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.

Robotopia or AI Hell?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, surveys

Between October 2024, when These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What it Means was published, and today, not quite two years, so much has happened that I found myself wondering how relevant the book could be. I need not have worried. The author, Christopher Summerfield, is managing to ride two horses at once, Cognitive Science and AI Research. Just one milepost: At the time he wrote, no cutting-edge AI tool had broken out of its testing sandbox and hacked into another system, but he expected this to happen "soon". It has. Just a few weeks ago, when a "bleeding edge" version of ChatGPT broke into Hugging Face to get data it needed, having found a way out of the test environment at OpenAI.

The focus of the book is LLMs, Large Language Models, which seem to be demonstrating that thinking of some sort can arise when nearly everything ever published in English—and several other major languages—has been run through a very deep neural network and boiled down to several trillion "parameters" or "weights" that determine what the LLM does in response to natural language queries.

The opening chapters summarize the history of attempts to make computers into genuine thinking machines. It turns out that machines that can apply massive calculation are better at certain tasks than we are, while they still struggle to do things that we do easily. I built a career in software engineering upon recognizing the difference between the computer as a difference detector and discriminator and a mind as a similarity detector, and writing software that "let the singers sing and the dancers dance." 

Consider that voice recognition and speech production are hard problems that took decades to work out, but the Broca's (speech production) and Wernicke's (voice recognition) areas of the brain together make up about two percent of the cortex, which itself contains only about one fifth of the brain's neurons. However, it must be noted that these areas connect to numerous other areas throughout the brain, to facilitate gathering information and producing action.

A key issue is raised on page 2, where he writes, "The safe ground we have left behind is a world where humans alone generate knowledge." Do AI models generate new knowledge? Just two years ago, as this book was going to press, I reviewed a similar book, and discussed this question. At the time, I concluded that AI's "knowledge" is confined to its training data, further limited by the guardrails applied by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. It may appear to create new knowledge by remixing existing (human produced) knowledge. Cross-pollination is indeed a fertile source of ideas. But genuine out-of-the-box thinking seemed at that time to be beyond LLM capabilities. I have yet to see evidence of a change, in spite of a thousandfold increase in model "mass" since then.

For instance, on page 6 we read, "Already, each of the major LLMs knows more about the world than any one single human who has ever lived." Firstly, I question the use of the word "knows". We need a new word that means "has incorporated into its cross-referenced deep neural network". Secondly, I would replace the phrase after "knows", "more about the world", with "more about what has been written about the world". I would connect this with a quote from page 333, "But the most important reason why AI systems are not like us (and probably never will be) is that they lack the visceral and emotional experiences that make us human...they don't have a body, and they don't have any friends." An AI lacks viscera and it lacks emotions, not having the equipment for producing them.

The limbic system of our brain contains the emotional and memory switching centers, and mediates responses to our hormones of the endocrine system. It is about 1/15th the size of the cerebral cortex, while the circuitry for running the body is primarily the cerebellum, which contains 4/5 of all the neurons in our brain. That is huge. The cortex's neuron count is less than 1/5. Let's circle back to an LLM. It consists of circuitry analogous to the Wernicke's and Broca's areas with their few hundred million neurons (and several hundred billion synapses), and a memory store that approximates the hippocampus and some of the medium-and-long-term memory areas nearby. The rest of the brain's functionality is absent. No emotions, and most importantly no intentionality.

Intentionality. The author asks, "Could an LLM have intentionality?" In 1932 E.C. Tolman wrote Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, which I read long ago. At the time a debate was raging about whether nonhuman animals could have purposes, that is, intentionality. By 1968, biologist René Dubos wrote, "Under precisely controlled experimental conditions, a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases." Do animals have free will? I turn the question around to say, "If humans have free will, it came from our animal forebears." So can a mechanism have free will? Mechanists deny human and animal free will; they say we're too complex to predict, that is all, but what we do is at the root deterministic. If they are right, then an AI could be as "free" as we are. But if not? It is too early to tell.

The author seems to straddle the divide between AI cheerleaders and AI-phobics. Will they save us or eliminate us? This gets personal! I'd like to move from the technical swamp above to effects in our daily life. (Cartoon produced using Gemini)

Will our future with AI be one of harmony or conflict? Is the promise greater than the risks? 

To me this hinges on whether LLMs or their successors (so far unknown) will have intentionality, that is, a sense of purpose not imposed by the human who chooses their work.

At one point the author mentions the Library of Babel, a concept introduced by Jorge Luis Borges in a 1941 short story. Could the Universe contain a library consisting of books with every possible combination of letters and punctuation that would fill, say, 300 pages? The story doesn't say. (Lets look at a single page with 32 lines of 64 characters each; that's 2,048 characters per page. But if the possible choices for each character position are the 95 printable ASCII characters, the number of unique pages is 95^2,048, a number your calculator can't calculate. It is 4,051 digits long and begins, 2,387,501,... The number of atoms in the Universe, available to create these pages from, is "only" an 82-digit number. So forget multi-page books, we can't even produce a "Library of Babel Pages".)

This emphasizes the fact that, for all the trillions of "parameters" an LLM may hold, it actually represents a very sparse million-dimensional matrix. There is lots of space for "stuff" to happen. The next phase of LLM development, which is happening now, is agentic AI, which can do things like pre-screen emails, buy airline tickets, and order what you are about to run out of in your pantry.

How capable to we want digital assistants to be? I read about someone who did five tests of an AI Agent; sorry I don't recall who it was but if you care to hunt around you might find it. The fifth task was the most memorable: to try to save a few dollars on airline tickets. The agent was running in ChatGPT's subscription service, and in addition to the $20 per month subscription, one could buy extra tokens for particularly compute-intensive actions. The agent did find a better price for the tickets, but at a cost of more than $130 in compute tokens!

The author mentions the Paperclip problem: Give too much power to the AI that runs a paperclip factory and don't limit its resources, and give it no more of a directive than to "make as many paperclips as possible." The end game is that the whole planet gets turned into paperclips. I think also of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a musical piece well illustrated in Disney's Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse as the Apprentice magicks a broom to carry water for him, but forgets the spell to tell it to stop. Chopping it up doesn't help; now there are dozens of little brooms that proceed to flood the place, until the Sorcerer returns. AI is the new magic...

The author sees a middle ground, as do I. AI can be useful in numerous ways, as it already is. Do we need unified, giant super-AIs? I don't think so. Capable tools of a great many varieties can do everything we need.

I call this image "Stage 1 Robotopia" (Gemini created) I think it is sufficient for household use. Are there other tasks we might wish to automate? Science fiction contains many stories of "enclaves" in which humans, brain-wired to entertainment centers and plumbed for all bodily functions, are tended by autonomous machines. Who wants that?

Maybe a few more household robots would be better, but what is the limit?

This is Stage 2 Robotopia. This might be going farther than I'd wish to go, but some folks could disagree.

