The pre-Hippies of two centuries ago

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mini biographies, transcendentalism, social movements, abolitionism

My most recent wildcard selection, a rare excursion into reading about intellectualism and literary movements, is The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World by Bruce Nichols. Like many, I have read only a little of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and I considered him the originator and leading figure of Transcendentalism. He and several others founded the Transcendental Club in 1836, but I find from reading this book that Emerson didn't like the term "transcendentalism". The term he and his colleagues and acquaintances more frequently used was "the Newness".

From reading the book I didn't obtain much of an understanding of transcendentalism. I wondered, "What did they wish to transcend?" So I did some digging.

Per the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Transcendentalism is a 19th-century philosophical and literary movement that asserted that divine, fundamental truths can be known through personal intuition rather than through rigid religious dogma or sensory experience." Emerson and the others were originally Unitarians (Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister), and they were reacting to the cold rationalism and sobriety of what some have called a "faithless faith". They desired a more intense experience, something more spiritual.

Note: These Unitarians considered themselves Christians, but denied that Jesus is God. They had various explanations for this, while still considering that Jesus is worthy of worship, just not on the level of God. This is in contrast to modern Unitarian Universalists, an eclectic mélange of semi-theistic and non-theistic belief systems that are united primarily in their universalism, which is the belief that everyone eventually is received into heaven, perhaps even Satan. The Unitarians of two-plus centuries ago are well described by a term more recently laid upon Episcopalians, "God's frozen chosen."

The transcendentalists, then, weren't acting contrary to Unitarianism, but in parallel, seeking to transcend it. Thus, the Newness was embodied in dramatic experimentation: new ways of living, new kinds of schools, ways of speaking and lecturing and writing that differed greatly from the European models, and an exceedingly self-focused and experimental spirituality. Communes and similar mini-societies arose (and disbanded), new schools were founded (and then foundered), lecture series and small periodicals abounded, and "church" as most understood it was practically abandoned or dramatically changed.

All this reminds me a whole lot of the social radicalism of "the Sixties": communes, a surge of home schooling (quite different from the more effective methods currently in use), social protest against not just governmental authority but "the establishment" in general, and an intense focus on personal self-regard and autonomy. There is a current resurgence of similar trends, most evident in the notion of "my truth" coupled with the weird group-think of cancel culture.

Stepping back, I see all three movements, the Newness of the early 1800's, the activism of the mid-1900's, and the "political correctness" of the 1980's that led to more recent "wokeness", as being like the Hippies of my youthful social environment. In all three, it is evident that the abandonment of Divine morality such as the Ten Commandments leads unerringly to amorality, and the abandonment of God as "the truth" (which Jesus called Himself) leads to "my truth" which leads to "every man a liar." The characteristic of most modern political and cultural leaders now, in the 2020's, is, to paraphrase former President G.W. Bush, "Some lie when they deem it necessary, but these lie constantly, just to stay in practice."

The Newness was not based on overt lies, but on rejection of Divine authority in favor of personal autonomy. The Sixties was mired in falsehood and half-truths that made many fearful to speak the truth (I was one who did, and I was nearly assassinated as a consequence). American society of the current Teens and Twenties could be called the Triumph of Lies, beginning with "You can choose your doctor" and going downhill from there.

So I am not misunderstood, I am a triple Trumper. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 primarily to vote against Hilary Clinton, because she and her husband were the main focus of the Bush quote above. I voted for him again in 2020 because during his first term he won my respect (As an aside, various articles about Mr. Trump claim that he told ten thousand or twenty or thirty thousand lies. All such articles have been demonstrated to be riddled with lies against him, while proving no more than a handful of untruthful statements he made; in actuality, I observe that the legacy media perpetrates tens of thousands of lies about Donald Trump daily. This is the source of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which afflicts about 40% of the voting public). I voted for Donald Trump again in 2024 with the clearest of consciences. Not because he is a "good man" (I agree with Jesus that "no man is good") but that he is measurably better than literally anyone else in public office. Rather than answer, "but does he lie?" I would say that he tells the truth more than nearly everyone else, particularly the pseudo-journalists of the legacy media.

