Mathematics and wokeness don't mix

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, education, polemics

When education becomes indoctrination, genuine learning vanishes. I had high hopes for this book when I saw it: Is Math Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics' Deepest Truths by Eugenia Cheng. As I read, I soon found my thinking sidetracked by hints of lunacy. Then on page 33 the text swerved into a sudden diatribe against white supremacy. Barely a dozen pages later the author, writing of logical reasoning and logical arguments, takes on the "straw man fallacy" (which she retitles the "straw person fallacy") by decrying sundry arguments against the notion of "white privilege". Hmm.

I looked at the profile photo and thought a while. Dr. Cheng is a British-born Chinese, rather young-looking (she's not yet 50, so a generation younger than I am). I lived Jim Crow before she was born; I know genuine white supremacy and white privilege. They hardly exist any more. The constant barrage of accusations regarding these things began during the Obama Presidential campaign in 2007, and continues to this day (it continues despite the fact that this Black activist was elected twice to the Presidency…or maybe because it's him behind the scenes egging it on). Then, along with many other false allegations, they were braided together into "wokeness", which is a slew of anti-white, anti-tradition, anti-family, anti-liberty trends that culminated in "cancel culture."

Muffling my discomfort, I continued reading. In the next chapter a similar tirade erupted, and I had had enough, not even a quarter of the way though the book. Either this math wizard is utterly suborned by leftism, or she's afraid if she doesn't kowtow to woke dictates she'll also get canceled. Either way, she fits the prompt that generated this image: "Defeated female wizard"

Here is my definition of WOKE: Wicked, Obfuscating, Kleptocratic Extortioners. And while we are at it, two of the left's favorite acronyms also belong on the chopping block: DEI = Devilish, Elitist Inversion of truth; and ESG is a total inversion, Environmental mismanagement + Social repression + utter misGovernance.

To be quite clear: Every element of wokeness is evil. The recent election is in part a mandate by a clear majority of the electorate to de-wokify America. Let's laugh the Leftocrats off the stage!!

When I decide not to finish reading a book it is my usual practice to not mention it; just to set it aside and read the next book and review it here. This time I have to pan it. The writing is mediocre but tolerable, the puppyish enthusiasm for topics hardly anyone has heard of is cute but distracting, and while the author's wish to calm the fears of mathophobes is laudable, her methods are off-putting. Far too many times, on rather simple subjects, she urges us to "think really hard about" something or other. Talks about tone deaf! There are many better books about math for those who fear math. This book is most likely to turn math-fearing folks into math-haters.

Is life everywhere or nearly nowhere?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, exobiology, astrobiology, seti, exoplanets, origins of life

The title of a recent book by Nathalie A. Cabrol is astonishing: The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life. Why astonishing? First, let us consider the limits of what is known.

• In our solar system, until recently, only three planets have been considered habitable at least part of the time since the solar system was formed about 4.6 billion years ago (hereafter Ga): Venus, Earth, and Mars. Both Venus and Mars are considered "almost certainly dead", but hints of continued habitability are discovered from time to time.
• Many "ice moons", such as three of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; Enceladus, a moon of Saturn; and Oberon, a moon of Uranus—all appear to have large subsurface oceans of liquid water, or actually brine, which could sustain life.
• Beyond the solar system, thousands of exoplanets have now been detected. A few hundred of these are at an appropriate distance from their host stars to be habitable, at least at present, if not for the long term.
• Most of the exoplanets so far detected and confirmed are less than 5,000 light years from Earth. A handful (so far) are at distances ranging up to 33,000 light years.

Further interesting information is found in the List of Exoplanet Extremes. 

What do these facts imply? As much as we might like to speculate about life (almost certainly bacterial or some analog thereof) on various solar system bodies, the confirmed occurrence of life in the solar system is found only on Earth. N=1.

Outside the solar system, we have partially probed a volume of space totaling about 80 billion cubic light years (considering the thickness of the galactic disk to be 1,000 light years). That's not bad; it is 1% of the volume of the Milky Way galaxy. However our galaxy is one of at least 200 billion, and probably more than a trillion, galaxies in the visible universe. We don't know how much universe lies beyond our visible horizon. Again, in all that space, known life: N=1.

From a numerical standpoint, the data we have relate to between a quintillionth and a quadrillionth of the known universe. That makes the book's title an astonishingly extreme overstatement.

On the other hand: The author, the director of the Carl Sagan center at the SETI institute, presents the principles by which life is likely to have arisen, and the evidence from all around the universe that the right chemistry to kick-start life exist nearly everywhere. This makes the book's title almost banally obvious! Isn't that great?

Rather than survey all of the author's points, I'll focus on a few of interest, that may be little known. Firstly, note that word "Origins" in the book's subtitle. Life may have started on Earth more than once. It may have arisen, been snuffed out, and arisen again, perhaps several times. Earlier incidences of life may not have been totally snuffed out, and still exist alongside "us".

Firstly, consider that the "standard DNA coding table" doesn't apply everywhere. For example, there are variations in the encoding of certain DNA codons (3-base groups) to amino acids (or to Stop) that are found in mitochondria. Various classes of eukaryotic organisms have different mitochondria, as revealed by their coding tables. Other microscopic critters, not all of them bacteria, have alternate coding tables. So far, 30 alternative coding tables are known, with the "standard table" bringing the total to 31. See List of Genetic Codes for more details.

Let's step back and consider the situation. There are 64 possible DNA codons. All known life on Earth uses 20 amino acids (one bacterial genus may use a 21st amino acid; I can't find out much information about it). There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, more possible amino acids. The 64-to-20 conversion involves numerous duplicate codes, which makes for a robust system. Many single-codon variations (micromutations, which are common), make no change in the protein being produced. How many possible coding tables are there? I am good at many kinds of math, but not the details of "permutations and combinations". The best I can figure, the number is at least 48x10³³ (a 35-digit number), but it could actually be an 84-digit number. Either way, it is a lot!

Is it safe to assume that life elsewhere in the universe also uses DNA and RNA and ribosome decoding to produce proteins from some 20 amino acids? Not really. It is not even safe to assume faraway life requires water. Dr. Cabrol mentions "life as we don't know it" from time to time. She considers places like the Saturnian moon Titan, where water ice is a rock and the primary liquid is methane. What kind of life could arise there? Water (our solvent!) is polar, but methane is nonpolar; perhaps the abundance of ammonia, which is polar, could make methane plus ammonia an appropriate solvent for generating life-as-we-don't-know-it.

I am reminded of the Lensman series of space opera novels by E.E. "Doc" Smith from 1948 to 1954. It concerns intergalactic warfare between water/oxygen-based life and methane/chlorine-based life. I am also reminded of what the character Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way." I am further reminded of Vital Dust by Christian deDuve, who calls life "inevitable" and "a cosmic imperative." There could be a lot of different kinds of life in the universe, and it's unlikely that we could eat any of it, nor that it could eat us!

