in my heart. Such sets were the favored "action figures" of my generation in the 1950's.

The book gives rather short shrift to the years after Brown found the skeletons of "the king". After that, what do you do for an encore? There are some touching (and some not-so-much) events of Brown's family history in later years, when he became able to loosen up with his daughter. Her mother had died when she was very young, shattering Brown's world. She was raised by her mother's parents, and seldom saw her father.

Brown lived to age 89. He'd been retired at age 65…most companies had mandatory retirement at that age. But he was afforded an office at the American Museum of Natural History and the title Emeritus for the following 24 years.

Would dinosaurs be so popular today if Barnum Brown never found the first T rex? I think someone else would have, within a year or two, and the current popularity of dinosaurs, and their king, would be the same. But this book would be about that someone else.

The bird we almost lost

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birds, eagles, bald eagles, natural history, american history

It is becoming easier again to see bald eagles. At present there are about 20,000 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states and a similar number in Alaska. Sixty years ago, there were just a few hundred at best, though perhaps Alaska had a few thousand.

In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird, Jack E Davis chronicles the double fall and rise again of our national symbol. For a century or more, although people loved images of eagles, putting them on buttons and banners, they considered the actual bird a pest. Bald eagles were shot, poisoned, trapped, clubbed, and had their nesting trees chopped down. It was rumored that children could be their prey, even though no such case is known. An eagle can't even carry off a lamb or piglet, although sometimes one may kill one and partially consume it on the spot.

Protective legislation, hard-fought, in the early 1900's led to a partial recovery until chemistry intervened: chemical pesticides discovered after WWII, primarily DDT, came into use so indiscriminately that many bird species were decimated. Sometimes the pesticide killed them outright, but more frequently, their eggs were weakened and would be crushed during brooding. Birds of prey were particularly affected, because their prey animals were contaminated. Once this was learned, and Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a slow process of discovery and eventual legislation (more hard fighting) led to a second recovery, which is still going on.

I remember DDT. From 1953 to 1961 we lived in Utah, across the street from a farm and orchard. The farmer had a boy my age. He and I and other boys would climb into a cherry tree when the Bing cherries got ripe, before the pickers came, and gorge ourselves. The DDT was visible as a whitish residue. We'd wipe some of it off, but not all. It didn't bother us. We didn't learn until much later how it affected birds and particularly their eggs and young. The Clean Air and Clean Water acts, bans on DDT, and the formation of the EPA put an end to the use of DDT and its relatives.

Today's scourge, though not particularly of birds, is neonicotinoid pesticides. They are more specific to insects…ALL insects, and many of their relatives and other invertebrates including earthworms. That's a story for another day, but it is much of the story behind Colony Collapse Disorder among honeybees.

The book is big, more than 400 pages, full of details. The number of people who studied eagles and the numbers who mobilized to agitate for their protection is quite amazing. An elderly man learned to climb to their nests to band the eaglets and proved how migratory they are; later an elderly woman learned climbing to record their lives. Thousands more studied them, learned of them, and all the while the proportion of those who would rather shoot them with bullets than a camera reduced and reduced. In more recent years (20 or more) streaming video from eagle nests has shown the nation their daily habits. Bird-cams of all sorts are increasingly popular.

Today, eagles nest within a few miles of my home. In most states, if you live within a couple of miles of a river or lake (eagles mostly eat fish, but they'll take prairie dogs and squirrels also), you probably live within a couple of miles of at least one eagle nest, or aerie (or eyrie).

When I look up and see a big bird with a long wingspan, I check for dihedral wings (the slight "V" between them). Dihedral equals turkey vulture (or sometimes black vulture, around here), while a flat flying surface equals an eagle. We have a lot of vultures around here (they come into our yard at times, if a fox has left half a squirrel lying around). But once in a while, we see an eagle.

It takes quite a writer to write a large book that keeps a reader's interest. Jack Davis has the knack. I really enjoyed this book.

