kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections
Looking for some lighter reading I picked up The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and the series editor John Joseph Adams. If there is a theme for this volume, I'd guess it is "Pouring out their pain." Even in the fantasy stories, all but a few of the twenty offerings, there are few positive endings.
Most of the authors are members of groups that are currently or formerly marginalized (and, I must say, members of most "formerly" marginalized groups still think they are marginalized, big time, whether they are or not). I'd say that gives the bunch of them the right to complain. It is interesting how some of them sought to couch their complaint. Most notably, Brenda Peynado in "The Kite Maker" places us inside the head of a human who is sympathetic to space alien refugees; they are not invaders, but fleeing a destroyed planet. The aliens resemble dragonflies, very fragile, and even though living in refugee camps—thinly disguised versions of the internment camps of the 1940's—and quite inoffensive, they are thoroughly hated by a great many. The trouble is, the story goes nowhere. The POV protagonist loses his business, but nothing is improved.
The most poignant is "On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon: meditations and ruminations while a beloved dog is being put to sleep. As touched as I was, I couldn't help noticing that the three-injection cocktail described is the one used for capital penalties by lethal injection, that is, "putting to sleep" for humans. Animals are typically euthanized by slow injection of a large overdose of an opioid or anaesthetic. It would actually be more humane to euthanize humans the same way.
I got no more than a page into some of the stories; I quickly discerned that they were going somewhere I didn't want to go. The rest left little impression. And that got me thinking. Who decides what is "the Best" for one of these compendia? The editor(s) of course. Thus the quality of the editor determines the quality of the volume. There are several other "the Best" collections being published on a more-or-less regular basis which I esteem more highly than this one.
Friday, November 29, 2019
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Avian athletes
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, migration, bird migration
Have you ever seen a blackpoll warbler? If you have, unless you are familiar with warblers, you may have mistaken it for a chickadee.
From this picture (from All About Birds), and the one below (same site, different page), you can see that they are similar. The warbler's body is strongly patterned, while the body of a black-capped chickadee is more uniform in color. We notice the black cap with a broad white lower face on both birds. They are so active, we seldom have time to see the differences.
But they don't sound the same. The chickadee is named for its call, which we often "spell" as "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee". The warbler's call is a series of very short, quick notes about an octave above the highest note on a piano.
Their migration habits differ dramatically. Chickadees don't migrate, except in the extreme north or south portions of their breeding range. Blackpoll warblers migrate 5,000 to 6,000 miles (8,000 to 10,000 km), each way, every year.
Both are endurance champions, just in quite different ways. Both are very small birds; a blackpoll warbler weighs 14-15 grams (~0.5 oz) most of the year and a black-capped chickadee weighs a little less at 11-12 grams (~0.4 oz). Except in the far northern reaches of its range, a chickadee stays year-round, braving winters that, in my experience living in Ohio, are about as miserable as I can imagine. The warbler, along with most warbler species, is a snowbird. I winters in the tropics and summers in or near the Arctic. Actually, our term ought to be "anti-snow bird"!
In Kenn Kaufman's new book A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, he describes a blackpoll warbler's yearly trek at length. A condensed version:
Every living blackpoll warbler is descended from ultramarathon champions! They are not the only ones. Hundreds of species of birds, many no larger than your thumb, yearly migrate hundreds to thousands of miles. Just in body-length terms, it would be like me (a six-footer) traveling halfway to the moon and back, every year…if there were somewhere halfway to the moon to stop for a few months.
One matter the author takes up in the book is the notion of "flyways". For ducks and other water birds, there do seem to be "highways in the sky" that they tend to follow. Not so for other birds. Recent technology shows this dramatically. Here is a national radar image from NEXRAD taken in May of 2016:
NEXRAD (Next generation radar) was developed to see rainfall. Birds are lots bigger than raindrops, so they are easily seen. As it happened, there were several large storm systems over the central and eastern U.S. that day. One stretches from southern Texas to eastern Nebraska, another just east of the Mississippi River into Indiana, and a smaller series of storms from Florida north to North Carolina. These all show up as green, yellow and red. The blue blotches with green centers show where the birds are during their spring migration. The black areas between blue blotches are areas not covered by the radar. The birds are spread out over the whole area; there are very few concentrations. One is visible at Lake Erie in northern Ohio. From about Cleveland, around the shore of Lake Erie to Toledo, birds that don't wish to cross the lake turn west and fly around it. If there are any "songbird flyways", this area is one of them. Its western portion is not covered by NEXRAD, so it isn't as prominent in this image as it ought to be.
