A Stable Diffusion glitch

 kw: observations, generated images, simulated intelligence, hallucinations

While creating an image to illustrate the prior post, an image was presented that had an odd-looking hand holding a distorted microphone. I was using Playground's Stable Diffusion engine. Even though Playground has a stock of "negative prompts" (stuff to avoid) including "deformed", "distorted", "poorly drawn hands", "missing fingers", this peculiar item still showed up. But it was just one out of 28 images produced, so the percentage isn't awful.

This is about 15% of the total image.

An overly preachy health book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, health, wellness, advice, polemics

The Dewey Decimal code for The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature's Lessons for a Long and Happy Life, by David B. Agus, MD, is 590. That number means "Zoological Sciences". It didn't take me long to realize that a more appropriate classification would be 613 (Promotion of Health) or 614 (Prevention of Disease), with a sub-classification meaning "polemic".

Ordinarily, if I decide not to read a book, I don't review it; I don't mention it. In this case, there may be some folks who can benefit from it, so I won't hide its existence. But it is not for me. There are a number of facts about different animals, although I don't think it is enough to get it a 590 classification.

The pattern is this: A story about what some animal experiences is presented, or a few facts about the lives of an animal, followed by a page or more of preaching. If the author could draw a simple conclusion without feeling the need to belabor the point to exhaustion, the book would be one-third the size…or less.

Crazy questions with not-so-crazy answers

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, q-and-a format, science, humor, cartoons

Here's a question for you:

Why don't compasses point toward the nearest hospital because of the magnetic fields created by MRI machines?

This question heads Chapter 32 of what if 2: additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions by Randall Munroe (Mr. Munroe doesn't capitalize his name on the book cover, but he does in the colophon). This book is the second in a series of, so far, unknown length. In spite of the book's subtitle, this question is not at all absurd, as we find in the first sentence of the answer, "They do, and it can be a problem!", which is followed by this cartoon:

The chapter fills four pages, answering the question in both qualitative and quantitative ways. For example, the author discusses how far from an MRI machine certain sensitive objects must be to be safe from harm or to operate correctly. In the case of a magnetic compass, explorers making their way to the magnetic north pole will be OK as long as they stay at least 10 meters from any MRI machines. Any nearer, and the compass will be offset, leading the explorer toward the machine, like a moth drawn to a candle. The magnetic stripe on a credit card is more robust, and needs to get within 3 meters to be demagnetized (at least partially). If you have a pacemaker, you need to stay 5 meters away, which makes a CT scan the only safe way to be scanned. Later on, the risk of bringing a helicopter to a hospital helipad is discussed, if the helipad has a MRI machine sitting nearby (a recent delivery, perhaps). Potential chaos!

My side note: Most MRI machines have a field strength of 1.5 Teslas (a magnetic unit so-named long before Mr. Musk was born. The magnetic field of the Earth is around 1/10,000 Tesla). It is these that are referred to in this article. A few special purpose MRI scanners have fields as strong as 12 Teslas. By the inverse square law, the square root of 12/1.5 is about 2.8, so our explorer has to stay 28 meters away from one of those, and folks with pacemakers are in danger closer than 14 m.

In toto, the book contains 64 chapters, plus 8 bonuses: 5 "Short Answer" sections with one-line (or one-cartoon) answers, and 3 "Weird & Worrying" sections, containing unanswered questions of various levels of oddity.

Mr. Munroe gathers questions and purveys the answers in one section of his cartoon website, xkcd.com. Another section contains an archive of cartoons, which he issues 3x/wk. Here is an example:

This is item #1741. Getting there, you can navigate anywhere else you want to on the site. I can't begin to describe the incredible variety of subjects he tackles. Publishing his cartoons online gives him great freedom. He isn't restricted to the rules required for cartoons published in newspapers, etc. Some of the cartoons are in the familiar four-panel form, and one that I saw, which has a thermal timeline of the past 18,000 years, with about 2,000 years per page click, is one of the longest web pages I've encountered.

In the book, subjects range from "Earth Eye" (What an eye the size of the Earth could see – it's a lot!) to "Snowball" (How big would a snowball get rolling down the side of Mt. Everest? – not as big as you think) and to "Niagara Straw" (could the flow of Niagara Falls be pushed through a soda straw? – the water velocity would exceed 1/4 the speed of light; the strength of soda straws isn't factored in). Of course, the subjects in what if? 2 are suggested by correspondents, so Mr. Munroe isn't confined to his own imagination. The exercise of imagination needed to provide the answers? That's a whole 'nother kettle of fireworks! And it makes for a delightful book. (I reviewed the prior what if? book and also how to by the same author several years ago.)

