They're following Winnie's advice

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, crime, police work, homicide

Winston Churchill is noted for saying (I must paraphrase), "Never give up. Never, never, give up." For New York Police Department's Cold Case Squad, just ten years old, this could be the motto. Stacy Horn, in The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad, has opened at least a keyhole into the (mostly) men whose job it is to crack the hardest cases.

Test pilots are famous for the saying, that their job is long periods of boredom spiced with brief moments of sheer terror. I suppose you could say this about detective work too, except that the terror is (fortunately) even more rare...but the boredom is, if anything, more mind-numbing.

In a typical TV show or film about police work, the ratio of "routine" detection—tracking down leads, talking to people who don't want to talk to you and mostly don't care if you drop dead, making endless phone calls, choking back your bile while negotiating with yet another even-more-bored bureaucrat—takes up no more than 40% of the screen time. The action has to be at least 60% or nobody will watch it, or recommend it to a friend.

Popular cop shows are full of lab "AHA" moments, DNA testing, forensic tricks, thrilling chases, and sensational arrests. Most of the fancy stuff isn't worth the time, most of the time. Today's sexy topic, DNA fingerprinting, is mostly too expensive.

In reality, action worth telling your grandkids is at most a percent, maybe 0.1%, of time spent. It takes a special kind of mind to survive a job like that. Stacy Horn introduces us to a big handful of such men—and no women, for good reason—and profiles four or five in some detail, while weaving into the narrative glimpses of the mini-worlds surrounding the Squad's realm: the case files and their endless stacks of DD5 forms; the evidence warehouses, where some small fraction of the evidence related to tens of thousands of murders (and maybe a couple million other crimes) is kept...and often lost; the labs they do use when they have evidence worth a professional look; and particularly, the neighborhoods they canvass over and over again, gleaning the tiniest of clues and fast-fading memories.

Why no women? Women and men think differently. I've had a couple of friends over the years who were policewomen; one was a detective. They bring different skills, and valuable ways of looking at evidence and personalities to police work. Both freely admitted they couldn't do the "street work" of homicide investigation. There are likely other reasons. If there are any women working Cold Case homicides, Horn doesn't mention any.

I got into a rant a few postings back, about crudity in public culture. While I have a few quibbles with the author's language when he is speaking for himself, I have none when he is quoting his subjects. Nor when he describes the crime scenes and mostly seedy settings where the great majority of murders take place. The subject doesn't lend itself to reading while eating, and I think the author uses no more ugliness than is warranted by the material.

For me, reading about some of the things done by the murderers mentioned in the book confirmed my support for capital 'punishment.' I use quotes, because putting a murderer to death is not really punishment. It is our only way to be totally sure he or she will not murder again.

There is little comfort in Cold Case work. It is an ugly necessity, if only to mitigate, at least a little, the proportion of evil persons. Horn makes it clear that few of these detectives are 'nice guys.' They are hard, tough, and aggressive. They have to be. If some of them are jerks, it's the price to be paid for bringing, if not quite justice, at least finality, to old crimes.

Turning nightmares into daymares: Trolls on patrol

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, police stories, mysteries

I enjoy reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series for straight escape with a thoughtful aroma, and plenty of smooth mystery writing. Thud! fills the bill.

Sam Vimes, a recently-minted Duke and Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch (in the current few books) gets a conundrum dropped into his lap that goes back two millenia. While Vimes has integrated the City Watch, deputizing nearly all allegedly sentient species—even, reluctantly, a vampire—the City's trolls ("our esteemed Siliconic citizens") and dwarfs (Pratchett's spelling; heavily-bearded and -armed folk, male or female) are ready to rumble. It's almost like West Side Story (or Romeo and Juliet), but with Rock vs Iron. Or perhaps a Civil War battle re-enactment among the rednecks (both Northern and Southern) who don't like how it turned out.

When some "deep dwarfs" called Grags show up and begin preaching dwarf puritanism, and young trolls begin club training, all leading up to Koom Valley Day, which commemorates an ill-remembered battle at which each side thinks it became the victim. There is action aplenty for all the members of the Watch, not just humans, trolls, and dwarfs, but the newly recruited vampire, a werewolf, and a human who was raised as a dwarf, plus the imp in Vimes's Gooseberry^TM PDA.

But what really happened, 2,000 years ago? That would be telling.

Pratchett excels in semi-magical fantasy, mystery, and semi-hard SF. The Discword books are his forum for combining them all.

Out of the sidewalk jungle, into the maw of the behemoth

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sharks, islands, natural history

What do you get when you keep a true-born thrill seeker cooped up in an Editor's job too long? You get a woman who gives a few years of her life, and a small fortune, to obtain short-term residence and proximity for a few months at the South Farallon Island.

Just twenty-seven miles west of the Golden Gate bridge, the Farallon Islands are uninhabited at present, except by a literal handful of researchers. A couple of these study the population of great white sharks that spend about half of their year in the surrounding waters, feeding mainly on the elephant seals, and other seals, that breed there. The islands are called the Devil's Teeth, for good reason, once you see the photos.

Were you ever told that a human in a wet suit looks a lot like a seal, and moves like one that is sick? That probably explains why very few knowledgeable SCUBA divers are willing to dive anywhere west of San Francisco. Even in the off season, there are great whites that pass by.

Susan Casey spent a couple of very short visits (a day trip and a few day-long "internship") on South Farallon. She managed to wangle the loan of a yacht to live on, anchored nearby, for a few months in 2003...until the ship broke its anchor chain and drifted off during a storm. She'd snuck onto the island to have one night in a stable bed, or she'd not be around to write the story. That story, Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks, is exactly as the title bills it.

The researchers she relied on, Scot and Peter, studied the white sharks for nearly twenty years. A few appeared every year of two throughout those years (Great whites seem to live upwards of thirty years). One group of males, called the Rat Pack, stay mostly to the south of the island. A group of females, called the Sisters, stay mostly to the northeast. I found the natural history fascinating. Mature females are bigger, mostly about 18 feet, up to 21 feet long. White sharks are bulky, and the larger ones are over eight feet wide and six feet deep. Mature males are in the 14-16 foot range. In either case, they are big, powerful predators. However, when a pod of Orcas show up—up to 30 feet long and 12 feet wide—the sharks vanish.

I am a quiet sort. I don't live for excitement and risk like Ms Casey does. In her narrative she pulls no punches about the privations she and others experienced. I am indebted to her for opening a window for me, onto a place, and a life, that I would certainly not experience voluntarily.

Lady in Red...Hat!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, women's society, human relations

I find it interesting on occasion to read a woman-oriented book. I grew up in a house full of boys. Mom complained that even the cats and goldfish were male. I had little chance to learn anything about women.

Sue Ellen Cooper, with the poem "Warning" (When I am old, I shall wear purple/And a red hat that doesn't go...) ringing in her memory, saw a red hat in a thrift store some seven years ago, and bought it. Later she got red hats for a few close friends, gave them the hats when they met for tea, and, somewhat whimsically, declared themselves the Red Hat Society, with Sue Ellen as the Queen. Mostly, they declare, "No Rules!", other than wearing red hats and purple clothes when they are together...at least. The RHS is a way for women over 50 (and younger Pink Hatters) to get together, drop all seriousness, and have fun together, especially if it is a bit silly.

It has grown to become a phenomenon. There are 18 Red Hat chapters in Rapid City, SD, and 23 in one Philadelphia suburb. Sue Ellen's book The Red Hat Society: Fun and Friendship After Fifty, is warm and welcoming (like a good tea party), and very well written. Its contents confirmed my understanding that women relate to one another in a way men simply cannot, and shouldn't try. Girl thing - Guy thing: we really do think differently.

So, I enjoyed the book, very much the outsider. Beyond that, I think it the better part of valor to avoid further comment.

The Snicker Factor

kw: entertainment, audience factors, vulgarity, rejections

I read portions of a book for which I decline to provide more information. It looked like it could be a fun book, billed as a humorous look at parenthood. I found it near-pornographic.

I have been an entertainer, sporadically and amateur, for more than forty years. Some time about 1970 I made a strategic decision: I will appeal to my audience's nobility. That is related to output. Then, approaching 1990, after we had our son, I decided that, to help him have a genuine childhood, not a pressure-filled 'miniature adulthood', we needed to strictly regulate his exposure to 'popular culture'. Furthermore, for the sake of consistency, and my own peace of mind, that if something was not appropriate for him, neither was it appropriate for me. That took care of input. No garbage in, no garbage out.

There was a recent newspaper article (it came off AP, so many papers carried it) that noted the recent 'G-Rated' movie "Chicken Little" is mis-rated. It has more violence than one would expect. We're in the middle of a ratings shift. In fact, based on what I've been told about some recent movies, the material in many R-Rated films would have earned them an X rating in the 1980s.

We know that kids need to learn what real life is like. However, most parents I know agree that they need to learn it SLOWLY. And there are many facets of "real life" that nobody really needs to learn in any subjective way; at most they need to be warned that certain things may be done by some people, but one hopes he or she never becomes acquainted with such a person.

Everyone who seeks to entertain others, whether by 1-on-1 wit to a friend or stand-up comedy; whether by performing, writing, creating artwork, or whatever; all must decide to what audience they wish to appeal. I am a singer and songwriter. I like some Country music. There are two basic streams to it: more common is the cry-in-your-beer about lost love, lost dogs, lost trucks, lost memory...the less common is about loving families, good friends, happy experiences, and successful relationships. I have chosen the latter path.

Of my more recent songs, one is about how similar I am to my father when he was this age, another about a formative experience my mother had as a pre-teen, another about raising a son young enough to be my grandson. People love them.

I perform for people who want something good in their lives. When I write humor, I aim for an honest belly laugh, not for an embarrased snicker. So when I read a book by a popular young woman that is filled with vulgarity and callous jests, it makes me sad that she finds an audience who wishes to be so debased and degraded. Of course I didn't finish the book! I don't need that kind of input.