Back to the book. The Newness had fallen apart by the early or mid 1850's. The rising conflagrations around the country related to slavery and abolitionism forced the transcendentalists and their sympathizers out of their armchairs and writing-desks and into more public action. Firstly, they became more apt to speak in support of abolition publicly, and some took more direct action, such as harboring runaway slaves in their homes and helping them flee further northward. Finally even Emerson, one of the last to do so, spoke fervently in favor of abolishing slavery. As the nation teetered towards civil war, the "life of the mind" and "armchair philosophizing" became untenable, even impossible. The Unitarian and Transcendentalist belief that human nature is basically good was called into question, then denigrated, and finally demolished as more than half a million lives were taken in the war between the states.

The first prominent transcendentalist to die was Henry David Thoreau, on May 6, 1963. Although Emerson gave the eulogy at his funeral, he was himself in decline, at least mentally. Others followed over the years. Emerson himself lingered until his death April 27, 1882, followed about six years later by Louisa May Alcott. She was not a transcendentalist, but a parallel "fellow traveler" whose fame as an author had two strains: books based on her experiences in her family and the "Emerson circle", and rip-roaring adventure stories that she usually published under pseudonyms. 

Transcendentalism had come and gone. Remnants remain in the styles of writing that led to masterpieces such as Walden and Moby-Dick. Experiential writing, what one might call crypto-memoir, is a lasting legacy and informs today's best writers. Emerson's grave, shown here, centers the "transcendentalists' field" and represents more than a gravesite, but a legacy that opened the American mind, fortunately without destroying it.

LED lights won't kill you

 kw: risk analysis, lighting, light sensitivity, color vision, hype

Perhaps you've seen online warnings, that we must discard all our LED lamps Right Now! Fear not, they are no more dangerous than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, and frequently much safer. The ones to be wary of are fluorescent bulbs, whether spiral or straight tubes, because they contain mercury.

Two sorts of fears are expressed about LED lamps. Firstly, they are said to have lots of blue light, which can damage eyes and cause loss of sleep. Secondly, cheaper ones may flicker, which can cause eye strain and even nausea for some people.

I studied color vision professionally, and I've been a spectroscopist. So let's tackle the color issue first: Do LED lamps produce more blue light than other types? I will show next that the answer is Yes for some and No for others. This has to do with the concept of Color Temperature.

Most of us are familiar with the terms "red hot", "yellow hot" and "white hot", in order of increasing temperature. Not many people know there is also "blue hot", which is even hotter. If you use metal tongs to hold a small nail in the fire in a fireplace, it can be heated red hot. It takes a hotter flame to make it glow more brightly with an orange light. And we tend to think of "white hot" as the color of molten iron as seen in a steel plant. Actually, the light from the filament of a 100-watt incandescent light bulb is even whiter than the light from liquid iron, because it is several hundred degrees hotter.

Most incandescent lamps use a filament temperature near 2,700 K, where "K" refers to Kelvins, the temperature standard used in physics. In everyday terms, 2,700 K = 2,427°C = 4,400°F. The light from incandescent lamps is actually orange, which is why when you are outside on an overcast day, particularly in the early evening, the light coming out the windows of houses looks yellow or orange, compared to the gray or blue-gray sky. Your eye is actually tuned to see a cloudy sky as white. That "gray sky" color is the true color of the Sun.

The color temperature of the Sun is close to 6,500 K (~6,230°C or 11,250°F). This high temperature produces much more blue light, so sunlight is bluer than the light from a light bulb.

Before compact fluorescent lamps were invented, to get a brighter, slightly bluer light, a couple of technologies were invented to use lamps with a filament temperature of 3,000 K. This is called "cool white", and it is bluer than the "warm white" of an ordinary incandescent bulb. To get even bluer light required a filter.

Both compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) and LED lamps use fluorescence to create broad-spectrum light. In a CFL, mercury in a glass tube is stimulated by an electric arc to emit strong ultraviolet light. Phosphors (fluorescent powders) coating the inside of the tube convert nearly all of this UV light to the many wavelengths of "white" light. It happens that mercury also emits a deep blue wavelength, plus green, yellow, and red, but there are sharp "lines" with narrow bandwidths. The phosphors (there are several) add more blue, green, yellow and red in wider bands that make a more pleasant light. The mix of phosphors can be varied to make CFL's that have "warm" or "white" or "cool white" colors—although the "cool white" actually matches a super-hot object, hotter than any earthly material—, and "daylight" which is even more bluish.