The light show far below

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, bioluminescence, memoirs, giant squid, architeuthis

When I lived in southern California I frequently went to the beach; my favorites were Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach. In the summertime there are periodic red tides, and when the water is visibly red, it isn't safe to swim. However, that is when it is nice to visit the beach at night to see glowing blue waves. The red tide creature is a type of dinoflagellate (a single-celled protist) that is also bioluminescent. When agitated, the critters glow or sparkle blue.

In Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea, author Edith Widder, PdD tells of the many marine creatures that glow, in many, many ways. In the deep sea, below the limits of sunlight, most animals make their own light. This in itself explains an early mystery: no matter now deep one sent a trawling net, many of the animals brought up had eyes. What are they observing? In this book we learn that there is a lot to observe down there!

Dr. Widder was one of the first persons to descend (in a submersible, of course) into the sea deeper than sunlight can reach, and turn off the lights. Whoever does this for their first time has the same reaction, "It's like a sky full of fireworks!". Yet, just after seeing that, when the lights are turned back on, you typically don't see anything! What gives?

Consider the dinoflagellates that light up the waves along many coastlines. A typical bioluminous dinoflagellate is between 20 and 40 microns in diameter. That's the size of the cells that make up the inside of your cheek. If you use a teaspoon to gently scrape the inside of your cheek, put a drop of the result on a microscope slide and look at medium power, such as 100x, you'll see a bunch of rather blobby cells that appear about an inch across or so, with slightly darker nuclei the size of a BB. Pull the slide out of the microscope and look at it. Just a bit of slightly milky fluid. Nothing you can see distinctly. Yet a single dinoflagellate, the same size as those cheek cells, can make a flash of light that can easily be seen in the dark. Thus, if your sub is surrounded by microbes, you won't see them with the lights on, but in the dark, the flashes they are making because of the disturbance caused by your sub makes the water itself seem to sparkle.

If you so see something, it is likely to be a jellyfish such as this one. Jellyfish and related animals called siphonophores are frequently bioluminescent.

Siphonophores in particular can be so transparent that, even if one is right outside the sub window, you may not see it right away…with the lights on.

What is the purpose of all this light in the deep sea? Three big things, and a host of lesser reasons. The big three: to find food, to avoid being eaten, and to find a mate.

Finding food: Some bioluminescent fish have "flashlights" near their eyes, little organs filled with bioluminescent bacteria, which they feed and care for. The light organs have shutters so the light can be blocked. Many deep sea animals respond to a flash of light with their own flash, so the hunting fish will make a quick flash, and decide among the return flashes if any are worth trying to eat. Whether or not it goes for a meal, it will jerk away, so the flash it made will not let a bigger predator know where it is. Many fish have light organs at the end of appendages where they act as lures to draw in a hungry animal, but it quickly becomes lunch itself. Angler fish are the best known purveyors of this hunting strategy.

Predator avoiding: The flash-and-jerk technique is one way to hunt without being hunted successfully. Another is counter-illumination. Creatures that spend much time near the edge of twilight but not below it could be seen from below unless they employed a little bit of light, shining from their bellies, to mimic the light that would be shining if they weren't there. A similar technique was studied by the U.S. Air Force in the 1970's. A project I worked on briefly studied how well we could see a cluster of lights set against a simulated sky. The idea was to fool the gunners of an antiaircraft battery, who might barely hear a high-flying bomber, but the counter-illumination would make the bomber effectively invisible. It didn't work very well, for two reasons: Firstly, human eyes have very high resolution, so the aircraft would have to have a great many closely-spaced lamps so it wouldn't look like a speckled "something" up above. Secondly, human eyes have excellent color discrimination, and the color of the sky is variable, even varying in different directions at a given time. Thus, lamps of one color that make the plane invisible when seen from directly below, might not work that well to one side or the other. A third nail in the project's coffin: polarizing sunglasses darken the sky, making such an illuminated aircraft more visible than if the lights were left off! Deep-sea fish don't have color vision, and they don't see as clearly, so a cluster of a dozen or two dozen light organs of any bluish or blue-green color, of appropriate brightness, can be an effective invisibility cloak.

