When the earth moves, his name is on everyone's lips

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, seismology, earthquakes, biographies

As a Geology student in about 1970, one big, big thing they drummed into us about earthquakes was the difference between Intensity, which is different at every point, and Magnitude, which is a characteristic of the total event. When an earthquake happens, a section of a fault—a large crack in the rocks of the earth's crust—experiences displacement. By displacement, I refer to the relative motion of rocks on the opposite sides of a flattish area. This area can be small, perhaps the size of a strip of roadway a block long; the relative motion may also be small, perhaps a few inches; in such a case, unless you happen to be lying down right above that section of the fault, you won't feel it. A small quake like this occurs, at the fault, in a second or less.

On the other hand, a section of fault a thousand kilometers long and twenty miles wide may erupt with relative motion of ten meters or more. Such an event is among the largest earthquakes possible, and can destroy most structures in any nearby (100 km, perhaps) cities and shift landscape features over a huge area. Such large slippage also takes longer, from a few seconds to a minute.

February 9, 1971 (3 months after my birthday...I won't say which) I awoke at 6AM sharp when my water bed sloshed and almost dumped me on the floor. I turned on the radio, grabbed a field notebook, and began to take notes. I lived in Alhambra, California at the time, 38 km from Sylmar, where the earthquake occured. Central Alhambra is built on well-consolidated sediments, so the shaking didn't damage my house much—just a few new cracks. Nearby areas built on looser soils, which shook more as the waves passed through, had much more damage.

It wasn't my first earthquake, just the most memorable. The other well-remembered event occurred nearly three years earlier, April 8, 1968, about 6:30 pm. I was at my parents' home for dinner. I'd just left the table to get something from the pantry, and found myself swaying while haning onto the pantry door. I looked toward the table, and the hanging lamp was swaying. My parents and brothers were quite still, with wide eyes. Then a "SPLOP" against the back door announced that a lot of water from the swimming pool had decided to form a mini-tsunami across the back yard. We were in Arcadia, 205 km from Borrego Mountain, so the motions were smoother and gentler, and no damage resulted (to us).

These two earthquakes were of nearly the same "size", with magnitudes of 6.6 (1971) and 6.5 (1968). Yet because of their different distances, the intensity of motion I experienced was quite different. I could not have remained standing had I been awake during the 1971 quake, but I was able to let go of the pantry door and stand in 1968.

OK, what does "magnitude mean"? The answer has everything to do with Charles Richter, as explained very well in the new biography "Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake; Measure of a Man" by Susan Elizabeth Hough, a USGS seismologist and a fine writer. Her explanation of "the Richter scale" focuses on the work Dr. Richter did to produce it, not on the technical details of its use. So, I'll take a bit of a digression here.

As I mentioned early on, earthquakes range from stupendous catastrophes over huge areas to tiny events hardly distinguishable from footfalls. A small thump you can barely hear with your ear to the ground causes ground "motion" that is measured in microns, while the Sylmar earthquake caused the dirt at the tops of hills to jump several feet into the air, and moved some houses right off their foundations into the yard nearby.

In the 1930s, the standard instrument for recording earthquake motions was the Anderson-Wood Seismograph. These days, seismographs record their data digitally, on tape or CDs...or DVDs I suppose. But the principle is the same. A small motion of a sensor is amplified so you can see it. Instruments intended to record stronger events use much less amplification, or even "de-amplify" the motion. The A-W instrument recorded with a light beam on a piece of film, so you had to develop the film, then you could make measurements. Seismology was smelly work.

Basically, after many measurements of many recordings, and taking the suggestion of his colleague Beno Gutenberg of using logarithms, Richter devised a method of reducing the measurements to a standard form. Thus, an earthquake could eventually be given a single number, a Magnitude, that recorded its strength.

A word about logarithms: they are the way our bodily senses work, so it is good to know how they work. If you have one light on in a room and turn on another of equal brightness, the light is twice as bright, and you can easily tell the difference. If you turn on a third, similar light, it is harder to tell the difference. If you have nine lights on, and turn on a tenth, you may find it hard to see the difference without carefully turning it off and on and off and on again as you look at some object all ten are illuminating. But if you have ten bulbs on and turn on ten more, the difference seems the same as when you had one on and turned on another. In other words, doubling the amount of light causes a similar response in you, regardless of the starting light level.

This allows you to see well in a room lighted by one or two 40-watt fluorescent tubes, yet go right outdoors, blink once or twice, and see quite well in full sunlight, though it is a thousand times as bright. There are ten steps of two that cover a range of 1000:1 (actually 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 1,024), and if you ask people how bright the sunlight is, compared to a well-lit room, many will say, "Ten times." In terms of the number two, ten is the logarithm of 1,024. This is nature's way to compensate for sensations that cover a very large range. But note: heat doesn't work like this, so don't try to make something "ten times hotter" and touch it! (The range of temperature we can endure without damage ranges from about 0 to 60 degrees Celsius, or 32 - 140 deg F. But in terms of absolute temperature in a physics sense, the range is ~270 to ~330 Kelvins, or about 1.2:1).

So, you take a seismogram and measure the biggest wiggle, or half the distance from the biggest plus to the biggest minus (the full-scale range). You take its logarithm. Shall we use powers of two? It turns out we are less sensitive to motion than to light. We feel one "shake" is significantly bigger than another when the motion is ten times greater. We can detect smaller differences, but it takes most folks some thought to decide if a shaking that is three times another is really that much different, as long as both are relatively small. So Richter decided that a magnitude of 4 would be ten times the motion of a magnitude of 3.

Specifically, as measured on an A-W seismograph set for recording quakes at moderate distance, he chose a 1mm wiggle of the light trace as a basis. Then, when the instrument was 100 km from the epicenter (the location directly above the piece of a fault that moved), a 1mm wiggle would be given a magnitude of 3. At that distance, then, a barely-recordable quake, with a wiggle just 0.01mm, would have a magnitude of 1.

How to correct for distance? Nobody knows when and where a quake will occur, so you take the recording from the instrument wherever it may be. My two most memorable quakes occurred 38 and 305 km from where I was when they occurred. Since they were both about 6.5 in magnitude, they'd have caused a wiggle of more than 3 meters on an A-W seismograph. The film is only 0.4 meters wide, so that wouldn't work anyway. But if the amplification setting is 100 times smaller (the machine then set for recording larger ground motions), the wiggle would be 32mm.

