Maybe human, maybe not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howey wowie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned a branch into a bush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiders multiplying?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

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

This is the rate chart for the past 24 hours:

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

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

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

Brazil spiders go bonkers, leading the world

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

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

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

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

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

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

Retracing a pioneer wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHOMP

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, teeth, history

I asked Whisk for a picture of someone with perfect teeth. It delivered. The book of the week is Bite, An Incisive History of Teeth, From Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt.

The first three parts of this four-part book are titled

• Toothy Adaptations in Nature: The Specialists
• Who, What, Where, and How Many?
• Teeth, Who Needs 'Em?

The 13 chapters in these parts cover a number of nonhuman animals with interesting teeth, or interesting things teeth do. Naturally, the scariest ones come first, Vampire Bats. Guess how big a vampire bat is. To use Charades categories, are they Bigger than a breadbox, Smaller than a cigar, or somewhere in between? For simplicity, in the list below, keep in mind that the wingspan is about twice the body length. There are three species:

1. The Common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, has a body length of about 9 cm (3.5 inch), and weighs 25-40 grams with an empty stomach; about an ounce.
2. The Hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata, is the same size, with a little more variation, but the largest ones don't exceed 9.5 cm or 3.75 inch.
3. The White-winged vampire bat, Diaemus youngi, is a little smaller, around 8.5 cm (3.3 inch) and usually weighs less than 35 grams.

Did you say, Smaller than a cigar? ding-ding-ding!

The body length of all three vampire bat species is very nearly the same as the Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, though vampire bats weigh about twice as much as a Little Brown Bat, and have shorter wings. I see Little Brown Bats frequently, flitting about in the warm season here. They are found throughout North America. Vampire bats, by contrast, are found in South America. An elderly Little Brown Bat fell dead right in front of me while I was walking in a park near home. Naturally, I collected it and took it to the nearby Museum of Natural History for their collection. I was surprised to see that its body was no bigger than my thumb.

Now, as to vampire bat teeth…they don't puncture the way Dracula would. They shave off a small bit of skin with teeth so sharp their victim may feel nothing. Then they lap the blood as it seeps out (no gushing), and their saliva, like the saliva of a mosquito, has an anticoagulant, keeping the blood flowing longer.

So vampire bats don't have Fangs. Snakes do. There is much discussion about the varieties of fangs. Vipers such as rattlesnakes in the New World and the Gaboon viper, Bitis gabonica, of Africa (with the longest fangs, at 5+ cm, or about 2 inches) have hypodermic-style fangs attached at the front of the mouth. The mouth opens almost flat when they strike, so the fangs drive straight in. Cobras and their relatives, including the Coral snake of North America, have fangs set a little farther back, and tend to strike and then chew, to give venom more time to emerge. Snakes such as the Boomslang, Dispholidus typus, also of Africa, have their fangs in the back of the mouth, where they really need to chomp down to inject venom. Also, the fangs are not hollow like a viper's, but grooved. They make up for such disadvantages by having extra-toxic venom.

The largest teeth are the various tusks, with African elephants, Loxodonta africana, holding the prize for the largest ones among living animals. In the 1890's a few elephants were killed that had tusks exceeding 3 m in length (~10 ft), weighing as much as 100 kg (220 lbs) each. The largest fossil tusks, of a Columbian mammoth, are almost 5 m long (~16 ft) and weigh considerably more than elephant tusks. Another prize-winner would be narwhal, Monodon monoceros; each male has a single spiral tusk that looks like the horn of a Unicorn (which led to many myths), 2-3 m long (7-10 ft), but it is slender and hollow, seldom weighing more than 7.5 kg (16.5 lbs).

There are a small number of toothless mammals, primarily the anteaters and echidnas, but larger numbers are found in other groups such as birds and many frogs. The largest toothless animals are the great baleen whales. 

The fourth part embarks on human dentition, "Human Teeth: The Bad Old Days and Beyond". The author starts with a discussion of Washington's teeth…or the lack thereof. By the time he was a public figure George Washington had only one natural tooth. It was used to anchor a denture until it also was lost. Thereafter, he had various full sets made, none of which worked well. This spring-loaded contraption had to be held in the mouth by constant biting pressure. I suppose the dentists never got springs of the right strength to open easily without causing the wearer to produce huge cheek muscles (look at portraits of Washington, grimly holding his mouth shut). The bases were pieces of lead, quite heavy (and toxic).

