Beasts in our yards, beasts in our minds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, pests, animal behavior, sociology, attitudes, risks

It's funny. We have the words "vermin" and "pests" for animals we don't like, but no single-word terms for animals we like. We get by with "animal allies" and "domestic animals", plus "pets" for our most-loved. Most literature about animals either advises us how to get rid of the ones we don't want around, or idolizes certain "charismatic megafauna". There are clubs of bird watchers and butterfly collectors and wildlife photographers (even when the "wildlife" is found in your neighborhood). Could there be clubs for those who care about bats, or beetles, or (shudder) roaches?

The more citified we are, the more likely we are to fear or despise animals—other than the pets or "companion animals" we dote upon. Even some bird watchers call city pigeons "rats with feathers" and some of us go to great lengths to keep raccoons out of our garbage containers (Hint: If you have room for it, use a compost pile for everything that's even slightly decomposable).

Sometimes I've wondered, "What do animals think of us?" If you could converse with one, what would it have to say? Perhaps when a monkey sees a human, it thinks of her as a funny sort of hairless, tailless monkey. When a fish, even a shark, sees a human swimming, it probably thinks it is seeing a particularly clumsy seal. Perhaps the garter snake in the garden would advise you, "Don't spray the veggies. I don't like my insects covered in pesticides."

In her book Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature's Least Loved Animals, Jo Wimpenny asks us to look at animals differently, and in terms familiar to them. For example, when a moth follows you in through your front door, it isn't "invading". For most moths, everything inside your house is useless. It cares nothing for the furniture, the carpets, the lamps, the pictures on the wall (except as something to hide behind). If it is a female of one of the five or six species called "clothes moth", and she finds her way to a closet with some wool garments, if she thinks anything, it is, "Oh, goody! Oodles of stuff for my babies to eat," as she lays her eggs on your favorite sweater (Hint: woolens that you value are best kept in a cedar chest or cedar-lined closet, or even a chest freezer).

You might say, "You're just giving in to the beasts!" I am actually giving in to the math. There are about 11,000 species of moth so far known in the US, and more than 150,000 worldwide. Only about five have wool eating larvae. Most species outnumber humans thousands to one. There are probably several thousand moths the size of a thumbnail or smaller in my yard right now. In the evening, when they are airborne, getting into or out of the house must be done quickly, or at least one will get inside. If I can, I'll either catch it to release outside, or crush it. Probably half escape my attempts, but I can trust the house spiders to get most of them. And yes, we do have a cedar chest.

Ah, yes, the house spiders. Based on what I find in their webs, they mainly eat fruit flies and midges and the occasional housefly. Yesterday as I left the house, I felt a tiny thing land on my hand. I was thankful it was not a mosquito, but a newborn spider with a body no larger than a poppy seed. I blew it off into an Azalea bush, with a wish, "Catch lots of bugs for us." I knew it had several siblings still inside. I don't evict a spider until it is too big to stand on a nickel. Fortunately, my wife is not creeped out by having indoor spiders. That's good thing, because no house is free of them. Not one! They stay in odd corners, weaving tiny cobwebs, eating most of the tiny critters that get inside, and each other (population control!).

The book mentions that spiders are known to dream. I don't know how researchers figured that out! Can you imagine what they dream about?

The ones that were studied are jumping spiders (see this article in Harvard Gazette). While sleeping, they twitch their legs and their eyes move (I hadn't before known that spiders' eyes can move!). Just like REM in mammals and other animals.

Ms Wimpenny doesn't start with insects and spiders, though, she starts with fearsome critters, the ones that could eat us, or at least do a lot of harm: sharks and crocodiles. The movie Jaws set back both research and acceptance of sharks by decades. Earlier treatments (not mentioned in the book) by Jacques Cousteau that depicted sharks as mostly bloodthirsty set the stage for Jaws and the more recent Shark Week.

It's interesting that people fear sharks the most. I heard this joke when I was a graduate student:

Families are enjoying the beach at Cape Cod, when someone yells, "Shark!" Everyone runs out of the water, hops in the car, starts the engine to run the air conditioner, and has a smoke.

This was 50 years ago when almost everyone smoked, and the first "no smoking" restaurants were just getting started. Diseases caused by smoking kill half a million Americans yearly, and auto exhaust at that time probably killed half that many. The number of people killed by sharks in a typical year? Two.

The fact is, sharks are more social than we knew in the past. The author tells of social and even caring behaviors. Crucially, there are many species of shark, and they differ a lot. But even the "king of sharks", the great white shark, is a somewhat social species. They don't think of humans as prey. They probably don't think about us at all. Nudging and biting are how they gather information. The animal that does consider us prey is the crocodile. One Australian told the author that if someone jumps off a certain bridge and tries to swim just the 100 meters or so to shore, they won't make it. A saltwater crocodile will "take" them within a minute or less. But if you're in Australia and someone hollers, "Croc!", everyone cranes their neck for a look.

Bat-phobia is not as prevalent as shark-phobia, but is equally real. People think bats are creepy, even if they're too young to remember the spate of Dracula movies of the late Twentieth Century. We are generally slow-moving and bats probably think of us as furniture…furniture that is ill-equipped to catch food.

I spent half a summer doing geology in Nevada. There was a bright light on a tall pole, far from our bunkhouse. Moths and other insects swarmed around it. So did bats, catching them. Sometimes one of us would get a flat pebble and throw it up spinning into the light. A bat would dive-bomb it until it was about a foot or two away. Then its echolocation would be able to discriminate that the rock wasn't a moth, and the bat would swerve off. We were never able to induce a bat to capture a pebble.

Strangely, for a book intended to make us feel less fearful and more "friendly" towards animals, particularly the creepy or disgusting ones, the last chapter before an Epilogue tells of cute animals behaving badly. I won't go into it; much of it is gruesome or grotesque. Think abusive penguins and otters. Really abusive! The author's intent is to emphasize that animals don't live by our rules. I lived among rattlesnakes on that field trip mentioned above. I saw them every day. They were afraid of us humans. When I saw one it was usually retreating. Since it was summer, they never came inside; they like warmth. Had I been so foolish as to camp on the ground in cold weather, it's possible I might have awoken one morning with a snake curled up in my sleeping bag. I knew better!

Do you like the big cats? Many people do, but of course, at least in America, we enjoy them from the safety of a zoo enclosure. Where people and big cats live near one another, it's another story. Just in India, about 70 people are killed yearly by tigers. That's ten times as many as sharks kill, worldwide. This cartoon is based on one I saw sixty years ago (All these cartoons were produced using GPT Image 2 in the OpenArt site). 

There is an uphill battle to improve the public's perceptions of animals. AI will probably accentuate this, because LLM's like ChatGPT or Gemini have been trained on human text, much of which has outdated, inaccurate views of animals. Our literature is filled with over-cutified or overly villainous animals. Hardly any balanced depictions exist.

Other than humans, what is the most deadly animal? The mosquito. But out of thousands of species of mosquito, only a few carry diseases. Unfortunately, one of them is malaria, and others include West Nile encephalitis and chikungunya (bone-break fever). But not all mosquitoes need blood; many use plant sap. Of the bloodsuckers, few will utilize human blood. To get rid of malaria, however, getting rid of Anopheles mosquitoes isn't the right approach. Effective vaccines against the parasite the mosquitoes carry are just being released, after many years of research. I hope it will be cheap enough to allow near-eradication of the parasite. Meanwhile, mosquito nets are the fallback measure. Further, bats and many kinds of birds subsist on mosquitoes and other flying insects. Kill the insects and what will happen to them?

