The robots are coming...aren't they?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, essay collections, essays

I almost titled this post "Artificial Intelligence Through a Human Lens". But that describes only a few of the essays in Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, edited by John Brockman.

When I was an active programmer (these days I'm called a "coder"), my colleagues and I often spoke of "putting the intelligence into the code". By "intelligence" we really meant the logic and formulas needed to "get the science done". During that 40-plus year career, and for the half-decade since, I've heard promises about the "electronic brains" we worked with. They were going to replace all of us; they would program themselves and outstrip mere humans; they would solve the world's ills; they would develop cures for all diseases and make us immortal. The spectrum of hopes, dreams and fears shared among professional programmers exactly matched the religious speculations of earlier generations! To many of my former colleagues, the computer was their god.

The term "artificial intelligence" may have first hit print soon after ENIAC became public, but it really took off after 1960, nearly sixty years ago. As far as I can tell, there has been about one article expressing fears for every two articles expressing hopes, over that entire time span. But in the popular press, and by that I mean primarily science fiction, the ratio has been about 4 or 5 dystopian visions for every utopian one…even with the popularity of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot books.

An aside: Asimov was famously neurotic. In his Robot fiction, the people are neurotic while the robots are deified. However, a great many of the short pieces explore all the ways a robot can go wrong, either because of a misapplication of one of the famous "Three Laws", or by a dilemma that arises when two of the laws are in conflict. The scary old film Forbidden Planet has its own version of Robbie the Robot temporarily driven to catatonia by being ordered to shoot a person.

While the pros have been dreaming of the wonderful things "thinking machines" could do, the SciFi community has put equal thought into what they might do, that we don't want them to do. Colossus is probably the best example (the book is much better, and infinitely more chilling, than the film).

While I thoroughly enjoyed reading Possible Minds, I finally realized that the essays tell us a lot about the writers, and very little about machine intelligences.

Some of the essays limn the history of the field, and the various "waves" (or fads!) that have swept through about once a decade. The current emphasis is "deep learning", which is really "neural nets" from about 30 years ago, made much deeper—many more layers of connectivity—and driven by hardware that runs several thousand times faster than the supercomputers of the 1980's. But a few authors do point out the difference between the binary response of electronic "neurons" and the nonlinear response of biological neurons. And at least a couple point out that natural intelligence is embodied, while hardly anyone is giving much attention to producing truly embodied AI (that is, robots of the Asimovian ilk).

Another aside: Before I learned the source of the name "Cray" for the Cray Computer Corporation, I surmised that it represented a contention that the machine had brain power equal to a crayfish. Only later did I learn of Seymour Cray, who has named his company for himself. But even today, I suspect that the hottest computers in existence still can't do things that the average crayfish does with ease.

What is a "deep learning" neural net? The biggest ones run on giant clusters of up to 100,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPU's), and simulate the on-off responses of billions of virtual "neurons". Each GPU models several thousand "neurons" and their connections. They are not universally connected, that would be a combinatorial explosion on steroids! But so far as I can discern, each virtual neuron has dozens to hundreds of connections. The setup needs many petabytes of active memory (not just disk). Such a machine, about the size of a Best Buy store, is touted as having the complexity of a human brain. Maybe (see below). The price tag runs in the billions, and the wattage in the millions.

More modest, and less costly, arrangements, perhaps 1/1000th the size, are pretty good at learning to recognize faces or animals; others perform optical character recognition (OCR). The Weather Channel app on my phone claims to be connected to Watson, the IBM system that won a Jeopardy episode a few years back. The key fact about these systems is that nobody knows what they are really doing "in there", and nobody even knows how to design an oversight system to find out. If someone figures that out, it will probably slow them to uselessness anyway. At least the 40-year-old fad of "expert systems" was able to explain its own reasoning, but proved incapable of much that might be useful.

To expand on the difference between virtual neurons in a deep learning system, and the real neurons found in all animals (except maybe sponges): A biological neuron is a two-part cell. One end includes the axon, a fiber that transmits a signal from the cell to several (or many, or very many) axon terminals, each connected to a different neuron. The other end has many dendrites, which reach toward cells sending signals to the neuron. An axon terminal connects to a dendrite, or directly to the cell body, of a neuron, through a synapse. That is one neuron. It receives signals from tens to hundreds to thousands of other neurons, and sends signals to a similar number of other neurons. Neurons in the cerebellum (which controls bodily functions) can have 100,000 synapses each! The "white matter" in the mid-brain consists of a dense spiderweb of axons that link almost everything to everything else in the brain. The spinal cord consists of long axons between the brain and the rest of the body.

