A lesson we are slow to learn

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, epidemiology, airborne pathogens

When I saw the title, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life we Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, I imagined a survey of the microorganisms that make their way into the air. Instead I found a historical survey of certain attitudes that the medical establishment has held, primarily a stubborn denial that bacteria and viruses and other micro-pathogens can travel long distances along with the air. By the end of the book, it appears that this denial persists to this day alongside an ever-strengthening view that airborne spread of disease is of paramount importance. I say "appears" because in the political climate of the past five years, the great majority of clinicians and epidemiologists have judged it prudent to say as little as possible about it. Political matters are so hyper-polarized these days that they taint or contaminate every aspect of national life.

The term "Covid-19" does not appear until the fifth of five sections of the book, on page 350, eight pages into the chapter "Disease X". Beginning on page 345 the virus is called SARS-COV-2. This is a curious inversion of time: I don't remember learning the name SARS-COV-2 until more than a year after the WHO (as reported on p 350) announced that the name of the disease would be Covid-19.

The first 340 pages of Airborne present a blow-by-blow (-by-blow) history of the small number of researchers who studied airborne microbes for decades and yet died or retired without their findings being recognized as at all relevant to the prevention or treatment of disease. This in spite of the fact that non-medical folks (darn near everybody on the planet) recognizes that, just as dust and smoke can be carried miles and hundreds of miles by wind and even breezes, so must the microbes which are ever-so-much smaller and lighter.

These days, I sometimes marvel at how clean the air in my house is. When the sun shines through a window, I'll see scattered specks of dust in the sunbeam, but I recall that in my childhood a sunbeam was really a beam, so dense it appeared solid. This was considered normal in the 1950's and before. We dust areas like the top of the piano weekly or monthly; it used to be a daily task. When I would catch a childhood disease such as measles, mumps or chicken pox, my mother would say, "Well, if you can see a sick kid, his germs can get to you." Forty years later, before an effective vaccine for chicken pox was developed, we sent our son to visit a friend who was sick with chicken pox so he could catch it. That is one disease that is deadly to adults but kids just shrug it off (and scratch a little).

It was almost laughably predictable that Mr. Zimmer would make Anthony Fauci into a semi-hero. On my part, I count President Trump's second greatest mistake to be his failure to either fire or sideline Dr. Fauci after their first televised appearance together, when the doctor contradicted nearly everything the President had to say (…and the greatest mistake was initiating the practice of "stimulus"; it gave his successor's administration "permission" to "stimulate" us into a 30-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt). I began to designate "Dr Fakey" from that press conference. And when he said, "I am Science", he proved that he had lost connection with reality. Mr. Zimmer partially redeems himself by noting that Dr. Fauci was shunted aside by the Trump administration, months too late, and he does point out that Dr. Fauci and much of the medical establishment was motivate initially by the shortage of semi-effective masks, to tell the public not to mask. Later lies, however, are ignored.

Just by the way, I got N-95 masks from a hardware store; they are excellent dust masks! But no matter what masks people used in the 2020-2022 time frame, I never saw another person wear a mask correctly. I know what it takes to make a mask fit so that I can mow the lawn without choking half to death; I am very sensitive to grass clipping dust. But it happens that viruses such as SARS-COV-2 and influenza and the common cold are in these masks' "sour spot" (the opposite of a sweet spot!): too small for pore size to catch them and too large for electrostatic capture to be highly effective. N-95 means the "sour spot" still can stop 95%, but that means 5% gets through, which is enough for most people to get sick anyway. And an ill-fitting N-95 mask is really about an N-10 mask, or worse. OK, enough of that diatribe.

What I hoped to see in the "Disease X" chapter and its successors was an even-handed history. Sadly, too much was left out. The Chinese doctor in Wuhan who worked on gain-of-function research into coronaviruses, and published the results in prestigious journals such as Science, is never mentioned. Ditto the fact that her research was bankrolled by Dr. Fauci, using an accounting trick to get around a prohibition by President Obama. I do not mention the doctor's name, since doing so is a sure ticket to "cancellation", even today. The five state governors who required nursing homes to take in patients infected with the virus are never mentioned. The illness and deaths caused by their policies form the bulk of the First Wave of Covid-19. No mention is made that the Wuhan Wet Market doesn't have bats for sale. I could go on…

Even though I saw where the book was going by the 50th page or so, I read it all. Carl Zimmer writes very well and I generally consider him, if not a wholly honest journalist, one of the better ones. This book falls short of his usual standard. I don't consider the time wasted, however. Though the book's main text is 414 pages, at least 340 pages of it contain interesting and useful history.

Another naturalist, more yards

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science, cities

When you think of Picnic Guests, what do you imagine? This image probably doesn't come to mind. Ants are the more likely thought. The third chapter of Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild, by Hanna Bjørgaas (or the fourth if you count a long "Introduction") considers ants. Ants that invade the author's city apartment, ants that drive her to consider chemical warfare. Discussions with a couple of scientists dissuade her, and she simply pays more attention to keeping things clean and outwaits them.

In the meantime, she uses a magnifier to get a closer look at one. At 20X, it looks quite fearsome. Ants are well fitted for living in a great many environments. They may be the primary ubiquitous animals. They live on six of the seven continents; none are native to Antarctica (the only insects that live there, in a few coastal areas, are a couple of species of midges that can survive being frozen for half the year). They abound everywhere else, and probably outweigh the sum of all mammals, humans included.

Ms Bjørgaas lives in Oslo, Norway. Her book was translated from Norwegian by Matt Bagguley. The nine titled chapters touch on living things she paid attention to during nine months of the year. She begins the year with crows, the most intelligent birds most of us are likely to encounter. Crows in the city, like many types of city birds, are less skittish around humans than their more rural cousins. They may not be as human-adapted as pigeons—sometimes you almost have to step on a pigeon before it flutters away—but they seem to have a keen sense of how far you can reach, should you be so inclined.

