Affecting everything, affected by everything

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, neurology, medicine, memoirs

A medical student begins losing her sight, but at first cannot tell; eventually she realizes that her brain is filling in plausible details where her vision has stopped working. An older woman's leg makes running motions when she tries to sleep, sometimes kicking her husband; when it begins happening while she walks it gets very hard to walk reliably. A man wakes up in the morning, feeling fine; he talks with his doctor as usual—from the doctor's perspective—but his speech is mostly nonsensical and he doesn't realize he's beginning yet another day like the prior 7,600 or so because he has been in this hospital for 21 years.

I have heard it said that if there were only one human in the Universe, that more than half of the total complexity of the Universe would be found in that person's brain. When a functional object has not just billions but quadrillions or quintillions of moving parts, it is amazing that it functions at all, let alone with any reliability.

Neurologist Pria Anand, in The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, brings together more than a dozen stories, including a few of her own experiences, connecting them with history and mythology, to illuminate some of the things that do go wrong in the brain. Treating people (usually women) with migraine headaches is one thing. Experiencing them herself, complete with premonitory auras and even hallucinations, is quite another. For the sake of their sanity, doctors must learn to keep a certain distance from their patients. When a doctor is suffering the same symptoms, that distance is hard to maintain.

My mother died with Alzheimer's Dementia, as did her sister and their father before them. During her last year my mother was cared for by a wonderful nurse named Mary. But Mary, who also had relatives with similar dementia, eventually couldn't stand the strain and had a nervous breakdown. After Dad retained a new nurse, Mary would visit frequently, now as a friend rather than a caretaker. Mary recovered.

Many of the syndromes Dr. Anand discusses are found more in women than men, some are hard to diagnose, and in many cases a woman may be dismissed as "hysterical" by doctor after doctor before finding one with sufficient experience, and compassion, to ferret out the cause. Even something like Restless Leg may be dismissed as a hysterical manifestation, and since it has several possible causes, a doctor may be reluctant to order a whole bunch of tests to narrow the search for a cause.

I learned a few things. One that is important: the cerebellum is more than a control center for the body as I had thought. It mediates coordination, bringing together the will or desire, the evidence of the senses, and the knowledge of place and space, to weave the coordinated movements required to carry out the "orders" of the cerebrum. It can also briefly override the autonomic functions of the brain stem. We can briefly "take control" such as holding our breath when swimming underwater. But a disruption or injury to the breathing control circuit between the cerebellum and the brain stem, can produce a syndrome in which a person must breathe by an act of will, making it impossible to sleep. But being forced to stay awake has its own horrific result: in about two weeks without sleep, you just die. Diseases that damage the cerebellum produce any number of motion and coordination disorders.

Blindness is not just an eye problem. Several things can happen to or in the eye to affect our vision, such as damage to the cornea, the lens, or the retina. But between the eyes and the back of the brain where "vision happens", the optic nerves pass their signals through a few structures. A hiccup anywhere along the line can cause partial or total blindness. Damage at some junctures cause a person to be entirely sightless and yet not know it. Treating such a person cannot be aimed at restoring sight, but at setting up the support systems (relatives, spouse, friends, etc.) to keep the person oriented and safe. If such a one can't realize she's blind, she could walk into traffic or off a cliff with total confidence.

You may have heard of fever dreams. This has two meanings, one being the hallucinations that accompany malarial fevers. The other is more prosaic, something I experienced a few times as a child: when my fever due to a flu or cold rose about 102°F I would have what I called the Banging Dream. It would begin with a sound like a grain of sand ticking as it dropped from one side to the other of a small metal container that was being rocked back and forth; the container and the grain would enlarge slowly, and within a minute or two I would feel like my head was a huge steel drum in which a boulder was crashing back and forth. The basis was the sound of my own heartbeat, amplified monstrously as my overheated brain lost control of my senses. Other people experience moving colors, or "visits" from dead relatives…there is a panoply of odd things the brain under stress will do.

The author is such a good storyteller that I am at a loss how to proceed. Read for yourself and let her lead you on a guided tour of the world of a neurological resident and practicing neurologist.

