Admirable serpents

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, herpetology, snakes, serpents

Let's start with a couple of anecdotes. We lived in Ohio when I was a teen. One summer my brothers and I found several small, brown snakes in a field. At first we thought they were baby copperheads. We watched them for a while. Soon we saw that when they were relaxed, their heads were oval, not triangular like the head of a copperhead. We checked in the encyclopedia (this was decades before the Internet was even a pipe dream), and learned that they were DeKay's brown snakes. Their resemblance to a copperhead was protective coloration. When bothered, one would pull its head back to make it look more triangular and strike the way a copperhead does. But their tiny teeth couldn't even draw blood. A day or two later our great uncle Verne, who lived in Missouri, came to visit. One of my brothers and I ran to the field and brought back several of the snakes to show him. He was terrified! Particularly when he saw one of them rear back and strike me, biting my finger. I showed him that it had no fangs and was harmless. He was still uneasy, so we ran back and let them go. 

Jump forward about fifteen years. One of my summer field camps during my Senior year as a geology student was in eastern Nevada, in the White Pine Mountains. I saw rattlesnakes every day. Although they can't "hear", not having ears, they can sort of hear by putting their jaw on the ground to pick up vibrations. They know when people are near from the way our footsteps reverberate in the soil. Whenever I saw one it was usually slithering away, having detected my approach already. I value rattlesnakes because they eat most varmints, such as rats, so I left them alone. Another couple of years later I was with a group of rockhounds and their families in the Mojave Desert. The first morning I took an early walk and encountered a sidewinder (a kind of rattlesnake), coiled near the camp, apparently asleep. I went back to confer with the others. Because small children were with us, we decided it had to be removed or killed. I went back and killed it. I hated to do so, but there was too much danger leaving it there.

One more story, a fun one. Before I was married I lived in East Los Angeles with a few other single brothers from the church. We had a house in a little forested valley, a kind of enclave surrounded by a neighborhood. The youngsters in the neighborhood, ages 12-15, all belonged to a gang; everyone 16 and older was already in jail or prison. The gang leader, Tony, lived next door to our house, just outside the valley. One day I happened upon a king snake coiled near our gate, between our yard and Tony's family. I could see Tony in his yard so I called him over. He was frightened. I picked up the snake; it was about five feet long. After it calmed down (it liked my warmth) I asked Tony if he wanted to hold it. He reached out and it bit him! I showed him that the little tooth marks on his hand weren't fang marks, and taught him how to ease the snake into his arms. Then he took it home to show his mother. When he came back and returned the snake to me, it reared back and bit him again! I said, "Tony, that snake's telling you that you need to get right with God. Otherwise the real 'snake', the Devil, will devour you." I don't know if Tony decided to believe in God, but his attitude toward me was much more respectful after that.

When I saw Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World, by Stephen S. Hall, I really hoped to learn a few things. The book didn't disappoint me. The eight chapters limn various aspects of snakes and their intersection with society and science. Each chapter includes a coda titled "Snake Road" with a focus on a relevant aspect of snakehood.

Studying snakes is trickier than most genres of natural history. Most snakes are very good at staying out of our way. The only exception I know of is the cottonmouth moccasin, which seems ready to confront any human who has the trepidation to enter its territory. Of course, I am familiar only with North American snakes. Other continents and countries have their own species, and their own histories of human-serpent contact. For example, half of all snakebite fatalities happen in India, some 60,000 per year. I suppose that cobras are more territorial than rattlesnakes.

In the last chapter, about the attempt to deal with invasive Burmese pythons (and the even larger Burmese-Indian python hybrids), we find that the snakes are so well camouflaged that when expert snake finders (perhaps only in their own eyes…) were tested in an enclosure smaller than a suburban yard, containing a dozen "planted" pythons, most found exactly none, and only a two saw even one of the snakes. The conclusion of Chapter Eight is that the pythons of southern Florida, descended from escaped (or released) pets, are already too numerous and too widespread to be eradicated. The chapter subtitle, "Adaptation," says it all. Snakes have been found to be genetically pre-loaded with an enormous "toolkit" that allows them to adapt to a new environment a whole lot faster than anyone imagined before.

A case in point. The females of one species of snake (I don't recall, and I didn't note it down) usually reproduce at least once yearly, after maturing in about three years. However, during a prolonged drought, they can take ten years to mature and may reproduce only once per decade. That's rather extreme adaptation, and it takes place during one generation, so natural selection isn't operating here. Rather, natural selection already operated in prior generations to produce a species that can manage such a wide range of environmental variation. Only humans have a wider range, and we need cultural and technical means to do so. A snake is born naked, stays that way, and just handles whatever nature throws at it.

We think of snakes as the prime example of being cold-blooded. It turns out that pythons are usually able to keep their body temperature in a narrow range near 85°F (29°C). That means on a cool morning snake hunters could use a thermal camera to look for them. If a snake is in the water, that won't help, but on land any thermal anomaly that's cooler than a mammal but warmer than the dirt would be worth a look.

Backing up a couple of chapters: Chapter 6, subtitled "Reproduction," is titled "The Evolution of Pleasure." It takes a pretty solid bit of evidence to determine if a snake can experience pleasure. A group of researchers gathered the most solid evidence possible: they discovered that female snakes have a clitoris…or, rather, that they have two, just as the males have paired penises (eat your heart out, Casanova). I'll just leave that right there for you to think about.