In the Introduction, though, which takes place in Antarctica where she worked briefly as a tour guide, her focus is not so much on penguins as on a particular species of lichen that caught her eye. Both crows and lichens appear later in the book also. The November chapter focuses on lichens, and is titled, "The Written Language of the City." This is because, among the great variety of lichen species, some are more sensitive, and others more tolerant of the polluted air of cities, particular when it includes sulfurous (stinky) gases. 

This picture shows at least three species of lichen on an old branch, in an area with rather clean air. Using citizen scientists to help collect observations, researchers have developed a "lichen scale" to measure the level of air pollution in and around cities. One may then map concentric rings that surround sources of more egregious stenches such as paper plants (Sixty years ago I remember the smell of paper plants near Newark NJ, which my cousin called "the armpit of New Jersey". It's been cleaned up a bit since then).

The author did an experiment in soil fertility. She bought nine pieces of cotton underwear and selected three locations, one in a desiccated city lot, one in a park, and one well outside the city in the forest. In each, she dug three holes and buried a garment a spade-length deep in each hole. Months later, there was nearly nothing left of her "offerings" in the forest, and the parkland holes yielded semi-composted cloth bits. The third location had been paved over since, which demolished that part of the experiment. I expect that the cloth may have been darkened a bit, but would have been otherwise almost unchanged, and I suspect she would agree. That's what others have found.

If you find the spectacle of a woman digging holes in a city park amusing, consider coming across her prone upon the ground, examining the contents of a shallow scrape with a strong magnifier. She did a little of this, as she tells in "August: Stories from Underground". With a bit more discretion, she visited a soil scientist, who showed her the life beneath our feet with a video microscope. A tiny springtail (the size of a comma) was a hideous monster compared to protozoa and other small denizens of the soil. And, of course, it must be said that the number of bacteria in a teaspoonful of soil will typically exceed the entire human population of the earth, perhaps ten times over. Even the dry, sandy soil of a trampled path in a city may contain a billion bacteria per gram.

This book is a delightful contrast to nature books that tend to concentrate on, for example, birds, or beetles, or some other focus. There is room in the concept of "naturalist" for anything living. I wish the book had an index. Still, it is fascinating and it opens one up to some of the variety to be found in any environment, if we will simply slow down and look, and listen, and observe.

The naturalist in the yard

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science

I took this picture in 2010, the first year I participated in the Great Sunflower Project. It is a sweat bee of a species common in the mid-Atlantic area, gathering pollen from a Lemon Queen Sunflower, the flower designated in the Project for attracting pollinators, primarily native bees. For those who like to be involved with natural history in their own surroundings, GSP is one program that Thor Hanson recommends in Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door.

According to directions, I planted sunflower seeds in early spring, and once the flowers began to bloom, I stood nearby for 15-30 minutes a few times weekly to record what I saw. The project organizers don't expect us backyard naturalists to identify the species of every bee. They supply a simple field guide to several broad types of common bees, and participants report how many of each type appears during each session of watching.

That year I saw very few honeybees, at least in the late summer when the sunflowers were blooming. But as summer cooled toward autumn, I saw a few more, not just on the sunflowers, including this one on a flower of garlic chive, near a smaller bee that I don't recognize (it is near upper left).

I participated in the project for several years, then stopped. Standing around on a hot August day is rather hard on me. But we have plenty of fare for pollinators in all seasons, as seen in the pair of pictures below:

On the left, three tiny bees (about 8mm) are picking over Sedum flowers that bloom in the spring next to our front walk. Oh the right is a flower bed with flowers for all seasons. A Hellebore is almost hidden beneath late-spring-blooming evening primroses. The Hellebore blooms from February until June. We have a few in other parts of the yard, to keep pollinators supplied while they await other kinds of flowers. In mid-June the Echinacea begin to bloom, and carry on for a month. Lavender and heather flower later, and several other flowering plants push the season almost to first snow. This garden is next to a crabapple tree, that flowers in mid-spring, and across the yard, an apple tree flowers in early spring.

One more creature we recently began to try to attract is the Monarch butterfly, with these milkweed plants. There is a schoolyard nearby that has a big patch of milkweed, but this is just the third year for us. We started with a single plant we grew from seeds we collected in the schoolyard. So far we haven't seen any butterflies, but these plants attract many more honeybees than I've seen in ten years or more. They also become infested with milkweed bugs. When they are very small, the little red nymphs must have honeydew like aphids do, because ants tend them.

Early in the book, Thor Hanson uses the term "backyard biology." Later he says it might be better to speak of "yard biology," though it is less euphonious, because nature doesn't just hide out behind our houses. It is all around us. The ten chapters (plus an Introduction and Conclusion) reveal the manifold riches of his own yard. Of course, he does live on an island in Washington state, with a yard that's bigger than average…multiple yards, from the sound of it. However, any of us, if we're willing to slow down and observe, can see a lot.

Thinking it over, we can gather quite a list of the variables that lead to quite a variety of creatures making themselves at home in any yard: variations of light and shade; warmth on cooler days and shelter on hotter days; foods that appeal to this or that sort of creature; shelter for the shy ones (such as little songbirds) and open spaces for the bold (rabbits, squirrels, and foxes; even deer when apples are falling).

I tend to favor insects because many of them ignore humans if we move gently and don't breathe on them. They're easier to photograph than birds. One acquaintance of the author uses a lighted sheet at night to attract moths, which he photographs obsessively. He has catalogued hundreds of species in his yard. One can do the same for beetles; many will also come to a lighted sheet. The beauty of a light trap is you don't have to catch and kill to identify most species (sometimes it's necessary, though).

