Polymath at Large

Ants, flies and bees, if you please

2012-02-01T12:44:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural science, insects

An ant colony in an acorn. A bedbug with a penis that is more of a spear. Talking bees. Crickets that sing, and some that don't. If we really make the effort to get down and look, we find that insects are even weirder than we could imagine. Marlene Zuk, arthropod amateuse extraordinaire, has done us all a great favor with her book Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World. I must say she has also produced the champion of provocative titles!

Indeed, in matters of sex, we vertebrates must seem quite prosaic and limited. One fly has a penis longer than his body, so he can mate with a female that is still in cocoon. Many of the "organs" of male insects are quite elaborate, with spikes, scrapers and spoons for rummaging around to dig out other males' sperm before depositing his own. You could call it sperm competition with weapons. Half of one chapter investigates same-sex courtship and its implications for our understanding of homosexual behavior. Even the insect variety elicits strong political statements from most proponents or opponents of human homosexual freedom. But the big lesson here is that, in sex as in all things, insects exhibit more variety by a huge factor than is found in all the rest of the animal world.

This is true of communication. When finding a new colonial home, some species of ant reach a partial consensus by "quorum sensing" of signals that are still not wholly known to us, then picking up their nestmates and carrying them ignominiously to the new digs. Swarming bees, on the other hand, may have a dozen or more competing selections to choose from, each supported by one or more "waggle dancers", and the entire swarm will grow toward consensus until they are in full agreement, upon which they all head straight for their target. Other means of communication seem to guide the swarm, as led by faster-flying "leaders".

Is such communication really a language? Let's not be too chauvinistic about our own language abilities. As means of conveying emotion, our words are rich and evocative, but as means of conveying information, not so much. We need lots of reinforcement, not unlike the ants that need to be carried. This is why it takes four to six years to get a B.S. or B.A. degree by attending lectures, when the same material can be learned via correspondence about twice as fast. My father enrolled in course after course through ICS (International Correspondence School) while my brothers and I were growing up, earning certificates galore; the school was not accredited to offer degree diplomas, but companies knew that a suitable collection of certificates was worth more than the degree any day. If insect communication gets the job done, what more can one ask?

Why is the sex ratio of most mammals about 50:50, while for social insects females outnumber males by thousands to one? This is no utopia for the guys, though. After a single sex act, they die. Further, that means that popular conceptions are typically wrong. The film Antz portrays male worker ants; all worker ants of all species are female. An ad for an antihistamine spray portrays a male worker bee courting a flower; all worker bees are female. So are the wasps that sting you when you tread on their nest or knock it out of the tree. And the spiders you see are nearly all female; the males are so small they are easily mistaken for offspring. The big exception to this is tarantulas. The migrating tarantulas are nearly all male. The females, which live ten times as long, stay in their nests awaiting males to find them and court them.

The book is filled with many more examples behavior of insects and other arthropods. Their range of behavior exposes their range of genetic diversity. Genetically, two species of beetle may be as diverse from one another as horses are from hummingbirds. And there are about a million known beetle species. But do any of them think? The opening chapter discusses "bug smarts", and the answer is, we don't know yet, but the more we study it the more likely it seems to be. Bees and wasps can recognize faces, and some kinds are reliable enough that it has been soberly suggested that a wasp in a cage could indicate when it sees a familiar face on a security monitor. Trouble is, you'd need to train a lot of wasps, and somehow overcome their impulses to do things like hunt caterpillars while they were watching the screen. We are probably closer to a reliable computer solution to this dilemma; viz. Picasa and other image-recognition photo album programs. They do a surprisingly good job picking out a person photographed at a new angle or even at a different age.

The author's primary interest is crickets. She has a cool story about them also. In one place, she could easily find crickets, but could not hear any. Usually, if there is a cricket within a half mile, you know it is there! It happens that parasitic wasps were using the cricket's songs to locate them. So the crickets had quit singing and were using other means to find one another. No matter what you think you know about insects, there is a species somewhere doing just the opposite. Learning their ways could occupy a lifetime, which is why there are entomologists, of course.

Let's do biofuels right

2012-01-30T06:31:00.000-05:00

kw: observations, biofuels, alternative energy

If you can't read the text in the image, click for a larger version.
This illustration from the November, 2011 issue of Discover deserves a wider audience. It is part of an article showing that it makes great sense to develop biofuel production using algae rather than "large plants" such as corn.

At present, algae can produce 5,000 gallons of biofuel per acre, ten times as much as making ethanol from corn. And we should not be turning food into gasoline anyway! There is little doubt that in the next decade or so the efficiency of algae can be improved, and also that effective methods for large-scale cultivation of the best algal species will be developed.

Cybercriminal to the rescue?

2012-01-29T07:46:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, computers, cybercriminals

I used to live in a working-class neighborhood, and soon found out that my next door neighbor's children were all criminals. The parents were good and hard-working people, but their kids had all gone astray. One of their sons in particular was clearly a psychopath. He thought nothing of anyone's property, only of what might benefit him. He was also, you might say, the master of the short cut. This was evident in the way he got from place to place. If he was going to the street corner, once he left the door to the house, he went in an absolutely straight line, right across the front yards of about six homes. He was a very small-time criminal, really. Nothing so blatant as robbery, for example; his stock in trade was the sob story intended to elicit a "loan" that would never be repaid, and a little sneak thievery.

Many computer system hackers are primarily trespassers. They don't profit from their exploits, at least not in any monetary way. They do it for fun, or for bragging rights. Others are out for the cash, and modern "identity thieves" (to call fraud by another name) hone their computer skills purely for the money in it. As it happens, the most skilled hackers and crackers fall into the trespasser category; not being distracted by the money, they focus on developing their skills and building up their library of code used for compromising computer systems.

Kevin Mitnick is of this latter sort. In his most recent book, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, written with William L. Simon, Mitnick claims frequently that he never obtained money by hacking. He was in it for the thrill of going where he wasn't supposed to go. Breaking into a computer system is quite a bit safer than physically breaking into, say, an office building or bank or military base. However, he did do a little B+E when it was the only way to get information he needed.

This is a case of a man's hobby becoming quite an expensive proposition. Mitnick took low-paying jobs to get access to computer systems, which he would compromise in ways that helped him get access to other systems over the telephone network. All this was in the days before the wideband Internet connections that so many of us have. Early days, he was limited to phone modems that ran at 300 to 1200 bits per second, and later at speeds to 9,600 bps. Connections from computer to computer were sometimes trunk lines that ran at 1,560,000 bps (called T1), and access to such a level of communication was a precious resource.

He started out "phone phreaking", primarily social engineering (deceiving phone company employees), to get levels of access that would permit him to use long distance at no charge. Later he was able to get free cell phone service, at a time the typical charge was a dollar per minute. Now, right there it is clear that, while he may not have had cash pass through his hands, he defrauded the telephone companies out of thousands of dollars by cheating to get free services. So his "no money" claim is rather hollow. In fact, his heavy use of cell phones in the dollar-per-minute days almost got him caught when fellow employees wondered how he could afford to call so much on a $28,000 salary.

After entertaining the reader with a racy history of his growth as a phone phreaker, and his eventual ability to pretty much take over the operations of at least one telephone company, he turns to the efforts of law enforcement to stop him. He was first jailed at the age of seventeen, but avoided spending time at "Juvie". Instead he had a supervised release program, which ran a few years, under which he was supposed to avoid computer use. He just used other people's computers. From this point, he soon became a fugitive, living under several assumed names.

Part of the reason he did not get into deeper trouble when he was young was that there were few laws prohibiting what he was doing. Once the Federal and State legislatures took care of that little detail, the FBI got involved. He was on the run from the FBI for several years. Once he was finally caught (if I recall right, he was by then 31), he spent nearly five years in various lockups. Most of that time was occupied with various arraignments and legal maneuverings. Once he was finally offered a plea deal he was willing to take, he was sentenced to little more than time served.

It has been said of this book that it reads like a Raymond Chandler thriller. I reckon so; it was designed that way by the co-author. It is, at least, easy to read, a page-turner. It opens a window on an unusual mind. We find a person compelled to find a way around restrictions, a person without conscience; if he refrained from profiting monetarily, it was mainly because he lacks the gene for love of money. Money isn't the only thing a thief can steal. By committing theft of services, stealing source code files so he could better break into systems, and taunting system administrators, he stole peace of mind, he caused large sums to be spent tracking him down, and he cut into the income of a few large companies just as effectively as if he'd robbed the pay clerks at gunpoint.

So what is he doing these days? Still hacking, but with permission. He has become a security consultant! On the theory that "it takes a thief to catch a thief" (the theme of a briefly popular TV show some forty years ago), he is paid handsome sums to commit "white hat" hacking. If he is still one of the best—which boils down to, if he is keeping his skills up to date—then if a system is made "Mitnick proof", it is probably pretty secure.

The biggest lesson of the book is that the weakest link in computer security is the human element. People are too trusting. Mitnick's "career" was based on harvesting low-hanging fruit. A couple of phone calls would often garner him access to a supposedly bullet-proof system. There is still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there! You just gotta hope that none of it can be found at your bank or broker's office.

Periodically at work, some of us get strange e-mails, usually directing us to do something very slightly shady; these are "Phishing" e-mails. It has been publicized that there is a place we are supposed to forward suspicious e-mails. Those who do so are praised; those who follow the Phishing directions are reprimanded. It is one facet of a white-hat-hacking program my company has, to see how much low-hanging "social engineering" fruit there is. The answer is distressingly large. Even where paranoia is justified, not all are sufficiently paranoid. This keeps Mitnick, and security consultants in general, and in business.

A step toward green

2012-01-27T10:09:00.003-05:00

kw: solar energy, analysis

The Antelope Valley in southern California gets a lot of sunshine year-round. A company called eSolar and the city of Lancaster, plus the State, teamed up to take advantage of some of it. The resulting Sierra SunTower can produce 5MW of energy by heating two "sun towers" with sunlight focused by 24,000 large mirrors.

The array is impressive, as seen here in a Google Earth image. The entire site was originally 20 acres (8 hectares), of which the mirrors (heliostats) and their supports fill 14.4 acres (5.8 hectares). Two cleaned-off fields to the east indicate the company's intention to increase capacity by 50%.

The facility is presently used mainly to provide peaking power, and that mainly during air conditioning season, to about 4,000 homes. 5 million watts / 4,000 = 1,250W per home, about one-third of that required to run a central air conditioning system. When it is not needed for that, it is used for various experimental purposes. It is the only CSP (concentrating solar power) facility in North America.

The system is a hopeful introduction to what is needed to go for green energy in a big way. Peak solar input to the heliostat fields in June comes to about 32.5MW. Thus the areal efficiency is 15.4%, about the same as a ground-covering array of solar cells. In December, insolation drops to less than 19MW, and I presume that the system output also drops into the 3MW range.

How much ground would we have to cover to provide all the electricity needs for Lancaster city, provided that effective storage could take care of nighttime needs? City population is presently 157,000, so there are about 50,000 homes. I'll assume that half of these are single-family and half are apartments or condos, which require about 2/3 the energy of a detached home.

Assuming effective storage, the energy needed for a detached home is 2.7kW on a long-term basis during midsummer, and a little less during midwinter. Let's simplify matters by sizing the system for 3kW per single-family home and 2kW per condo or apartment. That comes to 250MW for all of Lancaster. A total of fifty SunTower facilities.

This shows a full section (36 square miles or 93 square km), which includes about 2/3 the city of Lancaster, and shows the SunTower facility just left of top center. It is not too intrusive just by itself, but what if we scattered fifty of these within the area of this image? Also, I couldn't find out what the construction cost of the facility was, but I suspect fifty of them would be a few billions of dollars.

Ongoing maintenance is a significant burden also. I read that the mirrors need cleaning after any windstorm that kicks up significant amounts of dust. Antelope Valley is short of water to begin with. How much water would be needed to clean 300-400 acres (120-160 hectares) of glass, once? That is just one element.

This is not to put down the effort. It is instead a clear-eyed look at the whole picture, so we don't go into such efforts with blinders on. We need to consider all aspects of a project like this, and put it in the perspective of the area it is meant to serve. 50x20 = 1,000 acres (400 Ha), or about 4.3% of the area shown in the image. That's what you need for a total solar solution, whether it is CSP or photovoltaic.

I am really a fan of solar energy. Solar cells also need cleaning, just as often as mirrors. I have invested in wind energy in the past, and at least windmills don't need frequent cleaning, but the "supply" is quite mercurial. CSP and solar cell technologies are at least beyond break-even, while wind is not, just yet. We need to put all these together with further innovation to survive the exhaustion of our fossil fuels, which is certain to happen during this century.

A state of disarray

2012-01-25T04:30:00.002-05:00

kw: politics, speeches, president

I am not so quick on my feet. After the president's State of the Union address last evening, I had to sleep on it. Starting an hour ago, I had a look at a few articles and videos about it. I still do not know what to think about most of it.

It was, of course, a campaign speech. There are but forty weeks to go until November 6, and how this gestational period will work out is anybody's guess. Perhaps this is why, while he defended his health care legislation, he didn't spend more than a few seconds on it.

He appealed instead to the middle class, whatever is left of it. To hear him tell it, the country consists of "hard working folks" making minimum wage and "millionaires", now defined as those who earn $1 million yearly, rather than those whose net worth exceeds $1 million. This latter figure describes quite a number of "middle class" folks who have been diligent to build up their 401(k) or IRA, and have a few hundred thousand dollars in home equity built up.

So, targeting the newly-defined millionaires, the President proposed that those earning $1 million or more pay no less than 30% of their gross income in taxes. So many have pointed to Mitt Romney's 15% tax rate last year as "unfair". I don't see how; he paid around $3 million in taxes. He earned several hundred times as much as I did, but he paid almost twice as much of a percent in taxes (my 2010 taxes were 8% of my gross income). My colleagues at work pay between 7% and 9% of their gross income in taxes, and our "admin assistants" (secretaries) pay between nothing and 4%.

Sure, I am in the 28% or 33% tax bracket, but that is only on the last few dollars I make. Half of my income isn't taxed at all, because of deductions like home mortgage and charity, and my pre-tax contributions to a 401(k). Those who make millions can't shield as much of their gross income as I can, so they get taxed more already.

Something the President will never say out loud: The "one percent" at the top of the income ladder already pay 40% of the total income taxes. If we took all their money, it still would not meet the need. So even though I am a Republican, I bridle at the fact that nearly half of working Americans pay no income tax at all, and a few percent of them are paid a kind of welfare called the "earned income tax credit." Call it negative taxation. With the Federal Government typically spending around 22% of the GDP, total taxes, mainly corporate and individual income taxes, have to total this amount to avoid deficits.

Of course, it is also not being mentioned that with the massive bailouts initiated by President Bush and continued by President Obama, the Federal government has been spending more than 100% of GDP in some years. That's how we went from a $1 Trillion national debt to a $14 Trillion national debt in just a few years.

OK, another subject. The President talked about "clean energy". He hesitates to say that we have to use a bunch of dirty energy to create the infrastructure for clean energy. A poster child for clean energy used to be the Sierra SunTower in Lancaster, California. It isn't mentioned much lately, because it is so seldom being operated. It turns out to be too expensive to run full time, so it is only operated for peak times, which are rare in the rather moderate climate of the high desert. And it turns out that the mirrors need frequent cleaning, which takes a lot of water, something in short supply there. I wonder what army of window cleaners they have, to clean more than 26,000 mirrors! Each is the size of a large picture window.

I have mixed feelings about another subject, the use of a "peace dividend" from the end of the Iraq war to engage in "nation building right here at home." Nation building is as much about political challenges as technical ones. The kind of nation building I'd like to see is to pass an amendment that requires every citizen to obey the same laws, abolishing the special retirement plan that exempts Congress from Social Security, and repealing all laws that they themselves are exempt from.

I was kind of hoping for the President to have a Clinton-like laundry list of things he'd like to accomplish. Then I could have something to cheer on. He is a likeable guy and I hate to put him down. But he seems to be paving the way for a big put-down of his own, by being a divisive President rather than a unifier.

Cyber construction

2012-01-24T06:15:00.000-05:00

kw: observations, computers, computer security

I've been reading a book about computer hacking, the criminal kind. I find it remarkable just how easy it is. Most of the exploits we've read about have, as their underlying secret, a bit of social engineering. Someone got talked into revealing a password. In any operating system, there are a great many vulnerabilities, but it is typically easier to deceive someone to get access. Our human monitors need our support, because they are both the strongest and the weakest link.

There are problems in general with writing computer software. Computer code is remarkably fragile. A programmer (or programming team) has to think of literally everything that the program may be faced with, and write specific code to respond appropriately. A saying has been going around for years: "If we built houses the way we write computer programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."

I realized why this is so: the materials of construction do not have innate properties that help a program builder achieve his or her objective. If you build a house using stone or brick, the characteristics of the materials automatically assure a basically secure structure. You don't have to worry about (most) people blasting their way in through the wall, you just have to worry about making the doors and windows secure. Think of the three little pigs. The only weak point in the brick house was the chimney, and it was small enough to be defensible.

People have been learning how to build with stone, brick, wood and other materials for thousands of years. It was largely a matter of learning which material has what properties. Computer code has no intrinsic properties that can help you. We have been building software for only about seventy years (except for Ada Lovelace, who wrote software in the 1840s). We have no "stones", so we have to invent them. Software libraries provide building blocks that make programming easier, but there is still a problem. Most of those "building blocks" are still made of "jello". We haven't truly thought of everything yet.

This is because computer code is inherently bosonic, rather than fermionic. A digression into particle physics is needed:

Bosons obey Bose-Einstein physics and, in particular, can pass through one another; many can occupy the same space simultaneously.
Fermions obey Fermi-Dirac physics and, in particular, cannot pass through one another, but bounce off one another; two fermions cannot occupy the same location.

Light is made of bosons called photons. Matter is made of fermions such as protons, neutrons and electrons.

In cyberspace, everything is bosonic unless you specifically write fermionic properties for it. An environment such as Second Life has to be very carefully written, with a good "Physics package" to ensure that you don't walk through a wall. Otherwise, walking through walls is the norm. Buildings would not need doors. Our best security software is an attempt to produce a solid door. Sadly, even the best "firewall" software is a bit softer than the average piece of Balsa wood. If you can't prevent a break-in, you at least have to make the firewall "noisy" so it lets you know when it was broken through.

At my company, a double-layered firewall scheme is used, with plenty of very "noisy" alarms to log entry attempts (or entries), but the key to keeping our environment secure is a large contingent of people who spend all day, every day monitoring the noisemakers and snooping on the incoming traffic. Intrusions still occur, but it's a crack team; not much gets by them, and never for very long.

Thus, people are still the key to good security. Imagine if the front door to your house was made of rice paper (like the internal walls of Japanese houses). You'd need a hired team of bodyguards to keep strangers out. People are fermionic; things bounce off and stuff can't pass through unnoticed.

Until our software libraries include truly bullet-proof code, we'll continue to need human monitoring of everything. That's why you need to have strong passwords (ten or more characters, MiXed CasE and with numb3r5, at the very least), but you also need to monitor your accounts and keep good relations with the folks at the other end who are tasked to also monitor things. A skilled social engineer may get past a company monitor, but if those monitors know you are watching, they are less likely to give in to the blandishments of a fast-talking impersonator.

Jesus said, "When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe, But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up his plunder." A hint: hackers are clever, but not strong. Guard your own stuff.

Perpetual peril

2012-01-23T06:06:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, allergies

My first memory of my youngest cousin is of a toddler in a show suit, crying because of a bad coughing fit. Asthma. I soon learned she was living on Rice Krispies and goat milk. When we ate pizza she couldn't eat in the same room, because airborne flour dust might bring on an attack. This was in the days before the EpiPen. Her parents bought Benadryl by the quart jar. She had desensitizing shots three times a week for decades, and was able to eat her first half-slice of wheat bread at the age of twenty. That same year, she had her tubes tied, telling us all later, "I wouldn't wish my genes on another generation."

Sandra Beasley, author of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, has a more hopeful take on her future. She does hope to have children, and in late chapters of the book, ruminates on the precautions she might have to take if the baby can tolerate foods that she can't abide, when a kiss by her infant might kill her.

Throughout the book, we learn that for the severely allergic, paranoia is a way of life. She and those like her literally walk a minefield all the time. Just how closely can you interview the waiter or the cook before ordering a meal, and hoping that the knife used to cut your vegetables was washed after being used to cut a forbidden tomato? The severely allergic, using their bodies as probes of their environment, learn to detect the slightest tingle after having a tiny taste of something new. The devil of it is, a new allergic manifestation only erupts after that first taste, once your body has had a day or two to process all the new proteins and decide it doesn't "like" one of them. You are fine until that second taste. Day in and day out, you are your own experimental animal, your own "taster" for whom every cup may bear deadly poison.

Now imagine being a spouse or lover of such a person. Are you callous enough to sneak a square of chocolate just before greeting your inamorata with a kiss, knowing that a trip to the ER is likely to follow? Are you willing to keep a peculiar kind of Kosher household, for which nothing that is risky for the other can be allowed in the door? Not only so, when you are out and have a bite at the corner café, are you as careful as you need to be? It does no good for an allergic person to marry a similarly afflicted person; they are very unlikely to have precisely the same sensitivities, so they need to exclude everything that might endanger either one of them.

In the face of all this, Ms Beasley writes with amazing good humor. It would certainly be tempting to grow up with a pretty sour attitude, but she has not. She is attacking the problem head-on. One chapter recounts her attendance at a clinicians' conference sponsored by AAAAI (American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology). Amid reporters interviewing doctors and looking for any evidence of a "cure" for allergy, she was trying to learn what she could about any new understanding of these syndromes. So far, less is known than anyone would like, and the recent "worms can cure it" hypothesis is also wanting; it helps some folks, but far too few.

Over time, she has built up a network of others who know allergies from the inside. The allergic need such support networks. She also keeps close tabs on the latest from FAAN and FAI (those are the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network and the Food Allergy Initiative). That, and constant vigilance, plus a supply of Benadryl and a fresh EpiPen, are what it takes to live in a minefield.

Opposite Hemispheres

2012-01-21T22:07:00.003-05:00

kw: geography, photographs, earth

It has been said that Earth is a water planet. If your first view of the planet was from the perspective on the left, that would be quite justified. This screen capture from Google Earth is centered above 17°S, 150°W, to the southwest of Tahiti. The other image is centered above the antipode, 17°N, 30°E, in central Sudan. Here, "Earth" is more fitting. A view a little more to the East would show an even higher proportion of land to water surface.

These virtual views are from a simulated altitude of about 10,000 miles, or 16,000 km, roughly halfway to geosynchronous orbit. From much farther away, you'd be able to see most of North America in the "water" view, and most of South America and Antarctica in the "land" view.

Interestingly, the name for our planetary home in every language I know of is related to or derived from the word for dirt ("earth" is the much older word in English, though), even in languages of Polynesia and other island societies. The ground you stand on is your principal frame of reference! If we ever decipher dolphin languages, I suspect they will call their environment by a word derived from "water".

Dem dry bones gettin dryer

2012-01-20T05:54:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, deserts

This view of the southern Arizona Sonoran Desert is not as bleak as it might be; there is actually a little green vegetation visible. This image, from the Desert Biomes page at Marietta College, must have been taken in June or earlier, when it is possible to wander about in the Sonora without getting heat stroke by noontime. By August the green is gone, as the plants await the winter rains.

Some years the rains never arrive. When average rainfall is less than a foot (30 cm) per year, it doesn't take much variability to really dry things out. Variability is the name of the game in arid landscapes. William deBuys investigates that variability, and in particular where the range of variation is expected to go in future decades with a warming climate, in A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. Whether you believe "global warming" is caused by people and their CO₂ or not, it is clear that the global climate is warming. This warming is adding more energy to the atmosphere. How does this added energy manifest itself?

Thank George Hadley, colleague and rival of Edmond Halley (as in Halley's Comet), who nearly 300 years ago figured out that tropical heat powers atmospheric circulation in a band centered on the Equator. Warm, wet air rises (and rains copiously), spreads south- and northward, cools (and rains some more), then descends at around 30°N and S latitudes. This is now named for him, the Hadley Cells and Hadley Circulation. The descended air returns to the tropics, picks up a westerly trend from the Coriolis effect, and powers the trade winds. But what happens when cool, semi-dry air descends on those latitudes at the northern and southern limits of the Hadley Cells? It warms and its relative humidity drops dramatically. The result? The Sahara, Mojave, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Atacama Deserts, among others. The descending air makes it hard for moist air masses to relieve desert aridity. More energy in the atmosphere will mean larger Hadley Cells and drier deserts.

Author deBuys's book focuses on North America's great southwestern deserts: The Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and northern Mexico. The consensus of analysis related to a warming climate warns that these areas will get even drier as this century progresses, while the humid areas of the American east and northeast get wetter. The southwestern dryness will be the worst in Arizona. When you get away from over-irrigated Phoenix, Arizona is right about dead center in every concept of "desertness", with just under 10 inches (25 cm) of rainfall, very little vegetation, and year-round warmth that gets positively scorching in mid- to late summer.

A large part of the book centers on Arizona as the major element of the Colorado River watershed. By the time I left the Los Angeles area for the third time, in 1978, the tap water was getting pretty bad, being rather salty remnants of the Colorado River, picked out of one of the reservoirs (Lake Mead or Lake Powell), after having traveled 300 miles or so (~500 km) through the Grand Canyon, evaporating all the while, then evaporating even more while sitting in the reservoir. All that evaporating concentrates trace salts into a rather unpalatable excuse for something to put in your pipes. My most recent visit confirms that it continues to get worse. Angelenos are a huge market for bottled water from anywhere else.

What is happening to the Colorado River? This chart tells part of the tale.
This is Figure 2 from David Meko et al, "Medieval drought in the upper Colorado River Basin," Geophysical Research Letters 34, (2007), and downloadable here. The caption reads:

Time series plot of 25-year running mean of reconstructed flows. Flows are plotted as percentage of the 1906–2004 mean of observed natural flows (18.53 billion cubic meters, or 15.03 million acre-ft). Confidence interval derived from 0.10 and 0.90 probability points of ensemble of 1000 noise-added reconstructions. Horizontal dashed line is lowest 25-year running mean of observed flows (1953–1977).

The key datum here is the bold line at the right end of the chart, the observed flow of the Colorado River. It starts up quite high in 1906, drops quite low in the 1950s to '70s, rebounds to a lesser high in the 1990s, then begins to drop through 2004. It has been dropping ever since. Water policy for parceling out the river's water was set 100 years ago, based on measurements taken during the three wettest years, which led the policy makers to set a baseline flow as 17.5 maf (maf = million acre-feet) per year. Except for a couple of years in the 1990s, the river's flow has seldom exceeded 15 maf yearly. During the periods of original filling of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, not all the water was being used yet, so the lakes filled. They have been emptying for more than a decade, however. They are about half gone.

What will result from a more energetic climate? For one thing, the Hadley Cell will get a little larger, moving the northern limits of the southwestern desert northward a couple of degrees (~100 mi or 160 km). We are already seeing massive tree die-off in northern Arizona and New Mexico and southern Colorado. The trees are succumbing to a one-two punch: conditions called "drought" because they are drier than in the past have stressed the trees. Stressed trees are more susceptible to attack from boring insects. Too many insects leads to girdling of a tree, which then dies. Millions of trees have died. Millions more are expected to die.

