A Jeremiad for our time

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, overviews, critiques, capitalism, slave trade, colonialism

When I saw the title Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, by James Bradley, I expected a scientific or technical compendium of some sort. Far from it. The subject is indeed the ocean, more particularly what the human race has done to it. It isn't pretty. And there is a lot of it, more than 380 pages, plus 44 pages of endnotes (I read endnotes only if there is more substance to them than references or sources).

Each of the thirteen chapters focuses on an aspect of the ocean. That makes for rather long chapters. The author has compiled a great mass of information in each case, but the bulk of a typical chapter is a diatribe upon the various capitalistic ills. To Mr. Bradley, the much-used terms "violent colonialism" and "capitalistic violence" and variations thereof are redundancies. Eventually it seemed to me a pale shadow of the book of Lamentations.

One might hope the author has solutions for past and ongoing ills, be they overexploitation or slavery or pollution. Nope. Fortunately, he does tell us of a number of initiatives and projects by those who seek to mitigate them. This is a book of complaints.

I could have stopped early, but I decided to let the man have his say. He appears to be balanced on a knife edge between two proverbs I've seen attributed to Winston Churchill: "Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others," and "Man is uniquely capable of finding an optimum solution to any problem, but only after exhausting all other options." I am not sure I would label the author a Socialist, but he is clearly anti-Capitalistic.

I know he wants to motivate the public in some way, or in several ways. He hasn't the knack.

Gemini's recursive answer

 kw: simulated intelligence, ai, art generation

I use Gemini less than other art generation programs for two reasons: it produces only one image at a time and the image is always square. It is a generous square, 2048x2048, but to be able to crop out another shape such as 16x9 one must write creative prompts that include the term "wide aspect", for example.

This morning I asked the following,

Can Gemini create multiple images from one prompt?

Here is the response:

Not yes, not no, just sideways. Oh, well…

When viruses help us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, virology, bacteriophages, antibiotic resistance, medicine

These barely-living creatures look to me like a balloon attached to a hypodermic syringe. They are T2 bacteriophages injecting DNA into E. coli bacteria. The common term for a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria, is "phage", which means "eater". They eat bacteria.

The phage's DNA is packed into the "balloon", a protein capsule, so tightly that the pressure inside is more than 300 psi. No wonder that, once the "syringe" pierces the cell wall of the bacterium, the DNA erupts into the cellular interior. There, "shepherd" proteins that accompany it help it integrate with the cell's DNA and begin to make great numbers of copies of the phage. Once all supplies within the cell are exhausted, lytic enzymes cause the cell to rupture, releasing thousands of new phages.

To learn of phages and the breadth of their usefulness, I read The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage by Tom Ireland. The book has two strong themes: that phages save lives in an almost miraculous way; and that political and scientific blindness have hindered the study of phages in the "free world", primarily because they were primarily developed as a therapeutic tool in the Georgian SSR and Soviet Russia. By the time scientists in the West learned of their antibacterial use, the cultural trend was "Better dead than Red."

The first viruses discovered were phages. Doctors noticed that sometimes the bacterial "lawn" growing in a Petri dish would develop "plaques"—clear, circular holes—but that nothing could be seen under the microscope, just bits of broken bacteria. Later, by filtering the liquid mix from the clear spots through a very fine porcelain filter, a "something" could be produced that killed bacteria. The term "filterable virus" was coined. Only later, when the electron microscope was invented, were phages seen and given their name.

Bacterial cells are so different from the cells of animals that phages cannot infect us. While there are 600 or so human pathogenic viruses, there are tens to hundreds of thousands of known phages (so far), many millions of phages known only from DNA screening of water and soil, and from billions to perhaps more than a trillion varieties of phages in existence worldwide. I way "varieties" because the biological understanding of "species" doesn't really fit the way viruses, and phages in particular, evolve and reproduce.

Step a little closer to home. It is rather tricky to count the cells in a human body. About 80% of "our" cells are red blood cells, so when you hear a number like 30 trillion, realize that about 24 trillion are RBC's, and the other six trillion are nucleated cells (RBC's don't have a nucleus). We have a microbiome, mainly in our gut but also across our skin, that numbers 60-100 trillion bacterial cells. Bacteria are so small that this amazing number of cells weighs, in total, a few pounds, or a kilogram or two. How about viruses? They are in the air we breathe so of course we contain some. Just counting the phages that have been found preying on bacteria within and on us, the number is about ten phage particles per bacterial cell, or roughly a quadrillion. Phages are so tiny that a quadrillion of them totals about 1/30th of a gram.

After phages were discovered more than a century ago, they were found to have antibacterial properties that could be used to cure infections. Before the discovery of effective and economical antibiotics such as Penicillin, phages were the only cure.

Side note: no medicine is perfect. Whether antibiotic or phage therapy, the dose doesn't destroy 100% of the invading bacteria. Rather, bacterial numbers are reduced to the point that our immune system has time to kill every single bacterium that remains, and then we are fully well. We need at least a minimally functioning immune system to overcome an infection, no matter what medicines we may use.

An early practitioner and proponent of phage therapy, Felix D'Herelle, called phages a "third arm of the immune system". The classical arms of the immune system ("arm" in this case meaning "weapon system") are innate immunity and adaptive immunity. The first is immediate, the second requires cellular learning, but also confers longer-lasting immunity. More recently I have read that our microbiome can be considered a preventive arm of immunity, because the good bacteria in us prevent pathogens from getting a foothold and causing disease. Thus I would call phages either a part of this third arm, or a fourth arm, destroying many pathogens once they "land".

A long section of the book tells of the Eliava Institute in Georgia (European Georgia), in Tblisi, a focus of "medical vacations" by people with multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections. For decades Eliava was the only place where a patient could have a sample taken, a phage therapy either found in the "archives" at Eliava or developed from searching in dirty water (!), and, hopefully before dying, being treated and their life saved.

Later chapters tell us of an increasing number of phage therapy centers arising. Parallel to them, recent excitement about the possibilities of phages has led to some businesses developing ways to create custom phages from scratch. This is based on work done with the ΦX174 phage: This virus was the first organism to have its DNA completely sequenced, in 1977; and a slightly simplified phage based upon it was synthesized in 2012. It was first isolated in 1935 from sewer water in Paris. That makes sense, because it infects E. coli, the famous "poop germ".

ΦX174 is one of the smallest viruses. It doesn't have the syringe like the "T" phages and some others. It is just a tiny balloon containing the DNA for 11 genes. The capsule has 12 spikes that allow it to attach to a bacterial cell.

Phages, with their simplified genomes, were first-line tools in the early days of the genetic revolution, even before the structure of DNA was discovered in 1951 by Crick and Watson. They remain useful for genetic studies.

One reason for producing synthetic phages is that the capsules of certain ones, without the DNA content, can penetrate the brain-blood barrier. If the content of such a capsule is a chemotherapy drug, and the spikes are created to attach to cancer cells, extremely targeted therapy becomes possible, in the brain or elsewhere.