Dr. Hanson speaks much of birds, and advises getting not just "a birdhouse" but a dozen or more, of various sizes, because there are many varieties of bird that prefer to nest in cavities. There just aren't enough abandoned woodpecker holes to go around. During my last few years at my company I was on a team that monitored birdhouses scattered around the property. All were sized for bluebirds, which also made them ideal for swallows (2 species), wrens (3 species) and chickadees. On occasion we would find a birdhouse in a more sheltered location that had been taken over by a pair of starlings, which are rather large; they had pecked the hole a lot bigger. At the end of the season we would take that birdhouse to the company shop to be fitted with a new door, this time with a metal collar in the hole! On another part of the property there were much larger boxes designed for wood ducks. My wife and I have talked it over a little. We may get (or make) a few birdhouses.

Another project recommended in the book is iNaturalist. It is a phone app, with an accompanying website, where I find it helpful when I want to edit an entry. TIP: The GPS on my phone is not as accurate as I'd like, so I go into the website later and edit the location if it is too far off. The minimum "native" accuracy of an iNaturalist geolocation is four meters. That's usually sufficient; for us Yanks, that comes to a radius of 13 feet. On the website, if you remember accurately where you were (it shows you a detailed aerial photo), you can enter a value as small as one meter.

Here I have focused on the "what we can do" suggestions. The book is also chock full of stories about various animals of all sizes found in the author's yard, or discussed by his friends and colleagues. Getting closer to what goes on outdoors is good for us. We need to slow down and, typically, just look and listen. It is good to recognize that we are part of nature.

Spiders continue to spread

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After a week of lower activity, scanning of this blog has leapt up again in the past two days. Here's the list of actors for the past 24 hours (as of ~4pm Tue, 6/10/25):

I haven't seen the US drop to 12th place before. The heavy hitters today are Vietnam and Brazil, but nine other rather unexpected countries followed, above the US. I surmise that today, and recent heavy activity cycles in general, are driven by AI training. Good luck, folks; this blog is rather specialized.

Poorly-known life in the largest habitat

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, marine biology

The Blue Sea Dragon is a beautiful creature, a type of sea slug. You wouldn't want to handle one, in spite of their tiny size, around 3 cm at most (1¼"). They are armed with stinging cells similar to those of the Portuguese Man of War, which they obtain by eating small animals related to the Man of War and "appropriating" their stingers!

They are rather rare, found at or near the surface of warm oceans. This Wikipedia article has much more about them. They are also described on pages 147-148 of Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth by Sönke Johnsen, where they are presented as an example of small pelagic animals that avoid being eaten by being, not just noxious, but venomous. Sea slugs in general are tasty treats for many oceanic predators. Not these!

"Pelagic" is from a classical Greek word meaning "of the open ocean." By definition the pelagic zone is nearly all of the world ocean, all of the salt water that is far enough from the coast to be unaffected by surf action and is also above the bottom (by a rather poorly defined distance; at least several meters). The upper kilometer of this is of special interest to Dr. Johnsen, being the zone in which at least a little sunlight penetrates, making photosynthesis possible, and also making sight hunting possible.

The book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part catalogue, a catalogue of the attributes needed by the animals that live in the upper pelagic zone, never approaching land or the sea bottom…at least not voluntarily. The book is illustrated by Marlin Peterson; his depiction of the sea dragon, Glaucus atlanticus, is shown here for comparison with the photo above.

To study pelagic creatures is costly and difficult. Operating an oceangoing ship costs thousands of dollars daily, and the extra crew needed to handle a submersible or an ROV, or both, must be paid, and such equipment is worth millions. So, a dozen scientists and a couple of dozen crew may spend half a month of a month at sea, and get a smattering of photos via the ROV or in a submersible, but sometimes they return without sighting anything at all!

A large majority of pelagic animals avoid being seen by being transparent. The author writes of being on "blue water" SCUBA dives, knowing that thousands of finger-sized salps are all around, and seeing nothing. Animals that are not transparent are typically counter-shaded, and those that reside a little deeper down, where there is no upward-welling light to reflect off a silvery ventral side, have arrays of controllable bioluminescent organs that make their underside match the light coming from above. The "arms race" between predators that don't want prey to see them, and prey that don't want predators to see them, makes them hard to detect, even by each other! Thus, many can also shine their own bioluminescent flashlights to find a mate, for example, at the risk of attracting a predator.

Past knowledge of mid-oceanic life was gathered by trawling. One may thus learn of the existence of numerous animals, at least the slower ones. Not many oceanic squid, for example, are brought up by trawling. The fragile beings caught in a trawl usually arrive as clumps of unidentifiable sludge. By analogy, imagine studying London by dragging an anchor on a chain from a fast dirigible, to try to learn how the British live. More useful and appropriate methods are continually being devised.

An interesting contrast is presented in a section on Navigation. A pair of scientists the author knows uses a large, boxy tank surrounded by electromagnets to test juvenile sea turtles. They appear to have a magnetic sense, which helps the females navigate to their favored beach for laying their eggs, for example. Now consider elephant seals. The females come ashore to meet their mates, give birth, mate again a month later, then head out to sea. It is known that they travel thousands of kilometers to good feeding grounds, then return to land to give birth. It is also known that they swim a couple of hundred feet down (50-80 meters), so they can't be navigating by the stars. But a female elephant seal weighs a ton, and though she is less fearsome than her four-ton mate, she is still more dangerous than the average lion. You aren't going to get one of these in a magnet-bounded tank! As the author writes, with better-than-average scientific humility, he and others have studied elephant seal navigation for several years, and so far have learned nothing!

Such studies would be so much simpler if these animals—at least the smaller ones—could be brought into the laboratory and "put through their paces." But animals in the lab may not exhibit any of their in-the-wild behaviors, and the things they might do in a tank are likely to bear no resemblance to what they do in the open ocean. Scientists labor to devise more clever and less intrusive instruments, hoping to observe natural and normal behavior. Really, the study of this immense habitat, that covers 70% of the surface of the Earth, has just begun.

