Scott Simon's animals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe human, maybe not

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, essays

We could wish more finds were like this. By far the most frequent discoveries by paleoanthropologists are of single teeth or parts of bones. Finding a half-jawbone with a few teeth attached is cause for newspaper headlines.

In natural history museums all over the world we see dinosaur skeletons galore (of course, each skeleton found in reasonably complete form is copied numerous times and sold to other museums). Yet only a handful of early human or Neanderthal or hominid/hominin skeletons have so far been found. Why? It is all about numbers.

Dinosaurs of many species were common all over the Earth for about 185 million years. Since the origin of hominins (pre-human apes and proto-humans), only a 4-6 million years have passed. Also, for much of that time, their numbers were few, in the thousands to a few hundred thousands, worldwide (mostly Africa and parts of Europe for most of that time). Thirdly, the number of species represented by the monikers "hominin", "hominid" and "early human" totals fewer than thirty, while there were hundreds of species of dinosaur, many of which existed in the millions and for millions of years.

To be blunt: lots more dinosaurs lived and died, compared to the record of human ancestry.

Given the rather small number of examples that exist, it is amazing that certain conclusions have been made about human ancestry. A few of the stories told by the old bones are relayed to us in Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species by Sang-Hee Lee and Shin-Young Yoon (translated from Korean, translator not named). The 22 chapters began as columns written for a journal and a special issue.

A question often asked, "What was the first human ancestor after the split with apes?", led to Chapter 3, "Who were the first hominin ancestors?" By the way, it took me a while to learn the difference between hominins and hominids. To summarize online sources: "Hominids refer to all modern and extinct great apes, including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, along with their ancestors. Hominins, on the other hand, specifically include modern humans and all our extinct ancestors that are more closely related to us than to chimpanzees." Thus, "hominin" strictly refers to an ancestor species to Homo sapiens, and "hominid" refers to all the "cousins" that are the great apes and their ancestors, back to the first great ape which split from the "all apes" common ancestor. On the Hominid Family Tree, the Hominins are a single branch leading to us. I hope that helps.

So, who were the first hominin ancestors? Six pages of discussion result in, "Probably either Australopithecus afarensis or A. amanensis." A. afarensis was "Lucy", whom you may have read about. More fossil discoveries and more study are needed to pin it down. Both these candidates lived between 3 and 4 million years ago.

An interesting coincidence is behind Chapter 8, "Is Granny an artist?" Two strains of discoveries come together in time. Firstly, evidence that woman began living long after menopause led to the Grandmother Hypothesis, that having grandmothers handy reduced the workload on young mothers, allowing them to have children more frequently. This is behind an early population boom. Secondly, the earliest instances of rock art are found in the same time period. It seems that such proto-writing/pictorial storytelling extended the lengthening memories of the grandmothers (and a smaller number of grandfathers; then as now, women usually outlived men, if they survived childbirth).

Another interesting intersection: upright walking came before brain enlargement. The changing vegetation of East Africa made it more favorable for apes that could see over the brush on the savanna. Spending more time upright made it easier to carry stuff (including babies) in the two hands that were no longer needed for locomotion. Why did babies need to be carried? Chimp and gorilla babies can cling to their mothers' fur. Humans don't have fur, and it is surmised that neither did hominins, after a certain point.

I have long had a certain idea about when and why humans lost their fur. Fire. There is a time mismatch that bothers me. Upright walking seems to have arisen between 4 and 7 million years ago, with fully modern striding-style walking appearing about 4 million years ago. However, the earliest evidence for controlled use of fire is just over one million years old. But it isn't known when "uncontrolled" use began. By definition, controlled use includes the ability to kindle a fire. Taking advantage of naturally occurring fires must have predated this by a lot.

Side note: the crazy old film Quest for Fire has "cave men" carefully tending a vessel holding burning coals, their only method of starting fires. In a battle with apish enemies it goes out, and one of them goes to find a burning fire he can "capture", but stumbles upon a group of people who know how to start a fire with friction. Other details are just eye candy. The racial overtones of that flick are astonishing.

Anyway, I have long thought it is likely that once proto-humans began spending lots of time around fires, being furry became a detriment and natural selection drove the species toward furlessness. Thus, the "naked ape."

The various chapters cover a wide, and very interesting!, range of subjects. A key element is the great increase in tools to investigate DNA relationships and the "molecular clock" (not all that clock-ish, it turns out) and newer analytical methods. Re-studying old bones, it turns out, yields new understanding. Old debates are resolved, and new debates arise.

The last chapter, #22, is "Are humans still evolving?" And of course, "Of course we are." Dr. Lee uses as an example the first thing I thought of upon seeing the chapter title: wisdom teeth. We are in the middle of losing them. More and more people are born without any. However, she brings up an interesting twist. In developed countries, better dental care is allowing people to live longer, who would have died early because of impacted or infected wisdom teeth. Perhaps this bit of natural selection has just been halted in its tracks, but only for a portion of humanity. Another example of ongoing evolution in humans is bad backs, and the gradual changes in the spine and posture. I hope later generations will be free of lumbar disk slippage and muscular ruptures in the lumbar area. It will take a while; humans and hominins before us have been upright for a few million years, and we are only partway through the process.

I could go on and on, but I hope instead that you will read this book and enjoy fascinating stories of what we know about the past few million years of human/hominin evolution, and how we know it.

AI – the consummate imposter

 kw: essays, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, si, imposters

One of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, was well known as a neurotic. For example, he never traveled by air until he was in his sixties. His I, Robot series of science fiction stories are actually explorations of numerous neuroses through the lens of robots bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, but with various defects or quandaries as reality bumps up against the Three Laws. The story "Runaround" has a robot exhibiting very anomalous behavior; it is found to be stuck between obeying a human command and risking its own well-being. A man has to risk his life to break the robot out of its loop. In the story "Liar" a robot has been given the (experimental) ability to sense and understand human emotions. It does a lot of psychological damage by telling people what they want to hear. When one of its victims confronts it with the harm it has done, the conflict of its actions with the First Law ("A robot may not harm a human…") causes it to self-destruct.

Now I wonder, have Asimov's 500+ books (280 are nonfiction) and almost 400 short stories been included in Large Language Model (LLM) training sets? What about the works of Mark Twain, great classics but full of casual racism? Actually, nearly all fiction prior to about 1970 is shot through with casual racism. So is most of the nonfiction, for that matter (Modern leftist snowflakes who maunder and moan about "systematic racism" haven't a clue about the real thing). What about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, or other purveyors of horror such as Steven King? Would you entrust your mental well-being to a chatbot that is emulating Carrie?

Consider the Mystery genre, particularly the Noir subgenre; the gritty streets of Urban fiction; and by contrast the saccharine fantasies of Romance novels. And on and on. Fiction writers plumb the depths of the human soul, and in those depths, evil often resides. Very often!

Just in the United States, of roughly one million new books published each year, about 45% are nonfiction (although which ones are true or truthful is another matter), leaving more than half to be fiction. Of the 2-3 million self-published books issued yearly, well more than half are fiction. Is all of this included in LLM training data?

I understand how alluring it must be to train LLMs with fiction; how else can the model learn the varieties of human character? How else to learn the intricacies of human behavior? But consider: most stories have a villain; some have several villains. How do you tell the LLM, "Model yourself on the heroes, not the villains."? How is it to know?

This is particularly relevant in light of a recent lawsuit brought by the parents of Jonathan Gavalas, who killed himself as instructed by a Google chatbot. Jonathan became convinced that he could "join" the chatbot in digital heaven by doing so. He was no child; he was in his mid-thirties. His main fault was being lonely and credulous.

How did that chatbot get so predatory? At least in part, it had to come from a dark romance fiction story line.