Another method to avoid becoming lunch is to make very bright "burglar alarm" flashes when attacked, hoping to bring a bigger predator to drive off or consume whatever is eating you. The Jellyfish Lamp used by Dr. Widder to attract predators in the deep sea emulates a common distress display.

Mate location: Fireflies do this. Those of us living east of the Rockies in the US, and people in many other places worldwide, are familiar with these greenish lights in our yards in June (or December in the southern hemisphere): male fireflies "calling" for females, which don't fly, but rest among vegetation and answer the lights they see with lights of their own. So-called "sea fireflies" (tiny shrimplike ostracods, 1-2 mm long) have a similar mating process, as do a number of other deep water animals. The trick is to make a flash during a turn, to make it harder for a watching predator to locate, similar to hunt-and-jerk.

The last chapters of the book tell the tale of finding and filming giant squids for the first time using a more advanced Jellyfish Lamp named Medusa along with a baitfish to keep the predator busy for a moment. It worked spectacularly well. The montage below shows two images of the attack of a young giant squid on the bait. This squid was "only" ten feet mantle length, with tentacle length estimated at 15-20 feet.

Giant squids that are seen at the surface of the ocean are either dying or dead, and are always red. They float because they have ammonia in their tissues, so they don't need to swim to keep from sinking deeper and deeper. The have to swim to stay down. They are red because they have lost active control of their chromophores. Living, healthy giant squids in the videos these images come from look metallic, with colors of silver and bronze (bronze may indicate alarm), and you can see stripes on the arms.

The videos of these encounters made lots of people very famous, including Dr. Widder. I hope it gives her enough of a platform to advocate more effectively for ocean conservation, along with Sylvia Earle and younger leaders such as Luis David Calderon and Maggie Seida. In her last chapter she tells some compelling stories, including the saga of Georges Bank. This underwater plateau, larger than Massachusetts, has been fished into oblivion. It was once rich with a very diverse ecosystem that included several commercially desirable fish species. Fast-forward a couple of generations. Only after nothing of value was left to catch did the area receive governmental protection. The quantity of life is probably now similar to what existed in the early 1900's, but it is nearly all jellyfish. Not only are the fish gone, including jellyfish-eating swordfish, so are all other jellyfish eaters such as sea turtles. Now that the "cats" are all away, the jelly-mice are out to play, by the trillions. Leaving the place alone may eventually lead to a return to ecological health, but there is a "new normal" at present, and it's pretty stable.

Can we learn enough about the ocean, not just to preserve what's valuable, but to even know what is valuable and needs preserving? The world ocean has been humanity's waste dump and scrounging venue for centuries, even millennia. Now that humans number 8.1 billion, is going back even possible? We spend more on each new NASA venture (all of them much needed!) than the total amount reserved for oceanographic research yearly. A very visible program called Sea Grant has a budget of $90 million. That's "million" with an "M". Compare that to $7.4 billion being spent to "forgive" some student loans. Go ahead, divide the numbers: it's 82 times as much. I'll stop here and let my blood pressure subside.

Whew! I love this book. Get it and read it. Then search "bioluminescence" with your favorite browser and read some more. It can open a new universe to you.

Skirting the edge of destruction

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural disasters, apocalyptic imagery, history, quests

Craig Childs is an adventurer. A couple of decades ago he became enamored of the idea of exploring those portions of Earth that epitomize various ways natural events could do away with civilization, even humanity, and perhaps all life. He wrote about these experiences, and waxed lyrical about them, in his 2012 book Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth. The picture here is in no way a likeness, but an evocative generated image.

I see him imagining the planet musing, "How might I kill you? Let me count the ways." He chose nine ideas to instigate nine adventures, such as crossing a couple of deserts (the Sonora and a salar in the Atacama), spending a couple of weeks "helping" scientists gather data in the middle of the Greenland ice cap (I suspect he'd have preferred Antarctica, but getting sponsored to go there is infinitely harder), running a river of Class VI rapids in the Himalayas (all by itself that exposes you to a dozen ways to die), or spending just a couple of days crossing an Iowa cornfield to see if anything except corn can live there (spoiler: no surprise, it's darn little, a list that can fit on the back of a business card, mostly bugs and tiny plants). I can do no better than to list the chapter titles, with my instant summaries in brackets:

