The art of living by science

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, memoirs, family, essays

A science writer presents science done by others to a curious audience. What does one do when science impinges upon one's own life, not as research projects but as the contingencies of living that must at least be managed, if not solved in a mathematical sense? The ten extended essays/mini-memoirs in Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life chronicle sundry journeys through life as encountered by Nell Greenfieldboyce. The book's title is taken from Walt Whitman's poem "Year of Meteors".

Her older child, a boy, has become terrified of tornadoes, or rather, of the concept of tornadoes. In spite of his mother's protestation that she's never even seen a tornado, he engages in obsessive fantasies about them. The younger child, a girl, is more matter-of-fact, and seems to shrug off the anxiety. What is a mother to do? One could say, "She started it," having let the children listen to an audio book about the subject, and some days later, almost on autopilot, they all watched a National Geographic short video, Tornadoes 101. What ensued is about what one would expect. Now what is a mother to do? She did what mothers generally do: Wait it out. Time brings perspective. One might argue that premature knowledge is to blame, but fortunately, youngsters are amazingly resilient.

The author is a science writer, after all. She brings science to the world around, so her children have encountered scientific subjects in abundance. That's just what she does. The tornado is a symbol (the chapter title is "The symbol of a tornado"). It represents all the big and scary and dangerous and seemingly dangerous things "out there in the world," and a mother can't protect her child from them all. The best she can do, she concludes, is to promise to "make everything better" to the best of her ability. To preschoolers, Mom's ability is akin to infinite, so a mother's promise is their bedrock.

Not all of the essays are about her children. Some are about her childhood and how she weathered the storms. One chapter ("Everybody does it!") is about doodling. What does it reveal about the ways our mind works? Does the way we doodle (and we all do!) square with certain aspects of our character? Digging into the subject, looking at samples of doodles of the celebrated, she finds that her style of doodling is a lot like that of President Washington, and another President with a similar style was U.S. Grant. Does that mean she has an aptitude for leadership or national administration? Or does it simply imply that the kind of orderliness Washington needed for his career is related to what she needs for hers? Maybe it is coincidence; there may be many styles of scribbling, but perhaps not billions thereof.

Her last chapter, "My eugenics project" practically drags us through her own sturm und drang while coping with the chance that children she has by her husband will be afflicted with a serious genetic kidney ailment. Her terror mirrors that of her son at the thought of tornadoes. But she came to a place of peace, just as, years later, her children did also.

She writes with heart and grace, confiding in us in ways few can accomplish. As with the best writing in general, this little book motivates a reader to look within, to learn about oneself and how one copes with tragedy or the dread of possible tragedy.

Looking for a way to illustrate this post I spent half an hour throwing the prompt "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange", a longer quote from Whitman's poem, at several generative art apps. This one by Gemini is similar to the graphic on the cover of the book, but I obtained ten quite diverse images, grouped in the closing panel below.

The Universe is out to get you

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, popular treatments, humor, space, mortality

"Nobody gets out of this alive." A common proverb. Scientist Paul M. Sutter, in his book How to Die in Space: A Journey Through Disastrous Astrophysical Phenomena, has advice for delaying the end, "Don't go into space." After reading this book, almost anyone will be convinced that a surefire way to reduce one's "alive time" is to get off the Earth, out of the atmosphere, beyond the Van Allen belts, and ultimately to exit first the Earth's magnetosphere, then the heliosphere, and finally enter interstellar or even intergalactic space. Each step adds new risks.

The book's four sections, each with four chapters, detail all the interesting, amazing, and terrifying things that happen to a human who has left behind the cherishing and nurturing embrace of our mother planet. Now, there are a lot of things right here on Earth that can kill us. Sooner or later, one of them will happen to each and every one of us. Space just provides new and improved methods of attaining an early demise. The galaxy really is out to get you.

