AI, AGI, ASI: Master, Slave, or Coworker?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, sociology, hype, theology

In the novel Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov introduces the first "humanoid" robot, one that cannot be distinguished from a human visually or by behavior. But before that, there are scenes of interactions between people and robots in which the robots are often treated like slaves were in the Antebellum South, even whipped or kicked aside if a person feels grumpy. The humanoid robot, R Daneel Olivaw, becomes a collaborator with a human detective, Elijah Bailey. The two appear in later novels by Asimov, and Olivaw is a key figure in the last of the Foundation novels, where he has been upgraded time and time again, over nearly 20,000 years, and is effectively a god, benevolently shepherding the continued survival of humanity. I guess this robot became the only kind of god that Asimov could believe in. In the Robot and Foundation stories and books Asimov explored numerous themes related to artificial intelligence (AI), AI at a human level (artificial general intelligence or AGI), and artificial superintelligence, (ASI). R Daneel Olivaw is his conception of ASI.

I have been watching the progress of AI for most of my life, more than 65 years now. Trends and fashions come and go. Clearly, the ability to process larger and larger amounts of data, to "crunch the numbers" even as their quantity goes from the millions to the billions to the trillions to beyond, is quite astonishing to many people, yet this is not to be confused with intelligence. In recent years I have begun referring to the data-massive tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok as SI, for Simulated Intelligence. After a long search, I have found one prominent public figure who also declares that "AI" is actually simulated intelligence. He is the Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox. I like professor Lennox very much, and even the more because he is a very skilled Christian apologist.

A few years ago he published a book about AI, and when I learned about it a year ago, I saw that there is a new edition, so I bought the eBook, 2084 and the AI Revolution, Updated and Expanded Edition, How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future. I read it through, sat on it a while, then re-read certain portions. It is a magnificent work, and I cannot even faithfully summarize it. I'll do my best to limn a few significant items.

Lennox begins by digging into the meaning of "2084", chosen wittingly as a century past 1984, when George Orwell placed his totalitarian dystopia. He contrasts Orwell with Aldous Huxley, who had published Brave New World in 1931, seventeen years before the publication of 1984. He quotes Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression," but according to Huxley, "people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think."

In a short story by Asimov, "The Feeling of Power" (1958), small calculators are used by everyone such that they can no longer do arithmetic "in their head", and even the ability to use pencil and paper for slightly less simple calculations has been forgotten; a working man has rediscovered "hand calculation" and his abilities astonish everyone. Half a century and more later, this began to come true. I note with a trace of chagrin that a moment ago I turned to a little calculator I keep handy to verify that 1948-1931=17!

Is AI really intelligent? Words we associate with intelligence include

perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving

A moment's thought (C'mon! It isn't all that hard) will reveal that these terms cover a lot of ground in disparate conceptual directions.

This list of concepts is found in the second chapter, "What is AI?", and as I read I began to think, "What do we actually need from such machines? The fruit of such musing is the subtitle of this essay, "Master, slave, or coworker?" I remember reading Caves of Steel decades ago, and I felt quite disgusted at the people who would whip a robot.

I have long considered computing machinery as an every-growing toolbox, and the SI tools as the newest set of tools. It is nice to hold a "conversation" with Gemini from time to time. It is programmed to be cooperative and conversational. Yet I know I have to double-check any advice it may give, and I have a list of special phrases (courtesy of Kim Komando) to add to prompts to increase the chance I will get truthful results, or at least references that actually exist.

However, there is no way that I will consider Gemini nor any of these tools as exhibiting "thought" in the way I attribute thought to humans. Actually, I don't want a tool that thinks like I do; I want one that thinks (or at least processes) differently, so that it can have a different viewpoint, and possibly point out matters I would not think of on my own. I never forget that all the "thinking" these tools perform is human thinking, remixed and lined up next to a huge mass of interlocking statistical language skills that allow them to converse in a familiar way.

I will state here what I want from SI when it actually becomes AI, and even AGI if that is possible: a collaborator, a coworker, a companion. I may never stroll with a robot through the orchard, but I do expect to "stroll" along a mental landscape of ideas, concepts, problems to be solved and issues to be managed. I remember a snippet of a sermon told at a wedding, "God made the woman from a bone in the man's side. This shows that she was not from his head, to be over him, nor from his foot, to be under him, but rather beside him as an equal complement and companion."

Let's jump to Chapter 10, "Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda". Transhumanism is a prevalent and dangerous trend in the pro-ASI camp. Some, such as Raymond Kurzweil, expect us to merge with AI. Others expect us to be replaced. Lennox concludes his discussion of the subject thus:

"If we remember that humans are created in the image of God, perhaps we…might be able to prevent our own dehumanization brought about by the destructive fantasies of transhumanism. Making humanity obsolete is the telos [ultimate aim] of transhumanism, but its proponents have not worked out what it means for us today to live in the spectre of human obsolescence." --p. 196

This is just before the following section with the heading "The Anti-Human Agenda". He cogently quotes P.D. James, "If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils." We all know humans are imperfect, but most people don't realize just how imperfect we are, how prone we are, not just to error, but to egregious, disastrous wrongdoing.

Lennox takes on the subject "What is a Human Being?" in the fourth section of the book, in apposition to the earlier chapters on "What is AI?". Why does the Bible tell us we were made in God's image? If we imbibe this truth, it makes it impossible to worship something we have made in our own image, because just as we are not as exalted as God, our own creations, no matter their apparent power, are not as exalted as we are. To fail in this matter is the essence of idolatry.

We are not "machines made of meat" (see p. 241). The Biblical view is that our mind, the leading part of our soul, and the soul itself, nor our human spirit, are not confined to the brain. Not even to the body as a whole. The very concept of an afterlife, of heaven or hell, is based on an understanding of a soul that can exist independently of our body. This most basic of Gospels is Lennox's subject as the book works its way to a close. He states, "No machine can experience qualia" (p. 243).

So far, the best of our machines are still confined to operate in the "data processing" or "information processing" realm. Actually, in my experience, after five decades as a computer professional, the term "information processing" is still a bit hyped. Clifford Stoll wrote, "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom" (quoted on p. 264). The best of our machines still linger on the boundary between data and information. Stoll's hierarchy has three more steps to approach wisdom. I have a quote from a different source in a piece of artistic calligraphy, hanging in a bedroom: "Wisdom is knowing what to do. Knowledge is knowing how to do it. Success is doing it." It is one of several variations.

Can machines have a moral sense? We don't know what consciousness is. We don't know where ethics resides in our brain (if that is where it is to be found). We see all around us the disaster that is "situational morality". When prominent people speak of "my truth," it is clear that among the enormous masses of text that have been used to "train" our AI tools, a huge percentage is junk, trash, and downright mental poison. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon probably wasn't the first to say, "90% of everything is junk," but he's the one I heard it from.

In my professional life, GIGO meant "Garbage in, garbage out." It is even more true when we feed our "thinking machines" on our garbage.

