Collapsing Schwarzschild 's Cat

 kw: article reactions, black holes, primordial black holes, musings

A recent article at Space.com is titled, "Are planet-killing black holes hiding inside your cat?" I suppose the meme behind the title is Schrödinger's dead/not dead cat. The author, Robert Lea, quotes researcher Dejan Stojkovic as saying,

"But don't worry about a primordial black hole shooting through your cat, or you, for that matter. The team behind these findings says such an event would be non-lethal!"

The article includes an illustration of several sizes of black holes, from supermassive (a billion suns) to sub-proton size, which is in the range of theorized primordial black holes. In particular, a black hole with the "mass of an asteroid" is stated to be smaller than a proton. I suppose that depends on the asteroid; the term "asteroid" covers material ranging in size from a sand grain to a few hundred km.

It is stated that primordial black holes, if they exist, would be zipping about at near-light speed (nobody ever says why), so one would pass through you, or your cat, or Earth, very quickly; about a nanosecond, on your case. I thought of two ways a tiny black hole can cause harm. Firstly, the intense gravitational field "nearby" (we'll try to define that soon) could disrupt tissue; and the Hawking radiation that, we have learned, will eventually result in any black hole "evaporating" by emitting radiation and thus losing mass, could cook (or evaporate!) tissue it passes through.

I would expect these two phenomena to be significant in different regimes, viz:

1. A really small black hole, weighing, say less than a million metric tons (tonnes), will have a smaller reach, gravitationally, but its Hawking radiation will be stronger. If you are "near" such an object long enough, you may not suffer damage from the gravity, but you could get cooked.
2. A larger black hole will have much less Hawking radiation, but its gravitation reach will be greater. If you are "near" such an object long enough, its gravity can do great damage, but its radiation could be beneath notice.

Calculation time! I made much use of Victor T. Toth's Hawking Radiation Calculator. Here are relevant parameters for three possible black holes, one the size of a proton, one 100 times larger, and one 100 times smaller (in radius). The proton's radius is about 0.84 fm (femtometers), or 0.84x10^-15 m; we'll call this Rp.

• Radius in Rp:              100   1.0     0.01
• Mass, Million Tonnes:   56,600   566     5.66
• Temperature, Billion K:   2.17   217   21,700
• Heat, Billion Watts:  0.000111  1.11   11,100

Note that these all are really, really hot! To get a feel for their masses: Iron has a density of 7.9 Tonne/cubic m. A cube of iron weighing 5.66 million Tonnes would be 89.5 meters on a side; for 566 Tonnes, the size is 415 m, and for 56,600 million Tonnes, the size is 1,930 m, or more than a mile. That's getting to substantial asteroid size.

To illustrate how small a proton is in relation to a typical atom, atom radii are in the range of a tenth of a nanometer, or 100,000 fm. A black hole with a radius or 100,000 fm (a little smaller than an iron atom, for example) has these parameters:

• Mass, Million Tonnes:   67 million → 67 trillion Tonnes
• Temperature, K:        1.8 million
• Heat, Watts:               0.079

Note that this "bigger" black hole may be super-hot, but its radiation is negligible. Let's first focus on Gravity. For reference, "1 G" is 9.8 Nt/kg (Newtons per kilogram) at the surface of the Earth. The proton-sized black hole, weighing 566 million Tonnes, would exert a force of 378 Nt on a mass of one gram (such as a BB) at a distance of 1 cm. That's 38,600 G. Gravity scales as the square of 1/r, so within 1 mm of the black hole, anything there (cells in your body as it passes through?) would experience a force of 3.86 million G. Here, duration is everything. If the black hole's velocity is, say a third of the speed of light (or roughly 0.1 m per nanosecond), the time it takes to move one millimeter is about 10 picoseconds. That means that a random cell that is 1 mm off the center of the black hole's path will "see" a spike in force that rapidly changes direction through a 180° arc in the space of about 0.1 nanosecond, reaching nearly four billion G's.

I don't know how to describe the effect on the cell. It is unlikely to survive. It probably doesn't have time to be sucked into the black hole, but a cell that is "brushed by" (say, 1/100th mm) most certainly will be. The result will be a thin "soda straw" hole through the body, much less than 1 mm in diameter, but I don't know how much less.

How about the mass with a size of 100 proton radii? At 1 cm distance, the force would be 3.86 million G's. It is very likely that such a mass passing through you (or your cat) will leave a hole a substantial fraction of a cm across. It is similar to being hit by a 30 caliber rifle bullet, just much, much faster. If either of these masses were moving a lot more slowly, such as an orbital speed in the range of 30 km/sec, rather than 100,000 km/sec (1/3 of light speed), the breadth of destroyed tissue would be dozens to hundreds of times greater, and the diameter of the "soda straw" …? It's hard to comprehend. So let's not bother checking the atom-sized black hole, weighing in at 67 trillion Tonnes! If any exist, they could explain rare cases of disappearance, perhaps.

How about temperature? The hottest black hole is the smallest, and has an incredibly tiny surface area to radiate heat, but radiates 10,000 times as much heat as the proton-sized one. It can do so for a quarter of a million years. Its radiation, mostly X- and gamma rays, amounts to 11 trillion watts. If any of these were anywhere within a few light-years, we'd see them. Let's back off to the 100 Rp radius black hole, which radiates (still in X-rays and higher) 111,000 watts. If it is traveling at 1/3 c, it passes through you in 3-4 ns, leaving behind about 4 milliJoules, or some 4,000 ergs. Spread that out along the length of the path through your body, and it isn't much heat.

Now consider the middle mass, the proton-sized one. It radiates 1.11 billion watts. In the time given, it deposits around 4 Joules, or close to one calorie. Again, not much heating. So there is little "cooking" expected from really fast-moving primordial black holes. However, if their speed is closer to orbital speeds, the "dwell time" is several thousand times greater, and 4 joules becomes more than 10,000 joules, equal to a kilowatt for ten seconds. That'll burn a hole through you! It's not quite as powerful as a lightning strike, but it's getting in that range.

I started out thinking I could debunk the idea that primordial black holes aren't much danger. In certain circumstances they aren't, that's true, but what grounds to we have to assume they are going fast enough to pass through you, or me, or the nearest cat, without swallowing up a hurtful amount of stuff, and cooking much of what isn't sucked in?

Whatever speed they are moving, the smaller ones ought to be visible as sky-blue items that emit lots of X- and gamma radiation. With current instrumentation, we'd be hard pressed to determine their actual temperature. "Millions of degrees" just begins to describe it. So, I've actually presented a challenge to the idea that primordial black holes weighing less than about a half billion Tonnes exist at all.

Where are the Millenarians?

 kw: longevity, multiverse, musings

Among those who are so unwilling to die that they will try anything to circumvent the inevitable, I find a strange bunch who pin their hopes on the Multiverse.

The reasoning goes like this: the Multiverse has uncountable numbers of alternate universes that differ from the one we inhabit in numerous ways, from negligible to minor to rather major. They say (this is an approximate quote), "When someone in this universe is faced with death, so are many 'copies' in similar universes. Suppose you die in this universe, and so do many of your 'copies', but some of your 'copies' don't die in their universes. Can it be that your consciousness somehow traverses between universes, so that you find yourself in one of those where you didn't die? This can happen again and again. Therefore, nobody really dies, they just get a transfer to a place where they didn't die."

Let us consider for the moment that this supposition is true, and one may, just before (or during) dying, transfer to another universe where life goes on. If this can happen again and again, can it keep happening for a long, long time? If "nobody really dies," why is it that our universe doesn't seem to have anyone in it who has hung on for hundreds of years?

This couple recently celebrated their 81st anniversary. They are 98 and 102. Shouldn't there be someone out there celebrating anniversary #100, 200, or 1,000?

How is it that our universe isn't at the receiving end of lots of transfers? Further, if you get a transfer to the universe next door, what happens to the consciousness of your 'copy'?

Where are the thousand-year-old people?

I don't support MADD any more

 kw: musings, disappointment

I used to support MADD (Mothers Against Driving Drunk), but over the last dozen years they have become more strident, and now they've jumped on the scare tactics bandwagon.

I heard an ad today that claimed, in a very foreboding tone, "Someone is killed in a drunk driving accident every 50 seconds." I went, "Whah??"

Just for context: An hour has 3,600 seconds. Divide by 50 and you'd have 72 deaths per hour, which is 1,728 per day, or about 630,000 per year.

The total number of traffic deaths in the US each year is about 33,000, and about 10,000 are due to drunk driving. That's about one every 52 minutes (MINUTES, not SECONDS).

The total number of traffic deaths worldwide each year is about 1.3 million, and about 300,000 are due to drunk driving. Compare that to 630,000. Of course, the ad didn't say whether the US or the world was their scope. Either way it is dramatically incorrect.

It doesn't matter. I won't support an organization that tries to scare us into donating.