Earlier yet, we learn a lot about venom, including the likelihood that even "nonvenomous" snakes actually have a little venom in their saliva. In a "harmless" snake like a garter snake (or DeKay's brown snake) there is apparently a little cocktail of toxins that might be relevant to subduing their prey, but don't cause a reaction in us. I suspect the risk of infection from a garter snake's bite is greater than any risk from whatever toxins might be in its saliva. But venoms are proving useful. The components that silence nerves, or cause muscle tissue to die, and even the ones that intensify pain, are being intensively studied to learn what signaling pathways and cellular receptors are affected. These can then become targets for drug discovery to deal with medical conditions. Components of various snake venoms are also being repurposed as medical substances. Per the proverb of Paracelsus, "The dose makes the poison," a tiny bit of certain toxins can be very beneficial. It reminds me of the use of Botulin toxin (Botox), not only for cosmetic use, but as a safer alternative to curare to induce localized, but longer-term, paralysis without causing permanent nerve damage.

The author hopes more people will learn to appreciate snakes. I guess I'd propound a proverb here: Snakes have a lot to teach us, we simply need to learn how to listen.

(Image generated with SeeDream 4.0 in OpenArt)

Noise is about more than loudness

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, sound, noise, soundscapes

For about ten years I have worked part time at the Delaware Museum of Natural History (renamed in 2022 the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science). My "office" is on the top floor, above an exhibit hall. During the times the museum is open to the public, I constantly hear the sounds of children talking and shouting in the hall below. I happen to like it. Happy sounds are good sounds. On occasion I venture downstairs to wander among the exhibits. There, the sound is much louder, particularly where there is an exciting exhibit in that exhibit hall. The sound is equally happy, but at that volume, it soon gets tiring and I go back upstairs.

I haven't measured the sound level at the museum—I only recently downloaded an SPL (Sound Pressure Level)  app—but I estimate that the loudness at my desk is about 65-70 dba, about as loud as an older washing machine. Down in the hall, it must be 80 dba or more, with peaks in the 90's…there is nothing quite like a surprised child's shriek!

Near a busy highway, the loudness is also in the 70 dba range, but it is definitely not a happy sound, unless you happen to be a tire salesman and the sounds of tires wearing out leads you to anticipate future tire sales. Few of us treasure the noisy clangor of a busy city street. We go where we must, but when we have a choice, we prefer sounds that are more pleasant, and, importantly, less loud.

The coupled measures of loudness and pleasantness are teased apart for us in Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take it Back by Chris Berdik.

A definition for those needing it: "dba" means "A-weighted decibels". It is a measure of the intensity of sound, with zero set at the threshold of human hearing. "A-weighting" adjusts the sensitivity at different frequencies to match our ears' sensitivity. The scale is logarithmic, so that an increase of 10 dba means a tenfold increase in sound intensity. Most people consider a 10 dba increase to be "twice as loud," because our senses also follow a logarithmic response.

The app I used to measure sounds after I began reading the book is "SPL Meter" by Keuwlsoft. When installed, it arrives uncalibrated, and I could tell it was reading quite high. I don't have a sonic reference, so to reach an approximate calibration I used several well-reported sounds to set the calibration. Now its readings are about 15 dba lower than before and they accord well with reported measurements. I went around during the past week gathering measurements. I'll discuss a few of these below. The reading shown in this image measures the loudness of a particularly low-flying jet aircraft as measured in my front yard.

The book chronicles the very gradual development of public policy regarding noise. The sonic environment has been ignored almost universally, perhaps with the exception of some of those who plan parks and open spaces such as Central Park in New York City. Central Park is big enough to keep the city's traffic sounds at bay, and many sheltered areas are quiet and restful. Even more so, the gentle forest sounds are soothing, quite in contrast to the typically jangly background noise of a city.

The author's aim is not to add another tome to those extolling quietness and denigrating loudness; rather, his interest is the quality of the sounds that envelop us. Many of us greatly enjoy attending concerts, where the louder sounds threaten to damage our ears; this is more so at a rock concert than at an orchestral concert. But, I have attended an outdoor concert of 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky that used real cannons. There, it was worthwhile to put one's fingers in one's ears whenever the conductor pointed at the cannons! As fun as that was, I don't listen to loud orchestral music all day long. One of my relatives was a rock drummer for a while and has significant hearing loss. I am a folk singer; we don't go for volume, but for lyrics that touch the soul.

Let's consider: what could make the sounds of a city less stressful? Nearly half of Clamor is about that, about the researchers and companies that design soundscapes. The idea of a soundscape is not to just subtract unpleasant sounds, but also to mix in more pleasant sounds.

Here is my own soundscape practice: As I hinted above, jets fly over our house from time to time. Our neighborhood is in line with one of the runways at Philadelphia Airport, and when the wind is right, the landing pattern has jets sweeping in from all directions to a spot about a mile west of our house, then making a descending beeline for the runway. Most of them are still about a mile high when they cross over, and I've recently measured their sound intensity to be 75 dba. Most of the jets are either a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320. When a larger plane passes over, not only is it intrinsically louder, but it is usually lower, producing the louder sound recorded above. 80 dba is as loud as my lawn mower, heard from 2 meters away (where my ears are during use). Inside the house, where the background sound level is 24 dba (just a bit louder than a whisper), a jet flying over registers 48 dba, except the big ones exceed 52 dba. Sometimes I take an early afternoon nap. Since 40 dba is generally considered loud enough to disturb sleep, I do this: I turn on the clock radio and reduce the volume until I can't understand the words, but the gentle susurrus of human voices is a kind of white noise that helps me "not hear" the jets when they fly over. My nap is better as a result. The Internet is full of suggestions for private soundscapes: little fountains, audio files of forest sound, playlists of gentle string music, etc., etc.

What is a good soundscape for an office? What do you want to be hearing as you work? What, if anything, should be the background sound for a business meeting, particularly for hard negotiations? All these are being studied. Some progress is being made. Several chapters deal with various aspects of such work.

