Intertwined biographies of man and fish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fishing, tuna, fish tagging, biographies

What a title to begin with: Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, the new book by Karen Pinchin, chronicles the life of Al Anderson, the most prolific tagger of tunas and other fish, along with the natural history of bluefin tunas and the life of one particular fish that oceanographers named Amelia. In Mr. Anderson's website about the tagging of bluefin tuna, the fish in this photo is said to be Amelia, a fish that was first caught and tagged as a juvenile (the tag is the orange thingy hanging below the forward dorsal fin), then caught three more times; the records of her catch locations, and locations logged by a data logger upon her second "encounter" with oceanographers, robustly demonstrated that bluefin tuna range right across the Atlantic Ocean. This blew a big hole in a decades-old "two populations" convention that governed the catch quotas of fishing fleets. There is only one population of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

There! How's that for a spoiler? This lovely book winds together the lives of Al Anderson, his love of fishing, his eventually greater love of using tagging to gather scientific data about tunas, and the lives of the tunas themselves and Amelia in particular. Bluefin tunas went from being considered trash fish to become nearly the most valuable sea animal, on a dollars-per-pound basis. When big money is in play, old laws that permit or encourage overexploitation become deeply entrenched and unchangeable.

In the middle of the book the author notes in passing that bluefin tunas have chromatophores in their skin, and they can exhibit color and pattern changes similar to those of a squid. Note the skin pattern on Amelia in the photo. In most pictures showing a bluefin tuna, the blue-above-white color scheme is smooth, usually because the fish is dead. Amelia appears agitated, as a fish out of water ought to be! She lived another dozen or so years, and by her final capture and death in Portugal she weighed perhaps 600 pounds.

The book's title mentions obsession. Everything about fishing touches obsession: Al's obsessive love of fishing as a young man; his equally obsessive tagging program that began not that much later; the obsession of sushi-lovers for bluefin nigiri; the obsession for money that drives the entire bluefin fishery… The list goes on. Few people consider the tuna's obsession with staying alive.

Funny side note: We once met an elderly woman in South Dakota, who asked if I liked to fish. I don't, but I've done it whenever someone asks me along. I replied to her that I had fished a little, but I wasn't good at it, and that catching fish seemed to cost me more than going to the store to buy fish. She snorted, "Nobody fishes for economic reasons!" She loved to fish. I have my own obsessions, just not fishing!

In this case, a cluster of obsessions is driving the bluefin tuna to extinction. The future is bleak for this species.

Not exactly a poison primer

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, poisons, poisoners, women, history, short biographies

After reading The League of Lady Poisoners: Illustrated True Stories of Dangerous Women, written and illustrated by Lisa Perrin, I've become a little leery of having tea with a new acquaintance. These days there are more toxins than ever before that are odorless and tasteless, and some have long-delayed effects.

This book is a Wild Card selection. Although I usually peruse the Science section and a few others, including Science Fiction and Short Stories, I'll often poke around other Nonfiction areas of the library to see what might be interesting. I couldn't pass this one up.

Poison is considered a woman's weapon, but more poisonings are actually committed by men. However, since by far the most murders are committed by men, it stands to reason that even a less-common method men use would outnumber the primary method women use to be rid of an abusive spouse, terrifying neighbor, or inconvenient relative.

Most of the women presented here can be counted as serial killers. Having succeeded in one murder, a person finds that a line has been crossed, and follow-on killings result, often to cover up the first. One of the earliest was Cleopatra, who poisoned one of her brothers, and who tested poisons' effects on prisoners. She eventually poisoned herself and her two handmaids (the asp story is a fabrication; death by snakebite is agonizing. She would have mixed a poison containing lots of opium, to die painlessly).

Much more recently, possibly the most prolific poisoner was "Jolly Jane" Toppan. She confessed to 34 killings, but it is likely the total number of her victims exceeds 100. She worked as a nurse, which gave her access to her favorite toxins. She was almost unique in her obsession with watching others die by poisoning. Others were prolific as providers of poisons to others, such as a midwife in Nagyrév, Hungary; in the early 1900's she supplied arsenic to abused women, who collectively were called the Angel-Makers in later news accounts. Forty men are known to have died, making this practically an epidemic in the village. There may have been more.

Modern forensic methods can detect almost all known toxins. Arsenic is easy to test for. Fortunately, so is Fentanyl, which is taking tens of thousands of lives yearly in the US, nearly all by overdose. It is not known (and hardly anyone is looking) how many Fentanyl deaths are more deliberate.

Although one section describes common poisons and common poisonous plants and animals, nobody will gain knowledge how to use poisons from this book. The author's aim is the stories of the women themselves, and the sociology of their surroundings. In many cases it is easy to conclude, "Yes, so-and-so deserved to be killed." All too frequently, however, a first killing led to others. Killing is the ultimate slippery slope.

The author is a gifted illustrator. I've included just one random bit of her art. The main color used throughout is a sickly green color, the classical hue of poison. Most of the stories are illustrated by a full-page portrait. These are large and detailed (the pages are 7"x10"), so reproducing one here would probably violate the principle of fair use.

You can see much more of her art at her website.

As good as the writing is, and as fascinating as the stories are, with time I expect the lingering dread to fade. I don't want to go through life fearing new acquaintances.

Loneliness and Solitude are on different dimensions

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, sociology, loneliness, short biographies

I was seventeen, a member of a folk music group, and I'd been asked to join a small (five-member) Dixieland band made up of boys at my high school. Their clarinetist wanted to play saxophone and I wasn't too shabby a clarinet player. I could also play banjo. The folk group was breaking up because two of the guys were going away to college, so I was glad to have another music group to join.

After a number of practice sessions over a couple of months, the other members held a meeting but didn't ask me; I heard about it almost by chance from one of them. I went anyway, thinking it an oversight. The other guys were all in Explorer Scout uniforms with numerous merit badges on their sashes and other insignia. There was also a cameraman there and a reporter!

I knew they were all Explorer Scouts, and they knew I'd been a Boy Scout but inactive for a few years. They'd never invited me to join up as an Explorer; I was soon to find out why. The five of them were the entire membership of an Explorer Post, and they had all achieved Eagle Scout status that year, the only such Post in history. A newspaper story was being prepared.

Once I'd taken in all the facts, I sidled away and went home. I never spent time again with any of them. That day was the loneliest day I'd ever experienced. To use a term apparently coined by Richard Deming, it was my first experience of Exquisite Loneliness: loneliness that can make or break you, but it will surely change you. Deming explores this dimension of loneliness in This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity.

Loneliness is not solitude. Being alone can be restorative (is sure is for me!). Being in a crowd is different from being with a crowd, or with some people in a crowded situation. Loneliness happens more frequently when we're among others than when we're alone. I've experienced perhaps the usual amount of loneliness, but, fortunately, only a few incidents of such overwhelming loneliness.

Several years after high school, bushwhacked by a different kind of betrayal, I was making plans to clean up my affairs and head for the hills. Vague ideas of being like Jeremiah Johnson (a movie mountain man) flitted through my head. Fortunately, I had one friend left, though we'd been out of contact for months. I wanted to see him before I left town. I called, and he came over.

As background for what comes next, it's helpful to know that I had been a Christian for nine years, but part of the betrayal I mentioned led me to pull away from the church congregation. I was badly enough hurt that I'd decided to abandon "church". My friend's first words were, "Guess what happened to me while you were away? I got saved!" I blurted, "How did that happen?" (I'd thought it impossible) He told me of a different church without the troubles I'd seen where I'd been. I went, and he and I have been "in the church life" for 51 years and counting.