That is just one use for phages that we find in the last couple of chapters of The Good Virus. The author also discusses fears of "gray goo", because viruses are actually nanotechnological machines. If a nanotech machine has the directive, "reproduce at all costs", can it spread throughout the biosphere, turning all plants, animals, and everything into a mass of nothing but themselves? Considering that nature has already developed exactly such machines, but that they are engaged in an eternal "arms race" with bacteria—which quickly learn to fight back—we realize that no gray goo scenario is imminent.

One more note: not all phages are wholly beneficial to us. This lovely image from Science Photo Library shows A45 phages attacking Streptococcus pyogenes cells. These phages carry genes that induce the cells to release fever-inducing chemicals, which cause strep throat. If the Strep that naturally exists in you is healthy, there's no problem. When the bacteria get sick, though, so do you!

An even worse case of "sick bacteria causing sick people" results when this filamentous phage known as CTXφ infects Vibrio cholerae: the deadly waterborne disease cholera. No doubt, other such cases abound.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of the great majority of bacteriophages is so great that the author optimistically hopes that they will provide a very beneficial path toward treating infections that our antibiotics are increasingly unable to cope with.

By the way, images and articles regarding phages and E. coli seem to outnumber the rest, not because that's the most common, but because E. coli are used for so many kinds of genetic studies that they dominate the literature.

Spider activity subsiding

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

First thing in the morning, what do I see?
No more spiders looking at me.

After several weeks of hot action, things have settled down:

Singapore has been the heavy hitter, but represents only about half of the activity. There's no telling how much of this went through VPN's. I wonder how long things will remain "normal", or perhaps, just ordinary, at 50-100 views per day, or a few thousand per month. To me, that is satisfactory.

OPUS 500

 kw: art generation, ai art, simulated intelligence, milestones

I have been learning how to use art generation programs since November 2022. That is just a little more than two years. Initially DALL•E2 was all that was available. I used it until it went out of service a year later in favor of DALL•E3, which powers the Bing Image Creator. In the first few days using DALL•E2, with lots of experimentation, I produced two images that still please me a lot. One is a still-life "painting" in the style of Cezanne, the other is a "painting" of mountains in the style of the Hudson River School of painters:

Note the color blocks at lower right. That is DALL•E2's "signature". Pictures by DALL•E2 were 1024×1024, and to make them bigger one could Outpaint. I did that a lot. Eventually I began to make images that would be useful as screen wallpaper. I would prepare a large image and then crop it to 1920×1080, or a larger size with a 16×9 aspect ratio, and sign it in one of the lower corners with my name plus "/ Dall-E2", to give credit to both myself and my "commissioned artist".

At the very beginning I also tried out MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, but I wasn't too thrilled by the available toolsets, and SD required Discord, which I don't like to use.

Fast forward a couple of years. Over time I learned of other art generators:

• PlaygroundAI - I used it for 2-3 weeks during January 2024, but soon came across Playground, which may be related but had a better credit and subscription structure.
• Playground - I loved the Canvas mode, which also had Outpainting. It was taken out of service in November 2024, the company having decided to concentrate on graphic arts rather than fine art.
• I had been using Bard in Chrome as an alternative to ChatGPT. When its name was changed to Gemini, it was announced that it could generate art also. At first it would make four images at a time, but then it dropped three and now it only makes one per prompt, and it is always square, but 2048×2048. I've used it since February 2024.
• I found Leonardo AI in August 2024 and I've been using it since then. After a few months of using the free service, I bought a passel of credits.
• DreamStudio showed up the most recently, in November 2024. After a couple of months testing the free service, I bought some credits.
• Lastly, also in November 2024, I found Google Labs' ImageFX, which is free, but they don't keep history. Download what you want to keep right away or it'll vanish. It has some interesting features that I like, but not the rich feature set of DS or Leo AI.

My current "stable" of artists is DALL•E3, DreamStudio, Gemini, ImageFX, and Leonardo AI. All of these except Gemini can make images with various aspect ratios, although in the case of DALL•E3 the only alternative to square is "Resize to 4:3" which is actually nearly 16:9 (1792×1024), and it is a fresh image, similar to the one you "resized", but not a direct expansion of it. 

Recently I checked the folders that contain my "wallpaper" images, and found there were nearly 500. I had decided to try a different kind of image, similar to a piece of art we have that is embroidery on a floral theme. I wrote a few prompts and tried them out with the various art generators. I concluded that Leonardo AI and DALL•E3 worked with these prompts the best. At first I wanted a depiction of one artwork in a horizontal format, but none of the programs offered pictures that filled a 16×9 frame, or nearly so. Leonardo AI prepared a couple of images that featured two pieces side-by-side on a wall, so I began to concentrate on that. This is the prompt that produced the pictures of lilies:

Two pictures, finely detailed embroidery, of lily flowers of various colors and foliage within a pale green mat and dark green frame, mounted next to one another on a white wall

The upper image is of peonies, with a similar prompt but without "various colors". I also wanted an image with different flowers in each frame, and tried a prompt that said something like "peonies" first and "roses" next, but I kept getting peonies everywhere. Then I tried "roses" followed by "peonies", and still got only peonies! It seems that in existing art, peonies are a much more common theme for embroidery than roses. So I wrote a prompt that only mentioned roses, and got some images showing two pieces of art with roses. As I went along I produced wallpaper images from the ones I liked best.

I noticed at this point that I had 499 wallpaper files. I fired up Gimp (a Photoshop "cousin"), copied roses from one image with all roses and pasted them into one with all peonies, to produce my 500th wallpaper:

PS: I know that "opus" mainly refers to musical works, but I have seen it used for other creative products also.

Grin and bear down

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, teeth, odontology, paleontology, biology

It is easier to get the bite force of an alligator than a human. With a large alligator, it may be more dangerous, but the process is simple: restrain the beast, tap the tip of its nose so it will open its mouth, and stick the measuring tool in between the teeth at the back of the mouth. The measuring tool is typically a steel rod fitted with one or two force plates that can survive a few tons of force. When the gator feels the intruding rod it will bite as hard as it can, even though one or more teeth might be knocked out or broken.

Humans are more cooperative than alligators. However, a human will never bite with full force, particularly when his or her teeth meet the instrument. We have a protective reflex that snaps our jaw back open when we bite on something harder than the average bit of gristle. Very few people can bite hard enough to crack open a hazelnut, for example. We are all strong enough to do so, but the reflex prevents it. Why can an alligator (or a shark) bite hard enough to break teeth, but we cannot?

It isn't for lack of strength. As adults, if we break a tooth, it stays broken. Without the help of a dentist to fit a denture or insert an implant (both quite costly), we have lost that tooth forever. But an alligator's teeth are replaced when any break. Even more so the teeth of sharks. So it makes sense that humans have a reflex that protects our teeth, but sharks and alligator's don't need that reflex.

This is just one subject covered in a very entertaining way in Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt. The first section of the book consists of eight chapters that deal with various specialized kinds of teeth. The subject of bite force is found in chapter eight, where we find that a 17-foot crocodile can exert 3,700 pounds (~1,700 kg), and that regardless which of the four kinds of crocodilians were studied, bite force was based almost totally on size (the four "crocs" are alligators, crocodiles, caimans, and gharials). For example, even though the mouth of an alligator is twice as wide as the mouth of a crocodile of equal length, the length of their jaws is very nearly the same, and the bite force is the same.