Do you know the inverse-square law? Simply put, if you are twice as far from a source of energy, its intensity is one-fourth, and so on. So a standard A-W seismograph at 305 km from the Borrego Mountain earthquake, in my parent's dining room, would have shown a wiggle of 3200/(3.05*3.05) or 340mm. Large, but it does fit on the film. At the lower setting of the instrument, a 3.4mm wiggle would be seen.

There's another factor to look at. Distance can be measured pretty accurately from a seismogram. Earthquakes make two large waves, a P wave and an S wave. P is for Pressure, and causes squeezing and its reverse in the rocks it passes through. It arrives first. S is for Shear or Shaking, and is a side-to-side motion. It arrives later. The factor for figuring distance (in the western U.S.) is 9.7: if the S-P arrival is 10 seconds, the earthquake epicenter is 97 km away.

A little algebra, with the setting of M=3, A=1mm, D=100km, and the inverse-square law, yields the following equation, where "log" is a "common logarithm", to base 10:

M = log(A) + 2log(D) - 1

Now let's apply it. This example of a seismogram from a modern instrument has the following characteristics:

• Biggest wiggle: 245mm
  
• S-P time difference: 39sec (p arrives at t=0)
  
• The distance to the epicenter is thus 39*9.7 = 380km (rounded from 378)
  

M = log(245) + 2log(380) - 1 = 2.4 + 5.1 - 1 = 6.5

The nomograph in this illustration can do these calculations for you. Try it out. Draw a line from 245 on the right to 380 on the left, and read M in the middle scale.

As it was initially defined, Richter's magnitude scale worked in the range from 1 to 6, for earthquakes in southern California. He continued to revise it, particularly as better instruments were developed, and seismologists have not stood still since his death in 1985. Modern, wide-range instruments of great sensitivity allow a magnitude and location (by triangulation from several instruments) to be assigned quickly. However, a measure of total energy, produced by Moment-Magnitude calculations, is now used to assign a final number to an earthquake. While a difference of magnitude means a difference of 10 in distant ground motions, it means a difference of 30 in total energy released. Thus, while a "sixer" causes 100,000 times as much ground motion as a "one" at 100km distance, it has 24.3 million times the energy.

This is because of two effects. Firstly, an earthquake of magnitude 6 causes shaking over an area of a square mile or so that is as great as the earth's surface can support: accelerations of 1-2 g. This is why hilltops can be thrown into the air in quakes like that in 1971. Larger earthquakes have this level of intensity spread out over greater and greater areas, so a "big one" with a magnitude of 8, with 900 times the energy of a "sixer", will devastate an area of a couple thousand square miles, and knock down some stuff over an area even larger. The biggest earthquake recorded, with a magnitude of 9.5 in Chile in 1960 (May 22), devastated towns and cities throughout the country, and in nearby Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. But the ground motions of a 9.5 are not a great deal larger in linear size than those of a 6.5. Ground waves a few meters high seem to be the maximum.

Secondly, when you are too close to a large source of energy, the inverse-square law is not accurate. The fault that ruptured in 1960 offshore of Chile must have been half the length of the country of more, perhaps 2,500 km. If you were on the East coast of Argentina, perhaps 1,000km away, the ends of the fault rupture would be 1,600km distant. It's like trying to measure the brightness of a light bulb when you are two millimeters from the filament. You had to be in China or Europe to get an accurate record! At that distance, the greater size of the fault of a really big quake causes the instrument to record a larger excursion than if the quake were a 6 or so, even though someone near the epicenter of both quakes would find it hard to tell the difference (as she dodges falling masonry!).

Thus, an "instant" measure that indicates 8 really means something closer to 9 when all such factors are taken into account. Well, one can tell I savor the technical details. But the summary of these things occupies just one chapter of Dr. Hough's book. The other eighteen chapters detail the life of Caltech's pre-eminent Mystery Man.

Who was Charles F. Richter? He was a most private man. We are incredibly fortunate that he left all his papers to the Caltech archives. Without those, we'd be limited to the stories told by colleagues and a few neighbors, and those are rather thin on the ground. Without those, we'd never know he was a poet and novelist (unpublished); we'd know little of his frequent treks into the mountains; one might stumble on someone who knew him and his wife Lillian as practicing nudists; never would his relationships within the writing circle, particularly writing women, come to light. Without those, including poems in which he laid bare his soul, it would be hard indeed to determine that he suffered from Asperger's Syndrome.

His closest colleagues all regarded him as an odd sort, an eccentric, a mercurial fellow. Few knew of his breakdown at Stanford the one time he tried to move far from his Los Angeles home. Though he traveled the world—a little, on occasion—he was a persistent homebody. His wife took vacations alone, and he usually hiked alone. Even in Caltech circles he stayed in a narrow circle. He seldom went to the campus proper, staying near his office in the Seismological Lab off campus.

Can you tell that I must be at least halfway into Asperger's myself? I can go on for pages and pages in the vein of the first twenty paragraphs, but I find it hard to discuss the man. Psychologically, there are two big differences I can point to (besides the obvious one that he was a true genius, and I am at best a polymath). I have lived in many places, primarily because my family moved eight times before I moved out. Also, while I, as one AS writer states it, felt "like a Martian among Earthlings", I decided as a teenager to produce the personality I clearly lacked. I deliberately gave over a number of IQ points to "social processing", so I could, with only the smallest time lag, respond as expected in social situations I often didn't understand. It took decades, into my late 40s, before I found, hidden under the artificial personality, that a real one had slowly grown. So, the social integration that takes most folks 15-18 years took me 45-50.

It seems Charlie Richter never had this insight, or never thought it worth the hard work. He was frank to the point of bluntness or rudeness when he wasn't making an effort to be accommodating...and he didn't suffer fools gladly. However, he was perceptive enough to give a fellow a couple tries to prove he was a fool before he whisked him out of his life.

The author seems to believe, and with her I agree, that AS was an asset, giving Richter the focus and relentless energy to do the huge numbers of hand calculations that led to the simple formula I show above (or one much like it)...in 1935, when even mechanical-gear calculators were not to be found! His greatest work was done in a time that "computer" was a job description for a woman paid a little more than a secretary's wage to do pen-and-paper calculations for a scientist. Richter did his own computing.

