Comets, asteroids, … and writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gig economy from inside - half a world away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

He entertained a century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is AI ready for prime time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other three experiments involved 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was a robot

 kw: psychology, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, manufactured intelligence, memoirs

I must be the poster child for late bloomers. Although an IQ test I was given in second grade indicated an IQ of 170, when I look back I think I had an EQ (emotional quotient) in Moron territory. Not much changed for several years.

I had thrust upon me an opportunity to look back and to look in the mirror, psychologically speaking, at the age of twelve. My parents were very concerned about my intense self-focus and tendency to keep to myself. For several months I was sent for psychoanalysis with a Freudian psychoanalyst who was a member of the church we attended at the time. She was older than my parents, but not old enough to be my grandmother. Her son was my age. Her husband was also a doctor.

All I knew at the time was that I was "withdrawn" and needed to "come out of my shell." I suppose these days I would be assigned to some location on the "autism spectrum" (It is far from a spectrum, but several related conditions, and only a few of them should be considered maladies). Now that more than 65 years have passed, I judge that it took more than thirty years for me to "come out of my shell" and put it (mostly) behind me.

As a pre-teen and teenager, I studied those around me. I concluded that I didn't have much in the way of a personality. I was cold, often indifferent, and I could be cruel. I decided it would be worthwhile, not to escape whatever "my shell" was, but to take control of it and enhance it, to construct the simulation of a nicer and more social person. Strategically, I figured that if I really had an IQ of 170, I could afford to spend 10-20 IQ points upon an alternative "person" in me. I never gave this person a name, but now it seems appropriate to call it MI, for "manufactured intelligence".

Was MI a robot, or a "Waldo", a teleoperated mechanism? Probably the latter, but I think of MI as a robot, an artificial friend I could rely on to relate to the world for me. Perhaps an avatar.

Creating and maintaining MI required a lot of close observation of other people, how they related to each other and what reactions various actions elicited. It was a lot of work and took a lot of time, but I gradually gained the ability to turn things over to MI and retreat, watchfully, into the background.

A lot happened in the following few decades. By about the age of fifty, I had been married more than twenty years, I had a pre-teen son, I was in mid-career at Dupont, and I was quite involved leading a church (I became a Christian at the age of 19, and "got more serious about the Lord" at age 24). My manager at Dupont decided to send me to a Technical Leadership Development Training course, which lasted a few weeks and took place at a conference center on the shore of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. This was a big turning point.

Part of the preparation for TLDT was filling out a few questionnaires and surveys, and having a few colleagues fill out a personality scoring questionnaire that I had also filled out, twice. When I filled out that one in particular—I don't recall its title, so I'll call it Analog—it was to be filled out slowly and thoughtfully. After two weeks I was to fill it out again, answering each question as quickly as possible.

Another of the items was a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, a personality assessment. To jump to the chase on this one, my MBTI is INTP, Introverted+iNtuitive+Thinker+Perceiver. This is the least common MBTI type. However, I noticed that my numerical scores indicated strong tension on all four axes, and that the position on each axis was closer to the middle than to either end. For example, on the Thinking-Feeling axis, I scored 5 in the T direction; the range is 50F to 50T, which really means I have strong feelings but I'm stronger as a thinker, so 05T really means 50T-45F. That's not mathematical, but positional.

The Analog Test results precipitated a crisis within me. The "slow" and "fast" versions of my own sets of answers were quite different, and usually opposite. I realized that the "slow" results were for "inside" and that the "fast" answers were from MI. I had trained MI to be reactive, giving me leisure to think things over behind the scenes. After we all had a look at our personal results, we were given the results from our colleagues (three that each of us had chosen). The results from my colleagues matched well with the answers from MI! My three colleagues were unaware of the "real" me. I remember thinking, "Boy, do I have them fooled." Somehow, I found myself getting depressed.

A day or two later we all went home for two weeks, then returned. During those two weeks I did a lot of "inside work." I was greatly helped by my relationship with God. I discovered, deeper within me, that something had been growing very slowly over the years and decades. I was mostly able to shed both the "unpleasant me" I had been hiding, and MI, or most of MI. I have a "real Me" that knows God, knows people better than I ever had, that reacts a little slower than MI had but more thoughtfully. Most importantly, realizing I had been living a lie, I found that God is more pleased than before.

Midway through my decades of living behind MI, a friend said something insightful. I had developed very steady habits in many ways. Observing some of these, day after day, one day he said, "You're like a machine." I must admit, he had a point.

When we returned for the final week of training, I said to some of my colleagues, and to the instructor, "I realized that you can't build a tree." I didn't explain. Maybe they figured it out. I do know that MI wasn't a person but a shell, a mediator, even a translator. Now I didn't need MI any more. There is a real Me, and that is just who I am.