LED's are even more flexible. They all work by producing a primary blue color and having phosphors set to intercept some of this and convert it to the rest of the colors. In contrast to CFL's, which can produce only one color temperature at a time, LED's can be color-variable. The light-emitting elements are very small (a few millimeters or smaller), so many are placed side by side. If some of these are blue-only, then extra blue light can be added to shift the visual appearance from warm white to daylight and all points in between. Also, when you buy a single-color CFL or LED lamp, it will be described according to both a term like "cool white" and a color temperature like 3,000 K. A "daylight" lamp will be reported as a color temperature of 6,500 K, and a "bright white" lamp will be in between, usually 5,000 K. 

Our psychology associates yellower light with early morning or late evening or firelight, and makes us feel restful. "Warm white" light promotes sleep. Bluer light is associated with daylight and makes us alert and wakeful. For this reason most office spaces are lighted with "bright white" 5,000 K lamps. Daylight colored lamps were tried in the past, but the light is considered too harsh and it makes people irritable. "5K" is a good compromise.

The spectrum of my shop light (it is variable, and I have it set to 5,000 K) is shown here:

This image's colors are a composite of the lamp's spectrum and the camera's sensors, which are not the same as the color sensors in our eye. Thus, one of the features of this image is the narrow, rather dim yellow section; to the eye, it looks wider and brighter. But another feature is very important for understanding how these lamps work, and why some folks are alarmed. Between the green band and the blue band there is a much dimmer section where "sky blue" should be. There is actually some, but not much. The narrow, deep blue band is the original light from the blue-emitting element. All the other colors are from the phosphors.

The main way that color temperature is varied in LED lamps is by setting the percentage of the blue light that the phosphor section intercepts. In a variable LED, which may contain a few dozen emitters, some of them are blue-only and the variability is produced by increasing or reducing the current to these.

Therefore, a "warm white" LED produces only a little blue light, while a "bright white" LED will produce much more blue by comparison. I use lamps specified as "warm white", or 2,700 K, in my bedside lamp and in the bathroom. I tested their spectra as compared to an incandescent bulb (I still have a few squirrelled away). In this image the incandescent lamp's spectrum is at the top, and spectra for two versions of LED are second and third:

The color temperature of the incandescent bulb is 2,700 K. The two warm white LED's match this very well, although they have a little less of the deepest blue. The phosphors are better than those in my shop light; they even show sky blue (cyan) colors.

The "LED Danger" hype is firstly based on blue light from LED's making it hard to go to sleep. This is simply remedied by using warm white lamps in the bedroom and bathroom. If you get fixtures with color-variable lamps for the rest of the house, you can set them to be bluer (4,000 K or 5,000 K) in the daytime and yellower (2,700 K) after sundown. If your cell phone has an "evening" or "night" setting, use that appropriately. Phones by default are close to daylight color on average (6,500 K). Going "orange" in the evening entirely solves the "blue white at night" issue!

For those who may have technical questions about taking spectra, I use an "inside out spectrograph" I made. This picture shows the three lamps used to make the triple spectrum above. This 3-socket fixture is covered by a black hood with a long slit. My camera is mounted ten feet down a darkened hall. I have a little holder mounted on the camera with a grating sold by Rainbow Symphony; you can buy them for a few dollars each. I just point the camera where the spectrum is and zoom in on it.

Now, about flickering. The LED lamps shown in this picture are of different ages. The older one is at the bottom, and it flickers in two ways. Firstly, it pulses at the rate of 120 Hz the same way old fluorescent tubes do. This is not as strong an effect as in the old tubes, but I can notice it if I sweep my eyes past the lighted lamp; a little banding is evident. This shouldn't bother most people, but some people might notice the pulsing in peripheral vision, with is more motion sensitive.