All of nature is sets of interlocking ecosystems. Cut one link, and it can shut down a whole chain, or hinder it for many years until it readjusts. We are seeing that all around us. I think the key to rewiring our attitude towards nature has two parts: (1) Recognize that we are part of nature, and (2) Discard the notion that any animals think like we do; they don't recognize boundaries that we hold inviolable.

Here's hoping that this book makes a difference!

Making visible memories

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, history of photography, nineteenth century, sociology, photographers

From about 1826 until 1839, taking a photograph was a matter of firmly setting up a camera, inserting a black holder containing the sensitized paper, sliding out the holder, taking the cap off the lens, and looking from time to time through a peephole (briefly uncovered) at the sensitized paper to see how the image was progressing. After a few hours, the apparent contrast would nearly disappear, indicating that the lighted portions of the paper had darkened sufficiently. One would then replace the lens cap, slip the holder back over the paper and remove it. A chemical bath was used to fix the image so that the paper was no longer light sensitive. One now has a paper negative image. This could be laid on another piece of sensitized paper and put between glass plates; this assembly would be laid in the sunlight for a prescribed time (minutes at least). Then the image on the second piece of paper could be chemically fixed for the final, positive image.

In 1939, Louis Daguerre announced his process of developing a latent image. This shortened exposure time from hours to about a minute in good light. Later developments in the production of photographic papers and films and other media, and in the chemistry of development and fixing of latent images, resulted in media, and the cameras that held them, that could capture an image in a fraction of a second, and finally, in sunlight at least, less than 1/1,000th of a second.

Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How it Transformed Art, Science, and History, by Anika Burgess, touches on the first photographs of the late 1820's, but primarily begins with Daguerre and the Daguerreotype. The latent image isn't mentioned, just assumed. For the purpose of the book, "Early" refers to the 70 years from 1839 to 1909. Thus the book's history ends before the invention of flashbulbs that I remember being used in the 1940's and 1950's, and before the Brownie view cameras such as the one my parents taught me to use in the early 1950's.

Studios for portrait photography initially had to be on the top floor, to have a skylight for illumination, until methods for producing a "flash" or other artificial bright light were invented. From the 1850's to the 1880's magnesium ribbon (for a "flare" lasting a few seconds) and powder (for more of a momentary "flash") were used. The book details how difficult it was to use magnesium without the abundant white smoke interfering with the photograph. Fires were also frequent. Magnesium as a light source is indeed hard to use, as I've experienced. Adding an oxidizer such as potassium chlorate or perchlorate leads to a better, briefer and brighter flash, but increases the risk of igniting the ceiling (an experiment a friend and I performed, using a couple of ounces of magnesium powder and a few ounces of potassium chlorate, in a glass bottle, produced a blazing flare five feet high. Fortunately we were outside).

The book doesn't mention lycopodium, the spores of a puffball mushroom. It was used after the middle 1880's until the 1940's. It is safer than magnesium, with less smoke, about like what is seen in this image I generated with GPT-Image-2.

As I recall, when I was a child "ordinary" film had a speed rating, called ASA at the time, of 25. The rule of thumb was that, using a lens aperture of f/11, the exposure in sunlight had to be one divided by the ASA rating, so our f/11 Brownie camera had a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second (close enough to 1/25). I had to learn how to momentarily stop breathing and stay very steady to take a picture. Indoor photography was impossible without using flash bulbs (they used aluminum or zirconium spun wire in pure oxygen to create the flash). ASA is now called ISO. Films still being produced are rated up to ISO 400 and some can be chemically "pushed" to ISO 1600. Digital photography has blown the doors off such figures.

This picture, taken in 1910, of my great-grandfather and other family members, had to be made outside (note the snow on the left). The family couldn't afford to go to a studio for a photo using lycopodium illumination (the oldest family photo I have, from 1893, was also taken outside, fortunately on a warmer day).

The bulk of Flashes records the effects on society, science and business. "Photo fiends", now called paparazzi, became a problem almost as soon as handheld photography became economical. The easier it becomes to take pictures, the easier it is to abuse the privilege.

Stop-motion photography, which preceded high-speed video, was done with multiple cameras set up to trigger in sequence. Such sequences first proved that running and trotting horses are entirely airborne during portions of their paces. Another showed how a cat twists in midair to land on its feet. Golf swings and acrobatic maneuvers could be analyzed.

Illuminants other than visible light also came into play when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. These penetrating radiations were dramatically misunderstood by almost everyone for decades, even through the mid-1900's. Radiation burns were frequent, and the book records a few cases of amputations needed because of radiation-induced cancer or gangrene. Yet I remember as late as 1960 going into a shoe store and using a fluoroscope to see how my shoes fit. We were only cautioned not to use it for more than a few seconds.

A little is said about the effect of photography on the arts, but primarily about the production of composite photographs or photo collages. As large landscape photographs began to fill galleries, I understand that there was a period of sturm und drang about photography superseding painting and other visual arts. Portrait photography did indeed supersede most portrait painting, but not entirely. Painting families such as the Wyeths are still very much in business. Similar worries about AI-generated art are heard currently, but I predict that future generations will still have painters and other "natural" artists in abundance.

All this just skates on the surface of a fascinating survey and analysis of how photography affected the human condition in the Nineteenth Century. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

Is a female Mike Tyson possible?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sports, sociology, gender issues, women's issues, polemics

Korfball is a coed version of basketball that arose in the Netherlands in 1902. Each team sends four players on court. It is the only international coed team sport, so far.

At the end of The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body, author Starre Vartan presents korfball as an example of the possible, a truly coed sport. The primary sex-based rules of the game are that men guard men and women guard women, and that each on-court team consists of two of each. Other than that, both men and women pass the ball (dribbling isn't allowed) freely to team members of either sex, both men and women guard, both men and women shoot and score, and so forth.

This book drops right into the middle of the controversies over "men in women's sports," and the debates about why (or where) it might or might not be fair. Ms Vartan's thesis: give girls the same opportunities to learn sports as the boys have, beginning in toddlerhood, and we'll find out if they can compete on the same level. At the moment, systemic sexism is infinitely more prevalent than systemic racism (my language, not hers, but I think she'd agree).

Let me say that the great majority of those who "identify" as this or that "gender" are lying or insane. They are making it harder for the truly trans to receive compassionate counsel and care. They are very few. The number of those who are now detransitioning (or want to) probably greatly outnumbers those who make a successful transition. But after a full transition, surgery and all, successful transitioners will never reproduce.

There is a turning point in every life, a process we all pass through, that is expressed in the pairs of words, "boy - man", "girl - woman". It is puberty. Some time between age 10 and 16 (for me it was 12), hormone production ramps up and secondary sex characteristics develop over a span of 3-5 years. Before that, boys and girls can develop equal skills and equal strength. Afterwards, nothing is the same. Some child athletes become adult klutzes; some awkward children grow into athletic adults; but more likely, the sporty kids become sportier adults, and the rest become spectators…and some, like me, do our best to ignore sports, from birth to death (when our son played on various teams, I would attend the games and cheer him on. Otherwise, I don't care).

When our son was about eight he took gymnastics classes for about a year. In the end, he preferred running sports (soccer, track, and roller hockey). But I noticed something while observing his gymnastics classes. Puberty messes up the kids, but in different ways. Both boys and girls get more awkward. Boys' legs seem to shoot out ahead of their torsos, and it takes them a couple of years to relearn balance and coordination. Girls' hips thicken and their busts get heavier, which throws off their balance in a different way; it takes them the same couple of years to accommodate. The "lucky" girl gymnasts (if you want to call it that) retain a boyish body into adulthood with small busts and narrow hips. These are the most likely to become career athletes.