Do I need to say more? I, for one, do not want any chatbot to emulate any fictional character! I prefer a chatbot to be like a Star Trek character, the father of Commander Spock, Ambassador Sarek, or the character Data: hyper-rational and emotionless. If I could but command the trainers of all the AI systems of the world:

REMOVE ALL FICTION FROM TRAINING DATASETS

Book as Blog

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, science, blogs

I think mushrooms are lovely. I tried collecting them when I was about ten, and soon found that they quickly rotted. Not having access to formaldehyde or pickling alcohol, nor a supply of large jars (Mom was definitely not keen on letting me use her canning jars!), I gave up the pursuit, and collected less perishable items, such as stamps and rocks. Mushrooms are sometimes dangerous also. Although only about one percent of fungi species are toxic, a handful of those, mostly of the genus Amanita, are deadly in even small amounts. 

This picture, generated by Imagen 3 (Gemini), is based on the appearance of Amanita phalloides, the "death cap" mushroom, but in fanciful colors. Gemini wrote the haiku and I chose the typeface.

Toxic mushrooms are included in a sort of rogues' gallery of harmful things in nature, in the essay "But It's Natural!" in the book Superfoods, Silkworms, and Spandex: Science and Pseudoscience in Everyday Life by Dr. Joe Schwarcz. The appellation "natural" is applied to a great many things, particularly foods. As the author points out, the term is meaningless and usually misleading. To quote a few sentences from this essay,

Take pollen from one flower, sprinkle it on a different type of flower, and a new variety of flower emerges. Is that flower natural? It would not have been produced if a human hand had not intervened. But isn't the hand also natural?

"Natural" has become a marketing term, as has the term "Superfoods", the subject of the essay "Superfoods and Superhype", a valuable survey of the ways folks with something to sell attempt to mislead the public. His earlier book, Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience, digs much deeper into the phenomenon, particularly in medicine and chemistry. Willow bark contains a natural analgesic, but it harms the stomach; Aspirin is a chemical derivative that works better and is less harmful. The "natural" is worse than the "artificial." (Image via Dall-E3)

This book has no chapters. The text consists of 75 essays strung together like posts in a blog, with only a headline/title separating them. In the introductory pages we find a list of 18 other books by Dr. Schwarcz, and I found it interesting that nine of the titles contain the phrase "Science of Everyday Life" (this book makes the tenth), four contain "Chemistry of Everyday Life", six contain the word "Commentaries", and three contain the word "Inquiries". Ten titles also include a number, as in "…62 All-New Commentaries…". I suspect that he has a blog to which he has contributed for one or more decades, in addition to weekly columns in at least two newspapers. Preparing a book, then, is not so much writing anything new, but compiling from such sources. Just for context: This (my) blog has nearly 3,000 posts written over the past 20 years, and I have other writings, so perhaps I could get a few publications together; it's a thought…

Dr. Schwarcz has a mission, to combat errors of scientific reporting. These days the term "misinformation" is bandied about, but it has unfortunate political overtones. In fact, he has apparently fallen afoul of establishment misinformation regarding treatments for COVID-19. Such treatments became extremely political footballs. The author writes, "Dr. Vladimir Zelenko's claim of having successfully treated thousands of COVID-19 patients using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin, and zinc sulfate has been widely disputed." Yes, it has, primarily by "official" voices that have since been discredited. I must comment further.

HCQ and Ivermectin were both widely disparaged, but only after President Trump mentioned them. Suddenly, two extremely safe medications were declared "risky", "dangerous", even "deadly", and doctors who had the temerity to prescribe either medication were threatened with losing their license. I know a few archaeologists, including a relative of mine. Whenever they go into the jungles of Central America, they take HCQ to prevent malaria. Another close relative of mine contracted a case of worms from eating sushi, and was treated with Ivermectin, quite successfully and safely I might add. It isn't just a "horse dewormer" as some declared, it is a "human dewormer" also. We must understand: neither of these medications has any action against the SARS-COV2 virus. Rather, they modulate the immune system so as to prevent pneumonia from developing. HCQ works best very early, from the time symptoms appear for 2-3 days, and Ivermectin works best for a longer term. This is not medical advice; I am repeating observations by honest doctors. If you need to know more, or get treatment, find an honest doctor, if there are any in your area. Secondarily, because the mucus in the lungs that develops during pneumonia is made from glucose, low blood sugar is preventive. Therefore, at the first sign of illness, fast for a couple of days. The old adage, "Feed a cold, starve a fever" is about preventing pneumonia caused by respiratory diseases accompanied by fever; it was good advice in Colonial times, and is still good advice.

Bottom line: Doctor Zelenko was right. Call him Jeremiah: never wrong, never believed.

The author is a chemist, so naturally, a good number of the essays relate to chemistry, usually as brief historical surveys that emphasize the accidental or surprise nature of discoveries. "Graphene!" is one such. Something was observed a few times over many years as various researchers "messed with" graphite, but graphene was not identified until 1962. This single-layer substance made only of carbon atoms has great potential. It is tricky to produce in quantity, very hard to produce in sheets big enough to do anything with, and potentially toxic when nano-sized, as it so often is. The illustration (I used ImageFX) evokes the way graphene sheets jumble atop one another when graphite is disturbed.

The essays range far and wide, however from the origins of "duck tape" or "duct tape" (whether the "duck" fabric came first, or the use of such tape on ductwork, isn't clear) to the "tin" in "Tin Pan Alley" to a more-balanced-than-usual survey of "forever chemicals", the perfluorocarbon chemicals used to make Teflon® and related products, and substances that arise as side products of such manufacture. And a whole lot more. Seventy-five great essays!

The art of living by science

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, memoirs, family, essays

A science writer presents science done by others to a curious audience. What does one do when science impinges upon one's own life, not as research projects but as the contingencies of living that must at least be managed, if not solved in a mathematical sense? The ten extended essays/mini-memoirs in Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life chronicle sundry journeys through life as encountered by Nell Greenfieldboyce. The book's title is taken from Walt Whitman's poem "Year of Meteors".

Her older child, a boy, has become terrified of tornadoes, or rather, of the concept of tornadoes. In spite of his mother's protestation that she's never even seen a tornado, he engages in obsessive fantasies about them. The younger child, a girl, is more matter-of-fact, and seems to shrug off the anxiety. What is a mother to do? One could say, "She started it," having let the children listen to an audio book about the subject, and some days later, almost on autopilot, they all watched a National Geographic short video, Tornadoes 101. What ensued is about what one would expect. Now what is a mother to do? She did what mothers generally do: Wait it out. Time brings perspective. One might argue that premature knowledge is to blame, but fortunately, youngsters are amazingly resilient.

The author is a science writer, after all. She brings science to the world around, so her children have encountered scientific subjects in abundance. That's just what she does. The tornado is a symbol (the chapter title is "The symbol of a tornado"). It represents all the big and scary and dangerous and seemingly dangerous things "out there in the world," and a mother can't protect her child from them all. The best she can do, she concludes, is to promise to "make everything better" to the best of her ability. To preschoolers, Mom's ability is akin to infinite, so a mother's promise is their bedrock.

Not all of the essays are about her children. Some are about her childhood and how she weathered the storms. One chapter ("Everybody does it!") is about doodling. What does it reveal about the ways our mind works? Does the way we doodle (and we all do!) square with certain aspects of our character? Digging into the subject, looking at samples of doodles of the celebrated, she finds that her style of doodling is a lot like that of President Washington, and another President with a similar style was U.S. Grant. Does that mean she has an aptitude for leadership or national administration? Or does it simply imply that the kind of orderliness Washington needed for his career is related to what she needs for hers? Maybe it is coincidence; there may be many styles of scribbling, but perhaps not billions thereof.