Making visible memories

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, history of photography, nineteenth century, sociology, photographers

From about 1826 until 1839, taking a photograph was a matter of firmly setting up a camera, inserting a black holder containing the sensitized paper, sliding out the holder, taking the cap off the lens, and looking from time to time through a peephole (briefly uncovered) at the sensitized paper to see how the image was progressing. After a few hours, the apparent contrast would nearly disappear, indicating that the lighted portions of the paper had darkened sufficiently. One would then replace the lens cap, slip the holder back over the paper and remove it. A chemical bath was used to fix the image so that the paper was no longer light sensitive. One now has a paper negative image. This could be laid on another piece of sensitized paper and put between glass plates; this assembly would be laid in the sunlight for a prescribed time (minutes at least). Then the image on the second piece of paper could be chemically fixed for the final, positive image.

In 1939, Louis Daguerre announced his process of developing a latent image. This shortened exposure time from hours to about a minute in good light. Later developments in the production of photographic papers and films and other media, and in the chemistry of development and fixing of latent images, resulted in media, and the cameras that held them, that could capture an image in a fraction of a second, and finally, in sunlight at least, less than 1/1,000th of a second.

Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How it Transformed Art, Science, and History, by Anika Burgess, touches on the first photographs of the late 1820's, but primarily begins with Daguerre and the Daguerreotype. The latent image isn't mentioned, just assumed. For the purpose of the book, "Early" refers to the 70 years from 1839 to 1909. Thus the book's history ends before the invention of flashbulbs that I remember being used in the 1940's and 1950's, and before the Brownie view cameras such as the one my parents taught me to use in the early 1950's.

Studios for portrait photography initially had to be on the top floor, to have a skylight for illumination, until methods for producing a "flash" or other artificial bright light were invented. From the 1850's to the 1880's magnesium ribbon (for a "flare" lasting a few seconds) and powder (for more of a momentary "flash") were used. The book details how difficult it was to use magnesium without the abundant white smoke interfering with the photograph. Fires were also frequent. Magnesium as a light source is indeed hard to use, as I've experienced. Adding an oxidizer such as potassium chlorate or perchlorate leads to a better, briefer and brighter flash, but increases the risk of igniting the ceiling (an experiment a friend and I performed, using a couple of ounces of magnesium powder and a few ounces of potassium chlorate, in a glass bottle, produced a blazing flare five feet high. Fortunately we were outside).

The book doesn't mention lycopodium, the spores of a puffball mushroom. It was used after the middle 1880's until the 1940's. It is safer than magnesium, with less smoke, about like what is seen in this image I generated with GPT-Image-2.

As I recall, when I was a child "ordinary" film had a speed rating, called ASA at the time, of 25. The rule of thumb was that, using a lens aperture of f/11, the exposure in sunlight had to be one divided by the ASA rating, so our f/11 Brownie camera had a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second (close enough to 1/25). I had to learn how to momentarily stop breathing and stay very steady to take a picture. Indoor photography was impossible without using flash bulbs (they used aluminum or zirconium spun wire in pure oxygen to create the flash). ASA is now called ISO. Films still being produced are rated up to ISO 400 and some can be chemically "pushed" to ISO 1600. Digital photography has blown the doors off such figures.

This picture, taken in 1910, of my great-grandfather and other family members, had to be made outside (note the snow on the left). The family couldn't afford to go to a studio for a photo using lycopodium illumination (the oldest family photo I have, from 1893, was also taken outside, fortunately on a warmer day).

The bulk of Flashes records the effects on society, science and business. "Photo fiends", now called paparazzi, became a problem almost as soon as handheld photography became economical. The easier it becomes to take pictures, the easier it is to abuse the privilege.

Stop-motion photography, which preceded high-speed video, was done with multiple cameras set up to trigger in sequence. Such sequences first proved that running and trotting horses are entirely airborne during portions of their paces. Another showed how a cat twists in midair to land on its feet. Golf swings and acrobatic maneuvers could be analyzed.

Illuminants other than visible light also came into play when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. These penetrating radiations were dramatically misunderstood by almost everyone for decades, even through the mid-1900's. Radiation burns were frequent, and the book records a few cases of amputations needed because of radiation-induced cancer or gangrene. Yet I remember as late as 1960 going into a shoe store and using a fluoroscope to see how my shoes fit. We were only cautioned not to use it for more than a few seconds.