Dr. Cabrol points out that planets seem to outnumber stars. Perhaps many stars have no planets, but many more stars have at least one planet, and usually more than one. What proportion of these are rocky (not gaseous like Jupiter, which may have no solid surface) and in the habitable zone of their host stars? Is it a percent or so? Exoplanet data so far indicates between two and three percent. A further constraint is that, as a Main Sequence star heats up during its existence, the shift of the habitable zone shouldn't move beyond the planet in less than 5 billion years or so. This is just based on the fact that life on Earth required about 4.5 billion years to produce us. We are still left with several billion possible planets in our galaxy alone that have the potential to produce life that can become "civilized" and sufficiently technological to send signals via radio or laser or something that we could possibly detect if we are close enough. "Close enough" keeps getting farther away as our own technology improves.

Let's consider that 5 billion year figure. Our Sun is a star of type G2, a little larger than average. Something like 75%-80% of all stars are smaller and lighter. The lighter a star is, the longer it burns hydrogen on the Main Sequence. During that period, it gradually gets hotter and brighter as helium accumulates in the core. I am interested in the larger half of the K series of stars. Their mass is between 0.75 and 0.9 solar masses, and they burn hydrogen for between 17 and 35 billion years, compared to the Sun's expected hydrogen burning life of about 10 billion years. Stars lighter than 0.75 solar mass have even longer "lifetimes," but they are more likely to produce large flares, which can damage or extinguish life from the surfaces of any planets in their habitable zones. So I favor focusing efforts such as SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) on stars in the range K5 to G2. Even a G3 star probably would have begun to burn us off its surface by now, as our Sun is expected to do starting about a billion years from now.

The author also considers the Drake Equation, which is a thought experiment that helps us consider the likelihood or prevalence of life in our galaxy (or the universe). It consists of a bunch of factors that are multiplied together to produce N, a possible quantity of detectable civilizations "out there". An important factor is, "How long does civilization Z emit a signal that we could detect, if we are close enough and have sufficient technological sensitivity?" Consider Earth. The first radio transmission that reached beyond "local" was in December 1901. Just about 124 years ago. 

At present, there are a few dozen "clear channel" AM radio stations that emit 50,000 watt signals 24/7, a larger number of FM radio stations of similar or even greater power, and many TV stations, mostly below 10,000 watts. However, more and more of our TV watching is moving to cable (including fiber optics), and digital signals are more efficient, so stations that do broadcast are using lower power. I have an in-attic antenna that presently receives more than 60 digital TV stations, so I don't use (expensive!) cable. Radio is beginning to go digital also. I predict that Earth will be largely "radio silent" before the 200th anniversary of Marconi's transatlantic radio transmission.

If an exo-civilization is typically detectable for only 100-200 years, even without extincting themselves, that cuts a big hole in all our speculations using the Drake equation. I'll have to think more about this…

The last chapter deals at length with our own danger of extincting ourselves. The author considers pollution, particularly CO₂ buildup plus methane buildup, an existential threat; she states clearly that our window of opportunity for ensuring long-term survival is small, a matter of decades at most. I agree in part, but my expectation is not so dire. I won't encroach on her thesis, though.

I will close this part with a hearty recommendation of the book. It is full of great ideas and great information, and very well written. A pleasure!

------------------------------------

If you aren't interested in errata, you can stop here. I ran across a few items, equally the fault of the author and the copy editor, that need to be corrected.

Tidal Locking is mentioned just a few times. It is not clearly explained, and I found this on page 97: "Callisto is tidally locked to Jupiter, orbiting around it in the same amount of time it takes Jupiter to rotate." Not so. Callisto takes 17 days to revolve about Jupiter, while Jupiter takes 10 hours to rotate on its axis. Callisto's rotation period is 17 days, so it always presents the same hemisphere to Jupiter. This is the same in principle as our Moon, which both rotates and revolves in 27.5 days (sidereal periods), so we always see the same hemisphere. In the quoted sentence, the second instance of "Jupiter" should be "Callisto". A second instance where the numbers are correct is on page 141: Pluto and its moon Charon are mutually tidal locked, always facing each other the same way, both rotating and revolving in 153 days.

An egregious typo, minor misspelling of a homonym on page 142: "pour" rather than "pore". To study a document is to pore over it, not "pour."

Information Mastery, a la Carl Sagan, is a proposed scale of technological advancement. It is mentioned on page 215, where it is stated that Level A represents 106 "unique bits of information" and Level Z represents 1,031 bits. This is a formatting error, compounded by the insertion of the comma. The two numbers ought to be 10⁶, or one million, and 10³¹, or ten million trillion trillion (a 32-digit number). I suspect a dumb copy-paste removed the exponent formatting. Anyway, the concept is fascinating.

Let us consider where we are as a civilization on Sagan's scale. The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica contains about half a million topics in 40 million words. I suspect that Sagan would consider a "unique bit of information" to represent about a paragraph. These half million topics then are each stated in an average of 80 words, which comes to a smallish paragraph. Worldwide, there are several printed encyclopedias, but they overlap. Thousands, nay, millions of articles and books and journals are published yearly. Then there's Wikipedia, which has (today) 62 million pages, and about 1/8 of that is in 6.9 million formal articles. All told, that puts us in the realm of a Level C or Level D civilization.

There are a couple other typos, but they have less import. I'll leave it at that.

SF is as SF does

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

I use the term "SF" in the title rather than "SciFi" because Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie includes three categories: science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

The opening novelette and title story, "Lake of Souls" sits on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy, as does Ms Leckie. The story is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, of a crablike creature without a name, who embarks on a quest to find the fabled Lake of Souls, where it may obtain a soul and a name. Until obtaining soul and name, these creatures are called by the generic term Spawn.  This Spawn's quest differs from the usual process, where marks that appear on a being's head upon one's final molt can be read as a name. I don't use "he" or "she" for Spawn because the author studiously avoids genderizing it. The science fiction element enters with a human on the planet, the last survivor of a mass murder on his survey ship. He is on a quest of his own, to find the murderer and the communication device he brought to the planet with him. He and his shipmates had been calling Spawn's fellows "lobster dogs", and having met Spawn, he realizes that these beings are sentient, which he must communicate with "home base", and with others because of the political implications of his discovery. I'll leave it at that; I am perilously close to spoiling too much. I should mention in passing that the author is very skilled at imagining and portraying sundry sorts of non-Earthly beings.

Consider a feudal society, right here on Earth. The lords and ladies lived in splendor in their castles and manor houses, cared for by servants and surrounded by serfs who lived in penury and often misery. Aristocrats lived much longer than serfs, and soldiers typically had notoriously short lives because of the aristocratic hobby of warfare. Move that scenario to a planet on which the aristocrats are called the Justified, and live unlimited lives, though they can die, but never of "natural causes". Everyone else, the short-lived, serve the Justified. I should also mention that they are lionlike, and the Justified become many times stronger than the short-lived. This scenario plays out in "The Justified". An episode in mid-story indicates that short-lived can be promoted to Justified. This has implications for a future situation, back here on Earth again, if aging is defeated but that indefinite life extension is too costly for most to afford. In this and in nearly all of Ms Leckie's stories females are dominant.

These stories are from the first third of the book, where we find all the stories one could term "science fiction". The other two sections are taken from the author's world-building series, termed Imperial Reach and The Raven Tower. Both are based on pantheism: people interact with gods of many "sizes", some that are like feudal lords over a domain, and others that have more narrow realms of influence. Like the Justified discussed above, these gods aren't necessarily eternal, but how a god is done away with isn't made clear. They gain strength from being prayed to and sacrificed to, and the most common sacrifice is an ounce or so of one's own blood, spilled on a makeshift altar.

