Training matters – a lot!

 kw: experiments, simulated intelligence, generative art, photo essays

The following two images share something important:

What is that something? It is this prompt:

The essence of ingenuity

I selected the first image because it is the best of the images that includes a person, and the best overall. The other is shown because it is the best of those that do not include human figures (the great majority). These, and other images to be seen below, share one other, possibly equally important attribute: Each is the cream of between ten and forty images generated by that prompt in a particular art generator, as influenced by various settings offered by the different programs.

I used the prompt above with five art generators: Dall-E3 (Bing's Image Creator), DreamStudio, Gemini (which runs Imagen 3), ImageFX (Imagen 3 running in Google Labs), and Leonardo AI. I frequently use one or more of these programs to produce wallpaper for my computer, which has HD screens with 1920x1080 pixels. Thus, these were all produced with a "16x9" setting. In another post I'll get into the actual pixel ratios the programs use and how I cope with that.

My current session resulted in 22 images. When I noticed I had substituted "innovation" for "ingenuity" while working with DreamStudio, I went back and worked with it some more, producing four more images.

My workspace is the Downloads folder. I run Google One and my main storage area for images is OneDrive. I do this to keep intermediate or early files, that may be discarded later, from being transferred to OneDrive or backed up. Once I have a final set of images to keep I move them to permanent folders in the Pictures area.

A montage of six of the images will help me describe other aspects of my methods:

We have here a screen capture from the Downloads folder. Each program has its method of naming a file. Dall-E3 (DE3) uses a long string of alphanumerics, which probably encode the binary seed and other information. Right after I download an image I rename the file according to a scheme I worked out that includes an abbreviation for the program name, the date, a sequence number, the prompt, and a prompt modifier. In the cases shown here the modifiers, if used, are suffixes. For three of them the modifier is "retro panavision", and you can see that the program responded with Steampunk cameras in various settings. For two images I added "cinematic landscape", which yielded a filmlike atmosphere. Then "digital art", which was the first suffix I tried, also produced a steampunk vibe, and included some persons. Note that each of these images is one of many; others weren't kept. Let's look at some more:

DreamStudio includes the seed number in the file name, so I retained it. It also includes the first 30 characters of the prompt. Note the word "innovation", an error on my part. Thus the lower three images are a kind of ringer. We'll come back to DS. Above them are the first three items from ImageFX. When you download one of these, the file name is just "image_fx_". If the file isn't renamed, the next one is "image_fx_(2)", and so forth. ImageFX doesn't keep your history. It is free and there is no paid version.

The image I kept from running it without a modifier shows five apparently ingenious people doing stuff. When I added "digital art", I got abstract art. I downloaded four of these, two shown here, and two in the next montage:

Three of the abstract images look like impressionistic evocations of a galaxy. ImageFX offers buttons to push to add modifiers, or you can type your own. "Cinematic landscape" yielded a city scape in a valley; I've noticed that many pictures made from a prompt that mentions "landscape" have the "X" arrangement we all learned in kindergarten. The upper arms of the X are the flanks of mountains and the lower arms outline a river valley. Finally, "retro panavision" produced, not a camera, but an ingenious tinkerer in his workshop. This is my most favorite from this project, which is why I set it at the top of the post. Another montage:

These are the Leonardo AI offerings. This program will of course pay attention to modifiers or suffixes as normal parts of the prompt. I offers a rich set of Style and Substyle settings, which I abbreviated in the early part of the file names. Note that five of these images have a Steampunk look. That's not just because I like Steampunk, but because with certain Styles, with this prompt, that's nearly all that was offered. I really like the produce market image. I consider it "most different" from the others.

We round out the experience by making up the error I made when I ran DreamStudio the first time. Here is the final montage:

With DS, one can add modifiers, and there are also 16 Styles you can set with a button, including "Enhance" and "Digital Art". Without a Style set, we get kind of clunky Steampunk, at upper left. With "Enhance", the results were all architectural! "Cinematic" yielded Steampunk vibe on a city-wide scale.

Looking at all these makes me wonder what training data was used for each of the programs. I also wonder if the preset Styles in some of them have training subsets associated with them. All I can do at present is to continue to experiment, so I get a feel for the kind of vibe or atmosphere I want a picture to have.