If the book were a dry catalog, it wouldn't be worth reading. Happily, Dr. Sutter's humor keeps it light. He really doesn't want you to die an early death (a later one will do just fine, thank you!). His tone is appropriate to a class filled with ready-to-be-bored sophomores, most of whom will ignore all the warnings anyway. So as you read, relax and let your inner adolescent enjoy.

The book got me thinking. Just how many layers of protection are provided, not just by the Earth with its atmosphere and biosphere, but by the solar system itself? The heliosphere is produced by one dangerous phenomenon—solar wind—but protects Earth from certain interstellar and intergalactic risks. For example, at any one point near the Sun, its magnetic field is about as strong as a refrigerator magnet. But a refrigerator magnet is a couple of centimeters across, while the Sun's surface is about 10,000 times as large as the surface of the Earth. The Earth's magnetic field strength is less than 1% of that. The solar magnetic field diverts most non-solar cosmic rays. The much smaller magnetic field of Earth, including the Van Allen belts, diverts many of those that the heliosphere allows through. Even then, thousands of cosmic rays pass through any particular square cm of earth, or of you, each second. Without these two magnetic bubbles, cosmic ray intensity would be about equal to that of visible light, or roughly a kilowatt per square meter. But since cosmic rays are penetrating (average energy per particle is about 100,000 times the energy of the photons in a dental X-ray), you'd be warmed throughout, kind of like being in a cosmic microwave oven, with the proviso that these are not microwaves, but super-gamma-ray energies, so they also damage proteins and DNA.

Some stars, and particularly dying ones, have magnetic fields millions or billions or trillions of times as strong as that of the Sun. Suppose an intrepid interstellar traveler wishes to see a magnetar, which is a super-magnetic neutron star. It's only a few km in diameter, but weighs about as much as the Sun, perhaps up to twice as much. Let's ignore the high gravity environment for a moment. You get close enough to see the magnetar as something larger than a simple, blazing point, say a distance of 10,000 km. Have you seen the videos of scientists levitating a small frog in the field of an MRI magnet? Flesh is weakly magnetic. 10,000 km from a magnetar, the billion-times-MRI field would shred your body like a blender. Let's also consider gravity. At the surface of the Sun, if you could stand on it, gravity is about 28 G's. Fighter pilots wearing special suits can briefly tolerate 6 G's. You'd die, fast. And your distance from the Sun's center is 700,000 km. Remember the inverse square law? Do the math if you like. At 10,000 km from a neutron star (magnetar or not), gravity would be about 137,000 G's. In fact, getting to a distance of 10,000 km from any one-solar-mass "compact object", whether it's a neutron star, white dwarf, or black hole, would be the same. Big grease spot.

"All things in moderation." That is what the Earth, in its magnetospheric and heliospheric cocoon, provides. We need a little gravity. The 1-G field we are suited to, plus-or-minus 10% or so, is best. Extreme gravity goes from bad to catastrophic. How about low G? Zero gravity is bad for astronauts; lots of recent reports tell us just how bad. Early osteoporosis, for example. Even the 1/6 G of the Moon isn't enough. Stay on the Moon for a few years, and it will never be safe for you to return to Earth. Even Mars, with 3/8 G, may not be good enough to keep human bodies healthy long term. Sorry, ice skaters that want to skate a Martian canal. Do try to make it a short trip! And the only ice-covered area on Mars you'll find is near one of the poles, where it's cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide. You can't skate on frozen CO2. Most outer space temperatures are extreme in the other direction, at least if you're close enough to some kind of star to be able to learn much about it.

