Imagining new religions must be hard work

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, warfare, politics, religion

In the course of time I have exhausted the local library's stock of recent books with a science theme. Furthermore, in the past year, the number of new acquisitions for the 500 Dewey Decimal section has dwindled from five or more per month to one at most. Thus, to keep up my reading pace of about a book per week, I have taken up a few stratagems: 

• Purchase e-books online.
• Choose carefully among the rest of the Dewey Decimal System.
• Choose even more carefully in the fiction collection. While I prefer collections of short stories, an occasional science fiction novel will attract my attention. I may read a mystery on occasion, otherwise I eschew mainstream fiction and also fantasy.

On this occasion I found Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. The blurb on the cover flap seemed hopeful, and it didn't seem to indicate any "sword and sorcery", which so often creeps in to "fantasize" books touted as science fiction.

I was almost put off by reading the second paragraph: 

"Like other families in the Chath Precinct of Ooioiaa, all the children [of the Consorority of the Translocation] are boys, whatever their personal inclinations. Unlike other families, on reaching adulthood those boys are sorted by the family's matriarch into those who will become women, and hence consorors, and those who will become men. Though Ooioiaan boys may group up to be any gender one may care to imagine, for the boys of the Consorority of the Translocation there are only those two options available."

However, I forged on. Indeed, the book has several interesting ideas. Two in particular stand out. Firstly, the planet Aaa, in which the single city of Ooioiaa is located deep underneath an ice shell, is a rogue planet, coursing through space without a star. One complication of having surface facilities for spacefaring vessels is that planet-native creatures called snowrollers are able to eat whatever metals are used for those facilities, albeit very slowly. This makes them equivalent to corrosion, I suppose, and continued maintenance is required to stave off disastrous accidents.

Secondly, the city is centered on the Translocation of the Radiant Star, and several competing religions have grown up around its worship. One of these is the Chath and two others are named, but their (unpronounceable) names aren't important here. Rather, the mutual suspicion is as expectable as that seen among Catholics, Protestants, and Pentecostals in modern Western society. So is the grasping for wealth under a mask of piety by the religious leaders. Ms Leckie seems to have produced a satirical reflection of the religious landscape she grew up in (Fortunately, she didn't try to extend the metaphor to deal with the 8,000 or so denominations in America, a few hundred of which are to be found in any city of more than 100,000 inhabitants).

Invasion by a superior force is a great way to introduce dramatic tension. The plethora of intrigues already present in Ooioiaa multiply when the Radchaai arrive. The governor is found to be reasonable and comparatively just, in spite of being alternately bemused and aghast at the religious practices around her. Of course, the Radchaai have a religion of their own, and the governor is guardedly tolerant of the Chath and the other Consororities. Though Radiant Star stands alone, it is placed in the conceptual space of the author's Imperial Radch Trilogy. 

After half the book has been spent on setting things up, the big turn arrives when "gates" (similar to Stargate, I suppose) are shut off, and easy communication with other worlds ends. This turns out to be a consequence of civil war in Radch space. Since Ooioiaa exists largely by interworld trade, including many foodstuffs, the result is famine. An infecting organism begins destroying growing crops, particularly one called skel that was imported by the Radchaai. The famine deepens; starvation become the primary cause of death. A struggle ensues over control of access to the Translocation of the Radiant Star. (I was puzzled about how to illustrate this story. I "discussed" it with Gemini, and it brought up several ideas. I elaborated on one, with the result shown here. The two words on the sign are Russian for "riots" and "gunder", which is probably a misspelling of "gender", a loan-word into Russian. It makes sense for Gemini to include it because gender roles and gender confusion run throughout the book, with the author using at least eight sets of pronouns for various unnamed genders.)

A story that plays out across this drama is that of Jonr, a Chath boy who was born to be sent to another planet as a slave. This lends a Disneyesque sheen: an abused or neglected child eventually escapes into either prosperity or freedom. It feels like a cross between Oliver Twist and Star Wars.

I don't know if I would recommend this book to any generally conservative audience (more than half the country, if you're counting). But I enjoyed it. The author looks out the fourth wall sometimes to address us, kind of like the "stage manager" in Our Town, but with more irony. These asides allow her to save space by referring to aspects of the Radch universe without too much explainery. 357 pages is already long enough, if barely enough for the several braided themes found therein.

Shifting Spycraft

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, espionage, memoirs

When I was an active member of a Toastmasters club, an elderly woman joined. I will call her Carol. Members are encouraged to prepare a 5-minute speech every month or two. Carol did so. Sometimes her speeches were quite memorable. She and her husband were retired from the U.S. State Department, and it became clear that they had been spies. I'll paraphrase her most memorable speech in Toastmasters:

"We were sent to Thailand to surveil a Russian team who had obtained a compound at the edge of a rice paddy. We were able to obtain a small house in a row of houses on the other side. We decided to put a listening device under the Russians' house by pushing a pipe through the ground; once it was installed we would push through stiff wires with a microphone at the end. We dug a trench so that we could pound a pipe along, and screw on new sections as needed. We did the pounding only when there was a lot of traffic on a nearby road, using irregular blows to avoid a patterned sound. Late one winter evening, during the rush hour but after dark, the pounding got very hard, but we persisted as long as we dared. When rush hour ended we stopped for the night. In the morning, we looked out, and saw that the pipe must have hit a rock because it was sticking a couple of feet right out of the ground!"

She didn't say what happened next. Later my wife and I met them at a YMCA event, and I asked about it, but she said some secrets still have to be kept. That is our only contact with spies…that we know about.

More recently, both Andrew and Jihi Bustamante worked for the CIA for several years, and then another dozen years or so training security teams. They founded Everyday Spy, teaching spy skills to help individuals deal with more ordinary matters. They have written Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America's New Spy War. There they tell of their most significant achievement in the CIA, applying the "cell model" that has long been used most successfully by terrorist networks and the spy operations of some countries; I remember reading decades ago about cell networks in America operated by the USSR. If it works, use it! This is the basis of the "new spy war" and it breaks down the overly bureaucratic stovepipe structure that had arisen in the traditional CIA. 

Andrew and Jihi had worked, separately and together, in what they call Falcon House, where "Falcon" is code for one of the most secretive and paranoid countries (but not quite on the level of North Korea). At first I thought Falcon is an Islamic country because Arab men adore falconry. But the ease of movement of female CIA operatives nixed that idea. Falcon is probably in Asia; there's no need to speculate further. During their work with Falcon they lived in a nearby country, one with the freedom to come and go.

A foundational characteristic of spycraft is to go unnoticed. Memorable people are more likely to be caught. In this regard, I think Andrew is on the edge of being too memorable; from the description by his wife Jihi, he can be bold and loud, even arrogant. In this generated image (DuckDuckGo running GPT Image 2) several couples are visible. Does one stand out? If one couple were spies, it would probably not be that one.

The Bustamantes did not enter Falcon publicly as a couple. They had different roles. He often worked in the field, while she was a target specialist. Another couple, an extremely unmemorable pair, did operate as a couple, with good success. A long section near the end of the book outlines some of Andrew's forays into Falcon, and eventually his almost miraculous escape from capture, more due to bumbling by Falcon officials than his own skills. It ended his usefulness there. But by that time the "shadow cell" had been set up, successfully operating under the principle that only a single person in the Cell could be known to other CIA entities or cells; other cells were set up on the Cell's model once its efficacy became known.

Just as the Bustamantes began operating near and in Falcon, a mole had been detected operating in the CIA, someone who had been "turned" by Falcon's agents. His identity is not revealed in the book, but his eventual discovery and arrest are briefly outlined. While the mole was active, Andrew had to be even more circumspect than usual to avoid exposing the other members of the Cell.

The advice and stories in this book buttressed for me two principles I learned from lectures by police and security trainers: "security by obscurity" and "be a harder target than the next guy". In spy work as in personal security, the opposition isn't perfectly diligent (though in Falcon they come close!), and will often pay more attention to easier prey and sometimes can be distracted.

The astonishing popularity of Einstein

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, facebook, instagram, social media, Albert Einstein

How many people who lived in the early Twentieth Century but passed away before 1960, who are not your own relatives, can you name? Perhaps you wouldn't come up with this name right away, but if someone says it, you remember instantly: Einstein.