Excuse me if this seems crass: A woman whose bra has F cups is not going to be a talented athlete. You male athletes, try this: F-size breasts weigh five pounds each; strap two five-pound pot roasts to your chest and go exercise. Instant Klutz! Curiously, nowhere in Stronger Sex did I find a word about the effect of breast mass on athletic performance.

The great value in the book is the mass of data the author has gathered, or more frequently, gleaned, about the various strengths of female bodies. Briefly, nature has endowed women with extra "powers" to ensure they can carry, bear, nurture and raise offspring successfully. Where they stand out is in endurance, in the ability to bear pain even though they seem to feel it more intensely, in a stronger immune system, and in fueling exercise differently from men. But one significant fact must be kept in mind: A fit male body contains on average 15% fat, while a fit female body contains on average 25% fat. 

Putting that into practical terms, a woman of a given height and strength must weigh more than a man of the same height and strength. For example, consider a welterweight boxer, a man who weighs 144 pounds. He may have less than 15% body fat, but let's assume he actually has 15% fat; that comes to 21.6 pounds, leaving 122.4 pounds of lean body mass. A woman of equal strength and lean body mass, who has 25% body fat, will have 36 pounds of fat and weigh 158.4 pounds. That pushes her into the next weight class. In order to compete as a welterweight she would need to starve herself below 147 pounds, which would probably cause her periods to stop. It would also weaker her overall. But if she and the man were to box together with her weighing 158 pounds to his 144 pounds, she would still be at a disadvantage because moving the extra mass around would tire her out sooner. From this I conclude that boxing is not a sport in which men and women can compete on equal terms. Biochemistry and physiology make that impossible.

Let's jump to the top of the scale. In the 1980s Mike Tyson weighed 220 lbs (100 kg) and had 7% body fat. Probably no woman in history has equal vital statistics. What is the ultimate strength of a woman's body? I was in the mining town of Battle Mountain, Nevada with a team of geologists. We stayed in a hotel across the street from a saloon. The others went to the saloon. I stayed in the room. Late in the evening there was a commotion across the street. I glanced out to see two men fly out and land in the street. When my colleagues returned I got the story. Miners are typically smallish men. These two weighed in the 150# range. They got into a fight. The saloon owner, a very large woman of late middle age, stepped over, grabbed the two by their belts, picked them up and clashed them together like cymbals. Then she carried them to the door, one in each hand, and threw them into the street. I don't know how she would stand up to a heavyweight boxer, but I know I wouldn't care to cross her!

I agree with the author that there are sports at which men and woman can compete on an equal footing. There are others that this is not so. What needs to change is a pervasive culture of "no, they can't" without data or experience to back it up…and very often, "no, they can't" runs contrary to past experience! Sport in particular lends itself to extreme opinions, none of which are correct or even useful. Since the coming of age of the X Generation, X has meant eXtreme. It's time to chill, folks.

So much of Ms Vartan's writing in this book is polemical in nature that it can be hard to read. I'll forbear complaining further, because of its value. Get this book, tighten your belt, and read it for that value.

Too wrong to be wrong

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, pseudoscience, sociology, humor

Imagine two utterly involatile items—tungsten ball bearings, say—orbiting one another in an absolute vacuum at a temperature very near absolute zero. The only force operating on them is their mutual gravitation. Based on the common meaning of the words, this system would be an example of perpetual motion. One could quibble that even in this microkelvin environment, an occasional tungsten atom volatilizes, such that over an extremely long time, occasional collisions between errant atoms and one or the other object would slow their orbital motion. I don't know how to calculate how long a time must elapse until the objects come to rest and, of course, settle into contact, nor how much longer before they evaporate away to a uniform tungsten gas. Certainly, our universe could not host a region in which this system is possible.

To would-be inventors, perpetual motion has a very different meaning: a system from which one can extract usable energy without adding energy.

This painting by Norman Rockwell, which graced the cover of the October 1920 issue of Popular Science, illustrates one of the many thousands of ingenious designs of perpetual motion machines. Just like all the others, a machine like this can be made with very low-friction components so that it will run for a very long time. But it will always slow down and eventually stop. If you try to extract some of its energy of rotation, it will come to a stop even sooner. Always, always.

The sociological phenomenon of "getting something for nothing" lies behind perpetual motion, and is the subject of Chapter 4 of  Pseudo Science: An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them by Lydia Kang, MD and Nate Pedersen.

The authors state at the outset that the book is not comprehensive. Indeed, they shied away from overly politicized areas (e.g. Lamarckist and Lysenkoist theories of evolution) and the grossly evil ones (e.g. eugenic programs and vivisection, human and otherwise). Such things aside, they gathered 25 categories of pseudoscientific beliefs in four sections: "Pure Nonscience", such as flat-earthism, perpetual motion, and phrenology (bumps and lumps on the head); "Aliens! Ghosts! Bigfoot! Atlantis!", including UFOs (or UAPs these days), cryptozoology, and the "2012 Apocalypse"; "Wishful Thinking", or sundry ways to "predict" the future such as astrology or superstitions; and "Grifters, Nihilism and Denialism", where they lump in sundry conspiracy theories and dowsing.

Among the conspiracy theories they discuss, they do make a political foray, although I suppose they don't think of it that way: Climate Change Denial. What was once the Greenhouse Effect, from the early 1800's until the mid-1900's, became Global Warming before morphing another time or two so that now we hear of Climate Change, usually "catastrophic climate change". Here they toe the party line, the party of totalitarians. Sadly. Let's take a side trip into the facts as I know them:

• Joseph Fourier (he of the "series") in 1824 concluded that a "greenhouse trapping" effect by, primarily, water vapor caused the average temperature of the Earth to be warm enough to keep most of the planet's water in liquid phase.
• Svante Arrhenius in 1896 calculated the added effects of other gases, primarily carbon dioxide. He concluded that CO₂ could add a few degrees to the warming. The relevant sentence on p. 254 has Arrhenius stating that the added carbon dioxide "from coal combustion could result in global warming and possibly the extinction of the human race." This is utterly false. Arrhenius actually wrote,

"…we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." 

He was from Sweden, and thought a bit of warmth would be beneficial. Just for the record, I consider that Canada, Siberia, and Patagonia will benefit, possibly to become the new breadbaskets of their respective continents, along with the Scandinavian countries. Further,

• As a teen I repeated Arrhenius's calculations. Later I majored in four sciences, with a "hobby" of computer coding (with which I paid my way until retirement). 
• In the regime of CO₂ concentration below about 1% (10,000 ppm), the absorption bands in mid- to longwave infrared "max out", or become saturated, before a concentration of 500 ppm is reached. In other words, with a present concentration of 425 ppm, nearly all the warming possible has already occurred. CO₂ in the atmosphere is increasing about 2.5 ppm per year, so the little bit of extra warming we can expect over the next 25-30 years is minor to negligible.
• Studies of fossils from times of high CO₂ and experiments with enclosed stands of trees where extra CO₂ is added to the air have shown that trees and other leafy plants grow faster and larger when CO₂ concentration is about 1,000 ppm, or 0.1%. This goes for rice also, contrary to some recent claims in overly politicized reporting.

"Global warming" and its various aliases was appropriated by the totalitarian Left in the US and much of the developed world as a cudgel to gain political control of the populace and the energy economy. They reason that only by creating an impoverished populace, including elimination of the middle class, can they achieve the power they crave. The deplorable condition of the Leftist-controlled major cities in the US, and their surfeit of impoverished minorities, portends the condition of all the world under Leftism.

