Singapore is getting out of hand

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I checked my stats going back 30 days:

This is getting unreal! Is it all Singapore? That "attention" began about June 9. Yes:

Now, this is just silly. I have less than 3,000 posts. Somebody or somebodies seems to have downloaded the entire blog 10 times, or an equivalent level of activity. I hope they like it! Note the rest of the world; I consider that normal for a month.

Star stuff 'R' us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, chemistry, cosmology, biology, philosophy

Let's take powers of ten, in time, looking back to the beginning:

• 13.8 billion years ago, everything began. Starting with the "Big Bang", or whatever it was, in some tiny fraction of a second all energy and matter appeared and sorted themselves out, becoming something like 10⁸⁰ "elementary" particles; either protons, neutrons, and electrons, or electrons plus quarks. Initially something like a thousand times that many particles of both "matter" and "antimatter" formed, and some tiny imbalance resulted in all the matter presently in existence. At least the visible or potentially visible stuff. This is accompanied by a much greater number of bosons such as photons.
• 1.38 billion years ago, we find that our Galaxy has appeared (10 billion years earlier) and then our solar system (just over 3 billion years earlier), and then once Earth settled down, life that either began as bacteria or soon became bacterial and archaean (AKA prokaryotes); and finally eukaryotic cells (larger cells with a nucleus) had arisen, such that almost anything big enough for us to see was composed of them (though they were, as we are, vastly outnumbered by the tinier prokaryotes).
• 138 million years ago it's already getting late in the Age of Dinosaurs: the familiar Tyrannosaurs plus Triceratops, Iguanodon, and sauropods such as Argentinosaurus stalked the land, pterosaurs flew hither and yon, and the seas were filled with ammonites (like an octopus with a big, coiled shell), mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Flowering plants had recently evolved and were spreading everywhere.
• 13.8 million years ago it's the middle of the Miocene; mountain building is going on, and the continents have formed something similar to their modern configuration. A minor branch of mammals, the primates, has produced a few species larger than a rat, up to the size of a squirrel monkey.
• 1.38 million years ago, it's the middle Pleistocene. The ice ages began a million years earlier, and the Gorilla-Chimp-Hominin divide occurred in the range of 6-9 million years earlier. Homo erectus appeared 2 million years ago and by 1.38 million, was speciating into a few hominid species, although Neanderthals had yet to appear.
• 138,000 years ago, Neanderthals are all over Europe and Asia, while all archaic Homo sapiens are still in Africa.
• 13,800 years ago: It's been about 20,000 years since Neanderthals became extinct (or assimilated with H. sapiens). It's the middle of the Late Glacial Interstadial, a warm period that lasted about 1,800 years, followed by the colder Younger Dryas era. Humans are already on every continent except Antarctica (and maybe there also at times!). 
• 1,380 years ago: As I write this, that would be 643 AD (or CE), almost 160 years before Charlemagne unified the Holy Roman Empire. Anything resembling "science" is a millennium in the future.
• 138 years ago, in 1843, Queen Victoria had recently begun her 63-year reign; Louis Pasteur began to teach; the first Opium War had just ended in China; the first immigrant from Japan arrived in the United States. The germ theory of disease is still 50 years in the future.

That's a good place to stop the timeline, because 13.8 years ago almost anyone who can read this was alive and can remember numerous world events. It's also a useful backdrop to the much different history developed in What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner, by Dan Levitt. 

Note that there is no question mark in the title; it is not a question but a statement, an affirmation. Wind back to 13.8 billion years ago, and the first atoms were produced soon after, very soon. They are nearly all still with us. If we pull back to look at the Universe as a whole, nearly 75% by mass is hydrogen and 25% is helium. About 1% is everything else, all the other 90-odd elements that have been formed since stars began to shine. Subtract that 1%, and you have the composition of the Universe 13.7 (or maybe 13.6) billion years ago.

The core of an atom is its nucleus. For hydrogen, it's almost always a single proton. Two other forms (isotopes) of hydrogen have one and two added neutrons, respectively. Helium almost always has two protons and two neutrons; a rare isotope of helium has one neutron. Nearly all the atoms of hydrogen and helium that were produced in the extremely early universe are still in existence. About 1% of them have been compounded (fused) into other atoms, of almost 100 elements and several hundred isotopes. The book tells about the step-by-step discovery of how the stars "cooked" the other elements. Without that cooking, there would be no carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements that it takes to make Earth and the other planets, and also all living things including us. Note that the atoms in the stars, in planets, in us, probably don't have their "original" electrons. Those can move from atom to atom, and chemistry is what we call the movements of electrons.

