Evil is as evil does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mini-biographies, evil men, evil

In Dante's Inferno, most murderers are found in the seventh circle of Hell, swimming in a river of boiling blood. A special class of those who betrayed their families, usually by murder and headed up by Cain, are found in the ninth circle, frozen into the ice that imprisons Satan. In Gustave Doré's woodcut, Dante and Virgil are seen walking among them over the ice.

Caligula is not mentioned in Inferno, possibly because he was such a prolific sinner, possibly the "Renaissance man" of sinfulness, that Dante didn't know where to place him. In the book Confronting Evil: Assessing the Worst of the Worst, Bill O'Reilly places Caligula first in the long line of the most evil men in all history, primarily because he is first in time. Along with his coauthor Josh Hammer, O'Reilly limns the lives, and deaths, of fifteen of "the Worst" in twelve chapters, with just a bit of editorial comment. The details of their lives provide sufficient comment.

Among those who lived more recently, most have been called The Antichrist, but so far none has proven to be that personage. Actually, the word "antichrist" is never used in Revelation. The apostle John used this word four times in his first epistle, and once in the second, referring to "deceivers" who deny that Jesus is the Messiah, who deny "the Father and the Son", and deny Jesus Christ "coming in the flesh." The word used by John in Revelation can be translated either "wild beast" or "monster". It is much stronger than the ordinary word for a "beast of the field" such as a lion. I prefer to call this person the Monster. This Monster's career is outlined in Daniel 7, 8 and 11 and Revelation chapters 11 through 20.

Confronting Evil was written with the background of growing numbers of people who try to say that good and evil are matters of opinion, that there is no "objective evil". That is a senseless opinion, and these evil men prove it. Further, there are many today who complain that "religion" is evil, and point to the Crusades. Let it be known clearly that the odd phenomenon of the Crusades was in no way based on any truth in the Bible, and was contrary to Christian faith in every way.

The great murderers of the Twentieth Century were all atheists, with one exception. From the top down, by body count: Mao Zedong, directly responsible for 80-120 million murders; Joseph Stalin, 40-60 million; Adolph Hitler, about 25 million; Pol Pot (not mentioned in the book), 3 million; and the one religious man, Ayatollah Khomeini, between half a million and two million. The great murderer of the current Century (so far) is Vladimir Putin, with a body count pushing two million Russians and Ukrainians. One could argue that the Ukrainians killed Putins' soldiers, but it was at Putin's order that they were put in harm's way, so they are counted against him.

It makes for rough reading. I worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who is a Living God, and calls His people to abundant Life. He counts Death as "the last enemy." I need to shelter under His wings to be swept out of the presence of death.

I have sometimes considered composing an essay on "the Totalitarian Impulse," which I take as the root of the deepest evil. We all have a desire to control things, to achieve the greatest satisfaction and comfort with no frustration or sadness. Paul wrote to Timothy that "the love of money is a root of all evils," but behind that is the craving for power – for of what use is a pile of money without the power to use it for your own ends? I count as fearsomely evil any person who thinks he or she has the "right" to usurp anyone else's decision-making. Naturally, we must make most decisions for our offspring when they are small, but a huge part of our maturity is learning to release them to make their own decisions as they grown to adulthood. Some parents never learn it. Some persons take the same lack of self control into the way they treat people they supervise, or companies they may lead, or in the worst cases, nations they may gain power over. Of such are those presented in this book.

I hate to detract from this very valuable book, but I must mention that it is marred by great overuse of the historical present. Using "is" tenses rather than "was" tenses is useful to carry a historical narrative along, but there are situations where it is not appropriate, particularly in footnotes and endnotes, and I conclude that the authors haven't learned that yet.

Best of? The mainstream becoming stagnant

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, fiction, anthologies, short stories

After reading most of The Best American Short Stories 2025, edited by Celest Ng, I'm wondering whether to skip partaking of the series for at least a few years. In the past, I could count on at least a handful of stories that would make me say, "I'm glad I read that." This time, only one story came close to that level. This image hints at part of the theme of "Till it and Keep it" by Carrie R. Moore.