If you gave a mouse the equipment to speak, could he use it?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, quests

Fourth World by Kate Thompson is billed as science fiction, but the element of fantasy is rather strong in her writing. This is the first novel in a trilogy called "Missing Link". Danny, a seemingly handicapped boy, helped by his stepbrother Christy and some decidedly odd companions travel from Ireland to Scotland across a near-future Britain in the grip of energy-crisis rationing (forget £2-per-liter petrol; there is nearly none to be had at any price), in search of Danny's mother. Two of the companions are a dog and starling that can speak.

More than half the novel is taken up with their journey. When they arrive, they find a lot more speaking animals, including a pink, hairless mouse that befriends Christy. Now, with the starling I already drew the line. The mouse is a step way to far. Unless we have greatly misunderstood how brains work, there simply isn't enough gray matter in the brain of any small creature to manage the thinking that underlies speech. Perhaps the mouse looks like "The Brain" in the cartoon...

A second scientific quibble I have is with the notion that the Missing Link between humans and apes is defined by exactly one gene, that supposedly endows humans with the power of self-reflective thought and speech. The current understanding in Anthropology circles is that there are at least twenty known links between humans and the proto-hominid that is ancestral to both humans and chimpanzees. The genetic difference between people and chimps is a bit over two percent, meaning major differences in about five hundred of the 22,000 or so "genes" that define each species. Even in 2000, when this book was released, we knew that it takes a few hundred genes at least to differentiate humans from apes.

Oh, well. Thompson is a skilled writer. With a bit of struggle, I could at least set aside disbelief and enjoy the yarn. The twist at the end, revealing why Danny can hold his breath so long, is satisfying. I guess I'll hunt up the other two novels.

Highest pun-per-page rate going!

kw: book reviews, fantasy, humor, xanth series

I suppose you've heard of the court jester who was going to be hanged for punning on the king's name. He was offered clemency if he refrained from future puns. Upon his reply, "No noose is good news," he was promptly hanged.

For a graduate course in punmanship, read any of Piers Anthony's Xanth series novels. The current offering, Pet Peeve, is just a bit punnier, substantially racier, than the prior 20-odd Xanth books. In his postlude, Anthony relates that he can crank out a Xanth novel in about three months. With his very wide-ranging readership, all offering fresh meterial via his website, it's a surprise that it takes him that long...unless the first two months is weeding out the material.

Xanth is a Florida-shaped land full of elves, dwarves, goblins, ogres, were-creatures, and of course a smattering of humans. They all have a roughly third-grade sensibility when it comes to sexual matters. Males of any species "freak out" upon the sight of any female's panties. Of course, various females (human and near-human) go about bare-breasted or wholly bare at times, with little ill effect. It is all part of the Adult Conspiracy...and you'll just have to read about it because it just can't be described out of context.

In Pet Peeve, the Peeve is a Parody, a parrot-like bird that excels at the brutal art of mad-dog insult. The hero, the land's only gentle Goblin, is given the task of finding a home for the Peeve. On the way, an attempt to create a single nest-building construction robot goes awry when the robot's program—obtained from the Land of Robots on a mini-moon—is found to have no "stop" instruction. Robots are soon everywhere.

The plot plays distant second fiddle to the better-than-one-per-sentence pun rate that Anthony likes to maintain. This leaves one alternately tickled and irritated. But, then, that's what puns ought to do. They may be the "lowest form of humor," but they can hit you anywhere.

And you thought you knew what a frog is

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, amphibians

Did you ever hear Red Skelton parody of E.A. Poe's "Bells"?

Frogs-Frogs-Frogs! They are everywhere.
Frogs-Frogs-Frogs! Croaking fills the the air.
Louder-Louder-Louder! Is their blasted blare.
There's no silence through the night.

Croaks-Croaks-Croaks! Heard 3 miles away.
Five-Six-Seven...beyond that, they say.
Frogs-Frogs-Frogs-multiplying more each day.
There's no silence through the night.

What-What-What is their earthy reason?
When? When? When is wedlock out of season?
Is-Is-Is it the lack of indecision?
There's no silence through the night.

Don't-Don't-Don't try seeking them out.
Frogs-Frogs-Frogs! They're hiding all about.
Go-Go-Go mad until you shout:
There's no silence through the night!

("Madness of Frogs" from the giant coloring book "Red Skelton's Frog Follies" © 1976 Red Skelton, Gravette Pub. Co.)

Frogs: Inside Their Remarkable World, by Ellin Beltz, is a quick read. Plenty of information, compactly presented, and lots of pictures. Here we find why Toad is not a taxonomic term. [Toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads. Fine syllogism, that. The characteristics that mark a toad (warty, dry skin; more forward-looking eyes; shorter limbs; longer, more accurate tongue) arose in several families, so all toad groups are descended from frog ancestors, but their is no one Toad group.]

Dave Barry wrote, "If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry." Actually, most toads are better survivors than most frogs...and, the frogs are undeniably cuter (no fur, though). The ugliest of the toads is gradually eating all small non-toads in Australia. Its introduction, to eat a pesky beetle it actually prefers not to eat, has been one of the greater ecological disasters of well-meant 'alien species' introduction.

So, natural-historical lessons aside, we have quite a number of frog species in danger, mainly because they are much more sensitive to water-borne pollution than we are (imagine if all your skin were as sensitive as the front of your eye). And on the other side, some of the tougher frogs are putting our own livelihood in danger! Talk about a sandwich generation!

I enjoyed reading Frogs, but then, I was the kid that read dictionaries or encyclopedias for enjoyment.

Jovian Swim Meet

kw: book reviews, science fiction, interplanetary politics

Not long ago (Thursday, 10/20/05) I mused on the the possibility for human-alien hybrids, just based on the likelihood that two independent DNA systems might be compatible. Shortly thereafter, I read a book based on a human-alien hybrid. At first, I thought panspermia within the solar system might offer a way for the DNA between Earth and Jupiter life systems to be compatible. But, it turns out, these Jovians are from elsewhere...just where, we don't find out, but the fact itself is a source of dramatic tension.

So, Timothy Zahn presents the discovery of life "swimming" in the Jovian atmosphere, intelligent life at that. Within twenty years, Human-Qanska communication is sufficiently advanced that between them, the two species work out a way for a paraplegic human to be merged with a Qanskan embryo, to be born and raised a Qanska. The book is Manta's Gift, and the gift in question turns out to be a sacrifice different from what you might expect. The genre is semi-hard SF, with a strong veneer of politics to provide the evil megalomaniac that SF novels routinely deliver.

The cultural re-awakening of a young human show-off and jerk (how d'ya think he became paraplegic?) who must become his race's ambassador to Jove is convincingly, if sketchily, told. The dynamics of swimming in an environment that is swooshing around the Jovian equator at several hundred km/hr has been thought through, as has the complication of a thousand-fold change in fluid density as one descends.

As it happens, the Qanskans are in the midst of an ecological crisis, and it takes problem-solvers, that is, humans, to figure it out for them. How an herbivorous species gained sufficient intelligence to be self-aware and have advanced communication skills and culture, without simultaneously developing strong problem-solving skills, is beyond me.

I have an even bigger issue, one involving physics. Much is made of the Qanskans feeling wind in the left or right ear when they turn north or south. This becomes the focus of a dramatic episode, which is a shame. If you are swimming in the thick atmosphere, it makes no difference whatever how fast it is moving; to you it is calm, absent local turbulence. A hot-air balloon or dirigible may be in still air, or in a rapid, steady wind, but the inhabitants will experience complete calm, as long as they don't blow too close to something that stirs up an eddy. The wind-in-the-ear stuff makes it seem that these air-swimmers are somehow anchored to the planet's surface, thousands of miles below. Can't be so.

These quibbles aside, Zahn has several new and interesting ideas, and a way with words that make this an enjoyable yarn.

Making Reality and its Perils

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, reality bending

Karl Schroeder joins a long list of authors whose speculative fiction explores our relationship with reality and our own perceptions. Lady of Mazes takes you deep into a society that is based on the ability to choose the reality in which you will live. Nanomachines in your body and garments, in communication with an ubiquitous net of powerful computer equipment, work together with your will to place you, experientially, in a "shared reality" of your own making.

Then what happens if the system on which this society is based begins to break down, or is attacked? What is the result of a post-human, machine-based species that sets up a portion of the planetary system as its own turf, keeping humans out...at least most of them?

This satisfying meld of hard and soft SF is full of interesting ideas. The ability to be anywhere, virtually, in full-sensory experience becomes the ability to have a simulation of your personality running one or more agents that gather experience and interact with your acquaintances, much as you would, with the ability to replay their memories at high speed back into your own. Semisentient clothing could have the power to be doctor and protector, and even to become a temporary vacuum suit. Spinning cylinders, strung out along an orbit of their own, so oriented that an object released from the edge of one comes close enough to the next to provide an efficient means of intra-system transport.

In the end, technology produces virtual godhood for a few, who may or may not be in cahoots with the posthumans. They compete to save, or perhaps contain, the human societies. It's a little hard to tell.

A mysterious excuse for a biography of Roger Bacon

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, unknown scripts, medieval scholarship

One of my favorite exercises at the end of a work day is to open the newspaper and solve the daily cipher. These are kept simple by not enciphering the blank, though they can be tricky because they are too short for statistical methods to be of much use. Perhaps you know that universal mystery spy, Etaoin Shrdlu, or his sidekick Etaison Hurdl: these are mnemonics for the order of most frequent letters in 20th- and 19th-century newspaper prose, respectively. However, many, many of the quotes I decipher are quite short of E's or T's, and may have none entirely.