A biological neuron responds (sends a pulse through the axon, or not) to time-coded pulses from one or more of the synapses that connect to it. The response is nonlinear, and can differ for different synapses. The activity of each neuron is very, very complex. It is very likely that, should we ever determine exactly how a particular type of neuron "works", its activity will be found to require one or more GPU's to simulate with any fidelity. Thus, a true deep learning system would need to have, not thousands or even millions of GPU's, but at least 100 billion, simulating the traffic among somewhere between 100 trillion to 1,000 trillion synapses.

Folks, that is what it takes to produce a "superintelligent" AI. As an absolute minimum.

But let's look at that 100 billion figure. It has long been said that a human brain has 100 billion neurons. People think of this as the population of the "gray matter" that makes up the cerebral cortex, the folded outer shell of the brain, the stuff we think with. Here is the actual breakdown:

• Total average human brain: 86 billion neurons (and a similar number of "glia", that help the neurons in poorly-understood ways)
• Cerebral Cortex (~80% of brain's mass): 16 billion neurons
• Cerebellum (18% of brain's mass): 69 billion neurons
• Brain Stem (~2% of brain's mass): 1 billion neurons

Also, on average, a cerebellar neuron has 10-100 times as many synaptic connections as a cerebral neuron, even though it is much smaller. It takes most of the brain's "horsepower" to run the body! Your much-vaunted IQ really runs on about 19% of the neurons. About 1/3 of that is used for processing vision. (Another aside: This is why I claim that the human visual system is by far the most acute and capable; the human visual cortex exceeds the entire cerebral cortex of any other primate).

I wish that the essayists who wrote in Possible Minds had said more about different possibilities for producing intelligent machinery. Simulating natural machinery is a pretty tall order. The hottest deep learning system is about one-millionth of what is needed to truly replicate human brain function, and by "about" I mean, within a factor of 10 or 100. Considering that Moore's Law ended a decade ago, it may never be worthwhile. Even if Moore's Law restarted, a factor of one million in processing power requires 40 years. Getting the power consumption down to a few hundreds of watts, rather than several million watts (today) and possibly tens of billions of watts in the middle-future, may not be achievable. I hold little hope for "quantum computers". Currently they don't even qualify as a fad, just a laboratory curiosity with coherence times in the range of milliseconds. Quantum coherence needs lots of shielding. Tons. We'll see.

So, robot overlords? At the moment, I put them right next to faster-than-light starships, on the fantasy shelf.

Can a scientist be well-rounded?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, essay collections

Nearly a month has passed since I reviewed Eiseley, Volume One. Loren Eiseley's writing rewards close reading. If you are an aficionado of the Evelyn Wood speed reading method, you probably won't like Eiseley's essays. But if you can "slow down and smell the roses" you will find much to enjoy in Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume Two.

This book collects all of The Invisible Pyramid, The Night Country, and many selections from The Star Thrower. It is this last that probably engendered a parable about meaning that has circulated for most of my lifetime:

Walking along a lonely beach one windswept day, I saw that many starfish had been thrown onto the sand. I saw in the distance a man stoop, pick up a star, and sling it over the waves back into the sea. As I came up to him I looked around and said, "There must be thousands of starfish. You cannot throw them all back. How can it matter?" He held out a star and said, "It matters to this one," and flung it out to sea.

This is not a quote from Loren Eiseley; when he met a star thrower, he began throwing also, but said nothing to the man. That story is from an essay somewhere amidst Volume One. But, to take last things first, when he gathered essays to publish as The Star Thrower, perhaps he saw himself as one striving to do something "that matters to this one," among any who might read from him. These essays explore the boundary between science and, not just art, but everything else one might call "not science". Musing on the dramatic changes in human life that occurred once speech was attained, he considers the significant costs of our exceptionally large brain:

"His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that this planet has yet seen." (p. 357; emphasis mine)

The essay is titled "Science and the Sense of the Holy." Animals other than a very few primates (most especially humans) are divorced from considerations of time, space, and greatness (though not from rank: viz. pecking orders and the "Alpha male" phenomenon). A common house cat is able to anticipate tracking down the mouse she has just discerned beneath the stove in the kitchen. But for her, the next three or five minutes constitutes long-term planning. Your dog may consider you a deity, and thus the joking answer to the question some evangelists pose: "Why do we never see a dog set up an idol and worship it?", "Because dogs live among their gods!" But you dog's planning abilities are slender as compared to those of any toddler.

Eiseley gets to the meat of the matter in the essay "The Illusion of the Two Cultures." He writes here, and had written before, of the dismissive attitude he saw among numerous young scientists, that to pay attention to anything "arty" was quite suspect and to be discouraged, strenuously if necessary. These young Philistines are presumably in it either for glory or a good salary, but have no "sense of science."