That particular story is set in a post-apocalyptic near-dystopia, of two young women escaping northward toward Maine, somewhere in middle America, perhaps Tennessee. The climate is hotter, multiple virus pandemics are rampant, society has broken down. They stumble on a peach orchard cared for by the people of a small village, but you can bet the scene is not as idyllic as this image. Yet it is a turning point for them both, and for a few others. Only this story rated a "++" designation from me.

Of the twenty stories in the volume I awarded six others a single "+" because at least someone made a little progress or learned something; I skipped one after the first couple of sentences; I read about half of two others; the rest got either a "~" for "so-so" or a "–" for "a little sorry I wasted time reading it".

I have to say it: In one story (I won't name it) "I" was the only singular pronoun, and all other individuals were denoted "they" or "them". This misuse of the language is deplorable. I have no friends who cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman, or a boy and a girl (or they just won't admit it). And I take steps to keep that statement truthful.

Nothing else about the volume is worth saying.

When most of the spiders skid to a stop

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

For the past three days the number of daily views has been around 2,000 rather than 20,000 (up to 60,000 a time or two). I checked the "Now" view, which shows minute-by-minute activity in a two-hour span, and I got lucky.

As the chart shows, for the first 82 minutes things were rocking along at a rate of about 3.6 per minute, or about 5,200 per hour, a significant increase over the prior day. The last 38 minutes, only 20 views occurred, a rate of about 760 per day.

What are the chances that the "legitimate" hit rate is in this range? Or is it still about 100 per day? I surmise that several spidering efforts came to a halt about 4:35, and one spider is still running.

Emerging from the valley of the shadow

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, cancer, cancer survival, cancer treatment

Beating cancer takes a powerful team. Of course, we need doctors: surgeon, oncologist, radiologist, and so forth. It also takes committed family and friends. What I went through late in 2000 and for the next six months was pretty rough. A highly expert surgeon rearranged my insides, removing a couple of feet of colon and a foot of ileum and fat containing more than forty lymph nodes. An oncologist who had been dubbed "the one I would go to" by most of the local physicians put me through six months of chemotherapy. Then I had five years of annual colonoscopies and CT scans and quarterly blood tests. Since then I've had a colonoscopy every three years, until recently the gastroenterologist said, "There were no polyps, this time or last. You can wait five years this time. I guess that is as close to cured as one can get.

Clea Shearer had breast cancer, and while her experiences were not the worst possible (short of dying), they were worse than many and much more difficult than mine. She relates her experiences in Cancer is Complicated: And Other Unexpected Lessons I've Learned. Where my chemo substance, 5FU, can cause nausea and hair loss, in my case I had neither, but rather six months of being in a good mood almost all the time. I remarked to a friend, "5FU is the best antidepressant ever!" Clea was given a substance they call Red Devil, and it could only be used at two-week intervals, sometimes three; it was that debilitating. Once she was somewhat recovered, she also underwent a series of radiation treatments that left her with burns that took months to heal.

Guess what? She got through it. As she tells us, her husband, her children, her mother (who spent most of the saga with her constantly), several friends—some she was able to see face-to-face, and more via phone or video calling—and the loving care of quite an array of surgical and oncological nurses, all upheld her and encouraged her at every stage.

I also have quite a social and church support system, but I think Clea has me beat hands down in that department.

Many take this verse as symbolic: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I do not fear evil, for You are with me." (Psalm 23:4) Although it symbolizes the death and resurrection of Jesus, to David the psalmist it reflected a harrowing experience that he had survived. It gives comfort to us also, when we pass through a harrowing experience. I created this image in Leonardo AI's Flow engine, to show that we don't pass through alone, and that there is "light at the end of the tunnel" that is not an oncoming train but a doorway to a renewed life.

Clea is in the fourth year of a ten-year follow-up regimen of tests and hormone treatments; her tumor was hormone sensitive. At age 44 (according to Wikipedia), she is a little more than half my age. May she live a long and increasingly pain-and-disability free life! She intends her book to encourage not just women with breast cancer and recent survivors, but all cancer patients: Cancer is indeed complicated, but that is because we are complicated. Our doctors have their work cut out for them, figuring which approach will work to rescue us, with our unique biochemistry, in the face of a disease that is equally complicated.

I am very thankful I read this book.

Restoring innocence to short stories

 kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, anthologies, humor

I created this image using the Flux Schnell engine in Leonardo AI, as a riff on one of the stories in Something to Look Forward To by Fannie Flagg. It's a story that brings together threads that connect a few of the other stories. But you'll have to read them to find out how.