There are many tricks the puzzle columnist can play. For example, a single loose character usually refers to I or A, and you can use the fact that I is rarely found at the end of words to help discern which, early on in a solution. However, I have seen this: "OZN B RNSNATOKLS", which solved to "the X generation".

The medieval scholar Roger Bacon, and his Elizabethan-era namesake Francis Bacon, were both intimately familiar with codes, ciphers, and other methods of steganography (covered writing or hidden writing). Roger Bacon wrote of "Seven Ways of Concealing Secrets." They were

1. hiding a message "under characters and symbols," one kind of a Code;
2. hiding it "in enigmatical and figurative expressions," another kind of Code;
3. writing in a shorthand, such as leaving out vowels in a script like Hebrew that doesn't have them, a Shorthand Cipher;
4. Ciphers, where invented symbols, or alphabetic symbols in a different order, are substituted for the original letters, and possibly punctuation;
5. Ciphers with admixed characters, invented or borrowed, Null-padded Ciphers;
6. complete artificial languages, which are more complex types of Codes;
7. writing with even more brevity than an ordinary shorthand, possibly with lots of null material padding it. One could call this a Shared-Milieu Code, intelligible only between persons with a similar professional jargon.

Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone have written a sort of mixed biography, partly a biography of Roger Bacon, and partly that of a remarkable document, today called the Voynich Manuscript. In The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World, the Goldstones present a brief history of cryptography, of the Manuscript, and of the man who is its most likely creator.

From his writings, it is known that Roger Bacon was very concerned with concealing some of his writings, because of the scrutiny of the medieval Church. In his days, the Church had the chance to adopt an attitude toward science that embraced experience and experimental evidence, embracing what we call scientific knowledge, while making it subservient to the knowledge obtained by Faith. Instead, the Pope and cardinals rejected this way, choosing instead to deify the atheist Aristotle, who perferred inductive reasoning from imagined premises to deduction from observation. I wonder what things would be like today, if scientific advancement began in the 1200s rather than the 1600s?

As it was, Roger Bacon, who is sometimes called "the father of the scientific method," was in danger, and for some time imprisoned, because of his support for an anti-Aristotelian philosophy. Thus, during his decades of obscurity (he lived eighty years), it is likely he had plenty of time to put together a nearly 300 page document, entirely enciphered (at least), with enigmatic illustrations that are likely also encoded, or at least allegorical. This illustration (trimmed from one of the scans in the Beinecke Library website) shows a portion of one page; the text is accompanied by an apparently botanical drawing, but of no plant known.

I find it quite fascinating that, while the document is attributed to Roger Bacon, and contains a seeming key in a different cipher that translates to a Latin message referring to him, it is by no means certain, either that he composed it, or indeed that it was composed in the Century or locale in which he lived. After much reasoning on both sides of that issue, researchers in favor of Bacon's authorship fall back on the view that there is no other viable candidate...except perhaps Francis Bacon, who lived five hundred years later. But where he could have got such a store of 400-year-old, unused (!) paper is a bigger puzzle.

Is it a hoax? If it is, it is clearly the most elaborate, embodying by far the greatest amount of labor and diligence, of all hoaxes in history. Yet its script has been attacked by the best cryptanalysts of four centuries. The most controversial proposed decipherment is that of William R. Newbold, in the 1920s.

He used a complicated scheme of cipher (I keep wanting to spell it cypher!) decoding, anagrams, and punning rhymes, to produce quite a lot of rather plausible material. His decipherments cannot be conclusively discounted, and nobody else has come close to anything better.

Analysis of character frequencies provides only a partial clue. Languages contain redundancy, to aid a reader in getting a clear meaning. This redundancy varies. Complex languages such as English and Russian have a lot more redundancy than some. The languages with the least redundancy are Polynesian tongues, and wholly artificial languages such as Esperanto. The Voynich script has a level of redundancy—at the character level—that is right on a par with a Polynesian language.

There are just about a dozen examples of wholly unknown scripts. Most supply too little material for a useful cryptographic or linguistic analysis, and most are probably actual language scripts, written in 'clear text' for those who knew the language at the time. The Voynich Manuscript is the largest sample of an unknown script that is known (or almost certain) to be enciphered. Will its code ever be cracked? Perhaps it was, by Newbold, and perhaps not; perhaps someday, perhaps never. That is the body of a good mystery.

Alien Hybrids?

kw: space aliens, DNA, central dogma of genetics, genetic code

Do you think Spock could really exist? Is a hybrid between humans (or any Earth species) and an interstellar alien possible? Alien-human hybrids figure prominently in some writers' stories...and they are the core fear driving the "alien abduction" folks. Could it happen???

The Central Dogma of genetics is that DNA is transcribed onto RNA, and the transcribed RNA is used to make Proteins. Most of these proteins are Enzymes, that is, peptide catalysts. That isn't all there is to it, because some RNAs are Rybozymes, behaving as Enzymes though they aren't proteins. It turns out that biochemistry is nearly all geometry, and you can form a desired shape from amino acids (proteins) or from RNA. Also, in trying to determine if "junk DNA" is really junk, we are finding that some DNA has a regulatory function within the nucleus, plus there are at least five or six levels of regulatory activity by various protein families.

So, DNA is Transcribed to RNA, and most RNA is Translated to Protein. The translation function of genetics is based on the Genetic Code, which determines how the 64 3-Base Codons are distributed among the 20 Amino Acids and the Start and Stop functions. As it happens, in most Earth creatures, some amino acids correspond to as many as six RNA codons, some to four, on to just three that correspond to a single codon each. There is a minor difference between the code for Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes, but 62 of the codons are used identically in all cells...on Earth.

It appears that many of the amino acids used in active sites have larger codon sets, while "backbone" AAs have smaller sets. AAs that are "important" have more codes than those that are have more "scaffolding" functions. This is not totally consistent, but it explains one source of robustness; many point mutations make no difference in the shape of the protein encoded.

Recently, we find that all parts of this system are malleable. It is possible to synthesize bases that could be used in place of any of the A, C, G, and T (or U in RNA) bases used in Earth DNA. It is also possible to synthesize a great variety of "extra" amino acids. In fact, there are a couple of "extra" AAs that seem to be used by certain bacteria, and some researchers claim that there are a dozen or so variants of the "Earth" genetic code, found among bacteria only.

Researchers have also created the pieces to get certain bacteria to synthesize and use, in proteins, an amino acid not normally found in nature. So, while nearly all Earth life uses the familiar four bases and twenty amino acids, there is no guarantee that life forms that arose on a distant planet do so.

Since we know that all 64 Codons are used, we can think of a few simple variations that would work equally well. If you have a string of three symbols, there are six ways you can arrange them. That means, if you were to perform the same rearrangement on every codon in the set, there are six "genetic codes" that work exactly as the Earth one does.

If instead you determine how many different ways 64 Codons can be distributed among 20 AAs, the number isn't just in the billions, or in the trillions: it is an immense number with more than seventy digits. If we just look at a near-even distribution, with 60 codons parceled out three at a time to 20 items (e.g., the 20 AAs), with the two remaining items getting two codons each, the value is 60!/[(2!)²(3!)²⁰], which comes to 8.7x10⁷². There are many, many other ways to partition how many codons each AA gets.

Many of these will be less favorable, because certain 'sensitive' AAs don't get sufficient protection from mutation, but there are huge numbers of relatively 'good' codes that could be used, more than enough that each planet in the visible universe (assuming a billion or so per galaxy, and perhaps a trillion galaxies) can choose among billions of possibilities.

As a result, even if every star has a planet bearing life, the likelihood that two of them will have the same genetic code, or even remotely similar genetic codes, is effectively zero. We can determine how close to zero, by means of the "birthday paradox". You may know that, if you get 23 or more people in a room, there is a better-than-even chance that two of them will have the same birthday.

Similarly, if you assume that blondes have at most 100,000 hairs on their head, in any city with more than 100,000 blondes, there will be quite a few pairs with exactly the same number of hairs on their head. What is interesting is, if you have any group of at least 373 blondes, there is a better-than-50% chance that two of them will have the same number of hairs. Which to? You gotta count a lotta follicles!

Now, if the universe of possible DNA codes is of the order of 10⁷², what are the chances that there is an exact match between two codes, if the number of inhabited planets in our galaxy is ten billion...or in the universe, perhaps a quintillion (billion trillion)? Both are wild guesses, but plausible.

In the first case, the probability of a single match is 1-exp(-10^-52), which has 52 zeroes before you get a nonzero digit. In the second case, the match probability is 1-exp(-10^-30), which has 30 zeroes ahead of the first nonzero digit. Either way, it's way, way smaller than a chance in a million. Turning the question around, how many "viable codes" might there be, to assure that in the universe, or in our galaxy, the chance of at least one match is at least 50-50? For the galaxy, there must be fewer than 10²¹ actual DNA codes in use, and for the universe, fewer than 10⁴³.

So, we start with a 72-digit number, and cut it down by 29 digits, just to make some chance that two life forms, that arose in different planets, could hybridize. Not a good bet.

Added note January 2007: There are currently seventeen "genetic codes" known, in use by Earth organisms (see the Wikipedia article Translation (genetics) ). The vast majority of cells use the "standard code", but there are many minor variants used by mitochondria, a couple used by plastids, and a few others used by certain eukaryotic microbes.

Aliens on the Railroad

kw: book reviews, science fiction, alien empires, railroads

It takes a very skilled writer to make unearthly aliens that are convincing, sufficiently alien to reflect my humanness through unfamiliar eyes. So I must say at the outset, that Timothy Zahn's aliens are all too human. However, he spins a great tale, bringing new ideas to seem almost familiar.

Imagine a railroad to everywhere...that is, everywhere in the Galaxy. You just need to get an AU or two beyond Jupiter's orbit, and the rest of your trip, except for a short rocket ride from the station to your destination, is similar to a ride on the Cannonball from Wichita to Omaha. This is the background setting of Night Train to Rigel, Zahn's latest galactic opera. He is really good at this.

