Spiders multiply and spread out

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

After a lull, activity—views of my blog posts—has ramped up. I consider a view rate between 50 and 100 per day "normal", or at least ordinary. Let's look at the totals for the past week, on the world map:

The total for the week is more than 16,400, or an average of about 2,300 per day. Just for the 24 hours prior to about 10:00 am EDT, when I captured the view below, the sum is 2,670. But there's quite a difference in where the viewers are reported to be. For the week, Singapore topped the list, followed by Brazil, Vietnam, and the US. For the 24-hour period, Brazil moved to the top, with Vietnam close behind and Singapore a more distant third, with the US about where I'd expect it to be. Now that VPN's are nearly ubiquitous, it isn't even clear that more than one big spider is actually doing all this.

I hope they are all having fun reading nerdy book reviews.

DuPont and the Irish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, historiography, dupont company, irish, immigrants, gunpowder, sociology

Reading Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th-Century America, 20th Anniversary Edition, by Margaret M. Mulrooney, I obtained a view into the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants, not only in northern Delaware, where I now live, but in the industrial Northeast of the United States. I knew I would find no ancestors or even cousins among the gunpowder workers and other Irish employees at the du Pont facilities along the Brandywine River. I am about 1/4 Irish, but my Irish ancestors, upon arriving in the young U.S., made their ways to New Hampshire, Virginia and Pennsylvania. One family did settle in Salem, New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from New Castle, Delaware.

The book's first edition of 2002 was published about the time of the Dupont Company's 200th anniversary celebration. It was an expansion of the author's PhD dissertation at the University of Delaware. The 20th Anniversary Edition is updated with a little new material; the original scholarship is sound and has been supplemented but not reworked. The Introduction and first chapter ("Mutual Interests") summarize the history of the du Pont family, the original company founded by E. I. du Pont in 1802, and the managerial attitude and practices of Mr. du Pont and his successors during the 19th Century.

The title "Mutual Interests" introduces the vital distinction between the du Ponts and the leaders of many other industries in the area. Being of the French aristocratic tradition, yet with originally humble origins, Pierre S. du Pont and his sons, particularly Éleuthère I. and Victor M., had a keen sense of noblesse oblige, the "obligation of power", that induced an attitude of caring for their employees not just as paid labor but as quasi-family members. Some trace of that still remained when I was working for "Uncle Dupie", from which I retired in 2013: I saw on my manager's bookshelf the title How to Recognize and Reward Employees. This same manager was willing to explain business terms that I didn't understand well, and once said, "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it." That sounds harsher than it was, and I was a great fan of this manager, and most of the managers I had during 30 years with the company.

In the environment of the gunpowder yards of the four connected properties that made up the E. I. du Pont de Nemours company throughout most of the 1800's, Irish immigrants thrived. Though the work was dangerous, a point possibly over-emphasized by Dr. Mulrooney, the company's generous caretaking—free or low-cost housing, widows' pensions, higher pay than the norm, company-held savings accounts, and apprenticeship programs, for example—made "the powder" an attractive livelihood.

The company had initially hired mainly French-speaking immigrants, but wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland soon led to near-dominance of the labor market by the Irish. While most histories of Irish immigration to America focus on those who fled the potato famine of 1845-1852, the workforce at du Pont was roughly half Irish even in the 1820's and 1830's. It is on these people that the book initially focuses.

Irish were discriminated against in 19th Century America, because they were visibly "not English", predominantly Catholic, and poorly educated. However, E. I. du Pont soon found that the men could learn as fast as anyone, and their performance overcame his early reluctance to hire Irish workers. He had a practice of all new hires working as laborers for two years so he could assess their attitudes and work habits. Promotion to work as a powderman resulted in a significant increase in pay. He also favored married men for their stability and likelihood of a better attitude toward work.

In spite of discrimination, the Irish mostly knew they had it better than they'd had it in Ulster, where most were from. Consider: prior to the potato famine, some Ulstermen were prosperous but the more typical dwelling was a one-room cottage with a packed earth floor, little or no wood in the construction of mud or sod or peat walls, and a leaky roof. A single man working for the du Ponts would be in a dormitory, or boarding with a family, in a wooden structure with a wood floor, windows and doors that worked. A family would be in a two- to four-room house. The company's liberal benefits allowed a worker or couple to save a little, part of which they used to sponsor relatives in the "old country" to come to America, and chain migration was carried out for more than 100 years.