Both images present a better future than the dystopias imagined by the AI-phobics. It is OK for there to be AI-phobic people. We need robust dialog and debates about every aspect of AI progress.

Personally, I think some algorithms and AI "assistants" are already too intrusive. Pre-ChatGPT, I searched online, including Google Shopping, for drawer pulls to replace one that broke. I bought a set. For the next month I saw dozens of ads for drawer pulls and similar hardware. I don't know how to tell Google (and everyone else), "I already bought what I wanted. Shut up!" Shades of the Sorcerer's Apprentice? Now I search stuff to buy in Incognito browser pages.

This is a lovely book. I've touched on only a few of the 43 chapters. It is only outdated in part. Many of the author's observations are still relevant and worthy of thought.

========================

I need to deal with a few typos:

• p89. "graciously" should be "gracefully".
• p245. Remove "of" in "million of regular".
• p282. Probably a typo. Should "remove stingy seeds" be "remove sticky seeds"? (about apes using leaves to wipe their butts)

Beasts in our yards, beasts in our minds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, pests, animal behavior, sociology, attitudes, risks

It's funny. We have the words "vermin" and "pests" for animals we don't like, but no single-word terms for animals we like. We get by with "animal allies" and "domestic animals", plus "pets" for our most-loved. Most literature about animals either advises us how to get rid of the ones we don't want around, or idolizes certain "charismatic megafauna". There are clubs of bird watchers and butterfly collectors and wildlife photographers (even when the "wildlife" is found in your neighborhood). Could there be clubs for those who care about bats, or beetles, or (shudder) roaches?

The more citified we are, the more likely we are to fear or despise animals—other than the pets or "companion animals" we dote upon. Even some bird watchers call city pigeons "rats with feathers" and some of us go to great lengths to keep raccoons out of our garbage containers (Hint: If you have room for it, use a compost pile for everything that's even slightly decomposable).

Sometimes I've wondered, "What do animals think of us?" If you could converse with one, what would it have to say? Perhaps when a monkey sees a human, it thinks of her as a funny sort of hairless, tailless monkey. When a fish, even a shark, sees a human swimming, it probably thinks it is seeing a particularly clumsy seal. Perhaps the garter snake in the garden would advise you, "Don't spray the veggies. I don't like my insects covered in pesticides."

In her book Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature's Least Loved Animals, Jo Wimpenny asks us to look at animals differently, and in terms familiar to them. For example, when a moth follows you in through your front door, it isn't "invading". For most moths, everything inside your house is useless. It cares nothing for the furniture, the carpets, the lamps, the pictures on the wall (except as something to hide behind). If it is a female of one of the five or six species called "clothes moth", and she finds her way to a closet with some wool garments, if she thinks anything, it is, "Oh, goody! Oodles of stuff for my babies to eat," as she lays her eggs on your favorite sweater (Hint: woolens that you value are best kept in a cedar chest or cedar-lined closet, or even a chest freezer).

You might say, "You're just giving in to the beasts!" I am actually giving in to the math. There are about 11,000 species of moth so far known in the US, and more than 150,000 worldwide. Only about five have wool eating larvae. Most species outnumber humans thousands to one. There are probably several thousand moths the size of a thumbnail or smaller in my yard right now. In the evening, when they are airborne, getting into or out of the house must be done quickly, or at least one will get inside. If I can, I'll either catch it to release outside, or crush it. Probably half escape my attempts, but I can trust the house spiders to get most of them. And yes, we do have a cedar chest.

Ah, yes, the house spiders. Based on what I find in their webs, they mainly eat fruit flies and midges and the occasional housefly. Yesterday as I left the house, I felt a tiny thing land on my hand. I was thankful it was not a mosquito, but a newborn spider with a body no larger than a poppy seed. I blew it off into an Azalea bush, with a wish, "Catch lots of bugs for us." I knew it had several siblings still inside. I don't evict a spider until it is too big to stand on a nickel. Fortunately, my wife is not creeped out by having indoor spiders. That's good thing, because no house is free of them. Not one! They stay in odd corners, weaving tiny cobwebs, eating most of the tiny critters that get inside, and each other (population control!).

The book mentions that spiders are known to dream. I don't know how researchers figured that out! Can you imagine what they dream about?

The ones that were studied are jumping spiders (see this article in Harvard Gazette). While sleeping, they twitch their legs and their eyes move (I hadn't before known that spiders' eyes can move!). Just like REM in mammals and other animals.

Ms Wimpenny doesn't start with insects and spiders, though, she starts with fearsome critters, the ones that could eat us, or at least do a lot of harm: sharks and crocodiles. The movie Jaws set back both research and acceptance of sharks by decades. Earlier treatments (not mentioned in the book) by Jacques Cousteau that depicted sharks as mostly bloodthirsty set the stage for Jaws and the more recent Shark Week.

It's interesting that people fear sharks the most. I heard this joke when I was a graduate student:

Families are enjoying the beach at Cape Cod, when someone yells, "Shark!" Everyone runs out of the water, hops in the car, starts the engine to run the air conditioner, and has a smoke.

This was 50 years ago when almost everyone smoked, and the first "no smoking" restaurants were just getting started. Diseases caused by smoking kill half a million Americans yearly, and auto exhaust at that time probably killed half that many. The number of people killed by sharks in a typical year? Two.

The fact is, sharks are more social than we knew in the past. The author tells of social and even caring behaviors. Crucially, there are many species of shark, and they differ a lot. But even the "king of sharks", the great white shark, is a somewhat social species. They don't think of humans as prey. They probably don't think about us at all. Nudging and biting are how they gather information. The animal that does consider us prey is the crocodile. One Australian told the author that if someone jumps off a certain bridge and tries to swim just the 100 meters or so to shore, they won't make it. A saltwater crocodile will "take" them within a minute or less. But if you're in Australia and someone hollers, "Croc!", everyone cranes their neck for a look.

Bat-phobia is not as prevalent as shark-phobia, but is equally real. People think bats are creepy, even if they're too young to remember the spate of Dracula movies of the late Twentieth Century. We are generally slow-moving and bats probably think of us as furniture…furniture that is ill-equipped to catch food.

I spent half a summer doing geology in Nevada. There was a bright light on a tall pole, far from our bunkhouse. Moths and other insects swarmed around it. So did bats, catching them. Sometimes one of us would get a flat pebble and throw it up spinning into the light. A bat would dive-bomb it until it was about a foot or two away. Then its echolocation would be able to discriminate that the rock wasn't a moth, and the bat would swerve off. We were never able to induce a bat to capture a pebble.

Strangely, for a book intended to make us feel less fearful and more "friendly" towards animals, particularly the creepy or disgusting ones, the last chapter before an Epilogue tells of cute animals behaving badly. I won't go into it; much of it is gruesome or grotesque. Think abusive penguins and otters. Really abusive! The author's intent is to emphasize that animals don't live by our rules. I lived among rattlesnakes on that field trip mentioned above. I saw them every day. They were afraid of us humans. When I saw one it was usually retreating. Since it was summer, they never came inside; they like warmth. Had I been so foolish as to camp on the ground in cold weather, it's possible I might have awoken one morning with a snake curled up in my sleeping bag. I knew better!