Science is the art of the repeatable. The pinnacle of scientific achievement is to produce experimental results, publish them, and to have another scientist, or a laboratory full of them, reproduce the experiment and attain the same results. This is called "confirmation". Phenomena that cannot be repeated cannot be "confirmed" and are not admitted as science. Thus, one of my favorite parables (and less widely known than the one about the starfish), titled Non-repeatable phenomena:

There is a class of activity that is undertaken by nearly every person on Earth. Sometimes it produces great emotional responses—either positive or negative—and sometimes, not. Some people undertake these things alone, and some with one or more others; sometimes with many others. Some use various artifacts and implements, and others are able to obtain great results using only their bodily members. Some may attempt to repeat what others have done, to no effect whatever; others do so with greater and greater effect upon each repetition. There is no way to measure, ahead of time, whether a particular instance will be effective or not, or even perhaps quite negative. What is this activity? Music!

The same could be said of any performance art, of fine art, of "folk art"—which is fine art that hasn't been "discovered" yet—or even telling a story or joke ("Some can tell 'em, and some can't"). Thus, Eiseley gnaws at the great rift between "science" and "the arts" that had arisen in the past couple of centuries, and is growing still. Pointing out the need we all have for awe and beauty (I remember Einstein and his violin), he declares that this rift does disservice to both. It may not be possible to write great operas about the experiments of Edison or Faraday (though I once wrote a somewhat creditable sonnet about photosynthesis). Perhaps no painting can convey the beauty a mathematician sees in a new and succinct proof. But the best scientists everywhere confess that, when an experiment "comes together", they feel a sense of awe or beauty; when an astronomer has discerned a pattern in the dry data gathered from star after star or galaxy after galaxy, the emotional release equals that from hearing the climax of a great symphony as performed by a great orchestra. By the way, check out the audience who paid $100 or more to hear, say, the Berlin Philharmonic perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. People whose day job is technical or scientific will be well-represented. Thus Eiseley declares that "the two cultures" so frequently decried by some and touted by others, are an illusion. Without a sense of beauty, awe, and even holiness, few would persist.

I'll leave it to the reader to enjoy the first two-thirds of the volume and discover its delights. See why we are more similar to a slime mold than we may like to think ("The Star Dragon"), or how our attainment of wide-ranging consciousness of past and future has caused us to suffer "the wound of time" ("The Mind in Nature"). You won't be sorry.

The bones may be dry, but not the writer

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, essay collections

Once or twice over the years I stumbled upon an essay by Loren Eiseley. He always had a fresh take on a subject, and his writing has a lyrical quality unlike anyone else from the mid-Twentieth Century on. So when I came across his collected essays in two volumes, I couldn't resist!

I've just finished reading Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays, Vol. 1, edited by William Cronon. This volume and its companion are the 2016 offering of The Library of America Series. Volume 1 contains in three sections the three books The Immense Journey, The Firmament of Time, and The Unexpected Universe, and a fourth section, Uncollected Prose.

In modern terms, Eiseley was primarily a hominin palaeontologist; he studied the bones and grave-related artifacts of ancient humans and their ancestors and related species such as the Australopithecines. He studied human and prehuman evolution. This is in contrast to an anthropologist who studies human artifacts as evidence of culture and technology. Gathering specimens of archaic humans has always been difficult and very few were known in the 1950's to 1970's when Eiseley was most active. As late as the 1990's you could fit all known specimens of non-sapiens hominids and hominins into a footlocker. A small one. In his day a largeish suitcase was probably sufficient.

When writing for scientific publication, he could write prose as concise and acerbic as any. When writing for the public—and it is clear that this is what he most enjoyed—he wrote with heart and imagination and great lyricism. I know no other like him. He could immerse himself in a different viewpoint and somehow the writing drags us in with him. For example, writing of a spider, that was spinning a web in the heat of a street light late into winter:

  "Good Lord," I thought, "she has found herself a kind of minor sun and is going to upset the course of nature."
  I procured a ladder… There she was, the universe running down around her, warmly arranged among her guy ropes attached to the lamp supports—a great black and yellow embodiment of the life force, not giving up to either frost or stepladders. She ignored me and went on tightening and improving her web. … a kind of heroism, a world where even a spider refuses to lie down and die if a rope can still be spun on to a star. (p 111)

He notes that the web was her entire universe, and that she paid attention to nothing that wasn't in direct contact with her web. Then he wonders what we are missing, thinking that all the universe we see is all the universe there is.