A decade ago or so Mr. Kaufman moved from Arizona to Ohio, not far from the Magee Marsh refuge (and premier bird-watching boardwalk). The book focuses on events of a few springtime migration seasons. From the big eagles, vultures, and hawk, to blue jays, to little vireos and tiny warblers, hundreds of species of migrating birds fly through and stop over at or near Magee Marsh in the springtime. The author's lyric descriptions of these marvelous creatures and their travels are utterly captivating.
Here and there throughout the narrative, he tells the tale of a struggle he and his colleagues in northwest Ohio undertook to prevent the construction of an "experimental" wind turbine, right in the middle of the area, on a military reservation. It's worth considering just how dreadful big windmills can be for migrating birds.
A 2-megawatt turbine has a rotor about 90 m (~300 ft) in diameter, with three blades, atop a tower that places the top of the swept circle as high as 180 m (~600 ft). A stiff breeze of 20 m/s (~45 mph) is about midway in a turbine's power curve. When the wind is this speed aloft, it is about half that speed or less near the ground. In this breeze the blades rotate at 16 rpm, with a blade cutting through the air 48 times per minute, or about every 1¼ seconds. In that slice of time, a parcel of air 25 m long passes through the blades. For big birds like eagles soaring on this wind, there's one chance in 15 of getting hit by a blade. The speed of the blade tip is 75 m/s or 170 mph. They can't see it coming in time to react. For a duck-sized bird, the chance of getting hit are one in 35, and for a tiny warbler, "only" one in 165. But while only a few eagles pass along the Lake Erie shore daily, and a few dozen ducks, tens of thousands of warblers and other small songbirds do so, up to a few million each season. The daily "catch" of small birds can be hundreds. Not only so, one wind farm reported that more bats were being killed than birds. Think about this: every bat eats from 100 to 1,000 mosquitos and similar insects every day. How many can we afford to wipe out? There is one wind farm in California that is known to kill 100 golden eagles every year. Whatever happened to the Endangered Species Act? Big money, that's what.
Sadly, wind turbines aren't as eco-friendly as they are billed, and not just because they kill birds and bats. A big turbine contains a lot of metal, both steel and aluminum, which required a huge amount of energy to produce, and the coke (refined coal) needed to make the steel resulted in the release of a great amount of CO2. What holds up a big turbine? Many tons of steel-reinforced concrete in a hole the size of a garage. How does the turbine get moved into location? Several trucks per turbine, driving hundreds of miles. Much of the energy needed to produce the metals, particularly the aluminum, comes from hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. So I have called the wind turbine industry "a scheme for turning hydropower into aluminum and steel, moving it across the country, and turning the metals back into electricity…at a net loss." A turbine has a finite lifetime. I have yet to see a full econometric analysis of wind turbines that demonstrates how you get more out than you put in. If every bit of energy used for the mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, erecting, and operating of every wind turbine was required to be derived exclusively from wind power, I think the whole enterprise would shrink away to nothing in pretty short order.
Just by the way, now that solar cells are routinely produced that exceed 15% efficiency, the industry is operating at a net energy gain. We ought to be pushing for more solar, and leaving the wind to the birds.
The turbine project on the military base that the author and others were working against was eventually cancelled. Good news, temporarily.
I lived in Sandusky, Ohio during my high school years. One spring morning I was up early, and I hung a microphone out the window to record the dawn chorus. I wish I still had the tape. It was amazing and glorious. At the time I knew nothing about bird migration. I had no idea that I was living right along a concentration of migrating birds like none other. I could recognize no more than five or six bird calls (robin, chickadee, crow, jay, and hawk, at least). But I could tell that the morning birdsong had at least fifty species of singers contributing. Even if I didn't know what they were, I could tell one from another.