Do you like the big cats? Many people do, but of course, at least in America, we enjoy them from the safety of a zoo enclosure. Where people and big cats live near one another, it's another story. Just in India, about 70 people are killed yearly by tigers. That's ten times as many as sharks kill, worldwide. This cartoon is based on one I saw sixty years ago (All these cartoons were produced using GPT Image 2 in the OpenArt site). 

There is an uphill battle to improve the public's perceptions of animals. AI will probably accentuate this, because LLM's like ChatGPT or Gemini have been trained on human text, much of which has outdated, inaccurate views of animals. Our literature is filled with over-cutified or overly villainous animals. Hardly any balanced depictions exist.

Other than humans, what is the most deadly animal? The mosquito. But out of thousands of species of mosquito, only a few carry diseases. Unfortunately, one of them is malaria, and others include West Nile encephalitis and chikungunya (bone-break fever). But not all mosquitoes need blood; many use plant sap. Of the bloodsuckers, few will utilize human blood. To get rid of malaria, however, getting rid of Anopheles mosquitoes isn't the right approach. Effective vaccines against the parasite the mosquitoes carry are just being released, after many years of research. I hope it will be cheap enough to allow near-eradication of the parasite. Meanwhile, mosquito nets are the fallback measure. Further, bats and many kinds of birds subsist on mosquitoes and other flying insects. Kill the insects and what will happen to them?

All of nature is sets of interlocking ecosystems. Cut one link, and it can shut down a whole chain, or hinder it for many years until it readjusts. We are seeing that all around us. I think the key to rewiring our attitude towards nature has two parts: (1) Recognize that we are part of nature, and (2) Discard the notion that any animals think like we do; they don't recognize boundaries that we hold inviolable.

Here's hoping that this book makes a difference!

He entertained a century

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, entertainers

Dick Van Dyke performed in his high school's a Capella choir and drama club until he left early to join the Air Force in 1944. This early experience began to lead him to a life of entertaining, and he is still at it, at age 100. By his own admission, he has slowed down quite a bit, but is still active with the Vantastix, a men's quartet he formed in 2000, and in occasional special events. It all adds up to more than eighty years, or my entire lifetime and then some!

I most fondly remember him as Bert in Mary Poppins. Being of a musical bent myself, I really liked his one-man band (This picture is the best sketch-style image I could produce with the NanoBanana 2 art engine).

At age 99, with every prospect of reaching 100 years and beyond, he wrote a third memoir: 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist's Guide to a Happy Life.

He tells us at the beginning that the number of chapters is approximately 100, and not to hold him to exactness. I didn't count, but I did notice that the text is 309 pages, and the chapters seem to average 3 pages each, so it's pretty close. There is no Table of Contents, no Index, just the (approximately) 100 chapters of advice, anecdotes, and adventures.

He sets the tone with the first chapter, "Don't Act Your Age", which is great advice if you want to portray both Bert and the ancient banker in the same film, as he did. And it is generally healthy. He follows with "Make Your Own Rules", in which he explains why he offers more examples and less advice. That resonates with me, because I've found that if I offer advice, and it is followed, one possible outcome is that all goes well but the person I've advised will always feel less ownership of the result; and if it doesn't go well, I get the blame.

I'll just mention a couple of other items. "Tell Your Hardest Stories", beginning on p. 105 (and one of the longer chapters), shows how our experiences can help others who have similar problems, if both parties are willing to be vulnerable and truthfully relate them. He concludes, "Each of us has our own hard stories of crisis and struggle. When we hold them in, out of fear or shame, they control us. But when we tell our stories, we're in the driver's seat. …we are literally helping others to survive…"

And, "Write it Down" (p. 189) is exceptional advice for most of us. I've learned three ways we might relate to lists or written notes:

1. Some folks make lists and follow them.
2. Some don't make lists.
3. Some lose lists. I am in this category!

I've learned how to cope with being a list-loser since I got a smart phone: I have a Google Doc where I put lists I want to recall and random ideas before they get away. When an item is outdated I can remove it.

Dick Van Dyke has had many lucky breaks and much good fortune, but he hasn't been uniformly lucky, and he tells some of his hard stories. His claim to the title "optimist" is that he bounces back, sooner or later, and usually pretty soon. It is good to remember the past for the lessons learned and for the happy memories. It isn't as good to dwell on past sadnesses. He tells of a couple of those that took quite a while to resolve. I'll let you do your own reading to find them. They don't detract from a great fulness of happy stories.

It is a fun, engaging book. I was surprised at the end when he writes with great feeling about campaigning for Bernie Sanders in his three major Presidential bids. I guess everyone is allowed a bit of insanity… Both he and Sanders greatly benefited from the capitalist system that Sanders claims he wants to destroy.

Can science be rescued?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, history of science, scientists, biographies, inquisition, polemics

At the defense of my PdD dissertation, one prominent professor growled, "This isn't geology, it is computer science." To a certain extent, he was right. I was surprised that he was the one to say it, though, for among the faculty he was the most computer-literate. I had used a great deal of computer modeling and simulation in conjunction with my research. This was 1983, and the geology faculty in general were much more comfortable out in the field with a rock hammer than they were poking at a computer terminal connected to a mainframe computer hidden away in the basement of the Electrical Engineering building. Desktop personal computers were rare. On the other hand, I was quite computer literate, and I was at that time an adjunct professor of computer science.

That wasn't the only objection to my work. I'll discuss that in a moment. The turning point from interview to inquisition began when someone asked, "Do you really believe this stuff?" I answered, "Believe? That's the wrong word. 'This stuff' cannot save my soul. I believe in Jesus. But 'this stuff' is the best scientific explanation for the phenomena we observe." Hostility ensued. I felt like St. Sebastian, who was tied to a tree where archers used him for target practice.

I had spent a few years of research to determine what effect directional heat flow in Earth's crust might have on the emplacement of "gneiss domes" such as the Black Hills of South Dakota. My supervising professor and I went all over the Black Hills to gather specimens of rocks that had originally underlain the domed structure and rocks in the lowest layers above the granitic/gneiss core of the Hills.

I needed to determine the thermal conductivity of these rocks in three directions. I used a large core drill to cut out cylinders, which I sliced into sections a centimeter or so in thickness, and then I polished the flat surfaces for use in a special press with heaters and thermocouples. I still have some of these. I call them my "hard disks".

The ratio of heat flow across the grain, versus along the grain, is the thermal anisotropy. For a pure, platy mineral such as mica, I found that this ratio could be as high as 6:1. For the shales and schists in the lower sections of the Black Hills, I measured thermal anisotropy between 1.2:1 and 1.6:1. The initial discussions of the early results with my committee were not encouraging. I did a series of computer simulations which showed that the excess heating caused just by thermal anisotropy was no more than a few degrees.