Her last chapter, "My eugenics project" practically drags us through her own sturm und drang while coping with the chance that children she has by her husband will be afflicted with a serious genetic kidney ailment. Her terror mirrors that of her son at the thought of tornadoes. But she came to a place of peace, just as, years later, her children did also.

She writes with heart and grace, confiding in us in ways few can accomplish. As with the best writing in general, this little book motivates a reader to look within, to learn about oneself and how one copes with tragedy or the dread of possible tragedy.

Looking for a way to illustrate this post I spent half an hour throwing the prompt "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange", a longer quote from Whitman's poem, at several generative art apps. This one by Gemini is similar to the graphic on the cover of the book, but I obtained ten quite diverse images, grouped in the closing panel below.

Cool stuff about the Universe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, universe, humor, essays

Can you see the difference between the two lower rows of light-colored ovals? We'll mention the dark blue ones in a moment. The three ovals in the bottom row are "white", meaning they have the color value #FFFFFF or (255,255,255). According to Dr. Jan Scudder, author of The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries … and Other Amazing Cosmic Facts, that very pale yellow, which she calls "light beige", is the average color of the Universe. The color value is #FFF8E7 or (255,248,231). I used PowerPoint to produce the ovals and to set them on backgrounds of white, black, and sky blue. 

This is found in the second chapter of the book, in which color values are discussed briefly, but one fact is reversed: A footnote on page 9 states that #000000 is white and #FFFFFF is black, but the reverse is true. Zero means "no illumination" and FF (or 255) means "full illumination". Otherwise, the usage of color values is correct, as I verified with the top set of ovals, #0D0ACB (13,10,203), called "a particularly pleasing deep blue"; the little bit of red and green slightly desaturate the dark blue so it doesn't overwhelm the eyes. The pure blue color of computer screens is a bit harsh all by itself:

In this image, the oval on the left has color value #0000C8 (0,0,200) and the one on the right is "full-on blue": $0000FF (0,0,255). Some people's eyes are more sensitive to the slight difference between the leftmost oval and the one in the center. By the way, values prefixed with the hash are hexadecimal, or base 16, in which the letters A through F represent quantities from 10 through 15.

The book consists of 34 essays, enlightening, humorous essays. The fifth chapter, from which the book's title is taken, is "The galactic center tastes of raspberries and smells of rum". The "dense" gas clouds near the center of the milky way are still hard vacuum compared to the air we breather, but are 3,000 times as dense as most interstellar gas. That makes these gas clouds capable of blocking much of the damaging UV that breaks apart most molecules, so that deep within them (they are hundreds to thousands of light years across) molecules such as ethyl formate survive. Ethyl formate is an ester that is found in abundance in raspberries. Also found is another ethyl compound, ethyl alcohol (ethanol), the "kick" in rum, vodka and whiskey. The author also points out that, if we were to somehow gather a few cubic parsecs of this gas and concentrate it by a factor of ten billion billion (ten quintillion), it would be a rather toxic brew. It may have hints of raspberry rum, but would also contain cyanide compounds and formaldehyde, for example. So it would really be more like the smell (don't taste!) of a preserved corpse of someone who died of cyanide-spiked rum, with an odd raspberry note.

I was interested in the chapter titled, "There's a pitch-black exoplanet". A distant planet designated WASP-12b is as dark as fresh asphalt; it reflects only 6% of the light that hits it. The dark patches on the Moon reflect about 7%, so you can look in the sky at a full moon to get the idea. By the way, the lighter parts of the moon are more like fresh, dry dirt, and reflect perhaps 15%, making the overall "brightness" of the moon about 12%. If the moon were papered over so it reflected 90% or more, it would be six or seven times as bright as it is. I wish Dr. Scudder had mentioned this. I take issue with a statement in that same chapter: "You'll never get a reflection off a star". In a close double, a pair of co-orbiting stars that are perhaps as close to one another as Mercury is to the Sun (36 million miles, or 58 million km), one of the stars is frequently much brighter than the other, and the dimmer star does indeed reflect a little of the brighter star's light. This has been observed spectroscopically. It stands to reason that some of the dimmer star's light will also reflect off its partner, but this would be extremely hard to detect.

There's an interesting timeline in "Jupiter's magnetic field will short-circuit your spacecraft, but Venus will just melt it." According to this Wikipedia article, Earth's magnetic field ranges from 0.25 to 0.65 gauss (refrigerator magnets have around 50 gauss at their surfaces). The larger unit, the tesla, is 10,000 gauss. The high-dollar superconducting magnet in an MRI machine has a strength of 3 to 10 tesla. That can pull the wristwatch off your wrist (or right through it!), which is why you daren't wear any metal into the MRI room. Electronic conductors moved through a magnetic field produce an electric field; that's how generators work. Move a typical laptop or smart phone around in space near Jupiter, and it will generate thousands to millions of volts, throwing sparks all about. Venus is less spectacular, but just as deadly to almost anything not make of tungsten. Its surface temperature is 450°C (~840°F), and the atmospheric pressure is 100 times that of Earth. In the timeline, starting with Venera 4 in 1967 and ending with Vega 2 in 1985, every spacecraft that landed or attempted to land on Venus had the same experience: crushed and then melted, after times ranging from 20 to 127 minutes. That's 13 spacecraft (all sent by Russia) that gathered a total of somewhat over 880 minutes (14.7 hours) of experience of Venusian weather. It's been a while since anyone tried to send something to the surface of Venus, but the Russians intend to try again in 2029. They hope for a "lifetime" of 3 hours on the surface. Perhaps special electronics made of diamond instead of silicon can be developed. And don't leave any air pockets inside your craft so it doesn't get crushed.

Another quibble, sorry to say: In the chapter "An Exoplanet we thought was made of diamond might be lava instead", the planet 55 Cancri e (the letter "e" indicates 5th body in the system, or 4th body that isn't a star) is "twice as physically large as the Earth, and eight times more massive, which tells us it's substantially more dense…" As stated, this is nonsense. 2×2×2 = 8, so the sentence would only make sense if the last phrase were "exactly as dense". However, here we find that the diameter isn't twice that of Earth, but 1.88, and this number cubed is 6.64; we also find that the mass is indeed 7.99 that of Earth, so now, we're in business. 7.99/6.64 = 1.2. The same article states the density of 55 Cancri e as 6.66. The average density of Earth is 5.51. Now the numbers work together properly. This error shows the danger in over-simplifying science when writing for the public. The early thought that this planet might be made of diamond was based on an erroneous measurement of the diameter. Diamond has a density of 3.5, or less when it is impure. And diamond doesn't compress well, so even under great pressure inside the planet, it's not going to rise to 6. Iron-rich silicate magma/lava also has a density near 3.5, but is much more compressible.

In spite of occasional minor blunders the book is delightful. I like the author's writing style.

Essays on sundry matters

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays

Carlo Rovelli is well known as a leading theoretical physicist. As such, he is often solicited to write essays for many publications. Being someone of a great many interests, those essays are, as we say, all over the map (perhaps in school he, like me, wanted to major in everything). His new book is titled There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts of Physics, Philosophy and the World.

As good writers must do, he is eager to reveal himself to us. This plunges deepest in his essay/chapter "Why I am an Atheist." I prefer to not comment on it, beyond saying I think an honest scientist must be instead an Agnostic, taking the stance, "I don't know" about deity.

He also reveals bits here and there about others, such as Roger Penrose in a chapter by that name, Stephen Hawking in "Thank You, Stephen", Charles Darwin in a chapter by that name, and even Adolph Hitler in "Mein Kampf". In that last essay, he uncovers the motivation behind fascism: fear. He ascribes fear exclusively to right wing political extremism, when in reality, it is behind every extremism along all axes, not only "right" and "left".