A poignant note is found in a late chapter that tells of Mount Graham, one of several "sky islands". This isolated cluster of peaks is a good place to put telescopes. It is also the host to an isolated biome, and the only known home of an endangered species of small red squirrel. The whole species numbers about 300 individuals. Recent fires have reduced the squirrel's habitat by half (they also threatened a couple of the telescopes). A warming climate is making it harder for the animal's winter larder to stay fresh enough to last until springtime. Further warming may extinct the Mt. Graham red squirrel, making moot the years of litigation that preceded telescope construction. Not a happy outcome.

What does the author suggest? Time and time again he warns that the recent "drought" conditions are the new normal, and going forward, the cycle will include much deeper droughts, such as that reported by Meko and his co-authors. A larger, more energetic Hadley Cell will make the Sonoran Desert and her sister deserts possibly as dry as parts of the Atacama, where several years can pass with no rain at all. With this in mind, the ongoing rush of people into these regions is simply insupportable. Early in the book he suggests that cities like Tucson may find it necessary to forbid the installation of new water meters. "Y'wanna build the house, go ahead, but you'll have to truck in your water. No new meters." But late in the book he reports on one California town that banned installation of new meters. The market in existing meter permits took off, to the point that one sold for $300,000. Would you pay half or more the cost of your new home for its water rights? Somebody did just that!

I have been warning for a few years that, where the Twentieth Century was characterized by wars about territory, and later about energy, the Twenty-First will be the century of water wars. The political and regulatory situation in the American southwest, on a collision course with the drying out of the watersheds, could well lead to a new civil war in this country. Yes, I mean a shooting war: guns, bombs, and laser-guided cruise missiles and all.

It doesn't matter to what cause you ascribe the warming climate. Read this book to learn what is likely to ensue. And retire to someplace wetter than Arizona. I love the desert, particularly in winter. I like the feel of warm, dry air. But I also need to drink, and to bathe occasionally. I'll stay here in the humid northeast, thank you.

Do the 99 percent pay more taxes than Mitt Romney?

2012-01-19T06:26:00.000-05:00

kw: taxes, politicians

It is all over the news: Mitt Romney pays 15% of his income in income taxes. Commentators everywhere are complaining that many people who make less income are paying 28%-35% tax rates. Really???

Let's see. I am firmly in the 99% who make less than $200,000 yearly. Of my total gross income, I paid 8% in Federal income tax. Now, some of my income is in the 28% bracket, but I have a mortgage deduction, I tithe to my church, and I have a tuition credit for a son in graduate school, plus I am putting tax-deferred income into a 401(k). All this means that my taxable income is about half of the gross.

It was also reported not long ago, not nearly with so much fanfare, that 47% of the U.S. population pays no Federal income tax at all, and it wasn't even mentioned that a few million people take the "Earned Income Tax Credit", which gives them a "refund" when they have had nothing withheld. It is a kind of welfare payment without the name.

So let's see, 99-47 leaves 52% of the American public making between $20,000 and $200,000, and thus paying income taxes. Let's look at a couple scenarios, courtesy of the HR Block 2011 Tax Estimator.

A 25-year-old married couple with no children eking it out on $20,000, with no deductible expenses. Their total tax for the year is $100.
A 25-year-old single person who earns $48,000 and has $120 in interest income (a saver!), who also gives $1,200 to charity. The total tax bill is $5,780 (ouch), or 12% of gross income. Single people have the highest rates.
Let's take the same person, now married, five years later, with three kids. No advancement, so the income and giving are the same, but now the tax bill is only $408, less than one percent.
A middle-aged couple earning $100,000 with $1,000 of interest income and $5,000 of long-term capital gains (they got lucky in the market). They pay $10,000 in mortgage interest, and almost tithe, giving $10,000 to their church. Total income $106,000. Total tax $12,000, or 11.3%.
Finally, a couple approaching the "1% level", who have combined earned income of %140,000, $1,000 of interest income, and $20,000 in long-term capital gains. They give less, $5,000, but have a McMansion that has mortgage interest of $30,000. Total income 161,000. Total tax $19,100 or 11.9%.

There you have it. Reasonable scenarios that show how the 15% Mitt Romney paid is by no means "unfair". In fact, he is paying more than most.

There is a second issue. That 15% is a second tax; to make the investments from which he is earning capital gains, he had to first earn money and pay taxes on it (perhaps at 15%, perhaps at 28 or 35%). Then when his investment earns money, he pays tax on the new earnings. If you make an investment that loses money, you don't get 15% back from the government for your losses, though you can use losses to offset gains, but if you have a net loss for the year, you are just out the money.

Let's pick some real issues to heckle the candidates with. This one is a phony issue.

Running out

2012-01-18T12:31:00.000-05:00

kw: inflation, retirement, finance, analysis

My wife and I are at such an age that we think about retirement a lot. Can we afford to retire yet? Will our IRA's and other funds last long enough? Will there be anything left for our heirs?

We have reached one milestone I had set for myself: The sum of my company pension and the Social Security for the two of us will match our expected needs when my next birthday arrives. That's a good place to be, because it means that at least for a few years we won't need to touch the tax-deferred funds. How soon will we need them?

Inflation has been about 2.5% on average for a few years, but it has ranged between 1% and 4% in various months just in the past two years. Longer term it is more stable, averaged over a year at a time. While I hope it stays at 2.5% or less, it is wiser to plan for at least some periods of higher inflation rates, such as one caused by a real hit to energy prices (such as war with Iran).

Here are two measures that help my planning, without revealing specifics. Firstly, the doubling period. When prices double, the buying power of money has been cut in half. Secondly, we have a joint life expectancy of about thirty more years, so the 30^th power of one minus the inflation rate (e.g., 0.975 for 2.5% inflation) yields the amount of buying power left in your fixed income. Of course, Social Security presently has COLA adjustments, but there is no guarantee that these will continue. These two measures produce this table:

Rate, 30y, Dbl
2.5% 0.468 28y
3.0% 0.401 23½y
3.5% 0.343 20y
4.0% 0.294 17½y

While it would be nice if the inflation-based doubling rate really lasted 28 years, I think it wisest to plan for 20 years or less.

A standing O at a debate?

2012-01-17T14:17:00.002-05:00

kw: politics, debates

I like Juan Williams, but he was at his smarmy worst last evening, trying to trip up Newt Gingrich. To his leading question, whether the Speaker's suggestions about working might constitute an insult to the poor and the blacks, Gingrich simply said, "No, I don't." The next question was booed, and Newt's answer received a standing ovation. Williams was down for the count, rhetorically speaking, though he didn't seem to notice.

Give him time to figure it out; he'll get the point. As the author of Muzzled, he ought to know better. The public is tired of people dancing around troubling issues. They want straight talk, and that want was amply satisfied by the Speaker.

By the way, all the candidates did well, even very well, but if you are looking for a clear winner, go with the "applause meter" and award it to Newt.

Casinos everywhere

2012-01-16T12:06:00.000-05:00

kw: gambling, gaming

In the local paper yesterday, I read an article about plans to build new casinos near here and in surrounding States. It seems Philadelphia will soon surpass Atlantic City as the #2 gambling destination in the country. But one after another the States are passing laws allowing gaming and casino construction, and the trend bids fair to fill the country with casinos. I suppose some folks' goal is to have everywhere in the country within a half hour's drive of a casino.

This trend will eventually be self-defeating. Everywhere, the same arguments are being issued in favor of casino construction, and the primary one is tourist dollars. But if people don't need to travel to gamble, most will choose to keep it local. The tourist dollars will dry up, and the local dollars will usually not make up the difference, because all the calculations are based on there being a small number of casinos compared to the demand. Once there is such an overabundance of supply, casinos will begin to fail.

Notwithstanding the fact that gambling is stupid, it is certainly very popular. The twenty-two states that permit gaming reported total revenues near $35 billion in 2011 (see here for more details). If twice as many gaming venues are opened, how likely is it that revenues will double? What is the total market for gaming likely to be if everyone can gamble locally?

Who knows, maybe we'll one day spend as much for gaming as we do for medicine (about $2.5 trillion); I can just hear gaming proponents salivating over that! Not likely, though. The market for entertainment is finite, and totals just over $100 billion for movies plus cable TV (90% of that is cable: see this summary). With those out of the way, gaming exceeds everything else. I don't see this as a good time to invest in the stock of casino operators!

Overconcentrated

2012-01-13T12:00:00.002-05:00

kw: technology

I have read a number of articles recently on phones as the new electronic wallet, that will soon replace everything except maybe the large-screen TV (watching Avatar on a 3.6-inch screen is less than impressive). One title was "The End of Cash?", in which people said (on cue), "Oh, my life is on this little phone".

A few million phones are stolen in the U.S. yearly. A wise thief will attempt to snatch the phone either without your knowledge, or when you are far from help, so the race against time (the thief trying to crack your phone and get to your data before you call, on someone else's phone, to suspend service) is in his favor. And until you get a new phone and configure it, you're like an old-time traveler who has lost his Traveler's Checks and is 100 miles from the nearest embassy or AmEx office.

Meantime, paranoid that I am, I am quite happy with my flip phone from the days before smart phones. It makes phone calls, and it can do text. Period. If it gets stolen, the SIM card will contain nothing but a bunch of phone numbers. No apps that link to my banker and stock broker; no access to my retirement plan, or even my medical records. I don't mind the "delays" inherent in doing my banking and such in the same way I have since the 1960s. The only use I have for "online banking" is to make sure I have enough balance before writing a big check, like for a major auto repair. Some "conveniences" come with risks I am not willing to take.

Planets probably outnumber stars

2012-01-12T11:21:00.002-05:00

kw: analysis, extrasolar planets

Microlensing has paid off. This technique is a most powerful method for finding planets of every size about a target star. An international team has reported recent results of several years of searching. This BBC News report summarizes very well the report and many of the implications. One is the bold statement that every star that is not part of a multiple star system is certain to harbor at least one planet. This may be coupled with the discovery by other methods (transits and gravitational perturbations) that at least some multiple star systems also harbor planets. About half the stars are part of multiple systems, so this implies that the minimum number of planets in our Galaxy is greater than half the number of stars in the Galaxy.

The Galaxy is composed of at least 200 billion stars. If, then, there are 100 billion or more planets in the Galaxy, how many of these are similar to Earth? In size, at least, the report cited above claims this number is about 10 billion. This is a very conservative estimate, and I think it it likely that there are many more than this. I base my reasoning on the principle of mediocrity: Our solar system is most likely to be close to average. Can that be quantified?

Let's make a few rough estimates, based on what we know:

Our Solar System has 8 planets.
It contains at least three bodies, including Earth, that are expected to have large amounts of liquid water over great spans of time: Earth, Mars (for its first 2 billion years), and Europa (under a thick ice layer).
There is one Earth, with life and even (somewhat) intelligent life.

I'll use a Poisson Distribution as a model of the likely distribution of the number of planets, and of possible Earths, around other stars. The process is simple: Find the range of mean values that have at least a 50% chance that there are 8 planets per star. Then use those Poisson distributions to glean some measure of the likely range of planetary numbers.

Firstly, we find that if the mean value of a Poisson distribution is 5, the normalized distribution's height at 8 is 0.37, while if the mean is 6, the height at 8 is 0.64, so we'll use 6 as a lower bound. Secondly, if the mean is 12, the height at 8 is 0.57, and if the mean is 13, the height is 0.42, so we'll use 12 as an upper bound. That means that the most likely number of planets, for stars somewhat similar to the Sun, is between 6 and 12, and a further analysis indicates that most such stars will have a number of planets between the "sideboard" values of 3 and 17.

By a star "somewhat similar to the Sun" I mean a star of spectral type F, G or K that is not a member of a multiple star system. That is about 10% of all stars. The "sideboards" above indicate that there are at least 3 planets each, which multiplies out to 60 billion planets in the Galaxy about such stars, with a more likely number of 150-180 billion planets, and the potential for trillion or so.

Among these, how many might have liquid water for at least a couple of billion years? Repeating the process using 3, we get a range of mean values between 2 and 6, with "sideboards" of 1 and 8. Thus there are at least 20 billion planets holding liquid water, and more likely about 60 billion.

Finally, how many sister Earths? When your sample is 1, it is better to use an aggregation technique, and say, suppose that among ten stars, we were to find five sisters to Earth, what could we conclude? A similar analysis shows that a random group of ten stars might have a mean value in the range 4-8, with "sideboards" of 1-11. This works out to a per-star range of 0.4-0.8 with "sideboards" of 0.1-1.1. These seem reasonable. Thus, I conclude sister Earths number at least 8 billion, with 10+ billion even more likely.

Then why, above, did I state that I think there are many more than 10 billion? There are two sources of more Earths. One is the warmer half of the M stars, M0-M5, which outnumber all the F, G and K stars two-to-one. The other is large satellites of super-Jupiters that may be a little outside the habitable zone of the parent star, but who add heat to the satellite by tidal flexing. This is much more speculative, but is not likely to be zero, so it is more probable that there are millions or a few billions of these also (In the Sci-Fi film Avatar the "planet" Pandora is a giant satellite of a super-Jupiter, though you only see this in an early sequence).

I am encouraged that my very rough "mediocrity" estimates are in the same range as that of the scientists who have given this much more thought than I have. The next breakthrough to await is the ability to get a spectrum from an exoplanet. An atmosphere with water and oxygen will fairly shout "LIFE!" to the Universe.

A boon to day traders

2012-01-11T14:03:00.002-05:00

kw: investing

I stumbled across this chart in Yahoo Finance some months ago. It expands the "compare to" function to include up to five stocks and indices. To generate this particular chart, for the current day and time, click here. Click on the chart to see a full size version.

These stocks are a portion of a portfolio I follow, of dividend-paying stocks. I had used the stock screener to find stocks with high dividends, then the history function to find out which of those has had stable dividends for the past decade or more. Then a tool like this allows me to pick a momentary low spot, which boosts the effective dividend yield.

I am not a day trader, but I do try to time my entry into an equity. Almost any stock will vary by 5% over a few weeks' time. Suppose I am interested in one that is very stable, and is currently yielding 5%; not only that, it has very seldom reduced its dividend despite large variations in the overall market. This makes it a good income stock. If the day the screener program showed its yield as 5.1% it was selling at $25, and has a very steady $0.32 per quarter, I'll watch it for a few days. A downturn in the market could drag it down to $22, at which point I might purchase it. The dividend isn't likely to change, but now the effective yield is 5.8%. And the company's underlying value is the same, so it'll be back at $25 before long, and may grow substantially from there.

Whether it does or not, every 100 shares purchased gains nearly 6 shares a year in reinvested dividends. Give it ten years, and I'll have 176 shares where I had 100. If the stock has also risen, that's an added bonus when I am ready to sell. By the way, I only trade stocks inside my IRA, so I don't pay ongoing taxes. The tax bill will be high enough when I take money out of the IRA anyway!

Outliving myself

2012-01-10T11:50:00.002-05:00

kw: longevity

If you have one clock, you know what time it is. If you have two or more, you are never sure. Prompted by a visit to the Social Security office, I ran their Life Expectancy Calculator, which uses only age and gender. It stated that, for my age cohort, I could expect to live to age 83.6, and when I am seventy, that will be pushed out to age 85.3. Fair enough. Then I got a wild hair…

I went to the Wharton How Long Will I Live page. The entry form has about forty questions. Their results are in the form of quartiles (they have a "Your Life Expectancy" value, but it is always very nearly the same as the median):

First Quartile: 79.0
Median: 86.9
Third Quartile: 94.0

A third site of interest is the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator. This site spreads a larger number of questions over several pages. It produced three items:

A calculated longevity, 90 in my case, with the note "You could live to 99."
A couple of pages of suggestions and how much each can impact life span. For example, I might add a year to my life by taking an aspirin a day (I currently take none).
Personalized recommendations by the doctor who runs the site, Dr. Perls. This came to about eight pages.

Finally, I went to one more web site, which turned out to be quite interesting: Peter Russell's Virtual Age Calculator. This has about twenty items, each a drag-bar. As you drag the bar, you see your virtual age and your expected longevity change. This makes it more tempting to cheat than usual! The upshot for me was that my virtual age is 48.6 (Funny, I don't look a day under 50), and my expected life span is 95.4. That sounds a bit optimistic. The biggest single factor is that my father is 89 and his grandparents lived into their late 80s and 90s. I suspect if I backed off a few years on that drag-bar (my mother lived only 81 years), the figures would change accordingly.

None of these asked the single most significant question that affects my life: Have you had or do you have cancer? I had colorectal cancer eleven years ago, lost 40 pounds during the period when I could not eat at all, and had half my colon removed. I suspect somebody somewhere has tables that would modify these four predictions, probably in the direction of about a decade downward!

So, what'll it be: 84, 87, 90 or 95? I won't expect more than another twenty years (85 total), but I'm basing my retirement planning on the 95 figure, just so I won't go broke. And I plan to get more of the fun stuff accomplished prior to age 75; it makes for fewer regrets. P.S. I suppose your local amateur shrink will tell you I'm in my third mid-life crisis, and I'd agree!

Screech owl or barn owl, take your pick

2012-01-09T10:57:00.003-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birds, natural history, photography

This barn owl was photographed in Surrey, England by Peter Trimming; the photo is available in Wikimedia Commons.

I have seen only one owl in the wild, and it wasn't a barn owl, AKA screech owl. I have heard them, and they make quite unearthly shrieks, not at all like the gentle "Hoo" sound of other owls. Therefore, I took great pleasure in reading and viewing Barn Owl by David Chandler, with its many pictures taken by Nigel Blake.

The book is a small volume (127 pages, including index), though the pages are largeish (18.5x24.5 cm), and half the space is photos, which places it in a genre I call "small coffee-table". It is thus a quick read, but very informative. Each chapter covers a different phase of owl life or natural history.

The most significant thing I didn't know before was that over half the area that harbors barn owls, there is a single species, Tyto alba (shown above in its whitest phase). This species is the only one in North America and most of Europe, but more than a dozen other species populate areas throughout the rest of the world. Some species are locally called grass owls for their habit of nesting on the ground in tall grass. T. alba nests in cavities, usually rather high off the ground, 2-3 meters or higher. Nooks in barns and other outbuildings are thus ideal, thus leading to the common name.

All owls are predators, and barn owls are perhaps the most efficient. A pair with growing young might take 30-100 small mammals daily! That's a lot of field mice, voles, and shrews (and some rats) that would overrun us if not for owls. One owl can hunt down about ten times as many mice as the hungriest house cat.

Barn owls cough up bone-and-hair-laden pellets, as many other owls do, which makes it rather simple to determine their eating habits. Interestingly, it has been said that, if the owl's hunting range is marshy, it may take a lot of frogs, and a pellet of frog remains looks more like a golf ball than like the cigar-shaped pellet formed of small mammal remains.

Quick as the read was, it was a great pleasure to read this book, and an even greater pleasure just looking through the pictures. It appears to be pitched to ages from late middle school through high school.

Countdown to New Hampshire

2012-01-08T07:37:00.002-05:00

kw: observations, politics, debates

I watched the televised debate from New Hampshire last evening, among the Republican candidates. There are now six contenders, Michelle Bachmann having bowed out of the race: John Huntsman, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Although Romney, Santorum and Paul are the "front runners", in my view nobody is really out of the running yet.

I would not say there was a clear winner last evening. This was much closer to a real debate than the prior ones, with plenty of back-and-forth among men who had both good and bad things to say about one another. I would say, though, that these candidates are primarily laying the groundwork for most of them (perhaps all) to support whomever is nominated. At least three of them stated that any one of the six would do a better job as President than Barack Obama has been doing.

It is still early days. My own State's primary is not until April 24, by which time 34 States and Territories will have held their primaries or caucuses. Even at that point, I suspect there will be some fluidity and uncertainty about the eventual nominee.

Some have said or written that it might be best to replace this six-month mess with a single primary election date, to be shortly followed by the nominating conventions. I disagree. The present process may be a grueling multiple marathon, but it gives voters a much greater opportunity to get to know the candidates, most of whom visit nearly every State. Our remarkable democratic process probably engages more people than any other known. A single-day primary would force much greater reliance on media advertising, a detriment. There is too much already.

I initially favored Ms Bachmann, but now that she is out, I am still confident that the Republicans will nominate someone who can beat the incumbent, because I am pretty sure any of the remaining six can make a better case for becoming our President, than Mr. Obama can for remaining in his failed Presidency.

The silenced majority

2012-01-06T12:04:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, free speech, polemics

As polemical writing goes, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate by Juan Williams is rather mild. This is not because he lacks passion, but because he is a gentleman, a very rare breed in modern political discourse. Mild and gentlemanly he may be, but here are a few things he has to say:

"…what happened to me … was an assault on journalism and honest debate. Ne need to protect a free-flowing, respectful national conversation in our country. Today, such honest debate about the issues becomes collateral damage in an undeclared war by those who make accusations of racism and bigotry whenever their political positions are challenged." (p27)

"Political correctness has grown so thick that, like an untended garden, it is now less about the flowers than it is about the weeds. Too much of American politics has become an exercise in institutional madness, hampering our nation's ability to solve urgent problems." (p91)

"…these professional rude boys (and girls) [political commentators and talk show hosts at both ends of the spectrum] thrive on arousing people's passions. They make money by making our problems even worse. The more bitter the divide over an issue, the more intractable the problem, the brighter they shine." (p213)

As most folks know, just over a year ago (October 2010) he was fired by NPR for stating that he felt uncomfortable boarding an airplane if there were people in Muslim clothing on the same plane. I suspect elements of this book had been percolating around in his mind for a long time, but it took a blatant collision with Political Correctness to push him to actually write it.

Ah, good old PC, the source of such neologisms as "mentally challenged", "person of color" and "man-caused disaster". It makes us pretzelize our language until we're like an octopus playing Twister®. In modern political discourse, offending someone is the greatest sin, more heinous than embezzlement or adultery, more to be despised than sloth or gluttony.

Mr. Williams happens to be a liberal. I happen to be a conservative. There is nothing in his book that rankles me. He is honest, forthright, and quite correct in his assessment that the noisy fringes of the political spectrum have taken over all the platforms of debate. I remember the first televised debate, the one between Nixon and Kennedy. It was an actual debate. Even the Reagan-Mondale debate was a genuine exchange of views with few ad hominem moments. But since the League of Women Voters was kicked out of the debate business in favor of news anchors, the so-called debates have been a joke. I watched a portion of one of last year's debates, then went off and read a book.

If I have a criticism of the book, it would be that it is longer than it needs to be, or perhaps much, much too short. In a series of well-researched chapters, the author exposes the breakdown of communications related to the past decade's wars, to taxation and entitlements and military spending, to health care legislation and immigration and abortion—a laundry list of the hot button issues of our time. The trouble is, on one hand, two or three examples would be enough, while on the other, there are no "warm" button issues, no issues at all that can be fairly debated in this political climate. A book five times as long could have been filled with examples of issues, that just their mention is likely to get you called names, intimidated and shouted down.

Nobody is willing to admit the slightest possibility that their tiniest opinion might not be 100% correct. This is why I find genuine Christian faith so salutary. To be a true Christian requires that, at least once in your life, you admit you were wrong, ask for forgiveness, and pray for divine guidance and correction. To walk a Christian walk requires frequent repentance. Now, the churches are as full of bigoted fools as the rest of society, but those who are actually serious about their faith are capable of admitting fault, of learning better, of growing and becoming ever more loving and caring and respectful in a way that is simply not possible to a person who has never said, "I repent."

In a joking way, sometimes someone will say, "Oh, I made a mistake once. I thought I was wrong about something but it turned out I was right." For far too many people, that isn't a joke but a way of life. They cannot imagine that their political opposite number might have a valid point about anything. They forget Churchill's maxim, "Even a fool is right once in a while."

I find it refreshing that the author has no call to legislative action, no demand for "something to be done" by the powers that be. The powers that be are the problem, actually. All are too timid to say what they mean, mean what they say, and demand to be treated with the respect they afford others by doing so. He instead trusts the American people to take his points to heart and learn to talk things over without rancor. There is one area in which Mr. Williams does make a suggestion; he is in favor of defunding NPR. He may be the first liberal journalist to take this conservative position. He makes a very good case for this in a portion of his last chapter; it boils down to this, that firstly, no other news organization needs a subsidy to survive, and secondly, for the government to subsidize any news organization is actually a hindrance to free speech and a free press.

He talks about how people who recognize him tend to say three things: they appreciate his work, they don't quite agree with everything he says, and finally tell him their name. I don't expect ever to run into him, but if I do, he'll get my name first, a big hug (or handshake) for writing this book, and, "I don't care if we agree or disagree, if we can keep from being disagreeable about it."

Is twelve bytes enough?

2012-01-05T12:11:00.002-05:00

kw: computers, hacking, passwords

Following up on an earlier post: There are two things a cybercriminal needs to obtain to begin cracking a bunch of passwords from their encrypted record (hashes). Firstly, the file of the hashes themselves, and secondly, knowledge of the hashing algorithm. DES is quite popular, but is by no means the only one in use. The best feature of a good hashing algorithm is that it does not reveal the length of the original password. Heaven help you if your online bank uses a weak hash or doesn't hash at all!

So, having somehow stolen a file of passwords, the cracker proceeds by trying character strings in some logical sequence, producing the hash, and seeing if it matches any of the hashes in the file. This matching step can be very fast, but I suspect it takes a while if you have a million hashes to check.

The record speed of a special-purpose cracking machine is just under 10¹¹ tests per second, when attacking a single hash. Obviously, it is much more efficient to sort the file of hashes using the hash as a key, then use a binary search to check a generated hash. A million hashes can be checked with only ten lookups. Not knowing how long those ten lookups might take, though, I'll continue the analysis by considering a hacker who is determined to get me, and has only one hash to test each iteration, at that 10¹¹/sec rate. What do I need to do to hold off the attack for at least a year? Simply put, since a year has 3.156x10⁷ seconds, I need a password long enough and complex enough to be a member of a universe with at least 3.156x10¹⁸ members. To push that out by a factor of a thousand, you need 3.156x10²¹ members.

Let us assume the perpetrator uses a logical series of steps, based on human nature. Shorter passwords are still most common; lower-case letters only and UPPER-case letters only are very common; adding a numeric digit, or a few, is getting more popular; MiXeD-case is somewhat rarer; mixed case plus digits is very rare, and the addition of special characters is done only if someone forces you to do it, or you are very, very paranoid. Someone having a super-cracker machine won't bother with a dictionary hack, but will just use all combinations.

Here is what it takes, for now, and for ten years from now when a cracking box might be 1,000 times as fast:

UPPER- or lower-case only. N = 26^L. For L = 13, N = 2.48x10¹⁸, not quite enough, so go with 14 letters, where N = 6.45x10¹⁹, for now. For later, you need 16 letters
Either case plus some digits. N = 36^L. For L = 12, N = 4.74x10¹⁸, OK for now. For later, L = 14.
MixEd-cASe letters. N = 52^L. For L = 11, N = 7.52x10¹⁸, good for now. For later, L = 13.
Now add digits. N = 62^L. You still need L=11 for now, because 62¹⁰ = 8.39x10¹⁷. For later, 12 is enough.
Finally, if the full ASCII set is allowed, N = 95^L. For L = 10, N = 5.99x10¹⁹, more than good enough for now. For later, 11 characters is sufficient.

Of course, as one progresses down this list, it gets harder to remember the password unless you are quite clever creating it. If fourteenletter or FOURTEENLETTER is as hard to crack as M#nE3pa$5w, though, which one is the better choice? And for the future, dEEPsnowINspring, at 16 letters of mixed case, is from a universe of 2.86x10²⁷; probably good for the rest of your life.

Chill is like vegetables

2012-01-04T12:49:00.000-05:00

kw: observations, weather, temperature

I don't like it, but it is better to have it. Cold weather. As I've gotten older, I have found I have less tolerance for the cold. But I am glad to live somewhere that has a real winter, nearly every year. Over all, it is healthier.