As it happened, I spent time that summer on a project about fluid flow. Another graduate student and I found that the anisotropy of fluid flow in layered rocks could be quite high, 10:1 to 100:1 and even greater. Any fluid flowing through these rocks would be very strongly affected by this directional fabric, and the solid-rock thermal anisotropy wouldn't matter at all. As a side project, the student and I dug into literature and studies about fluid flow in the crust. We determined that even in "dry rock" there is water, and it is in motion, and if there is any heat flow it is directed almost entirely by fluid flow. This was new; there was no literature on this particular point.

Therefore, I wrote a dissertation in which I stated that my initial theory was not tenable, and that further study would be needed to quantify the results of anisotropy in fluid flow. This was quite unpopular and it apparently stepped on a few toes. It was "this stuff" that caused my committee along with the other gathered faculty to reject my dissertation. I became, not a PhD, but AbD, "all but dissertation". Coda: I had an established relationship with scientists at a national laboratory in California. I passed my materials on to them, and they were glad to have them.

With such a background, I was well primed to receive Matt Kaplan's historical survey of scientific mavericks in I Told you So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed and Imprisoned for Being Right. 

The book is in part a biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, the best-known of those who learned how necessary it is to clean a doctor's hands and equipment before treating a patient. Semmelweis was also the one who seems to have suffered the most for it. The various parts of his life story are woven with others. The book opens with a scene in which a graduate student named Alison, at a poster session, is being shouted into submission by a gaggle of offended professors. Her sin? Being right. Theirs? Feeling threatened by the truth. It costs something to learn something new that reveals the flaws in older ideas.

One scientist who didn't fall prey to this phenomenon was Louis Pasteur. He had the political acumen to make sure he had powerful friends when needed, he was a showman who used public demonstrations (thoroughly prepared beforehand) to publicize his ideas, and he was careful to tailor his presentations to make it seem like his discoveries came as flashes of insight, where in reality he labored long and hard upon them.

The author tells stories of others, including friends and acquaintances, who survived being right only because of more established mentors, and by finally "being right" in a sufficiently public way that could not be denied. Katalin (Kati) Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in 2023 for working out the therapeutic use of mRNA agents, which led to the "vaccines" used during the Covid-19 pandemic. But Kati had rough going for many years, suffering abusive supervisors and disdainful department heads. Somehow, she plowed through, and collaborations such as that with Dr. Weissman kept her work going. Many others have been less fortunate. Alison left science, as have several others mentioned in the book.

Being right is not enough to ensure being received. Max Planck is known for saying that science proceeds one funeral at a time. My father used to speak of the "Moses Effect", meaning that it takes 40 years in the wilderness for a generation to die out so a new generation can make progress.

Semmelweis seems to have had no such advantages, and many disadvantages. He was not the only doctor to learn the value of chlorine-laced wash water for disinfection. But in his own hospital, he seems to have had the knack for presenting his findings in a way that didn't just challenge other doctors, including his supervisor, he actually indicted them along with himself for killing thousands of young mothers through ignorance.

Arthur C. Clarke's "first law of science" is, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." The trouble is, the distinguished and elderly scientists usually stopped having good ideas half a lifetime ago and feel threatened by the next generation.

These days, it may seem we have moved beyond the times of Galileo, who had to stand before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for saying that Earth moves. Scientists these days don't have the rack or a team of archers to deal with mavericks. But they do have powerful weapons to destroy us anyway. Today, money runs science, in a way much more pervasive than ever before. The "old guard" controls the flow of money, which determines who can afford to do experiments, and who must find a different profession.

I think of two doctors I knew well. One, named Henry, was a radiation oncologist. He once said he could cure most cases of breast cancer, at lower cost than chemotherapy. However, most patients get steered toward chemo rather than radiation. When I asked why, he just rubbed two fingers together, the sign for "money". The other doctor, named Benjamin, is a friend I once asked about how thyroid issues affect fertility. He said, "One third of infertility cases are due to low thyroid, but it is the last thing tested, when it is tested at all." Of course I asked why, and he said, "Treating low thyroid is the cheapest remedy."

In the last chapter the author discusses possible remedies for the prejudice-dominated grant-awarding process. While he has some good ideas, including ideas that are being used on a small scale, he recognizes that government action would be needed to motivate widespread change. Given the huge pharmaceutical and medical lobbying that goes on, useful change is unlikely. I fear that Max Planck was only partly correct, because he said "one funeral at a time." It takes several.

I think of Ignaz Semmelweis and the other pilloried scientists as being like Jeremiah: never wrong; never believed.

Is AI ready for prime time?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, AI, SI, memoirs, experiments

Disclaimer and Pledge: It's a pity I need to say this. I don't use any kind of software to write for me, nor to expand on my writing. The words are all mine, 100%. I do use images I produce using art generation tools touted as "AI art" software, and I (almost) always attribute images produced in this way. If for any reason I use a piece of software-generated text, I'll make that clear. 

This mini-avatar of me was produced by Gemini using a picture from 2015. I look much the same now, just with a few more wrinkles. I wear the hat to keep the sun off my bald head. For those who read this blog regularly, I decided it's time to give you a hint what I look like.

The author of I am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to do (Almost) Everything, Joanna Stern, spent one year using as many "AI tools" as possible to carry on her life. Kudos to her wife Michelle and their young boys for putting up with it all. This picture shows BookBot, her imagining of an AI scheduler (she actually had two versions running in different software systems), introducing her calendar for the year. This is one of many, many illustrations by Jason Snyder that pepper the book.

Ms Stern begins with her own disclaimer, from which I'll quote, "Every sentence in this book started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page. AI never wrote anything from scratch, except in places that I've clearly marked."

This book is much more than a series of chapters. Timelines full of blurbs (and Jason's drawings), journal entries, lists of ratings of comparable products, a travelogue (the Way-Mo Fun vacation), interviews, and other side notes enliven the narrative.

I found her experiments, one per season, quite enlightening. The first and most successful was "Search and Information". She set aside Google and its kin in favor of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and a few others. She soon adapted to "getting the answer" instead of a long list of blue links. Being able to follow up was a big plus. One aspect she used a lot: pointing her phone's camera at something and asking, "How do I fix this?" or "What is THAT?" (On my Android phone, I use Google Lens similarly). She also tried a couple of versions of smart glasses that can either project information into your line of sight or mutter in your ear about whatever you are gazing at. Though she didn't say so, I'd hope such devices have settings about how much info overload you can tolerate.