The formidable memory characteristic of AS was an asset throughout his life. Knowledge is always a salable commodity. In the Caltech community, where knowledge is more valued than among the "great unwashed," Richter would have had to be a lot odder than he was to be unwelcome. Health and mental problems he may have had, but he lived to age 85, and was beloved by those who knew him, an odd duck, but one worth knowing.

Jumbo's underground telephone

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, african elephants

We joke about keeping one ear to the ground. Old Western films show an Indian guide putting an ear down and telling how many and how far away a war party is. As a Geology student, I heard occasional reports of people camping who heard a rattling or banging sound just before feeling the shaking of an earthquake—I guess they were using a rather thin pillow!

Also, as a Geology student, I took the requisite Geophysics course. For a couple of weeks, a bunch of grungy kids tramped about a meadow near campus, laying out geophones and banging a metal plate with a sledge hammer while running a multichannel chart recorder (no digital equipment in 1970). Eventually, most of us figured out that there was a water pipe buried about nine feet down. One or two claimed they could hear the thumps if they got a couple hundred feet away and put their ear to the ground. I reckon they could. None claimed to hear the smaller echo from the pipe.

About ten years ago, Caitlin O'Connell and a couple of colleagues published the first monograph (O'Connell, Arnason, & Hart, 1977 in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) describing African elephants' use of seismic signals, "sound in the ground", to communicate farther than their rumbling voices can carry through the air.

Continued work showed that the gel pads in elephant feet, and others between shoulders and head, resemble the "melon" in dolphin heads, that is used to focus sound and transduce between bone and water or air for better sonic efficiency. Also, elephants have an ear flap that they close when listening "below". To sense ground signals, an elephant usually lifts one forefoot, rises onto the toes of the other, and closes the ear flaps. Sound is then efficiently transmitted through the leg bones to the bones around the ear. With both legs on the ground (on tiptoe), the evidence is pretty strong that the animal can determine direction.

In The Elephant's Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa Dr. O'Connell narrates her studies of elephants and discovery of seismic listening over several field seasons in Namibia beginning in the early 1990s. Good science is a detective story, and this one is first-rate.

The author and her partner (now husband) Tim Rodwell began with a 3-year grant they almost stumbled onto while taking a break in Africa, before beginning PhD work. They were to study elepants in and near the Caprivi Game Park, with the main goal of reducing elephant depredation on the people's crops...and their fatal retaliation. It was during this period that she first noticed the tiptoe listening behavior that led to her discovery.

Between this study, finishing their PhD work, and further studies in Caprivi and at Etosha National Park, they and a number of co-workers gathered great amounts of data on the relationships within elephant family groups, both matriarchal herds and smaller bull "clubs"; learned that elephants recognize voices, by their differing responses to alarm calls, whether they came from "someone they knew" or not; and determined that an alarm call heard only seismically (through the ground) resulted in alertness, but little excitement.

In the midst of it all, it was easy to observe that elephants are as individually different as people. They are playful, moreso as calves, but somewhat at any age. The amount of bull jousting that goes on has a lot to do with how secure the larger bulls feel, having more to do with personality than with brute strength.

Caitlin and Tim have established an educational and fund-raising organization known as Utopia Scientific, and carry on their studies in Africa and at their American campuses.

How would having neighbors change us?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, first contact, SETI

I read only a portion or two of James Gunn's The Listeners in the 1970s, when it appeared piecemeal. It was refreshing to find the whole volume and devour this 35-year-old classic.

If a civilization on another planet were to send a signal we could receive, what would be its content? Some years ago, some folks devised a message in several parts, and put it, part by part, weeks between them, on a web site for all to decipher. It was clever, and many clever people deciphered it at least in part. As it turned out, not some parts of it were amenable to more than one interpretation. Making a completely unambiguous communication of any complexity is hard, and perhaps impossible (remember the old story "To Serve Man", which turned out to be about a cook book).

Jim Gunn has come up with perhaps the best compromise. The message, once the signal is detected, is composed primarily of a hash of early radio transmissions. The content of those transmissions yields a good estimate of the distance to the alien star: 45 light years. But there is more. Each short segment of the hash is followed by a staticky blip. Each blip contains simply several pulses. Once the project workers realize they can be considered an on-off raster pattern, it doesn't take long to produce an image that gives a few clues to the aliens' appearance and number system, plus a few words.

Much of the dramatic tension in the book surrounds first, the apparent futility of the Project before a signal is detected, and the meaning of the message it conveys. Of course, for the novel to go anywhere after this point, the message must be answered with one of our own; and it is, a similar image. Ninety years later, one would expect an answer, and the denouement follows from that answer.

I found myself wondering, would the world really develop such an extended peaceful period after receiving the first alien message? War and chaos are equally likely, particularly once people realize knowledge coming from an alien source will be a valuable resource like any other: something worth fighting for. We are unlikely to unite in the face of The Other until we physically face The Other.

I think the religious response in the novel is too pat. That a religion could be formed around the "Solitarian" perspective seems incredible. More likely, a "Christian" sect would arise who found the idea of aliens to be some kind of attack on the uniqueness of God.

These are minor flaws. As a classic in the field, The Listeners sets the standard others must still meet.

It isn't your car that is out to get you; it is something much bigger...

kw: book reviews, horror, occult, automobiles, highways

I read very little Fear Fiction. For some reason, I was sufficiently intrigued by the cover blurb to give Destinations Unknown by Gary A. Braunbeck a try. He is certainly a compelling writer; I stayed up a bit too late to finish the first story of the three in the book.

In an essay a decade back or so, Orson Scott Card deconstructs Fear Fiction into three genres, based on the time element. Dread is fear of what might happen, a foreboding. Card happens to be master of the unresolved Dread story. Terror is fear incited by awful events witnessed, or suffered by, the story viewpoint. Horror is remembered terror; it is already over, but you can't get over it. This is used to great effect by consecutive terror-horror-(dread-)terror-horror cyclic "slasher" stories. Braunbeck's writing follows the dread-terror-horror sequence, but of these three stories two end with a cycle-breaking resolution.

The first story, "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss", is by far the best and the best-written. It explores the idea, one sure to twig off droves of conspiracy theorists, that auto "accidents" are really "occurrences", somehow proctored by a godlike entity, The Road, assisted by Road People, including the title characters. It's incredibly well done, and introduces a nearly-believable parallel world for us to contemplate.