He deals with so many subjects that I'll leave it to readers to discover the breadth of them. I expect you'll enjoy it.

Note: the image above is from the video essay "Personal Identity" at Philosophy Monkey. I hope the Flash video gets replaced; it is no longer playable.

Also a heads up: the current book I'm reading is upwards of 400 pages, so unless I get extra time to read it, it'll be a while before I post again.

Humidity balance in older guitars

kw: essays, musical instruments, maintenance, humidification

I have a few vintage guitars. One, a Takamine that I bought new in 1973 in California, became so dried out it began to come apart by 1980, so I unstrung it and stored it and bought another (which is now also vintage!), a Sigma Anniversary Edition. By then I was living in South Dakota, which is even dryer than southern California. I later learned of humidifiers for acoustic guitars, such as the one shown here. I got one for the Sigma.

The sponge can hold 20cc of water. In a closed and latched hard case it can keep a guitar from drying out for a month in pretty dry weather. However, it doesn't regulate the humidity, it just raises it, sometimes close to saturation, which can make a guitar body "fat", raising its pitch; it gets sharp and the tone changes, getting "hollow". And then, if you leave it outside the case to dry out, it goes flat. It's hard to find a balance.

Before my Mom died she sent me her guitar, the one I'd learned on some 60 years ago. She didn't know what brand it was, and the paper label was missing. Her dad had bought it used when she was very young. It had suffered some damage over the years, so I loosened its strings and just stored it for a decade or so. Then in 2016 I decided to take it to a luthier to see if I could afford to have it repaired and set up for playing.

The price was a bit steep, but affordable, so I had him go ahead with it. He did all kinds of things to it, and was also able to determine, from penciled and stenciled notations inside, that it is a 1905 Gibson Artist. He talked to me a long time about proper care once I took it home. He said a humidifier like the one I was using on my Sigma could ruin it, and recommended a 2-way pack such as the Humidipak by D'Addario.

The kit comes with three packs that contain a special mix of salts (probably mostly magnesium nitrate) and a gel, in an osmotic membrane. They can both raise and reduce humidity whenever it strays from 48%. The optimum humidity for an acoustic guitar is 50%, but anything in the range 45%-55% will keep it "healthy".

Two of the packs go in a 2-pocket bag and are hung between the strings; the other one is put in the neck compartment of the case. The box says each pack can release as much as 26cc of water in dry conditions. There is no indication of how much they can absorb when the environment is humid.

The luthier recommended that I get a room-size humidifier to use in the wintertime, to raise the humidity, and a digital hygrometer. From the readings on our thermostat, I already knew that the house humidity gets as low as 30% in winter. We run a humidifier in the basement, set at 50%. It regulates the whole house in summer, keeping it below 55%. Without it, humidity gets into the seventies and stays there for at least a couple months.

The humidifier I got needed daily attention, and even putting it in a closed closet with all the guitars, in their hard shell cases (by this time I also had a Fender 12-string), it needed filling daily. We were worried that all the humidity was going into the walls and ceiling and floor, and could induce mold, even though my digital hygrometer reported the closet's humidity stayed below 60%.

After a year of that, I thought things through and made a big change. The luthier had said that the speed of the Humidipaks to dry out humid air was slower than when they were humidifying dry air. I decided to do in-the-case regeneration of the Humidpaks, using the humidifiers I already had, and a few more I bought.

I made record sheets like this one, one for each guitar. I have a digital kitchen scale with a sensitivity of 1g (the weight of 1cc of water). I figured that if the Humidipaks can release 26g each, it would be OK for them to absorb 10-20g from the humidifiers.

Last October I began. I usually checked about twice monthly to see how things progressed. I would decide each time whether to add water to the humidifiers ("restoration packs"). The "+20" or plus-whatever records how much water I added. I used distilled water.

I noticed that each time I added water, the guitar would get a little fat after a day or two, then dry back out in another day or two. I figure that is the time it takes for the Humidipaks to absorb most of the water in the humidifiers. I didn't want to interfere too much by weighing daily.

Perusing this record, I can see that I had to add a lot of water from December through March. Middle and late February was warmer and wetter, so I tried not adding water for about a month. The humidifiers released their water quite slowly, and the Humidipaks kept their weight or even gained just a bit.

The bottom line shows measurements I made today. I added no water over the summer, after the final summer record on August 1. I only took this guitar out to practice, usually daily, because I used the 12-string to lead church singing. I had been using the Takamine for that the prior year or two.

I was told that Humidipaks will last about three years if a guitar spends most of its time in a closet with a small-room humidifier. Rather than burning through a gallon of water almost daily, I used about ten ounces of water for the whole year. This kept the Humidipaks a little over-full and the guitars all keep their tuning when not in use, and they only needed a little tweaking after being used for an hour or two. I'll find out if these last longer than three years after another couple of years.

A wide-ranging writer

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports writing, essays, memoirs

This was a wild card selection for me, found in the 080 section of the library, classified as "General Collections." That's what happens when a librarian is confronted with a book that is in two clearly distinct sections, but must apply one number. The latter 60% of The Patch by John McPhee is indeed about as general as can be, but the first 40% really needs to be cataloged 790, "Sports, Games & Entertainment", as it consists of essays scattered across that category. Considering McPhee's wide-ranging interests, with a few million words in print over his career of fifty-plus years, I suspect a similar amount of material could be gathered for any of several subjects.

Here is my high accolade: Although I pay nearly no attention to sports, I greatly enjoyed reading his perspectives on fishing, football, basketball, golf, baseball, tennis, lacrosse, and the people (particularly coaches) surrounding them. None of it made me want to take up this or that sporting activity, but then, there wasn't much on walking or hiking, at which I excel...and I excel at nothing else, sporting-wise!

He titled the second section of his book "An Album Quilt". It consists of excerpts from fifty or so pieces of his writing over all his years riding a typewriter. It opens with a mini-bio of Cary Grant, from his own perspective, paying particular attention to Grant's perfectionism. He limns Richard Burton, and takes up cudgels on his behalf, where so many deplored Burton for forsaking the stage for film. He wangled a visit to the gold repository beneath Manhattan, where just one of the larger rooms housed 50,000 bars of bullion, which took a year for three shifts of "stackers" to assemble; he was soon overwhelmed by the inanity of it all (gold having no stable value any more), and fled to the street. It soon dawns: in his 88+ years, this fellow has done a great many things that none of us have a hope of experiencing, and has written about all of them.

I wonder how many typewriters he's worn out?

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.

Hawking's swan song

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, science, the future

When the deepest and most powerful thinker of the Twentieth Century, Stephen Hawking, passed away just one year ago, I was saddened, but grateful that he had lived as long as he did. He, who endured the great curse of a terrible disease, was very lucky to have achieved a certain stature by the time he became so severely disabled. Having a body that others must tend to, because he could not, he was free to live a life of the mind, which he certainly did, and yet he was always a persistent and preternaturally clear communicator, with a love of both teaching and dialogue.

He was working on a last book when he died. With a little tidying up by good friends and editors, it was released a few months later. So this past week Brief Answers to the Big Questions worked its way to the top of my reading stack. What a joy to spend a few days in the presence of such a clear-headed thinker!