From all of this I conclude that the author is fascinated (obsessed?) with feudalism, with highly structured societies, and with extreme feminism. Also that she would like to be a god. Then again, who wouldn't?

Trees as old as history

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, trees, ancient trees

Let me start with an old, old tree: Methuselah, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) that began to grow in about 2820 BC and is (as I write) about 4,844 years old. This picture shows it and one that is probably nearly as old, on their mountainside in eastern Nevada. If I properly read the captions of the many pictures of these to trees, Methuselah is on the left. Although it looks dead, it is not. A ribbon of living tissue winds up the trunk and sprouts needles each spring.

Of nearly 75,000 known tree species, only a few typically reach ages greater than a thousand years, and just a few surpass 2,500 years. Bristlecone Pines and a few other species that can approach or exceed 5,000 years are scarce.

At the other end of the scale, the shortest-lived tree species I know of is a type of mimosa, the Persian Silk Tree, colloquially called the Balloon Tree for its flowers like rounded tufts of pink hair. They live no more than thirty years. We had four of these, two in the front yard and two in the back, in Oklahoma. They were mature, about 25 feet tall, when we moved in. Six years later all four died within a month of each other. Where we live now we have two pin oak trees (black oak). I understand that they typically live between 200 and 500 years. I know when they were planted as saplings by the former owner; they are 63 years old. Both are nearly 200 feet tall, and have probably stopped growing upward. At breast height, their trunks are more than three feet in diameter.

In early August, 2020 a tropical storm passed through our area, including northern Delaware. Powerful winds knocked over many trees, most notably a "champion tree" at Hagley Museum, a (roughly) 300-year-old Osage Orange. In 1997 I took this picture of my parents, my wife and our son at the tree. Just for its size it is a true champion!

We became acquainted with Osage Orange trees in Oklahoma. They bear woody, resiny green seed balls the size of a baseball or softball, that we called "hedge apples." With their piney smell, the fruits are sometimes used as air fresheners. Certain animals eat the seeds, which requires really strong teeth.

Retired Professor Anthony D. Fredericks traveled the US from end to end to visit ten ancient trees, the oldest of their kinds in this country. Methuselah was one of the first. He tells us the trees' stories and his enjoyment of them in his book In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey among Ancient Trees. The book is illustrated by Rebecca Noelle Purvis and Phyllis Disher Fredericks. I suspect they are his daughter and wife.

Each section and each chapter begins with a full-page illustration like this one, which presents the Bennett Juniper, which is a Sierra Juniper (Juniperus grandis) living in east-central California. This juniper is about 3,000 years old.

Other trees that can reach 3,000 or more years include the two species of redwood, the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens, which means "always vital") of northern California and southern Oregon, and the Giant Sequoia (Sequoia giganteum) of central California.

None of these is the oldest of North American trees, however. Two "clonal" trees seem to have begun to grow right after the icecap melted a little after 12,000 BC. One is Pando, an aspen in Utah that covers 106 acres. The name Pando means "I spread," and it has quite a spread. To us it appears to be a huge grove of tens of thousands of trees, but all these "trees", some 50+ feet tall and 100-150 years old, are actually branches, growing off a single root system. It is hard to pin down the true age of a clone like Pando. The "sidebars" on its age are 8,000 - 12,000 years.

A second ancient clone is the Hurunga Oak of southern California, a Palmer's Oak (Quercus palmeri) that is probably quite close to 13,000 years old. Rather than the tens of thousands of branches that Pando has, the Hurunga Oak has about seventy branches spread over a root system that is under some 2,130 square feet (198 sq m) of soil.

Trees of great age grow slowly. Except for the sequoias. When young, a Coast Redwood can grow several feet yearly. As they approach heights exceeding 300 ft (90 m), they slow down and begin to spread out. The tallest one, named Hyperion, is 380 feet (116 m). Giant Redwood trees sometimes surpass 300 feet, though rarely, but they grow a thicker trunk. For a tree such as Methuselah, which is less than twenty feet tall, for most of its life it has grown no more than five inches per century.

The author begins each chapter with a semi-fictional vignette of human life somewhere on earth at the time the tree sprouted. Fortunately, these are short (not my favorite feature). It is bracing to consider trees that began to grow before the invention or writing, that have survived storms and floods and hurricanes, and now have to cope with us, the greedy primates that are making everything on this planet into commodities. 

Many of the trees presented in this book are in secret locations. When something becomes popular, it can be "loved to death". Fifty years ago my wife and I took our honeymoon in Sequoia National Park. We saw then how the forest floor around many of the huge trees was being trampled, stripping the soil cover from some of the roots. I wonder how much such damage contributed to the loss of several percent of the trees during wildfires in the 2010's and 2020's?

In a closing chapter we find information about the Old-Growth Forest Network. One significant goal of theirs is to find and designate, and arrange protection for, a patch of old-growth forest in every county in the U.S. that contains forests, about 2/3 of them. There are at present 175 designated old-growth forests, and we can find those near us at www.oldgrowthforest.net. On their searchable map I find nine such forests within an hour's drive of my home. I see day trips in our future!

If you like trees you'll love this book. If you aren't that tuned in to them, perhaps reading it will "tune you up."

Canadian spider scanning

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I looked in the stats, and what did I see?
Canadian spiders, comin' after me!

There was a big bump in usage late yesterday and earlier today. Here's the 24-hour picture:

Based on weekly stats, there's another bump with a few hundred views the prior afternoon. Here's the world view:

When spidering is not active, this blog gets 50-100 views daily. If we set aside Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong, only 22 views are left, so perhaps 30 or so of the Asian views are legitimate. That seems to be common in recent months. I wonder if the spider just switched the VPN to Canada this time around?

Amusing ... sort of.

Insects – making friends of foes

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, entomology, surveys

Books about insects usually focus either on their beauty and diversity, or on problems and pests. Metamorphosis: How Insects are Changing Our World, by Erica McAlister with Adiran Washbourne, introduces us to the mysteries of metamorphosis before focusing on the usefulness of certain insects. (Image produced using Dall-E3, after lengthy negotiations and creative prompting. The text was added afterward.)

More than 80% of insect species undergo complete metamorphosis, in which the life stages are Egg, Larva, Pupa, and Adult. The rest have incomplete metamorphosis, in which instead of a larva (such as a caterpillar or grub or maggot), there is usually a nymph that looks more and more like the adult as it grows, and there is no pupa stage. A major chapter of the book outlines the history of discovery of the stages of metamorphosis. Note that many creatures other than insects have metamorphosis, sometimes with many more than four stages.

Do you get itchy just thinking about fleas? So do I. The way they store energy to be suddenly released in an astounding jump was studied, which revealed resilin, the most elastic protein known. It can release very nearly 100% of the stored energy, very fast. It required numerous advances in photographic technology to develop camera systems that could take images fast enough to record an event that takes just one or two thousandths of a second, so the takeoff mechanism could be studied properly. Scientists also needed to learn how to induce a flea to jump on demand, in the presence of large, noisy pieces of equipment and large, looming humans! Synthetic resilin and resilin-like polypeptides are revolutionizing the elastomer industry.