So, what has gotten into you, and into me? Primarily water (60+% of our bodies are water), composed of hydrogen from the early universe and oxygen cooked up in a large star that later blew up as a supernova. In whatever way elements were produced in stars, the way they got back into the universe to become planets and people was by supernova explosions…well, some amount of lighter elements got out of stars in a more gentle way as they shed their outer layers in the late stages of being a red giant. But anything heavier than iron had to come from a supernova, created during the eruption, and most elements heavier than oxygen also were expelled during supernova eruptions.

Chapters in the book detail the discoveries of organic chemicals, and RNA and DNA, and other molecules of life, a story that is still unfolding. The story of all the parts that have to work together for a cell to function is one of the most complex tales there is. Every cell in your body is as complex as Chicago, but operates millions of times faster. Even bacterial cells are only "simpler" by comparison: one cell of the "simple" bacterium E. coli contains 20,000 "factories" called ribosomes, that produce proteins under the direction of bits of RNA copied from the DNA "library". And the same cell contains thousands of other active bits called organelles with sundry functions. A typical cell in our body is 15,000 times as large (in volume; 25x the diameter) as an E. coli cell, and contains dozens of organelles that the bacterium doesn't have (or need). All are made from either primordial hydrogen or from the forty or so other elements, ejected by supernovae, which were brought together on this planet to become living things. THAT is what has gotten into us.

Reading this book was joyful. I hope you read it and will agree.

Teeny-tiny deities

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, recombinant dna, gene editing, ethics, morality

When I saw the title of As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, by Matthew Cobb, I knew I was in for a bit of preachiness. I was right, but it was worth it. Dr. Cobb has been among those in the forefront of genetic research for several decades. His perspective is unique. His moral perspective is also nearly unique, as he reports. Few can keep their integrity: As is usual with us faulty humans, when something gets big, really big, you can ferret out nearly every motive by keeping in mind, "Follow the money." There's enough potential money involved that whole national political attitudes have been shifted, repeatedly. I am politically unwise, so I'll leave it to you to read the gory details; I'll look at the technologies he presents us.

The book traces the history of genetic modification, including the dreams of those who, before the ink was dry on Watson and Crick's publication of the structure of DNA, began to opine rapturously about "rewriting the code of life". The predictions of "what we can do with DNA" exceed even the rhapsodies of those promoting "artificial intelligence". I see these two realms of technology running in parallel, a neck-and-neck race for general godhood on both fronts.

Let's look at the current situation first. The present culmination of all the technologies called "genetic editing" is the precise removal and replacement of a single nucleotide, an advance called Base Editing. It's a step beyond the more familiar CRISPR (more below). Versions of this called Prime Editing and Double-Prime Editing are being worked out at present. These technologies still need to go through a number of medical and regulatory hoops before they can be used for therapies, but they are the most promising to date.

CRISPR, when it appeared a decade ago, and garnered a Nobel Prize for Drs Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020, was called "DNA scissors". I describe it a little more here. Once the CRISPR agent latches onto DNA, a CAS protein (CAS9 is best known) cuts both strands, and related molecules add "new stuff" at the break and the knit it back together. In more recent years it has been found that the agent isn't as specific as was first thought, and that multiple trials are often needed to get the result you were after. That makes it too risky to use for editing the human germline (the sex cells that turn into babies). Base and Prime Editing methods need a great deal more research and testing to make sure they are as reliable as we need.

However, these targeted mechanisms are a great deal better than older methods, outlined in the book, including something called TALEN, which I liken to a moderately-well-aimed axe. A TALEN needs less accessory machinery than CRISPR and its descendants, because the aim is to remove the "bad half" of a DNA double strand, and let cellular machinery patch the break with a copy of the opposite, "good" side.

Let us consider, though, that methods such as TALEN and earlier tools are not totally obsolete. A proverb of mine (from the Computer Science arena) is, "Nothing is obsolete if it does something you want done." Nature typically takes the "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" approach; our bodies are full of remnants of older structures that work well enough that evolution hasn't removed or replaced them. Think of the appendix; its function has been largely superseded by the spleen, but is still does a couple of immunological functions well enough that we still have it. It is worthwhile keeping, even though we can live without it (mine is gone, 20 years past). Other animals with a less-developed spleen have a much larger appendix. Irony personified: "appendix" means "added on" or even "useless". It isn't.