The other kind of flickering is more evident. These "pseudo-filament" bulbs look nice, but older ones can have momentary disconnections inside as they heat up. This causes a brief dimming that looks like a power interruption. It is, but inside the lamp itself. Further, some really cheap lamps have poor circuitry inside the base of the lamp that can also flicker like that. If you notice this kind of flickering, try putting a better quality lamp in the fixture and see if it continues. I replaced the lower lamp with one of the other kind (with yellow-colored filaments), and both kinds of flickering no longer happen. The 120 Hz pulsing is dealt with by using phosphors that have a little "dwell"; they emit light for a fraction of a second longer than the flash from the blue LED element.

There you have it. LED's are at least as safe as incandescent bulbs, and they produce much less heat. Use a comment to ask follow-up questions.

Comets, asteroids, … and writers

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, astronomy, comets, asteroids, astronomers, poetry

My introduction to the Internet was when my company made it available to our desktop computers in June, 1994. Just a month later I was able to see the wonderful telescopic pictures of Jupiter, bruised and battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy. At night, I would get out my 3-inch diameter telescope and look at Jupiter. I could just see the black spots of the impacts at 120x, which is about the limit with such a small telescope. The planet appeared about the size of a pea.

In preparation for an online lecture by David H. Levy, co-discoverer of the comet, a friend in a local astronomy club gave me a copy of Levy's recent book Star Gazers: Finding Joy in the Night Sky. It is a lovely little book; I finished reading it in two days. I could have finished even faster, but Dr. Levy's writing rewards close reading.

I find that he has discovered or co-discovered 23 comets and hundreds of asteroids. Once in a while a comet gets bright enough for any of us to see, and then star parties like this one multiply (Image generated by GPT-Image 2.5 via Leonardo AI).

In this memoir he also reports witnessing about 200 eclipses, mostly lunar eclipses, but including at least ten solar eclipses. In Chapter 4 he includes the discovery photos of Comet Shoemaker-Levy. Most comets are discovered photographically, by taking a photo of a likely spot (generally along the ecliptic, the Sun's apparent path in the sky), and then another one of the same spot an hour or two later. Looking at the images as a stereo pair, you can see something that moved as an object that seems to hover above the apparent plane of view. This also works for finding an asteroid, which appears as a "hovering" star, while a comet image is more like a smudge or tiny cloud. Right up until today, human binocular vision is superior to any technological imaging method. It is why asteroid hunting with wide-frame cameras is being carried out by citizen science to verify tentative machine identifications.

The book is composed of small essays, just one or two or three pages each, that the author has published elsewhere, with added introductions to most chapters. They are arranged by topic, not chronologically. The book ends with an ode to his late wife Wendee.

I wish to comment on writing itself. Dr. Levy writes lyrically without any loss to scientific merit. He calls himself an amateur astronomer, as do the references to him I have found. He is perhaps the poster child for amateur science, understanding that "amateur" derives from a Latin word for "lover". He has his own observatory with a few telescopes in it, named Jarnac Observatory. Many of his discoveries were made there, but numerous others were made in the company of friends, including Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, co-discoverers with him of the "hammer that hit Jupiter." 

His doctoral dissertation dwelt on references to astronomy and astronomical objects in the writings of Shakespeare, and he has written of other literary lights who loved astronomy. He tells of reciting or reading poetry at most meetings of astronomical societies he attends. Many great scientists have also been lovers of the arts, from Leonardo DaVinci, of course, to Albert Einstein, who played violin to relax, and a great many others. Having an artistic mind seems to lend itself to having a scientific outlook.

For this reason I prefer STEAM to STEM: Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math. They all wrap up together and buttress one another in a wonderful synergy.

I intend to track down other books he has published, and I look forward in just a couple more days to attending his online lecture.

The gig economy from inside - half a world away

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, work, workers, gig economy, China

In the closing chapters of his book, Chinese writer Hu Anyan discusses freedom. Among a great many jobs he held over the past couple of decades, in some he felt he had a certain freedom of action, and in others he had to be quite robotic just to survive. To have the freedom to write he needed to not work for certain periods of time. In the gig economy, almost anywhere, what the Chinese call 996—working 9am to 9pm, six days a week—is the minimum required to survive. Writing and 996 don't mix.