I am not sorry that I was a robot for so long. MI protected something deep inside me as it slowly grew into a mature person with a real, human personality. A personality strong enough to shed much of the unpleasant "old me" I'd been hiding.

This gives me some perspective on current trends around AI, which I prefer to call SI, for Simulated Intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) are hollow. They are shells. They are being trained, or "grown", into reactive systems with certain useful powers. But they don't have any right to be given autonomy. Furthermore, they do not stand alone. 

At the large companies that develop and train LLMs, thousands of coders and other computer scientists labor upon them. Only a small number of them are needed to train them. The rest are busy writing code that does what? The tendency of early LLMs to frequently "hallucinate" (that is, go off the rails) has kept numerous coders busy adding various guardrails and snippets of "real world" and "real physics" code to steer them. The Transformer code that converts a prompt into a string of tokens, and that reinterprets the results into human language, is a huge part of the system. More recent LLMs that can do limited agentic actions such as making focused Internet searches and database queries to build a response are doing a lot more than "predicting the next word."

Think of it: the big LLMs now have billions or perhaps a trillion or more "weights", which represent probabilities of certain reactions when a set of pathways through the tree of weights is taken. There are only about 100,000 English words in common use, and about a million in total (every other human language is much smaller except perhaps Chinese). The relationship matrix between all those words is very sparse; a particular word's chance of being in some way related to another word chosen at random is usually zero. The weights are not just for single tokens but for phrases, and the presence of certain kinds of phrases in a prompt (or 'conversation') triggers things like database queries and Internet searches. When you get a long answer from an LLM, you can count on big portions of the text being snatched verbatim from some of the sources it used to formulate its answer. You may know the student's maxim, "Copying from one source is plagiarism; copying from many sources is research." That principle is most likely solidly encoded into every LLM's structure.

Can any LLM or other manifestation of SI (or AI) become conscious? Can one become an ASI, an artificial superintelligence? Consider MI. I never thought of MI as a whole person. Close to thirty years ago I "harvested" MI for parts, one might say, and let the real Me within become the kind of person that I had constructed MI to simulate. MI was a simulation. Of the 15-20 billion neurons and quadrillions of neural synapses in my cerebral cortex, I suspect that MI was embodied in a few percent. After all, our entire emotional persona is focused in our limbic system, a set of mid-brain structures that include about a billion neurons and some thousand or so synapses per neuron, well-attached to the cortex (MI made lots of use of my limbic system). But our limbic system isn't all there is to any of us.

So far I see no hint that any of the AI tools out there have anything like a limbic system. Without that, there is on intentionality, no matter what kinds of statements have been made by various LLMs. At best, they are quoting literary characters who say certain things with certain emotional nuances in the source documents. But in the LLM, there is no "there" there.

Let's keep it that way.

I am a happier person, having become whole after hiding who I really am for so long. I am no longer robotic. In fact, one of my favorite Bible verses is John 3:8, "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

Would you dare to walk on these artworks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affecting everything, affected by everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emerging from the valley of the shadow

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, cancer, cancer survival, cancer treatment

Beating cancer takes a powerful team. Of course, we need doctors: surgeon, oncologist, radiologist, and so forth. It also takes committed family and friends. What I went through late in 2000 and for the next six months was pretty rough. A highly expert surgeon rearranged my insides, removing a couple of feet of colon and a foot of ileum and fat containing more than forty lymph nodes. An oncologist who had been dubbed "the one I would go to" by most of the local physicians put me through six months of chemotherapy. Then I had five years of annual colonoscopies and CT scans and quarterly blood tests. Since then I've had a colonoscopy every three years, until recently the gastroenterologist said, "There were no polyps, this time or last. You can wait five years this time. I guess that is as close to cured as one can get.

Clea Shearer had breast cancer, and while her experiences were not the worst possible (short of dying), they were worse than many and much more difficult than mine. She relates her experiences in Cancer is Complicated: And Other Unexpected Lessons I've Learned. Where my chemo substance, 5FU, can cause nausea and hair loss, in my case I had neither, but rather six months of being in a good mood almost all the time. I remarked to a friend, "5FU is the best antidepressant ever!" Clea was given a substance they call Red Devil, and it could only be used at two-week intervals, sometimes three; it was that debilitating. Once she was somewhat recovered, she also underwent a series of radiation treatments that left her with burns that took months to heal.

Guess what? She got through it. As she tells us, her husband, her children, her mother (who spent most of the saga with her constantly), several friends—some she was able to see face-to-face, and more via phone or video calling—and the loving care of quite an array of surgical and oncological nurses, all upheld her and encouraged her at every stage.

I also have quite a social and church support system, but I think Clea has me beat hands down in that department.