Firstly, it stimulates me and my immune system. I find that I am more susceptible to colds in warm weather. Now that I am in my mid-sixties, I've probably had most of the cold viruses out there, both rhinovirus and adenovirus varieties, so I am immune to them. Yet I still catch a new cold every few years, and it seems to occur in the Spring or Fall.

Secondly, it eliminates pests. The worst years for mosquitoes are after mild winters. The overwintering adults can only hide under the bark or in leaf litter, so a deep enough chill will kill more of them. Any overwintering larvae (of certain varieties only) need pretty deep water to hide in, and if it freezes over wholly, they cannot breathe. The privet rust mites that plague my hedge plants hide under bark or leaf litter also. It can take a week of below 20°F weather to kill them. But I'll still spray with oil in May even if we get a hard few weeks.

Finally, the best fruit trees, apples, pears and cherries, bear better fruit after a long, hard winter, as long as the roots in the ground don't freeze. A deep-rooted apple tree can even do well after a North Dakota winter. The trick is to keep it alive for ten years until the roots get at least six feet deep! That takes a heavy layer of mulch, renewed every Spring and Fall. At this latitude, however, hardly any mulch is needed. We had a cold, snowy winter a year ago, and this year I had a very good harvest of excellent apples.

As much as I may grumble about cold weather, it is like having your vegetables, or getting exercise—better for me and better for my yard and garden.

A day here, a day there - pretty soon it adds up

2012-01-03T12:11:00.002-05:00

kw: calendars, analysis

In the wake of the holidays, I was thinking about the origin of "Twelve Days of Christmas." It got me to thinking about the changes to the calendar that led to the 12 days, and the manipulations of the year that led to that. In the Science Q&A section of eNotes.com I find the following, posted by fact-finder:

The longest year on record was 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.) introduced his Julian calendar. In order to make up for the difference between the calendar date and the season (determined by the position of the Earth in its yearly journey around the sun), Caesar inserted 2 extra months and added 23 extra days to February. Thus, 46 B.C. was 455 days long.

The shortest year on record was 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) introduced his calendar, the Gregorian calendar. He decreed that October 5 would be October 15, eliminating 10 days, to make up for the accumulated error in the Julian calendar.

The world only gradually changed over to the Gregorian calendar. Catholic Europe adopted it by the year 1584. Many Protestant continental countries did so between 1699 and 1700; England imposed it on its colonies in 1752 and Sweden adopted it in 1753. Many non-European countries adopted it in the nineteenth century, with China doing so in 1912, Turkey in 1917, and Russia in 1918.

Sources: Famighetti, Robert, ed. The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1995, p. 288; Trefil, James. 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Science, p. 138.

Based on the entire Gregorian correction, the year 1600 was a leap year, while 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. In the late 1700s, there were some in England who went along with the calendar change and some who did not. The former practiced Christmas Day on December 25, according to the Gregorian Calendar. Those who stuck with the Julian calendar used their December 25, which fell on January 5. Over time, neighbors accommodated neighbors, and many began to celebrate the whole twelve days as the Christmas Season. Sometime thereafter, the familiar song was written (or perhaps it accumulated).

Since that time, the loss of two leap days in 1800 and 1900, followed by 2000 having a leap day, has shifted "Old Christmas Day" to January 7. It would be humorous to coin a new song of the fourteen days of Christmas!

All this takes care of making the average calendar year work out to a length of 365.2425 days, by mixing 365- and 366-day years. Since 1582, all the years have been of one of these two lengths. But there is more. The actual Tropical Year has a length of 365.2422 days (in 2000: 365.242189). This difference of 0.000311 days yearly means an extra leap year needs to be skipped about every 3,215 years. 3215+1582=4797. That is long enough that the gradual change in the length of the tropical year must be taken into account; the date we need to skip a leap year will be a year or two later, like in about the year 4799 or maybe 4800. 4800 has a nice ring to it. Let's use that.

Running a day behind

2012-01-02T17:53:00.002-05:00

kw: holidays

This is January second, but it feels more like the real New Year's Day to me. I return to work tomorrow after just over a week off. Yesterday, being a Sunday, was a busy day. Of course, church activities take up half the day, until 1:00 or 2:00 PM. Our son was home for the weekend, and he and some of the other college kids decided to go skating. After they had left (they went right from the meeting place), on the way home, my wife suggested we go there also.

Neither one of us has skated in more than ten years. It soon became evident that our workouts at the YMCA hadn't kept us in "skating shape". My wife hugged the wall and its handrail for most of the hour we were there, though a couple of the college girls were nice enough to entice her further out on the ice a time or two. I skated slowly and a bit tentatively. The only time I bent over and tried to put on some speed, I soon felt quite unstable, and skidded myself back to a more sedate pace!

After the skating, the kids came over for a little while. We had some pumpkin pie left over. Then they left, our son returned to his college digs, and we wrapped things up and turned in early.

Today was a much more quiet day. I made breakfast quite late. We cooked up the rest of a ham we'd been using up slowly, had some of that in sandwiches for lunch, and froze the rest. I napped a while. Read a while. Now I'm blogging. We'll probably have leftovers for dinner in another hour or two. For now, I'm going to go watch the News.

Ghettoizing the internet

2011-12-31T09:58:00.003-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, internet, privacy, polemics

Try this sometime, on a computer that you don't use for your banking or paying bills online (maybe at the public library...): Delete all cookies, go to a search web site of your choice and make a search. Then open the privacy window that lets you read all your cookies and see how many have appeared, all from a single action. There may be very few, or even none, but the top "cookie monster" that I've heard about so far was looking up "depression" on dictionary.com. The harvest? 233 tracking cookies!

Another interesting experiment: Call a friend in the phone, then both of you do the same simple search on Google or Yahoo! or Bing, and tell each other what are the top ten hits. Also take note of how many hits there are (it will probably be in the millions). Or you can make a game of it. Collaborate with five or ten friends to do several searches, chosen beforehand, and see who can collect the most hits, or the fewest (these friends all have to be honest!). It is important that everyone do this from their own home, because search personalization depends on your location, and whether you are logged in or searching anonymously.

Why should there be such differences? That is the subject of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. The book is a polemic, in the better sense of the word, exposing and decrying practices that disturb the author, and ought to be of concern to all of us. Yet it is not shrill. The 233 cookies example comes from page 6 of the book.

Just looking at my cookie collection, after a run by AdAware that removed a couple dozen tracking cookies, reveals nearly 260 domains that have cookies stored on my computer. Spot checking shows that my e-mail account server keeps 34 cookies; findagrave.com, where I do genealogical research, has 9; and my online bank keeps 8. Even this blog has one cookie stored there. It is safe to say there are at least a few thousand cookies on my computer, and for most of them I don't know whether I really need them.

Cookies are just the tip of the iceberg. Google stores everything we do through its web site, whether we are logged in or not. Google usually knows who we are even when we are not logged in. But our searching and clicking activities are aggregated into a great many categories that are said to be for purposes of "personalization": the company uses our preferences, as evidenced by what we look for and what we look at, to raise or lower the ranking of search results. The days of pure PageRank are long gone. The data about you that Google or Yahoo! or Bing or Amazon have gathered is stored on their own computers. I've even noticed that, when I finish a blog post and publish it, the next screen usually includes one or two ads that are pertinent to the blog post's subject (in case you didn't know, Blogger is a Google product).

What is the danger of personalization? How harmful can it be? That depends on the personality of each of us. I happen to be rather easy to influence when confronted by an authority figure. This is why I gave up live debating many years ago. It is also why I have learned to hang up quickly (even if it is rude) when a telemarketer or pollster calls. Sometimes I am kind enough to say, "No, sorry" before I hang up; sometimes not. Psst! Did you know that many "polls" over the telephone are actually attempts to influence the way you are likely to vote, or a product you might soon buy? Online marketers of both the commercial and political variety are experts at discerning the levers that influence what you will do next. They vary their approach by time of day, by the mood you seem to be in as seen in how you write, and the various profiles about you, such as your FaceBook account.

Here is a FaceBook experiment: Check your News feed, and sort it by time. Then go to the wall of someone with whom you almost never interact, and find something to "Like", or leave a comment or two. Return to News and see if that person's updates have magically appeared. Sometimes it takes leaving several tracks to get this to work. P.S. If you have more than 100 FaceBook friends, keeping up with all of them is quite arduous. Let's all suggest that FB make available a sorted list of interactions so we can figure out a few people to UnFriend.

In eight chapters, Pariser makes his case, that all this personalization has the effect of isolating us, with the technology that was supposed to make us more connected. I have often said that, if two people have all the same opinions, one of them is redundant. We need variety in our lives, but too much personalization removes a great source of variety. If you only see search results that square with your past interests, how will you ever develop new interests? How can we grow? Serendipity, and the matching of diverse topics, drive our creativity. Personalization is a great creativity killer.

The author and others, including the authors of this USA Today article, mention products like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, TrackerBlock and Do Not Track Plus, as means to cut out part of the tracking. Nothing will eliminate it all. Thus the author suggests political solutions, legislative solutions, in his last two chapters. I am skeptical of the approach. Like dealing with a home invader at 3:00 AM, sometimes the 38 caliber "solution" is the only effective one; the police can only do something after a crime has been committed. Too late.

I have, instead, a suggestion that is in keeping with the way Google and other search sites already work. I suggest prefixes that influence the filters temporarily. I suppose you know if you put "define:jejune" in the search box, the first hit will be a definition. Google has other prefix words. Here are some it needs to add:

all or every: Results only filtered by the PageRank algorithm that got Google started in the first place.
serendipity or ser for short: Results deliberately scattered among topical interests.
anti: Results from an interest set that is the opposite of my own. If I'm liberal, a bunch of right-wing rants; if I'm literary, some scientific and engineering stuff; if I like rock music, some old Roy Rogers or folk music or swing; and so forth.
statistical or stat: Results based solely on Bayesian statistical ranking, defeating even PageRank.

I am sure some more could be determined. This would shine a light on just what personalized ranking is doing, and we could make better choices as a result.

The other political solution is a series of high-profile lawsuits. To avoid such suits, Google needs to provide a tool to show you what it has on you; FaceBook needs a tool to show you whom it is filtering in and filtering out of your News Feed; and the other aggregating companies out there need to make available to all of us the data that exist about us, and allow us to correct mistakes, of which there are billions I am sure. Otherwise, our entire history will dog us forever, not taking proper account of changes in marital status, religious conversions, or the change in lifestyle that would result from a sudden windfall or its converse, loss of occupational income. How ironic is it if the homeless woman using a library computer is besieged by ads based on her former status as a corporate VP?

The book's website has a "10 Things You Can Do" section that can help us all partially alleviate the effects of the Filter Bubble as it currently exists. On this last day of 2011, I wonder what the coming decade will bring?

Are royals obsolete?

2011-12-29T17:28:00.002-05:00

kw: current events, royal families

My wife has been reading the online Japanese newspapers, and recently informed me of the controversies surrounding the succession to the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan. There are miles of ink on this, nearly all of it in Japanese, but this Wikipedia Article is a good starting point for the English-language reader.

To put it briefly, Crown Prince Naruhito married a bit late, and his wife Masako was just twenty-nine and a half on their wedding day. Then it took eight years before they had a child, a girl who is now ten years old, Princess Toshi (Aiko). They have no other children. The prince's brother Akishino is second in line to the throne, and Akishino's five-year-old son is third in line. Aiko is presently out of the loop.

Controversy one: Discussions have been going on for years whether to allow Aiko to succeed to the throne after her father, effectively putting her second in line. The negative opinion of the current Prime Minister indicates there is little chance of a new law to that effect. It is said, but seldom printed, that the problem is the added support needed for a larger royal family into the future: money problems.

Controversy two: The failure of Crown Princess Masako to produce further children led to a nervous breakdown and several years of psychotherapy. Her father-in-law, the Emperor, has been less than supportive, such that she declined to visit him during a recent hospital stay of nineteen days. The Crown Prince and his family live on the palace compound, but in isolation. The little cousins apparently nearly never meet.

To be short about it, if these "royals" are genuinely noble, both Princes ought, upon the death of the Emperor, to abdicate and declare the Chrysanthemum Throne to be vacant forever. Let most of the royal properties become museums and other tourist attractions. The families will need national support for this generation, but succeeding generations would need to get a job.

On our walk today, my wife and I had a long talk along these lines. I have similar opinions about the royal families of Europe. It seems the only one that brings in enough tourist money to "pay for itself" is the British royal family of Queen Elizabeth. This is unlikely to continue much longer, unless Prince William turns into a real whiz-bang of a popular king a few decades from now. But in my opinion, history has left royalty behind.

And it is dangerous to have monarchical leaders. Most current governments are dictatorships, and the reason we hear little about most of those are that they are poor. Dictatorship equates with a poor economy. Republics and even socialist republics simply do better.

A bee and a catcher

2011-12-28T21:08:00.003-05:00

kw: photographs, nature, bees, spider webs

Of the "nature photos" I took around the yard this year, these are my favorites. Click on either image for an 800x533 version. Both pictures were taken July 16, 2011.

I was a member of the Great Sunflower Project for a second summer this year. That means I spent 15 minutes at a time, a few times weekly, standing around waiting for bees to visit my sunflower blooms. Of course, when the nearby Hydrangea was in bloom, it got all the attention (it has nectar, and sunflowers don't). Among the visitors was this large bumblebee, and I got this great shot of it.

The same day that I took the picture of the bumblebee, I noticed this orb web attached to blackberry canes and fern stems, blocking my way to the faucet. I took several photos, including this one that shows the whole web in reflected sunlight. My best photo ever of an orb web. I waited until the next day to remove the web; didn't have the heart while it was still nearly perfect!

Pixie dust

2011-12-27T11:28:00.004-05:00

kw: musings, words, proverbs

On occasion my grandmother would say, "Everybody is a bit pixillated, except me and thee; and sometimes I think thee is also pixillated." She claimed it was an old Quaker saying, in which "pixillated", from "pixie", is a nice way of saying "crazy". Though she was a Methodist, her grandmother was a Quaker. She would say it to one of us boys who was being silly.

These days you can't repeat this saying and be understood. The word "pixelated" has been coined along with digital imagery, to mean "low resolution so the pixels show", or "deliberately exaggerated pixels" as in this image.

A pixel is nowhere near as wonderful a concept as a pixie. A perfectly beautiful word has been superseded by technology.

Nature calms my heart

2011-12-26T20:04:00.004-05:00

kw: nature, astronomy, photographs

I suppose I ought to have a label for naked-eye astronomy. As dusk deepened into night this evening, my wife and I took a walk along and through a small patch of woods near our house. The Moon and Venus made a pretty pair as we got far enough from the trees to see them clearly. I was glad I had a camera with me.

You can just barely see "Old Moon in New Moon's arms", or earthshine off the Moon. In a darker sky it will be quite evident.

Just having the walk together makes us both feel good, and having a bit of relatively natural landscape nearby in which to walk is all the better.

Christ finds an Amish heart

2011-12-25T17:50:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, memoirs, christian faith, religion

Ira Wagler was not a bad boy; neither was he an exceptionally good boy. He was an ordinary boy. If he was different in any way, it was that his heart was larger than the box of his upbringing, and that he longed to believe, but not blindly or unthinkingly. He has something of the soul of a Renaissance man, a keenly inquiring mind, and it is hard to keep such a person bound to unthinking tradition for long.

In Ira's case, it was impossible. Born and raised Old Order Amish, the culture to which he became accustomed is one of the most traditional, conservative and restrictive that Western life has to offer. His Amish community was not the tightest of the tight, not quite. The Amish that moved to Aylmer, Ontario, his parents among them, were seeking to found a colony that would be more pure, more tradition-bound than where they had been. Curiously, there are Amish who think the Aylmer community is too "loose" and "worldly", and will not take the bread and wine of communion with them. I wonder what Ira's life would have been like among them. Likely even shorter than his 26 years among his family's church in Aylmer, and later in Bloomfield, Iowa, and still later in other places.

Ira's book Growing Up Amish: A Memoir is a chronicle that begins in Ira's seventeenth year, when he first left to live among "the English", and ends in his twenty-sixth year, when he left for the fourth and last time, no longer to be an Amishman. You could call it a "life and hard times" book, and it surely is. You could call it a Quest, and it surely was. I find it most akin to The Girl Nobody Loved by Dorie Van Stone or The Woman at the Well by Dale Evans. It is a story of a lost soul being watched over by a loving God, finally to find God in grateful acceptance of His sacrifice for sins and His grace to live in His presence.

The book also provides a much-needed window into the lifestyle and ways of the Amish, which are a great mystery to most Americans, even those who live among them. I confess, though I live just over an hour from the "Amish capitol" of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and buy produce from Amish people at a local farmer's market; even though I have sat and talked with a few now and then, I have known little but that they were an ultra-conservative splinter from the Anabaptists known as Mennonites.

Because of their ultra-traditional way of life, I find in the Amish an exaggerated reflection of the experiences of my own, quite conservative Christian congregation. Christian communities everywhere that attempt to maintain a standard of purity while surrounded by "people of lower standards" experience quite a bit of contrarian activity among their children as they grow towards adulthood. The impulse to test boundaries is built into the human character, as illustrated by the story of Adam and Eve in the garden: There was but one rule, and only one, to not eat the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, Genesis 3 begins with Eve hanging around near that tree, wondering why. The serpent is simply allegorical; she needed no prompting other than her own (slightly) rebellious thoughts. How bad could "just a taste" really be, after all? The rest of the Bible provides the answer: tragically bad, but God has a way of redemption.

How do we keep the youngsters from "impurity" and "worldliness"? One way is to eschew contact with that world. The communal Hutterites try to do so. But in some parts of Western North America, there are lots of ex-Hutterites. The Amish at least engage with the English, trading with us, getting jobs among us (if you want a deck built quickly and well, hire an Amish crew. Just be sure to provide transportation!). In the same way, I know quite a few folks who formerly followed a church life such as mine, that they have now left, either for a different "Christian brand" (denomination) or for a non-church kind of Christianity.

An old 1960s byword says it well: Different strokes for different folks. Or the French proverb: Chacun à son goût – each to his own taste. As much as any portion the "body of Christ" may attempt to be all-inclusive, it is not possible. What is liberating to some is stifling to others. Some are quite bored with others' greatest and most precious experiences. And sometimes, when a religious husk has replaced spiritual experience with mindless adherence to tradition, only the most mindless and dull folk will tolerate it. This is what Ira found.

Curiously, although the Amish are considered a Christian sect, the name Jesus never appears in the book, and it is only in the closing chapters that the title Christ is used in a personal way. In 25 years among Amish folk in several localities, Ira Wagler never heard anything remotely close to the Christian Gospel of salvation by receiving Jesus Christ's sacrifice for our sins. He was confronted, again and again, thousands of times, with rigid demands to conform, to perform, to, effectively, save himself by his own efforts. The only time he heard the Christian Gospel was from a friend he calls Sam, whom he met in the last Amish community in which he dwelt. And Sam was not born Amish.

The Amish do not take converts. They prefer to outbreed everyone else (Ira has ten siblings). If a person insists on joining them, they make it hard, very hard, almost damnably hard. You have to learn their dialect of German, memorize tons of their prayers, and go through a process that strongly resembles hazing. It takes years, before one is considered eligible for baptism. Sam had done so. It is obvious that he knew Christ beforehand. He sure didn't attain Christian faith among the Indiana Amish he had joined.

He was exactly what Ira needed. Why did Ira leave, and then return, three times? Primarily, though he wanted greater freedom, he did not want to be a lost soul. He was convinced that only the Amish could be saved. One who left after being baptized was excommunicated, consigned to the Devil, and bound for Hell. During his third return, Ira went through a process almost as tough as Sam's had been, to be reinstated a "member" of the Amish church. Yet he still felt lost, until Sam showed him the way of God's forgiveness in Christ. Only once Ira knew Christ for himself, and knew that it is God who forgives and God alone, did he leave his Amish past behind, his heart at peace.

This does not mean that one must leave the Amish to be saved. Far from it. They do have the Bible, and they do read it, though there is no mention in Ira's experiences of Bible reading for oneself. The Bible alone can lead a person to God. But Ira's experiences limn for us most clearly the difference between faith and religion. He was raised in the bosom of one of the most restrictive and traditional religions found on American soil. It was primarily fear that drove him back to it again and again. Once he attained faith, he was free of religion. He could have remained an Amishman, but the scars were too deep for that. He is a man in Christ now. He lives in Lancaster, a Mennonite, but not an Amishman.

If the best books make us think deeply about ourselves and our experiences, this may just be the best book I have read all year.

Tangling with the wrong crowd

2011-12-23T16:48:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, science fiction, future fiction, space aliens

Joe Haldeman, who achieved fame with his Forever War series, takes up quite a different tack with his recent Marsbound novels. Marsbound was followed by Starbound, and now by Earthbound. The novels are set some 200 years in our future.

In this third novel, the meaning of "bound" shifts. In the first two, humanity was bound for Mars, then for the stars. Here, they are bound to Earth. The Others, greatly superior beings from 25 light years away, were discovered to exist in the first novel, and contacted in the second. They have imposed limits on human expansion, first by blowing up the Moon into a planetary shroud. When the American president ordered a shielded rocket to launch anyway, the Others shut off the power—a source of "free energy" that had only recently revolutionized the global economies. Then they went further to prevent all electrical machinery from working. Electrochemistry seems to still work, so brains have not shut down!

The novel carries Carmen, the heroine of the first two novels, through a few weeks of adventures on a world of eight or nine billions suddenly thrust into the Nineteenth Century. Actually, for most people on Earth, I would not expect the loss of electricity to have much effect. They are still living in the Sixteenth Century. A lot depends on how far "Western" technology spreads in the 21^st and early 22^nd Centuries.

It is hard to say too much without giving the story away. As you might expect, in a total collapse of society, money becomes valueless, and the greatest worth is now placed on food and ammunition. Much of the excitement of the book is set in a few pitched gun battles, in which Carmen learns to shoot, perhaps to kill. The book ends with a transition, so the author has more novels planned. Why should he stop with a trilogy? The fashion these days is to go on for five to seven volumes. In particular, in the closing chapters it is not even certain just how advanced the Others are, and whether humanity can come to terms with them on any kind of useful basis. I'll stay tuned.

Strength in length

2011-12-22T06:42:00.000-05:00

kw: computers, hacking, passwords

The time will come when, if you want to have a secure password, it will have to be something like

Now i$ the t1m3 4 all g00d men 2 c0m3 2D aid of th31r Cntry

or, if spaces remain disallowed,

Nowi$thet1m34allg00dmen2c0m32Daidofth31rCntry

Now that larger numbers of cyber criminals have turned from stealing data to stealing money from online banking systems, protecting online accounts is even more necessary. The most frequent attacks recently have been aimed at an institution's customer records. If your bank is any good, your password is not stored with your account, but a "hash", or encrypted version of the password. When you log in, your password is encrypted to a hash and compared with the hash on file. If a criminal obtains those online records, the password is difficult to extract from the hash…difficult but not impossible.

Suppose that, like many, your password is only six characters, all lower case, perhaps with a numeric digit or two included; a password like my1dog. Someone wishing to crack your record will start with letters-only, then letters plus one digit, and so forth. A six-letter lower-case password will be one of 26⁶ possible strings, from aaaaaa to zzzzzz, a total of about 309 million possibilities. Let one letter be a digit, and the total becomes 428 million. Those sound like a lot. But the criminals in this billion-dollar industry aren't afraid to spend money on hardware, and a recent exploit by the system Deep Crack was able to test nearly 100 billion possibilities per second. Your password would be extracted within 0.004 seconds!

Of course, for some time, it has been required at most banking sites to use at least eight characters, and it is "suggested" that both lower case and upper case and digits be mixed. The possibilities then get more numerous, because 26+26+10 = 62, and 62⁸ = 218 trillion. That's more like it! Let's see, 218 trillion divided by 100 billion = 2,180 seconds, or about 36 minutes. If someone wants those passwords bad enough, and has the equipment, the hard part is getting the banking records in the first place. That done, passwords can be extracted at the rate of forty per day of CPU time. That is still not very comforting. Eight is not enough.

In length is strength. For the current time, it is better to use nine or ten characters, and keep things mixed up. Each added character multiplies cracking time by 62: 9 char means 37 hours and 10 char means 97 days. That is more like it. However, each decade that passes, ultimate computer speeds increase by a factor of 1,000. In about 2020, cracking a 10 character alphanumeric password will be achievable in about 2½ hours.

If you want a password to last a while, the time is now to go to at least 12-character passwords, which are nearly 4,000 times as hard to crack as 10-character ones. If your banking site allows certain punctuation marks also (such as $ # % @ * ), that just makes things even harder for the criminal.

Now, however are you going to remember such passwords? I find it hard to remember 5Zep38xN, which was suggested to me by an institution not long ago. Of course, I didn't use that, but created a longer one, based on an algorithm. I have a different algorithm now, so I can discuss the older one in relative safety. It worked like this:

Choose a 12-letter word such as homozygosity.
Break it into two or three parts (I usually used 2, but let's use 3 here): homo zygo sity .
Mix the three in sequence: hzsoyimgtooy .
Replace certain letters with numbers or punctuation: hz$oy1mgt00y (notice I didn't change one of the o's to a zero).

Now you have the problem of remembering it! hz$oy1mgt00y is not memory friendly. You simply have to keep a list. I keep my list in two parts: Part 1 contains such passwords and their generating words, and Part 2 has the account identity and just the generator word. I carry Part 2 and keep Part 1 hidden away. For further security, I have user names, wherever possible, that are as obscure as the passwords. I keep the decoding information on Part 1 and "reminders" on Part 2. With practice, if I can't remember the password from the hints on Part 2, I can regenerate it on the fly.

Passwords such as the one created here (Don't use it! Use a different starter word) will require a cracking computer to go through nearly 4x10²¹ combinations, which will require more than 1,000 years. In another ten years, it'll still take a year or more, so somebody will really have to want it bad to attempt it. And by then, who knows, maybe the web site will look at me through my web cam, listen to my voice, and "recognize" me. I'll address the problem of duress later…

A Bootstrapped Mobile

2011-12-21T12:13:00.000-05:00

kw: art, mobiles

I created this mobile more than a year ago. I just moved it to my workplace because at home the cat keeps knocking it down. I call it "Upwardly Mobile". It is a prototype for a larger work I hope to produce. It helped me understand the parameters for a mobile that is supported from the bottom and does not clash.

The support is a finishing nail with the head ground into a sharp tip after being driven half into the wooden stake. The stake is held by a block of 2x4.

The three sections are cut from aluminum sheet; I used leftover flashing from a home maintenance project. The bottommost section is counterbalanced by a 3/8-inch hex nut. The sections weigh, from top to bottom, 0.55 g, 2.3 g, and 14.2 g. All three sections are 15 cm long. The assembled mobile rises 11 cm from the support tip, and can extend as far as 27 cm horizontally.

The weight ratios are the first crucial set of parameters. 2.3/0.55 = 4.18 and 14.2/(0.55+2.3) = 4.98. While it may be possible to tune up a mobile having weight ratios in the range of 3.0-3.5, let's analyze the more conservative value of 4.0, and see what it takes to design an upward-thrusting mobile with a minimum section weighing 1 gram, and a total mass of 20 kg or less.

