Will our cosmic angst ever be relieved?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, life, extraterrestrial life, SETI

About eleven years ago I posted a review of David Brin's novel Existence. In it I mentioned two books that form the "bookends" to my thinking about exo-life: Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee (2000), and Vital Dust (1995) by Christian de Duve. I read both those books before I began this blog. It may be that The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos, by Jaime Green, is a fourth worthy player in this space.

Now that we know at least the existence of more than 5,500 exoplanets, plus more than 8,000 "candidates" that are being vetted, it is clear that planets outnumber stars.  A few hundred planets are in the "earthlike" range of size and mass and surface gravity; as of late July 2023 this Wikipedia page lists 63 "potentially habitable" objects in the "Earth to Super-Earth" size range, small enough to be "probably rocky". That is well over 1% of the known exoplanets, which implies that such planets number between 10 billion and 20 billion in our galaxy (accepting the extrapolations of scientists who publish about this). It is well to note that a rocky planet with 2.5 Earth's size would have 15.6 times Earth's volume and, if of the same density, 15.6 times its mass. The greater radius would mean, by the cube-square law, that the surface gravity would be 2.5 times that of Earth. It is unlikely that the density would be the same, so that's just a very rough starting point.

As the author points out in a late chapter, somewhat channeling Peter Ward, bacterial life (or something very like it) appeared on Earth within half a billion years after it was formed, but since there was a period of "molten crust" for 300-400 million years, it could have come into existence rather rapidly, on cosmic timescales. But then, it took another billion years for photosynthesis to emerge, and another billion or 1.5 billion years for the first eukaryotic (complex, nucleus-bearing) cells to be produced. So even with our whole planet for a chemical-evolutionary playground, it was apparently rather hard for the basics of complex life to arise. Once it did arise, the next period, called the "boring billion", was required for the evolution of multicellular creatures bigger than a poppy seed. So, is de Duve right, that these developments are inevitable, or are Ward and Brownlee right, that the several big steps in this progression are so hard and rare that we cannot logically claim that a sequence like this happened more than once?

To my statistical mind, it seems we need some way to determine the variance in those numbers, applied to billions of planets. For example, let us first suppose that the production of eukaryotic cells takes, on average, five billion years after photosynthesizing bacterial cells originate, with a standard deviation of half a billion years. In such a case, for it to take only 1.5 billion years is a 7-sigma outlier; it can only happen on one planet out of 390 billion. Thus, if there are, to be generous, about 20 billion "habitable" planets per large galaxy, there would only be eukaryotes that arose this "quickly" on one planet per 20 galaxies. Our chances of having a near neighbor are slim indeed! On the other hand, if 1.5 billion is closer to the average, and the standard deviation is half a billion years, then about half the "habitable" planets on which life originates can be expected to develop complex life in 2-4 billion years from the inception of life. The Milky Way is big, with a volume of about 30 billion cubic parsecs. Divide 30 billion by 10 billion: three cubic parsecs per planet, or about 100 cubic light-years. The radius of a sphere of this size is about 3 light years; double this to get 6 light-years from planet to planet. That points to a galaxy littered with inhabited planets. This is no improvement over the Drake equation, which is easy to manipulate to find any result. We still suffer from a dramatic lack of knowledge.

The book has six (longish) chapters, and the tone is wistful and lyrical rather than coldly analytical; more like Vital Dust than Rare Earth. I enjoyed it very much. The big questions, to which Ms Green returns again and again, are how we would recognize life on another planet, from a distance, and then if/when we meet "aliens", how we might communicate. At one point she muses on the problem we are facing to communicate with our descendants, across a gap of 10,000 years—about 350 generations—regarding the danger of radioactive wastes stored at Yucca Mountain or other repositories. Consider how English has changed in just 1,000 years. Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon, cannot be read nor heard intelligibly by anyone without learning it as a foreign language. Although it was a Germanic language, modern German speakers are equally befuddled. That was just 1,000 years ago. Middle English, or Chaucerian, of 500-600 years ago, is barely intelligible; many words we can recognize in print are pronounced differently now than they were then (for example, the "e" that ends so many words such as "made" or "file" was explicitly pronounced). Even the "English" of the King James Bible takes some getting used to, even though the latest edition of the KJB was produced in 1769; the "original" text of 1611 is very difficult for most of us to read. If we have such trouble with human language (and there are hundreds of "extinct" languages that still cannot be read by anyone), how will we ever learn a truly alien language, "spoken" by a creature that is not even as well related to us as an octopus?