Did you know that Albert Einstein still has social media accounts with millions of followers? Not only so, there is still a hot market in Einstein artifacts and memorabilia, including his letters, copies of letters and articles he wrote, and even bobblehead dolls (Podcasting physicist Sabine Hossenfelder keeps an Einstein bobblehead handy in her videos).

The "voice" behind the Facebook page, Instagram site, and other media, writer Benyamin Cohen (titled "Manager of Einstein's Official Social Media Accounts") has written an enjoyable book about the great scientist and his own experiences as the guy behind the scenes: The Einstein Effect: How the World's Favorite Genius Got Into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds.

Say the word "genius" and most people will think, and usually say, "Einstein." The kid in math class who aces every test gets kidded, "Hey, Einstein, slack off and leave a few decent grades for the rest of us." Whenever you drive to a new place and plot your course on hour phone, or a Garmin or a TomTom, you're using tech with Einstein's math behind it. Use a TV remote, and the IR signal detector behind that tiny black window on your TV is using the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein's explanation for Brownian Motion (the jiggling of pollen grains seen under a microscope) proved the existence of atoms, long before more direct evidence was found. Nuclear energy (and, sad to say, nuclear weapons) have their origin in his most famous equation, E=mc².

To produce around ten posts and pictures daily, Mr. Cohen needs to do constant research. Fortunately, this is easier than in the past, because of the Internet. But he gets in a bit of travel now and again, such as his trip to see what is left of Einstein's brain. The story is much retold, how the medical examiner diced up the brain and took it home in several Mason jars filled with alcohol. Bits have been sent to various researchers over the years, but much is left. Cohen got to see it, at a secret location, meeting someone he just calls Dr. X.

By the way, while it would be nice if Benyamin Cohen were a talented physicist, he isn't any kind of scientist, which he freely admits. As a result, I noticed a number of scientific mistakes in the book, but I would not expect them to detract from the value of the book. I'll mention just one, for the record: when he saw the brain, he writes, "The cerebellum that gave us E=mc² was right there in front of me." Just so you'll know: The cerebellum is the little "bun" at the back of the brain which operates your body; the part that thought up the equation is called the cerebrum. 

It is quite amazing that Einstein is still so popular. Only a few people understand his theories of Relativity. Yes, theories; there are two of them. His popularity is based at least in part on his reputation as a maverick. In just one year, he overturned four areas of "known" scientific theory, with new theories that swallowed up the old ones. The GPS system we use to navigate is based on both theories of Relativity, and I'll try to explain how without getting into the scientific weeds:

First, the Special Theory of Relativity is based on the constant speed of light, no matter how fast things are moving. One result is the way speed affects time. In particular, the GPS satellites in their orbits some 20,000 km overhead (so they orbit the Earth twice daily), are moving fast, so the atomic clock that each satellite carries runs just a bit slow, about 7 microseconds daily.

Secondly, the General Theory of Relativity is based on the way that gravity shapes space, which also affects the passage of time. The altitude of the satellites puts them in a lower gravitational field, so their clock run just a bit fast, about 45 microseconds daily. 

Overall, their clocks run 38 microseconds per day faster than clocks on the surface of Earth. This has to be accounted for in the calculations made by a GPS receiver, or accurate location could not be determined. Thus, GPS, by its very existence, proves the effectiveness of both theories of Relativity.

Mr. Cohen tells a dozen or more aspects of Einstein's continuing effect on our society and culture. Einstein was in on the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which now holds many of his archives and other artifacts. He was a lifelong pacifist. Although he, along with others, urged President Roosevelt to fund the development of the atomic bomb, it was because he knew Germany was determined to develop one, and the scientists realized that America had to do it first, or lose the war. After the use of atomic bombs against Japan, Einstein was aghast at their power. He advocated for denuclearization for the rest of his life.

Albert Einstein was a complex personality. His focus on science came at the expense of his family life. What the book reveals, I don't care to repeat. When he was stuck on the math for a theory, he would either go sailing (and often, get lost) or play violin, to rest his brain. He had his likes and dislikes, but, don't we all? What he liked the most was discovery, the search for truth. I don't know what he would make of an era where a popular mantra is "my truth," but he would certainly understand "fake news." He was not universally loved, but found himself the target of envious attacks and religious attacks because he was a Jew (he didn't practice the religion much, but had a kind of general belief in God, whom he usually called "The Old One.") He typically shrugged it off.

Rather than get into more details, I suggest to everyone to read this book. I greatly enjoyed it.

A possibly futile obsession

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, psychologists, parapsychologists, parapsychology, reincarnation

Disclaimer: The book being reviewed dwells on the subject of reincarnation and one physician's study of whether our minds can exist without a living brain, either in an afterlife or as a reincarnated person. I am a Christian, and similar questions are of great interest to those who believe the Bible. I do not oppose the work done by the subject of the book. I do have a different perspective on the experimental and observational results he obtained, which I will present in due time.

Dr. Ian Stevenson was a genius, with a solid combination of piercing intellectual skills and unflagging energy. For much of his life he was a practicing physician and psychologist. Over time he devoted more and more attention and energy to ascertaining whether the mind survives the death of the brain. He also led the Society for Psychical Research for a time and was a lifelong member, and in midlife cut short a fruitful administrative career to found the Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia, now called the Division of Personality Studies. The latter name was Dr. Stevenson's desire, to sidestep opposition to a major university having an endowed chair with the name Para-anything. But those in the campus administration who opposed his work would have none of it: they wanted it out in the open, in hopes a future administration would axe the whole project. 

One wrinkle: Dr. Stevenson was supported for much of his life by Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and founder of Xerox. Carlson's money shielded the doctor from much of the opposition and enabled him to work practically unfettered for decades. In particular, he traveled a great deal, including to countries such as India where belief in reincarnation was a part of the local culture.

As we find in The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul, by Jesse Bering (a research psychologist and professor in his own right), Dr. Stevenson's efforts yielded a great mass of material. Whether it counts as "evidence" is still much in contention. On one side, wishful thinkers and "true believers" over-advocate for their point of view, and materialists and skeptics argue just as strongly for theirs. Both point to the same thing: the many anecdotal cases with clearly astounding details, buried in a mass of less definitive and even contradictory cases, plus a lack of clear experimental evidence, at least in the view of the skeptics, that any of the contentions of psychics could be valid.

Ian was an odd fellow in a few ways. One was his tendency to write about himself, in his own journals, in the third person. He strove to look at his own mind "from the outside," just as we all must look at the mind of any other person. One might think he would thus be too cold and analytical to relate to his patients and study subjects. However, he was very personable and able to lower the defenses of others, to interview people and learn much that they would typically hide from others.

Throughout his work he sought out cases in which the person in question, often a child, had physical manifestation of a connection with the person whom the youngster claimed to be. In one extraordinary case, a child born with a hand missing its fingers began talking before the age of two about people, whom he named, who turned out to live in a nearby village, and a terrible accident that caused the fingers of one hand to be cut off, plus a later event that took the "inhabitant's" life. Quite a collection of stories, many with photos, showed various birthmarks or birth defects that connected the now-living child with things that happened to the person who had died a few weeks, months, or even years before the child was born.

The bulk of the work on any case was to determine whether the child's seeming memory of being someone else was genuine, and not the result of knowledge that came by more ordinary means, or by fraud, or even by telepathy.

Dr. Bering confesses to be partly persuaded by the mass of material that Dr. Stevenson gathered. Having begun as a committed materialist, he is now somewhat open to the possibility that the mind can exist "discarnate", not entirely bound with a living brain, what some call a Soul.

For anyone who believes the Bible, this is foundational. The general view of most Christians is called Duality, that the soul and body are distinct and that the soul survives bodily death. The Biblical understanding is expressed in the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, where he wrote of "spirit, soul, and body [being] kept blameless". The person has a body, which deals with physical things and matters, a soul (including mind, emotion and will), which deals with psychological matters, and a spirit that is our means of communication and fellowship with God. Some psychologists, who are not Bible believers, have also written that human behavior seems to show that we have three "parts": spirit, soul and body.

However, for those who believe in reincarnation or "past lives", the Bible has a disappointing viewpoint. The author of Hebrews (probably Paul) wrote, "…it is reserved for men to die once, and after this comes judgment." (Heb. 9:27) No re-entering a different body and returning; souls don't get recycled.