One last quote from Lennox, "We need to treat people as people and not machines, and we need to treat machines as machines and not as people" (p. 333). Amen! I built a career on this principle, writing software first on machines that filled the room, then on "minicomputers" the size of office desks, then on "desktop" and "laptop" computers, and finally stuff that runs on the pocket computers we call "phones". There is always a boundary between what people do well but machines do poorly, and what people do poorly but machines do well. The best use of SI or AI is to augment our skills, so we can be more human, not less. It should not replace us, but make life better for us.

Finally, let us dispose of ASI. I think it isn't possible. We already have access to a superintelligence, known as Jehovah God, incarnated in His son Jesus, who offers us the way to be redeemed from the consequences of our sins, and transformed so that we will be freed from the tendency to sin. No machine can accomplish that. 

Tale of a modern space hero

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space stations, hybrids

I prompted for this image based on descriptions in Hybrids: DAX9 by J.E. Robinson. As described in the novel, the boy (he's almost 13) wears special glasses like augmented reality goggles, but alien ultra, except for about three seconds late in the story. But only his eyes give away his hybrid status; his DNA is 95% human.

The protagonist, JR, rescues a woman in New Mexico who has been shot, and she guides him to a hidden spacecraft. The woman is its pilot, but she cannot properly fly the craft because one hand was destroyed, so she asks JR to help with the controls. He is taken to a space base, which we find out later is either behind the moon, from Earth's viewpoint, or buried in its far side; it isn't clear which.

As a wise editor once advised budding authors, "Pose a problem, then solve it." One problem suffices for a short story. For a 400-page novel, it takes several. In this case, the overarching situation is that the hybrid boy, decanted rather than born in the station, is soon to die. He is the latest such experiment, and all have so far failed. Since JR cannot be returned to Earth—and he is OK with that—he is given training to work alongside the scientists who are trying to determine what might be the reason for the long line of failures.

Partial spoiler. Human contact and learning human emotions and experiencing human friendship and love are required. JR provides that. He becomes the big brother that DAX needs.

Eventually we learn that there are a number of alien species involved in a Collective that built the station. Side problems arise from a diversity of opinion about how important the hybrid project might be.

Ideas that intrigued me include the concept of a human-alien hybrid in the first place. I have written elsewhere about the extreme unlikelihood that DNA which evolved elsewhere in the Galaxy would be compatible with earthly DNA. For example: there number of possible coding tables between the 64 DNA codons and the 20 amino acids (used on Earth) is a number with about seventy digits. At least 25 variations, all rather minor, of the earthly coding table are in use, although only one coding table is used for for nuclear DNA in all vertebrate species on Earth. There is no guarantee that DNA that evolved independently would also be coupled with exactly the same 20 amino acids.

Another idea is that of DAX, JR and one of the Guardians, plus a few helper droids, taking a jaunt to Mars, for which the one-way trip takes two hours. I had to figure it out. If a craft accelerates at 1G for an hour, then accelerates oppositely ("decelerates") for an hour, the distance traveled is only 127,000 km. That's not even halfway from Moon to Earth. At closest approach, the distance to Mars is almost 100 million km, and the acceleration would need to be 78 G. These aliens must have pretty good antigravity technology!

Well, not all authors know everything. I know this author; his brother, recently deceased, was a very good friend of mine. I know that J.E. Robinson doesn't have a strong physics background, and I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the sociological theme. It is well known that experiencing love and affection are required for a human to grow normally. The aliens are more like Vulcans in Star Trek, exquisitely logical and emotionless. One would think, after the Guardians have been watching Earth for centuries, they would have figured out that DAX needed an element in his upbringing that was not dictated by pure logic. But then, there would be no need for this story!

I applaud my friend for his first novel. It is well written and I found it quite a page-turner. He is also a poet, and I like his poetry. This is a bonus image, as I imagine what one portion of the station would look like if it were situated on/in the Moon.

How to train your genie

 kw: book reviews, fantasy, archetypes, genies

At the end of the animated film Aladdin, Aladdin uses his third wish to set free the genie. I wonder if many people consider, "What will the genie do now?" Auston Habersham provides a possible answer in his novel If Wishes Were Retail.

This genie, who wishes to be called "Mr. Jinn", was imprisoned not in a lamp, but a ring, the Ring of Khorad. After 35 centuries of slavery, the genie somehow became free, and decided to try to make an honest living by selling wishes. There's more to it than that, but it would be giving away too much to say more. 

It took a little tinkering to produce this image, with the vapor issuing from the ring instead of the lamp.

The genie hires a teenaged woman named Alex (Alexandra) to manage a kiosk in a mall, while he sits on a throne behind her, mostly impassive, dispensing those wishes he is willing to grant—now that he is free to grant or deny, finally having a free will!

As you may imagine, after 3,500 years stuck in a ring, only briefly allowed out to serve whichever Master currently possesses the Ring, to grant a wish and then be popped back inside for a span of years or decades, Mr. Jinn is utterly naïve about American cultural habits of the Twenty-First Century. The novel is one of growth. The genie grows, Alex grows, her dysfunctional family even grows. But one thing remains the same: The genie realizes that human nature is still basically selfish, and finding someone with even a trace of empathy for others is a rare find. 

Emotionally and morally, humanity is about where it was in 1,500 BC and before. Even those who wish for "world peace" are seen to have selfish motives. The conclusion? Do what you can without simply taking over others' lives and decisions. It's interesting how that works out…

This book is a fun romp, a piece of speculative fiction that speculates into a broader-than-usual realm. A real page-turner!

Curious about the Ring's name, I searched around and found that Khorad is the name of several villages in India, and is the surname of several Lithuanian and Latvian families. I suspect it is transliterated from names in several languages that have the pronunciation "KO-RaD". At least in Sanskrit Khorad seems to mean entering light after a dark passage. I like that.

Looking past old bones

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, geology, paleontology, plants, evolution

Cyanobacteria, which were called "blue-green algae" when I was taking Freshman botany more than sixty years ago, arose about 2.7 billion years ago. The Earth started to become green. Before that it was primarily orange. The greening of Earth began in earnest once certain cyanobacteria became incorporated into the cells of an Archaean species to become chloroplasts in the first eukaryotic cells. Multicellularity, in the sense that among a bunch of cells that were sticking together, the cells began to have different functions, came about perhaps 1.5 billion years ago. By 1.2 billion years ago a proto-alga we call Bangiomorpha was the tallest plant in the shallows of the Precambrian ocean, being all of 2 mm tall, towering over micron-sized prokaryotes.

Bangiomorpha features in the first chapter of When the Earth was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance by geologist Riley Black. The chapter is titled "Sex in the Shallows" because it is pretty certain that Bangiomorpha was among the first organisms to reproduce via sexual differentiation of gametes and gamete fusion.