Most science fiction stories about contact with ET's sidestep the problem by having the aliens figure out some of our languages before arriving, or by having telepathy, or they have a "universal translator" such as those on Star Trek. I've read one story that took a serious swipe at the problem: human astronauts find an abandoned spaceship, and one of them finds a chemistry handbook and locates the Periodic Table of the Elements. Right away that yields, not just the alien words for about 100 elements, but the symbols for the alien number system. A big leg up. How to go beyond that? It still won't be easy. Maybe an alien version of the CRC Handbook would help…

Nonetheless, I think the occurrence of life is somewhere in the middle, such that at least a few planets within 100 light years (31 parsecs) will be found to have complex life. Whether any of those planets will host technological species is more iffy, but I am hopeful. Life that gets any kind of start is going to diversify. The diversity of plants and animals is astonishing, and in the Bacterial/Archaean realm there may be 100 times as many species. I think that, as the Ian Malcolm character said in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way." (Picture from Mongabay)

And you thought you knew ice

 kw book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, ice, fads and fashions

In a canny plan quite the opposite of "carrying coals to Newcastle" (a coal mining district in England, for GenX and younger), Frederic Tudor carried ice to the tropics. Beginning in 1801, he persuaded first one of his brothers, and later another, to help him scope out Cuba and other locations at which to sell ice. As told in ICE: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, by Amy Brady, things went badly, time and time again, until the Tudor brothers had a brainstorm: Bring ice to saloons in Havana and show bartenders how to produce really cold (and really cool) cocktails. Can you imagine a warm Martini or Old-fashioned? At the time, nobody in Cuba could imagine anything else. That would soon change.

Americans in the New England colonies had been harvesting ice from ponds for a few generations, and ice houses could keep some of it frozen well through the summer. The last century or so of the Little Ice Age helped. Thoreau wrote of ice harvesters working on Walden Pond in 1846. A century earlier, George Washington's favorite dessert was ice cream, made from ice kept in the Mount Vernon ice house after being harvested nearby. One cannot harvest ice in Virginia any more; the Little Ice Age ended about the time President Washington died. It's still possible to harvest ice in Massachusetts, in colder winters.

By 1806 the alcohol-fueled revolution in the use of New England ice in warmer climes, from the Caribbean to New Orleans to the mid-Atlantic, had triggered the Ice Trade. In 14 illuminating chapters, ICE details the development of the Ice Trade through several incarnations. Mechanical refrigeration using compression and expansion of gases and gas-liquid-gas phase transitions was the subject of experiments from about 1755 to 1850, and the first commercial ice-making machines were sold in about 1865. Fast-forward another century, and the households of America were well on their way to having, if not always "a chicken in every pot", a "Frigidaire in every kitchen".

Today manufactured coldness is a requirement. Ice in our drinks. Ice to skate on. Ice in a cloth bag to soothe sore muscles and tendons. Snow machines on ski slopes for dry winters. Supercold coolers to transfer vaccines. Dry ice (-109°F or -78.5°C) to make vapor for parties, chill organs being transferred between hospitals, and suffocate rats in their nests. Liquid helium (-452°F or -269°C) for the superconducting magnets in MRI machines and giant "colliders" (we used to call them atom smashers).