It is said that at public dinners George Washington ate nearly nothing and drank little. However, his teeth were not wooden as some legends state. They were a mix of carved ivory, animal teeth such as pig, and human teeth. The rumor that some of those human teeth came from his slaves is discussed and dismissed. Washington's dentist did purchase teeth from slaves, but he is not known to have used any in the dentures he made for Washington.

There is a chapter about the various torture devices used for extracting teeth, which like all surgeries, was done without anesthesia until the 1840's. Of course, even in ancient times alcohol's stupefying effects were sometimes used for that purpose, but it was risky. To really knock someone out with wine you need to almost kill them.

I was surprised to read that more than 80% of humans have problems with wisdom teeth, and at least half have one or more removed by middle age. I wonder if those statistics relate primarily to the West, or are worldwide. I haven't been able to verify. I had all 32 of my teeth until I was 65, when one of them got a cavity that was too big for ordinary "drill-n-fill", and there was already bone recession. It was pulled, so now I have 31. But the last chapter in Part IV introduces technologies being developed that may permit new teeth to be grown in place, and other possible marvels that will make trips to the dentist less of an existential dread.

We think we are sort of average. In the tooth department, at least among mammals, that's close. The mammal with the fewest teeth is the walrus (18), while the giant armadillo has 70…but at sea, dolphins have 250 teeth. So our mouth full of 28 to 32 pearly whites is about in the middle, at least for land mammals. But non mammals can have many more than 70 teeth: 3,000 for some sharks, 9,000 for some catfish (including teeth on their tongue!), and for teeth not in the jaws at all, the common garden snail has a tongue with 15,000-25,000 tiny teeth. 

The Epilogue, "How Science Works", tells the story of a shovel-tusk animal called Platybelodon, one of the Gomphotheres, a relative of elephants. This genus had a very extended lower jaw, more than a meter, with two enormous incisors at the end that resemble a scoop shovel half a meter wide. The author regales us with the tale of the various hypotheses by different scientists, of the way(s) this unique appendage was used. The message: scientific conclusions are always provisional. New ways of studying evidence, new instruments and techniques for gathering evidence, and new discoveries in the field, all redirect the thinking of scientific workers. One hopes that each new theory comes closer to the truth. 

This just scratches the surface. There is much to learn here.

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

I must touch upon a few errata:

• On page 42 and a couple of other places the author discusses C3 and C4 photosynthesis, and how the evolution of grasses changed the tooth structure of horses. Grasses and a few other plant types are tougher and contain more silica, so a grazing animal needs teeth that keep growing as they wear down. But he calls C3 and C4 "isotopes". They are not. They refer to a chemical with three carbon atoms in the photosynthesis mechanism of most plants, and a more efficient mechanism using a chemical with four carbon atoms in grasses and their relatives. They are different molecules with closely related functions. One could call them "functional analogs". The word "isotope" refers to an atomic nucleus with a specific number of neutrons and protons, as compared to a nucleus with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. For carbon, the common isotope has six protons and six neutrons and is called C-12. The other stable isotope of carbon has seven neutrons and is called C-13.
• On page 79, discussing venoms, we find some components listed, including "proteins (especially enzymes), chains of proteins (called peptides), …". Oops. Peptides are mini-proteins, short chains of amino acids. NOT "chains of proteins".
• On page 242, discussing vestigial anatomy, we read that the tailbone "whose only function seems to be to break if we land on it or even sit down too hard". The tailbone, the coccyx, holds our pelvic floor together. Many muscles and tendons attach to it. Ask your doctor what would result if your coccyx had to be removed.

Nobody's an expert on everything. Get this book anyway!

Final four – out of seven

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

Three stories of the last seven in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor, that I rated, "OK, there's an interesting idea or two here," and there is one I liked well enough to say, "I'm glad I read it." The other three were quickly rejected; stuff I don't wish to burden my memory with.