1. Deserts Consume [Sonora Desert, Mexico]
2. Ice Collapses [Glacier in Patagonia, Chile]
3. Seas Rise [St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea off Alaska]
4. Civilizations Fall [Squaw Peak/Piestewa Peak near Phoenix, AZ; side journey to Maya country]
5. Cold Returns [Greenland, far uphill from the west coast]
6. Species Vanish [Iowa cornfield; a few square miles of monoculture]
7. Mountains Move [Salween River, Tibet]
8. Cataclysm Strikes [Lava field in Mauna Kea, HI]
9. Seas Boil [Atacama Desert, Chile]

The basic message, reiterated often, is that this is a favored time to be on Earth. Bad times of numerous varieties come and go, but each chapter illustrates for us ways the Earth can outdo anything encountered in human history. Greatly outdo. For example, if you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980, you might recall the thick dust we all had to wash off everything, all over the U.S. (and a number of other countries). All that was from the expulsion of about one cubic km of material, which blasted ahead of it another 2-3 cubic km of existing rock and ash. Eleven years later Mt. Pinatubo ejected 10 cubic km. In 1912 the largest eruption of the 20th Century, Novarupta, was a further three times as large.

Volcanic eruptions are scaled, similarly to earthquakes, by a scale called VEI, Volcanic Eruption Index. Each number on the scale is a factor of 10 larger than the one before. Mt. St. Helens was VEI 5 and the other two mentioned were VEI 6.0 and VEI 6.5. The scale goes as high as almost 9, and an eruption of VEI 8.0 releases 1,000 cubic km. The most recent VEI 8 eruption was the Taupō volcano in New Zealand, 27,000 years ago. The largest known eruption in geologic history was one of eight VEI 8 or larger eruptions that occurred in Paraná Province, Brazil about 132 million years ago, a VEI 8.9, with an eruptive volume of 8,600 cubic km. All of those eight eruptions were larger than the largest eruption from the Yellowstone caldera, the "supervolcano" of recent hype. See this list for more information.

That's all just one kind of event that makes a serious dent in the global ecosystem. The message of the book is that Earth has a lot of ways to make our life miserable at the very least, and perhaps to terminate it. So far, our comparative good fortune has held.

The lyrical writing makes the book enjoyable to read. I was rather astounded at the amount of misery suffered by the author and his companions (he never adventured alone). "Better he than me!" The more optimistic message I see is that life has persisted on Earth for very nearly four billion years, in spite of VEI 8 volcanoes, iceball stages that left no liquid water on the surface, even at the equator, and titanic flooding events; all this in the face of a warming Sun, which is 30% hotter now than four billion years ago, and will be 40% hotter than it is now in another 5 billion years, just before it becomes a red giant and heats up by another factor of about 100. At that point, the sky will be nearly half filled by searing orange light emitted by a thin gas with a temperature of at least 3,500°C (6,300°F). The planet itself will melt. In the meantime, we have perhaps a billion years to figure out how to migrate to the stars. Cheers!

====================

Errata: I must deal with two egregious errors.

Firstly, in page 90 we find, "…a quarter of the earth is covered with water." Hardly!! The ocean covers 70.8% of the planet, almost three-quarters. If we consider fresh water in all its forms, lakes and rivers add less than 1%, while ice caps (Antarctica and Greenland) make up another 2.8%, leaving something over 74% of earth covered by ocean, ice, or fresh water.

Secondly, and much more serious: On page 290 the author writes that the impacts of gigantic planetesimals during the Late Heavy Bombardment as it is called, prior to 3.8 billion years ago (and beginning 4.2 billion years ago), triggered nuclear reactions that produced major radioactive isotopes, particularly the long-lived isotopes of thorium, uranium and potassium. The amount of heating needed to produce nuclear reactions is not in the thousands of degrees (during the LHB the core may have exceeded 15,000°F or 8,300°C) but in the millions or tens of millions of degrees. LHB heating cannot have had the slightest effect on the isotopic abundance of the Earth, although various isotopes would have been included in the impacting bodies already. However, there is an interesting side point here, which the author also misses. Let's look back at the three isotopes mentioned, going back 4 billion years, which we will call T0:

• Th-232, half-life (T½) 14.2 billion years (Gy). Four billion is only 28% of a half-life, so going backwards, we find that at T0 there was about 20% more Th-232 than there is today.
• U-238, T½ = 4.5 Gy. At T0 there was almost twice as much U-238 as today.
• U-235, T½ = 0.70 Gy. Four billion is 5.7 half lives, so at T0 there was 40 times as much U-235 as today. At present, U-238 is 138 times as abundant as U-235, but at T0 the ratio was about 7:1.
• K-40, T½ = 1.26 Gy. Four billion is just over three half-lives, so at T0 there was about nine times as much K-40 as today.