A narrow view of art

kw: musings, poetry, art

I work the puzzles in the daily newspaper, including a feature titled Cryptic Byword, compiled by Luis Campos. A few days ago the deciphered quote was this:

"The best poetry jolts and shocks; it mines language for what we have not seen, have not heard" —Canadian Poet Dionne Brand.

My first reaction was, "What a stupid statement! This 'poet' lacks imagination." Of course, I had to look her up. Ms Brand has impressive credentials, including a term as the Poet Laureate of Toronto (9/2009 - 11/2012). From the bits of her writing available on various web sites, I find she is indeed an very talented writer. She has also, as a past Professor of Women's Studies and now a Research Professor of Theater and English Studies, ensconced herself in a narrow academic setting in which perpetual outrage is encouraged and rewarded. She is doing great work in her chosen field, so I do not blame her for the view expressed above, though the adjective "polemic" should be inserted before "poetry".

Before looking up her vitae, I mused about poetry, and about art in general, and its purposes. I like poetry, but I don't obsess over it as some do. I have bought precious few of the multitude of poetic anthologies, and most of those I own were gifts. According to the accepted taxonomy, poems come in three species:

• Structured verse with meter and rhyme. For generations this was "poetry," whether the heroic couplets of so much English verse including Shakespeare's frequent rhymed couplets, the dactylic hexameter of Homer and classical Greek poetry in general, or the tight structures of the few subspecies of Sonnet. Even Limericks and Clerihews, which the "serious" literati might despise, have solid structures that require creativity.
• Blank verse. This is a specialty of playwrights of the Elizabethan theater. There is the metrical structure (variously violated, particularly by Shakespeare) of the ten-syllable iambic line, but with no rhyme scheme.
• Free verse. This is the prevailing genre of the Poetry Slam, where jolts and shocks abound. I look upon most free verse as prose with the lines broken in sundry places. Some free verse is very well written. Some.

Whichever species a poem belongs to, what functions does it perform? Must it shock? I have at hand Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The turns of language may induce the occasional jolt, but such is not the poet's aim. She was expressing her emotions during her courtship with Robert Browning, before they married. A simple view is that her aim was to express Love. In a more nuanced view she was working through the cloud of feelings surrounding her growing love, first her doubt and fear and then affection and awe, and finally acceptance and comfort. They show her growth until, in the 43'd of the 44 sonnets, she could pen one of the most famous lines in English: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." She goes on to enumerate seven, with clear indications that she is just beginning, but has run out of "sonnet space"!

My all-time favorite books of poetry are When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne. I have the 1956 editions, given me by my parents when I was about ten years old. Surprised? Although I love Frost and Dickinson and Stevenson (I have A Child's Garden of Verses), it is to Milne I most frequently turn…for what? For humor, for insight into the child within, and for their lovely sound! I read them aloud. Our son used to love it when I would recite "Disobedience", which begins

James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.

Opening each line with a dispondee (two long, stressed syllables) is genius personified! The following anapestic feet, and variations on them, keep the poem galloping along. Although there is a shock when a reader realizes the boy's mother is not returning, the light tone of the poem indicates it is an object lesson, not a report of a tragedy. It is a poem of turning-the-tables.

A.A. Milne's children's poems remind me to smile, to slow down and smell the flowers. I have a rather dour personality, and therein I find balm for my soul.

While I prefer rhyming verse, I can be stirred by blank verse…but it has to be very good! There is nothing better than the inspiring speech from Henry V by Shakespeare known as "St. Crispin's Day", which brought "band of brothers" into the English vocabulary. This is poetry that both ennobles and motivates.

Do I have any favorites among the lengthy ranks of purveyors of free verse? Not a one. Having read a few poems by Professor Brand, I can admire her skill, but I am otherwise left cold. I have also partaken of portions by Tony Morrison; though she was not a poet, her prose has poetical power (I have read only portions, no complete novels, because they go places I don't wish to go), and is frequently polemical also. I can analyze a work and discern its polemical intent—and so far, everything of Brand's I have seen has polemical intent—but I am not motivated. Polemics are for motivating, but you have to hit the right buttons. Sorry, Ms Brand!

And what of the other arts? There are painters and sculptors who make it their business to jolt and shock, but they are generally inferior, if not in craft, then in vision. There is "art" that demeans, and I don't mean only pornography. In the performance arts in particular, a few modern comedians carry on the uplifting tradition of Jack Benny or Red Skelton, but they are few. Far more must be "blue" to be funny, although they elicit mostly snickers rather than honest laughter.

In my folk-singing-in-coffee-shops years, I was sometimes asked why I sang certain songs. I would reply that I wished to raise my audience up, not knock them down. Every artist, of any genre, has this choice: ennoble others, or debase them.

I would agree with the second half of the quote above, that poetry ought to "mine language". To what purpose? Here is my shorter proverb (and you can substitute "art" for "poetry"):

The best poetry helps the reader grow.

If the ground had not been cursed

kw: musings, patriarchs, biblical chronology

I take much of the Bible literally. Some portions, particularly in the Revelation to John, are specifically stated to be "signs", that is, symbolic. Others that are in poetic form tend have symbolic sections. Theologians of all stripes argue endlessly over which portions are "most literal" or otherwise. But whether a section is best understood poetically or literally, the outline of action has moral and spiritual meaning for us. Being a number-oriented sort of guy, I return again and again to the puzzle of the great ages of the patriarchs before Moses.

Did people, or at least some people, really live nearly a thousand years, in the time before the great flood? Perhaps. I am not a "young earth creationist". I accept "the Gap" between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, as described by G.H. Pember in Earth's Earliest Ages. I understand that this century-old book is again being reprinted. Thus, whether the various lists of "begats" in Genesis actually add up to put Adam's creation at about 4000 BC, or are not as connected as they appear, I look to the stories to find lessons for today.

I obtained this list of the ages of the Patriarchs up to Moses from an essay in a site called Is That in the Bible? . The first dark horizontal line represents the era of the Flood and the second represents the era of the Covenant with Abraham.

Most people who have heard of the Bible have heard of "the Fall." There are actually four Falls, and each led the LORD God to respond with a curse. The numbers in this chart indicate the effects of these curses.

The first Fall was when Adam and his wife ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Whether this story is literal or figurative is less important than the lesson embodied in the curses which followed. Only one of those is pertinent here, the curse on the ground (Genesis 3:17b-19):

Cursed is the ground because of you;

In toil will you eat of it all the days of your life.

And thorns and thistles will it bring forth for you,

And you will eat the herb of the field.

By the sweat of your face you will eat bread

Until you return to the ground,

Because from it you were taken;

For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

The second Fall followed a few decades later, probably not more than 20-25 years. Cain and Abel were born, and when they were grown, Cain killed Abel. There is plenty of meaning in that story, but I am interested here in what follows. God reprimanded Cain, and then uttered this curse (Genesis 4:11-12a):

And now you are cursed from the ground,

Which has opened its mouth to receive 

your brother's blood from your hand. 

When you till the ground, 

it will no longer yield its strength to you.

I cannot tell whether this curse was on Cain only, or Cain and his descendants, or on all the ground. Since Cain, who was a farmer, went on after this to build a city and set up a godless civilization (which led to the Flood), it is most likely that this curse pertained to Cain and his descendants. After Abel was killed and Cain left, Seth was born, and named "Seth" because he was the replacement for Abel.

Most likely, until the flood, for Seth's descendants the ground still "yielded its strength", supporting their great lifespans.

By the time of Noah, "violence filled the earth" (Genesis 6:11). This was the third Fall. The flood was an acted-out curse on everyone except Noah's family, safe in the Ark. It must also have reduced the fecundity of the ground, as evidenced by the life spans of the post-flood patriarchs after Shem (did you know Shem outlived Abraham?). There are three generations that lived between 400-500 years, and then four of the next five generations, including Abram's father Terah, lived more than 200 years.

What happened at the time of Peleg? The fourth Fall. "Peleg" means "divided". Until his father's generation there was one language, until the people presumed to build a great tower to "make a name for themselves" (Genesis 11:4). God confused their language and the people scattered, and the nations were divided, shortly before the birth or Peleg. The "tower of Babel" had been a declaration of independence from God, and the scattering was the curse. From that time idolatry became almost universal. I might consider that a further Fall, but it is part and parcel with the fourth Fall. Nonetheless, between the time of Abram and Moses we find a further shortening of life spans to the limit of 120 years. (Shortly before the Flood, when God said man's days would be 120 years (Genesis 6:3), it may have been with this in mind, or as He foresaw. Only one person, a French woman named Jeanne Calment, has lived more than 120 years in the modern era.)