Being active in a congregation of believers doesn't eliminate loneliness but it helps.

Richard Deming had things a lot rougher than I did growing up. I had a short spell of heavy alcohol use, then gave it up. I experimented with drugs just a tiny bit, and abandoned that. I don't like things that mess with my mind. Deming became a blackout drunk and at one point spent a night in jail over it. Having read his confessions to us, I am still not sure how much loneliness he suffered because of repeated, crushing experiences, and how much he is predisposed to more loneliness than "average", whatever that might be. His book explores the lives of six creative people—a psychoanalyst and writer, a painter, a photographer, two other writers of different genres, and a screenwriter; all of them celebrated in their time, or part of it—, all of whom experienced and expressed great loneliness. All of them morphed their loneliness into creative genius.

I also wonder, what is the proportion of people who experience "exquisite loneliness" and are broken by it, rather than motivated to heal? …or at least to grow?

As an introvert (INTP in Myers-Briggs terms), I enjoy social experiences, and I also enjoy periods of solitude. At a leadership training camp I was paired with my M-B opposite, a man who is ESFJ. He is almost compelled to sociality and suffers from solitude. I suppose the world needs us both.

Deming is a writer who, in self-revelation, motivates his reader to self-examination. That's valuable. Loneliness isn't a "problem" to be "solved". It's a signal that we need to reassess something. Over time, we might gain sufficient wisdom to know what to reassess.

Compared to him we are all math-challenged

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, mathematicians, memoirs, short biographies

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, by Karen Olsson, is part biography (of André Weil and his sister Simone), part memoir, part rumination. The one thing it is not, is a description of the Weil Conjectures. Let's see why, beginning with this statement, not from the book, but from the Online Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Weil believed that many fundamental theorems in number theory and algebra had analogous formulations in algebraic geometry and topology. Collectively known as the Weil conjectures, they became the basis for both these disciplines."

The four (not two) disciplines mentioned are utter mysteries to everyone but a literal handful (really!, like four or five) of mathematicians who have a sufficient grasp of all of them for the quote above to make sense. Ms Olsson is not one of those few, but if she were, she might find describing these things to a popular audience (including me, an accomplished mathematician, but not in this league) a task similar to that shunted aside in 1965 by Dr. Robert Feynman; when asked after the Nobel Prize ceremony in which he was awarded the Prize, "Can you tell us briefly what it was that you did?", he replied, "Buddy, if I could tell you that in one minute, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize."

In nearly every page the book switches gears, between a mini-biography of Simone Weil, one of André Weil, the author's memories of mathematical study (which she dropped after receiving her degree at Harvard), her more recent attempt to rekindle her early love of math, and vignettes about historical mathematicians whose work underlay that which André Weil labored upon.

The word "mathematics" literally means "learnings", emphasizing plurality. The power of the Weil Conjectures lies in making connections between and among areas that have been treated as separate, to show that they are all one. With that in mind, I find a multi-threaded book like this to be just the vehicle needed, to induce in someone like me at least a bit of the feeling that must have inhabited Weil as he considered his conjectures and the way the disciplines so treated reflected from one another to show mathematics as a conceptual whole. The satisfaction of finishing this book lies not in comprehending Weil's work, but in seeing that whole, though from afar.

Genetics – Messier than you ever dreamed

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, short biographies, genetics, domains of life, trees of life, horizontal gene transfer

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen took me a week to read, and it was a week well spent. From the Acknowledgements section, it apparently took the author four years to research and write, and that was time well spent.

I have read articles and portions of books about the subjects of Tangled Tree, but I hadn't put it all together. One one level it is a biography of the work of Carl Woese. On another it is a record of the tremendous advances in our understanding the breadth of living things and our increasing understanding of just how complex evolutionary history and genetic inheritance really is. Certainly, there is a great deal more to learn.

Triggered by an offhand remark by Francis Crick, early in his career Carl Woese sought to create and to use tools to discern the sequences of chemical units in genetic polymers. He wanted to use genetic material to look deep into time, to find the relatedness of all life and its deep history. He settled on a group of RNA molecules that are strongly conserved and thus ubiquitous in all cells, the 16s RNA unit of the prokaryotic ribosome and the 18s RNA unit of the eukaryotic ribosome. They have the virtue, from this viewpoint, of changing very slowly, so deep relatedness between many organisms can be determined.

The first breakthrough came in 1977, when Woese produced a kind of RNA fingerprint for certain methane-producing microbes. His colleague Ralph Wolfe remembers him saying, "These things aren't even bacteria." Study of several other methanogens confirmed that impression. Then other special microbes were found that were also "not bacteria" and are now grouped with them in this new domain. After a few names were applied and rejected, the new domain of living things is now dubbed Archaea. They differ in several significant ways from Bacteria. Many thought Woese ought to get a Nobel Prize for this discovery. He thought so also; he was never one to even profess humility! Somehow, he didn't get one.

The book presents a tangled web of its own, discussing Woese's many collaborators and students, some of which became opponents, at least in his own mind. By 2000, when the first quasi-complete draft of the sequence of the human genome was presented, molecular biology had advanced so rapidly that Woese never fully understood what was going on, and was kind of left in the dust. The book gently presents his increasing paranoia as discovery after discovery was made by former students and colleagues. A core issue was the shape of the "tree of life".

The family tree of organisms has deep origins, and has been used in more ways than I thought were possible. Darwin included a sketchy tree in The Origin of Species. Trees became expressions of theory and political platforms within the biological community. But such trees got into trouble when certain further developments ensued. Two are key.

Firstly, beginning in 1967, ten years before Woese's discovery of the Archaea, Lynn Margulis (then Sagan) published her first paper about endosymbionts, as they are now called. In brief, these are the mitochondria (energy producing organelles) in all eukaryotic cells, and the chloroplasts (energy conversion—from light plus carbon dioxide to energy plus oxygen—organelles) in plant cells. It took Mrs. Margulis and her colleagues and sympathizers decades to make us all clear that these organelles started out as bacteria that took up residence in slightly larger cells, which then grew even larger, over the eons, and became more and more complex, to become all the Eukaryotes, or critters big enough to see without a microscope (and a great many that are still pretty tiny). You are a Eukaryote. Without a few thousand mitochondria in every cell in your body, you would die. Very fast. Or, rather, you could not exist at all.

A quick aside before going on. I used the work Prokaryote above. It refers to everything that is not a Eukaryote. In particular (so far!), it refers to Bacteria and Archaea, because they don't have a nucleus (the "Kary-" bit refers to the nucleus). Woese hated the term. But it is just too convenient a way to refer to the non-eukaryotic microbes that actually dominate all life on Earth.

Secondly, in the late 1990's, genome sequencing had produced enough data that researchers were able to determine that everywhere they looked (initially only among prokaryotic microbes), they saw DNA sequences that came from other organisms. Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) was soon understood to be very common among the Prokaryotes, including across the "domain boundary" between Bacteria and Archaea. Initially, HGT was studied as a mechanism by which pathogens quickly acquire, and share, antibiotic resistance. Now it is understood to be so widespread that some think there is really only one "bacterial species" with a couple of dozen semi-stable forms that we used to call species; and only one "archaean species", similarly. Or maybe they are all just one big mess of microbial soup! Stay tuned…

By the "mid oughts" (prior to 2010), it was becoming clear that Eukaryotes also contain substantial amounts of DNA that were acquired via various mechanisms of HGT. To date, it seems that 8% of human DNA is the complete genomes of hundreds or thousands of retroviruses. Viruses, particularly retroviruses, are one way that HGT operates in Eukaryotes.