When I was a child we called refrigerators "ice boxes", and in some parts of the country people still had ice boxes and regular visits from the iceman to deliver a 50- or 100-lb block of manufactured ice. The last time I saw an ice box in use was in the 1950's. Reading ICE was a nostalgic indulgence for me.

Something the book doesn't touch on, but a fun fact nonetheless: from time to time we hear of the "ice death of the Universe." The actual background temperature of the Universe is 2.7K (-270°C or -455°F), colder than liquid helium. However, "stuff" is spread out so thin that there are still billions of galaxies full of billions of stars that harbor temperatures of millions of degrees, and innumerable planets with temperatures ranging from a couple of hundred degrees below zero (but still hundreds of degrees warmer than 2.7K) up to thousands of degrees, where matter begins to break down into plasma. We are a long way from all of it chilling. But, as the Norse predicted, if physics is allowed to have its way for a few more trillion or quadrillion years, ice will win. Then Ragnarok, the victory of the Ice Giants, will finally occur.

Innovation can take its sweet time

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, culture, sociology, evolution, innovation

The cover of the book really catches the eye, being decorated with lovely shells of the Cuban land snail Polymita picta. Interestingly, these snails are never mentioned in the text. These golf-ball-sized snails are considered by many to be the most beautiful snails in the world.

For your delectation, here are some more, from one lot in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde. 

I happen to consider a different species the "most beautiful", and I'll show some examples below.

The term Sleeping Beauties is used by practitioners of scientometrics (measuring the effectiveness of scientific ideas), to describe articles or monographs that receive few or no citations by other scientists, for years or decades, until they suddenly become "popular", possibly receiving hundreds or thousands of citations in literature. A real "blockbuster" idea might then be cited, and even enter the popular press, for many years. One learns this rather late in the book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture by Andreas Wagner.

The thesis of the book is that innovations crop up all the time but are seldom "on time". They may need to arise a few times before factors in the environment permit them to spread. The first example in the book is grass. Grass evolved about 70 million years ago, but widespread grasslands did not appear until about 25 million years ago in South America and Asia, and 10-15 million years ago in North America. From that time, grasses radiated into thousands of species, from cm-high Alpine grasses to 20-meter-high timber bamboo. Although grasses had several innovations that made them more efficient—growth from the base rather than the tip; drought and heat resistance; SiO2 granules in the tissues—these did not favor them when Earth was mostly moist and tropical. Only in certain isolated areas did the environment favor grasses over other plants. Then the environment changed, and so did the kind of plant cover found on the major continents. The evolution of C4 photosynthesis, which makes plants that use it well adapted to CO2 levels below 1000 ppm, and a change of climate to warmer and drier across large swathes of continents, favored grasses even more over shrubs and trees. Today, even though many decry the rising CO2 level—it is more than 400 ppm now—trees and shrubs are struggling and grow more slowly than they did while dinosaurs were around, while grasses do quite well.

Similar cases are found throughout the natural world. About one-third of the book explains what has happened in evolutionary, cellular, and molecular terms. Basically, every biological entity undergoes many small DNA mutations in various cells yearly. Some are damaging and cause the cell to die. Some affect how a cell grows and it becomes cancerous, which can cause the entire animal to die a few weeks or months later. Most seem to be neutral, in that they don't change the protein a gene makes or the way a regulatory sequence works. Finally, some improve the lot of that cell; as it divides, whatever it is doing (making digestive enzymes, making muscle move, releasing a hormone) might be done a bit better so that daughter cells attain that advantage. In a multicellular animal or plant (a metazoan) a mutation must arise in a germ cell, one that will become an egg or sperm, for the trait to enter the next generation. 