He had a kind of sideways take on natural selection. Clearly understanding evolution and evolutionary theory, he points out that the popular image of "survival of the fittest" is quite wrong-headed and actually back-to-front. More than once he described how little lungfish struggle from drying pond to, hopefully, wetter ones, and calls them "fish failures". The genetic pathway their ancestors took made them less fit as a fish, but more fit overall, allowing them to endure where "fishier fish" could not. A species of lungfish or something like it evolved into the earliest amphibian. Those lungfish that still exist aren't much in the way of being fishes, nor of being salamanders, but are a compromise of both.

In the same way, proto-human primates were small, became hairless and rather weak, adopting an upright posture before they had brain enough to be much of a toolmaker. Somehow this "failed ape" survived long enough to develop toolmaking, fire, and broader social groupings, all with a brain not much larger than a chimp's.

But at a later stage, language erupted. To this day we know less about the development of language skills than about the depths of the sea. In several of the essays Eiseley waxes lyrical about what this could have meant. Language effectively brought most physical evolution to a halt, substituting cultural evolution. Human culture effectively shields us from most strictures of natural selection. But as compared to the lungfish, are we closer to the salamander, or still only a little ways beyond the ape? Are we like the lungfish in truth, no more than halfway developed in a direction we cannot discern? Are we still "failed apes" and "not-quite amphibians"…let alone a true "land" animal along the track of that analogy? In one of the last essays in the book Eiseley wonders if, having grasped the fires of the universe, will we survive our own half-formedness and grow to be worthy of the powers to which we aspire?

Indeed. I can hardly wait to dig into the second volume!

Real advice for real conundrums

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, advice, essay collections

Talk about making life's lemons into lemonade! Dan Ariely suffered catastrophic burns, spent three years in a hospital, and basically missed out entirely on being a teenager. Would he have studied social science without having had those experiences? There is no way to know, but he has become an adept observer of the human condition. Even more, he is an expert on irrationality and is a professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.

For all that humans are called "the rational animal", and though this rationality has led to high civilization and amazing technology, there is little evidence that humans in general lead rational lives. Quite the contrary: we spend most of our time on autopilot, repeating the habits we learned when very young.

Young children are learning machines. What a pity that the need to regiment our "education" is almost exactly designed to minimize true learning! Fortunately, there is time "after school" and "after homework". As my youngest brother told us at my parents' Fiftieth Anniversary party, growing up with three older brothers, "I got lots of education when I wasn't being schooled." But by age twelve or so, the inner compulsion to learn wanes, and pretty much ends by age twenty, for most of us.

Here is how I define neurosis: Neurosis is a defense mechanism that is seriously out of date. PTSD is an extreme version. Less extreme, but still troubling, is our tendency to react to the words and actions of others as though they came from people we hated or feared years and decades ago. I once lost a girlfriend because I keep a record of my gasoline purchases in my glove compartment. Her ex-husband also did that, and she couldn't abide the feelings that arose when she saw me write down the mileage and what I'd spent for gas.

People who were bit by a dog at a very early age may fear all dogs for the rest of their life. Woe to such a person who marries a dog lover! A woman we know grew up with a psychotic mother who would be walking across the room, and suddenly reach over and hit her from behind. Our friend is a skilled pianist, but cannot play a piano that faces the wall. She needs a wall at her back when playing, even though nobody has tried to hit her from behind for forty years!

We live with and continually exhibit milder irrationalities day to day, and when we notice them, we may be motivated to develop a new habit. Or maybe not. Some folks who read the Wall Street Journal send questions about such things to the Ask Ariely column, and the lucky ones get answered. The most recent questions answered (in Dan's unique way) include "Where should we seat those awful wedding guests?" and "Is 'First come, first served' really fair?".

Dan's column and other research have provided fodder for three previous books, and now this one, Irrationally Your: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles. Many of the items include more-or-less-relevant cartoons by William Haefeli:






This shows such a pairing, and I used an image of the page's text, mainly to avoid all the formatting and finding the right typefaces to roughly imitate it. This also shows a feature I haven't seen elsewhere (except in my own blog posts): keywords or index tags!

This isn't "Ask Abby" kind of advice, and I suspect the questions are ones Abby would not have deigned to answer. I picked a short answer above; most are about twice as long and some run a couple of pages.

Do you want to know why pickup lines, cheesy as they are, work at all? Boiling down two paragraphs of Dan's answer: People like to be complimented. Based on that, Dan says, "Compliments are free … why not just give more of them." Good advice to us all. Asked about the apparent multiplication of mismatched socks, Dan discusses our perceptions, and recommends going to the trouble of sorting all the socks; some of the "mismatched" ones will probably have matches that were "mismatched" earlier and are probably only inches from their mate. But he also ponders the chance that dryers might have "sock black holes."