The other two stories seem to me to be fillers, to get the book up beyond 200 pages ("Ballad" takes 170). The first, "Congestion", puts the reader under the skin of a fat dude with heart troubles trying to drive himself to the emergency room through a traffic jam. The second, "Merge Right", is a grief fantasy, that goes right about where you'd expect a grief story to go if the depths of grief were physically realized.

Defense of the giant grasshoppers

kw: book reviews, science fiction, historical fiction, medieval period, aliens, first contact

Years ago, I read a novella that placed a time-traveling scientist in a medieval village during the 14th century plague. It devolved to a psychological study of the young woman, herself immunized against Yersinia pestis and a host of other ills, becoming the last person alive in the village, finally burying the village priest.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn reminded me of it. I know that this book is an expansion of an earlier novella by Flynn, but I haven't determined if it was the one I read or not. There is no time traveler here, though the cosmological theory developed by one character hints at a way to travel in time.

The basic story, 80% narrative of 14th-Century life and 20% vignettes of the lives of the historians studying the earlier events, is of a starcraft that barely escapes crashing in the Black Forest, but lands damaged. Its insectile inhabitants are, rather astonishingly, welcomed by first one, then two or three of the first humans to locate their landing site. Gradually they become accepted by many, but not all, of the villagers. At the end, the ship is repaired, at least enough to take off, though a successful return to home is not assured. A few aliens remain behind, preferring certain, but slow, death in the German village to the rather significant chance of an infinitely-prolonged dying if the ship gets "stuck" in a space warp. Should their fellows succeed, they plan to return for them.

The aliens cannot gain full nourishment from Earth foods, because their biochemistry requires 21 amino acids, while nearly all Earth life lives with 20. The missing ingredient is never found, and the ship does not return. Rather, everyone dies of plague, except the aliens who die of malnutrition, and the village gains the name Teufelheim (Devil's home), later elided to Eifelheim.

Back in the present, a historian is trying to determine why this location alone, now with the name Eifelheim, was never resettled after being depopulated by plague in 1349. His lover, a physicist, is trying to develop a better model of cosmology than 11-dimensioned string theory. About the time she succeeds, she happens to see a strangely-configured illuminated capital letter in a manuscript the historian is studying, and recognizes that it is a circuit diagram similar to one she had designed to detect signs of her theory's special particles. The manuscript and others were located by a librarian who is trying to seduce the historian; at the end, it seems she might have done so, but that strand is left hanging.

In fact, a number of strands are left hanging, in the rather obvious way that is becoming common—it almost harks back to the cliffhanger endings of Perils of Pauline episodes. While the historian and librarian, with the help of a narrator-colleague, do confirm that the "demons" of certain documents really were aliens, no other subplot is completed. It's no surprise that Flynn wishes to write more books. Ending a novel with no more than a hope of the solution is an unsatisfying way to prompt for a series of sequelae.

Virtual life with real consequences

kw: book reviews, science fiction, near-future, wearable computers, digital infrastructure

The title Rainbows End at first made me wonder if it simply embodied the recent trend toward eliminating apostropes. Then I figured it is a declarative sentence, to which I reply, "Yes, I suppose they do." Later in the book, the author makes the same pair of points, leaving his own reasoning obscure.

Halfway through the fourth chapter, I began to wonder if I'd read this before. I checked prior reviews and found that Chapter 4, titled "Synthetic Serendipity", had appeared in The Year's Best Science Fiction 2004, which I reviewed April 12, 2006.

Vernor Vinge throws ideas at you a bucket full at a time. The core plot is the struggle between a somewhat stereotypical mad medico who wishes to "save" the world—which requires enslaving it—and a global watchdog group, an extension of the Dept. of Homeland Security. This latter agency, still called DHS, wishes to prevent development of a technology called YGMB, for "you gotta believe me," a means of making your dictates simply irresistible.

The environment and setting provide the novel's allure. As near as I can figure, the central protagonist, Robert Gu, having been in high school in 1965—it is implied that was his senior year—is either my same age (60 later this year) or at most 2-3 years younger. At age 75, he places the time frame as 2022, or 2025 at the latest. There are allusions to seminal events "in the teens" that are recent memory to adults, but not to most youngsters, who'd have been too young to remember or not born yet.

Wearable computers have become clothing full of tiny processors and communications nodes linked to special contact lenses, which project images directly on the retina. The environment has become infrastructure, with every item bigger than a ladybug having its own digital tag. Thus, someone on a nature walk can call up a view of the landscape in which every bush, tree, and weed is tagged with botanical information, and taking a second look at any bug or other critter calls up appropriate zoological references.

People build their own world, so a row of suburban bungalows may appear as medieval huts to one, as "McMansions" to another, and hobbit-holes to someone else. People watching anything remotely can appear virtually, to anyone caring to see the virtual viewers. With a landscape full of cameras, you can see in any direction you want, including through the wall that happens to be in front of you (I'd find it hard to avoid walking into that wall, myself, at that point!), or from a treetop or spider burrow. Someone who is "wearing" can call up just about anything imaginable.

Call up how? Not with keystokes or mouse clicks. Your shirt and its sensors collaborate with you to build up a physical vocabulary of gestures and postures, in addition to subvocalized commands. When you've made yourself telepresent in a particular "space", things you say and do are heard and seen by others in that space. To communicate with a smaller audience one employs "sming" or silent messaging.

Highly acclaimed poet Robert Gu, aged 75, has the right genetics to respond almost miraculously to treatments that cure his Alzheimer's dementia and return most of his body to a 17-year-old's. His prostate seems to get stuck in his 50s, though, so he still has to get up a couple times nightly. He also finds that he has lost the ability to create poetry. Oh, he can spin words into rhyme well enough, rhymes that still affect others. But the sharp edge that made him a legend is gone. So is the sharp tongue with which he made himself sincerely hated by all who actually met him, family included.

The plot is complex, with several threads. A central thread is the efforts of the aforementioned medical scientist to keep his research secret. Another is the poet's desire to regain his poet's edge. His granddaughter hopes to help him leapfrog into the mid-21st Century by teaching him to "wear" (the word is never in quotes in the book. You just have to pick it up). He gets good enough to participate in what he thinks will be anti-establishment hijinks, but the plot is ever so much deeper than you can imagine, as he finds himself an unlikely savior of Civilization as We (might) Know It. A fun read.