Where would the genetics revolution be without the lowly fruit fly? The species used for decades now to winkle out the laws of inheritance, Drosophila melanogaster, actually a vinegar fly, has four gigantic chromosomes, rather than the dozens of more tightly-wrapped ones found in other critters. These flies also have the virtue of short lives and tiny size, so you can keep hundreds in a small space and feed them bananas, and do multi-generation studies in months rather than decades.

I'll skip forward to the last chapter, about cockroaches. (Ugh! you say...me, too.) They have a distributed nervous system that (this is my take) seems to act like a meta-brain, which makes a roach quite a bit smarter than other insects of comparable size. They also react faster; in my experience (when I lived in Houston), while I can usually swat a fly, I had no better than 50% success swatting roaches.

And what might we say of blowfly maggots (bigger Ugh from most), which help forensic detectives estimate how long ago a murder victim died; or soldier flies, which don't carry disease and whose maggots are super-nutritious and very fast-growing, so that they are called "ultimate upcyclers" as they turn food waste into food (I don't know about you, but I'd cook them first); or metallic colors on blue butterflies and green beetles (and many others) that have led to the development of color-shifting coatings for autos and dazzling paints that won't fade; or the unique hydrophobic-hydrophilic array on Namibian beetles that can harvest water from misty air?

The usefulness of insects has not been surveyed before in the way I find here. This book is way beyond just "fascinating"!

Slaying the trash monster

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, trash, garbage, environmentalism, recycling, plastics

In 2017 and 2019 there were controversial proposals in northern Delaware to raise the permitted height of the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington from about 150 feet to 190 and then 225 feet. This all dropped out of the news after a while. A recent search reveals that the present permitted height is 225 feet and the operator is seeking a variance to allow a new permitted height of 325 feet. At the same time, new compaction technology is being studied, that involved dropping weights of between six and thirty tons as much as 75 feet onto existing trash piles to increase their density and reduce the height of current landfills.

With this all sitting in the back of my mind, I ran across a book published last year, Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman's Trashy Journey to Zero Waste, by Eve O. Schaub. In prior years Mrs. Schaub has performed year-long experiments, with her family's often reluctant approval, that resulted in Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter. She has promised her family that this is the last such experiment! Having taken on the Trash Monster, and finding it rather harder to slay than the prior ones, she will need to set her sights on less onerous quests in the future.

At the beginning of the experiment, she reports that her family—she and her husband and two girls, teen and post-teen—had been filling a 96-gallon trash container every week. If "filling" is literally true, that comes to 4,992 gallons. At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, it is 667 cubic feet, which is just over 8x8x10 feet, or one-twelfth of the volume of a 1,000 square-foot ranch house. Her family also has a 96-gallon recycling container, but I didn't get a good handle on how frequently it fills. Suffice it to say that total waste had been well beyond 5,000 gallons yearly, probably in the 1,000-cubic-foot range. How hard is it to reduce the landfilled portion to zero, and also getting recycling "right"? That is, it's good to recycle if the people taking away our "recycling" actually recycle it. (Spoiler: they mostly don't.)

Let me contrast that with my family, which until fifteen years ago included my wife and me and our college-age son. Now it is just the two of us. We have a few waste baskets around the house and a box for recyclables, which mostly holds cardboard, paper, and occasional steel or aluminum cans. If we were to hold our trash container until we filled it, we would be putting it out about every six weeks. We fill a plastic grocery bag or two weekly, which sit forlornly in the bottom of the bin on trash pickup day. The trash collectors typically reach in and snag out the bags rather than roll the whole bin over to upend into their truck. When our son was at home, we sometimes filled a third bag. By the way, we mostly kept all those single-use grocery bags, folded and stuffed into a bag. We reuse them for garbage. Now that we can't obtain them any more, our supply is slowly depleting. It will last another few years. As for the recycling bin, we put it out every second week, typically less than half full.

I suspect that the author's family and my family are close to the opposite ends of a spectrum of trash disposal for middle-class families in America. Back to the Wilmington landfill. It is notable in the area because the operator accepts trash from outside Delaware. Geographically and demographically, Wilmington is a suburb or Philadelphia. I suspect overflowing landfills in Philly provide a significant portion of the total trash.

This is the most recent Google Earth satellite photo of Cherry Island. By noodling around with my mouse, I find that the maximum height of the main dumping area, at lower right, is 150 feet. The similarly-sized area to its left has a height of 40-50 feet, as does the smaller area to the upper right. I don't know the filling strategy.

Wilmington is a smallish city, with about 80,000 residents, and the rest of the northeastern quarter of New Castle County has about twice that population. I don't know if Newark, Delaware, home of University of Delaware, uses the same landfill. If so, that portion of the county has a similar total population, making population of the "upper half" of the county about 400,00, all using that landfill. There is an area "south of the canal" focused on Middletown, that pushes total county population to almost 600,000, or more than half the state total. This historical montage of the Cherry Island area is instructive:

The years are 2010, 2005, and 1992 (it is what is available). Thirty years ago, only the whitish triangle in the middle of the photo was being actively landfilled. The county had planned for the future, and over time, we see how the future has arrived. Today's future includes possible growth of the main landfill to 325 feet, nearly the height of Iron Hill, at 328 feet the second-highest point in Delaware! The highest point in the state is a survey marker near Ebright Road as it passes north into Pennsylvania, 448 ft.

What has the author and her family discovered? It appears that to really not send anything to the landfill, in the face of limited recycling options, one must become a hoarder! So much for the Year of No Clutter!! I think it is the ancillary matters related to recycling that form the findings of greatest value. First and foremost: Plastic just isn't recyclable. Polyethylene (PE) can be "downcycled", that is, turned into products of lower value than their original use, such as making picnic benches out of recycled milk cartons. That takes care of "triangle" numbers #2 and #4, for high-density PE and low-density PE. All the other numbers can't be recycled, no matter what various industry websites say.

Can they be burned? Sort of. At present, waste incineration is sometimes used to generate heat to drive turbines and make electricity. However, burning plastics generates lots of toxic chemicals, and the worst of these come in two groups, the furans and the dioxins. In order:

Until petroleum-based polymers came along, the primary source of furans in the atmosphere was forest fires. They are produced by pyrolysis of cellulose, fortunately in rather low amounts. Typical methods of plastic incineration have a very high yield of furans, and they are trouble! Asthma- and cancer-causing trouble. Where is the research in how to incinerate plastic in a way that reduces furan production?

Dioxins contain chlorine, and are worse than furans. Forest fires also produce dioxins, but in very low amounts, due to the small amounts of chlorine in wood. PVC and PCB and other chlorine-containing plastics produce huge amounts of dioxins when burned. There should probably be a ban on burning them, but then what would we do with the waste? At present these are usually sent to landfills.

Looking back to a motto of Earth Day: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first word is Reduce. Don't buy so many plastics in the first place, particularly the chlorine-containing ones. When "organic" produce or meat is wrapped in plastic, much of its "benefit" is nullified. Public safety is touted as the reason for wrapping (and over-wrapping and even triple-wrapping) food in plastic. A century ago that wasn't an option. The options were oilcloth for certain products, and cloth or paper for the rest. People learned how to use these to safely transport stuff, or they got food poisoning as a learning experience.

For some waste materials, reusing and recycling are possible. But for plastics in particular, these are hard to impossible. Mrs. Schaub advocates legislation coupled with education to make a difference. Both are hard. But so is encroaching illness and early death.