I hope Mr. Kaufman's books reach a wide audience. The more of us who care about wildlife, including birds, the more likely that youngsters a generation or three in the future can wake up to a morning chorus as glorious as the one I remember.
Have you ever seen a blackpoll warbler? If you have, unless you are familiar with warblers, you may have mistaken it for a chickadee.
From this picture (from All About Birds), and the one below (same site, different page), you can see that they are similar. The warbler's body is strongly patterned, while the body of a black-capped chickadee is more uniform in color. We notice the black cap with a broad white lower face on both birds. They are so active, we seldom have time to see the differences.
But they don't sound the same. The chickadee is named for its call, which we often "spell" as "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee". The warbler's call is a series of very short, quick notes about an octave above the highest note on a piano.
Their migration habits differ dramatically. Chickadees don't migrate, except in the extreme north or south portions of their breeding range. Blackpoll warblers migrate 5,000 to 6,000 miles (8,000 to 10,000 km), each way, every year.
Both are endurance champions, just in quite different ways. Both are very small birds; a blackpoll warbler weighs 14-15 grams (~0.5 oz) most of the year and a black-capped chickadee weighs a little less at 11-12 grams (~0.4 oz). Except in the far northern reaches of its range, a chickadee stays year-round, braving winters that, in my experience living in Ohio, are about as miserable as I can imagine. The warbler, along with most warbler species, is a snowbird. I winters in the tropics and summers in or near the Arctic. Actually, our term ought to be "anti-snow bird"!
In Kenn Kaufman's new book A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, he describes a blackpoll warbler's yearly trek at length. A condensed version:
The spring migration is less of an ultra-marathon and more a series of medium-length "hops". Beginning from a winter range in Venezuela or Brazil, a bird destined to nest near Denali or Nome, Alaska flies a few hundred miles to the northern coast of South America. There it rests a day or so and fattens up for a crossing of the Caribbean, which it crosses by island-hopping until it reaches Florida. The next hop may be to Georgia or thereabouts. Then it fattens up for a longer trek, nearly nonstop to western Alaska. The winter migration is a pair of ultra-marathons. The bird begins by crossing North America, which takes about three days of nonstop flying, until it reaches New England, perhaps Massachusetts. There, it eats until it weighs about a full ounce (28 grams or more). Then it flies south, out to sea, not to see land (except perhaps Bermuda in the distance) until it reaches the coast of Venezuela, weighing less than half what it did just four days earlier.
Every living blackpoll warbler is descended from ultramarathon champions! They are not the only ones. Hundreds of species of birds, many no larger than your thumb, yearly migrate hundreds to thousands of miles. Just in body-length terms, it would be like me (a six-footer) traveling halfway to the moon and back, every year…if there were somewhere halfway to the moon to stop for a few months.
One matter the author takes up in the book is the notion of "flyways". For ducks and other water birds, there do seem to be "highways in the sky" that they tend to follow. Not so for other birds. Recent technology shows this dramatically. Here is a national radar image from NEXRAD taken in May of 2016:
NEXRAD (Next generation radar) was developed to see rainfall. Birds are lots bigger than raindrops, so they are easily seen. As it happened, there were several large storm systems over the central and eastern U.S. that day. One stretches from southern Texas to eastern Nebraska, another just east of the Mississippi River into Indiana, and a smaller series of storms from Florida north to North Carolina. These all show up as green, yellow and red. The blue blotches with green centers show where the birds are during their spring migration. The black areas between blue blotches are areas not covered by the radar. The birds are spread out over the whole area; there are very few concentrations. One is visible at Lake Erie in northern Ohio. From about Cleveland, around the shore of Lake Erie to Toledo, birds that don't wish to cross the lake turn west and fly around it. If there are any "songbird flyways", this area is one of them. Its western portion is not covered by NEXRAD, so it isn't as prominent in this image as it ought to be.