If these figures are put together with present abundances of each isotope (a few parts per million), it balances out that radiogenic heating, just from these four, was about six times as much as it is today. There may have been other isotopes present when Earth was formed, but because the universe was already about nine billion years old, anything short-lived that hadn't been very recently forged in nearby supernovae would have been long gone.

More radiogenic heating most likely led to early initiation and more rapid plate tectonics once the LJB-induced melting subsided and the crust formed. The Earth as a whole could have been warmer and stayed so for a good while as a result, offsetting the reduced heating of the 30%-cooler Sun. We know so little of that era, but it is clear that life started as soon as liquid water was able to remain and accumulate. Life is an active agent, and has "conspired" for almost 4 billion years to keep Earth habitable.

Update on FAQ for the Universe

 kw: update to book review, nonfiction, science, ultimate questions

Yesterday I reviewed Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. It consists of 20 essays on questions they have received online. I have a couple of items to discuss (one is an error). This doesn't negate how enjoyable and informative the book is. These are side issues.

First, in answering "Are Humans Predictable?" the authors discuss whether neurons are subject to quantum effects. After all, they are rather small and their synapses are tiny, smaller than a bacterium. In fact, with a width of 20-40 nm, a synapse spans about 100-200 atoms. That is small enough that "shot noise", which is typically understood to be about the square root of the number of atoms involved, could be significant. In this case, it amounts to at least 1%. So, if any particular synapse misfires about one time in 100, that adds a random element into our thoughts, purely by quantum effects. 

The above is my analysis, nowhere to be found in the chapter. What I do find is an egregious error: "A single neuron is made of more than 10²⁷ particles." (p. 167) That is the number of particles in a kilogram! [Avogadro's Number, which is the number of nucleons (protons plus neutrons) in a gram of any material, is about 6.02x10²³. The number of neutrons in the average light nucleus is about equal to the number of protons, and the number of electrons equals the number of protons, so the electrons in a gram of "body stuff" come to half of Avogadro's Number. Thus the total number of particles in a gram is almost 10²⁴.] Does a neuron weigh a kilogram? No, it weighs a microgram or so, or about one-billionth of a kg. Thus the statement in the book is off by a factor of a billion.

Secondly, answering the question "Do We Live in a Computer Simulation?" the authors state that the Universe with its rules (the "laws of nature") seems very similar to a computer program…so it just might be so. Is it likely that a godlike computer nerd would program a simulation to have a basic contradiction at its core, that is, that the General Theory of Relativity drives large scale phenomena while Quantum Mechanics drives small scale phenomena, with a very fuzzy dividing line between them? That dividing "line" is at roughly atomic scale, but Buckyballs of Carbon-60 exhibit quantum interference in a two-slit arrangement. Presumably, baseballs could do so also, given sufficiently precise equipment. Furthermore, General Relativity breaks down at the center of a black hole, which is expected to be a singularity of zero size and infinite density; and Quantum Mechanics doesn't allow singularities to exist. It also occurs to me that electrons and quarks are also "described" as having zero size but finite mass, which also implies infinite density. To me it seems that if "someone" has devised a simulation in which we all are players (or maybe just me, and the rest of you are part of the environment), that "someone" has a pathological sense of humor!

A great book inspires all kinds of philosophizing!

Universal FAQ

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cosmology, ultimate questions, humor

I was thinking of titling this post "The FAQ to end all FAQ's", but realized that's too much hubris. I like answer lists (and many kinds of lists). Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, serves up question-answering essays on twenty big questions. One could say they have really put the universe under a microscope.

Both authors are PhD scientists, and Jorge Cham is also a cartoonist (see Piled Higher and Deeper – this links to the archive; it ran 20 years). Nearly every page of the book has at least one of his little illustrations. Here are a couple of them, picked at random.