"Recombinant DNA" is now considered old hat. The technology is more than forty years old. Millions of diabetics are alive because nearly all the insulin they need is produced by this technology. Before recombinant insulin was economical, an eye doctor prescribed insulin drops for my eye, to heal an injury. It was pork insulin, and I was allergic to it; I almost lost the eye. This is the real "Frankenstein" method, where DNA from one organism is spliced into DNA from another. 

Every time a new genetic technology was developed, it was both hyped and decried. Purple promises abounded in medical literature and the popular press, and accusations of "acting like God" abounded right alongside them. On four occasions, lovingly detailed by our author, the researchers have come together and slowed things down. Though they have never called for a moratorium (the "m" word, to many of the author's colleagues), perhaps at least temporary moratoria ought to have been urged. The researchers may not have gone far enough, but the fact that they went as far as they did, and four times, indicates the moral quandary in which they found themselves. 

One side aspect of CRISPR (I think  I have this right) is the Gene Drive, which produces a kind of non-Mendelian inheritance that can drive a species to extinction, either by eliminating all the males or making them all sterile. The mechanics of XY chromosome systems makes it easier to target males. The appearance of this technology led to the closest thing to a moratorium, but eventually, this did not come about. As it happens, a Gene Drive isn't the magic bullet. Limited tests had some early success followed by reduced effectiveness of the Drive. It isn't 100% effective (is anything?). Thus, there are a few survivors. They sire a population that isn't affected by the Gene Drive, and pretty soon the pest (such as a mosquito) you were trying to eradicate returns in a more resistant form. But suppose you did drive a malaria-bearing mosquito species to extinction, worldwide: How likely is it that another species will take its place? Will the replacement be better, or perhaps worse?

If a Gene Drive were developed that affected the human species, then what? There are some folks, often called "environmental wackos", who think the Earth is better off without humans. If a few of them get their hands on a few million dollars, what's to stop them from producing, and then releasing, such an agent? Could its progress be stopped? "Playing God" works both ways.

I find I haven't said much about AI, though I intended to. Similar noise abounds around AI as a doomsday technology. But I think I don't need to say more at this point. Mark Twain wrote, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So are the predictions of imminent human extinction by DNA or by AI, and also the utopian fantasies regarding both.

A quote near the end of the book sums up a lot of this very well, as told to the author by Sheila Jasanoff:

I think that the fears, the nightmares, serve their own purpose. They are prods to make people think harder about the things that can go wrong. If the 'hope people' are the warriors, then the 'fear people' are the worriers. I think we might need both of them in society, to keep the one calibrating the other, and in some kind of balance.

Although there are those who really wish to exercise godlike powers, it's ironic that the best anyone can so far do is make tiny changes—one base here, half a dozen there—to a DNA library with several billion. A real God, for those who believe in Him, made all of it, all at once.

__________________

A bit off a quibble as a postscript. A chapter titled "Weapons" describes several kinds of what are called "gain of function" research, and mentions several viruses, including a variant of Smallpox, that were made many times more virulent than the "natural" product. But the author goes out of his way to say that the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was not produced this way, stating "there is no evidence of this". He has believed a lie. I do not attribute falsehood to Dr. Cobb, but naivety and foolishness. A very few facts:

• Dr. Fauci is known to have responded to a Federal moratorium on gain-of-function research by going around the regulations to funnel several million dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to carry out such research on coronaviruses. (This is usually called money laundering)
• He and others said for a long time that the virus came from a bat bought at a "wet market", and later that it came from a pangolin. The Wuhan wet market does not have either bats or pangolins for sale, not now, and not in 2019. (Yes, I have sources in China)
• He has more recently said that there may have been a "lab leak".
• One of the doctors at the Wuhan lab published several articles, including in Nature, about gain-of-function research on coronaviruses collected from bats a few years previously.
• Thousands of Wuhan residents took vacations in the US and other Western countries in mid-to-late 2019, before the Chinese government announced anything about a new respiratory disease erupting in the Wuhan area. This "pulse" of Wuhan-resident vacationers was unusual. It was followed by the first "pulse" of COVID-19 cases in the West.

I conclude that there was a lot more involved than a "leak" from the Wuhan lab. It is a near certainty that the first genetically-engineered bioweapon has already been used. In folklore, the "bad gods" such as Loki always seem to get their licks in first, and are just barely overcome. Human gods are no better, and typically far worse.