These programs all had very different training sets. Short prompts like the one used here bring this out the best. However, even very long prompts cannot force conformity. There is just too much latitude in an image for every detail to be pinned down. This is one reason I keep lots and lots of images from these experiments. When I am considering a picture I want to produce, I can look through my "collection" as an archive, a library of "looks".

But…nothing beats playing around with the prompt's wording, suffixes, modifiers, Styles, etc., etc. I'll show one more favorite, a bigger version of one of these last four:

It's kind of compelling…

How useful can you be?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, self-help, advice, sociology

Years ago I had Stephen Covey training according to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I couldn't pass up the chance to read Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The approaches of these two men are quite different; 7 Habits is almost engineering-oriented, being quite analytical, while Seven Tools is anecdotal and geared to setting emotional hooks to motivate us as we read.

In the hierarchy or pyramid described by Abraham Maslow, Esteem (of both self and others) is at the fourth level, after one's needs for physical sustenance, secure dwelling, and a supportive community are met. Esteem, as Maslow describes it, depends primarily on accomplishment. These days, with "self esteem" being treated as a right rather than something earned, it would be better to use the terms "respect" and "self respect" (although "respect" is in danger of being swept sideways also). The most useful people are the happiest.

I was interested in what an art generating program might produce from the overly-simple prompt "The most useful person". These two images are the best offered by, on the left, Dall-E3 (in Bing) and DreamStudio (using its Anime style; other styles yielded blah results, as did other programs).

I am quite taken by the gardening/farming image. I have often thought of farmers as the most useful people. I put primary producers, such as miners, as a close second. In the early 1980's, when over-regulation threatened both farmers and coal mining companies, a popular T-shirt began to circulate that said, "Let them starve in the dark". It made the point succinctly. [Disclaimer: At the time I was in graduate school, and consulting for a gold mining company.] These images, and the others I passed on, show the great importance of the substance used to train a generative model.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's book has, naturally, seven chapters plus an Introduction. In the Introduction he points out that here he will have nothing to say about the scandals that dogged his middle years, because those matters have been overly thoroughly treated elsewhere. This book is about the attitudes he developed over the years, that he feels led him to success as a bodybuilder, health coach, movie star, governor, and philanthropist. His first two Tools are to develop a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, and then to grow that vision as large as possible.

Large visions are necessary. As it is said, you don't get to the Moon by planning to go halfway there. On the other hand, he points out that after aiming and preparing for a big goal, you might have to be satisfied with partial success, at least at first. This isn't like getting stranded halfway to the Moon. It is more like taking possession of a 3-bedroom house you can afford in a suburb, rather than the manor house in a rural countryside you hope one day to have. Consider it a stepping stone, and you have a roof over your head while you work (Hard! That's Chapter 3) at greater things for the future.

I don't plan to outline all the chapters. The advice is practical and the stories are well matched to the recommendations. I was touched in particular by several stories of how he related to competitors and potential opponents. In one singular instance, a bodybuilder had beat him out for a title, and at first he couldn't figure out how. He asked the man's advice, and eventually invited him to live and train together. A competitor need not be an enemy. In this case, the man was a great friend to him. If certain folks became enemies, we don't learn about it from Arnold. This is an admirable attitude.

Here and there I was put off by a bit of profane language. It isn't necessary. There is always a forcible alternative to cussing. Other than that, the book is fun to read, and well stocked with useful advice.

Two visions writ on the American landscape

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geography, cartography, surveying, history

Take a look in the lower right portion of this street map, around the name Anaheim:

Much of the map is gridded in a N-S, E-W pattern familiar to most Americans, but the older portion of the city of Anaheim, an area about 2.5 x 2.5 miles, is tilted 14.5° west of north. I used to think this was due to the city being originally laid out with a compass that wasn't corrected for declination, but the magnetic declination in this area is about 11° east of north, and over the past century it has been similar, never to the west. I haven't learned more about the original survey, but it was clearly done before the rest of the county, probably in the late 1800's.

Now look north of Anaheim, past Fullerton: There is no grid in much of this area. It is an area of suburbs with winding streets, which also includes a nature preserve, an arboretum, and a couple of large parks plus a long, skinny—and winding—golf course.