Many take this verse as symbolic: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I do not fear evil, for You are with me." (Psalm 23:4) Although it symbolizes the death and resurrection of Jesus, to David the psalmist it reflected a harrowing experience that he had survived. It gives comfort to us also, when we pass through a harrowing experience. I created this image in Leonardo AI's Flow engine, to show that we don't pass through alone, and that there is "light at the end of the tunnel" that is not an oncoming train but a doorway to a renewed life.

Clea is in the fourth year of a ten-year follow-up regimen of tests and hormone treatments; her tumor was hormone sensitive. At age 44 (according to Wikipedia), she is a little more than half my age. May she live a long and increasingly pain-and-disability free life! She intends her book to encourage not just women with breast cancer and recent survivors, but all cancer patients: Cancer is indeed complicated, but that is because we are complicated. Our doctors have their work cut out for them, figuring which approach will work to rescue us, with our unique biochemistry, in the face of a disease that is equally complicated.

I am very thankful I read this book.

She turned a branch into a bush

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, anthropology, anthropologists, human origins

I once read about Maeve Leakey that as a girl she would work a jigsaw puzzle from the back, not seeing the picture; this prepared her to work as an anthropologist, matching chips and slivers of fossil bone to reconstruct a skull or a mandible or part of a femur. Although she doesn't mention this youthful skill in her memoir The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past (co-written with Samira Leakey), she does tell of herself and her team members spending hundreds or thousands of hours piecing bits of fossil together. In the landscapes where she works, it is rare to find a scrap of bone as large as a hand, or even a finger.

While I typically find or generate an image relevant to a book I will review, in this case I could do no better than the cover photographer. This picture is a classic portrait of the remarkable paleoanthropologist.

The book touches on her younger life, but primarily begins when she had finished her PhD and was planning to work with living primates. She was invited to join an expedition with Louis Leakey in Kenya. It isn't clear when she moved to Kenya permanently, but she has lived primarily in that country ever since. She published Sediments in 2020 while her husband Richard Leakey was living; he died in 2022. Certain segments of the book outline his health challenges: Kidney disease beginning in 1969, multiple kidney transplants beginning about ten years later, and a liver transplant much later. Naturally, these episodes affected her and her work, but she persevered.

Maeve and her husband shared an admirable combination of formidable technical skills with great administrative ability, though their personalities and styles differed quite a bit. This enabled Maeve to carry on the anthropology, including fundraising and directing teams of workers while Richard filled crucial roles in major conservation organizations. Throughout the book and in the Acknowledgements she credits numerous field assistants, mostly Kenyans, whose labors enabled the tremendous scientific achievements we read about.

The thread that runs throughout is the conviction Maeve had from very early that the evolutionary path from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the genus Homo and then the species Homo sapiens (us) was not linear, but was one pathway through a branching bush. Near the end of the book she points out that in the period roughly 1.4-2 million years ago there were typically four hominin (human related or ancestral) species sharing the landscape of northeastern Africa. 

Further, when "early modern" H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe for the last time in prehistory, about 60-70,000 years ago, they came into the presence of the descendants of earlier migrations, the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. There are hints that another hominin species or two existed alongside them. We do know that modern Eurasians bear a small percentage of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Her image of a "family bush" has been vindicated.

I have read a few other books about the life and work of Richard's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, who stand as monuments of the field, and of Richard's work. This book rounds out the collection, full of stories of a top scientist among stellar scientists, who has herself become a monument, a living legend. It helps that she is a master storyteller. I loved this book.

Wolves making it against all odds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, wildlife, wildlife management, wolves, biologists, naturalists, memoirs

About two decades before wolves were trucked into Yellowstone National Park, a lone female wolf made her way from Canada into the area around Glacier National Park. She was named Kishinena, Later a male wolf joined her, and the pair raised at least three litters of pups. By the time "re-introduction" was officially carried out, the Glacier NP area was host to a few packs of self-introduced wolves.

One woman witnessed it all, and continued to study wolves in and near Montana for forty years. Dr. Diane K. Boyd became the most skilled wolf trapper in America, although she never caught Kishinena. We can be generous and say that she was still learning in those early years.

At first when I was reading Dr. Boyd's memoir A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, my mental image of a wolf trap was the cruel leg-crushing snap trap employed by fur trappers. Eventually I learned that recovery trappers use a cable trap that doesn't break any bones and seldom breaks the skin. A wolf (or mis-caught bear or other animal) that struggles for hours against such a trap can still cut off circulation to the trapped foot to cause permanent injury; this is why a biologist runs the trapline at least twice daily. 

