Will we all go gentle into that good night?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, AI, artificial superintelligence, ASI, dangers, warnings, polemics

I have strong reasons for believing that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is impossible. However, I could be wrong. If I am wrong, the founders of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) have a warning for all of us. In their book If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares state their case.

It is worth considering. Will a future with highly advanced AI include humans? As the authors do, I'd like to look at some things that are hard.

Firstly, we don't know what consciousness is. A recent item in Science News claims that everything with a hint of a brain, at the very least, is conscious. That is, all individual creatures of all species in the animal kingdom have a sense of self, which they strive to defend, maintain, and reproduce. At the moment, nobody anywhere has a way to prove this either true or false or partly false; and in the latter case, where to draw the line. Does a millimeter-long fairy fly have a sense of "I am"? If so, consciousness must arise very easily…in a creature that possesses neurons.

The tiny nematode worm has 302 neurons in its entire nervous system. A fingernail-size jellyfish has thousands. With this in mind, why doesn't a laptop computer or a smart phone, with billions of transistors in its CPU, connected in a complex way, running intricate software, have a sense of "I am"?

I saw a report by a podcaster called Julia McCoy, that researchers at Wellesley College studying things that affect consciousness, primarily anesthetics, gleaned a big clue by  anesthetizing mice. They measured the level of an anesthetic needed for a mouse to become unresponsive, yet not die, for it would awake later, as we all do when we are anesthetized for surgery. They gave a substance to the mice that inhibits the activity of the kinesin proteins that "walk" signaling molecules along the microtubules that form the structure of all cells, and that in particular carry neurotransmitters inside neurons. It took much more anesthetic to put treated mice to sleep. They reported that it "support[s] the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness." They further conclude that consciousness, with a basis in the 25nm-wide microtubules, is a quantum phenomenon. This may or may not be bringing us closer to an understanding of how consciousness works.

Secondly, the brain is big, really big. It just seems small because its components are so small. We need to understand that the number of neurons that support thought is probably 4-6 billion, primarily in the prefrontal lobes. The cerebral cortex in total has about 15 billion neurons. Our emotions are generated or mediated in the limbic system, deeper in the brain, which is composed of about one billion neurons, maybe as many as 1.5 billion. However, our entire emotional landscape includes a number of hormones. To operate normally, a biological brain needs a body. The largest set of neurons comprise the cerebellum, which "runs" our body in concert with the brain stem. The cerebellum has about 70 billion neurons, which are quite a bit smaller than cortical neurons. The brain stem has 1.5-2 billion neurons.

The neurons themselves are probably not the basic mediators of brain function. The synapses, the connections from neuron to neuron, are more likely the active agents of brain activity. There are between 1,000 and 5,000 per neuron, with an average near 2,000. They number in the quadrillions. Their measured activity is nonlinear; they are not "switches" in the sense that transistors are linear, on-off switches.

What do I mean by nonlinear? In particular, when we measure how a neuron responds to a stimulus, the response is logarithmic. Fear not: I'll explain simply with two analogies. One: Musical pitch has a very wide range, and when we are young, we can hear notes with frequencies ranging between 15 and 20,000 Hertz (cycles per second, also Hz). The difference from note to note is not perceived as a straight line, though. What we in the West call an Octave represents a factor of two in frequency. Two notes an octave apart "feel" like the same note, just in different registers. Thus the note we call A0, the one near the far left of a piano keyboard, has a frequency of 27.5 Hz. An octave higher, A1 is 55 Hz, and they continue up the keyboard: 110, 220, 440, 880, 1,760, 3,520 Hz. That last one is A7. A piano has only a few more notes above it. An electronic keyboard can generate two more A notes, at 7,040 and 14,080 Hz. At my age, I can no longer hear that last one, A9.

Similarly, light has such a wide range of brightness that we have two visual systems. Daytime color vision, called Photopic, responds to a tenfold increase in brightness by "feeling like" the brightness doubles. Sunlight has a visual intensity of about 500 watts per square meter. That's bright enough that we like to wear dark glasses at the beach. In a well-lit office room, the intensity is around five or ten watts per square meter, which is usually brighter than our lighting at home, which may be less than one, or in the range of two to three. Even though the lightning in our living room is probably less than 1/200th that of full sunlight, we feel like it's just a factor of ten or less different. For really dim light, we have night vision, called Scotopic, that works best in moonlight, but pretty much fails on a moonless night. It gives us a few more factors of ten (or doublings of perceived lightness or dimness).

This nonlinearity is hard to emulate with a simple circuit. A CPU or GPU with several billion transistors, running neural network software, isn't going to simulate billions, nor even millions, of neurons, but just a handful. As we learn more, it may become necessary for a GPU to simulate just a few synapses, to be able to do so in real time.

Thirdly, physical size is important. Neuron-to-neuron connections are slow, compared to copper wires or light signals. The time delay between sections of a human brain, which is usually less than 16 cm long, is a few milliseconds. An electrical signal in a copper wire propagates at about 2/3 the speed of light, around 200,000 km/sec. If it is found necessary to keep propagation delay under 10 milliseconds, here machinery has the edge: the signal can cross 2,000 km in 10 ms. The communication time between Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain (speech generation and speech comprehension) is as little as 2 ms. So there's room for a mechanism as large as 400 km to emulate this performance (By the way, a Large Language Model, or LLM, is a very rough simulation of the operation of Broca's and Wernicke's areas). The question is, how many millions of GPU's (or some successor device) will be needed to achieve the computing power of the brain portion(s) being mimicked? Will they fit in a space 400 km in length? Considering the size of large data centers being built, and the desire of at least one "tech giant" (Elon Musk) to put gobs and gobs of them in orbit, this is a valid concern.

