Crime and ambiguity

 kw: book reviews, mysteries, anthologies, crime fiction

I took a break from a steady diet of nonfiction to read The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021, edited by Lee Child.

The phrase "murder mystery" evokes the most common subgenre of mystery and crime fiction. Fortunately, not all good mystery stories involve murder, and these are the ones I prefer. Some stories and story series, set in small towns, involve so many murders that one is left wondering whether the town will soon be uninhabited. I like a clever crime with a clever solution, or even a banal crime that requires cleverness to be solved.

A mystery story usually needs a resolution, meaning most mysteries are also problem-solving or puzzle-solving stories. Come to think of it, nearly all satisfying stories, of every genre, involve problem solving. Stories that don't resolve are rarely satisfying; the few such that make it into print (or are published online) draw few positive reviews.

Enough philosophizing! The last story in this volume, a "bonus story", "My Favorite Murder" by Ambrose Bierce, is one of the very few engaging stories that doesn't resolve, but the story-within-the-story has an ending of sorts, leaving the "outer resolution" up to the reader. Bierce exaggerates so dramatically that he can be considered an honorary member of the X (for "eXtreme") generation. Prior to reading this story, I had only read a few bits of The Devil's Dictionary, which exemplifies why he is called "bitter Bierce."

Of the 20 stories of 2021, I read 19. A story by Stephen King is included, but having read one short story by King a long time ago I decided that he takes a reader to places I don't care to visit.

A few of the stories involve crimes other than murder. One that deserves special mention is "The Adventure of the Home Office Baby" by David Marcum; he is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes, and writes new Holmes stories with great verisimilitude. I believe Conan Doyle would be flattered. A stillborn baby is the only death in the piece, which is much more about international intrigue, meaning Mycroft Holmes is involved. Saying any more would be too much. This is my favorite of the 19.

A few other stories don't involve murder, but most do. All are very well written and I enjoyed them. I'll leave it at that.

Another week, another world to conquer

 kw: book reviews, semi-fiction, nonfiction, empire building, supervillains

Want to take over the world? You'll have to wait in line. Firstly, and more seriously, you'll have V. Putin, J.R. Biden, and J.P. Xi, at the very least, to elbow out of the way. More tongue-in-cheek, the number of aspiring globe-controllers may soon take a sharp rise, with the publication of How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain by Ryan North.

Indeed, the schemes are at least borderline practical. Mr. North knows what he is talking about; he creates supervillains in his day job with Marvel. I have but one quibble with the way the book begins: Chapter 1 is titled "Every Supervillain Needs a Secret Base." It needs to be bumped ahead to become Chapter 2, and Chapter 1 ought to be, "Amassing Your First Billion." 

Secret bases don't come cheap. Particularly now that every curious person with Google Earth can scan around, zooming in on anything suspicious. So first, you need to gather sufficient clout to coerce Google to fuzz out the area of your interest in both GMaps and GEarth, the way sundry world governments have had "areas of national importance" fuzzed out or blacked out (This site outlines 15 of them). Then you need to obtain title and control of the place (those don't always go together).

A few folks have tried making "new land" near existing land, "Seabases". Sometimes it even works for a while. Then the nearest country takes it over. It seems the first billion you can gather would just be seed money to work toward something more like a trillion, so you can buy your own country. That's a better beginning. The illustrations and the villainous character in them are the work of the author's friend Carly Monardo.

I seem to remember that L. Ron Hubbard lived aboard ship for decades to avoid extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion. The "Sea Org" of Scientology funneled supplies and personnel to the ship. I don't know what it does now that Hubbard has joined the Thetans. 

In one chapter—I forget which—we learn that the perfect crime is the one people thank you for. It might have been Chapter 4, "Controlling the Weather…", related to "solving" climate change. That's where I realized that the author's "supervillain" just might be a super-superhero in disguise. I like his take in Chapter 7, "Time Travel": as soon as he gets it, he'll come back and rewrite this chapter before the book goes to print.