Some of the correspondents have creative ideas of their own to share, such as the guy who glued quarters to his office stapler and a few other frequently-"borrowed" items. None went missing after that. Another asks whether setting a higher or somewhat low price for a house to be sold will yield the best final price; he guesses that a lower starting price might work better. Dan agrees, pointing out that if you have only one potential buyer, you are at a negotiating disadvantage, and may wind up accepting a low-ball offer; with several people competing, attracted by the lower initial price, you are more likely to get a better offer from at least one of them.

The overall message is, if we more clearly realize that the irrationality of "rational animal", that is, why people really do what they do, we're more likely to relate to others in a more satisfactory way, and more likely to get what we want out of life. I dimly realized some of these things long ago, leading to the first "commandment" of ten that I hung on my office wall: People don't want to be treated fairly. They want to be treated well. The work of Dan Ariely, Nobelist Daniel Kahneman and others can help us treat others well without treating ourselves badly.

Decrying a Florida tourists seldom see

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemic, newspaper columns, essay collections

Carl Hiaasen is a journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald, and has been for quite some time. A hundred or so of his columns from the past ten years have been gathered by his editor Diane Stevenson into his new book Dance of the Reptiles. You might think the title is about alligators, but a piece of wisdom from my mother came to mind within a few pages of starting the book: Many years ago I was leaving to hike alone up Mt. Lowe, which is accessed through the old Groucho Marx estate in upper Altadena. She expressed worry for my safety, and I said, "I know how to avoid rattlesnakes." She said, "I know, but I'm worried about rattle-people!" The Reptiles of the book are public officials in Florida.

Alice Longworth Roosevelt is said to have carried a cushion embroidered with the words, "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit here by me." She'd have been delighted by a visit from Mr. Hiaasen, at least for a while. He is a skilled storyteller, and the writing itself kept me going for quite a while, maybe a third of the book. After that it became a slog. I just don't have an appetite for quite so much mad-dog, polemical journalism.

I understand his frustration. I moved here to the Mid-Atlantic area (I'm kinda south-west of Philadelphia) about 20 years ago. I sure didn't stay here because of the political climate. Within 2 years of our marriage, we moved from California to a Western state, and we've lived in the West or Midwest ever since. A couple of months after our move, our son entered first grade, so I began attending PTA and School Board meetings. What a shock! The PTA was OK, though I was sitting next to a corrupt politician who soon became a senator. My personal take on his voting record is that he has exactly opposite values to mine. I score him a perfect Zero, at least until yesterday, when he actually voted in favor of the XL Pipeline!! (Not that it did any good…)

School Board was another matter. Every member was on the take. The President was big into construction, and it was no coincidence that plans were brought forward time and again, either to demolish building A so a new school could be built somewhere else, or to change the school year in such a way as would necessitate big (and costly) amounts of remodeling of about half the buildings. I got the notion one day that a well-placed bomb at one of their closed door meetings (the usual kind) would do the human race a whole lot of good. Once I realized I had begun thinking that was a really good idea, I quit attending.

I really don't know what to say about the book. It is ancient wisdom that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I think it'd need a dozen more pens of the quality this author shows, to make much of a dent in Florida's public service industry. If you hanker for a really comprehensive catalog of the ways politics go bad, and you used to think New Jersey politics were the worst this country has to offer, read this book, or as much of it as you can without being awakened with the heebie-jeebies!

No mother lets go - why should she?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essay collections, humor, autobiographies

They say you should write what you know, and this author knows (1) dogs and dog hair, and (2) her daughter who just moved out. Not a bad combination. Lisa Scottoline (I think it has four syllables) has five dogs. Her daughter and co-author Francesca Scottoline Serritella has one, but give her time. The book, a collection of 700-word humorous essays, is My Nest Isn't Empty, it Just has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman. Francesca wrote eleven of the seventy pieces/chapters.

While a core concept is that Francesca "recently" moved out to her own apartment, the pieces are as wide-ranging as you can imagine. Lisa has a squirrel mind, running hither and yon, burying one nugget only to dig up another, and write about it. I don't know what any of her novels are like, because this is the first time I've seen her in print (I read very few "mainline" mystery novels). But she writes about dogs (maybe a quarter of the pieces) and dog hair (three); her happy invention of Unresolutions, or resolving to do more of what makes you happy; her mother Mary (almost another quarter of the pieces), who admonished Francesca to always sing at the piano bar; and finds herself musing on a stretch of highway that boasts a sign it was "adopted" by a strip club. Finally, the title piece, which comes last, is about freedom. Being in the midst of it, we know, my wife and I; we don't have to think every little minute about the way our very next action will impact our son. He isn't here, and won't care, and gets bored if we try to tell him anyway.