It's very important to understand that people are hugely various. In the realm of felt experience, "diversity" is much more than ethnicity. Not everyone enjoys the sounds of happy children; some people find it excessively annoying. Most people I know enjoy rock music. There are a very few rock musicians and composers whose work I appreciate; I hate most of it. I like classical music, almost exclusively pre-1900; "12-tone" and "atonal" compositions are just meaningless noise to me. I like country and folk music, but mostly for the lyrics. I like the sounds of a babbling brook in a quiet forest, as seen in this picture, taken in a small woods near our house. Many people would find it either annoying or boring. The sound intensity in this woods is as low as 50 dba, which is "quiet" as defined by urban planners.

I did the following measurements this past week:

• 48 dba outside my front door in the daytime. Most of the sound I could hear was road noise from a highway 1/3 mile (~550 m) away.
• 65 dba from the same spot, when my neighbor across the street accidentally set off his car alarm. Fortuitous timing! The sound is designed to be annoying, to get attention. Most of us have learned to tune it out, making car alarms largely useless.
• 65 dba (ranging from 62-74) seated with friends in a restaurant that doesn't play background music. The higher reading was during conversation at our table.
• 50 dba in the forest as noted above, but...
• 60 dba when crows were calling nearby.
• 82 dba, my lawnmower at 1 meter.
• 79 dba, my lawnmower at 2 meters. Note: a difference of -3 dba indicates the intensity was one-half. Power is proportional to the square of intensity, so this follows the inverse square law: -3 dba is one-fourth of the sound power.
• 64 dba is conversation in an otherwise quiet room. Note that we spoke louder in the restaurant setting.

Clamor comes along at the cusp of a revolution in architecture, city planning, and numerous disciplines that have historically ignored sound. The book is not prescriptive; it is reporting on progress as it happens. I hope in just a few years to find that the sonic environment is more and more taken into account everywhere. I am fortunate to live in a quiet suburb. May those living with more noise soon find that the sounds around them are changing to reduce stress rather than enhance it.

A star in a circle in Nevada

 kw: photo essays, investigations, maps, satellite photographs

It is interesting to peruse odd things people post about what they've seen on Google Maps or Google Earth. Recently I saw a few items that include these coordinates: 37°24'05.7"N, 116°52'06.1"W, which are easier to enter into GEarth (which I used) or GMaps as 37.40158, -116.86781. When you do, this appears:

Note, the accuracy of the coordinates with degrees-minutes-seconds, in tenths of a second, is just over 3 meters or 10 feet. The accuracy of coordinates with decimal degrees, reported to five digits after the decimal point, is 1.1 meters or 3.6 feet. I converted the one to the other, and the fifth decimal is effectively a guard digit, having excess precision.

What is this circle-star figure in the Nevada desert? Spoiler alert, if you want to call it that: I still don't know. This is a report of a journey that hasn't reached the destination. The outer circle is 242.5 m (796 ft) in diameter. The inner circle is less regular, and is about 150 m (490 ft) across. The figure is not really very large.

I first looked back in time, which is why I did this in Google Earth. The earliest clear satellite photo is from 2003, where it appears that some recent activity had taken place:

I shifted the view a little when making this screen capture, to show a series of small craters in the desert floor to the east of the figure. The craters are about 10 m (~34 ft) in diameter. I'll return to them in a moment.

The six squares in the six triangles each contain some darkish object. In 2003, which is less clear, they look like they may be battle tanks. This closeup of the area in 2022 shows something quite different:

Three of the items are seen. They look like missiles. I can't even guess about the object at the center of the figure. This is the sharpest image available at present. I wonder what the missiles are defending?

The 10 meter craters are probably bomb craters. They are much too small to represent nuclear munitions. This image shows craters from fission bomb tests in the 1950's at the Nevada Test Site (as it was popularly called):

This image has the same scale as the prior two. The central blast-exit holes are much larger than 10 m, and the collapse craters are in the 100-150 m range. Here is an overview of a 7x10 km portion of the Nevada Test Site as it appears today:

This area is about 80 km (50 mi) SSE of the circle-star figure we are looking at. The Test Site is in an area now administered by the Dept. of Energy, while our figure is in the middle of the Tonopah Test Range. Both are portions of the Nellis Air Force Range Complex, and entirely surrounded by BLM lands.

I would say that our figure is in a pole of inaccessibility. I decided to look nearby for more clues. About 2.5 km (~1.5 mi) to the west we find an interesting complex:

This image from 2022 shows three walled areas. What look like structures are really various things. The block to the left appears to contain ammunition dumps. The brown square inside a small walled area at lower center seems to be a very old metal building with holes in the roof. What look like small buildings to the right and upper center are mostly various assemblages of shipping containers. Note the black shadows of some kinds of pillars at the corners and midpoints of the walls around two of the sections. Based on a visit I made to a Minuteman missile silo I made many years ago, I surmise that these are motion detectors. I looked back into time:

The images are dated. The earliest one that is somewhat clear is from 2003. The image from 1985 (Landsat, which was the epitome of high resolution at the time!), shows at least that the complex was there already. I suspect it dates from the 1950s. The pillars are seen in the 2014 image, not before. Each image shows a different arrangement of shipping containers. The ammunition bunkers, if that is what they are, appeared after 2014 and before 2020 (which I didn't show here). The square brown thing also appeared after 2014. That's all I can extract from these images at this resolution.

Another area about 3 km (~2 mi) NNE of our figure looks like an early layout for the roads of a suburb:

The area of this image is 3.5x5 km. I included the circle-star so we can see how close it is. The dark spots along cross-shaped portion midway along the connecting road may look like dwellings at this scale, but they are really arrangements of shipping containers.

