How long until AI truly catches up?

 kw: analysis, artificial intelligence, moore's law, generative language models

I recently heard an expert in artificial intelligence speak of the capabilities of the various "generative language" systems out there. The best known are ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4. Google has Bard and Microsoft plus Meta have Llama-2. I recall it was said that GPT-4 has about 50 billion parameters, and Llama-2 has ten times that many, or half a trillion. These parameters are the "knobs" that are set by the training process, which is primarily a consolidation of billions of text documents.

How do these mechanisms compare with the human brain? (The original, larger version of this image was created by Sarah Holmlund, who holds the copyright.)

We often hear that the brain has 100 billion neurons. The actual number is about 87 billion, plus or minus a billion or two. What is less well known is that nearly 70 billion of those neurons are in the cerebellum, running the body and connecting the body to the cerebrum and the limbic system. 16-17 billion neurons comprise the cerebral cortex, where most neurologists consider our conscious mind to reside, and another 1.5 billion comprise the limbic system and the memory switching centers, including the hippocampus.

I don't know how much fan-in and fan-out there is for the nodes in a neural network (the most common "black box" running AI operations). I suspect is ranges into the dozens or even hundreds, for at least some of the nodes. In the human brain, each neuron is connected to between 1,000 and 10,000 others at synapses, with an average number of about 7,000. The synapse is the key "switch", and a neuron's population of synapses primarily determine its behavior. The number of synapses in the non-cerebellar parts of the brain is more than 120 trillion.

The synapses are not simple on-off switches; they have nonlinear behavior, and they seem to have a certain amount of "decision-making" ability, depending on timing between inputs and the surrounding "chatter" of nearby synapses. However, for the moment we can compare the number of synapses with the neural net parameters mentioned in the podcast. 120 trillion is about 240 times the number of parameters that make up the guts of Llama-2, and 2,400 times the size of GPT-4.

It is fair to say that the entire human cerebrum is not involved in language use, and perhaps only a few percent make up our own language production apparatus. However, the rest of the brain is involved in the knowledge context, in cross-referencing memories, and in weighing emotional responses that arise in the limbic system, for example. AI mechanisms do none of this. So our language "machine" is perhaps 10-100x the size of today's AI systems, but we cannot discount the context provided by the rest of the brain.

Let's project a version of Moore's Law onto this disparity. In its original form, it relates to hardware density: the number of transistors on a single chip doubles about every two years. Ultimate speed was also used for CPU power prediction, but this has pretty much come to an end. The highest clock rate for silicon-based CPU's has been stuck near 4 GHz for twenty years or more. The way newer systems get around this limitation is to put more CPU's (or cores) into a machine, up to 20 or 32 in the most recent chips. The CPU in the machine I'm using right now has 8 cores.

Brain neurons aren't nearly so fast, but they all run at once (most AI neural nets are virtual, with each CPU emulating dozens or hundreds of individual neurons and the hundreds of thousands of connections between them). Signal speed in brain neurons is about 60 m/s, so a neuron that is triggered can signal anywhere in the brain (thousands of anywhere's!) within 3 or 4 milliseconds. Waves of activity, coordinating millions of neurons, produce the Beta frequencies between 13 and 30 Hz. In that time tens of trillions of synapses have each fired between 10 and 50 times. That's a lot of processing.

One projection would be: For the Llama-2 set of parameters to be increased by a factor of ten might require 6-7 years. For GPT-4 to get a 100x boost could require 12-15 years.

However, we must consider that, for any generative AI to produce truly useful text, its creators will need to take the other functions of the brain into account; at the very least, context, memory indexing, and emotional content. Then, if we're in the 240x to 2,400x realm, Moore's law would project a timeframe of around 16 years to 23 years.