Artificial aliens?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, physics, cosmology, genetics, first contact

To put Sara Imari Walker's last question first, will first contact with a true alien occur in a laboratory? Dr. Walker's book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence is a heady brew of ideas. She has a wonderful kind of mind that looks at things from angles others would never imagine existed, and she has managed to find a number of kindred souls with a similar talent.

Dr. Walker and her colleagues propose Assembly Theory, a new view of evolution in which technology has become an agent of evolutionary change, and "selection" takes on a meaning that would mightily bemuse Darwin. Her explanations make sense. I don't yet understand enough about assembly theory to attempt an explanation. I must content myself with a few bullet points gleaned from the third chapter ("Life is what?"; intended to be pronounced with a distinct upward lilt, as, "Life is WHAT??"). These items do not describe life, but rather objects. Objects as the new theory envisions them:

• Objects are finite and distinguishable
• Objects are breakable (I would have said, "can be disassembled")
• Objects exist more than once
• Objects are lineages
• Objects form via selection

Some objects are living things. Some are not. A wooden table of the kind I built long ago to hold my mouse pad next to my desk is an example. I constructed it using nine pieces of wood, eight large wood screws, 24 small nails, and some glue. The top is plywood, which itself was fabricated by someone else before I bought it from a lumberyard and cut it to size. We can inventory the statements. 

• My little mouse-pad table is finite (less than a meter tall) and is distinct from other items of furniture in this room, some purchased (and thus built by someone else) and others built here, by me.
• It can be taken apart, by removing the fasteners and breaking the glue joints (no doubt tearing wood in the process). I don't plan to do so.
• I have made other similar tables, which I suppose qualifies at "exists more than once." Worldwide, there are many tables of many designs, but all related in general shape and function.
• Is it a lineage? The idea of "table", generalized from "supporting platform" is certainly a lineage, going back to the first table or table-like platform built by a human or prehuman creature.
• "Selection" in such a case means that the I selected to make a table rather than a cantilevered shelf hung off my desk, or other possible means of supporting my mouse pad.

Consider a screwdriver. The author writes, "An evolutionary chain of objects is necessary to assemble screwdrivers into existence." In other words, the forebears of screwdrivers include machine shops, mining and metals productions facilities, and creatures like us to think them up. In the case of living things, the "lineage" of everything alive today goes back about 3.9 billion years. All known life comes from life. What came before?

This is the crux of the matter for assembly theory. The theorists use these concepts to imagine life as we don't know it, life as no one knows it.

Side question: Can objects be produced by other objects that are not living? They can, which is apparently where all nonliving and never-previously-living things arose. For example, a planet such as Earth was assembled from dust, rocks, etc., under the influence of gravity and electromagnetism and sundry other possible forces. Also, natural, nonliving actions produce raindrops and snowflakes in clouds, sand and gravel from rocks, and so forth. 

However, the production of objects by nonliving processes yields objects with very few unique parts. Living objects tend to be much more complex, as do many of their products. Thus this conjecture, stated at least a couple of times in the book, "Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects with many unique parts." The author notes that many kinds of minerals don't form in the absence of life. I recall taking a class in minerology, in which the professor stated, "There are about 1,000 mineral species known in the earliest rocks, before there was much life on Earth. There are now more than 4,000 minerals, and most of them can only form because there is life on Earth." Today the number of catalogued minerals is almost 7,000, and that may grow to more than 10,000 as busy geologists keep finding new stuff.

This principle yields the basis of the author's "assembly index", a measure of the minimum number of steps needed to produce an object. This gets us away from looking for life that is too chemically similar to "Earthlings" (from microbes and viruses to whales and forests, with us in the mid-range). If the assembly index of numerous objects collected on an exoplanet is large enough, we could conclude that life most likely produced them. The critical number is, according to the author, fifteen.

Frankly, I don't know how assembly index is calculated. I read that the assembly index of the molecule ATP is fifteen. This molecule has 47 atoms. Perhaps the calculation allows the synthesis to begin with smaller molecules that natural processes have already produced: water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, phosphorus oxide, and perhaps even small hydrocarbons such as ethane (ethane can result from abiotic, or nonliving, processes, but in the presence of a living biosphere we never observe it).

Therefore, the number 15 seems to be a good "filter" to discern objects produced by life.

A second prong in the approach by proponents of assembly theory is the development of a "chemputer", a semi-automated way to sort of "3d print" molecules, designed to have certain properties, in an attempt to produce a chemical system that takes on the attributes of life: reproduction, ingestion of supplies, elimination of wastes, relationships (very broadly construed), for example. Were such an effort to succeed, using large numbers of chemputers to explore the "assembly space" of small-to-medium sized molecules, there might indeed be alien life produced in the laboratory. It would be as alien as anything we might find on a planet far away, perhaps even more so. 

The key to grasping assembly theory is the claim that all things life can build are historically contingent. We can see this in the visible relatedness between the wide range of animals known as "tetrapods". They all have four limbs. The mythical flying horse Pegasus cannot evolve from a horse, because to do so would require adding two new limbs (to become wings) to a body that already works well with four limbs. The intermediate steps required don't make sense (and let's ignore the physics of wings long enough to support a half-ton animal). In fact, mammalian hexapods in general aren't likely to arise, because the competition from extremely well-adapted tetrapods has already pretty much filled all available ecological niches for critters bigger than a cockroach…on land, at least.

Historical contingency is a key concept. Finger-and-toenails didn't evolve all at once. They descended from claws. Claws came from something else. All living things trace back to a single-celled creature called LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA may not be the first cell. At one time other living things could have existed alongside LUCA that may have had quite different chemistry and cellular mechanisms. But only LUCA has descendants: us, and every living thing in the biosphere of Earth.

Our chain of imagined forebears stops with LUCA. Our knowledge is further constrained, because it is extremely unlikely that any creature now living is descended without change from LUCA. When I say "extremely unlikely", that middle E needs to be drawn out, "Extreeeeeeeeeeeemely!" Meaning, utterly impossible unless the universe is truly infinite, with an infinite number, not just of planets, but of biospheres. Even if we somehow track back the chain of biochemical contingency to "show" us a robust model of LUCA, the chain stops there.