A little is said about the effect of photography on the arts, but primarily about the production of composite photographs or photo collages. As large landscape photographs began to fill galleries, I understand that there was a period of sturm und drang about photography superseding painting and other visual arts. Portrait photography did indeed supersede most portrait painting, but not entirely. Painting families such as the Wyeths are still very much in business. Similar worries about AI-generated art are heard currently, but I predict that future generations will still have painters and other "natural" artists in abundance.

All this just skates on the surface of a fascinating survey and analysis of how photography affected the human condition in the Nineteenth Century. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

Surging spiders

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

I checked on the blog just now, and saw that the view rate more than doubled in the past day to 56,000. Here is the chart for the past 24 hours:

The peak rate in the seven-o'clock hour was 11,440. The average rate during that hour was more than three per second. A full day at that rate would be almost 275,000 views! I checked the "Now" view, to see the past two hours:

The surge around 7:40 (my time, EDT) peaked at around 470, and that 10-minute surge totaled about 4,000 views (~6.5/second), 27% of the total for these two hours, and a daily rate over 575,000. The plateau that followed, at 150/minute, totaled about 5,800, and since then the per-minute rate has been around 30, varying from 15-60.

I have belatedly considered the number of views of the posts themselves, and the numbers don't add up. In a "posts statistics" view I am shown the number of views for the twenty most popular posts for a period, from which I can project the rest (there are 2,717 today) by fitting a lognormal distribution. The total views of the blog in any period, from an hour to a year, is five to ten times the sum of the views of all the posts. 

I conclude that 80-90% of the views recorded are hits on the blog that are not taken further. That is, no posts are opened. Whatever algorithm it is that "finds" this blog apparently checks the home page, and most of the time, drops it without going further. Oh, well. If the 10:1 ratio is the most likely, it still means that in the past 24 hours, about (at least?) 5,600 posts have been opened, and the hits have been scattered throughout the blog's history, on average opening each one twice. Compare this to the likely "real" activity of about four views per hour, wherever someone's search for a topic lands them.

What melting ice reveals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, glaciology, ice-patch archaeology

There are about 200,000 mountain glaciers worldwide, not counting the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. Searching for information about "perennial ice patches" I found statements about "tens of thousands". However, in a couple of areas where the ice patches and the glaciers have been comprehensively mapped, the ice patches outnumber the glaciers.

This matters to archaeologists. A glacier is on the move; that is part of the definition. That means that the ice experiences shearing. The field of glacial archaeology is primarily the study of stuff that is found where a glacier's tongue is melting, and only stone or metal objects tend to survive being squashed and shredded beyond recognition. A perennial ice patch is, also by definition, stationary. Thus, an item that was dropped, lost, or otherwise placed on an ice patch and later covered by snow and incorporated, is preserved in the ice, sometimes for millennia. 

Only the points of arrows and spears survive passage through a glacier. Entire arrows, complete with wooden shaft, fletching, and decoration, and a great many other artifacts made of or including wood, leather, bone, cloth and other perishable materials have been found melting out of ice patches. As the climate shifts, continually, an ice patch will grow from year to year and then partially melt for a few years. Once a perishable artifact emerges from the ice, it will usually rot and vanish within a few years.

The current warming cycle is a boon to ice-patch archaeologists. As reported in The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice, by Lisa Baril, the opportunities greatly exceed the number of ice-patch scientists and the available time to study them. This is based on the author's projection that ice patches are melting away, and may all disappear in the next few decades. I will touch on this contention later on.

The field of ice-patch archaeology was jump-started 35 years ago when the ice mummy Ötzi was discovered in the Alps. The story is told in commendable detail in the book. The man's body was dried but mostly intact, and his clothing, weapons and other possessions were nearly all intact and well preserved. Over time, with the development of more and better study techniques, it was found that he was murdered about 5,200 years ago, probably a day or two after a fight of some kind. The ice patch he was frozen into is in a mountain pass; he didn't make it over the pass into the next valley. I call this image, produced using Nano Banana 2, "Ötzi in happier times". Perhaps I should have showed him enjoying a meal with friends.

Being able to recover perishable artifacts greatly enriches our picture of the cultures of the times and places. For example, many wooden poles, some with fabric or leather "flags" attached, have been found in Norway and other areas including the Yukon. They were a mystery for a time, until indigenous people recognized them as "scare sticks" used to keep a fleeing group of reindeer or caribou on a path leading to stacked-stone blinds where hunters waited. Sadly, it has taken quite a while for "professional" archaeologists to learn the value of the knowledge in "the people who live there." This subject arises several times in the book.