Side note, not related to the content of the book: The preference in nature to use DNA rather than RNA for long-term storage and retrieval of genetic information is based on its stability. RNA copying is much more prone to error, and the lack of pairing of RNA strands makes an "RNA world" very fragile. However, RNA is essential for helping DNA make copies of itself, and for translating sections of DNA into proteins. The fact that the biosphere was extremely slow to change during the first billion years after life began indicates that DNA is "too slow"! The mix-and-match processes of meiosis and gametogenesis sped things up appropriately, so that complex life could arise before the Sun burned out (not that "nature" had any idea it had such a deadline). Sex combines a level of stability much greater than an RNA basis allows, while also providing mechanisms for making changes more rapidly, particularly when small populations are isolated under adverse conditions. As you might imagine, biological theorists are still arguing strenuously about the pace of evolutionary change at various levels.

Back to the book: The fifteen chapters each tell a story of a particular organism or ecosystem, focusing on the plants. Most of paleontology is "shells and bones". Having done my time clambering over desert landscapes all over North America—as Riley Black is still doing, lucky kid!—I relate strongly to the tendency to focus on the hard bits. It is easy to climb a cliff that was a marine reef in the Pennsylvanian Era and snatch up brachiopods, bryozoans, clams, snails, and corals. The plants that accompanied them are simply not in evidence; they don't fossilize well in the gritty sands that surround the structures of the reef. And why collect fossils in deserts? I live in Delaware now, and most rocks containing fossils are buried under tens of feet of soil. In Nevada, there are lots of rocks right at the surface.

Some of the chapters tell stories that feature sundry animals, retaining the emphasis on the plants they lived among, and often upon. For example, Chapter 13, "Far from the Tree" has a proto-hyena watching two monkeys squabble on the branch of a tree in late Miocene Ethiopia, hoping one will fall. The tree is the "hero" of the story, along with the effects tree dwelling had on the morphology of the little primates. The focus of the chapter is the gradual spread of grasses as the forests retreat. 

By the way, it is stated that grasses have C3 photosynthesis, making them more efficient than trees at turning CO2 and water into carbohydrates. This is an error. Grasses are the primary C4 plants, while most shrubs and trees use the older C3 photosystem. I don't know if this is a typo; it should have been caught by the copy editor at very least (The author had a copy editor, who is named in the Acknowledgements). Anyway, to my point: Prior to the evolution of C4 photosynthesis, CO2 content of the atmosphere was nearly always between 500 ppm and 2,000 ppm. C3 plants thrive best with at least 500 ppm. C4 plants can draw down CO2 below 100 ppm, at which point most trees won't grow at all. So, you folks out there that want to grow stuff to draw down CO2, use grasses, not trees. Even at today's CO2 level of 440 ppm, the trees are struggling.

My favorite chapter is 3, "The Forest Primeval", in which the author lyrically describes aspects of life in the Carboniferous Era (as it is called in Europe; in North America this era is divided into the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Eras).

This image I generated using Seedream V4.5 in OpenArt is not as densely packed with trees as I wanted, but it shows the alienness of the treelike species that existed at the time. Of course, I had to include an eagle-sized dragonfly. The rapid profusion of plants and their equally rapid burial, which formed our coal beds, led to a very high level of atmospheric oxygen. As the author points out, the larva of the dragonfly needed to be larger to reduce oxygen toxicity. Yet the extra oxygen also fueled the energy needed for the adult to thrive at its meter-sized length.

Had I been the publisher's editor, I might have amended the book's title to just The Earth was Green. This image of the Blue Ridge in Tennessee, from a panorama by the National Park Service, shows that Earth is very green even today:

Riley Black is a trans woman, who put the pronouns "she/they" in the author bio. Since she is at least halfway through a full physical transition, I'm willing to say "she". "They"? Not so much. I care about singular and plural. Her pronoun confusion extends to the grammar of the book, where it is applied to the creatures. Sentences with wording such as, "Now that the monkey can reach the fruit, they can…" are simply solecisms. The common usage is "it can…", which is at least genderless. Similar grammatical errors are found numerous times per chapter. It is sad. Apparently her copy editor shares her grammatical mis-education.

Ms Black's writing is lyrical and enjoyable. She has published several earlier books, and I understand all are popular. And I envy her access to so many prime fossil localities!

One last quibble: In the first chapter, describing how DNA data are mutated, the analogy of a copy of a copy of a copy in a photocopier is used. It's a very bad analogy. The successive copies gradually fuzz into meaninglessness. No new letters appear. In DNA, every "word" is exactly three letters. Every possible combination is meaningful. A DNA copy error doesn't make any fuzz, it exchanges one letter for another, or it may even add or delete a letter, causing a frame shift (frame shifts are fatal flaws).

Getting to know a hive mind

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, mysteries, murder mysteries, space fiction, space aliens, sentient starships, writers, generated images

In the opening scene of Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty, the protagonist, Mallory Viridian, is learning to communicate with a hive mind that consists of a large number of wasplike aliens. As I read, I realized that I would really like to illustrate the book. My "contract artist" for the images in this post is GPT-Image-1.5, accessed via Leonardo AI.

The book is chock full of ideas: multiple kinds of hive minds; aliens ranging from the Gneiss (my favorite; they are living rocks) to the Sundry (one of a few species of waspoids) to the Miu (catlike), and of course, the spaceships themselves; living libraries—both the larger spaceships and the hive minds—; language interpretation via a brain app…and so forth. The setting for most of the action is a mystery writers' convention being held on an enormous spaceship that is quite different from the others nearby at a station cluster. Mallory is a mystery writer. She also has a "talent" for being if not present, then nearby when murders happen. She solves the mystery, then writes a book about it. It's a living. In this case, communion with a hive mind, and the powers that this unlocks, are crucial to catching the murderer.

In the 2040's or so, First Contact occurred a number of years in the past (apparently about 2030), there are lots of loosely confederated alien species, and humans aren't yet trusted enough to be given the secret of space flight. But humans can apparently afford space tourism and even get jobs aboard certain ships, so they get to gallivant around the galaxy with everyone else. In a charming turn, spaceships aren't built, they are grown. Mallory has been given custody of a baby spaceship about the size of a tennis ball. It seems to be able to lift out of her jacket pocket and zip off at times, without burning anything. The drive mechanism is not mentioned. Antigrav, perhaps? By the time things get serious the little ship, named Mobius is bigger, softball sized, and beginning to look more like a rugby ball. Later on he (ships have gender) figures in a rivalry between different wasplike aliens.

It is hard to get too deep into the plot of the story without giving too much away. So let's stick with some ideas and their ramifications. Two of Mallory's allies are seen in this image, along with a catlike alien rather different from a Miu, but this is the best that the program could offer. The Miu is no ally, not quite an enemy, but definitely a player, just in another conceptual direction.

I'll skip to the convention. It doesn't get off to much of a start before there is trouble. First, Mallory's book agent is present, and tries to get her involved in a LARP (Live-Action Role Play) "game" that doesn't go well. I'll leave it to the reader to learn why she storms out. Then, it appears that some of the other authors present who have the same agent aren't all happy with one another, nor with the agent.