There isn't a lot I can say without giving away too much of the plot. Zahn is just getting going with the galactic railroad idea. He also brings us a hive-mind entity with really big aspirations, a look into how high high finance can get when you've got a few colony worlds under your belt (who will be the first multi-trillionaire?), and some rather interesting blending of human and other.

I often take care to note if a book's plot has a labyrinth hidden underneath. (Short course: the difference between a labyrinth and maze is, you can get lost in a maze. A labyrinth has a single path, however it may wind around.) The oldest labyrinth tradition generates paths with three, seven, eleven, or fifteen circlings of the goal before one reaches it. You can get a three-turn path into a short story or novella, a 7-turn path into most novellas or novels, but few writers try for more than seven turns. I think this book achieves eleven turns, but I didn't count. Suffice it to say, there is double-, triple-cross, and greater here, enough for the most devoted of mystery readers.

I did say this is a mystery, didn't I? I guess not. But I find that the best science fiction is also good mystery writing. Sci-fi is about problem solving, as is mystery writing. When they are combined, the result is very satisfying.

Lion Story: the 1960s Lion King [Zamba 1948-1966]

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, performing animals

If you went to a circus thirty or forty years ago, you saw the "lion tamer" with his whip, chair, and gun. He would have a few lions, or maybe tigers or both. They would sit on short platforms, perform simple tricks, roar or snarl or swipe on command. Have you been to a large cat show in the last fifteen years or so? Perhaps Sigfried and Roy (before the recent mauling), or a similar show? They men or women with their cats don't call themselves trainers any more. What has changed (besides the 90's-00's tendency for ever-more extreme effects and hype)?

In large part, Ralph Helfer and others like him happened. He was one of the first "animal workers" to use kindness, affection, and bonding to make the animals he works with his colleagues. Frequently, a show—whether with big cats, birds of prey, or a menagerie of furry and feathery performers—will begin with someone explaining that no cruelty or coercion was used to train the animals. This is the influence of those who have shown us we can get better, and safer, results if the animals are motivated by pride and affection rather than by fear.

Ralph Helfer has presented highlights of his career with large animals in a series of books, first the Beauty of the Beasts and Modoc, and now Zamba: The True Story of the Greatest Lion That Ever Lived. Zamba was a nearly-weaned cub when a friend of Helfer's brought him to him. The cub had probably been driven from his mother by a new pride-leader male, before he was found, dehydrated and starving, and brought to the States. Helfer doesn't say for sure that Zamba was brought to him in 1948, but we find that Zamba died in 1966, and Ralph frequently states they were together for eighteen years.

Together! What a freighted word. Zamba slept in Ralph's bed, which had to be rebuilt once the lion became a 300-pound adult. He grew to 500 pounds, some nine feet long. Big! And he remained affectionate with humans. After Helfer married, and he and Toni had a little girl, young Tana was raised with one of the biggest "house pets" ever! The cover picture is Tana at Seven with Zamba, probably already in his teens (the author is quite cagey with several key dates).

Prior to meeting Zamba, Helfer had a bit of a career as a supplier of performing animals going. Zamba became his greatest star. Others include Gentle Ben the bear and Modoc the elephant, subjects of his other books.

Though the book is filled with hair-raising advenures, including a year Ralph and Zamba spent in Kenya working to make the film "Lion", the theme is affection training. Ralph Helfer has been for decades a leading voice, advocating bonding with animals, so that, whether they are performers or working animals, they work with their handler because they like to, they like or love the person, and wish to please him or her.

From a philosophical viewpoint, the way we treat animals (and our children) reveals much about us. Those who use fear to motivate, are themselves fearful. One cannot call a person "loving" who uses coercion and cruelty to get his way. The proverb says, "to have a friend, be a friend." I say, "Amen," whether the friend you desire is human or not. Thank you, Ralph.

From Web to Web...in 200 Years

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, information technology, history

Nearly forty years ago, working as a technician for a Xerox subsidiary, my colleagues and I had a need to gather data more rapidly. The lab had recently acquired a rather expensive digital voltmeter (DVM). Digging around in the manual, we found that it could do two things...wonderful things.

Firstly, it could scan as many as eight inputs, at a rate of one per second, or slower if so desired. Secondly, the digitized voltage was made available electronically at a bank of output plugs, in 5-level Teletype code.

We also had an 029 keypunch. It turned out to be able to take BCD or EBCDIC input, with some added circuitry to tell it when to punch the input or eject and start a new card. We only needed BCD for numbers, so we decided to build an interface. Transistors weren't exactly new, but the affordable ones were fragile. Integrated circuitry was still being invented. We chose to use a bank of telephone relays to effect the data conversion between 5-level and BCD, plus two EBCDIC codes for the period and minus signs.

All the circuitry was designed by my supervisor, the senior lab tech, and I did about half the wiring. We were testing experimental high-powered arc lamps, so we also built circuits to buffer the signals we wanted (lamp volts and amps, light meter reading, pulse power and frequency in pulse mode) to the DVM.

The contraption we made was a wonder to behold. Every couple of seconds the DVM's display would change, the relay board would rattle like a dozen loud knitters, then the 029 would punch a burst of four or five digits, with - and . as needed. Every set of readings went on one card. The date and run number were set up automaticlly using a drum card program.

Before long we had a lot of cards—dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Though another of the techs could program, he was needed on another project most of the time, so the manager gave me an amazing book, FORTRAN for the IBM 1130: A Programmed Instruction Approach. In about two days I learned FORTRAN II, sat down at our other 029, and began punching my first real program. The 1130's operator showed me how to stack the FORTRAN compiler (a few hundred cards), my program deck, and the "executive" cards that told the 1130 what to do with them all, into a tray in the right order, and I was off.

I call Fortran my mother tongue. It seems to fit naturally into my brain. It was at least a month before I first saw an error message. I have seen more since, but I built a career on seeing very few of them in the first place. Fact is (cough) I am a Superprogrammer. Roughly fifty times as productive as the average 'professional' programmer.

Back to the knitting needles. The sound came back to me, very poignantly, when I read about the sight and sound of the Harvard Mark I in operation. Techno-historian James Essinger wrote in Jacquard's Web: How a hand loom led to the birth of the information age, about the Mark I, "In operation, the machine was described by one commentator as making the sound of 'a roomful of ladies knitting.'"

The thread that developed into IT runs something like this: Jacquard to Babbage & Lovelace to Hollerith to Aiken to the team that designed ENIAC. While Babbage's Difference Engine was never finished (by him), and his Analytical Engine wasn't begun (though Ada Lovelace wrote code that would have run on it), his ideas led directly from the card-programmed loom of Jacquard to the card-controlled Tabulators of Hollerith.

Had Babbage received the level of financial support from the British Government that Aiken did from Thomas Watson at IBM, he might have produced a genuine steam-driven, card-programmed and -controlled digital cogwheel computer in the 19th century. Without IBM support, and later US military support, it might have been another generation or two beyond until a practical computer was built.

Throughout Jacquard's Web Essinger presents capsule biographies of the major players. He weaves a fascinating web of his own, showing how the ideas leapt from mind to mind, enabled at each stage by the technology available. The ideas had to await the technology.

I wonder, if the Analytical Engine had been built, what the world might be like. With a hundred-year head start programming them, regardless of the technology that embodied them, programming today would likely be a much more robust craft than it is. When a major program such as Microsoft Excel can be considered "good" although it is know to have hundreds of thousands of coding errors (tens of thousands are found and corrected yearly), we realize that, though now the technology has grown mightily since 1940 (a billion times in processing speed, a trillion times in storage capacity), the ideas are little advanced. Information science has quite a ways to go to catch up to information technology.

An acquaintance once said, "If we built buildings with the same level of quality that we write computer programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." That's a subject for a rant elsewhen.

The most contested land on the planet...for now

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural environment, rain forests

When I see "See it on PBS" on a book cover, I am wary. PBS has a definite agenda about the "natural world." I always ask, if humans aren't part of nature, where are we? Like it or not, this planet must support six billion of us, at present, and it will likely be called upon to support nine to twelve billion of us before we learn the trick of regulating our population globally. In my opinion, the long-term carrying capacity of Earth was surpassed about thirty years ago. One way or another, human population will return to about the four billion level, one way or another...if it does so in time not to crash all the way to zero. And I am a conservative!! More radical environmentalists prefer a human population of one billion or less.

That said, Deep Jungle by Fred Pearce, a portion of the Eden Project and subject of a PBS documentary, presents a wealth of information from numerous viewpoints, about the tropical rainforests found primarily in Latin America, East Asia, and Central Africa.

Here, for the first time, I found a well-researched discussion of the rather new understanding that there really are no "pristine, virgin" forests out there. I learned this about central Mexico because of the work of a relative of mine: Studying the ruins and the environment at Palenque, he asked the question, "What caused the drought that led to the collapse of Maya society in the 1400s?" While indications in areas not occupied by Mayans showed that there had been a climate change to drier conditions, the change was not severe, except in the areas inhabited by high populations.

His conclusion: Desertification, caused by the Mayan habit of insulating their buildings with a 20-25 cm layer of stucco. Stucco is produced with the help of charcoal, and huge areas of forest were cleared in order to make all that stucco. The rain patterns shifted, drought ensued, crops failed, and over a century or two the population migrated to areas where agriculture was more productive, even as increased starvation and disease reduced their numbers.

Today, in Mayan areas, the forest has grown back. If not for the ruins, we would think it primeval forest. Yet, indeed, much of it was not forested just 600 years ago.