Compared to the peg-shaped teeth of these reptiles, a human molar is rather complex, as this dentist's sign shows. The strong, curved roots of the molar hold it firmly in the jaw. This is why, whenever someone needs to have a molar removed, the dentist schedules a double-length appointment, and these days takes great care to inject enough Novocain or Lidocaine, because the tooth will probably need to be broken in half to get it out, and removing each section requires a great deal of force. I've noticed that dentists tend to be built like weightlifters, and it makes sense!

Human teeth are not particularly sharp. Our pet cat's teeth are much sharper than mine. But perhaps the sharpest teeth belong to vampire bats, the subject of the first chapter. The incisors of a vampire bat are so sharp that the bat can slice off a bit of skin, really a shallow scrape, without disturbing the sleep of the victim. The typical location of the bite is a toe or ear or other easy-to-reach extremity—certainly not the neck! The shallow wound will ooze blood, which the bat laps up. Along with this understanding, we learn how the mythology of vampires and of bats had to be gradually swept aside so scientists could learn how these tiny mammals really live.

A side note on the subject of Chapter 2, the candiru fish of Brazil. Contrary to rumors, these slender catfish don't swim into you while you are peeing in the river. They are about half an inch in diameter, and won't fit. The author was able to track down just one apparently verified account of a man who had this happen, but "apparently verified" turned out to be not really verifiable.

Other kinds of specialized teeth include fangs, both the large canines of baboons and the venom-bearing fangs of certain snakes and lizards such as the Gila monster. They include tusks, which are teeth that project out of the mouth or skull. And we learn why the teeth of horses continue to grow with age: Grass is so abrasive it wears down the crowns of the teeth, so new material has to be grown continually, or no horse would live more than a few years.

Does every animal have teeth? Or at least, all the animals big enough for us to notice? Apparently the earliest vertebrates had no teeth, and no jaws. Hagfish have a weird Y-shaped sort-of-tongue with two patches of toothlike scrapers. They eat from a fallen fish or whale by gripping a bit of flesh with the Y, then tying themselves into a knot that they slip forward until they can pry against the flesh and tear out the piece, which they just swallow. Some frogs and toads are toothless, and turtles have a beak of keratin rather than teeth. Of course birds have a beak also, and the proverb "scarce as hens' teeth" is apt. Certain experiments show that the genes for making teeth are present in birds, but are inactive. The dinosaur ancestors of birds probably all, or nearly all, had teeth.

While the toothed whales—porpoises, orcas, and sperm whales—have many teeth, the other major group of whales instead have baleen or "whalebone", a filtering organ, and no teeth. The echidna, or spiny anteater, and other anteaters, have no teeth, swallowing their prey whole; their main "utensil" is the tongue.

Cephalopod mollusks (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, etc.) have beaks similar to a parrot's beak, made also of keratin. Contrary to this fanciful image of Jack Sparrow about to enter the gullet of a Kraken, or mythical giant squid, squids don't have any teeth. The beak of a giant squid is about the size of a fist; the exposed portion that actually bites is just 2-3 inches across (5-7 cm).

The last section of the book is all about human teeth, and the things people do and have done with them. You may have heard that George Washington had wooden teeth. He lost most of his teeth rather early, probably because of mercury poisoning due to medical practices of the time. His dentures contained teeth of porcelain and of human origin. When dentists of the era extracted teeth, they kept them to be fitted into dentures. Certain cultures drilled holes into the front of incisors to put jewels or other ornaments in. That's a rather painful way to show status! 

As someone who has a bunch of fillings, and now a few crowns, I know the rigors and discomfort, and sometimes the pain, of dental work. The author tells of research that may one day allow us to re-grow lost teeth. It would be a slow process, but a few months of careful chewing while the new tooth grows into place would be no worse than a few months of careful chewing while the titanium root of an implant becomes firmly incorporated into the jaw, until the titanium-and-ceramic crown can be attached. And it may cost a lot less.

Appreciate the teeth you have. Take care of them. Perhaps some folks alive today will live to see the re-growth of lost teeth. Until then, love your dentists; they really try to cause minimal pain while doing maximum good!

In French spider is araignée

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I logged in to Blogger to begin a post and saw that there has been a lot of activity. In the recent past, when spiders aren't active, the total number of views has been around 700, with half of that from the US. For the past week, however:

I think that the roughly equal spread of ~14,000 views between France, the US and Singapore reflects VPN usage, probably by several entities. Getting such large numbers, for a blog with less than 3,000 posts, doesn't make sense otherwise. However, at this point I can do no more than marvel at it.

Bible translation is tough – NET proves it

 kw: book reviews, partial reviews, Bible translation, Bible interpretation, annotations, grammar

Did you ever wonder why so many verses in the Bible begin with the word "And"? It seems our grade school teachers spent tons of effort to convince us not to use run-on sentences, and then in the Bible (for those who read it), run-on sentences seem to be the rule! In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and to a lesser extent the Greek of the New Testament, it was accepted narrative style to begin many sentences with conjunctions as a way of maintaining narrative flow.

In Hebrew the mechanism is to prefix the first word of a sentence with the smallest Hebrew letter, vav, which looks like an apostrophe. Bible scholars over the years have overloaded this little letter with quite a bit of freight, but more careful scholars in recent decades have mostly "unloaded" it.

I read the Bible daily, usually a few Old Testament chapters and one New Testament chapter. I like to investigate various translations, which I tend to do every second year. The rest of the time I stick to the Recovery Version (RcV – see recoveryversion.bible to read the online text version or to order a print version that has study notes). RcV is the best Bible translation I know of.

In 2019 The Holy Bible, New English Translation (NET) was published as a single volume containing both Testaments plus about 60,000 notes of three kinds:

• TN, Translator's Note, which explains why certain words or phrases were selected.
• TC, Text-Critical note, which adds supplementary information regarding old versions and other translations, particularly when references to other works are more extensive than a line or two.
• SN, Study Note, which explains historical or cultural information that can help a contemporary person understand a passage better.

The Bible text plus the notes comprise 2,392 pages. The Old Testament was translated by fourteen scholars, and the New Testament was translated by five scholars. I note that nearly half of the translators were educated at Dallas Theological Seminary.

The typeface is small, so I realized that it would take 2-3 years, or more, to read the entire volume. I would need to plan ahead. I read a few verses and notes to "survey the landscape." I was immediately disappointed.

Some background: I learned the "gap theory" as a preteen, from my parents. Put simply, I learned that Genesis 1:2 is not a direct continuation of v1:1, but that an unstated amount of time passed. Later I obtained a Scofield Reference Bible (C.I. Scofield's student L.S. Chafer founded Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924), which has this note on the word "created" in the first verse:

But [meaning only] three creative acts of God are recorded in this chapter: (1) the heavens and the earth, v. 1; (2) animal life, v. 21; and (3) human life, vs. 26,27. The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.