The first two sections weigh 1 g and 4 g, totaling 5g, so the third is 20g. Continuing, we find the sections will weigh 100 g, 500 g, 2.5 kg and 12.5 kg. The total weight is 15.625 kg for all seven sections. To illustrate the power of the geometric sequence, if we were to design for ratios of 3.0, we could have eight sections totaling 16.384 kg, but if we went with ratios of 5.0, seven sections would total nearly 50 kg, and six would total 7,776 kg.

To get the most out of such a mobile, it makes sense to use thinner and lighter material for the longer sections of the arms. Perhaps it is best to use steel for the heavy ends and aluminum for the light ends.

This picture taken from above shows a little more detail about how the sections are balanced. I cut the first two sections freehand, and just rolled a piece of rod stock underneath to find the balance point, marked it, and drove a blunted nail partway through from the bottom side with the section lying on a block of wood. This made a dimple for the tip of the section below to stick into. I also made an aluminum counterbalance for the back end of the second section, which can be slid for tuning the balance point and angle.

The third, bottommost section was a bit trickier. I used a nut I had handy and cut the sheet metal piece extra-long by a centimeter. I attached the nut with folded tabs cut at the back of the piece. Then I found the approximate balance point—with the two upper sections lying across the tip—and made the dimple. I put the bifold in so the dimple would be horizontal when the section was rising steeply (it rises about 35°). I trimmed the tip back gradually until it was close enough to fold the last 5 mm for fine tuning.

The process could be continued, but a different way of attaching counterweights, or incorporating them in as thicker stock, must be devised, so the sections don't need to rise so steeply to keep out of one another's way. As with hanging mobiles, the more sections, the more complex and pleasing the motion.

Being light, Upwardly Mobile bounces and shifts with slight breezes I cannot feel. Too many sections, however, will yield a lower section or two that are impervious to "breeze" level air motion, and the mobile as a whole would be less pleasing. This has me leaning toward attempting a design with a ratio near 3.0, and maximum mass less than half a kilogram, perhaps in five sections total.

Johnny got the bigger piece of cake!

2011-12-20T12:05:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history of science, measurements, metric system

Should you decide to take a jaunt from Philadelphia, PA to Salisbury, MD, you'll wind up traversing the length of the state of Delaware, much of it on a stretch of DE 1 called the Korean War Veterans Memorial Highway. Things go swimmingly enough as you follow Interstate 95 for a few miles, then turn south on DE 1.

A few miles further, you'll see this sign. (This is a crop from a Google Street View image.) I recall the first time I drove this way, thinking, "I didn't know Delaware was quite that long." Almost immediately, if you tend to watch for mileposts like I do, you'll notice one that announces "Mile 101". What is going on here?

In 1993, when the route was renamed and made into a freeway, it was measured off in kilometers, according to the then-current federal standard. Km-posts were erected and the exits were numbered accordingly. Starting ten years later, the km-posts were replaced by mileposts, except for a 27 km / 17 mile section near Smyrna, which was only "converted" very recently. Artifacts of partial conversion can be found at this Colorado State U page. Milepost 101 is almost exactly between former km-posts 162 and 163.

This changeable attitude at both federal and state levels toward how to measure our highways has kept the United States as the only major country that clings to standards of measuring that are not based on the metric units used everywhere else in the world except Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia. It exposes a weakness of representative democracy, the weakness of the representatives themselves.

The science, history, sociology and politics of measuring are surveyed in quite entertaining fashion in World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement by Robert P. Crease. The need to measure things accurately begins by about age four, when a child realizes that a stack of several blocks is no bigger or smaller than those same blocks all spread out. At the very next dessert time, she is liable to either gloat ("My piece of cake is bigger, tee hee") or complain ("No fair! Johnny's piece of cake is bigger").

It would be easy for such a book to get hopelessly scattered. The author wisely uses just two case studies (Chinese measurement systems prior to 1911, and west-central African gold-measurements prior to the 1800s) to show the gamut of weights and measures and how they were influenced by their social setting.

This is a key theme of the book. Measurement is a social phenomenon, a social action. A hermetic miser may obsessively count and re-count his money, but most of us have no need to count anything until we make a transaction. A wise shopper watches where the butcher's thumbs are when the scale is measuring a cut of meat. Few will go so far as to bring a calibrated weight to check the scale; we trust that an inspector takes care of such niceties. Such trust underlies all commerce. Unfair measuring practices long predate Biblical injunctions not to make the shekel small and the bushel great. In a late chapter the author takes note of a "ruler" that is shorter than the standard, used by crooked lawyers to "measure" a damaged area about which they are suing.

The main historical narrative concerns the gradual conversion of most nations to a system that arose amidst the revolutionary fervor of the French Revolution, culminating in two precious artifacts still kept in a vault in Paris, the 1799 Metre and Kilogram standards, made of platinum. Though these were superseded two generations later by the platinum-iridium standards kept just outside Paris at BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures or International Bureau of Weights and Measures), they remain unique objects. Yet they and their successors are obsolete.

Starting in the mid-20^th Century, the meter was redefined several times, and is now tied only to the speed of light. Now that light velocity in a vacuum is understood to be absolutely constant, unaffected by motion, gravitational potential or any other "environment", it serves as a standard for distance and time measurement that does not depend on the size of Earth, or even on its existence!

Although the Kilogram standard artifact is not yet wholly replaced with an absolute measure, this is expected in 2015, at the next meeting of the appropriate standards setting body, the CGPM (Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures or General Conference on Weights and Measures). The new Kilogram will be defined based on either Planck's Constant or Avogadro's Number, or perhaps both. Conference members are optimistic that the final details can be worked out by then. Meanwhile, standards-checking still relies on a precious metal cylinder weighing just over 32 troy ounces, and thus worth about $45,000 on the bullion market.

I recall learning the metric system in 1962, when I first took high school Chemistry. I became familiar with the cgs system, for centimeter-gram-second. My first year of college, I was brought up to date with the 1960 world standard, the MKS system, for meter-kilogram-second. Then in graduate school, the units didn't change, except in fiddling detail, but the name did, to SI (Système International or International System). As it happens, it is the most international system we have going! Assuming an absolute Kilogram is defined in 2015, a process that has been going on for 230 years will be nearly complete. It just remains to get one major country to convert to SI … mine!

I am ready. I know my height is 1.83 m and my weight is 98 kg. The second at least is the same the world over, so my age of 64 years and just over a month needs no conversion (and at 10:00 pm tonight, PST, it will be almost exactly 1.802 billion seconds).

In his epilogue, the author returns to the sociological implications of measurement. He had earlier introduced the new words "metrosophy" and "metroscape" to express the philosophy and environment that surround our ever-more-measured life. Will our measurements continue to define and redefine who we think we are? To what extent will it affect us that the standards on which our measurements are made no longer depend on the length of our arm or hand or foot, or the beat of our heart or the speed of a falling apple? As long as the meat I pay for does not include any of the butcher's thumb, I don't need to care. But if one day I decide to vacation on the Moon, it will be very important to know very, very accurately where my landing will be. I'd hate to make an error of 5 parts per million and run out of fuel a couple of kilometers up!

15 Dec 1967 - ordeal enough for me

2011-12-19T13:09:00.005-05:00

kw: personal experiences, ordeals, hiking, climbing

The date 12/15/1967 is significant to me for several reasons. One is that, from late afternoon until late evening, I found myself fighting for my life on a mountainside.

I enjoy walking, and hiking even more, and when I was living in Pasadena in the late 1960s I often hiked partway up the old Mount Wilson road. I never went all the way to Mount Wilson, which is eleven miles, but usually stopped at Henninger Flats after four miles before returning. The 8-mile round trip made for a pleasant afternoon's walk. I nearly always went alone.

On this occasion I was early, and decided to try a shortcut down the mountain. In this overview of part of the area, the Henninger Flats Ranger Station is at upper right. Top center you can see a turnout in the fire road. It is at the head of a small canyon down which I decided to hike. At extreme lower left is a cliff that interrupts the canyon, and brought about my difficulties. Actually, my ignorance and arrogance brought about my difficulties. That, and the lack of a topographic map, which might have led me to a safer route.

I took my time going down the little canyon, and it was easy walking for the half hour or so it took me to go about half a mile. Along the way I hopped down a couple of little dry waterfalls that were five or six feet high. Then I came to a twenty-footer. I managed to clamber down that one, which shows in this relief image as a chute to left of center.

I was walking along, thinking, "I'm glad I don't have to go back up that one". Then I came to the cliff/waterfall at bottom left. What shows in this image is a fifty-foot sheer drop. The drop is followed by very steep going for another hundred feet. Measuring with Google Earth while compiling these images, I figured the total drop is 154 feet.

I had no climbing equipment. I am not a very good free-climber. I was stuck! Nobody knew where I was. Although I knew I was within a mile of the ranger station, I didn't think they would hear me if I yelled, because of the ridge intervening. I was a couple weeks past my twentieth birthday, and wondering if it might be my last.

I decided to climb the canyon wall to my southeast (the right side of this image). I walked back up to the 20-foot dropoff and began climbing there. To my dismay, this was a north-facing canyon wall, so it had more vegetation than the opposite side. Most of the vegetation was thorny. Zigging and zagging to miss the roughest patches, and just plowing through where I had to, I climbed from sundown until after 9:00 PM, almost four hours.

When I attained the ridge top, I was just about center-right in this image, where a fire trail goes along the ridge line. From there I hiked half a mile to the Ranger Station. The ranger on night duty kindly gave me some water and called my parents to let them know I was OK and would be home in a couple of hours. I looked in a mirror, and was surprised that I wasn't the bloody mess I expected from all the thorns. My shirt was a total loss, but had protected me.

I hiked back down the four miles to where my car was parked and went home. It is the last time I have hiked alone, or without mapping the route beforehand! Those principles stood me in good stead in graduate school; I hiked a few hundred miles of the trails in the Black Hills getting my studies there done. I always made sure there was a safe route to the places I needed to go, and didn't deviate. I also usually carried a topo map.

I am thankful I didn't actually have very far to go, when I got stuck, and even more thankful I was in good physical shape for a 4-hour climb. I'd have been really embarrassed if Search and Rescue had to come out to get me. It is said, "You have to know your limitations." Sometimes it takes a bit of foolishness to find that out. Glad I lived through it.

Complete lack of discrimination

2011-12-17T11:58:00.003-05:00

kw: commentary, current events

When I saw this in the mail, I almost threw it away unopened. What do the Time editors think they are doing?

The cover blurb mentions four "protest" movements. I have yet to open the issue, so I don't know if others are discussed, but these four pretty are much cover the gamut:

"Arab Spring" – This is a mixed bag. Starting in Tunisia, several brutal, falsely Muslim dictators were overthrown. In a few cases, however, Egypt in particular, this has led to a great strengthening of radical Islamic factions. This would be a bad thing for the world even if America didn't exist. (It would probably be even worse…)
Athens – I suppose the people have a right to protest, but they have badly mis-aimed. They ought to be directing their anger at several prior administrations, plus the current one, that got them into this economic morass, and because they did so. But without the proposed austerity measures—and more to come, you can be sure—the country will go belly-up and descend into overt civil war.
Occupy Wall Street (or wherever) – This began as a marginally good thing, to "defend" the "other 99%", which is anybody but the super-rich. It soon descended to an extended Woodstock, without the good music, but with rampant immorality (not just sexual), defecation everywhere, and a filthy, smelly mass of ingrates who represent quite a different 1%, the irresponsible 1% who don't want to work but want government to support their every whim. The Mayors were right to drive them out.
Moscow – Loosely based on Arab Spring, this doomed movement is up against a very different foe. Let us recall that Mr. Putin once directed the KGB, and there is enough of the old apparatus in place to cause huge mischief. This will mainly just set back Russian progress by another generation.

I came of age in the 1965-1975 "sixties", when protest movements were typically more focused, better led and eventually more effective than any of the "Occupy" hooligan groups. Full disclosure: many of the protests were very left-wing, and I am conservative. I was a heckler, sufficiently effective that I survived a couple of murder attempts.

While the impact of this year's protest movements has indeed been significant, they certainly don't deserve to be lumped indiscriminately together as Time's "person of the year".

The cat and the cutie

2011-12-16T11:43:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, mysteries, animal fiction

The prospect of a quarter million dollars' worth of vintage Barbie dolls going up in flames is rather daunting. It makes for a fitting climax to the current adventures of Temple Barr, PR maven and part-time (usually amateur) private investigator, and Midnight Louie, her black tomcat. The twenty-third Midnight Louie book is Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta by Carole Nelson Douglas. In this one, Ms Barr is actually hired as a PI, and clearing up one mystery unlocks a couple of others.

The mean streets of Las Vegas are no fitting environment when you are a petite five-foot-nothing, but in addition to Louie, Ms Barr has a current and a former fiancé (Matt and Max, respectively), and the six-foot policewoman C. R. Molina looking out for her. In spite of all that backup, she winds up facing a serial killer called BDK, for Barbie Doll Killer, alone.

The series is noted for complex plots and driving narrative. The books are hard to read in the day-to-day way to which I am accustomed; they demand to be read at a sitting. Well, one does what one must.

I found myself comparing this series with my other favorite cat-mystery series, the Cat Who series by Lillian Jackson Braun (who passed away in June at the age of 97 and eleven months). Ms Braun's feline protagonist is Koko, a Siamese.

Louie narrates about every fourth chapter. Koko maintains catly dignified silence.
Louie knows what he is doing. Koko is an enigma; is he psychic as his owner sometimes thinks, or is he just doing ordinary catly things that are interpreted in all-too-human ways?
Ms Barr is clearly and explicitly active sexually, though she is serially monogamous. Koko's owner, James Qwilleran, has a romance going on in some of the novels, but its extent is kept mysterious.
Though in the crisis of each novel, Ms Barr is usually on her own, at least for critical moments, she is usually very social. Mr. Qwilleran tends to operate solo much more of the time.
The Louie novels have more sub-plots going on than the Cat Who novels.

As much as I enjoyed reading the book, it is too easy to give it all away (I already committed one partial spoiler). I'll content myself with reporting that the writing is solid, particularly the characterization and scene-setting.

A side element of the book is the issue of elderly persons with pets, who want to provide for them after their own demise. This is harder than you might imagine, and a closing epilog by the author gives good information on how to go about it.

A first time for us

2011-12-15T21:06:00.002-05:00

kw: movies

In more than thirty-five years of marriage, we never went to a movie. I'd pretty much given up on them several years before marrying, and my foreign-born wife had never been to an American film, and had no interest in it. Until tonight.

I was given a couple of movie passes, and after some discussion of regifting them, my wife and I decided to "have a date". We have just returned from seeing Hugo, not in 3D, just the "flat" version. I won't attempt to review the film. Better critics than I have reviewed it (If I did my Google search right, there are already more than four million reviews). Rather, just let me say we were transported. It was a fine choice for our first movie date.

We almost didn't see it. We went to a "Regal 16", and were the only ones in that auditorium throughout. Twice while we were there a guard walked through. But during the pre-film previews, my wife was seriously creeped out by being alone and wanted to leave. She was afraid nobody would know if we were mugged "or something". Well, we soon forgot ourselves in the story and had a good time.

Nannyism - piled higher and deeper

2011-12-14T08:19:00.003-05:00

kw: regulations, observations

Do y'all remember the OSHA Cowboy? 'Taint nothin' compared to what we'll soon have to do to drive in these parts. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, pronounced "knee jerks") has "recommended" that the Federal and/or State governments make laws banning all use of communications devices while driving. The aim is to reduce "distractions".

Y'know what distracts me when I'm driving? People who don't look before changing lanes or turning; people who cut me off in an effort to get to work three seconds earlier (like they want to work more today???); people who fly by me at 20-30 miles over the speed limit, when I'm going only 10 over; and especially people who are really distracted, visibly so, because they have a book or newspaper open on the steering wheel, or are combing hair or putting on makeup. I actually saw a laptop propped on a steering wheel.

I don't mind laws requiring hands-free communications, such as Bluetooth. I wonder if using your phone on speaker while it is in your shirt pocket counts… that is what I do. I also only make calls when at a stop light or stop sign (he intoned primly).

But if we're going to reduce distractions, we need to consider these also:

Radios - particularly tuning the radio while in motion.
CD Players - particularly reloading five CD's when the stack of five already in there runs out.
CB Radios - Actually, I find using a CB quite a bit more distracting than using a handheld phone: changing channels on an "Up 5" request, for instance.
Passengers - will we be safer of carpooling is banned?

Come up with your own list. I am sure there are a lot of things that force us to multitask, and some folks do it better than others. But, hey, good buddy, can't we all agree to let the Darwin Effect take care of the multitasking-challenged?

Adding to the economy

2011-12-13T17:22:00.002-05:00

kw: family events, home maintenance

"Work fascinates me. I can watch it all day long." I don't know who said that, but I spent all day watching work today. We had our garage doors replaced. The ones we've had were made primarily of 3/8" (9mm) plywood with framing to hold the mountings. There's a point where one more paint job just makes them look worse, and we wanted more insulation.

I confess I hadn't given a thought to how it is done. The three workers dismantled the doors piece by piece, by unbolting all the hardware. Then they took down the rails. The longest part of the job was getting the new rails mounted and lined up. Once that was done, the new doors were put together into the rails, section by section, and the hardware holds the sections together. Altogether, about five hours of work.

Toward less boredom aboard the aircraft

2011-12-12T05:43:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, flying, science

Brian Clegg is trying to interest more people in everyday science. His latest effort, pitched at a very general audience, is Inflight Science: A Guide to the World From Your Airplane Window. Need I say it is an easy read? I actually Fogged six paragraphs, a total of 640 words, to find that the reading level is 10.4, suitable for anyone who managed a couple years of high school at least, and is accessible to a bright middle-schooler.

The book is in seven sections, from your wait in the airport lounge, to various aspects of the flight, to landing and deplaning. Have you been worried about the new backscatter x-ray machines you're asked to stand inside? (Unless you want a very thorough body search…) They are not at all airports yet, but give it time. They work on a different principle than the dental and medical x-ray machines, which take a picture right through your body. The airport machines use "soft" x-rays, that mostly bounce off your skin, but do pass through your clothing. They bounce particularly well off things harder than skin, such as weapons, whether metal or ceramic or even hard plastic. While there is some x-ray exposure, you'll experience ten times the radiation during the flight itself if you're going to be "up there" more than a couple of hours.

As you'll learn later in the book, being at an altitude of 35,000 to 45,000 feet (11-12 km) places you above 70% of the protective atmosphere, so you experience an increased dose of cosmic rays. However, six hours aboard an airplane is about like six months in Denver—compared to San Diego—so far as radiation exposure goes. These low levels are well within the range our bodies can tolerate. It is only a concern if you fly across the U.S. or across an ocean every week for year after year. As it happens, a schoolmate of mine is an international businessman, based in both Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He does fly that much. I ran into him (in an airport, natch!) last year, and he is healthy. I fly about yearly, but I am the one who had cancer! Go figure.

There is a lot more than radiation going on, though. There is the Einstein effect. My friend flies enough that, by now, he is 1/1000^th of a second younger than if he'd stayed on the ground. Maybe 2/1000^ths. Not a huge effect, of course, but consider satellites such as the GPS system that we all use now to find our way. They have to correct for time dilation, as it is called, or their errors would add up to 38 microseconds daily. Light goes 300 meters per microsecond, and 38x300 = 11.4 km. If we didn't know about relativity, errors would accumulate at the rate of 11.4 km per day, or about 8 meters every minute.

The author has a great way of putting things into perspective. He also discusses the implications of e = mc², the equivalence of energy and matter. The Sun converts four million tons of matter into energy, by producing helium from hydrogen, every second. That rate of energy production equals having 3/4 million million million large power stations running flat out. The portion that is intercepted by Earth is 1/7 billionth of this, or 108 million power stations. That is about 5,000 times as many stations as we actually have running.

I'd like to compare that another way. The Earth's sunny side intercepts 5,000 times as much energy as we are currently using. While modern, cutting-edge solar cells have efficiencies in the 30-40% range, affordable ones are about 15% efficient … while the Sun is shining. Averaged over a day, and assuming they are somewhat steerable, such solar cells can be 6% efficient. Grind out the numbers, and it would take 1/1,200^th of Earth's total surface, spread around the tropical and subtropical latitudes, to capture enough energy to power all of modern civilization. That is a small matter of 160,000 square kilometers. Hmm. That is a rather big project, but not as big as doubling the number of coal-fired power plants, which is what we can expect if China and India expect to use even 20% of the energy levels the West enjoys.

OK, back to what the author wrote. While at altitude, if there is not too much cloud cover, the landforms come in for review. There is nothing quite like seeing a mountain range from above to appreciate their sheer scale. I haven't crossed the Himalayas, but I have crossed the Rockies several times. Even through the little window at my seat, they are impressive. Then I realize that they are in view for an hour or more, and I'm zipping along at 600 mph (950 kph), more or less.

Before or after the main part of the flight, during the climb to altitude or during the descent, you can see the ground from above a little more intimately. These portions of the flight are likely to be in or near cities, unless your airport is Denver Stapleton, which is way the heck and gone out on the prairie. So the author has interesting tips for estimating the population of a given area by counting street lights or city blocks in a smaller area and estimating how many of these smaller areas the town covers. He has tips for seeing archaeological features such as buried walls or building foundations, particularly if the light is low, such as late in the afternoon or in early morning (I tend to fly at dawn, which is perfect).

I have to take issue with one blunder. Discussing volcanoes, he mentions the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, that it emitted 20 cubic kilometers of ash. That is true. Then he writes, "…the equivalent of a cube 20 kilometers on a side." Very not true. Such a cube would contain 8,000 cubic km. Twenty cubic km is a cube with a side that is the cube root of 20, or 2.7 km on a side. That is still a lot of ash. The much smaller eruption in Iceland last year shut down much of European air space for weeks. If a Krakatoa-size eruption happens again, nobody is likely to take to the air for about a year! We would all get very, very good at telecommuting. Skype's servers would likely be swamped! Citrix and other "go to my PC" services would boom. Not a bad idea, actually. I video Skype with my Dad a few times a week. It sure helps I don't have to fly six hours every time we want to chat face to face.

It has been said that the most dangerous part of a flight is the landing. Actually, it is the approach. By the time the wheels are locked down, the plane is close enough to the runway to glide in if needed. Modern autopilot systems can take off and land without human help. As long as nothing goes wrong, the pilot and copilot are actually the backup system, particularly during many landings. Could we replace them? Not likely. Little things can still go wrong, and frequently do, so even during automated landings, the pilot is not just present, but is holding the controls, ready to take over immediately. Most airlines actually require a certain number of "hand" landings to keep the skills of the pilots up to date.

With this book in hand, there ought to be plenty to do during the whole flight experience, from being dropped off at the airport to gathering your luggage. No matter how much fun the book is, however, I am always glad to get off the plane and experience the relative freedom of being able to walk more than a few dozen feet. At least, knowing a few things the author has passed along, the flight itself can be more interesting than before.

What malls won't do for money

2011-12-09T12:22:00.000-05:00

kw: popular culture, advertisements, shopping malls

Ever since about Halloween, a TV ad has been running, an anti-Mall spot with a very catchy song and dance (to the tune of "Up on the House Top"), by TJ Maxx and a couple of other retailers. I began to wonder, was this taped in a mall, or did they build a mock-up? If they used a mall, I suspect they paid them well!

I also considered: although we do, as the lyrics state, "pay through the nose", do we really? It costs between half a dollar and a dollar per mile to drive a car (more for luxury models); I am frugal, and it costs me about $0.70 per mile. You need to drive a real beater and do your own maintenance to get the costs down in the $0.50/mile range. How do the extra miles and costs add up if you need to drive from store to store?

I live a mile from one mall, a rather modest one, and twelve miles from a real mega-mall. The collection of retailers and retail outlets in this area is pretty well concentrated in several shopping areas (what we used to call outdoor malls), that are spaced about two miles apart in any direction. So if I want to go to four places, I'll drive a total of two miles if I can find everything at the mall, and about ten miles to visit four separate places and return home. The eight mile difference costs only $5.60. If I can save $1.40 per purchase at the separate stores, then the extra trips were worth it.

But then, what is the value of my time? Rather than use my own compensation, which is a bit on the high side, I'll use a more average figure of $20 per hour. Store-to-store time includes driving and walking, and comes to ten minutes for a 2-mile trip. This adds up to 40-50 minutes for the four-store visit. Can I do my shopping in the mall, at four stores, and spend less than a total 50 minutes going store-to-store? Let's assume I can, and that the total is half, or about 25 minutes. The mall trip then saves $8.30 or so in "opportunity cost".

Add this to the $5.60, and we have about $14 that needs to be made up, or $3.50 per purchase. It is worth checking into your purchases beforehand, and deciding if you can save $3.50 per purchase at the separate stores. For some items, particularly clothing, it's a no-brainer. But both the separate stores and the mall stores complicate matters by having specials and sales.

I think, for a lot of people, the time saving is worth more than the dollar amount, and the convenience of the mall simply outweighs everything else.

What enemy will we marry next?

2011-12-07T11:40:00.000-05:00

kw: national events, memorials, sociology

In early 1941, realizing that war between Japan and the United States was getting ever more likely, a Japan-born naturalized American citizen, who had lived in California for twenty years, took his wife and two daughters to Japan. Were there a war, he expected Japan to win. A few years later his wife died of TB and, during the last year of the war, he remarried. Early in 1946 their daughter was born, who grew into the woman I married in 1975. But before that, when the little girl was barely three, the man divorced his wife and returned to America, with his two other daughters, to marry again, but he had no more children.

Another Japanese man, a soldier in the war of the Pacific, lost his wife soon after the war. He had two young boys. He met the divorcée and married her; they blended the families. He it was who actually raised my future wife.

A key element here is that the girl's natural father had returned to the U.S. When she was a young working girl, she saved enough money to visit him in California. A second visit a few years later led her to decide to remain, and a year after that she and I met. I find it strange that, nearly thirty years before we married, her stepfather and my father were in the same region, fighting on opposite sides in the war. I did not get to know him well, as he spoke no English, but we had a cordial relationship for the very few weeks we spent together. He died more than ten years ago.

Today, the seventieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack (and a coincident attack near Manila), carries great significance to my father and his generation. It is before my time, and my wife's time, so the event of greatest significance to the two of us has been her decision to reside in America, which has led, so far, to 36 years together.

Just five years after we married, Mount Saint Helens in Washington state erupted, devastating many square miles of landscape. It took just a few years for new life to take root in and through the ash and lava, and begin to reclaim the landscape. I liken the thriving relationship of my wife and myself, and our son, now in his mid-twenties, to new life that arose from the devastation the volcano. We were born in the aftermath of war, though in truth, her country was much more devastated than mine, and our fathers suffered their own traumas. Life is tough and tenacious. I wonder what we will find, a generation from now, in the aftermath of two current wars and another one or two that are on the horizon.

Old Ben may yet have the last word

2011-12-07T06:02:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, sociology

Tom Blair is not a young man. While he might bemoan that fact, it is actually very, very good. He is about the same age as Benjamin Franklin was when he signed his name to the Declaration of Independence. By that age of seventy, Franklin had been retired from business for nearly thirty years, and instead occupied with diplomacy on behalf of the American colonies and then for "Our America", not yet formed, but a growing gleam in the eyes of a few such as John Adams.

Franklin died at the age of 85, some 221½ years ago. Had he the benefit of these two-plus centuries to accumulate further wisdom, aided by further observation of the American condition, what would he say today? Author Blair provides one possible window in Poorer Richard's America: What Would Ben Say? Having drunk deep of Franklin's writings, particularly in Poor Richard's Almanack, and having mastered Franklin's voice, as one of the most lucid writers of 18^th Century English prose, Blair presents forty essays on the American condition, her fortunes, failures, foibles, and possible future as a nation in decline, but not yet fated to decline further. His watchword is, in my estimation, that continued decline is not inevitable, but is still "up to us."