There are shorter sequences that are still a puzzle, and many of them tend to be present in multiple copies. One sequence of middling size is apparently found three million times in the DNA of every cell in your body, and mine! Nobody yet knows why, or whether it does anything. If it does do something, it must do a lot of it! Nobody yet knows where they come from, except from "some other critter". The result is a "tree" of life that resembles a web, a network, anything but a tree. It is hard to even use the term "tree of life" in any meaningful way any more.

A typical human body contains about 37 trillion eukaryotic cells, of a few hundred varieties that make up the tissues of the body. That same body is inhabited, without and particularly within, by more than 100 trillion prokaryotic cells, of several thousand "species" of Bacteria and Archaea. They are not just passive. Certain ones enable you to eat certain foods. The prokaryotic "glove" of organisms on our skin actually prevent many pathogens from attaching and attacking us. A similar "glove" lines our digestive tract. There is so much still to learn about all this! One consequence is this: our cells and their nuclei (where the DNA is) are pretty robust, and keep inside and outside separate. But disease and various insults to our body's integrity can allow DNA from outside some of our cells to get inside, and sometimes to be incorporated. That is another variety of HGT.

Carl Woese didn't like his work being eclipsed. He had the misfortune of making a great discovery that was soon just one of many astonishing discoveries, and he sort of got nudged aside. Though he was awarded many prizes and much praised, without a Nobel Prize, it seems he could never be satisfied. Yet he is remembered as a core figure in the great revelations about the way genetics works, that dominated biology in the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries.

Investing - what Buffett can do and you cannot

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, investing, short biographies, letters

Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, is legendary for parlaying a modest fortune into billions, primarily by investing. He is considered a genius at stock picking. Warren Buffet's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor, by Jeremy C. Miller, tells the real story, at least about the first 13 years, the BPL years.

Probably the impression most people have is that Buffett was somehow prescient, and could time the market. The reality is much more prosaic. Ground Rules is about half large extracts from the Partnership Letters that Buffett wrote to his partners (initially three family members), from 1956 to 1969; and about half Miller's analysis, a valuable asset in its own right.

Buffett's style of active investment management bore (and bears) no resemblance to that of the managers of the roughly 2,000 funds of the "Growth" variety, and even of most of the 1,500 or so "Value" funds, let alone all the other categories. He was an early Value investor, but Value has a different meaning nowadays.

After working in the investment field on his own and for Benjamin Graham, the "father of Value investing", he set up Buffett Partnership Ltd., with his own money and that of a few relatives. When Graham retired, Buffett already had savings of about $175,000 (more than $1.5 million in today's dollars). BPL was set up with about $100,000, having the stated goal to beat the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 10% yearly. In those 13 years he never had a down year, and usually beat the Dow by much more than 10%. He had parlayed the $100,000, plus other funds added as partners were added, into about $50 million (in 1970 dollars; more than $300 million in today's dollars). How?

Buffett had learned deep value investing from Ben Graham. His motto was, "You don't buy stock, you buy the business." That is, even owning one share, you should think like someone running the business. He developed his own ideas upon that foundation, so that he soon had three kinds of investments in the BPL partnerships:

• General – Graham-style value stocks: with much research, companies were found whose total stock value was less than the raw asset value of liquidating the company. Stock of companies with management who had a reasonable chance of keeping the business from foundering could be purchased with almost total certainty that the stock value would increase, probably by a great amount. Such "low hanging fruit" are very rarely to be found today, nor at nearly any time since about 1970. Buffett liked a stock to not grow fast, at first, giving him time to buy a lot of it, a little at a time so as not to stir up market activity around it. Later he split this category into two based on size, particularly once BPL had much greater funding. Most General stocks represent small companies, and a million-dollar investment could buy the whole company, or totally skew the market for it.
• Workouts – Arbitrage opportunities in today's lingo: companies in trouble, or with more cash and idle capital assets on hand than the value of all shares of stock. He would obtain a large amount (10-20%) of a small company's stock, giving him leverage (and often a seat on the Board), so that he could influence company operations. He would influence, or force, company management to get rid of unprofitable operations and concentrate capital where it could do more good, both in a business sense and a financial sense. Sometimes he was vilified in the press, much as T. Boone Pickens was a generation ago, and Nelson Peltz has been in recent years. With no more than a couple of exceptions, he avoided eliminating jobs in large numbers, even at the cost of a few more percentage points in a stock's value. I don't think either Pickens or Peltz ever cared one whit how many jobs they eliminated.
• Controls – Ownership of more than 40%, and of course more than 50%, of a company's stock would give Buffett total control of operations. His last Control was Berkshire Hathaway, which he still controls. 

Does any of this sound like "timing the market"? Buffett repeatedly expressed his disdain for the very thought, and claimed he had no interest in market timing. He preferred stocks that were independent of market movements, and chose Generals in particular for this characteristic. This took a lot of research, in an era without electronic research tools.

So, whichever sort of investment one plans to make (most of us will find Workouts and Controls out of our reach!), these simple steps must be adhered to:

• Set a goal toward which you are willing to work, hard.
• Research, research, and research some more to locate publicly-traded companies that offer a great chance to meet that goal. This minimizes risk.
• Follow a disciplined plan to obtain an appropriate amount of the stock (this can take months or even years).
• When the goal is met, sell, perhaps as gradually as you bought in. The whole process is likely to take several years. Buffett didn't care for any time horizon shorter than 3-5 years.

Doing so sounds simple, but is emotionally impossible for more than about one person in a million. Buffett had an emotional detachment from the decisions he made that just might be unique. He also had the business acumen to successfully arbitrage or control a company he had bought. It is one thing to understand what he did. It is another to do any part of it. That is why there are so few investment billionaires.

This reminds me, in a sideways way, of something Art Linkletter said when he was interviewed late in his life. He was asked how he had such success interviewing children for his show "Art Linkletter's House Party" (I was in the audience once, at age 8, but wasn't called up on stage to talk with him). He said, "I can tell you my secret, but you can't do it. The kids have to know you are at the same mental level." Ground Rules tells you Buffett's secrets. Bet you can't do it.

Some leading ladies of science

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, short biographies, women, science

My parents knew who Hedy Lamarr was; she starred in more than 20 American films in the 1940s and 1950s, after being a film star in Europe beginning in 1930. They didn't know she held the patent for spread-spectrum radio, a critical technology for secure communications. I learned of it in the 1960s after her work was declassified.

What other women of science did I learn of? Naturally, my mother had the books by Irene Joliot-Curie, so I knew of Madame Curie and her nearly-forgotten husband Pierre, and or Irene herself. Working only the memory banks here (Boy! Am I tempted to rely on Google…):

• Being a computer programmer for 40 years, it is a slam dunk that I'd know about Admiral Grace Hopper, a founder of the COBOL language, who is credited with changing our word for a machine error from "glitch" to "bug"…and pasted the wayward moth into her notebook.
• And of course, Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program, for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a machine that is a whole lot easier to emulate in software than to actually build of brass gears and ratchets.
• Being a DuPont-er, I knew of Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar®. Wish I'd had the chance to meet her while she was still at the company.
• I have met Ellen Kullman, current CEO of DuPont, who began as a mechanical engineer.
• I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and later a few of her essays.
• I read of "jumping genes" in a popular article by Barbara McClintock, and later the monographs in which she reported her work.
• Emmy Noether, honored by Alfred Einstein for cracking the math needed for his general theory of relativity.
• Florence Nightingale, who used statistics to show that battlefield hospitals were a hundred times as deadly as enemy bullets, and reformed nursing practice as a result.
• Lise Meitner, a physicist on a par with Bohr and Heisenberg.
• Rosalind Franklin, who would be the discoverer of the Double Helix if she hadn't been undercut by her boss.
• Lynn Margulis, who first explained how complex eukaryotic cells developed from collaborations among simpler prokaryotic cells (known today as bacteria).
• Sylvia Earle, in my opinion the most innovative practicing oceanographer.
• Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut.
• Teacher Christa McAuliffe, who died aboard the Challenger when it blew up.
• Primatologist Jane Goodall, whose most recent book will be reviewed here in a few days.
• Primatologist Dian Fossey, who did for gorillas what Goodall did for chimps.