The "interesting" three are 

• "Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!" by T.J. Klune. At the end of ten years of uninterrupted labor in a factory, a semisentient robot is given one week to experience life outside of work. Then it is to be recycled by having its memories erased and getting equipment and software upgrades. Another ten year stint is to follow. Et cetera. I confess that I skimmed past much of the day by day details of the last week that "Douglas", or P-23, experienced. It is the somewhat predictable rollup of sightseeing, new experiences, making friends, and so forth. The crux is the final discussion Douglas has with the Supervisor. As robot technology improves, so does their self-awareness. Douglas does indeed get recycled, but I'll leave it to you to read for yourself. It points up the ethical issues surrounding AI, should it ever achieve consciousness, but I'll return to this theme later on.
• "The Sort" by Thomas Ha. In a world that embraced genetic modification far beyond what we have so far achieved, and then began to reject it, a man and his son are sightseeing, driving in the desert Southwest. They are far from their home, where their own modified humanness is known and probably accepted (this isn't quite clear), and now among people who don't all tolerate modified humans. The man and his son are telepathic, but only with each other. There are hints that their telepathy extends to certain other modified entities, such as a Tiger that can speak a few words, and perhaps even the basketball-sized garlic bulbs to be sorted in a strange ritual. I would ordinarily pass off such a story as "going nowhere," but in this case that is the point. Having pulled back from rampant modification-for-modifications'-sake, most of the world has thrown out the baby with the bathwater and is stuck in a reactionary rut. To do something "just because you can" is frequently the worst reason for doing it.
• "Ushers" by Joe Hill. Many cultures, including American folklore, contain a grim reaper or banshee or similar supernatural entities that either accomplish a person's death or foretell it or, in the case of this story, accompany the soon-to-die and "usher" them into the afterlife. In this story, a young man, Martin, can see the Ushers, which makes him act strangely at times, and his history of avoiding certain disasters has piqued the attention of the FBI. Most of the story consists of two interviews. Knowing beforehand that his interviewers are soon to be ushered off the scene, Martin tells of his "gift" to one of them. Soon after, they are Ushered out of this life in an accident.

The story I liked best is "The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics" by Adam-Troy Castro. The title together with the content of the story gives a better view of the complexity of the ethical and moral intricacies that will be needed to produce wholly beneficial AGI (G for General) or ASI (S for Super), whether in a robot body or not. The story consists of one enormous sentence, extremely well constructed to avoid the turgidity of single-sentence legal contracts. A self-aware robot has been placed on a planet by its cruel owner, ordered to await his return without moving, and abandoned. It knows this. 

If for no other reason, it is worthwhile to get this volume for this story alone, and to read this incredible sentence thoughtfully, in detail. I will mention just one item, the core idea of human-AI ethics: If a mechanism is created that can feel pain, there are some (many?) people who will inflict pain on purpose. This is a thesis also found in the opening scenes of Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. Furthermore, insomuch as a mechanism can be used to cause pain in other persons, there are some (many?) who will do so, apparently with great pleasure to themselves.

This is part of the reason I refer to AI as SI, Simulated Intelligence. Part of the reason I dearly hope that sentience is forever impossible to mechanisms.

A couple of worthwhile stories out of eight

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

I read at least parts of eight more stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, guest edited by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked three to varying degrees, I rejected three after reading no more than a half page, and I didn't like the other two even well enough to mention their titles. I'll comment on the better three.

I have noticed that the genre notes are alternating: The first story is science fiction, the second is fantasy, and so forth. I seldom like a fantasy offering, but I read most of them anyway. The first was actually rather good: "The River Judge" (Fantasy) by S.L. Huang. I call this a "murder non-mystery". The drama isn't in who committed the many murders that occurred during about a decade of life in a poor Chinese village; it is in how they were covered up, and eventually, how the Imperial magistrates and investigators were motivated to leave the area alone. This would be a simple alternate history story except that a ghost is involved. The ghost is not talkative—that would be too easy. But it is able to make its desire known.

I like the concept in "The Weight of Your Own Ashes" (Science Fiction) by Carlie St. George, of an alien species that inhabits multiple bodies. There is no explanation how the shared consciousness of this multi-body person works when those bodies are separated by many light years. It isn't important to the progress of the story, which involves the death of one body. Another of the four remaining bodies is soon standing in the room formerly shared with a girlfriend, holding the urn containing the cremains of the dead member. This person has many legal papers and processes to go through, and his/her own emotional turmoil to overcome. The girlfriend has her own emotional reactions. A side vignette has the protagonist getting advice, but not much comfort, from a friend of a different alien of a species that typically inhabits thousands of bodies.