This one map encapsulates the tension written in America's landscape between the Cartesian vision of Thomas Jefferson and the more naturalistic vision of later city-and-landscape planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, the planner of New York's Central Park. Some 2/3 of the United States is laid out in a grid with the squares one mile on a side, which facilitates agriculture, as seen in this satellite image of an area about 6 x 4 miles in size northwest of Edmund, OK.

We can see that where the suburbs are built into the agricultural landscape, even though within them the streets may wind about or run at different angle, the neighborhood boundaries fit neatly into a quarter section (1/2 x 1/2 mile) or a section (1 x 1 mile). The farmers in the area are free to divide up their land as they see fit, but they tend to use rectangles and squares parallel to the section boundaries.

Having lived in Oklahoma for nine years, I can testify that navigation is typically quite easy. Someone will say, "Just go 3 miles east and 6 miles north, and turn in at the next street on the left." Then they may need to tell of another turn or two. No GPS is typically needed. On the other hand, I once visited some relatives in North Carolina, in the days before GPS. I was instructed how to find the local police department. I went there and told them where I wanted to go. A patrolman drove ahead to lead me along the winding roads and around several turns. When we got to the house he said, "We'll show you how to find this place one more time, if you need it. After that you are on your own." Today, I'd use GPS, and arrive with no clue about how I actually would get there without it.

Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America, by Amir Alexander, tells the story of how both the grid and the anti-grid came about. The first chapter (of six), plus most of the Introduction before it, leads a reader gently through the mathematical and philosophical background that led from the geometry of Euclid to the analytical geometry of Descartes and on to the esoteric geometry imagined by Newton. Euclidean geometry is constructive; objects such as triangles and circles and lines are constructed according to defined rules. Cartesian geometry is deductive; one may place Euclidean objects at will in a mathematical space. However, the X-Y grid we call the Cartesian coordinate system did not originate with Descartes, but was named in his honor a century later. To Descartes, the universe is filled to capacity by Euclidean objects with no gap between them. A modern thinker cannot imagine it, but it was "the way things are" to that generation of philosophers.

Newton instead imagined an empty and unbounded space, in which every location had an "address", a pair of X-Y coordinates, and a mathematical object was defined by the series of such "addresses" it encountered. Thus, three sets of coordinates defined a triangle's corners, and thereby the triangle itself, while any point on its boundary could be calculated from the corner coordinates and a measure of how far along one of the edges the point of interest happened to be. This infinite and empty mathematical space gave free rein to the mathematical imagination in a way that the filled space of Descartes could not. It led directly to Newton's invention of "fluxions", or The Calculus as it is now called.

Thomas Jefferson seized on Newton's Cartesian system as the perfect method for surveying the great continent of North America. We learn of the long struggle to get such an idea accepted by the Congress of the new United States. Jefferson, wary of cities and their evil effect on people, considered farmers, "honest yeomen, wedded to the soil," as the epitome of human perfection. He believed that, given the opportunity to obtain land with no history, no cultural meaning attached (Jefferson ignored the original inhabitants, with tragic results), farmers would build a republic on sound principles of ethics and responsibility.

Jefferson abhorred the model of power embodied in places such as the gardens of Versailles, seen here, with broad lanes radiating from the palace and the landscape constructed in homage to the tyrant-king Louis.

Mostly by the force of his personality, and the power he had as America's third President, Jefferson was able to get the project started, firstly in Ohio, and over the following 150-ish years, it developed across much of America, at least in arable lands, and many semi-arable areas.

Fast-forward a generation or so. There was a long struggle to prepare a plan for the island of Manhattan. Eventually, much of it was gridded, not according to the N-S, E-W grid in the Midwest and West, but parallel to the twin rivers, the Hudson and East Rivers. As this plan was being carried out, with dictatorial powers the city planners assumed (which would soon be shot down these days), an anti-grid movement began.

The first "win" in the anti-grid salvo was the planning and construction of Central Park in New York City, encompassing 877 acres. Although the boundaries are streets of the city grid, within all is sylvan, irregular, and naturalistic, with no right angle to be found. The success of its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, led to the design of smaller but equally attractive parks in major and medium-sized cities all over the country.