I conclude that reaching truly human-level AI performance is possible in my lifetime (I'm over 75 years old), just barely. But there is one more hurdle: What size will such hardware be? At the moment, the AI systems we have been discussing rely on large rooms full of racks of CPU's or GPU's (A GPU runs less than half the speed of a CPU, but can do more overlapping operations, plus it uses a little less power). The electricity running such an installation is a few million watts, including some million-watt air chilling units. That's still a long way from having a human-sized robot walking around with a human-capable brain squeezed into its 50-kg body somewhere.

This is a reach, but with the human brain using 20 watts, how long would the naïve version of Moore's law, applied to power consumption, predict? For a factor of 100,000 in power reduction: 33 years.

I really don't expect to live to an age near 110, but if I do, things could be very, verrry interesting by then.

Potty-mouth physicist

 kw: book reviews, science, quantum physics, debunking, pans

I should have known better. I saw the title, Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics, by Chris Ferrie. I saw the opening pages, with an F-bomb in the header, and more scattered through the introduction. I figured, "I've been known to use the F-bomb, and a few related bombs, at times. I think I can handle it." I couldn't. I struggled through 1/3 of the book and gave up.

My usual practice when I decide not to finish a book is to ignore it and not write a review. I just couldn't do that this time, my conscience wouldn't let me. To be clear, I don't like this book!

Chris Ferrie is a quantum physicist. He is also one of the older Millennials, for whom the F-bomb is the all-purpose adjective and a panoply of 4-letter Anglo-Saxon epithets take the place of terms that one may actually have to engage in thinking to use properly. His whole generation could benefit from viewing To Sir With Love, the classic film with Sidney Poitier as a teacher in England; in particular, a mandatory viewing, at least ten times, of the teacher's tirade against some serious student misbehavior, which he pulls off without using a single vulgar term. Millennials are linguistically lazy, and this book was written to cater to them.

It's clear from the outset that Dr. Ferrie is quite disturbed by the scams being pulled off by charlatans of numerous stripes who wedge the word "quantum" into the name of their wares: Quantum Energy, Quantum Vodou (or Voodoo), Quantum Crystal Scanning… Ah, me, the silliness never stops. He sets out to instruct his victims/readers in what "quantum" really means and what quanta really do.

The science is good; the presentation, no way.

Becoming a star, two ways

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrophysics, memoirs

Sarafina had a tough row to hoe, and has done better than even she expected. If she hasn't already (by this date in July 2023) received her PhD, I expect she soon will, to become Dr. Sarafina El-Badry Nance. In her memoir, Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark, she presents herself to us as one seeking to know the universe as a way to know herself. The memoir is a catharsis for her.

Each chapter begins with a nugget of astronomical or astrophysical understanding, which then leads to events in her life, some of them happy, many of them painful, even agonizing. She is studious, so her response to her parents' unhappy marriage was to work herself practically to death. She survived a year or so with a very abusive boyfriend, blaming herself for his failures, which all too many abused women do. Her father had cancer treatment (it seems he has so far survived, although it was advanced), which led to genetic testing for him, which led to genetic testing for her: she found she was at great risk of breast cancer, and no matter what she did with her breasts, she would have to monitor several potential risks frequently. She chose total removal and reconstruction (something I recall that the actress Angelina Jolie also chose…and so did a friend of ours for similar reasons, but after already having one lumpectomy). Amidst all that, she was, by the end of the book, close to completing her doctorate in Astrophysics.

She had happy moments and happy periods. Her father encouraged her love of astronomy, and encouraged her to ignore naysayers (She reports on several. Be careful what you say to children; you can destroy them needlessly). She fondly recalls sitting outside with him just to watch the sky. She had women friends, and a supportive therapist or two, at key moments in her life. She prevailed.

She studies supernovae (AKA supernovas). Her big discovery so far relates to determining that large amounts of hydrogen remain in many supernovae, between a few percent and 30% of the stars' masses. She doesn't mention whether these are Type 2 or Type 1a, which I wish she had mentioned (Type 1a supernovae provide the key bit of data underlying the hypothesis of Dark Energy. According to that, about 75% of the mass/energy of the entire universe is bound up in Dark Energy, if it exists. I happen to think this proportion, if it is not zero, is greatly exaggerated.).