Similar analyses elsewhere have shown that human populations have farmed nearly everywhere, and that no large areas of forest occur in the tropics that did not pass through at least one period in the past thousand years during which they were treeless, or at least devoid of the vast majority of trees; the farmers often kept certain very productive or popular species, while destroying most other species around them. For example, many Brazil nut trees are much older than the forest around them, because they were kept by the farmers through several cycles of forest clearing and regrowth.

This is but one surprise I found in the book. Clearly, it made the greatest impression on me. If this is so, then, why is there any problem with the forest clearing that is going on right now? Mainly, the clearing is taking place at a much higher rate, soils are being destroyed along with the forests they support, and the numbers of people involved is generally much greater. Prior forest-clearing by farmers was done in a way that preserved or increased soil fertility. "Black soil" in many forest areas is known as the most productive. It is always a human product. So is the sterile "Yellow soil" that results from modern, ignorant clearing methods. The lumberjack is not a steward of the soil; a farmer is.

These insights are a small part of a quality treatment of great breadth. A better book than I expected.

I opened a window, and influenza

kw: personal experience, flu, influenza, pandemics

The most-promoted news of the past day or so is that the Federal government has begun to pay attention to the possibility that a very virulent bird flu virus may become a worldwide scourge in the next few years. A sidebar story is the recent reconstruction of the DNA of the virus responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed perhaps 40 million people.

So far as I can determine, the virus itself has not been reconstructed; they have just produced the bare DNA. Even in a virus, in addition to its protein coat, the DNA is accompanied by a few proteins and other biochemicals needed to produce an active virion. I certainly hope they don't go so far as to restore active virions (I wonder if there is a Latin plural...).

Anyway, I have a tale to tell.

At least concerning influenza, I have a very effective immune system. I have seldom had a "flu" for more than 24 hours, and on a few occasions I have thrown off an infection in about six hours. As an adult, I have had no more than one bout of flu per decade. This may have saved my life.

I am a stamp collector. One prize of my collection was acquiring my Grandmother's collection and duplicates, from my Mother's attic. My Grandmother was a single woman until the early part of the Great War. Having been born in 1890, this made her a spinster, imposed upon by her married sisters to help with the sewing, and working as a schoolteacher in a 1-room school in Poteau, OK. She lived in Fort Smith, AR.

When the war started, she had been collecting in a desultory way, but the sudden depopulation of most men in the area meant she needed a hobby, badly. She used her wide circle of friends to gather a great many of the envelopes that arrived in Fort Smith and Poteau, particularly the foreign ones. In her duplicate box there resided two stock books, one packed with US stamps, and the other with foreign stamps, all from the 1930s and earlier, with a very great many from 1900-1920. There were hundreds of copies of certain common stamps.

Though she married late in 1915, to an older man who wasn't accepted for service, she collected assiduously until her children were well into high school. My Grandfather was a good provider, she had a good excuse to make her sisters do their own sewing, and she was an efficient housekeeper, so she had time for her stamps right up to 1939. My mother graduated high school in 1940, so I can imagine the last year of school was very busy for the whole family.

It came about that I spent quite a while with the "red one-cent Washington" issues. From 1908 to 1920, the stamps look the same, but there is always a little difference from issue to issue, sometimes more than one issue in a year. Though many of the stamps had been pulled or soaked off their envelopes, there was quite a pile of cuttings, squares cut from envelopes with the stamps still attached.

I soaked many of the cuttings to remove the stamps. On more than one occasion, I let them soak over night, beginning with warm water and letting it cool. I always intended to process them within an hour, but sometimes forgot or got sidetracked. My way is to soak a batch of stamps until each one will slide of the paper, then put them in fresh water to soak off the rest of the glue.

All told, by soaking off so many stamps, I was exposed to old, dried—and then remoistened—saliva from hundreds of people from all over the country, and many from worldwide locations. However it may have happened, I had a springtime flu that year. I had it bad, and it lasted three days. Very high fever, very bad malaise, heavy coughing but little production.

I wonder if I am the only person to catch the 1918 flu in 1998?

Sea Serpent Sandwich

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ocean zoology, cryptozoology

Everybody likes a gripping monster tale. Even more so when there is some chance the monster is real. Richard Ellis, in Monsters of the Sea: the truth about the Loch Ness Monster, the Giant Squid, Sea Serpents, Mermaids, and other Fantastic Creatures of the Deep, unravels a few mysteries, but quite a few are left to the Cryptozoologists, who work to determine which legends are based on real creatures.

My age-mates and I grew up thinking of the great squid as it is seen in the Disney production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have followed the scientific reports and the surrounding legends on and off all my life. I remember reading of 18-inch sucker scars on sperm whales, compared with the 6-inch suckers on the largest squid known, about 50 feet in length, and being left to draw the obvious conclusion. Though it turns out the 18-inch and 6-inch figures are both wildly inflated, it is still likely that squid larger than the 50-footer exist. However, given that most squids mate but once, then die, I wonder just how big a squid can get before it gives in to the urge to reproduce?

I also have read that, with about a million sperm whales about, whose diet is almost entirely of large squid, there really do need to be huge populations of Giant Squid (Architeuthis), Humboldt Squid, and other "big" squid to supply the demand.

Well, as it turns out, many stories of Sea Serpents are more likely squid sightings. Some few may be of extra-large octopi. In the chapter "Blobs and Globsters," Ellis describes a car-size chunk of tissue found in Florida in 1896, that quite likely represented the remains of a huge octopus. The chunk was likely a major portion of the "head" and the stumps of the arms, and weighed five to seven tons. If it was in proportion to most other species, its arms were about 100 feet long. Compare in bulk to the biggest whole squid found, at about 55 feet and less than a ton of weight. That squid's tentacles (the two very skinny "catching" appendages) were 37 feet long, the rest of the body 18 feet long, and the eight other arms about 16 feet long.

The author presents legends and, where possible, background facts, about all the creatures in the subtitle and more, including whales and sharks. It is clear he is most fascinated with the cephalopods. He has a special chapter each on the biology of giant squids and on octopi. Just based on the powerful creatures we know to exist, we find that in the sea, we are prey. In spite of our technological superiority, a few folk each year end up as some sea monster's meal.

The book is well worth the reading, a great synthesis of scholarship and storytelling.

A Thoroughly Victorian Naturalist

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, naturalists, evolution

Imagine, if you will, that after nearly sixteen years of research and study, after groping for a synthesis of his studies of earthworms and domestic fowl, after ruminating over his observations of the ecology of the pampas and the finches of the Galapagos Islands, after beginning to prepare a final outline of a great, multi-volume survey of his theory of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin had one day been presented with a monograph describing natural selection, newly printed, describing every facet of the mechanism that drives evolutionary change, a mechanism he had elaborated on in detail in his outline.

This nearly happened! Though scientists in the Victorian era were generally no more or less venial and credit-hungry than those of today, there were two, at least, who behaved with nobility and commendable restraint, when it happened that they both deduced the same hypothesis. While Alfred Russel Wallace could have published his monograph—he was already a much-published and celebrated naturalist—he decided to send a copy of the manuscript to Darwin for review. Darwin was in a quandary!

The story of his handling of this delicate situation, with the help of some wiser, or at least bolder, friends, is told in numerous books, including the recent biography of Wallace, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, by Ross A. Slotten. A mainly friendly relationship between Wallace and Darwin ensued, which lasted until Darwin’s death, and which was recalled by Wallace with much fondness near the end of his own life in 1909.

The publication of Darwin’s and Wallace’s first papers on the theory of natural selection, presented simultaneously to the Linnean Society, marked a turning point in the lives of both men. But, while it was the beginning of ever-increasing celebrity for Darwin, it led to a rougher road for Wallace. He rode the crest for a time, but when he later began to investigate Spiritualism, becoming quite an apostle for the “new religion,” he lost favor and influence, and fell into a couple decades of eclipse. His passionate embrace of the anti-vaccination cause, and later of many “thoroughly unpopular” movements, made him far from a favorite of the drawing room. Only in his eighties did he become a “national treasure,” and gain the recognition for his earlier work on an appropriate scale.

Today he is remembered less for supplying the prod to Darwin to publish “a sketch” of his theory in The Origin of Species (short title), and more for Wallacea. This region in Indonesia began as Wallace’s Line, an apparent biological boundary between Asian faunas to the west and Australian faunas to the east. It originally ran from the strait between Bali and Lombok, north between Borneo and Celebes. Later investigations showed that there is a region of gradual decline in one fauna as another takes over, rather than the sharp line that Wallace posited. Today Wallace’s Line delineates the first appearance of a great number of Australian species and the last appearance of several important Asian ones, while to the east, Weber’s and Lyddeker’s Lines mark the last appearance of all key Asian avian and mammalian species.

The amount of material is massive. It is undoubtedly less so than Wallace’s own autobiography My Life, but it took me a good while to read. I employed a stratagem I use when I find a book to be, however interesting, quite a long slog: I read this at work during breaks while reading other books at home, mainly bedtime. Thus the prior two posts are for books I completed while making my way through Heretic. Slotten is a good writer, or I’d have not finished. Wallace’s life is a fascinating window into the Victorian world at the height of its colonial power. Regardless of the privations Wallace, Bates (of Batesian mimicry fame), Spruce and others endured, they were greatly lessened by the pervasive influence of British civilization to all but the most remote corners of the world. Author Slotten’s masterwork is a fascinating window into the lives of Wallace, Darwin, and other naturalists of the time.

Post-Humanity on the edge

kw: book reviews, science fiction, sociological fiction, propriety

Over the past century and more, the central trend I have noticed in Science Fiction has been a shift from a technical to a social emphasis. Early sci-fi and speculative fiction (spec-fi), such as that by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle (Challenger series in particular), and H. G. Wells, were largely about the science, known or imagined. The human aspect of the story was secondary, even though Verne and Wells in particular used their stories to protest or parody their social environments. While Doc Smith's Lensman series' good-vs-evil conflict limned the recent (to Smith) World War, much of the focus was on the solution to the problem of secure identification, and securing persons of character worthy of that responsibility.