For this area also I looked into the past. I went back until the "roads" looked fresh, in 2006. The prior year, they are not present at all:

The option that comes to mind is the intention to build a fake suburb to blow up with a nuclear bomb, such as was done elsewhere; a video about one is here. The atmospheric test ban treaty (1963) would have put an end to it.

Earlier I called this area a "pole of inaccessibility." When you enter the coordinates of this point into Google Maps, it is labeled Pahrump, Nevada. However, the actual town of Pahrump is 150 km (93 mi) to the NNE. The nearest paved highway is US 95 (quite different from I-95 along the east coast), about 20 km (12 mi) to the SW. I could find no roads of any kind connecting US 95 to the dirt roads in this area.

Some dirt roads go north, but not in any straightforward way. A broad valley between this area and US 6 some 75-80 km (47-50 mi) to the north is crisscrossed by ephemeral dirt roads. US 6 goes between Tonopah and the real Pahrump, and further to the NE. In other directions, the picture is the same. I suspect the only way to get "here" is by helicopter…unless you walk, and can carry about ten gallons of drinking water. Even in winter the dry Nevada air will suck at least a gallon per day out of you; been there, done that.

Searching out roads to the north I encountered this (the area is about 10x16 km, or 7x10 mi):

Near the center of the concentric circular arcs is a hiking area called "Nye's Giant Target" on Google Maps; it has the sublabel "(small)". This image is from 2012, when the lines were clearer; they have suffered wear through time. Maybe this is a desert version of a crop circle…

There you have it. My speculations, or rather semi-educated guesses. There's no solution to these mysteries outside of military records that have probably been almost forgotten. It is simply fun to traipse around—virtually—to see what is out there.

A multiplanet enthusiast

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, emigration, planets, mars

From time to time I use a very small prompt with an art generation program. The prompt for this image was "Planets everywhere." The site I used was Leonardo AI with the Lightning engine and its Dynamic style. The engine clearly doesn't understand either physics or astronomy. Actually, the way these programs work, the engine cannot be said to "understand" at all. But I like the surreal look of the image.

I produced this image about a year ago. It came to mind when I saw the cover art for Out of This World and Into the Next: A Physicist's Guide to Space Exploration by Adriana Marais. The author is based in South Africa, and she was one of the Mars One candidates for their plans to send people on a one-way trip. Mars One went out of business in 2019, but the banner has been taken up by Elon Musk and SpaceX.

The book is rather big; it's intended to be comprehensive, a sort of "History of humanity starting from the Big Bang." In keeping with the author's Germanic heritage, the Table of Contents is a thorough outline. Denying the trace of Teutonic detail-mindedness found in my own heritage, I'll touch a few items of interest and leave the rest to the interested reader.

The subjects of Part I, "Where do we come from?", remind me of a Bible verse. The three subjects (elaborated in 13 subchapters) are "The Universe", "Our biosphere", and "Are we alone?" Zechariah 12:1 tells that God "stretched out the heavens, laid the foundations of the earth, and formed the spirit of man within him." Each set of 4-5 items goes from broad to narrow. The tip of the arrow at the end of this Part introduces the Kardashev Scale. This is worth a bit of discussion.

Nikolai Kardashev proposed a three-point scale to describe the energy made available to a technological civilization:

1. A Type 1 civilization, labeled Planetary, has attained control of all the energy available on a single planet, including all the incident sunlight.
2. A Type 2 civilization, labeled Stellar, captures and uses all the energy output of one star, presumably its home star.
3. A Type 3 civilization, labeled Galactic, controls all the energy of its home galaxy.

Many, myself included, add Type 0, to represent the beginning of technology as evidenced by the first mastery of fire. This level was apparently achieved before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, as much as two million years ago. How far have humans come towards becoming a full Type 1 civilization? Relevant facts:

• Worldwide energy use is about 625 exajoules per year (note: 80% is fossil fuel use). That's 174 billion megawatt-hours (MWh, = 1,000 kWh) per year.
• Solar energy influx is 1.53 million billion MWh per year. The ratio of these two numbers is about 1:8,800. In other words, our global energy use is 0.0114% of the energy available in sunlight.
• Internal heat flow of the earth, half radiogenic and half primordial, is 410 billion MWh per year. Thus total geothermal energy is about 2.4 times the global energy budget.

Thus we are about 1/90th of a percent along the way to being a Kardashev Type 1 civilization. Dr. Marais points out that photosynthesis converts just under 2% of sunlight into sugar, putting the biosphere's Kardashev level about ninety times farther along, compared with vaunted human technology.

Years ago I first examined the "carbon debt" indicated by the oxygen in the atmosphere and the oxidized iron in Earth's crust. Going back to the origin of oxygen-emitting photosynthesis (which came along half a billion to a billion years after other varieties of photosynthesis such that found in sulfur-digesting bacteria), we first find about a billion years of accumulation of "red beds" and other iron oxide deposits. Once the iron was all oxidized, oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere, as carbon-containing detritus was buried in the crust and later subducted beneath it by plate tectonics. I concluded that if we could find all the oil, natural gas, coal and tar in the crust, and also the graphite and diamond in the upper mantle, and burn it, that might use up most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. By contrast, 200+ years of fossil fuel consumption have "used up" about 0.01% of it. 

A little thought is sufficient to realize that there are limits to the energy available from fossil fuels, and not just because the oxygen will run out (to be replaced by carbon dioxide). Rather, we must consider the medical fact that humans (and who knows how many other animals) begin to feel distressed when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 1,000 ppm. So, we don't want to go anywhere near that! From the vantage point of 430 ppm today, up from 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution, 1,000 ppm seems far, far off. It isn't. Global energy use is still increasing, fast. Think about that.