As a rising star in the astrophysics community, she also became a star in the community of cancer survivors. She researched her genetic condition and her options relentlessly, and reported her Odyssey on social media. Pushing aside a few trolls, she had enormous positive feedback from women who appreciated her work and the knowledge she was able to confer to them.

This book is most touching, incredibly illuminating (in sundry ways), and a painful joy to read.

Cells make up all known life

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cytology, biological cells

When I was a pre-teen a family friend, a biologist at the University of Utah, gave me two little bottles. They were powdered dyes, Eosin and Carmine. Both were red powders, but I learned that Eosin is more acidic, so the two dyes stain biological materials differently. I used them sometimes, with my little microscope, but I usually examined things in their unstained state.

If you have a microscope available, and some glass slides and cover slips, try this: using an ordinary teaspoon, gently scrape inside your cheek, and put a drop of the slightly milky fluid on a slide. Drop a cover slip on top and have a look, first at 100x. The grayish blobs are epithelial cells. If you have a dye such as Mauve (an Aniline dye) available, you can use that, and then you might see something like this:

For a sense of scale, these cells are typically about 50 microns wide (0.05 mm). If you are viewing this on a laptop screen they probably appear about a half inch across (12 mm), and on a phone, perhaps half that size. So this image is about 240x on a laptop, 100-120x on a phone.

If you don't have any kind of dye, a drop of household iodine will make a slightly brown stain on the nucleus.

Cells such as these have lots going on inside them, but hardly anything besides the nucleus is visible with an optical microscope. The wavelength of yellow-green light, where we see best, is just over half a micron (550 nm). The best optical systems cannot distinguish items smaller than that.

In the 1960's I began to see articles about cell substructures in Scientific American (we subscribed), with images taken with an electron microscope. I was enthralled! This image of a cell similar to the cheek cells above is from Pocket Dentistry. It has some cellular substructures (organelles) labeled.

The organelles and what they do is outlined—briefly!—in early chapters of The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a cancer physician, researcher and professor of medicine in New York City.

Looked at in detail, a cell is like a city. Consider a few functions of a well-run city: traffic control; waste management; distribution of energy, food, fuel and supplies; manufacturing; libraries, including the knowledge base for manufacturing; and policing. In a cell:

• The proteins actin and myosin work together to produce movement, such as in muscles. Cities don't typically move around, but in a cell the same proteins are used to shuttle materials about: a transportation system.
• Some vacuoles gather waste products, are shuttled to the cell membrane, and deposit them outside the cell: waste management.
• Mitochondria produce energy, at the same time taking in oxygen and excreting carbon dioxide: energy production and distribution.
• The DNA in the nucleus is the cell's library of instructions, both how to make proteins and how they are linked up.
• Misfolded and other "problem" proteins are gathered into lysosomes and destroyed or recycled: a police function.

The author takes us through the history of the discovery of the cell, with mini-biographies of key researchers such as Rudolf Virchow, who stated that "all life is made of cells" and that normal and abnormal issues in creatures stemmed from normal or abnormal functions of cells. The bulk of the book consists of chapters titled The Guardian Cell (neutrophils in the immune system), The Contemplating Cell (neurons), The Renewing Cell (stem cells), and so forth. The book is a mini-education in organismic cytology.

Dr. Mukherjee's life work is with cancer ("The Selfish Cell"), and the mysteries of the many, many varieties of cancer. Cancer isn't one malady, it is a behavior expressed by numerous kinds of cells that get off-balance; cells don't just have a "grow this much and then slow down" or "…and then divide" mechanism, they have (a few or several) opposing mechanisms which rise and fall in concert to regulate such things. In a car, there is the gas pedal and the brake pedal, which the driver operates in synchrony to regulate speed. 