Most of the stories I read in Analog, Amazing, and Azimov's sci-fi magazine in the 1970s and 1980s were, by contrast, about human relations, regardless that most of the beings were aliens: they usually were foils for very human foibles, and the problem-solving in these stories was aimed at accommodating variant cultures or opinions. The grand ballet of good-vs-evil was seldom seen, and the "let's build this gizmo to fix that problem" type of story, even less so.

It was with a story called "My Brother's Keeper," by an author whose name I forget, that I first took note of the circa-1980 emphasis on transcendence without need of high technology: the author imagined a future, a rather near one, in which Social Security falls under its own weight, and explored the result. The protagonist, with the help of a few geriatric, but new, friends, finds a good way to make lemonade with the lemons that drop in their laps. Personal transcendence was the common theme of the stories written by those who, a decade or so earlier, became hippies and drop-outs trying to "find themselves." These are sci-fi only in the sense that they are placed in a future.

The latter 20th and early 21st Century has seen the grand, galaxy-spanning epic move from fringe to mainstream: Star Trek and Star Wars films and books embody the trend. The former is a discovery epic, the latter a conquest epic.

Throughout, sci-fi and spec-fi writers have shown increased sophistication in their portrayal of geopolitics and geopoliticians. While Star Wars spreads a model of very Earthly (5th-to-8th-Century Byzantine, in fact) geopolitics into a galaxy-spanning epic, J. D. Townsend, in The Assassin's Dream, fits his drama onto the few continents of this very Earth. The novel is not just post-Apocalyptic: two Apocalypses have passed, and another is being ushered in as the story closes. Here, personal transcendence is a background issue; group transcendence comes to the fore as two groups of a new kind of human—engineered rather than mutated—struggle to survive among a human race that emphatically not ready to be replaced.

The story posits, both in the Tressalines and in unmodified humans, an advancement in the development and use of ESP. Townsend wisely refrains from speculating on a mechanism. Rather, taking it as a fact, he explores the implications. So, I place this in the spec-fi category. The ending leaves room for a series of sequelae.

I have one major scruple. There are two chapters, largely composed of explicit sex, that could be wholly excised without harm to the story. References elsewhere, to "Sexual Services" as a public function, could easily be toned down to the subdued level practiced by most writers of the 1950s. As it is, the sexual writing is of a sort that I call "writer's wet dreams." I have yet to find a man who can write about women's sexuality without making them into men with vaginas. In thirty years of diligent search, I have yet to find one natural (XX chromosome) woman who thinks like the women in male-written fiction.

A note to authors everywhere: if you want to write about explicit sex, write about it, sell it in the appropriate marketplace, and be done with it. Don't try to make it an "integral" part of a story about something else. The attempt is usually laughable and always distracting. Artists, particularly writers, have the opportunity to ennoble or to debase their audience. In which way would you prefer to be remembered?

Meat vs Metal (as usual)

kw: book reviews, science fiction, imaginative fiction

In a story I read long ago, perhaps by Asimov, but maybe not; perhaps titled "The Perfect Robot," the president of the robot company is on a compulsive quest to produce a robot that cannot be distinguished from a person. Several models of ever-greater perfection are produced, until a robot is presented to that executive, that is so perfect, he cannot determine whether it is a robot or a young man. That day, aliens arrive: first contact! Wouldn't you know it, the robot company is one place they are taken to visit. The company president proudly shows off the robot, emphasizing that it cannot be distinguished from a man without disassembly. The alien responds, "So, what's the point?"

I grew up to stories of robots. In the 1950s and '60s, I read everything by Asimov, of course, but also by every other science fiction writer, especially about robots. It was the other stories by Asimov, primarily his "Habitats" stories, that clued me in to the secret. In both "Robot" and "Habitat" stories, Asimov was really exploring neurosis. Even later, as I read his frequent columns in various publications, including his own monthly SF&F rag, I realized that he was America's most successful neurotic. Until very late in life, for example, he never took an airplane flight.

There is a comparative dearth of good robot stories filling the time between his last new story (late 1980s) and about 2002. The current underlying theme of robot stories in this decade is exploring subjective reality and solipsism. Who am I, really? If you had an infallible test to distinguish human from android, would you dare to use it on yourself?

The robots in Robota, by Doug Chiang (ideator and illustrator) and Orson Scott Card (wordsmith), can in no way be confused for people. They don't want to be. They are extreme extrapolations of semi-anthropoid "mechanicals" that partake more the nature of industrial robots—generalized to insecto-humanic form—than of the Honda Asimo.

The story line is rather silly. It is the illustrations by Chiang and the lyrical writing by Card that bring the story and the reader/viewer's mind together in a willing suspension of disbelief. As with all great art, Robota brings you willingly into a created world different from your own. The visual art—more page space is given to images than to words—is worth perusal on its own merits.

So what does the book explore? It is deeply post-apocalyptic. Indeed, two apocalypses are in its past, and the story ushers in a third. The "who am I" twist in the denouement closes the knot.

The Little Things Beneath our Feet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biogeography

After circling the globe on Beagle, Darwin spent about twenty years fussily preparing a huge tome on his findings. Upon receiving a write-up of Wallace's independent work, he rushed into print with Origin of Species, an "outline" of the larger work he never completed. During that twenty year period, and for ten years thereafter, he studied earthworms. He once stated that all the soil of England passed through her earthworms about each decade.

In Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World, Yvonne Baskin presents a glimpse into the world beneath our feet. The background cover photo is labeled in the credits "200 species of mites". I suppose they were extracted from one soil sample in Canada, based on the photo credit. Doesn't surprise me. I've read that there is at least one ant colony for each living human, and at least a ton of termites to each of us. I read that there are probably ten times as many nematodes as termites in the world. The author quotes Nathan Cobb's 1914 statement: "If all the matter in the universe except nematodes were swept away, our world would still be recognizable,...its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes." Now it appears that more than half of all animal species are nematodes...I'd thought that was beetles! But every beetle species has at least two parasitic nematodes...

It wasn't what I expected when I began. I was hoping for a natural-historic survey of the field. That is accomplished, very briskly, in one chapter. Case histories of a number of locales make up the rest, and the focus is on what happens to the subsoil critters when people do something to it. In other words, this is an ecological manifesto. The warning is clear, if unwelcome: There are already a number of clear examples for which a large area of soil has been changed beyond recovery, even "managed recovery." Formerly forested places where trees cannot be induced to grow, for example. It is found that the subsurface fungi and microbes that could support trees have been replaced by an ecology that can't. Just one example.

A thought-provoking book. Personally, I like getting a pinch of some stuff, whether yard dirt, pond mud, or birdbath scum, and looking at it under a microscope to see what's there. Now, when I peer at tiny worms, mites, rotifers, and fungi, I'll recall that what we do to our yards can effect huge changes in which of these will flourish, which die away, and what new creatures may replace them.

New Orleans Bay

kw: disasters, city planning, politics

Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I wrote an Email to Louisiana Governor Blanco, suggesting that the city be relocated to higher ground, such as that just to the north of Lake Pontchartrain. A couple days later, there was a newspaper article about the way she lambasted Speaker Hastert for making a similar suggestion on the House floor. Oh, well. I didn't really think she'd like the idea.

But I really think the existence of New Orleans as the world's largest below-sea-level city has been the result of the most egregious string of stupid city planning decisions in human history (yes, I do think it is even worse than Venice...by far. We knew more in the early 1900s than the Italians did in the 1400s, about sediment subsidence on deltas. It was just ignored).

In my opinion, that portion of the French Quarter, the Old City, that is above mean high tide, ought to be protected as a historic enclave. The rest ought to be allowed to return to lagoon status, which is what "nature" wants in any case, and sooner or later it shall be so. But the later it happens, the more it will cost the US Taxpayers.

Omnibus Review No.2

kw: book reviews, grammar, etymology, nonfiction, ecology, science fiction, humor

Another week had to pass, and I've read four books. Seems using a computer all day, when it gets intense, to do so at home also is like a busman's holiday. Well, that's another story.

• Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, also subtitled The seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhumes: a collection of "the real stories," or as real as can be known, by Chris Roberts.
• Word Origins...and how we know them, also subtitled Etymology for Everyone: a modest collection of the conceptual tools used to discern words' histories, by Anatoly Leiberman.
• Tree: a Life Story, a natural history of one conceptual Douglas Fir by David Susuki and Wayne Grady.
• Only You Can Save Mankind, science fiction, firmly tongue-in-cheek, by Terry Pratchett.

The two "words" books are much different from one another. The first presents entertaining histories that are known, conjectured, or speculated to have led to about forty familiar nursery rhymes, and some that led to groups of similar rhymes, such as lullabies. I've long wondered why "Rock-a-bye Baby" ends with the baby falling out of a tree. You won't quite learn exactly why, here, but you'll get food for thought about it.

I've long realized that stories of dragons, elves, sprites, and the knights in shining armor that overcome them, or become subject to their tricks, are about inner battles: one day I realized that the dragon is me, the knight is me, and the captive damsel is also me; I cried a long time. Other stories, about ogres, trolls, and giants, recall the terror of learning to get along with larger kids, older siblings, and parents, who were not always exactly pleased with us.

But nursery rhymes, most often, seem to be kids' ways of coping with unconquerable forces, or of making fun of the grown-up hypocrites around them. Author Roberts has dug up quite a set of interesting history for our enjoyment.