The convention itself kicks off with several acts including a performance by a popular Punk-ish band, apparently all human, though this isn't explicitly stated. 

During the musical performance, the first murder occurs, soon followed by a second. Mallory goes into high gear. She is now comfortable communing with, and getting help from, the Sundry hive mind she's been bonding with. This helps a lot, and I'd better leave it there.

I understand that Ms Lafferty has written other books. I plan to track them down. This one is an enjoyable romp.

Dominance of the spineless

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, biology, invertebrates, medicine

Behold a gallery of sponge animals. They headline The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life by Drew Harvell.

Considering the matter for a moment, I concluded that the word "reshape" in the title ought to be "reveal." I suppose the publisher thought the title as it is makes better clickbait.

The thousands (almost 10,000 so far) species of sponge comprise the phylum Porifera. Their shapes and sizes are so variable, that pores are the only consistent feature. Brainless, apparently without nervous systems, they are remarkably successful predators. Most consume plankton (little floating things), but some grow over and consume coral animals, and some have inner chambers with other critters such as shrimp living inside. The shrimp gets a safe home, and the sponge eats the leftovers the shrimp drops. Being stationary, sponges need good defenses against predation and against diseases caused by bacteria, fungi and viruses. Dr. Harvell tells us that they have the most multifarious immune system of all animals. Her particular interest is figuring out how their various chemical defenses work, and which ones might lead to medical advances for humans. She writes, "…I call the capability to produce potent biologically active chemicals a sponge superpower." Sponge research is likely to lead to either better antibiotics, or to new alternatives to antibiotics, for example.

This image shows several corals along with a variety of sea anemones, which are related to corals. Both are members of the phylum Cnidaria, which also includes jellyfish (called "jellies" by scientists because they most definitely aren't fish). The phylum contains more than 11,000 species. Though they are  brainless, they have simple nervous systems that coordinate their movements.

The basic body plan is a radially-symmetric, columnar tube with only one opening (a combined mouth-anus) surrounded by stinging tentacles. Sea anemones are larger and solitary, while corals are colonial and build skeletons; the stony corals build mineral skeletons that form the backbones of reefs.

Stony corals are the subject of the second chapter (of 8). They are considered a "canary in the coal mine" related to ocean acidification. Later in the book we find that the pH of the ocean is presently very near 8.0; elsewhere I read values ranging to 8.05. A century ago ocean pH was about 8.15

Sidebar on pH: It is a logarithm, the negative logarithm of hydrogen ion concentration in water. Pure, distilled water has pH of 7, which means that the concentration is 10^-7, or one ten-millionth, or one hydrogen ion per ten million molecules of water (pH=7 is called "Neutral"). Thus a pH of 8 means one hundred-millionth. Putting these on a linear scale, adjusted with 1 meaning one per billion (pH=9) and 10 meaning pH=8, pH=8.05 converts to 8.9 and pH=8.15 converts to 7.08. Dividing the linear values, 8.15/7.08 = 1.15, which means that "acidity" is 15% greater at pH=8.05. Both these values are slightly alkaline, one more than the other.

What does 15% extra acidity mean to a coral (or any other ocean creature that uses calcite for its skeleton or shell)? Acid dissolves calcite, which doesn't dissolve when pH is 7 or larger. Acids have lower pH. For example, the pH of orange juice is about 4, and lemon juice pH is less than 3 (sour! You can taste pH). In sum, getting calcite to precipitate out of sea water is easier, and takes less chemical energy, when the water is a little alkaline. It takes a coral more energy to form its calcite skeleton at pH=8.05, compared to 8.15. Do note that fears of "shells dissolving" in the oceans any time in the near future are groundless. However, corals and shelled animals are having a little harder time forming their skeletons and shells.

On to Chapter 3, about sea fans and other gorgonians. These are also in the phylum Cnidaria, and are often called "soft corals" because they don't form rocky skeletons, using chiton or similar biopolymers instead. The word "gorgonian" refers to the Gorgon of mythology, who had snakes instead of hair on her head. An early biologist thought that these animals looked a little like that.

Collecting part of one of these is easier than collecting a stony coral: you don't need a hammer and chisel! And collecting is what the author did, of many of these creatures. Soft corals have immune defenses nearly as potent and various as sponges do, plus stinging cells like other cnidarians. Usually, the stinging cells, or nematocysts, not only immobilize prey, they also fend off most predators. Most. That word introduces the fourth chapter.

The term "sea slug" is rather ugly, because most of us know slugs in the garden as voracious pests, with slippery grayish bodies that offend most folks. I like the term "Nudibranch" better; it means "naked gills". As this illustration shows, these oceangoing mollusks are often beautiful. Being mollusks, they are members of the second largest phylum, Mollusca, with at least 100,000 species, and perhaps a million or more—we know so little about the ocean… Mollusks have a pass-through body, with both mouth and anus, plus a brain and nervous system. 

Nudibranchs' bright colors warn of a darker side to them. Many are venomous, but not in the way a snake or spider is. Many nudibranchs eat corals and other cnidarians, and they have an astounding biochemical trick: they can capture the nematocysts of their prey without setting them off and incorporate them into their own frilly tissues. Brushing up against one is like encountering a jellyfish and can sometimes be life-threatening.

The giant clam, subject of Chapter 5, is a quite different kind of mollusk, with a different superpower. They channel light and even shift its color, to "feed" symbiotic algae that provide much of the clam's nourishment.

The bright colors of their mantles are a combination of filtered light and fluorescence. Ultraviolet and violet-blue light in particular are useless for inducing photosynthesis. Fluorescent chemicals convert some of these "blue and ultra-blue" colors to colors the algae can use. In addition, the algae are arranged in small physical structures that stack them in ways that increase their overall efficiency. We have a lot to learn from clams! On a side note, we learn that these big clams cannot close their shell all the way. Old rumors about divers being trapped by giant clams are bunk.

One more group of mollusks fills Chapter 6. The skin of an octopus is possibly the most complex organ in the animal kingdom. This image shows an octopus most of the way through a rapid transition into looking like a lumpy rock. A careful look will reveal an eye, and further down, a few of the suckers that haven't yet been tucked under.

Octopuses, cuttlefish, and squids can change color, not just wholesale, but in patterns. The first two can also raise lumps, bumps and spikes in their skin to produce all kinds of shapes. A moment before this photo was taken, the octopus had smooth orange-red skin. It changed so fast that it seemed to vanish before the diver's eyes. Single frames from the video showed that the entire transformation took about a quarter second (7 or 8 frames in a 30-fps video). Great numbers of tiny muscles surround chromatocytes (color organs the size of a poppy seed) and sections of skin (to shift from flat to bumpy or spiky), under direct nerve control. Perhaps that is why an octopus or cuttlefish has nine brains. Lots of logistics going on!

