Sundry superheroes...and supervillains of course

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural creatures, supertechnology

I find I am a bit more than halfway through The Best of World SF, Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Two stories this time, because the second is a novella, about 40 pages long.

"The Emptiness at the Heart of All Things" by Fabio Fernandes. Matinta is a genus of jumping spiders, most of which are found in Brazil. The genus is probably named for Matinta Pereira, a supernatural hag that wreaks justice…sometimes. An author and policewoman journeys to an isolated house in scrubby land called sertão to meet a forgotten woman author, to interview her. She uses the guise of gathering material for a dissertation. A series of murders, centered on the house, constitute the mystery she hopes to solve. But dealing with a Matinta is more than she bargained for.

"The Sun From Both Sides" by R.S.A. Garcia. I think it is no mistake that this story comes after the prior one. Here we find a plethora of superheroes and supervillains. Or, perhaps, the beneficiaries of multiple, competing supertechnologies. If the weapons described herein are ever developed, either a new level of Mutual Assured Destruction will balance the powers, as in this story, or all life will be rapidly annihilated. Here, wish fulfillment reigns, and the super couple at the core of the story prevails. (The image is more violent than the style of warfare depicted in the story, but semi-pacifistic combat doesn't make for memorable images)

Great diversity in just 5 stories

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, fantasy ancestries, praying robots, ecowarriors, nanobot reconstruction, time travel

Another five stories from The Best of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar:

"Xingzhou" by Ng Yi-Sheng. Billed in the opening blurb as a fantastical history of Singapore: I'd never have guess if they hadn't said so. The grand"parents" of the protagonist are given short biographies: a man, a demon, a hive being, and a sentient fungus (and very high official indeed). Xingzhou seems to be on the surface of a protostar. The language is so expressive yet so ambiguous, one can't really tell. But it's hot. At some point war intervenes and the various expats are taken to Earth, where it is at least less hot.

"Prayer" by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Kamil Spychalski. More robots. This time, a triad code-named Cerberus. They guard a cryptocoin-mining ship, rather gruesomely, but carry out a sort of prayer dance prior to executing intruders.

"The Green Ship" by Francesco Verso, translated by Michael Colbert. A combination of Greenpeace and a refugee rescue organization. These folks have a converted aircraft carrier that is registered as a micronation. Rescuing refugees is increasingly necessary as the dystopian world outside Europe worsens, and giant 3D printers can erect barrier structures at the edge of sovereign ocean overnight.

"Eyes of the Crocodile" by Malena Salazar Maciá, translated by Toshiya Kamei. A race to bring corrected algorithms to a distribution place, while erring nanobots are gradually annihilating humans. Guess where the eyes in question appear?

"Bootblack" by Tade Thompson. The statement of a witness to a time traveler: a "shoeshine boy" is called a "bootblack" by the traveler, likes the term, and adopts it.

I thought about adding the country of each author's origin, but then figured it's better to leave it up to you to find out.

Of robots and visions and the multiverse

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, robots, rejection, mourning, time travel, inverse universe

Stories 3 through 7 in The Best of World SF, Volume 1, edited by Lavie Tidhar:

"Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. Computron, invented and built in 1957, is the only sentient robot. It resides in a robot museum, and becomes a collaborator, writing fanfic with another fan of an anime series about a man and a robot having adventures.

"Virtual Snapshots" by Tlotlo Tsamaase. A story of rejection, in a dystopia of purchased air and enforced isolation. The saddest line in literature comes near the end, "…the only regret I have: no one to say 'I love you' to."

"What the Dead Man Said" by Chinelo Onwualu. Of mourning, false and true, and of traditions, kept and broken. Set in a future New Biafra, the Igbo [Ibo] region of Nigeria. (I know people of both Ibo and Yoruba extraction; the differences are stark) When we see and converse with the dead one, is it only internal?

"Delhi" by Vandana Singh. A man sees apparitions. Are they ghosts, or ephemeral contacts across the gulfs of time? Can one's future self reach back to give aid? Can such time loops actually stabilize the time stream?

"The Wheel of Samsara" by Han Song. A mysterious singing bell/wheel (hollow gong?) seems to hold the key to inverting the universe.