It's not just heat that does one in. Most hot things in the Universe also produce copious penetrating radiation, of several kinds. Outside Earth's magnetosphere, solar wind is a fierce drizzle of protons and alphas (He nuclei) and electrons, with particle energies similar to dental X-rays, dense enough to give a fella radiation poisoning rather soon, in days or even hours. Solar flares emit gamma rays (photons) at much higher energies and densities. Astronauts in space stations receive warnings of solar flares, and hide in specially shielded areas, so they'll live through it. Earth's magnetosphere has no effect on gamma rays. But let's consider a rather quiet star that happens to be larger than the Sun, such as Sirius. The Dog Star weighs in at 2 solar masses, but is 25 times as bright. Where the Sun's light is about 1/3 UV and shorter wavelengths, for Sirius the proportion is 2/3, and a lot of that is at short wavelengths indeed. It might seem good news that the habitable zone (where water on a planet would be liquid most of the time) is 5 times the size of the one in the solar system. In that liquid-water zone you would get sunburnt twice as fast, and unless you had a really robust ozone layer, you'd need to worry about more than UVA and UVB. UVC and UVD are progressively more damaging, verging on the kind of damage X-rays do. In orbit around a planet that is orbiting Sirius, you would need a huge amount of shielding just to be safe from the much stronger stellar wind. And lots of stars are progressively bigger, brighter and more dangerous than Sirius.

The author catalogs everything out there that is "out to get us". It's an impressive list; I've just skated the surface here, just vamped on topics that came to me as I wrote. The author's humor keeps it light, so a reader will hardly mind that the subject is death, dying and other kinds of mayhem. Very enjoyable, actually.

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Coda: I have to deal with an issue. Dr. Sutter explains the onionskin model of the core of a large star, describing the successive crises as first hydrogen is consumed, then after the core heats up by 10x or so, helium is burned until it runs low, and so forth. When he gets past carbon, which fuses to produce neon (plus an alpha particle) at some horrendous temperature in the billions of Kelvins (same size of degree as °C, but shifted by 273), he oversimplifies. He states that neon burns to produce oxygen. Is it going backward? It's more complicated than that. The neon shell contains some alphas, produced by carbon fusion, and under intense bombardment by gamma rays, some of the neon is split to oxygen plus alpha (helium), while the rest captures the alphas to produce magnesium and then silicon. Silicon then fuses to produce nickel, but a lot of other reactions also occur, so that all the even-numbered elements in between are also produced. His point is that the nickel isotope so produced is unstable and emits an alpha to yield iron. That's the end of the chain. No more fusion energy is available; other processes that occur in supernovae and during collisions of neutron stars produce all the other elements. See the Stellar Nucleosynthesis article in Wikipedia for a more comprehensive discussion.

Ambiguous omens

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, desert environment, climate anxiety, mojave desert, owls

To be human is to be self-conflicted to some extent. For Ben Ehrenreich, self-conflict defines his character. In his memoir Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, he presents himself and the social circles he inhabits as generally, not quite unhappy, but chronically anxious, seeking bits of contentment and even joy wherever they may be found. He does not project victimhood, which is the stock-in-trade of Lefties generally; rather, he finds himself in the current of the "lives of quiet desperation" described by Thoreau.

The book opens with a hike with a pair of friends near Joshua Tree National Park, where a pair of owls seemed to be leading the hikers along a canyon. Owls figure frequently in his remembrances, and the book closes with a glimpse of an owl. He wonders whether owls are typically omens of evil, whether they can ever portend good. To the owls themselves, we are almost always evil omens. 

As it happens, to most cultures an owl brings bad news, but in Japan and Guatemala owls are good. The Japanese word for owl, 梟, pronounced fukurō, has the same sound as "without hardship". Owls are ambiguous as omens. I, for one, love seeing an owl. The "hooh---hoo-hoo-hoooh" call heard around here on occasion is from a Great Horned Owl, but I've seen one only once in the wild.

I love deserts, and so does Mr. Ehrenreich. For the first part of the book he and his wife lived near 29 Palms just north of Joshua Tree National Park, for the second section he was living in Las Vegas—at the other end of the Mojave Desert—for one school year on a teaching fellowship, and the last chapter takes place in Landers, back near Joshua Tree but further to the northwest. 

I have camped out in Joshua Tree several times, both with my parents and with fellow desert rats. I return most frequently to an area further north, along I-40 and old Hwy 66. This picture shows the colorful mountains north of Pisgah Crater. A similar patch of mountains 35 miles to the west are named Calico, quite aptly.