My first accident occurred when I was, age 15, allowed to put the car away by moving it from the driveway into the garage, on a rainy day. My foot slipped off the brake and floored the gas pedal, and the car leapt through the garage and burst halfway through the back wall. Cancer is like that: floored accelerator, no brakes. My father was very mechanical: he and I had several days of father-son bonding while we pulled apart the broken wall and repaired it. He taught me a lot of carpentry and other skills that week.

One goal of the book is the concept of "the new human", meaning a human with renewed tissues or organs, so the rest of the body can continue living. The author's "poster child" is Emily Whitehead. To quote the caption on her photo:

"…the first child treated at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for relapsed, refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)…[her] T cells were extracted, genetically modified to "weaponize" them against her cancer, and reinfused into her body."

She is still in good health eleven years later. She is a "new human", with something new in her immune system. From a cellular viewpoint, regulating cells is a step beyond "genetic engineering".

When I was in 8th grade I wanted to be a biologist, specifically, a cytologist, someone who studies cells. At a school assembly, the headmaster (I was in a private school using a British system) asked each one of us what we wanted to be. My fellow students wanted to be doctors, lawyers, professors, and so forth. When my turn came I said, "A cytologist." The headmaster nodded agreeably and said, "A psychologist, how nice!" I didn't think it wise to explain at that point. 

Reading this book helped me realize how utterly complex is the living cell! As I wrote above, it is easily as full of numerous functions as a city, a city that runs itself. And the trillions of mini-metropolises that make up our bodies usually operate almost flawlessly! It's an enjoyable and fulfilling book.

The view from everywhere!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy

At its closest approach to Earth, Venus is about 38 million km away. Just before this or just after this (a few weeks), the planet is a bright crescent in the morning or evening sky, and its apparent diameter is just over one minute of arc (1/60th of a degree). Someone with keen eyesight would be able to tell it isn't an unresolved dot, and could see that it looks elongated. That's the closest we can come on Earth to seeing any body in the Solar System besides the Sun or the Moon as anything more than a tiny dot.

If any of the seven known planets of the Trappist-1 system is habitable, the sky would be quite a bit more interesting as the short year (19 days or less) transpired. Some of what we might see is described in the sixth chapter of Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe by Philip Plait, PhD, an astronomer who lives in Colorado. Rather than repeat what he wrote, I analyzed the system a bit to provide this summary:

• The 7 planets are designated by letters from b to h.
• Their sizes are similar, ranging from 0.775 the size of Earth (h) to 1.13 (g).
• Planet d is the most likely to have liquid water on the surface, though it is thought to have little atmosphere, comparable to that on Mars.
• The star is about 12% the size of the Sun, and is a "cool" red dwarf, with a temperature of 2,550K (~2,275°C or ~4,065°F).
• The planets orbit between 1.73 million km and 9.26 million km from the star.
• By contrast, Mercury's orbit ranges from 47 million km to 70 million km from the Sun.

We see both the Sun and the Moon as having a size of 32 arcmin or arc minutes (0.53°) on the sky. Nearly every one of the seven planets in the Trappist system can be seen from any of the others as a disk, any time they are in the sky:

• From planet b, the nearest to the star, planet h, the farthest, appears as large as 4.5 arcmin at closest approach, a tiny but clear disk.
• When planet g is nearly opposite planet h, from g the other appears as small as 2 arcmin, barely discernable as "not a star". All other cases, the sizes appear larger, even quite large.
• From planet d, planet c appears as large as 50 arcmin, or 1.55 times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth.
• From planet d, planet e appears as large as 39 arcmin, or 1.2 times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth.

How does the star look? Its visible brightness is one hundred-thousandth that of the Sun, while it is 45 times closer to planet d, compared to Earth and the Sun. This works out to a visible brightness of 2%, compared to the Sun. This dim light is spread out over a disk more than five times the apparent size of the Sun. Also:

• From planet b, the star's apparent size is just over ten times that of the Sun to us.
• From planet h, the apparent size is about twice that of the Sun.