A partial compromise between the naturalism of Olmsted and the European vision embodied in Versailles (and many copycat royal gardens) was struck by the French designer Pierre Charles L'Enfant in his plan for Washington, DC.

The long central Capitol Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial at the west to the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building, and onward to the Lincoln Center at the east end, forms the axis of a series of avenues radiating from not just the Capitol and the White House but an additional fifteen figurative power centers, representing the fifteen U.S. states in existence prior to 1796. Note that the Jefferson Memorial, symmetrically opposed to the White house, is in an area without the gridded aspect of the rest of the city. A rebuke of Jefferson's vision, perhaps? I find it suggestive that later additions to the landscape, the two Lincoln-honoring "anchors" of The Mall, and the Jefferson Memorial, focus more on the Savior of the Union than on its initial architect.

We are complex creatures, we humans. The Grid is based on belief in human goodness. The Anti-Grid is in part a reaction to an understanding of universal human sinfulness and the restorative quality of natural, or naturalistic, landscapes. Not all farmers are "honest yeoman"…and there are tens of millions fewer family farms than existed a century ago. Not all city dwellers are the demons Jefferson imagined, which is a relief, given that 81% of Americans live in cities and "highly urban" areas, only 3% are farmers, and the rest live in suburban and semi-rural areas.

Today a new grid has been imposed, not just on America, but on the world. If you use Google Maps to view anyplace on Earth, and right-click on something, the top line on the menu that appears will be the geodetic coordinates, such as 39.94962, -75.15028 for the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. On your phone, in the Maps app, zoom in on a place and press your finger to a point of interest for about a second. The coordinates (with an extra digit of precision) will be placed in the search bar. These numbers are not very meaningful to us, but they are critical to the function of your GPS navigator, whether in your phone or a standalone unit. Hint: if you need to go to a location that doesn't have a convenient address, and you can find it on the map, you can get its coordinates and make them a named "favorite" for later use. The navigator can steer you almost right to it, perhaps giving you an indication of a short walk if it's not right on a street.

I want to give kudos to the author and his editors. This book has the most thorough index I've ever seen in a book of 370+ pages. The book is very well written. While reading all the math history in the first chapter, I thought, "Oh, he's going to lose some folks here," but the writing carries one on. Not everyone will understand, but the review gives one a feel for the currents of history that led to Newton's breakthrough, and to Jefferson's geometrical obsession.

Compliance among Auto Art programs

 kw: ai experiments, simulated intelligence, automatic art, comparisons, generated art

I like caves. In the post Troglodyte Fantasy I reported on a project to generate images of about a dozen rooms built into cave spaces, using two different art generators. I experimented with several others, and I conclude that the various programs vary significantly in how much they conform to or comply with the details of a prompt. I used long prompts in particular for this project. Here is the first one, which was intended to reify my ideas for a "man cave":

A room in a spectacular cave that has many stalactites and stalagmites, with flowstone on the room's walls, fitted out as an office with a desk and chair and desk lamp and two large computer monitors, with a bookshelf full of books to one side and two smaller side chairs.

Note that the room inventory is one desk, one desk chair, two side chairs, a desk lamp, two computer monitors, and one bookshelf. The milieu is a cave as described.

So far, I have produced images for all the rooms using three programs: Leonardo AI, ImageFX, and most recently DreamStudio. I also produced several versions of the Cave Office image using Gemini, Dall-E3, and Playground. The degree of prompt compliance these programs exhibit is quite variable, both from program to program and within the various "styles" or other toolsets of a program. I show some findings below, first for the four programs that I managed to "persuade" to hit nearly all the goals. Here is an image montage:

DE3: Dall-E3 – Everything is there, plus an extra bookshelf and several extra lamps in addition to a tiny desk lamp. We also see a view outside the cave through an archway.

DS: DreamStudio – There is only one side chair. There is a bonus monitor and floor lamp. However, it took the production of dozens of images to get this one.

GEM: Gemini – No side chairs, but everything else is there. The desk lamp is off, and the cave in general is the darkest one of these four. This was cropped from a square image.