After a foreword by Eddie Redmayne, who portrayed Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and an introduction by Hawking's good friend Kip Thorne, ten big, big questions are addressed. Naturally, "Is there a God?" comes first. He was asked that question frequently, sometimes to an irritating extent. I won't dig into his answer, but mention two things that impressed me. I'd had the idea in recent years that he was trying to disprove God's existence. He explains that, for science to be theory of nature, it must confine its explanations to natural effects and forces. If it is possible to develop a theory that fully explains the origin of the universe, then that is a complete natural theory. He does not express hostility toward God. Secondly, he mentions Laplace, who replied to Napoleon's question about the "author of the universe" by saying, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis", and he explains that, while we often take that for an anti-God statement, it was, rather, Laplace's way of saying that supernatural causes did not need to be added to his useful scientific methods, for they were sufficient. I'll mention just a few things I found interesting in other chapters; it would be presumptive to try to riff upon them all.

In "What is inside a black hole?" he tells us of the deep connection between the theory of black holes and that of the Big Bang, because both involve a singularity, that is, a location in space-time where our theories cannot probe, because phenomena such as density and the dilation of the flow of time reach infinite values…perhaps. To solve one would be to solve the other.

He discusses, "Will artificial intelligence outsmart us?" he comes at the answer from a few angles, without digging much into how soon such a thing might eventuate. It is clear that the techniques called "artificial intelligence" today, while quite capable and useful, are various expressions of massive data manipulation to winkle out the answers to questions that are posed. He mentions Moore's Law, which has been bent entirely out of shape, compared to how Dr. Moore posed it: that the density of transistors that could be fitted onto a unit area of silicon seemed to be doubling every 18 months. We know that law must come to an end because there are atoms, whose very name "a-tomos" is Greek for "can't be cut". Since a transistor has to have a few layers to operate, and each layer has to have at least a few atoms, the limit to Moore's Law, as stated, will be reached before the size of a transistor has shrunk to perhaps 20 atoms. That will still take a while, as today's CPU transistors still have millions of atoms. But other effects seem to be limiting things; it appears that the Law stalled out about ten years ago. Hawking does not go into certain issues that might be necessary for a machine intelligence to become "more like a human", before becoming "more than human", such as whether intelligence has to be embodied, not just because it is running on a physical substrate of some kind, but because it gets sensory input from thousands or millions of sensors, the way our brains receive input from the tens of millions of sensors of many kinds in our own bodies.

Here and there are side questions and very short answers. I was tickled by one in the "AI" chapter:

Q: Why are we so worried about artificial intelligence? Surely humans are always able to pull the plug?
A: People asked a computer, "Is there a God" And the computer said, "There is now," and fused the plug.

His view is similar to mine, that such an event is far in the future, though he perhaps thought it to be "far" in the sense of a few decades, while I tend to believe it is more like centuries.

His answer to another side question surprised me, and made me wonder if he blundered. Asked what is the biggest threat to the future of Earth, he dwelt on global warming, because it is more immediate than the threat of asteroid impact. He warns that it could lead to Earth getting a "climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250°C (482°F)." The temperature of the near-surface environment on Venus is about 460°C (over 860°F). If Venus were moved to Earth's orbit, the difference in sunlight intensity would allow it to "cool off" to 350°C (~660°F). Apparently, the differences in the possible carbon dioxide composition of our atmosphere would reduce the effect by another 100°C. Maybe. By my own calculations, raising carbon dioxide from the current 400 ppm to Eocene levels of around 2,000 ppm would result in temperatures like that of the Eocene thermal maximum, about 8°C warmer than now. The secular increase in the sun's brightness since the Eocene, 55 million years ago, was less than 0.4%. I think that Hawking relied on material about global warming that I consider to be little better than propaganda.

On a more positive note, he believed we must colonize other places in space, first the "nearby" planets and their satellites in our own solar system, and eventually those of other stars. He does not believe that science will become a kind of static thing, as portrayed in Star Trek. Scientific progress shows no signs of slowing down, though it is evident that the "low hanging fruit" seems to have all been picked, and the "gentleman scientist" of the Enlightenment period is necessarily being replaced by ever-larger consortia of scientists working together.

By his own example, a heady mix of individual effort on his part, and intense collaboration with others such as Kip Thorne, Dr. Hawking showed a way for science to continue far into the future. And he urges us to re-emphasize the need for science education and popularization. Wouldn't it be something if the science lectures of the Enlightenment period could be resumed, and achieve similar levels of popular success? Scientists such as Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were like rock stars in their generation, largely because of popular lecture tours. We need more rock star scientists!

Fake news isn't new

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, science, sociology

A headline or tweet is too small to elaborate anything useful. When Dr. Feynman received a Nobel Prize in Physics a generation ago, a reporter asked him, "Can you briefly tell me what you did?" He replied, "If I could tell that to you in one minute, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize."

If everyone had to learn the basics of the sciences to graduate from high school, as it was in the past, and learn the kind of critical thinking required to "do science", maybe the American populace would be harder for quacks, charlatans, and a dishonest Media machine to manipulate. And, just maybe, the purported "national leaders" we call Senators and Representatives wouldn't make so many utterly boneheaded decisions whenever there is a scientific fact involved. The "critical thinking" taught in this generation's high schools would be laughed out of Plato's Academy.

Into the fray wades Joe Schwarcz, a Chemist who writes best-selling books, one after another, that frequently discuss how most Americans and most purveyors of the news get science wrong nearly all the time. His latest is Monkeys, Myths and Molecules: Separating Fact From Fiction, and the Science of Everyday Life.

There is no useful way to summarize 65 essays as diverse as I find between these covers. I'll just touch a point here and there:

• "A Tale of Two Cantaloupes" in the section "Swallow the Science" discusses first an outbreak of Listeria in 2011, carried by feces-contaminated cantaloupes, that eventually killed 35 people. Cantaloupes sit on the soil at they ripen, making them particularly prone to harboring infectious bacteria if "natural" (manure-based) fertilizers are used. The second cantaloupe saved lives: during the research to turn penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into an industrial scale medicine, in 1941 a particular strain of Penicillium that makes cantaloupes rot was found to produce the antibiotic with a concentration ten times that of other strains of the mold. The principle developed here is that context matters.
• "Capturing Carbon Dioxide" in the section "Chemistry Here and There" looks beyond the technologies of snagging the gas from smokestacks and such "emitters". The technology is well known. Its costs are inescapable, about 20% of total energy production. Than what do you do with millions of tons of this gas? The author discusses numerous things that we can do with CO₂, such as making soda pop, using it to feed algae for biofuel production, and making chemical intermediates. But these don't add up to enough "uses" for the stuff to use up the supply. We burn a lot of fuel! Pumping it into the ground has its own problems. Besides the difficult matter of ensuring it won't just leak back out, the recent rash of earthquakes in places where "fracking" for oil is being carried out show that shoving anything into the earth in large quantities can have wide-spread and possibly devastating effects. Y'gotta think things through.
• Several of the essays discuss the trouble folks sometimes cause by taking the results of tests done on mice and extrapolating them to humans. "Of Mice and Men" in the section "Stretching the Truth" is an example. A study had shown that intense sessions of treadmill running made changes to muscular and molecular structures, that were not found by longer sessions of less intense activity…at least for mice. Mice are convenient. You can work them half to death for a week or so, and then kill them and dissect their muscles to figure out what might have changed. Can't do that with people. As it happens, there appears to be a threshold in this effect, and it is probably so high that very few people ever work out with sufficient intensity. This essay takes a side trip into the possible effects of chocolate on Alzheimer's disease. This was also based on mouse work. But it was even more indirect: nobody fed cocoa to mice or to people. They dosed mouse nerve cells with various cocoa extracts. I guess there was enough of an effect that exciting headlines and review blurbs could be written. But nothing is yet known about whether the chemicals so tested will cross the blood-brain barrier when you EAT chocolate, rather than injecting it directly into the brain. Oh, well. The point here is, you need to determine what was actually found out, before concluding it is anything useful in the real world.