I like the idea of the chemputer. But I don't hold out much hope. The assembly space of "small molecules" is too big. For example, if we "restrict" ourselves to the twenty most common elements, all of which are found in known life, and all of which are likely to be in any possible kind of life, and further, we call a molecule "small" if it has fifty or fewer atoms (just a tad bigger than ATP), the number of possible chemical species (most of them quite chemically unstable) is close to ten-to-the-power-of-65. A 66-digit integer. How large is that number? The number of stars in the visible universe is thought to be a 22- or 23-digit number. Could the average number of planets be as great as ten? Even if that were so, the number of planets in all the galaxies in the visible universe is no larger than the largest 24-digit number. It is hard to think about 66-digit numbers in any useful way. 

Dr. Walker dreams of being the researcher in the cartoon above, "meeting" the first true alien in the laboratory. I hope her dream comes true. But I think it more likely that we'll come across something, somewhere, soon, that proves life as we don't yet know it does in fact exist.

Spiders multiply and spread out

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After a lull, activity—views of my blog posts—has ramped up. I consider a view rate between 50 and 100 per day "normal", or at least ordinary. Let's look at the totals for the past week, on the world map:

The total for the week is more than 16,400, or an average of about 2,300 per day. Just for the 24 hours prior to about 10:00 am EDT, when I captured the view below, the sum is 2,670. But there's quite a difference in where the viewers are reported to be. For the week, Singapore topped the list, followed by Brazil, Vietnam, and the US. For the 24-hour period, Brazil moved to the top, with Vietnam close behind and Singapore a more distant third, with the US about where I'd expect it to be. Now that VPN's are nearly ubiquitous, it isn't even clear that more than one big spider is actually doing all this.

I hope they are all having fun reading nerdy book reviews.

DuPont and the Irish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, historiography, dupont company, irish, immigrants, gunpowder, sociology

Reading Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th-Century America, 20th Anniversary Edition, by Margaret M. Mulrooney, I obtained a view into the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants, not only in northern Delaware, where I now live, but in the industrial Northeast of the United States. I knew I would find no ancestors or even cousins among the gunpowder workers and other Irish employees at the du Pont facilities along the Brandywine River. I am about 1/4 Irish, but my Irish ancestors, upon arriving in the young U.S., made their ways to New Hampshire, Virginia and Pennsylvania. One family did settle in Salem, New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from New Castle, Delaware.

The book's first edition of 2002 was published about the time of the Dupont Company's 200th anniversary celebration. It was an expansion of the author's PhD dissertation at the University of Delaware. The 20th Anniversary Edition is updated with a little new material; the original scholarship is sound and has been supplemented but not reworked. The Introduction and first chapter ("Mutual Interests") summarize the history of the du Pont family, the original company founded by E. I. du Pont in 1802, and the managerial attitude and practices of Mr. du Pont and his successors during the 19th Century.

The title "Mutual Interests" introduces the vital distinction between the du Ponts and the leaders of many other industries in the area. Being of the French aristocratic tradition, yet with originally humble origins, Pierre S. du Pont and his sons, particularly Éleuthère I. and Victor M., had a keen sense of noblesse oblige, the "obligation of power", that induced an attitude of caring for their employees not just as paid labor but as quasi-family members. Some trace of that still remained when I was working for "Uncle Dupie", from which I retired in 2013: I saw on my manager's bookshelf the title How to Recognize and Reward Employees. This same manager was willing to explain business terms that I didn't understand well, and once said, "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it." That sounds harsher than it was, and I was a great fan of this manager, and most of the managers I had during 30 years with the company.

In the environment of the gunpowder yards of the four connected properties that made up the E. I. du Pont de Nemours company throughout most of the 1800's, Irish immigrants thrived. Though the work was dangerous, a point possibly over-emphasized by Dr. Mulrooney, the company's generous caretaking—free or low-cost housing, widows' pensions, higher pay than the norm, company-held savings accounts, and apprenticeship programs, for example—made "the powder" an attractive livelihood.

The company had initially hired mainly French-speaking immigrants, but wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland soon led to near-dominance of the labor market by the Irish. While most histories of Irish immigration to America focus on those who fled the potato famine of 1845-1852, the workforce at du Pont was roughly half Irish even in the 1820's and 1830's. It is on these people that the book initially focuses.

Irish were discriminated against in 19th Century America, because they were visibly "not English", predominantly Catholic, and poorly educated. However, E. I. du Pont soon found that the men could learn as fast as anyone, and their performance overcame his early reluctance to hire Irish workers. He had a practice of all new hires working as laborers for two years so he could assess their attitudes and work habits. Promotion to work as a powderman resulted in a significant increase in pay. He also favored married men for their stability and likelihood of a better attitude toward work.

In spite of discrimination, the Irish mostly knew they had it better than they'd had it in Ulster, where most were from. Consider: prior to the potato famine, some Ulstermen were prosperous but the more typical dwelling was a one-room cottage with a packed earth floor, little or no wood in the construction of mud or sod or peat walls, and a leaky roof. A single man working for the du Ponts would be in a dormitory, or boarding with a family, in a wooden structure with a wood floor, windows and doors that worked. A family would be in a two- to four-room house. The company's liberal benefits allowed a worker or couple to save a little, part of which they used to sponsor relatives in the "old country" to come to America, and chain migration was carried out for more than 100 years.

In time, the Irish Catholics could afford a little stipend for a circuit-riding priest, and later, they built St Joseph's on the Brandywine. By the end of the century, the church sponsored a school for the Catholic children, as seen in this photo from 1887. For much of the 19th Century, children from the powder yards were instructed on Sundays at the Brandywine Manufacturers' Sunday School, where a child's instruction was concordant with the family religion; the deist du Ponts accepted and supported the religious upbringing of the students.