Climate change has become a political tool, such that reasoned dialogue is no longer possible. OK, end of my soap box rant.

Much of the humor in the book is found in picture captions, such as, from the chapter Phrenology, an old illustration captioned, "An 1886 illustration of parents annoying children by stressing about their future careers," and in Cryptozoology, by an etching of a kraken dragging a ship into the sea, "This giant octopus would like a word about your sushi order." The text itself is straightforward, light-hearted in general, and a pleasure to read.

In the Personality Psychology chapter some ink is spent on MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Many businesses use this to categorize (or label) employees. The category I fit is INTP, for Introverted-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving. If the sixteen Types are taken as some fixed construct, being thusly labeled can lead to managerial abuse, which the authors dwell upon. However, at my company, at least, we learned the details of our assessments. Each Type Indication was based on our answers to a couple dozen questions. The final Indicator, such as the T applied to me, is a balance between opposing traits. Thus T and F, or Thinking and Feeling, go together. With up to 100 points to dole out, the T=7 in my score actually indicated 49T-42F, which means I am strong in both traits. As it happens, my career was built on my analytical skills, but I am also well known for my tendency to weep at weddings, and the way my son played the Toccata by Khachaturian at a recital also brought me to tears. The other three Indicators were also balances. I-E (Introversion-Extraversion), for example was stronger for I with a good dollop of E, and this is further influenced by the fact that I am somewhat bipolar: When I am "up" I am more sociable than otherwise, and "otherwise" tends to last longer. In this case, treating MBTI Types as prison cells is the pseudoscience. The authors rightly decry such practices.

In the chapter on the "2012 Mayan Apocalypse" it is a pity that they don't mention the excellent book, 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, by Mark Van Stone, PhD, co-author of Reading the Maya Glyphs. In Dr. Van Stone's view, frequently stated, "December 22nd, 2012 will be akin to January 1 on our calendar."

The book is fun, interesting, and contains a bit of an Easter egg: The cover is printed in three colors of fluorescent ink, as these photos show.

This is a library book, and the dimmer section at lower left of the UV image is caused by library tape—which absorbs most UV—holding the catalog number to the spine.

============

My turn to give the copywriter a wrist-slap:

• On p. 105, the phrase "…more likely of the reeds' displacement" is missing a word and should read, "…more likely cause of the reeds' displacement."
• On p. 139, a picture of the Aztec Calendar Stone is labeled "The Maya Calendar." This is a very common error. The Mayan civilization fell before 900 AD. The Aztec civilization, featuring a different ethnic group, began about 1300 AD, four centuries later. The inscriptions of both cultures are distinctive and unique to each.
• On p. 155, pipes bursting due to freezing water are likened to a soda can bursting in the freezer. Sorry, but the latter eruption is due to CO₂ being driven out of the soda as it freezes. There is room in the can for water-to-ice expansion, but the CO₂ raises the pressure much higher.
• On p. 259, a more basic typo: a temperature rise of 2.5°F is equated to -16°C. This is a category error. As a temperature difference, 2.5°F equals nearly 1.4°C (of course, when the temperature is 2.5°F on a winter's day, that does equal -16°C).

DuPont and the Irish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, historiography, dupont company, irish, immigrants, gunpowder, sociology

Reading Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th-Century America, 20th Anniversary Edition, by Margaret M. Mulrooney, I obtained a view into the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants, not only in northern Delaware, where I now live, but in the industrial Northeast of the United States. I knew I would find no ancestors or even cousins among the gunpowder workers and other Irish employees at the du Pont facilities along the Brandywine River. I am about 1/4 Irish, but my Irish ancestors, upon arriving in the young U.S., made their ways to New Hampshire, Virginia and Pennsylvania. One family did settle in Salem, New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from New Castle, Delaware.

The book's first edition of 2002 was published about the time of the Dupont Company's 200th anniversary celebration. It was an expansion of the author's PhD dissertation at the University of Delaware. The 20th Anniversary Edition is updated with a little new material; the original scholarship is sound and has been supplemented but not reworked. The Introduction and first chapter ("Mutual Interests") summarize the history of the du Pont family, the original company founded by E. I. du Pont in 1802, and the managerial attitude and practices of Mr. du Pont and his successors during the 19th Century.

The title "Mutual Interests" introduces the vital distinction between the du Ponts and the leaders of many other industries in the area. Being of the French aristocratic tradition, yet with originally humble origins, Pierre S. du Pont and his sons, particularly Éleuthère I. and Victor M., had a keen sense of noblesse oblige, the "obligation of power", that induced an attitude of caring for their employees not just as paid labor but as quasi-family members. Some trace of that still remained when I was working for "Uncle Dupie", from which I retired in 2013: I saw on my manager's bookshelf the title How to Recognize and Reward Employees. This same manager was willing to explain business terms that I didn't understand well, and once said, "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it." That sounds harsher than it was, and I was a great fan of this manager, and most of the managers I had during 30 years with the company.

In the environment of the gunpowder yards of the four connected properties that made up the E. I. du Pont de Nemours company throughout most of the 1800's, Irish immigrants thrived. Though the work was dangerous, a point possibly over-emphasized by Dr. Mulrooney, the company's generous caretaking—free or low-cost housing, widows' pensions, higher pay than the norm, company-held savings accounts, and apprenticeship programs, for example—made "the powder" an attractive livelihood.

The company had initially hired mainly French-speaking immigrants, but wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland soon led to near-dominance of the labor market by the Irish. While most histories of Irish immigration to America focus on those who fled the potato famine of 1845-1852, the workforce at du Pont was roughly half Irish even in the 1820's and 1830's. It is on these people that the book initially focuses.

Irish were discriminated against in 19th Century America, because they were visibly "not English", predominantly Catholic, and poorly educated. However, E. I. du Pont soon found that the men could learn as fast as anyone, and their performance overcame his early reluctance to hire Irish workers. He had a practice of all new hires working as laborers for two years so he could assess their attitudes and work habits. Promotion to work as a powderman resulted in a significant increase in pay. He also favored married men for their stability and likelihood of a better attitude toward work.

In spite of discrimination, the Irish mostly knew they had it better than they'd had it in Ulster, where most were from. Consider: prior to the potato famine, some Ulstermen were prosperous but the more typical dwelling was a one-room cottage with a packed earth floor, little or no wood in the construction of mud or sod or peat walls, and a leaky roof. A single man working for the du Ponts would be in a dormitory, or boarding with a family, in a wooden structure with a wood floor, windows and doors that worked. A family would be in a two- to four-room house. The company's liberal benefits allowed a worker or couple to save a little, part of which they used to sponsor relatives in the "old country" to come to America, and chain migration was carried out for more than 100 years.

In time, the Irish Catholics could afford a little stipend for a circuit-riding priest, and later, they built St Joseph's on the Brandywine. By the end of the century, the church sponsored a school for the Catholic children, as seen in this photo from 1887. For much of the 19th Century, children from the powder yards were instructed on Sundays at the Brandywine Manufacturers' Sunday School, where a child's instruction was concordant with the family religion; the deist du Ponts accepted and supported the religious upbringing of the students.

The Irish families also struck a solid compromise between their traditional ways and the Mid-Atlantic culture, with is where the "White Lace" part of the book's title derives. They didn't fully enter the "melting pot" that we may often hear of, which was honored only in the breach anyway. They didn't "assimilate" but they "acculturated," making as much of the benefits of hard work and thrift as possible, while in part acceding to the consumerism that was a continually rising force in industrializing America.