God called out Abram to found a new nation that would follow Him. This nation, set up in the name of the grandson of Abram/Abraham, became Israel. Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago and Moses lived about 3,500 years ago. Although disease and violence kept average lifespan as low as 35-40 years for much of the time after Moses, small numbers of people lived into their seventies and even eighties. Only after the discovery of antibiotics and the establishment of good public health measures in most countries after about 1930 did average lifespan increase past sixty years and then to about eighty years, as it is today, at least in the more developed nations. But even now only a small number live beyond eighty years. 

Here is the question I have been pondering: What if the ground still "yielded its strength," and other limits to human life, apparently established by God, were removed? What if people could confidently expect to live a comparatively healthy life about ten times as long as we are used to?

Firstly, the ground would need to yield its strength in a superlative way, because nearly everyone who was born in the past 900-1,000 years would still be alive! 

In my family tree, the most distant ancestor I care to keep track of is Edward I king of England, born in 1239. Were he alive today he'd be 781 years old, and could expect to live another century or two. He is 23 generations back. Would he still be king? Would his living so long (along with billions of others) be a good thing?

One other aspect to the lists of "begats" in Genesis is that most of the men had children starting at about age 100. Were that to continue until now, the descendants of Edward I living today would be not 23 generations removed, but about eight. That could still pose a problem if some of them were too impatient to wait for the "old king" (or maybe his father or grandfather) do die of "natural causes", and led a patricidal coup.

But let's look at Edward. His engineers developed the first large trebuchet, or counterweight catapult. It was capable of throwing stone missiles weighing 200-400 pounds, which could break through castle walls. That's why he was called The Hammer of Scotland (and he took on Wales, also). He was a brute, and I suspect none of us would find him a pleasant companion. However, longer generation times might mean slower cultural changes. We might also be brutes, and get along with him just fine.

All this makes me wonder, how many people would there be? Without getting long about it, I find that from 1300 to 1800 AD world population rose from a third of a billion to about a billion. Generation times probably averaged 25 years. If we roughly count half a billion times twenty generations, that's about ten billion people born in those five centuries. Since 1800, the number of people born is another thirty billion. If all of them were still alive, that's forty billion. If only half of them were alive, that's twenty billion. Either way, the earth has to produce a lot of food for such a population!

I considered, what would life be like for a couple who marry at about age 30 and expect to live another 800-900 years? Would there still be menopause for the woman at age 50, or would women be like female birds, that may slow down a bit, but seem to remain fertile as long as they live? A small bird such as an American robin can live 12-14 years, although there are lots of predators out there and few live past age three or four. Humans have few predators besides bacteria and viruses; what if robins were the same?

We recently had a brood of robins raised on our kitchen window sill, so I looked into their lives. In our area robins first breed at age one and raise two or three broods each summer. Each brood averages four chicks. The eggs incubate two weeks and the chicks spend another two weeks in the nest. They receive follow-up help for another week, then the parents fly off and start another nest. Now stretch the ten years of a long-lived robin couple to a thousand years, a factor of 100:

At age 100, a couple marries and has four children. The five weeks a robin couple cares for their eggs and chicks stretches to 500 weeks, or ten years. For humans, we like to hang onto our kids for about twenty years instead, and space them a year or two apart. That's OK. At age 125, the nest is empty, and a couple might relocate for new horizons, and start another "clutch". After the third batch of kids is grown and gone, the couple is about 175-180. They take a break, just as robins take a winter break until the next spring. Proportionally, let's assume this couple takes off 50-80 years. That's time enough for travel, learning some new skills, maybe attaining new hobbies like making pianos or painting murals. Around the age of 250, it's time for another round or three of childrearing.

Let's suppose this cycle repeats about every 150 years until they get too old after the sixth set of three "clutches" of about four kids, and are ready for the long sleep, being around 900 years old. Their children, if all are still living, number about 72. Of course, there are hundreds of grand- and great-grandchildren and so forth.

That kind of fecundity would soon lead to a population not of billions, but perhaps trillions! Even if habitats were built to cover the oceans, it isn't possible to fit more than five trillion people, with only one square meter each. Nobody could go anywhere! There's nowhere to grow food. I conclude that couples would need to stop after one or two "families" were raised, and just enjoy themselves for the next 700 years or so. That takes very, very effective conception control (or an innocuous way to end the sex drive).

These are just a few considerations I have. It seems the way things work now is actually pretty good. I may return to the subject…

Dissatisfiers and Satisfiers

kw: musings, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment

From time to time I read or hear (radio program) one or another "happiness expert". The article or program will typically include a list of things that do or do not promote happiness. Sometimes I take notes. Collating my notes, I have two composite lists of four items. Here they are, with my thoughts on each:

Things that we think will make us happy, but don't, the Dissatisfiers:

1. Money. You may have heard or read, "Money is the root of all evil." Is it a Bible verse? Not quite. The first phrase of 1 Timothy 6:10 is, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil". "Love of money" is one word in Greek, "philargyria", or literally, "love of the soul for silver". Note that this kind of love is A root, not The root, and that all kinds of evil, not all evils, are the result. We'll see why in a moment. I once had a dispute with a company executive who promoted "passion for profits". I declared that I had built my career on a passion for excellence, and that profits had always followed. His rejoinder was so double-tongued and self-blind that I was glad I already had an exit strategy! Money is useful, but it is a tool. Some say it can become an idol, but it isn't really. In this "modern" age, few believe in material idols, but people might make education, art, love (or lust), or religion an end in themselves, and thus a false god. Money can be a means to obtain one's idol. But its proper use is to secure one's life and comfort, and in anyone with a willing heart, money can be used to help others. Ask a billionaire, "Is it enough?" It is never enough if money is the goal. As a goal it promotes dissatisfaction.
2. Power. The Englishman Lord Acton is credited with saying, "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." As a lifelong observer of British monarchy in the reign of Victoria and her predecessors, he ought to know. But there is a corollary quote by David Brin, "…it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." In my thirties I said to a supervisor that I was considering aiming for management (I was on a "tech track" at the time). He responded by making me the supervisor of two colleagues. I soon realized that it was all to easy to abuse power, and asked for an end to that experiment. Perhaps that makes me sane, by David Brin's standard, anyway! In the first three centuries of Christianity, nobody would be elevated to be an elder in a church (by a bishop or apostle) if he seemed to greatly desire eldership. Indeed, it was the usual practice to make a "test offer" of temporary eldership, and if the person accepted without protest, the post was temporary indeed, and not followed up with any further offers of responsibility. Augustine wrote that someone had to say, "I don't want it!" three times, on three occasions, before he was eligible to become an elder. "Abuse of power" is much talked about today. Genuine abuse of power is a great source of many evils. Indeed, it matters little how much money you have if someone with power doesn't permit you to use your money as you choose. Liberty is the appropriate power to make your own choices, but confers no right to make choices for anyone else.
3. Pleasure. Here I do not refer to all pleasure, but pleasure as an end to be sought, even by illicit means. Extreme pleasure-seeking leads to addiction. We are motivated by the pleasure/pain principle. However, it is one thing to take pleasure in good work, good relationships, and enjoyable activities, and quite another to seek pleasure to the detriment of others or of one's own well-being. Pleasure can become a false god. When chasing after pleasures disrupts someone's working life, or causes them to fail in school, or to neglect necessary relationships, it is no longer promoting satisfaction, but the opposite.
4. Fame. We all want to be well thought of. We can easily be drawn to wanting to be widely thought of: to have a large number of followers on Twitter or Instagram or whatever; to have the applause from large crowds and so forth. It can be addicting. I accompanied our son to a class camp, with a hundred or so pre-teens. One activity was a campfire. There were several acts and skits, and I sang them a song. They didn't just applaud, the boys cheered and the girls screamed like I was a rock star! I told my son later, "What a rush!! Now I know why rock stars do it." But I'm still glad that, working my way into a music career 50+ years ago, I changed direction and opted for a "day job." I am well enough regarded by the handful of people I really care about. More than that is unnecessary, and leads to dissatisfaction.