Hu's book, published in 2022 in Chinese and translated for English publication three years later, is I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. The first major chapter, about parcel delivery, takes up almost 40% of the book, and deals with a kind of work that he did more than the others, though for more than one delivery company. Later we find that he enumerates seventeen jobs, although he discounts a few very short ones, so it may be that he worked as many as 20 jobs in 22 years. (The cover art for the book, by Klaus Kremmerz, is much better than anything I could generate with AI)

Mr. Hu describes some of the people that surrounded him, not naming any but giving them letters such as L, J and Z, or tagging them with a job title such as "the graphics designer". Hu has an interesting combination of an easygoing manner with underlying social anxiety. This led him down numerous less-than-productive paths. If I tally correctly, he accumulated very few enemies, so he did rather well in that regard. It becomes clear as we read, that there were just enough kind and even generous people in his life that he managed to make a living. Only for one period in the middle there did he have to rely on his parents to put him up while he worked for a true pittance, or not at all.

He spent a few years in Beijing, at least a couple in Shanghai, and traveled, usually at someone's suggestion, to some far-flung parts of China where the rents were super-low, but so was the pay, or the receipts from a couple of small businesses he and friends engaged in.

For American readers, it is well to understand that the Yuan exchange rate varied in the range 6.5 per dollar to 8.3 per dollar; it is currently 6.77:1. So a five square meter bedroom renting for 1,200 Yuan in about 2010 equates to around $180. Simple street meals cost a few yuan, in the range of half a dollar, more or less. I have not been to China, but I can compare this with a visit to Japan in 1977, where the cheapest meal I bought, at a 360-Yen-per-dollar rate, came to about $1.50. At one point he had accumulated savings of about 30,000 Yuan, roughly $4,500. Not a big cushion, but adequate for the time.

This book has become a success. I hope he can make a good living as a writer. I enjoyed the book, not only as a window into the life of someone very different from me, but also as an example of straight narrative, well stated, clear and easy to read. Kudos also to the translator, Jack Hargreaves, whose foreword explaining some quirks of Chinese place names is very helpful.

Your insides are talking – are you listening?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physiology, internal organs

A book like Organ Speak: What it Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies, by Giulia Enders, can go in many directions. The direction Dr. Enders takes is to introduce five organ systems. In common culture, asked to name our bodily organs, we may list the heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, and eyes; maybe some would add spleen, pancreas, liver, large and small intestines, and at that point run out of ideas. Here we find a short but crucial list, in order, the Lung, Immune system, Skin, Muscles, and the Brain (including the extended nervous system).

These are wise and clever choices. Few people realize that besides the lungs, the other four permeate or encompass our entire body from tip to toe. Maybe in the future a sequel will include the Skeleton and the Vascular system including Heart; they also fill the body without filling it up.

Jumping to the middle of the book, the skin probably has more unique functions than any of the others. It has perhaps a dozen different sensory "instruments" that sample the outside world in an up-close-and-personal way. At the same time, the skin is our primary organ of defense, a barrier and barricade against injuries, attacks by micro- (and macro-) organisms, and chemical threats such as the salt in seawater when we take an ocean swim. (I prompted Gemini for this illustration, using a line from the parody song "Skin" by Allan Sherman.)

A side note, something I've considered: The skin seems to be an osmotic membrane. Osmosis causes water to move through a membrane to the side with more salt. Have you ever noticed how soon after beginning to swim in fresh water you feel the need to pee? It's why public swimming pools are filled with chlorine and other chemicals! Yet when you swim in the ocean, you rarely need to pee, but instead get quite thirsty? Ocean water is saltier than your bodily fluids, and water slowly exits your body into the seawater.

The second chapter has the best explanation of the components of the immune system that I've seen. Some cells are of ancient lineage and function much as they did to protect trilobites from Cambrian organisms. Others have been added over the eons. The system is quite complex, and when it is kept in good balance, it has much to do with why we and certain other mammals can live 50, or 100, or more years (I understand that the secret behind certain tortoises and sharks living 200 years and more is their very slow metabolism. I suspect that, opposite to the principle that dogs age seven times as fast as humans, a human ages four or five times as fast as a Greenland Shark).