Finally, what is the color of the sky? As mentioned, so far, planet d is thought to have very little atmosphere (perhaps like Mars), and planets b and c probably have none (like Mercury); the other four planets may have atmospheres, but we don't know. Such a sky would likely be black, or nearly so. The top row of this diagram shows how the Trappist-1 star would appear, firstly from off-planet, and then under a sky as dense as Earth's atmosphere.

Trappist-1 is one of the reddest of red dwarf stars. It is slightly "cooler" than the filament of an incandescent bulb, so it appears orange from space. Under a clear noontime sky with no dust in the air, it would be just a little more reddish because of blue light scattered away to illuminate the sky. The physics of light scattering mean that the sky still would have a slightly blue color. However, if there were even a little dust in the air, the sky would be pinkish, or perhaps salmon-colored as the sky of Mars is due to fine dust that never settles, even in its thin atmosphere.

The other stars I compiled here show the star color from space, its reddened color seen through an atmosphere (this is why the Sun is called a "yellow-white star"; from Earth it seems so), and the color of a clear sky. The relative brightness of sky and star are certain to be quite different from what this diagram shows, depending on the density of the atmosphere. From atop a high mountain on Earth, the sky is much bluer than it could ever be when seen from sea level.

A few words about the four stars other than Trappist-1 and the Sun:

• Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, known to have at least two planets. It is a little hotter than Trappist-1 and is the closest star to the Sun. Its visible brightness is quite a bit brighter than Trappist-1, but still a tiny fraction of the Sun's brightness. The noontime color temperature is a little more orange than its space appearance, though against a bluish sky it appears closer to bright yellow.
• Sirius is about twice the size of the Sun and is several thousand degrees hotter. A planet would have to be five times as far from it as Earth is from the Sun, to avoid all its water being boiled away.
• Rigel is one of the "knees" of the constellation Orion. It is a blue supergiant about twice as hot as the sun, and so bright that a planet would need to be about 350 times as far away as Earth is from the Sun, to be habitable. But this star won't last long. It will burn out or go supernova in a few million years.
• There are very few of the super-hot "O" type stars. One of four that is naked-eye visible from Earth is Alnitak, the leftmost star in Orion's belt. Such a star doesn't last long. They burn bright and exhaust their fuel quickly. Most of their "light" is ultraviolet and soft X-rays.

OK, that's a bunch of info about planets around other stars. Dr. Plait tells us what it's like to view the sky and space from the Moon, Mars, an asteroid, a comet, a moon of Saturn, and near the Pluto/Charon system. Then he takes us to the Trappist-1 system, and on to a planet orbiting two stars, into a globular cluster (imagine a sky with 100 times as many stars), and near enough to a nebula and a black hole or two to see their fireworks (but from a safe distance!).

I was particularly taken by the description of approaching Saturn. Passing the rings (which would take days at the "sane" speeds of "only" a few miles per second), seeing things like their "spokes" and "propellers", the moonlets and gaps…what a travelogue!

The author writes of the way the absence, or near-absence, of an atmosphere can trick the eye because there is no haziness to distant objects. Distances on the Moon or Mars or an airless asteroid would be very hard to judge. We learn how the different levels of gravity might feel on a different planet or satellite or asteroid…and how landing "on" an asteroid might just take you right inside it (oops!). He writes with compelling grace and subtle humor. I loved the book.

Is Singapore a portal?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I don't know why this didn't occur to me week ago. This level of activity from a tiny place like Singapore must have an external origin:

Look particularly at the June 25th item. This blog has fewer than 3,000 posts. Did someone gulp down the whole thing in one day? Perhaps, and that implies automated scanning. I don't know why, though. Just for context, in this report, everything except Singapore looks like a normal month for this blog:

I suspect at least 10-20 actors out there, using servers in Singapore through VPN's. Singapore has many of the fastest servers in the world, so they're an attractive way-station for VPN users with fast connections. Going through a server in one's own country can slow things down mightily. Via my VPN I've encountered servers in the US that throttle everything to 3Mbps or less. That's like 1980's speeds! Fortunately, most US-based servers are lots faster than that.