Things that lead to fulfillment and happiness, the Satisfiers:

1. Faith. He that believes only in himself has a fool for a god. We need God, a God who is greater than we are. I speak not of religion, which has to do with what we do. Faith is the belief itself and the object of that belief. Based on what we believe, we may do certain things, and thus be called "religious", but religion without faith is done for fame, and has no useful result. It is said that a faithful person is never entirely satisfied, because we so seldom live up to what we believe in. However, a certain holy yearning to do better is no detriment to the great satisfaction of serving a gracious God as well as we can.
2. Family. Not everyone has a congenial family. If your parents, siblings or other relatives are evil, perhaps it is best to gather a "family of choice." This would be your closest friends (see next item). But in most cases, we are happiest when we spend time with our spouse, children, parents, siblings, and others of our extended family. This is why most people choose to spend holidays with family.
3. Friendship. I knew a youngster during my Freshman year of college who had a huge family. His father had married four times: each of the first three wives had ten or more children and then died, and number four had just had a ninth child and was going strong. He had grandnephews and grandnieces older than he was. Perhaps he didn't need friends. The family farm had forty or more houses on the property, full of his relatives. The rest of us may have only three or four close relatives, or maybe ten or so, but we are built to relate to 100-150 people. We fill the gap with friends and acquaintances. I am not talking about "FaceBook friends" here. Some folks have several thousand of those, but they really have no more than a few dozen actual friends. We cannot be normal if we are entirely solitary.
4. Meaningful Work. I read a book titled Rivethead by Ben Hamper a long time ago. He was a riveter in an auto plant, attaching bumpers to trucks. Stultifying work. He and a couple of others got creative and invented a collective person they named Armand Hammer. By dividing up the work, they had time for other pursuits and a chance to "unwind" (and, I presume, Armand Hammer earned enough to support them all). But it has been truly said, "Love your job and you'll never 'work' a day in your life." I knew someone who strove to excel as a business executive. He was offered a promotion to executive vice president of his company. He was happy where he was, and he felt it was the best fit for him. He didn't think the promotion would be as good a fit, but felt he had to accept it. At the first meeting of the EVP's with the CEO, the CEO began the meeting by saying, "Gentlemen, we have all sold our souls for this." My friend stood and said, "I have not," and left. He resigned and pursued work in a different field, which he soon found was even more satisfying. For many, a job just puts food on the table and pays the rent; they are meaningfully occupied in their church, or volunteering, or carrying on a social hobby. Although just about everyone who writes about this uses the term "meaningful work", it may be better to call it "meaningful occupation" or even "vocation". A Vocation is a calling. When we have a calling we are typically the most satisfied. 

Looking at the second list, I would subsume the first and second points into the third. Firstly to be a Friend of God; secondly, to be a Friend to my family members (as much as that is possible); thirdly, to have Friends to whom I may not be related but who share a mutual love and respect. "A threefold cord is not easily broken" (Ecclesiasted 4:12b). These things lead to satisfaction. The things the foolish pursue lead to dissatisfaction.

Climate Change or Climate Forcing...redux

kw: musings, greenhouse effect, greenhouse warming, global warming, climate change, climatology, analysis

When I wrote a book review on the subject of climate change a few days ago, I had something in mind, but the review went in a different direction. The title actually didn't fit any more. Here are charts I made to illustrate my thinking on the terminology about "carbon pollution" and all the hype surrounding it, on both sides. Firstly, an nGram of the usage of three popular terms since 1970:

Although warming caused by the greenhouse effect, in particular that caused by carbon dioxide, was quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, only after about 1970 was it brought to public attention. The great promotion of this issue really took off after 1985. This nGram shows that, in print at least, "Greenhouse Effect" was soon superseded by "Climate Change" and "Global Warning". But let's focus on a different term and its scientific synonym:

You can see from the upper chart that the term "Climate Forcing" has been scarcely a blip on the radar. But on the scale of the lower chart we see that about the time "Greenhouse Effect" peaked, "Climate Forcing" began to surge (relatively speaking), and shortly after that, "Anthropogenic Climate Change", a more scientific synonym, came along, but it is quite a mouthful.

It is a pity that Google stopped scanning books in 2008. I'd like to see how these words have fared in these past ten years. Nonetheless, I did a Google search for all these terms and a few others I've thought of in the past day or two (put in quotes to force literal searching), setting the search time to the past year, here is how they score:

• 7 - Anthropogenic Climate (allows "change" or other following words): 488,000
• 8 - Anthropogenic Climate Change: 478,000
• 6 - Carbon Pollution: 523,000
• 1 - Climate Change: 147,000,000
• 9 - Climate Forcing: 366,000
• 4 - Climate Science: 2,310,000
• 5 - Climate Warming: 975,000
• 2 - Global Warming: 56,600,000
• 3 - Greenhouse Effect: 4,360,000
• 10 - Greenhouse Warming: 295,000

The number preceding each term is its rank in this alphabetized list.

Why do people use the words they use? Impact. "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" get the public's attention. But the actual debate is not really about whether climate is changing or the globe (i.e. its atmosphere) is warming. It is about the extent that human civilization contributes to the change or the warming. However, "Anthropo..whatever" is too much of a mouthful, and "Climate Forcing" doesn't have quite the ring of the more popular terms.

But: Climate Forcing is really the best term about which to have a policy debate. The atmospheric climate will change gradually over time, whether the human race is highly civilized or goes extinct. Prior to 1975, the big worry about "Climate Change" was about "Global Cooling". A cooling trend highlighted by the first 15-18 years of weather satellite measurements triggered fears of a new ice age. And we find that the recent Solar Maximum had lower sunspot activity than most prior cycles. Based on historical records, this could indicate a cooling trend because lower solar activity heats the Earth's atmosphere less than average. Sunspot numbers are an indicator (not a cause) of the number of flares and other phenomena that send extra energy our way.

So, how big a factor is Climate Forcing? Let's call the Climate Forcing Factor the CFF. The way the media report things, one group called "climate deniers" would say the CFF is close to zero. In the same media, a group called "established science" claims the CFF is "most" or "nearly all" of the difference, in the range 50%-90%. Putting aside my conviction that the media are rather incredibly biased, we can instead identify the poles of the debate as "Large CFF" and "Small CFF" factions. Who is right? Do we have a way to know?

We don't, actually! But we can dig out an indication or two.

This article in ScienceDirect states that variations in sunspot activity account for about 40% of long term temperature rise in Norway over the past century, with a probable range of 25-56%. For a different portion of the North Atlantic, the range is 63-72%. This ought to please the Large CFF folks.

Remember the ozone hole? Starting about 30 years ago colleagues of mine at DuPont determined the great amount of damage being caused to the ozone layer some 15 miles (~25 km) overhead, and this triggered research efforts at DuPont and other chemical companies to find new refrigerants for air conditioners and new propellants for aerosol cans. The ozone "hole" was a dramatic thinning of this layer mainly over Antarctica, but spreading halfway to the equator, and there was a similar, but smaller thinning over the Arctic. But we need to be clear: the "ozone layer" isn't pure ozone; it is where ozone is concentrated to a level of about one part in 100,000 (0.001%); it is still mostly nitrogen. Ozone at sea level is around 1/30th of this, about 1/3,000,000th. Chlorine from refrigerants and propellants in use before 1980 had reduced the level of ozone over the poles by about 2/3, and elsewhere by about 20%. "Ozone hole" is the dramatic term that refers to the reduction of ozone from 1/100,000 to 1/300,000 over Antarctica during the southern summer.

Ozone is funny stuff. It is created from oxygen by ultraviolet light (UV), and then it absorbs UV, which heats it up. So the more ozone, the more the atmosphere is heated from the top. Specifically, at subtropical latitudes, surface temperature averages about 300K (27°C or 81°F), while 15 km (9½ mi) above, air temperature has fallen to about 200K (-73°C or -100°F). Ozone and other stratospheric gases absorb UV and some IR to raise the temperature back to 300K by about 50 km (30 mi) altitude. This warm gas in the mid- to upper stratosphere emits thermal radiation (longwave infrared) both upwards and downwards, which heats the air below a little. The gradual increase in stratospheric ozone levels over the past 30 years have contributed a little heating, but I have not found a rigorous analysis of the matter. "About a degree" is a general statement I have read. This is a factor that tends to please the Small CFF folks.

These things indicate that the CFF is unlikely to be greater than 50%, and is probably closer to 25% or less. I would not say, "close to zero", so I am not in the extreme Small CFF crowd, but neither do I favor Large CFF. As I have stated elsewhere, I learned that if we were to raise carbon dioxide levels to, say, ten times their present level, the amount of greenhouse heating would not exceed 4°C or about 7°F. That is quite significant. Is it enough to end civilization? I don't think so, but it will definitely change it. We are unlikely to find out, though. If we were to burn all the fossil fuels that we currently know about, it would no more than double the amount of carbon dioxide that we have already emitted. That's another way of saying that we have already burned about half the global reserve of fossil fuels. In rough terms, it means we have so far doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide, from around 200 ppm to around 400 ppm. Once we run out of natural gas, oil and coal—should we continue freely burning them—the level could become around 600 ppm. I don't think we have enough fossil fuel available to push that to 1,000 ppm, where some people begin to feel the effects.

For all that, we must continue to find other sources of energy, on all fronts. No source of energy is perfect. Wind farms (currently 4% of global electricity generation) disturb wind patterns, heat the air that passes through the fan blades, and kill migrating birds; solar panels turn about 15-20% of sunlight into solar energy and the rest is turned into heat, and much of this would be in desert areas where the sand usually reflects 75% of the light right back out into space; geothermal energy is "clean" from a heat perspective, because the heat will emerge from the earth anyway, but using geothermal energy causes pollution of surface water and ground water, a whole lot of pollution; and so forth. The more we learn about all these things, the better we can select energy generation methods that cause the least harm. That, and that alone, will reduce the CFF. It will probably never be zero, until human population is zero.