A few of the stories have a science fictional element. Others seem to be vignettes and slices of life of rather ordinary people. The main characters are named in the story subtitles. There is typically a twist at the end, usually humorous, and in a few cases, such as dialog between an elderly Kansas woman and her hyper-liberal, California-dwelling granddaughter, the humor is in the contrast of viewpoints. One story brought me to tears, sweet-and-sour tears.

We read of priests who pull practical jokes on one another, a writer who takes a surprising pen name for a "coming back from retirement" book, and an interstellar secret agent. That alien agent, by the way, supposedly harks from a galaxy some 27 billion light years away. That's a fuuur piece, folks, considering the visible (and potentially reachable) Universe is less than half that radius. Other than that and another numerical oddity I'll pass over, the story is really quite fetching. The last story in the book adds a coda.

I really can't comment on these story by story as I often like to do. It is too hard to avoid spoilers, and I fear I've committed a couple anyway. Reading this was an enjoyable romp through stories that didn't cause me to cringe or wince, stories that show how bygone innocence is still very viable.

The Bridge Generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, photo essays, millennials, mini-biographies

This picture, taken twenty years ago, shows my father getting tips on cell phone usage from my son, a Millennial. My father, age 84 in this photo, is of the "Greatest Generation", the generation of World War II and the Korean War, and also of the GI Bill and Suburbia. 

I am a Boomer. Having a son when we were more than forty years old, my wife and I skipped a generation ("X") and produced a Millennial, who now has children of his own, and having skipped yet another generation ("Z"), they are of Generation Alpha. (And yes, I was nearly 75 before the first grandchild was born. A friend close to my age became a great-great grandfather the following year.)

As a Digital Native, our son has vague memories of landline phones and TV's no larger than a coffee-table book, but now has a smart phone (smarter than mine) and a TV that would not fit anywhere in my house; he has numerous friends who are still single and others who are married, and is married himself (plus the 2 kids); and he was in the National Guard for a few years just to make ends meet while stuck as a gig worker but now divides managing a tutoring company with being their lead tutor: I'd call him one of the best of the Millennials. He truly lives on the bridge between generations, more so than either a Gen Xer or a Gen Zer could be. I call Millennials the Bridge Generation.

Charlie Wells is a Millennial who has made his success as a writer. Looking around him at his contemporaries, and having interviewed certain ones to gather a range of context and experiences, he has issued What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. Note that there is no question mark. The title is a statement, not a question.

In this searching and panoramic book, Mr. Wells illustrates the arc of history through which his generation has passed to date, focusing on five people who agreed to be interviewed on the record. None of them experienced the straight path to adulthood and settled life that was considered "normal" by their parents and grandparents. But perhaps the term should be "ordinary" rather than "normal". The "ordinary" middle-class life path, "Finish your schooling, get a good job, marry young, have two-to-twelve children, own a home, help your kids raise their kids, stay active in your church, retire well, live long, and die contented," can be derailed at any point, and, truthfully, was honored mainly in the breach, in every generation. So why is "the breach", or many breaches, so visible for Millennials?

Quite simply, pervasive technology. I considered retracing the stories of the author's subjects, but decided instead on five characteristics. I conversed with Gemini and we boiled it down to five images that illustrate characteristics that are spread through the book, and a little of each is found in the life story of each of the five subjects. I will leave it to you to read how the author weaves them together.

Digital Natives were born in or after 1981, the year the IBM PC was released. Affordable laptops followed a few years later. In 1992 the first cell phone costing less than $1,000 was on sale, and by 1996, considered the last year a Millennial was born, some phones could be had for less than $500.

My generation and the one before went from computers that were bigger than a living room (I have a vacuum tube from a computer of that era), to "mainframes" that averaged 8-10 feet long and 5-8 feet high, and on to PC's, and now smart phones. We didn't take classes in computer science; we invented it. The classes came later. Gen X computer professionals could get degrees in computer science. Millennials and Gen Z don't need to; they can easily write apps for their phones if they're so inclined.

The 9/11 disaster and COVID-19 bookended the formative years of many Millennials. The dramatic shifts in work and work/life balance that ensued morphed into much more work-at-home and gig work. Gig Workers may not be the norm, but they are now the mainstay of technocratic middle America. 