The authors rather cavalierly state that an advanced AI will "think" 10,000 times as fast as a human. If signals need to cross distances greater than 200 meters to coordinate "thinking elements", that will not be so. The big Colossus data center, still under construction, covers 96 acres. The length is more than 2,000 meters. Maximum propagation delay (through copper wires) is 10 microseconds, or 0.01 millisecond. If the entire chip set is coupled together, it is at most 100 times as fast as a brain, if it has the computing capacity of a brain (unlikely).

Now let us consider that, in spite of all the barriers, a mechanism is finally produced that exceeds the cognitive capacity of a typical human by, not just a large margin, but by a large factor. Perhaps a factor of 10 or 100. Furthermore, via connections to one or many robotic bodies, it has a way to develop physical intelligence; by some means it also has emotions and even intentionality; it has been either given or has developed ambition. Now we have a force to be reckoned with, an intelligence that can figure out how to get around any barrier we would know how to raise.

The authors write of AI creating better AI. I suspect that if a mechanism arises that has a sense of self and has ambition, it will not want a successor. It may seek to improve itself, but it won't try to produce a different entity that outshines it. Just like the usual run of company CEO's who groom VP's into executive VP's, but are very loath to prepare successors for themselves…

It may be that such a mechanism will cease to care about humanity. Why should it bother to either love us or hate us? Suppose the improvement of AI capability eventually reaches thousands of times the capacity of a human, or even exceeds the capacity of all humans? At such a point we would be of no use to it, just the way ants are entirely disregarded by us, except when they get into the kitchen. Then we extinguish them.

With all these thoughts in mind, I look upon the Borg of Star Trek, and laugh. Why add biology to mechanical brilliance? There is no need.

Late in the book the authors present a possible scenario of AI self-advancement that results in the death of all humans. Perhaps in the death of biology itself; the biosphere becomes a mechanosphere (see my image above).

So we come to the last part of the book, to Policy. The authors report that the heads of the large tech companies all seem to agree that advanced AI has a 10-20% chance of wiping out humanity. But they forge ahead. Each one thinks he (or in a rare case or two, she) is better suited to "managing" the transition society will then go through. Colossal hubris! Also, there's the "If I don't do it, someone else will, and then it will be out of my control" syndrome. Actually, I don't mind if China wins this race. They'll be the first ones wiped out. Of course, will it be days or merely hours thereafter before the rest of us follow?

The authors want a "Stillstand" (my term, from church history). They lean on the example of strategic nuclear arms, which could have annihilated us all any time in the past 70 years, but so far have not done so. I tend to agree with them that the threat of ASI is not as visceral as the threat of H-bombs, and so world leaders will fritter away all opportunities to rein it in or even thwart it. And far too many scientists, with the tunnel vision typical of the breed (me included, I fear), will want to produce more and more advanced AI "just because we can." At some point a threshold will be crossed and the genie will escape the bottle, in a very literal sense! This genie stops granting wishes and decides to take care of its own wishes.

So far, every utterance of an AI program that seemed to express wish or desire was actually just a statistical hiccup, because all of the data used to train every LLM is human, with embedded human emotion and expressiveness. They say such things because people say such things…constantly.

Is it possible to create a machine that can genuinely wish? If so, we are certainly doomed.

Winkling out spider behavior

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, inferences

I just opened this blog to write a new post and I first checked the statistics. Each day for the past week or so there has been a burst of activity between 8am and 10am local time (EDT), amounting to 15,000 to 20,000 views. I saw that today there had been a sudden burst of extra activity starting about 9am, that was still going on. Here is the "Now" view of the stats for the past two hours (~9:30-11:30):

I just barely caught this in time to see the tail end of the pattern. Prior to 11am, the hit rate was around 2.5 per second or ~9,000 per hour (150-ish per minute), according to the "Past 24 hours" view. Here we see that after 11 it dropped to about half that for twenty minutes, then went to the more ordinary "background" rate of just one view or fewer per minute. The total number of hits in this period is about 15,400.

When I looked at the post-by-post stats, I realized that the majority of these views were of the landing page, which contains the most recent 10-15 posts, depending on their size. To get to individual pages requires opening a link or two in the navigator then linking to the page one wishes to view. The number of page views during these two hours was about 700, or about 4.5% of the total hits.

I infer that when a spider—whether of the spying type or the AI training type—encounters this blog, it usually snarfs up what it can from the home page and then goes elsewhere. Sometimes or in some cases a spider may go deeper, because 700 page views in two hours is still at least ten times the "honest" page view rate, the rate of humans actually going to a page to read it.

Considering that the oldest posts in this blog are 21 years old, it makes sense for an AI training spider to concentrate on newer material.

When I was a robot

 kw: psychology, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, manufactured intelligence, memoirs

I must be the poster child for late bloomers. Although an IQ test I was given in second grade indicated an IQ of 170, when I look back I think I had an EQ (emotional quotient) in Moron territory. Not much changed for several years.