Postscript: Do you know what the global average temperature is? I am a geophysicist. Including the whole planet, the average temperature is about 4,000K (over 7,000°F). We need a different term for "global average atmospheric temperature", and we need to always specify at what elevation; is it surface, or at the average elevation of continental plains (about half or 2/3 a kilometer), or some other "standard" height?

Relativity from a photon's point of view

kw: musings, special relativity, physics

I am between books, catching up on journal reading. Something has arisen in my thoughts from time to time, and this is as good a time as any to solidify it a little. The question: If a photon had consciousness, what would it experience?

I have read in numerous books and articles that Albert Einstein began the mental journey that led to the special theory of relativity by imagining he could ride along with a photon. Reading his own writings, though, we find that he was really thinking of riding a very fast railway carriage, and seeing how this might affect the photon's motion. Based on the Michelson-Morely experiment and on theoretical work by Lorentz, Fitzgerald and others, he concluded that no matter what speed he attained, the photon would zip by at the same speed, the one we define as c, the "speed of light". Then, taking the constancy of c as an axiom, he derived the special theory of relativity.

Supposing the photon could be endowed with the ability to observe on its own, what would it observe? Based on a wealth of experimental data, we can discuss the "career" of a photon in three sections:

1. Emission
2. Propagation
3. Absorption

Although we seldom think about the time it takes for a photon to be emitted, we can consider that the "wavicle" model implies a finite "size" that is similar to the wavelength, according to Feynman's probability-wave diagram (actually, when I saw Feynman draw this during a lecture, he only put in about 1½ or 2 cycles of the wave inside the envelope). Therefore, though we typically think of the emission as occuring "instantly"—if we think of it at all—it is reasonable to posit that it takes about the time required for one cycle to occur. In this discussion we will assume that everything occurs in a vacuum or near-vacuum, so that we don't need to consider refractive index or the reduction in the value of c within a material medium.

For a visible photon of wavelength 546.1 nm (the green Hg line), which has energy of 2.270 eV and a frequency of 549.0 THz, that emission might take 1.822x10^-15 sec, or 1.822 fs (femtoseconds). We may also assume that absorption occurs in a similar amount of time.

This photon-observer needs to have quick reactions indeed to observe anything at all during such brief periods of time! Will it, then, have more leisure for observation during propagation? No! According to the special theory of relativity, no matter the physical length of its journey, the time experienced by the photon will be zero; it will be unable to observe its own propagation.

From the photon's point of view, whether the photon was emitted by an electron transition at one end of the lab, and absorbed by inducing a similar transition at the other end, or the photon was emitted billions of years ago in a galaxy far, far away and today happens to arrive and produce an electron transition in the CCD attached to yon telescope, its experience is the same: less than 2 fs of emission immediately followed by less than 2 fs of absorption, after which it exists no longer. To us, one photon "was there" for a few nanoseconds and the other, for billions of years. The "experience" of the two photons, however, was identical: be emitted/be absorbed.

That is it! A photon of green light can at most experience 3-4 fs of emission and absorption. The rest of the universe is irrelevant to it. For a photon to have a longer "career", from its point of view, it would have to have a longer wavelength, a lot longer! For example, the power grid leaks a lot of 60 Hz (ultra-low-frequency) radio waves, photons with a wavelength of about 50,000 km and photon energies of 4.1x10^-15 eV. Such a photon might "experience" a time period of around 1/30 of a second. Pity the poor X-rays and gamma rays, with energies of thousands to millions, and even billions of eV! Their wavelengths are very short (from about a nanometer to a femtometer or less) and their frequencies are very high (from thousands to billions of THz). A one-billion-eV gamma ray photon is likely emitted in about 4 fs, and would most likely "experience" a total of less than 10^-23 seconds of existence.

Had Einstein actually spent his time thinking like a photon, I doubt much would have come of it. But instead, he thought of a very fast railway carriage observing a photon, which is much more interesting, and led to much more interesting results.

Random Thoughts on the Virtual Human

kw: musings, artificial intelligence, computers, supercomputers

In one of Isaac Asimov's early Robot stories, the president of U.S. Robotics keeps demanding a more and more perfect robot, until at great cost a robot is produced that cannot be distinguished from a human. At that point aliens arrive, and in the course of time visit U.S. Robotics, where they are shown the robot. One of them turns and says, "So what is the point?"

What, indeed? It was published earlier this year that the largest supercomputer complex currently in use has a storage capacity and parallel processing speed that exceeds that of the human brain. What is required to do this? The facility fills a room the size of a medium-size warehouse and uses a total of 7 million watts, both for processing and for cooling. Of course, we are told that Moore's Law ensures that all this will "soon" be scaled down to a much more manageable size and power requirement.

I wonder what "soon" means. A loose way to state Moore's Law is that circuit density doubles about every two years. The Watson supercomputer, which has considerably less capacity than the brain—but is really, really good at looking up trivia needed to score points in Jeopardy—fills a dozen racks and would barely fit in a large bedroom. The warehouse-sized machine mentioned above must occupy 20 to 50 times that volume. Let's say, 2,000 cubic m, or 2 billion cc. The brain's volume is less than 1,500 cc. The ratio is about 1.33 million. Dividing in half enough times, we find it'll take just over 40 years for the brain-sized supercomputer to be possible.

Is that really needed? Why do we want to replicate humans? It presently takes 15-20 years and anything from a few thousand to a quarter million $US to produce an adult human, depending on education level and the level of development of the country in which this person is born and raised. No, the real desire for producing "artificial intelligence", aside from the coolness factor (yawn), is to have a machine that can do jobs humans don't want to do, or cannot do, yet requires more intelligence than we find in waldo-sorta robots (actually teleoperated devices).

At present, even Watson and the larger supercomputers are horribly inefficient. What would it take to do brain things the brain way, using silicon chips and wires instead of neurons and their support systems? Signals along sensory and motor neurons in the body are rather quick, in the range from 20-100 m/s. But they have a larger diameter than brain neurons, so the latter are slower: 3-5 m/s. Thus, it takes a signal about 40-50 ms to go from one end of the brain to another, such as from the optic lobes to the prefrontal lobes. This may underlie the frequency of the Alpha wave, at around 10Hz (8-12). It is the highest frequency rhythm in which the brain can participate as a whole.

But if you use coaxial cables or optical fibers or other kinds of wire for signal transmission, what is needed to keep signal transmission below 50 ms? Signal speeds in wire or fiber are about 2/3 c, or 200,000,000 m/s. In 50 ms, a signal can traverse about 10 million m or 10,000 km. So a mechanical brain can be continent-sized, leaving plenty of room for the really massively parallel kind of computation that the real brain performs.

A neuron is not just some on/off switch. It does some nonlinear processing of its own, so it would take a small CPU to emulate its activity (We'll need to learn a lot more about the various ways neurons in the cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala and so forth, react to incoming signals).

Well, the brain has 10 billion neurons and 100 billion supporting cells called glia (of several different kinds). We can consider the glia as infrastructure and focus on the neurons. The modern package of a CPU is the cell phone. A smart phone's volume is 80 cc. 10 billion of these comes to 800 billion cc, or about 40 of those warehouses mentioned above. If they are "rackified" outside their cases, and powered externally so they need no batteries, and the radio module replaced with a hard-wire fanout, the volume can be reduced by 10, but you do need to wire them together. Each neuron has from 1,000 to more than 10,000 connections to other neurons, so it'll require a lot of wire. Still, we are in the range of a warehouse with less than 10,000 cu. m, quite a lot smaller than the continent we could fill, and retain the speed we need.

A question might arise at this point: Why is this system so much larger than one which is already faster than a brain? It is because I chose a neuron analog with around 1/10th the volume of a cell phone. The big supercomputer does not use virtual neurons; it does processing by a method entirely different from neuronal activities. But if you want to emulate the brain's functions, you have to emulate the way it does them. That vaunted supercomputer is not nearly as effective as the average house cat at recognizing faces, or voices, or footstep rhythms.

OK, whether it needs a few thousand cubic meters, or ten times that much, it might be costly, but it is theoretically possible to build a system that does brain things in the brain's way. But such a mind would be insane from the outset. Our brain is part of a complex system that includes a body full of sensors and an endocrine system (the original brain) with at least a couple dozen signalling molecules, and a few ways of expressing itself to external beings. Unless a brain, natural or built, has lots and lots of input and stimulation, it "spins its wheels" into helpless catatonia. Of course, using wires or optical fibers allows fast reflexes across pretty large spaces, but you'd really want a body much more human sized, attached to a brain locked away somewhere, via a fast data link no more than a few dozen km in length. A world traveler this one could not be. Remember, motor and sensory neurons have transit speeds in the 30-100 m/s range, so a 2m axon is traversed in 10-40 ms, but the shorter ones (upper body) on the fastest reflex arcs can get a signal to or from the nearest ganglion in a couple of milliseconds.