That is the entirety of Scofield's Note 2. The next note describes "without form and void" as the result of judgment, referring to certain passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah, and to the "lamentation" sections of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, stating that their language "goes beyond the kings of Tyre and Babylon".

Still later I learned that Hebrew has more than one past tense, and that "created" in 1:1 is in a different past tense than the verbs in the rest of the chapter. Thus, to quote John Lennox of Oxford University, "What does the book of Genesis say about when the universe was created? Absolutely nothing!" These things were the common intellectual heritage of evangelical Christianity for at least two generations. In more recent years, "young-earth creationists" have taken over, in a politico-theological sense, a significant number of evangelical congregations and even schools of theology. It appears that their hyper-literalist ideology has infected this translation also.

The opening phrase of Genesis 1:2 in NET is, "Now the earth was without shape and empty,…". Note E, a Translator's Note (TN) on the word "Now" makes much of a peculiar interpretation of v1:1 as a title of what follows, rather than as a narrative element. Here the little letter vav is brought into service in an obsolete, overloaded way. Looking in my Hebrew-English Interlinear Bible I see that the word "now" in NET is a translation of vav, which is translated "and" in the King James Version and more than a dozen others, while about half so many use "now". Either is OK. More modern versions usually leave it out. That is also OK based on current English usage. But Note E goes into a long discourse based on this "vav consecutive", clearly seeking to deny any interpretation that allows a length of time to pass between these verses. Scofield's interpretation is thus disparaged.

Soon, reinforcements arrive: Note G, on "without shape and empty" specifically denies that this phrase could refer to a consequence of judgment. In particular, the translator states that it is "unsound" to refer the application of the phrase to judgment by Isaiah and Jeremiah, back to Genesis 1:2. I wrote a marginal note: "God is timeless".

What we have here is a young-earth creationist forcing his interpretation upon these passages. How very sad. It undermines the value of the entire volume. Furthermore, the middle couplets of Isaiah 45:18 state, "He is the God / Who formed the earth and made it; / He established it; / He did not create it waste, / But He formed it to be inhabited" (RcV). In NET Note V on this verse is more young-earth nonsense. This verse clearly states that the condition of the earth at the beginning of Genesis 1:2 is not the way God originally created it. It makes me shake my head in wonderment. What a misdirection of Christian effort!

After making notes on these matters I set aside NET for five years. In December 2024, planning my Bible reading schedule for 2025, I decided to begin to read through NET at a rate of about two pages daily, at the same time reading the New Testament, about a chapter at a time, in RcV. I set up a document to record notes.

Two days ago, having reached page 104, I finished reading Genesis and all its Notes. I decided to write this preliminary evaluation. In my own notes I find 35 comments, mostly about things I consider erroneous or misapplied. As I look them over, I think it is best to concentrate on only a few egregious matters. And first I wish to present three places where the NET translator(s) got something right that traditional Christianity has missed or gotten wrong. When I refer to other translations in bulk, it is based on a perusal of sections of Bible Gateway.

• Gen 2:4, Note M: a TN and SN explain the NET usage "This is the account…" in place of a literal translation "These are the generations…", pointing out that the Hebrew term has a more general application beyond recounting human genealogies. Most translations use "account", "records", "story", or "history", and these notes explain why.
• Gen 9:22, Note E: The TN and SN provide a good explanation, from grammar and context, to show that when Ham "saw the nakedness" of his father Noah, it is not a euphemism for committing incest. Ham was just a tattletale, and, as I have heard more than one teacher ask, "Why did Ham go into the tent anyway?" The strength of Noah's reaction indicates that this latter question has an answer that God has hidden from us.
• Gen 38:9, Note b: NET translation of the key phrases is "whenever he [Onan] slept with his brother's wife, he wasted his emission on the ground". The TN and SN note that this was a repeated practice, and that Onan didn't masturbate but indeed had sex with Tamar, but performed coitus interruptus, or withdrawal, to keep her from becoming pregnant. The crusty old term "Onanism" is a misnomer.

Now to a few less helpful items:

• Firstly, something that isn't theologically negative, but I find annoying: Several notes on each page say that something was done—leaving a word out, adding a word, substituting a name for a pronoun or vice versa, or rearranging phrases—for "stylistic reasons" or, more rarely "for clarity." It would have been far better to state in the introductory text that "many" instances of stylistic or clarifying rearrangements and substitutions took place, and that a convention (I'd have recommended a special character such as §) is used to mark such cases. This would have shortened the volume by several percent!
• Gen 4:1, Note T: Where a literal translation would have, "I have acquired a man by Jehovah", NET has "I have created a man just as the Lord did". Regardless what weasel words fill the TN and SN in Note T, this is the worst possible rendering of the phrase. It doesn't even qualify as an interpretation. It is too awful to simply call "wrong".
• Gen 6:5, Note G: TN equates "heart" with "mind". The rest of scripture makes clear that "heart" is all of the soul (mind+will+emotion) plus the conscience. The mind is included, but is not the whole of it. This misconstruction confuses numerous spiritual gems.
• Gen 6:9, Note C: Noah was one of a very few who "walked with God". Thankfully, the NET text is correct, but the Note dilutes it to mean "had cordial relations with". Does the NT equivalent, "walk in spirit" (or "walk by the Spirit") fall to the same low place in NET parlance (I don't know, I haven't looked for it yet)?
• Gen 12:8 and many other places; also Note P: Literally, Abraham "called upon the name of Jehovah." NET text is "worshipped the Lord". The Bible does not waste words. There is a perfectly good Hebrew term, "worship the Lord", but to discard "call on the name" by narrowing its meaning to "worship" is a travesty of a powerful spiritual matter.

That is enough to make the point. The background and agenda of at least some translators is all too visible, which sometimes leads me to doubt that some of them are genuine believers. As Jesus said to certain ones, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that testify of Me, but you do not come to Me that you may have life."

To go on to another matter than stifles the usefulness of many notes. I collected certain grammatical terms as I read. There is no hint of explanation of any of them. First, here is a list of Hebrew terms and a brief meaning for each:

• hiphil - a verbal stem in Biblical Hebrew that expresses causative action.
• hitpael [properly hithpael] - a verb pattern in Biblical Hebrew that expresses reflexive actions, such as "to do something to oneself". It's one of the seven major verb patterns in Hebrew.
• hophal - the passive form of the Hiphil stem formation.
• niphal - a verb stem in Biblical Hebrew that can express a variety of actions, including passive, reflexive, or middle voice. Another of "the 7".
• piel - a verbal stem formations, signifying an intensified or causative action of a verb.
• pual - a verbal stem, the passive voice of the Piel stem.
• qal - the simplest and most basic verb stem, representing a straightforward action or state without additional nuances like causation or intensity.
• qere - the "read" version of a word, indicating the pronunciation that should be used instead of the written form ("ketiv") which may appear different in the text due to scribal tradition.
• wayyiqtal [properly wayyiqtol] - a verb form that indicates a simple action that was completed in the past.