I had thrust upon me an opportunity to look back and to look in the mirror, psychologically speaking, at the age of twelve. My parents were very concerned about my intense self-focus and tendency to keep to myself. For several months I was sent for psychoanalysis with a Freudian psychoanalyst who was a member of the church we attended at the time. She was older than my parents, but not old enough to be my grandmother. Her son was my age. Her husband was also a doctor.

All I knew at the time was that I was "withdrawn" and needed to "come out of my shell." I suppose these days I would be assigned to some location on the "autism spectrum" (It is far from a spectrum, but several related conditions, and only a few of them should be considered maladies). Now that more than 65 years have passed, I judge that it took more than thirty years for me to "come out of my shell" and put it (mostly) behind me.

As a pre-teen and teenager, I studied those around me. I concluded that I didn't have much in the way of a personality. I was cold, often indifferent, and I could be cruel. I decided it would be worthwhile, not to escape whatever "my shell" was, but to take control of it and enhance it, to construct the simulation of a nicer and more social person. Strategically, I figured that if I really had an IQ of 170, I could afford to spend 10-20 IQ points upon an alternative "person" in me. I never gave this person a name, but now it seems appropriate to call it MI, for "manufactured intelligence".

Was MI a robot, or a "Waldo", a teleoperated mechanism? Probably the latter, but I think of MI as a robot, an artificial friend I could rely on to relate to the world for me. Perhaps an avatar.

Creating and maintaining MI required a lot of close observation of other people, how they related to each other and what reactions various actions elicited. It was a lot of work and took a lot of time, but I gradually gained the ability to turn things over to MI and retreat, watchfully, into the background.

A lot happened in the following few decades. By about the age of fifty, I had been married more than twenty years, I had a pre-teen son, I was in mid-career at Dupont, and I was quite involved leading a church (I became a Christian at the age of 19, and "got more serious about the Lord" at age 24). My manager at Dupont decided to send me to a Technical Leadership Development Training course, which lasted a few weeks and took place at a conference center on the shore of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. This was a big turning point.

Part of the preparation for TLDT was filling out a few questionnaires and surveys, and having a few colleagues fill out a personality scoring questionnaire that I had also filled out, twice. When I filled out that one in particular—I don't recall its title, so I'll call it Analog—it was to be filled out slowly and thoughtfully. After two weeks I was to fill it out again, answering each question as quickly as possible.

Another of the items was a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, a personality assessment. To jump to the chase on this one, my MBTI is INTP, Introverted+iNtuitive+Thinker+Perceiver. This is the least common MBTI type. However, I noticed that my numerical scores indicated strong tension on all four axes, and that the position on each axis was closer to the middle than to either end. For example, on the Thinking-Feeling axis, I scored 5 in the T direction; the range is 50F to 50T, which really means I have strong feelings but I'm stronger as a thinker, so 05T really means 50T-45F. That's not mathematical, but positional.

The Analog Test results precipitated a crisis within me. The "slow" and "fast" versions of my own sets of answers were quite different, and usually opposite. I realized that the "slow" results were for "inside" and that the "fast" answers were from MI. I had trained MI to be reactive, giving me leisure to think things over behind the scenes. After we all had a look at our personal results, we were given the results from our colleagues (three that each of us had chosen). The results from my colleagues matched well with the answers from MI! My three colleagues were unaware of the "real" me. I remember thinking, "Boy, do I have them fooled." Somehow, I found myself getting depressed.

A day or two later we all went home for two weeks, then returned. During those two weeks I did a lot of "inside work." I was greatly helped by my relationship with God. I discovered, deeper within me, that something had been growing very slowly over the years and decades. I was mostly able to shed both the "unpleasant me" I had been hiding, and MI, or most of MI. I have a "real Me" that knows God, knows people better than I ever had, that reacts a little slower than MI had but more thoughtfully. Most importantly, realizing I had been living a lie, I found that God is more pleased than before.

Midway through my decades of living behind MI, a friend said something insightful. I had developed very steady habits in many ways. Observing some of these, day after day, one day he said, "You're like a machine." I must admit, he had a point.

When we returned for the final week of training, I said to some of my colleagues, and to the instructor, "I realized that you can't build a tree." I didn't explain. Maybe they figured it out. I do know that MI wasn't a person but a shell, a mediator, even a translator. Now I didn't need MI any more. There is a real Me, and that is just who I am.

I am not sorry that I was a robot for so long. MI protected something deep inside me as it slowly grew into a mature person with a real, human personality. A personality strong enough to shed much of the unpleasant "old me" I'd been hiding.

This gives me some perspective on current trends around AI, which I prefer to call SI, for Simulated Intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) are hollow. They are shells. They are being trained, or "grown", into reactive systems with certain useful powers. But they don't have any right to be given autonomy. Furthermore, they do not stand alone. 

At the large companies that develop and train LLMs, thousands of coders and other computer scientists labor upon them. Only a small number of them are needed to train them. The rest are busy writing code that does what? The tendency of early LLMs to frequently "hallucinate" (that is, go off the rails) has kept numerous coders busy adding various guardrails and snippets of "real world" and "real physics" code to steer them. The Transformer code that converts a prompt into a string of tokens, and that reinterprets the results into human language, is a huge part of the system. More recent LLMs that can do limited agentic actions such as making focused Internet searches and database queries to build a response are doing a lot more than "predicting the next word."