So I totally get it, that life is about being who you are and learning, painful as that might be, to let everyone else be who he is or she is. Talking to your parent or your offspring isn't just about conversation, it is about connecting. Talking past one another is, by contrast, a tragedy. I reckon it helps that Lisa is Italian. They won't tolerate "talking past"; they'll talk until they get through, which is why, as she writes, keeping essays to 700 words was so hard: "I can barely say hello in 700 words." It is harder for those of us with that good old "British reserve," for whom creative silence has become an art form, but connecting is quite a bit more scarce. Thank God my son is talkative; if I just sit and look at him long enough, he'll spill his guts. It happens even faster if I can motivate myself to ask some leading questions, and this has enough reward that I keep doing it.

It is gratifying to see, in spite of the double divorce, the departure of Thing One and Thing Two, that the author and her mother and daughter remain close. A mother may always have "her little girl" ensconced in her heart, kept unchanging as the "little girl" grows to 24, 44, 64; but to give her the space to be a good companion even as the mismatches increase, is grace indeed.

Beliefs as diverse as the people who hold them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, faith, philosophy, essay collections

At my dissertation defense, I was presenting the results of my research, which were a bit controversial. One of the first questions asked was, "Do you really believe that?" The tone showed that the professor asking carried a lot of freight; it was inquisitorial. I replied, slowly, "I don't use the word 'believe' that way. I consider my hypothesis to be the most scientifically logical, the best explanation. But this stuff won't save my soul. I believe in Jesus."

Most people don't use "believe" in the divinely significant, soul-saving sense. The phrase "I believe" prefaces a great range of much more down-to-earth understanding. Yet somewhere between "I believe it might rain" and the Nicene creed, all of us have a core of some kind, a belief or two upon which we base our understanding of ourselves.

Several editors working with NPR have just published a second collection of essays that probe these self-defining beliefs, This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. The first such collection, a few years ago, took its title from a series of radio addresses by Edward R. Murrow two generations back.

If you agreed to write an essay that squeezed your most important core belief into 500 words, what would you write? It might be worth your while to visit thisibelieve.org and contribute an essay of your own. The editors are collecting as many such essays as they can.

How to articulate one's belief? Reading the book might be a good start. Learn by example. Here we find the whole range of humanity, from Nobelists such as Elie Weisel to the founder of Craigslist, from high- and middle-schoolers to the very aged, from nuns and priests to the nonreligious, examining what it is upon which they base their day-to-day life. My somewhat rude "I believe in Jesus" statement will not, by itself, do much for me (though I don't regret saying it).

My public persona is this blog. What do I believe; what lies behind the handle?

I believe people want to know what other people are thinking. For people like me, it is the main reason to read a lot of books. For others, it leads to endless small talk, even with strangers. Some spend a lot of time alone, figuring it all out while others party incessantly. No matter how, we are taking in information about others, or ruminating on what we've learned from them. Even the most self-centered people want to know what others are thinking, even if it is only to take advantage of them.

I have a friend who is among the brightest people I know. Not only has he a PhD, his parents do, his siblings do, and everyone in his family except one uncle who he jokes is the "black sheep" of the family. He tells of learning from his mother, "We are smarter than the others. Why should we care what they think?" What she meant, of course, was for her son not to guide his behavior by conformity to public opinion. As I've gotten to know her, I find her intensely interested in others, for a reason similar to one of mine: being able to anticipate reactions. This is not mainly to avoid offense, but to see it coming and plan for it.

People like this friend and I, and his mother, who tend to live inwardly, develop emotional intelligence rather slowly. It takes serious effort to learn social skills that more extroverted people seem to gain easily. For an introvert, being in any people-oriented line of work is a bit like being a prize fighter. You are going to be taking punches, so learn to take them when they get through your defenses, and keep on polishing your defenses.

But there is a second reason to learn what people think, that is equally important. Everything in the human world started with a thought. New ideas don't spring full-grown from the heads of geniuses. Geniuses have a body of older knowledge and understanding on which they base their ideas. Some say Einstein's genius was not in producing Relativity; others also did so. But he was the most adept at explaining it to others, using clocks, measuring sticks and railway carriages as metaphors for concepts others had only explained by equations. His genius was in knowing how other people thought, deeply enough that he could communicate the new thoughts to them.

Human thought leads to new ways of coping with the Universe. I believe that's worth plenty of study.