That's enough for now. And I still await my own criterion for genuine artificial intelligence: A mechanism, unaided, does its own research and development and obtains a patent.

Cubized!

kw: musings, workplaces

A career has an arc, and mine has apparently peaked, some time in the recent past. I am now officially working my way down the ladder of success. After a decade or so in an office with a window, today I finished moving into a cubicle in a large room with nine co-workers, including our supervisor. The larger group to which we belong is bringing everyone from scattered locations into a single building. At least I won't be sharing an office.

After 45 years on the job, at a variety of companies and institutions, I've had nearly every work arrangement a desk worker can have. My first job was in a laboratory setting, and I had a desk in a corner. Later, working as a draftsman/design engineer, I was in a low-walled cubicle in a space almost too big to see across. Even sitting down, I could see and be seen across the cavernous room. Since then, I have usually had a private office.

The last thing I did after packing my stuff was measure the office, by the simple expedient of counting ceiling tiles. Twelve 2'x4' tiles, plus a row of partial tiles, comes to just over 100 square feet (9.3-9.4 sq m). The ceiling tiles above the new space number precisely 10, for 80 sq ft (7.4 sq m). However, there is a five-drawer horizontal file just outside the entryway, which would have been inside were this an office. It now contains my 40-year collection of algorithms and other analytical projects. I have as much shelf space as I had before. There is also a large common space with a table, where one or another of us can sometimes be found doing paperwork that takes more space than a desk affords. So in a sense, I have more space and flexibility than before.

I find I am not much bothered or distracted by hearing the others when they talk together or on the phone. The walls of this cubicle are pretty high (64" = 1.63m), and they absorb a lot of sound. So perhaps my colleagues won't be too bothered that I frequently talk as I work. I warned them that I talk and mutter almost constantly. That's not exactly true, it overstates my habit, but it is better to set expectations in a beneficial direction.

Now that the several days of move preparation and moving are done, I can turn my mind back to work and to productive pastimes like this blog.

Is there reality to near death experiences?

kw: musings, near-death experiences, beliefs

Getting ready to review the book Heaven is for Real, which I reviewed yesterday, I did a lot of extra reading about NDE's. As you might imagine, there is a very wide spectrum of beliefs about what these extraordinary events might mean, or perhaps several spectra. One spectrum is from complete credulity ("They have to be real") to total rejection ("They are all hallucinations"). Another is based on one's own belief system, from "They support my faith" or "They strengthen my faith" to "They are meaningless" or even "They are a delusion by wicked spirits".

Strangely, reading NDE accounts, I didn't find any people who said, in effect, "Yeah, I saw this and heard that and so forth, but it doesn't mean anything to me." Also, quite a number of folks said it wasn't like dreaming, but seemed a much more concrete experience that led to vivid memories.

There are various lists of the common elements of NDE's. The core experience seems to consist of these few elements:

1. Transport to a different place, sometimes "taken" by other persons or entities, sometimes more "automatic", like involuntary flight.
2. Some kind of life review, perhaps having one's life events shown on a screen, or read from a book, or being questioned by an entity who may or may not be sympathetic.
3. A turn in the action, often a kind of interruption, with the understanding that return to the former existence is required.
4. Transport back and reviving.

The transport in item 1 is most often flight through a kind of tunnel, perhaps with a light at the end, among Westerners, while Asians and many Africans more often report passing over some kind of landscape. The transport in item 4 is usually more abrupt, and may be a simple thrusting "downward" or "back".

Many, particularly in the West, report meeting deceased relatives or acquaintances. Others report that all the entities they met were "angels" or some other nonhuman beings. Here interpretation is most prevalent; a person's cultural background determines what the accompanying beings will be called.

The life review might be long or short, comforting or frightening, and seems to have little to do with one's religion. A guilty-feeling Christian or Hindu or whatever is more likely to have an unpleasant experience than a more secure believer. I sought out accounts from a variety of cultures and religions. There is little to generalize, but I did discern a few trends:

1. Christians are most likely to report that they visited "heaven" or "paradise".
2. Jews from a strictly conservative background tend to report the most detailed life reviews, and one case that I read was long and detailed and very unpleasant and scary.
3. Jews from more mystical backgrounds are more likely to report a "garden of Eden" experience.
4. Hindus and Buddhists seldom report a heavenly experience, because the life review takes place before admission to a place they can see nearby. They usually report being sent back before they get a look inside. Buddhist NDE's appear to be quite rare.
5. Muslims almost uniformly consider NDE's as hallucinations, stating, "If you revived, you weren't dead, and only the dead can go to paradise, so you didn't go to paradise." However, there are a few reports of Muslims who had a very strong, heavenly and pleasant experience, who converted to Christianity after reviving.
6. I did not find any reports from people whose background was Shinto or Bah'ai.

I looked and looked, but did not find any records of people changing religions after an NDE, except for those few Muslim reports. Rather, people who had been weakly religious before became more pious in their own religion as a result, while those who were already quite diligent were more likely to exhort others than before.

So do NDE's actually have anything to do with God? I tend to think that NDE's are primarily hallucinatory. A few cases, such as that of Colton Burpo, have aspects that make them seem more genuine, just as there are a few cases of visions or revelatory dreams that seem more genuine (as opposed to a great many reported visions and dreams that are most likely theologically meaningless or even deceptive). As a believer in God, of necessity I believe in divine revelation. But I also believe that genuine revelation is very rare. If all NDE's are given by God for His purpose, it would make sense that they contain a consistent message. Generally, they don't.

More on using the moments

kw: musings, time perspective

Three days ago I posted about how some little things I do daily add up over the decades. Of course, my thinking didn't stop there.

Most folks, upon reaching adulthood, have forty to eighty years yet to live. We all have things we must do, and we also do things we like to do. Our habits, weekly or daily, make up the days for us. So in our waking moments, what does a daily minute or a daily hour or quarter hour mean over forty years? If you come of long-lived stock, just double the figures below.

My baseline was the half hour spent each evening brushing teeth and showering, plus the cleanup and dressing, before going to bed. It was easy to note that this uses 1/48^th of my total time, or one full year out of each 48. Recalculating for forty years means 40/48, or 304.36 days (304d 9h).

Commuting to and from work used to take me two hours daily, but in the past 16 years, it has been ten minutes each way, which comes to 2/3 of that 1/48 of a day, or 1/72^nd of a day, but at a rate of some 240 days per year. In the past 16 years, it adds up to 53d 4h. During the prior ten years, the two daily hours times 240 days added up to 200 days commuting time. Earlier in life I usually had a short commute like I now do, so let's give those 21 years 1/72 of each of 240 days per year, for another 70 days. All totaled up, in 47 years of working life I have spent just over 323 days commuting, or 0.88 year.

On boring days the papers sometimes have an article about how the average American spends six hours daily in front of the TV. Some might, but I suspect for most of us it is less than that. One full hour daily with the TV, over forty years, adds up to twice my shower commitment, or more than 608 days. For the true couch potatoes who spend 6-8 hours daily? It comes to 10-13.3 years of the forty.

How about weekly activities? Some half of Americans spend an hour in church weekly. Ignoring getting ready and commuting, the "pew hours" come to 50 per year (52 for those who attend church while on vacation), or some 2000 hours over forty years. That comes to 83d 8h. Some churches seem to offer more; at least their devotees spend more time there. Say you spend 2 hours on Sunday (one hour in "Sunday school" and one in the "service"), and one hour midweek. That triple time attendance totals 250 days in forty years.

How many do laundry twice weekly? Does it take an hour of your time to wash and dry and sort a load? Maybe half that? That gets you into the same ballpark as attending church an hour weekly. What else do you do weekly; play a half hour of pickup basketball or tennis? That's just over forty days in forty years. How about hitting the gym (aerobics or treadmill) for 30 minutes three times weekly? That is 125 days in 40 years. Not a bad thing to do with just under one percent of your time.

So here are some round figures to think about:

• One-half hour weekly means about a day per year, or a bit over 40 days in 40 years.
• One-half hour daily is seven times as much: just over a week per year, or 43 weeks (actually 304 days) in 40 years.
• Anything you do 8 hours daily, whether sleep or watch TV, is consuming a full third of your time, which comes to 13 years and 122 days in 40 years. Let's just say such a habit finishes eighth grade over a forty year span!

That's all worth a little thought now and then, wouldn't you say?

Measuring the moments

kw: musings, time perspective

I tend to think all kinds of things in the shower. It is one of the very few things during which I can't read. I began to wonder how much of my life this daily ritual is taking up. With no paper or calculator handy, I was stuck doing estimates and rough calculations.