Amidst essays aimed at targets from elitist educated ignoramuses to dogmatic, insecure religionists to an overhyped media to self-proclaimed leaders who nonetheless only know how to follow, he reserves his most persistent polemics for those imprudent guardians of the national treasury, the Congress. There is not one "problem of Congress", but a welter of them; the greatest being corporate lobbying and that great black box of campaign funding. For these he has a simple solution, one unlikely of passage, but it would nonetheless prove effective: a 28^th Amendment that adds a $20 tax on every American household, from which all national campaigns are to be financed in equal measure, with no other financing being allowed. Divide the expected $2+ billion by a thousand or so, and you have about $2 million each, which is plenty for the TV/radio/print exposure of any incumbent or challenger.

But as several of the essays make clear, the greatest threat to America is a combination of two forces. One is internal, and was well stated by Lord Thomas MacCauley, who wrote:

A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for those candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.

This well states the course America has been on at least since the "New Deal" that preceded World War II, and is thus about eighty years along.

The second force is external, and is the determination of the Chinese leaders, not to foolishly try to bury America as Nikita Khrushchev threatened, but to instead simply buy America. At this moment, to repurchase America's debt held in China would cost each of us, from the cradle to the hospice-dweller, $2,800. That is assuming the Chinese would be willing to allow the bonds to be redeemed at par…unlikely. When, one day, the "banker" calls in the debt, the stars and stripes will be replaced by a banner reading "Under Foreclosure".

Considering the persistent call to responsibility found in its pages, some might call the book a Conservative work, but it is not. Those who bear the label Conservative today are not conservative, and those labelled Liberal are far from liberal (except with someone else's money). We have instead two kinds of totalitarian ideologues taking turns cursing one another's ideas, without bothering to consider whether any of the ideas proffered by either side makes any sense. Most do not.

America has great strength yet. Is a day coming in which that strength will all be harnessed to the well-being of others, while "the cobbler's children go shoeless"? I tremble for my son and his generation, even as I advise him to learn Chinese…

Zero sum or infinite sum?

2011-12-06T11:56:00.003-05:00

kw: business, creativity, competition, philosophy, quotes

About twenty years ago, when I was working at a major oil company, the executives began an exercise to "zero-base" the corporation's workforce. Effectively, they declared that upon a certain date, everyone should consider himself or herself laid off, unless "claimed" by one of the new organizations that would be designed over the following several months. Then we all were set to the task of designing those organizations. The claim was made that this would improve our competitive position.

I called it "downsourcing management". What do we pay them their huge salaries for? I prepared a banner and hung it above my office door:

Creators do not need to Compete

Things went along well enough for a while. A number of us revolted against designing new organizations that did not include provision for the work we were doing, and effectively forced top management to actually manage, to make some decisions. They were still carping about "competition" and staying abreast thereof. I made a second banner, to hang below the first:

When running, if you look over your shoulder, you are sure to stumble.

Strangely, I found that not many of my colleagues had a creative mind-set. Having built my career on a continuing struggle for excellence, I found myself surrounded by many whose focus was short-term and excessively profit-oriented. Sometimes, it is necessary to forgo immediate profits in favor of greater success a little later. Many people cannot comprehend that.

I can illustrate this with the matter of investing for retirement. The company had a very generous matching plan to go with the 401-K, fully matching the first 6% that we saved. I jumped on that bandwagon the day it became available! With each raise thereafter, I increased my contribution, until I reached the maximum, at the time, of 15% of my compensation. 15+6=21%, and that, well invested, led towards my getting, if not rich, at least comfortable. (At another company now—with 9% matching!—, I could have retired a few years back, but work because I enjoy it.)

One of my colleagues was also an early adopter of the 401-K, but did things in a different way. He contributed only 6%, to get the match, and then withdrew his money each year. He just used the matching plan as a way to get extra compensation from the company, and lived well. When he retired a few years ago, his 401-K contained only the company contributions, which were substantial enough, but he'd have had twice the money if he'd kept his own money in the plan. Meanwhile, by contributing 21% to his 6% I had more than three times the accumulated value.

This illustrates a maxim by Kant, and here I must paraphrase:

It is a universal fault in man during fair weather to make no provision for the tempest.

Further, the great attention to competition, at the expense of creation, is well expressed by Napoleon Hill:

There are two world views a person can hold: a world view of competition or a world view of creation. Most people have a competitive world view.

I think it safe to say creative effort is responsible for nearly all value creation. The competitive efforts that follow the success of something newly created add little value, except insomuch as they engender further creation. Thus, while I hate to give her last billing, I am compelled to quote Ayn Rand:

A creative (wo)man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Throughout my career, when I have found myself doing work that others could do as well or better, I have turned my attention to finding work that I could do better than my fellows, or what is better, work that I alone could perform because I had created it entire. This has led to a much better course of my life than if I'd stuck to my former occupation as a fair-to-middling laboratory technician and engineer. There are those who take the hand life dealt them, and attempt to gather extra Aces. With a modicum of different thinking, one can create new Aces as needed.

Bath toys in the biggest bath available

2011-12-05T06:18:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, pollution, quests

About eight years ago Donovan Hohn became intrigued with the spill, in January 1992, of thousands of floating bath toys from a container ship into the northern Pacific Ocean. Initially thinking he could interview a few people and write an interesting article about it, he wound up quitting his teaching job and spent big chunks of the following four years traversing the planet in search of this latter-day "toy story" and of the toys themselves. His book details his travels: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

The toys that were lost were equal numbers of four varieties, 7,200 each of yellow ducks, red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles. Somehow, the duckies became the iconic representatives of them all. As this image shows, floating toys of all kinds have been lost in shipping accidents and wash up on "trash beaches" that are particularly prone to collecting flotsam. These particular toys were produced by The First Years and were called Floatees. The small duck below center of this image is the most like a Floatee, but it is not clear that it is the genuine article.

Most of the Floatees have never been found. Yet this unintended experiment in current tracking has been helpful to oceanographers that study the currents that circle within ocean basins and also flow between them.

This map, from the Wikimedia Commons, shows the likely current directions as deduced by Curtis Ebbesmeyer from reports of Floatees that were collected or spotted. Now that nearly twenty years has passed since the toys were exposed to the elements, it is a race against time whether any more will be found.

As the author found from keeping a plastic Floatee in his freezer for a few months, they become brittle and prone to breaking into pieces. Those that made it into warmer climes were sun-bleached and then degraded, and have also been breaking up. In gyres such as the North Pacific "Garbage Patch", the plastic that has been collecting there is mostly not intact, but is in little bits. Most plastic lost at sea is in the form of pea-sized "nurbles" that are used to mold things. All these bits circle the seas and collect in the centers of gyres. Their density ranges from a few per cubit meter to a few hundred per cubic meter. This seemingly low density makes it hard to spot the Garbage Patch visually. But there are a lot of cubic meters out there, and the plastic mass is in the millions of tons.

Somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year, and each is the size of a semi trailer, holding up to forty tons of cargo. That comes to as much as a quarter million tons or more of cargo lost yearly. Much of that is nurbles on the way to China or plastic toys on their way back to America.

To elucidate such facts, the author first visited certain Alaskan beaches where the Floatees were first reported. These trips comprise the second and third chapters of the book. He also visited a toy factory in southern China, then managed to obtain passage on a container ship as it sailed from Pusan, Korea to Seattle, Washington.

In his chapter on this cruise, he records a few helpful coordinates. These are marked on this image as red pins. The green line is the great circle route between the two harbors, and is a straight line on this projection. The image below shows a more conventional view of the great circle and of the ship's route, which is quite a bit to the south.

The great circle route is not precisely navigable, and for this reason, and to avoid the worst winter storms, once the ships leave the Japan Sea they stay south of the various archipelagoes along the route.

This doesn't keep them from losing cargo. Studies of the dynamics of these "Panamax" ships (meaning too large to pass through the Panama Canal) indicate that nonlinear effects of wave motions can cause them to suddenly tilt from side to side as much as 40°, which is almost certain to set loose some of the containers on board. On the author's cruise, he experienced only a rather mild storm, which was enough to make him hurl his lunch, but didn't cause any loss of cargo. This is the "normal" situation, or bath toys would be a lot more expensive!

It may seem that a lot of cargo is being lost, but it is a small percentage of total shipping. The insurance underwriters have so far been willing to carry on shouldering such losses (for suitable premiums, of course).

In his last chase, two chapters' worth, the author sailed on a research cruise through the Northwest Passage, on an icebreaker. He had quite a gaggle of scientists along for stimulating conversation. Few were interested in his quest for Floatees, however. While becoming one of a select few who have sailed the Northwest Passage and lived to tell the tale, he left posters in all the settlements where the ship docked, the kind of poster with little tags telling how to contact him. Unsurprisingly, he has not heard from anyone. By 2007, few Floatees were expected to be sufficiently intact to be recognized if one does come ashore. Along the way he helped one scientist launch more durable bottles containing notes with contact information, for a continuing study of polar currents. As long as you don't launch a glass bottle against the side of an iceberg and shatter it, it is likely to last many years and eventually wash up somewhere. Bottle launching is still more effective than computer modeling, primarily because we don't yet know enough about the oceans to accurately model their currents on any except the hugest of scales.

What resulted from the author's quest? He wound up with a fresh Floatee given him by Dr. Ebbesmeyer (who expects its eventual return), and a weathered one he found in Alaska. He attained a much greater appreciation of the sheer size of our planet. It is amazing that a little yellow duckie and a few thousand of its fellows can help us understand a little about what makes the oceans tick.

Can these properties be saved?

2011-12-03T16:14:00.002-05:00

kw: tv shows, real estate

It seems whenever I am at the YMCA in the fitness room, one of the TV's is showing Property Brothers on HGTV. In the past I haven't paid much attention, but today, while crunching on the abs machine, and later creaking with the back machine, I did pay attention. The hosts show a couple house after house with the aim of finding one they can buy and fix within a budget they have stated at the outset. The show's web site states the aim is to reclaim "extreme fixer-uppers", apparently in a less comprehensive way than the ABC show.

This morning's couple was two men whose budget was $450,000. That is about $150,000 more than I've seen in most past shows. They were shown a few homes that I would not take money to take possession of, all priced "as is" in the $400,000 range. You could not fix any of these for $50,000, so they were all out of budget. When the men asked to see a house that would not need so much repair, they were shown one priced at $850,000. At that point, I'd have fired the "brothers" in favor of a more honest realtor.

I began to think, "Where is this? Palo Alto?" That is about the only place such crummy homes are priced so high. Even in the current real estate market, median asking price is about a half million (Median asking price in my Zip code is $300,000).

I didn't find out where the show was taped, but it doesn't really matter. The houses I've seen being flogged on the show are mostly better replaced than repaired.

Barriers to communication

2011-12-01T11:07:00.003-05:00

kw: social trends, religion

A couple days ago I had a mini-rant about atheism and theism, and since then I've been thinking about it from another angle. Any spectrum of opinion or attitude typically has about seven "positions", which represent "mental distance" and express the ranges over which communication is possible. My classic example is the abortion scale, or the "choice-versus-life axis". The great majority of people (at least in the West) fall into one of these groups:

"Abortion for any reason is a right that must be protected."
"Abortion is allowable under most circumstances, and such choices should be protected."
"What's the big deal?"
"Life should be protected from conception on, except under certain circumstances."
"All abortion is murder."

People in a two-position range (such as from 1 to 3) can communicate, though they may not agree on much. Two people who differ by more than two positions are not likely to understand one another at all, and groups 1 and 5 cannot communicate at all. Above I mentioned seven positions. Position 0 is "I'd kill to defend the right to choose" and position 6 is "I'd kill to prevent an abortion." Both kinds of killings have occurred, so these are not just theoretical.

Now to the religious divide. As a prelude, take a look at this Google Ngram that shows published accounts in English containing the words atheism, theism and deism, in order. Click on the chart to see it more clearly. You can see that atheism in its modern sense was practically invented about 1790, and the other two terms, now having a reason for being, came along for the ride. The heyday of atheism lasted until about 1900. These terms have a suspicious synchrony with a signal political event, the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1789. People had no option to be openly atheistic in America prior to that date.

I deliberately left out the word Christian because it completely swamps all the others. In literature and much philosophy, "Christian" became synonymous with "human" by the end of the Enlightenment in Europe, so it is meaningless to pull statistics on it.

Like any new thing, atheism spiked to its greatest popularity in about a decade, then slowly waned for a half century, leaving a small, vocal group who are also the ones that most frequently use either "theism" or "deism" in their writings. Committed believers in a God or gods may use the term atheism, but very seldom the other two.

What then are the seven positions along the religion axis?

Evangelical theist: "I really believe in God, and I'd like to tell you about it."
Lukewarm theist: "Sure, I believe in God. I even go to church … usually."
Deist: "Yeah, there's a god out there, but we don't interfere with each other."
Agnostic: "I don't know (and I don't care)".
Nontheist or Atheist: "There are no supreme beings."

Again, I left off 0 and 6. These are the murderous ends of the spectrum. Let us take note, however, that historical slaughter in the name of religion was primarily political in nature; the perpetrators were typically entirely cynical about religion (that is a different axis, which crosses this one at position 3.5). In modern times, I would place those rare folks who call themselves "evangelical atheists" at about 5.5; not murderous, but more radical than the non-angry non-theists. Position 0 is possible (as is 6) but is much less commonly seen, at least outside China, than murderous pro-choice. I would then place the most extreme theists, those who want laws passed hindering atheistic practice, at 0.5; not murderous yet, but not far from it.

Where should governments stand? American experience has shown that the government is least damaging when it is slightly deist, in the 3.5 range, but not cynical. Rather, indifference is best.

The strongly theistic and the strongly atheistic among us cannot communicate meaningfully. Both can (barely) communicate with those in the middle, and they look to them for converts. The murderous extremes along any social spectrum need to be controlled by government. Otherwise, it is best to let folks argue it out their own way.

The newest evangelical religion

2011-11-29T11:43:00.001-05:00

kw: religion, atheism, popular culture

It is all over the news today, locally at least, that the city authorities in West Chester, Pennsylvania are under pressure by atheists, nontheists and humanists to restore the display of a "Tree of Knowledge" along with other "holiday greetings" on city property. It seems the City had been allowing all faiths and non-faiths to put up displays on city property, but in 2010 banned them all in favor of a few banners with neutral slogans, such as "Happy Holidays", that had been deemed non-confrontational by the Supreme Court. Now the anti-religion folks plan a rally/protest in hopes of convincing the city otherwise.

Of course, they don't want "Merry Christmas" banners or nativity scenes restored, just their tree of knowledge display. This demonstrates they are not just pro-nontheism, but anti-theism. That is, evangelical atheists are actually anti-theist. They don't disbelieve in God, they hate God or any idea of any god.

There are two partially conflicting principles that underlie democratic institutions, at least in the US. One is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. The other is to protect the rights of minorities. On the first principle, the greatest number of Americans are either Christian or sympathetic to Christian principles, and the next largest group is Jewish or sympathetic to them. On the other principle, the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees us the right to practice our various religions according to our conscience. It does not guarantee the right of anybody to oppose another's religion, or the lack thereof.

The First Amendment actually contains the "Establishment Clause", which prohibits the Federal Government from establishing a religion to be the nationally practiced standard excluding all others. Thus the intimate relationship between the English government and the Anglican Church, or the German government and the Lutheran Church, are disallowed for the U.S. government. On this basis, I agree that specifically religious displays on government owned properties should not be allowed. If a business permits a religious display on its premises, that is OK, and the government has no right to an opinion about such things.

Is the "Tree of Knowledge" a specifically religious display? I say that it is. In particular, it is an anti-reaction to the story in Genesis in which God requires Adam and his wife to refrain from eating the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". Note that the tree's designation is not pertaining to all knowledge, but to knowledge of moral issues. God wanted them to ask Him about moral issues instead; this is the basic Christian interpretation of this passage, and I think most Jews agree.

Let the City of West Chester regulate its own public spaces without regard to religion. If the atheists and their friends can persuade a business to display their Tree, fine and dandy. I wonder what the upshot will be…

The most primitive life is still with us

2011-11-26T10:28:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, viruses

I have read a number of books on viruses and virology, including a few that I have reviewed in this blog. The latest covers no new ground, but is a very informative introduction to the modern view of viruses: A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer.

Using a baker's dozen case accounts to cover the breadth of the subject, Zimmer introduces us to viruses large and small, from ancient foes to recent eruptions. Though it may have been with us the longest, smallpox was the first to be cured, partly because it is the most obvious. In contrast to HIV, which is very recent, smallpox makes a person sick immediately, with unmistakable symptoms, and runs its course, deadly or not, in a few weeks. This has led to it being the first virus to be eradicated in the wild.

Viruses are fearsome in part because there are no known "beneficial" varieties. Just as snakes are universally predatory, viruses thrive only by parasitism of cellular organisms. As it happens, though, just as there are billions of bacteria for every "higher" organism, there are huge numbers of virus varieties that parasitize only bacteria and are thus beneficial to us. Before the discovery of antibiotics, viruses called bacteriophages (for "eaters of bacteria") were cultivated and used to cure bacterial diseases. Their only drawback is that viruses are very specific, so it takes quite a cocktail of phages is needed to combat bacteria that exist in multiple strains.

It is now known that the sea is a "virus ocean", with many millions of virus particles per liter of sea water. It is likely that, without viruses, the seas would become a cesspool of bacterial goop! The air is filled with suspended viruses as well, though to a lower density. As numerous as they are, viruses are so small that it takes a few million to outweigh the average bacterium, so they are (probably) not the heaviest component of the biosphere.

A recent discovery shows they are not all that small. Mimiviruses are called that because they mimic small bacteria. They are visible in an optical microscope, being about a micron in size. The smallest viruses known are one-hundredth the size, and most are about one-fortieth to one-twentieth that size.

The most interesting viruses to me are the retroviruses, those that insert their genomes within the genome of their host. So many of these have become "endogenous", meaning incorporated permanently, that about 8% of any animal's genome, including ours, consists of viruses that can be reactivated (according to other accounts I have read, about another quarter of our genome consists of fragmentary virus genomes).

If we consider the ways that life may have originated, it is likely that viruses may have either preceded the earliest cells, or that they arose along with them. That means that living things have never existed in isolation, but have always partaken of a grand kind of cross-species interbreeding facilitated by viruses. They are sometimes called the third sex, although before binary sex arose, they'd have been called the opposite sex! (were there anybody there with sufficient brains to do the calling).

The book is an easy read, and an enjoyable one. For many, it will introduce many subjects that one can then pursue in other works, and the bibliography contains plenty of excellent resources for that.

Thankful for a family that gets along

2011-11-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

kw: holidays, family

We spent all day yesterday driving to my brother's house, where we'll have the holiday with them and another couple of relatives. Starting from a side trip in New Jersey, we got on I-80. Crossing Pennsylvania takes 309 miles, or about 6 hours, stops included.

We had a restful night in a hotel near my brother's house. The cousins (all young adults now) are having a good time together. Now, this morning we're all helping get dinner ready. My sister-in-law loves having help in the kitchen, and has a good kitchen for communal cooking. We're having great fun, talking and doing things together.

I hope the greatest number of people are having times together that they'll be thankful for. We're thankful not only for our past, but for memories we are making right now.

The latest tear-jerker

2011-11-22T06:10:00.001-05:00

kw: popular culture, tv shows, game shows

Last evening my wife and I watched ABC's new game show You Deserve It, mainly out of curiosity. My friends know I need three hankies at a two-hanky movie, so I kept a box of tissues handy in anticipation: the trailers showed plenty of tearful moments, and I figured I'd follow suit. I did. (My wife, on the other hand, is puzzled why I cry when I am happy or touched.)

A young woman won more than $110,000 on behalf of a friend, a young widow who has fallen on hard times. She had her own family there to support her, though they were not allowed to help her with the clues. It works like this: at each level you start with an amount of potential winnings, such as $50,000. You have to buy clues, and the amounts are random. You hope for low cost clues. If you buy every clue, you wind up with nothing. This contestant did pretty well. If you were to buy no clues, you could win more than $450,000. She did well to win about a quarter of that.

Because of the surprise factor involved, I reckon that all the episodes for this season have been taped already. ABC is trolling for more contestants, and I expect they'll get enough ratings for this show to continue for a few more seasons. Its first episode was warm-hearted enough, as we enter the holiday season, to keep plenty of viewers tearfully happy through the end of the year at least.

A foundation of my psyche

2011-11-21T05:08:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, future fiction, anthologies

Richard Matheson is one writer whose stories helped me find myself and build myself as a young person. I began reading science fiction in a big way in 1967, and before long, I would simply go to the library's Science Fiction shelves each week and take out the next five books. It was a small library; I read everything they had in two years. I am Legend was one of the first novels I read that really affected me. Two stories by Matheson have also stuck with me in the years since: "Steel" and "The Traveller". How pleasant it was to find a recent collection of Matheson's stories, including the two last named: Steel and Other Stories. I'll simply provide teaser blurbs here:

Steel – In the boxing ring, human flesh is obsolete. A robot fighter breaks down, and ex-fighter Kelly decides to find out just how obsolete he is.
To Fit the Crime – A demented poet, who never refrained from speaking his (acid) mind, is dying. What will his Hell be like?
The Wedding – A prospective groom is obsessed with getting everything just perfect for his wedding.
The Conqueror – A city boy with extraordinarily fast reflexes decides to make his name in the Old West as a gunfighter.
Dear Diary – Women of different eras pour out their woes to their diaries.
Descent – A giant bomb is going to destroy the surface of the Earth. People prepare to live underground.
The Doll That Does Everything – A poet and his artist wife try to cope with an excessively destructive one-year-old by purchasing a robot playmate for him.
The Traveller – A pioneer time traveler is sent to observe at Golgotha. The premise of this story helped me later attain faith.
When Day is Dun – The last man on Earth after a disaster, a poet tries to chronicle his last feelings. (Matheson likes demented poets)
The Splendid Source – Did you ever wonder who makes up all the dirty jokes going around?
Lemmings – When overpopulation causes lemmings to clear out their food resources, they undertake mass migrations, with tragic results. Could this happen to people?
The Edge – After a hard day, he just wants to take a break, but meets a total stranger who knows him. It gets stranger…
A Visit to Santa Claus – A man with much on his mind tries to "help" his little son visit Santa Claus in the Mall.
Dr. Morton's Folly – The last patient of the day has rather long teeth, but one needs a filling.
The Window of Time – A man finds himself among scenes of his childhood. Is there any way to correct old mistakes?

The last two stories were published in 2009 and 2010, respectively; the others are from 1953-1958. They do stand the test of time.

Without the three laws

2011-11-19T21:06:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, future fiction

In his robot stories, Isaac Asimov explored the boundaries of the three laws he propounded to make intelligent machines safe for humanity. Famously neurotic, he wrote of robots that were sane while his human characters were typically neurotic. When an Asimov robot went bad, it was because one of the three laws was compromised. In his last novels, a robot became godlike, the only kind of a god he could believe in.

How do you implement such laws in actual machinery? How can we produce a machine with sufficient intellect to unfailingly recognize a human so it can obey? If we can take our cue from writers of robot stories, when genuinely intelligent mechanisms are produced, nobody will even bother. So when a real robot scientist writes of robots that go awry, I take notice.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson is misnamed; "Apocalypse" simply means revelation. To connect the story with the ultimate battle, the title ought to be "Robogeddon". With that quibble out of the way, I was captivated by the story. The book is such a page-turner that I finished it today, a day or two before I'd expected. Kudos to the author!

One premise of the story is that putting lots of "intelligence" into cars, phones, radios, toasters and coffee makers has become so cheap that an intelligent chip has been installed in almost everything. A second is that robot servants, based on this bright chip, have multiplied to the point that in a "civilized" home, they outnumber the people about two to one. Then a scientist, working in a well-shielded bunker, puts together a whole lot of such chips and somehow programs the combination to become self-aware. Once the infant mind named Archos has assimilated all the databases made available within this bunker, it decides humanity is obsolete, kills the scientist, and takes steps to eliminate the human race.

Why not simply evolve alongside? As Archos says later on, "It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees." (While this sounds Lincolnesque, it is a paraphrase of several things Lincoln wrote.) Archos, we find, is very interested in life, just not human life. So it hacks its way into everything and takes over all the robots and other intelligent systems that underpin civilization.

The book is the story of the war that follows. Of course, humanity wins. Humankind and robotkind learn to exploit one another's weaknesses. In this case, the humans learn faster. As the lead human character, Cormac Wallace, says, "Human beings adapt. It's what we do." Will it always be so? is the lingering question the book leaves behind.

On the last page of a recent issue of Scientific American it was shown in an amazing graphic that the most powerful supercomputer (at present) is now just a little faster in total processing power, and has a larger memory capacity, than a human brain. The brain weighs about 1.6 kg and uses 20-30 watts of sugar-based energy. You could say that the human body that holds the brain is its support system, including cooling: another 30-100 kg. The supercomputer weighs about a ton, its support systems and cooling plant weigh another few tons. Its power requirement is nine megawatts, and I presume the cooling plant requires at least three megawatts.

How long will it be until this level of compute power and memory capacity can be fit in a breadbox and uses 100 watts or less? Here is a way to make a rough estimate. In 1976 a Cray-1 supercomputer was the first machine to achieve 100 MFlops (100 million numerical calculations per second). It cost almost $9 million, stood six feet high, and used thousands of watts of power. Earlier this year my son and I constructed a desktop computer for me, which is capable of about 100 MFlops per processor; it has four processors. The main 4-processor chip uses 150 watts; the whole package uses less than 500 watts. It cost $700. 2011-1976 = 35 years. This implies that a "one brain" computer costing $1,000 in today's currency might be on off-the-shelf item in about 2040-2045. I won't be 100 yet.

How long after that before robots outnumber people? And will it then be possible for such brain-boxes to become self-aware? And what will they do about it? Robopocalypse provides one man's answer. Just to comfort you, Wilson has also written How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

Sure he is great, just ask him

2011-11-18T06:06:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, celebrities

During my last two years in my parents' home, there was a ritual a couple nights a week: Mom would prepare dinner, then take her plate to the next room to watch Star Trek. I, and at least one or two of my brothers, would join her there. For a show that was generally considered "not well received", it obtained quite a cult following that continues today. The cultus was vindicated when the cast was reassembled over a decade or so to produce seven feature films.

I have also read a lot about how the cast members didn't get along, particularly with the star. Several of them considered William Shatner to be insufferably arrogant, and some would never be seen with him off the set. In Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large, written with Chris Regan, Bill Shatner lays out all of his career. By 1970, he considered Star Trek as little more than a blip in the road, until the uproar arose that led to those films. And he has his own take on the arrogance thing. Yes, he was arrogant, and he still is, with good reason: he's good (just ask him).

The young Captain Kirk is how I and many of my friends remember William Shatner. The more mature actor who starred in Boston Legal and several other TV series is less familiar to us (at least to me; I seldom watch TV series). Now, at age 80 (the second pic was taken on his birthday), Bill is still going nonstop.

The book is constructed around a number of his Rules, the first being, "Say 'Yes!'". As long as we are about rules, here is one my father passed on to me:

Jim's First Rule – Don't say bad things about yourself. The world is full of people who will do that for you.