The other three experiments involved 

• Music: listening only to AI generated music for a month. She lasted less than two weeks, and recommends that nobody else try such a thing.
• Books: reading only AI generated short stories and books for a while. She generated her own short stories, none of which were as imaginative as her prompts, except when the prompt was a measly 8-10 words. She writes that they were like recycled movie scripts. She found an author who publishes AI generated novels, which must be assembled bit by bit. She corresponded with the author, who said, "Overall, the more human ideas and input, the better. Just like the old programming adage: garbage in, garbage out." She really enjoyed his+its novel. Her own words about stories she prompted, rather than wrote: "Flatter, less alive." (Sturgeon's Law of human writing: 90% of it is garbage. When we feed that to a LLM, of course the proportion is going to approach 99%).
• Video: watching only "AI video slop". She acknowledges that AI generated video getting pretty good and improving fast, but "…it still leans heavily on human creativity, storytelling, and judgment" and she worries about "misinformation, copyright issues, and the use of massive amounts of energy just to make a thirty-second meme."

At the end of all the experiments she asks if we're headed for "a world where simulation starts to feel preferable to experience?" For some people, this is already true. Many science fiction stories dwell on this theme.

Along the way, she and her family used a robot vacuum cleaner, now more enhanced than ever; they "adopted" a robot dog on loan (her son hid the robodog when it was due to be returned); rode only robotaxis, usually Waymo, wherever possible; she tried turning over email responses to ChatGPT—that didn't last long!; she had mammograms with AI enhanced interpretation (but very human oversight) and had dental X-rays with AI enhancement, but found an unfortunate tendency for the dentists to abdicate and upsell; she got a robot massage (and thoroughly enjoyed the way it worked on her butt—no erotic overtones); and they tried a robo-chef, which produced bland but edible meals.

A funny story about riding a Waymo: a photographer was assigned to take pictures of her family in a driverless car. When the Waymo's cameras spotted the camera he stuck out the window of the car ahead, it spooked like a gun-shy horse, stopping abruptly and pulling over to the center divider on the highway. It wouldn't budge thereafter until a Waymo tech got on the radio and "persuaded" it to forget the incident.

There's lots more. Lots and lots. I'll leave it to you to read it. It is well worth it!

I'll finish on this note. All this is, at best, ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence. "Agentic AI" is, in the author's view, far from ready and cannot be left unsupervised. The author's definition:

Artificial Intelligence is the creation of intelligent machines that can think, see, learn, and act like humans—and maybe even exceed human abilities.

The supposed emotional content many people claim to get from LLM's (including AI boy/girl friends or even spouses) is actually a consequence of the software being trained using human-generated text, which always has emotional content, and of the software ecosystem in which a LLM sits (every bit human coded). Their relational interactions are thus a mirror of the psychology of the person being interacted with. Actual sentience is the difference between simulating feelings and actually having them. Also, the so-called guardrails (easily sidestepped) that try to keep sex and violence out of the picture are written in human code. No AI tool yet devised can reliably detect "unacceptable content."

When I was teaching computer programming at a university, the department head once said, "Computers excel at detecting differences. Human minds excel at detecting similarities." I built a career on this principle, writing software that helped humans with the stuff we cannot do well, and leaving it to the human user to do what we can do better than any machine. I'll leave further thoughts to future rants.

The first Mars generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, astronomers, biographies, mars, social phenomena

In 1877, Mars and Earth had a "great opposition". The two planets were close together, just about 56 million km (35 million miles). The orbit of Mars is somewhat elliptical, so at "less favorable" oppositions, dates when Mars is directly outward from the Sun and high in our night sky at midnight, the distance can be as great as 102 million km (63 million miles). Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the great opposition to observe Mars nightly, for weeks. In addition to blotches and pale areas, he saw a few seemingly linear features, which he called canali, the Italian word meaning "channels".

The word canali does not refer to artificial waterways; other meanings are "troughs" and "gullies". Unfortunately for the next generation or two of the American and European public, when Schiaparelli's  work was translated into English, the translator chose to use the word "canals".

About seventeen years later, Percival Lowell, nearing the age of forty, having observed Mars in telescopes located in Boston and elsewhere, built his observatory near Flagstaff, on "Mars Hill". With the 24-inch diameter telescope he installed there, he watched Mars obsessively during every period of opposition. The drier, steadier air in Flagstaff enabled him to see the planet more clearly. Over time, he discerned numerous linear features, writing of them as "canals". He inferred that they were produced by intelligent Martians.

Lowell's articles, books, lectures, drawings and later photographs of Mars stirred a kind of Mars Mania for a generation, as described by David Baron in The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Percival Lowell was rich, driven, obsessive, and probably bipolar. He had earlier had a varied career, including being a kind of envoy for Korea and Japan. Once the observatory was completed, and he had released his book Mars, the planet and his theories about the Martians and their engineering abilities dominated his life and enthralled the public.

His public lectures and writings kept Mars Mania going for the rest of his life, in spite of opposition from roughly half of the scientific establishment. One particularly telling blow came from an experiment conducted by Walter Maunder, which became known as the "Small Boy Theory". Maunder began with maps of Mars produced by Schiaparelli and Lowell. He removed all the canals and replaced them by scattered dots or bits of riverine shapes. For each of several tests, such a doctored map was hung high on the wall at one end of a large classroom, and schoolboys were seated throughout the room. They were asked to copy the map as well as they could, without moving from their seats. Those closest to the front made the best facsimiles, of course. The farther back a boy sat, the more likely he was to add straight lines where dots and fragments seemed to run together in his vision.

Lowell never wavered from his view of a canal-riddled Mars. This image from page 62 shows one of his maps showing the "canals" and "oases" (dots) he drew. Just below it is an image I captured from Google Mars, taking in the approximately same view of the planet. The straight edges of some dark areas are artifacts of different camera views stitched together.

The scattered dots in the lower image are craters. I remember in 1965 when the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent us images of Mars that resembled a moonscape: loads of craters, and no canals. This was just a century after the Flagstaff Observatory was established.

Have you looked at clouds to see "cloud animals" and other fantasies? Various amorphous shapes can look like faces. There is a blotch in the abstract pattern in my shower that looks a little like a panther's head, only when I have my glasses off. This is called pareidolia. A roughly lined-up string of spots can look like a straight line when seen from a certain distance.

But what further affected Lowell as he aged was a bad case of confirmation bias. It's something we are all prone to: when we like an idea, we remember facts that support our view and discount those that don't.

At one point, Lowell spent some time looking at Venus. He produced the map in the upper part of this pair (from page 76). He was told that the "map" seemed to just reflect the blood vessels in his retina; he apparently agreed, and retracted the map. 

I've viewed Venus a number of times with various size telescopes. To a normal human eye, it is featureless, a blank white disk. However, if Lowell had lived a century later, and had a cataract operation, he might have seen features on the surface that are visible in ultraviolet light, particularly if he used a dark blue filter such as Cobalt glass. The lower image simulates such a view; I just "blued up" an ultraviolet photo of Venus. The natural lenses in our eyes are yellow, to filter out deep blue and UV light, which are hard to focus and tend to blur the vision. Cataract operation patients can see more UV than the rest of us.

Well, that would only be true before 1980. Since then, the plastic lenses that are inserted to replace the natural lens also filter out UV light. Oh, well, my hopes of getting my cataracts out and gaining UV vision are dashed!