Of course, now that I am out of the shower, I can look up things like the number of seconds in a Tropical year (31,556,925 and change), but for horseback math, I just remember 31.5 million seconds, which equals half a million minutes (plus 5%, or 525 k) or just over 8750 hours (8,766). Similarly the "work month" of four and a third weeks (30.333 days) contains 2,620,800 seconds, which I round to 2.5 million; 43,680 minutes (43.5 k); and 728 hours.

The day I can remember exactly: 86,400 s = 1,440 m = 24 h. The week, being seven times as much, comes to 604,800 s (I remember 600 k), 10,080 m (10 k), and 168 h.

Now, how much time do I spend showering? The whole evening ritual, from brushing teeth to squeegeeing water off the walls takes half an hour. That's 1/48^th of my day, and that means that every 48 years I spend a year in the showering ritual. I don't think it has been the same length since birth, so I'll just count my adult life, so far 44 years since I was on my own at age 21. In four more years, I'll have racked up that year! Will I have time to accumulate a second year? Not likely; that'll take until I am 117. I have a reasonable prospect of living 90-95 years, but that's probably the limit.

Eating is quite variable. If I was doing all the cooking, I'd want to calculate that separately, anyway, but I find it takes me only about ten minutes to polish off a meal, unless I am at a buffet restaurant, where I can graze for about an hour. Let's ignore that and consider ordinary meals only: Another half hour daily, and another year accumulated per 48 years lived.

Then there are the big time-consumers, sleep and work. I have worked close to a forty-hour week since the age of 19, but my time off has increased in recent years, so that I currently work only 45 weeks per year, effectively, what with holidays and vacation time: 40x45 = 1,800 hours yearly. In earlier years, it was 40x48 = 1,920. Using 47 for a likely average, I find 1,880 hours. In 46 years, so far, that comes to almost 86,500 hours. Divide that by 8,750 hours in a year, and it is just under ten years (9.9).

Sleep is even harder to calculate, because I would sleep 8-9 hours in my twenties, but I get half that or less now. I can discern three periods in my life. Twelve years of an average 8.5 hours, twenty years of 7 hours, and the past fourteen years I average five hours, including any naps I take. That all adds up (using Gregorian years of 365.2425 days) to just under 109,000 hours. Divide that by 8,750, and we get almost 12.4. That's twelve years on the mattress just since I was 19, plus whatever time I spent sleeping in my childhood.

I spend a quite variable amount of time reading every day. Since it is in spurts (breaks, toilet visits, reading before sleep, before some meals—or after) I really can't pin it down, but it comes to an hour or two daily. That adds up to between 1/24 and 1/12 of my time.

Well, I could dig into more things, like hobbies, but I'd have to have a recorded time budget to get any accuracy. Instead, it got me thinking further: A doctor once said most of us get at least two billion heartbeats before the old ticker wears out. My resting heart rate is near 60 per minute, and two billion seconds comes to 63.4 years. So I am a few millions into my third billion. Three billion seconds is almost exactly 95 years. If I have, say, a half billion heartbeats still in me, and I retire soon, I'll have a "disposable time bank" of some 100,000 waking, usable hours. If I am lucky and live to 95, I'll have more like 200,000 hours available. How well will I spend that time?

The middle memory

kw: musings, memory, thinking

I love it when a book gets me thinking. I reviewed How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, yesterday. A portion of their discussion of Neandertal cognition was memory.

Usually, memory is considered to have two varieties, long term and short term. Short term memory can hold a phone number, or someone's name, or a short list of items, for a few seconds, up to a minute or so. Repetition of a short-term memory, or a sudden shock, can fix it in long term memory, which lasts decades. But another term came up in the discussion of tool making and expertise: working memory. It wasn't really quantified.

Is working memory some combination of short- and long term memory, or something distinct? It seems to work this way. When you are engaged in a task, particularly one which is not wholly familiar, you may have to hold several things in memory for periods of minutes to hours. Yet, once you are done, all the memories fade.

I took advantage of this whenever I wrote a computer program or subroutine. In the very early days, I did what beginning programmers usually do, and built stand-alone applications (today folks just call them apps). They consisted of a stack of FORTRAN code that just did what I wanted it to do, usually. Whether extract certain numbers from a list or calculate a Fourier series, I just set it all up to do what I wanted. While I was writing, particularly in the days of the card punch (no terminal screen to help), I kept the entire program in mind as I spun out the code, line by line.

As time went on, I learned to break up a process into chunks, and write the chunks one at a time. I began to rely on callable routines. Eventually, I could write a program with a general outline:

Program dostuff
Call Askfordata
Call Crankonthedata
Call Printresults
Stop
End

But this just deferred the situation. The core of the work was in routine Crankonthedata, and it could be quite involved, with hundreds of lines of code. Sometimes I could break it up further, but there is a limit to "chunking" a problem. Sooner or later, you have to make it all go.

There was another technique I learned to rely on. As problems I needed to program got harder, it would take several days to write a routine. By such a time, I was pre-writing not the program code, but a flow chart of its operation, and spinning out the code for each block of the flow chart as I came to it. Inevitably, something would not work right, or I'd come to a section and find out I hadn't thought it through sufficiently; there were some dangling threads in the logic that I had to tie up. So at the end of the day, I learned to "grok" the whole routine I was working on, sort of hang the whole thing on a mental blackboard, and go to sleep on it. In the morning, I'd have a batch of stuff ready to write, and it could take half the morning to catch up.

By the way, I always wrote lots of comments in my code, something not all programmers do. Do you know why? I found out that if I looked at the routine just a couple of weeks later, I had no idea what was going on, unless I had good comments to help me decipher what I had written! All trace of the memory was gone. Somehow, a detailed memory, with thousands of parts, that I could hold onto for a few days, would still not make it into long term memory.

Perhaps that's a blessing. I wonder whether my brain would be full now, if I could remember every line of code I wrote over a forty year career. As I've written elsewhere, I used to produce 500-1000 lines a week of FORTRAN. With an average usable "year" of forty weeks (nobody works a 52-week year), that comes to a million lines of code or more.

I once met a pianist who claimed to be nothing special in the memory department, but he typically prepares for a concert by learning 100-150 pages of music. He performs strictly from memory. When he is getting ready for the next concert, any pieces he is not repeating have to be learned. The rest he mostly forgets, though he has a core repertory of a few hundred pages of music that he performs more often.

So what is working memory? It seems to be a forgettable memory store with a medium period, up to a few days or a couple of weeks. If things like FORTRAN code were stored as compactly in the brain as they are on a hard disk, my million lines of FORTRAN might total no more than fifty megabytes. These days, that's about a third of a square millimeter on the surface of a hard disk (the disk in my current computer stores 100 Gby per square inch, or 155 Mby per square mm). Somehow, we may store much more than this about many things, but not everything. I am awed.

Human hysteresis

kw: musings, psychology

Hysteresis is the tendency of a system's behavior to depend on its history. When the history is but one of a number of influences, possibly including inherent tendencies, we can more generally say it is the tendency to take one path in one direction, and another in the reverse direction.

A well known system that exhibits hysteresis it the magnetization of a piece of iron. In this diagram, H is the applied magnetic field, and B is the magnetization of the material. The red curve shows magnetization to saturation of an initially unmagnetized piece. The point Br, where H has been reduced to zero but some amount of B remains, is the remanent magnetization, rendering the piece a (provisionally) permanent magnet. You can make a nail into a weak permanent magnet by stroking it with a stronger magnet, such as one of the Alnico magnets used for holding things to your refrigerator.

When a strong enough reverse field is applied (see the blue curve), at the point Hc, the remanent field is erased. If H is returned to zero from that point, the piece's magnetism is gone. But if you continue along the green curve, you can magnetize the piece in the opposite direction. Magnetizing, demagnetizing, and reverse magnetizing all take energy. This illustrates one reason that putting a soft magnetic material into an oscillating magnetic field causes it to heat up.

This kind of Hysteresis Curve illustrates a lagging tendency. It takes a lot of H before B gets large, and the remanent B resists changes in B until overcome by a saturating amount of H. There is a slightly analogous tendency exhibited by a person going from one place to another, when there is a choice of paths to take. Some people will take later choices, some earlier. The first ones could be said to exhibit lagging hysteresis, the others, leading hysteresis. For an example:

Suppose you live in at the location marked "Home" at lower left, and wish to walk to "Store"; and, of course, return home. The green and blue paths shown illustrate two possible ways to get there or back. There is little to distinguish them. They have the same length. Assume that there are no stop lights, just four-way stop signs at every corner (this is a neighborhood store, not in a busy locale). Are you more likely to take the "leading" route (green) or the "lagging" route (blue)? I tend to make my turns early, and take leading routes whenever possible. I suspect there are about equal numbers of people who would make either choice.

It would be an interesting sociological experiment to gather information from a large number of people, which ones turn early and which ones turn later, and try to correlate other factors in their life or character, such as optimism or introversion or gender.