In time, the Irish Catholics could afford a little stipend for a circuit-riding priest, and later, they built St Joseph's on the Brandywine. By the end of the century, the church sponsored a school for the Catholic children, as seen in this photo from 1887. For much of the 19th Century, children from the powder yards were instructed on Sundays at the Brandywine Manufacturers' Sunday School, where a child's instruction was concordant with the family religion; the deist du Ponts accepted and supported the religious upbringing of the students.

The Irish families also struck a solid compromise between their traditional ways and the Mid-Atlantic culture, with is where the "White Lace" part of the book's title derives. They didn't fully enter the "melting pot" that we may often hear of, which was honored only in the breach anyway. They didn't "assimilate" but they "acculturated," making as much of the benefits of hard work and thrift as possible, while in part acceding to the consumerism that was a continually rising force in industrializing America.

The book's chapters cover in some detail the cultural traditions they kept, and didn't, their dwellings, their use of yards and dooryards and kitchen gardens, and the niceties of life that they obtained. They knew many luxuries were out of reach, but they craved a certain amount of gentility. Having been landless, they knew the value of land, and strove to save enough to buy houses or farms. Over all, the Irish along the Brandywine, and elsewhere in America that they encountered favorable work environments, overcame stereotypes and thrived.

Their stories induced me to hark back to family research I have carried out most of my life; fourteen years ago I wrote a summary of the immigrants in my own family tree. I found a few "ice age immigrants": I am between 6% and 12% Cherokee. Of the rest, 24% were born in Ireland, 9% in Scotland, 39% in England, 16% in Germany, and a smattering of other parts of Europe. It's interesting that Ancestry.com's DNA analysis didn't show a trace of Cherokee, and pegged my English roots at 70%. That's the conundrum of small number statistics. We think of getting 50% of our DNA from our father and 50% from our mother. But the vagaries of "crossing over" that produces eggs and sperm can shift these proportions one way or another, so one child could be 60-40 and another 25-75! Pity poor Senator Elizabeth Warren, who grew up being told she had "substantial" Native American ancestry. Her DNA test results, released in 2018, showed "between 1/64 and 1/1,024" Cherokee ancestry. Actually, I count her lucky. My DNA results cannot demonstrate even that much, yet family records show a minimum of 1/16. That's life.

After retirement I worked for three years as a volunteer docent at the Machine Shop at Hagley Museum, on the grounds of the du Pont powder mills (see the picture). I learned a lot of company and du Pont family history, and Dupont company history. There was much in this book that I'd never heard before. It was great to re-connect with the stories of the powder mill, and to learn of an immigrant population that I had heard only a little about.

A word about safety. The Dupont Company had a strong tradition of safety all during the time I worked there. I learned that the number of gunpowder explosions during the 118 years that black powder was manufactured there exceeded one per year. But a typical black powder factory in America of the time had five to ten times as many explosions. Dupont powdermen had a much greater chance of living long enough to retire, compared to the rest. This is the only quibble I have with Powder & Lace; otherwise, it is a marvelous book.

ZEUS's thunderbolt

 kw: articles, lasers, record setting

An article yesterday in earth.com reports on a record-setting power level for "the most powerful U.S. laser," named ZEUS: 2 petawatts peak power in a pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second. The click-bait headline states "over 100x the global electricity output." Let's unpack this a little for us mere mortals.

The author helpfully states that 2 petawatts is 2 quadrillion watts. Firstly, assuming a "square" pulse (it isn't, but probably close enough), 2 quadrillion watts times 25 quintillionths of a second results in 50/1,000ths, or 1/20th, of a watt-second. A watt-second is also known as a Joule, the standard unit of energy. The night light in my hallway uses 0.25 watts, continuously. The energy of this laser pulse would keep my night light shining for…one-fifth of a second. Barely the blink of an eye! What gives?