The author argues that small mutations such as SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) occur with great frequency. Some mutations can affect larger things. A SNP in just the right place can disable a regulatory sequence, so that a key protein is no longer made. Sometimes an error in DNA copying causes a whole gene to be duplicated. Then if you have copy A and copy B of that gene, and copy B is the next one to incur a SNP or other mutation that changes its function (usually decreasing it), the organism can get along fine as long as copy A works well. Then further changes to copy B might occur until it is sufficiently modified that it might take on another function. However, let us be clear that this doesn't happen all in one organism, but over several generations. In prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea), where the entire organism is a single cell, it is easier to see how this can lead to rapid evolution. In eukaryotes (protozoa and all metazoa, including almost everything big enough to see), a mutation, beneficial or not, must pass through the bottleneck of reproduction, occurring in a germ cell, or it will not affect the next generation. I think this is not made clear enough in the text. The author deals almost exclusively with single-celled organisms.

I'll step aside from the book's content for a moment. The statistics of metazoan reproduction are such a steep hill for new mutations to climb that it would seem that their evolution must almost come to a complete halt. But there is a "third sex" that transmits genetic information horizontally between organisms, including across species boundaries: viruses, retroviruses in particular. Although some retroviruses (such as HIV) cause disease, others do not. Let's call one of these apparently harmless viruses Friendly Human Virus, or FHV. You'd never notice an infection by FHV, it is so low-level. For a period of time the infected cells would produce FHV particles, and in the process they would incorporate the FHV genome into the cell's DNA. Not all infected cells die. About 8% of human DNA consists of hundreds of "endogenous retroviruses", stored more-or-less intact in our "noncoding DNA" (it used to be called "junk DNA"). Some of the FHV particles your body sheds will include copies of some of your own DNA that the new virus particles picked up during their manufacture, which is a rather sloppy process. When someone is infected with FHV that came from you, cells in that person's body get some of your DNA incorporated into their genomes. The "Viral 8%" is part of a "library" of potentially useful genes that may get activated by other mutations later on. Contrast this 8% with the amount of your own DNA that is actually used to make proteins (2%) and regulatory sequences including ribozymes (another 2%).

There is a lot of terminology in the chapters that form the "meat" of the author's argument. It's OK, it's all well described and defined. By the middle of the book a reader can understand how certain kinds of innovation in evolutionary traits occur over and over, until other factors in the environment one change or another something favorable, something that will spread in a population.

The second half of the book discusses similar concepts as they relate to culture. Culture is not only a human thing, although until a generation or two ago, everyone thought only humans had culture. Consider certain small British birds with bills that can puncture the heavy foil lid of a milk bottle. For many years the milkman left milk bottles on people's porches once or twice weekly. At some point, a bird managed to cut its way into a milk bottle to get a beak-full of milk. Birds observe one another, and when another bird saw the feat, it tried it. Soon, the practice spread throughout the British Isles. Milk is now dispensed in a different way, which thwarts the birds. This is an example that seems to have spread rapidly, but the details are interesting. A little records-gathering has shown that the practice was confined to a small area for a few years, and then spread rapidly after that delay. I haven't learned if it happened more than once, but the author of Beauties posits that every time an innovation is researched in detail, it is found to have occurred several or many times, but only the most recent is usually remembered. He discusses the use of citrus fruits to combat scurvy: it was discovered several times during a period of two centuries before finally "taking hold" in the British Navy, to the point that British sailors are still called Limeys.

In general (but see below), the book is a great pleasure to read. There is a lot to think about, a lot to learn. Evolution has more going on than I'd have thought.

As promised, here is an example of what I consider the most beautiful species of snail, the Splendid Jewel Snail, Liguus fasciatus splendidus. The next picture has a few examples of other subspecies of jewel snails.

These are found primarily in Florida, on the trees and shrubs of "hammocks" (the local pronunciation of "hummocks", elevated, shrubby places in the Everglades).