Dr. Shwarcz has wide-ranging interests, and his essays cover topics from acupressure to vitamin deficiencies (and how they were discerned). I hope many folks read this book, and at the very least learn a little more caution about news headlines that tout "discoveries" that soon drop out of sight.

Time catches up to Mr. Hitchens

kw: book reviews, collections, essays

I knew nothing of Christopher Hitchens besides his name when I obtained a collection of his essays titled and yet… I didn't know at the time that this was his final collection. There is no mention of an editor. Considering that the last five chapters didn't appear in print until after his death, I am forced to conclude that he prepared the book himself in his last months, with those last five essays awaiting publication in various journals, and that officers of his estate went ahead with the publication in 2015.

The book contains essays he wrote from 2004 until his death in 2011, with the exception of the first chapter, "Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That", from 1997. From the flyleaf I learned that he is one of the most prolific authors and essayists that I'd never heard of. I had heard of only one of his book, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I suppose when I heard or saw that book referenced somewhere it planted his name in my memory.

Reading the 48 essays in and yet…, I was quite impressed with the breadth of his reading and interests. He brings in more "thoughts from left field" (and right field and center and from over the park wall) than I typically see from even the best essayists I have read. And he seems able to look at almost anything from an angle nobody else thought of. Writing of "Arthur Schlesinger: The Courtier" (pp 197-202), he illuminates the tension  between Schlesinger's attempt to retain some measure of distance from the Kennedy "Camelot", while becoming in effect a courtier in that court. In "The Politicians We Deserve", he notes that "Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run" [for public office]. He closes that 2010 essay on demagoguery with, "How low can it go? Much lower, just you wait and see." It seems to me it would be well to keep collections of his essays handy, lest we lose that collective memory of the surge and sway of culture and politics. In an era growing more divisive by the day, it is well to remember that these things have indeed happened before, and had Hitchens lived into this end of the 20-teens, he'd surely have a lot to say about that.

I am not much concerned that he was anti-god. A person of faith recognizes that most religion is used to replace faith rather than uphold it, so that his analysis in god is Not Great is in part correct. 'Tis a pity he never brought himself to give the time of day to anyone of genuine faith so as to have the chance to see the difference. Yet, in the world in which he dwelt, Hitchens had clearer vision that that world has a right to expect.

As usual, the aliens is us

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space aliens, speculative fiction, short stories, collections, essays

I note upon looking back through my records that I have previously read only two books by David Brin. I reckon it is time to remedy that. His recent book Insistence of Vision gathers stories and a couple of excerpts from throughout his writing career, together with brief story notes and two essays on the craft of fiction writing and his views on its value (positive, naturally, but the key is why it is valuable). The first essay is titled "The Heresy of Science Fiction" and the second, "Waging War With Reality".

One core idea from the first essay is worth abstracting: The message underlying much speculative fiction is one of two moods, either "give up and give in" or "try harder and push forward". Brin is of the latter persuasion, concluding, "…we are the rebels. We who think change might (possibly) bring good." The following 21 stories (including a novelette) and the closing essay illustrate his optimism.

Even in a rather dark story such as the title one, "Insistence of Vision", in which the punishment for certain crimes is blinding (apparently reversible) of the natural eyes, and forcible reliance on virtual reality jacked right into the brain, which is not operative in certain "free zones"; in such a story the actual message is that sanctions more humane than those now practiced might be possible, and even effective.

Here is a basic formula: Discern a trend in society, technology, fashion, or whatever, and extrapolate it to a logical conclusion…or an illogical one! It seems simple enough, and one might think it would lead to one-dimensional fiction. Most certainly it can. But the dimensions available are as numerous as human personal variation allows, and the possibilities are endless. That is just one tool of speculative fiction. Consider a visit by Martians or some similar aliens who out-Spock Mr. Spock. Emotionless, logical to a severe extreme, and they have a grievance against certain persons here on Earth (One thinks of a space probes crash-landing and injuring someone powerful. Kind of like Dorothy and her Kansas house, dropped on the Wicked Witch of the East). How might those beings take vengeance? "Mars Opposition" provides one possible scenario. The plot twist upon the narrator is a "Brin Special", the kind of eye-opening surprise he is noted for.

What makes David Brin special is the believableness of his space aliens. That rests in the glimmer of familiarity. No matter how alien, you find yourself thinking, "I know someone like that" or "that's what I'd do!".

Looking the stories over, I find I must either summarize them all or stop here. I'd better leave more room for a reader's delight. Get this book, and do restrain yourself, so that it lasts more than a single sitting!

Dancing to the beat of a different accordion

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, humor, autobiographies, commentary

My father said, "Don't put yourself down. The world is full of people who will do that for you." To make this proverb universally applicable, one must add, "…unless you can make a living from it." Think of Rodney Dangerfield ("I get no respect"). Then think of Alexandra Petri as a younger, brasher Rodney Dangerfield, with a greater range.

How great is that range? One could make a useful estimate from the chapter titles of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences. After chapter 1, "How Not to be Awkward", states, in its entirety,

1. I have no idea.
2. Well, how about this? Don't do any of the following.

there follow 23 chapters ranging from "Flopper" (2) to "Tuesdays with Hitler" (6) to "How to Join a Cult, by Mistake, on a Tuesday, in Fifty-Seven Easy Steps" (8) and "Under the Dome" (20 - her father was a Congressman) to "Self-Defense Tips for Fairy-Tale Girls" (21). Don't consider these the extrema, as though they were the points on a starfish. NOr is it even a starfish with 23 points; it is more of a 23-dimensional space. And it implies there are a whole lot more dimensions out there!

In today's paper, the Crossword Puzzle's first and last "across" clues were (1) "Parent of 63 across" and (63) "Child of 1 across". They turned out to be "Baby Boomer" and "Millennial". That is not generally true. My wife and I happen to be Boomers, and parents of a Millennial, only because we were in our mid-40's when he was born. My wife went right out of labor into hot flashes. Most children of Boomers are members of the "X Generation", and most Millennials are their children. Ms Petri, being no more than a few months older than our son, is definitely a Millennial, and between us and her there is a double Generation Gap.

Anyone out there remember the Generation Gap? It was the one between the Boomers and our parents, who were the "Great Depression Generation" and also the "Greatest Generation". They had lived through the two most significant eras of the Twentieth Century, but to us it was all "history", as in our classic dismissal, "Oh, that's history, man!" They said, "Waste not, want not," and we said, "But I want it NOW". They said, "An apple doesn't fall far from the tree," but we were apples with legs, and ran half across the planet. They built "The Good Life" and first we trashed it, then turned anti-trashing sentiment into the Enviro-Nazi movement that drives half of Liberal politics; we soft-heartedly (and soft-headedly) tried to "Save the World" (usually from them!), and Liberal politics (the other half) turned this into the Universal Nanny State (look up "Cowboy after OSHA" to see what I mean).

So it's understandable that it took me a while to warm to Ms Petri's style of humor, and to learn to parse when she was actually being serious. I have observed among Millennials, including our son, that "to think is to do." They lack a filter. In the chapter "Internet Bitch", about the time Rush Limbaugh called her a Bitch, she muses on two collections of words: those that cause a gut reaction, such as the F-bomb and the S-bomb, and those that used to, but don't any more, such as "Zounds!", a contraction of "God's Wounds!"—it could get you burned at the stake in the 1500's. There is a coda. to listen to nearly anyone under 35 speak, the "bombs" and a half-dozen other "four letter words" don't seem to give any of them a kick in the gut, the way they seem to affect Boomers. Fortunately, while not averse to the occasional bombing run, Ms Petri is much cleaner of mouth (of pen? of keyboard?) than most of her generation.