Secondly, while I have a Classical education, the following English terms were new to me; these are in the order I found them:

• jussive - a verbal form expressing a command (whatever happened to "imperative"?).
• preterite - a verbal form that denotes events that were completed in the past.
• disjunctive - expressing a choice between two mutually exclusive possibilities.
• deictic - a word or expression whose meaning is dependent on the context in which it is used.
• concessive - a conjunction, preposition, phrase, or clause describing a state of affairs that might have been expected to rule out what is described in the main clause but in fact does not.
• hendiadys - the expression of a single idea by two words connected with “and,” such as nice and warm.
• proleptic - to anticipate or assume that something in the future is already happening.
• pleonastic - using more words than are needed to express an idea, such as "free gift". A fancy word for "redundant" or "verbose".
• gentilic - a word that describes a group of people based on their national, tribal, or racial affiliation.
• antimeria - using a word in a different part of speech than it's typically used in.
• enclitic - a word pronounced with so little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word, such as n't in can't. A fancy word for a contraction.
• protasis - the clause expressing the condition in a conditional sentence.
• elative - a grammatical case which indicates that something comes from somewhere, someone, or something else, as in "out of Africa".
• locative - a grammatical case which indicates that something is somewhere, such as -side in oceanside.
• substantival - having the function of a noun or noun equivalent.
• desiderative - feeling or expressing desire.

I note that I got a red "misspelt" flag on only two of these terms, so they are nearly all in Blogger's spelling dictionary.

In my future reading—I plan to finish it all—I will restrict my notes to the most egregious examples, and of course to notes that teach me something or provide a great explanation of some Biblical puzzle. I may post an update to this review in 2-3 years, but I think this is enough to make clear why I do not recommend this to someone uneducated in Biblical principles of interpretation. There is too much here that will either weaken one's faith or that waters down valuable spiritual lessons that the Bible seeks to teach.

First find out what is there

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, cartography, mini-biographies

Exploration is mainly finding out what is "out there" and the most useful product of exploration is a map or chart.

Here we see mapper Cassie Bongiovanni with a color-coded contour map of the Molloy Hole in the Arctic Ocean, pointing out the deepest location within it. That spot, at a depth of 18,212 feet or 5,551 meters, is the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean, which is the only ocean without a trench that reaches into the Hadal Zone, which is defined to be deeper than 6,000 m (19,685 ft).

Ms Bongiovanni and a rotating crew of helpers accompanied Victor Vescovo on his ship DSSV Pressure Drop during the Five Deeps expedition (I reviewed another book about it in 2021). In the next image she is shown at the ship's mapping station with Aileen Bohan. Over the year-and-a-half of the Five Deeps expedition sponsored and led by Mr. Vescovo she mapped the deepest points in the five oceans and large surrounding areas, a total area exceeding that of Texas. The ship had a million-dollar multibeam sonar attached, which was needed to pinpoint the deepest spots, and to provide high-resolution mapping. The resulting maps were submitted to the Seabed 2030 Project.

When I began reading The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans by Laura Trethewey, I naturally assumed that the focus would be the Seabed 2030 Project. It soon became clear that a major aim of the book is sharing the story of Cassie Bongiovanni, who was just 25, a freshly-minted mapper, when she got the opportunity to be the on-board mapper for the Five Deeps expedition and, as a critical side benefit, prepare detailed maps of several percent of the ocean floor.

It has been said, very frequently!, that we know the surface of the Moon in greater detail than we know the sea floor. Let's think about that a moment. With a 16-inch (40 cm) diameter telescope, visual acuity during moments of the best seeing can be 1/3 of a second of arc, or about 1/620,000 of one's distance to an object. The Moon's distance at closest approach (which occurs monthly) is about 360,000 km. Over time, a dedicated visual observer can get acquainted with the features of the visible side of the moon with a resolution of about 580 meters, or 1,900 feet. Of course, space telescopes and spacecraft have mapped the Moon with much more detail than this. But consider: Right now, we are about halfway through the Seabed 2030 Project, and about 1/4 of the total area of the ocean bottom has been mapped with resolution of 1,000 meters or better. A visual astronomer with a biggish backyard telescope does indeed see the Moon better than we see the ocean floor! The initial goal of Seabed 2030 is 100 m resolution over most of the ocean, and 800 m resolution in the deepest depths. At that point, there will still be parts of the ocean that are less known than the Moon can be known by a visual astronomer.

Once you have a map, what do you do with it? For seafaring purposes, a specialized map called a chart facilitates navigation. On shipboard, "chart" has a special meaning; nautical charts show tons of information, including all the named places known at that time, information about currents and depths that are known, ferry routes, plus navigation aids such as LORAN and, of course, latitude and longitude lines. Near coastlines, the depth indications are crucial; you don't want to run aground.

In the deeper ocean, other business interests predominate. An enormous debate going on right now is what to do about metallic deposits on the seabed, such as "manganese nodules" or "polymetallic seabed nodules". What are these nodules?

Large areas of the sea floor, typically at depths between 2 and 5 km, known as the Abyssal Plain, are littered with, and sometimes almost solidly covered with lumps about the size of a potato, consisting of sulfides and oxides of several metallic elements, such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, and some "rare earths" (which aren't rare, just hard to separate from one another; there are 17 such elements that are chemically very, very similar). Mining companies are just champing at the bit to go out and dredge the sea floor, to hoover up millions of tons of the nodules and refine them for the valuable metals they contain.

Their opponents are environmental and scientific interests, saying, "Let's find out what is there first, before destroying it." The nodules grow slowly, gaining at most an inch in size per million years. The oldest parts of the sea floor are about 200 million years, because the marine plates are pulled down into the trenches and recycled. Depending on where one finds it, a nodule the size of your fist could have taken between five and fifty million years to grow to that size.

Living things dwell on and near them. The shrimp in this picture isn't here on a sightseeing expedition. It expects to find something to eat.

Deep water corals, sponges and other animals live on the nodules, where they can have a firm attachment. The surrounding seabed is soft mud, to which such creatures cannot attach. But burrowing animals live in the mud, where they might be preyed upon, and the nodules provide a modicum of safety compared to an open, flat muddy field.

Ms Trethewey attended meetings of the International Seabed Authority, where such issues are debated. Later she asked Victor Vescovo of his opinion. He has several reasons to say that seabed mining will not prove economical. The most important is the law of supply and demand. A sudden increase in supply will drive prices down. Secondly, it is easy to lose stuff at sea. If a cable breaks and your 50-ton mining machine falls to the seafloor untethered, it will cost more to retrieve it than it did to build it, but building its replacement will take months (years?).

Thanks to Mr. Vescovo and Ms Bongiovanni, we have great maps of the greatest depths. May the mapmaking continue and prosper!

The book covers a lot more ground than the tidbits that interested me, that I've riffed on here. A great read!

This year's spidering has begun

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I checked in to Blogger this morning to see activity on my latest post. I saw that there has been an upsurge of activity. For this image and the next I set the lookback to 30 days:

As the lower chart shows, the usual daily views rate is about 100. Beginning on February 12, it rose over three days into the thousands. Here is the worldwide distribution:

When I see Singapore in the top spot, I think of a spider elsewhere using a VPN. For Austria and Germany to also exceed the US in activity is interesting. I was curious about what "Other" may be. I set the lookback to 7 days and expanded "Other":

Here we see that 14 countries have two or more views each. There are fewer than 200 countries in the world, so how could "Other" be 339? The map of DNS servers must have domains registered in numerous entities that are not countries. I don't know. It is an interesting mystery. If someone knows, feel free to comment.