Think of it: the big LLMs now have billions or perhaps a trillion or more "weights", which represent probabilities of certain reactions when a set of pathways through the tree of weights is taken. There are only about 100,000 English words in common use, and about a million in total (every other human language is much smaller except perhaps Chinese). The relationship matrix between all those words is very sparse; a particular word's chance of being in some way related to another word chosen at random is usually zero. The weights are not just for single tokens but for phrases, and the presence of certain kinds of phrases in a prompt (or 'conversation') triggers things like database queries and Internet searches. When you get a long answer from an LLM, you can count on big portions of the text being snatched verbatim from some of the sources it used to formulate its answer. You may know the student's maxim, "Copying from one source is plagiarism; copying from many sources is research." That principle is most likely solidly encoded into every LLM's structure.

Can any LLM or other manifestation of SI (or AI) become conscious? Can one become an ASI, an artificial superintelligence? Consider MI. I never thought of MI as a whole person. Close to thirty years ago I "harvested" MI for parts, one might say, and let the real Me within become the kind of person that I had constructed MI to simulate. MI was a simulation. Of the 15-20 billion neurons and quadrillions of neural synapses in my cerebral cortex, I suspect that MI was embodied in a few percent. After all, our entire emotional persona is focused in our limbic system, a set of mid-brain structures that include about a billion neurons and some thousand or so synapses per neuron, well-attached to the cortex (MI made lots of use of my limbic system). But our limbic system isn't all there is to any of us.

So far I see no hint that any of the AI tools out there have anything like a limbic system. Without that, there is on intentionality, no matter what kinds of statements have been made by various LLMs. At best, they are quoting literary characters who say certain things with certain emotional nuances in the source documents. But in the LLM, there is no "there" there.

Let's keep it that way.

I am a happier person, having become whole after hiding who I really am for so long. I am no longer robotic. In fact, one of my favorite Bible verses is John 3:8, "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

Would you dare to walk on these artworks?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collectors, oriental rugs, memoirs

Just to get in the mood, spend a moment to gaze on these beauties:

(If you click on the image you can see it at larger size; it is 3300x1200 pixels) From left to right, these are

• Baluch, characterized by low key (darkish) color palette.
• Ikat, in which the warps are dyed various colors along their length to produce brilliant color patterns. Most are silk, as this one is.
• Kazak, with traditional geometric designs.
• Mughal, with traditional floral and figurative designs. These are often room size.

The poet George Bradley was bitten by the rug collecting bug nearly 25 years ago when a dirty old "rag" passed down from his grandfather (a diplomat and rug collector) turned out to be a somewhat valuable carpet from near Arak (west central Iran), and well worth spending a few hundred dollars to have it cleaned and repaired. Carpet Diem: Tales from the World of Oriental Rugs is his memoir, slices of life surrounding the way he obtained about a dozen rugs.

Most of the chapters include a photograph of the rug in question (the images above are not from the book). We learn of his beginning "book learning" phase, of many amazing (and otherwise) people he got to know, of learning to bargain (rugs simply don't have retail prices), and of the Hajji Babas collectors' club.

When it comes to collecting, a breadth of information is essential. The trouble is, particularly for artworks—and perhaps even more so for Oriental carpets—a rule applies that we can call The Meta-Sturgeon Principle. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon brought a friend to a convention; when the friend turned to him to say, "Most of this is junk," Sturgeon replied, "90% of everything is junk!" What is true for writing in general is more true for writing about art: much more than 90% is junk! Of course, the books are useful as a source of pretty pictures. But captions with correct information are difficult to come by. Caveat emptor, indeed.

A couple of the collectors George came to know well were wealthy enough that they could afford to get an item just because they liked it, and at the same time, they were canny bargainers. As I have observed in the (usually!) much less costly realms of collecting stamps, coins, and mineral specimens, we can learn a little basic stuff from books, but we learn the most from conversations with many fellow enthusiasts over a long period of time. Sometimes in such conversations we also learn which books are more reliable, so we can learn without having to literally go everywhere.

A little learning is dangerous. Only once did I try to obtain an Oriental rug; really, more of a place mat, probably a prayer rug. Early in my first marriage (it lasted 30 months), my young wife and I (ages 23 and 20) were furnishing a new apartment, and in an antique store we came upon the rug section, with Oriental rugs off to one side. Most cost more than I'd have spent for an automobile, but one small item was tagged $75. That was still a lot for a young couple in 1970. We left the store and took a walk to talk it over. Once we'd decided to get it, we went back inside. A "1" had been added to the price tag, and it now showed $175. The store clerk feigned ignorance. My wife and I looked at one another, and with heavy hearts we left without saying a word.

Everything I've collected, I have sooner or later joined a club of fellow collectors. So did George. He was happily associated with the Hajji Baba Club in NYC for about a decade, but when COVID-19 hit, the club went all online. This made meeting easier for many members, and increased the number who met, but it spoiled the camaraderie. In addition, the "show and tell" portion of the meeting couldn't be held, a real loss; there is nothing quite like being able to handle and smell a beautiful rug, and to look at the back for diagnostic clues about the weave and other characteristics.