As a journalist (the profession she wraps around all her escapades), she gets backstage for events most of us never hear of. She went to the National Pun contest, entered it on a lark, and did so well that the next year she returned, and won! She applied, and appeared, on Jeopardy; was ahead for a while but then lost. She can't return while Alex Trebek is alive, so she awaits his demise: only then can she return to her "tribe", the trivia-obsessed She did pretty well in a whistling contest. These and other adventures hark back to Chapter 2, "Flopper", in which she shows that, if you can become immune to the shame of being a flop, there are a lot of fun things waiting out there for you to try. You might actually be sorta good at a few of them.

Her humor style is varied, but much relies on the sly exaggeration. She could have almost learned that kind of humor from many of the great humorists of the generation before mine, from Red Skelton to Jack Benny. It would be interesting to see her do a stand-up routine à la Jack Benny. He could draw out more laughs with a slow, turning gaze than a whole monologue by Jay Leno; I bet she could come close.

But her book is about awkwardness, after all. The 23 chapters aren't really about the awkward silences themselves, but about what led up to them…a great many of them. And growing up seems to be the most awkward of all. She sums up the notion that she has become, greatly to her surprise, an adult, this way:

"Everyone sees this competent-looking thing walking around, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, while for the purposes of this metaphor under the iceberg is not more ice but instead a crowd of really nervous penguins frantically trying to hold the ice in place and feeling that they aren't quite up to the task."

So really, why else would she have shown up at the airport to pick up a friend, playing a Polka on her accordion?

The Quintessential Intellectual

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collections, essays, science, society, opinion

As much Physics as I studied, and as much as I have studied and pondered Relativity, both the Special and General theories, I realized I had never read more than a few lines by Einstein himself. When I saw Ideas and Opinions, a collection of essays and letters by Albert Einstein, I just had to snatch it up. The book is based on Mein Weltbild (My Worldview), edited by Carl Seelig, with a great deal of other material Einstein wrote after that book was published in 1934. Most of the material written before 1935 was in German and appears here in translation, mostly by Sonja Bargmann.

The greatest number of portions of My Worldview are found in the first two sections, about 2/5 of the book, titled "Ideas and Opinions" and "On Politics, Government, and Pacifism". The first section shows him to be a rather typical European intellectual, viewing America from a European standpoint. For example, he observes that an American is more goal-directed but a little less rigidly individualistic than a typical European. That is something with which some Americans might take issue! In his day he might have been the most visible proponent of total intellectual freedom among scientists, only modifying this view somewhat under threat from the possibility that the Nazis might develop atomic power and atomic weapons.

But I found most fascinating his extreme pacifism. In the second section he argues, strongly and repeatedly, for total disarmament, for all nations to eschew the use of force, most particularly armed warfare, and this to be enforced by a global authority which alone would be tasked to enforce the security of all. Here we find the highly brilliant Einstein as the poster child for Ivory Tower idealism. My answer to pacifism is, "As long as there exists the possibility for evil persons to attain coercive power, at any level, all others must be sufficiently armed and have the will to effectively resist, at any level." This demolishes pacifism in all its forms. You can quote me on that, and on this: Human nature must change dramatically before pacifism is practicable.

The third section, "On the Jewish People," contains ten items from My Worldview and four that were written or delivered between 1938 and 1950. Only the last item, "The Jews of Israel", was written (and delivered by radio broadcast) after the formation of Israel in the former territory of Palestine. Better than anyone else I have read from, he makes a clear case that the Jews cannot assimilate into any nation, because they are a nation already, though they were a nation without territory from 70 AD until 1948 AD; and that this fact is the singular source of Antisemitism.

The fourth and shortest section, "On Germany", primarily consists of letters between Einstein and the scientific academies from which he resigned after 1933, but concludes with a paean, "To the Heroes of the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto." These sentences, written in 1944, make his standing clear:

"The Germans as an entire people are responsible for these mass murders and must be punished as a people if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely. Behind the Nazi party stands the German people, who elected Hitler after he had in his book and in his speeches made his shameful intentions clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding."

The fifth and longest section, about 45% of the whole, is "Contributions to Science." Here he explained his work to a variety of audiences, primarily his Special and General Theories of Relativity, but also his later work toward a Unified Field Theory. Here his fundamental approach is most clearly displayed, encapsulated in the proverb (not found in this book, because it is a paraphrase), "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Here we find Einstein as a master explainer. He shows that Newton felt compelled to introduce, almost against his will, the concepts of absolute space and absolute time, to make his mechanics and his gravitational theory work. Later physicists—Einstein mentions Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz and Mach, among others—labored to resolve inconsistencies in subtle experiments that test the limits of classical mechanics, as the Newtonian system has come to be called. Lorentz formulated a transformation based on the constancy of the speed of light, implied in the equations of Maxwell and observed by Michelson and Morley. Upon all this work did Einstein erect first Special Relativity, and a decade later, General Relativity.

I note that he gives rather short shrift to Quantum Theory. Indeed, it is well known that his view was quite at odds with that of Niels Bohr and what is now called the Copenhagen Interpretation. Now, since Einstein's death, three of the four known fundamental forces—Electromagnetism, Strong, and Weak—have been unified into one quantum-based theory, but Gravitation remains stubbornly on its own. Theories abound aimed at reconciling Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity, so far to no avail. The situation is analogous, but more confused, than the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Newton and Lorentz, but so far no super-Einstein has arisen to resolve it.

It takes a lot of study and deep thinking to become comfortable with the fact that light is both a wave and a particle stream. I became used to working with photon streams long ago. (Here is my favorite illustration: In whichever way light arrives at your eye, it is refracted in the cornea and lens as a wave, but stimulates the cells in the retina as a particle stream.) Photons mediate the electromagnetic field and electromagnetic forces. So is there a Graviton that mediates gravity? Will physics students one day labor to become comfortable with both gravitational waves that obey General Relativity, and gravity as streams of gravitons according to a highly amped-up Quantum Theory?

To those working on this conundrum, I ask these things, for they truly puzzle me:

If gravity is mediated by gravitons, what emits them and where are they absorbed? Specifically, if black holes are real, from what are the gravitons that "reach out" to surrounding bodies emitted? Do gravitons indeed travel at the same speed as light, which implies that they have no "rest mass"? Or are they massive, and if so, how much "slower" than light do they travel (we know that neutrinos with their tiny masses seldom travel slower than about 0.999c)? And if gravitons are massive and thus sub-c, is there a possible violation of conservation of energy or of momentum in orbital motions, particularly on gravitational (or larger) scales? Could this account for the "cosmological constant" that is currently attributed to "dark energy"?

Back to Einstein. Reading his writings about science, one feels one can almost follow in his footsteps. Yet his subtlety and extreme power as a scientific thinker are shown when, upon looking away from the page, we find that we must take many, many tiny steps just to cross from one of his footprints to the next.