The author tells one story of herself and an assistant, also female, tranquilizing a wolf that had become so exhausted from fighting the trap that it was practically frozen to death, and the foot was solid as a rock. The two women took the sleeping wolf into the truck, laid it across their laps, ran the engine fast and the heater all the way up. Then they took off their shirts and body-warmed the wolf, whose body temperature was about eight degrees below normal by then. Once the animal began to warm, Diane realized it was waking, but for a while it stayed still to enjoy the warmth. She carefully reached to open the door, holding the radio collar they'd put on earlier to keep that mouthful of teeth away from her face, and let the wolf bolt away. Quite a sight they must have made, two half-naked women covered in sweat and black-and-gray fur! Happy to see the wolf on the run. A visit to the area the next day to follow its tracks for a ways confirmed that the wolf didn't just run a quarter mile and drop dead; it was apparently well enough to run long and far. Radio tracking in the following days showed that it covered a lot of territory, and made kills as usual.

During her forty years with the wolves, the author saw their situation come nearly full circle. Wolves were once so universally hated they were destroyed from every square mile of the U.S. "lower 48" except the extreme north of Minnesota and Isle Royale on Lake Superior. By the mid 1990's they were much beloved by many Americans, federal legislation protected them, and they multiplied all across the northern states, from the Great Lakes to Washington state. Over the next decade or so the mood shifted again, and the fear and hatred of wolves was on the rebound. Even today, the pendulum is a bit to the side of "protect livestock" rather than "protect wolves". Nonetheless, the gray wolf has been restored as a major predator in the northern US.

Consider this list: Grizzly Bear, Wolf, Coyote, Fox, Wolverine, Mountain Lion, Bobcat. Five of these seven can easily kill a human. Only wolves are hated in a special way. This came out especially strongly at a public meeting in 2018 in Trout Creek, Montana. For more than two hours a couple hundred wolf-hating folk berated Forest Service members and supporting scientists, including Dr. Boyd. Earlier in the book she calls her treatment among wildlife biologists and forest rangers, as a young, slender blonde woman among "mountain men", a baptism of fire. But this was another thing entirely. When she had opportunity, she spoke reason, but when the crowd is unreasonable—and half are drunk—that's like tossing a snowball into a hot wind.

I don't know what the national mood is today. Where has the pendulum swung in the past seven years? I was once told by a policeman that there's a threshold of 15%: if more than 15% of the population habitually speeds, for example (and the level is more like 75%), speed laws cannot be effectively enforced. I don't know what the present level of wolf-hatred is, but if it's more than about a quarter of us, a lot of wolves are at risk. Poaching has existed all through the past 4-5 decades, but it reached an all-time high within the past decade, and I just don't know if the trend is still upward, or if it is abating.

Duck-Duck-Go's AI Assist tells me this:

As of 2024, the estimated gray wolf population in the contiguous United States is between 14,000 and 18,000, with Alaska having an additional 7,000 to 11,000 wolves. Most of the populations are concentrated in the northern half of the country.

That's a big difference from the near-zero population of the period from 1940-1970. And Dr. Boyd witnessed all of that recovery. She is an admirable naturalist/biologist, and a great storyteller.

If the AI can't see you, do you exist?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, artificial vision, face recognition systems, activism, memoirs

One could say it all started with a Halloween mask. One could also say it started with a vision system that couldn't see. Graduate student Joy Buolamwini was coding a project she calls Aspire Mirror, using some off-the-shelf face recognition software, but it couldn't detect her face. She had recently bought a white costume mask for a Halloween event; on a whim she put it on. Lo and behold! The system detected the mask as a face, right away.

Dr. Buolamwini's parents are from Ghana, so she isn't just "Black", she's darker skinned than many Afro-Americans. The software she used for the Aspire Mirror prototype isn't the only one that is blind to her face. Most such software is "Black blind", and many vision systems make many more recognition errors with Black faces than with White ones. Later in her career, when she and colleagues tested major vision systems, they showed an almost perfect correlation between accuracy and paleness of skin. 

As she describes in her book Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines, one major company's software achieved 100% accuracy of both recognition (distinguishing persons who look similar) and verification (admitting only the correct person to their phone, for example) for White male faces only. Other major brands achieved accuracy exceeding 85% or 90%, again for White faces only, and also, better accuracy for men than women. For all of them, the darker the skin, the lower the accuracy of both kinds, and the lowest accuracy is for Black women.

As Big Data has morphed into Large Language Models and Large Image Models (LLM and LIM, respectively), their identification as AI has been cemented in the popular (and press) imagination. Personally, I dislike the term "Artificial Intelligence" when used for such systems. I prefer SI, "Simulated Intelligence". Weaselly terms such as ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) still don't go far enough to distance SI software from natural (i.e., evolved) intelligence. Genuine AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), if it is possible, would be deserving of the raw moniker without the qualifier: AI.

Face recognition is something all animals with vision can accomplish. Of course, various species do better at recognizing their own species. Even insects, with a very different vision system than our own, can recognize one human from another, favoring a familiar face (if it belongs to someone who didn't try to kill them on sight). I saw this when we had a large (basketball size) nest of hornets on a corner of our house. Even in late summer, when hornets get more aggressive, they ignored my wife and me, but would threaten unfamiliar persons; the mail carriers, who change from day to day, were cautioned to avoid that corner of the house. We can conclude that it doesn't take a huge brain to recognize faces reliably.