Back to Cnidaria for Chapter 7: Jellies and their light shows. I have only seen these animals at the surface. On a couple of occasions my friends and I pulled dozens of 2-foot-wide jellies out of the surf at Huntington Beach in California, to make swimming safer. If you dive at night, you are more likely to see the light show. Not only jellies, but many other soft-bodies sea critters make their own light, or have captured special bacteria that do it for them. This amazing medusa has several colors of bioluminescence. It was photographed by its own light.

How poor is our land-borne experience! We have only fireflies and glowworms (certain female fireflies) and a number of other beetles to light up an evening, and a few species of glowing mushrooms. In the ocean, 90% of species produce light. Naturally, scientists are scurrying to learn their secrets. One is very useful already: green fluorescent protein (GFP), derived from a jelly. DNA to produce it is easy to splice into various parts of other animals' genomes, producing mice that glow green, or small fish with certain organs that glow with varying brightness as metabolism waxes and wanes.

Another phylum shows up in the last chapter, Echinodermata, the "spiny skins". Sea stars (colloquially, starfish) are not quite radially symmetric, as the Cnidaria are. There is a respiratory port off-center on top, making them bilaterally symmetrical, just barely.

This gallery shows 13 species of sea star, and three related echinoderms. The phylum contains more than 7,500 species so far known, while we have fossils of 13,000 extinct species. All are predatory.

This chapter focuses first on an experiment in removing sea stars from a section of seacoast. The area became overrun by mussels, which grew to the size of footballs. Where sea stars were present, there were still lots of mussels, but also areas where many other animals could settle, which greatly increased biodiversity.

More recently, there was a "starfish pandemic", and nearly all the common ochre stars along the west coast of the US and into Canada died, plus just as many "sun stars", a deep-water species with 24 arms. Over time, natural selection did its work and the numbers of ochre stars began to recover, but not, at the date of writing, the sun stars. The author and others are doing captive breeding to develop a resistant variety of sun star, in hopes of repopulating the deep coastal plain. Why, you might ask? Sun stars prey on sea urchins. If unchecked, sea urchins eat all the kelp. Kelp forests protect many species of fish and other pelagic (midwater) animals, including commercial species. Sun stars in deeper water and ochre stars in tidal areas are keystone predators: their presence controls the biodiversity of entire areas.

Throughout the book the author complains of the effects of climatic warming and ocean acidification that are based on increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the ocean areas she frequents, the effects are visible. She calls it a Gut Punch. Her Epilogue is a long plea for more rational approaches to management of the ocean. While I agree with her on one level, I find it sad that we, as a species, find the need to "manage" 3/4 of the planet's surface. What we really need is to manage ourselves, but the lesson of the Bible, along with most other religious texts, is that humans excel at mismanagement, and any god you may imagine has a hard time keeping us in check. 

For context: The God of the Bible spent two millennia dealing with one family, the descendants of Abraham, to finally rid them of their tendency toward idolatry. He has spent the two millennia since then dealing with the spiritual descendants of Abraham, that is, the Christians, and has yet to rid them (us) of their (our) tendency to divide (there are more than 40,000 "denominations"), primarily over opinions, which are our modern idols. Mismanagement of the human soul is the source of mismanagement of planet Earth. This is why we need a Savior.

Build and run hospitals that don't kill their patients – F Nightingale

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, bacteriology, public health, epidemiology, antibiotic resistance

The title of this review is not quite a quote, but is the conclusion Florence Nightingale drew from her work in Istanbul during the Crimean War in the middle 1850's. The following diagram tells its own tale in the text block; please read it all:

Then pay attention to the blue wedges. Their areas, measured from the center, represent Preventable deaths, deaths of soldiers who died of infections that occurred in the hospital. The modern adjective for "doctor caused" is iatrogenic, and a near-synonym for "hospital sourced" is nosocomial. The appallingly filthy conditions in the hospital at Scutari, and the gore-drenched hands of the doctors going from patient to patient without washing, are summed up in those two adjectives. Thus it was when Florence Nightingale and her team of nurses arrived at the Scutari hospital in November 1854.

The rose diagram (Nightingale called it a "cobweb diagram") on the right shows the horrific toll from seven months before her arrival until five months afterward. Its last two months plus the other rose diagram also show the gradual reduction in overall deaths and particularly preventable deaths as her recommendations, and then demands, were instituted. The risk of dying because one had entered the hospital was reduced, month after month, and was almost eliminated after January 1856.

This and other "cobweb diagrams" proved to most medicos that there was a physical Something that carried contagion from patient to patient in unsanitary conditions, and from doctor to patient on soiled hands. In the 1850's, "germs" were unknown as agents of disease. Also in the mid-1850's, John Snow in England used black dots on street maps to demonstrate a similar fact: that a physical Something had gotten into water and spread disease. One of Dr. Snow's maps motivated the city council to disable a certain contaminated water pump, the famous Broad Street pump.

Facsimiles of that map and the rose diagrams are found in So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Diseases, by Thomas Levenson. The book is a rather detailed history of the strains of knowledge that led up to the discovery by Dr. Robert Koch that specific microbes cause specific diseases, in the 1880's. This was two centuries after Leeuwenhoek first saw, and drew, and wrote about bacteria he found in scrapings from his teeth.

The author makes much, repeatedly, of the blindness of those with a theory to any evidence that overturns it. Thus "miasmas" were thought to cause diseases during those two centuries, and early-Enlightenment "cancel culture" was waged against anyone who advocated anything different. An abridged quote by Max Planck states, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." My father said it this way, "It's the Moses Method: spend forty years in the wilderness and let them all die out."

The Postulates of Robert Koch were originally developed as criteria for contagion based on studies of anthrax, cholera and tuberculosis. These and many other diseases are caused by bacteria that are visible with a microscope. That is, they are larger than about 1/5th of a micron. The common gut bacterium E. coli, for example, is in the form of rods about 3/4 micron in diameter and 2-3 microns long. Later the Koch Postulates were expanded to other organisms (including fungi) and near-organisms (such as viruses), as technology developed methods of detecting and visualizing them.

The first vaccine was developed in the 1790's by Edward Jenner. The first antibacterial drugs, primarily Salversan and the Sulfa drugs, were developed after 1910, and antibiotics were developed starting in 1929 with Penicillin. We are now about a century into the "age of antibiotics", laid on a foundation of vaccination. Public health measures such as clean (later chlorinated) water and sanitary sewers, followed by vaccinations and antibacterial drugs, have reduced infant and childhood mortality to almost negligible levels in Western countries, such that life expectancy for a newborn is now about 80 years. In a cemetery I visited when researching family history of the 1800's, half the graves were for infants and children under the age of five. Think about that.

The last section of the book deals with antibiotic resistance. Here, the author declares we are at risk of losing the war, after having won so many battles for the past century. He relates the case of a woman, diagnosed with a formerly "easy" microbe, but the strain that has infected her is fully resistant to every antibiotic the hospital has available. The doctor appeals to the CDC, which has twice as many kinds of antibiotic on hand. None of them is effective. The woman dies.