The first question: "Why Can't I Travel Back in Time?" The answer isn't simple, though the authors simplify things as much as they can, so the essay takes up about 14 pages. It ends with a technical dichotomy, that time reversal doesn't violate any laws of physics, but getting the engineering expertise to carry it off is far, far from us. Put simply, you can't unmake an omelette, a practical expression of the term "entropy".

Another question that is currently on the minds of many is "How Long Will Humanity Survive?" Here the dichotomy is between doomsayers and Pollyanna's, which make up only a few percent of humanity, but between them they make nearly all the noise. Things that might doom us include asteroids, "gray goo" (runaway nanotech), and too much CO₂. I have to quibble about the comparison of Earth and Venus in this chapter. The surface temperature of Venus is 800°+ F, and the description goes into a runaway greenhouse as the oceans boiled off. However, Venus is presently water-free. It is the CO₂ that is keeping it that hot. Furthermore, the amount of CO₂ in its atmosphere is about 2 million times the amount in Earth's atmosphere. Clearly, the relationship between the amount of CO₂ and the temperature isn't a simple straight line, otherwise Venus would be hotter than the hottest known star (I plan to go into this principle in a future post...how far in the future is not settled). Also, something that isn't mentioned, probably because the authors are into robotics and physics, and not biology, is that few species remain unchanged for more than one or two million years. To speculate about what humans might be doing a billion years from now, by which time the Sun will be 40% hotter and our oceans will have long since boiled off, has to include being somewhere else.

By the way, the chapter "Can We Turn Mars into Earth?" mentions that Mars is so cold because there's no greenhouse effect, because its atmosphere is less than 1/100th as dense as Earth's. But I realized that nearly all of that is CO₂. Earth's atmosphere is only 0.04% CO₂. So Mars has 25 times as much greenhouse gas per square meter! What gives? Water, that's what. Nearly all the greenhouse effect on Earth is from water vapor, 60° worth. The CO₂ just adds another couple of degrees. And the amount of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere is 1-2% (up to 3% in the Tropics). It would take a lot of water to bring the temperature of Mars up by 60°, and it would still be colder than winter in Montana. The water would immediately freeze back out, so terraforming Mars is rather out of the question.

Being somewhere else is taken up in "What's Stopping Us From Traveling to the Stars?" and a later chapter, "Can We Build a Warp Drive?" We have about 200 million years to figure these out...at most. Basic parameters of what the Sun will do to us, if nothing else really bad happens (like a Moon-size asteroid smacking into Central Park):

• A quarter to half a billion years from now, whether CO₂ is under control or not, it's too hot for terrestrial animals and plants to live.
• A billion years from now, the oceans have finished boiling away, so marine life is also caput.
• 4 billion years along, the Sun expands into a red giant. It may or may not reach Earth, but with at least 30% of the sky toasting at a temperature of 5,000°F or more, the planet will be liquified.

There are more stages to the Sun's evolution into a white dwarf, but that's enough to ruin the entire solar system. If we move to Enceladus, under the ice, by that time, the oceans of Enceladus will also boil off. So, how do we "go elsewhere"? Slowly, by galactic standards. If we want to push a 190,000 ton (170,000 metric Tons) spaceship to half the speed of light, its kinetic energy becomes immense. BTW, that is the supposed weight of the Enterprise in Star Trek, which is powered by antimatter-matter annihilation. Each kg of the spaceship has a kinetic energy of 3x10¹⁶ Joules, which you could obtain by annihilating 1/6 of a kg of matter with 1/6 of a kg of antimatter…if the conversion of energy to motion is 100% efficient. To go more like 90% the speed of light more than doubles the energy required. Basically, to send a fleet of spaceships "nearly as fast as light" (NAFAL) would require annihilating the entire mass of, say, Jupiter. And then you have to slow them down when they reach their destination. Thus the question about warp drives. Again, we find the answer is dichotomous: possible in two or three ways according to the laws of physics, but an engineering "challenge."

The last chapter is "Why Do We Ask Questions?" I'm a simpleton; my answer is, "Because we don't know everything yet, and we are driven to do so," some of us, at least. The authors get more philosophical than that. In the end they point out that we can answer questions of What and How, usually, but never Why. It occurs to me that when a little kid asks, "Why is the sky blue?" we should answer, "I can tell you how" (well, I can, but perhaps not every Dad can), and then proceed to do so, at the kid's level.