She is a born optimist. Still, as fascinating and well written as the book is, it's a bit of a downer. I'm glad to already be at the more frugal end of the spectrum. But there are still habits it would be worthwhile for me to change. I hope you'll read this book, and perhaps learn some useful strategies and habits.

---------------------------

I want to correct a single erratum. On the first page we find a list of "Ten Statistics to be Horrified By". Number 6 states:

In its history, eight billion metric tons of plastic have been produced. That's the mass equivalent of 100 Moons.

Gigantic oops! The Moon's mass is 1/81st the mass of the Earth. That means that plastics already outweigh the entire Earth by 23%. Hardly! Eight billion is an 8 followed by nine zeroes. The statement implies that the Moon's mass is 80 million metric tons. The Moon, in short tons, weighs close to 8 followed by 19 zeroes. That's 80 billion billion short tons, or 72 billion billion metric tons. A better comparison would have been that 8 billion metric tons is about equal to 80,000 fully-laden aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford class.

Still Life with Eels

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, fisheries, eels, poaching

When I was a child we visited tide pools in southern California, where my brothers and I would collect not only shells but a few living starfish, which we salted and dried for display. Sometimes we saw people using a putty knife to pry abalones off the rocks, which they would take home and cook to eat. I remember my mother telling us, "Don't take too many things. Leave some for others. If everyone takes these things, one day there will be none left." At the time I couldn't imagine that.

That was more than sixty years ago. About twenty years later the tide pools bore signs forbidding collecting. A few years after that they were closed; visiting was prohibited. Too much had been taken, and the sea life needed to recover. To date, the pools haven't been re-opened.

Now, living near the east coast, primarily the shores of New Jersey and Delaware, I find precious few seashells when we go to the ocean. Not being a fisherman, I don't notice the prevalence of fish, but others tell me that catching your limit takes longer than it used to. In certain seasons we do see fish in the rivers, but one thing I have never seen: eels. They migrate at night, and only in certain seasons. Anyway, if I am out at night, it is to do astronomy, not to look for animals. I am told that, during the seasons of migration, there are a great many eels, an uncountable multitude. Yet, fisheries reports indicate that what we see today is a tiny fraction of the numbers seen just one or two generations ago.

So, there are still eels. After reading Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell, I wonder, how close are we to exterminating them? The title of this image is the title of this review: Still Life with Eels. For the time being.

The fashion for eating eels comes and goes. Right now unagi (the Japanese word for Eel, and the currently popular name for eels-for-eating, particularly in sushi) is wildly popular. So popular that around half the unagi eaten around the world, particularly in Japan and America, originated with poached elvers.

Why do I say "originated with"? Eels have an astounding life cycle, more like a butterfly than a vertebrate. In early works of natural history, several different species were named, but they were all eventually found to be stages in the life of the eel.

This diagram, from ResearchGate, is worth considering in detail:

Begin at upper right, with spawning. This has never been seen, so the drawing is speculative. For American and European eels, spawning takes place in the Sargasso Sea. The eel larva is at first a tiny transparent thing a lot like a flatworm, called a leptocephalus, which means "small head". Nobody knows what they eat. Once they get a little bigger they become rounder but remain transparent, so they are called "glass eels". In this form they migrate from somewhere in the Sargasso Sea to the mouth of a river, a distance of 2,000 to 4,000 miles. Near the end of this journey they transform into elvers and begin to migrate upstream. Whether they go fully into freshwater or remain in an estuarine environment, they transform again into yellow eels. After a few years, for males, or up to thirty years for females, they become adults as silver eels and begin to migrate downstream. From this time they do not eat until they reach the Sargasso Sea to spawn. After spawning, the emaciated adults presumably die and sink to the ocean floor, or get snarfed up by carnivorous fish on the way down.

American and European eels haven't been successfully induced to spawn in captivity. Hormone treatments have rarely made a female produce eggs, and the eggs can be fertilized by suitably treated males, but the larvae don't live more than a matter of hours or a few days. However, the Chinese have perfected methods for raising river-caught elvers to adult size. This has led to a still-growing trade in elvers. The price has followed a roller-coaster as the market has shifted over the decades. The price of elvers is in the thousands of dollars per pound range at present. Eel dealers carefully, but very quickly!, send them to the Chinese eel farms. The adult eels are re-imported to America or Europe.

Elver prices are so high that poaching abounds. The Fish & Wildlife Service in America have been able to make a little dent in the trade, but are nowhere near stopping it. This is complicated by treaties with Native American tribes, which assert their rights over the fisheries in their territories. However, in Maine in particular, where the book is focused, the quantity of elvers fished by non-Natives, under licensed quotas, is many times greater than the Native American fishery. The fact remains that the biomass of American eels is probably less than 1/10th what it was thirty or forty years ago, and much, much less than it was in pre-Colonial times. Like nearly every fish stock worldwide, only a few percent remains. Humans love to eat fish, and we are loving them to extinction.

Ms Shell writes of the actions and attitudes of many players and stakeholders in this drama, including an American who is usually just known as "Sara", who has succeeded in setting up an eel farm in America, where many had failed in the past. Also including some of the eel experts who happen to also be leading poachers…or they were, prior to being prosecuted and in some cases, jailed. There are still too many prominent folks who say there are more than enough eels. To anyone who isn't profiting from the trade in elvers and eels, this is clearly not so. The book ends in ambiguity and hope.

Before closing, I need to correct a misapprehension by the author about sushi. Like many Americans, she thinks of sushi as raw fish. That is actually sashimi. Sushi, broadly speaking, is "rice plus seaweed plus lots of other things, served cold." Some of those "other things" include a few kinds of sashimi. At a sashimi restaurant they don't usually serve sushi, just a few kinds of fish with rice on the side and other side ingredients. Even there, eel is not served raw. Very few kinds of fish are served raw, and shellfish such as shrimp, and also octopus and squid, are always cooked. 

At a sushi restaurant, the raw fish is usually one of several species of tuna, and in American sushi restaurants salmon may also be served raw. I haven't seen salmon served raw in Japan (but I haven't been there for several years, so maybe that has changed). The reason for this care is parasites. Tuna and other predatory fish may have parasitic worms in them, but they are large enough for the sashimi chef to see and to remove. Many kinds of fish have smaller parasites that are harder, or economically impossible, to remove (it's usually done with a hook similar to a crochet hook). Still, the process isn't always perfect. At an Asian buffet restaurant in America that includes sushi, I never take the pieces with raw fish; I don't want to need to be dewormed! Finally, the kinds of sushi called "rolls" usually include vegetables and strips of scrambled eggs, and often contain no fish. A "California roll" has eggs, carrots, avocado, and mushrooms. No fish. So, while unagi sushi is very popular, not many know that the eel is always cooked. It isn't safe to eat raw.

Greenland was once green

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geoscience, ice science, ice drilling, ice coring, greenland, ice caps, climate change

This is the rig
That drilled the ice
Down into the soil
That proved the land
Was free of ice,
Less than a million years ago.

The climate then
Was like today's
But CO₂
Was half so much.
It shows that it
Could happen again:
It's really up to us.