The book's chapters cover in some detail the cultural traditions they kept, and didn't, their dwellings, their use of yards and dooryards and kitchen gardens, and the niceties of life that they obtained. They knew many luxuries were out of reach, but they craved a certain amount of gentility. Having been landless, they knew the value of land, and strove to save enough to buy houses or farms. Over all, the Irish along the Brandywine, and elsewhere in America that they encountered favorable work environments, overcame stereotypes and thrived.

Their stories induced me to hark back to family research I have carried out most of my life; fourteen years ago I wrote a summary of the immigrants in my own family tree. I found a few "ice age immigrants": I am between 6% and 12% Cherokee. Of the rest, 24% were born in Ireland, 9% in Scotland, 39% in England, 16% in Germany, and a smattering of other parts of Europe. It's interesting that Ancestry.com's DNA analysis didn't show a trace of Cherokee, and pegged my English roots at 70%. That's the conundrum of small number statistics. We think of getting 50% of our DNA from our father and 50% from our mother. But the vagaries of "crossing over" that produces eggs and sperm can shift these proportions one way or another, so one child could be 60-40 and another 25-75! Pity poor Senator Elizabeth Warren, who grew up being told she had "substantial" Native American ancestry. Her DNA test results, released in 2018, showed "between 1/64 and 1/1,024" Cherokee ancestry. Actually, I count her lucky. My DNA results cannot demonstrate even that much, yet family records show a minimum of 1/16. That's life.

After retirement I worked for three years as a volunteer docent at the Machine Shop at Hagley Museum, on the grounds of the du Pont powder mills (see the picture). I learned a lot of company and du Pont family history, and Dupont company history. There was much in this book that I'd never heard before. It was great to re-connect with the stories of the powder mill, and to learn of an immigrant population that I had heard only a little about.

A word about safety. The Dupont Company had a strong tradition of safety all during the time I worked there. I learned that the number of gunpowder explosions during the 118 years that black powder was manufactured there exceeded one per year. But a typical black powder factory in America of the time had five to ten times as many explosions. Dupont powdermen had a much greater chance of living long enough to retire, compared to the rest. This is the only quibble I have with Powder & Lace; otherwise, it is a marvelous book.

Doctor Doolittle attainable?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, sociology, communication

How do animals communicate? Why do they do so? What do they have to talk about? What are they saying? Can we eavesdrop? Can we horn in?

The first question has numerous answers, and has motivated a great lot of literature. The answers to the third and successive questions are still elusive at best, and impossible (to date) to answer. But the second question, now: Ah, that's a good one. Why, indeed, do animals communicate? To narrow the focus quite a bit: Why do animals talk?

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum takes up precisely that question. Were I the editor I would suggest adding a word to the title: Vocally. Dr. Kershenbaum states in the Introduction that this book focuses only on auditory communication, to keep the book's size manageable. And while I am making suggestions, may I offer that the cover picture, of a frog nose-to-nose with a snail, is way off the point? Frogs eat snails, and snails are remarkably mute. There's a pair with nothing, but nothing, to talk about!

In the context of biological evolution, vocalizing, in common with all kinds of communication, must serve the needs of the creature in its environment. Take up the question for yourself: what needs to you have? Shelter, food, a mate, and enjoyment. Each of these needs is different in detail from the similar needs of any animal in its own environment. Also, for most animals larger than a limpet, a fifth need would be a sense of purpose, even though that may be largely wrapped up in both providing and securing the first four needs.

The author illustrates the range of animal talk by discussing seven animals: Wolf, Dolphin, Parrot, Hyrax, Gibbon, Chimpanzee, and Human. In each chapter the animal's unique vocalizations are examined with this question in view: Is it Language? And a corollary: Is it a stepping stone towards language?

At first it seem to me that the order is a bit odd: Hyraxes weigh a pound or two, with a correspondingly small brain; dolphins are the heaviest on the list and, after humans, have the largest brain in relation to body size. I finally recognized a specific order, that of successive degrees of verbal complexity. I wondered why Dolphins were brought in so early. Most of us think of them has being closest to having a language. However, their whistles are variable, not repeatable, and nobody has yet been able to discern a vocabulary of "dolphinese". The author stresses in this chapter and others that language does not necessarily require discrete words. I am strongly skeptical about that. I personally tend to put "wordlessness" as distinctive on non-language, but I am willing to withhold judgment for now.

Can wolf howling be considered linguistic in any way? It must be pre-linguistic, as it is a kind of singing. Howling wolves are clearly enjoying the experience; howling is emotional. Considering that, in humans, the brain structures that support song are larger and more deeply established than those that support speaking and speech hearing, it is evident to me that song came long before speech, and perhaps by a million years or more…or perhaps by several millions of years.

The first animal treated that seems to have word-like utterances is the hyrax, a little marmot-sized relative of elephants—they even have little tusks! It may seem a stretch to call their chippy, chittery vocalizations as songs, but the author thinks they are. They are not random strings of the five distinct sounds a hyrax makes; they seem to have a syntax. That is, certain sounds never occur one after the other, while others are usually found in succession. Just as we have words that contain several syllables, it may be that, if hyraxes actually have "words", many are of several syllables. (In human speech, contrast monosyllabic Chinese with polysyllabic Japanese.)

Putting gibbons next in order, we find certain similarities in their "songs" to hyrax "songs" except that gibbons have 27 (or 28, the text says both at different points) distinct utterances, with a much more complex syntax than that of hyrax "songs".

Parrots are a really mixed bunch. While most parrots, and several other birds such as Mynah birds and ravens, can mimic human speech sounds (and doorbells, gunshots and sirens), they don't use these sounds in meaningful ways, with an exception or two. A bird named Alex, an African Grey Parrot, became famous for his ability to hold a simple but meaningful conversation with a human. Getting Alex to this point took a lot of training, of a special type described in the Parrots chapter. Alex has died, and another African Grey Parrot is being trained; stay tuned.

Was Alex an exceptional genius among birds? For one thing, his verbal abilities indicate that the arrangement of a bird's brain might be quite a bit more efficient and economical than that of a mammal's brain. His brain was the size of a shelled walnut and weighed less than a quarter ounce. A typical house cat has a one-ounce brain, and only a very exceptional cat can learn to recognize more than their name and the sound of a can opener. Regardless of Alex's skills, it is evident that parrots in the wild don't use language in any humanlike, or even Alex-like, way.

So, gibbons sing. Chimpanzees don't. What some (stress: some) chimps can do is learn either rudimentary ASL (American Sign Language) or other physical means of indicating a small number of words. Sentences longer than "give banana" seem to be beyond them. The gorilla Koko learned more ASL and was a better conversationalist. But neither chimps nor gorillas have a vocal apparatus that can produce uttered language, and it is pretty clear that they don't have the flexibility of mentation to support humanlike language at the level of a two-year-old human. Somehow, Alex the parrot could hold his own with a six-year-old human.

The author stresses again and again that animals communicate according to the needs imposed by their environments. The complexity of their utterances—and again, he is reporting only on audible communication—generally reflects the complexity of their social environment. It appears that only humans can maintain relationships with potentially thousands of other humans (The number of names in the Picasa face-name directory for my photos comes to about 1,200. There are a few hundred other people I know by name and face and converse with more frequently than yearly, whom I have not photographed). The largest chimpanzee "village" is less than 100. Similarly for dolphins, orcas, and their kin.