DreamStudio Style Gallery

 kw: ai experiments, ai art, art generation, styles

I find that strong contrast of elements provides a real test of prompt adherence by an art generating program. This came to light while I was enjoying the Man Cave (Troglodyte) concept, depicting offices, living rooms, kitchens, and so forth inside caves, using the various programs. Generally speaking, Dall-E3, ImageFX, and certain Presets for Leonardo AI produced more pleasing and realistic caves while depicting the "rooms" I prompted for, compared to Gemini and DreamStudio.

I began to investigate the SDXL 1.0 engine in DreamStudio a bit more to see what it takes to induce it to make better caves, choosing it over Gemini because it has more "knobs" I can turn. I decided to first gather a "style book" of the seventeen styles, using a fixed seed (142857, which is 999999/7) and a square aspect ratio. You might find these image montages a useful reference. I grouped them six at a time. The prompt is included in all the file names, right after the Style name and the seed value.

These first six show some commonality: The main desk a little to one side, an opening in the ceiling, and an archway at the back that usually leads deeper into the cave. The number of chairs, the presence of secondary workstations and bookshelves, and the style of flooring are all quite variable. Only the Digital Art style actually has any cave decoration (stalactites). The next six:

The common features seen in the first six are generally present. Fantasy Art style also has stalactites. The Origami style is quite spare, and while a ceiling opening is not seen, the lighting indicates that one is probably present. The last five:

Numbers 16 and 17 are out of order because I neglected to download #16 until after I had downloaded #17, and I have a sequence order of "file date" set in File Explorer. Note that the 3D Model style is the most similar to the Enhance style (#2). The trends seen before continue. Pixel Art style takes a whack at making stalactites.

If I want to make a Troglodyte series using DreamStudio, the best style to use is either Digital Art or Fantasy Art. The other styles mostly produce a cave that looks like the undecorated portions of Mammoth Cave, which resembles a series of long concrete tunnels.

Book as Blog

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, science, blogs

I think mushrooms are lovely. I tried collecting them when I was about ten, and soon found that they quickly rotted. Not having access to formaldehyde or pickling alcohol, nor a supply of large jars (Mom was definitely not keen on letting me use her canning jars!), I gave up the pursuit, and collected less perishable items, such as stamps and rocks. Mushrooms are sometimes dangerous also. Although only about one percent of fungi species are toxic, a handful of those, mostly of the genus Amanita, are deadly in even small amounts. 

This picture, generated by Imagen 3 (Gemini), is based on the appearance of Amanita phalloides, the "death cap" mushroom, but in fanciful colors. Gemini wrote the haiku and I chose the typeface.

Toxic mushrooms are included in a sort of rogues' gallery of harmful things in nature, in the essay "But It's Natural!" in the book Superfoods, Silkworms, and Spandex: Science and Pseudoscience in Everyday Life by Dr. Joe Schwarcz. The appellation "natural" is applied to a great many things, particularly foods. As the author points out, the term is meaningless and usually misleading. To quote a few sentences from this essay,

Take pollen from one flower, sprinkle it on a different type of flower, and a new variety of flower emerges. Is that flower natural? It would not have been produced if a human hand had not intervened. But isn't the hand also natural?

"Natural" has become a marketing term, as has the term "Superfoods", the subject of the essay "Superfoods and Superhype", a valuable survey of the ways folks with something to sell attempt to mislead the public. His earlier book, Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience, digs much deeper into the phenomenon, particularly in medicine and chemistry. Willow bark contains a natural analgesic, but it harms the stomach; Aspirin is a chemical derivative that works better and is less harmful. The "natural" is worse than the "artificial." (Image via Dall-E3)

This book has no chapters. The text consists of 75 essays strung together like posts in a blog, with only a headline/title separating them. In the introductory pages we find a list of 18 other books by Dr. Schwarcz, and I found it interesting that nine of the titles contain the phrase "Science of Everyday Life" (this book makes the tenth), four contain "Chemistry of Everyday Life", six contain the word "Commentaries", and three contain the word "Inquiries". Ten titles also include a number, as in "…62 All-New Commentaries…". I suspect that he has a blog to which he has contributed for one or more decades, in addition to weekly columns in at least two newspapers. Preparing a book, then, is not so much writing anything new, but compiling from such sources. Just for context: This (my) blog has nearly 3,000 posts written over the past 20 years, and I have other writings, so perhaps I could get a few publications together; it's a thought…

Dr. Schwarcz has a mission, to combat errors of scientific reporting. These days the term "misinformation" is bandied about, but it has unfortunate political overtones. In fact, he has apparently fallen afoul of establishment misinformation regarding treatments for COVID-19. Such treatments became extremely political footballs. The author writes, "Dr. Vladimir Zelenko's claim of having successfully treated thousands of COVID-19 patients using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin, and zinc sulfate has been widely disputed." Yes, it has, primarily by "official" voices that have since been discredited. I must comment further.

HCQ and Ivermectin were both widely disparaged, but only after President Trump mentioned them. Suddenly, two extremely safe medications were declared "risky", "dangerous", even "deadly", and doctors who had the temerity to prescribe either medication were threatened with losing their license. I know a few archaeologists, including a relative of mine. Whenever they go into the jungles of Central America, they take HCQ to prevent malaria. Another close relative of mine contracted a case of worms from eating sushi, and was treated with Ivermectin, quite successfully and safely I might add. It isn't just a "horse dewormer" as some declared, it is a "human dewormer" also. We must understand: neither of these medications has any action against the SARS-COV2 virus. Rather, they modulate the immune system so as to prevent pneumonia from developing. HCQ works best very early, from the time symptoms appear for 2-3 days, and Ivermectin works best for a longer term. This is not medical advice; I am repeating observations by honest doctors. If you need to know more, or get treatment, find an honest doctor, if there are any in your area. Secondarily, because the mucus in the lungs that develops during pneumonia is made from glucose, low blood sugar is preventive. Therefore, at the first sign of illness, fast for a couple of days. The old adage, "Feed a cold, starve a fever" is about preventing pneumonia caused by respiratory diseases accompanied by fever; it was good advice in Colonial times, and is still good advice.

Bottom line: Doctor Zelenko was right. Call him Jeremiah: never wrong, never believed.

The author is a chemist, so naturally, a good number of the essays relate to chemistry, usually as brief historical surveys that emphasize the accidental or surprise nature of discoveries. "Graphene!" is one such. Something was observed a few times over many years as various researchers "messed with" graphite, but graphene was not identified until 1962. This single-layer substance made only of carbon atoms has great potential. It is tricky to produce in quantity, very hard to produce in sheets big enough to do anything with, and potentially toxic when nano-sized, as it so often is. The illustration (I used ImageFX) evokes the way graphene sheets jumble atop one another when graphite is disturbed.