A decade ago or so Mr. Kaufman moved from Arizona to Ohio, not far from the Magee Marsh refuge (and premier bird-watching boardwalk). The book focuses on events of a few springtime migration seasons. From the big eagles, vultures, and hawk, to blue jays, to little vireos and tiny warblers, hundreds of species of migrating birds fly through and stop over at or near Magee Marsh in the springtime. The author's lyric descriptions of these marvelous creatures and their travels are utterly captivating.
Here and there throughout the narrative, he tells the tale of a struggle he and his colleagues in northwest Ohio undertook to prevent the construction of an "experimental" wind turbine, right in the middle of the area, on a military reservation. It's worth considering just how dreadful big windmills can be for migrating birds.
A 2-megawatt turbine has a rotor about 90 m (~300 ft) in diameter, with three blades, atop a tower that places the top of the swept circle as high as 180 m (~600 ft). A stiff breeze of 20 m/s (~45 mph) is about midway in a turbine's power curve. When the wind is this speed aloft, it is about half that speed or less near the ground. In this breeze the blades rotate at 16 rpm, with a blade cutting through the air 48 times per minute, or about every 1¼ seconds. In that slice of time, a parcel of air 25 m long passes through the blades. For big birds like eagles soaring on this wind, there's one chance in 15 of getting hit by a blade. The speed of the blade tip is 75 m/s or 170 mph. They can't see it coming in time to react. For a duck-sized bird, the chance of getting hit are one in 35, and for a tiny warbler, "only" one in 165. But while only a few eagles pass along the Lake Erie shore daily, and a few dozen ducks, tens of thousands of warblers and other small songbirds do so, up to a few million each season. The daily "catch" of small birds can be hundreds. Not only so, one wind farm reported that more bats were being killed than birds. Think about this: every bat eats from 100 to 1,000 mosquitos and similar insects every day. How many can we afford to wipe out? There is one wind farm in California that is known to kill 100 golden eagles every year. Whatever happened to the Endangered Species Act? Big money, that's what.
Sadly, wind turbines aren't as eco-friendly as they are billed, and not just because they kill birds and bats. A big turbine contains a lot of metal, both steel and aluminum, which required a huge amount of energy to produce, and the coke (refined coal) needed to make the steel resulted in the release of a great amount of CO2. What holds up a big turbine? Many tons of steel-reinforced concrete in a hole the size of a garage. How does the turbine get moved into location? Several trucks per turbine, driving hundreds of miles. Much of the energy needed to produce the metals, particularly the aluminum, comes from hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. So I have called the wind turbine industry "a scheme for turning hydropower into aluminum and steel, moving it across the country, and turning the metals back into electricity…at a net loss." A turbine has a finite lifetime. I have yet to see a full econometric analysis of wind turbines that demonstrates how you get more out than you put in. If every bit of energy used for the mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, erecting, and operating of every wind turbine was required to be derived exclusively from wind power, I think the whole enterprise would shrink away to nothing in pretty short order.
Just by the way, now that solar cells are routinely produced that exceed 15% efficiency, the industry is operating at a net energy gain. We ought to be pushing for more solar, and leaving the wind to the birds.
The turbine project on the military base that the author and others were working against was eventually cancelled. Good news, temporarily.
I lived in Sandusky, Ohio during my high school years. One spring morning I was up early, and I hung a microphone out the window to record the dawn chorus. I wish I still had the tape. It was amazing and glorious. At the time I knew nothing about bird migration. I had no idea that I was living right along a concentration of migrating birds like none other. I could recognize no more than five or six bird calls (robin, chickadee, crow, jay, and hawk, at least). But I could tell that the morning birdsong had at least fifty species of singers contributing. Even if I didn't know what they were, I could tell one from another.
I hope Mr. Kaufman's books reach a wide audience. The more of us who care about wildlife, including birds, the more likely that youngsters a generation or three in the future can wake up to a morning chorus as glorious as the one I remember.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Losers getting loster
kw: book reviews, short stories, fiction
I got two stories into Fly Already by Etgar Keret, and decided to try only one more before giving up. That story, "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot out of a Cannon" is a rather grimy dream sequence, but not the kind of downer the first two stories provided. So I started another and that was that.