The Irish families also struck a solid compromise between their traditional ways and the Mid-Atlantic culture, with is where the "White Lace" part of the book's title derives. They didn't fully enter the "melting pot" that we may often hear of, which was honored only in the breach anyway. They didn't "assimilate" but they "acculturated," making as much of the benefits of hard work and thrift as possible, while in part acceding to the consumerism that was a continually rising force in industrializing America.

The book's chapters cover in some detail the cultural traditions they kept, and didn't, their dwellings, their use of yards and dooryards and kitchen gardens, and the niceties of life that they obtained. They knew many luxuries were out of reach, but they craved a certain amount of gentility. Having been landless, they knew the value of land, and strove to save enough to buy houses or farms. Over all, the Irish along the Brandywine, and elsewhere in America that they encountered favorable work environments, overcame stereotypes and thrived.

Their stories induced me to hark back to family research I have carried out most of my life; fourteen years ago I wrote a summary of the immigrants in my own family tree. I found a few "ice age immigrants": I am between 6% and 12% Cherokee. Of the rest, 24% were born in Ireland, 9% in Scotland, 39% in England, 16% in Germany, and a smattering of other parts of Europe. It's interesting that Ancestry.com's DNA analysis didn't show a trace of Cherokee, and pegged my English roots at 70%. That's the conundrum of small number statistics. We think of getting 50% of our DNA from our father and 50% from our mother. But the vagaries of "crossing over" that produces eggs and sperm can shift these proportions one way or another, so one child could be 60-40 and another 25-75! Pity poor Senator Elizabeth Warren, who grew up being told she had "substantial" Native American ancestry. Her DNA test results, released in 2018, showed "between 1/64 and 1/1,024" Cherokee ancestry. Actually, I count her lucky. My DNA results cannot demonstrate even that much, yet family records show a minimum of 1/16. That's life.

After retirement I worked for three years as a volunteer docent at the Machine Shop at Hagley Museum, on the grounds of the du Pont powder mills (see the picture). I learned a lot of company and du Pont family history, and Dupont company history. There was much in this book that I'd never heard before. It was great to re-connect with the stories of the powder mill, and to learn of an immigrant population that I had heard only a little about.

A word about safety. The Dupont Company had a strong tradition of safety all during the time I worked there. I learned that the number of gunpowder explosions during the 118 years that black powder was manufactured there exceeded one per year. But a typical black powder factory in America of the time had five to ten times as many explosions. Dupont powdermen had a much greater chance of living long enough to retire, compared to the rest. This is the only quibble I have with Powder & Lace; otherwise, it is a marvelous book.

ZEUS's thunderbolt

 kw: articles, lasers, record setting

An article yesterday in earth.com reports on a record-setting power level for "the most powerful U.S. laser," named ZEUS: 2 petawatts peak power in a pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second. The click-bait headline states "over 100x the global electricity output." Let's unpack this a little for us mere mortals.

The author helpfully states that 2 petawatts is 2 quadrillion watts. Firstly, assuming a "square" pulse (it isn't, but probably close enough), 2 quadrillion watts times 25 quintillionths of a second results in 50/1,000ths, or 1/20th, of a watt-second. A watt-second is also known as a Joule, the standard unit of energy. The night light in my hallway uses 0.25 watts, continuously. The energy of this laser pulse would keep my night light shining for…one-fifth of a second. Barely the blink of an eye! What gives?

The breakthrough this article reports is not the sheer power of the pulse. A 0.05 Joule pulse is nothing special. Off-the-shelf metal-cutting lasers operate in the range of 30 J per pulse, ten pulses per second, for an average power of 300 watts. The pulses are short, in the nanosecond to microsecond range, but nowhere near as short as the 25-attosecond  pulse width of the ZEUS laser.

The breakthrough in pulse width is important because it enables the achievement of extreme power levels (such as petawatts), which, I am informed by the Duck Duck Go "AI Assistant", "…enables the study of complex interactions between light and matter, such as astrophysical phenomena and particle acceleration. These powerful lasers are also used in various fields, including medical treatments and material science research."

De-jargonizing that, it says that materials behave differently when hit that hard, and quantum particles such as electrons can be accelerated to extreme energies without resorting to miles-wide accelerators. The "astrophysical phenomena" mentioned include the very high energy environments found near black holes or during supernova eruptions.

Now that scientists have squeezed a modest-energy pulse into one forty-thousandth of a trillionth of a second, I expect further work will lead to much greater total power and peak power.

Doctor Doolittle attainable?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, sociology, communication

How do animals communicate? Why do they do so? What do they have to talk about? What are they saying? Can we eavesdrop? Can we horn in?

The first question has numerous answers, and has motivated a great lot of literature. The answers to the third and successive questions are still elusive at best, and impossible (to date) to answer. But the second question, now: Ah, that's a good one. Why, indeed, do animals communicate? To narrow the focus quite a bit: Why do animals talk?

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum takes up precisely that question. Were I the editor I would suggest adding a word to the title: Vocally. Dr. Kershenbaum states in the Introduction that this book focuses only on auditory communication, to keep the book's size manageable. And while I am making suggestions, may I offer that the cover picture, of a frog nose-to-nose with a snail, is way off the point? Frogs eat snails, and snails are remarkably mute. There's a pair with nothing, but nothing, to talk about!

In the context of biological evolution, vocalizing, in common with all kinds of communication, must serve the needs of the creature in its environment. Take up the question for yourself: what needs to you have? Shelter, food, a mate, and enjoyment. Each of these needs is different in detail from the similar needs of any animal in its own environment. Also, for most animals larger than a limpet, a fifth need would be a sense of purpose, even though that may be largely wrapped up in both providing and securing the first four needs.