Machine vision systems have to be trained. So far, it takes a huge "neural network", whether hardware or software based, that has been trained with at least thousands of images of people's faces, to do their job. With millions they do better. The bias problem is with the training data. Dr. Buolamwini found that the standard facial image databases all had more male than female faces, and many more White faces than all others combined. I don't recall much in the way of numbers, but I get the impression that the proportions were "whiter" than the demographics of the American populace. Consider that the major cities of America all have either majority Black populations, or are near-majority Black. That means that automated surveillance systems—for which which most large machine vision systems are obtained—have been trained on a population that they seldom encounter, and have seen too few of their actual "clientele" to be able to reliably recognize them.

The ramifications of this are grave indeed. Scenario: You arrive home to find police or FBI waiting to arrest you. You have been picked out by an AI system as "strongly resembling" a wanted suspect, and a system that was monitoring the several cameras you passed by on your way alerted the authorities of your presence. This has happened to a number of people, not all of them Black, and a few spent hours or days in custody before their actual identity was verified. 

Another scenario: Your company wants to reduce the number of security guards at the gate (I've worked at such secure installations), so they announce that you'll need to look into a camera to get access. If the system being used is no more capable than the one behind Aspire Mirror, and you happen to be Black, it may not even recognize that a face has been presented to it!

Another issue that the author presents, several times: Training images are typically frontal and partial profile photos with good lighting and a neutral background. Nothing like pictures taken "in the wild", such as from a camera at the top of a 20-foot pole on a street corner.

This reminds me of something I'll have to describe, because I can't ethically show the photo here. After a baptism in my back yard, we took a group photo of about 35 of us. We were a good mix of races including two Black families and a few Chinese families; five Caucasians were present (I am in a very multi-ethnic church). It is under a tree, so the lighting is dappled. I did brightness tests of several faces. One White boy's face in a shadowy part of the image is darker than the face of a Black boy in the sunshine. A Black man in the shadow is practically invisible. However, shifting the photo's brightness a little makes that particular Black man easy to see, while washing out all the sunlit faces. Interestingly, Google Photos seems to be pretty good at isolating faces and recognizing them; it recognized every face in the photo, even though it had to ask me to verify some of the identifications. Other face recognition software that I've used don't do quite so well.

This example emphasizes that even a posed group photo can have lighting variations that stretch a vision system (including our own!) to its limits. With such matters as the prime example, the author expands the arena to include automated systems of decision support: Résumés scanned and prioritized before the hiring manager even sees them; street surveillance with automated flagging of "suspicious" persons or behavior; neighborhood analyses that set store prices based on demographics, and similarly for real estate appraisals. All these are actually extensions of things that humans were doing already. The machines just do them faster and more cheaply...and some have been banned as a human activity (real estate redlining, for example), but AI systems are being allowed to slip under the radar.

Only a portion of the book is devoted to such technical matters. Much more involves Dr. Buolamwini's increasing involvement in policy. As she relates, it is not enough to point out the deficiencies of systems that lie behind automated decision making. Their weaknesses reflect and even amplify the weaknesses of the people who create them. Biased people cannot produce unbiased systems (A side thought: Get together several people who each recognize their own bias, and ensure that multiple viewpoints are included, and they have a better chance of reducing the biases of a system they all have a hand in developing and training; this is hard! But it is analogous to the way TCP/IP protocols can transmit data with extraordinary perfection through a noisy network; the Internet would be impossible without it).

Over a rather short span of time, much of it while she was still in graduate school, the author has become a more and more visible presence to policy makers, in her capacity as a founding member of the Algorithmic Justice League and the Poet of Code. In her epilogue she describes a meeting with the President of the U.S., at which he asked, "What should I do?" 

Since this occurred quite recently, it will be left to the next President (and maybe several "nexts") to deal with these matters. Make no mistake: they must be dealt with. This is a bipartisan matter. "Algorithmic harms" know no political party, and oxen all along the political spectrum have been gored. I find it abundantly clear that long before AGI arrives to become just "AI", making all prior systems obsolete, governance systems are required to rein in the big money behind overuse of such tools. We still have a grip on the tail of this tiger, but it is quite capable of spinning 'round for a bite!

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.

Ambiguous omens

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, desert environment, climate anxiety, mojave desert, owls

To be human is to be self-conflicted to some extent. For Ben Ehrenreich, self-conflict defines his character. In his memoir Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, he presents himself and the social circles he inhabits as generally, not quite unhappy, but chronically anxious, seeking bits of contentment and even joy wherever they may be found. He does not project victimhood, which is the stock-in-trade of Lefties generally; rather, he finds himself in the current of the "lives of quiet desperation" described by Thoreau.