I have a quibble. On page 181 the author discusses writing systems that were studied in detail by Mark Changizi and colleagues, including Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese and Cherokee. They sorted the characters in a script according to the number of strokes. For example, "O" and "I" have one stroke (when written without serifs), while "M" and "W" have four. Analyzed this way, there are great similarities among writing systems, and he states, "Most characters can be written with three strokes, some with one or two, but none has more than four, regardless of the writing system." I think Dr. Wagner missed something. This is ridiculous if one includes the logographic scripts, primarily Chinese, Japanese and Hangul (Korean). The image at right is scanned from the spine of my Japanese wife's "big dictionary". It reads "Complete Kanji Dictionary Ocean", where "ocean" is an emphatic modifier of "complete"; the corpus deals with more than 80,000 logographs. From top down, the number of strokes are 17, 13, 13, and 10. If one wishes to separately treat the portions that don't touch, dividing a single logogram into its root and "the rest", many of those still have more than four strokes each. Hangul characters usually have fewer strokes than Chinese, but seldom fewer than 5 or 6. I dug around among other languages of Asia. A "swirly" script like Tamil may have letters with few strokes in the formal sense, but some single strokes swirl around so much they may as well be three or four, to which another stroke or two are added. I don't know how one even counts strokes in Sanskrit! And then there's classical Mayan. The characters are very complex, and quite variable depending on the writer. Dozens of strokes are typical. A key concept when looking at a Mayan stela: the carved glyphs are intended to appear a though they were written with a brush in a paper codex (of which few survive).  Probably 95% of the world's scripts follow the "4-or-less" tendency, but it is not universal.

Secondly, as to the structure of the book. The endnotes occupy 38 pages, and more than half the space is devoted to long notes that could have been incorporated into the main body of text, which is 240 pages. Such asides take off from the main text in a way that it's often necessary to go back to the original page and re-read what came before the superscript, to get the thread of the discussion. Bad practice. Dear authors, don't put "asides" in endnotes, just keep them in the main text or leave them out. If something is worth saying, that's where to say it. Reserve endnotes for citations or very (very!) brief elucidations.

Police work from the inside

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, police, stories

"If I find myself getting to be such a hard ass, I'll have to find another line of work." Several of the policemen who tell their stories in Walk the Blue Line: They Walk the Line Between Life and Death, by James Patterson, Matt Eversmann, and Chris Mooney, expressed such a feeling.

Imagine that your work brings you daily into scenes of tragedy, sadness, mayhem and death. A man, about whom you know almost nothing, dying in front of you after your partner shot him…or maybe you shot him; he reminds you of a brother or a cousin who may be having his own problems, and you make a silent prayer that he doesn't stray this far. The child, battered almost to death, on whom you performed CPR while the ambulance was coming; you thank God she isn't your own little daughter or granddaughter. A gunfight broke out at a street party, and you're there just in time to begin binding up the wounded—it's a miracle nobody died this time—while the other partygoers have their phones out recording everything and posting it to Instagram; are all today's kids this callous? you think.

How long would it take for you to develop PTSD? Several of the officers record their own struggles with emotional shutdown, and how, in past years, to seek help was a career-killer. But times have changed, thank God. Many police departments (but not all, sadly) have instituted programs of counseling and emotional therapy to help members cope with just the overpowering emotional load they experience. One of the roughly 50 stories notes that three times as many police officers commit suicide as are killed by criminals. In smaller departments, the rate is 2-3 times as high as in larger departments. (By the way, murders of police in most years is about 40 nationwide. In 2020, 264 were killed. And the Leftist media called the riots "mostly peaceful"!)

One consequence of the recent, enormous social shift in (some people's) attitude toward police are reflected in many officers' stories in this book. More and more officers are leaving police work because of daily contact with extremely hateful people, whom they have been sent to help. One response has been more community policing, which emphasizes relationships between the policemen and policewomen and the people where they live and work. Larger numbers of police live in the communities they serve. They interact with those around them, both in and out of uniform.