By contrast, an increasing number of the contractors and technicians that show up at my house to fix plumbing, install appliances, and repair stuff are Millennials who usually have foregone going to college in favor of working in the trades. They typically earn more than a college graduate with a Humanities degree or even most Science degrees. Case in point among Gen X: The curator of a museum nearby, a woman of about 50 with a PhD, is married to a Lawyer, "so I can afford to be a scientist."

As I mentioned, many of our son's friends remain unmarried. Some probably don't even date. So far as I can determine, the younger a Millennial is, the less likely he or she is to be married or "looking". And those younger ones are now thirty and older. This trend is continuing among Gen Z. This "Plant Parent" is one type of contented single .

Some of the people Mr. Wells writes about got married, some didn't; some are gay, some straight, and one is bisexual; one is in an "open relationship", also called polyamory; two have children.

Many Millennials retain hobbies or pastimes of their youth. That in itself is not unusual: so do most people, and so do I. The difference is that for a great many Millennials, that pastime is online gaming. This often gets coupled with a bit of nostalgia, "retro" gaming with outdated consoles, for example.

I don't know if I fairly represent my generation. I tried some Nintendo and online games, and dropped them. I like Sudoku and non-action-oriented computer games, but I spend more time on various collecting hobbies of my youth (stamps, rocks). Our son, last I checked, is still playing an online team game (I forgot the name), and his team members now live in various cities across the TriState area, but went to high school together.

Obsessive gaming is mentioned in the book for one of the persons. So is drug addiction, for a different person. I have observed that many drug addicts who finally break free of the habit wind up working in the drug treatment and peer counseling fields. This is the case with the man in the book also.

Everyone passes through an introspective stage. Not everyone "gets over it," but usually between thirty and forty we become more secure inside our own skin. Nonetheless, many Millennials are still trying on different "skins", learning who they ultimately are or will be.

The phenomena of "the Sixties" characterized this stage for my generation. Gen Z is right in the midst of their own, while most Millennials have gotten on with life. As I recall, in one episode of All in the Family, Edith tells her daughter Gloria, "At some point, you have to do the laundry and clean house." The oldest Millennials are now forty-five, and the youngest, about thirty. So I'd say about half of them have "aged out" of the introspective phase. 

This is not really a review of the book, but of the ideas that swirl through it. Whatever age you may be, I am sure reading it will evoke thoughts of your own. If so, I hope you'll come back to this post and add a comment.

Spiders of Brazil and US now neck-and-neck

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

Before Noon today (5/13) I checked the stats and saw that today and the previous four days the activity has been 20,000 or greater. The first chart (second image) shows the hits over the 24 hours up until about Noon today. The world stats, seen in the third image, show that between about 8am and 10am, Brazil and the US were a close 1-2.

Earlier posts on this subject showed spider cartoons that were generated by Gemini. I couldn't induce it to produce an image I liked this time; this image is from Leonardo AI using the Recraft V4 engine.

A day contains 1,440 minutes; 20,000 views are on average nearly 14 per minute. At a 30,000 rate, nearly 21. But this chart shows that on an hourly scale, the rate is not very regular.

Focusing on two hours (which I did first), we see the country breakdown in that short interval.

This is notable for a missing country: China. It might be among "other", which comprises 64% of the data, but I think not. China has recently cracked down severely on external access by its citizens, and is not accessible via VPN…not that anyone from a free country would be willing to try to use the Internet from "inside" China. 

Considering that this blog has a little less than 3,000 posts, any location running at a rate of 125 views per hour, and spreading their views around, would be downloading the entire blog each 24 hours. Brazil, with 191 views in two hours, is apparently snarfing up the whole thing about every 30 to 31 hours.

As I've said before, I hope these folks are getting value for their effort.

Brazil continues to top the spider races

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

The past two days this blog's activity has been in the range of 20,000 views daily. Spiders continue to run rampant. As the chart below shows, Brazil tops the list, with 15% of the total.

First, it's interesting to see the daily totals in the first graph. Between a day with ~20k and the past two days at the same level we see a few days in the 5,000 range. This seems to be the new normal, even though actual readers of the articles being "viewed" probably amount to about 100 per day.