Essays on sundry matters

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays

Carlo Rovelli is well known as a leading theoretical physicist. As such, he is often solicited to write essays for many publications. Being someone of a great many interests, those essays are, as we say, all over the map (perhaps in school he, like me, wanted to major in everything). His new book is titled There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts of Physics, Philosophy and the World.

As good writers must do, he is eager to reveal himself to us. This plunges deepest in his essay/chapter "Why I am an Atheist." I prefer to not comment on it, beyond saying I think an honest scientist must be instead an Agnostic, taking the stance, "I don't know" about deity.

He also reveals bits here and there about others, such as Roger Penrose in a chapter by that name, Stephen Hawking in "Thank You, Stephen", Charles Darwin in a chapter by that name, and even Adolph Hitler in "Mein Kampf". In that last essay, he uncovers the motivation behind fascism: fear. He ascribes fear exclusively to right wing political extremism, when in reality, it is behind every extremism along all axes, not only "right" and "left".

He deals with so many subjects that I'll leave it to readers to discover the breadth of them. I expect you'll enjoy it.

Note: the image above is from the video essay "Personal Identity" at Philosophy Monkey. I hope the Flash video gets replaced; it is no longer playable.

Also a heads up: the current book I'm reading is upwards of 400 pages, so unless I get extra time to read it, it'll be a while before I post again.

It's a long way to forever

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, life extension, immortality

Life is like a game of Tetris. The blocks just keep coming, and their speed increases, until a player can't keep up and the bin fills. Game over. But there is a twist. In the computer game, there is a maximum speed of block fall. Once you train your reflexes, you can accumulate rather incredible scores. But there still isn't a way to play it forever. Fatigue sets in, if nothing else. In life, we find another twist. There is also a maximum speed, but our reflexes slow down over time, until nobody can keep up. Game Over. Permanently.

I saw The Price of Immortality by Peter Ward, and I thought, "This can't be the geologist." He isn't. He is half the age and in a different field altogether. As writers, both Peter Wards are equally skilled and engaging.

The book begins with a visit to a church, the Church of Perpetual Life. There is no god involved in this religion. The congregants "worship" indefinite life extension. As in more familiar churches (and their analogs, the synagogues, temples and mosques), the social element is strong, and in this case it reigns supreme. They and other immortalists are hoping for a medical or biological "escape velocity" to be reached, such that techniques and technologies for extending life push the End Game out, say, 30-50 years, and within that time, further advances push it further, until eventually, human lives can be extended without limit. This is the basis of a saying made popular in The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger (1962): "Millions alive today will never die." (He borrowed it from the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose focus is quite different)

The book takes us through the twists and turns of the various movements that surround the obsessive interest in perpetual life, from body-freezing (and head- or brain-freezing for the less prosperous), to digital uploading, to stem cell dreaming; most of the 13 chapters allow us to encounter a different take on the matter. The final take is that of the less-obsessed doctors and researchers: Human life seems to have a built-in limit of 110-120 years, and we ought to focus on extending our health span to match our life span.

Chapter 7, "Know Thyself", discusses the nine hallmarks of aging. It is a difficult discussion, partly because the philosophical and medical discussion takes some getting used to, and even more because we just don't want to hear it. Every one of the nine is being studied by multiple groups, and we are clearly in a learning phase in every case, far from any kind of implementation phase. I'll touch on three of them that I have paid attention to in recent years.

Mitochondrial Dysfunction. Most of the mitochondria in this image show signs of breaking down. A few appear intact. The proportion of failing mitochondria increases as we age. It is not known (so far as I've been able to learn) how the mitochondria that get into a fertilized ovum are rejuvenated. Until we know that, we have no hope of reversing the process for aging humans.

There are certain diseases that occur because of congenital problems with mitochondria. That isn't the situation here. The source of lower energy in the elderly, and eventually, part of the source of their frailty (another is cellular senescence), is the reduced energy produced by failing mitochondria. When your tank runs out, if nothing else has killed you, that will.