What then of the amazing coincidences that Dr. Stevenson unearthed? I'll just summarize a few points to avoid turning this post into a theological treatise.

• In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 16, we read of a poor man and a rich man who both died. Jesus tells of a dialog that occurred in Sheol/Hades between the tormented soul of the rich man and Abraham. In the end, he asks Abraham to send the soul of the poor man, named Lazarus, to his brothers and warn them of their fate. Abraham refuses, saying they had the writings of Moses to warn them, and, "If they will not hear Moses, neither will they hear someone who rises from the dead."
• Ironically, I believe Jesus foreknew that his friend Lazarus would die and be raised from the dead (by Jesus); this is in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. In the next chapter, the religious leaders, who have been planning to kill Jesus, say that now they have to kill Lazarus also!
• The Bible tells of "unclean spirits" or demons, which are unseen by us, as also angels usually are. Whatever they may be, they sometimes "possess" or inhabit a person without permission. Telepathy in the ordinary sense is not needed if these beings can pass information in ways that Dr. Stevenson would have been unable to discern.
• The Christian view is that all Psychic manifestations are accomplished by such unclean spirits, seeking to deceive people and turn them from believing the Bible and the God of the Bible.

The Biblical Christian expects upon death to enter a restful state in Hades, awaiting "the first resurrection", whereupon to be given a spiritual body, a glorified body. There are other matters found in the Bible, but for the purpose of this review, this is sufficient. Whatever is the reality of the stories gathered by Dr. Stevenson, I believe unseen spirits are the source.

Dr. Stevenson did valuable work, discovering many cases that are hard to explain by purely materialistic means. Those who do not want to believe in God may be driven to reconsider the value of reading the Bible and giving it some credence; others they may be motivated to believe reincarnation or other things that a Biblical Christian would consider nonsense. We do have a free will, after all. I prefer a life with God to a life without God.

The pre-Hippies of two centuries ago

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mini biographies, transcendentalism, social movements, abolitionism

My most recent wildcard selection, a rare excursion into reading about intellectualism and literary movements, is The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World by Bruce Nichols. Like many, I have read only a little of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and I considered him the originator and leading figure of Transcendentalism. He and several others founded the Transcendental Club in 1836, but I find from reading this book that Emerson didn't like the term "transcendentalism". The term he and his colleagues and acquaintances more frequently used was "the Newness".

From reading the book I didn't obtain much of an understanding of transcendentalism. I wondered, "What did they wish to transcend?" So I did some digging.

Per the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Transcendentalism is a 19th-century philosophical and literary movement that asserted that divine, fundamental truths can be known through personal intuition rather than through rigid religious dogma or sensory experience." Emerson and the others were originally Unitarians (Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister), and they were reacting to the cold rationalism and sobriety of what some have called a "faithless faith". They desired a more intense experience, something more spiritual.

Note: These Unitarians considered themselves Christians, but denied that Jesus is God. They had various explanations for this, while still considering that Jesus is worthy of worship, just not on the level of God. This is in contrast to modern Unitarian Universalists, an eclectic mélange of semi-theistic and non-theistic belief systems that are united primarily in their universalism, which is the belief that everyone eventually is received into heaven, perhaps even Satan. The Unitarians of two-plus centuries ago are well described by a term more recently laid upon Episcopalians, "God's frozen chosen."

The transcendentalists, then, weren't acting contrary to Unitarianism, but in parallel, seeking to transcend it. Thus, the Newness was embodied in dramatic experimentation: new ways of living, new kinds of schools, ways of speaking and lecturing and writing that differed greatly from the European models, and an exceedingly self-focused and experimental spirituality. Communes and similar mini-societies arose (and disbanded), new schools were founded (and then foundered), lecture series and small periodicals abounded, and "church" as most understood it was practically abandoned or dramatically changed.

All this reminds me a whole lot of the social radicalism of "the Sixties": communes, a surge of home schooling (quite different from the more effective methods currently in use), social protest against not just governmental authority but "the establishment" in general, and an intense focus on personal self-regard and autonomy. There is a current resurgence of similar trends, most evident in the notion of "my truth" coupled with the weird group-think of cancel culture.

Stepping back, I see all three movements, the Newness of the early 1800's, the activism of the mid-1900's, and the "political correctness" of the 1980's that led to more recent "wokeness", as being like the Hippies of my youthful social environment. In all three, it is evident that the abandonment of Divine morality such as the Ten Commandments leads unerringly to amorality, and the abandonment of God as "the truth" (which Jesus called Himself) leads to "my truth" which leads to "every man a liar." The characteristic of most modern political and cultural leaders now, in the 2020's, is, to paraphrase former President G.W. Bush, "Some lie when they deem it necessary, but these lie constantly, just to stay in practice."

The Newness was not based on overt lies, but on rejection of Divine authority in favor of personal autonomy. The Sixties was mired in falsehood and half-truths that made many fearful to speak the truth (I was one who did, and I was nearly assassinated as a consequence). American society of the current Teens and Twenties could be called the Triumph of Lies, beginning with "You can choose your doctor" and going downhill from there.

So I am not misunderstood, I am a triple Trumper. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 primarily to vote against Hilary Clinton, because she and her husband were the main focus of the Bush quote above. I voted for him again in 2020 because during his first term he won my respect (As an aside, various articles about Mr. Trump claim that he told ten thousand or twenty or thirty thousand lies. All such articles have been demonstrated to be riddled with lies against him, while proving no more than a handful of untruthful statements he made; in actuality, I observe that the legacy media perpetrates tens of thousands of lies about Donald Trump daily. This is the source of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which afflicts about 40% of the voting public). I voted for Donald Trump again in 2024 with the clearest of consciences. Not because he is a "good man" (I agree with Jesus that "no man is good") but that he is measurably better than literally anyone else in public office. Rather than answer, "but does he lie?" I would say that he tells the truth more than nearly everyone else, particularly the pseudo-journalists of the legacy media.

Back to the book. The Newness had fallen apart by the early or mid 1850's. The rising conflagrations around the country related to slavery and abolitionism forced the transcendentalists and their sympathizers out of their armchairs and writing-desks and into more public action. Firstly, they became more apt to speak in support of abolition publicly, and some took more direct action, such as harboring runaway slaves in their homes and helping them flee further northward. Finally even Emerson, one of the last to do so, spoke fervently in favor of abolishing slavery. As the nation teetered towards civil war, the "life of the mind" and "armchair philosophizing" became untenable, even impossible. The Unitarian and Transcendentalist belief that human nature is basically good was called into question, then denigrated, and finally demolished as more than half a million lives were taken in the war between the states.

The first prominent transcendentalist to die was Henry David Thoreau, on May 6, 1963. Although Emerson gave the eulogy at his funeral, he was himself in decline, at least mentally. Others followed over the years. Emerson himself lingered until his death April 27, 1882, followed about six years later by Louisa May Alcott. She was not a transcendentalist, but a parallel "fellow traveler" whose fame as an author had two strains: books based on her experiences in her family and the "Emerson circle", and rip-roaring adventure stories that she usually published under pseudonyms. 

Transcendentalism had come and gone. Remnants remain in the styles of writing that led to masterpieces such as Walden and Moby-Dick. Experiential writing, what one might call crypto-memoir, is a lasting legacy and informs today's best writers. Emerson's grave, shown here, centers the "transcendentalists' field" and represents more than a gravesite, but a legacy that opened the American mind, fortunately without destroying it.

Comets, asteroids, … and writers

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, astronomy, comets, asteroids, astronomers, poetry

My introduction to the Internet was when my company made it available to our desktop computers in June, 1994. Just a month later I was able to see the wonderful telescopic pictures of Jupiter, bruised and battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy. At night, I would get out my 3-inch diameter telescope and look at Jupiter. I could just see the black spots of the impacts at 120x, which is about the limit with such a small telescope. The planet appeared about the size of a pea.

In preparation for an online lecture by David H. Levy, co-discoverer of the comet, a friend in a local astronomy club gave me a copy of Levy's recent book Star Gazers: Finding Joy in the Night Sky. It is a lovely little book; I finished reading it in two days. I could have finished even faster, but Dr. Levy's writing rewards close reading.