Getting "eyes" for what you really need

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, spirituality

This'll be briefer than usual. Mark Buchanan's new book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret of More is a wonderful book, but I've been able only to give it a rapid run-through. I'll need to go back and re-read and ponder. This one will stay in my "ready" area.

Mark Buchanan is a Baptist pastor living near Vancouver. Though I am no fan of the pastoral system, I do recognize the value that can result when a man or woman of God must produce regular, inspiring messages for his congregation. The flip side of "90% of everything is junk" is Bradbury's dictum: "Write every day. Finish one story a week. I defy anyone to write 52 bad stories in a row." Meaning at the end of the year you'll have something worth the effort.

I have come to realize that the true "evidence" of the holy Spirit is persistence, or what is called in the New Testament "endurance." Jesus said, "Whoever endures to the end shall be saved," not talking about eternal salvation but rescue from temptation or the world's allure: practical, daily salvation.

Such endurance, such persistence, such perseverance is right in the midst of the author's message. The book is an exposition of the first nine verses of Peter's second Epistle:

Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours:
Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he's nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.

The analogy used to explain the seeming dichotomy—"he has given us everything we need" and "make every effort"—is like delivery day at a building site. You have the land and the plan, and now you have all the materials. It is time to start building. If the plan calls for a hotel, and the materials delivered correspond, then build a hotel, not a bungalow. Don't sell yourself short.

Buchanan's genius is the apt analogy, the telling insight. We are a bundle of contradictions. We need to see. To see the building materials lying ready to hand, and to see the plan showing what goes where, will grow us beyond the contradictions. When Jesus said, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," he meant it. Peter's few sentences, and Mark Buchanan's practical explanations, help us to see and to build.

To explain my title...when our son was a pre-schooler we frequently went rock collecting with a club. The fossil hunts were the best. The first time we went to a quarry, where lots of little shelly fossils were "floating" out of the deposits, the trip leader opened a box to show us the kinds of fossils we could expect to find. He held up one particular brachiopod (similar to a clam, but of an extinct order) and said, "This one is quite rare." Our 4-year-old looked at it, trotted off, and came back in ten minutes with three of them. This sort of thing happened on every trip. Once he saw what the target was, he "had his eyes on" for that pattern, and could always find some. Hidden in Plain Sight helps be "get my eyes on" for the virtues I am, every so slowly, gaining.

The unrevealing of Revelation

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, eschatology, polemics, religion

Just a week ago I reviewed a book specifically confronting the theology and eschatology of the Left Behind books. Here I consider a work with a broader scope: A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization by Jonathan Kirsch. While Kirsch takes issue with the Left Behind books, his target is the apocalyptic phenomenon in general.

The author makes it clear he is not a Bible believer, at least not in any way similar to those who would call themselves "Bible believers." In other words, he is no literalist, and in whatever way he may use the Bible spiritually, he feels free to pick and choose what to trust and what to attribute to human error. Today's Fundamentalists do certainly take their literalism too far, but we must consider that God actually has had a hand in the writing, preservation, collecting, and distribution of the 66 (and perhaps 72) books considered to be the "word of God" by millions worldwide.

The thesis is this: Revelation is failed prophecy. It uses metaphorical language to describe current events and the writer's less-than-pious revenge fantasies. Now, since generation after generation has passed away and the world has "failed to end on time," Bible believing Christians, particularly literalists, must cope with this: either admit that its predictions are false, spiritualize all meaning out of them, or devise an eschatological theory that lets time be very, very flexible in God's hands.

There is actually strong support for the idea that certain periods of time "don't count" on God's calendar. The clearest example is the statement in 1 Kings 6:1, that the period from the Exodus to the Kingdom was 480 years. If you add up all the times in the historical books that go before, you find 612 years, and this is the period Josephus also used. However, during the time of the Judges, if you add up the times that the Midianites and others ruled over the Israelites, you get 132 years. 612-132=480. Many conclude that God's clock doesn't run when Israel is subject to others. It seems the most logical explanation. Such considerations are ignored by Kirsch, and maybe he knows nothing of them.

The chapters of the book outline the history of Revelation, from the time of its writing to the present day. He bases much on Augustine's dichotomy: Some read Revelation "carnally", some "spiritually". The writer, probably John the son of Zebedee (though Kirsch strongly disputes this), announced at the outset that Jesus "made it known by signs" (in KJV, "signified it"). Kirsch rightly emphasizes this term. I recall one speaker saying, "Let's not be too busy about counting heads or toes (the latter referring to Nebuchadnezzar's dream), but about how we are to live."

Like many others, the author expresses surprise and disgust at a book about God's vengeance. Nearly every other part of the New Testament emphasizes God's goodness, love, and caring. Yet this same God said in Deuteronomy 32:35 "Vengeance is mine and so is retribution", which Paul quoted when he wrote in Romans 12:19. Without Revelation and a few shorter passages in Daniel and Zechariah, we gain no insight into when and how He will avenge. When God is love, He is really loving, and when He is severe, He is really severe! Let us realize that, just as we are complex, God is more complex and has ranges of emotion we cannot imagine.

The bulk History of the End is a detailed survey of the various foibles of people who have read Revelation "carnally". The modern focus that most exercises the author is the popularity of the "Left Behind" series of books, and the recent elevation to office of four "born again" Presidents in succession, at least three of whom clearly declared their belief that we are living in "the end times."

Revelation seems to have become a peculiarly American phenomenon. While European christendom was being lulled to sleep, spiritually, in the 19th and 20th Centuries, American Christians have increasingly focused popular theology in the horror stories that result from a too-literal reading. Two groups emerged by the late 19th Century. Many people, millennialist and fundamentalist, took an almost passive stance toward society except for their duty to "preach salvation to a doomed world." They saw no value in social "improvement".

Others, considering the millennium to refer to an earthly condition God's people might bring about, agitated against slavery and for humane social works. Up until 1914, they thought they were making good progress, but the "war to end all wars" disabused them of that notion, and the second great War less than a generation later pretty much killed that idea off...for a time. We actually see a revived "social gospel" these days, in spite of the threat from resurgent Islam; these people think they can reason with the insane.