Telomere Shortening. It's funny, telomeres are a good-news-bad-news topic. When a cell divides, the telomeres of the daughter cells come out a bit shorter. There are processes that lengthen them, but that's still quite a mystery. It may indeed result in longer life for some people. Cells whose telomeres don't shorten at all are cancer cells. Again, we still don't know why. But when telomeres get to a certain minimum length, cellular senescence (another of the 9) seems to begin, but this is not the only "trigger" for that process.

It seems that telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, is very selective. I suspect that, were it to run rampant, we'd encounter another dangerous condition. So far I haven't heard of one.

Bloated Stem Cells. I learned of this matter very recently. The research was published less than 2 months ago, months after the book came out. As I understand it, after the age of 65, a small proportion of our stem cells get larger and more active, and the activity of the rest of them decreases. These bloated cells gradually take over; they seem to have a kind of gene drive. The total amount of new blood produced, however, decreases. You can read about it here. It sounds like a slow kind of body-wide cancer to me.

This phenomenon may be related to another of the nine, stem cell exhaustion. It's too early to tell, because the current research relates only to blood stem cells.

Well, there you have it, three of the 9 (or 10) matters that must be overcome to either halt or reverse aging. I think we are quite far from any "escape velocity", an opinion similar to the author's.

Let's look at another angle for a moment. Suppose we achieve a condition of "death is optional" for every person on Earth. There will always be accidents, I suppose. Maybe the "downloaders" (more in a moment) are hoping for a way to "back up" our consciousness so the backup can be put in a new body (obtained where?) if the "original" is destroyed. But consider, 100 years from now, the 7.7 billion people now alive are nearly all still around, plus perhaps another thirty billion or so who have been born in the meantime, and they are all immortal also. Do you really think immortal people will stop having babies? I think we can supplement accidents with famine. Famine like nobody can imagine. Famine that makes the Biafra and "great leap forward" disasters look like skipping a meal or two.

One poignant story I read a few decades ago revolved around a man who remembered. Everybody was 200-300 years old, or more, but none of them could remember hardly anything that had happened more than 50-70 years earlier. Except this fellow. Who was least fortunate? The story made me consider that "oldster forgetting" is probably mostly a case of the memory running out of room. If true life extension is developed, we may find we must either learn to actively forget a lot of stuff, or find out we're not capable of learning much after a certain age, which is probably around 100 years.

Maybe the digital backup folks can also focus on offloading memories we want to remove from active storage. But my knowledge of computer science makes me skeptical that we'll get very far in the coming century or less. Consider: one cubic millimeter contains about 200,000 neurons in the cerebellum, and about 20,000 of the larger neurons found in the cerebrum (the "thinking" part of our brain). Each cerebral neuron connects to between 1,000 and 100,000 others, with an average of about 4,000; each cerebellar neuron connects to at least 40,000 others. Running the body takes up 75% of our neurons, and 95%+ of the total synapses in our brains: the cerebellum. Our big cerebrum uses the rest. 

The best figure I can learn for the volume of a synapse is about a third of a cubic micron, so if our entire brain volume consisted of synapses, there's room for about 50 trillion. The actual number is probably half that, leaving room for the 16-17 billion cerebral and limbic neurons, and the 70-74 billion cerebellar neurons.

That's a lot of machinery. I have seen it touted a time or two that one or another supercomputer has more transistors in its collection of CPUs than the number of neurons in the brain. Well and good. But it takes more than a transistor to model a neuron. It takes at least a full core of a modern processor to do a good job of modeling a single neuron, with its thousands to tens of thousands of inputs and outputs (synapses in the body, message signals in a computer)…in real time. Neurons cycle at rates between 10Hz and 50Hz. The 8-core CPU in my computer consumes 40 watts. Let's ignore the cerebellum for a moment. Modeling 16 billion cerebral neurons will take 2 billion CPUs, consuming 800 Gigawatts. The brain uses 20 watts. If Moore's Law still held (it doesn't, not for 15-20 years), there's a very long way to go, just to model ONE brain. Let alone billions.