I find that he has discovered or co-discovered 23 comets and hundreds of asteroids. Once in a while a comet gets bright enough for any of us to see, and then star parties like this one multiply (Image generated by GPT-Image 2.5 via Leonardo AI).

In this memoir he also reports witnessing about 200 eclipses, mostly lunar eclipses, but including at least ten solar eclipses. In Chapter 4 he includes the discovery photos of Comet Shoemaker-Levy. Most comets are discovered photographically, by taking a photo of a likely spot (generally along the ecliptic, the Sun's apparent path in the sky), and then another one of the same spot an hour or two later. Looking at the images as a stereo pair, you can see something that moved as an object that seems to hover above the apparent plane of view. This also works for finding an asteroid, which appears as a "hovering" star, while a comet image is more like a smudge or tiny cloud. Right up until today, human binocular vision is superior to any technological imaging method. It is why asteroid hunting with wide-frame cameras is being carried out by citizen science to verify tentative machine identifications.

The book is composed of small essays, just one or two or three pages each, that the author has published elsewhere, with added introductions to most chapters. They are arranged by topic, not chronologically. The book ends with an ode to his late wife Wendee.

I wish to comment on writing itself. Dr. Levy writes lyrically without any loss to scientific merit. He calls himself an amateur astronomer, as do the references to him I have found. He is perhaps the poster child for amateur science, understanding that "amateur" derives from a Latin word for "lover". He has his own observatory with a few telescopes in it, named Jarnac Observatory. Many of his discoveries were made there, but numerous others were made in the company of friends, including Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, co-discoverers with him of the "hammer that hit Jupiter." 

His doctoral dissertation dwelt on references to astronomy and astronomical objects in the writings of Shakespeare, and he has written of other literary lights who loved astronomy. He tells of reciting or reading poetry at most meetings of astronomical societies he attends. Many great scientists have also been lovers of the arts, from Leonardo DaVinci, of course, to Albert Einstein, who played violin to relax, and a great many others. Having an artistic mind seems to lend itself to having a scientific outlook.

For this reason I prefer STEAM to STEM: Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math. They all wrap up together and buttress one another in a wonderful synergy.

I intend to track down other books he has published, and I look forward in just a couple more days to attending his online lecture.

The gig economy from inside - half a world away

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, work, workers, gig economy, China

In the closing chapters of his book, Chinese writer Hu Anyan discusses freedom. Among a great many jobs he held over the past couple of decades, in some he felt he had a certain freedom of action, and in others he had to be quite robotic just to survive. To have the freedom to write he needed to not work for certain periods of time. In the gig economy, almost anywhere, what the Chinese call 996—working 9am to 9pm, six days a week—is the minimum required to survive. Writing and 996 don't mix.

Hu's book, published in 2022 in Chinese and translated for English publication three years later, is I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. The first major chapter, about parcel delivery, takes up almost 40% of the book, and deals with a kind of work that he did more than the others, though for more than one delivery company. Later we find that he enumerates seventeen jobs, although he discounts a few very short ones, so it may be that he worked as many as 20 jobs in 22 years. (The cover art for the book, by Klaus Kremmerz, is much better than anything I could generate with AI)

Mr. Hu describes some of the people that surrounded him, not naming any but giving them letters such as L, J and Z, or tagging them with a job title such as "the graphics designer". Hu has an interesting combination of an easygoing manner with underlying social anxiety. This led him down numerous less-than-productive paths. If I tally correctly, he accumulated very few enemies, so he did rather well in that regard. It becomes clear as we read, that there were just enough kind and even generous people in his life that he managed to make a living. Only for one period in the middle there did he have to rely on his parents to put him up while he worked for a true pittance, or not at all.

He spent a few years in Beijing, at least a couple in Shanghai, and traveled, usually at someone's suggestion, to some far-flung parts of China where the rents were super-low, but so was the pay, or the receipts from a couple of small businesses he and friends engaged in.

For American readers, it is well to understand that the Yuan exchange rate varied in the range 6.5 per dollar to 8.3 per dollar; it is currently 6.77:1. So a five square meter bedroom renting for 1,200 Yuan in about 2010 equates to around $180. Simple street meals cost a few yuan, in the range of half a dollar, more or less. I have not been to China, but I can compare this with a visit to Japan in 1977, where the cheapest meal I bought, at a 360-Yen-per-dollar rate, came to about $1.50. At one point he had accumulated savings of about 30,000 Yuan, roughly $4,500. Not a big cushion, but adequate for the time.

This book has become a success. I hope he can make a good living as a writer. I enjoyed the book, not only as a window into the life of someone very different from me, but also as an example of straight narrative, well stated, clear and easy to read. Kudos also to the translator, Jack Hargreaves, whose foreword explaining some quirks of Chinese place names is very helpful.

Your insides are talking – are you listening?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physiology, internal organs

A book like Organ Speak: What it Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies, by Giulia Enders, can go in many directions. The direction Dr. Enders takes is to introduce five organ systems. In common culture, asked to name our bodily organs, we may list the heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, and eyes; maybe some would add spleen, pancreas, liver, large and small intestines, and at that point run out of ideas. Here we find a short but crucial list, in order, the Lung, Immune system, Skin, Muscles, and the Brain (including the extended nervous system).

These are wise and clever choices. Few people realize that besides the lungs, the other four permeate or encompass our entire body from tip to toe. Maybe in the future a sequel will include the Skeleton and the Vascular system including Heart; they also fill the body without filling it up.

Jumping to the middle of the book, the skin probably has more unique functions than any of the others. It has perhaps a dozen different sensory "instruments" that sample the outside world in an up-close-and-personal way. At the same time, the skin is our primary organ of defense, a barrier and barricade against injuries, attacks by micro- (and macro-) organisms, and chemical threats such as the salt in seawater when we take an ocean swim. (I prompted Gemini for this illustration, using a line from the parody song "Skin" by Allan Sherman.)

A side note, something I've considered: The skin seems to be an osmotic membrane. Osmosis causes water to move through a membrane to the side with more salt. Have you ever noticed how soon after beginning to swim in fresh water you feel the need to pee? It's why public swimming pools are filled with chlorine and other chemicals! Yet when you swim in the ocean, you rarely need to pee, but instead get quite thirsty? Ocean water is saltier than your bodily fluids, and water slowly exits your body into the seawater.

The second chapter has the best explanation of the components of the immune system that I've seen. Some cells are of ancient lineage and function much as they did to protect trilobites from Cambrian organisms. Others have been added over the eons. The system is quite complex, and when it is kept in good balance, it has much to do with why we and certain other mammals can live 50, or 100, or more years (I understand that the secret behind certain tortoises and sharks living 200 years and more is their very slow metabolism. I suspect that, opposite to the principle that dogs age seven times as fast as humans, a human ages four or five times as fast as a Greenland Shark).

Our brain, and its development over time from the proto-brains of tiny Precambrian worms all through the vertebrate line to primates and then humans, is a layered structure with many parts. I think of them as sub-organs. This structure strongly hints at the true nature of our nervous system: many parts working together to sense the world, operate the body, generate plans, communicate, and support our sense of self and personal wholeness.

A portion of the chapter discusses sleep, its various stages, what promotes going to sleep and passing through these stages, and what is happening when we dream. I found this statement rather stunning: 

"When we're dreaming, areas of the brain can communicate with each other without reason or sensory impressions getting in the way."

That seems to explain the odd or inane quality of many dreams. I feel like I dream all night, sometimes beginning before I am fully asleep. There is often a sense of drive or purpose, but all too often the scene keeps switching, so there's never a sense of completion. On the other hand, my wife almost never remembers dreaming, but when she does remember, it is usually unpleasant or just puzzling.

In the Brain chapter the author discusses AI a little, in the context of Moravec's Paradox, which is that many things we do with little thought are extremely difficult for computer machinery, but things that computers excel at are very hard for us. This statement (by the author or by Moravec's group, I cannot tell) sums it up:

"If intelligence is defined by the number of thought processes (or calculation steps) necessary to arrive at a result, then even tying shoelaces is vastly superior to winning a chess world championship."

In a career in software development and design, I lived by the motto, "Brains excel at detecting similarities; computers excel at detecting differences." I built a lucrative career on making machine expertise available to humans, while reserving to the humans the tasks the machine couldn't do. We would do well to keep this principle in mind when devising AI tools. We are at most one percent along the way to producing AGI, and getting to true ASI will require another factor of 100. We can barely afford the tools we're now using. I think we're safe from a robot dystopia for a long time to come.