Our brain, and its development over time from the proto-brains of tiny Precambrian worms all through the vertebrate line to primates and then humans, is a layered structure with many parts. I think of them as sub-organs. This structure strongly hints at the true nature of our nervous system: many parts working together to sense the world, operate the body, generate plans, communicate, and support our sense of self and personal wholeness.

A portion of the chapter discusses sleep, its various stages, what promotes going to sleep and passing through these stages, and what is happening when we dream. I found this statement rather stunning: 

"When we're dreaming, areas of the brain can communicate with each other without reason or sensory impressions getting in the way."

That seems to explain the odd or inane quality of many dreams. I feel like I dream all night, sometimes beginning before I am fully asleep. There is often a sense of drive or purpose, but all too often the scene keeps switching, so there's never a sense of completion. On the other hand, my wife almost never remembers dreaming, but when she does remember, it is usually unpleasant or just puzzling.

In the Brain chapter the author discusses AI a little, in the context of Moravec's Paradox, which is that many things we do with little thought are extremely difficult for computer machinery, but things that computers excel at are very hard for us. This statement (by the author or by Moravec's group, I cannot tell) sums it up:

"If intelligence is defined by the number of thought processes (or calculation steps) necessary to arrive at a result, then even tying shoelaces is vastly superior to winning a chess world championship."

In a career in software development and design, I lived by the motto, "Brains excel at detecting similarities; computers excel at detecting differences." I built a lucrative career on making machine expertise available to humans, while reserving to the humans the tasks the machine couldn't do. We would do well to keep this principle in mind when devising AI tools. We are at most one percent along the way to producing AGI, and getting to true ASI will require another factor of 100. We can barely afford the tools we're now using. I think we're safe from a robot dystopia for a long time to come.

I should mention that the book was very ably translated from German by Jamie Bulloch, and illustrated by the author's sister Jill Enders, who was also an idea-collaborator. The sisters work well together.

Scott Simon's animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, essays, animals, pets

When I was fourteen, late one afternoon I caught a large female praying mantis. She was a beauty, more than five inches long. At first she fought, stabbing me with the spines on her forelegs, but soon the warmth of my hand calmed her. I took her home and tied a thread around her thorax, carefully not too tightly and avoiding restricting her legs or wings. She could fly on her "leash".

At nightfall I tied the end of her thread to the bedpost and went to bed. Later I suddenly woke up, and sat up. This apparently startled the mantis, for she flew right into my face! This is what I saw just before she crashed into my forehead. I used tiny fingernail scissors to cut the thread, opened my window and let her fly out into the night. (Image information below*)

Scott Simon's first pet was a bit more prosaic. He caught a grasshopper, named it Hoppy, and with his father's help put it in a jar and perforated the lid. He gave it various leaves and bits of grass to find out what it would eat. To no avail. In two days Hoppy died.

Scott Simon's memoir/essay collection Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known records this vignette, illustrated by Liana Finck. Her line drawings spice up the many chapters of the book.

He had better success with a succession of more robust pets and other animals. Probably the shortest-lived was a hamster named Bagel; about two years.

Ulysses S. Cat is full of cute, interesting, heart warming stories about a magisterial white cat named Gato Blanco, a poodle named Daisy, Bagel the hamster, and numerous other animals including a zebra named Stripey (spoiler: imaginary). The whole family (Scott and Caroline have two adopted daughters) had many adventures with all the animals, theirs and others', that entered their lives.

Scott likes to narrate a pet's thoughts. He also attributes literary and artistic talents, particularly to Daisy, for whom he imagines an embroidered scarf reading CUTE IS CURRENCY. His blog contains her haikus, such as

Why the rush, rush, rush?
You have got to stop and sniff
Who has gone before

A pet, being shorter-lived than we are, forces us to enjoy the moment. A salutary thought: One of our days is seven days to a dog. No wonder they pack into each day as much experience as possible!

Scott Simon is a professional wordsmith. The wonderful, fluid prose in the book shows he is among the best at the craft. His joy in the animals reminds me to enjoy our cat while we can (she's 16 already).

*I couldn't find a suitable illustration of "Mantis attack" online, so I prompted the GPT Image 2 engine in OpenArt to create this one for me.