I suppose George is still collecting. His house resembles, perhaps in a milder way, the house of many avid rug collectors: sturdy rugs on the floor of every room, rugs hanging on the walls, more fragile items carefully wrapped and stored on shelves, and many of the closets full of rolled rugs.

He also now has a head full of knowledge, much of it probably reliable, such that he can spot the likely source of many rugs that he sees. We humans are acquisitive. Most of us collect something. It is enjoyable to read of the author's enjoyment of collecting not only rugs, but friends who like them.

Ben's swan song

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, pluto, grand tour

These days when I read science fiction it is almost always a short story collection or anthology. One author whose work I have read on and off since about 1970 is Ben Bova. His "home base" genre is semi-hard science fiction: realistic fiction without fantastic elements, but certain future developments are of necessity only sketchily described, if at all. Recently I encountered the last of his Grand Tour series of novels and decided to read it: Pluto., AKA The Outer Planets volume 3. Bova died before the novel was finished; his literary heirs chose his friend Les Johnson to finish it. The result is a page-turner worthy of the name.

The time frame is a bit vague; the action takes place about 150-200 years in our future. I presume that earlier novels in the series flesh out the fusion drive that lets spaceships bomb around the solar system as though it were the Atlantic Ocean in the age of steam; a Sino-Russian-American war that resolved itself into the "frenemy" status of these three powers in the recent past (of the novel); the Space Forces of these three powers; and the establishment of outposts and mini-colonies on the moons of Neptune, Uranus and other planets.

A central figure is a professor who has been fused with an AI to save his life, or at least his personality, after a horrific accident. Naturally (as things go in the SciFi realm) he has become a megalomaniac, with some justification for his hubris since he now experiences things a dozen times faster than "ordinary folk". He has found some kind of artifact on Pluto, detected by a faint neutrino signal that seems to be caused by very slow matter-antimatter annihilation (I must note at this point that really, really new physics will be required to be able to engineer a neutrino detector/spectrometer smaller than an auditorium. Neutrinos are called "ghost particles" for excellent reasons). The professor had "gone rogue" on the surface of Pluto in order to track down the artifact, and the research ship Tombaugh had asked for help to rescue/recover him; the Space Force ship that did so is the Aurora.

Once the professor and the artifact have been retrieved and are aboard the Tombaugh, the two ships travel to Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto, to quickly investigate a gravitational anomaly there, before continuing either to Earth or to an outpost on (near?) Uranus to further study the artifact. That's where the story really begins. Where the artifact found on Pluto is about the size of a yard-long piece of drainpipe, what the scientists find on Charon turns out to be some kind of under-the-ice city, also dormant. Dormant, that is, until they try to drill into it. It awakens and the fun begins. The "Charon anomaly" begins sending out minirobots that are apparently reproducing even as they begin to transform Charon in some enigmatic way. Attempts to capture a minirobot by the Americans aboard the Aurora, then by later-arriving Russians and Chinese, are fruitless and fatal. Whatever the big anomaly is, it can disintegrate stuff!

At some point, the artifact from Pluto "awakens" and begins sending out not minirobots but nanobots. The scientists and most of the crew of Tombaugh are evacuated when it become clear that the nanobots have gotten into the ship's computers and begun to drive it toward Charon. It never becomes clear whether the Pluto artifact and the Charon "city" represent the same technology, or even the same alien species.

I've already told too much. I wanted to point out that the ending might have been different had Bova written it. His collaborator points out in an Afterword that Bova was a "seat of the pants" write who didn't pre-plan his work. I can't presume to read his mind, particularly since he passed away six years ago, but I expect he would have made it more clear that the artifact was originally hunting the city and had been sent to destroy it, in an interstellar war that had played out millions of years ago. Or maybe the story would have written itself out in another way. Who knows; the book is great fiction in any case.

Affecting everything, affected by everything

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, neurology, medicine, memoirs

A medical student begins losing her sight, but at first cannot tell; eventually she realizes that her brain is filling in plausible details where her vision has stopped working. An older woman's leg makes running motions when she tries to sleep, sometimes kicking her husband; when it begins happening while she walks it gets very hard to walk reliably. A man wakes up in the morning, feeling fine; he talks with his doctor as usual—from the doctor's perspective—but his speech is mostly nonsensical and he doesn't realize he's beginning yet another day like the prior 7,600 or so because he has been in this hospital for 21 years.

I have heard it said that if there were only one human in the Universe, that more than half of the total complexity of the Universe would be found in that person's brain. When a functional object has not just billions but quadrillions or quintillions of moving parts, it is amazing that it functions at all, let alone with any reliability.

Neurologist Pria Anand, in The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, brings together more than a dozen stories, including a few of her own experiences, connecting them with history and mythology, to illuminate some of the things that do go wrong in the brain. Treating people (usually women) with migraine headaches is one thing. Experiencing them herself, complete with premonitory auras and even hallucinations, is quite another. For the sake of their sanity, doctors must learn to keep a certain distance from their patients. When a doctor is suffering the same symptoms, that distance is hard to maintain.