Every story gripping. As usual, I read SF faster than nonfiction, but when the ideas are so diverse, the story flow so compelling, I force myself to slow down a bit to pay better attention.

SF from everywhere

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, international science fiction, anthologies

I made a gap in my posting when the prior book I reviewed contained more than 400 pages, and was worthy of slower reading and pondering. I find that the current book is even larger, pushing 600 pages: The Best of World SF, Volume 1 edited by Lavie Tidhar. I decided to review the stories a few at a time. Two stories to start:

"Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. The title encompasses the primary technical idea: "immersers", which employ two technologies. Firstly, facing the wearer/user, an enhanced-reality/translator/adviser. The plot dynamic revolves around the problem of leaning too heavily on the device. Secondly, facing the world without, an avatar, not explained but apparently a kind of hologram that surrounds the wearer. Others who pay attention can in part see the wearer within the avatar, but in one case (the first-person protagonist), the avatar is multi-layered. The third-person protagonist must actually touch the person to determine if someone is "in there". To say more would be to spoil much. The undercurrent is that of cultural domination by "Galactics", who are portrayed as white and tall, whilst others are smaller and darker: a metaphor for "The White Man's Burden" as embodied in the British Empire's attitude toward nearly everyone else. Ms de Bodard lived in Vietnam for a time, so southeast Asian culture infuses her work, much to the better, I might add.

(Image by Brian Versteeg, found at The Plaid Zebra)

"Debtless" by Chen Quifan, translated by Blake Stone-Banks. The milieu is asteroid mining, but the miners are in perpetual debt, even born to debt. This reflects the "company store" worker-enslavement activities of early rapacious industrialism, but on steroids. The source of perpetual debt, an updated idea of original sin, is found to be a technology of immortality. The human relationships among the miners impel the protagonist to discover what is behind the oppressive system.

These stories, and the other 24 in the volume, are all written "elsewhere", or what we chauvinistic Americans would call "international". That alone makes them worth reading. The skilled writing and the fresh ideas, freshly presented, make them worth absorbing.

Trajectory of the soundscape

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, acoustics, sound, noise pollution, silencing

Summer nights we hear mostly katydids, my wife and I. In late spring, there will be a few. By late July there are myriads, and they out-shout the annual cicadas ("locusts" to some). Just by listening through a slightly opened window we can tell how warm it is outside: at a comfortable temperature, they sing their usual 3-part song, "katy-did"; when it is uncomfortably warm for me, we hear "katy-didn't"; cooler temperatures elicit only a 2-part song ("katy") and the coolest temperatures at which they will sing (around 60°F) they just burp "kate!".

The earliest noisy ancestors of katydids lived about 350 million years ago, about twice as long ago as the earliest dinosaurs. Animals probably made inadvertent sounds as far back as a billion years or more, but we don't know of specific hearing structures prior to about half that.

We learn the history of sound and sound-making by living beings in the early chapters of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, by David George Haskell. This book is lyrically written, celebrating the sounds of living things of every kind. The author also laments the gradual silencing of the natural world, and then goes on to point out the ways dominant human cultures silence others.

Many of the sounds animals make go unheard by humans. Firstly, the sonic realms we call "ultrasonic" (frequencies above about 20,000 Hz, such as the laughter of mice or the echolocation beeps of bats) and "infrasonic" (below about 15 Hz, where most elephant-speak occurs) cannot be perceived with our natural auditory systems. Secondly, we are very badly equipped to hear with our head under water, although we can hear some louder sounds such as the whistles and creaky-door sounds of nearby dolphins. But when out of water, we hear nothing: sounds made underwater stay there (kinda like "staying in Vegas").

The ears of land animals are elaborate transducers between airborne sound and the liquid environment in our inner ears. Most hearing is mediated by ciliated cells, which first evolved 3+ billion years ago, in the oceans. They are most sensitive to waterborne vibrations.