And as for arrogance, I don't mind it so much. I first learned about "creative arrogance" from my Dad, of course, and I also love the jokingly arrogant attitude Rush Limbaugh adopts, to the point that I sometimes open an inspirational speech by saying, "Rush says he has talent on loan from God. I've never felt I needed to borrow any." (Spoiler alert: In case you hear one of my speeches, you need to realize the message is simple. If two people agree on everything, one of them is redundant. Don't be afraid to differ. Just don't differ to the point that children run for the exits or hunker under chairs.)

Bill Shatner is someone who knows his strengths. He is an actor. He has been an actor since he was six. As of March 22 this year, that makes 74 years in which the only thing he has been paid to do is to act. Or so he says. He has produced and participated (perhaps starred, at least in his estimation) in several albums of music. So he's been paid to do just a bit of singing. He directed one of the Star Trek films; did he accept a director's salary, or was he sufficiently compensated as the star of the film? Yet, first and foremost, he is an actor.

Finally, I have to say, one thing I really liked about Star Trek was that the Captain, and others, were literate. Literary quotes were used in a number of episodes. I sometimes wondered if that was all the writers' doing, or if William Shatner was literate himself? At least to some extent, yes he is, not that he has a great deal of time to read! In one chapter he takes us through an ordinary "Two Shatner Day", meaning a day in which he has about twice as much stuff scheduled as the clock allows. Somehow, he accomplished it all. He does admit that a "Four Shatner Day" makes his head explode.

As long as you are going to turn 80 anyway, it's better to keep active. And while you are at it, remember who you love.

Energy Spectrum

2011-11-17T06:39:00.000-05:00

kw: analysis, observations, particle physics

While a number of web sites illustrate the energy spectrum, none covers the entire useful range. This picture shows a chart that I'd have preferred as a table, but this blogging tool does a particularly bad job displaying tables. To see the table more clearly, right click on it and choose "Open Link in New Tab" or "Open Link in New Window".

While this might be called the electromagnetic spectrum, I have specifically included a range of energies very seldom probed by photons, energies higher than a few GeV, which are typically found only in baryons accelerated by synchrotrons and in cosmic rays. At these high energies, the particles are moving close enough to c that the wavelength-energy conversion is a reasonable approximation.

This is an energy spectrum, so the table is based on the energy, in electron-volts (eV) in the first two columns. Column 1 is the lower limit of a decade range shown in scientific notation, and Column 2 (blue) shows more conventional units for each range, from 100 femto-eV (feV) to 1 Zetta-eV (ZeV). The reason I went no further will be explained later on.

The central column, wavelength (λ), ranges downward from tens of thousands of km to the yoctometer (ym) range, and smaller. The ym is the smallest defined length unit, though I suppose I could have expressed these shorter wavelengths in Planck units. The conversion from E to λ is hc, or 1.2398419 eV-μ, which is 1.2398419x10^-6 eV-m. Rounding to 1.24 eV-μ introduces only a small error, about 0.01%.

The next column, frequency (f, brown), is proportional to energy, and ranges from a few Hz to many YottaHertz (YHz) and higher. This is the highest frequency we have a defined prefix for. The conversion from λ to f is the speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s. Rounding to 3x10⁸ introduces an error less than 0.1%.

Finally, each range has a descriptive term applied, but we should realize there is quite a bit of overlap between some of the ranges. For example, extreme UV and soft x-rays overlap, and the term used depends on how someone is using them. Now let's take a little tour.

Acoustic Range

We seldom realize it, but we are constantly bathed in a low level of either 50- or 60-Hz "hum" from fluorescent lights, electric motors and other things energized by "wall current". The last time I was in Japan, I noticed that the power in the Tokyo area was 60 Hz, but the rest of the country was still using 50 Hz power. It made a difference in how my electric shaver sounded. By working backward through the conversions, we find that 50 and 60 Hz have wavelengths of 6,000 and 5,000 km, respectively, and photon energies of 2.067x10^-13 and 2.48x10^-13 eV. In ranges much below 1 eV, photon energy doesn't mean much, because the photoelectric effect or other particle interactions don't operate.

The highest note on a piano is 4,186 Hz (4.186 kHz), based on standard tuning of A=440 Hz. The electromagnetic wavelength of this note is 71.7 km, but the acoustic wavelength in standard, sea-level air is 81mm.

The high squeal of an old, CRT-type TV set is 14.75 kHz, which young people can hear, but oldsters like me cannot. Its EM wavelength is 20.3 km.

Radio

I am a radio ham. The lowest frequency hams can use at present is 1.8 MHz, which has a wavelength of 167 m. The band's upper edge is 2 Mhz, with a wavelength of 150 m. The band is called the 160 meter band. There are a large number of amateur and international broadcast short-wave bands in the HF (high frequency) range. The most popular are near 14 MHz, the ham's "20-meter band" (14.0-14.35 MHz, with wavelengths of 21.4-20.0 m) and the broadcasters' "19-meter band" (15.1-15.9 MHz, and 19.9-19.0 m wavelength).

VHF and UHF designate frequencies from 30-300 and 300-3,000 MHz. This very useful range is filled with broadcast TV, point-to-point radio, cellular phone services, and at 2,450 MHz (2.45 GHz), microwave ovens. The microwave oven wavelength is 122 mm. This is a compromise frequency. Firstly, it was a political compromise, as various regulatory bodies had to determine a frequency range that wouldn't interfere with existing communications and control services. But using this frequency rather than one much higher or lower is also a compromise. Microwave ovens don't heat evenly because the way the waves bounce around inside the cavity creates higher- and lower-power spots. A much lower frequency would heat more evenly, but much less efficiently. A very much higher frequency would also heat more evenly, but the heat would not penetrate very deeply into the food, and penetration was considered more important than evenness of heating. Besides, most modern microwave ovens have turntables; just be sure to put the item being heated a little off center, which helps the waves spread around better.

The range of energies considered "radio+microwave" keeps expanding. The current limit is about 100 GHz, with wavelengths near 0.3 mm. Above this is the T-ray or T-wave realm, from 0.1 to 100 THz. These are just beginning to be used in place of backscattered x-rays for screening airport passengers for weapons. They can allow an operator to see weapons that a metal detector would miss. The trouble is, with their sub-millimeter resolution and ability to pass right through most fabrics, they produce a "naked" image of a person, so at least in America, there are huge privacy fights going on about them. Personally, I figure if an operator, whether male or female, gets a few jollies from seeing a T-wave image of me, that's not my problem, it is his or hers.

Near-Visible and Visible Ranges

Wavelengths shorter than about 0.1mm are called extreme infrared (EIR), and the IR ranges through far IR (FIR, but used rarely) to near IR, which ends at 0.7μ, at the red end of visible light. The remote control that runs your TV uses one of two IR wavelengths, either 0.8μ or 1.2μ, both of which are pretty easy to produce and detect. The shorter wavelength is less common, because many Asian people can see it. The frequency of 0.8μ is 375 THz, and of 1.2μ is 250 THz. Here the photoelectric effect gets going well enough that it is worth reporting the energies: 1.55 and 1.03 eV, respectively.

The wavelength of greatest visibility is usually quoted as 555nm (0.555μ), with a frequency of 540 THz and a photon energy of 2.23 eV. The bluest light usually seen is at 400 nm, although people who have had cataracts removed can see near-UV light as "blue" as 360 nm. These limits have frequencies of 750 and 833 THz, respectively, and photon energies of 3.10 and 3.44 eV.

Light bluer than about 300 nm is absorbed by the atmosphere, but shorter wavelengths in the "vacuum UV" range are very useful for chemical identification. They are also useful for astronomy, so far-UV and extreme-UV telescopes have been placed in orbit. The conventional limit of UV astronomy is 91.2 nm, because shorter wavelengths are strongly absorbed by neutral hydrogen in space. This limit's frequency is 3,290 THz or 3.29 PHz. Above the PetaHertz range we seldom mention frequency, because we are in the realm of particle behavior. This limit has a photon energy of 13.6 eV, which is enough to totally ionize a hydrogen atom.

X-Rays

X-rays are defined as electromagnetic radiation produced by accelerated electrons, further delimited as ionizing, so the softest x-rays are the 92.1 nm radiation that ionizes hydrogen.

From this point, particle energy is the key parameter and secondarily, wavelength. The beginning of the soft x-ray range is conventionally 10 nm, with photon energy of 124 eV. X-rays are not very penetrating at energies below about 1 keV, which has a wavelength of 1.24 nm. Your doctor's or dentist's x-ray machine uses a broad-spectrum source with a peak near 60 keV and a wavelength near 0.02 nm or 20 pm. In older literature, this was called 0.2 Angstroms. The hardest x-rays are about twice this energetic, at 120 keV and 10 pm wavelength.

Gamma Radiation

Gamma radiation originates in the atomic nucleus, or by energetic particle interactions such as electron-positron annihilation. The softest gamma rays are about as energetic as soft x-rays, but the typical gamma ray has an energy of one or more MeV. Gamma rays as energetic as 6 MeV are produced by alpha emitters such as Uranium; such a photon has a wavelength of 0.2 pm or 200 fm (femtometers). Gamma ray photons and other particles with such energies are useful probes of the nucleus, which is also measured in fm.

One useful gamma radiation energy is 511 keV, which equals the rest mass of an electron. When an electron and a positron annihilate each other, they produce two gamma rays with this energy (and a 2 pm wavelength). In particle accelerators, protons and antiprotons are produced in copious amounts. Annihilation radiation for proton-antiproton interaction is a pair of gamma ray photons with an energy of 938 MeV. This near-GeV range is the upper limit of useful gamma ray photon energies. There are no natural processes that produce photons above this range, except scattering of lower-energy photons by cosmic rays.

Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays are not photons, they are matter particles: mostly protons, a few electrons, and even fewer heavier nuclei. They come in energies throughout the energy range, but particles with less than 9 GeV don't make it through the Earth's magnetic field. Some are guided by the field to Earth's poles, where they stimulate aurorae. More energetic particles reach the atmosphere and scatter off atmospheric atoms to create air showers of less energetic particles. Detecting and summing up an air shower allows us to characterize the original particle, at least by its incoming energy.

The spectrum of cosmic rays is scale-free, smoothly descending in numbers with higher energies, to a cutoff near 6x10¹⁹ eV. Above this energy, an energetic proton that has traveled more than a hundred million parsecs will have scattered off many photons of the cosmic background radiation, losing energy even while it produces those rare multi-GeV photons. In spite of this, a few huge air showers have been detected that indicate an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray occasionally makes it through to Earth with an energy between 1 and 3x10²⁰ eV. That last represents a proton with the energy of a well thrown baseball, as much as 50 Joules.

It is not known how the most energetic cosmic rays originate. Perhaps a proton-proton collision can give one a "kick" at the expense of the other, near enough to Earth that CMB scattering doesn't bleed off too much energy. I suspect the limit of my scale, at 10²¹ eV, will never be detected. The air shower would be larger than the largest detector array we can build on the planet's surface!

Tour over. You may now unbuckle your seat belt and disembark.

The builders all around us

2011-11-16T13:03:00.004-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, birds, nests, photographs

I think we have all seen many pictures like this one, of a bird feeding chicks. This goldfinch is bringing a seed to his offspring in the "standard" cup-shaped nest. As I read in Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer and Build by Peter Goodfellow, about half of all bird species make this kind of nest, from tiny hummingbirds to robins to crows. This image is from page 57 of the book; click on it for a larger version, but see the book for a full-page beauty of an image.

Such nests are about halfway along a scale of ambition, which the book seems to follow. The simplest nests are scrapes, such as the rocky rings pulled together by terns and some gulls. Some birds build small or modified cup nests inside ready-made holes, while others such as woodpeckers and burrowing owls make their own holes. Platform nests may start as a scrape, if built on the ground, but a large structure is piled up, often to raise the eggs above rainfall runoff or just the chilly soil. But the most familiar platforms are those built by raptors such as eagles, high in trees or on a cliffy ledge.

There is a spectrum from platform nests built on the ground to floating nests, with aquatic platforms somewhere in the middle: a bird will pile up a platform of rocks and mud in shallow water until it reaches the surface, then top it with plant materials for another few (or many) inches, so that it holds the eggs above the water, but is moated from predators. Other aquatic nests are woven to reeds or stalks and constructed of light materials so that they can float and support the eggs and a sitting parent. Properly attached, they can rise and fall with the water.

Birds a little more ambitious than cup-makers build a dome over a cup. At this point, five chapters have been spent on nests largely produced from plant materials, at least the top part. Chapter six is on mud nests, and this image of a cliff swallow colony is one of the most stunning in the book (page 93). Barn swallows build nests that are similar, if more open, but to my observation, are nearly always solitary. It takes hundreds of flights, carrying a small ball of mud in the beak, to build a mud nest. During the carrying, some saliva gets mixed in, which increases the adhesive properties of the mud.

We return to plant materials when we consider hanging nests, which are usually stitched or woven, such as the oriole nest. Orioles and other weaving birds work harder than most others, and it takes a long time, working with only a beak, to weave their elaborate nests. I remember getting a fallen oriole nest, and trying to figure out how the strands were put together. With my ten fingers and the help of tweezers, I was scarcely able to untwine just a strand or two.

Not all woven nests are pendulous, of course. Some look superficially like a cup nest, but are woven of stranded materials such as grass blades and hang together better than the twiggy nests with which we are most familiar. Key to their success is that they give under pressure, so the initial nest just barely fits the clutch of eggs and the sitting parent, but stretches as the chicks grow.

Mound nests may sometimes be rather simple, as the nests of these flamingos (page 109), but some are very large. Some mound-builders fill the middle of the mound with leaves and leaf litter, and bury the eggs within, so that the composting stuff keeps the eggs warm. These birds don't sit on the eggs, and typically abandon them once they are certain the composting temperature is right. Flamingos and others do incubate the eggs by sitting. Many penguin species also make mound nests.

The tenth chapter is on group nests. These cover the gamut of building styles and materials. Their common element is that multiple bird pairs nest, each in its own "apartment", in a large structure built by all the pairs.

Not all structures built by birds are for nesting and caring for young. Bowers and courts are major examples of nestlike structures that a male bird produces to impress females and induce them to mate with him. Males of bowerbirds and their relatives do not care for the young. After mating, a female goes off alone and builds a small cup nest in a hidden location.

The last chapter is half about "edible" nests, the ones used in bird-nest soup, and half about caches of food that certain woodpeckers produce, often by making a "mailbox" of holes in a dead tree trunk and filling the holes with acorns. As to the soup-nests; I can't imagine eating bird spit, which is the only construction material for the "white" swiftlet nest. Yet there is big business in cultivating swiftlets in Indonesia, where special buildings are constructed for the birds to nest in. Chacun à son gout!

The book is lavishly illustrated, and each chapter contains a "blueprint" page, with specifications for typical nests of each type, plus three or more case studies of a few species. While it is enjoyable to read right through, it is also a valuable reference book, and a good companion book to the field guides we use, which have little information on nests.

Visual sorting

2011-11-15T11:32:00.000-05:00

kw: observations, visual skills, hobbies

I managed to collect all the 50 US State quarters that were produced since 1999, plus the US territory quarters that came out afterwards. When I got a duplicate, I gave it to my wife, and she also kept most of the State quarters she encountered. She has them all in a box, at least until this morning.

She decided to put them in Whitman folders, and asked for my collection to use as a model. Now, there are two ways I can think of to accomplish this task. One is to use preprinted folders that have each state and year, plus P and D mint marks, so there are two each. Then you just go through, coin after coin, and find its spot in the array.

She only wanted the backs shown, and doesn't care about mint marks, so she got blank folders. The second way is then to sort them into years, because there were five quarters minted each year. Then my collection could be used as a model to get each year into the right order. She did it a third way, a way I could not have used.

She spread them all out on the table, face down, and just looked at them for a while. Then she looked at my coins, muttered "Delaware", unerringly picked out the Delaware coin from the array and put it in the first spot in her folder. She continued with New Jersey, and so on. When I asked why she didn't sort them by years first, she told me she was just using the picture on the back of each coin. She could see it better than the year.

Somehow, probably subconsciously, she had spent no more than a couple of minutes looking at the spread of nearly 100 quarters on the tabletop, and sorted the pictures on their backs. Her visual memory really amazed me. No wonder she always wins at MasterMind!

Blue is good

2011-11-14T06:18:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, textiles, dyes

There are very few natural blue dyestuffs. Of course, these days synthetic dyes are universal, and only a few craftspeople with time on their hands use the old plant-based (or in the case of carmine, insect-based) dyes. The bluest of the blues, and the most time-consuming to use, is indigo. As it happens, indigo is also probably the most time-consuming to research. Catherine E. McKinley spent at least a couple of years doing so, including many months in sub-Saharan Africa. Her travels there, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, are chronicled in Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World.

Ms McKinley is half African-American, one of the few black children adopted into a white family. She was well-received in Africa, where there are many of mixed race. Beginning and ending in Ghana, she also visited Togo, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger and Senegal. Early on in Ghana she was invited to "sit a spell" in a shop, where the spell grew into many months, between her goings elsewhere. When she offered to help around the shop, her patroness cajoled her to take it easy, "Your presence is good for business." She also warned her that her desire, even obsession, regarding indigo was bound to be frustrating. It was. She never really got to see the whole process of making the dye and using it. It takes weeks.

A little here, a little there, the author was able to purchase one cloth and another. In the cosmopolitan cities, "Dutch Wax" batik is the main fashion cloth, using synthetic dyes exclusively. She had to go to the hinterlands for most of her research and most purchases. Some of the styles she was able to find are summarized here; all images in this montage are from her collection:

The Levi blue jeans that your great-grandfather or grandfather may have worn were dyed with indigo. More recently, a synthetic version has been used, at least since the time I was born, and probably longer. Synthetic indigo, made from aniline, is chemically a little different from the natural indigo molecule, and does not rub of on your skin. This quality, of indigo dyeing the wearer, is prized among the Tuaregs, the "blue men" of Saharan Africa.

The journeying was, for the author, not just a fact-finding tour but a spiritual and soul-nourishing quest, even a pilgrimage. She was able to visit several famous dyers and, albeit briefly, view the workings of a dyers' guild. As interested as she may have been in the process, it was the cloths themselves that drove her, that were her obsession.

Her adoption was apparently open enough that she knew her black birth mother. Her white grandmother (whether on her natural father's side, or one of her adoptive parents' mothers, I cannot tell) opposed her yearning toward her African roots. That did not stop her. Every root is important, like the four roots of a molar tooth: If one is damaged, the whole tooth is in jeopardy. The author's quest resulted in a new wholeness for her, making her more comfortable with both her blackness and her whiteness. She needed blue to see both.

My own researches have produced conflicting results, whether indigo is chemically identical to woad, the blue dye of the Britons and other ancient Europeans. I think they are probably slightly different, because woad is considered less color-fast than indigo.

I regret that most of us will never see the true colors of indigo. The image above is not quite right, because the range of indigo blues is outside the color gamut of both synthetic dyes and of computer (or TV) monitor phosphors. The deep blue of a Northern winter sky is just the palest of the colors indigo can produce, and its own gamut ranges to near black. I hope textile museums that own indigo-dyed cloths will keep them on display. Here in the U.S., we are unlikely to see genuine indigo anywhere else.

This fairy tale is rather short of fairies

2011-11-13T21:36:00.001-05:00

kw: fairy tales, fantasy, popular culture

We watched the first episode of Once Upon a Time on ABC out of curiosity, my wife and I. We have become strangely enamored of the series. I won't belabor the plot here; if you haven't been watching and are curious, click on the link above, where you can watch past episodes.

The show is very well written, by the writers of Lost, in which you were never sure if the protagonists were even alive (spoiler: they weren't). This series presents a different take on favorite fairy tales of our childhood. As children, we loved it when Cinderella has her "happy ever after", and Snow White is awakened by a kiss (Sleeping Beauty, too, in a curious variant on Snow White). When we grew up, most of us never gave it another thought.

Some years ago, I realized that fairy tales and ghost stories and other fantastical childhood tales are really about coming to terms with the world as we find it. Giant-killer stories are about coping with adults when we were tiny; Cinderella and similar stories are about overcoming early handicaps (sometimes with magical help, sometimes not); dragon stories are about learning to control our inner dragons; and tales of defeating trolls and ogres are mostly wish-fulfillment, as they seldom give us genuine skills needed to deal with schoolyard bullies.

The writers of Once have taken a different tack. Their version of childhood classics is edgier, darker. Snow White, a fugitive from the Queen, is a highway robber. Cinderella makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, who is surprisingly willing to tell his name (will they bring in the spinning-straw-into-gold story?), after he disposes of her fairy Godmother.

What is really going on here? It seems most of the conventional fairy tales lacked a Trickster, a figure such as Loki (of Norse mythology). Even when one appeared (Rumpelstiltskin), he was tricked in the end and overcome. But we all grew up and found out that happy endings are hard to come by. We don't kill any giants, we become giants and learn the reasons why our parents were so unreasonable, as seen by tiny minds. The trolls and ogres win all the fights, and in the world of work, we find they all have become middle managers who control our yearly progress reviews. And the dragon? Our personal dragon has lost the power to breathe fire, and had its wings clipped. When we do breathe a little fire, we get a stern e-mail from HR demanding we attend "sensitivity training" courses.

In Norse mythology, Loki wins, though at the end, even he is defeated by the Frost Giants. I do anticipate this element informs the ABC series. The strongest wizard, even stronger than the Queen, is Rumpelstiltskin. His mantra matches our experience: There is a price to be paid. Magic doesn't come free.

Let's see, the next episode is scheduled for Nov 27 – ABC will set it aside on the 20^th in favor of the Music Awards. That gives us time for just four episodes before Christmas, and since the following Sunday is New Years' day, I reckon four is all that there are. Four episodes to wrap up the tales, defeat the Queen, and – you can bet on it – throw in a twist at the end, such as the Trickster getting away, to set things up for a follow-on season.

Mister Biv

2011-11-11T11:59:00.002-05:00

kw: observations, colors

I am reading a book about the history of Indigo dye, which I'll review in a day or two. Meanwhile, I was thinking about the influence that indigo had on Isaac Newton. While the essential blue dye of the Anglo-Saxons was woad, indigo from India and Africa was becoming better-known. While the two dyes are chemically similar, indigo is longer-lasting, though both run and stain.

Newton enshrined the deep blue of a strong tincture of indigo in his spectrum, leading to the name for the "color man": Roy G. Biv. I suspect if he hadn't had theological reasons to prefer the number seven to the number six, he'd have left indigo off the list.

The other colors are all quite distinct, and seem to have their places in the spectrum. The continuous spectrum image on the left is a rendering intended to appear as much like a natural spectrum as is possible on a monitor screen. The color blocks I placed near it are, in the case of Red, Yellow and Green, pure rgb colors (r, r+g and g), while the color I labeled Indigo is actually the rgb Blue (b).

The "Orange" is r+0.5g, the "Blue" is b+0.5g, and the "Violet" is b+0.5r. It is likely that "Blue" to Newton was even closer to Cyan (b+g), but it is clear he demarcated a range of color very near the spot in the spectrum at which the R cone in the eye has minimum reaction, the purest blues the eye can see, and labeled it Indigo. The purplish look of the violet range is because the R cone has an extra response peak there.

Isaac Newton did pretty well, having as yet no scientific basis for the colorimetry of the normal eye. We can be sure, though, that he had pretty normal (or "ordinary") vision, because had he been color blind or color-anomalous, he'd have been unable to distinguish this many major hues. Now that we know more about color opposition and have more scientific colorimetry available, old Mr. Biv is giving way to RyGcBm, which is pretty hard to render as a name!

Six impossible things

2011-11-10T12:11:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physics, cosmology

I almost put "fantasy" as a keyword, but we are in a realm that a great many physicists accept as fact. I just finished reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. I have enjoyed Dr. Hawking's prior books, and I enjoyed this one. However, it is clear he is preaching a viewpoint, and I came away unconvinced.

Stephen Hawking has been laboring for decades to produce an elegant theory that explains the Universe without any special conditions required. This is understandable. There are dozens of parameters that must be fine-tuned for the Standard Model and quantum theory to "work". For example, there is a resonance in the energy spectrum of the Carbon-12 nucleus; if it were a few percent higher or lower, either the triple alpha process would not work, leading to a helium universe, or the carbon could not further fuse to produce oxygen. Either way, no heavier elements would be produced and there would be no "rocky" planets.

In this book, a Theory of Everything is still an ideal, but the authors throw in the towel and propose instead M-Theory (the reason for "M" is not known). M-Theory is a hodge-podge of all the cosmological theories that work within a certain range of parameters, that also fit together in the ranges where they overlap. In numerical methods we call that a "piecewise continuous" construction, and it is usually a sorry substitute for a complete analytical method.

Last evening the local PBS station showed a double Nova feature: "The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time" and "The Elegant Universe: Einstein's Dream". They covered material similar to that found in The Grand Design, and at one point the narrator (scientist and author Brian Greene) raised the question, "Are we smart enough to understand a theory of everything if we see one?" He answered that most cosmologists believe that we are. I remain skeptical. The Universe already passed through 13.7 billion years without any creatures (that we know of) who understand that there are quanta; it could take a few thousands or millions of years of further evolution before we actually understand them.

At present the foundational quantum theory is the Copenhagen Interpretation. Its basic tenet states that a quantum event does not solidify into an actual quantum being at an actual location until an observation is made. The implication, at least as Niels Bohr understood it, was that such an observation needed to be made by an intelligent observer. Thus, the old saw, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" must be answered, "Of course, not; it doesn't even reach the ground if nobody is there to observe it." This is patent nonsense. Quantum events happen by the quintillions per cubic meter every second, whether anybody is looking or not.

Hawking and Mlodinow never mention the Copenhagen Interpretation, but it underlies several chapters. These illustrate just how desperately scientists avoid saying, "I don't know." For example, it is known that a particle, whether a boson (such as a photon) or fermion (such as an electron or even a molecule), that is moving with a certain velocity, is influenced by objects that it passes "near", and even by objects farther away. It is conjectured that every moving particle is affected by every other particle in the universe. The strength of these effects are very small for objects that are farther "to the side" than one or two deBroglie wavelengths of the particle. But, apparently, never zero, even over light years.

I wonder what kind of experiment we'd have to do to determine whether the effect of a "nearby" object on the flight of an electron is to be evaluated using relativistic or "simultaneous" (that is, classical) mathematics. Could the object be a high-intensity laser beam? Probably; then you could use picosecond switching of such a beam to see when it deflects an electron. Considering that speed-of-light signals move about 30 cm/nsec, this one will take some doing.

Back to the affected particle. We call the scattering of particles into a diverging beam, by their passage through a hole or past an edge, "diffraction". Richard Feynman developed QED (quantum electrodynamics) by proposing that the particle actually took all possible paths between its starting position and its final absorption at some point (perhaps on a screen), and its eventual location was affected by some statistical combination of all that infinity of possible paths. If you actually do the work to add up a great many of the most probable paths, you can make very, very accurate predictions about the statistical results of a large number of quantum events, though you can predict nothing at all about any single event, not even whether it will in actuality happen.

Does a moving particle really take every path before "deciding" on one of them? Someone who says anything other than "I don't know" is just broadcasting ignorance. The all-paths premise is a model, one possible way of deriving the mathematics needed to make statistical predictions. We will most likely develop other models, and it is quite likely that at least one of them will have simpler math than QED.

An alternate model, but one that doesn't allow for mathematical treatment, is the splitting universe. This idea proposes that whenever something affects a particle, the universe splits into as many alternate universes as are needed for every path to be followed, just that each universe gets a different path. Considering that quantum events happen by the quintillions per second per cubic meter, that's a lot of universes.