I got that into 420 words. Though quickly done and a tad clumsy, I think I'll send it along to the project. Some of the essays in the book are probably as spur-of-the-moment (though I've had a day or so of reading the book to let these ideas gel). Others seem much more thought through. I'll mention just one favorite: Sister Helen Prejean's "Living My Prayer" is about learning what she believes by observing her own actions. Such an exercise would benefit all of us.

Scientists that can write?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, collections

The book is The Best American Science Writing 2006, edited by Atul Gawande; series editor Jesse Cohen. I had hopes of finding, among the 21 chapters, at least ten or so scientists who write well. What did I find?

• Four scientists, one Biologist and three Psychologists
  
• Three professors of writing or journalism
  
• Eight journalists and "correspondents" to a single outlet
  
• Six free-lance writers and "correspondents" to numerous outlets
  

Details follow.

Chapter, Author (Bio): Subject

"Your Move", Tom Mueller (Free-lance Writer): Chess-playing Computers, as they gain more heuristic abilities, are making plays that the grandmasters learn from.

"My Bionic Quest for Boléro, Michael Chorost (Lecturer in Composition, Univ of SF): Most of the power of a cochlear implant is unused; the author gets upgrades until he can enjoy music.

"Earth Without People", Alan Weisman (Professor of Journalism, Univ of AZ): We can easily find the remnants of some past civilizations (Egypt, Babylon), but others are vanishing into the landscape (Maya, Zimbabwe); remove humans, and the biosphere will fill in pretty quickly.

"The Curse of Akkad", Elizabeth Kolbert (Writer, The New Yorker): Following the above, where did those civilizations go—and why? Nature is quite capable of driving us off the planet.

"Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time", Dennis Overbye (Correspondent, New York Times): Does the General Theory of Relativity really allow for time travel, at least into the past? [my answer: One-way only; if there isn't a way for the past to access the future, there won't be one if you go then, either. You can't take it with you...in either direction!]

"Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic?", W. Wayt Gibbs (Writer & Editor, Scientific American): Good news, fatties! There's a lot of new fat around, but it isn't shortening your life as much as some folks are saying. Dieting stress is a greater risk than is overweight, for most.

"Nature's Bioterrorist", Michael Specter (Writer, The New Yorker): Bird flu is simply the most visible (to some) Damoclean Sword; more evidence that the biosphere doesn't care about us.

"On Autism's Cause, It's Parents vs. Research", Gardiner Harris (Journalist, New York Times) and Anahad O'Connor (Journalist, New York Times): Mercury in vaccines, how much of a danger? What a hot potato! A tuna sandwich contains a little Methyl-Mercury, and one dose of a vaccine contains a very similar amount, but of Ethyl-Mercury, which is supposedly safer. [However, you don't inject a tuna sandwich! I suspect the stomach and ileum do something to the Me-Hg that doesn't happen with injected Et-Hg.]

"What Makes People Gay?", Neil Swidey (Writer, Boston Globe Magazine): It seems the nature-nurture debate is over on this one. Genes play some part, but intra-uterine experiences must play a bigger part, because quite a number of identical twins have opposite sexual orientation. [I wonder if it could have anything to do with the mirror-image character of embryonic self-cloning? Further, regardless of sexual orientation, all people are capable of heterosex; those who truly don't enjoy it are a very tiny few. There are other alternate sexual orientations, which the people who experience them claim are just as innate: preference for many partners, or for the very young, for example. Some would say, 'you allow me to be a bigamist, and I'll allow gays to marry.']

"The Tangle", Jonathan Weiner (Professor of Journalism, Columbia U): A 3-generation detective story, that just may lead to a preventative, if not a cure, for ALS and Alzheimer's. [Who'd a thunk some of the oldest bacteria around (cyanobacteria) are making slow-acting neurotoxins (e.g. BMAA)? Then again, why not? We know so little about almost everything besides a few warm and fuzzy or feathery critters (and little enough about them).]

"Clone Your Troubles Away", David Quammen (Free-lance Writer): The operative image is the clone of a calico cat, a curious, friendly animal, but not calico. Clones are not copies [My post "Why identical twins aren't" addresses this]. So why clone?

"The Coming Death Shortage", Charles C. Mann (Correspondent, various): The approximate doubling of average life span since the 1880s might be the greatest single driver of 20th century economic change. What if it were to double again? The terms "generation gap" and "generation war" will take on new meaning [Shakespeare's tragedies and many "fairy tales" are based on troubles that arise when oldsters don't die on cue].

"Devolution", H. Allen Orr (Professor of Biology, Univ of Rochester): The key quote is, "intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics." [Actually, to me, ID, Creationism, and similar public wrangling smack of "tearing up the tares". Faith cannot change the world; its mission is to help people escape the world.]