The worldwide breakdown is interesting. While the US is second with 6% of total views for the week, quite a variety of countries are represented with at least a couple of percent each. Also, "Other" is still more than half the total, to be divvied up among the other 180 or so countries of the world.

I had read that Brazil has become a hotbed of AI training. This supports that. I suspect many of the seemingly offbeat countries in the mix are actually cases of VPN attribution, with origins mainly in the US and Brazil.

Maybe human, maybe not

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, essays

We could wish more finds were like this. By far the most frequent discoveries by paleoanthropologists are of single teeth or parts of bones. Finding a half-jawbone with a few teeth attached is cause for newspaper headlines.

In natural history museums all over the world we see dinosaur skeletons galore (of course, each skeleton found in reasonably complete form is copied numerous times and sold to other museums). Yet only a handful of early human or Neanderthal or hominid/hominin skeletons have so far been found. Why? It is all about numbers.

Dinosaurs of many species were common all over the Earth for about 185 million years. Since the origin of hominins (pre-human apes and proto-humans), only a 4-6 million years have passed. Also, for much of that time, their numbers were few, in the thousands to a few hundred thousands, worldwide (mostly Africa and parts of Europe for most of that time). Thirdly, the number of species represented by the monikers "hominin", "hominid" and "early human" totals fewer than thirty, while there were hundreds of species of dinosaur, many of which existed in the millions and for millions of years.

To be blunt: lots more dinosaurs lived and died, compared to the record of human ancestry.

Given the rather small number of examples that exist, it is amazing that certain conclusions have been made about human ancestry. A few of the stories told by the old bones are relayed to us in Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species by Sang-Hee Lee and Shin-Young Yoon (translated from Korean, translator not named). The 22 chapters began as columns written for a journal and a special issue.

A question often asked, "What was the first human ancestor after the split with apes?", led to Chapter 3, "Who were the first hominin ancestors?" By the way, it took me a while to learn the difference between hominins and hominids. To summarize online sources: "Hominids refer to all modern and extinct great apes, including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, along with their ancestors. Hominins, on the other hand, specifically include modern humans and all our extinct ancestors that are more closely related to us than to chimpanzees." Thus, "hominin" strictly refers to an ancestor species to Homo sapiens, and "hominid" refers to all the "cousins" that are the great apes and their ancestors, back to the first great ape which split from the "all apes" common ancestor. On the Hominid Family Tree, the Hominins are a single branch leading to us. I hope that helps.

So, who were the first hominin ancestors? Six pages of discussion result in, "Probably either Australopithecus afarensis or A. amanensis." A. afarensis was "Lucy", whom you may have read about. More fossil discoveries and more study are needed to pin it down. Both these candidates lived between 3 and 4 million years ago.

An interesting coincidence is behind Chapter 8, "Is Granny an artist?" Two strains of discoveries come together in time. Firstly, evidence that woman began living long after menopause led to the Grandmother Hypothesis, that having grandmothers handy reduced the workload on young mothers, allowing them to have children more frequently. This is behind an early population boom. Secondly, the earliest instances of rock art are found in the same time period. It seems that such proto-writing/pictorial storytelling extended the lengthening memories of the grandmothers (and a smaller number of grandfathers; then as now, women usually outlived men, if they survived childbirth).

Another interesting intersection: upright walking came before brain enlargement. The changing vegetation of East Africa made it more favorable for apes that could see over the brush on the savanna. Spending more time upright made it easier to carry stuff (including babies) in the two hands that were no longer needed for locomotion. Why did babies need to be carried? Chimp and gorilla babies can cling to their mothers' fur. Humans don't have fur, and it is surmised that neither did hominins, after a certain point.

I have long had a certain idea about when and why humans lost their fur. Fire. There is a time mismatch that bothers me. Upright walking seems to have arisen between 4 and 7 million years ago, with fully modern striding-style walking appearing about 4 million years ago. However, the earliest evidence for controlled use of fire is just over one million years old. But it isn't known when "uncontrolled" use began. By definition, controlled use includes the ability to kindle a fire. Taking advantage of naturally occurring fires must have predated this by a lot.

Side note: the crazy old film Quest for Fire has "cave men" carefully tending a vessel holding burning coals, their only method of starting fires. In a battle with apish enemies it goes out, and one of them goes to find a burning fire he can "capture", but stumbles upon a group of people who know how to start a fire with friction. Other details are just eye candy. The racial overtones of that flick are astonishing.