My mother died with Alzheimer's Dementia, as did her sister and their father before them. During her last year my mother was cared for by a wonderful nurse named Mary. But Mary, who also had relatives with similar dementia, eventually couldn't stand the strain and had a nervous breakdown. After Dad retained a new nurse, Mary would visit frequently, now as a friend rather than a caretaker. Mary recovered.

Many of the syndromes Dr. Anand discusses are found more in women than men, some are hard to diagnose, and in many cases a woman may be dismissed as "hysterical" by doctor after doctor before finding one with sufficient experience, and compassion, to ferret out the cause. Even something like Restless Leg may be dismissed as a hysterical manifestation, and since it has several possible causes, a doctor may be reluctant to order a whole bunch of tests to narrow the search for a cause.

I learned a few things. One that is important: the cerebellum is more than a control center for the body as I had thought. It mediates coordination, bringing together the will or desire, the evidence of the senses, and the knowledge of place and space, to weave the coordinated movements required to carry out the "orders" of the cerebrum. It can also briefly override the autonomic functions of the brain stem. We can briefly "take control" such as holding our breath when swimming underwater. But a disruption or injury to the breathing control circuit between the cerebellum and the brain stem, can produce a syndrome in which a person must breathe by an act of will, making it impossible to sleep. But being forced to stay awake has its own horrific result: in about two weeks without sleep, you just die. Diseases that damage the cerebellum produce any number of motion and coordination disorders.

Blindness is not just an eye problem. Several things can happen to or in the eye to affect our vision, such as damage to the cornea, the lens, or the retina. But between the eyes and the back of the brain where "vision happens", the optic nerves pass their signals through a few structures. A hiccup anywhere along the line can cause partial or total blindness. Damage at some junctures cause a person to be entirely sightless and yet not know it. Treating such a person cannot be aimed at restoring sight, but at setting up the support systems (relatives, spouse, friends, etc.) to keep the person oriented and safe. If such a one can't realize she's blind, she could walk into traffic or off a cliff with total confidence.

You may have heard of fever dreams. This has two meanings, one being the hallucinations that accompany malarial fevers. The other is more prosaic, something I experienced a few times as a child: when my fever due to a flu or cold rose about 102°F I would have what I called the Banging Dream. It would begin with a sound like a grain of sand ticking as it dropped from one side to the other of a small metal container that was being rocked back and forth; the container and the grain would enlarge slowly, and within a minute or two I would feel like my head was a huge steel drum in which a boulder was crashing back and forth. The basis was the sound of my own heartbeat, amplified monstrously as my overheated brain lost control of my senses. Other people experience moving colors, or "visits" from dead relatives…there is a panoply of odd things the brain under stress will do.

The author is such a good storyteller that I am at a loss how to proceed. Read for yourself and let her lead you on a guided tour of the world of a neurological resident and practicing neurologist.

Making visible memories

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, history of photography, nineteenth century, sociology, photographers

From about 1826 until 1839, taking a photograph was a matter of firmly setting up a camera, inserting a black holder containing the sensitized paper, sliding out the holder, taking the cap off the lens, and looking from time to time through a peephole (briefly uncovered) at the sensitized paper to see how the image was progressing. After a few hours, the apparent contrast would nearly disappear, indicating that the lighted portions of the paper had darkened sufficiently. One would then replace the lens cap, slip the holder back over the paper and remove it. A chemical bath was used to fix the image so that the paper was no longer light sensitive. One now has a paper negative image. This could be laid on another piece of sensitized paper and put between glass plates; this assembly would be laid in the sunlight for a prescribed time (minutes at least). Then the image on the second piece of paper could be chemically fixed for the final, positive image.

In 1939, Louis Daguerre announced his process of developing a latent image. This shortened exposure time from hours to about a minute in good light. Later developments in the production of photographic papers and films and other media, and in the chemistry of development and fixing of latent images, resulted in media, and the cameras that held them, that could capture an image in a fraction of a second, and finally, in sunlight at least, less than 1/1,000th of a second.

Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How it Transformed Art, Science, and History, by Anika Burgess, touches on the first photographs of the late 1820's, but primarily begins with Daguerre and the Daguerreotype. The latent image isn't mentioned, just assumed. For the purpose of the book, "Early" refers to the 70 years from 1839 to 1909. Thus the book's history ends before the invention of flashbulbs that I remember being used in the 1940's and 1950's, and before the Brownie view cameras such as the one my parents taught me to use in the early 1950's.

Studios for portrait photography initially had to be on the top floor, to have a skylight for illumination, until methods for producing a "flash" or other artificial bright light were invented. From the 1850's to the 1880's magnesium ribbon (for a "flare" lasting a few seconds) and powder (for more of a momentary "flash") were used. The book details how difficult it was to use magnesium without the abundant white smoke interfering with the photograph. Fires were also frequent. Magnesium as a light source is indeed hard to use, as I've experienced. Adding an oxidizer such as potassium chlorate or perchlorate leads to a better, briefer and brighter flash, but increases the risk of igniting the ceiling (an experiment a friend and I performed, using a couple of ounces of magnesium powder and a few ounces of potassium chlorate, in a glass bottle, produced a blazing flare five feet high. Fortunately we were outside).

The book doesn't mention lycopodium, the spores of a puffball mushroom. It was used after the middle 1880's until the 1940's. It is safer than magnesium, with less smoke, about like what is seen in this image I generated with GPT-Image-2.