That's 16, and I could probably dig deeper, but time won't allow. With the help of good library work, Rachel Swaby has gathered biographical material for 52 of the best women scientists for her book Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World. In her introduction she explains why she included only deceased women, so three people on my list above could not have appeared, though I wish she'd included Fossey. She also explains that the incredible fame of Marie Curie made it rather moot to include her, though she did include her daughter Irene.

Thus we learn of Alice Ball, who concocted the first practical, injectable serum of chaulmoogra oil to treat leprosy; Emilie de Chatelet (sorry I left off the accents), who translated Newton's Principia into French, and wrote a commentary about the same size; Annie Jump Cannon, who practically created the Henry Draper Catalog of Stellar Spectra by classifying nearly 400,000 stars, also pretty much creating the classification criteria as she went; and Marie Tharp, whose work resurrected the theory of continental drift that is now called Plate Tectonics. I guess I could add Tharp above as a 17^th; I read articles she wrote with Bruce Heezen in 1970.

It was enjoyable reading, but I think I'd have been more pleased were the book a third longer. Many of the mini-biographies are barely two pages, and the style would suit Joe Friday ("Just the facts, please."). It is a good beginning towards restoring a historical imbalance in science reporting. It wouldn't be a bad idea for a copy of this book to make its way into every middle school girl's backpack.

In the thrall of a two-faced god

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, science and politics, history of science, radiation, short biographies

This post's title is taken from the last chapter of The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson. Nelson chronicles the discovery of radiation and radioisotopes, and development of various radioactive products, that began in the late 1800's. He carries through to the present day, in which more than 400 nuclear power stations produce about 1/7th of electricity worldwide, hundreds of radioactive isotopes are known and dozens are used for various medical and industrial purposes, yet several major power plant failures and the problem of accumulating waste from nuclear power plants has led to overweening public fear of anything related to the word "radiation".

Thus, I have observed that the "epic rise" and "dramatic fall" refer to public perception. Prior to 1945, radiation was extremely popular. Lying in a pool of radioactive water was supposed to be therapeutic. Even in 1960, when I was given a half-ounce of "yellowcake" (pure U₃O₈) powder in a gelatin capsule on a field trip to a Uranium processing plant, it was considered rather benign, and such "pills" were suitable gifts to a troop of Boy Scouts. Public hysteria had yet to set in. Trips to Las Vegas to see A-bomb tests were still popular, and would remain so until 1963. Even then, the end of air-blast testing was a result of a treaty with the USSR, not from public protest in America.

Nuclear waste became an issue primarily in America, because of a set of rather odd laws that prohibited reprocessing spent fuel from nuclear power plants. This is done as a matter of routine in Europe.

A side note for those who need it: Induced fission of Uranium or Plutonium results in "fission products". When a large nucleus is split because it has absorbed a neutron, it leaves behind two fragments (sometimes three) whose mass totals the original mass, minus the mass of two or more neutrons released during the fission event. It is kind of like a drop of water splitting into two smaller drops plus a few tiny droplets. These fission fragments are usually radioactive isotopes, typically with several excess neutrons, so they tend to decay quickly by beta decay, which converts neutrons to protons and balances the nucleus better. Several such decays will result in a stable nucleus. The trouble comes because some of the "quick" decays actually occur over months or years. These longer-lived isotopes accumulate in spent fuel from reactors, and as a result, it stays "hot" for thousands of years. Chemical processing can easily separate out these waste products, leaving purified Uranium or Plutonium, whichever "fuel" was first used. Purified Uranium is called "depleted Uranium" because the power-making isotope has been greatly reduced or eliminated. This stuff makes great bullets for snipers, being almost twice as dense as lead. Reprocessed Plutonium can be returned to the reactor as fresh fuel. Also note that reactors that use enriched Uranium are designed quite differently from those using Plutonium.

In the late 1970's there was a great debate going on about the safety of storing nuclear power plant waste. I was at a public event where a nuclear power industry representative described the materials. He said that the spent fuel from a certain kind of plant would be in a canister that looks a lot like a 50-gallon oil drum, but that it would initially be producing 10,000 watts of heat from the decay of fission fragments. This would decline to 5,000 watts over several hundred years, then be quite steady for thousands of years thereafter. I stood and asked, "May I obtain one or two to heat my crawl space in winter?"

Back to the book. The historical sketches and mini-biographies are invaluable. Dr. Roentgen, the Curies, Fermi, Oppenheimer and so many others are brought to life as rounded personalities in a way I have not read elsewhere. The glacially slow tragedies that prematurely ended the lives of nearly all early students of radioactivity are heartbreaking. It took much, much too long for scientists to realize that the energetic particles released by these isotopes were displacing electrons or atoms from their places throughout any material they passed through, including their own bodies. Such displacement did damage that frequently resulted in cancer or, at higher levels, radiation toxicity and even rather rapid death at the highest levels. A further note on isotopes:

An isotope is a form of an element characterized by a specific number of neutrons in the nucleus. Thus, all atoms of Oxygen have 8 protons in the nucleus, but the number of neutrons ranges from 4 to 18, giving them atomic masses of 12 to 26. The "usual" isotope of Oxygen, O-16, has 8 neutrons. Very small amounts of O-17 and O-18, with 9 and 10 neutrons, exist naturally. All other Oxygen isotopes are short-lived and only exist because of reactions in a nuclear reactor, and usually only when a scientist's purpose is to create them. The most stable of these reactor-created isotopes of Oxygen is O-15, with a half life of about 2 minutes.

The book's 17 chapters are in 4 sections. The first covers the early years up to 1938 or '39, and the second, the development of induced fission and the Manhattan Project that led to both Uranium and Plutonium bombs. One of each was dropped on Japan in 1945, and I can't help wondering if this was as much for experimental reasons as military. The third section covers the cold war, and the fourth, the early spread and more recent fallback of nuclear power generation and the power plant disasters that led to its fall from grace.

I was surprised to find out (I should not have been) that the meltdown at Chernobyl was only one of at least 10 or 12, and became known because it was close enough to international borders that its fallout plume was easily detected in other countries. The others had been successfully kept secret, even though one or two may have exceeded Chernobyl in total radioactive materials released and environmental damage.

The most difficult chapter to read through was the one on Fukushima ("Blessed Island" in Japanese). It is the best documented of the "big three" of the world's imagination, the other two being Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The narrative exposes the monumental stupidity of the "designers" and "engineers" (they do not truly deserve those titles), who chose a reactor design known to be flawed; who chose to put it on a coastline prone to tsunamis and against clear warnings by geologists, and also in one of the more earthquake-prone parts of Japan—which is more earthquake-prone as a country than almost any other—; who chose to place the backup generators for the cooling system in basements that were at or below sea level; and then the host of errors that were made in operational safety measures during the weeks and months prior to the disaster. Actually, this was a series of linked disasters that played out over half a year's time, and in some measure they are still being played out.