No I am not glad I read any of those four stories. If someone is such a loser that reading about other even worse losers gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, go for it. I prefer reading about people who have at least a ghost of a chance of learning from their mistakes, or even better, from the mistakes of others.
I got two stories into Fly Already by Etgar Keret, and decided to try only one more before giving up. That story, "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot out of a Cannon" is a rather grimy dream sequence, but not the kind of downer the first two stories provided. So I started another and that was that.
No I am not glad I read any of those four stories. If someone is such a loser that reading about other even worse losers gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, go for it. I prefer reading about people who have at least a ghost of a chance of learning from their mistakes, or even better, from the mistakes of others.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Can we bring the Dodo back?
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, species restoration, rewilding
So your children or grandchildren visit Yellowstone in the year 2040. A year or two previously another step in the "rewilding" of the Park was taken. Information on the "Guide to Yellowstone" app has a prominent section on "Safety in the Park". The newest arrivals, ten healthy Smilodon (saber-toothed cats), have begun taking over territory from one of the wolf packs. Special safety precautions are required. Nobody is permitted to drive their own vehicle in the area, but must be squired around in special Safari vehicles with added armoring of the doors and top, and extra-thick windows of Lexan. Nobody is permitted to leave the vehicles for any reason. So far, it is still OK to be outside in the Old Faithful Geyser area and some hot spring areas. So far…
Saber-toothed cats. How cute. They once roamed widely in North America, and were a principal predator of the over-sized elk of the time, those too big for a wolf pack to reliably prey upon. A male Smilodon would weight more than twice as much as a cougar (AKA puma). Its 5- to 6-inch (12-15 cm) fangs made it the top predator of the Pleistocene. In a head-to-head encounter, a lion would stand little chance.
At the moment, nobody is proposing a re-creation of this cat. However, as we find in The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals, by Torill Kornfeldt (translated by Fiona Graham), there are serious efforts afoot to restore the Woolly Mammoth, the Passenger Pigeon, the Aurochs (the ancestral bovine), and the Northern White Rhino (very recently extinct). Other researchers are experimenting with chicken DNA, attempting to "bring out the inner dinosaur" in them.
Of course, chickens are dinosaurs, don't-you-know, but we like "real" dinos, with long snouts, teeth, and long tails. How about a flock of chicken-sized toothy dinos to chase down the moths and mice in your back yard? Would you want one for a pet? Considering how impossible it is to house-break a chicken, I don't relish the thought of cleaning up dino poop all over the house.
Perhaps half the book's chapters return again and again to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are working to restore large herbivores to the steppe landscape. The residents of a large enclosed area there include musk oxen and a bison. A herd of mammoths to accompany a much larger number of these grazers, in a much larger area (fenceless?) would complete the picture, because elephants and their kin do something smaller herbivores can't: they knock down trees, which opens up the landscape for the grasses to grow. The activities of all these animals together produce a much richer landscape for animals of all kinds. The Park enclosure is a much more various and interesting habitat than the surrounding area. To knock down trees, the Limovs employ a Soviet-era troop carrier. They have to be their own "virtual mammoths" for the time being.
Let's suppose George Church and his colleagues produce a furry baby pachyderm some day. Would it be a mammoth? At first, only a little bit. Not having a good understanding of the full sequence of mammoth DNA, the workers are gathering one trait after another, to see if they can be spliced into the genome of Asian elephants. One result could be an elephant that is more cold-resistant, increasing their "natural" range (the elephants in places like the Oklahoma City Zoo, or the National Zoo in Washington, DC, can't spend more than a little time outside in the winter, and require hours and hours indoors to warm up afterwards).
Making one mammoth look-alike doesn't produce a mammoth act-alike, because that requires a herd. The herd somehow has to regain tribal knowledge that was lost thousand of years ago when the last mammoths died. It has proven arduous and very costly to properly socialize zoo-born Condors. Nobody is sure they really know all that a Condor must when they are returned to the California mountains. Some live, some don't. How do you socialize a mammoth? Taking a few hundred of them to Siberia for the Limovs to oversee would be by far the easiest part of the matter!