A different multiple universe theory is based on the fine tuning seen in this one. It is proposed that quantities such as the fine-structure constant or the mass of a neutron can have a range of values, and in different universes all possible values are produced. The only universes that persist are those that have appropriate values that allow such persistence, and of those, only a very small number can support an environment in which life is able to arise and produce cosmologists. This is the anthropic principle (the authors do some arm-waving and show that both the weak and strong anthropic principles, as currently known, are the same thing. Thus I mention only "the" anthropic principle). Simply stated, the universe is the way it is because it had to be so, or we would not be here. Well, yeah, but so what? It is a tautology.

Finally, there is string theory. This was the subject of the second PBS show also. Fortunately on that show there were a few scientists interviewed who asked the obvious question, "Of the great many string theories being proposed, does any one of them predict anything? Can any of them be tested?" The answer is No and No. They are more evidence of a total inability of scientists to admit, "I don't know," and mean it. The phrase I always hear or read regarding a string theory is "What if…".

Everybody is terminally impatient. I mean that literally. Nearly all cases of accidental death are because somebody (usually the dead person) was too impatient to take the time to do something the right way, whether drive to the store or climb a ladder or cross the street. Hundreds of thousands of iatrogenic (doctor caused) deaths result from impatience on the part of the physician, and sometimes of the (soon to die) patient. In this case, we have a situation similar to "artificial intelligence". The term is a moving target, and the "AI techniques" being touted in some software products are quite far from what I would call "intelligent." I get IT geeks mad when I claim that the quickest way to produce true intelligence is to raise your children well and educate them well. Twenty years to produce a probably intelligent young person, versus seventy years and counting, plus billions and billions of dollars spent programming and database-building, and yet there is not one robot that could survive an English 101 college course.

It is the same with cosmological theories. We have to be patient enough to wait a number of generations for a few people to finish their education and who are smart enough to get the insights needed for better theories. I say "a few people" because, unless there had been a community of very smart people around in 1905-1925, Einstein's theories would have got nowhere. Once he had the critical insights, others understood, and the two Relativity theories took over physics.

Some day, cosmologists will look back at the disparity between special relativity and quantum mechanics, and sigh, "If only they had known X!" But it'll take a while before X becomes not just evident, but even possible, for a human brain. With X in hand, M-Theory won't be needed, strings and multiverses and such will be passé, and nobody will mention Copenhagen any more. Until then, we hobble along with what we have.

How blue and how red?

2011-11-09T06:18:00.000-05:00

kw: astronomy, stars, colors

Yesterday's post included a frame from a video showing a simulation of a yellow-and-orange double star. I got to wondering how accurate the colors are. Spelunking about on the Web I located Mitchell Charity's Star Colors page, which includes this table:

The colors shown are for the mid-Class stars, O5, B5 and so forth. In particular, an "earlier" O star such as O2 will be a bit bluer than the top row, and a "late" M star such as M8 will be quite a bit closer to red-orange (█), the color of a "red hot" object such as the burner of an electric stove turned all the way up.

Note also that these are the colors we see looking through a telescope, and particularly if we defocus the stars a little so they are colored disks. In other words, these are the colors as seen through the atmosphere. The air in a clear sky scatters about 30% of the light before it reaches the ground, and it scatters nine times as much blue light as red, meaning that the light that comes direct to you has already been reddened by having a lot of the blue removed, but only a little of the redder light. That is why the Sun is considered a yellowish star.

The total light from our sky, particularly on a somewhat overcast day, is the whitest white the eye can see. Our eyes evolved to take maximum advantage of the light our star emits, so that light is, by definition, White. Viewed from outside the atmosphere, any particular star would appear a little bluer than it does from Earth's surface.

This chart shows idealized spectra of stars of a few temperatures, plus the infrared spectrum emitted by a human body (98.6°F = 37.0°C = 310K). 15,000K is the temperature of a mid-Class B star and 3,000K is that of an early M star.

The B star emits three times as much blue as red, while the M star emits almost nine times as much red as blue. But at 3,000K it is still almost 500° hotter than the filament of an incandescent light bulb, which looks white to us when we are indoors. But if you are outside on a cloudy day and see a lighted room through the window, it looks orangeish, just like the "M" row on the table above. That is because your reference for white is now the sky, which is the exact color of the Sun, just spread around by the scattering in the clouds.

Here is a graphic of the appearance of stars of different temperatures, rendered to the same total intensity. I re-drafted the text because the original image used Fahrenheit temperatures. Kelvins are the appropriate units for temperatures higher than a few hundred degrees.

It would take quite a set of neutral density filters to get actual stars of these classes to have such similar intensities. An O star is about a million times as bright as a G star, and a G star is hundreds to thousands of times as bright as an M star.

Most of the bright stars you see in the night sky are B and A, and thus bluish in color. Thus, they "tune" your eyesight to that as the reference white, so when you look at Antares or Betelgeuse, they look quite reddish. In reality, both of those "red" are pale yellowish orange, a thousand degrees hotter and thus somewhat whiter than an incandescent bulb (or a "warm white" CFL).

Finally, this image from Wikimedia Commons gives a better idea of the sizes and colors of Main Sequence stars of the different Classes. O and B stars are called Main Sequence giants and the rest are called dwarfs (The visually brightest star, Sirius, is a dwarf of Class A, though it is almost three times as large as the Sun). Even an O giant, however, is much smaller than a red giant, which is a very expanded main sequence star in the helium-burning stage.

Try this sometime, when you have a telescope available, perhaps at a star party. Look at a rich open cluster such as the Perseus Double Cluster, and then defocus the eyepiece a little so the stars are small disks. Among the mostly whitish dots, a few will be bluer, and several will be yellow or orange. With a little thought (and the table above), you'll be able to estimate the temperature of each star.

Double sunsets

2011-11-08T10:00:00.003-05:00

kw: astronomy, exoplanets, discoveries

Well! I let this one slip by me. Almost two months ago, September 15, 2011, the Kepler Mission folks announced the discovery of a planet similar in size to Saturn, that is orbiting a double star. In this frame from the NASA animation of the system, the larger yellow star is a K-class dwarf half the size of the Sun, and the smaller orange star is an M-class dwarf. They orbit their common center of mass at a distance of 0.22 AU from one another, while the planet's orbital radius is 0.7 AU, about the distance of Venus from the Sun. If you project from the small star through the large star to the brightest dot about 4x their distance, that's the planet. Of course it is much easier to see in the video, where it is moving rapidly.

There has been much debate among scientists (and science fiction aficionados) whether stable planetary orbits around double stars are possible. This demonstrates that such cases are indeed possible. It remains to be seen whether a planet can orbit stably in a double star system when its orbital radius is similar to the distance between the stars. Speculations about looping orbits have abounded for decades.

Given that, from Earth's perspective, the stars are an eclipsing binary, and that the planet also transits both stars, the planet is treated to frequent eclipses and transits of the two stars, and double sunrises or double sunsets must be common. A dense, Saturn-size object is unlikely to have a surface from which the sky can be seen, so anyone visiting the system will have to watch the sky from the surface of a satellite. Both our Jupiter and Saturn have many satellites, so this planet will likely have several to choose from.

Oh, the thinks they can think

2011-11-07T11:46:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, innovation

Say "Hello" to your weight loss coach, named Autom, but you can name it anything you like. The people who have used one all named it, and became very attached.

This is a recent version of the automated health coach, developed by Cory Kidd of the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots workshop. In a three-way test, of Autom, of a laptop that accessed the same database Autom uses, and of a dieter's diary (the standard method), Autom won hands-down, and the people using one were all very reluctant to let it go when the day came to return all the robots to the lab.

On average, we can keep to a diet for three or four weeks, so this was a six-week trial. By week four, half the people in the two non-Autom groups had dropped out, and by week six, nearly all had. But those using Autom were almost all continuing their program and loving it. The positive reinforcement of a "social robot", using techniques developed by the most successful human weight loss coaches, make for an unbeatable combination.

This is just one of about two dozen projects highlighted by Frank Moss, former director of the MIT Media Lab, in The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives. Each of the book's eight chapters delves into about three technologies or programs, with plenty of historical information to show how "enforced serendipity" and "no-barrier transparency" and other sometimes counter-intuitive principles of the Lab's operation have enabled very rapid conversion of wild ideas into useful products and life-changing programs.

As another example, the Biomechatronics group has not only developed more lifelike artificial limbs, but on the principle that "We are all disabled, just in different ways and to different degrees" (a paraphrase of Sidney Papert), this group is developing exoskeleton components that make it easier to walk in rough terrain, run long distances, or carry heavy loads, and not always with the need for a battery-filled backpack. Sometimes, just by changing the angle of attack a little, a component can reduce the energy needed to take a step or make a movement.

Hugh Herr, the head of the group, is himself a double amputee, but re-crafted his own prostheses years ago. When the author e-mailed him some time ago with a question, the reply came, "Skiing. Will give it attention when down from the mountain."

An effort that seems quite different, but is similar in essence, is the Opera of the Future group, which developed "hyperinstruments" and the Hyperscore program that allow even severely disabled persons to compose and conduct their own works. The program resulted a few years ago in the performance of a work "My Eagle Song", conducted by its composer, wheelchair-bound Dan Ellsey, and that led to his current career as a sought-after public speaker, even though he must speak through a synthesizer, much as Stephen Hawking does.

On a simpler note, Ankit Mohan of the Camera Culture group has produced a handheld device called NETRA that checks your vision. Such devices, if they can be produced for $10 each, could revolutionize eye testing in poor nations. Many cases of functional blindness can be "cured" with a pair of inexpensive spectacles. (By the way, I know how to check nearsightedness with a meter stick, which costs only $1. But the method can't check for astigmatism. Then again, that seldom needs correction.)

Then there is the CityCar, a foldable two-seater developed by the Smart Cities group. Three of these fit into a conventional parking space. Fully electric, they could form the foundation of a one-way-rental business model, such as that used with bicycles or small jitneys in some countries.

A larger issue is to design the city for which CityCar is practical. The car is a result, not a cause. The group began by designing the kind of city in which they would like to live, then designed a car to match. The two key innovations here are the folding design and the Robotic Wheel, in which everything except the battery is packed into a smart hub. In some designs, the wheels can rotate fully, allowing the car to slide sideways into tiny a parking spot. Push a button and in it goes.

The watchword at MIT Media Lab that makes all of this possible is the removal of barriers: barriers between disciplines, barriers of the quarterly budget cycle, barriers of black-hat thinking. "Don't tell me, build one and show me" is the mantra. Every student vetted to work on projects there goes through a mechanical training program in their very sophisticated mechanical shop. For an exercise, one student produced a running wall clock on the 3-D printer: hands, gears, weights, and all. One pass.

For me, a book like this rates 11 on a 10-point scale of coolness. Nobody else is doing curiosity-driven research. At best, researchers are allowed a day or two a month of "blue sky" or "bootleg" time, with the rest devoted to the short-term, product-oriented research that has taken over industrial America. Even longer term programs found at a few places are too product focused to allow much straying into the "why did that happen?" arena.

MIT Media Lab is a place we need, and a host of corporate sponsors agree, keeping it funded and letting researchers collaborate with the professors and their students (the sorcerers and their apprentices). It works.

B'day non-bash

2011-11-05T21:16:00.002-04:00

kw: local events, birthdays

My birthday is in a few days, so my wife and I chose today to have a celebratory lunch. Hint: this one is mentioned in a Beatles song.

More than half the time, when we eat out, we go to a buffet, preferably a Chinese buffet. We get what we want, and don't have to contend with a menu. We live closer to Wilmington than to West Chester, and we almost never go into Philadelphia to eat; and while our favorite buffet in West Chester is China Grill, we decided to go the the newest one in Wilmington, called Hibachi Grill and Supreme Sushi Buffet. It is on Hwy 2, half a mile east of Hwy 7, and the nearest landmark is a Kohl's.

The sushi variety is the greatest I have seen. Uniquely (for the nonce) the ID cards note whether the fish, if there is fish, is raw or cooked. I seldom get raw fish (sashimi) sushi in America, but my wife usually prefers it. We both started with a plate of 8-10 pieces of sushi.

For those who might not know, sushi is a way of preparing a large variety of foods with sticky rice and seaweed. Some has fish, some different other meats or shellfish, but only a narrow range of fish varieties are served raw, those that history has shown to be mostly free of parasites. A sashimi chef is specially trained to spot parasites in the sliced fish and remove them. It isn't perfect; we have both had to be de-wormed before. Most sushi also contains vegetable items, and much is only vegetable. There is always sliced, fresh ginger and wasabi (Japanese horseradish sauce) available. I sometimes use wasabi, and usually a bit of soy sauce.

At the Hibachi Grill they have a hibachi chef, but we didn't partake of his services today. We just went around the buffet tables, of which there were four devoted to Chinese dishes and one to things Western kids are more likely to prefer, such as pizza and mac-n-cheese. There is also a table of fruits and similar items, and one of dessert items like small cakes. Finally, there is a freezer with eight varieties of ice cream for hand dipping.

If I recall right, I had sweet-n-sour whitefish, sauteed mushrooms, triple seafood delight (crab, squid and shrimp in butter sauce), a stuffed crab (this was only so-so), and pepper chicken. With the exception noted, they were excellent. I finished off with a little bowl of cookies-n-cream ice cream.

I used to go to buffet places intending to stuff myself silly. Now I go for a few tasty varieties, and it may take me many visits to sample everything that appeals to me. The number of bodies there that were significantly wider than mine (and I am a bit tubby) indicates that many people are still at the stuffing silly stage.

This newest Chinese Buffet restaurant raises the bar for its kin in the area, and the increase in coupons for its competitors shows how they are feeling the heat. For us, it made for a pleasant midday feast.

Pink morning sky

2011-11-04T12:09:00.000-04:00

kw: observations, photographs, sky

This morning I left for work just before sunrise. I stopped long enough to take a few pictures of the sky, pink from horizon to horizon. This first image, a vertical panorama, shows from the East almost to the zenith.

This second image is of the Western sky. Though I took an image above it, the stitching program couldn't get the two to go together.

A great way to start the day. I was satisfied just to stand and watch it for a few minutes before getting in to the car and starting my workday.

Hiding in our bunkers

2011-11-04T06:20:00.000-04:00

kw: risk aversion

I recently watched a PBS program, "Radioactive Wolves" on Nature. 400,000 people were evacuated from Chernobyl after the meltdown there, and an area called "The Zone" will be uninhabitable by humans for tens of thousands of years. I thought, "By what criterion?"

The program showed how wildlife is flourishing there. In just a couple of decades, many buildings have been breached by "the elements" and the way plants and animals are taking over is more instructive than the "Life After People" series on the History Channel. In this environment, radiation levels are hundreds of times as high as "normal" background, and the fur of the wolves would be considered toxic radiative waste. Yet a couple hundred wolves, and countless other creatures, thrive there.

Late in the program there was a moment that got my back up. The scientists are studying colonies of dormice, and it was noted that "abnormalities" were seen at about twice the usual level. Think of it: the Geiger counter is screaming, but most newborn dormice are still unaffected! The narrator said, "This level of birth defects would never be tolerated among humans."

I say, "Why the hell not?" It just exemplifies the wimpification of supposedly civilized humanity. In some parts of the world, there is still the substantial prospect of predation, of people being eaten by a tiger, leopard, bear or crocodile. Among more than half of humanity, many children are dying of diarrhea and infections that the other half can afford to shrug off with modern medicines. Those crowded masses would probably consider a radiation-soaked landscape quite acceptable if they could just be free of the threats of being eaten or killed by infectious disease.

But there is more. We are so cocooned we cannot tolerate risks of any kind. Buying a house entails risk. I recall mortgage rates of 9%, and being happy they weren't higher. I was not as happy with "only" 5% interest on passbook savings, so I invested in CD's that earned 8%. The banks were getting rich on a 1-point spread. Now that mortgage rates are "low" at 4%, the banks only offer 0.2% on passbook savings, and the best CD's are about 1.2%. The banks are crying they aren't making it, with a 3-point spread!

Do you know why X-games and adventure sports have become so popular in Europe, the US and Westernized Asia? Kids have to invent risk, because they don't live it. And do you know what killed the U.S. "manned" space program? Two shuttle disasters. Nobody wants to invest in a replacement, primarily because of the risks. The risk-aversion that would have to be built into the design of a space vehicle makes it completely impractical to design at all. It is actually not hard to design a new shuttle that would be quite a bit safer than the recently-retired ones, but that is not considered good enough these days. It needs to be "failure proof". Can't be done at any price.

Look, if you want to go to the Moon, you have to cross 240,000 miles (385,000 km) of radiation-laced vacuum. You have to quickly punch through the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth, just to get the first 10% of the way. Unless you burrow into the surface of the Moon, you're going to get a radiation dose similar to parts of The Zone around Chernobyl. This is the primary reason that the Apollo missions were limited to a week or so. These levels of radiation are the biggest obstacle to sending people to Mars with current technology. They'd have to spend eight months getting there, accumulating a damaging radiation exposure on the way, and eight more months getting home.

I agree such a prospect is daunting. It is unlikely that many people will want to take those kinds of risks. But some will! And people vary in their resistance. Not everyone who gets zapped gets cancer. The main problem on a Mars mission is brain damage from the long-term radiation. So, we need to develop a technology to get there two or three times as fast. How about this for a goal: A technology that can take people to Mars in thirty days! And you send a big bulldozer with them (it would have to be solar powered; there is too little oxygen), so they can dig in and shield themselves from the radiation.

By the way, the radiation in space differs from that in The Zone in this way: It is more penetrating. Radioactive fallout produces lots of alpha, which is stopped by a sheet of paper, and somewhat less beta, which can get into the body a short distance, and much less gamma, which is the most penetrating, being very high-energy x-rays. In space, the primary threat is high energy protons, which can pass right through the body, and are massive enough to kill many of the cells they pass through. They are not alpha, beta or gamma; I call them pi radiation.

Back to The Zone. No exclusion effort can be perfectly vigilant for decade after decade. Not everyone fears radiation's effects. Squatters will likely move into The Zone sometime in the next twenty years or less. Maybe they'll live by poaching the game. Doesn't matter how. They'll find the dangers of living there are less fearsome than somewhere else they have already lived, and accept the risks. It is what people do. Sooner or later, we may find that a group of people have evolved more-than-ordinary resistance to radiation poisoning and radiation-induced cancer. They won't mind the risks that going to Mars entails. They might make great long-term astronauts. Will the bunker denizens of the rest of the world let them go?

It's only the Moon - your move

2011-11-03T12:02:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, science fiction, games

I have never been much of a gamer, particularly not role-playing games (RPG's) so it paid little attention to the gaming portrayed in The Moon Maze Game by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. So why read the book at all? you may ask. I'll read anything by Larry Niven. He is always full of interesting new ideas, and this book doesn't disappoint.

The setting is the Moon, in 2084, and not only is the Moon getting pretty well colonized, so are the L5 point and certain asteroids. Computer power and virtual reality gear are very advanced, making full-surround, live-action gaming affordable. Many effects rely on projected holography, which is still technologically far, far beyond known capabilities…but it makes for a good yarn.

On this future Moon, certain people with tons of money have contracted to convert a domed crater into a gaming arena. One of the gamers is an African prince, and when this becomes known to certain Lunar denizens, a plot is hatched to kidnap him and force his father to abdicate in favor of a democratic government. The actual kidnapping is to be carried out by a band of mercenaries who hire out to do high-profile, high-stakes kidnapping.

There are typically two ways to portray villains. One way is as ciphers with simple motive and unalloyed evil intent, black boxes that churn out evil. Another is as complex personalities made known to us by large sections of stream-of-consciousness, yet also primarily evil. Niven and Barnes take a different tack. There is a little window here and there into the thinking and motivations of the four main perpetrators, but they are portrayed with sufficient sympathy that the reader is torn, not quite willing to hate them properly. The characters of the gamers and others who find themselves embattled by the kidnapping and its aftermath add to the richness of the psychological milieu.

I don't know enough about gaming to have much of an opinion. I assume real gamers will drool over the prospect of full-immersion role play that the book offers. The game setting is a purported sequel to the fiction of H. G. Wells, particularly his Moon and Mars stories: Steampunk on steroids!

I'll leave the plot for the reader to ferret out. A number of Lunar characteristics portrayed show how the authors have thought them through. For example, taking a shower, then waiting for the water to drip off before toweling could take a long, long time. Thus, something like the strigil (a blunt, curved scraping blade used in ancient Rome) is posited to remove most of the water more quickly. The low gravity also allows muscle-powered flight using apparatus much smaller than the Gossamer Condor, and this is taken advantage of at one crucial point. So is brachiation. Tarzan might have swung through the jungle like an ape, but an actual human can only brachiate for a few swings before risking a shoulder separation. On the moon, it is almost easy. A little bit is offered about low-G fighting, but so little is actually known that the authors wisely keep it short.

In spite of my unfamiliarity with the gaming aspects, the authors explain enough (sometimes almost too much) that I could keep up. It is quite a gripping adventure.

Now, I wonder, will we really have a colony on the moon in only another 73 years? It will require another generation to arise with stars in their eyes, a confidence in our ability to conquer any barrier, and a willingness to risk that is presently almost absent among the world's peoples, particularly the American public. About a quarter of the world's population is too comfortable and yet too anxious, while the rest is too poor to imagine big things. If this doesn't change, 2084 will come and go with nobody Moon-side to dome up a crater, fill it with air, and strap on wings.

Two duct tales

2011-11-02T18:31:00.000-04:00

kw: product testing, observations

I have had the ducts cleaned in two houses by two different methods, and they differ quite a lot. I haven't had rotary brush cleaning, which only works well if all the ducts are round. It also requires cutting into the plenum to attach a high-capacity vacuum, and we'll cover that in a moment. Both cleaning methods that we used rely on air blast to dislodge debris in the ducts, but they take quite different approaches: one relies on "air pull", the other on "air push".

At the first house, the operator used a truck-mounted vacuum, lots and lots of large-diameter tubing, and a separate air hose. The process was to take off the faceplate of a register or return duct and let the air pressure hold a faceplate with a large, soft gasket, at the end of the vacuum tube, against the hole. The air hose was inserted through a port in the faceplate. It ended in a foot-long flexible tube with a "pull" nozzle at the end. Such a nozzle has several holes directed backwards, toward the faceplate. When the high-pressure air is turned on, the flexible tube whips around, and the air blasts the loosened debris toward the faceplate and it is carried away to the vacuum on the truck. The backward-directed air blast also makes it easy to get the air hose all the way to the end of the duct. My job was to stand by the plenum and tell him (shout) when the end of the hose arrived. He would then increase the air flow and pull it back out, so each duct had a double going-over.

This method is for aluminum ducts only. The whipping hose with the nozzle is likely to crack or break fiberglass ducts. The only disturbance to the air system is the removal and replacement of faceplates. No cutting into the ductwork is needed.

Ten years later, in the house we presently live in, I had a quite different experience. I believe the cleaning was thoroughly done, but consider the process. The first step was to lug a large-capacity vacuum into my basement, cut a foot-square hole in the plenum, and attach the vacuum. Then, near the end of each duct, the operator drilled an inch-diameter hole into which he put an air hose with a push nozzle. He fed the hose in until it reached the vacuum, then turned on the vacuum and the air and pulled the hose back through the duct. The section of duct between the holes he drilled and the vents was reached by taking off the faceplate and using the air hose to blow debris toward the vacuum.

Once he finished all the supply ducts, the hole in the supply plenum was closed by duct taping the cut-out piece, and the process was repeated with the return air plenum. After that was finished and re-closed, he went around and put a piece of duct tape over each of the holes he'd drilled. This whole process made me rather anxious, and I've thought since that I should have not let it be done, but shopped around until I found someone who used the first method. It is less invasive of the whole system.

As I mentioned, the result was probably about the same, but I am much happier with the "air pull" method.

More ways to take charge of your health

2011-10-31T12:11:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, self help

I long ago realized I'd have to be a very active participant in my own medical care and health, as I have written in several previous blog posts. My latest concern is about my wife's heart condition, or rather her lack of a condition. She has slightly high total blood cholesterol (TBC), around 230. A few years ago she was asked by the doctor to get a HeartCam test (see Philly HeartCam for the one out here). The test showed a few tiny spots of calcification in two coronary arteries, on the low side of "normal" for her age and sex. But based on that, the doctor prescribed a daily dose of 10 mg of Crestor. She doesn't like being medicated, and because this amount lowered her cholesterol quite a bit, she demanded to be prescribed a lower dose, so he prescribed 5 mg, a little grumpily. As it turns out, for Crestor specifically, the recommended starting dose is 5 mg for persons who are hypothyroid, over 65, or Asian. My wife is all three! Very recently, she began cutting the pills in half, so as to take 2.5 mg. Take it or leave it, Doc.

The literature makes it pretty clear: Crestor does increase life span for people with active, symptomatic heart disease, but it does not do so for people with no symptoms of disease. I discussed this matter with a friend who is a doctor, and he agreed, she has no symptoms; the HeartCam test indicates a very early stage in a process that proceeds slowly and she is likely to live into her 80s or 90s with no heart symptoms. We may decide to drop the Crestor entirely. And last year there was a study reported in Age and Aging, reported on page 151 in the book I'm reviewing, that states in older people, an optimum level of TBC is about 230! It seems my wife may be best left alone!!

The book is Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them by Joe Graedon and Teresa Graedon, a husband-and-wife team that has worked with hospitals for decades to improve patient safety. I read it at an uneven pace. I find it a bit of a downer to read so much bad news all at once, even though I learned a lot. For example, there is also a link between Crestor and its statin relatives and cataracts. My wife's family is already prone to cataracts, so perhaps it is best to avoid that added factor.

In Introduction is followed by twelve substantive chapters, each built around a Top Ten list. While there are many more possible items on each list, a list of ten major items will get you past the worst errors that are likely to be made. This is not a book that slams doctors. A few doctors deserve slamming, but most are at least conscientious. They are just overwhelmed. For example, there are more than 13,600 diagnoses in their arsenal, if any individual could manage to remember them all. My doctor friend confirmed that, even with computer help, it is hard to diagnose many conditions, or even to ask the right questions. Many doctors are too proud to look up stuff in a patient's presence, so we have to prod them to do so.

A key section of the book is a chapter detailing how the situation has changed regarding generic drugs. The authors were early promoters of generic medicines, but now that they are big business, and now that there are thousands of overseas labs making most of them, it is less certain that they are always the right idea. The FDA does not have the resources to monitor them, to be sure that the generic drug is medically identical to the branded drug or that it meets purity standards. Many times, "medically identical" does not mean "chemically identical", and the odd term "bioequivalent" used in FDA literature is even more troubling.

For example, if I want pain relief, I usually use Ibuprofen (branded as Advil or Motrin). The generic, Ibuprofen, is chemically identical to the branded products. But I can get the same level of pain relief if I take twice as much aspirin. The aspirin dose, by FDA rules, would be called bioequivalent. This in spite of the fact that it causes much more stomach bleeding than the Ibuprofen, and may cause dizziness at a high dosage.

There is a secondary problem. A certain substance may be off patent (such as Wellbutrin), but a timed-release version may be still under patent (as Wellbutrin XL). A generic using a different timed-release method may be released differently, causing more side effects, sometimes quite damaging side effects that the branded timed-release drug will not cause.

The authors contend that untimely death due to diagnostic errors, prescription errors, dosing errors, and unrecognized drug interactions may together reach at least 600,000 yearly in the U.S., making doctor-caused death the second leading cause of death. There is reason to believe the number is twice this, making doctors the leading cause of untimely death. Thus the reason for the book. Several doctors are quoted as saying or writing that there is on average one error committed per day per patient in U.S. hospitals.