IFX: ImageFX – Everything is there, plus an extra bookshelf and extra desk lamp. I understand that both Gemini and ImageFX use Imagen 3 to generate images, but there must be different training sets in the background.

The other two programs have numerous "style" settings, so in the second montage I showcase two variations for each program:

Leo: Leonardo AI. On the left, style and substyle "Phoenix" and "illustration", which explains the drawn appearance. Everything is there, although the two lamps stand beside rather than on the desk, so there is no real desk lamp. I am not sure what the green tree in the corner is doing there! "Phoenix" is billed as being extra-compliant to prompts. 

On the right, style and substyle "Lightning" and "vibrant", so color and contrast are enhanced. It's hard to see where a second monitor might be. Everything else is there, with added chairs and tables and table lamps, like a mini-conference sidebar. Note that Leonardo AI has various levels of credit usage for different styles, and Phoenix costs 2.4 times Lightning, while most other styles cost 1.4 times Lightning, which is promoted as fast and cheap.

PG: Playground. On the left, using the SDXL (Stable Diffusion XL) engine, probably version 1.0. There is only one side chair, but an extra bookshelf opposite, and a smaller bookshelf at the far end of the room.

On the right, using the PG30 (Playground 3.0) engine, which is billed as "very compliant to prompts". That is apparent here. Everything is there, with nothing extra. Sadly, Playground has dropped its image generation interface and announced it is going into graphic design. I'll miss it. It had the most options, but a big learning curve.

This doesn't get very deep into the use of these programs. At present the only program I have paid into is DreamStudio, because they have a pay-as-you-go plan, similar to the one Dall-E2 had. The others have various subscription plans, which I avoid. I haven't tried editing or outpainting with any of these except Playground. 

It is likely I could edit an image to add something I think is missing. But I prefer to get an image that is closer to what I want from the start, so little or no editing is needed. In the past I used outpainting to turn a square image into a wide-format image. That is not needed now, except for Gemini, but when asked for "wide format" it produces an image a little zoomed out so you can crop it, and its original images are 2048x2048, which helps.

Twenty mystery stories – that will hold me for a while

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, mystery stories, crime fiction, anthologies, collections

I read mystery stories from time to time. Not novels; I prefer the short form because the author has to make a point and be done with it. Seeing that The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024, edited by Anthony Horowitz, was available, I checked it out.

Twenty stories, and I have to say, all over the map. I like variety. With one exception I liked these stories. Here is my breakdown:

• ++ : 3
• +   : 9
• ~   : 7
• x   : 1 (skipped this one)

Not all of these are "murder mysteries", only about half. To me, that is a relief. "True crime", in all its variety, is more to my taste. Herewith, the three I liked the best:

"Beat the Clock" by Michael Bracken. The solution to a murder hinges on the vagaries of what clocks do—or must have done for them—when Daylight Time starts or ends. Motive? A big inheritance, that all expect will go three ways.

"How to Teach Yourself to Swim" by Fleur Bradley. The narrator can't do much to help an abused boy, but the boy rescues himself from a drug-dealing family by learning to swim.

"A Family Matter" by Leonardo Padura. Here I must digress. This is about someone wishing to escape from Castro's Cuba. A dear friend of mine swam overnight from a city near Guantanamo Base to a little offshore island, laid doggo in the water while the sun was up, then swam to the Base and obtained asylum in the US. This was more than 50 years ago. He still lives, now in California. In the story, the escapee is being helped from an unexpected direction, and the narrator, a retired cop, relies on the importance of family in Cuban society to find him, and then the twist occurs and I must leave it to you to see that for yourself.

A few of the notes I wrote after reading the stories:

Hidden heroism.
One too many snap decisions.
"Never not a cop" can be good.
Outliving the forensics.
Single mom gets away with killing (not her ex).

The last story, called a Bonus by the editor, is "The Suicide of Kiaros" by L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz series. The editor called it "the darkest story in the book," so I skimmed it without missing much. It's another gotaway story. It is not the story I skipped entirely; that one I could see right away hinged on deadly danger to a family, and I can't stomach those.

Great writing, from end to end. Now, back to science and scifi.

Strong support for blue sky research

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, serendipity

To abbreviate a saying usually attributed to Isaac Asimov: Science begins with the phrase, "Hmm, that's funny!" 