The essays range far and wide, however from the origins of "duck tape" or "duct tape" (whether the "duck" fabric came first, or the use of such tape on ductwork, isn't clear) to the "tin" in "Tin Pan Alley" to a more-balanced-than-usual survey of "forever chemicals", the perfluorocarbon chemicals used to make Teflon® and related products, and substances that arise as side products of such manufacture. And a whole lot more. Seventy-five great essays!

For AI art, word order matters, but less than I expected

 kw: art generation, ai art, experiments, word order, semantics

Continuing my Troglodyte series of generated images, I began rewriting the long prompts I'd been using, putting the main description of the room first, followed by a phrase about the cave, followed by other items and details. I noticed after a while that it has been harder to elicit images with lots of cave decoration (stalactites, etc.). I began to wonder if the elements of a prompt were somehow treated like the ingredients list on a cereal box, in order by quantity (or by importance in this application). For example, here is a prompt I used a year ago for "Cave Dining Room":

A room in a spectacular cave that has many stalactites and stalagmites, with flowstone on the room's walls, fitted out as a grand dining room with a long table and at least twelve chairs, a chandelier over the table, and a buffet stand nearby

This is the prompt I used in the past few days:

A dining room in a spectacular natural cave with stalactites and stalagmites and flowstone, with seating for twenty or more, with buffet to the side and chandeliers from the ceiling, plus a grandfather clock and a large pantry, and the floor is natural stone with a patterned rug under the table

Here are the resulting images, both from Leonardo AI. Note that the settings were not exactly the same, but here my focus is on the difference in the amount of cave decoration.

The upper image is a little more "cavey"; the lower image is the best of a dozen or more attempts to get the feel I wanted. Some of the images had ceilings that looked more like tangled tree roots, others were almost smooth, though rounded and arched.

In some settings Leonardo AI has an option for "AI Enhancement" of the prompt. It also implements the Style and other settings by modifying the prompt internally. I could only get an inkling of the latter phenomenon by saving an image, because about 50 characters of the prompt used are included in the file name. I say "an inkling" because an AI-enhanced prompt balloons to a few hundred characters. In either case, by studying prompt enhancement, I find that enhancement is primarily done by adding adjectives and sometimes adjective-noun groups (such as the phrase "vibrant cinematic photo").

I designed an experiment to see how much word order matters when a prompt consists entirely of nouns:

meadow, mountains, flowers, butterflies, birds

In Leonardo AI's Classic Mode (its other mode is Flow, which I'll say more about in another post), I first used the Flux Schnell model and the Creative style, 16x9 aspect ratio, small image size (1184x672), with a fixed seed of 142857. When I downloaded the image, the file name was

Flux_Schnell_a_surreal_and_vibrant_cinematic_photo_of_meadow_m_0.jpg

Thus, the prompt had been enhanced because of the Creative style. The program also appends a number so it can distinguish repeated uses of a prompt.

To keep to the bare 5-word prompt only I switched the style to None. Here are the two resulting images, full size (1184x672), enhanced prompt above, 5-word prompt below:

The images are very similar, with some interesting differences. The upper (enhanced) one has no birds; of the five birds in the lower (ordinary) one, the two birds at upper left replaced ambiguous-looking butterflies and a butterfly at far left appears to be a bird-butterfly hybrid. The trees are similar, but the mountains have certain differences, and the enhanced image appears more stormy or foggy. Take note of the yellow flower at bottom center. It is one of several persistent elements from image to image, with only one significant variation I'll point out later on.

The next two images have "rotated" prompts, first "mountains, flowers, butterflies, birds, meadow" and then "flowers, butterflies, birds, meadow, mountains".

In each image there are three birds flying in the distance, and in the upper image in particular, a couple of rather ambiguous flying things. You may have noticed that all the butterflies are Monarchs. A significant change from the upper to the lower image is the bokeh (out-of-focus look) in the distance below, whereas the mountains are sharp above. The next two images are from the next two rotated prompts, "butterflies, birds, meadow, mountains, flowers" and "birds, meadow, mountains, flowers, butterflies".

The upper image has no clearly-defined birds. The five butterflies at the top in a cluster are all distorted, having either birdlike aspects or extra wings. The upper image also has out-of-focus mountains and trees, but in the lower image everything is in focus, plus there are added trees to the left. That is all the prompt rotations.

As a further experiment I added a few words to the prompt, and then as a last experiment, added more words to make it a descriptive phrase. The two prompts are:

birds in the foreground, meadow, mountains, flowers, butterflies

birds in the foreground of a mountain meadow with flowers and butterflies

In each image, a single bird is in the foreground, as requested, but not "birds". Nothing is in the sky; all the butterflies are also in the foreground. The big yellow flower has been replaced in the upper image by three smaller flowers. Both images have significant bokeh, in both background and the immediate foreground. The trees and mountains are also a bit more different from the prior six images, moreso than those six differ among themselves.

Note that all of these use the same seed: 142857. It's a favorite number of mine, being the repeating unit of the decimal expansion of 1/7. A couple of times I tested seed consistency by repeating the generation without changing anything. So far as I could tell, the images were pixel-by-pixel identical. So the only thing available to cause differences between the images would be differences in the prompt.

I don't know how a prompt is turned into "tokens", which are numbers that represent conceptual entries in a database of "meanings", as "meanings" might be understood in the context of generative AI. The order that they occur clearly matters, but not by a great deal. Adding directive words, such as "in the foreground" and "glue words", the little articles, conjunctions, and prepositions between the nouns, also made a difference, otherwise the last two images would be identical.

I don't know why some images are in focus throughout, while others have various levels of bokeh in the background and/or immediate foreground.

I have learned a couple of things, and uncovered further mysteries about art generation. The adventure continues!

Music for another planet

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, music, pop music, musical revolutions, biography

You just gotta know your own limitations. I just read Rob Sheffield's new book Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music. Ms Swift is a genius, a phenomenon, an incredible performer…with an oeuvre that leaves me unmoved.

Mr. Sheffield's semi-biography, full of inside allusions and abbreviations (most of which went right past me) is written for her fans. About halfway through I realized that he has mastered the art of writing in a female voice. That makes him quite a phenomenon also. It ensures a connection with Taylor Swift's primary fan base.

To be banal about it: The book outlines the career of Taylor Swift, which now spans 19 years, and in particular, all the swerves and redirections she has made to keep it going and rising. It isn't mentioned clearly, that she knows keenly just how short the attention span of the music-consuming public is. Apparently, she is delighted to oblige, and she manages to pivot before anyone else notices the need to pivot.

The last time I went to a Pop music concert, it was to see Peter, Paul and Mary in 1971. If I listen to music without just letting it be a background for something else I am doing, it is to learn to sing it (This doesn't take long: When I was in high school I first heard Bob Dylan sing "The Times, They are a-Changin'", on the radio during a family road trip with my Dad driving. I grabbed some paper and wrote out the lyrics on the spot). Thus, reading and hearing about people who spend hours and hours just listening, sometimes over and over, to a favorite album, I feel they and I inhabit different planets.

That's OK. I liked the book. It let me peek in a window to learn about a remarkable person. I think her career will continue to rise (ignore the hype about that little hiccup at S.B. LIV). 