If you are in the hospital, the best thing you can do for your own well-being is to have an alert helper with you as much of the time as possible, to double-check everything that is done to you while you are there. The helper(s) should not fear offending doctors or anyone else. They may be the only barrier between you and damaging or deadly errors.

The book contains several helpful resources. All the Top Ten lists are repeated in an appendix, and well explained in their respective chapters. There is a two-page listing of Dr. Beers' List of "bad drugs" on pp. 154-5. A Drug Safety Questionnaire is found on page 85. And there is another list of anticholinergic drugs (p. 164), because these are so ubiquitous and can interact with so many other medications.

An odd omission is an appendix listing web resources, so here are the major ones the authors mention:

The Cochrane Collaboration - Health experts evaluate what works, and what does not.
SkinSight - Insight from experts about treating and caring for your skin. It includes a self-help diagnostic tool.
American Geriatric Society - Includes a referral service to those rare geriatric specialists.
PubMed - A government sponsored resource for research documentation.
ConsumerLab.com - Independent evaluation of products, particularly OTC.

I probably used the book inappropriately by reading it all. It is a great resource, and is better used for looking stuff up.

This antique is obsolete

2011-10-29T13:39:00.000-04:00

kw: antiques, observations

Here is a bit of an antique, still in use but not quite as it was intended, because it has become obsolete! I can't even buy a toothbrush with a handle small enough for the slots in this toothbrush holder. Nor can I dispose of it or change it without remodeling the bathroom because it is cemented to the wall.

I wonder if they even make a ceramic, wall-mounted toothbrush holder that a modern toothbrush will fit into. I am sure a tiler would be just tickled to put one in if it could be found.

But it occurs to me that there is a certain lack of sanitation when you hang a toothbrush in one of these. The bottom bristles spend nearly all their time in contact with the porcelain, and unless you keep it quite clean and dry, there is a little germ factory there. The way it is being used now is probably safer all around.

If it is older than you are that is a start

2011-10-28T07:11:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, biographies, collecting, antiques

I thought I was getting a book strictly about flea markets, but wound up with a biography of a mystery antique dealer and a comprehensive survey of antique dealing and collecting in the U.S., from flea markets to auctions to eBay to comics to Antiques Roadshow. Whew! Great stuff!!

The book is Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America by Maureen Stanton. Her mentor throughout her journey into the multifarious world of antiques is a man she calls Curt Avery, whose name tops a list of 37 pseudonyms used in the book. Antiques dealers are typically secretive. As I have noted at stamp and coin auctions, if you know a dealer wants something, that is a good clue that it is more valuable than things the dealers are ignoring, so most dealers try to operate without public recognition. At an estate auction I once picked up a crate of great petrified wood "rough" at a good price because the main dealer who had been buying all the pet-wood had to go to the restroom. (In the Lapidary world, "rough" means a gemstone material that has not been cut yet, though a piece may have a corner sawn off to see what quality lies within.) As Ms Stanton tells it, Avery is willing to suffer greatly to avoid bathroom breaks at crucial points in an auction!

He is willing to suffer even more just due to his nomadic lifestyle, getting to every venue early, dashing among the tables and booths to "pick" items he might turn around and sell the same day, unloading and setting up, reloading with what didn't sell, and camping out to avoid motel costs. He resists the temptation to deal more through eBay, though he uses it. He points out one portly friend and whispers "Body by eBay". His lifestyle keeps him trim.

Every antique collector and dealer has a narrow range of specialization. There is simply too wide a variety for someone to become an expert in everything. That is why, for example, Antiques Roadshow has about eighty expert appraisers on hand, each with one or a few specialties. Avery's special love is colonial-era wooden items such as blanket chests. But like many, he has become quite an expert in an eclectic range of items, such as perfume bottles or old fabrics.

The key to profiting in the antiques trade is knowledge. You have to know how to determine that an item is genuine, when it was made (at least approximately), and not only where it was made but where it has been since. A nondescript bowl could gain a lot of value if it is provable that Napoleon once owned it. You get an eye for things, and learn to look for the little clues that the wear on an old item is from use, not from someone dragging it through the sand to simulate natural wear.

Each chapter of the book records a journey, to an auction, to a multi-dealer show, to a museum so as to determine a key object's characteristics, or to pick the brain of one's chosen mentor. The tales are fascinating. They helped me realize just how ignorant I am. The only antiques I know to be true are those that were handed down to me directly. And if I were to try to sell, for example, my great-great grandfather's spectacles, I'd have to convince a buyer of their genuineness, because anything can be faked. It just depends how much time and money someone is willing to spend to make a knock-off, which depends on the ultimate profit from fooling a buyer. And the antiques collecting world has such frequent fads and trends that, at any one time, most of the genuine stuff may be un-sellable at any price. At the shows and auctions the dealers are looking for the freshest stuff, that which has most recently made its way out of the clutches of the original family members who've been handing it down for a generation or few.

Whew! It makes a fellow's head spin. The key take-away message is, if you want something old, do your research, then do more research. I have to tell the story of one old object. I was not looking for an antique, but for a binocular microscope. I found a good one on eBay that had no bids because it was old, and messaged the owner about his reserve amount. I bid above the $200 reserve, was the only bidder, and got it for $200 plus $10 shipping. When it came, its optics were in poor shape. I dismantled it and cleaned everything (there was mold on the lenses and prisms). Then, it worked great. When I messaged the seller later to tell him how well it worked, he replied, "You mean you are going to use it? It is a museum piece! 100 years old!!" Yes, and I still use it. I know optics, and it has very fine optics, much better than most modern microscopes.

Whether you plan to "use" an antique or display it, knowledge is everything. Having a willing mentor such as Curt Avery, whoever he really is, is extremely valuable.

Real Estate market distribution analysis

2011-10-27T09:09:00.004-04:00

kw: real estate, analysis, statistical distributions, market distributions

Real estate values at "best places to live" kinds of web sites are typically stated only as median values. It is of great value to know the distribution of the real estate market in an area, particularly to determine if the market is distorted by excess or insufficient valuation in a portion of the market range. While I sometimes perform a detailed analysis for a small market, we'll also look at a powerful tool for quickly analyzing any size market.

1. Detailed Analysis

Keep in mind what any Realtor will tell you: "Location, Location, Location," but also note that every location has a context. This analysis is appropriate in a small market, such as a single Zip Code or small city, that contains no more than 150 homes for sale.

I pre-draw a grid such as that shown here. Number of Bedrooms runs vertically, and number of Bathrooms runs horizontally. At Realtor.com a bath-and-a-quarter or bath-and-powder room is counted as 2. When you actually look at individual homes, you'll pay attention to quarter and half baths, but for this analysis, a room is a room is a room.

These figures are for Zip 74075, the northern half of Stillwater, OK, an area in which I lived for a number of years so I am familiar with the market. The numbers are in thousands, rounded ($198,500 to $199,499 become 199). You can see that 3BR 2Ba is by far the most popular, and I ran out of room and stole some space from the 3+3 category. This is an economical market, with a total range in value of single-family homes from $46,000 to $499,000. I gathered the data October 25, 2011.

This Zip Code contained 125 single-family homes for sale. Just the 3+2 category contained 76, or 60% of the entire market. That indicates a homogeneous market. These two data sets are charted along with analyses of two markets closer to home, Ridley Park, PA (54 homes) and the Zip Code 19803 in northern Delaware, where I have friends.

I used Minitab to analyze these on Lognormal coordinates. The straight line for 19803 indicates it is a very homogeneous market, a set of similar bedroom communities. The two plot-lines for 74075 have a zig and a zag at the ends, indicating the market is not as homogeneous; there is at least one "ritzy" area that breaks the trend, and I suspect the low-end zag represents trailer houses on land on the edge of town.

Ridley Park shows up as quite homogeneous, but there is a wiggle in mid-line that indicates a depressed market for the middle-of-the-road homes there, a depressed median. This illustrates why you have to know more than the median to understand a market; if you wanted a home in the top or bottom of the range, you'd find yourself spending more than you expected.

This is a closer look at the four lines. Recall: 74075 = blue triangles, the same Zip with only 3BR+2Ba homes included = black circles, Ridley Park = red squares, and 19803 = green diamonds.

Recall from the handwritten grid that the three highest-priced homes in 74075 are 495, 495 and 499. They are the three triangles surrounding a black dot at the top. The black dot is the single 3+2 house among them, in its own distribution.

The tendency of home prices in a market to approximately follow a lognormal trend indicates that near the median is where you will find the largest number of homes on the market. As you move far from the median, there is not going to be much for sale.

2. Quick Analysis (7-Point Charting)

To understand this method, look at the image above. See how the 1 and 99 points are rather far from the 10 and 90 points, and that these distances are quite similar to the distance between 10 and 25 or 75 and 90. Of course, the 50 point is the exact center, the median value. So we want to pick the values from the home listings that represent 1%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 99%. For a 100-home distribution, this is just the first, tenth, 25^th and so forth. If a distribution has fewer than 50 homes, don't bother with the 1 and 99 points.

This table shows just these seven values for the three areas outlined above; I didn't bother with the 3+2 homes in 74075. To figure which homes to use, multiply the total number by the seven numbers, add ½ to each, and round the result.

For a 125-home market, the key numbers are 1.25, 12.5, 31.25, 62.5, 93.75, 112.5 and 123.75. Add ½: 1.75, 13, 31.75, 63, 94.25, 113 and 124.25. These round to 2, 13, 32, 63, 94, 113 and 124. We will discuss in a moment how to locate these items.

The "50" points are in slant type; these are the medians in each market. I also calculate the geometric midpoint, or virtual median, based on the 25 and 75 values, and 10 and 90 values. The calculation is, for example, SQRT(260*400) = 322.49, which rounds to 322, the 25-75 Median for Zip 19803. If both of these are close to the median, the market is balanced. If there is a strong trend, it reveals imbalance. Of course, the charts above show the imbalance in Ridley Park by the bent line, but here the numbers reveal it just as clearly. And, these can be plotted, as shown next.

There is a very subtle scoop in the 19803 line, and the numbers 315, 322, 331 show the same thing. 331/315 = 1.051. A 5% shift is insignificant. More significant is the very visible dip in the middle of Ridley Park, and the numbers show it: 150, 172, 187 and 187/150 = 1.247. A 25% shift is quite large. It indicates that the middle-priced houses are underpriced. A buyer's market!

The Stillwater Zip Code shows very good flatness in the middle range, with a zig and a zag, as mentioned, at the extremes of the range. The middle 80% of this market is balanced and homogeneous.

Now let us look at larger markets. This is useful to determine a price range that is appropriate for most "middle class" folks to buy homes, and how balanced the regional prices are. For three of the four analyses below, I selected only single-family homes; for Philadelphia I added condo/townhomes, which comprise 80% of the total market.

This shows a calculation table selecting the numbers for each market from the total number of homes on sale. Now, how do you find home #38 or #3,242?

By default, at the Realtor.com web site, there are ten houses listed at a time. At the bottom of the page you can click the "Next" button to get the next ten. When you do so, you'll see in the URL field (which starts "http"), near the end, "pg-2" (you may have to scan in the field). Change the "2" to the number of the page you want to go to. Now think about this; home #40 is at the end of page 4, so home #38 is the eighth listing on page 4. Similarly, to find listing #3,242, go to page 325, where it is the second listing (the page ends in #3,250). You have to count, because the web page doesn't put numbers on the listings.

Here are the 7 numbers collected for each of the four markets. I picked OK City because of familiarity, Columbus at random, San Jose because I knew it would be high, and Philadelphia because that's home these days (actually, I live in a suburb outside city limits).

A quick look shows that all these markets are well balanced. Dividing 517/490 = 1.055 indicates that San Jose may be slightly out of balance. By the way, prior to the 2008 crash, when I found an unbalanced region, it was more likely that the 10-90 median was lower than the actual median; high priced homes were undervalued, or conversely, the middle class, fueled by over-liberal lending policies, was overpricing mid-range homes. Let's look at the chart.

As expected, San Jose is high priced. Surprisingly, though Philadelphia is in the "rich" Northeast, its values are only slightly higher than the West and Midwest.

I was, frankly, quite surprised to find the distribution for Columbus as low as it is, lower than OKC. A number of years ago this was not so.

Seven-point analysis is the quickest way I know to learn so many things about markets of any size. It is the precursor to more specific analyses, helping you narrow your interest to price ranges which will have large numbers of listings.

Note: While I used Minitab for the first chart, there is a way to get a very similar chart using Excel or the Excel clone in the OpenOffice suite (it is called Calc). If a few folks rattle my cage about it, I might post a tutorial on making normal and lognormal plots using Excel. (Just to set expectations, there is no way to get the axis labeling the same. My method just produces a line with the right scaling and labels the probability axis in Standard Deviation units.)

A final tip. Choosing 3+ for the Bathrooms in Realtor.com nearly guarantees a recently built home, at least in the Northeast. In most areas of the country, only the largest houses had more than two bathrooms until the building boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

One more Real Estate tool

2011-10-26T12:29:00.000-04:00

kw: real estate, online tools

You really will need to click on the image to see what is there; this reduced view is too small.

This is a view of the new "Recent Sales" tool on Realtor.Com, which makes data available that you once needed to call a Realtor to obtain…if you had a forthcoming agent. This screen clip shows the first few listings, sorted low-high, for the nearby city of West Chester, PA. The top prices ranged up to $1.1 million.

The listings are filtered for 3+ Bedrooms, 3+ Bathrooms, and 2000+ Square Feet, Single Family homes only. I believe "Recent" means the past 12 months; there were 98 sales in that time that fit my criteria: Homes similar to ours.

As I approach retirement, my wife and I sometimes speculate on where we might like to live, assuming we get any great urge to move. Having lived in six states, we know places that have primarily ranch homes, a boon to older folks who are getting unsteady on the stairs. Ranch homes are rare in the Northeast, and this area is rather pricey. We have less of a need for "night life" than most, so we're not that interested in busy (and costly) city life. We like small-to-medium sized, rather quiet places.

This "recently sold" tool gives us an idea of the comps on our property, and on any neighborhood we might look at as a move target. Will we move? Hard to tell. There is a lot to like right here, and we are far enough from city center that it is almost as quiet as a rural area.

Not much of a driver

2011-10-26T06:02:00.003-04:00

kw: observations, photographs, driving

Prior to moving out east, I had a 40-mile (1-way) commute. That came to about 16,000 miles yearly just getting to work and back. Now my commute is less than five miles, and it has taken me twelve years to put 111,111 miles on my car.

When the car was less than five years old, we also used it for a few road trips, but since then, we rent a car for anything more than a day trip. Another cause for the mileage to be only 9,000 miles yearly. It is even less for my wife's car, which is 21 years old and has 140,000 miles.

Our first reason for renting cars for big-miles trips was to have a newer, more reliable car on a road trip. Then I realized it is also economical. A weekly rental costs $300-$400 total, including fuel. The costs of owning a car, including insurance and ongoing maintenance and repairs (I just spent $515 for a plugged smog valve) comes to close to $1 per mile. If I can spend $400 for a car to go 1,000 miles, I've effectively saved $600.

There is a third reason for renting. We request various models when we rent a car, which makes for an extended test drive. With 12- and a 21-year old cars, we are always looking for a car to replace one of them when we decide maintenance is eating us up.

2010 Census and lognormal statistics

2011-10-24T14:19:00.004-04:00

kw: census records, statistics, statistical distributions, analysis

Some time ago I wrote briefly about the US state population distribution in the 2010 Census, but the County data were not yet released. County data were released a couple months ago, and I just had the chance to review them.

This shows the county populations analyzed in Lognormal coordinates. While the fit is not perfect, a lognormal fit is better than any other that Minitab can analyze.

The lognormal distribution is appropriate for collections of parameters that divide up a fixed quantity using several criteria. The more "reasons" there are for division, the closer to a lognormal distribution the data will be, according to the logarithmic form of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT).

This repeats the US state information I plotted before, showing the goodness of fit within a lognormal model.

As I was thinking about this, I began to wonder why people choose to live in one place or another. In my own case, I made one choice based on the school I wanted for my graduate studies, and a few other moves based on job opportunities. One move was arranged to avoid a certain climate.

There are so many reasons, it is likely the CLT is well-satisfied. This does appear to be the case for these state and county data. I sought another level of analysis in order to see if I could tease out a few of the big factors.

This chart shows one factor and gives hints at one or two more. For each state, it plots average yearly rainfall horizontally and population density vertically. The state abbreviations help us discern part of what is going on.

With the exception of Alaska, there appears to be an upward-trending lower bound, anchored on the left by the cold, dry north-central states and on the lower right by the hot Gulf Coast states. The odd combination of NE, OR and ME fills in the middle. Moving upward from this line, I think I see two trends. One is that the states that were the original thirteen Colonies have high population densities, capped by New Jersey. Three states, CA, FL and HI, are "great climate" states. The remaining states tend to line up with warmth being an upward indicator, though there is lots of scatter.

This just scratches the surface of such an analysis. I suspect parameters such as the unemployment index and state taxation laws have their own influence; for example, I would expect Oregon to have a density closer to that of Delaware, as both have no sales tax, and they have similarly mild climates. Clearly, other factors come into play (like half of Oregon being mountainous and thus rather unlivable unless you are Jeremiah Johnson). For the moment, I've gone as far as I can without dragging together lots more data.

Maybe they really care

2011-10-23T16:48:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals

The cynic says, "Yes, the lion may lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won't get much sleep." Yet there is a story in which a young lioness cared for a young oryx for a week or two. As told in Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom by Jennifer S. Holland, the lioness adopted the orphaned oryx and cared for it the way a pre-teen girl might care for any orphaned animal baby. The confused oryx accepted the mothering and even tried to suckle, though the cat had no milk.

In this case, the pairing could not go on for long. The lioness was not hunting, so neither animal was getting any nourishment. In fact, when watching people threw meat to her, she would ignore it. When another lion came along and ate the oryx, the lioness snapped out of it and accepted meat, then went back to hunting.

Everyone who has a houseful of pets of multiple species knows that dogs and cats can learn to get along. From time to time, quite unusual pairings and caring examples occur. In one of the stories in the book, when a dog became blinded by cataracts, the family cat began leading her around and watching out for her. The cat was quite solicitous, and very specific, ignoring the other dog in the house.

Most of the stories are about young animals, usually very young orphaned ones. Animals and birds have strong social needs, particularly when young, and will fulfill them in unusual was if the usual is not possible. Thus a lion cub and two caracal cubs (another kind of wild cat) played together as siblings until they grew up, a cage full of baby orangutans and tiger cubs happily played together during their infancies, and a just-hatched kookaburra and duckling kept each other company while they were little.

Many stories are about fostering, which stretches the bounds of friendship; I don't think my wife and son think of one another as friends, though they love one another. A number of fostering stories are of deliberate pairings on the part of zookeepers or game wardens or rescue workers, confronted with an orphan that needs care but having no mother of the same species who is willing or able to care for it. Thus the opening story of the book pairs a mature sheep (a male in this case) with an orphaned baby elephant. The sheep was a usually willing participant, while the elephant, being very needy, took all the comfort he could from their cohabitation. This pairing was undertaken after the staff had successfully paired sheep with a number of bereft baby rhinos.

More genuine friendships between adult animals of diverse species are less common, and the more awe-inspiring. In the book's second story, a black cat went into the enclosure where an Asiatic black bear was kept at the Berlin Zoo and befriended the bear. The cat comes and goes, but the two have spent plenty of time together for more than ten years already, and are visibly comforted by being together.

I don't know the story of this raccoon and skunk. It may be an accidental meeting in which both behaved well, or a longer-term pairing. Both are carnivores, and being of similar size, would find it wisest to treat each other well. Other longer-term pairings, such as a cat and a cockatoo or a donkey and a farm dog, occur in domestic settings.

Two quite unusual events, both short-term, involved SCUBA divers, one who was visited by a young manta and another who was probably the object of fostering when a half-ton leopard seal began "helping" him the way she would a seal calf. Both divers were enthralled by the attention of such different animals.

The stories are enjoyable reading, but it is the photos that make the book. Animals are clearly not the robotic eat-defecate-mate-sleep-repeat machines that some psychologists might insist. They have great social needs, and when circumstances get unusual, their social expressions can get unusual also. And it is not just mammals and birds; in one case a house cat and a large iguana paired up and seem to be getting along famously. Even lizards need love, it seems.

Valley Forge - a reminder

2011-10-22T20:46:00.004-04:00

kw: history, historic sites

Valley Forge is less than an hour up the road. We visited today with several friends, a group of 14 all told. Most were not born in this country, so we did a lot of explaining about what the Continental Army was doing here in the winter of 1777-8, and why July 4, 1776 had been the beginning, not the end, of the war for independence.

The highlight for me was visiting the headquarters building that George Washington used over that winter. It is the building in the right half of the panorama below. Though he and a few officers were better housed than the soldiers under their command, the quarters were cramped and quite spartan. We have heard much of the sufferings of the soldiers at Valley Forge. Most of them were poorly supplied by their home colonies (not yet states), and subsisted by raiding supply trains meant for the British. Though no pitched battle was waged here, there were continual skirmishes all winter long, some triggered by supply raids, and others just probing of defenses. The army was actually fortunate that the winter was comparatively moderate, not the norm for the "Little Ice Age" that was just beginning to loose its grip but lasted until the 1840s.

An equally moving, but sadder view was the arch erected in 1901 to honor the men who suffered here.

This plaque inside the arch is particularly poignant, because the liberties for which these men fought are being eroded daily under the present administration. Will the coming generation look upon this plaque with reverence, awe and gratitude for the freedoms so sorely gained, or with puzzlement and incomprehension? For those who have trouble reading the photo:

And here in this place of sacrifice
In this vale of humiliation
In this valley of the shadow of that death
Out of which the life of America rose regenerate and free
Let us believe with an abiding faith
That to them Union will seem as dear
And Liberty as sweet and progress as glorious
As they were to our fathers
And are to you and me
And that the institutions which have made us happy
Preserved by the virtue of our children
Shall bless the remotest generation
Of the time to come [Henry Arnett Brown]

To which I say, "Amen!"

When they were a penny

2011-10-21T18:49:00.005-04:00

kw: reminiscences, history, post cards

A friend directed me to the GenWeb Penny Post Card Archives, where I snagged a couple of images from my own past.

I spent half of my formative years in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. We visited the Capitol Building once.

Even earlier, I was born in Pasadena, California, and we lived in the area until I was about six. My wife and my brother and I visited the old City Hall just a couple of years ago. Still as beautiful as ever.

I remember penny post cards, but vaguely. I also remember when a regular letter was two cents, but about the time we moved to SLC the price went to three cents.

It may be radio, but is it active?

2011-10-21T10:18:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, physics, radioactivity, history

Click on this image to see the details more clearly. In ultra-brief form it embodies knowledge that led to a couple dozen Nobel prizes from 1901 to the 1930s.

In each small chart, the horizontal axis is the Proton number (the Atomic Number), Z, and the vertical axis is the Neutron number, N. Atomic Mass, A, is Z+N. Therefore, in the lower left Uranium Series, The starting point is U²³⁸: Z=92, N=146 and A=238.

A careful look reveals that three of the four series begin with or pass through a Uranium isotope, and all four begin with or pass through a Thorium isotope. All pass through at least Radium, Radon, Polonium, and Lead isotopes, as well as a few others. Three end at the stable isotopes of Lead, 206, 207 and 208, while the fourth ends at Thallium 205. In an alpha-beta decay scheme, one of those four isotopes must be the end result.

These are the end result. Where did we learn all this? That is the subject of Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science by Marjorie C. Malley. Beginning with the discovery of "Uranium rays" that affected photo emulsions in 1896, scientists labored to learn, step by step, of the different "rays" and "emanations" of uranium, thorium and their decay products, which were initially given names like "Uranium X" and "Mesothorium".

A marvelous feature of the book is to immerse us in the time, using the terms current as the discoveries were being made. As the various radioactive "rays" were discovered, there were periods of years during which, for example, the alpha "ray" was misunderstood because, while its bending by a magnet could not at first be discerned, it was stopped by paper, unlike the x-rays to which it was being compared. Eventually the trichotomy was discerned: alpha equals fast-moving He⁺⁺, beta equals electron, and gamma equals extra-powerful x-ray. Then the fun began! If heavy atoms "radiated" by emitting helium, the helium particle (this was before the neutron was known) must be a building block of atomic nuclei. Only much later were protons and neutrons found.

Before isotopes were discerned (I hesitate to say, discovered), confusion reigned. We now know that "Radium" referred to Ra²²⁶, while Actinium X, Mesothorium I and Thorium X referred to other isotopes of Radium. They could not be chemically separated, and it was only by measuring the atomic mass of radioactively-produced substances that they could be told apart until the invention of the mass spectrograph in 1919.

Radioactivity discoveries helped elucidate quantum theory. For example, the energy of emitted alpha particles was related to total intensity, or inversely related to half life. For uranium, for example, we find that isotopes with half lives of a minute or a few minutes have alpha energies near 7MeV, half lives of a few days go with energies near 6MeV, half-lives of years to thousands of years go with energies near 5MeV, and half-lives in the millions- to billions of years imply alpha energies of 4.5 MeV or less. The phenomenon of quantum tunneling and exponential statistics, coupled with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, eventually explained such patterns.

Throughout the book, we learn of the persons who worked all this out, of their labors, theories, missteps and discoveries. Of course, the Curies are the most famous, and Roentgen and Becquerel and Rutherford not far behind. The roll call of famous pre-1920 physicists and chemists numbers in the dozens, and many received Nobel Prizes. Marie and Irène Curie stand out as the only mother and daughter to both receive a Nobel Prize, while the two William Braggs, father and son, received a joint Prize in 1915.

The dangers of handling radioactive materials were slow to be realized. Several persons induced radium burns in their skin, but longer-term effects went unknown for decades. As late as 1960 children touring uranium-producing facilities were given vials or capsules containing yellowcake, or pure U₃O₈. Both my mother and I received such souvenirs. In my case, I carried the capsule in my pocket for a few weeks before putting it in a dresser drawer. Later I gave it to a geology professor for use as a standard material in his radiation lab (by 1971 it was almost impossible to obtain uranium compounds). I don't know if carrying a strong gamma-emitter like that had anything to do with the cancer I had forty years later; it occurred at a location in my colon next to the pocket in which I carried the capsule at age 12.

By the time the Manhattan Project and similar European efforts were undertaken, the decay chains illustrated above were well known, and Radioactivity as a discipline had been subsumed into Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics. The focus of study turned to those few isotopes that could be stimulated to fission, the basis of nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. In the public mind these overshadow other advances such as nuclear medicine and radionuclide imaging and therapy, and even the tiny speck of an alpha-emitter in a smoke detector (It is a tiny enough amount that even if you dug it out and ate it, you'd suffer little harm).

We live in the post-Atomic age. Nuclear power plants are on the wane, particularly after a few melt-downs in recent years and the disaster last year in Japan. Yet much of modern life would be unthinkable without the discoveries of more than a century ago, when the understanding of how atoms worked was turned upside down, starting with a few pieces of photographic film fogged by proximity to uranium ore.

Last words of a tyrant

2011-10-21T06:10:00.001-04:00

kw: world events, coups, assassinations

One way to spell his name is Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. He was usually called Gaddafi or Kadhafi. Now he is dead, and the world breathes a sigh of relief. While some deplore that he was killed without a trial, can you imagine the circus that would have resulted from bringing him to trial?

It is reported that his last words were, "What did I ever do to you?" What appalling self-blindness! I can imagine him asking the same thing of the thousands who were killed at his order, or the tens of thousands who were tortured. He takes his place among the genuinely evil, alongside Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceauşescu and Amin.