Several officers also reported the positive consequences of treating everyone kindly, with respect. A prostitute turns her life around, gets a degree and a career. A drug dealer gets out of "the business" and visits the cop who talked with him kindly, to thank him. While there isn't much chance to treat a maniac kindly when he is rushing at you with a knife or is shooting at you, much more frequently people need to be questioned, and an officer's attitude makes all the difference in the outcome. One officer, a third-generation policeman, tries to live his father's instruction, to be "tough on crime but kind to people."

There does appear to be a sea change in the recent generation or two. One story is of the Columbine shooting, now 24 years in the past. It was new, it was unique (at the time!). One shocking thing I learned was the level of violence the shooters had prepared for, not just with guns and ammunition, but with dozens, perhaps more than 100, small bombs they were carrying! The shooters intended to be a 2-man terrorist army, a weapon of mass destruction all their own.

It's really funny, how many people, for at least a couple of years, have been shouting, "Defund the police!" But now when they get in trouble they shout, "Help me!!" I remember "Off the Pigs!" of almost 60 years ago giving way to demands for more police protection as the Hippies of "the 60's" got older, got married, and had children. But they didn't take it far enough; Columbine and the many mass shootings that followed show the tragedy of the "gun-free zone" doctrine. A gun-free zone is a target, a fat, juicy, undefended target.

In my early 20's I was pulled over for speeding. After the young officer filled out the ticket, he gave it to me, with tears in his eyes, and said, "Take care, would you?" I realized that he probably knew someone who had recently died in a car crash. It helped me a lot.

Our son's father-in-law is a retired policeman. He's one of the nicest guys I know. He's also the one you want on hand for Thanksgiving dinner: he knows five ways to cook a turkey, and can do them all at once.

Police are people, too.

Hell is where you find it

 kw: book reviews, humor, memoirs, commentary

Zach Zimmerman is a comedian, a stand-up comic. He expects one day to be slayin' 'em in Hell. Maybe.

His memoir Is it Hot in Here? Or am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth? is my wildcard selection this time. As depicted in this little book, his father is the kind of preacher that makes the Devil smile. More on that later.

Zach was brought up in an ostensibly Evangelical household; his father was an associate pastor, and he was subjected to fire-and-brimstone preaching not just in church but at the dinner table almost daily. Zach writes that he prayed a "sinner's prayer" daily, or more than daily, with no discernible result. He is gay, and became an atheist, having concluded that Hell is much less fearful if you stop believing in it. It makes sense. The only Jesus he ever heard about is one who is just itching to plunge sinners, especially gays, into hellfire.

His essays are humorous, and also informative to someone like me, as straight as they come. Oh, I understand the mechanics of gay sex. Such details are glossed over; rather, these essays reveal the complex emotions of a chronically insecure homosexual, who finds coming out to other gays almost as painful as coming out to his parents. Near the end of the book, it seems he found a partial rapprochement with his mother. His father? Not mentioned, so probably not.

OK, some commentary. Unhappy Christians are an Atheist's best argument for atheism. The several thousand denominations, and Denominationalism itself, are Satan's masterpiece. The overweening focus on homosexuality in American Christianity is just one of the many distractions provided in the Devil's Department Store. Another Department is religion itself. I am enormously grateful to God for letting me see, very early in my Christian life, that He desires not religion, but a relationship. About half the things taught in the Bible are instructions in how to relate to The Almighty. The "sinner's prayer" isn't found there, although it isn't bad in itself, and many people do come to Christ after praying in that way. It is the belief in Christ, not belief in the prayer, that saves.

Fire-and-brimstone preaching easily leads to the belief that Jesus is the Devil's disciple. The real focus of the preaching by Jesus and His apostles was redemption from Hell, by becoming a child of God. As Paul wrote to Timothy, God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth." (1Tim 2:4) The first word Jesus spoke in His preaching was, "Repent." It is easier to come to Christ if you know who He really is. Far too many false evangelists preach a non-Biblical Christ. Zach is one of their victims.

