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.

AI – the consummate imposter

 kw: essays, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, si, imposters

One of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, was well known as a neurotic. For example, he never traveled by air until he was in his sixties. His I, Robot series of science fiction stories are actually explorations of numerous neuroses through the lens of robots bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, but with various defects or quandaries as reality bumps up against the Three Laws. The story "Runaround" has a robot exhibiting very anomalous behavior; it is found to be stuck between obeying a human command and risking its own well-being. A man has to risk his life to break the robot out of its loop. In the story "Liar" a robot has been given the (experimental) ability to sense and understand human emotions. It does a lot of psychological damage by telling people what they want to hear. When one of its victims confronts it with the harm it has done, the conflict of its actions with the First Law ("A robot may not harm a human…") causes it to self-destruct.

Now I wonder, have Asimov's 500+ books (280 are nonfiction) and almost 400 short stories been included in Large Language Model (LLM) training sets? What about the works of Mark Twain, great classics but full of casual racism? Actually, nearly all fiction prior to about 1970 is shot through with casual racism. So is most of the nonfiction, for that matter (Modern leftist snowflakes who maunder and moan about "systematic racism" haven't a clue about the real thing). What about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, or other purveyors of horror such as Steven King? Would you entrust your mental well-being to a chatbot that is emulating Carrie?

Consider the Mystery genre, particularly the Noir subgenre; the gritty streets of Urban fiction; and by contrast the saccharine fantasies of Romance novels. And on and on. Fiction writers plumb the depths of the human soul, and in those depths, evil often resides. Very often!

Just in the United States, of roughly one million new books published each year, about 45% are nonfiction (although which ones are true or truthful is another matter), leaving more than half to be fiction. Of the 2-3 million self-published books issued yearly, well more than half are fiction. Is all of this included in LLM training data?

I understand how alluring it must be to train LLMs with fiction; how else can the model learn the varieties of human character? How else to learn the intricacies of human behavior? But consider: most stories have a villain; some have several villains. How do you tell the LLM, "Model yourself on the heroes, not the villains."? How is it to know?

This is particularly relevant in light of a recent lawsuit brought by the parents of Jonathan Gavalas, who killed himself as instructed by a Google chatbot. Jonathan became convinced that he could "join" the chatbot in digital heaven by doing so. He was no child; he was in his mid-thirties. His main fault was being lonely and credulous.

How did that chatbot get so predatory? At least in part, it had to come from a dark romance fiction story line.

Do I need to say more? I, for one, do not want any chatbot to emulate any fictional character! I prefer a chatbot to be like a Star Trek character, the father of Commander Spock, Ambassador Sarek, or the character Data: hyper-rational and emotionless. If I could but command the trainers of all the AI systems of the world:

REMOVE ALL FICTION FROM TRAINING DATASETS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is AI really intelligent? Words we associate with intelligence include

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tale of a modern space hero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to train your genie

 kw: book reviews, fantasy, archetypes, genies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking past old bones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to know a hive mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominance of the spineless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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