As I recall, when I was a child "ordinary" film had a speed rating, called ASA at the time, of 25. The rule of thumb was that, using a lens aperture of f/11, the exposure in sunlight had to be one divided by the ASA rating, so our f/11 Brownie camera had a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second (close enough to 1/25). I had to learn how to momentarily stop breathing and stay very steady to take a picture. Indoor photography was impossible without using flash bulbs (they used aluminum or zirconium spun wire in pure oxygen to create the flash). ASA is now called ISO. Films still being produced are rated up to ISO 400 and some can be chemically "pushed" to ISO 1600. Digital photography has blown the doors off such figures.

This picture, taken in 1910, of my great-grandfather and other family members, had to be made outside (note the snow on the left). The family couldn't afford to go to a studio for a photo using lycopodium illumination (the oldest family photo I have, from 1893, was also taken outside, fortunately on a warmer day).

The bulk of Flashes records the effects on society, science and business. "Photo fiends", now called paparazzi, became a problem almost as soon as handheld photography became economical. The easier it becomes to take pictures, the easier it is to abuse the privilege.

Stop-motion photography, which preceded high-speed video, was done with multiple cameras set up to trigger in sequence. Such sequences first proved that running and trotting horses are entirely airborne during portions of their paces. Another showed how a cat twists in midair to land on its feet. Golf swings and acrobatic maneuvers could be analyzed.

Illuminants other than visible light also came into play when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. These penetrating radiations were dramatically misunderstood by almost everyone for decades, even through the mid-1900's. Radiation burns were frequent, and the book records a few cases of amputations needed because of radiation-induced cancer or gangrene. Yet I remember as late as 1960 going into a shoe store and using a fluoroscope to see how my shoes fit. We were only cautioned not to use it for more than a few seconds.

A little is said about the effect of photography on the arts, but primarily about the production of composite photographs or photo collages. As large landscape photographs began to fill galleries, I understand that there was a period of sturm und drang about photography superseding painting and other visual arts. Portrait photography did indeed supersede most portrait painting, but not entirely. Painting families such as the Wyeths are still very much in business. Similar worries about AI-generated art are heard currently, but I predict that future generations will still have painters and other "natural" artists in abundance.

All this just skates on the surface of a fascinating survey and analysis of how photography affected the human condition in the Nineteenth Century. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

Surging spiders

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

I checked on the blog just now, and saw that the view rate more than doubled in the past day to 56,000. Here is the chart for the past 24 hours:

The peak rate in the seven-o'clock hour was 11,440. The average rate during that hour was more than three per second. A full day at that rate would be almost 275,000 views! I checked the "Now" view, to see the past two hours:

The surge around 7:40 (my time, EDT) peaked at around 470, and that 10-minute surge totaled about 4,000 views (~6.5/second), 27% of the total for these two hours, and a daily rate over 575,000. The plateau that followed, at 150/minute, totaled about 5,800, and since then the per-minute rate has been around 30, varying from 15-60.

I have belatedly considered the number of views of the posts themselves, and the numbers don't add up. In a "posts statistics" view I am shown the number of views for the twenty most popular posts for a period, from which I can project the rest (there are 2,717 today) by fitting a lognormal distribution. The total views of the blog in any period, from an hour to a year, is five to ten times the sum of the views of all the posts. 

I conclude that 80-90% of the views recorded are hits on the blog that are not taken further. That is, no posts are opened. Whatever algorithm it is that "finds" this blog apparently checks the home page, and most of the time, drops it without going further. Oh, well. If the 10:1 ratio is the most likely, it still means that in the past 24 hours, about (at least?) 5,600 posts have been opened, and the hits have been scattered throughout the blog's history, on average opening each one twice. Compare this to the likely "real" activity of about four views per hour, wherever someone's search for a topic lands them.

What melting ice reveals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, glaciology, ice-patch archaeology

There are about 200,000 mountain glaciers worldwide, not counting the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. Searching for information about "perennial ice patches" I found statements about "tens of thousands". However, in a couple of areas where the ice patches and the glaciers have been comprehensively mapped, the ice patches outnumber the glaciers.

This matters to archaeologists. A glacier is on the move; that is part of the definition. That means that the ice experiences shearing. The field of glacial archaeology is primarily the study of stuff that is found where a glacier's tongue is melting, and only stone or metal objects tend to survive being squashed and shredded beyond recognition. A perennial ice patch is, also by definition, stationary. Thus, an item that was dropped, lost, or otherwise placed on an ice patch and later covered by snow and incorporated, is preserved in the ice, sometimes for millennia. 

Only the points of arrows and spears survive passage through a glacier. Entire arrows, complete with wooden shaft, fletching, and decoration, and a great many other artifacts made of or including wood, leather, bone, cloth and other perishable materials have been found melting out of ice patches. As the climate shifts, continually, an ice patch will grow from year to year and then partially melt for a few years. Once a perishable artifact emerges from the ice, it will usually rot and vanish within a few years.

The current warming cycle is a boon to ice-patch archaeologists. As reported in The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice, by Lisa Baril, the opportunities greatly exceed the number of ice-patch scientists and the available time to study them. This is based on the author's projection that ice patches are melting away, and may all disappear in the next few decades. I will touch on this contention later on.