What do I think? I am of the flexible-timeline persuasion. Those parts of Revelation that seem most amenable to literal interpretation, wedded with parts of Daniel, certain things Paul and the Evangelists wrote, and the last part of Zechariah, produce this rough outline:

• The first four seals have likely been opened.
  
• The world gets worse and worse. Finally, God is ready to reply to the martyrs' call for vengeance.
  
• A major European or Euro-African coalition arises.
  
• Its leader makes a treaty with Israel, with a 7-year duration. Perhaps it includes permission to erect a Temple. This leader, whether a person or a coalition, we can call the Beast (nowhere is Antichrist used in Revelation).
  
• It is most likely that the Beast is a person, a man, whose origin is somewhere in the Macedonia-Bulgaria region. He is not a Jew.
  
• Natural disasters are supplemented, then replaced, by disasters that beggar the imagination. The worst ones, though, do not exceed "one third", which could have various meanings.
  
• Eventually, the Beast breaks the treaty and attempts to subjugate Israel and their religion. Three and a half years have passed.
  
• The first "taking away" (AKA rapture) of "those who are ready" occurs. The timing is uncertain, whether this is before the prior item, or even if they are simultaneous.
  
• There may be two literal prophets speaking in Jerusalem from this point on. About this time, an angel preaches "the eternal gospel." It is according to this gospel that the people remaining alive at the end are judged.
  
• Disasters now take on a supernatural element, and spread to worldwide scope. One is a long drought. Euphrates dries up.
  
• Mongolia is the only possible source of 200 million horsemen, if these are indeed a literal cavalry. Their progress toward Palestine takes about 13 months (a day, a week, a month, and a year).
  
• Other armies also gather to attack. It is not clear whether their target is the Jewish people or the Beast.
  
• The two prophets are killed, to arise and ascend 3.5 days later. Their ascension should be just after the second "taking away" of the rest of the believers, the one that occurs "at the last trumpet".
  
• The final battle follows. Christ intervenes. I don't think the horse or the sword-tongue are literal, but God can do anything...
  
• Supposing the 1260 days refers to the period just ended, the 1290 and 1335 days mentioned by Daniel probably indicate that cleaning up the mess from the battle takes thirty days in Jerusalem and 75 days elsewhere. Then the thousand-year kingdom begins.
  
• Just before the cleaning-up period, Christ will judge those who didn't participate in the battle (all the soldiers are condemned), according to the "eternal gospel." This is the "sheep and goats" judgment referred to in Matthew 25. Many, the sheep, will have secretly defied the Beast and helped the persecuted Christians and Jews during the last three-plus years. For the persecuted ones, this period was their chance to finish "getting ready". Most Christians hate this idea...they don't want to chance being there.
  

It may be that every one of these points has a spiritual applicaition only. That is OK, it is God's responsibility only. But in the light of God's evident desire to destroy "the destroyers of the earth" at least some of these events are probably literal.

It is instructive to see how the eschatology I've been taught is viewed by various "outsiders". These are things we must not insist on. Eschatological doctrine is the most divisive kind. Let us remember that in Jesus' longest prayer (John 17), he prayed three times "that they all may be one." Until that is fulfilled, the rest is moot.

The other half of the apostolic commission

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, history

What is an apostle? To condense the first two chapters of The Normal Christian Church Life by Watchman Nee:

• Jesus, the "apostle and high priest whom we confess" (Heb 3:1) is the unique Apostle sent by the Father.
  
• Jesus appointed twelve of his disciples and called them apostles (Matt 10:2, Mark 3:13, Luke 6:13). These were the apostles of the Son; later Judas was replaced by Matthias (Acts 1:26).
  
• Beginning with Saul of Tarsus and Barnabas (Acts 13:1-4; 14:14), the Holy Spirit chose apostles. Others include Silas who replaced Barnabas as Paul's companion (1 Thes 1:1; 2:7) and Timothy (same verses), and Andronicus and Junia (Rom 16:7).
  
• The term apostle is also used of those sent by churches for more specific missions, such as Epaphroditus (Phil 2:25), sent by the church in Philippi with supplies and support for Paul in prison.
  
• The apostles of the Son are a closed group of twelve, now including Matthias.
  
• The Spirit continues appointing and sending apostles, though the common practice is now to call them missionaries. The Latinate term missionary is simply a translation from the Greek word apostolos.

The first time I read through the New Testament I noticed Andronicus and Junia in Romans 16:7, and simply concluded they were a husband-and-wife team that worked with Paul, as did Prisca and Aquila. I took quite literally that "there is no more...male nor female" (Gal 3:28) as far as God's work us concerned. Later I was for a time tainted with the "conservative" (reactionary, to tell the truth) notion that women ought not teach. Two things happened.

I had gotten into the habit of thinking, and occasionally saying, that the Bible allowed women to work in any way except as an elder or apostle. Later I realized that Prisca and her husband did apostles' work, and she was seemingly in the lead; maybe teaching while he made the tents. Then I saw Romans 16:7 more clearly, that Andronicus and Junia were "outstanding among the apostles", that is, outstanding apostles...both of them. Luckily I didn't first read the NIV or another corrupted version that "male-ifies" her name to Junias. I was reading the AV (KJV), and fortunately that, the "21st Century KJV" and the Recovery Version all have it right: Junia.

Secondly, in the early 1990s many friends went to Russia and Eastern Europe after the break up of the USSR, as missionaries. Both male and female, married couples and singles, all ages (25 and older). One woman I'd known many years, still single in her early 40s, went to the Ukraine, learned the language, and planted herself there in a suburb of Kiev. In 1999 I met her at a church conference, with several Ukrainian women, for whom she was interpreting. Sometimes spiritual senses take over our natural senses: she smelled holy. I knew I was in the presence of an apostle, and perhaps one or more of her companions were apostles in training...or in fact.

As a side note, God graciously, over the same period of time, put my wife and me in contact with a church consisting only of women. One of them stayed at our home a few days. Most were married, but none of their husbands was willing to attend meetings or otherwise be involved in the church life. Several were unbelievers. Later, some of the men began attending, and other families were added, but the women who'd been caring for the church during more than a decade already were not about to cede leadership to the less-experienced, and formerly uncaring, men. Few of my fellow believers are happy to see female elders, but I for one am not bothered, rather I am happy.