Dr. Liberman's book is a much more difficult read. I find linguists' tools fascinating, but it is easy for me to see that it would take a number of the precious few years I have left to gain any facility with them. In the end, I find etymology a bit like playing 'Tetris'. With a handful of exceptions, we don't know the 'original origin' of a word. Rather, we determine, say, that STAND and quite a number of ST- words (STAY, STEAD, STABLE...) come from a Greek root meaning "fixed" or "held steady". We may even find an older word that the Greek came from, but we know we'll probably never find out if ST- goes back to the origins of speech in the 1000th Century BCE. In the end, a Tetris block will get you. But it's pretty cool to see how linguists dig out the relationships. Cool and strenous.

Suzuki and Grady have produced a lyric proem to a Douglas Fir (they use the term Douglas-fir, because the tree is not a real fir, but a false cypress), tracing its history from the fall of seeds centuries ago, through maturity, ending in its inability to overcome the depredations of predatory beetles, becoming first a snag, then a fallen giant, finally a nurse log for a row of hemlocks. Along the way they open little windows into many facets of Earth history and ecological studies. As close as I've come to a kind of empathy with a forest giant. This is the second time I've read the book.

Terry Pratchett writes well enough to entertain me in six or seven subgenres of Science Fiction. This book plays off the 1992 Gulf War and its obsessive TV coverage against video games, as the latter get more real, until the young gamester Johnny finds the line between game and world getting rather blurry. From one angle, it is a solipsist permabulation. But mainly it is a humorous romp through the half-real world of "virtual reality," which we find is getting more real-seeming daily. My favorite series of Pratchett's is the Discworld saga.

Omnibus Review

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction, dogs, grammar, humor

I note I haven't posted since August 24th. That's when I began physical therapy for tendonitis caused by excessive use of the computer mouse. I wear a brace along the top of my arm, anchored to my thumb. A foot-long contrivance, all to protect a bit of tendon a half-inch long while it heals. I've recovered enough to make one post, which I'll use as a mega-review of the eight books I've read in the past twelve days. These are not in the order I read them.

First, the dog books:

• The Light-years Beneath My Feet, science fiction by Alan Dean Foster.
• The Dogfather, a mystery by Susan Conant.
• Dog World and the Humans who Live There, nonfiction by Alfred Gingold.

To over-generalize, the world (in the West, at least) is composed of dog people, cat people, a smattering of bird-, snake-, and other ex0tic pet-fanciers, and those who wonder how a "dumb animal" can inspire such devotion. Of course, we pet people know animals aren't dumb; they speak languages that humans seldom care to learn. Yet many, perhaps most, house pets learn quite a lot of the human language used around them. So who is the dumb one?

In Foster's tale, which continues the alien abduction story told in Lost and Found, the dog has been equipped to speak, and given sufficient brain boost to do so rather eloquently. The dog and his man, plus two alien creatures allied with them, continue their quest to return home after being captured by "evil alien zookeepers". It puts an interesting spin on the experience of many animals captured in the wild for our zoological parks.

The Conant mystery, about a dog trainer "invited" to train the new puppy of a Mafia figure, is touted as "The dog lovers' answer to Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who series." Ms Braun's protagonists are two Siamese who keep a retired, rich journalist and provide him with clues to solve murder mysteries. Both cats and journalist are urbane, witty, and noble, though the gentleman in question can be a bit of a bumbler. Ms Conant's canines are definitely the kept ones, here, and the trainer is anything but urbane or noble. There is really no solving of a mystery in this book, unless it is the detection done by the Mafioso in figuring out who offed his favorite hit man. Inside job, of course. However, the story is enlivened by a view inside the world of high-stakes dog shows. A fun read, but Braun's cat stories are in no danger.

The Gingold narrative traces a "why" person's conversion to dog lover. Anyone who has seen a Norfolk terrier will understand that Gingold had no choice: "resistance is futile; prepare to be assimilated." Being a writer by trade, however, he goes a bit farther than you might expect, becoming conversant with dog breeders, trainers, and the show circuit. So the title is apt. George the terrier is a foil for a world of dogs that Mr. Gingold observes, records, and finds amusing or admirable by turn.

Now, a couple SF&F collections:

• Wild Galaxy, an anthology of Sci Fi stories by William F. Nolan.
• Bedlam's Edge, an anthology of Urban Fantasy stories, edited by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, written by fifteen writers including the editors. All concern Urban Elves or Mall Elves, the Sidhe set in Ms Lackey's bailiwick.

Here, the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy could not be more pronounced. Nolan's stories are near-hard Sci Fi, shorter on explanation than "really hard" Sci Fi, but set in a universe that, we understand in reading, could be explained if he wished to take the extra space. I found it interesting that nearly all his stories derive their tension from solipsism: as "mechanicals" (androids) replace humans, how do you know which you are? I find his obsessive attention to this boundary reminiscent of Asimov's "I Robot" stories and their successors. For Asimov, robots were sane—or they could by—, humans weren't, nor could they be. His non-robot stories primarily explore various neuroses. Nolan digs deeper. Once you have machines that mimic humans so precisely, how to distinguish? I most of the stories, mayhem is required, to see the gears inside. In only a few does the human protagonist come to terms with the thought that every other "person" may be mechanical.

Finally, a diversity of nonfiction:

• Bob Hope: My Life in Jokes, a brief autobiogiggle, with brief notes by Bob Hope held together by material collected by daugher Linda Hope.
• The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution, by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard.
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, a grammatical guide for the true sticklers among us, by Lynne Truss.

Ms Hope has done us all a service by collecting hundreds of her father's best jokes, and ordered them by decades (nine of them, at the time of writing). I remember seeing a live TV special in which Bob Hope appeared, when he was about 95. I don't know if the cameramen were being cruel or just unfeeling, but they broadcast him from the time he stepped from a limousine, helped by a nurse to reach the stage. It was, inadvertantly, quite touching. We saw a bent-over, tentative, shuffling old man led to the steps and helped up to the stage. At its verge, he was handed a microphone, the nurse backed away, and he seemed to bloom. The ancient vanished, and there was Bob Hope! He could'a been forty. His piece wasn't long, time enough for thirty or forty jokes, and he said goodbye to the host, handed over the microphone, vanished, and the nurse returned to help an old, old man leave. With Bob Hope, at any stage of his life (I was a fan for fifty years, and watched a couple of his movies made when my parents were young), what you saw was what he was.

Messrs. Kusek and Leonhard present a more serious issue. With about half the online American public, and many millions more worldwide, downloading music freely using peer-to-peer and similar networks, are we all criminals, or the vanguard in a sea change in the music industry? Really, the answer is "both". However, downloaders are criminals in the sense that the flow of traffic on I-95 between NYC and DC is composed of criminals, because they are all going 70 mph or faster in 55- or 65-mph zones. They are not "nefarious pirates," as the recording tycoons would have us believe. Pirates attempt to profit financially. Downloaders don't; they just want music at prices below rip-off. There is a principle of jurisprudence, that if more than 15% of a population refuse to abide by a law, it becomes impossible to enforce, and will eventually be replaced or eliminated. The authors expect the music industry to change much as other industries have changed, when disruptive technologies drive some segments of an industry out of business while setting the stage for new ones to arise and thrive (buggy-whips, any one?). Fact is, the recording industry is going away, but the music industry as a whole will grow mightily. The authors' preferred method of music distribution is "music like water," where part of our subscription to online services is divvied up according to the services provided. It is quite doable now to record the number of times a particular entertainer's track is copied, and to pay accordingly. This will eventually work for videos and still images also.

Ms Truss has a visceral reaction to solecism. That means, these days she must feel pretty sick all the time. Unlike the vast majority in the "grammar advice" genre, her book is readable, entertaining, and educational. Having a sense of proportion, she knows where to stop. So, while she briskly explains a half dozen uses of the comma, for example, when she mentions as an aside one writer who lists seventeen (calling them an insufficient collection), she doesn't give us the seventeen. Considering that very few people could enumerate two or more uses of the comma, what's the use?!? While some writers decry punctuation almost in its entirety—in manifestoes that make copious use of punctuation—and the spread of phone texting and "emailese" (e.g. "CU B4 8" and "wrking on pres. - hav it dun by noon - boss wants rt aftr lnch") bid fair to replace almost every symbol with the dash, the author makes a good case that punctuation will survive, as writers find the need to ensure their readers will understand their writing. Had Matthew had the use of a comma in 55 AD, theologians wouldn't be fighting over the passage rendered "I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise" by Protestants, and by Catholics, "I say to you today, you shall be with me in paradise."

OK, that's the lot. Tendon a bit sore, time to ice it then put my brace back on.

Action Hero 101

kw: book reviews, martial arts

I've had just a smattering of martial arts instruction. Main useful thing: I know how to fall down without breaking my own bones. My favorite sparring partner in my Judo class when I was 15 was a friend, a football player, who weighed 300 pounds, just twice my weight. Even though he was letting me throw him, it was very satisfying to get him off the ground, over my back, and land him in a roll (not a thud; I didn't want to hurt him). He also had a couple of bigger guys to work with, so he could actually have a useful workout.

Years later, at least ten years since I'd had any instruction, my mother countered her "empty nest" by studying martial arts. One day I visited with a friend. He saw her certificate for the brown belts in karate, judo, and jujitsu. He asked, "What's the difference between judo and jujitsu?" She said, "Larry, come here." I obligingly let her domonstrate, "Judo is like this" "and jujitsu is like this" . For those with the same question, jujitsu makes use of the opponent's own body instead of one's own as the pivot of the throws. Done well, it can look like you picked a fellow up by the tips of your fingers, or even like you threw him without touching him. It also makes lots of use of submission grips and joint-jamming holds. At the time, Mom weighed 105, and I weighed 190. My friend was suitably impressed.

As you might imagine, I decided I'd better learn enough to counter her moves. Together with a friend—a policewoman exactly my size—I joined the dojo where Mom studied. I guess we worked out there for almost a year. This led to two more amusing incidents.