I was quite amused to read of one fellow who wants to bring back the Passenger Pigeon. Their legendary flocks, of millions of birds, would certainly be a sight to see. So would the foot-deep guano they'd leave behind after they ate their way through a chunk of landscape...or a suburb. In the West and Midwest, and to a lesser extent out here in DelMarVa, I've seen flocks of starlings that number in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is enjoyable to watch a swooping cloud of them swirl through the sky and suddenly drop onto a cluster of trees, and then burst into the sky again. In suburban neighborhoods, they are a pest, such that some neighborhood associations employ retired folks to use special guns that shoot whistling bottle-rocket-like projectiles into the trees and drive them off (to a different neighborhood). Now, multiply that by 100. Passenger pigeons were 3-6 times the size (weight) of starlings.
By the way, to reduce starling populations, make it legal to kill and eat them. They'd be a lot easier to wipe out than the passenger pigeons were. They are an invasive bird here; European natives. But it takes a lot of them to make a meal; they weigh about 2.5 ounces each. "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", singing or not, is a good indication of their size.
Scientists are very divided about restoring extinct species, and about rewilding, a separate topic. You can restore a landscape's wildness by simply moving all the people out, and perhaps trucking certain animals in. Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone has made great changes in the way the elk and other grazers behave, and in the vegetation of the landscape. If a cold-resistant elephant is produced, woolly or not, is it a good idea to release a bunch of them in central parts of the USA? We would also need to import a bunch of Thai and Indian elephant trainers to teach the people who live there how to live alongside them! Lack of success in that area would be marked by the critters being poached back out of existence.
Maybe Siberia is big enough, and remote enough, for a true Pleistocene Park, the size of Pennsylvania or more. There's hardly anywhere else on Earth that mammoths could be re-introduced in any meaningful way. That's not the author's conclusion; she doesn't draw one. It is my conclusion.
So your children or grandchildren visit Yellowstone in the year 2040. A year or two previously another step in the "rewilding" of the Park was taken. Information on the "Guide to Yellowstone" app has a prominent section on "Safety in the Park". The newest arrivals, ten healthy Smilodon (saber-toothed cats), have begun taking over territory from one of the wolf packs. Special safety precautions are required. Nobody is permitted to drive their own vehicle in the area, but must be squired around in special Safari vehicles with added armoring of the doors and top, and extra-thick windows of Lexan. Nobody is permitted to leave the vehicles for any reason. So far, it is still OK to be outside in the Old Faithful Geyser area and some hot spring areas. So far…
Saber-toothed cats. How cute. They once roamed widely in North America, and were a principal predator of the over-sized elk of the time, those too big for a wolf pack to reliably prey upon. A male Smilodon would weight more than twice as much as a cougar (AKA puma). Its 5- to 6-inch (12-15 cm) fangs made it the top predator of the Pleistocene. In a head-to-head encounter, a lion would stand little chance.
At the moment, nobody is proposing a re-creation of this cat. However, as we find in The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals, by Torill Kornfeldt (translated by Fiona Graham), there are serious efforts afoot to restore the Woolly Mammoth, the Passenger Pigeon, the Aurochs (the ancestral bovine), and the Northern White Rhino (very recently extinct). Other researchers are experimenting with chicken DNA, attempting to "bring out the inner dinosaur" in them.
Of course, chickens are dinosaurs, don't-you-know, but we like "real" dinos, with long snouts, teeth, and long tails. How about a flock of chicken-sized toothy dinos to chase down the moths and mice in your back yard? Would you want one for a pet? Considering how impossible it is to house-break a chicken, I don't relish the thought of cleaning up dino poop all over the house.