Finally, "Yarns" by Susan Palwick is placed in a dystopia in which the Combine runs things. Not some one-world government, but more like a one-world crime syndicate that has an uneasy but dominant relationship with the police authorities of various quasi-nations. Pervasive surveillance prevails. The protagonist, a schoolteacher named Irene, is targeted for assassination, but she distracts her assassin, a teen of the Combine, with knitting, until they become allies and a relative of the boy helps them both go into hiding in a more effective way. This is the one story that redeems the prior failures.

I generated the image using Gemini. Seven stories to go. Is there another that is worthwhile? I'll soon know.

Best of? Not off to a good start

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies, collections

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 compendium is in its eleventh year. This year's guest editor is Nnedi Okorafor. The series has a spotty history with me. Today I am 1/4 of the way through and it's not looking too good. Of the first five items, I have read three, skipped one almost entirely and skipped about half of another. I will comment on two of the stories, one that I found mostly good and one that is puzzling but at least not bad. The genre of each piece is included below the title.

The first story in the collection (Genre is Science Fiction) is "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim. Section after section, a short, patterned statement is repeated, with variations, on both sides of the page, in various orientations, interspersed with a short paragraph or two of entreaty. Apparently, an entity with many eyes can read many texts in parallel, and it is trying to teach us the beginnings of the same skill. We are exhorted to read the left side of the page with the left eye, and the right side with the right eye. I am one of a very few people who can go "wide-eyed" enough to attempt this, and of course the result is a muddle. The concept is interesting; the experience is one I don't plan to repeat.

The title of the fifth story (Science Fiction) is obscene, so I will mask it: "F**k Them Kids" by Tatiana Obey. The story itself is a romp, centering on a spaceship race. The race is utterly unrealistic, with small, personal spaceships (apparently capable of faster-than-light travel), decorated like NASCAR race cars, zooming through an "asteroid belt" that bears more resemblance to that video game relic Asteroids than to the actual asteroid region between Mars and Jupiter. The ships glance off asteroids and each other, so presumably the speeds involved are closer to NASCAR, 200 mph or less, than to actual inter-asteroidal velocities of 20,000 to 50,000 mph. Very fun to read; just read it like a story of back-road racing in the country.

For those who don't know, the reality of the actual asteroid belt is this: If you are near enough to a real asteroid the size of an grape or larger to actually see it visually, the next-nearest asteroid of similar size is at least a million miles away. We have sent eight spacecraft crosswise through the asteroid belt, to reach the outer planets. None has collided with even a sand grain.

Two out of five isn't a good beginning. I hope for better luck in the remaining 15 stories.

The image above was made with GPT-4o, which is getting a little obsolete, but it is more adherent to shortish prompts (~120 characters) than most. Along the way I tried a few other art engines, so I'll add a couple of the images as a bonus to this post:

Using Microsoft AI: 

Using Seedream 4.0:

Is a female Mike Tyson possible?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports, sociology, gender issues, women's issues, polemics

Korfball is a coed version of basketball that arose in the Netherlands in 1902. Each team sends four players on court. It is the only international coed team sport, so far.

At the end of The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body, author Starre Vartan presents korfball as an example of the possible, a truly coed sport. The primary sex-based rules of the game are that men guard men and women guard women, and that each on-court team consists of two of each. Other than that, both men and women pass the ball (dribbling isn't allowed) freely to team members of either sex, both men and women guard, both men and women shoot and score, and so forth.

This book drops right into the middle of the controversies over "men in women's sports," and the debates about why (or where) it might or might not be fair. Ms Vartan's thesis: give girls the same opportunities to learn sports as the boys have, beginning in toddlerhood, and we'll find out if they can compete on the same level. At the moment, systemic sexism is infinitely more prevalent than systemic racism (my language, not hers, but I think she'd agree).

Let me say that the great majority of those who "identify" as this or that "gender" are lying or insane. They are making it harder for the truly trans to receive compassionate counsel and care. They are very few. The number of those who are now detransitioning (or want to) probably greatly outnumbers those who make a successful transition. But after a full transition, surgery and all, successful transitioners will never reproduce.

There is a turning point in every life, a process we all pass through, that is expressed in the pairs of words, "boy - man", "girl - woman". It is puberty. Some time between age 10 and 16 (for me it was 12), hormone production ramps up and secondary sex characteristics develop over a span of 3-5 years. Before that, boys and girls can develop equal skills and equal strength. Afterwards, nothing is the same. Some child athletes become adult klutzes; some awkward children grow into athletic adults; but more likely, the sporty kids become sportier adults, and the rest become spectators…and some, like me, do our best to ignore sports, from birth to death (when our son played on various teams, I would attend the games and cheer him on. Otherwise, I don't care).