A final point. I have seen it proclaimed that human civilization today is approaching a Kardashev level of 1; estimates range up to 0.7. Hmph! We are far below that. Just focusing on Kardashev levels zero and 1, we can consider a logarithmic scale, so that a scale value of 0.7 would represent energy use of about half of total solar input, or 765 quadrillion kWh per year. That's about 4,400 times as much energy as we are presently using! We need a different scale for energy consumption less than 0.1 of the solar value (the logarithm of 0.1 is -1, and starting from 1 for "1 solar output", the result is a Kardashev level of 0). For the moment, I'll set this aside.

As for levels 2 and 3, I have a couple of thoughts. A spherical construction that encloses the entire Sun at a suitable distance (probably between Earth and Mars) could capture all of the Sun's energy. Such a construction is called a Dyson Sphere, after the physicist who popularized the concept. We would need to take apart at least all of Jupiter and possibly Saturn also to accomplish it. Communication is a bit of a problem; the travel time of light or radio across the sphere would take about twenty minutes, one-way. Communication in a Galactic civilization is another thing entirely; getting a signal across the Milky Way Galaxy would require about 100,000 years. Talking across dwarf galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds would be quicker; only a few thousand years!

In Part II, "Who are we?", the focus at the culmination of the 15 chapters is Terraforming. The next-to-last topic is "The Anthropocene," a designation that some have proposed for a geologic age that began 250-300 years ago with the Industrial Revolution, and so far has resulted in the extinction of many species (though it is so far probably less than one percent). Can we indeed terraform Mars? Let us contrast this with our current activities, which could be considered "the anti-terraforming of Earth" (my coinage).

It is worthwhile to ask, does our experience of human nature give us any grounds for optimism that we can properly terraform another planet? It is wise at this point to jump to the conclusion in Part III (Where are we going?), its last section, "Transforming our world." That is the crux of the matter. Can we terraform Earth? This is a question asked by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: Which will cost less, establishing one (or a few) million people in a new colony on Mars, or restoring the environment on Earth so that future global catastrophes will not wipe us off the planet? Clearly, he is in favor of the latter course, and I agree.

I hope Dr. Marais gets her chance to go to Mars. She wants it so much she can taste it. Her evocative essay "Off-World" almost gives us the taste for it. It is markedly utopian. She needs to add to her scientific perspective the lens of history. No utopian society has ever succeeded. The advice of a pioneer of space inhabitation, "Go with friends!", tells you only part of what you need to know. Because friends change. Those who once ran together grow apart. The current divorce rate of about 50% does not bode well for the ability of mere humans to establish the kind of society she describes.

I like the dream. I wish I could conclude it won't turn into a nightmare.

Preparing to write this, I ran the prompt "Planets everywhere" in OpenArt's DynaVision engine, with AI Enhancement turned on. This was the result. The physics is a little better, but this is still surreal. If you were to see this density of planets in the sky, it would be best to go far away. The chaotic gravitational regime would soon prove catastrophic. Still, it's a fun image.

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

A couple of minor errata:

• On p. 188 Yuri Gagarin is said to have "experience[d] the weightlessness of being beyond Earth's gravitational field." Not even close. He was well within it, but orbiting such that the centripetal force and the gravitational force exactly canceled. He experienced microgravity. If he'd been paying attention, he might have noticed very slight tidal forces tending to reorient him if he tried to float free inside his capsule.
• On p. 195 we read that the wavelengths of visible light are "similar to the size of atoms". The wavelength range of visible light is 400 nm to 700 nm, or roughly half a micrometer. The diameter of a typical atom is 2-3 tenths of a nanometer, or some 2,000 times smaller. The author is making the point that light bounces off material stuff. Actually, X-rays of the sort used in medicine do have wavelengths similar to the size of atoms, and they pass right through most materials. So the physics is wrong anyway.

Who do I think I am?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, pronouns, popular culture

Toddlers are addressed by everyone as "you" so frequently that they think their name is "You," and upon hearing others using "I" for themselves, the little ones think that "I" and "Me" refer exclusively to those others. Pronouns take a while to get used to. This kind of confusion underlies a bit of wordplay in a Looney Tunes cartoon in which Elmer Fudd is pursuing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. As John McWhorter tells us in the Introduction to his new book, his title is found in this exchange:

BUGS (to Elmer): Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?

DAFFY: Shoot him now, shoot him now.

BUGS: You keep out of this; he doesn't have to shoot you now.

DAFFY: Ha! Hold it right there! Pronoun trouble! It's not, "He doesn't have to shoot 'you' now," it's "He doesn't have to shoot 'me' now." Well, I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!

(BLAM!) [This being a cartoon, Daffy is now covered in soot]

The title of the book is Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

While the author points out the confusion of Daffy in mixing up "me" and "you", the reply of Bugs to Daffy in the third line shows that Bugs isn't so clear himself. The wordplay is reminiscent of the "Who's on First?" routines of the 1930's made famous by Abbott and Costello in the 1940's and later.

As the thread of the book winds along, we find that pronouns have been alternately steadfast and malleable. Each chapter traces the usage of a pronoun or a set of subject-object pronouns (such as "I" and "me" or "he" and "him"). A particularly long section traces the history of "me" as it switched between object-only, subject-only, and a little bit of both. For example, while I was taught that the "correct" way to refer to myself plus a friend doing something is, "Jerry and I went to a movie," for a century or so this has stood alongside "Me and Jerry went…" and almost as frequently, "Jerry and me went…"

Here are the rules I was taught, to which I habitually adhere, going on 70 years:

• When listing a group that includes you, out of modesty refer to yourself last.
• If the group is the subject of the sentence, refer to yourself as "I", as in "I went": "Jerry and I went."
• If the group is the object, refer to yourself as "me", as in "It made me happy": "It made Jerry and me happy."