But just as I was sure the author would inveigh against continuing use of nuclear power, he produced a string of facts such as:

• The total death toll from nuclear power plant meltdowns, so far as is known, is 33,000 or less. This compares with 15,000 deaths over 30 years in the coal mining industry worldwide, and 20,000 in the petroleum industry.
• The atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed roughly 200,000-250,000 within the first half year (half of those in the first minutes). An equal number were killed by the tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean. Roughly twice this many die yearly in America alone from smoking-related cancer and heart disease.
• A dam failure in China in 1975 killed 171,000.
• On a per-megawatt-hour basis, fossil fuels are 18 times as deadly as nuclear fuels.

This is why Nelson calls "Radiance", the totality of industries and products of radioactive elements and isotopes, the two-faced god, like Janus. To moderns, the apt analogy is a two-edged sword. One daren't touch it anywhere but the handle! Yet public opinion is so strong, and the ignorance of scientific principles so profound in both public and political spheres, that atomic energy is effectively dead in America and a number of other "developed" countries, at least for the next generation or two.

Here is some final food for thought I came across as I considered this post:

This illustration went around and around the Web after it was published late in 2011. It shows the excess radiation exposure people are expected to receive by living in the various Japanese prefectures. The red-toned one is Fukushima Prefecture, and the exposure is 0.25-0.50 µSv/h. That unit needs explaining:

Unit: µSv/h - micro-Sieverts/hour. Radiation toxicity begins to make itself evident above a total dose of about 500 mSv (500,000 µSv), or half a Sievert, and more severe affects appear after 1 Sievert. About one person in 18 is expected to develop cancer if exposed to 1 Sv total over an extended period—for example, 115 µSv/h for one year.

It is hardly risky to spend much time even in Fukushima Prefecture. Lifetime exposure under an excess dose of 0.50 µSv/h would be about 2/3 of a Sievert. However, there are a few focal areas near the destroyed power plant in which you'd be very sick after spending no more than a few hours. If you want the thrill of visiting a nuclear wilderness, though, nothing beats taking a "nuclear tourism" tour of the Chernobyl area, where one can look into lands that are said to be too radioactive for people to live, but where wildlife flourishes without human interference, and one can even take a short walk over ground that cannot, by law, be built upon for at least 10,000 years.

Why are there so many important numbers?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, numbers, short biographies

A subject that is exercising many physicists and cosmologists is why so many peculiar numbers are needed to define the physics of the Universe, and why they are so seemingly unrelated. Even more, some of them, according to the current theories, need to take rather precise values or the Universe cannot exist, or if it can, it cannot support carbon-based life.

For example, the efficiency of conversion of hydrogen to helium in stars like the sun is very nearly 0.007. (A proton weighs 1.00739 AMU, where the C¹² nucleus is defined to weigh 12.0, and a helium nucleus weighs 4.0015 AMU; 4×1.00739 = 4.02956; subtracting 4.0015 gives 0.02806; dividing by 4.02956 yields 0.00696). Were the efficiency as low as 0.006, to quote James D. Stein, "The neutron and proton would not bond to each other, deuterium would not form, and the Universe would consist of nothing but hydrogen" (We'll get back to the error in this statement later). And were it a little higher, at 0.008, "…it would be far to easy for protons to bond together," and the "big bang" would seemingly have gone on to bang away all the Universe to helium and heavier elements in short order: no hydrogen means no water, and any life that forms would need a different fluid.

Given that nobody has yet determined some tiny (five or fewer) set of really fundamental constants, from which everything else can be derived, we have quite a number of them. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was supposed to pave the way for a more fundamental physical theory, but that seems about as far off as it did before. My most recent printout of the CODATA list of "important" constants runs to several pages.

The book is Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define Our Universe by James D. Stein, a mathematics professor at CSU Long Beach. Out of the zoo of CODATA constants, he has chosen 13 to explain to us, and even better, he presents short biographies of the scientists whose work led to an understanding of each of them.

Some numbers have dimensions, meaning that their numerical value depends on the system of measurement. Such is Avogadro's Number, 6.0221413×10²³, the number of atoms in 12 grams of the carbon-12 isotope. It is the ratio of the gram to the AMU. By extension, it is the definition for a mole of any substance, where a mole is the weight in grams equal to the atomic or molecular weight of the atoms or molecules. Thus, one mole of pure isotopic iron as Fe⁵⁶ is 56 grams (or, strictly speaking, 55.9349393 grams, because the atomic weight of that isotope of iron is 55.9349393 AMU). Now, suppose instead of grams, we had in history defined a unit mass to be something else, call it a marg, with a mass about 1.66 times as large. Then Avogadro's Number would be, nearly exactly, 10²⁴, and it is likely that scientists would lobby hard to get the marg redefined to make that number exact. Something similar happened fifty or so years ago, when the inch was redefined to be exactly 25.4mm.

Other numbers are dimensionless, such as absolute zero. This is an extrapolated temperature, defined according to the ideal gas law, at which no more heat can be extracted from a substance, and the atomic or molecular motions that define what we mean by "temperature" would cease completely, except for the tiny gyrations needed to avoid violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The "temperature" 0K (K for "kelvins", which have the same size as Celsius degrees), AKA 0R (in which a Réamur is equal in size to a Fahrenheit degree, but the scale begins at absolute zero), needs no units. Zero is zero.

Another dimensionless number is 1/137, the Fine Structure Constant, initially derived from spectroscopy in a magnetic field. Its actual value is 1/137.036 and about six more digits. Though it can be derived from more fundamental constants such as the unit charge and the speed of light, all the units cancel out, so it is the same numerically in all possible systems of units. This isn't one of Dr. Stein's examples. He presents only two dimensionless constants, Avogadro's Number and the efficiency of hydrogen fusion, discussed above. In the latter chapter (Chapter 10), I was surprised at a number of errors that the physicists among his reviewers ought to have caught.

One was the fusion of proton with neutron, mentioned above. Highly energetic P-P collisions are required for the protons to physically approach close enough for one to emit a positron and become a neutron. Then the strong force can take over and fuse the two. The value of actual interest here is the efficiency of P+P→D+e⁺ conversion. A deuteron weighs 2.01355 AMU, so the conversion efficiency is 0.00061. I suspect it is this number, not the 4P→He⁺⁺ efficiency, that matters most. Another error was quite a long discussion of the mechanics of the P-P chain, in which the text uses "electron" instead of "proton" throughout. Electron collisions don't matter in the core of a star. The substance is a plasma. In essence, it is a mass of colliding protons (and deuterons and other nuclei) in a thin soup of unbound electrons, where there is nearly (or entirely) no impediment to P-P collisions except their own positive electric charge. At much lower energies (temperatures up to a few hundred degrees rather than tens of millions), H-H collisions that occur are primarily mediated by interactions between the electron clouds of the H atoms.

OK, gripe over. I confess to being rather staggered by that, but the rest of the book is a delight. We learn, not just the scientific endeavors of Boltzmann or Newton or Boyle, but their lives and something of their personalities. Science is a human activity, and one could say it is the most human of activities: figuring out how things work is our stock in trade (even if we devote our adolescence to figuring out how the opposite sex works!). The beauty of the numbers Dr. Stein has chosen lies in the sheer brilliance needed to first see the requirement for such a quantity, then to ferret out a way to determine what it is. We may see them as obvious in hindsight, but, for example, prior to Newton's insight, a law of common gravitational attraction just didn't fit in anybody's head.