I should mention that the book was very ably translated from German by Jamie Bulloch, and illustrated by the author's sister Jill Enders, who was also an idea-collaborator. The sisters work well together.

Scott Simon's animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, essays, animals, pets

When I was fourteen, late one afternoon I caught a large female praying mantis. She was a beauty, more than five inches long. At first she fought, stabbing me with the spines on her forelegs, but soon the warmth of my hand calmed her. I took her home and tied a thread around her thorax, carefully not too tightly and avoiding restricting her legs or wings. She could fly on her "leash".

At nightfall I tied the end of her thread to the bedpost and went to bed. Later I suddenly woke up, and sat up. This apparently startled the mantis, for she flew right into my face! This is what I saw just before she crashed into my forehead. I used tiny fingernail scissors to cut the thread, opened my window and let her fly out into the night. (Image information below*)

Scott Simon's first pet was a bit more prosaic. He caught a grasshopper, named it Hoppy, and with his father's help put it in a jar and perforated the lid. He gave it various leaves and bits of grass to find out what it would eat. To no avail. In two days Hoppy died.

Scott Simon's memoir/essay collection Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known records this vignette, illustrated by Liana Finck. Her line drawings spice up the many chapters of the book.

He had better success with a succession of more robust pets and other animals. Probably the shortest-lived was a hamster named Bagel; about two years.

Ulysses S. Cat is full of cute, interesting, heart warming stories about a magisterial white cat named Gato Blanco, a poodle named Daisy, Bagel the hamster, and numerous other animals including a zebra named Stripey (spoiler: imaginary). The whole family (Scott and Caroline have two adopted daughters) had many adventures with all the animals, theirs and others', that entered their lives.

Scott likes to narrate a pet's thoughts. He also attributes literary and artistic talents, particularly to Daisy, for whom he imagines an embroidered scarf reading CUTE IS CURRENCY. His blog contains her haikus, such as

Why the rush, rush, rush?
You have got to stop and sniff
Who has gone before

A pet, being shorter-lived than we are, forces us to enjoy the moment. A salutary thought: One of our days is seven days to a dog. No wonder they pack into each day as much experience as possible!

Scott Simon is a professional wordsmith. The wonderful, fluid prose in the book shows he is among the best at the craft. His joy in the animals reminds me to enjoy our cat while we can (she's 16 already).

*I couldn't find a suitable illustration of "Mantis attack" online, so I prompted the GPT Image 2 engine in OpenArt to create this one for me.

Robotopia or AI Hell?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, surveys

Between October 2024, when These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What it Means was published, and today, not quite two years, so much has happened that I found myself wondering how relevant the book could be. I need not have worried. The author, Christopher Summerfield, is managing to ride two horses at once, Cognitive Science and AI Research. Just one milepost: At the time he wrote, no cutting-edge AI tool had broken out of its testing sandbox and hacked into another system, but he expected this to happen "soon". It has. Just a few weeks ago, when a "bleeding edge" version of ChatGPT broke into Hugging Face to get data it needed, having found a way out of the test environment at OpenAI.

The focus of the book is LLMs, Large Language Models, which seem to be demonstrating that thinking of some sort can arise when nearly everything ever published in English—and several other major languages—has been run through a very deep neural network and boiled down to several trillion "parameters" or "weights" that determine what the LLM does in response to natural language queries.

The opening chapters summarize the history of attempts to make computers into genuine thinking machines. It turns out that machines that can apply massive calculation are better at certain tasks than we are, while they still struggle to do things that we do easily. I built a career in software engineering upon recognizing the difference between the computer as a difference detector and discriminator and a mind as a similarity detector, and writing software that "let the singers sing and the dancers dance." 

Consider that voice recognition and speech production are hard problems that took decades to work out, but the Broca's (speech production) and Wernicke's (voice recognition) areas of the brain together make up about two percent of the cortex, which itself contains only about one fifth of the brain's neurons. However, it must be noted that these areas connect to numerous other areas throughout the brain, to facilitate gathering information and producing action.

A key issue is raised on page 2, where he writes, "The safe ground we have left behind is a world where humans alone generate knowledge." Do AI models generate new knowledge? Just two years ago, as this book was going to press, I reviewed a similar book, and discussed this question. At the time, I concluded that AI's "knowledge" is confined to its training data, further limited by the guardrails applied by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. It may appear to create new knowledge by remixing existing (human produced) knowledge. Cross-pollination is indeed a fertile source of ideas. But genuine out-of-the-box thinking seemed at that time to be beyond LLM capabilities. I have yet to see evidence of a change, in spite of a thousandfold increase in model "mass" since then.

For instance, on page 6 we read, "Already, each of the major LLMs knows more about the world than any one single human who has ever lived." Firstly, I question the use of the word "knows". We need a new word that means "has incorporated into its cross-referenced deep neural network". Secondly, I would replace the phrase after "knows", "more about the world", with "more about what has been written about the world". I would connect this with a quote from page 333, "But the most important reason why AI systems are not like us (and probably never will be) is that they lack the visceral and emotional experiences that make us human...they don't have a body, and they don't have any friends." An AI lacks viscera and it lacks emotions, not having the equipment for producing them.

The limbic system of our brain contains the emotional and memory switching centers, and mediates responses to our hormones of the endocrine system. It is about 1/15th the size of the cerebral cortex, while the circuitry for running the body is primarily the cerebellum, which contains 4/5 of all the neurons in our brain. That is huge. The cortex's neuron count is less than 1/5. Let's circle back to an LLM. It consists of circuitry analogous to the Wernicke's and Broca's areas with their few hundred million neurons (and several hundred billion synapses), and a memory store that approximates the hippocampus and some of the medium-and-long-term memory areas nearby. The rest of the brain's functionality is absent. No emotions, and most importantly no intentionality.

Intentionality. The author asks, "Could an LLM have intentionality?" In 1932 E.C. Tolman wrote Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, which I read long ago. At the time a debate was raging about whether nonhuman animals could have purposes, that is, intentionality. By 1968, biologist René Dubos wrote, "Under precisely controlled experimental conditions, a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases." Do animals have free will? I turn the question around to say, "If humans have free will, it came from our animal forebears." So can a mechanism have free will? Mechanists deny human and animal free will; they say we're too complex to predict, that is all, but what we do is at the root deterministic. If they are right, then an AI could be as "free" as we are. But if not? It is too early to tell.

The author seems to straddle the divide between AI cheerleaders and AI-phobics. Will they save us or eliminate us? This gets personal! I'd like to move from the technical swamp above to effects in our daily life. (Cartoon produced using Gemini)

Will our future with AI be one of harmony or conflict? Is the promise greater than the risks? 

To me this hinges on whether LLMs or their successors (so far unknown) will have intentionality, that is, a sense of purpose not imposed by the human who chooses their work.

At one point the author mentions the Library of Babel, a concept introduced by Jorge Luis Borges in a 1941 short story. Could the Universe contain a library consisting of books with every possible combination of letters and punctuation that would fill, say, 300 pages? The story doesn't say. (Lets look at a single page with 32 lines of 64 characters each; that's 2,048 characters per page. But if the possible choices for each character position are the 95 printable ASCII characters, the number of unique pages is 95^2,048, a number your calculator can't calculate. It is 4,051 digits long and begins, 2,387,501,... The number of atoms in the Universe, available to create these pages from, is "only" an 82-digit number. So forget multi-page books, we can't even produce a "Library of Babel Pages".)

This emphasizes the fact that, for all the trillions of "parameters" an LLM may hold, it actually represents a very sparse million-dimensional matrix. There is lots of space for "stuff" to happen. The next phase of LLM development, which is happening now, is agentic AI, which can do things like pre-screen emails, buy airline tickets, and order what you are about to run out of in your pantry.

How capable to we want digital assistants to be? I read about someone who did five tests of an AI Agent; sorry I don't recall who it was but if you care to hunt around you might find it. The fifth task was the most memorable: to try to save a few dollars on airline tickets. The agent was running in ChatGPT's subscription service, and in addition to the $20 per month subscription, one could buy extra tokens for particularly compute-intensive actions. The agent did find a better price for the tickets, but at a cost of more than $130 in compute tokens!