How and where and when did humans make a breakthrough that allows an actual infinite range of expression? We may not make many more unique sounds than the sound-repertory of a gibbon (English phoneme lists range from 44 to 46, and Mandarin Chinese requires 88 phonemes, but Hawaiian gets by with 24). We combine them endlessly, and we can distinguish them. Thus, most English speakers can speak and recognize about 10,000 one-syllable words, 30,000-35,000 2-syllable words, and a total of 60,000-100,000 total words, plus all the case inflections and conjugations needed to make grammar work. The author stresses this point: No other animal has grammar, or at least nothing like a grammar that we can recognize.

What conclusions can we draw from all this? Firstly, that a great deal of research lies ahead, for us to begin to understand what any particular species of animal "means" by its utterances. Secondly, whether "words" really are necessary for the kind of flexible communication we call "human communication," which is what we usually mean when we use the term "language."

What Dr. Kershenbaum has given us is not the answer to "Why animals talk," but a few foundation stones, of a set of unknown size, the groundwork for learning why they do talk, and eventually, what they are saying (which we may find out is not anything we'd enjoy hearing!).

How useful can you be?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, self-help, advice, sociology

Years ago I had Stephen Covey training according to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I couldn't pass up the chance to read Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The approaches of these two men are quite different; 7 Habits is almost engineering-oriented, being quite analytical, while Seven Tools is anecdotal and geared to setting emotional hooks to motivate us as we read.

In the hierarchy or pyramid described by Abraham Maslow, Esteem (of both self and others) is at the fourth level, after one's needs for physical sustenance, secure dwelling, and a supportive community are met. Esteem, as Maslow describes it, depends primarily on accomplishment. These days, with "self esteem" being treated as a right rather than something earned, it would be better to use the terms "respect" and "self respect" (although "respect" is in danger of being swept sideways also). The most useful people are the happiest.

I was interested in what an art generating program might produce from the overly-simple prompt "The most useful person". These two images are the best offered by, on the left, Dall-E3 (in Bing) and DreamStudio (using its Anime style; other styles yielded blah results, as did other programs).

I am quite taken by the gardening/farming image. I have often thought of farmers as the most useful people. I put primary producers, such as miners, as a close second. In the early 1980's, when over-regulation threatened both farmers and coal mining companies, a popular T-shirt began to circulate that said, "Let them starve in the dark". It made the point succinctly. [Disclaimer: At the time I was in graduate school, and consulting for a gold mining company.] These images, and the others I passed on, show the great importance of the substance used to train a generative model.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's book has, naturally, seven chapters plus an Introduction. In the Introduction he points out that here he will have nothing to say about the scandals that dogged his middle years, because those matters have been overly thoroughly treated elsewhere. This book is about the attitudes he developed over the years, that he feels led him to success as a bodybuilder, health coach, movie star, governor, and philanthropist. His first two Tools are to develop a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, and then to grow that vision as large as possible.

Large visions are necessary. As it is said, you don't get to the Moon by planning to go halfway there. On the other hand, he points out that after aiming and preparing for a big goal, you might have to be satisfied with partial success, at least at first. This isn't like getting stranded halfway to the Moon. It is more like taking possession of a 3-bedroom house you can afford in a suburb, rather than the manor house in a rural countryside you hope one day to have. Consider it a stepping stone, and you have a roof over your head while you work (Hard! That's Chapter 3) at greater things for the future.

I don't plan to outline all the chapters. The advice is practical and the stories are well matched to the recommendations. I was touched in particular by several stories of how he related to competitors and potential opponents. In one singular instance, a bodybuilder had beat him out for a title, and at first he couldn't figure out how. He asked the man's advice, and eventually invited him to live and train together. A competitor need not be an enemy. In this case, the man was a great friend to him. If certain folks became enemies, we don't learn about it from Arnold. This is an admirable attitude.

Here and there I was put off by a bit of profane language. It isn't necessary. There is always a forcible alternative to cussing. Other than that, the book is fun to read, and well stocked with useful advice.

Herd Immunity versus Herd Mentality

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, pandemics, covid-19, sars-cov-2, politics, epidemiology, sociology

During what we now know was an early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, Johan Anderberg wrote his analysis of the unique approach taken by Sweden, as compared to all the other First World nations: The Herd: How Sweden Chose Its Own Path Through the Worst Pandemic in 100 years, translated from Swedish by Alice E. Olsson and published in English in 2022.

The book covers from early March 2020 until the end of the year. Writing in 2021 a book to be published the following year, the author could not have foreseen how absolutely middle-of-the road the results would be in Sweden, or how the pandemic would play out for another two full years, followed by a sputtering endemic infection that has become a slightly-worse-than-usual type of flu. Four other coronaviruses are known to cause fall-to-winter colds, and now there is a fifth, that is a little more deadly than the other four, but on a par with Type A influenza.

The action centers on two significant men, Anders Tegnell, Sweden's state epidemiologist, and Johan Giesecke, advisor of WHO to the Public Health Agency of Sweden. Other important men and women played their parts, including the Prime Minister of Sweden, but these two, with Tegnell in the lead, helmed the Swedish strategy for coping with the pandemic, for at least the year 2020.

Just as the two men began to collaborate, on March 12, Giesecke quoted a 17th Century noble who had written to his son, "An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regulatur" and thoughtfully provided a translation, "Don't you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" (p.73) This attitude was the underlying basis for dealing with the hundred-odd world governments and hundreds of news agencies that questioned, then decried, then condemned the light touch taken by the Swedes.

Early on Tegnell and Giesecke sought not to limit transmission but, in the absence of a viable vaccine, to allow the infection to spread while taking measures to protect the frail elderly and other vulnerable persons, with the goal of establishing herd immunity. There is much discussion of this concept in the book, with an equation or two related to R₀, the expected number of persons one infected person infects. Later, discussion moved to such buzz phrases as "limit the spread" and "flatten the curve", which caused confusion and had no discernible effect.

I remember well that President Trump authorized the military to make available great numbers of hospital beds and ventilator equipment, many on Navy ships. These went largely unused. To my discernment, being put on a ventilator was a death sentence for 50% of patients who were thus treated, and a great way to lose a quarter to half of one's body weight and muscle mass for those who survived, leading to months of recuperation. 

This is as good a time as any to note that a good friend of mine, a physician, and I worked out a plan: 

1. Since the main killer of Covid patients is pneumonia, and the lung-filling fluids of pneumonia are primarily composed of sugars, at the first symptom it is best to stop eating, ingesting only water, for at least 2-3 days.
2. Rather than fighting a fever, seek to enhance it into the 102°F range (39°C), to support the T-cells that are fighting the virus. He intended to use hot water baths or to get in the car on a sunny day and turn up the heat all the way. I preferred to not use anti-fever medications such as Tylenol.

As it happens, the doctor and I, in spite of being "fully vaccinated", both contracted Covid-19 twice, and survived quite well. In my case, effective antivirals were available by that time, which no doubt helped a lot.

The Swedish epidemiologists didn't stay "in the silo" of epidemiology, but took a more sociological approach. They disdained the notion of locking down a society, and while the rest of the world (or at least Europe and North America and developed Asia) was mandating masks, forbidding church and other gatherings, closing schools, and issuing "6-foot spacing" guidelines, they kept Swedish society almost completely open.

It seems the rest of the world took their cue from an amateur scientist with no epidemiological training, Tomas Puevo, who published an essay, "The Hammer and the Dance", predicting that the attempt to attain herd immunity would result in 10 million deaths in the USA (pp. 124-5). The actual total by end-April 2024 was 1.2 million, and at the end of 2020, about 380,000. But politicians and some scientists worldwide bought into this totally, and we were all locked down.

I'll jump forward to the denouement, which begins on p. 288 with a bit of genuine epidemiology: comparing year-on-year death statistics to discern "excess deaths" that might more properly be attributed to Covid-19 (or any other epidemic agent). 