The breakthrough this article reports is not the sheer power of the pulse. A 0.05 Joule pulse is nothing special. Off-the-shelf metal-cutting lasers operate in the range of 30 J per pulse, ten pulses per second, for an average power of 300 watts. The pulses are short, in the nanosecond to microsecond range, but nowhere near as short as the 25-attosecond  pulse width of the ZEUS laser.

The breakthrough in pulse width is important because it enables the achievement of extreme power levels (such as petawatts), which, I am informed by the Duck Duck Go "AI Assistant", "…enables the study of complex interactions between light and matter, such as astrophysical phenomena and particle acceleration. These powerful lasers are also used in various fields, including medical treatments and material science research."

De-jargonizing that, it says that materials behave differently when hit that hard, and quantum particles such as electrons can be accelerated to extreme energies without resorting to miles-wide accelerators. The "astrophysical phenomena" mentioned include the very high energy environments found near black holes or during supernova eruptions.

Now that scientists have squeezed a modest-energy pulse into one forty-thousandth of a trillionth of a second, I expect further work will lead to much greater total power and peak power.

Doctor Doolittle attainable?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, sociology, communication

How do animals communicate? Why do they do so? What do they have to talk about? What are they saying? Can we eavesdrop? Can we horn in?

The first question has numerous answers, and has motivated a great lot of literature. The answers to the third and successive questions are still elusive at best, and impossible (to date) to answer. But the second question, now: Ah, that's a good one. Why, indeed, do animals communicate? To narrow the focus quite a bit: Why do animals talk?

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum takes up precisely that question. Were I the editor I would suggest adding a word to the title: Vocally. Dr. Kershenbaum states in the Introduction that this book focuses only on auditory communication, to keep the book's size manageable. And while I am making suggestions, may I offer that the cover picture, of a frog nose-to-nose with a snail, is way off the point? Frogs eat snails, and snails are remarkably mute. There's a pair with nothing, but nothing, to talk about!

In the context of biological evolution, vocalizing, in common with all kinds of communication, must serve the needs of the creature in its environment. Take up the question for yourself: what needs to you have? Shelter, food, a mate, and enjoyment. Each of these needs is different in detail from the similar needs of any animal in its own environment. Also, for most animals larger than a limpet, a fifth need would be a sense of purpose, even though that may be largely wrapped up in both providing and securing the first four needs.

The author illustrates the range of animal talk by discussing seven animals: Wolf, Dolphin, Parrot, Hyrax, Gibbon, Chimpanzee, and Human. In each chapter the animal's unique vocalizations are examined with this question in view: Is it Language? And a corollary: Is it a stepping stone towards language?

At first it seem to me that the order is a bit odd: Hyraxes weigh a pound or two, with a correspondingly small brain; dolphins are the heaviest on the list and, after humans, have the largest brain in relation to body size. I finally recognized a specific order, that of successive degrees of verbal complexity. I wondered why Dolphins were brought in so early. Most of us think of them has being closest to having a language. However, their whistles are variable, not repeatable, and nobody has yet been able to discern a vocabulary of "dolphinese". The author stresses in this chapter and others that language does not necessarily require discrete words. I am strongly skeptical about that. I personally tend to put "wordlessness" as distinctive on non-language, but I am willing to withhold judgment for now.

Can wolf howling be considered linguistic in any way? It must be pre-linguistic, as it is a kind of singing. Howling wolves are clearly enjoying the experience; howling is emotional. Considering that, in humans, the brain structures that support song are larger and more deeply established than those that support speaking and speech hearing, it is evident to me that song came long before speech, and perhaps by a million years or more…or perhaps by several millions of years.

The first animal treated that seems to have word-like utterances is the hyrax, a little marmot-sized relative of elephants—they even have little tusks! It may seem a stretch to call their chippy, chittery vocalizations as songs, but the author thinks they are. They are not random strings of the five distinct sounds a hyrax makes; they seem to have a syntax. That is, certain sounds never occur one after the other, while others are usually found in succession. Just as we have words that contain several syllables, it may be that, if hyraxes actually have "words", many are of several syllables. (In human speech, contrast monosyllabic Chinese with polysyllabic Japanese.)