When the Ice is Gone: What the Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future by Paul Bierman concludes with a prognosis for human civilization: Get ready for tremendous upheavals, no matter what we do; we can easily make things worse, or with effort mitigate the pain but not eliminate it.

Dr. Bierman has worked in Greenland and around the world. He brings us the history of Greenland, and particularly the US/Danish military efforts to establish DEW-Line-extension radar stations and under-ice military encampments during the Cold War.

Don't know what is/was the Distant Early Warning Line? I grew up knowing about it, plus the two Lines closer in, that were intended to detect ballistic missiles coming over the polar regions from Russia. We also had periodic tests of the radio warning system that a DEW Line alert would trigger. We would then have 15 or so minutes to prepare for nuclear hell to rain down. We practiced in school, to duck under our desks and hold our legs ("and kiss your ass goodbye," we said under our breaths).

Ice is hard to live on or in. A light touch is necessary, so the Inuit and other northern peoples manage it. A military is not known for having a light touch. Ice at any temperature above -40° (either C or F; that's the crossover temperature) slowly flows under pressure. The warmer it is, the faster it flows. The tunnels and other under-ice structures needed to be maintained by crews of ice trimmers because the walls close in at least several inches yearly, and the floor heaves, etc., etc. The Army put a lot of effort and buckets of money into studying the properties of Greenland ice (and ice in other places, though they are not the focus of the book). One effort was deep drilling.

It took a few decades to learn how to drill into the ice and extract a core. Drilling makes friction which causes heating, so there needs to be a "drill fluid" that is at least as dense as ice, to keep the drill hole from closing around the drill shaft and capturing the drill string and bit. If that happens all you can do is move over and start a new hole, with new equipment. Various drill fluids were used. The most effective were based on diesel oil with various additives to make it more dense and less corrosive to the equipment. To this day, if you go to one of the ice core storage facilities, such as the one in Copenhagen, the cores stink of diesel oil and other noxious materials.

Camp Century, situated atop almost a mile of ice, housed the first drill rig, shown above, to extract ice cores, not only to the base of the ice, but tens of feet into the sediment beneath, which at the time was a type of permafrost called "permacrete": just as hard to drill as concrete, but with ice binding everything together. The story is told in loving detail, and it was a truly heroic effort. The hole was completed in early July 1966.

Here a mystery intervenes. For several decades, a dog-in-the-manger scientist stingily parceled out bits of ice core to scientists he favored, and the below-the-ice material was ignored. Finally that material was discovered among some odds-and-ends sent to an ice laboratory in Copenhagen, and in 2019 the author and a large collaboration of scientific teams were able to get portions to study. One finding in particular shook them up.

One of the researchers working with Dr. Bierman noticed dark bits that didn't look like mineral grains. Under a microscope, they were seen to be plant matter. Gathering more was easy. Melt a few grams of permacrete, centrifuge, and wait. Little dark bits will float to the top. Botanists were able to identify some of the species represented. It proved that the land had once been ice free, not nearly as long ago as everyone thought. A lot more work finally demonstrated that the ice-free period ended a bit less than half a million years ago. Other measurements, such as isotope ratios from the water in the permacrete, showed that the average temperature during the ice-free time was similar to what it is today on the coast of Greenland at that latitude, but that atmospheric CO₂ was about 280 ppm; it is 420 ppm now. Camp Century is more than 100 miles inland of the present edge of the ice.

There are multitudes of other findings, but this is the smoking gun. The ice cap of Greenland is more fragile than we thought, and at least 2/3 of it melted away for some period before snow and ice accumulated again. If all of the ice in Greenland were to melt, that alone would add 24 feet, or about 7.5 m, to the depth of the ocean. Two-thirds of that would result in 16 feet, or 5 m.

The last chapter of the book describes some consequences of the sea rising by 5 m. The timeline is instructive, though. That sea level rise will take at least a couple of decades. A lot depends on politics and business, as the author acknowledges. Here's my take on that.

Nearly all of the leaders in Washington are at one extreme or the other. Genuine Democrats and Republicans rarely rise to national leadership. An often-misquoted Bible verse begins, "The love of money is a root of all evils…" (1 Tim 6:10). Note that it says "a root" not "the root." There are other roots. A close second root is the lust for power and control. Whether far Right or far Left, the Totalitarians of both political parties want to exert control. Over us. Mitigating the climate crisis is not in the interest of either of them. The situation itself, and exaggerating its direness, is their weapon against us. The more moderate national leaders are utterly swamped by the control-mongers. In the world, the top five carbon emitters are:

1. China, 34% of total, 9.24 Ton/y/person
2. USA, 12% of total, 13.8 Ton/y/person
3. India, 7.6% of total, 2.07 Ton/y/person
4. Russia, 5.3% of total, 14.5 Ton/y/person
5. Japan, 2.4% of total, 7.54 Ton/y/person

Those five add up to 61.3%. If China could "catch down" with Japan on a per person basis, its percentage would go from 34% to just under 28% of the current total, or 29.6% of a total amount that is 93.7% of today's total. That difference would be nearly half of total US emission. China is the elephant in the room.

I wanted to go into much more detail, but I decided this is not where that belongs. I would add only this: our only bridge to a future without fossil fuels, or nearly so, is nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion is too far in the future to be of any help. As it happens, I've recently learned that China is building experimental Thorium reactors, perhaps hoping to replace Uranium. Apparently Thorium "burning" produces less (or less dangerous?) radioactive waste. Similar research is starting up here also. I need to do more research, but it is a hopeful sign.

All these things have long lead times. Part of the problem is regulatory. With control freaks in charge of both sides of Congress, I am not sure they will be any help. I hate to end this review on a downer, but at present, I see a long tunnel ahead before any light might appear.

This book is required reading for everyone, particularly voters.

Re-visiting the Jabberwock

 kw: ai experiments, artificial intelligence, generated art, poems, illustrations, photo essays

A little more than two years ago I used Dall-E2 to illustrate the poem "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. Now that there are four high quality generative art sites that I use, I experimented with bringing just the Jabberwock itself up to date. In nearly all cases the programs relied on dragon imagery.

This is a wide-view redraw by Dall-E3 of one result of my second prompt. It's a little less sinister than the results of the first prompt. Here is how it went:

Dall-E3: "The Jabberwock"

All are fierce dragons in near-silhouette. All but one are shown against the Moon.

Dall-E3: "The Jabberwock as a pastel painting"

The word "pastel" has evoked a less sinister atmosphere. We find flowers and butterflies and in one case the dragon is actually smiling. Now that Dall-E3 can recast a square image into one with a wider aspect ratio I had it re-do the second image, on upper right. Note that the wide image at the top of the post has elements from all four images. By experimentation I found that, while re-formatting each image produces a different result, repeating the re-format step on a particular square image yields exactly the same wider image as the prior re-formatting on that image. The re-formatting offerings are square and 4:3, but the resulting wide format images are actually 1792x1024, with a ratio of 1.75:1 or 7:4. That's close enough to 16:9 (HD) that it takes just a little cropping to produce a 16:9 image (1792x1008), which can be put through Upscayl to make it big enough to use for an HD wallpaper.