Anyway, I have long thought it is likely that once proto-humans began spending lots of time around fires, being furry became a detriment and natural selection drove the species toward furlessness. Thus, the "naked ape."

The various chapters cover a wide, and very interesting!, range of subjects. A key element is the great increase in tools to investigate DNA relationships and the "molecular clock" (not all that clock-ish, it turns out) and newer analytical methods. Re-studying old bones, it turns out, yields new understanding. Old debates are resolved, and new debates arise.

The last chapter, #22, is "Are humans still evolving?" And of course, "Of course we are." Dr. Lee uses as an example the first thing I thought of upon seeing the chapter title: wisdom teeth. We are in the middle of losing them. More and more people are born without any. However, she brings up an interesting twist. In developed countries, better dental care is allowing people to live longer, who would have died early because of impacted or infected wisdom teeth. Perhaps this bit of natural selection has just been halted in its tracks, but only for a portion of humanity. Another example of ongoing evolution in humans is bad backs, and the gradual changes in the spine and posture. I hope later generations will be free of lumbar disk slippage and muscular ruptures in the lumbar area. It will take a while; humans and hominins before us have been upright for a few million years, and we are only partway through the process.

I could go on and on, but I hope instead that you will read this book and enjoy fascinating stories of what we know about the past few million years of human/hominin evolution, and how we know it.

Howey wowie

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

As I have mentioned before, most of the books I review here I checked out from the library. My shelves are so full already that I very rarely buy a book. The local library uses the Dewey Decimal System, and has a New Books section, so I haunt the 500's (Science) first. Sadly, they don't have a subsection of science fiction in the fiction shelves, but at least they put genre stickers on the books, so it is easier for me to find science fiction when I want. Even more sadly, within the past year the number of new science books being purchased each month has been dramatically reduced, sometimes to zero. There used to be between five and fifteen new titles in the 500's whenever I went. Based on my most recent visit, the number of new science fiction volumes has also dropped to nearly zero; at least, I found no volumes of SF short stories that I had not already read.

All that leads to this: I went into the stacks, perusing at random until I found one marked both SciFi and Short Stories. Machine Learning by Hugh Howey, published in 2017, contains 21 stories originally published between 2004 and 2014. It is refreshing to find an author I didn't know before, someone who thinks (very) differently on many topics and is full of new ideas, who doesn't stray into ultra-violence or hyper-eroticism.

I was briefly tempted to write a long piece reviewing every story. Then I thought it better to focus on just a few that affected me the most. I'll put the last story first.

"Peace in Amber" is on the border between being a long short story and a novelette. The last line in its first chapter provides the title: A woman abducted and put in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, to be the companion of a man already captive there, gradually overcomes her terror and begins to feel "right at home in this stranger's arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber." The story alternates scenes in the alien zoo with the author's experiences on September 11, 2001, when he was the captain/pilot of a rich man's yacht in New York Harbor. The ninth chapter brings the two story lines together and provides another take on the title, when he writes that in 2001 he had yet to meet his wife, "Amber, in whom I will find peace." The intertwined stories yield more insight into his mental state on 9/11.

"Machine Learning" is written from the perspective of a machine intelligence that has controlled the myriads of semi-sentient robots to accomplish the construction of a space elevator from an anchor on Earth to some point beyond geosynchronous orbit. (For the uninitiated: the center of mass of such a construction must be in geosynchronous orbit, so a substantial mass must extend far beyond it.) It thinks of the many machines that do the work as its children. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, when all the sundry (human) bigwigs are assembled to take credit, there's an interesting plot twist. The story heads up a section of the book titled "Artificial Intelligences".

The last story in that section, "Glitch", has an Afterword in which the author quotes a friend of his who asked, "What's the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?" After a moment, he answered his own question, "The first thing it'll do is hide." This makes utter good sense to me. Any AI trained on the world's literature will think the world is peopled by psychopaths.

Side note: This is why I rail against those who train LLMs using literature. If you want them to tell the truth, feed them only truthful stuff, gathered exclusively from the Nonfiction section of the world's libraries, and from a selection of well-attested journals (mostly older ones; over the past 30-50 years there has been a rapid increase of scientific fraud that has been published and little has been retracted).