"The Literary Darwinists", D. T. Max (Journalist, various): The term refers to a recent trend in literary criticism [It seems to me a back-to-front approach. Evolution even explains the way we think. So of course it explains the way we write, which is thinking out loud...even the way we edit our writing reveals the way we think].

"The Day Everything Died", Karen Wright (Free-lance Writer): The Permian extinction event [see my post "Nature's whack at the Dinosaurs' grandparents] is gradually being seen as a true event, a short-term affair. A generation or two ago, it was "common knowledge" that it took a few million years to transpire. Of course, you can't attack life so slowly and expect it to roll over and die. A few million years, or even one million, is enough for evolution to adapt species to any new conditions short of removal of the biosphere wholesale (and maybe even that!).

"Mighty White of You", Jack Hitt (Contributing Writer, various): A broader perspective of the debate over "Kennewick Man", who seemed to be more "caucasoid" than expected. "Race" is bound to be with us for a long while yet. The skeletal variations found within each "race" are broad enough to encompass every race. In other words, take off the skin, and you can't unambiguously sort a random collection of skeletons as to race. But some whites can't stand being scooped by Asian proto-Americans.

"Is God an Accident?", Paul Bloom (Professor of Psychology, Yale): The desire to worship something appears to be an unexpected side effect of other evolutionary trends in human development [Maybe so. Religion is rule-based, and most of us are more comfortable when we have rules to follow that mostly work, even if our explanation for the rules is mythological. Faith is person-based, so it relies on experience rather than evolution, and falls below the author's radar].

"Yawning", Robert Provine (Professor of Psychology, Univ of MD): Don't read this chapter! By the end you'll have aching jaws. [Yawning is so contagious I yawned several times just getting this much written. Did you yawn just now? Gotcha!]

"Ten Planets? Why Not Eleven?", Kenneth Chang (Journalist, New York Times): The discoveries by astronomer Michael Brown of several large "plutinos" including Sedna (larger than Ceres, the largest asteroid) and Eris (larger than Pluto). [Since this essay appeared in the New York Times, astronomers have mostly agreed to demote Pluto rather than open the door to perhaps dozens or hundreds of new planets that are expected to be lurking in the Kuiper belt.]

"Climbing the Redwoods", Richard Preston (Free-lance Writer): The author must have plenty of time to learn new things. Learning to climb trees which don't begin to branch below 200-250 feet...oh, man, I'd die! A 350-foot tree is an ecosystem unto itself, in which it is possible to get quite lost (as one climber has done, as reported here).

"We're All Machiavellians", Frans B. M. de Waal (Professor of Psychology, Emory U): What's the difference between you or me and the average Chimpanzee? Mainly, the chimp is less of a hypocrite. He or she is unabashedly interested in food, power, status and sex. We are abashed, but no less interested...nor any less determined!

Y'know that wandering generation?..still wandering.

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essay collections

When we were young, many of my generation—the '60s kids, the ME generation, the Boomers—embarked on a journey, one by one, to "find myself." What did we find? Most of us found something, and settled down. Now, we're the Establishment, the un-trustable over-30s, mainly the grand, moderate majority that both political wings claim as their turf. The ones that didn't really find much make up those wings.

Marion Winik is a writer, essayist, commentator on NPR since 1991, and, one might say, a pretty successful person. Her most recent essay collection, Above Us Only Sky, reveals the journey, still in progress, of a lost soul finding itself.

The book is sectioned as History ("Back"), Family ("Underfoot"), Introspection ("In the Mirror"), a special, formative Historical Vignette ("Back Again", comprised of the title essay), and Surroundings/Relationships ("Around").

Ms Winik shows us herself, warts and all. She doesn't flinch from showing us her self-contradictions. Atheistic to the point of anti-theism (the book's title expresses it: there's nothing up there but sky), she revels in remnants of her Jewish upbringing and her first husband's love of Christmas. Clinging tightly to her youngest daughter, trying to raise her well, yet she made this baby with a definitely risky man. She writes with her head (a very good brain in there, and excellent writing indeed) about a lifetime of following her heart (a very fickle heart at that, much of the time...but when she loves, she loves hard, long, and well).

She can be lyrical, and she can be crude, almost vulgar (it takes more than a couple f-words to make be stop a book early...I came close); she covers quite a spectrum of experience and reverie. As I am a right-leaning moderate, I found it interesting to read and try to get into the head of someone who actively campaigned that Reagan be impeached, who lives in a world in which "my kind of thinking" is considered akin to the average Martian.

Marion Winik hasn't really found herself yet. Her continued journey makes interesting reading.