I went on to try Gemini (formerly Bard), which now uses Imagen 3 to make images, and only one at a time. The 3-panel pasteup here is from three prompts:

• An image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky
• An image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting
• A full-body image of the Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting

Adding "pastel" definitely produces a less fierce result. The third item is the least dragonlike. Unfortunately for much of what I do, one cannot outpaint with Gemini, and asking for "wide format" or "HD ratio" gets ignored.. Maybe such options are available with Gemini Plus, but I haven't yet signed up for that.

I looked next to Leonardo AI, which is the most recent tool I've used. It has many options and variations. Here I'll present four sets of results. Leo produces images in a horizontal string. I rearranged these as 2x2 rectangular arrays. The original images are 1368x768 pixels, not quite a 16:9 ratio (though it's labeled as such in the menu), but 171:96.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting", Portrait, Cinematic

The "eye" in each image is a flag that indicates it is public. One needs a paid subscription to make private images. Though these are all dragonoid, some of them have no wings. This prompt without "pastel painting" produced much darker and fiercer results.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Concept Art, Stylistic Illustration

These were the most colorful results of all my experiments with Leo. The "Concept Art" setting pushes such limits. Though these have fierce expressions, they are rather cute.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Graphic Design, 3D

These are quite dark and sinister, but not as dark as some results.

Leonardo: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky as a pastel painting", Graphic Design, 3D

The addition of "pastel" has lightened things up a lot, both in visual and emotional tone. It's interesting to note that these critters all have multiple tails. I count lavender as the least threatening hue.

Finally, I turned to Playground, which was once the most flexible of the tools. Since they shut down Canvas mode in mid-September, it has been harder to use all the filters and other options. The free version is slow, and sometimes times out. Playground also presents a horizontal string of four images, which I rearranged as a 2x2 matrix. I set aspect ratio to 4:3 mode, which one would expect to yield 1.333:1 images; the actual images are 1216x832, about 1.46:1 or 19:13. For the two Playground mode where this was possible I used the Watercolor filter, considering it similar to saying "pastel painting". Playground has three image engines available.

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Stable Diffusion XL, Watercolor filter

The background architecture in items 1 and 4 adds interest. SDXL is now considered a "traditional" or even "retro" engine. I also had the option to set a "faithfulness to prompt" setting, and used 4 ("more free").

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Playground v2.5, Watercolor filter

As I've frequently observed, PG25 is edgier and typically a bit darker.

Playground: "The Jabberwock from the poem Jabberwocky", Playground v3.0, no filter

Wow! What a difference from all the others. PG30 is apparently more attuned to "poem". It even tried to write one (second image), though the character strings are illegible. The third image looks like it could be a bookplate. PG30 is now the most colorful and creative engine Playground has to offer; it was introduced earlier this year.

I must say a word about limits and conditions in the free versions I use.

• Dall-E3 lets you run 15 prompts daily, and each prompt yields four images. There appears to be no charge for re-formatting an image.
• Gemini has no explicit limit, but when I asked, it told me that sending many image requests in rapid sequence could slow things down.
• Leonardo AI gives you 150 points to use in a day. However, that doesn't mean 150 images. There are about ten (the number occasionally varies) Presets. Two of them "charge" 10 points per prompt, and in the free version, you always get four images per prompt. One of them is 24 points (on a few occasions I saw it was 104 points). The rest are 14 points. So it is possible to generate fifteen 10-pointers, or ten 14-pointers plus one 10-pointer, or six 24-pointers (with 6 unusable points) per day. A "day" resets to the time you created your account, which is 8PM for me. You can outpaint and inpaint with Leonardo, for variable numbers of points per action.
• Playground originally let me generate 150 images daily, up to four at a time. More recently the limit has been 50, and at present I don't see an indication of how many images I have left in a session.

Paying for a subscription to Playground or Leonardo AI opens up greatly expanded limits, and added functionality. I haven't tried all the combinations of either of these programs, but one day I may pick one of them to subscribe to. I have lots else going on in my life, so I don't see much need to do so at the moment.

An interplanetary thriller

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, moon, mars, mysteries

The Oxygen Farmer by Colin Holmes is an upgrade from the Space Opera subgenre of science fiction. It is set in space, mostly on or near the Moon, and there is plenty of opera, of the dysfunctional-family kind. The novel is a thrilling mystery that I can't say much about without being a spoiler. I'll confine myself to some of the ideas that interested me. 

This image is the fruit of a long negotiation with LeonardoAI. It's intended to evoke generic "space opera".

The setting is in late 2077, plus about a year; things happen fast in scifi spacetime. The first time I saw children using cell phones (flip phones in the late 1990's) I remarked, "Give it another generation or so, and they'll install a phone in the bone behind the ear of everyone, that is biologically powered and voice activated." The year 2077 is closer to two generations future, and everyone wears a "wristy", a souped up smart watch. It is used for "everything", the way smart phones/watches are used today in China and much of Europe…the US has some catching up to do. If you ask Ray Kurzweil, he would say that such a device will be long out of date by 2077.

There's an interesting dichotomy of thought. The protagonist/hero, Mil, (he really does some heroic stuff) was born 1/1/2000, so he's pushing eighty. Living and working on the Moon for half his life already, he thinks of himself as superannuated, too old to know better than to keep working. Yet the norm on Earth is to live to around the age of 140, and while it isn't stated, there's the implication that retirement before age 100 is unusual.

Chemical rockets are still used, but seem to be more efficient, shortening trips between Earth and Moon, and soon enough, Mars. Someone remarks that visiting the Moon is getting too much like visiting Cleveland; considering it's roughly a full day of travel, that would be starting from Melbourne, perhaps.

The super-rich guy behind a lot of what goes on is named Amon Neff. He's apparently the first trillionaire; the author trusts us to recognize that monetary amounts can be thought of in 2024 terms, even though inflation in the coming 53 years is likely to make today's trillion into 5-10 trillion (or much more) in the currency of 2077. I found it interesting that Neff's age in 2077 places his birth year near that of a modern near-trillionaire with two 4-letter names. But "our" super-rich guy isn't much like what Neff turns out to be.

Space and radiation medicine has apparently advanced a lot. Mil, even after a long lifetime of more-than-ordinary radiation exposure, survives an event that doses him with 4 Grays. A Gray is a unit of acute radiation absorbed, and for reference, 5 Grays leads to death within two weeks about half the time…for an initially healthy person. When a fella already has one foot and three toes in the grave, it takes a lot to keep his ticker ticking.

I like the concept of oxygen farming. The infrastructure needed to make practical use of such a resource is well thought out. The electrochemistry, and solar energy harvesting to run it all, are presented sketchily at best, which makes sense because they aren't on the plotline, but are stagecraft.

The author surrounds his characters with lots of equipment in various stages of wearing out, usually for dramatic effect. Set aside the Moon as the environment, and it is a lot like the life of  ranchers I know, who excel at keeping old trucks and tractors working decades past the expiration of their warranties.

The book's a fun read.

Had a good chat with your houseplant today?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, botany, research, plant consciousness, communication, signaling, plant movement, plant intelligence

In the human realm, "talking to the animals" like Dr. Doolittle is fictional. In the plant realm, it may be commonplace. What constitutes "communication"? There is more philosophy than science wrapped up in any attempt to answer that question. Even more so for the words "consciousness" and "intelligence". We may not have definitive answers in the next few decades, and perhaps we never will. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, author Zoë Schlanger doesn't provide the answers, though some of those she interviewed offered nascent attempts at doing so.