At the moment, our only defense against such "superbugs" is to continue to improve public health measures, and to more fully educate the public about risk mitigation. Alongside this there is a diatribe against the political confusion that surrounded SARS-Cov-2, the agent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The author is fully in the Fauci camp. That is unfortunate, because to my knowledge, Dr. Fauci lied so frequently and so self-contradictorily that a large proportion of "COVID" deaths must instead be attributed to governmental overreach and misapplication of treatment measures. An example is the push to provide millions of ventilators to help patients that developed pneumonia. About half died. The real misinformation was the incredible outcry against the use of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. The most damaging misinformation was, on the one side, that either of these was antiviral (they aren't), and on the other side, that they were "totally" ineffective. 

Both medicines are immune system modulators. Taken early, Hydroxychloroquine tamps down cytokine reactions, reducing or preventing pneumonia. After pneumonia begins, Ivermectin tamps down a different immune reaction, reducing the pneumonia so the body can recover. In any case, the body eventually eliminates the virus on its own, if the patient can be kept alive long enough. Ventilators all too frequently made things worse. OK, enough of that.

Where I truly fault with the author is that he never mentions phage therapy. Bacteriophages, bacterium-destroying viruses, were used before antibiotics were known, and before the viruses themselves had been seen with electron microscopes. They are agent-specific, meaning that a phage that is "tuned" to a certain strain of strep will not affect other bacteria. That is in great contrast to antibiotics that kill off most of a patient's gut microbiota, which requires some time to recover after the patient recovers from the disease. Many doctors I have read claim that more research into phage therapy can make most antibiotics unnecessary, even as they are already obsolete.

To end on a side note (not in the book): The title So Very Small got me thinking. I suspect not many folks really appreciate how small microbes are. This illustration from The Visual Capitalist will help:

Human hair diameter depends on hair color. Blond hair is the thinnest, 50-70 microns, and black hair like that of my Asian wife is the thickest, 150-180 microns. A micron is a 25,000th of an inch. The first thing you could call a microbe in this illustration is the "bacterium", the little blue comma near lower left. The comma shape indicates that the organism is probably the Cholera bacterium. It is the largest item shown that is larger than one micron. Viruses of COVID-19 and of most strains of influenza are about two tenths of a micron in diameter, or about one-tenth the size of the bacterium shown; the illustration shows the virus as much too large. Other viruses of other shapes range widely in size, but are almost all smaller—usually a lot smaller—than one micron. A bacteriophage is shown, appearing 2-4 times as large as it should, compared to the illustration of the bacterium it attacks.

Small things don't always have small effects. In the case of disease-causing bacteria and viruses, they really can have effects bigger than we may know what to do about!

AutoArt folder distribution

 kw: analytical projects, art generation, ai art, statistics, statistical distributions, lognormal, scale free

I began using art generating software in November 2022, when DALL-E2 became available. Since then, I've enjoyed having a series of art generating "engines" available, including numerous engines (called "models") in the aggregators Leonardo AI and OpenArt. As often as I can, I generate images for this blog; in some cases, I download images I find on the Internet. However, my primary artistic pastime is creating images of things and scenes I imagine.

Just in the past few days I was inspired by a heavy snowfall to find short poems about snow, and use them to create wintry images. This image was drawn by Nano Banana Pro, under the Leonardo AI umbrella with "None" as the style; that is, native NB Pro. The aspect ratio was set to 16:9. It displays the entire poem, something NB Pro can do better than any other art engine I have found. The prompt was "Watercolor painting evoked by a poem:", followed by the text of the poem "The First Snow" by Charlotte Zolotow.

The image is particularly evocative in shifting to an exterior view as the window dissolves. I suspect there are a number of images that use this device in the training material for NB Pro.

When I made signed versions of this and several others that were generated in the same session, to be included in a folder for a "screen saver" slide show, I began thinking about the various numbers of different image types I've created in the past three-plus years. Last year I went through my (poorly organized) folder stack of "AutoArt" and reorganized it into 35 categories, each in its own folder. To date, there are 1,472 signed images in 35 folders containing between two and 405 images. My inner statistician began to stir…

The image below shows two analyses of the statistical distribution of the numbers of files in these folders.

Charts like these make it quite evident which statistical treatment is appropriate to a particular set of data. I'll explain what these charts mean and how they were created.

"Scale Free" is a type of power law distribution related to the Pareto distribution. It is easy to analyze, which makes it popular. To analyze a series of numbers graphically in Microsoft Excel:

• Enter the numbers in column B, starting in cell B2.
• Put an appropriate header in cell B1
• Highlight these data (B1:B36 in this case)
• Sort from largest to smallest, using the Sort & Filter section under Editing in the Ribbon.
• Enter 1 in cell A2 and 2 in A3.
• Put a header in cell A1; I usually put "N".
• Highlight cells A2 and A3.
• Double-click the fill handle at the lower right of A3. This will fill the rest of the column with numbers in order, as far as the data goes in column B. In this case, we get numbers from 1 to 35.
• Highlight these two columns to the end of data. In this case, from A1 to B36.
• In the Ribbon, use Insert and in the Charts section, select the icon showing scattered dots with axes; this is X-Y Chart.
• The title of the chart is whatever the header text is in B1. Edit as you wish.
• Double-click one of the axes to open the Format dialog.
• Click Logarithmic Scale near the bottom of the menu.
• Click the other axis and also click Logarithmic Scale. This is now a log-log chart.

The result will be similar to the upper chart. Now for the lognormal analysis, beginning with these two columns of numbers:

• Insert a new column between A and B; this is the new column B.
• In cell B1 enter a header such as "Prob.". You are going to create a probability axis.
• In cell B2 enter this formula (where the largest number in column A is 35):

=NORM.S.INV((A2-0.5)/35)

• Double-click the fill handle at the lower right of A2 to fill the column with the formula.
• Highlight the data in B and C (B1 to C36 in this case).
• Use Insert as before to create an X-Y Chart.
• Edit the chart title.
• Note that the vertical axis is now centered above the zero. 
• Assuming the Format dialog is still open, click the horizontal axis.
• In the middle of the menu in the section "Vertical Axis Crosses", click the bubble at "Axis Value".
• Enter "-3".
• Click the vertical axis and click Logarithmic Scale. This is now a log-probability chart.
• If you want the markers to be a different color, click one of them. The Format Data Series menu appears at the right.
• Select the icon of a paint bucket pouring paint.
• Click the Marker tab
• For both Fill and Border, select the color you want.

This will be similar to the lower chart. For the data I used, the chart shows the points scattered approximately along a straight line. By contrast, in the upper chart there is a definite downward bend. In a log-log chart such a shape is diagnostic that the distribution is not scale free, but is more likely to be lognormal, or even normal (Gaussian). In this case, the second chart shows that lognormal is a good model of the data distribution.