We humans go to great lengths to have quiet living spaces. I live in a suburb that is noted for being very quiet, at least from human noises. We do hear, blocks away, the occasional siren, and a bit of road noise. Otherwise, we hear a small amount of birdsong and insect noises. Bird song here is less by far than what I heard as a child in the 1950's and 60's. As I wrote above, summer nights can be noisy with insect sounds. Not just katydids but several kinds of crickets. Once I put a small microphone at the focus of a curved reflector taken from a desk lamp, and went about the yard pointing it here and there. I was amazed at the multitude of very high-pitched sounds, like crickets but 2-3 octaves higher. Being on the edge of hearing anyway, these sounds are usually too faint to hear.

But not that many of us have the luxury of a quiet home. Cities are noisy. VERY noisy. As the author brings out, the historical development of cities has resulted in poorer areas being the noisiest. It's almost an exact relationship. By that measure, the oceans are becoming impoverished. Human noise fills the seas. If the designers of ships' propulsion systems were required to spend a cruise wearing earphones attached to hydrophones placed on the ship's keel, they'd probably be permanently deafened within a day by the noise from the screws (propellers); I hope then they'd me more inclined to design quieter systems in the future! A single oil tanker or container ship, powered by multiple motors the size of houses, makes as much noise as a city. Multiply that by about 6,000 mega-ships, plus another 60,000 "smaller" commercial vessels afloat at any one time, and you have a sonic apocalypse. It is growing steadily. No wonder whales aren't rebounding that much. They did in the past—just for the past few decades—, but that has leveled off as our commerce fills their world with literally deafening racket.

This big book (400+ pages) is filled with wonderful information I've skimmed past or skipped here. We need sound, and we need a balance of louder and quieter places in our life; and so it is for all creatures. The sounds of animals are so many and varied and amazing, it is good to be able to hear them. That includes, not just taking an evening stroll amidst the thrums of katydid and cicada and cricket; not only going outside at dawn for the dawn chorus of bird song; even going to Cape Henlopen or Cape May when dolphins are passing and going under to listen to them. It includes being attentive to what is around us, not just sights but sounds and even smells.

I don't know what else to say about this amazing book. It's big, and I could have done with an even bigger book.

A new rampage of Russian spiders

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I looked at my stats, and what did I see?
A bunch'a Russian spiders, looking back at me!

To repeat, this is not a popular blog. I usually get 20-40 hits per day. Take away Russia, and the rest make sense (this is 7 days' data).

Loop or Noose?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, decision support, skeptical views

I pondered several ways to start this review. A quote seems best:

"Computers are good at optimizing a system, but it takes humans to sort out what we actually want from that system." (Emphasis author's, p 246)

The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, by Jacob Ward, reveals the penetration of so-called "decision support systems" into every area of society. They are the latest manifestation of "artificial intelligence" (AI). It is quite amazing that true AI cannot be defined, but it has been touted as "just around the corner" since about the time I was born (the 1940's).

Contrary to the contention of a rosy-eyed Google scientist, no AI system has yet achieved sentience. And that is a big part of the problem. Firstly, sentience also defies definition, although somewhere, in some dictionary, no doubt we can find, "Sentience is equal to consciousness," and then when we look up "consciousness" we find, "A synonym for sentience." Many would say, "I know it when I see it," yet most of those same people would deny that "animals" are sentient (ignoring that humans are animals)…unless they have a beloved pet, then they would say, "Oh, cats/dogs are people, too!" But they'd probably draw the line at a mouse or rat or goldfish.

Secondly, sentience must include a moral sense. Without it, a thinking being is a monster, in the sense of horror literature such as Frankenstein (Although the creature in that novel had better moral sense than his creator, which was the point of the book). And, a-a-and, morality is even harder to define than sentience or consciousness!

Well, a bit about the book before I embark on further ranting. Jacob Ward writes of three loops, nested within one another. To quote him further (pp 8-9):

"The innermost loop is human behavior as we inherited it, the natural tendencies and autopilot functions that evolution gave us." In the terminology of some, this is System 1, also called 'instinct' or 'gut feelings'. System 2 will be addressed shortly.

"The second loop is the way that modern forces—consumer technology, capitalism, marketing, politics—have sampled the innermost loop of behavior and reflected those patterns back at us, resulting in everything from our addiction to cigarettes and gambling to systemic racism in real estate and machine learning."

"The outermost loop…[presages] a future in which our ancient and modern tendencies have been studied, sampled, fed into automated pattern-recognition systems, and sold back to us in servings we will be doubly conditioned to consume without a second thought."