The book opens with a hike with a pair of friends near Joshua Tree National Park, where a pair of owls seemed to be leading the hikers along a canyon. Owls figure frequently in his remembrances, and the book closes with a glimpse of an owl. He wonders whether owls are typically omens of evil, whether they can ever portend good. To the owls themselves, we are almost always evil omens. 

As it happens, to most cultures an owl brings bad news, but in Japan and Guatemala owls are good. The Japanese word for owl, 梟, pronounced fukurō, has the same sound as "without hardship". Owls are ambiguous as omens. I, for one, love seeing an owl. The "hooh---hoo-hoo-hoooh" call heard around here on occasion is from a Great Horned Owl, but I've seen one only once in the wild.

I love deserts, and so does Mr. Ehrenreich. For the first part of the book he and his wife lived near 29 Palms just north of Joshua Tree National Park, for the second section he was living in Las Vegas—at the other end of the Mojave Desert—for one school year on a teaching fellowship, and the last chapter takes place in Landers, back near Joshua Tree but further to the northwest. 

I have camped out in Joshua Tree several times, both with my parents and with fellow desert rats. I return most frequently to an area further north, along I-40 and old Hwy 66. This picture shows the colorful mountains north of Pisgah Crater. A similar patch of mountains 35 miles to the west are named Calico, quite aptly.

Desert living has an effect on a person. The sights, smells and even tastes differ quite a bit from those in more temperate climes. The heat gets hotter, the cold gets colder, the wind blows harder, the rare rainstorms are fiercer, and this very rawness accentuates every shift of weather and hones the senses. Desert people tend to be more "colorful".

Another theme that runs through the book is the author's almost-obsession with "the Rhino", as he calls President Trump. It becomes clear that in this case he is indeed a victim, a victim of the "mainstream media" that produced an ugly caricature of Donald Trump and vehemently, even violently, opposed everything about that caricature without engaging the real person. When a misguided "journalist" published an article about President Trumps "10,000 lies", a genuine journalist analyzed the material and showed that all but a few of the "lies" were truths the first guy didn't like or "business exaggerations" of the kind that were uniformly praised in "the Press" prior to the 2015 Presidential campaign. Actually, the media has libeled Mr. Trump thousands of times per day, and continues to do so, thus it is no surprise that Mr. Ehrenreich had a bad impression of him. He spreads his ire around a bit also, calling National Security Adviser John Bolton a "mustachioed cretin". Hmm. I don't know any genuine cretin (medically defined as a severely mentally deficient person with an IQ less than 40) who could graduate from Yale and then the Yale Law School, earning a JD. Dr. Bolton is abrasive as a cinderblock, but stupid he definitely is not.

The author's anxiety about climate change is part of a larger existential anxiety that forms an undercurrent of his life. His writing pops back and forth in time, typically about every page, between current events seen through a Leftist lens and mini-bios of a number of historical writers and philosophers. His pick of historical figures tends towards the little-known, such as Jacob Boehme (Jakob Böhme, 1575-1625), whom most theologians consider a heretic, but a milder one than really wacky ones such as Arius of the 4th Century. He dwells much on a contention of Hegel and others that writing itself is more of a problem than a solution. That is a hard stance for a writer to live with! He makes a good point: The earliest writing is mainly lists of goods and administrative instruction, while actual literature came much, much later. Having gathered numerous threads together, though, he weaves no tapestry, draws no conclusion.

The book begins and ends with existential angst. It would be rather hard to take, were it not for the author's lyrical gifts as a writer. Whatever the topic, his writing is enjoyable. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down", as Mary Poppins sang. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm not him.

The light show far below

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, bioluminescence, memoirs, giant squid, architeuthis

When I lived in southern California I frequently went to the beach; my favorites were Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach. In the summertime there are periodic red tides, and when the water is visibly red, it isn't safe to swim. However, that is when it is nice to visit the beach at night to see glowing blue waves. The red tide creature is a type of dinoflagellate (a single-celled protist) that is also bioluminescent. When agitated, the critters glow or sparkle blue.

In Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea, author Edith Widder, PdD tells of the many marine creatures that glow, in many, many ways. In the deep sea, below the limits of sunlight, most animals make their own light. This in itself explains an early mystery: no matter now deep one sent a trawling net, many of the animals brought up had eyes. What are they observing? In this book we learn that there is a lot to observe down there!

Dr. Widder was one of the first persons to descend (in a submersible, of course) into the sea deeper than sunlight can reach, and turn off the lights. Whoever does this for their first time has the same reaction, "It's like a sky full of fireworks!". Yet, just after seeing that, when the lights are turned back on, you typically don't see anything! What gives?