OK, for those who aren't sure how the sky is blue, it's because light scatters off molecules, but it scatters better and better the closer the size of the molecules are to the wavelength of the light. Molecules are a lot smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so the shorter wavelengths, which look blue, get scattered more. So sunlight is scattered, and more blue scatters than other colors. Bonus point: The light that comes straight to us from the Sun is thus a bit more yellow, because some of the blue has been scattered away. It's the reason the Sun is thought of as a yellow star, when actually, if you get above the atmosphere, it is pure white.

So this is a very enjoyable book, with a great lot of humor in the answers (one author likes banana smoothies and the other likes peach smoothies, so there are digs back and forth, for example). We get multiple answers to a bunch of interesting questions. We may not like all the answers (I'd really like to be able to get to another star system, for example), but we get a better understanding of what's involved in real answers.

Up to his elbows in alligators

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, mini-biographies, law enforcement, alligators, environmentalism, everglades

Decades ago during the misnamed "sexual revolution", protests against many laws were made and we often heard the slogan, "You can't legislate morality." Though I was pretty young then, still in college, I thought, "Nonsense! We legislate nothing but morality." What is lawmaking? It is the process of defining what moral laws we care enough about to sanction (punish people for). As I watched the process unfold, as certain formerly illegal matters were legalized, and other matters were made illegal (often improperly), I came to this conclusion:

Not all that is ethical is legal.
Not all that is legal is ethical.

Fast-forward a generation or so: It has become illegal in some states or cities to call someone "him" or "her" if they prefer to be called "them" or "zhe" or "go away". It has become legal to destroy a city if your reason is "I am offended/oppressed/outraged". These are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It has become illegal to practice common sense, and what was formerly criminal insanity is the "most legal".

Jeff's career was law enforcement. He was working in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and for a good many years, he primarily caught poachers and brought them to prosecution. As chronicled in Gator County: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner, near the end of his career he was asked to embark on an extended sting operation, going undercover. To provide only a mild spoiler (because of course he succeeded, or there'd be no book): his sting caught a ringleader, and a number of lesser figures were caught in the net. But Jeff had seen what it really means to be a poacher, and he was able to weave the net more loosely so as to avoid catching absolutely everyone who'd been involved. He had more than a minimal conscience, and he cared for being ethical more than strict legality. He also knew the conclusions I stated above.

What happens when the enforcer comes to identify with his "prey"? This is the conundrum Jeff faced as he morphed himself into a seedy-looking trying-to-do-better ne'er-do-well, someone who could pass as a newly minted alligator farmer in a countryside filled with a mix of mostly honest alligator farmers and alligator hunters, and some less than honest, and a few downright scoundrels.

A similar process transformed the author as she dug deeper and deeper into Jeff's story, and the stories of others such as Peg Brown, the most legendary of the poachers of the prior generation (she befriended his son). The book's chapters bounce around between her life growing up in Florida, being a Floridian among Floridians who had been on the land for generations. She could internalize their struggles to cope with seeing their day-to-day survival methods becoming illegalized, until in many cases their choices were to poach for a living, to move somewhere else, or to starve. She asks, several times, "How does a family live when they were barely making it and their breadwinner is now incarcerated?"

The allied question that bedeviled Jeff as his operation drew to a close was, "What becomes of children if both parents are imprisoned?" Because many of the men who worked for the ringleader would bring their wives into some of the work, such as gathering alligator eggs in "illegal" quantities. The wives knew what was going on, so they were technically complicit.

Parts of some chapters outline the stages the Everglades went through as Florida became a popular destination. The Army Corps of Engineers, in their efforts to "tame" the 'glades, actually set in motion dramatic environmental changes that led to a reduction by 95% or more of the alligator population, not only in Florida but throughout gator country. But who got blamed? People like Peg Brown. Even after the alligator population rebounded—due more to their adaptability than to the efforts of environmentalists—the poaching laws were kept or even strengthened.

The poaching, at least of alligators, doesn't seem to be wiping them out. Their numbers in every state of the deep south continue to increase. There are millions, dozens to hundreds of times as many as there were 60 years ago.

This book isn't about "the corruption of Goody Two-shoes". When the operation ended, including the deliberate overlooking of some, including the wives, Jeff appeared in court when the chief perpetrators, the ones who weren't just flouting the law but smashing it to bits, were tried. It is about how we relate to others, and the struggle it can be to understand someone with whom we fundamentally disagree. I am reminded of the most remembered line of Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."