Putting gibbons next in order, we find certain similarities in their "songs" to hyrax "songs" except that gibbons have 27 (or 28, the text says both at different points) distinct utterances, with a much more complex syntax than that of hyrax "songs".

Parrots are a really mixed bunch. While most parrots, and several other birds such as Mynah birds and ravens, can mimic human speech sounds (and doorbells, gunshots and sirens), they don't use these sounds in meaningful ways, with an exception or two. A bird named Alex, an African Grey Parrot, became famous for his ability to hold a simple but meaningful conversation with a human. Getting Alex to this point took a lot of training, of a special type described in the Parrots chapter. Alex has died, and another African Grey Parrot is being trained; stay tuned.

Was Alex an exceptional genius among birds? For one thing, his verbal abilities indicate that the arrangement of a bird's brain might be quite a bit more efficient and economical than that of a mammal's brain. His brain was the size of a shelled walnut and weighed less than a quarter ounce. A typical house cat has a one-ounce brain, and only a very exceptional cat can learn to recognize more than their name and the sound of a can opener. Regardless of Alex's skills, it is evident that parrots in the wild don't use language in any humanlike, or even Alex-like, way.

So, gibbons sing. Chimpanzees don't. What some (stress: some) chimps can do is learn either rudimentary ASL (American Sign Language) or other physical means of indicating a small number of words. Sentences longer than "give banana" seem to be beyond them. The gorilla Koko learned more ASL and was a better conversationalist. But neither chimps nor gorillas have a vocal apparatus that can produce uttered language, and it is pretty clear that they don't have the flexibility of mentation to support humanlike language at the level of a two-year-old human. Somehow, Alex the parrot could hold his own with a six-year-old human.

The author stresses again and again that animals communicate according to the needs imposed by their environments. The complexity of their utterances—and again, he is reporting only on audible communication—generally reflects the complexity of their social environment. It appears that only humans can maintain relationships with potentially thousands of other humans (The number of names in the Picasa face-name directory for my photos comes to about 1,200. There are a few hundred other people I know by name and face and converse with more frequently than yearly, whom I have not photographed). The largest chimpanzee "village" is less than 100. Similarly for dolphins, orcas, and their kin.

How and where and when did humans make a breakthrough that allows an actual infinite range of expression? We may not make many more unique sounds than the sound-repertory of a gibbon (English phoneme lists range from 44 to 46, and Mandarin Chinese requires 88 phonemes, but Hawaiian gets by with 24). We combine them endlessly, and we can distinguish them. Thus, most English speakers can speak and recognize about 10,000 one-syllable words, 30,000-35,000 2-syllable words, and a total of 60,000-100,000 total words, plus all the case inflections and conjugations needed to make grammar work. The author stresses this point: No other animal has grammar, or at least nothing like a grammar that we can recognize.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Firstly, that a great deal of research lies ahead, for us to begin to understand what any particular species of animal "means" by its utterances. Secondly, whether "words" really are necessary for the kind of flexible communication we call "human communication," which is what we usually mean when we use the term "language."

What Dr. Kershenbaum has given us is not the answer to "Why animals talk," but a few foundation stones, of a set of unknown size, the groundwork for learning why they do talk, and eventually, what they are saying (which we may find out is not anything we'd enjoy hearing!).

The bear facts

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, natural history, bears

This is a very unfortunate bear. It is an Asiatic Black Bear, also called a Moon Bear. It has been in this "crush cage" its entire life, and will probably die here. A couple of times per week a long, very thick needle is thrust into its side to extract bile from its gall bladder. The bare patch on the bear's belly isn't just from gall extraction; its hair is generally falling out because of malnourishment, in spite of the fact that it is obese: "empty calories" in their grimmest manifestation.

As we learn in Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future by Gloria Dickie, 12,000 of these bears are "farmed" in China and much of Southeast Asia, including a few countries such as Vietnam, where the practice has been legally banned (but that's very poorly enforced). Twelve thousand is about one quarter of the entire population of these bears. The bile sells for about $1 for 1cc, which comes to 25,000 Vietnamese Dong or 4,000 Cambodian Riels. The bile is claimed to have great medicinal benefits. It actually does have certain medical uses, but there are other medicines that work better, though they may cost more.