I once worked as a machinist at Cal Tech, often in the big room where the mirror for the Palomar Telescope was formed and polished decades earlier. Later half the room was taken over to build an early synchrotron (atom smasher), which had been disassembled but big concrete rings remained. Also, a cabinet in a corner of the room was filled with manuscripts of experiments that had been performed using the synchrotron, often attached to copies of PhD dissertations, which indicated the student had been awarded the degree. We were assembling an innovative radio telescope in the room, and its reflective surface was being machined semi-automatically. I had to be present to monitor and adjust the machinery, listening for anomalies in the process. During chunks of semi-free time I read here and there in the manuscripts. I found that many of the students using the synchrotron had eventually proved their original idea to be incorrect, but had discovered something else along the way, so they got their Doctorate anyway. Scientific serendipity at work!

Scientific serendipity is the theme of Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space by Chris Lintott. I would broaden the scope of the title, because much science is built on "random" discoveries, things found while looking for something else. Recent case: A medicine for treating Type II Diabetes, semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic® and Wegovy®, was found to promote weight loss, which is now the biggest market for it. Weight loss is making billions for the drug companies.

In nine chapters Professor Lintott leads us through the history of several important discoveries. One amazing example is the Hubble Deep Field. Several astronomers took a big risk and managed to convince the folks in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope to have it point towards a spot in space near the Big Dipper, where nothing could be seen on earlier photographs of the sky. For four days!

This is part of the result; it is about a quarter of the whole image, which included an area of sky about 0.6% the area of the Moon. Thus this image is about 0.15% of the Moon's apparent area.

This is at 1/3 the scale of the original image, so each pixel here is the average of 9 original pixels. I darkened the background to get rid of very low-level jitter. Just left of center, the bright white item with spikes is a star. Near top center is a dimmer, more yellowish star. Both stars are too dim to be seen by most telescopes. Besides these two stars, everything else in this image bigger than a single pixel is a galaxy. Hundreds are shown here, and nearly 2,000 galaxies have been enumerated in the entire full-scale image. Each galaxy contains billions to hundreds of billions of stars.

This Deep Field image triggered deeper and deeper-field images, because the longer a telescope records the light from an area, the more stuff is seen. More recent work with the James Webb Space Telescope (hereafter JWST), including infrared deep fields, shows that we can record information for at least a few trillion galaxies in the visible universe. The tiniest (apparently tiniest!), and thus farthest, galaxies shown may be at a distance of 12-13 billion light-years, showing us what things were like when the Universe was one or two billion years old.

For "older" light than that, we must rely on microwaves. The continuing expansion of the cosmos means that older light has been red-shifted, and at 12.5 or 13 billion years back, any "light" that could be visible here and now has been red-shifted to far infrared or even to microwaves. We have pigeon droppings and the unstoppable determination of two scientists to thank for first recording those microwaves, depicted here over the whole sky:

The features of this image are the highly amplified variations in a generally uniform radiation field, over the whole sky, that is characteristic of a blackbody with a temperature of 2.73K, or -270.42°C or 454.8°F. This corresponds to a peak microwave frequency of about 160 GHz, a wavelength of about 1.9 mm. This can be compared to the microwaves in your microwave oven, with a frequency of 2.45 GHz and wavelength of 120 mm.

In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson weren't looking for anything astronomical. They were trying to reduce the noise in a large antenna being used to bounce signals off the Echo satellite. At one point, they evicted a nesting family of pigeons and cleaned out the droppings. That did reduce the noise, but some remained. The "stray" signal was eventually found to be coming from literally every direction at the same frequency range and intensity. That meant it was not on Earth, and probably outside the Solar System, or even the Milky Way galaxy. It is actually "light" (originally X-rays and gamma rays) that was emitted when the age of the universe was about 360,000 years, red-shifted to microwave radio frequencies.

The features of the image above represent variations of only 0.01% of the total intensity. They were measured by spacecraft, because there are too many noisy microwave emitters on Earth.

I love astronomy, and I could go on and on, but I'll leave it to you to read the book. We haven't found solid evidence of aliens, visiting or elsewhere, but that would be the biggest discovery of all. And I suspect further serendipity will lead to it.