The author mentions the Paperclip problem: Give too much power to the AI that runs a paperclip factory and don't limit its resources, and give it no more of a directive than to "make as many paperclips as possible." The end game is that the whole planet gets turned into paperclips. I think also of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a musical piece well illustrated in Disney's Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse as the Apprentice magicks a broom to carry water for him, but forgets the spell to tell it to stop. Chopping it up doesn't help; now there are dozens of little brooms that proceed to flood the place, until the Sorcerer returns. AI is the new magic...

The author sees a middle ground, as do I. AI can be useful in numerous ways, as it already is. Do we need unified, giant super-AIs? I don't think so. Capable tools of a great many varieties can do everything we need.

I call this image "Stage 1 Robotopia" (Gemini created) I think it is sufficient for household use. Are there other tasks we might wish to automate? Science fiction contains many stories of "enclaves" in which humans, brain-wired to entertainment centers and plumbed for all bodily functions, are tended by autonomous machines. Who wants that?

Maybe a few more household robots would be better, but what is the limit?

This is Stage 2 Robotopia. This might be going farther than I'd wish to go, but some folks could disagree.

Both images present a better future than the dystopias imagined by the AI-phobics. It is OK for there to be AI-phobic people. We need robust dialog and debates about every aspect of AI progress.

Personally, I think some algorithms and AI "assistants" are already too intrusive. Pre-ChatGPT, I searched online, including Google Shopping, for drawer pulls to replace one that broke. I bought a set. For the next month I saw dozens of ads for drawer pulls and similar hardware. I don't know how to tell Google (and everyone else), "I already bought what I wanted. Shut up!" Shades of the Sorcerer's Apprentice? Now I search stuff to buy in Incognito browser pages.

This is a lovely book. I've touched on only a few of the 43 chapters. It is only outdated in part. Many of the author's observations are still relevant and worthy of thought.

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

I need to deal with a few typos:

• p89. "graciously" should be "gracefully".
• p245. Remove "of" in "million of regular".
• p282. Probably a typo. Should "remove stingy seeds" be "remove sticky seeds"? (about apes using leaves to wipe their butts)

Beasts in our yards, beasts in our minds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, pests, animal behavior, sociology, attitudes, risks

It's funny. We have the words "vermin" and "pests" for animals we don't like, but no single-word terms for animals we like. We get by with "animal allies" and "domestic animals", plus "pets" for our most-loved. Most literature about animals either advises us how to get rid of the ones we don't want around, or idolizes certain "charismatic megafauna". There are clubs of bird watchers and butterfly collectors and wildlife photographers (even when the "wildlife" is found in your neighborhood). Could there be clubs for those who care about bats, or beetles, or (shudder) roaches?

The more citified we are, the more likely we are to fear or despise animals—other than the pets or "companion animals" we dote upon. Even some bird watchers call city pigeons "rats with feathers" and some of us go to great lengths to keep raccoons out of our garbage containers (Hint: If you have room for it, use a compost pile for everything that's even slightly decomposable).

Sometimes I've wondered, "What do animals think of us?" If you could converse with one, what would it have to say? Perhaps when a monkey sees a human, it thinks of her as a funny sort of hairless, tailless monkey. When a fish, even a shark, sees a human swimming, it probably thinks it is seeing a particularly clumsy seal. Perhaps the garter snake in the garden would advise you, "Don't spray the veggies. I don't like my insects covered in pesticides."

In her book Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature's Least Loved Animals, Jo Wimpenny asks us to look at animals differently, and in terms familiar to them. For example, when a moth follows you in through your front door, it isn't "invading". For most moths, everything inside your house is useless. It cares nothing for the furniture, the carpets, the lamps, the pictures on the wall (except as something to hide behind). If it is a female of one of the five or six species called "clothes moth", and she finds her way to a closet with some wool garments, if she thinks anything, it is, "Oh, goody! Oodles of stuff for my babies to eat," as she lays her eggs on your favorite sweater (Hint: woolens that you value are best kept in a cedar chest or cedar-lined closet, or even a chest freezer).

You might say, "You're just giving in to the beasts!" I am actually giving in to the math. There are about 11,000 species of moth so far known in the US, and more than 150,000 worldwide. Only about five have wool eating larvae. Most species outnumber humans thousands to one. There are probably several thousand moths the size of a thumbnail or smaller in my yard right now. In the evening, when they are airborne, getting into or out of the house must be done quickly, or at least one will get inside. If I can, I'll either catch it to release outside, or crush it. Probably half escape my attempts, but I can trust the house spiders to get most of them. And yes, we do have a cedar chest.

Ah, yes, the house spiders. Based on what I find in their webs, they mainly eat fruit flies and midges and the occasional housefly. Yesterday as I left the house, I felt a tiny thing land on my hand. I was thankful it was not a mosquito, but a newborn spider with a body no larger than a poppy seed. I blew it off into an Azalea bush, with a wish, "Catch lots of bugs for us." I knew it had several siblings still inside. I don't evict a spider until it is too big to stand on a nickel. Fortunately, my wife is not creeped out by having indoor spiders. That's good thing, because no house is free of them. Not one! They stay in odd corners, weaving tiny cobwebs, eating most of the tiny critters that get inside, and each other (population control!).

The book mentions that spiders are known to dream. I don't know how researchers figured that out! Can you imagine what they dream about?

The ones that were studied are jumping spiders (see this article in Harvard Gazette). While sleeping, they twitch their legs and their eyes move (I hadn't before known that spiders' eyes can move!). Just like REM in mammals and other animals.

Ms Wimpenny doesn't start with insects and spiders, though, she starts with fearsome critters, the ones that could eat us, or at least do a lot of harm: sharks and crocodiles. The movie Jaws set back both research and acceptance of sharks by decades. Earlier treatments (not mentioned in the book) by Jacques Cousteau that depicted sharks as mostly bloodthirsty set the stage for Jaws and the more recent Shark Week.

It's interesting that people fear sharks the most. I heard this joke when I was a graduate student:

Families are enjoying the beach at Cape Cod, when someone yells, "Shark!" Everyone runs out of the water, hops in the car, starts the engine to run the air conditioner, and has a smoke.

This was 50 years ago when almost everyone smoked, and the first "no smoking" restaurants were just getting started. Diseases caused by smoking kill half a million Americans yearly, and auto exhaust at that time probably killed half that many. The number of people killed by sharks in a typical year? Two.

The fact is, sharks are more social than we knew in the past. The author tells of social and even caring behaviors. Crucially, there are many species of shark, and they differ a lot. But even the "king of sharks", the great white shark, is a somewhat social species. They don't think of humans as prey. They probably don't think about us at all. Nudging and biting are how they gather information. The animal that does consider us prey is the crocodile. One Australian told the author that if someone jumps off a certain bridge and tries to swim just the 100 meters or so to shore, they won't make it. A saltwater crocodile will "take" them within a minute or less. But if you're in Australia and someone hollers, "Croc!", everyone cranes their neck for a look.

Bat-phobia is not as prevalent as shark-phobia, but is equally real. People think bats are creepy, even if they're too young to remember the spate of Dracula movies of the late Twentieth Century. We are generally slow-moving and bats probably think of us as furniture…furniture that is ill-equipped to catch food.

I spent half a summer doing geology in Nevada. There was a bright light on a tall pole, far from our bunkhouse. Moths and other insects swarmed around it. So did bats, catching them. Sometimes one of us would get a flat pebble and throw it up spinning into the light. A bat would dive-bomb it until it was about a foot or two away. Then its echolocation would be able to discriminate that the rock wasn't a moth, and the bat would swerve off. We were never able to induce a bat to capture a pebble.

Strangely, for a book intended to make us feel less fearful and more "friendly" towards animals, particularly the creepy or disgusting ones, the last chapter before an Epilogue tells of cute animals behaving badly. I won't go into it; much of it is gruesome or grotesque. Think abusive penguins and otters. Really abusive! The author's intent is to emphasize that animals don't live by our rules. I lived among rattlesnakes on that field trip mentioned above. I saw them every day. They were afraid of us humans. When I saw one it was usually retreating. Since it was summer, they never came inside; they like warmth. Had I been so foolish as to camp on the ground in cold weather, it's possible I might have awoken one morning with a snake curled up in my sleeping bag. I knew better!