Social media are the most visible expression of The Loop. It's pretty well known that FaceBook seldom displays in your News Feed (incredible misnomer!) posts from more than 25 of your "friends", no matter how many you have. To get them to show you someone else, you need to go into your home page's Friends tab, find someone whose posts you haven't seen lately, and click the link to see if they've been posting. Usually they have. So, go along and "Like" or "Love" or whatever the past five or more posts by that person. Most likely, the next item posted by that person will show up in your news feed.

By feeding you only what you have responded to in the past, FB tightens The Loop around you. You need to take deliberate steps to widen it.

Can our System 2 help? System 2 is our reasoning facility, our deliberate, thinking response to something. It is slower than System 1, and is harder work. Very few people use System 2 for more than a few minutes per week. We use it to learn something new, but as soon as we can, we push the "new stuff" onto System 1 and let it run on autopilot.

Only System 2 can get us out of some aspects of The Loop, the personal ones, such as our FB News Feed, for example (and that, only to a limited extent). When we use the Loyalty Card at the grocery or pharmacy, we're feeding data to a Loop system, which determines what coupons to print onto your receipt (or the coupon printer next to the receipt printer). Our credit card company knows which restaurants we frequent, which grocery and department stores, and where we vacation.

I have a System 2 method for finding stuff online. I use a browser in Private Mode (Incognito in Chrome), and the Duck Duck Go search engine. (Be careful about searching videos and images, though; DDG feeds those searches to Google, and during the session, Google can look at cookies to find out who you are. Why do you think they are called "tracking cookies"?) In case I look for something any other way, I can expect to find ads for it popping up for the following month.

That's creepy enough, but it's not dangerous. Surveillance is dangerous. Police use decision support software with databases to check faces seen in a camera against nearly any face ever photographed (yes, such holistic databases exist!). This has been going on for a long time in China and other totalitarian nations; it is in its infancy in the U.S. Don't expect the trend to reverse course, because trying to get politicians and officials to use System 2 thinking to write laws to limit such behavior…it just ain't happenin'.

AI isn't moral. No more moral than a hammer. A hammer is very useful. In the hands of Thor, or anyone else with blunt force homicide in mind, it's an awesome weapon. A screwdriver is very useful. Long ago I learned to throw knives: how to test for balance, and how to hold it so it is poised to penetrate at a particular distance. I found out that a typical screwdriver is almost perfectly balanced, and is very easy to throw so that it sticks right through a 1x4. I never tried it on a living being; I do have some measure of self control.

AI has no self control. Sadly, the people involved with so-called AI systems have no self control either. Those who produce the systems are in it for the money. Those who buy the systems have a goal in mind that pays no mind to side effects such as identifying someone who looks like a perpetrator, but is not. Even without AI's "help", mistaken convictions occur: every year in the U.S. 100-200 people are found to be innocent of a crime for which they were convicted in criminal court; we don't know how many others might be exonerated if there were more workers in exoneration projects.

I have a lot of experience with the face recognition engine in Google Picasa: tens of thousands of ID's of friends and relatives and acquaintances. About every second or third time I check face ID's of new pix in Picasa (I first give it a half hour to noodle around with the database), one or two of the "faces" it finds are non-faces such as hubcaps or odd shadows on a wall. I find it 80-90% accurate in finding matches to faces I already tagged, but for faces that are entirely new to it, it attaches an ID as a "nearest match", rather than just asking, "Is this someone new?"

Just by the bye, Google has a race problem. I have numerous friends who are non-white. If I had a way to ask Picasa why it so frequently confuses them with one another, I expect the answer would echo a common canard of the 1950's, "They all look the same to me". I'd like to hear from anyone who uses Google Photos and its face tagging, whether the same effect is found there. So far, I've avoided moving my 70,000 photos to GP (for one thing, I'd have to pay for the disk space).

One of the big problems with "big data" and "machine learning" and "neural net systems" is that they are opaque. Once they have been "trained" with a few thousand (or a few million) examples, and have developed criteria for deciding something, there is no way to know what those criteria are. Humans tend to develop criteria that number five or fewer (although some of our "gut feelings" may be based on a lot more than that, but System 1 is equally opaque!), but "deep learning" systems may winkle out hundreds or thousands of correlations, each of which contributes a tiny fraction of a percent of the final decision.