When our son was about eight he took gymnastics classes for about a year. In the end, he preferred running sports (soccer, track, and roller hockey). But I noticed something while observing his gymnastics classes. Puberty messes up the kids, but in different ways. Both boys and girls get more awkward. Boys' legs seem to shoot out ahead of their torsos, and it takes them a couple of years to relearn balance and coordination. Girls' hips thicken and their busts get heavier, which throws off their balance in a different way; it takes them the same couple of years to accommodate. The "lucky" girl gymnasts (if you want to call it that) retain a boyish body into adulthood with small busts and narrow hips. These are the most likely to become career athletes.

Excuse me if this seems crass: A woman whose bra has F cups is not going to be a talented athlete. You male athletes, try this: F-size breasts weigh five pounds each; strap two five-pound pot roasts to your chest and go exercise. Instant Klutz! Curiously, nowhere in Stronger Sex did I find a word about the effect of breast mass on athletic performance.

The great value in the book is the mass of data the author has gathered, or more frequently, gleaned, about the various strengths of female bodies. Briefly, nature has endowed women with extra "powers" to ensure they can carry, bear, nurture and raise offspring successfully. Where they stand out is in endurance, in the ability to bear pain even though they seem to feel it more intensely, in a stronger immune system, and in fueling exercise differently from men. But one significant fact must be kept in mind: A fit male body contains on average 15% fat, while a fit female body contains on average 25% fat. 

Putting that into practical terms, a woman of a given height and strength must weigh more than a man of the same height and strength. For example, consider a welterweight boxer, a man who weighs 144 pounds. He may have less than 15% body fat, but let's assume he actually has 15% fat; that comes to 21.6 pounds, leaving 122.4 pounds of lean body mass. A woman of equal strength and lean body mass, who has 25% body fat, will have 36 pounds of fat and weigh 158.4 pounds. That pushes her into the next weight class. In order to compete as a welterweight she would need to starve herself below 147 pounds, which would probably cause her periods to stop. It would also weaker her overall. But if she and the man were to box together with her weighing 158 pounds to his 144 pounds, she would still be at a disadvantage because moving the extra mass around would tire her out sooner. From this I conclude that boxing is not a sport in which men and women can compete on equal terms. Biochemistry and physiology make that impossible.

Let's jump to the top of the scale. In the 1980s Mike Tyson weighed 220 lbs (100 kg) and had 7% body fat. Probably no woman in history has equal vital statistics. What is the ultimate strength of a woman's body? I was in the mining town of Battle Mountain, Nevada with a team of geologists. We stayed in a hotel across the street from a saloon. The others went to the saloon. I stayed in the room. Late in the evening there was a commotion across the street. I glanced out to see two men fly out and land in the street. When my colleagues returned I got the story. Miners are typically smallish men. These two weighed in the 150# range. They got into a fight. The saloon owner, a very large woman of late middle age, stepped over, grabbed the two by their belts, picked them up and clashed them together like cymbals. Then she carried them to the door, one in each hand, and threw them into the street. I don't know how she would stand up to a heavyweight boxer, but I know I wouldn't care to cross her!

I agree with the author that there are sports at which men and woman can compete on an equal footing. There are others that this is not so. What needs to change is a pervasive culture of "no, they can't" without data or experience to back it up…and very often, "no, they can't" runs contrary to past experience! Sport in particular lends itself to extreme opinions, none of which are correct or even useful. Since the coming of age of the X Generation, X has meant eXtreme. It's time to chill, folks.

So much of Ms Vartan's writing in this book is polemical in nature that it can be hard to read. I'll forbear complaining further, because of its value. Get this book, tighten your belt, and read it for that value.

A new spider racing record

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I finished the prior post and looked at the stats. Today and yesterday, the number of views exceeds 33,000 per day. That means my entire blog was downloaded about twelve times each day! The spiders are racing through the blogosphere.

Gemini produced this image using Nano Banana 2. It also provided cute commentary on the details, such as the expressions, the spiders in the grandstand, etc. Seems rather proud of itself.

This is the hour-by-hour trace for the past 24h:

At the peak, the rate is nearly 2 hits per second, for an entire hour. 35,200 in 12 hours...with a good, long run, about six hours, exceeding one hit per second.