The field of ice-patch archaeology was jump-started 35 years ago when the ice mummy Ötzi was discovered in the Alps. The story is told in commendable detail in the book. The man's body was dried but mostly intact, and his clothing, weapons and other possessions were nearly all intact and well preserved. Over time, with the development of more and better study techniques, it was found that he was murdered about 5,200 years ago, probably a day or two after a fight of some kind. The ice patch he was frozen into is in a mountain pass; he didn't make it over the pass into the next valley. I call this image, produced using Nano Banana 2, "Ötzi in happier times". Perhaps I should have showed him enjoying a meal with friends.

Being able to recover perishable artifacts greatly enriches our picture of the cultures of the times and places. For example, many wooden poles, some with fabric or leather "flags" attached, have been found in Norway and other areas including the Yukon. They were a mystery for a time, until indigenous people recognized them as "scare sticks" used to keep a fleeing group of reindeer or caribou on a path leading to stacked-stone blinds where hunters waited. Sadly, it has taken quite a while for "professional" archaeologists to learn the value of the knowledge in "the people who live there." This subject arises several times in the book.

The oldest artifact so far recovered from an ice patch is a part of an atlatl found to be 10,300 years old, recovered in Wyoming in 2007. In this case, the window of opportunity was just a day: Craig Lee found an ice patch that included lots of bison dung, and saw a stick poking out. He collected it, called the federal archaeologist for an emergency collection permit, and then checked around for more items. The next day it snowed, a lot. In the nineteen years since, the ice patch has grown, not melted back. In other places, ice patches have melted totally away. No matter which direction the general climate is "going", there is great variation from place to place.

This brings me to the sad subject of the over-hype about a warming climate. Is the climate warming? Yes, absolutely. Is it caused by rising CO₂? Yes, at least in part. Are humans to blame? Partly. It is a fact that in 1800 AD the CO₂ level was 280 parts per million (ppm), and now it is about 425 ppm. In 1897 Svante Arrhenius published his study of the greenhouse effect, in which he predicted that doubling the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere would increase global average temperature 4°C. However, others with a better knowledge of infrared spectroscopy later published that the effect would be 1°C or a little less. Both were wrong, in different directions.

I worked in infrared spectroscopy in the 1970's. Ten years before that I had reproduced Arrhenius's calculations, so it was easy to apply a better understanding of optical saturation and, so to speak, "hit it in the middle"; my conclusion was 1.5°C for a doubling of CO₂. Our present concentration of 425 ppm is about 1.5 times 280 ppm. Global average temperature has risen about 1°C, which indicates that my calculations are in the right range.

Now let us consider saturation. While the IPCC reports upon which climate alarmism is based do mention saturation, they don't stress it nearly enough. Saturation works this way. A chart of temperature as a function of concentration is not a straight line, but a curve, with two components. Arrhenius described one component this way, that a geometric increase in concentration produces a linear increase in temperature. He predicted that reducing CO₂ from 280 ppm to 140 ppm would reduce temperature 4°C, doubling it to 560 ppm would increase it 4°C, and doubling again to 1,120 ppm would cause a further increase of 4°C, or a total of 8°C, and so forth. This ignores saturation. By a level of 400 ppm, the CO₂ is absorbing almost all that it can absorb. Only a tiny bit more absorption is possible no matter how high CO₂ goes. 

There are very low-level secondary "wings" on the spectral absorption bands that come into play after concentration reaches a few percent, then the temperature rises more rapidly. This is what happened on Venus, where the concentration is more than 20,000 times the current concentration in Earth's atmosphere. We don't have enough fossil fuel to cause that to happen!

Saturation of absorption by CO₂ means that a further increase to 560 ppm—a doubling from the pre-industrial level—will not cause much increase in temperature, if any.

This should not make us complacent. We still need to continue adding more energy sources that don't require burning hydrocarbons. That includes nuclear fission. If CO₂ increases beyond 1,000 ppm it will be harder for some people to breathe comfortably, and the higher it goes, the greater the number of people who will feel the effects. But we need to recognize that it will be a long, long time, if ever, before a battery-powered jet aircraft will be practical, or even possible. And in cold climates, keeping an electric automobile cabin warm uses more power than moving the vehicle. The market for EV's is essentially zero in northern Norway, for example (it may improve when sodium batteries become more common; lithium does very poorly in the cold, but sodium performs very well).

Although I was a bit put off by the drum beat of climate change concern, I really like the book, and I learned a lot. I recommend it.

-------------

A few items I need to mention:

1. On page 27, discussing carbon-14 dating, it says, "This method works well for organic objects up to fifty thousand years old, after which the amount of carbon remaining in organic material becomes vanishingly small." The amount of total carbon remains almost exactly the same. The amount of carbon-14 is what vanishes. C-14 in atmospheric CO₂, from which plants make it into sugar, is 1.4 parts per trillion.
2. On page 66, discussing Pleistocene extinctions, the word "others" is needed: "All of them would go extinct, … but many continued to thrive." Not "many" but "many others" thrived, if "all" of the species mentioned went extinct.
3. On page 203, the catalog of tall Himalayan mountains is called "fourteeners". This term refers to mountains exceeding 14,000 feet in North America. The high Asian peaks, taller than 26,000 feet, are called "eight-thousanders", referring to 8,000 meters, or 26,247 feet.

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.