Imagine my joy to find a book that sheds a welcome light on Junia: The Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth About Junia by Rena Pederson. The author, a committed Christian but professional skeptic (a journalist), devoted much of her time and quite a bit of cash over several years to strip away the layers of historical obscurity and male revisionism, to find the real Junia.

Early in her book, Ms Pederson quotes Jill Briscoe: "Men of quality are not threatened by women of equality". She herself follows to say that it "may be easier to say than to do." (p. 82) This cuts to the root of the matter. Had Paul written "Andronicus and Junia, who are outstanding servants of God", nobody would be bothered that Junia is female. Any who thinks she might have worked as an apostle would be free to do so, and those who preferred to think of her as an outstanding children's meeting teacher could content themselves with that (puerile) idea. Ambiguous words like "servant" allow such mental laxity. But because she and Andronicus are clearly designated apostles, and outstanding ones at that, once reactionary conservatism took over the church, eventually (by the 13th Century) she was written out of existence.

More than half of the English translations of the Bible still in print have "Junias", a male name. This in spite of the fact that no man in all the corpus of contemporary Greek writing was ever named Junias, while Junia is rather common. It is a first-name version of the family name Junius, sort of like Lindsey as a first name (I have Lindsey ancestors, and a close friend of my younger years was a girl named Lindsey).

Why would it be so "unimaginable" for a woman to be an apostle? Blame it on the way Christendom developed. The strong Greek element that gradually took over the philosophically-minded clerics, once a hierarchy had built up, was quite misgynistic. Pederson writes, "The Greeks saw female sexuality as a threat that had to be controlled, subordinated, and restricted. The Roman Christians carried on that viewpoint." (p. 147)

I might add that the pagan "mysteries" were mainly involved with sexuality rituals, which had two purposes: to ritually ensure fertility of crops and livestock, and to introduce sex in a social setting that reduced its power over the "young and impressionable". Modern engagement and marriage rituals, including the sexually-charged play (garters, thrown flowers, etc.) at "receptions", are a holdover of pagan fertility rituals intended to strengthen family cohesion.

Why do we carry such misogyny with us, still in the 21st Century? In a word, men are afraid of women, or more accurately, they are afraid of their reactions to women. I'll admit it; I am afraid of my reactions. Until last year, I was supervised by a bubbly, voluptuous blonde half my age. You can bet I had to struggle to remain calm in her presence. It is easier now, working for a nice young man just a year or two older than the blonde; I have no sexual attraction to him whatever (oh, man what would I do if I were bisexual?!?). We are sexual beings. It colors every aspect of our lives. I've known but one man who seemingly had no sexual feelings for male or female, and it may be he is just a good actor. Misogyny may be one way to reduce the danger of sex in public life, but it is a particularly damaging one. Clear-headed self-control is ever so much better.

The author visited Italy several times, to see historical sites contemporary with Junia's Rome and learn what life might have been like for her as a church leader in 65 AD...and how she might have been martyred, for it is likely that she was. She visited and interviewed religious leaders and teachers, finding a surprising level of acceptance of Junia as a female apostle. There was considerable discussion of the Romans verse and early writings.

In the process, she found herself up against the problem of origins. The oldest manuscripts we have were copied from older—now lost—manuscripts, 250-300 years after Paul wrote Romans. She realized as she hadn't been before how troublesome it can be to determine what Paul, Mark, Luke or anyone actually wrote. Among the 5,600 New Testament manuscripts we have older than 14th Century, there are a third of a million "variants", places where one manuscript differs from others on a word, a phrase, or perhaps just an accent.

I have at my side a wonderful volume, "A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament" by Bruce M. Metzger. It lists all the important variants. Most are innocuous, such as a half dozen manuscripts that in Stephen's testimony in Acts 7, have him say "your fathers" rather than "our fathers", referring to the Patriarchs (Acts 7:39). More serious are cases like the verses after Mark 16:8 that do not appear in our oldest manuscripts.

She concludes in her chapter "Which Bible Can You Believe" that "You can believe that scripture, overall, is inspired by God, as I do, but leave room for the possibility that translators and printers make mistakes." (p. 171) The situation is particularly clear when you have multiple versions of an event, such as the healing of the blind man near Jericho.

In Matthew's account (20:29-34), it occurs as Jesus is leaving Jericho, and he heals two blind men. Mark (10:46-52) also has Jesus leaving Jericho, and one blind man named Bartimaeus is healed. Luke (18:35-43) reports that as Jesus was approaching Jericho, he heals one blind man. He follows with the story of Zacchaeus, which the other Gospels do not have.

There are two seeming contradictions to clear up: when did this occur, and how many were healed? The latter point is easier. Matthew was an accountant, the kind of person to notice the second blind man, who was otherwise overshadowed by his more vocal companion. The "when" could be a bit more of a problem, but let us consider this difference in the persons: Matthew and Peter (reported by Mark) were both eye-witnesses, who noticed different things, but knew when an event happened in the flow of events. Luke gained his knowledge by interviewing witnesses, years later. He probably didn't have a complete copy of Mark's Gospel to help. It is likely that he got the stories of the blind man and of Zacchaeus from the same person on two occasions, someone who didn't recall, didn't mention, which came first, so Luke recorded them in the order he received them.

Ms Pederson presents a fascinating analysis of the winding path that Junia/Junias has followed through the ages, until today, nearly all of the most recent translations have Junia, following the universal testimony of Greek manuscripts and of all commentators of the first eight or ten centuries of the Christian era.

Near the end of her pilgrimage, the author visited, on three occasions, the little church named for Prisca, in Rome. On her final visit, she arrived an hour early for the Mass (daylight savings time fooled her). When the people arrived, she sat among a living congregation of families, with altar boys and altar girls, with mothers and fathers herding their children together, and found that, in seeking for Junia, Junia had found her.

Readers in a FOG

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philosophy, philosophy of science

Let us briefly discuss the Gunning Fog Index. It measures the level of education one needs to fully comprehend a document. Beginning with a sample of at least 100 words (200-300 is better), one counts three things: the number of words, the number of "hard" words, and the number of sentences. "Hard" words are words of three or more syllables except proper names and words whose third syllable is an inflection such as the "-ly" in "vividly" or "-er" in "reformer".