I hope someone is getting something useful from this!

Building Kepler's platonic-solid Solar System

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, generation starships, solar system engineering, totalitarianism, culture shock

It takes a lot of backstory to assemble the worldviews in Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter. Rather than drive off readers with 10-plus chapters of stage-setting (in a 37-chapter book), the author wisely metes it out in digestible portions as needed.

Seen from afar—say, half a light-year away in the Oort cloud—two Earth-born cultures, separated by a millennium, are about to collide.

• The generation starship Lightbird has been traveling for a century from Ross 128b, a habitable planet of the red dwarf star Ross 128, eleven light-years from the Solar System. Energy for its propulsion is from lumes, enigmatic creatures of deep space that can apparently convert matter to antimatter, or extract antimatter from vacuum energy. The author doesn't dig too far, a decision I support. Ross 128b was colonized a thousand years earlier.
• The residents of the Solar System spent a good part of that thousand years enveloping a sphere a little larger than the orbit of Uranus in the Mask, a carbon nanotube structure that hides the inner seven planets from the universe, and hides the universe from within. Material for the Mask, and for an inner structure, the Wrap that hides the Sun from view, was derived from partial demolition of Jupiter and the other giant planets, except for Neptune, which was destroyed by lumes, an event that started the whole adventure. The lumes were thought to be weapons of a super-advanced interstellar culture that was preparing to invade. A millennium later, no invasion has yet arisen. An interplanetary "railway" called the Frame was also built to facilitate travel everywhere inside the Mask, but mostly in the orbital plane of the seven surviving planets.

Both cultures are totalitarian in nature. Aboard Lightbird, everything must contribute to the progress of the four-generation mission of reaching the Solar System. That includes decisions about who is allowed to be born, and such a decision is at the core of a neurosis that afflicts a young woman named Muree. She is one of a few who care for the onboard lume tank. The lumes have proven useful, and an ecology that promotes a tank containing about 100 of them is managed such that they create a new lume about each day, even as another lume is consumed in providing energy to drive the constant acceleration of the ship, and power its life support mechanisms. (Note, the amount of antimatter needed for this would be just a few grams per day, so a different consumption rate might be warranted. I don't know how much a lume is supposed to weigh.)

Ruling the many trillions of humans in the Solar System, most of whom live aboard the Frame or in orbital habitats, an oligarchy has totalitarian control of many matters, including a deep secret about the actual disposition of the Sun. The crux of the drama is a quest by Muree, once she has become an ambassador from the starship to the Fortress Sol, as the Mask-bound society is called, to learn what is really going on inside the Wrap. A young man named Rab is Muree's opposite number, and their collaboration is soon seen as a conspiracy by the rulers of Fortress Sol.

My grasp of political science is tenuous at best. Naturally, the unraveling of a thousand-year-old political system is not for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't have a clue how to advise Mr. Baxter about it. So I'll stick with intriguing ideas, and leave it to you to read the book for yourself, and get from it what you are equipped to consume.

The Frame is found to be analogous to the nested-Platonic-Solid model of the Solar System devised by Kepler, before he determined that planetary orbits are (almost) ellipses. I say "almost" because the influence of all the planets upon each other perturbs the orbits a bit. There is a reason the planets are spaced far apart!

In Kepler's model, the five Platonic solids each enclose a sphere that just touches each planar face, and each is enclosed in a sphere that just touches all its corners. From outermost inward, they are a cube (8 faces), tetrahedron (4 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), icosahedron (20 faces), and octahedron (8 faces). The fit is not exact, but the thickness of the spherical shells takes up the slack between the nearest and farthest points in each orbit from the Sun. The outermost sphere contains the orbit of Saturn, and so forth inward.

The Frame is planar, with rings and spokes. It is a rotating structure that has "trolleys" which move along the rings and inward or outward along the spokes. To get from a station on the Frame to a planet, one takes a shuttlecraft. A few numbers were used, and the math is fascinating.

First, the rotation of the outermost ring of the Frame, some distance outside the aphelion of Uranus, is sufficient to produce a centripetal force (rotation-induced artificial gravity) of 1/3 G. In the past, I did calculations to find out the stresses in a large, rotating ring with a centripetal force of 1 G. It turns out, if the radius of the ring is 1 km, we don't have any material that can sustain the stress, except perhaps carbon nanotubes, but only if they are continuous, with no breaks. Thus, a thread of nanotubes with a structure similar to cotton thread (composed of entwined strands a few cm long) is much weaker and would pull apart at much lower stress. I want to know if this Solar-System-spanning rotating Frame is feasible, based on science so far known.