Consider the dinoflagellates that light up the waves along many coastlines. A typical bioluminous dinoflagellate is between 20 and 40 microns in diameter. That's the size of the cells that make up the inside of your cheek. If you use a teaspoon to gently scrape the inside of your cheek, put a drop of the result on a microscope slide and look at medium power, such as 100x, you'll see a bunch of rather blobby cells that appear about an inch across or so, with slightly darker nuclei the size of a BB. Pull the slide out of the microscope and look at it. Just a bit of slightly milky fluid. Nothing you can see distinctly. Yet a single dinoflagellate, the same size as those cheek cells, can make a flash of light that can easily be seen in the dark. Thus, if your sub is surrounded by microbes, you won't see them with the lights on, but in the dark, the flashes they are making because of the disturbance caused by your sub makes the water itself seem to sparkle.

If you so see something, it is likely to be a jellyfish such as this one. Jellyfish and related animals called siphonophores are frequently bioluminescent.

Siphonophores in particular can be so transparent that, even if one is right outside the sub window, you may not see it right away…with the lights on.

What is the purpose of all this light in the deep sea? Three big things, and a host of lesser reasons. The big three: to find food, to avoid being eaten, and to find a mate.

Finding food: Some bioluminescent fish have "flashlights" near their eyes, little organs filled with bioluminescent bacteria, which they feed and care for. The light organs have shutters so the light can be blocked. Many deep sea animals respond to a flash of light with their own flash, so the hunting fish will make a quick flash, and decide among the return flashes if any are worth trying to eat. Whether or not it goes for a meal, it will jerk away, so the flash it made will not let a bigger predator know where it is. Many fish have light organs at the end of appendages where they act as lures to draw in a hungry animal, but it quickly becomes lunch itself. Angler fish are the best known purveyors of this hunting strategy.

Predator avoiding: The flash-and-jerk technique is one way to hunt without being hunted successfully. Another is counter-illumination. Creatures that spend much time near the edge of twilight but not below it could be seen from below unless they employed a little bit of light, shining from their bellies, to mimic the light that would be shining if they weren't there. A similar technique was studied by the U.S. Air Force in the 1970's. A project I worked on briefly studied how well we could see a cluster of lights set against a simulated sky. The idea was to fool the gunners of an antiaircraft battery, who might barely hear a high-flying bomber, but the counter-illumination would make the bomber effectively invisible. It didn't work very well, for two reasons: Firstly, human eyes have very high resolution, so the aircraft would have to have a great many closely-spaced lamps so it wouldn't look like a speckled "something" up above. Secondly, human eyes have excellent color discrimination, and the color of the sky is variable, even varying in different directions at a given time. Thus, lamps of one color that make the plane invisible when seen from directly below, might not work that well to one side or the other. A third nail in the project's coffin: polarizing sunglasses darken the sky, making such an illuminated aircraft more visible than if the lights were left off! Deep-sea fish don't have color vision, and they don't see as clearly, so a cluster of a dozen or two dozen light organs of any bluish or blue-green color, of appropriate brightness, can be an effective invisibility cloak.

Another method to avoid becoming lunch is to make very bright "burglar alarm" flashes when attacked, hoping to bring a bigger predator to drive off or consume whatever is eating you. The Jellyfish Lamp used by Dr. Widder to attract predators in the deep sea emulates a common distress display.

Mate location: Fireflies do this. Those of us living east of the Rockies in the US, and people in many other places worldwide, are familiar with these greenish lights in our yards in June (or December in the southern hemisphere): male fireflies "calling" for females, which don't fly, but rest among vegetation and answer the lights they see with lights of their own. So-called "sea fireflies" (tiny shrimplike ostracods, 1-2 mm long) have a similar mating process, as do a number of other deep water animals. The trick is to make a flash during a turn, to make it harder for a watching predator to locate, similar to hunt-and-jerk.

The last chapters of the book tell the tale of finding and filming giant squids for the first time using a more advanced Jellyfish Lamp named Medusa along with a baitfish to keep the predator busy for a moment. It worked spectacularly well. The montage below shows two images of the attack of a young giant squid on the bait. This squid was "only" ten feet mantle length, with tentacle length estimated at 15-20 feet.

Giant squids that are seen at the surface of the ocean are either dying or dead, and are always red. They float because they have ammonia in their tissues, so they don't need to swim to keep from sinking deeper and deeper. The have to swim to stay down. They are red because they have lost active control of their chromophores. Living, healthy giant squids in the videos these images come from look metallic, with colors of silver and bronze (bronze may indicate alarm), and you can see stripes on the arms.