Then Chapter 9 pulls out all the stops, "Ensuring You Are Never, Ever, Ever Forgotten." The time frames go by powers of 10: 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, etc. The 1,000-year memorial involves bronze items in shallow water. Costs rise with the time frame. The billion-year memorial requires getting it off Earth, and the 10-billion-year one? One must move it to the outer Solar System, at the very least. Beyond that, we learn of the times, in billions, trillions, quadrillions (we're just getting started) of years until the heat death of the universe, the decay of protons, and the evaporation of black holes via Hawking Radiation (that one has 100 zeroes after the 1. It seems the author found a use for Googol, different from Google!). I guess that has to count as "Ever".

It's a tremendously fun book. I don't care to partake of supervillainy, but if anyone is inspired by this book, I may know what to look out for.

A scientist - up by the bootstraps

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, scientists

Psyche is asteroid #16, the 16th to be found, discovered in 1852. It's the largest metal-rich asteroid, so intriguing that NASA, in a project initiated and led by geologist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, intends to send a spacecraft to have a close look. No collision is intended! The hammer is a metaphor for the actual instruments that will be used (next paragraph).

Psyche is about 226 km (140 miles) in average diameter. The instruments that will peer at and into the asteroid include a magnetometer, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and a dual-camera multi-spectral imager. All for just under a billion dollars. Launch was initially set for this year, but is delayed a year while an instrument that was delayed is finished and tested.

Dr. Elkins-Tanton's memoir A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman outlines the paths that led her to a scientific career and sufficient prominence to become a Principal Investigator (PI) on a NASA mission.

She writes of several threads: childhood and growing up but having different interests from many others;  a very brief and concealing sideswipe at the childhood sexual abuse she suffered; education at MIT and elsewhere, where she was sometimes informed flatly that she didn't belong and was there "on sufferance"; a courtship, marriage, childbirth, and breakup (fortunately not a bitter one but any divorce is traumatic); renewed love with a more compatible husband; a growing career dogged by continued symptoms of the "glass ceiling"; field work in Russia, where they are openly dismissive of women in science; building a leadership-facilitation business with her husband and her son; growing leadership roles, one of which led to the Psyche mission with NASA; and her growing leadership in fostering a scientific culture that is more welcoming of women and others formerly left out.

If you didn't just think or say, "Wow!", I don't know what it takes to impress you. For myself, I am overwhelmed. This is one admirable woman and a scientific rock star. For me to write much more than this would be a disservice. Get the book!

The physics of life and living things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biophysics, dna, biomolecules, self-assembly

A friend of mine is a biophysicist. I asked him once what he does. He said he wasn't working in biophysics, but was writing computer code for a government agency. I didn't press further. When I saw that a book about biophysics I decided to read it: So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World by Raghuveer Parthasarathy. The book's title opens a key sentence in the last paragraph of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

I was a physics major in 1969 and 1970. While physics deals with phenomena on all scales, from the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that can span the universe to the Planck Length, the smallest possible "useful" unit of length, most physicists at that time worked with subatomic particles, smaller than an atom by a factor of about 10,000, but still very large compared to the Planck Length: If a proton were enlarged to span the distance between Hartford, CT and Providence, RI, about 100 km, the Planck Length would become about the size of a proton.

If we move up in the scale of things to the nano-realm, from the size of an atom (an iron atom's diameter is 0.26 nanometers) and that of a DNA molecule (~10 nm in diameter, but very, very long) to the size of bacterial cells (500 nm to 10,000 nm), and further to the cells of animals and plants (10,000 - 100,000 nm), we are in the realm of biophysics.

The author first presents four physical principles that govern living things:

• Self-assembly – biological things typically "build themselves", such as the "liquid membrane" of a cell or a cell's nucleus, or a soap bubble as seen here. The electrochemical properties of all biomolecules facilitate their roles.