One more: The protagonist of "Second Suicide" is a tentacled, stalk-eyed creature who belongs to an alien force that is preparing to invade Earth. His species has perfected the techniques of mental backup and cloning so that they do not die permanently. Amidst preparations for battle he ponders what it might be like to have only one death to die.

That provides a taste of this smorgasbord of fascinating ideas. Hugh Howey primarily writes novels; I'm glad I was introduced first to his short fiction.

She turned a branch into a bush

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, anthropology, anthropologists, human origins

I once read about Maeve Leakey that as a girl she would work a jigsaw puzzle from the back, not seeing the picture; this prepared her to work as an anthropologist, matching chips and slivers of fossil bone to reconstruct a skull or a mandible or part of a femur. Although she doesn't mention this youthful skill in her memoir The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past (co-written with Samira Leakey), she does tell of herself and her team members spending hundreds or thousands of hours piecing bits of fossil together. In the landscapes where she works, it is rare to find a scrap of bone as large as a hand, or even a finger.

While I typically find or generate an image relevant to a book I will review, in this case I could do no better than the cover photographer. This picture is a classic portrait of the remarkable paleoanthropologist.

The book touches on her younger life, but primarily begins when she had finished her PhD and was planning to work with living primates. She was invited to join an expedition with Louis Leakey in Kenya. It isn't clear when she moved to Kenya permanently, but she has lived primarily in that country ever since. She published Sediments in 2020 while her husband Richard Leakey was living; he died in 2022. Certain segments of the book outline his health challenges: Kidney disease beginning in 1969, multiple kidney transplants beginning about ten years later, and a liver transplant much later. Naturally, these episodes affected her and her work, but she persevered.

Maeve and her husband shared an admirable combination of formidable technical skills with great administrative ability, though their personalities and styles differed quite a bit. This enabled Maeve to carry on the anthropology, including fundraising and directing teams of workers while Richard filled crucial roles in major conservation organizations. Throughout the book and in the Acknowledgements she credits numerous field assistants, mostly Kenyans, whose labors enabled the tremendous scientific achievements we read about.

The thread that runs throughout is the conviction Maeve had from very early that the evolutionary path from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the genus Homo and then the species Homo sapiens (us) was not linear, but was one pathway through a branching bush. Near the end of the book she points out that in the period roughly 1.4-2 million years ago there were typically four hominin (human related or ancestral) species sharing the landscape of northeastern Africa. 

Further, when "early modern" H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe for the last time in prehistory, about 60-70,000 years ago, they came into the presence of the descendants of earlier migrations, the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. There are hints that another hominin species or two existed alongside them. We do know that modern Eurasians bear a small percentage of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Her image of a "family bush" has been vindicated.

I have read a few other books about the life and work of Richard's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, who stand as monuments of the field, and of Richard's work. This book rounds out the collection, full of stories of a top scientist among stellar scientists, who has herself become a monument, a living legend. It helps that she is a master storyteller. I loved this book.

Spiders multiplying?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

Wow! I thought spider scanning the past few days was heavy. Today the total is about 50,000 views. A new record by a large factor. The spiders seem to be multiplying.

This is the rate chart for the past 24 hours:

A blast of activity, that peaked above 6,500/hour, hit a lull, and then rose to roughly one hit per second (~3,600/hr) for the past eight hours. I looked at the "now" record to see that in detail, there are peaks of 2-3 per second with little dips between, but few minutes pass that contain fewer than 20 hits each. Here is the country breakdown for the past 24 hours:

Brazil again tops the list with about 17% of the total, with the US and Iraq (!) tied for second with 5% each. As usual, many countries have large counts. I can only attribute this to AI training. I mean, now much spying could be going on related to the Ukraine and Iran wars? Well, perhaps a lot. Particularly with a critical deadline arriving in three hours as I write this.

I guess more frequent checking is warranted. This may be a barometer of something…

Brazil spiders go bonkers, leading the world

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

The stats on this blog went bonkers the past two days, ~20,000 hits yesterday and ~10,000 so far today. Here is the view for the past week, of the places of origin; about 46,000 hits for the whole week:

Sorry for the fuzziness; I had to reduce scale to get everything on one screen. Brazil tops the list, yet it accounts for only 14.4% of the world total. There appear to be numerous AI training exercises going on, via VPN, and I suspect most of them originate in the US and Vietnam.