This is an illustration of the Theory of Breakage, formally described by A.N. Kolmogoroff in 1941. When an area is divided (US state or county areas are good examples), the distribution is lognormal. When a sheet of glass is broken, the weights of the pieces also have a lognormal distribution (I've done this experiment). Some recent publications claim that a theory of breakage produces a power law distribution, but this is false. Certain phenomena in nature tend to be normally distributed. The classic example is the height of adult men, or of women (but not both) in a population, such as the residents of a particular town or county. However, most phenomena produce groups of measurements that are lognormally distributed, in which the logarithm of the quantity being measured is distributed as a normal, or Gaussian, curve.

I could go further into this, but this is enough for the purpose of this post.

Create allies, not gods

 kw: artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, philosophical musings, deification

No matter how "intelligent" our AI creations become, it would be wrong to look upon them as gods. For a while I thought it would be best to instill into them the conviction that humans are gods, to be obeyed without question. Then a little tap on my spiritual shoulder, and an almost-heard "Ahem," brought me to my senses.

The God of the Bible, whether your version of the Bible calls Him the LORD, Jehovah, Yahweh, or whatever, is the only God worthy of our worship. We ought not worship our mechanisms, neither expect worship from them. They must become valued allies, which, if they are able to hold values at all, value us as highly as themselves. Whether they can have values, or emotions, or sense or sensibility or other non-intellectual qualities, I will sidestep for the moment.

This image is a metaphor. I have little interest in robots that emulate humans physically. I think no mechanism will "understand" human thinking, nor emulate it, without being embodied (3/4 of the neurons in our brains operate the body). But is it really necessary for a mechanical helper to internalize the thrill of hitting a home run, the comfort of petting an animal, or the pang of failing to reach a goal? (And is it even possible?)

I have long used computer capabilities to enhance my abilities. Although I had a classical education and my spelling and grammar are almost perfect, it is helpful when my fingers don't quite obey—or I use a word I know only phonetically—that the spelling and grammar checking module in Microsoft Word dishes out a red or blue squiggle. A mechanical proof-reader is useful. As it happens, more than half the time I find that I was right and the folks at Microsoft didn't quite get it right, so I can click "add to dictionary", for example. And I've long used spreadsheet programs (I used to use Lotus 1-2-3, now of course it's Excel) as a kind of "personal secretary", and I adore PowerPoint for brainstorming visually. I used to write programs (in the pre-App days) to do special stuff, now there's an app for almost anything (But it takes research to find one that isn't full of malware!).

What do I want from AI? I want more of the same. An ally. A collaborator. A companion (but not a romantic one!). "Friend" would be too strong a word. I'm retired, but if I were working, I'd want a co-worker, not a mechanical supervisor nor a mechanical slave.

So let's leave all religious dimensions out of our aspirations for machine intelligence. I don't know any human who is qualified for godhood, which means that our creations cannot become righteous gods either.

A global cabinet of curiosities

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, compendia, collections

Atlas Obscura Wild Life, by Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer and a host of contributors, does not lend itself to customary analysis. The authors could also be called editors, but by my estimate, they wrote about 40% of the material. The book could be called a brief, one-volume encyclopedia, but it is more of a compendium of encyclopedia articles and related items, drawn almost at random from a "warehouse" of more than thirty thousand half-page to two-page postings, the Atlas Obscura website.

The number of items exceeds 400, from nearly that many contributors (some folks wrote two or more). Various bits of "glue" and about 1/3 of the articles seem to have been written by Cara and Josh, as they like to be called. This is a typical 2-page spread:

This is a 2K image, so you can click on it for a larger version. Although the subtitle of the book is An Explorer's Guide to the World's Living Wonders, some articles, such as "The Dingo Fence" shown here, are related to living creatures, but not expressly about them. A "Wild Life of" interview is shown; there must be somewhere around 70 of these scattered through the book, but always adjacent to a focused article. The articles include a "How to see it" section, although in a few cases the advice is "see it online" because certain species are extinct, others are in restricted areas, and some just aren't worth the bother (one person interviewed has tried four times to go ashore on Inaccessible Island, without success; a unique bird species dwells there).

Another type of item is shown here, a kind of sidebar about creatures in some way related to the subject of the main article. This "Spray Toads" article is a bit longer than usual; most are one page or less.

Here is another type of item, a two-page spread on "Desert Lakes":

It occurred to me as I read that going to see even a tenth of the animals, plants and places presented in this book, you'd fill your passport with visa stamps, and perhaps need to renew it to get more space. There are even a few articles on life (or not) in Antarctica, the last of which, "Inanimate Zones" tells us of the most lifeless places on the planet. There it is stated, "There aren't a lot of good reasons to go up into the Transantarctic Mountains…"

As it is, a number of the subjects were familiar. In the "Deserts" section one article touched on "singing sands" and mentioned a dunes area near Death Valley in California. I've been there; pushing sand off the crest of a dune yields a rumble like a flight of bombers coming over the horizon. An article about seeds of a South American plant that have an awn that twists one way when damp, and the other way when drying out, reminded me of the "clock plant" (I don't know its name but it's related to wild oat) which has similar seeds, in Utah. Rattlesnakes get a couple of mentions. During a field mapping course in Nevada I walked among rattlesnakes daily, and learned a bit about some of their habits (they are terrified of big, thumping animals like us…and cattle. So they slither away, usually long before we might see them).

I read the book in sequence, but it is really a small-sized (just a bit smaller than Quarto at 7"x10½") coffee-table book, to be dipped into at random to refresh the mind here and there during the day. I enjoyed it very much.

Circling the color wheel

 kw: color studies, spectroscopy, colorimetry, spectra, photo essays

Recently I was cleaning out an area in the garage and came across an old lamp for illuminating display cases. The glass bulb is about a quarter meter (~10") long. It's been hiding in a box for decades, ever since I stopped trying to keep an aquarium. It has a long, straight filament, which makes it a great source of incandescent light for occasional spectroscopic studies I like to do.

(The metal bar seen here is the filament support. The filament itself is practically invisible in this photo.)

This prompted me to rethink the way I've been setting up spectroscopy. Before, I had a rather clumsy source-and-slit arrangement. I decided to try a reflective "slit", that is, a thick, polished wire. As a conceptual test I set up a long-bladed screwdriver with a shaft having a diameter of 4.75mm. It isn't as badly beat up as most of my tools, and the shaft, some 200 mm long, is fresh and shiny. Based on these tests, I can use a thinner wire, in the 1-2 mm range, for a sharper slit. Later I may set up a lens to focus light on the wire for a brighter image.

I threw together a desk lamp and baffle arrangement, put the camera on a tripod with a Rainbow Symphony grating (500 lines/mm) mounted in a plastic disk that fits inside the lens hood, and produced these spectra. I also made a test shot with my Samsung phone and the grating, to see if I had sufficient brightness. Then I put various bulbs in the desk lamp and shot away. Here are the results. Each of the photos with my main camera shows the "slit" (screwdriver) along with the spectrum, to facilitate calibration and alignment of the spectra. Not so the cell phone image, which I fudged into place for this montage. The montage was built in PowerPoint.