The book gave me a lot to think about. I hope that is true for many more folks. How many of us will react, "Let me live long and well, so I can die with few regrets."

Late brainwave: If Moore's Law were still working, and doubling time of CPU cycles per watt were 2 years, running a brain in a computer could become possible/economical in 64 years. Being able to run a billion of them would take another 30 years. No matter what happens, the year 2116 ought to be an interesting time.

3 on Metamorphosis

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, metamorphosis, coming of age, anthologies

Last evening I finished reading The Best of World SF, Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar. The three stories that end the book have a common theme one could call either Metamorphosis or Coming of Age.

"The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir" by Kevin Tidbeck. Skidbladnir is a hermit crab. A big one, that needs not a snail shell for a home but a skyscraper. It is also an interstellar traveler. People have learned to communicate with these crabs for the sake of interstellar commerce. I am not sure what the crabs get from it. Skidbladnir is outgrowing its "shell", and needs help to locate a bigger one.

"Prime Meridian" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. A woman down on her luck, in a dystopia where that is the usual lot, is portrayed very evocatively, by an author who somehow kept my interest, even while evoking someone skirting the edge of chronic depression. When opportunity arises, the woman grows to the challenge. Some caterpillars take a lot longer than others to turn into a butterfly.

"If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" by Zen Cho. A fantasy tale of an immense snake turning into a dragon...after a few tries. It's hard to say more without giving much too much away.

I am quite pleased that of 26 stories, only one had to be skipped, and for well over half I said to myself, "I'm glad I read that."

8 quicker stories, and one passed over

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, ragpickers, faithfulness, obsession, cryptozoology, scams, fantastical maladies, hallucinations, exobiology

The next set of stories (in The Best of World SF, Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar), which eventually totaled nine, were a bit shorter than those that went before, and I had a little more time to read today. I also focused more on the ideas, since most of these were less lyrical.

"DUMP" by Cristina Jurado, translated by Steve Redwood. Large trash dumps, particularly in Third World countries, have residents who scrounge useful stuff. This story's trash dump is bigger than most cities, with hierarchies of ragpickers. One has her life turned around in an unexpected way.

"Rue Chair" by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo. The story started dark and got darker. A few sentences in I skipped the rest. There are places I am unwilling to be taken.

"His Master's Voice" by Hannu Rajaniemi. Multiple levels of flashback keep the reader off balance, as a pet dog and cat learn (fast) the technologies needed to rescue their Master, who happens to be either a cloned person or the cloner, I couldn't tell for certain.

"Benjamin Schneider's Little Greys" by Nir Yaniv, translated by Lavie Tidhar. Sometimes hypochondria is a mask for real maladies. This one happens to be contagious, and very mysterious.

"The Cryptid" by Emil Hjörvar Peterson. Here a Cryptid is a possible cryptic creature, not verified, as distinguished from a Wonderbeast, a verified being, possibly from another dimension.

"The Bank of Burkina Faso" by Ekaterina Sedia. We know the ploy, "My deceased uncle left a large sum in Bank X, which can only be accessed with the help of a non-National such as yourself." What if two people have such stories, focused on the same Bank X, and the stories are true, and they meet and join forces? In this case it requires teaching stray dogs to dream.

"An Incomplete Guide to Understanding the Rose Petal Infestation Associated With Ever Typhoid Patients in the Tropicool IcyLand Urban Indian Slum" by Kuzhali Manickavel. One must let go and swim through sentences of utter unreality, couched in medical terms.

"The Old Man with the Third Hand" by Kofi Nyameye. Is the protagonist real and her imaginary friend a figment, or is it the other way around? This has a happier ending than I at first expected.

"The Green" by Lauren Beukes. The planet is remote, the plants and animals exponentially deadlier than any to be encountered on Earth. Yet harvesting them has become a necessity for the miraculous products to be found therein. How to cope?

Some good and interesting ideas. Others, I have yet to discern. All (but one) worth the reading. There are but three stories left in the book, but one is another novella (85 pp).