The eleven chapters of Light Eaters delve into several strains of research that are on the verge of redefining what a "plant" really is and re-settling our understanding of the rôles plants play in the biosphere. As we find from numerous lines of research, plants have several routes of plant-to-plant signaling: chemical, electrical, acoustic, and possibly bacterio-genetic. Plants discriminate. They are found to send differing signals to siblings versus non-siblings of the same species; plants of one species can also "eavesdrop" on signals of another species. Furthermore, plants send signals intended for animal species! An example of the latter is the plants that emit a pheromone that attracts a certain species of parasitic wasp when a caterpillar that the wasp parasitizes begins chewing on the plant's leaves. It's rather like a youngster who gets attacked and calls on his older brother for help, but in this case the "older brother" is a different species. Plants getting chewed on also emit other volatile chemicals that alert nearby plants, which respond by altering the chemistry of their leaves to be distasteful or even toxic to the caterpillar.

These are examples of chemical signaling. Other stressors such as drought result in plants making tiny clicking noises as low-pressure bubbles collapse; it is similar to the popping knuckles most people engage in. It's hard for me to determine what kind of research showed other plants responding to these barely audible sounds, but Chapter 5, "An Ear to the Ground" presents the evidence. 

What about electrical signals? Within a plant, it has been found that cutting a leaf initiates a wave of electrical activity that sweeps through the plant. These images of a small plant leaf, taken just before a scissor cut, then one second after, and then seven more seconds later. The plant had been grown from seed containing engineered genes that cause the calcium channels (every cell has them) to trigger Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) when they emit or pass an electrical signal. The electrochemical signal moves as a wave through the whole plant. These images were clipped from this video. If the video doesn't work (they can be ephemeral), search for "gfp plant signaling". This is just one of several.

As the narrator in the video explains, the signal moves through the whole plant in about a minute along the veins, and spreads from the veins throughout all the plant's tissues at a slower rate.

This got me thinking. We know that while an electrical signal in a metallic wire is very fast, roughly the speed of light, the electrochemical signals in animal nerves are much slower. I had the neural conduction speed measured in my arm one time, after an injury. It was 60 m/s, which is normal. The fastest neural conduction speed in mammals is about twice this, and some nerves, where speed is less critical, are as slow as the range 2-5 m/s. Plants don't have nerves; at least none that we can recognize. But the veins seem to have a similar function, albeit slower, in the range of about 1 mm/s. That is between 2,000 and 120,000 times slower than animal neurons.

Put that together with a statement later in the book. The author had a hint of an idea (one I was toying with as I read): What if we think of the entire plant as a brain? She asked one scientist, who said, "I think you're right. I just don't talk about it." Let's speculate a bit. If you get jabbed in the leg with a pin, you'll react within about a quarter of a second. In the little plant shown in the video, which is about 10 cm across, the signal "I've been cut!" reaches the whole plant in less than two minutes. The "reaction" of the plant is to begin to synthesize noxious chemicals in the leaves, which takes a few hours. From this we can extract a couple of ratios:

1. We can infer the signaling time between your leg and brain as about 1/30 second. If signaling through the plant took 100 seconds, the ratio is 3,000:1.
2. Your physical flinch and "Ouch!" begin after about 1/4 second, while chemical synthesis in the plant gets underway in an hour (3,600 sec), for a ratio of 14,400:1.

If, then, the whole plant is, or contains, a distributed brain, it runs several thousand times more slowly than an animal brain. This is in accord with the rate that twigs grow on many woody plants, compared with the rate of animal motions. Animals move at about "the speed of gravity", by which I mean that rapid animal motions, such as swatting at a fly, happen at speeds similar to that of an object dropped a meter or so. Time-lapse videos of plants either growing or "doing" various things, such as the "reaching" of bean tendrils for something to cling to, show their motions to be hundreds to thousands of times slower than animal motions. It seems plausible that, if plants "think", they do so correspondingly slowly. While we cannot consider plants to have a nervous system, perhaps a term such as "signal conduction system" or "signal transduction system" can be used.

Do they think? Plant "intelligence" has been a fiercely contentious issue for decades, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. Focusing on just three things: speed of motion, speed of communication, and speed of reaction, I (and, I think, Ms Schlanger) consider plants to be doing most things animals do, but on a time scale around 10,000 times slower. If we learn to talk to plants, and to hearken and understand what they are saying, we'll need enormous patience. Perhaps a translating SI (simulated intelligence) application can craft a signal at a rate the plant can accept, patiently receive its reply, and signal a human (who is doing something else in the meantime, because it could be hours) to come "read" the response. Even if the human then requires several minutes to decide what to say next, to the plant, the signal coming back, through the app, seems to begin almost instantly.

Finally, do plants see? Plants that mimic neighboring species hint that this is so. How can a South American vine Boquila take on the appearance of at least a few dozen other plants, just by growing in the vicinity? Moreso, if part of this vine is near one kind of plant, and another part is near another, it mimics both! To a lesser extent Mistletoe plants do something similar. One researcher believes the "signal" received by a Boquila plant is not visual, but bacterio-genetic, some kind of genetic signal from the neighboring plant's cloud of symbiont bacteria. All animals and all plants are inhabited by and surrounded by their own microbiome. Each breath we exhale contains members of our microbiome. Your own bacterial "envelope" changes every time you make a new friend and begin spending lots of time with him or her. The author finds a visual hypothesis more parsimonious, and I agree. Plants do have photoreceptors; they are chloroplasts. There are also other colored bodies in plants, in colors other than green. They may also receive light as well as reflect it, or they may provide color filters for chloroplasts to detect colored light. The author points out that this is similar to cuttlefish, which have color-blind eyes, yet they can still mimic the patterns and colors of the surface they are sitting on, probably because their whole skin surface is covered with photoreceptors that must provide the color signal.

I suggest a "red hat" experiment. Start with a number (12 at least) of plants that are wired to detect stress. Once they have recovered from being wired the experiment begins. Whenever the person who cares for the plants wears a red hat, that person also takes a snip from the end of one leaf of half the plants, chosen by a prearranged formula, and let some of the plants never be snipped. Let the interval between snipping incidents be a few days. I conjecture that after a few weeks at most, the plants will all react whenever the caretaker enters wearing the hat, before any snipping is done. This should indicate something visual on the part of the plants. It is likely that the never-snipped plants will react differently from the others. However, it is always possible that the caretaker is in a different mental state on "snipping days", and this causes an airborne chemical signal that the plants can detect and react to. I am not sure how to control for that.

Plants are fascinating, even more so now to me, after reading this book. What a great read!

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A couple of quibbles and contentions:

1. On p 39 the author coined the adjective "Descartian", referring to René Descartes. The adjective "Cartesian" already exists and is easier to say.
2. On p 156 we read, "In the United States alone, as many as 11,000 farmworkers are fatally poisoned by pesticides each year, and another 385 million are severely poisoned…". 'Scuse me, but the entire US population is about 360 million, of whom two million are farmworkers. The CDC states 10,000-20,000 "poisonings" without saying how many are fatal. Sundry reports are all over the place. One appears to be the author's source for 11,000 fatalities yearly, while another states that 60,000 nonfatal incidents occurred in five years, or 12,000 per year. The author needs to dig a bit deeper.