Rough analysis: I don't know where my notebook is from doing that analysis, so we'll indulge in a bit of hand-waving instead. I'll begin with the basis that carbon nanotubes would be barely adequate to hold together a rotating ring of 1 km radius, with 1 G of centripetal force at its periphery. Our basic equation for centripetal force is F = Mv²/r.

• Subproblem 1: How big can r be if the target F is 1/3 G? Since v = αr, where α is angular velocity (degrees per second, perhaps), and we assume M is always 1 (that is, 1 kg), F = α²r. Thus, at constant angular velocity, F is proportional to r, so the radius for 1/3 G is 1/3 the radius for 1 G.
• Subproblem 2: What is the radius of the outer ring? It must be outside the aphelion distance of Uranus, which is 20.073 AU or just over three billion km. I don't know how much the passage of Uranus close to the Frame would perturb it, but let's ignore that for the moment, and posit a radius of 3.1 billion km.
• SP 3: The 1 G rotating, 1-km-radius ring has a peripheral velocity of 99 m/s and rotates one full turn every 63.5 s. We want F to be 9.8/3 = 3.267, and r is now 3.1 billion km (or 3.1 trillion m), which will equal v². The square root of the resulting 10.13 trillion (in units of squared velocity) is 3.182 million m/s or 3,182 km/s. This is about 470 times the orbital speed of Uranus. Uranus completes an orbit of the Sun every 84 years. Any point on this ring must therefore orbit the Sun about every 65 days. 

If you leave a station orbiting above Uranus and want to catch up to a station on the Frame, it takes a bit of a push. If you accelerate at 1 G in your shuttle:  v = at, or t = v/a. 3,182,000/9.8 = almost 325,000 seconds, or 3.75 days. If instead, you can handle 3 G's for thirty hours, that will do it.

I'll leave it to the physics-inclined to figure the hoop stress in the ring. You can be sure it is thousands of times the ultimate breaking stress of a carbon nanotube. 

Anyway, I figured all this after the fact. The "invention" of the lumes and the astonishing Solar-System-scale engineering imagined in Fortress Sol yielded quite an arena for space-cowboy derring-do, as Muree and her allies try to uncover the big lie at the root of the political system. What a fun read!

A spider blast

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

I thought yesterday's spider outbreak was the peak. The peak is being sustained, or perhaps I should speak of a range of peaks. Here is the profile of views in the past 24 hours (captured at 10am):

A simple, twelve hour sawtooth burst. At the peak, 3,012 views per hour is almost one per second. To me, that seems like a lot, but I considered popular blogs that have millions of followers; they probably have thousands of views per second. Nonetheless, the barely visible background rate of perhaps four or five per hour is what I consider normal for this blog.

The geographic chart carries little useful information:

I didn't even bother opening up the "Other" section, which encompasses 43% of the 20,700 hits in the past day. A more normal day's activity would consist of less than 100 views, 2/3 from the US, and a total of no more than 20 countries.

I have been attributing this to AI/LLM training. Now I wonder whether the various AI Assistants such as CoPilot and Gemini 3 are performing blog scans as part of their "research" when answering a question. That seems to me better than the prospect of all this activity being only for LLM training.

Swapping out part after part

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, prosthetics, transplanting

To start on a personal note: In these book reviews I typically relate the book's subject to my own experience. I started this blog when I was nearly sixty, and now, 21 years later, I'd say I have experienced a lot. In the light of the present book, however, I suppose I am fortunate that I have hardly anything personal to relate. Reading Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach has been a fascinating adventure into realms unknown.

When I saw the title I wondered if the subject might be the various rates at which "we" are replaced, from daily for the lining of the stomach to never for the lens of the eye (unless we get cataracts removed and replaced with intra-ocular lenses–but that's a prosthesis). Perhaps you've heard that most of our substance is replaced every seven years. That's sorta so, and sorta not. But Ms Roach's subject is medical replacements, whether mechanical or transplanted. Plus an augmentation or two like breast and butt implants. 

This image was made using the Phoenix 1.0 engine in Leonardo AI.