Singapore Spider ramps it up

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Nine days ago I noted a new player in the spider game, Singapore. Today I see they are still at it:

For at least the past week, and probably going back 10-11 days, more than 1,000 hits from Singapore have occurred daily. I wonder if others have noted this.

Singapore is so small its bright blue dot doesn't even show on the map above.

Pestiferousness

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, sociology, pests

Smack in the middle of Pennsylvania, about a half-hour drive from Penn State University, we find Penn's Cave and Wildlife Park. Our whole church had an outing there some years ago, and on the fence of the wildlife park I saw this sign. It raises the point: when a bear and a human find themselves in close proximity, who is the trespasser?

One point made in Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire is that humans are the ultimate trespassers. When the bear is "in the woods", supposedly a "natural" setting, of course the person is in the bear's territory. When the bear is enjoying your swimming pool, though, take a moment to consider: if "your" yard and house were "developed" just a couple of years ago, that bear's favorite scratching tree might have been removed to make room to install the swimming pool. A quarter acre or more of forest may have been removed to plant grass for the yard. What else used to live there with the bear?

Pests is not about insects or disease or anything most of us first think of when we hear the word "pest". It is about vertebrates that are called "pests" by some significant number of humans, somewhere. The word "pest" comes from Latin pestis, meaning Plague or pestilence, plus several other meanings including "curse". In the opening chapter the author curses, frequently and eloquently, about a squirrel that destroys her tomatoes, every year without fail. She even tried chicken wire, but the squirrel could reach through, and cherry tomatoes fit through. Chicken wire works for us; we fence far enough from the plants that squirrel limbs aren't long enough to reach.

So, the bailiwick of the book is mammals, from mice to elephants; birds such as pigeons; and reptiles such as snakes. In particular, Burmese pythons in Florida have cross bred with native boas/pythons to produce offspring that are much larger; big enough to tackle humans. Most of us find ourselves pestered by more prosaic critters: mice, voles, squirrels, or rabbits, perhaps rats.

The single biggest problem is the huge range of attitudes about any animal that might be called a pest. For example, we know deer live near our neighborhood, in a few loosely-connected patches of forest totaling 30 acres, and there are forested areas of similar size scattered all through the surrounding several square miles. When we have apples drop in the fall, we'll sometimes see where a deer or two bedded down to munch fallen apples in a protected corner near the tree. We haven't caught any in the act (yet). My wife doesn't like deer that get into the yard, while I am more neutral. A few neighbors try to feed the deer, while others would rather shoot them, except there is no hunting allowed in residential areas even in deer season. 

Similar ranges of attitude exist in my neighborhood for the local squirrels, foxes, raccoons, and hawks. I've seen a Cooper's Hawk land on a squirrel not ten feet from me and flap away with it to feed her nestlings (Cooper's Hawks are mainly bird hawks, but they're not too particular). My wife wishes the hawk would go after the rest of the squirrels in our yard.

Slide halfway around the planet to Kenya. A hungry elephant can consume all of a poor farmer's crop overnight. While it is barely possible to build a fence that elephants can't destroy, it would cost more than what an entire Kenyan town could afford. The author reports that combinations of electrified wires and bees, along with other measures, discourages most elephants. In Kenya, "coexistence" isn't a cool slogan on a bumper sticker, spelled out in bowdlerized religious symbols, it is a necessary wildlife management skill.

Stories abound, but the author's focus is on attitudes. Those who can afford it like to live in more "natural" settings, but then far too many of us get perturbed when "nature" pays a visit. Leave a door ajar, and a sparrow might get inside (dodging a Cooper's Hawk perhaps): you could spend a couple of hours trying to get the terrified bird back outside. Meanwhile, it will have poo'd and peed in a few places; birds don't wait to find a toilet to "drop it". Is that bird a pest? Attitude…

The author points a finger at the Western/Christian cultural undercurrent of "dominion", based on Genesis 1:28. Less than half of English translations of The Bible use "dominion" to translate the Hebrew word, while a larger number use "rule", which is more accurate. A few use "take charge". By domesticating many animals and penning out the rest, the human race has definitely set itself up to "rule" nature. "Pests" are those animals that remind us our rule isn't perfect; we aren't totally sovereign. A little humility is a useful antidote to our hubris.