• Regulatory Circuits – phenomena such as the expression of a gene involve feedback loops with several elements.
• Predictable Randomness – this is the basis of statistical inference, and underlies Brownian Motion, which is the "motor" of many actions within cells.
• Scaling – relationships between length, area and volume regulate what is possible at different sizes, and underlie the dramatic difference between the kinds of legs that work for a rhinoceros beetle, compared to those of a rhinoceros, for example.

The book contains many illustrations drawn by the author, such as the ones shown above. 

The author proceeds from basic facts about atoms and molecules to the molecules need to operate a living cell, primarily DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars and lipids (fats). Examples of self-assembly introduce the ways these molecules' properties facilitate the construction of all the organelles in a cell. Certain operations require more specialized machinery; an example is ferrying certain products over longer distances (clear across an animal cell, which is 10-100x as wide as a bacterium, for example), because Brownian motion is too slow. This is carried out by special kinds of molecules that "walk" along the fibers that form an internal skeleton of the cell. Shorter range transport is typically carried out quite efficiently by relying on Brownian movement to jostle molecules around until they latch onto their targets. When a motion of a micron or so is needed, transport time is around a microsecond.

The four principles listed above are emergent properties of biomolecules in an environment warm enough for Brownian motion to help them go where they need to go, at least inside bacterial cells. Over evolutionary time, mechanisms have been developed that facilitate larger-scale things and operations, right up to the size of a blue whale or redwood tree. This was apparently a hard problem. The "boring billion" refers to a billion-year period during which bacteria and archaea, having developed quite a lot of sophistication, including the ability to aggregate into large assemblages such as stromatolites, didn't do much at all. Finally, eukaryotic cells arose, and things got a lot less boring. Animals, plants, fungi and protozoa are composed of eukaryotic cells (the word means "cells with a nucleus"). The largest eukaryotic cells are the neurons that run end-to-end in large animals such as whales or giant squids. The largest bacteria or archaea are 1/100 millimeter long (well, there are a very few species of bacteria that are 10-20 mm long and 3/4 mm diameter. All the rest are microscopic).

The last section of the book deals with the genetic revolution, first in reading ("sequencing") DNA and now writing it, or editing it. The prospect of "designer babies" and "clone armies" emphasizes that these matters have moral aspects. We have to work out "who decides what is moral" (particularly because most genetic scientists are atheists and so have no external moral compass). The author is optimistic that this can be carried out without much drama. 

I am less optimistic. The author discusses Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who announced having used CRISPR/CAS9 to gene-edit twin embryos. The girls were born in 2018. The Chinese government, partially under outside pressure, reacted strongly, shut down He's lab and jailed him. I suspect the next researcher who decides to give it a go won't announce anything. This may have already happened. Not everyone is willing to wait for consensus. The technique of "gene drive", which can rapidly send a species, such as a noxious sort of mosquito, into extinction, is an even scarier prospect. There is no guarantee that a gene drive that works in the Anopheles mosquito only will not mutate into one that crosses into another species, and eventually spreads and spreads. Think of "Ice-Nine" in Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

On another note: In the present technical environment dominated by Big Data, the author presents a good case for understanding—based on hypothesis, experiment, synthesis, and theory—wherever possible. He uses the example of making numerous experiments with a ball, rolled down a ramp and off the table, and measuring where it hits the floor. One could prepare a table based on thousands of such experiments. Then someone could use that table to determine, based on a ball's velocity and height from the floor, to predict where it will land. But a smaller number of experiments can underlie the development of a formula by which one can calculate the landing distance, without needing to interpolate from a table. The formula is based on understanding what gravity does, and experiments to confirm the strength of gravity. It isn't too extreme to say that Big Data is often used blindly. Physics, including biophysics, leads to understanding and removes the blinders.

I probably haven't demonstrated a great deal of my own understanding of biophysics. I have a lot to think over. This book is a marvelous introduction to the subject.

Errata: On p.266, illustrating how gene drive works, the example is a species of mosquito, gray in color. Sometimes a mutation occurs, yielding a black insect. In mid-discussion this sentence occurs, "Suppose just one individual has the gray mutation." It should be "…black mutation", as is clear from the accompanying illustration and the rest of the discussion.