Perhaps half the book's chapters return again and again to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are working to restore large herbivores to the steppe landscape. The residents of a large enclosed area there include musk oxen and a bison. A herd of mammoths to accompany a much larger number of these grazers, in a much larger area (fenceless?) would complete the picture, because elephants and their kin do something smaller herbivores can't: they knock down trees, which opens up the landscape for the grasses to grow. The activities of all these animals together produce a much richer landscape for animals of all kinds. The Park enclosure is a much more various and interesting habitat than the surrounding area. To knock down trees, the Limovs employ a Soviet-era troop carrier. They have to be their own "virtual mammoths" for the time being.
Let's suppose George Church and his colleagues produce a furry baby pachyderm some day. Would it be a mammoth? At first, only a little bit. Not having a good understanding of the full sequence of mammoth DNA, the workers are gathering one trait after another, to see if they can be spliced into the genome of Asian elephants. One result could be an elephant that is more cold-resistant, increasing their "natural" range (the elephants in places like the Oklahoma City Zoo, or the National Zoo in Washington, DC, can't spend more than a little time outside in the winter, and require hours and hours indoors to warm up afterwards).
Making one mammoth look-alike doesn't produce a mammoth act-alike, because that requires a herd. The herd somehow has to regain tribal knowledge that was lost thousand of years ago when the last mammoths died. It has proven arduous and very costly to properly socialize zoo-born Condors. Nobody is sure they really know all that a Condor must when they are returned to the California mountains. Some live, some don't. How do you socialize a mammoth? Taking a few hundred of them to Siberia for the Limovs to oversee would be by far the easiest part of the matter!
I was quite amused to read of one fellow who wants to bring back the Passenger Pigeon. Their legendary flocks, of millions of birds, would certainly be a sight to see. So would the foot-deep guano they'd leave behind after they ate their way through a chunk of landscape...or a suburb. In the West and Midwest, and to a lesser extent out here in DelMarVa, I've seen flocks of starlings that number in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is enjoyable to watch a swooping cloud of them swirl through the sky and suddenly drop onto a cluster of trees, and then burst into the sky again. In suburban neighborhoods, they are a pest, such that some neighborhood associations employ retired folks to use special guns that shoot whistling bottle-rocket-like projectiles into the trees and drive them off (to a different neighborhood). Now, multiply that by 100. Passenger pigeons were 3-6 times the size (weight) of starlings.
By the way, to reduce starling populations, make it legal to kill and eat them. They'd be a lot easier to wipe out than the passenger pigeons were. They are an invasive bird here; European natives. But it takes a lot of them to make a meal; they weigh about 2.5 ounces each. "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", singing or not, is a good indication of their size.
Scientists are very divided about restoring extinct species, and about rewilding, a separate topic. You can restore a landscape's wildness by simply moving all the people out, and perhaps trucking certain animals in. Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone has made great changes in the way the elk and other grazers behave, and in the vegetation of the landscape. If a cold-resistant elephant is produced, woolly or not, is it a good idea to release a bunch of them in central parts of the USA? We would also need to import a bunch of Thai and Indian elephant trainers to teach the people who live there how to live alongside them! Lack of success in that area would be marked by the critters being poached back out of existence.
Maybe Siberia is big enough, and remote enough, for a true Pleistocene Park, the size of Pennsylvania or more. There's hardly anywhere else on Earth that mammoths could be re-introduced in any meaningful way. That's not the author's conclusion; she doesn't draw one. It is my conclusion.
Thursday, November 07, 2019
Putting the X in eXaggerate
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, how to, humor
Troubled by drones? Maybe you want to sunbathe without being on camera. If so, lookee here:
In this drawing "from life", we have Serena Williams downing a drone with her ace tennis serve, as drawn by Randall Munroe. The tale is told, and illustrated, in Chapter 22 of how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems.
Mr. Munroe doesn't tell us how he got Ms Williams and her husband to help with this phase of "How to Catch a Drone"; it seems they were already on speaking terms. That's not all there is to the chapter, however. A lot of things can intercept a drone, most of them illegal, all of them (including a Williams serve) rather dangerous...to the recipient!