The oldest artifact so far recovered from an ice patch is a part of an atlatl found to be 10,300 years old, recovered in Wyoming in 2007. In this case, the window of opportunity was just a day: Craig Lee found an ice patch that included lots of bison dung, and saw a stick poking out. He collected it, called the federal archaeologist for an emergency collection permit, and then checked around for more items. The next day it snowed, a lot. In the nineteen years since, the ice patch has grown, not melted back. In other places, ice patches have melted totally away. No matter which direction the general climate is "going", there is great variation from place to place.

This brings me to the sad subject of the over-hype about a warming climate. Is the climate warming? Yes, absolutely. Is it caused by rising CO₂? Yes, at least in part. Are humans to blame? Partly. It is a fact that in 1800 AD the CO₂ level was 280 parts per million (ppm), and now it is about 425 ppm. In 1897 Svante Arrhenius published his study of the greenhouse effect, in which he predicted that doubling the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere would increase global average temperature 4°C. However, others with a better knowledge of infrared spectroscopy later published that the effect would be 1°C or a little less. Both were wrong, in different directions.

I worked in infrared spectroscopy in the 1970's. Ten years before that I had reproduced Arrhenius's calculations, so it was easy to apply a better understanding of optical saturation and, so to speak, "hit it in the middle"; my conclusion was 1.5°C for a doubling of CO₂. Our present concentration of 425 ppm is about 1.5 times 280 ppm. Global average temperature has risen about 1°C, which indicates that my calculations are in the right range.

Now let us consider saturation. While the IPCC reports upon which climate alarmism is based do mention saturation, they don't stress it nearly enough. Saturation works this way. A chart of temperature as a function of concentration is not a straight line, but a curve, with two components. Arrhenius described one component this way, that a geometric increase in concentration produces a linear increase in temperature. He predicted that reducing CO₂ from 280 ppm to 140 ppm would reduce temperature 4°C, doubling it to 560 ppm would increase it 4°C, and doubling again to 1,120 ppm would cause a further increase of 4°C, or a total of 8°C, and so forth. This ignores saturation. By a level of 400 ppm, the CO₂ is absorbing almost all that it can absorb. Only a tiny bit more absorption is possible no matter how high CO₂ goes. 

There are very low-level secondary "wings" on the spectral absorption bands that come into play after concentration reaches a few percent, then the temperature rises more rapidly. This is what happened on Venus, where the concentration is more than 20,000 times the current concentration in Earth's atmosphere. We don't have enough fossil fuel to cause that to happen!

Saturation of absorption by CO₂ means that a further increase to 560 ppm—a doubling from the pre-industrial level—will not cause much increase in temperature, if any.

This should not make us complacent. We still need to continue adding more energy sources that don't require burning hydrocarbons. That includes nuclear fission. If CO₂ increases beyond 1,000 ppm it will be harder for some people to breathe comfortably, and the higher it goes, the greater the number of people who will feel the effects. But we need to recognize that it will be a long, long time, if ever, before a battery-powered jet aircraft will be practical, or even possible. And in cold climates, keeping an electric automobile cabin warm uses more power than moving the vehicle. The market for EV's is essentially zero in northern Norway, for example (it may improve when sodium batteries become more common; lithium does very poorly in the cold, but sodium performs very well).

Although I was a bit put off by the drum beat of climate change concern, I really like the book, and I learned a lot. I recommend it.

-------------

A few items I need to mention:

1. On page 27, discussing carbon-14 dating, it says, "This method works well for organic objects up to fifty thousand years old, after which the amount of carbon remaining in organic material becomes vanishingly small." The amount of total carbon remains almost exactly the same. The amount of carbon-14 is what vanishes. C-14 in atmospheric CO₂, from which plants make it into sugar, is 1.4 parts per trillion.
2. On page 66, discussing Pleistocene extinctions, the word "others" is needed: "All of them would go extinct, … but many continued to thrive." Not "many" but "many others" thrived, if "all" of the species mentioned went extinct.
3. On page 203, the catalog of tall Himalayan mountains is called "fourteeners". This term refers to mountains exceeding 14,000 feet in North America. The high Asian peaks, taller than 26,000 feet, are called "eight-thousanders", referring to 8,000 meters, or 26,247 feet.