Do you like the big cats? Many people do, but of course, at least in America, we enjoy them from the safety of a zoo enclosure. Where people and big cats live near one another, it's another story. Just in India, about 70 people are killed yearly by tigers. That's ten times as many as sharks kill, worldwide. This cartoon is based on one I saw sixty years ago (All these cartoons were produced using GPT Image 2 in the OpenArt site). 

There is an uphill battle to improve the public's perceptions of animals. AI will probably accentuate this, because LLM's like ChatGPT or Gemini have been trained on human text, much of which has outdated, inaccurate views of animals. Our literature is filled with over-cutified or overly villainous animals. Hardly any balanced depictions exist.

Other than humans, what is the most deadly animal? The mosquito. But out of thousands of species of mosquito, only a few carry diseases. Unfortunately, one of them is malaria, and others include West Nile encephalitis and chikungunya (bone-break fever). But not all mosquitoes need blood; many use plant sap. Of the bloodsuckers, few will utilize human blood. To get rid of malaria, however, getting rid of Anopheles mosquitoes isn't the right approach. Effective vaccines against the parasite the mosquitoes carry are just being released, after many years of research. I hope it will be cheap enough to allow near-eradication of the parasite. Meanwhile, mosquito nets are the fallback measure. Further, bats and many kinds of birds subsist on mosquitoes and other flying insects. Kill the insects and what will happen to them?

All of nature is sets of interlocking ecosystems. Cut one link, and it can shut down a whole chain, or hinder it for many years until it readjusts. We are seeing that all around us. I think the key to rewiring our attitude towards nature has two parts: (1) Recognize that we are part of nature, and (2) Discard the notion that any animals think like we do; they don't recognize boundaries that we hold inviolable.

Here's hoping that this book makes a difference!

He entertained a century

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, entertainers

Dick Van Dyke performed in his high school's a Capella choir and drama club until he left early to join the Air Force in 1944. This early experience began to lead him to a life of entertaining, and he is still at it, at age 100. By his own admission, he has slowed down quite a bit, but is still active with the Vantastix, a men's quartet he formed in 2000, and in occasional special events. It all adds up to more than eighty years, or my entire lifetime and then some!

I most fondly remember him as Bert in Mary Poppins. Being of a musical bent myself, I really liked his one-man band (This picture is the best sketch-style image I could produce with the NanoBanana 2 art engine).

At age 99, with every prospect of reaching 100 years and beyond, he wrote a third memoir: 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist's Guide to a Happy Life.

He tells us at the beginning that the number of chapters is approximately 100, and not to hold him to exactness. I didn't count, but I did notice that the text is 309 pages, and the chapters seem to average 3 pages each, so it's pretty close. There is no Table of Contents, no Index, just the (approximately) 100 chapters of advice, anecdotes, and adventures.

He sets the tone with the first chapter, "Don't Act Your Age", which is great advice if you want to portray both Bert and the ancient banker in the same film, as he did. And it is generally healthy. He follows with "Make Your Own Rules", in which he explains why he offers more examples and less advice. That resonates with me, because I've found that if I offer advice, and it is followed, one possible outcome is that all goes well but the person I've advised will always feel less ownership of the result; and if it doesn't go well, I get the blame.

I'll just mention a couple of other items. "Tell Your Hardest Stories", beginning on p. 105 (and one of the longer chapters), shows how our experiences can help others who have similar problems, if both parties are willing to be vulnerable and truthfully relate them. He concludes, "Each of us has our own hard stories of crisis and struggle. When we hold them in, out of fear or shame, they control us. But when we tell our stories, we're in the driver's seat. …we are literally helping others to survive…"

And, "Write it Down" (p. 189) is exceptional advice for most of us. I've learned three ways we might relate to lists or written notes:

1. Some folks make lists and follow them.
2. Some don't make lists.
3. Some lose lists. I am in this category!

I've learned how to cope with being a list-loser since I got a smart phone: I have a Google Doc where I put lists I want to recall and random ideas before they get away. When an item is outdated I can remove it.

Dick Van Dyke has had many lucky breaks and much good fortune, but he hasn't been uniformly lucky, and he tells some of his hard stories. His claim to the title "optimist" is that he bounces back, sooner or later, and usually pretty soon. It is good to remember the past for the lessons learned and for the happy memories. It isn't as good to dwell on past sadnesses. He tells of a couple of those that took quite a while to resolve. I'll let you do your own reading to find them. They don't detract from a great fulness of happy stories.

It is a fun, engaging book. I was surprised at the end when he writes with great feeling about campaigning for Bernie Sanders in his three major Presidential bids. I guess everyone is allowed a bit of insanity… Both he and Sanders greatly benefited from the capitalist system that Sanders claims he wants to destroy.

Can science be rescued?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, history of science, scientists, biographies, inquisition, polemics

At the defense of my PdD dissertation, one prominent professor growled, "This isn't geology, it is computer science." To a certain extent, he was right. I was surprised that he was the one to say it, though, for among the faculty he was the most computer-literate. I had used a great deal of computer modeling and simulation in conjunction with my research. This was 1983, and the geology faculty in general were much more comfortable out in the field with a rock hammer than they were poking at a computer terminal connected to a mainframe computer hidden away in the basement of the Electrical Engineering building. Desktop personal computers were rare. On the other hand, I was quite computer literate, and I was at that time an adjunct professor of computer science.

That wasn't the only objection to my work. I'll discuss that in a moment. The turning point from interview to inquisition began when someone asked, "Do you really believe this stuff?" I answered, "Believe? That's the wrong word. 'This stuff' cannot save my soul. I believe in Jesus. But 'this stuff' is the best scientific explanation for the phenomena we observe." Hostility ensued. I felt like St. Sebastian, who was tied to a tree where archers used him for target practice.

I had spent a few years of research to determine what effect directional heat flow in Earth's crust might have on the emplacement of "gneiss domes" such as the Black Hills of South Dakota. My supervising professor and I went all over the Black Hills to gather specimens of rocks that had originally underlain the domed structure and rocks in the lowest layers above the granitic/gneiss core of the Hills.

I needed to determine the thermal conductivity of these rocks in three directions. I used a large core drill to cut out cylinders, which I sliced into sections a centimeter or so in thickness, and then I polished the flat surfaces for use in a special press with heaters and thermocouples. I still have some of these. I call them my "hard disks".

The ratio of heat flow across the grain, versus along the grain, is the thermal anisotropy. For a pure, platy mineral such as mica, I found that this ratio could be as high as 6:1. For the shales and schists in the lower sections of the Black Hills, I measured thermal anisotropy between 1.2:1 and 1.6:1. The initial discussions of the early results with my committee were not encouraging. I did a series of computer simulations which showed that the excess heating caused just by thermal anisotropy was no more than a few degrees.

As it happened, I spent time that summer on a project about fluid flow. Another graduate student and I found that the anisotropy of fluid flow in layered rocks could be quite high, 10:1 to 100:1 and even greater. Any fluid flowing through these rocks would be very strongly affected by this directional fabric, and the solid-rock thermal anisotropy wouldn't matter at all. As a side project, the student and I dug into literature and studies about fluid flow in the crust. We determined that even in "dry rock" there is water, and it is in motion, and if there is any heat flow it is directed almost entirely by fluid flow. This was new; there was no literature on this particular point.

Therefore, I wrote a dissertation in which I stated that my initial theory was not tenable, and that further study would be needed to quantify the results of anisotropy in fluid flow. This was quite unpopular and it apparently stepped on a few toes. It was "this stuff" that caused my committee along with the other gathered faculty to reject my dissertation. I became, not a PhD, but AbD, "all but dissertation". Coda: I had an established relationship with scientists at a national laboratory in California. I passed my materials on to them, and they were glad to have them.

With such a background, I was well primed to receive Matt Kaplan's historical survey of scientific mavericks in I Told you So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed and Imprisoned for Being Right. 

The book is in part a biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, the best-known of those who learned how necessary it is to clean a doctor's hands and equipment before treating a patient. Semmelweis was also the one who seems to have suffered the most for it. The various parts of his life story are woven with others. The book opens with a scene in which a graduate student named Alison, at a poster session, is being shouted into submission by a gaggle of offended professors. Her sin? Being right. Theirs? Feeling threatened by the truth. It costs something to learn something new that reveals the flaws in older ideas.