Octophilia

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, natural history, octopuses

For most of my life, the colloquial plural of "octopus" was "octopi". Later, I read that either "octopods" or "octopoda" would be a better choice, but these never stuck. The accepted plural now is "octopuses". We've welcomed the word "octopus" fully into the English language, rather than as an Anglicized Latin or Greek term.

David Scheel became enamored of octopuses while engaged in his first oceanographic survey project as a P.I. (Principal Investigator). He had a grant application accepted, despite, as he admits, a rather severe shortage of experience. It doesn't seem to have held him back. He primarily lives in Alaska, but has studied octopuses all over the world. His new book Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses brings his experiences to us. Chapters are introduced by line drawings by Laurel "Yoyo" Scheel, whom I presume to be his daughter. I just wish he'd also included a bunch of photos in the book, even if it raised its price. 

The book's title is a translation of the Eyak word for octopus, tse-le:x-guh, and aptly describes how an octopus appears when you look under the rock into its den. I don't know how that word is pronounced, but I suspect ":x" is a click combination. The Eyak people are a group of those often called Aleuts, living on the Alaskan islands. They catch octopuses to eat, as do many coastal people the world over.

It's amazing to me that these highly intelligent creatures—on a par with the brightest of birds and possibly with porpoises—seldom live more than a year or two. One species, Graneledone boreopacifica (there is no common name; they live a mile or more deep) is known to brood eggs as long as 4.5 years, but their full life span is unknown.

Dr. Scheel's first study subject was the Giant Pacific Octopus. The largest verified specimen weighed 437 pounds. Even a more-common one weighing 50 to 100 pounds can grab someone by the leg and hold them underwater; one chapter records someone's experience of this. That fellow managed to get away before drowning, but lost some skin in the process. Most species weigh a few pounds or less. I encountered one in a tide pool, poked it with a stick, and found my hand grasped when a tentacle unrolled along the stick and "shook hands" momentarily. I think it was more curious than irked (fortunately!).

The four sections of the book, grouping together 22 chapters, are titled "Where are they?", "Want", "Reach", and "Revelation". Every section is fascinating; here I'll just touch on "Reach", which is about octopus senses. 

The last chapter in this section is the best: 16 Dreaming Octopuses. It's pretty well established that they do dream, and this probably extends to all cephalopods; other cephalopods include squids and cuttlefish. The octopus in this image is dreaming, and the shifting colors and textures (note the papillae on the head) seem to correspond to our experience of REM sleep. The animal's eyes are not closed, but experiments have shown that they don't see much during octopus sleep; just enough to detect an oncoming predator.

Curiously, the eyes of octopuses have only one light sensing pigment, which means they are color blind…or are they? Their skin is light sensitive, and the chromatophores (color-displaying cells) seem to act like filters, allowing color sensing by the skin. The eyes are also sensitive to something ours are not: polarized light (unless we are wearing polarizing shades). Try to wrap your mind around this: seeing with your eyes in shades of gray, such as by the light of a quarter moon (when your color vision has shut off), yet having colors supplied by your skin, and an overlay of polarization (somehow). Would humans wear clothing if an important organ of vision was their skin, with its 360° view?

Chapter 15 Constant Octopuses delves into the experience of constancy. When we are moving smoothly, it appears that the scenery is in motion and we are stationary. Yet if we move a hand, either with our counter to the apparent motion of the scenery, it remains "attached" to us in our sense. Octopuses also experience a constancy of self. The author expands the discussion to the matter of how any animal distinguishes self from not-self. Is this the core of consciousness? It seems likely! This implies that consciousness and self-awareness are not on-off traits, but occur as a spectrum.