A story is told of Napoleon, challenging his generals to make an egg stand on end. After they'd all given up, he held the egg and rapped it gently on the tabletop, enough to crush the end just a little. Then it stood. One general protested, "Well, that is obvious!", to which Napoleon replied, "It wasn't obvious before you saw me do it."

The early evolutionists

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, evolutionary theory, short biographies, history of science

The fundamental divide between the facts of evolution and the theory of evolution has been at the root of both the scientific and theological debates about "transformation of species" for centuries. In Charles Darwin's correspondence he once referred to "us transformationists", using the word derived from ancient speculations about species change. As Rebecca Stott brings out in Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, some early attacks upon On the Origin of Species were accusations of plagiarism!

Poor Darwin was assailed from all sides. The religious censured him for impiety (as many still do), and most scientists either decried his theory of natural selection or denied his priority. Claimants to priority put forward by various "correspondents" included Aristotle, nearly 2,200 years earlier, and Jahiz of Basra "only" 1,000 years before Darwin's publication. As Professor Stott shows, these first two at least are bogus claims. Anything that either man may have written about mutability of species served only as a foil to clear statements on their eternal fixity. Aristotle in particular may have been curious about the apparent ambiguity of sponges, but seems to have concluded that they were rather peculiar plants. It was not until the 1820s that the motile larvae of sponges were observed, giving the first clue to their animal nature.

However, numbers of earlier students of natural history did speculate about species change. Such speculations were based on observations that the boundaries of "kinds" were not as fixed as one might like. Certain hybrids were known, for example, some sterile and others not. In the 16^th to the early 19^th Centuries, however, just to speculate in print could get you in serious trouble with the theocratic governments of Europe. There were notions that all species might have somehow been derived from a "primordial filament". Those who published such views were at great risk.

Prior to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1800, though, nobody put forward a theoretical explanation for a mechanism of species change. His theory is called "Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics", and the best-known example is the giraffe, which is imagined to have arisen as ancestral forms stretched their necks to reach the leaves of trees; those which could stretch the best passed on longer necks to their descendants. Charles Lyell effectively demolished this view before Darwin had developed his own theory.

As the mini-biographies in Darwin's Ghosts show, those who published "transformationist" views prior to 1840—including Erasmus Darwin—and thus risked censure, persecution and death, laid the groundwork for Darwin to publish Origin and survive with his skin intact. The only person who clearly enunciated a theory of Natural Selection, independently of Darwin, was Alfred Wallace. The gentlemanly way both Darwin and Wallace and the scientists Darwin consulted handled the priority question is a highlight of scientific history.

The priority question arose only because the theocratic risk had induced Darwin to spend some twenty years gathering added examples and refining his arguments, so there would be no refuting his theory (so greatly did he underestimate the persistence of Pharisaical creationists!). Had he published his theory soon after he had confirmed it, Wallace would likely have known about it, and possibly had the book in hand during his expeditions in the Malay Archipelago. Think what a different route his collecting activities might have taken were he searching for further confirmation of the theory! However, his independent derivation of Natural Selection, based on Malthusian theory for both him and Darwin, strengthened Darwin's supporters when the debates heated up in the decades after 1860.

The debates continue, sad to say. While proponents of Judaism don't seem to care much, both Christian and Muslim apologists decry all aspects of evolutionary theory, from the great spans of time it needs to the notion that human dignity is denigrated (We're apes, folks. Get used to it). Now that millions of fossils and their stratigraphic relations have shown that extinction and evolution are factual, many are forced by the evidence to admit that "life has changed through time", which is how evolution is defined. But the Theory of evolution! Now, that's where the Shinola "hits the fan". The Theory is Natural Selection. Its outline is simple:

• Most individuals of all species die young and thus do not reproduce.
• There is variation among the members of any species.
• Certain variations tend to help an individual survive and reproduce, while others tend to hinder or prevent survival and reproduction.
• There is a mechanism that leads to increased variation within a species, nowadays called mutation.
• Over long periods of time, variations that promote survival and reproduction increase, even as others decrease.

All this together is also called Descent with Modification, a term Darwin first used. By contrast, in the prior theory, Lamarckian evolution,  modification precedes descent.

The matter of mutation was unknown to Darwin and his contemporaries. So was the digital nature of inheritance. When I was young, "mutation" in popular culture was thought to be some sudden, monumental change, such as the radioactive spider biting Peter Parker to turn him into Spider Man. Actual mutations are tiny, tiny variations in DNA. Every one of us contains between 50 and 100 such mutations that make each person genetically different from being exact replicas of the parental mix that produced the egg and sperm that fused to form the embryo that became him or her. Even "identical" twins are different in this way. Most mutations have no effect. Of the very few that do, some cause the embryo to die very early, some lead to birth defects or other debilities, while a few may be beneficial. These last are most likely to help us or our descendants survive better.

In a later edition of Origin, Darwin was persuaded to add a Historical Sketch, to outline the ideas of his predecessors. This Sketch is included as the last chapter of Darwin's Ghosts. So what is the secret of this Secret History? That Darwin and Wallace really did produce an entirely original theory. Natural Selection has been called the most successful scientific theory (proponents of quantum electrodynamics or the general theory of relativity notwithstanding). It has been said that without Natural Selection, none of biology makes any sense, but with it, everything does.

For me, the book placed a solid stamp on the originality of the theory of Natural Selection. Those who accused Darwin of plagiarism were mistaken. No theory of descent with modification preceded Darwin and Wallace. No substantial variant theory has stood the test of time. Subscripts such as "punctuated equilibrium" add details that explain the effect of sudden shifts of environment, for example, without changing the essential nature of Darwinism.

Third time is the charm, ain't it

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, dictionaries, short biographies, lexicography

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes poke fun at someone's diction by chanting, "'Ain't' ain't a word 'cause it ain't in the dictionary." Then in my sophomore year, the high school library obtained a copy of the latest "big dictionary," Webster's Third International (to use its short title). Some smart aleck or other looked in it right away, and came running out to say, "Hey, now 'ain't' is in the dictionary!" We all had to run in to see. Sure enough, big as life:

I crept back in later and checked in a few other dictionaries, something I had not considered doing before. Surprise! "Ain't" was in each and every one!! The new dictionary was remarkable only in what it left out: a notification that "ain't" was colloquial, or substandard, or "to be deprecated", and though it did say "disapproved by many", it seemed to approve, noting its use by "many cultivated speakers". As a much-abused nerdy kid, I knew well enough to keep that discovery to myself.

Unbeknownst to all of us kids, the publication of Webster's Third (W3) by the Merriam Co. triggered a controversy that is still not quite over. A debate or dispute is a short-term affair, but a controversy can go on and on, particularly when it touches on matters of tradition. Then, like the centuries-long arguments about the Trinity, the self-worth of touchy intellectuals gets called into question, and the fray outlasts the original participants.

The scope of the W3 controversy is ably canvassed by David Skinner in The Story of Ain't: America, its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published. It is no spoiler to mention that anti-W3 material has been published as recently as 2011, a full fifty years after the dictionary was issued. This book is neither pro- nor anti-W3, but is rather a history of the making of the volume, and the story of the principal characters surrounding it.

About the first half of the book's 40 chapters consist of mini-biographies of more than twenty men, and a woman or two. The central figures in the drama are Philip Gove, editor of W3, and Dwight Macdonald, who wrote the most damning (and still quoted) attack upon it. Equally important are William A. Nielson, who edited the predecessor volume (W2) that was issued in 1934, and Charles C. Fries, a pioneer of scientific linguistics. Ordinarily, I am quite put off by biography (I very seldom read one), but Skinner has woven the little biographies together in a most readable way. I still found that it took me a few extra days to read.