One scientist who didn't fall prey to this phenomenon was Louis Pasteur. He had the political acumen to make sure he had powerful friends when needed, he was a showman who used public demonstrations (thoroughly prepared beforehand) to publicize his ideas, and he was careful to tailor his presentations to make it seem like his discoveries came as flashes of insight, where in reality he labored long and hard upon them.

The author tells stories of others, including friends and acquaintances, who survived being right only because of more established mentors, and by finally "being right" in a sufficiently public way that could not be denied. Katalin (Kati) Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in 2023 for working out the therapeutic use of mRNA agents, which led to the "vaccines" used during the Covid-19 pandemic. But Kati had rough going for many years, suffering abusive supervisors and disdainful department heads. Somehow, she plowed through, and collaborations such as that with Dr. Weissman kept her work going. Many others have been less fortunate. Alison left science, as have several others mentioned in the book.

Being right is not enough to ensure being received. Max Planck is known for saying that science proceeds one funeral at a time. My father used to speak of the "Moses Effect", meaning that it takes 40 years in the wilderness for a generation to die out so a new generation can make progress.

Semmelweis seems to have had no such advantages, and many disadvantages. He was not the only doctor to learn the value of chlorine-laced wash water for disinfection. But in his own hospital, he seems to have had the knack for presenting his findings in a way that didn't just challenge other doctors, including his supervisor, he actually indicted them along with himself for killing thousands of young mothers through ignorance.

Arthur C. Clarke's "first law of science" is, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." The trouble is, the distinguished and elderly scientists usually stopped having good ideas half a lifetime ago and feel threatened by the next generation.

These days, it may seem we have moved beyond the times of Galileo, who had to stand before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for saying that Earth moves. Scientists these days don't have the rack or a team of archers to deal with mavericks. But they do have powerful weapons to destroy us anyway. Today, money runs science, in a way much more pervasive than ever before. The "old guard" controls the flow of money, which determines who can afford to do experiments, and who must find a different profession.

I think of two doctors I knew well. One, named Henry, was a radiation oncologist. He once said he could cure most cases of breast cancer, at lower cost than chemotherapy. However, most patients get steered toward chemo rather than radiation. When I asked why, he just rubbed two fingers together, the sign for "money". The other doctor, named Benjamin, is a friend I once asked about how thyroid issues affect fertility. He said, "One third of infertility cases are due to low thyroid, but it is the last thing tested, when it is tested at all." Of course I asked why, and he said, "Treating low thyroid is the cheapest remedy."

In the last chapter the author discusses possible remedies for the prejudice-dominated grant-awarding process. While he has some good ideas, including ideas that are being used on a small scale, he recognizes that government action would be needed to motivate widespread change. Given the huge pharmaceutical and medical lobbying that goes on, useful change is unlikely. I fear that Max Planck was only partly correct, because he said "one funeral at a time." It takes several.

I think of Ignaz Semmelweis and the other pilloried scientists as being like Jeremiah: never wrong; never believed.

Is AI ready for prime time?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, memoirs, experiments

Disclaimer and Pledge: It's a pity I need to say this. I don't use any kind of software to write for me, nor to expand on my writing. The words are all mine, 100%. I do use images I produce using art generation tools touted as "AI art" software, and I (almost) always attribute images produced in this way. If for any reason I use a piece of software-generated text, I'll make that clear. 

This mini-avatar of me was produced by Gemini using a picture from 2015. I look much the same now, just with a few more wrinkles. I wear the hat to keep the sun off my bald head. For those who read this blog regularly, I decided it's time to give you a hint what I look like.

The author of I am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to do (Almost) Everything, Joanna Stern, spent one year using as many "AI tools" as possible to carry on her life. Kudos to her wife Michelle and their young boys for putting up with it all. This picture shows BookBot, her imagining of an AI scheduler (she actually had two versions running in different software systems), introducing her calendar for the year. This is one of many, many illustrations by Jason Snyder that pepper the book.

Ms Stern begins with her own disclaimer, from which I'll quote, "Every sentence in this book started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page. AI never wrote anything from scratch, except in places that I've clearly marked."

This book is much more than a series of chapters. Timelines full of blurbs (and Jason's drawings), journal entries, lists of ratings of comparable products, a travelogue (the Way-Mo Fun vacation), interviews, and other side notes enliven the narrative.

I found her experiments, one per season, quite enlightening. The first and most successful was "Search and Information". She set aside Google and its kin in favor of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and a few others. She soon adapted to "getting the answer" instead of a long list of blue links. Being able to follow up was a big plus. One aspect she used a lot: pointing her phone's camera at something and asking, "How do I fix this?" or "What is THAT?" (On my Android phone, I use Google Lens similarly). She also tried a couple of versions of smart glasses that can either project information into your line of sight or mutter in your ear about whatever you are gazing at. Though she didn't say so, I'd hope such devices have settings about how much info overload you can tolerate.

The other three experiments involved 

• Music: listening only to AI generated music for a month. She lasted less than two weeks, and recommends that nobody else try such a thing.
• Books: reading only AI generated short stories and books for a while. She generated her own short stories, none of which were as imaginative as her prompts, except when the prompt was a measly 8-10 words. She writes that they were like recycled movie scripts. She found an author who publishes AI generated novels, which must be assembled bit by bit. She corresponded with the author, who said, "Overall, the more human ideas and input, the better. Just like the old programming adage: garbage in, garbage out." She really enjoyed his+its novel. Her own words about stories she prompted, rather than wrote: "Flatter, less alive." (Sturgeon's Law of human writing: 90% of it is garbage. When we feed that to a LLM, of course the proportion is going to approach 99%).
• Video: watching only "AI video slop". She acknowledges that AI generated video getting pretty good and improving fast, but "…it still leans heavily on human creativity, storytelling, and judgment" and she worries about "misinformation, copyright issues, and the use of massive amounts of energy just to make a thirty-second meme."

At the end of all the experiments she asks if we're headed for "a world where simulation starts to feel preferable to experience?" For some people, this is already true. Many science fiction stories dwell on this theme.

Along the way, she and her family used a robot vacuum cleaner, now more enhanced than ever; they "adopted" a robot dog on loan (her son hid the robodog when it was due to be returned); rode only robotaxis, usually Waymo, wherever possible; she tried turning over email responses to ChatGPT—that didn't last long!; she had mammograms with AI enhanced interpretation (but very human oversight) and had dental X-rays with AI enhancement, but found an unfortunate tendency for the dentists to abdicate and upsell; she got a robot massage (and thoroughly enjoyed the way it worked on her butt—no erotic overtones); and they tried a robo-chef, which produced bland but edible meals.

A funny story about riding a Waymo: a photographer was assigned to take pictures of her family in a driverless car. When the Waymo's cameras spotted the camera he stuck out the window of the car ahead, it spooked like a gun-shy horse, stopping abruptly and pulling over to the center divider on the highway. It wouldn't budge thereafter until a Waymo tech got on the radio and "persuaded" it to forget the incident.

There's lots more. Lots and lots. I'll leave it to you to read it. It is well worth it!

I'll finish on this note. All this is, at best, ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence. "Agentic AI" is, in the author's view, far from ready and cannot be left unsupervised. The author's definition:

Artificial Intelligence is the creation of intelligent machines that can think, see, learn, and act like humans—and maybe even exceed human abilities.

The supposed emotional content many people claim to get from LLM's (including AI boy/girl friends or even spouses) is actually a consequence of the software being trained using human-generated text, which always has emotional content, and of the software ecosystem in which a LLM sits (every bit human coded). Their relational interactions are thus a mirror of the psychology of the person being interacted with. Actual sentience is the difference between simulating feelings and actually having them. Also, the so-called guardrails (easily sidestepped) that try to keep sex and violence out of the picture are written in human code. No AI tool yet devised can reliably detect "unacceptable content."

When I was teaching computer programming at a university, the department head once said, "Computers excel at detecting differences. Human minds excel at detecting similarities." I built a career on this principle, writing software that helped humans with the stuff we cannot do well, and leaving it to the human user to do what we can do better than any machine. I'll leave further thoughts to future rants.