People are not pieces of iron. Some people will return by the route they took initially, while others will take the alternate route to go back home. Iron can't do that. Also, there are details about this route that we don't see in a magnetic hysteresis diagram. You must cross four streets to reach your objective. By my count, there are 20 distinct ways to get from home to the store, and all have the same walking distance, but the two shown are the only ones that have only two turns. The others have either four or six turns.

To do a social psychology study that gets into that kind of detail, you'd need to equip people with recording GPS devices, and see which people always take the same route and which ones tend to vary their route, and, well, I can think of more variations, but you get the point. People are interesting, because even in a very simple setting like this, there are so many possible outcomes.

Pixie dust

kw: musings, words, proverbs

On occasion my grandmother would say, "Everybody is a bit pixillated, except me and thee; and sometimes I think thee is also pixillated." She claimed it was an old Quaker saying, in which "pixillated", from "pixie", is a nice way of saying "crazy". Though she was a Methodist, her grandmother was a Quaker. She would say it to one of us boys who was being silly.

These days you can't repeat this saying and be understood. The word "pixelated" has been coined along with digital imagery, to mean "low resolution so the pixels show", or "deliberately exaggerated pixels" as in this image.

A pixel is nowhere near as wonderful a concept as a pixie. A perfectly beautiful word has been superseded by technology.

My favorite paradox

kw: musings, logic

One of he famous stories of mathematics is about the "Hardy-Ramanujan Number" 1729. G.H. Hardy related:

I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Of course, when Srinivasa Ramanujan said "number" of course he meant a natural number, not an integer, or he'd have said "integer". This is because, as his notebooks show, 91 is the sum of two different cubes two different ways, but one of the numbers being cubed is -5. Careful with his words, he was.

Suppose you wanted to make a list of interesting numbers (positive only, of course). You could start out with 1, the first number; 2, the first even number and the only even prime; 3, the smallest odd prime; 4, the smallest perfect square other than 1; 5, the number of digits on a primate hand, and the number that, when multiplied by any odd number, replicates itself as the last digit of the result; and so forth.

Sooner or later you might come to a number about which you know nothing "interesting", and you can't find anything about it. Have you found the first "uninteresting number"? How Interesting! Does it go on the list, or not?

By the way, these days you'd have to go far to find a number about which nothing has been written. Wikipedia includes thousands of pages about number after number. That first "unidentified flying number" probably has at least five digits.

Side thoughts on brief riches

kw: musings, wealth, motivation

I lived for several years near Ponca City, Oklahoma, when I worked for Conoco. The most famous town landmark is the Marland Mansion, built in 1925 for E. W. Marland, founder of Marland Oil, which became Conoco. This image is from Wikimedia Commons.

I remembered something one can see at the mansion while reading about motivation, a quote by Marland: "Who knows why people do what they do? I spent money like water on my town and my people, and they thrived and prospered."

As is plainly visible, he spent money on himself at a pretty good clip also. So much so that by the time the mansion was finished, he was nearly broke, and never lived in it! He had always wanted to live in a palace. Like Moses and the promised land, he saw it but did not enter in.

There is another quote by him that I find poignant. He was a scientific innovator, and invented a number of the techniques of geophysical prospecting for petroleum. At a speech in, I think, the late 1920s he said (I paraphrase), "We have learned where oil is to be found, and how to find more."

When he was saying this, he did not know that he had already found every drop of oil he was ever to find. All of what we now call "easy oil" had been found. It required further innovations by many scientists to refine the techniques he pioneered so as to see further and more clearly into the earth, then refinements in drilling technology so as to reach the oil once it is found.

At the time I transferred out of Ponca City, the first "deep water tension-leg" drilling platform was installed in 1,500 feet (450 m) of water. It was a technical success, but at then-current oil prices, a commercial failure. Oil prices are now four times higher. Current technology, such as that used for the problematic BP well Deepwater Horizon, allows drilling in water four times as deep. Marland would be impressed. He would not be surprised.

Life with a smaller star

kw: musings, astronomy, extrasolar planets

Late yesterday it was announced that extrasolar planet Gliese 581g, the sixth planet discovered circling dwarf star Gliese 581, is in a "Goldilocks" orbit: not too close, not too far away, but just right, smack in the middle of the habitable zone around the star. The planetary particulars:

• Mass: 3x Earth or more (most likely: 4x)
• Distance to Star: 0.146 AU or 14 million miles
• Equilibrium temperature of an airless body: 228K = -45C (A watery atmosphere's greenhouse effect adds about 35C → -10C average, but can range much higher and lower depending on latitude)

The star's particulars:

• Mass: 0.3 Sun
• Diameter: 0.3 Sun
• Surface Temperature: 3200K (Sun is 6500K)
• Stellar type: M3V (Sun is G2V)
  
• Visible brightness: 0.002 Sun (see below)
• Total luminosity: 0.012 Sun (lots of infrared)
  

This image, from this Wikipedia article (recommended reading!), shows how Gliese 581 would look were it in the vicinity of our Sun. However, if there are inhabitants about the new planet, they are almost seven times as close to a star which is 0.3x the diameter of our Sun, so it would appear twice the diameter in their sky, having an angular width of more than one degree.

That is the first thing that would be different about life on this new super-Earth, so-called because it is larger, probably about 1.5x the diameter of Earth. What else would be different, and what would seem the same?

Firstly, just because astronomers call an M star a "red dwarf" doesn't mean they are all that red. An incandescent bulb's filament has a temperature near 2800K, while a carbon arc (think searchlight or old-fashioned movie projector) has a temperature near 3400K. Both of those look pretty white unless you compare them to sunlight on a clear day, then they look a little yellowish. The Sun is the standard of "white" to our eyes because all the eyes on this planet evolved to take maximum advantage of the Sun's light. Similarly, any creatures on the new planet (which I propose naming Goldilocks) will have eyes adapted to take advantage of its light, which will look white to them, even as light from our Sun would appear a little bluish to them.

So, being closer to the star means it covers a lot more sky, about 4.5x compared to the Sun's apparent area. 4.5×0.012 = .054, or 1/18th and 4.5×0.002 = 0.009, or 1/111. The different sensitivity of the eyes of a resident of Goldilocks would cause the apparent brightness to be closer to 1/20th than to 1/100th. While the ambient lighting will be brighter than the inside of an office building, it won't be by much. And what color would that sky appear? It would be blue, even for one of us. The Rayleigh scattering in a clear atmosphere scatters blue light nine times as well as red light. In fact, it takes a very, very cool star, less than 2000K, to have light that would scatter to look whitish or yellowish rather than blue (to us).

One nice thing about an M3 star compared to a redder star of M5-M9: stability. While more variable than the Sun, an M3 star is not a flare star, so it won't periodically blast the planet's surface with x-rays. The star is considered to be about twice the age of the Sun, but its stellar evolution is so much slower that is is probably only a few percent brighter than it was eight or nine billion years ago (the Sun is 40% brighter than four billion years ago). So the stability of any ecosystem on Goldilocks depends on the stability of its orbit, which we know very little about yet.

One consequence of having much less of the incident light in the "energetic" wavelengths that we humans can see is that there is a lot less energy available for photosynthesis of the kinds we know. Both C3 and C4 photosystems use blue photons with energies greater than 2.6 eV and red-orange photons with energies close to 2 eV. They don't need the green ones in between, so the green light is rejected (reflected). There are precious few 2.6 eV photons that reach Goldilocks, so a different system is needed. Plants there might look black; they have to absorb everything effectively. It'll take some interesting chemistry to utilize infrared photons, if it is possible at all.

This means the energy available to drive a biosphere is correspondingly small, maybe 1/50th to 1/20th of the productivity per acre compared to Earth plants. That corresponds to the productivity on the floor of a thick forest or rain forest. Ferns and other dimness-tolerant plants do well enough there, but life runs at a slower pace. The forest canopy is where the action is. Goldilocks will probably have few places where a canopied forest is even possible, being more of a tundra planet.

And all that is if, big IF, there is life there. While the temperature range is right for having liquid water on parts of Goldilocks, it will be some time before we will be able to determine whether there really is any water there.

My speculation? That it is an ocean planet, and may not have any land that emerges to the air. Look at our solar system. There's lots of ice on the moons of the cooler planets (Jupiter and outward). Mars lost most of its water because it is to small, with low gravity. Goldilocks is cooler than Earth, more like Mars, but is quite a bit heavier. It will have lost very little of any water that came its way, or was part of its formation. I do hope there is some permanent, solid ground somewhere on Goldilocks. It is hard to imagine smart dolphins developing effective telescopes or radio transmitters and thus finding out about the rest of the universe. A radio message has been sent their way, to arrive about 2029. If they receive it, we could get a reply in another twenty years, about 2050. Long before that, maybe we'll have a telescope system that can image the planet directly, so we can see whether it has continents or any weather.