Period. Those who used alternative constructions were considered ignorant or uneducated and, in a school setting, were firmly corrected. Again and again if necessary.

I admit to a bit of discomfort with accepting Dr. McWhorter's contention that "Me and Jerry went" is permissible due to historical English usage, and even the more, numerous languages that either have dual-use pronouns or don't have object-subject distinctions anyway. I don't really care what is acceptable in Tagalog or !Kung. I want to be clearly understood by Anglophones.

By the end of that first chapter I had a side thought, "I wonder if his goal is to support the singularizing of 'they'?" A quick look at the Table of Contents confirmed my suspicion: the last chapter's title is "They Was Plural." However, I didn't let that slow me down. I enjoyed the book, the linguistic histories and odd collections of pronouns that surround and underlie the ones with which we English speakers fill our prose. I didn't know before that in Old English, the male, female, and neuter third-person singular pronouns were "he", "heo", and "hit". "He" has stuck with us, while over time "hit" was de-aspirated to "it", but the path from "heo" to "she" (with a side jaunt to spit out "her") was more circuitous.

By the way, this puts paid to the contention that pronouns are so pervasive that making changes is arduous-to-impossible. All to support the tiny smattering of folks who don't like being either "he" or "she", and of course it is barbarous to call them "it", so of course "they" is called in to fill the gap. Behind all that is the delusion that "nonbinary" is a valid gender. In actuality, there is tremendous political force behind the delusion, for totalitarian reasons I'll defer for the nonce, such that a change has already been made, and is being forced on an unwilling public. For my part, if someone points to a individual person and says something like, "They are with me," I'm likely to respond, "Is there a mouse in his (or her) pocket?"—depending on the visible appearance of the person. And to close the loop, I have yet to hear someone say, "They is with me." I wonder if the "they" standing by even notices the gaffe.

Furthermore, there are numerous instances of "they" as a nonspecific singular pronoun, such as, "When a newcomer arrives, they need to be greeted by an usher." However, these have arisen over the past 50-60 years primarily by folks who bend over backwards to cater to old-line feminism and its crusade to change "chairman" and "chairwoman" to "chair" or "chairperson", etc. Until I was in my twenties, the acceptable usage was, "When a newcomer arrives, he needs to be greeted by an usher," unless the newcomer is expected to be female, such as at a League of Women Voters event; then, "…she needs…" is preferred.

I would say it is a little early to take up the cudgels for settling on "they" where "it" will work. To the contention that "it" refers to inanimate things, just ask anyone with a pet, where "it" is frequently used to refer to one's furbaby, except by those who over-humanize their pets. So if a man or woman doesn't want to be referred to either by "he" or "she", I'd prefer to say "it". Of course, speaking to such a person, I'll use "you." Just like I would to any other human. Or even a pet.

Not to leave too sour a taste in your mouth, dear reader, I must say that Dr. McWhorter writes very well, the book is quite valuable, and if it proves to be a trend-setter, perhaps I'll have to bend to what then becomes truly common usage. I come from a long-lived family, so I say, time will tell. Who knows what another decade or two will bring.

Spiders aroar - AI training?

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

About two months ago, July 16, the number of views this blog experienced was 77. That is "about right", historically. For the last six months, that was the closest to a "normal" day; no other day has seen fewer than 200 views, and the rate has frequently been in the thousands per day.

Firstly, here we see the past 24 hours (from Noon 9/4/25 to Noon today):

Even the "dull roar" of the first 14 hours of this record (~100/h) exceeds the July 16 (~3/h) rate by a factor of 30, and the rate since then has been has high as 540/h. World distribution for this period is interesting, and a bit surprising:

Surprise #1: The US is at the top; its total slightly exceeds the combined total for Singapore and Hong Kong.

Surprise #2: The top six countries each exceed 77 views per day, and "other" represents a rate that would hit every post in this blog over less than five days.

Let's look at the past month:

The daily rate on August 20 was around 500 views that day. All others were greater. Switching to the other end of the time scale, here is the "Now" picture, the past two hours:

The "clutter" through most of this period is 3-5 views per minute, never less than 2. That comes to around 3,000 per day. The five spikes in the 40-90 view/min range add another 300 or so views, making up more than half the 595 total for this two-hour period. 595 views/2h = 7,140/day. Probably half of that is in such spikes, the rest as ongoing "clutter". For reference, 77 views/day comes to ~6.4/2h, or 0.053 views/min.

I like to think I am truthful and mostly correct. I hope that is a positive influence for the AI agents that are probably being trained with material from this blog. Considering that there are close to two million blogs more popular than this one (in ordinary times, at least), my influence is likely in the range of 0.00001%. Ha!

Fluorescence on the porch

 kw: photo essays, fluorescence, ultraviolet, spectra, diffraction gratings

This is a look into a bag of plastic rings taken from cottage cheese containers, illuminated with a UV "party light", or "black light". A number of food products are sold with such rings sealing the tops. They are polypropylene, which is not fluorescent by itself; manufacturers add a fluorescent tracer for reasons known only to them.

I happened upon this when I saw a glint of blue on a sunny day, in the grass near a Dunkin Donuts shop. It turned out to be a piece of plastic from a soup container. Later I found that the plastic rings that seal my favorite brand of cottage cheese are the same material. I like fluorescent stuff, so I've been collecting these ever since, as UV detectors. As you may conclude, I eat cottage cheese a lot; I have some with my breakfast at least twice weekly.