Scientific Linguistics remains a difficult issue, partly because no two linguists agree on just what it is. Some years ago a friend of mine was working towards a PhD in linguistics, under a professor who is a structuralist, and claims that as the most scientific approach. C.C. Fries would have damned him for ignoring empirical data about current usage in favor of theories about "generation" of language as promoted by Noam Chomsky. Philip Gove followed Fries's lead (by the way, grammarians are an equally contentious breed, and some would condemn me for that apostrophe-s, claiming the proper possessive is Fries'), basing his instructions to contributors on empiricism.

Where earlier dictionaries, particularly W2, sought to be normative or even prescriptive, Gove in W3 sought instead to embody competent reportage of the English language as American's speak it. This led to a bit of clumsiness because all the illustrative examples are from written, even published, material. But how else can one obtain historical usage? Unlike the Oxford English Dictionary, which traced each word to its earliest use, W3 used history as a springboard to the present, emphasizing current (as of 1960) American English.

In the later chapters that report on the controversy that erupted in 1961, we find that most of those complaining about it compared W3 to an imaginary W2, not having checked to see that most of their bugaboos were right there in W2 also! Yet W3 is definitely not some slightly-altered clone of W2. It is quite different. W2 was not only prescriptive, it also resembled a one-volume encyclopedia, whereas W3 stuck to defining words, not discoursing at length on the item a word "meant". This was by design, and controversy or no, it has influenced dictionary making ever since. I find that the Collins (also called a Webster's) Unabridged on my desk, published in 1979, owes much to Gove's approach, and defines by reporting.

The way we learn language is by imitation. A dictionary doesn't need to prescribe to influence. We who use them do so to learn what is not just normal or normative, but what is ordinary, because only by using a word in its ordinary sense(s) can we be understood, at least in expository prose. In more creative work, it can be salutary to stretch the meaning of a word, but most of what I write is instructional, and being understood is primary. New words and new meanings arise from children and poets; once they are established, the rest of us can use them for the everyday purpose of communication.

The lonely path of righteous refusal

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, dissension, dissenters, sociology, short biographies

I didn't take me long to read Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times, by Eyal Press. However, it did take a while to think it over. We all like to think we would help others who were being oppressed, or at least refuse to actively harm them, but is it true? In the vast majority of cases, it has not proven true.

The book is built around the stories of four persons: a border official in Switzerland in 1938 who allowed hundreds of Jews to enter illegally; a Serbian in 1991 who falsely identified dozens of Croats as Serbs during an exercise in "ethnic cleansing", saving their lives; an Israeli soldier in an elite unit who, in 2003, joined a dozen of his fellows to sign a letter detailing why they would no longer enforce immoral laws against Palestinians being harassed by Jewish authorities; and a Hispanic-American financial adviser who in 2003 blew the whistle on a major Ponzi scheme in Houston, one that was second in size only to Bernie Madoff's.

Four people, very different from one another. Three men and a woman. Three of the four lost their jobs; the fellow in Serbia had had no job to lose, but he was lucky not to lose his life. The border officer in 1938 could well have lost his life, even in "neutral" Switzerland. In all four cases, the person did not truly stand alone, though in three cases they were "locally alone", unaware of others who were also acting out of conscience rather than taking orders. And even for the Israeli soldier, with his dozen fellows, social isolation and obloquy followed and haunted them thereafter.

Compared to these people's stories, the one I am about to mention is very minor, but it illustrates the pressures one must endure to break ranks with the momentum of a popular effort. I worked for three years developing specifications and some of the software for a major project, but I became concerned that the overall design was faulty and the programming, being done by a consulting firm, was flimsy and filled with bugs. Near the end of the three years, once we had filed for a patent on a key component (yes, you can patent a computer program), the group leader announced that we must quickly get the product ready for general use. I protested that it was still more of a prototype, quite far from being ready. I was quite disturbed, and I'd been growing more uncomfortable for the prior year, because all the others were very gung-ho, in spite of many very damaging flaws in the program's operation. My concerns were brushed aside. I argued privately with the other programmers and designers, one by one, to no avail.

I continued my work, wondering what to do, when nature took a hand. I discovered I was dying of cancer. On the last two days before taking a few extra days off before Thanksgiving, I carefully crafted a three-page letter. My primary goal was to stop the program going into production until the specific weaknesses I identified could be corrected, a process I estimated (underestimated it turned out) would take at least two more years. I did not send anything by e-mail. I printed three copies, dated and signed them, and hand delivered them to the offices of the supervisor, the manager, and the general manager. I told myself, if I wasn't dying, I'd have to prepare to be fired. I went home. We went away for the holiday weekend; I figured I ought to enjoy myself as much as possible in spite of the pain. Upon our return, I went into the hospital, expecting to die on the operating table.

As it happened, the surgeon is an expert and tracked down every little bit of cancer. Thus, six days later my supervisor arrived at my hospital bedside to visit me. He assured me that the "flap" over my letter hadn't lasted long, and the software team had been ordered to prepare specifications for a "version 2.0" with a nearly complete redesign to avoid the weaknesses I had identified. He and I agreed that I would probably have a six month convalescence, and if I did any work in that period, it needed to be lower-stress than such a hot project. I was relieved. I still had a job. I was a bit sad that it effectively ended a thirty-year career in software design and programming. Once I was ready for full time work again, I'd be in a different division. Looking back over the twelve years that have passed since then, I realize how very lucky I am. I could have been fired or forced out in any number of ways, the sympathy due to my illness notwithstanding. I liked the programmers and designers I worked with on that project. I haven't seen any of them since.

Some acts of conscience save lives. Some just save a little money. Some save reputations. None is easy. I recall the story of Elijah, who is not quite so fearless and heroic as he is made out. He was very emotional, and probably had to work himself up to his signature deed: challenging the prophets of Baal and eventually leading the slaughter of 400 of them. Shortly, he received a letter from Queen Jezebel, a very credible death threat. He fled into the desert. God sent him an angel. He asked the angel to take his life so Jezebel would not have the pleasure of doing so. The angel led him on a long walk—40 days—to meet God. He again requested to die, complaining that he stood alone. Boy, was he depressed! God replied, "I have reserved to myself 7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal." God sent him to Elisha, so he would have a companion and a successor.

We need others. We need them so badly that we can commit almost any act, or overlook almost any crime, if the alternative is standing alone. I marvel at the aloneness of Jesus. Though he had 11 faithful followers (and a thief) in his entourage, and though they were supported by a number of rich women, the Gospels make clear that before he was resurrected, only one of all of them understood what he was doing, Mary of Bethany, who anointed him. Particularly in John's Gospel, his frustration is evident time and again, at their dullness. Eventually, praying for the strength to undergo Golgotha, he was literally sweating blood. Christians believe he is God. The better term is God-Man. And that man was stressed to the limit!

Yes, we need others. Even where conscientious objectors are treated humanely, there will be many who call them traitors. They find it hard to get work, unless they move to a place where they are not known. Even where a whistle-blower is well treated, the incident is certain to precipitate a major career change, if not end it altogether. And there will usually be some who call you a betrayer. Yet I am heartened by taking another look at the work of Stanley Milgram, who performed the "electrocution" experiment in which students were asked, and then demanded, to push a switch to "shock" an actor who was faking his pain, in a "learning" experiment. Much is made of the fact that in the initial experiment 70% of the students complied right up to the highest "shock" level, which had the actor faking a fainting swoon. I am frankly amazed that 30% mustered the gumption at some point to refuse to go further. I am further amazed that nobody tried to knock Milgram's block off (or if anyone did, he didn't report it).