While it would be arduous to delve through the printout of such a system's decision tree, it should be mandatory for such a printout to be possible to produce. I am in favor of legislation making it a crime to produce such a system that cannot explain its decisions. For those systems that "support" life-and-death decisions, it should be a capital offense.

Of Course it is harder and more expensive to build a transparent decision support system. So what? I say, kill off a few such offenders, and perhaps the rest will find out how to write them economically! Naturally, no politician will propose such a law.

The real danger of AI isn't from AI itself, but from people who put too much trust in it. That's why The Loop is really a Noose.

Probably the real Pearl Hart

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, outlaws, women, biographies

When you're one of a kind, and become a legend, speculation abounds. Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West's Most Notorious Woman Bandit, by John Boessenecker, is my most recent wild card selection. The author, who really knows his research, has written a biography that is most likely the most truthful depiction of Pearl Hart's life we are ever to receive. Accounts ranging from mostly speculative to downright fallacious abound, and as of this writing, the Wikipedia Article "Pearl Hart", somewhat less than 50% factual, perpetuates one of many myths about her given name. Our author ought to get a Wikipedia account and correct it.

Lillie Naomi Davy was born April 19, 1871, the third of nine children of Anna and Albert Davy. She died in her daughter Millie's home in Los Angeles, on May 9, 1935, aged 64. She is interred in Whittier under her married name, Lillie Naomi Meyers. Earl Meyers, AKA Earl Nighthawk, was the last of her several husbands.

When she was 28, on May 29, 1899, a man calling himself Joe Boot and Lillie, now calling herself Pearl Hart, perhaps after the name of a deceased madam, robbed a stagecoach in Kane Spring Canyon, Arizona, along the Gila river near Riverside.

This photo shows a display in the Yuma Territorial Prison, where she spent two years of a five year sentence. Joe Boot was also incarcerated there for a time. The large picture of Pearl holding a rifle is reproduced on the cover of Wildcat.

The author stresses frequently that the horrific abuse Lillie and her siblings endured whenever Albert Davy was present (less than half the time, it seems), led them all to be untrustful of anyone except themselves. The older girls at least were probably also sexually abused. They treated sex as a commodity, and some of them, Lillie included, were prostitutes at various times. In Lillie's case it may have underlain her disdain for dressing or acting like a woman (except in the bedroom). She felt mens' clothing was more comfortable, and her command of profane language was legendary; at least a couple of her sisters could match her, curse for curse.

I don't know how to relate to outlaw characters. Their stories are often fascinating, and this one is doubly so, because Pearl Hart was the only really "badman" among women of the time. While she lived a life of petty crime until her thirties, her life is defined by a single event that took no more than a couple of hours. It is sometimes called the last stagecoach robbery, but it isn't; that came more than 15 years later. It isn't even the only one in which a woman played a part, but it is the only one where she played a primary part, and it became the most notorious.

Who knows why people do what they do? Except for the youngest boy, who died at age 10, all of the Davy siblings spent various periods of time on the wrong side of the law. The parenting "skills" of their father must have had much to do with that, but it doesn't go very far to elucidate the nature-nurture divide. The book is deeply interesting, and equally puzzling. I appreciate the work John Boessenecker undertook to extract the real story of Pearl Hart from the mists of time and the maze of speculative accounts that surround her legend.

Making a little science go a long way

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientific laws, scientific phenomena, compendia

"Your task, should you accept it, is to write a 15-to-30-word summary of a law or phenomenon of science. Then do it 600 times." In How It All Works: All Scientific Laws and Phenomena Illustrated and Demonstrated, written by Brian Clegg and illustrated by Adam Dant, the actual number of summaries is 598. With repetitions (5 each for the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Strong Interaction, but usually no more than 2), the number of actual items summarized is 525.

Ignoring repetitions, the number of items tagged "L" for Law is 100. The rest (498) are tagged "P" for Phenomenon. Since there are more than 200 scientific laws named for people, and numerous others without eponyms, such as the geological Law of Superposition or the Law of Reflection in optics, a lot has been left out. However, as comprehensive as my scientific education is, there were a few things I learned, so nearly anyone will find new things to learn…or, to begin to learn, because a 2- to 3-sentence blurb provides only a starting point.