You may have heard of UV-detecting beads. They slowly change color in sunlight or when exposed to a UV lamp. There are several colors, but they all are clear once they've been away from a source of UV for a few minutes. The bonus of the fluorescent plastic is that it responds instantly.

Here I have a piece of the plastic hanging from a curtain rod in our sun porch. Some UV-sensitive beads are hanging with it, but their color change was rather subtle at the time this picture was taken. The blue tint of the plastic ring is evident…not overpowering, but evident.

This is a fresh ring. I noticed that, after six months in the sunny window, the ring that was there wasn't showing such bright fluorescence, and appeared more greenish. I replaced it with this new one and took it into my workshop to evaluate.

This photo under UV light shows the old ring on the right and a new one on the left. To the camera, they look very similar, but they look quite different by eye. This is at least partly because the camera sensor's color response is different from that of our eyes, and partly because the sensor can record UV, which is invisible to us. Also in the photo is a syringe I use for lubricating small parts, and also a reflection of the illuminating lamp, seen at the top of the photo. The desktop is dark brown Formica.

I decided to take a crude spectrum of these two pieces of plastic under UV illumination. I used this diffraction grating from Rainbow Symphony (the current price is $15 for a pack of 25). 

This grating has 500 lines/mm, which corresponds to 12,700 lines/inch. I have an old sheet of grating material from Edmund Scientific with 13,600 lines /inch, or 535 lines/mm, but it is harder to handle than these convenient slide mounts. Rainbow Symphony also sells gratings with 1,000 lines/mm, for those who want to photograph spectra at higher resolution.

This is the spectrum of the party light, tilted so that a sliver shows past the lampshade, at the left, with the main spectral lines noted. The filter isn't perfect, so visible lines of mercury come through. The very strong line pair centered on 406 nm gives the lamp its distinctive bluish-violet look, but it appears pure blue to the camera. There is also a faint orange-red line that I surmise is fluorescence from the filter material inside the lamp; mercury doesn't have a 620 nm line. Note how the 578 nm line pair appears yellow-green in the photo; to the eye it appears yellow-orange.

The UV wavelength that makes the plastic fluoresce is 365 nm. The camera can see it, as the photo shows. It is not visible to the eye, unless you have had a cataract operation; the natural lens of the eye is yellowish and filters it out. The strongest spectral line of mercury is 256 nm, but that won't pass through glass. A phosphor in the lamp filter fluoresces at 365 nm, increasing the efficiency of the lamp.

For reference, sunscreen and UV blocking sunglasses need to filter out all wavelengths shorter than 400 nm, or even 450 nm (mid-blue). In commercials, UVA refers to wavelengths near 365 nm, and UVC refers to 256 nm and nearby wavelengths. The middle range, called UVB, in the 320 nm range, doesn't have a convenient mercury spectral line to use for testing. Sunlight has a continuous spectrum of light that makes it through the atmosphere, from 180 nm in the deep UV (UVD) to 2,000 nm (mid-infrared).

This is a montage of the spectra of the two rings. I could have sharpened them by adding a slit above, but these spectra serve the purpose. The upper part shows the fresh plastic ring's spectrum. It fluoresces in the range from blue to green, with blue being brighter. The mix of blue and green makes the fluorescence of the ring look blue-white rather than deep blue.

The lower part shows the spectrum of the old, faded ring. There is less blue, but the green is unchanged. Thus, to the eye it appears greenish and dimmer when sitting in sunlight. That gives me a good reason to keep a bagful of these rings. About twice yearly I need to replace the "UV detector" in my porch window with a fresh ring.

These are useful to me, to remind me to wear sunglasses outside. I already have cataracts, but they aren't so bad that I need cataract surgery…yet. The more diligent I am to protect my eyes from UV, the longer I can do without it.

Too wrong to be wrong

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, pseudoscience, sociology, humor

Imagine two utterly involatile items—tungsten ball bearings, say—orbiting one another in an absolute vacuum at a temperature very near absolute zero. The only force operating on them is their mutual gravitation. Based on the common meaning of the words, this system would be an example of perpetual motion. One could quibble that even in this microkelvin environment, an occasional tungsten atom volatilizes, such that over an extremely long time, occasional collisions between errant atoms and one or the other object would slow their orbital motion. I don't know how to calculate how long a time must elapse until the objects come to rest and, of course, settle into contact, nor how much longer before they evaporate away to a uniform tungsten gas. Certainly, our universe could not host a region in which this system is possible.

To would-be inventors, perpetual motion has a very different meaning: a system from which one can extract usable energy without adding energy.

This painting by Norman Rockwell, which graced the cover of the October 1920 issue of Popular Science, illustrates one of the many thousands of ingenious designs of perpetual motion machines. Just like all the others, a machine like this can be made with very low-friction components so that it will run for a very long time. But it will always slow down and eventually stop. If you try to extract some of its energy of rotation, it will come to a stop even sooner. Always, always.

The sociological phenomenon of "getting something for nothing" lies behind perpetual motion, and is the subject of Chapter 4 of  Pseudo Science: An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them by Lydia Kang, MD and Nate Pedersen.

The authors state at the outset that the book is not comprehensive. Indeed, they shied away from overly politicized areas (e.g. Lamarckist and Lysenkoist theories of evolution) and the grossly evil ones (e.g. eugenic programs and vivisection, human and otherwise). Such things aside, they gathered 25 categories of pseudoscientific beliefs in four sections: "Pure Nonscience", such as flat-earthism, perpetual motion, and phrenology (bumps and lumps on the head); "Aliens! Ghosts! Bigfoot! Atlantis!", including UFOs (or UAPs these days), cryptozoology, and the "2012 Apocalypse"; "Wishful Thinking", or sundry ways to "predict" the future such as astrology or superstitions; and "Grifters, Nihilism and Denialism", where they lump in sundry conspiracy theories and dowsing.