There is a middle ground there. Those who refused to go further didn't attack the experimenter, they simply refused to continue. As Milgram reported, a few did stalk out angrily, but most who refused were shaking and sweating, yet held their ground. In declining to harm (or seem to) the actor, they also refrained from harming anybody. Some may dream about being like Rambo and cleaning things up with guns blazing. Real life isn't like that. As the Swiss border official and the Serbian villager found, a bit of studied deception was much more effective. And as the Israeli soldier and the American whistle-blower found, open refusal requires persistence, but can finally be effective. Mr. Press doesn't state this, but I suspect the exposing of the 2003 Ponzi scheme made the later exposing of the Madoff affair go a little more quickly, once a few concerned folks began to raise the alarm. Yes, it still took years. But it might have taken years longer, and the loss could have been 2-3 times greater. Who knows, it might still be going on!

A semi-biography of SJ

kw: book reviews, short biographies, quotes

The title recalls Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot. Wittingly so. A collection of more than 160 quotes classified under more than 150 headings, I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, edited by George Beahm, gathers a comprehensive overview of the world as seen by Steve Jobs, but very little of how he saw himself. He was famously secretive, so there is no surprise there.

Steve Jobs became a public figure in his mid-twenties, and remained so for three decades, so the editor had a great deal of material to cull into this small book. The quotes are arranged alphabetically by (editor chosen) category, rather than on a timeline. An appendix of 17 pages titled "Milestones" provides year-by-year events, and that gave me a better historical sense of the life of SJ, as he is called in the editor's own text.

I have not read the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, but I plan to do so (so many books, so little time). The sense of SJ that I got from this collection is of an exceptional genius who was more comfortable with his products than with the people, yet made an effort to succeed in relationship building. You don't become a successful entrepreneur if you're a total jerk. He seems to have had the same outlook on life as a friend of mine, who was brought up with the philosophy, "We aren't everyone. We are Dravens (a pseudonym). We don't have to care what others think."

He had to have a strong sense of his own mind to live a life so consistently against the tide of "expert opinion". Several of the quotes echo sentiments such as Henry Ford's "If you asked the people, they just wanted a faster horse." SJ didn't give people what they wanted. He gave them what they were going to want. That was his genius.

Fostering magical consciousness

kw: book reviews, short biographies, spiritualism

I have read the introduction and a few chapters of The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds by John Chambers. I won't be completing the book. The author presents 24 short biographies that focus on supernatural and spiritualistic experiences. Persons discussed include Ben Jonson, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Harry Houdini and Winston Churchill.

The introduction poses a question of what would have resulted if the sack of Prague in 1620 had been forestalled by a victory of Frederick V of Bohemia. Prague was a center of investigation into "alternate realities", a welter of alchemical, astrological, cabalistic and other occultist practices. In this and the mini-biographies, the author writes with the credulity of a true believer about the possibility that the modern world could have been a product, not of science and technology, but a "technology of magic".

There is no doubt that some of the people limned here reported extraordinary experiences. But none produced a new technology that has not been superseded by the products of the scientific method. As Churchill once wrote, "Even a fool is right once in a while." The phlogiston theory, for example, did explain many aspects of combustion, but it could not fully account for everything, while a proper chemical understanding of oxidation-reduction reactions shows that phlogiston was simply wrong.

It has been well known since I was small that Isaac Newton wrote in greater volume about Bible interpretation and alchemy than he did about science (which he called "natural philosophy"). Chambers pretends that this is some new discovery, and heavily freights his narrative with Newton's struggles to reconcile his supernatural and spiritual beliefs with the scientific method he was busily inventing, as though Newton expected some synthesis of alchemy and chemistry or astrology and physics. It is no surprise that Newton never achieved this reconciliation. Many today have yet to do so. Astrology may be nonsense, but it is charming nonsense, and the daily newspaper horoscope remains as popular as ever, in spite of the fact that there are many more personality types than astrology can account for!

I keep a pretty cluttered mental attic, but the spiritualist proclivities of sundry geniuses get the heave-ho.

Would Plato spin in his grave?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philosophers, short biographies

In The Republic Plato urged us to adopt a "Philosocracy", where a polis much like Athens is ruled by a philosopher-king. Naturally, being a philosopher, and thinking of himself that he was living what he preached, he expected a philosopher to rule most wisely. It doesn't take long, reading a biography of Plato, to realize that he was self-deceived. He strongly favored censorship of the popular press, for example, advocating a system similar to the Roman Catholic "Index" of allowed reading. Further, he had great disdain for the common folk, "hoi polloi", thinking that he, being wiser, ought not be subject to the laws which bound the many.

He also favored "Greek love", writing, "Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice on the part of the governed." As one may guess, I consider male-male sex to be perversion. I consider the current "untouchable" status of such behavior as evidence of cowardice on the part of modern society and her leaders.

The authority I accept, The Bible, has this to say: "Whoever cannot rule his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls." In a word: defenseless. Paul, writing about the leadership of the church, stated that both elders (presbyters) and deacons (ministers) must be family men who had proven their fitness to lead by raising successful and respectful children. I assert that the same ought to be true of public leaders.

(Aside: of the current crop of noisemakers in Washington, of both parties, only one has raised children who, while not mistake-free, are wise enough to have owned up to their mistakes and have since bettered their lives: the current President, Mr. GW Bush. Perhaps it is in some way related to the fact that only he shows any sign of having a backbone.)

There may be a few philosophers in history who actually practiced what they taught, but none come to mind. Two students of philosophy and history, Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson, have written Philosophers Behaving Badly, a study of eight prominent modern (post-Descartes) philosophers who are stellar examples of those whose lives were most opposite to their teachings. They are Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzche, Russel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault.

One could say that the transition from traditional philosophies to Logical Positivist and other "modern" philosophical trends rests squarely on these eight men. It is also safe to say that none of these eight could be trusted with the heart or life of anyone; they all left a trail of broken lives in their wake. They were all exceptionally bad at conducting human relations. They were all compulsive practitioners of numerous vices. Though one has been called an ascetic, that regards only one facet of his life; otherwise, he was a rampant hedonist.

Is this the best that we can do? I know three practicing philosophers, and one former practitioner. One at least is a rather pleasant person...the former philosopher who is now an electrical engineer. The other three, I wouldn't trust on a wager.

The authors state, "Adultery does not disqualify a person from presenting good philosophy." I say, "Oh, yes it does." These eight philosophers are largely responsible for the development of the current of the present age, that is destructive of families, racist, elitist, and hedonistic to a greater degree than any former generation (yes, I know my history. There is nothing new under the sun, but there is certainly more of it these days).

Yet adultery is but one sin, and the book chronicles many. The authors state that these eight were chosen not for sexual excess—though six at least were excessive to excess!—but for a significant lack of integrity. Not only did they violate their own ideals, they showed no sign that they though they ought to conform in any slightest way to the ideals they taught others. They were, to a man, exemplars of the kind of men Jesus rebuked: "Whitewashed tombs, well decorated but full of corruption."

Human leadership is a job like other jobs. You don't qualify for it by being a convincing speaker or writer. You get a job at one level, and if you do it well, you get promoted. The ballot box ensures that, to at least some extent, promotion to national leadership is contingent on demonstrating successful leadership in prior "jobs."