The author illustrates the range of animal talk by discussing seven animals: Wolf, Dolphin, Parrot, Hyrax, Gibbon, Chimpanzee, and Human. In each chapter the animal's unique vocalizations are examined with this question in view: Is it Language? And a corollary: Is it a stepping stone towards language?

At first it seem to me that the order is a bit odd: Hyraxes weigh a pound or two, with a correspondingly small brain; dolphins are the heaviest on the list and, after humans, have the largest brain in relation to body size. I finally recognized a specific order, that of successive degrees of verbal complexity. I wondered why Dolphins were brought in so early. Most of us think of them has being closest to having a language. However, their whistles are variable, not repeatable, and nobody has yet been able to discern a vocabulary of "dolphinese". The author stresses in this chapter and others that language does not necessarily require discrete words. I am strongly skeptical about that. I personally tend to put "wordlessness" as distinctive on non-language, but I am willing to withhold judgment for now.

Can wolf howling be considered linguistic in any way? It must be pre-linguistic, as it is a kind of singing. Howling wolves are clearly enjoying the experience; howling is emotional. Considering that, in humans, the brain structures that support song are larger and more deeply established than those that support speaking and speech hearing, it is evident to me that song came long before speech, and perhaps by a million years or more…or perhaps by several millions of years.

The first animal treated that seems to have word-like utterances is the hyrax, a little marmot-sized relative of elephants—they even have little tusks! It may seem a stretch to call their chippy, chittery vocalizations as songs, but the author thinks they are. They are not random strings of the five distinct sounds a hyrax makes; they seem to have a syntax. That is, certain sounds never occur one after the other, while others are usually found in succession. Just as we have words that contain several syllables, it may be that, if hyraxes actually have "words", many are of several syllables. (In human speech, contrast monosyllabic Chinese with polysyllabic Japanese.)

Putting gibbons next in order, we find certain similarities in their "songs" to hyrax "songs" except that gibbons have 27 (or 28, the text says both at different points) distinct utterances, with a much more complex syntax than that of hyrax "songs".

Parrots are a really mixed bunch. While most parrots, and several other birds such as Mynah birds and ravens, can mimic human speech sounds (and doorbells, gunshots and sirens), they don't use these sounds in meaningful ways, with an exception or two. A bird named Alex, an African Grey Parrot, became famous for his ability to hold a simple but meaningful conversation with a human. Getting Alex to this point took a lot of training, of a special type described in the Parrots chapter. Alex has died, and another African Grey Parrot is being trained; stay tuned.

Was Alex an exceptional genius among birds? For one thing, his verbal abilities indicate that the arrangement of a bird's brain might be quite a bit more efficient and economical than that of a mammal's brain. His brain was the size of a shelled walnut and weighed less than a quarter ounce. A typical house cat has a one-ounce brain, and only a very exceptional cat can learn to recognize more than their name and the sound of a can opener. Regardless of Alex's skills, it is evident that parrots in the wild don't use language in any humanlike, or even Alex-like, way.

So, gibbons sing. Chimpanzees don't. What some (stress: some) chimps can do is learn either rudimentary ASL (American Sign Language) or other physical means of indicating a small number of words. Sentences longer than "give banana" seem to be beyond them. The gorilla Koko learned more ASL and was a better conversationalist. But neither chimps nor gorillas have a vocal apparatus that can produce uttered language, and it is pretty clear that they don't have the flexibility of mentation to support humanlike language at the level of a two-year-old human. Somehow, Alex the parrot could hold his own with a six-year-old human.

The author stresses again and again that animals communicate according to the needs imposed by their environments. The complexity of their utterances—and again, he is reporting only on audible communication—generally reflects the complexity of their social environment. It appears that only humans can maintain relationships with potentially thousands of other humans (The number of names in the Picasa face-name directory for my photos comes to about 1,200. There are a few hundred other people I know by name and face and converse with more frequently than yearly, whom I have not photographed). The largest chimpanzee "village" is less than 100. Similarly for dolphins, orcas, and their kin.

How and where and when did humans make a breakthrough that allows an actual infinite range of expression? We may not make many more unique sounds than the sound-repertory of a gibbon (English phoneme lists range from 44 to 46, and Mandarin Chinese requires 88 phonemes, but Hawaiian gets by with 24). We combine them endlessly, and we can distinguish them. Thus, most English speakers can speak and recognize about 10,000 one-syllable words, 30,000-35,000 2-syllable words, and a total of 60,000-100,000 total words, plus all the case inflections and conjugations needed to make grammar work. The author stresses this point: No other animal has grammar, or at least nothing like a grammar that we can recognize.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Firstly, that a great deal of research lies ahead, for us to begin to understand what any particular species of animal "means" by its utterances. Secondly, whether "words" really are necessary for the kind of flexible communication we call "human communication," which is what we usually mean when we use the term "language."

What Dr. Kershenbaum has given us is not the answer to "Why animals talk," but a few foundation stones, of a set of unknown size, the groundwork for learning why they do talk, and eventually, what they are saying (which we may find out is not anything we'd enjoy hearing!).

The bear facts

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, natural history, bears

This is a very unfortunate bear. It is an Asiatic Black Bear, also called a Moon Bear. It has been in this "crush cage" its entire life, and will probably die here. A couple of times per week a long, very thick needle is thrust into its side to extract bile from its gall bladder. The bare patch on the bear's belly isn't just from gall extraction; its hair is generally falling out because of malnourishment, in spite of the fact that it is obese: "empty calories" in their grimmest manifestation.

As we learn in Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie, 12,000 of these bears are "farmed" in China and much of Southeast Asia, including a few countries such as Vietnam, where the practice has been legally banned (but that's very poorly enforced). Twelve thousand is about one quarter of the entire population of these bears. The bile sells for about $1 for 1cc, which comes to 25,000 Vietnamese Dong or 4,000 Cambodian Riels. The bile is claimed to have great medicinal benefits. It actually does have certain medical uses, but there are other medicines that work better, though they may cost more.