Finally, I must mention the spectrum of sociability. Octopuses are generally considered asocial and sometimes antisocial. Yet they do need to get together to mate. More recently, octopuses have been found in aggregations in which they display quite a range of social behaviors. The last three chapters explore this.

At one extreme, if two octopuses differ in size, the larger one will frequently eat the smaller one, or at least try, whether they are the same or different species. If a large female who is a bit hungry is approached to mate by a smaller male (in some species the males are much smaller), she may try to eat him. Accidental meetings between two octopuses of similar size, particularly males, can engender a confrontation, as seen here. The dark coloration is the "I'll stand my ground!" signal, although the one on the left is likely to soon flee.

When one octopus decides to kill another, it uses something like a headlock, wrapping an arm around the head, sometimes using two arms. It tries to close off the mantle and siphon, suffocating the opponent.

In some settings, however, octopuses can be cooperative, as seen in this "nursery" full of females, nearly all wrapped around egg clusters in a defensive posture. The yellowish sea anemones are not typically eaten by octopuses because of the stinging cells on their own tentacles. (This image was very dim online; I've boosted the contrast quite a lot. I seldom perform more than cursory digital darkroom work on downloaded pictures.)

Many more subjects are covered, including octopuses as prey; as predators on crabs, clams, small fishes and each other; and tool use, including throwing things at each other when in social aggregations. There is so much to cover, and the author has done an admirable job of condensing a huge subject into this readable and fascinating book.

The fruits of loneliness

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, naturalists, memoirs, isolation, bereavement

Everyone reacted to the pandemic and the various governmental restrictions surrounding it in different ways. Introverts like me could just hide out and read or carry on private studies; I had the freedom to take a few months off work. My very social aunt suffered greatly: isolated in her Independent Living suite, with meals delivered to the door and nobody allowed to visit for several months (thanks to Gov. Newsom, solidly in the running for worst in the nation), within a year she died, not of illness but of loneliness.

Dr. Maddalena Bearzi, a very active oceanographer, suffered as one might who'd lost all one's best friends at once. Being of an active mind and character, she found things to do, carrying on "homespun naturalist" activities in spite of the nagging depression. Stranded: Finding Nature in Uncertain Times is her memoir of those times.

The first and last chapters limn her last foray into the ocean to observe porpoises and whales, before the lockdown, and her first after the lockdown was lifted, more than a year later. In between, rather than spend all her time on the inside looking out, she took walks with her dog, she gardened mightily, and she made the acquaintance of the animals all around her that she had earlier mostly ignored.

It seems her dog Genghis is a real goofball. Fortunately he is a lovable goofball, in spite of his penchant for endangering the integrity of her shoulder socket whenever he spies a lizard or squirrel. She tells of several lizard species she encountered during those months, primarily at times that Genghis didn't see them yet. She watched a paper wasp land on her sandwich just before she took a bite, getting itself spotted with a bit of avocado; that enabled her to keep an eye on that particular wasp as it took up guard duties at the entrance to a nest in one of her patio lounges. She tells us of the gradual replacement of the native gray squirrels by invaders from the east, Eastern Fox Squirrels brought to California by well-meaning folks. She also encountered an opossum or two, and tried to spot coyotes that she sometimes heard, but never saw.

She has a chapter, really a well-deserved diatribe, about captive animals, particularly free-roaming ones such as orcas. Under certain circumstances, caging an animal may be needed, and urban kids do get some good from seeing zoo animals, at least in modern zoos with larger enclosures. But putting large animals in small aquariums for the sake of entertainment is quite troubling.

Her writing is lyrical, deep and evocative of many good emotions. I'm glad she's back to her beloved cetaceans, continuing a more-than-25-year study of their surface habits, now with new eyes for them after the months she spent observing a variety of (to her) less familiar species.