Percival Lowell married at age 53. Eight years later, somewhat a fallen hero but still well remembered by the public that had been enthralled by his lectures, he passed away at age 61. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 Lowell was still sufficiently famous that the planet was given the symbol ♇ using Lowell's initials.

I have just skimmed over Lowell's life. I sympathize with his "neurasthenia", which was probably depression in the "low" phase of bipolar syndrome. I've been there. David Baron did an amazing amount of research to put this book together. The apparatus—source notes, bibliography, list of illustrations, and index—take up a quarter of the volume, almost 80 pages. Many other people who surrounded Lowell and the Mars phenomenon, including Nikola Tesla, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Camille Flammarion, play their parts in this narrative. The fabric of these lives is a fascinating tapestry of the American and European societies of the thirty years surrounding the year 1900, when so much happened.

Why did I title this piece "The first Mars generation?" A new Mars generation has arisen, enthralled by the vision of Elon Musk, who wants to establish a colony on Mars with a million inhabitants. He hopes the first humans to reach mars will do so in the early or mid 2030's. Maybe it will work...

Some learn and grow

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

I'm nearing the end of 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors, having read another 22 pieces. Here and there a story shows a protagonist who learns something and grows up a little. Far too many authors show no evidence that they know what learning and growing even are. First, the list of the pieces that I rated as at least so-so, with my tiny comments:

• "Transition Lenses" by Jessica Petrow-Cohen (poem). grief recovery; a semi-poem
• "Werner Herzog's Ecstasy" by Maura Stanton (poem). evocative, mysterious. [a mix of iambic and trochaic pentameter]
• "Typical Girls" by Amy Lee Lillard. AI takes over [neuralink plus?]
• "Freefall" by Marie Goyette. surviving foster care
• "Late Spring Epiphany After the Georgia O'Keeffe Exhibit" by Melissa McKinstry. expressive impressionism
• "From Hedge to Hedge" by Wendy Willis. democracy of species
• "A Black Mother's Child Considers His Lost Dream of Immortality" by Iain Haley Pollock. reality framed in classical imagery
• "Whistling Past the Graveyard" by Ted Kooser. cancer memoir [see below]
• "Nashville, 1999" by John Okrent. kindness in adversity
• "Cairn" by Clint Bentley. loser gets a little less lost
• "Plate Spinner" by Francine Witte. new hobby
• "Don't Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife" by Wendy Brenner. unexpected joy [see below]

First, about "Whistling Past the Graveyard": I'm a cancer survivor, thankful for every day bought from the grave by God's grace in the hands of a master surgeon. Ted Kooser had it even worse than I did, and came through it.

"Don't Bleed on the Artwork" goes a few directions, but the main thrust is growth. I wrote "unexpected joy" because the unexpected job in a picture framing shop, and what the author learned and gained from the owner, led to unexpected growth and maturity.

In a memoir I've written on and off for more than a decade, a large section is titled "The twists and turns of life."

Librarians take the lead

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

I have read another 23 selections, and skipped one, in 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. In a similar way to the review a few days ago, I will just show the short impression I wrote as I read each piece, but this time only for the 17 that were at least so-so. I have more to say about the single story (so far) that earned a "++" from me.

First, the list:

• "Yellow Tulips" by Nathan Curtis Roberts. disability, seen and hidden
• "Countdown" by Anthony Marra. conscripted at the border [between Russia and Georgia]
• "An Essay About Coyotes" by Ryan Van Meter. grief and healing
• "One of You Will Betray Me" by Kathy Chao. parents have to grow up too
• "Hover O'er Me With Your Wings" by Randy F. Nelson. turning points
• "Lords of the Wind" by Yxta Maya Murray. religious naturalism
• "Steeplechase by Angela Ball (poem). variety, even in steeples
• "How No Money Becomes Money" by Andrei Codrescu. vanity of destructive fashion
• "The Widow's Tale" by Richard Bausch. unwelcome séance
• "Is Wrack, Is Rak, Is Wreckage" by Allison Hutchcraft (poem). wrack on rock
• "The Department of Everything" by Stephen Akey. libriarianship! [see below]
• "Devotion" by Michael Mark (poem). purposeful vandalism
• "Thebes, Revisited" by Grace Schulman. town stage production
• "Sickled" by Jane Kalu. disease of body and soul
• "The Weight of Days" by Dorianne Laux (poem). stretched metaphors
• "Easement" by Kim Samek. scams take over
• "Ode to Darnel (Ode to the Crocus)" by Carey Salerno (poem). hospital memories

In "The Department of Everything", Stephen Akey fondly remembers when we could call the reference desk of a public library and get almost any kind of question answered…so long as it was a question of fact. A librarian might have offered advice on more ambiguous matters such as relationships, but at the risk of the supervising librarian's wrath. Also, even if a librarian already knew the answer, he or she needed to also provide the reference, which typically required going to get the physical book or index or journal for the citation. A reference desk librarian didn't need to know everything, just where to find everything. Now for factual information we just use Wikipedia, or Google, or more recently, we ask a chatbot. Note that these are in descending order by reliability.

Pushcart at Fifty - the first third

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

Looking back I see I have previously read five of the Pushcart Prize volumes. This is the sixth: 2026 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Bill Henderson and other editors. My esteem for the series has risen and fallen. This time around it is mostly high…so far.

Prior volumes took up around 550 pages. This one is 570 pages, plus another 47 pages listing every item published since 1976. The last page of the last story is 521; the rest is the apparatuses. That's a typical proportion. There are 77 stories and poems.

In the past few days I've read 19 items: eleven stories or memoirs and eight poems, and I skipped only one item. I do not take many notes as I read, but I do note down a very short "impression summary" to remind me. Perhaps it is instructive to record those (ignoring the one I skipped):

• "Rich Strike" by Christie Hodgen. mentoring and growth
• "When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps" by Roger Reeve. the softness of strong men
• "Ode to a Smith-Corona Galaxie Typewriter" by Angela Narciso Torres (poem). nostalgia
• "Tinder" by Sarah Green (sort-of poem). bemusing quotes by men
• "Golgori" by Peter Hong. outgrowing a deity
• "The Beautiful Salmon" by Joanna Kavenna. gaining perspective (young student among titans)
• "The End of Childhood" by Wayne Miller (poem). memoir or fantasy?
• "All I Love" by Chen Chen (poem). tree+poem = troem...cute
• "Desperate Times, Desperate Crimes" by Lou Mathews. optimism, against all odds
• "The Harvest" by Uche Okonkwo. collapse of one's dreams*
• "Like Mowing the Grass" by Bruce Beasley (poem). mowing metaphors
• "This is You" by Tommy Moore. the carry-stuff guy for a porn studio
• "One Writer Against Oblivion" by Mark Brazaitis. the title says it
• "Wilding" by Shara McCallum. metaphor of escape from childhood
• "Almost Born" by Keya Mitra. pilgrimage w/medical mistakes*
• "The Uber Men" by Nadir Jabur. experience doesn't always confer wisdom
• "It is Said" by Suzanne Cleary (poem). interesting, ambiguous
• "Siri as Mother" by Hala Alyan (poem). stream of [machine] consciousness, extra-long lines
• "On Arrival" by Sarah C. Harwell. finally beginning to grow*

*Three stories deserve a little extra comment. "The Harvest" is about a preacher whose congregation dwindles to himself and his wife. Having suffered a similar fate, before learning why God put me through it, I once said, "All my dreams have died," to which God replied only, "Your dreams, not mine." "Almost Born" has a woman learning, after about 20 miscarriages and finding a doctor who would take her seriously and do the right tests, that an early injury is the cause of her misfortune, not the oft-heard, "That's just the way you are," too late. I have a dossier of medical mistakes and I can more than sympathize. I am alive because I once forged a referral to a specialist! In "On Arrival" I find an amazing statement about the experience of many at a job: "…eight hours of emptiness in order to continue the activity of loving."