The book starts with the nose. What do you do when it has been lopped off in a duel, as happened to Cyrano? A century or more ago, a strap-on or glue-on prosthesis of tin or leather was the best one could do. Later, various methods were developed of auto-transplantation (moving some "stuff" from elsewhere on your body to your nasal area). Get over your squeamishness if you want to read not just this chapter, but the book in general!

I must say, the author appears to have gotten entirely past any hints of squeamishness. She reports observing a variety of procedures in the operating room, including the careful disassembly of an organ donor, from whom the corneas are removed first, then almost everything but the head and bowels, even entire legs (stripped from inside the skin, which is repacked with filler materials for the funeral). A donor's parts can be enough to "edit" more than seventy other people.

Skin removed by catastrophic flensing or burning can't be attended to with any kind of prosthesis; the best solution is auto-transplants. It turns out that other kinds of skin can be used temporarily while your own body grows enough skin for repeated transplants. Frog skin isn't rejected too fast, plus it has antibacterial properties. If you don't mind being partly green for a few weeks!

Even intimate parts aren't exempt from needing repair, or reconstruction/construction. There are two ways to produce an artificial vagina for a trans woman. One is by turning the penis inside out, to be followed by a lifetime of "dilation" to keep this essentially permanent wound from sealing up. The other is by using other tissues of varying sensitivity to simulate vaginal mucosa, and sections of colon appear to work the best. And repairing (or constructing) male "equipment" can be equally cringe-inducing.

Are we still the sum of our parts, when more and more of those parts are "other"? In the chapter on xenotransplantation, using parts from pigs or other animals, the question is addressed: Is a genetically-modified pig heart OK to transplant into a Jew? With typically Talmudic wisdom, the consensus of the rabbis is, Yes, because the heart is not being eaten. At the moment, organs from pigs are a temporary measure, to stretch the life of a heart patient while waiting for a heart from a human donor.

We hope one day to be able to either grow an organ from someone's own stem cells, which becomes a homo-transplant. I have seen a few science fiction stories where rich persons (usually such persons are evil) have lab-grown bodies, self-clones, to be harvested as needed. If it can be thought of, someone will probably try to do it some day. A technology that is perhaps easier, and certainly can be faster, is to 3D print with special nozzles that spit out cells onto a framework, usually of collagen (which provides the structural framework of most organs). However, even a simple item like an earlobe has four or more cell types. It is like writing a multicolored letter using one of those special pens with four colors of ink you activate by pushing down one cartridge or the other. And for muscles in particular, the cells need to be in a certain orientation.

Thinking it over, I remembered that I have a few teeth with crowns. Dental crowns aren't mentioned in Replaceable, but they could have been. I wear glasses. I suppose those qualify as a supportive prosthetic. But other than that, I count myself lucky I've never needed to get a prosthetic hand, foot, leg, lung (Mary tried to sleep a night in an iron lung; she lasted two hours), or a transplanted finger, kidney or pancreas (a friend of mine was cured of diabetes...).

I've previously reviewed four of Mary Roach's books. She is becoming one of my favorite writers.

Spiders on a rampage

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

In the past two hours this blog has received 4,016 views. I am pretty sure that no more than 100 of them are legitimate persons who might, perhaps, read a post or two. The rest are spiders of one kind or another. When I first noticed surges of spidering a few years ago, the source was Russia, most likely Russian hackers, or perhaps Russian governmental agents looking for negative press in the blogosphere. In the past year or so, multiple governments are interested in what bloggers have to say, but the bigger source of suction is AI training.

4,016 views averages 33+ per minute. Longer term, in the past two days, the daily total is about 12,000. Here is the minute-by-minute rate:

This minute-by-minute variability is quite different from the steady blasts of 50 hits at a time, every few minutes, that characterized the Russian spidering a decade ago. And the next chart shows how the hits are scattered around the world:

This shows that numerous entities are active, probably all using VPN's. There's no telling where any of these actually originate. And notice the large remnant in "Other", fully one-third of the total, scattered among the other 190 or so countries of the Earth. To reprise: The number of "legitimate" hits in this two-hour interval is about five.

Considering the tendency of blogs to be more inflammatory and biased than actual journalism, and even much more so than published (via a publishing house or peer-reviewed journal) material, training LLM's via the blogosphere ought not be done. It is creating digital "snowflakes" and digital sociopaths in great numbers.