The videos of these encounters made lots of people very famous, including Dr. Widder. I hope it gives her enough of a platform to advocate more effectively for ocean conservation, along with Sylvia Earle and younger leaders such as Luis David Calderon and Maggie Seida. In her last chapter she tells some compelling stories, including the saga of Georges Bank. This underwater plateau, larger than Massachusetts, has been fished into oblivion. It was once rich with a very diverse ecosystem that included several commercially desirable fish species. Fast-forward a couple of generations. Only after nothing of value was left to catch did the area receive governmental protection. The quantity of life is probably now similar to what existed in the early 1900's, but it is nearly all jellyfish. Not only are the fish gone, including jellyfish-eating swordfish, so are all other jellyfish eaters such as sea turtles. Now that the "cats" are all away, the jelly-mice are out to play, by the trillions. Leaving the place alone may eventually lead to a return to ecological health, but there is a "new normal" at present, and it's pretty stable.

Can we learn enough about the ocean, not just to preserve what's valuable, but to even know what is valuable and needs preserving? The world ocean has been humanity's waste dump and scrounging venue for centuries, even millennia. Now that humans number 8.1 billion, is going back even possible? We spend more on each new NASA venture (all of them much needed!) than the total amount reserved for oceanographic research yearly. A very visible program called Sea Grant has a budget of $90 million. That's "million" with an "M". Compare that to $7.4 billion being spent to "forgive" some student loans. Go ahead, divide the numbers: it's 82 times as much. I'll stop here and let my blood pressure subside.

Whew! I love this book. Get it and read it. Then search "bioluminescence" with your favorite browser and read some more. It can open a new universe to you.

Up to his elbows in alligators

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, mini-biographies, law enforcement, alligators, environmentalism, everglades

Decades ago during the misnamed "sexual revolution", protests against many laws were made and we often heard the slogan, "You can't legislate morality." Though I was pretty young then, still in college, I thought, "Nonsense! We legislate nothing but morality." What is lawmaking? It is the process of defining what moral laws we care enough about to sanction (punish people for). As I watched the process unfold, as certain formerly illegal matters were legalized, and other matters were made illegal (often improperly), I came to this conclusion:

Not all that is ethical is legal.
Not all that is legal is ethical.

Fast-forward a generation or so: It has become illegal in some states or cities to call someone "him" or "her" if they prefer to be called "them" or "zhe" or "go away". It has become legal to destroy a city if your reason is "I am offended/oppressed/outraged". These are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It has become illegal to practice common sense, and what was formerly criminal insanity is the "most legal".

Jeff's career was law enforcement. He was working in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and for a good many years, he primarily caught poachers and brought them to prosecution. As chronicled in Gator County: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner, near the end of his career he was asked to embark on an extended sting operation, going undercover. To provide only a mild spoiler (because of course he succeeded, or there'd be no book): his sting caught a ringleader, and a number of lesser figures were caught in the net. But Jeff had seen what it really means to be a poacher, and he was able to weave the net more loosely so as to avoid catching absolutely everyone who'd been involved. He had more than a minimal conscience, and he cared for being ethical more than strict legality. He also knew the conclusions I stated above.

What happens when the enforcer comes to identify with his "prey"? This is the conundrum Jeff faced as he morphed himself into a seedy-looking trying-to-do-better ne'er-do-well, someone who could pass as a newly minted alligator farmer in a countryside filled with a mix of mostly honest alligator farmers and alligator hunters, and some less than honest, and a few downright scoundrels.

A similar process transformed the author as she dug deeper and deeper into Jeff's story, and the stories of others such as Peg Brown, the most legendary of the poachers of the prior generation (she befriended his son). The book's chapters bounce around between her life growing up in Florida, being a Floridian among Floridians who had been on the land for generations. She could internalize their struggles to cope with seeing their day-to-day survival methods becoming illegalized, until in many cases their choices were to poach for a living, to move somewhere else, or to starve. She asks, several times, "How does a family live when they were barely making it and their breadwinner is now incarcerated?"

The allied question that bedeviled Jeff as his operation drew to a close was, "What becomes of children if both parents are imprisoned?" Because many of the men who worked for the ringleader would bring their wives into some of the work, such as gathering alligator eggs in "illegal" quantities. The wives knew what was going on, so they were technically complicit.

Parts of some chapters outline the stages the Everglades went through as Florida became a popular destination. The Army Corps of Engineers, in their efforts to "tame" the 'glades, actually set in motion dramatic environmental changes that led to a reduction by 95% or more of the alligator population, not only in Florida but throughout gator country. But who got blamed? People like Peg Brown. Even after the alligator population rebounded—due more to their adaptability than to the efforts of environmentalists—the poaching laws were kept or even strengthened.

The poaching, at least of alligators, doesn't seem to be wiping them out. Their numbers in every state of the deep south continue to increase. There are millions, dozens to hundreds of times as many as there were 60 years ago.

This book isn't about "the corruption of Goody Two-shoes". When the operation ended, including the deliberate overlooking of some, including the wives, Jeff appeared in court when the chief perpetrators, the ones who weren't just flouting the law but smashing it to bits, were tried. It is about how we relate to others, and the struggle it can be to understand someone with whom we fundamentally disagree. I am reminded of the most remembered line of Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."