Among the conspiracy theories they discuss, they do make a political foray, although I suppose they don't think of it that way: Climate Change Denial. What was once the Greenhouse Effect, from the early 1800's until the mid-1900's, became Global Warming before morphing another time or two so that now we hear of Climate Change, usually "catastrophic climate change". Here they toe the party line, the party of totalitarians. Sadly. Let's take a side trip into the facts as I know them:

• Joseph Fourier (he of the "series") in 1824 concluded that a "greenhouse trapping" effect by, primarily, water vapor caused the average temperature of the Earth to be warm enough to keep most of the planet's water in liquid phase.
• Svante Arrhenius in 1896 calculated the added effects of other gases, primarily carbon dioxide. He concluded that CO₂ could add a few degrees to the warming. The relevant sentence on p. 254 has Arrhenius stating that the added carbon dioxide "from coal combustion could result in global warming and possibly the extinction of the human race." This is utterly false. Arrhenius actually wrote,

"…we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." 

He was from Sweden, and thought a bit of warmth would be beneficial. Just for the record, I consider that Canada, Siberia, and Patagonia will benefit, possibly to become the new breadbaskets of their respective continents, along with the Scandinavian countries. Further,

• As a teen I repeated Arrhenius's calculations. Later I majored in four sciences, with a "hobby" of computer coding (with which I paid my way until retirement). 
• In the regime of CO₂ concentration below about 1% (10,000 ppm), the absorption bands in mid- to longwave infrared "max out", or become saturated, before a concentration of 500 ppm is reached. In other words, with a present concentration of 425 ppm, nearly all the warming possible has already occurred. CO₂ in the atmosphere is increasing about 2.5 ppm per year, so the little bit of extra warming we can expect over the next 25-30 years is minor to negligible.
• Studies of fossils from times of high CO₂ and experiments with enclosed stands of trees where extra CO₂ is added to the air have shown that trees and other leafy plants grow faster and larger when CO₂ concentration is about 1,000 ppm, or 0.1%. This goes for rice also, contrary to some recent claims in overly politicized reporting.

"Global warming" and its various aliases was appropriated by the totalitarian Left in the US and much of the developed world as a cudgel to gain political control of the populace and the energy economy. They reason that only by creating an impoverished populace, including elimination of the middle class, can they achieve the power they crave. The deplorable condition of the Leftist-controlled major cities in the US, and their surfeit of impoverished minorities, portends the condition of all the world under Leftism.

Climate change has become a political tool, such that reasoned dialogue is no longer possible. OK, end of my soap box rant.

Much of the humor in the book is found in picture captions, such as, from the chapter Phrenology, an old illustration captioned, "An 1886 illustration of parents annoying children by stressing about their future careers," and in Cryptozoology, by an etching of a kraken dragging a ship into the sea, "This giant octopus would like a word about your sushi order." The text itself is straightforward, light-hearted in general, and a pleasure to read.

In the Personality Psychology chapter some ink is spent on MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Many businesses use this to categorize (or label) employees. The category I fit is INTP, for Introverted-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving. If the sixteen Types are taken as some fixed construct, being thusly labeled can lead to managerial abuse, which the authors dwell upon. However, at my company, at least, we learned the details of our assessments. Each Type Indication was based on our answers to a couple dozen questions. The final Indicator, such as the T applied to me, is a balance between opposing traits. Thus T and F, or Thinking and Feeling, go together. With up to 100 points to dole out, the T=7 in my score actually indicated 49T-42F, which means I am strong in both traits. As it happens, my career was built on my analytical skills, but I am also well known for my tendency to weep at weddings, and the way my son played the Toccata by Khachaturian at a recital also brought me to tears. The other three Indicators were also balances. I-E (Introversion-Extraversion), for example was stronger for I with a good dollop of E, and this is further influenced by the fact that I am somewhat bipolar: When I am "up" I am more sociable than otherwise, and "otherwise" tends to last longer. In this case, treating MBTI Types as prison cells is the pseudoscience. The authors rightly decry such practices.

In the chapter on the "2012 Mayan Apocalypse" it is a pity that they don't mention the excellent book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, by Mark Van Stone, PhD, co-author of Reading the Maya Glyphs. In Dr. Van Stone's view, frequently stated, "December 22nd, 2012 will be akin to January 1 on our calendar."

The book is fun, interesting, and contains a bit of an Easter egg: The cover is printed in three colors of fluorescent ink, as these photos show.

This is a library book, and the dimmer section at lower left of the UV image is caused by library tape—which absorbs most UV—holding the catalog number to the spine.

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

My turn to give the copywriter a wrist-slap:

• On p. 105, the phrase "…more likely of the reeds' displacement" is missing a word and should read, "…more likely cause of the reeds' displacement."
• On p. 139, a picture of the Aztec Calendar Stone is labeled "The Maya Calendar." This is a very common error. The Mayan civilization fell before 900 AD. The Aztec civilization, featuring a different ethnic group, began about 1300 AD, four centuries later. The inscriptions of both cultures are distinctive and unique to each.
• On p. 155, pipes bursting due to freezing water are likened to a soda can bursting in the freezer. Sorry, but the latter eruption is due to CO₂ being driven out of the soda as it freezes. There is room in the can for water-to-ice expansion, but the CO₂ raises the pressure much higher.
• On p. 259, a more basic typo: a temperature rise of 2.5°F is equated to -16°C. This is a category error. As a temperature difference, 2.5°F equals nearly 1.4°C (of course, when the temperature is 2.5°F on a winter's day, that does equal -16°C).