Why we can't see an atomic nucleus

 kw: speculative musings, calculations, photon energies, resolution

Looking at a small, old photograph made with a Brownie box camera in about 1950, I asked my father, "Can we take a picture of this picture and blow it up real big, so it is clearer?" He said, "The grain of the film would be magnified, not the details in the original scene." A few years later, using a slightly-better-than-a-toy microscope, I designed an "expander", a device with a couple of lenses that attached above the eyepiece to enlarge the image even more. I wanted to see things at 2,000X, and the microscope was limited to 400X (which is pretty good, actually). To my surprise, while the image was indeed five times as large, no more detail was visible. It was just fuzzier.

With more time and study I learned that the maximum practical magnification of an optical microscope is 800X, for someone with normal vision. Using higher magnification (up to 1,600X is available with many higher quality microscopes) makes it a little easier to see the details that are barely visible at 800X, but doesn't bring more details into view. Why is this? It comes down to the nature of light. The basic concept is that you need a "probe" smaller than the finest detail you want to see. To see bacteria, light is good enough, but to see smaller details, something smaller is needed. An atom is 10,000 times smaller than a small bacterial cell, and atomic nuclei are 100 million times smaller. We'll go step by step.

The visible spectrum is a narrow range of wavelengths of light, and you may have read that the range is from 400 nanometers (nm) at the blue end to 700 nm at the red end. These numbers are rounded off; for most people, the deepest violet (or "bluest blue") that is visible has a wavelength near 380 nm, and the "reddest red" visible is at about 750 nm. Our color vision is most sensitive to green light with a wavelength near 555 nm. This is used to calculate the highest practical magnification of microscopes. Using a bluish (sky blue, not deep blue) filter with an optical microscope reduces the fuzziness induced by longer wavelength light: red and orange are not eliminated, but reduced, making the image a bit clearer.

Articles abound regarding the ultimate resolution of microscope (and telescope) optics. Without getting into lots of equations, we can jump to the conclusion that a practical limit for most optical systems is about equal to half the wavelength of the illumination. Thus, in visible light, objects smaller than about 277 nm, or 1/3600th of a millimeter, cannot be discerned.

A second critical factor is the resolution of the unaided eye ("naked eye"). The definition of 20/20 vision is based on optical resolution of one arcminute, or 1/60th of a degree. This is sometimes stated as the ability to see lines spaced 1/10th mm apart at "reading distance"; if you do some figuring, that means "reading distance" is about 13.5 inches or 340 mm. I just held a book where I normally do for reading and measured 14 inches, so that's about right.

The ratio of 1/3600 to 1/10 is 360. How, then, can a microscope have useful magnification as high as 800X? Most microscope objective lenses are "stand-off" lenses, which sit a little farther from the subject than the diameter of their front lens. Special lens arrangements with a front lens at least twice as large as the lens-to-subject distance, used with oil between the lens and the object, can more than double the resolution, so the effective ratio gets into the range of 720 to 800. This is adequate to see bacteria such as E. coli, which are about 1/1000 mm in diameter and 2-3 thousandths of a mm long. At 800X, they would appear 0.8 mm in diameter and around 2 mm long "at reading distance". This is as far as an optical microscope can take us.

My original question was about seeing an atomic nucleus. First let's take a step in that direction and consider seeing atoms. A typical atom has a size of one or two tenths of a nanometer. That's about 1/10,000th the size of an E. coli bacterial cell. What kind of light can see that? To see atoms we need a wavelength of a tenth of a nanometer. Or less. Less is better. What kind of light does that?

To go further, we need an equation that relates photon energy to its wavelength. The standard form of this equation is

E = hc/λ

The symbols are

• E is photon (or other particle) energy
• h is Planck's constant (an extremely small number)
• c is the speed of light (an extremely large number)
• λ is the wavelength

Combining h and c in units consistent with energy in electron-Volts and wavelength in nm, this equation simplifies to

E = 1239.8/λ, and its converse, λ=1239.8/E

For our use, we can round 1239.8 to 1240. The electron-Volt, or eV, is a useful energy unit for dealing with light and with accelerated particles, such as the electrons we will consider momentarily. We find that blue light photons at 400 nm have an energy of 3.1 eV and red light photons at 700 nm have an energy of 1.77 eV. That is enough energy to stimulate the molecules in the retina of the eye without doing damage. Shorter wavelengths, with higher energy, such as ultraviolet, are damaging, which is a good reason to wear sunglasses outside.

What is the energy of a photon with a wavelength of 0.1 nm? It is 12,400 eV, often written 12.4 KeV. These are X-rays. The trouble with X-rays is that they are very hard to focus. Fortunately, because wave-particle duality applies to matter particles as well as to photons, the electron microscope was invented. Electrons can be easily turned into a beam and focused. Over time, electron microscopes were improved to the point that atoms can now be imaged directly.

This image was made with an electron microscope using an electron energy of 300,000 eV, or a wavelength of about 0.004 nm, or 4 picometers (pm). It shows a grain boundary between two silicon crystals. A technical detail: this is not a scanning electron microscope, which relies on electrons bouncing off the subject. This is transmission electron microscopy, or TEM, with the subject cut and polished to extreme thinness. The electrons that do bounce off scatter in all directions, and also knock electrons loose from the silicon, which makes for a messy image, but electrons that pass through ("transmit") form a good image, so TEM is best for this application.

On your screen the shortest distance between atoms should appear to be a few mm. Now consider: the nuclei of these atoms are 10,000 times smaller. What kind of probe can reach inside an atom to see the nucleus?

The wavelength of the electrons in this instrument, as noted, is 4 pm, while the size of an atomic nucleus is measured in femtometers (fm); 4 pm = 4,000 fm. That's much too big. A particle with a wavelength of 1 fm has to be very energetic indeed: 1,240,000,000 eV, or 1.24 GeV (1 GeV is one billion eV). The electron microscope that made the image above cost a couple of million dollars and is five feet high. Much of that size is needed to keep the very high voltage from sparking over and shorting out! Not to mention probably killing the operator. A billion eV is like lightning; it can jump for miles! A different kind of apparatus is needed.

Scientists probe the nucleus with large particle accelerators that cost many millions, or billions, of dollars, euros, whatever. They seldom use electrons. The electron is a light particle, and boosting it to energy greater than a billion eV is hard. The maximum seems to be 50 GeV. Using heavier particles, usually protons, works better. However, as the image at the top of this post implies, smacking a really high energy particle against a nucleus knocks off all kinds of stuff. That is really not conducive to making a "photograph" of a nucleus. Big accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland have huge detectors to gather the spray of "stuff" that results from smacking nuclei really hard, with particles accelerated to extreme energies: 6.5 TeV (Trillion eV) so far (A detail: both probes and targets are accelerated, in opposite directions, so the combined collision energy is 13 TeV).

This all illustrates a critical point: The smaller the things you want to see, the more energy is needed to do so, and the more it will cost. To see really small things, right down to the level of the Planck length, which is about 1/6th of trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter, would require enough energy to create another Universe. I don't think it is wise to play with such energies!