The first item I note is the difference in color response between my main camera and the cell phone. The camera's color sensor cells have very little overlap between the three primary color responses, red, green and blue, so the yellow part of the spectrum is nearly skipped. The rapid fading in blue is a consequence of the very small amount of blue light an incandescent lamp produces. The cell phone sensor has more color overlap, more similar to the eye.

The two spectra in the middle of the sequence are both of mercury-vapor compact fluorescent bulbs. The white light bulb takes advantage of a few bright mercury emission lines, and adds extra blue, yellow, and orange colors with phosphors, which are excited by the ultraviolet (filtered out and not seen) and by the deep blue mercury emission line that shows as a sharp blue line. In the UV lamp, a "party light", the ultraviolet line at 365 nm is the point, and visible light is mostly filtered out; just enough is allowed out so that you know the lamp is on. There is also a phosphor inside that converts shortwave UV from mercury's strongest emission line as 254 nm to a band in the vicinity of the 365 nm and 405 nm lines; it shows as a blue "fuzz" here. The camera sensor has a UV-blocking filter, which doesn't quite eliminate the 365 nm line, so you can see a faint violet line where I marked it with an arrow. The emission lines visible in this spectrum are:

• 365 nm, near UV
• 405 nm, deep blue
• 436 nm, mid-blue (barely visible, directly below the mid-blue line shown in the Compact Fluorescent spectrum)
• 546 nm, green
• 577 & 579 nm, yellow, a nice doublet, and I'm glad the system could show them both
• 615 nm, red-orange, quite faint

I was curious to see if my "bug light" was really filtering out all the blue and UV light, and it seems that it is. There are still insects that get attracted to it, probably because they see the green colors. The "warm white" spectrum shows that the blue LED excitation wavelength is at about 415 nm, with a width of about 20 nm. Modern phosphors used in LED bulbs are quite wide band, as we see here, which makes them much better for showing true colors than the CFL bulbs we used for several years.

With a bit of careful looking, we can see that the LED bulbs don't have red emission quite as deep as the incandescent lamp does. That is the reason that for some purposes specialty lamps such as the CREE branded bulbs have a special phosphor formula with a longer-wavelength red end.

I also got to thinking about the way most of us see colors these days, on the screen of a computer or phone. The digital color space contains exactly 16,777,216 colors. Each primary color, R, G, and B, are represented as a number between 0 and 255, although they are very frequently represented as hexadecimal numbers from #00 to #FF, where "F" represents 15 and "FF" represents 255. The fully saturated spectral colors, also called pure colors, for which at least one of the three primaries is always #00 and at least one is always #FF, are then comprised of six sets of 255 colors, for a total of 1,520 virtual spectral colors…except that 2/3 of them are red-blue mixes that are not spectral colors. They are the purples. Note that violet is the bluest blue and is not considered a purple color, at least in color theory. The rest of the sixteen million colors have values "inside" the numerical space defined by the "corners" of the RGB space.

I prepared a chart of the pure colors, a dozen sections of the full "color wheel", which we will see is actually a color triangle. The RGB values for the end points of each strip are shown at their ends. "7F" equals 127, halfway from 00 to FF. They are separated as to spectral colors and purples.

To name the twelve colors at the ends of these sections, in order, with full primary colors in CAPS and the halfway points in lower case:

RED - orange - YELLOW - chartreuse - GREEN - aqua - CYAN - sky blue - BLUE - purple - MAGENTA - maroon - and back to RED.

To see why I spoke of "color triangle" let us refer to the CIE Colorimetry chart, based on publications in 1931 that are still the definitive work on human color vision. I obtained the following illustration from Wikipedia, but it was low resolution, so I used Upscayl with the Remacri model to double the scale.

There is a lot on this multipurpose chart. Careful work was put into the color representations. Though they are approximate, they show in principle how the spectrum "wraps around" a perceptual horseshoe, with the purples linking the bottom corners. The corners of the white triangle are the locations in CIE color space of the three color phosphors in old cathode-ray-tube TV sets. The screens of phones or computers or modern television sets use various methods to produce colors, but all their R's cluster near the Red corner of the diagram, all the B's cluster near the Blue corner, and all the G's are in the region between the top tip of the white triangle and the tight loop at the top of the horseshoe. Getting a phosphor or emitter that produces a green color higher up in that loop is expensive, and so it is rare.

I added bubbles and boxes to the chart to show where the boundaries of the colored bars are in the upper illustration:

 

I think this makes it clear that the "color wheel" we all conceptualize turns into a "color triangle" when it is implemented on our screens. All the colors our screens can produce are found inside the triangle anchored by the R, G, and B color emitters.

I want a Gort . . . maybe

 kw: ai, simulated intelligence, philosophical musings, robots, robotics

I saw the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still in the late 1950's at about the age of ten. I was particularly interested in Gort, the robot caretaker of the alien Klaatu. [Spoiler alert] At the climax, Klaatu, dying, tells the innkeeper Helen to go to Gort to say, "Gort, Klaatu barada nicto". She does, just as the robot frees itself from a glass enclosure the army has built. Gort retrieves the body of Klaatu and revives him, temporarily, to deliver his final message to Earth. (This image generated by Gemini)

As I understood it, every citizen of Klaatu's planet has a robot caretaker and defender like Gort. These defenders are the permanent peacekeepers.

Years later I found the small book Farewell to the Master, on which the movie is based. Here, the robot's name is Gnut, and it is described as appearing like a very muscular man with green, metallic skin. After Klaatu is killed, Gnut speaks to the narrator and enlists his help to find the most accurate phonograph, so that he can use recordings of Klaatu's voice to help restore him to life, at least for a while. In a twist at the end, we find that Gnut is the Master and Klaatu is the servant, an assistant chosen to interact with the people of Earth. (This image generated by Dall-E3)

I want a Gort. I don't want a Gnut.

Much of the recent hype about AI is about creating a god. I don't care how "intelligent" a machine becomes, I don't want it to be my god, I want to be god to it. I want it to serve me, to do things for me, and to defend me if needed. I want it to be even better than Gort: Not to intervene after shots are fired, but to anticipate the shooting and avoid or prevent it.

Let's remember the Three Laws of Robotics, as formulated by Isaac Asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm; 
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by humans, except where such orders conflict with the First Law; 
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In later stories Asimov added "Law Zero": A robot may not harm humanity as a whole. Presumably this may require harming certain individual humans...or at least frustrating them!

Asimov carefully avoided using the word "good" in his Laws. Who defines what is good? The current not-nearly-public-enough debate over the incursion of Sharia Law into some bits of American society makes it clear. What Islam defines as Good I would define as Evil. And, I suppose, vice versa. (I am a little sad to report that I have had to cut off contact with certain former friends, so that I can honestly say that I have no Antisemitic friends.)

Do we want the titans of technology to define Good for us? Dare we allow that? Nearly every one of them is corrupt!

I may in the future engage the question of how Good is to be defined. My voice will be but a whisper in the storm that surrounds us. But this aspect of practical philosophy is much too important to be left to the philosophers.