I'm not sure about the validity of one of these, Dermott's Law. The summary is seen in the image.

The "law" is an empirical relationship that is approximately true, given suitable values of the minimum period and the derived constant, for the major moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. There is a particular minimum period and constant for each planet's system of satellites.  In a (very brief) Wikipedia Article, this conclusion is stated: 

"Such power-laws may be a consequence of collapsing-cloud models of planetary and satellite systems possessing various symmetries [such as] the Titius-Bode law. They may also reflect the effect of resonance-driven commensurabilities in the various systems."

I prefer to call it the Dermott Trend. In itself, it is a clue that the phenomena of natural satellite formation have certain regularities. A real law or set of laws may one day describe these regularities.

The image above shows how the summaries are presented. In each 10-page chapter we first see a two-page illustration with lots happening. Then we find 46 items cropped from the illustration accompanied by text summarizing the law or phenomenon. The 13 chapters begin with the Kitchen and proceed in expanding steps to the largest realms, The Solar System (12) and The Entire Universe! (13). The Laws are unevenly scattered, with at least one in each chapter, and 22 in the middle chapter, The Street (7). Between 24 and 45 phenomena are used to round out each chapter.

I must point out an error in one summary. For Brewster's Law we read, "The polarization of a reflected ray of light is dependent on the angle at which it enters a transparent medium. The sun's rays are polarized by the mirror." Brewster's Law applies to transparent media, as the first sentence states. The light reflected from the first (glass) surface of an ordinary mirror will be partially polarized, or wholly polarized if the angle of reflection is Brewster's Angle, a function of the refractive index of the glass. But light reflected from the metallic coating on the back of the mirror is not polarized. Furthermore, in that part of the illustration, the beam of "sunlight" being reflected is coming from the wrong direction: the sun is below the horizon behind the mirror, on the other side of the picture, throwing crepuscular rays across clouds (the Crepuscular Rays are a phenomenon summarized a few blurbs later).

This is a fun book. I'll give the author a pass for not actually including "all laws and phenomena", which would require some gigantic, uncountable number of blurbs.

A wolf for all seasons

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wolves, yellowstone, biographies

He was old for an alpha wolf. About 8 years old; that's late 60's in wolf years. But that is the age of Wolf 302 when he became the alpha wolf of the newly-formed Blacktail Pack. Wolf packs in Yellowstone are named for geographic features in their territory. The presence of Blacktail Creek in their territory made it a valuable one, but not a prime location such as a larger pack might hold.

In The Redemption of Wolf 302: From Renegade to Yellowstone Alpha Male, by Rick McIntyre, we find the biography of this wolf and a partial biography of the Druid Peak Pack, with which 302 was associated for much of his life. In this image, of the Druid Peak wolves, he is the black wolf near center.

He was a lover, not a fighter. Contrary to the stereotype, the alpha male does not father all the pups in "his" pack. He may try to, and will spend a lot of time "pinning" the lower-ranking wolves, and chasing off (sometimes killing) visiting males doing a little out-breeding. But the alpha female actually rules the pack, and females choose their mates. Among wolves, that frequently means that a particular litter might have two, three or more fathers. Wolf 302 was popular with the female wolves all his life, which meant he got more than the usual amount of critical attention from alpha wolves in all directions, particularly in his own pack.

302 was a late bloomer, learning responsibility only after he was a couple of years older than the average life span of a wild wolf (4.5 years). But learn it he did, such that when the waning of a couple of packs' membership opened up a territory a sufficient distance from the one claimed by Druid Peak Pack, he and few others, including three females, formed the Blacktail Pack. He was a stellar alpha during his short "reign", less than a year.

It would be a disservice to you for me to try to present a comprehensive overview of 302's life. That is Rick McIntyre's job, and he does it very, very well. I find that this is the third book by this author about the Yellowstone wolves, of a total of five. I guess I have some book-finding to do.

P.S. I commend the author, either for employing an excellent copy editor, or for having a grammatical education at least the equal of mine. I found no typos or other solecisms.