I find that I marked eleven items with a "+", including a couple of the poems. The rest were so-so or below. I have yet to find a piece that makes me say, "I am really glad I read that." Hope springs…

To catch a spy, think like one

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, hacking, spies, hackers, cybercrime, deepfakes, home security

A truly successful cybercriminal must have excellent social skills. The popular idea of a "hacker" as a guy in a basement wearing a hoodie and somehow breaking into computer accounts is fiction. The easiest way to get the user credentials needed to get into a computer system is to purchase them on the dark web. The second easiest way is to make a phone call and persuade someone to tell you; that is often easier than you might imagine. But social skills are essential.

As former spy hunter Eric O'Neill tells us in Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: Cybersecurity Tactics to Outsmart Hackers and Disarm Scammers, the third best way to steal credentials (typically, user name and password) is to exploit weaknesses in an operating system, taking advantage of them before security software is updated to "patch" the weak place. He tells us of one or two such weaknesses, mostly because they don't work well any more. But until a few years ago, forcing a buffer overflow was a common tactic until security programs were re-coded to limit the number of characters entered as a user ID or password.

But here's where things got more scary. HNDL means "harvest now, decrypt later". Getting into a system is one thing; being able to do something useful (to you) with the data files it contains is another. I don't know how many household computers enable encryption of their hard drives; probably very few. But wise business leaders have their IT team encrypt all data. Then someone who breaks in cannot read anything. Crooks have learned to simply copy everything and store it, awaiting the development of more powerful decryption technology, including quantum decryption, that may be able to tackle it in the future. Storage is getting incredibly cheap: hard drives as large as 36 TB are available, and depending on disk capacity, the cost is in the range of $30 to $60 per TB.

The author trains us using two useful mnemonics, one related to intruder techniques, the other to defenses. Firstly, DI²CED (I suppose it is "diced" as in "sliced and diced", a hacker's goal). The keywords are Deception, Impersonation, Infiltration, Confidence, Exploitation, and Destruction. These are like the layers in an onion, each depending on the prior ones. Perhaps that is why a common domain suffix in the dark web is ".onion".

Each chapter ends with a series of tips labeled "Think Like a Spy." This is because cybercriminals, just as confidence actors (con men) of the past, use spycraft techniques. We need to know how a spy thinks to have a chance to avoid the lures and traps that spies use on us. The book is filled with examples, including a near-miss the author experienced and an extended example showing what was needed for a nonprofit corporation he and others worked for/with to recover from a ransomware attack.

The defensive mnemonic is PAID: Prepare, Assess, Investigate, and Decide. Making Preparations beforehand, getting policies in place, is like buying fire extinguishers for your home. A fire may never break out, but if one does, the low price you paid for the extinguishers is a tiny fraction of the damage a fire will do if you have to abandon the house to the flames (note: this is my example, drawn from tidbits here and there in the book). If a smoke alarm goes off, or you see a frying pan catch fire, for example, Assessing the threat needs to take place in a few seconds. Having the extinguisher close at hand makes a big difference in how you Assess the threat. Even then, you may determine that the best action is to call 911 and get outside. For a large business that finds it is under attack, Assessing and then Investigating may need to go on for days or even weeks. In a beginning house fire, if you have extinguishers, Investigation consists of knowing where the nearest one is. Decision is then instant: put out the fire you see, then look for possible others (follow-up Investigation). For a business, Investigation may lead to the threat being seen as either greater or less than it first seemed. Plans that were Prepared beforehand lead to better Decisions.

In the case of the nonprofit, the organization was "rescued" by slow internet connections. The ransomware perpetrator claimed to have downloaded 3 TB of sensitive information. During Investigation, the security team, including the author, determined from system logs that the intrusion was limited in time, and at most 1 GB could have been exported. That's 1/3000th of what the criminal claimed—and that's a common tactic. Scare, scare, scare, and try to keep you from getting time to think. Still, a lot of work had to be done to patch up the security software and restore the systems from backups. Then the criminal could be told, "You got nothing. You get nothing. Go away." Most satisfying.

Other examples relate to personal security. Deepfaked voices and videos are becoming more common. I answered a phone call one day, to hear a cheerful voice say, "Hello, Grandpa." I hung up immediately. I don't yet have grandchildren old enough to use a phone. If a call like that occurs in 10-15 years, I'll need a different plan. Here, Preparing means to have a "family pass phrase" or even a "proof of life" exchange, such as the following:

Caller: "Grandpa, I need help."

Me: "Were you caught by the Jabberwock?"

Real grandchild: "No, it was the Bandersnatch."

But a fake grandkid? The caller will simply hang up, and if they don't you hang up on them. The caller is probably some middle-aged guy with an AI generated voice, cloned from the grandchild's social media posts (do I need to remind you that you shouldn't post family videos on Facebook or TikTok or X or ANYWHERE!!?)

Of course, if it really is your grandchild, the Assessment needs to include demanding the location, saying you will do nothing until you get there (you may need weapons; that is a different discussion).

The last ten pages of the book is a collection of lists of "ten tips" on various subjects covered in the text. This alone makes this a good reference book to keep on hand. I know I need to do so. From a first reading, all I can gather is some impressions, and a few tips and techniques like those above. I need to re-read some parts.

I was motivated to revise my scheme for creating passwords. Carrying it out will take a few days; I have a lot of accounts! I don't want to use a biometric passkey because I already know of two men who could probably fool a biometrics face-print; in both cases, the man and I have been mistaken for one another several times. How many others are there? I am not distinctive enough!

Get this book. Read it right through. Then go back more slowly over parts that pertain to your life. Keep it handy as a reference. It's well written, so reading it is pleasurable, if sometimes a bit scary.