• In 2020, the total number who died of all causes in Sweden was 98,124. 
• The annual average for 2015-2019 was 90,962. 
• In 1993, the year of a bad flu outbreak ("the Beijing flu"), the figure was 97,008. 
• Swedish population in 2020 and in 1993 (rounded): 10,369,000 and 8,574,000. 
• Divide deaths by population. 
• In 2020: 9,463 per million
• In 1993: 11,310 per million 
• Population average 2015-2019: 10,109,000. Divide it out: 8,998
• Delta per million in 2020 = 465 excess deaths per million
• Delta per million in 1993 = 2,312 (almost 5x!).

Conclusion: The Covid-19 pandemic was far from being "the worst pandemic in 100 years". It was probably second-worse.

Note: CDC data (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00016654.htm) indicates that in an "ordinary" flu season, flu leads to about 10,000 deaths in the USA. In the 1992-1993 seasons, 45,000 such deaths occurred each of the two years. Dividing these figures by a population of about 330 million, we find that flu deaths are "usually" about 30 per million, while the sum of 1992 and 1993 deaths by flu comes to 273. The Beijing flu hit Sweden 8.5 times as hard as it did the USA.

Backing up to p. 223, where the scientific community "turned from evidence-based reasoning to the precautionary principle": One scientist wrote of the reasoning of Anders Tegnell, "If he's wrong, it costs life. If I'm wrong, what harm does it do?" This is a markedly false dichotomy, for the lockdowns and other draconian measures not only did much harm, they cost many lives in themselves, including a great increase in suicide among younger people. The scientist who wrote that statement doesn't deserve to be called scientific.

Even in Sweden, by the end of 2020 the situation was no longer driven by science (protestations by fraudulent scientist Andrew Fauci notwithstanding), but by politics, specifically the totalitarian politics of control and the amassing of power. So-called "cancel culture" took control, such that the final sentence in the chapter titled "Science!" is, "What was regarded as a scientific discussion in Sweden was deemed to be misinformation in other countries." (p. 247). This is still true!

Considering the polarizing politics that arose from this, or rather that took advantage of it, I need to point out that on p. 243 the author quotes Glenn Kessler's article in The Washington Post that claimed Donald Trump issued 16,241 false and misleading claims in his first three years in office. He is apparently unaware that the article was debunked within a week by real journalists at the New York Post and The Atlantic. They found that at most, Mr. Trump lied outright no more than a handful of times; rather, Kessler printed thousands of lies in his article. True to form, Kessler just doubled down and issued further claims. The debunking has been so covered up it is hard to track down the truth. In actuality, since 2015 The WaPo, NYT and other "leading" publishers committed tens of thousands of lies against Donald Trump weekly, and continue to do so.

Let's look at some charts from Worldometer, which is cited a few times in the book. Note that the last update to their figures was April 13, 2024. Reporting has become too sporadic and unreliable for them to continue. I must add that early reporting is also somewhat questionable, and in particular, nothing that was "reported" by China or North Korea (DPRK in Worldometer) should be relied upon.

First, to discuss the summary for the whole world:

The fluctuating death rate shows the progress of the different "waves", ten of them, counting the late, rather tiny, bump from November 2023 to February 2024. The biggest wave of cases, in early 2022, with a wave of deaths that is lower than two of the others, shows how infectious the Omicron variant of the virus was, and how much less deadly it was.

When The Herd was written, the third wave, counted worldwide, was just ending. These figures help us establish some criteria. New daily cases in 2022 peaked at 500 per million persons, and exceeded 100 for much of the year; at all other times there were fewer than 100. The current case rate is 2/million or less.

The worldwide Covid-19 death rate exceeded 1/million persons for all of 2021 and the first third of 2022, and then, as the Delta variant petered out, it dropped very low and apparently remains well below 100 total deaths daily, or some 0.012 deaths daily per million population. As mentioned, this is in line with seasonal influenza. This is why, although some nutty politicians continue calling for restrictions to be imposed again, nobody is paying attention.

Next, let's look at how Sweden fared in all this:

It is worth noting that, while the daily case rate prior to August 2020, worldwide and in Sweden, is almost not visible on these charts, the daily death rates in this period were quite high. The very early death rate exceeded 10% of (known) cases. Two factors combine: figuring out how many actual cases there were was very difficult early on, and the large number of deaths represent "low-hanging fruit", or people who were at death's door already. In the USA, this was exacerbated in five states whose governors required nursing homes to take in people dying of Covid-19, which spread through those nursing homes like wildfire, killing many. I contend that those five governors are the five greatest mass murderers of the early 21st Century.

During the second wave at the end of 2020, Swedish politicians were spooked that Covid-19 deaths had again exceeded 100 per day (10/million in a population of just over 10 million), and as is noted in The Herd, began to swerve from the open stance of the prior year.

The figures in brown at top right of these charts show that the total case rate in Sweden was three times the world average, and the total death rate was just under three times as much.

Arguably, the country worst hit by the pandemic was the USA:

I am not sure whether the lockdowns in the USA were the worst in the Free World, but in my experience they were pretty bad. They varied from state to state. The first wave of deaths was not quite as bad, on a per-capita basis, as for Sweden, but the second wave was clearly worse. After the end of 2021, the USA case rate was much higher than that for Sweden, and this apparently continues, but after the middle of 2022 the Covid-19 death rate in the USA is quite a bit lower than Sweden's.

Compared to the world, the total case rate for the USA is 3.7 times higher and the total death rate is just over 4.0 times as high.

I originally prepared two more similar graphs, for the UK and for Norway, but instead I'll present the following:

The vertical axis is deaths from Covid-19 per million population of a country. Sweden, shown as "Swe", is right in the middle. The USA is to its upper right, with the UK in between. Among more authoritarian European countries, I've marked Bulgaria, Hungary, and Bosnia/Herzegovina, which had three of the four highest death rates in the world. The highest was Peru, for reasons I won't plumb here. By contrast, look at Canada and Norway ("Nor"; in each case except "World" the title is to the right of the dot). Nearly all the dots below them are countries in Africa and poorer parts of Asia, places which had few infections and very low death rates. 

I would think an ambitious epidemiologist could make a career of finding out whether there was something more than dumb luck that "blessed" the Third World. But I also must note that I have, from the beginning, strongly suspected that the USA was targeted by China, which released this bug with malice aforethought. I am flabbergasted by the number of American pundits who defend China at every turn. I know enough Chinese people to have an inkling of their way of thinking. Not every war goes fast. The Chinese way is patient, slow, and—insofar as they can ensure it—irresistible. To their way of thinking, WW3 has begun, and if they can manage it, our enemy will remove our head before we notice we have died.

The core message of this chart is that lockdowns had no discernible effect. Every European nation and most others locked down a great deal more than Norway, which stayed open during that very crucial first year, and has remained more open than most other countries thereafter. As a preacher once said about faith healing, "God may heal you today, but eventually you are going to die of something."

We learned from this pandemic that we have more to fear from totalitarian politicians than we do from a global disease outbreak. Sweden showed that society could remain open, taking only certain rather cautious measures, without harming the citizens either medically or politically. It is hard to tell whether any country achieved herd immunity, but it is certain that with the exception of Sweden, most countries fell victim to herd mentality, from which they are still in a very slow recovery.

Yes, she is funny

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, humor, comedians, sociology

At my grandmother's funeral, many years ago, I was with my then-fiancée, in the second row behind my parents. At some point, someone coming in had a minor mishap—nearly tripping—and my fiancée laughed. She laughed rather loudly, and then stifled it. And turned very red. I just held her hand and we waited it out. I was glad for her laughter, really. It calmed me somehow.