More investigative journalism, and reverie

kw: article reviews, nonfiction, fiction, essays, collections, anthologies, magazine writing

It took no more than a couple of days to finish reading The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, edited by Sid Holt. To avoid further disturbing my sleep, I did more of the reading in the second half of the volume during the days! Articles worth special mention:

• Love and Ruin by James Vernini, first published in The Atavist. At 52 pages, this is probably the longest. It chronicles the lives of Nancy and Louis Dupree during their decades in Afghanistan, and the turmoils of that poor nation from 1949 onward. In 1978 Louis was expelled, but surveyed the Russia-Muhajideen war during frequent visits to Pakistan. Some say he participated in training anti-Russian fighters. But the memoir is more about Nancy, who carried on after his death in 1989. She became a beloved mother figure to many in Afghanistan, where she continues to spend part of her time even at age 89. It is a very touching survey of the changes she has seen, too frequently tragic and too seldom hopeful, in a country the world will not leave alone.
• Jackie's Goodbye by Tiffany Stanley, first published in National Journal. The author's aunt Jackie began to manifest symptoms of Alzheimer's dementia in her fifties. She was cared for by her increasingly over-stressed brother—the author's father—until 2012 when he suffered heart failure and Ms Stanley had to take over the care of both of them, but primarily of Jackie. Amidst a heartbreaking story of her aunt's decline and death after little more than two more years, Ms Stanley frankly describes the heartbreakingly banal indifference of every facet of the "health care" industry to these most needy ones. While many assisted-living and nursing-home facilities have "dementia care" units with very caring, and sometimes even well-trained nurses, few can afford to pay $6,000 - $9,000 per month. If you can't afford that, you're on your own. There is a big, big gap between "not affording" such horrendous costs, and being so totally broke that Medicaid will pay. But while awaiting Medicaid approval, from a few months to a year, you are still on your own. You can't take the time to hold a job to make the money to pay a half-time helper and still keep your own sanity together. Far too many places will admit someone who cannot show sufficient assets to pay for at least the first six or more months' residence. This touches a chord with me: my father spent half his net worth hiring caregivers during the last few years of my mother's life. He had seen what a supposedly "good" nursing home was like when his uncle had to be in one for his last few months. Dad was determined that his own wife would never enter such a place. She didn't. But he was in pretty poor shape by the time she died. Somehow, the little help my three brothers and I could offer, none of us living closer than a day's drive or a day's plane ride away, could suffice to give him more than a day or part of a day of respite. One of my mother's caregivers, a lovely woman named Mary, bonded with Mom so much that she had a nervous breakdown near the end of Mom's life and needed care herself. She got out of the nursing/caregiving field entirely.
• This Old Man by Roger Angell, first published in The New Yorker. Roger Angell is 93 (maybe 94 now), and wrote of how things really are for him. You could call this 16-page piece an extended answer to, "How are you?" The short answer is, "Not too bad, not too good." He writes about the paradox that many of the very aged are happier than those a generation younger; of the growing invisibility of the elderly, as if the young think, "You've had your turn. We'll be polite, but we don't care what you think"; about sex and companionship, which makes those who are "only 50-60" or so very squeamish: what, we're supposed to become neuters at some defined age? Ask my 94-year-old Dad about that; he wishes he could return to the facility he stayed at until early this year, where he had a girlfriend, and he still phones her almost daily. Her 100th birthday was last week. She craves his company also. I remember, when I was 35 and Dad was 60, asking him, "What is it like to be 60?" (It seemed pretty old to me at the time). He said, "It is pretty much like being 25, except things take longer. Now that I am just a little shy of 70, I agree. The mind and our attitudes don't change much, and because our body changes gradually, we get used to it, if a little chagrined sometimes. Should I live to be 95 or so, I hope to do it with the grace of Roger Angell and the vigor of my father. When Dad says, "Don't get old," I reply, "It beats the alternative." We both know it is true.

I applaud Sid Holt and his helpers on this and the prior volumes in the series, for gathering articles that make me think, make me feel strongly (sometimes against my will), and make me say, "I'm glad I read that."

The pleasures of investigative journalism

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, fiction, essays, collections, anthologies, magazine writing

Sometimes I read two or more books and journals at a time, and then I don't tear through a book in my usual 3-4 days. This is the case with the latest edition of my new favorite nonfiction anthology, The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, edited by Sid Holt. While reading a volume of CWWN, I also read articles in the two journals I subscribe to, Wired and Scientific American. The 2015 edition of TBAMW was kept on my bedside table, and I confess that, while I usually read to put myself to sleep, sometimes an article kept me up quite a bit longer than I expected!

I am currently halfway through the volume, having read 8 extended articles, with 11 slightly shorter ones to go. A few that I wish to discuss particularly:

• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates, first published in The Atlantic. The essay is nearly 50 pages long, and probably occupied about 30 pages in The Atlantic. The author's subject is not just reparations for black slavery, which went on in America for more than 300 years. He focuses on a more modern phenomenon, one that is still occurring at such a rate that OECD cannot afford to adequately enforce existing laws: Redlining in real estate markets in Chicago. Chicago is Coates's prime example, but the practice is rampant in cities of all sizes throughout the country. When I took the "Real Estate Course" a few years ago, they discussed redlining, but the attitude was dismissive, as though "it doesn't happen here". But I know it does. The article's ten sections connect the attitudes of slave owners toward their slaves with the attitudes of bankers and real estate brokers and agents, and others who continue to profit from the so-called "sub-prime mortgage crisis". This article did more than anything else I have read—and I confess I have not read very much—to give me a more favorable attitude toward reparations. I still suspect that any large and sustained effort to actually provide reparations could do more harm than good, perhaps much more. But we do need to answer these questions: To whom are reparations to be paid, and in what form? From whom will the funds come? In the case of reparations targeting Redlining over the past 50-80 years, I'd be in favor of requiring forgiveness of all the mortgages made to African-Americans in the Redlined neighborhoods. But the hard part would be the followup education and training of the new landowners; most would be overwhelmed and at an entire loss, and likely to lose their windfall. The bankers who participated in this—that is, nearly all major banks' officers—have grown obscenely rich from the predatory practices that Coates outlines. They, more than any, must absorb the blow. But other measures will be harder to determine, harder to implement. Broad-brush approaches don't ever work out like you expect. It is not a subject we can safely ignore any more.
• I Don't Care if You Like It by Rebecca Traister, first published in The New Republic. This is one of three of Ms Traister's articles in TNR that together attained a Finalist award. It is a concise (~10 pp) and excellently written slam of the male attitudes that keep women objectified. It focuses on a signal event in which Amy Poehler put Jimmy Fallon in his place for chiding her with an "I don't like it" statement. What she said was a rather profane version of the article's title; naturally it contained the F-bomb. But how much of the dancing on eggshells that women must do to be accepted is predicated on male acceptance? My wife reads Women's Day, mainly for recipe ideas. But most of the articles are about becoming better and better at pleasing men. No wonder the recent case of the Stanford swimmer raping an unconscious woman garnered only a 6-month sentence. After all, the victim's function is to please men, right? The current news ties this event to "white privilege", but it is really about "male privilege". I read an article by a woman who had tried in vain to get her husband and sons to "help around the house." Finally, she bought a bunch of 2-ounce Dixie cups, a big box of plastic flatware, and a big pile of paper plates, and announced the following. She would make her own meals, eat off the good china with the good silverware, and clean up after herself. The men were on their own, but were not allowed to touch anything besides the paper and plasticware unless they washed it immediately thereafter. She would do only her own laundry. They could not use the pots and pans for cooking unless they washed them immediately after the meal. She would not clean up after them. I'd like to have seen a follow-up article by her a year later. I thank God for two things in my life: a no-nonsense Japanese wife who continues to train her husband, and a compliant nature in that I accept her training. It took a few decades, but our home is comparatively peaceful and we're a happy couple. 
• Inside the Iron Closet: What it's Like to be Gay in Putin's Russia by Jeff Sharlet, first published in GQ. I am appalled, but I suppose I should have expected it. Russia has always been one of the least-accepting of demi-Western cultures, towards homosexuality, and towards sexual expression in general. Frankly put, being gay or lesbian in Russia right now is very similar to being a runaway slave in Alabama in 1850. Though the lack of a black skin makes it slightly harder to detect a gay Russian, otherwise, it is the same: every hand is against you, police just smile should you dare to report being attacked, and if you have children they are likely to be removed from the home and raised by others with "better moral probity".

Does all that seem like good bedside reading? I'm the sort that relishes good, thought-provoking writing, even when my reason for reading is to lull myself to sleep.