In Leviticus 18, verses 6-23 outline numerous sexual sins, most of them incestuous. Homosexual sex is found in verse 22. Child sacrifice and bestiality are also condemned in nearby verses. Gay sex is just one of a dozen or more varieties of adultery. The Seventh Commandment, "You shall not commit adultery," covers them all.

Who knows whether, on at least one of the many occasions that Zach prayed the "sinner's prayer", God accepted it? He had no subjective feeling about it, but it may have laid a foundation for later work by the Holy Spirit to bring Zach into a genuine relationship with God. My own experience of receiving Christ encompassed several events over at least five years. "Where there is life there is hope." (Eccl 9:4)

The good news is, the sharks are coming back

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fish, sharks, memoirs

This mug shot of a white shark was recorded with a pole camera. It is used to identify the shark when it is seen again. Look carefully at the boundary between the white underside and the gray back of the shark, particularly the wiggly part just forward of the pectoral fin. Also, the head has numerous scars, many of them from the claws of seals the shark has eaten. All these markings are distinctive, and the older a shark is, the more unique features it accumulates.

Oceanographer Greg Skomal and his colleagues have compiled "ID pictures" for a few hundred sharks in their efforts to produce a census of sorts of the occurrence of white sharks in the waters off Massachusetts and New England. They have also tagged a couple of hundred of them with acoustic tags, which regularly "ping" a series of buoys off Cape Cod and the Massachusetts when the animals enter the area, or with recording tags that track their movements. The work is described in Dr. Skomal's memoir/documentary book Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark.

Here we see him on the "pulpit" of a shark-tagging boat, getting a pole camera ready, as the boat approaches a few sharks that were spotted from an airplane, including the one above. I clipped these two images from one of the many videos of Dr. Skomal's work as a shark researcher.

He gained his passion for studying sharks when he saw Jaws as a youngster. During his college years he expected one day to move to California, where a white shark "hot spot" is found near the Farallon Islands. Once he completed undergraduate studies in Massachusetts in 1983, however, white sharks were occasionally being seen in the area, and his relationship with the oceanographers was such that he was reluctant to leave. He eventually stayed, first spending a few years on Martha's Vineyard and later landside, and now heads shark research in the whole area.

He came along just in time. White sharks had been almost absent for many years, mostly because their preferred prey, seals, had been hunted nearly to extinction because of state bounties. Saltwater fishing tournaments, which formerly treated all sharks as "trash fish" and "vermin", began expanding their purview, and then specialized "monster tournaments" began, targeting sharks, and the great white shark in particular. But for years, white sharks were quite rare compared to blue sharks and mako sharks and a few others.

With the end of the bounty, the seals began to return. The rocky areas around Cape Cod are prime seal nursery habitat and haulout areas. White sharks followed. Now there are hundreds, although other shark species number in the thousands. Tagging that targeted white sharks in particular began as a definitely side endeavor. The book details the growth of this "tail" until it began to "wag the dog". The changeover occupied the late 1980's and 1990's. 

Here we see Dr. Skomal on the pulpit, from a better vantage point (the airplane), just after he has placed a recording tag behind the dorsal fin of a shark that appears to be nine feet long, so its age may be twelve years.

White sharks live about seventy years, similar to our longevity, and they begin to procreate by age twenty, also like us. However, they do not care for the young after they are born. Instead, a female shark has a double uterus, into which several eggs are placed. The first baby shark to hatch in each side gradually eats the other eggs, so the total gestation time is about twice as long as humans', while the babies grow to a size of 4-5 feet. Once the babies are born they are on their own.

As you may imagine, the greatly increasing presence of these large predators—as large as twenty feet—in coastal waters near extremely popular swimming beaches has many people upset. However, the efforts of Dr. Skomal and many other oceanographers to educate the public, and to try to allay the unrealistic fears engendered by the Jaws films, brought many people to realize that these animals are necessary for a healthy ecosystem. White sharks in the Atlantic were listed as Vulnerable in 1997 and have been federally protected since then; Pacific white sharks were listed a few years earlier.