One evening, the woman dropped me off at my home, which I shared with several other college guys and recent graduates. One of them, a Puerto Rican, said, "What are the funny uniforms." We explained that they were judo gis (gi is pronounced with a hard G). Then we showed him a little. She took me over in a hip throw, and the fellow's eyes got big. Then I swung her over in a shoulder throw, and his eyes got bigger. In his Hispanic culture, a man just doesn't do that to a woman! Of course, she rolled right up with a grin and slapped him on the shoulder: "It's fun!"

Another time, a family man who lived nearby said he'd heard I was "doing karate." He bounced around like a boxer, and faked a kick at me. I caught his heel and upset him onto the grass. He got up and laughed it off, but I said, "Look, I'm pretty sure I can keep you from hurting me, but I am not sure I can do it without hurting you. I'm not quite that good yet."

By contrast, Chuck Norris, who has favored us with Against All Odds: My Story, once defeated 22 black belts in a row, forcing each in turn to tap his submission, without hurting any of them. Norris's co-author, Ken Abraham, has rendered his stories in a very readable, enjoyable account of his life.

I have long been interested in Chuck Norris's versatility. It is well known that, if a martial artist has studied mainly one discipline, someone familiar with that discipline, though of lesser skill, can still defend against it. The best practitioners have studied numerous styles and incorporated them into a fighting style that is impossible to anticipate.

I particularly appreciate Norris's unabashed expressions of faith. He presents his life frankly, the good with the bad. A Bible teacher will tell you that the Bible presents the "heroes of faith" to us "warts and all." Norris doesn't hide his warts, but does show how God has helped him rise above them and put his weaknesses behind him.

Even more, I appreciate that Norris has labored to educate children through the program now known as KickStart, which has had great success reducing the influence of gangs and drugs in many schools.

It is hard to realize that Chuck Norris is 65...but he tells us himself that he was born in 1940. He's had a fuller life than most, and had a better impact on the world around him.

Politics as Unusual

kw: book reviews, essays, politics

Do you remember who said, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert their children to Christianity."? Ann Coulter still says, so, and backs it up with reasons. Nobody yet—and it has been four years—has, in print, offered anything remotely resembling a reasoned contrary argument. I've looked and looked, and found emotionalism at best, but usually personal attacks of the vilest kind.

Ms Coulter would respond that her opponents' only weapon is character assassination. So she offers up her own brand of political polemic in her new book, How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must).

She presses her point in the title chapter. Thereafter, she offers up just over 100 essays expressing her conservative views with considerable wit and erudition. You may not like what she says, but you must admit she does her homework.

It took reading them all, then pondering, for me to realize that she refrains from going after those the media in general is attacking. She specializes in recounting the ignored stories, the underreported angles, the "elephants in the corner" that "the media" bypasses.

The author skewers the liberal and famous right and left. As she says, "They are such easy targets." For example, in the essay, "Checks and Balances, but Mostly Checks," she notes late in the essay that every major newspaper and news program reported how "Bush outspent Gore 4 to 1 on Florida recount." However, not one of them reported that 7/8 of Gore's fund was donated by just 84 persons, and that 2/3 came from 38 individual contributions averaging $55,000, and ranging from $25,000 to $500,000. By contrast, no donation to G.W. Bush exceeded $5,000, so that he raised his $13+ million from several thousand persons. So, which party caters to the rich???

As Bernard Baruch stated, "Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." That goes for women, too. And I must here paraphrase Mark Twain, "Someone who will not think, has no advantage over someone who cannot think." Ann Coulter knows how to think, so put on your thinking cap before you enter the lists against her.

Plan Would Move African Animals to U.S.

kw: news, ecoidiocy

Plan Would Move African Animals to U.S. at Yahoo! News recounts the latest and most extreme piece of ecological idiocy so far proposed. Here is the basis: At the beginning of the Holocene, the "modern era" of about the last 12,000 years, most species in a diverse population of large mammals became extinct. It is likely that early people had a lot to do with this, though the radical climate change had to play a rôle.

In addition to the several deer species (including moose), bovines (bison), gazelles (pronghorn), bears, pumas, wolves and coyotes, there were cousins of modern camels, rhinos, cheetahs and elephants. However, the 20,000-year-ago cheetah analog that chased pronghorns was actually in a different family of cats, and was not a cheetah, the mammoth and mastadon species were adapted to a cold climate, similar to Baffin Island today, and and the predator-prey mix had a balance similar to that now seen in the Yukon.

An African ecosystem overlaid on today's North American? Dumb.

For these Ants, the Picnic is Your House

kw: book reviews, monographs, natural history

Have you ever seen an ant the size of a hornet? Chances are, if you did, you thought it was a hornet! Except it was black, and didn't fly very fast. The Eastern and Western "black carpenter ant" species have queens an inch long, and workers a half inch or larger in length. In northern areas too cold for most termites, they take over the job of reducing our houses to piles of sawdust. At least in North America, when you see a black ant that big, you are seeing one of these carpenter ants. However, if you see only one, it is probably a lone forager looking for water. When they are hunting, they stay more hidden. They don't eat wood, but insects that infest the trees they live in. They just prefer "digging" in wood to digging in dirt like more familiar ants.

Laurel D. Hansen and John H. Klotz have produced a book that is quite to the scientific side of the technical/popular spectrum: Carpenter Ants of the United States and Canada. The book is brief but comprehensive. The morphology chapter has numerous drawings and photos that show the internals...and you thought it was tricky to dissect a frog in BIO 101! There is enough new terminology here to keep you busy for a day or two adding new vocabulary.

Here I learned that the two big, black species are but two of 24 species of North American carpenter ants, though one is found only in Hawaii and one only in Florida. Eight of the 24 are found in the mid-Atlantic area where I live. Oh, joy! What I hadn't known was that the common species have three sizes of workers: the half-inch monsters, some a bit over a quarter inch, and some rather less than a quarter inch. It is the smaller ones you are likely to see tending aphids on your rose bush—their sugar farm—, while the bigger ones tackle moths and flies for protein. I thought they were different species.

A strenuous read, but rewarding.

Here, try my specs...

kw: book reviews, self help

This isn't original with me, nor with Stephen Covey, from whom I heard it: Do your eyes trouble you? Having a hard time seeing sometimes? Here, try my eyeglasses. I can see perfectly with them. What, don't they help you? Strange...

Not so strange. If my eyes and nearsighted and yours are farsighted, or if we simply have quite different amounts of astigmatism, there's no way my glasses will do you much good...and vice versa. Some things are like that. My eyes are not your eyes.

Some are not. If you have a bad Strep throat, there are several antibiotics that ought to nicely clear it up. Of course, these days, the germ in question may be resistant to most antibiotics, so it may take a trial or two to find the one (or some combination) that will do the job. But, if the one causing your strep throat is one you caught from me, the same combination that works for me will work for you. One cause, one solution.

Are the emotional and mental quirks that we all suffer in the category of "one cause, one solution" or "my neurosis is not like your neurosis"? Hard to tell. Every self-help book I've read claims that this or that method or procedure will certainly work; it is all in the diligence you bring to it. That simply turns into a game of "blame the victim" when it doesn't work for someone.

So it is with the patterned behavior we all experience. I recently finished reading Make the Leap: a Practical Guide to Breaking the Patterns that Hold You Back by Farrell Silverberg, PhD. He has written a helpful book, if patterns are your problem. But what is a pattern?

We live by patterns. Most of us have a way we get to work, or church, or the grocery. We almost always go the same way. Whether we walk, drive, take the bus or train, we can do it without noticing; we are on autopilot. It is a useful pattern.

One day I was on the way to the library. The first half the way is the same roads I take to my son's school. I was nearly to the school before I broke out of autopilot, cussed, and turned back to the library. I was trapped by a pattern, if briefly.

Here is another, one that I cringe to recall. Like most school age boys, I had a few fights growing up. On a couple of occasions I was ambushed while sitting down. Many years later, when my son was 4 or 5, he dashed over to my chair and jumped on me. I hollered and thrashed, and he was flung across the room. Well, that was the first and last time he joyfully sprang into my lap. I was trapped by a pattern that hadn't been used for decades.

Some patterns are mild, some very strong. A very outdated, maladaptive pattern is what we call a neurosis. It is based on behavior that once helped, but doesn't do so any more. Now it harms us.

I'm not going to go into detail about the book. Dr. Silverberg is a very good writer, with useful methods to teach, but he makes no bones that it takes a lot of work on your part to see, understand, and break a pattern. It then takes more, much more, work to push it into permanent limbo.

I didn't find a pair of glasses that fit. But perhaps the things I remember will help me see any patterns that show up later. I happen to like my routines. I worked hard to set up many of them. I have reached the curmudgeonly state where I'd rather a few folks broke a pattern here or there, and left mine alone.

Self-limiting Phenomena, part 2

kw: practical darwinism

Creating the former post, I thought of another hot-button topic that one may also consider in genetic terms. The modern litmus test for political correctness is "choice." By that is meant one's attitude toward "abortion rights."

Concerning my own position, I will not elaborate beyond saying that I believe abortion is not a moral form of birth control.

But here I take a darwinist perspective. Consider, of a number of women raised in similar environments and having similar beliefs, who become pregnant, in all cases surprised by it and not at all happy about it: some will abort, and some will not.

Perhaps if you dug deep enough into each woman's history, you would find some consistent environmental difference between the "aborters" and the "non-aborters." I think it unlikely. Rather, it is likely that there is a spectrum of attitudes, built into our brains, regarding the balance of convenience versus procreation. It is analogous to the spectrum of boldness-timidity, extraversion-introversion, and many others. Twin studies show there is a strong genetic component to all of these.

Here is the plain, evolutionary fact: women who are more likely to have an abortion for the sake of convenience will have fewer children than the others. Therefore, the tendency to abuse abortion is self-limiting, and will remain a minority of the population.

I imagine there are a number of other societal issues that have a Darwinian component...