A telling anecdote from Chapter 4, "Liquid Gold": In a hospital the author encountered a bear farmer she had met. He told her he had joint pains. She asked, "You have lots of bile!" He said, "I want something that works."

On to other bears. The smallest is the Sun Bear; adults average about 130 pounds, half the size of a Moon Bear. The largest is the Kodiak population of the Brown Bear, up to 1,000 pounds and more. The most dangerous is the Sloth Bear of India, which kills more people than all other bears combined (This is a dreadful combination of very dense population of humans and an extremely territorial bear). Next largest is a tie between the Brown Bears of the "Lower 48 states", also called the Grizzly Bear, and the Polar Bear. These two bears are also considered man-killers, but only the Polar Bear thinks of humans as prey. We are about the size of a seal, their favorite snack. The most popular bear is the Panda Bear, which tops out at around 300 pounds. These are also the rarest in the wild. The most populous bear is the American Black Bear (the only one I've seen in the wild), in the 600-pound range, but a few old males have topped 900 pounds. The number in the U.S. is nearly half a million, with half that many in Canada. Finally, the South American Spectacled Bear is rather rare (less than 18,000 remaining), and is the most cautious and shy. In her worldwide travels, with experts to guide her, she never saw one of these in the wild.

There are a few illustrations in the book, primarily chapter headings such as this one for Chapter 1. The artist, Arjun Parikh, has a unique style.

The book is a feast of information and impressions of not just the bears, but of human interactions with them in the various places they inhabit. None of them is as cuddly as our imagination dictates, though the tiny Sun Bear comes close (just watch out for 3-inch claws). 

Please consider finding, and signing, a petition to Asian governments to ban farming bears for bile.

P.S. Although I typically add Metric conversions when I use English units, there are so many this time that it would be cumbersome. I expect an educated reader to be able to divide pounds by 2.2 to get kg, and to multiply inches by 2.54 (or just 2.5) to get cm.

S.I. and the floating cat

 kw: simulated intelligence, art generation

I had Dall-E3 generate several images of a sumptuous parlor, including a piano and a sleeping cat, which I had stipulated was to be "sleeping on a sofa." A piano bench is not a sofa, but this cat isn't exactly sleeping on it: she is levitating next to it.

I add this to my folio of interesting glitches by art generation software.

The rest of Pushcart gets better

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, short stories, poems, collections

I wrote in the prior post about the volume 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, that a large proportion of the stories in the first third of the volume are for very niche audiences. Happily, audience awareness broadened after that. I rejected only four of the pieces making up pages 175-442. I am a bit surprised that I marked a "+" on ten prose pieces and four poems! Let's be clear, the only thing "poetic" about the poems is the evocative atmosphere. They were on subjects that mean something to me. I'll mention one:

"Memory" by Kevin Prufer summoned memories of my own mother as she descended into the fog of Alzheimer's Dementia, and also very early memories of leading by grandfather by the hand on walks, to make sure he found his way back home. The last line is about another poem for the author's mother that he didn't complete, "…because it was too sad and none of it / was helpful to anyone." Well, Kevin, the piece you did write was helpful to me.

When you know your offering is in a niche, there are ways to expand its reach. I'll mention two examples:

"The Crows of Karachi" by Rafia Zakaria presents a slice of life in the poor district of Karachi, Pakistan (truthfully, most of the city so qualifies). The crows are emblems of the vagaries of life, and the climax of the piece contrasts two women, one (the author's mother) who fed small birds while being vigilant to keep the crows from driving them away, and the other woman feeding birds indiscriminately, which fed only the crows.

"Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager, the last piece in the volume, is a sad tale of post-partum depression, a rather extreme case thereof, seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old daughter.

Verdict: I found the volume worth reading, even if I had to "engineer" my reading pace to minimize the junk.

By the way, the last 98 pages of the 540-page volume comprise various lists and indexes, but the "Contributors' Notes" take up just 3½ pages, barely a line or two per author. Not really enough in my view.