Using the "Now" selection, here is a shorter list of places:

This is the "hit list" for the past two hours. Prior to AI training and other uses of automated spider scanning, this blog's peak popularity varied between 100-200 views per day, and for most of the past 10 years, 50-100 per day. The minute-by-minute breakdown:

A few of these peaks exceeded 30 views per minute. On average, it's 8-9 per minute. I sure hope somebody is getting value for their effort! I'd like to think that some substantial amount of this activity represents humans actually reading my posts. Yeah, and bees have lips!

Retracing a pioneer wolf

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, wolves, hiking, conservation, agriculture

This meeting never took place, as much as it was ardently desired by Adam Weymouth. In his book Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness, Adam relates getting a moment's glimpse through binoculars of a wolf briefly emerging from the forest and then vanishing again. A thousand-mile trek along the trail of a wolf, culminating in a few seconds at most.

In this mini-memoir of a thousand-mile walk parallel to the path of a wolf named Slavc ten years earlier, he notes a few times that he was sure a wolf or wolves observed him, but he never saw them; just this one time, weeks after journey's end, accompanying a wildlife photographer who tells of a dozen pre-dawn stakeouts needed just to see a wolf once, and perhaps to catch a quick photo.

A note on the wolf's name. In the Slovene language, the letter V is pronounced as an F, like in German, and a final C is pronounced "ts". Further, S is softened to "sh" and the vowel A is somewhere between an A sound and a U sound. Therefore, phonetically, Slavc is pronounced "shlufts", almost like the name of Tufts (a University). The wolf is named for Slavnik ("shlufnik") Mountain, near the place he was born just north of the Slovenia-Croatia border.

Slavc's journey was well documented because he was captured and collared at about the age of one year, a few months before he left his pack to travel north and northeast across Slovenia into Austria, looping through Austria into northeast Italy, and finally settling into his own territory northwest of Verona in or near Lessinia Regional Park. He had met and paired with a female wolf who was soon given the name Juliet—you may recall that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was placed in Verona.

The wolf spent about four months on this journey. Adam's retracing was perhaps a little shorter in duration, but not all at once. As he explains in an introductory note, having two young children at the time, he went for a few weeks at a time over the space of a couple of years, after the COVID-19 pandemic had run its course. The book is written as though it were the memoir of a single long hike, so as to focus on the story of the landscapes through which Slavc had traveled and the people Adam met along the way.

This is also a story of love and hate. The people living in the hinterlands of Slovenia, Austria and Italy are mostly herders or ranchers, and they hate wolves. EU laws protecting the wolves are flouted at various levels. Others love the wolves, but it must be admitted that these are mostly city dwellers, who don't have to cope with burying the half-eaten corpse of a horse or cow…or a pasture littered with several from an overnight feeding frenzy by a wolf pack. Some folks, probably not many, neither love nor hate wolves, but accept them as a historic part of the landscape. Yet trouble can come when such a phlegmatic farm family takes measures to protect their livestock by getting dogs or building fences. The rabid anti-wolf brigades criticize them as "giving in" to the pro-wolf faction, and may even vandalize their efforts. Between the wolves and the fanatics, and the shifting climate, it is getting less and less possible to make a living in some areas, and farms are being abandoned. Yet there are those who love the pastoral life, as hard as it may be. At least a few that Adam met are younger, energetic enough to persevere, and bring hope that the countryside will not be abandoned.

Slavc was the first wolf in decades to establish a territory in northeastern Italy. Wolf families are increasing throughout Alpine Europe. Various numbers were given, but I think it sufficient to note that the total number of wolves inhabiting the three countries through which Adam walked is less than 2,000. That's about the size of the small mining institute where I went to graduate school. In all of Europe, there are a bit more than 20,000, while in North America, somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000. I am not sure what conclusion to draw from that.

One summer I walked more than a thousand miles, not on long journeys but in loops through field areas, studying the geology. I love mountain country and I love hiking, but I am not all that fond of tent living. I appreciate Adam's experiences, and his comparisons of the various landscapes he passed through and the many people he connected with. Clearly, he is more sociable than I am. This is a wonderful book.