A big issue is ignorance. There was a joke when I was a child about a city kid on a field trip seeing a pile of discarded milk bottles, who said, "A cow's nest!" That's only slightly exaggerated. Every day children eat eggs but have never seen a chicken, let alone reached under a hen (risking a peck) to feel the warm eggs. Perhaps suburban houses and yards should come with a "Former Owners' Manual", describing the lives of the rabbits, squirrels, voles, mice, raccoons, foxes, perhaps even deer or coyotes (or even pumas) that were displaced to clear the land and build the house. The Manual should include strategies for coping with former residents and their descendants that may still make use of the place. Lacking that, reading this book is a good way to begin to learn.

Singapore Spider!

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Over the years I've seen Singapore show up in my stats a time or two. This morning, getting ready to write a review, I noticed a big bump: almost 1,000 hits so far today and 400 yesterday. An ordinary day yields about 50.

This shows 1,326 from Singapore, probably all in the past two days, and 206 from Russia, which has been the source of most spider scanning for years. I suppose it's possible that someone in Russia is using a proxy server in Singapore.

Other stats on the page show that all of the Singapore hits were on Android using Safari. An interesting combination.

I hope the searcher(s) found something worth reading.

Planets outnumber stars

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrometry, exoplanets

We have so far detected about 5,000 exoplanets (planets of other stars). Since the first confirmed detection in January 1992, astronomers have developed five methods to detect exoplanets, over most of the range of plausible sizes, and quite a range of orbital periods. That's enough to learn a few things.

In Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, author Chris Impey describes the most common type of planet: Diameter larger than Earth but smaller then Neptune, in an orbit on the warm side of the habitability zone, or inside of it. These are called "super-Earths" and "mini-Neptunes", with the dividing line about twice the diameter of Earth. Neptune weighs just over 17 times as much as Earth, so variations in density increase the range of masses from about 17:1 to perhaps 25:1 (or 20:0.8).

The technology of exoplanet discovery makes up the first of four sections of the book. The other three sections consider habitability, how we might search for life on exoplanets, and the possibilities for us or our machines to visit them.

I hadn't known that there are five ways to detect an exoplanet. In particular, I didn't know that astrometry can be used for that. Astrometry means "star measurement", and in this application, it refers to precise measurements of a star's location or position. While quite a number of exoplanets have been detected by the doppler shift in stellar spectra, using telescopes on Earth's surface, the use of a star's position is many times more delicate, and can only be done from telescopes in space. A bit of figuration will illustrate the difference.

Considering the mass of Earth as a basis, and calling it 1, the mass of Jupiter is 317.8 and that of the Sun is 332,946. The Sun's diameter is 1,392,000 km, the average distance of Earth from the Sun is 149.6 million km, and the average distance between Jupiter and the Sun is 778.3 million km. The orbital velocity of Earth is 29.78 km/sec = 107,200 km/hr and that of Jupiter is 13.1 km/sec = 47,160 km/hr.

The doppler shift caused by the Sun's reaction to the planetary motions is calculated by mass and distance ratios. Thus, for Jupiter, the mass ratio is 317.8/332,946 = 0.000 954 5; so the Sun's velocity is that times 13.1 km/sec = 0.0125 km/sec = 12.5 m/s. It takes a very precise spectroscope to measure the doppler shift caused by this motion, but it has now been done many times. 

The closer Jupiter is to the Sun, the faster it goes, and therefore the faster the Sun goes. Let's put Jupiter in Earth's orbit and check the consequences: 0.000 954 5 x 29.78 = 0.0284 or 28.4 m/s. This is more than twice the earlier figure. This is much easier to detect, and explains why the first exoplanets to be detected were "hot Jupiters" that orbited very close to their host stars. Also, doppler shift is the same from any distance, as long as you can gather enough light to get a good and precise spectrum.

Now we consider hyper-precision astrometry. The diffraction limit of the Hubble Space Telescope in visible wavelengths is around 0.02 milli-arc-seconds (5.5 billionths of a degree). It would be the same for any space telescope of equal size. However, even though star images are enlarged by diffraction to that degree, the position of a star can be measured with greater precision than this. One must magnify star images to cover many pixels of the detector, and the centroid of the star image can be calculated with great precision, in the range of millionths of an arc second (trillionths of a degree). The longer the exposure (the more photons captured), the more precisely this can be done, as the statistics of the "shot noise" of photon detection reduce the errors that would cause.

Specialized orbiting telescopes are being planned that can do this for a number of stars in a field of view. The positions of many stars would be measured again and again over long periods, looking for tiny shifts. How tiny?