Desert living has an effect on a person. The sights, smells and even tastes differ quite a bit from those in more temperate climes. The heat gets hotter, the cold gets colder, the wind blows harder, the rare rainstorms are fiercer, and this very rawness accentuates every shift of weather and hones the senses. Desert people tend to be more "colorful".

Another theme that runs through the book is the author's almost-obsession with "the Rhino", as he calls President Trump. It becomes clear that in this case he is indeed a victim, a victim of the "mainstream media" that produced an ugly caricature of Donald Trump and vehemently, even violently, opposed everything about that caricature without engaging the real person. When a misguided "journalist" published an article about President Trumps "10,000 lies", a genuine journalist analyzed the material and showed that all but a few of the "lies" were truths the first guy didn't like or "business exaggerations" of the kind that were uniformly praised in "the Press" prior to the 2015 Presidential campaign. Actually, the media has libeled Mr. Trump thousands of times per day, and continues to do so, thus it is no surprise that Mr. Ehrenreich had a bad impression of him. He spreads his ire around a bit also, calling National Security Adviser John Bolton a "mustachioed cretin". Hmm. I don't know any genuine cretin (medically defined as a severely mentally deficient person with an IQ less than 40) who could graduate from Yale and then the Yale Law School, earning a JD. Dr. Bolton is abrasive as a cinderblock, but stupid he definitely is not.

The author's anxiety about climate change is part of a larger existential anxiety that forms an undercurrent of his life. His writing pops back and forth in time, typically about every page, between current events seen through a Leftist lens and mini-bios of a number of historical writers and philosophers. His pick of historical figures tends towards the little-known, such as Jacob Boehme (Jakob Böhme, 1575-1625), whom most theologians consider a heretic, but a milder one than really wacky ones such as Arius of the 4th Century. He dwells much on a contention of Hegel and others that writing itself is more of a problem than a solution. That is a hard stance for a writer to live with! He makes a good point: The earliest writing is mainly lists of goods and administrative instruction, while actual literature came much, much later. Having gathered numerous threads together, though, he weaves no tapestry, draws no conclusion.

The book begins and ends with existential angst. It would be rather hard to take, were it not for the author's lyrical gifts as a writer. Whatever the topic, his writing is enjoyable. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down", as Mary Poppins sang. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm not him.

Is it spidering or something else?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I was away for a couple of weeks, so it will be a few more days before I have finished reading another book to review. I see that in the past month there was a surge in views for a week or so, with the greatest number emerging from Hong Kong, followed by Singapore:

Viewing from the US and following, with the possible exception of China, represents my usual clientele. Even after this surge, view rates have been high, until just the last day or two. This shows the past week:

One hundred views daily is still well above the usual for this blog. Hong Kong and Singapore still dominate, but by a lesser amount (table follows). For the past 24 hours, we find this activity:

There is a further decrease, but still plenty of activity. To see the trend numerically, here are the percentages:

In spite of a marked decrease in daily views, Hong Kong still dominated today's activity, while Singapore didn't decrease, but its percentage increases because of reduced total activity. I include China because I suspect there is also some "extra" activity from there, but perhaps not all of China is such. The next table shows normalized numbers:

The row labeled "normal" is USA plus Other, and the range of ~800 to ~1,200 is what I expect for a month of activity by genuinely interested viewers, around 30/day.

It is more evident here that activity from Singapore has remained steady while that from Hong Kong reduced to less than 1/3 of the "surge" level. China's activity fell steadily, while "other" stayed level.

How much of this is automatic spidering and how much represents actual persons viewing posts? I can't presume to read minds, not even machine "minds". I suspect that the activity from Hong Kong originates from China as a whole by proxy, while Singapore is its own animal. Perhaps I should say I "speculate" rather than "suspect". I can analyze numbers all day long, but little further insight is likely.