A telling anecdote from Chapter 4, "Liquid Gold": In a hospital the author encountered a bear farmer she had met. He told her he had joint pains. She asked, "You have lots of bile!" He said, "I want something that works."

On to other bears. The smallest is the Sun Bear; adults average about 130 pounds, half the size of a Moon Bear. The largest is the Kodiak population of the Brown Bear, up to 1,000 pounds and more. The most dangerous is the Sloth Bear of India, which kills more people than all other bears combined (This is a dreadful combination of very dense population of humans and an extremely territorial bear). Next largest is a tie between the Brown Bears of the "Lower 48 states", also called the Grizzly Bear, and the Polar Bear. These two bears are also considered man-killers, but only the Polar Bear thinks of humans as prey. We are about the size of a seal, their favorite snack. The most popular bear is the Panda Bear, which tops out at around 300 pounds. These are also the rarest in the wild. The most populous bear is the American Black Bear (the only one I've seen in the wild), in the 600-pound range, but a few old males have topped 900 pounds. The number in the U.S. is nearly half a million, with half that many in Canada. Finally, the South American Spectacled Bear is rather rare (less than 18,000 remaining), and is the most cautious and shy. In her worldwide travels, with experts to guide her, she never saw one of these in the wild.

There are a few illustrations in the book, primarily chapter headings such as this one for Chapter 1. The artist, Arjun Parikh, has a unique style.

The book is a feast of information and impressions of not just the bears, but of human interactions with them in the various places they inhabit. None of them is as cuddly as our imagination dictates, though the tiny Sun Bear comes close (just watch out for 3-inch claws). 

Please consider finding, and signing, a petition to Asian governments to ban farming bears for bile.

P.S. Although I typically add Metric conversions when I use English units, there are so many this time that it would be cumbersome. I expect an educated reader to be able to divide pounds by 2.2 to get kg, and to multiply inches by 2.54 (or just 2.5) to get cm.

S.I. and the floating cat

 kw: simulated intelligence, art generation

I had Dall-E3 generate several images of a sumptuous parlor, including a piano and a sleeping cat, which I had stipulated was to be "sleeping on a sofa." A piano bench is not a sofa, but this cat isn't exactly sleeping on it: she is levitating next to it.

I add this to my folio of interesting glitches by art generation software.

The rest of Pushcart gets better

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, short stories, poems, collections

I wrote in the prior post about the volume 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, that a large proportion of the stories in the first third of the volume are for very niche audiences. Happily, audience awareness broadened after that. I rejected only four of the pieces making up pages 175-442. I am a bit surprised that I marked a "+" on ten prose pieces and four poems! Let's be clear, the only thing "poetic" about the poems is the evocative atmosphere. They were on subjects that mean something to me. I'll mention one:

"Memory" by Kevin Prufer summoned memories of my own mother as she descended into the fog of Alzheimer's Dementia, and also very early memories of leading by grandfather by the hand on walks, to make sure he found his way back home. The last line is about another poem for the author's mother that he didn't complete, "…because it was too sad and none of it / was helpful to anyone." Well, Kevin, the piece you did write was helpful to me.

When you know your offering is in a niche, there are ways to expand its reach. I'll mention two examples:

"The Crows of Karachi" by Rafia Zakaria presents a slice of life in the poor district of Karachi, Pakistan (truthfully, most of the city so qualifies). The crows are emblems of the vagaries of life, and the climax of the piece contrasts two women, one (the author's mother) who fed small birds while being vigilant to keep the crows from driving them away, and the other woman feeding birds indiscriminately, which fed only the crows.

"Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager, the last piece in the volume, is a sad tale of post-partum depression, a rather extreme case thereof, seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old daughter.

Verdict: I found the volume worth reading, even if I had to "engineer" my reading pace to minimize the junk.

By the way, the last 98 pages of the 540-page volume comprise various lists and indexes, but the "Contributors' Notes" take up just 3½ pages, barely a line or two per author. Not really enough in my view.

Pushcart at the one-third point

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, short stories, poems, collections

The cover logo for each year's Pushcart Prize volume has a different color scheme. This year's is red on low-key gray-blue, as seen here. The volume is 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson, leading "the Pushcart Prize editors."

I have sometimes wondered why the Pushcart emblem was chosen. It evokes a food cart. Were there ever itinerant booksellers that used hand carts? Anyway, the idea gets across.

In the past week or so I have (usually) read 22 of the 70 items. Ten are poems, as poems are currently understood: slightly evocative prose with line breaks at semi-regular intervals. No rhyme, no rhythm (I check, by reading aloud).

I have a marking scheme that I use on a copy of the Table of Contents:

• + , I'm glad I read it (I use as many as three pluses).
• ~ , It's OK. Well enough written, but nothing gripping.
• - , It wasn't worth reading.
• x , After a sentence or two, skipped the rest, for any of a variety of reasons.

So far I have just one story marked "+" and two poems marked "x". I'll comment a bit on that one story, and follow with some general comments.

"Epithalamium" by Bill Roorbach" seems initially to be about a dog, but it is actually about healing a relationship. The word "epithalamium" refers to a poem written for a bride just before her marriage. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out if there is even a bride involved in this story; I didn't find one, but I think I know what the author is getting at anyway.

I would characterize most of the other stories with, "Getting nowhere at no particular speed." In some cases, the author's point seems to be to present a slice of life from a culture that is familiar to the author, but not to an English-speaking readership. I considered the Introduction to the volume: the editors impress upon us the relative freedom of "small presses" compared to the big book or journal publishers. This is true. It also ensures that most of the pieces will appeal to niche audiences. That's OK. Based upon my reactions to so many stories, I am not in most of those niches.

Am I getting curmudgeonly as I approach the end of my Seventies? Somewhat, I suppose. But each Spring I seek out the latest Pushcart Prize volume, for the nuggets I find within. There could be a nugget or two in the next 48 items…