Several encounters people have had with white sharks in waters off Massachusetts and New England are detailed. A few of them were fatal. A few others were severe, and the victims spent months or years recovering. Some were bad scares that left tooth marks on boogie boards or kayaks, for example. Understandably, fatal shark attacks cause great consternation in coastal towns and their residents. Dr. Skomal has had to walk a fine line between defending the sharks and educating the people among whom he lives, to avoid charges of "caring more about science than people's lives".

In spite of much greater numbers of these sharks in New England's waters since 1990 or so, these animals are elusive and their behavior is not as well known as we would like. People who like to kayak out to be among the seals are basically walking in front of a loaded shotgun with a hair trigger. To my way of thinking, that's a way to earn a Darwin Award. Quite a number of "shark mitigation" methods have been discussed over the years. Based on experiences in Australia and South Africa, it is known that none of them is 100% effective. We in the West have gotten used to being the apex predator for a few generations, while in other parts of the world, there are still tigers or hippos, etc., that take a few lives yearly (many more than sharks, actually). 

Now America's well-heeled "elites" find themselves sharing the water with a real apex predator, one we cannot drive out or completely destroy. Knowing their habits is the best way to avoid getting in their crosshairs. Humans aren't their preferred prey, seals are. But a human swimming or paddling looks enough like an injured or naïve seal that a shark might take an exploratory bite to see "what is that thing?". Such a bite, from a mouth two feet wide full of 3-inch, serrated teeth, can well be fatal. And the shark was "just checking". The more research, the more learning, the better!

This informative and engaging book can educate us all. I hope it gets very wide circulation.

Automated western art, ABCD test

 kw: experiments, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, art, generated art, images, comparisons

Several months ago I had the idea to try more prompts that differed only in the style requested. I ran four sessions with the prompt

Painting of a western landscape with a dramatic sky in the style of [Artist]

The four artists I chose were Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran (I was familiar with both), John F Kensett, and R Brownell McGrew (not strictly western, but prolific landscape artists). The initial squares I chose from what Dall-E2 generated for each artist are these:

I outpainted them to these sizes: 3200x1984 (first 2), 1880x1984, and 2944x1920. Resized for composing together, and reduced for this montage, here they are:

The artists are as stated above, beginning at the upper left and proceeding clockwise. With a little study you can see where the original square would be in each image. I cropped large, not quite maximal, portions of each image to a ratio of 16:9, with these results:

For three of these I emphasized the sky, and for the one in Kensett style I emphasized the desert floor, while still leaving plenty of sky.

I hunted through public images by each of these artists so I could show to what extent Dall-E2 emulated him. I searched for paintings that might bear some slight resemblance to the generated ones. This montage is of quite reduced versions of a painting by each artist, clockwise from top right:

1. Oregon Trail by Bierstadt
2. Green River, Wyoming by Moran
3. Mount Chocorua by Kensett
4. Winter Morning by McGrew

Mt. Chocorua is in Hew Hampshire; JF Kensett is considered a Hudson Valley School painter.

It seems that Dall-E2 can produce distinct styles, but not quite distinctive styles-by-a-particular-artist. Given the millions of high quality images of both photos of wonderful scenery and classic art available online, I don't really need to generate good looking landscapes. This was a fun project, but not something I intend to to a great amount. True (human) artists have little to fear from generated art.

In the future we can expect tools like Dall-E2 to get better and better, and I expect within a year or two the ability to generate highly detailed, 4K images in a single Generate (maybe for a higher price per credit), which can then be edited, including with pasted-in bits one could upload during the process. Will they have a "human touch"?

Why would we want paintings by a nonhuman entity to have a "human touch"? It's the nonhuman touch that interests me. The "Alien City" images I produced earlier are intended to be "not human". Even when I asked for a picture "in the style of Chesley Bonestell" I didn't expect slavish imitation, and I was right about that! The image that resulted is the "least human" of the four.