Fast-forward nearly thirty years. I had a very major cancer operation and came home looking like a corpse. Being able to do nearly nothing, I alternated between reading, watching inane TV, eating and sleeping. That Sunday evening I happened to turn on ABC to watch, for the first time ever, America's Funniest Home Videos. Tom Bergeron was the host. I laughed my fool head off! I felt great for the first time in a long time. I watched that show faithfully for the next decade or so. I don't credit the show for my amazing survival (nobody lives 20+ years after having what I had, but I did). But it sure helped. I called it my Laugh Therapy. It has been a few years since I had time to watch AFV, or anything else, for that matter. I lead an active life. But from what I hear, a lot of popular themes from the show in the early 2000's aren't used any more. Too many "professional offended people" complained.

One would think that the country (and most of the West) is overrun by the always-offended folk who are bigger buzz kills than the dourest of Puritans in Colonial America. They don't like it when anyone laughs at anything...unless it is them doing the laughing, mostly as Schadenfreude against conservatives' embarrassment. However, consider that, less than a quarter of Americans use X/Twitter, and the noisy, vocal trolls are just a percent of that. That is what drives Cancel Culture, 1/4% of the country. Talk about the tail wagging the dog! But we should expect the tail to be in a bad mood, it's right next to the s**thole!

The best defense against humorless idiots (most especially the Woke, in my view) is to laugh them out of town. Kat Timpf, for one, is doing just that. Her new book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything is Funny, and We're All in This Together, is a big breath of fresh air to me and to anyone who just wishes folks would loosen up a little. So what does she think is funny? It's better to ask, what doesn't she joke about? The list is very, very short. Maybe nonexistent. Start with the most taboo subjects: disease and death. Go on from there.

Kat Timpf is a comedian. Her current gig is Gutfeld on FOX. She doesn't just do comedy. She writes (writing lots of columns is good practice for writing a book) just as much, often her own soufflé of libertarianism and satire. Particularly in the political arena, she's an equal-opportunity abuser.

How's this for dark humor. Riffing on "the Quarantine" of 2020, upon hearing "Anne Frank had to hide in an attic…" a few too many times: "Pioneers probably didn't have time to notice the little annoying things about their pioneer family, because they had that exhausting, dangerous cross-country journey to distract them. Plus, if you were a chick, you were just constantly getting pregnant and giving birth, and then some of the kids you had already given birth to would sometimes die along the way before you reached your horse-driven destination. So no, they probably were not noticing how much their husbands' whistling bothered them because the were too busy discussing whether or not they should, I don't know, eat the body of the kid that just died in order to have the strength to pop out the next one." (pp39-40). That is from the chapter "No one wants to hear you whine (unless it's funny)". 

This is a serious book, under the satire. She is making a plea for allowing humor to work its magic as a universal releaser-of-really-bad-feelings. As it happens, comedians are the second-biggest target of the humorless Wokemeisters, right after Christians. As a lapsed Catholic, perhaps Kat ought to be glad she doesn't have Christian faith just now. Christian comedians are doubly Cancelled these days.

Bottom line: She is in favor of the freest of free-speech environments possible. Then, her final chapter consists of instructions on when not to speak: when the police want you to. It is three pages of instruction on handling several scenarios. Not a joke in the chapter, because police, by the nature of their job, need to be entirely humorless. Of course, when you're with a cop friend off duty, joke around all you like. But not whenever there's a chance you are under suspicion.

Kat is, as generations X and later are, pretty free with her use of expletives. It seems that, for all the generations subsequent to mine, various derivatives of the F word are the general adjectives of choice, and the S word is the generalized noun of choice. I watched a few of her routines that are on YouTube; she rarely dropped either bomb, but she did occasionally do so. I am an old-school entertainer (think of Red Skelton or Roy Rogers): in the public arena we have a choice, to ennoble our audience or to debase them. Blue humor causes snickers, not honest laughter. Go watch an old video of Red Skelton doing a Clem Kadiddlehopper routine, or Gertrude and Heathcliff the seagulls. You'll laugh with tears until you get a smile-ache. Not a cuss word from end to end. Are you an entertainer? Leave your audience feeling better about themselves because they were with you. (But if there is a Woke heckler in the crowd, that fool you want to drive out in pelting shame! It can be done without cussing. The rest of the audience will be thankful.)

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.

And you thought you knew ice

 kw book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, ice, fads and fashions

In a canny plan quite the opposite of "carrying coals to Newcastle" (a coal mining district in England, for GenX and younger), Frederic Tudor carried ice to the tropics. Beginning in 1801, he persuaded first one of his brothers, and later another, to help him scope out Cuba and other locations at which to sell ice. As told in ICE: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, by Amy Brady, things went badly, time and time again, until the Tudor brothers had a brainstorm: Bring ice to saloons in Havana and show bartenders how to produce really cold (and really cool) cocktails. Can you imagine a warm Martini or Old-fashioned? At the time, nobody in Cuba could imagine anything else. That would soon change.

Americans in the New England colonies had been harvesting ice from ponds for a few generations, and ice houses could keep some of it frozen well through the summer. The last century or so of the Little Ice Age helped. Thoreau wrote of ice harvesters working on Walden Pond in 1846. A century earlier, George Washington's favorite dessert was ice cream, made from ice kept in the Mount Vernon ice house after being harvested nearby. One cannot harvest ice in Virginia any more; the Little Ice Age ended about the time President Washington died. It's still possible to harvest ice in Massachusetts, in colder winters.

By 1806 the alcohol-fueled revolution in the use of New England ice in warmer climes, from the Caribbean to New Orleans to the mid-Atlantic, had triggered the Ice Trade. In 14 illuminating chapters, ICE details the development of the Ice Trade through several incarnations. Mechanical refrigeration using compression and expansion of gases and gas-liquid-gas phase transitions was the subject of experiments from about 1755 to 1850, and the first commercial ice-making machines were sold in about 1865. Fast-forward another century, and the households of America were well on their way to having, if not always "a chicken in every pot", a "Frigidaire in every kitchen".

Today manufactured coldness is a requirement. Ice in our drinks. Ice to skate on. Ice in a cloth bag to soothe sore muscles and tendons. Snow machines on ski slopes for dry winters. Supercold coolers to transfer vaccines. Dry ice (-109°F or -78.5°C) to make vapor for parties, chill organs being transferred between hospitals, and suffocate rats in their nests. Liquid helium (-452°F or -269°C) for the superconducting magnets in MRI machines and giant "colliders" (we used to call them atom smashers).

When I was a child we called refrigerators "ice boxes", and in some parts of the country people still had ice boxes and regular visits from the iceman to deliver a 50- or 100-lb block of manufactured ice. The last time I saw an ice box in use was in the 1950's. Reading ICE was a nostalgic indulgence for me.

Something the book doesn't touch on, but a fun fact nonetheless: from time to time we hear of the "ice death of the Universe." The actual background temperature of the Universe is 2.7K (-270°C or -455°F), colder than liquid helium. However, "stuff" is spread out so thin that there are still billions of galaxies full of billions of stars that harbor temperatures of millions of degrees, and innumerable planets with temperatures ranging from a couple of hundred degrees below zero (but still hundreds of degrees warmer than 2.7K) up to thousands of degrees, where matter begins to break down into plasma. We are a long way from all of it chilling. But, as the Norse predicted, if physics is allowed to have its way for a few more trillion or quadrillion years, ice will win. Then Ragnarok, the victory of the Ice Giants, will finally occur.