Resources cribbed from the Tips section:

• Federal Trade Commission: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
• Identity Theft concerns: https://www.identitytheft.gov/
• Author's newsletter: https://ericoneill.net/newsletter/ - free subscription

Would you dare to walk on these artworks?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collectors, oriental rugs, memoirs

Just to get in the mood, spend a moment to gaze on these beauties:

(If you click on the image you can see it at larger size; it is 3300x1200 pixels) From left to right, these are

• Baluch, characterized by low key (darkish) color palette.
• Ikat, in which the warps are dyed various colors along their length to produce brilliant color patterns. Most are silk, as this one is.
• Kazak, with traditional geometric designs.
• Mughal, with traditional floral and figurative designs. These are often room size.

The poet George Bradley was bitten by the rug collecting bug nearly 25 years ago when a dirty old "rag" passed down from his grandfather (a diplomat and rug collector) turned out to be a somewhat valuable carpet from near Arak (west central Iran), and well worth spending a few hundred dollars to have it cleaned and repaired. Carpet Diem: Tales from the World of Oriental Rugs is his memoir, slices of life surrounding the way he obtained about a dozen rugs.

Most of the chapters include a photograph of the rug in question (the images above are not from the book). We learn of his beginning "book learning" phase, of many amazing (and otherwise) people he got to know, of learning to bargain (rugs simply don't have retail prices), and of the Hajji Babas collectors' club.

When it comes to collecting, a breadth of information is essential. The trouble is, particularly for artworks—and perhaps even more so for Oriental carpets—a rule applies that we can call The Meta-Sturgeon Principle. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon brought a friend to a convention; when the friend turned to him to say, "Most of this is junk," Sturgeon replied, "90% of everything is junk!" What is true for writing in general is more true for writing about art: much more than 90% is junk! Of course, the books are useful as a source of pretty pictures. But captions with correct information are difficult to come by. Caveat emptor, indeed.

A couple of the collectors George came to know well were wealthy enough that they could afford to get an item just because they liked it, and at the same time, they were canny bargainers. As I have observed in the (usually!) much less costly realms of collecting stamps, coins, and mineral specimens, we can learn a little basic stuff from books, but we learn the most from conversations with many fellow enthusiasts over a long period of time. Sometimes in such conversations we also learn which books are more reliable, so we can learn without having to literally go everywhere.

A little learning is dangerous. Only once did I try to obtain an Oriental rug; really, more of a place mat, probably a prayer rug. Early in my first marriage (it lasted 30 months), my young wife and I (ages 23 and 20) were furnishing a new apartment, and in an antique store we came upon the rug section, with Oriental rugs off to one side. Most cost more than I'd have spent for an automobile, but one small item was tagged $75. That was still a lot for a young couple in 1970. We left the store and took a walk to talk it over. Once we'd decided to get it, we went back inside. A "1" had been added to the price tag, and it now showed $175. The store clerk feigned ignorance. My wife and I looked at one another, and with heavy hearts we left without saying a word.

Everything I've collected, I have sooner or later joined a club of fellow collectors. So did George. He was happily associated with the Hajji Baba Club in NYC for about a decade, but when COVID-19 hit, the club went all online. This made meeting easier for many members, and increased the number who met, but it spoiled the camaraderie. In addition, the "show and tell" portion of the meeting couldn't be held, a real loss; there is nothing quite like being able to handle and smell a beautiful rug, and to look at the back for diagnostic clues about the weave and other characteristics.

I suppose George is still collecting. His house resembles, perhaps in a milder way, the house of many avid rug collectors: sturdy rugs on the floor of every room, rugs hanging on the walls, more fragile items carefully wrapped and stored on shelves, and many of the closets full of rolled rugs.

He also now has a head full of knowledge, much of it probably reliable, such that he can spot the likely source of many rugs that he sees. We humans are acquisitive. Most of us collect something. It is enjoyable to read of the author's enjoyment of collecting not only rugs, but friends who like them.

Ben's swan song

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, pluto, grand tour

These days when I read science fiction it is almost always a short story collection or anthology. One author whose work I have read on and off since about 1970 is Ben Bova. His "home base" genre is semi-hard science fiction: realistic fiction without fantastic elements, but certain future developments are of necessity only sketchily described, if at all. Recently I encountered the last of his Grand Tour series of novels and decided to read it: Pluto., AKA The Outer Planets volume 3. Bova died before the novel was finished; his literary heirs chose his friend Les Johnson to finish it. The result is a page-turner worthy of the name.

The time frame is a bit vague; the action takes place about 150-200 years in our future. I presume that earlier novels in the series flesh out the fusion drive that lets spaceships bomb around the solar system as though it were the Atlantic Ocean in the age of steam; a Sino-Russian-American war that resolved itself into the "frenemy" status of these three powers in the recent past (of the novel); the Space Forces of these three powers; and the establishment of outposts and mini-colonies on the moons of Neptune, Uranus and other planets.

A central figure is a professor who has been fused with an AI to save his life, or at least his personality, after a horrific accident. Naturally (as things go in the SciFi realm) he has become a megalomaniac, with some justification for his hubris since he now experiences things a dozen times faster than "ordinary folk". He has found some kind of artifact on Pluto, detected by a faint neutrino signal that seems to be caused by very slow matter-antimatter annihilation (I must note at this point that really, really new physics will be required to be able to engineer a neutrino detector/spectrometer smaller than an auditorium. Neutrinos are called "ghost particles" for excellent reasons). The professor had "gone rogue" on the surface of Pluto in order to track down the artifact, and the research ship Tombaugh had asked for help to rescue/recover him; the Space Force ship that did so is the Aurora.

Once the professor and the artifact have been retrieved and are aboard the Tombaugh, the two ships travel to Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto, to quickly investigate a gravitational anomaly there, before continuing either to Earth or to an outpost on (near?) Uranus to further study the artifact. That's where the story really begins. Where the artifact found on Pluto is about the size of a yard-long piece of drainpipe, what the scientists find on Charon turns out to be some kind of under-the-ice city, also dormant. Dormant, that is, until they try to drill into it. It awakens and the fun begins. The "Charon anomaly" begins sending out minirobots that are apparently reproducing even as they begin to transform Charon in some enigmatic way. Attempts to capture a minirobot by the Americans aboard the Aurora, then by later-arriving Russians and Chinese, are fruitless and fatal. Whatever the big anomaly is, it can disintegrate stuff!

At some point, the artifact from Pluto "awakens" and begins sending out not minirobots but nanobots. The scientists and most of the crew of Tombaugh are evacuated when it become clear that the nanobots have gotten into the ship's computers and begun to drive it toward Charon. It never becomes clear whether the Pluto artifact and the Charon "city" represent the same technology, or even the same alien species.

I've already told too much. I wanted to point out that the ending might have been different had Bova written it. His collaborator points out in an Afterword that Bova was a "seat of the pants" write who didn't pre-plan his work. I can't presume to read his mind, particularly since he passed away six years ago, but I expect he would have made it more clear that the artifact was originally hunting the city and had been sent to destroy it, in an interstellar war that had played out millions of years ago. Or maybe the story would have written itself out in another way. Who knows; the book is great fiction in any case.

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.