For Jupiter again, when the planet moves from one side of its orbit to the other, it moves 1.56 billion km. The Sun moves 1.56 billion × 317.8 / 332,946 = 1.49 million km, or 1.07 times the Sun's diameter! However, this motion requires six years...starting at the right place.

How far away can we detect the shift? One millionth of an arc second has a tangent of 0.000 000 0159; dividing this into 1.49 million km yields 93.6 trillion km. That's almost ten light years (9.9). To reach a reasonable number of stars with this technique requires astrometric measurements with a relative precision from star to star of a ten millionth of an arc second, or smaller if possible. This takes big telescopes and long exposure times. But it has been done!

OK, that's a long discussion of two methods: Doppler Shift (the first method to work) and High Precision Astrometry (the most recent). To round out the methods, the third is the most prolific to date: the Transit method, which measures the little dip in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star. The fourth is Microlensing, for which stars are watched for brightening that occurs during the period (measured in days) that one passes in front of another and its gravity magnifies the star behind; a small extra glimmer signals that the star in front has a planet. The fifth is Direct Imaging, which works best for large planets farther from their host stars. Each method has a useful range of planetary size and orbital distance, which means we are getting a more and more complete overview of what is out there.

I will give rather short shrift to the latter three sections of the book. They are very interesting, but secondary to my interest in the subject. Only a small percentage of exoplanets so far detected are at a suitable distance from their host stars to have a chance of having liquid water at or near the surface. Thus, the discussion of habitability and life are more speculative. The author does bring up an interesting subject: Could the Earth be detected by any of these methods, from suitably placed stars in "nearby" space, the nearest few hundred light years? Very possibly!

The statistics of what we now know indicate something even more interesting: Nearly every star seems to have at least one planet, and wherever the viewpoint and associated method(s) are favorable we find a few planets, usually 3, 4 or 5. Precision timing of Transits is beginning to reap a harvest of added planets in many of the systems initially found using that method, for example. That means that there are more planets than stars, overall.

Furthermore, the Solar System has, so far discovered, 200 moons, most of them around Jupiter and Saturn. BUT! Although the surface temperature of satellites that distant from the Sun is far too cold to allow liquid water, the interiors of several larger satellites could hold a large liquid ocean, which could then host life. It may be that the greatest number of objects in the Universe that host living beings (microbes, at least) will prove to be satellites of large planets!

That in itself made the book worth reading.

Nonsense in , interestingness out

 kw: ai experiments, generated art, dall-e, nonsense processing

I read that an AI researcher made up a word, "crungus", and used it to prompt a generated art app. He reported that this yielded several pictures of ogre-like monsters. I decided to try the same "word" with DALL-E2. I ran it twice, with these results:

While the program primarily associates the prompt with food, it threw a human-ish character into each set of replies. Most of the foods have a crunchy look, like tempura. It is refreshing, however: no monsters for me.

I should mention that every time I run DALL-E2 I use a freshly-opened Incognito Chrome browser window. OpenAI has history of what I've been doing in its own database, but any cookies DALL-E2 may have dropped get erased when I close the browser.

I made up another nonsense word, "knorb", which yielded this:

It's a pity DELL-E2 doesn't have an "Explain" button, but if its neural net consists of many layers of millions of nodes, who wants to read through an "explanation" anyway? This word somehow triggered images related to tools and mechanical things. Next I chose a word made up by a comedian in a funny article about punctuation, "flabbergasterisk". Here the results were so surprising I ran it a second time:

The first set of returns produced more food. The second set also has a food theme, but I rather like the still life composition of the second one in the second set. As originally conceived, the flabbergasterisk looks like this:

To check DALL-E2's vocabulary, I picked three obscure, but genuine, words. The first was "Limerence":

Limerence is a psychological term defined as involuntary, intense, obsessive desire for another person, without sexual overtones. The three women pictured could be objects of desire, but at least one of the images is a bit suggestive in nature. I don't know what kind of bird is pictured at the left. The next real word was "Omnishambles":

Here the program is in uncharted territory. "Omni" means "everything" and "shambles" means to be in disorder, so the word means "disastrous disorder" (it's how I would describe the Biden Presidency). It isn't a geographical term. The final word is "Velleity":

"Velleity" is a mild wish or inclination without motivation; it doesn't lead to action. One could call it the "wishy" side of "wishy-washy". The flower pictures are nice, but are total non sequiturs. I am not sure how a near-empty jar of rolled oats relates to anything.

It has been a fun exercise.