The cover of the book shows someone changing a light bulb while standing on two drones. I hope they are the ultra-high-capacity (and ultra-high-stability) kind. Curiously, there is no chapter on lightbulb-changing. That is probably just as well. In Chapter 21, "How to Take a Selfie", after discussing things like focal length, field of view, and the popularity of Selfie Sticks, Munroe takes us farther and farther afield: selfies with big towers, in which you and the tower appear of similar heights; selfies with the moon, or even the sun (ditto); and on to using other planets as backdrops, which requires bigger and bigger telescopes to image the celestial orb in question.
To use Venus as a "selfie companion", for example, you need to use the Palomar Telescope as the camera lens and stand on a mountaintop in an appropriate location four miles away, after doing the calculations to determine when Venus rises over that mountaintop. Considering that the angle Venus makes on the sky when it is in a good position to show a crescent is about one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and the apparent motion of Venus (and stars and everything) is 15°/hr or 15 arc-minutes per minute, so you'd have no more than two seconds in which to take the picture. Hmm. Make a hi-res video instead, and you can pick out the appropriate frame later. Miss the shot? You can try again in eight years.
The author gets into throwing things, and discusses the possibility that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River. At the location of the event, the river is 372 feet wide. A strong thrower, throwing the dollar with a flat spin, can send it upwards of 450 feet, so it is quite possible. Washington liked throwing things, and he was good at it. I had to figure out, though, did he have a silver dollar to throw? I looked up the history of the Philadelphia Mint. It first manufactured the "flowing hair" dollar in 1794, five years before Washington died. So, yes, silver dollars were available. Cool. The chapter "How to Throw Things", however, gets into a lot more kinds of throwing, going to extreme limits, as is done in each chapter (like, how far could Carly Rae Jepson throw George Washington?)
It's obvious, the book is great fun. It takes things a big, big step beyond the Mythbusters, but with the same motto: "Don't try this at home". Some of the things really could cook your goose (like the lava moat).
Troubled by drones? Maybe you want to sunbathe without being on camera. If so, lookee here:
Mr. Munroe doesn't tell us how he got Ms Williams and her husband to help with this phase of "How to Catch a Drone"; it seems they were already on speaking terms. That's not all there is to the chapter, however. A lot of things can intercept a drone, most of them illegal, all of them (including a Williams serve) rather dangerous...to the recipient!
The cover of the book shows someone changing a light bulb while standing on two drones. I hope they are the ultra-high-capacity (and ultra-high-stability) kind. Curiously, there is no chapter on lightbulb-changing. That is probably just as well. In Chapter 21, "How to Take a Selfie", after discussing things like focal length, field of view, and the popularity of Selfie Sticks, Munroe takes us farther and farther afield: selfies with big towers, in which you and the tower appear of similar heights; selfies with the moon, or even the sun (ditto); and on to using other planets as backdrops, which requires bigger and bigger telescopes to image the celestial orb in question.
To use Venus as a "selfie companion", for example, you need to use the Palomar Telescope as the camera lens and stand on a mountaintop in an appropriate location four miles away, after doing the calculations to determine when Venus rises over that mountaintop. Considering that the angle Venus makes on the sky when it is in a good position to show a crescent is about one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and the apparent motion of Venus (and stars and everything) is 15°/hr or 15 arc-minutes per minute, so you'd have no more than two seconds in which to take the picture. Hmm. Make a hi-res video instead, and you can pick out the appropriate frame later. Miss the shot? You can try again in eight years.
The author gets into throwing things, and discusses the possibility that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River. At the location of the event, the river is 372 feet wide. A strong thrower, throwing the dollar with a flat spin, can send it upwards of 450 feet, so it is quite possible. Washington liked throwing things, and he was good at it. I had to figure out, though, did he have a silver dollar to throw? I looked up the history of the Philadelphia Mint. It first manufactured the "flowing hair" dollar in 1794, five years before Washington died. So, yes, silver dollars were available. Cool. The chapter "How to Throw Things", however, gets into a lot more kinds of throwing, going to extreme limits, as is done in each chapter (like, how far could Carly Rae Jepson throw George Washington?)
It's obvious, the book is great fun. It takes things a big, big step beyond the Mythbusters, but with the same motto: "Don't try this at home". Some of the things really could cook your goose (like the lava moat).