From the three counts, calculate (1) Number of words per sentence (Sw), and (2) percent of hard words (Hw). For example, we might find 187 words, 19 hard words, and 12 sentences. Sw = 187/12 = 15.6; Hw = 100*19/187 = 10.2. Then calculate 0.4*(Sw+Hw); for the example Fog = 0.4*(15.6+10.2) = 10.3. This means someone who finished the 10th grade ought to have no trouble reading the document...or at least that sample.

Few popular texts have a Fog Index greater than 10. Most "newspaperese" is found to be in the range 7-9, though online technical news such as I read from CNet and Yahoo can range from 12 to 16. Comic book captions (there is little other text) fall in the range 3 to 6 (Just for the record, my first paragraph above has a Fog Index of 8.5; if "vividly" and "reformer" are counted as "hard" words, it is instead 9.5).

What does a number like 16 mean? On the face of it, it means you'd find it hard to read unless you've completed a BA or BS in college. However, an interested amateur with a high school education and several years work or hobby experience will be able to read "tougher" text than just education might indicate.

Now, imagine getting a book in hand, and finding that the Fog Index is more than 30! When I began to (attempt to) read Exceeding Our Grasp: Science History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives by P. Kyle Stanford, I found myself quite in a fog. I checked a few paragraphs in the first couple of chapters. Their Fog Indices ranged from 27 to 39!

Guess what...I ain't reading this book! I have fourteen years of college and graduate school. Peter Gunning would tell me I ought to be able to handle text that "fogs out" at 26. What does it take for text to attain a Fog Index of 39? About 300 words in four sentences (Sw = 75), and almost 25% hard words (that's more than 70 words such as "unrepresentative", "idiosyncrasy", "underdetermination", and "nonskeptical"). I find nearly every sentence to be sufficiently difficult to parse (I can't recall the antecendent when I get to the end of a 90-word sentence) that I simply don't have enough years left in my life to devote to comprehend the text in full. My opinion is that this is the worst-written technical treatise I've ever encountered.

With a little hopping around and puzzling out sections here and there, I can summarize the thesis thus: "Underdetermination of Theories" means that the evidence does not admit of any single, comprehensive theory, of anything. Many philosophers of science posit that, for any accepted theory, such as General Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics, or Darwinian Natural Selection, another theory could be found that explains all known phenomena and makes the same predictions. They just don't say how hard it will be to find that new theory.

The enormous body work that Einstein, Lorentz, and others did to produce first Special Relativity then General Relativity, to replace Newtonian Mechanics, indicates that "how hard" is often "almost impossible". Regardless, Dr. Stanford is a leader among the anti-Realists in scientific philosophy. He points out that Maxwell's equations were produced based on the Ether model of electromagnetic propagation. He neglects to say that the genius of Maxwell was to produce a theory sufficiently robust that the overturning of Ether didn't invalidate his work. Just to say this at a Fog Index of 1: I don't believe him. Should he reply that I don't understand, I'd reply the onus is on him to write readable text.

I foresee primarily libraries obtaining the book, and few individuals. People who succeed in reading it will be those who are already conversant in the field. The opaque diction will minimize the number of non-philosophers whom he could reach were he a better writer.

Biblical snake oil...on both sides

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, eschatology, polemics

When I saw the book's title, The New Brothers Grimm and their Left Behind Fairy Tales, I thought at first the subject was literary and historical, perhaps something to do with lost or lesser known tales by the Grimms. Then I saw the cover illustration, a cut from "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" by Dürer.

David T. Morgan, a retired professor of history with a religious bent, is the latest to take on the Left Behind mythology of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. For any who don't know, the series is a fictional portrayal of the last seven years of this age, based on "premillenial dispensationalism", the belief system that this age (this "dispensation") will end with a 7-year period of terrible judgments, followed by a thousand-year earthly kingdom under Christ (the "millenium").

There is pretty good support in the Bible for this as a general view, but the details are rather fuzzy. Dr. Morgan takes the view that the theological system itself, and the specific predictions made on that basis, are "spiritual snake oil". He is at least partly right.

I wish he were a better expositor. He is a good historian, but less adept as a theologian. Dispensational theology is clearly the best way to understand the Bible, but there are numerous versions, and many overdo the point. For example, the Scofield system, with seven "dispensations", is useful but overly-detailed. One must stretch to make one's point. The simplest way to divide up history is based on Romans 5:14a and 17b: "Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses,...how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life".

Focus on "death reigned from Adam to Moses" and "those [with] grace...reign in life". The first phrase refers to the time before the Law, the second to the time since the Cross, which brought in Grace. There is thus a third period of time, from Moses until Christ. We can call these the Age before Law, the Age of Law, and the Age of Grace. If the promise of a thousand-year kingdom is literal, that is a fourth age, the Age of the Kingdom. Thus, four time periods.

The term "dispensation" is one way to translate a Greek word usually translated "economy". It refers to the definition of the word: "to dispense scarce resources". Dispensing of resources. That is Economy. The roots of the word mean "law of the home" or "...of the household", so God's economy is how God runs his "house".

What is God's house today? It is the church. What was it from Moses' time to the coming of Christ? The nation of Israel, focused on the temple. What was it prior to Moses? It was those people who desired to serve God, such as Adam, Noah, and Abraham. God spent four hundred years producing a corporate "people of God" from the descendants of Abraham's grandson Jacob/Israel, but prior to their production of the tabernacle, God's house was Moses' tent.

Such a view helps one when choosing how to apply the Bible, and how to understand how it applies to today's people of God, both Jews and Christians.

Dr. Morgan clearly thinks any sort of dispensational view is hogwash. He appears to follow Protestant theology, which makes no useful distinction between Old and New Testament truth. I guess he's never read Hebrews, for that is its primary subject. He also frequently protests against God's judgments, often in very disparaging language. I agree that the authors of Left Behind are much too bloodthirsty, but we must remember, when God is loving, He is very loving, but when He is severe, He is very severe. Morgan's view of God is based on unmingled sentimentality.

The book is marred throughout by a sarcastic, derisive tone. Harsh irony seems to be the gentlest weapon in the authors's arsenal. He exposes many clear errors made by "the New Brothers Grimm" as he calls LaHaye and Jenkins. He is right that the books are more fantasy than anything else. However, I am embarrassed by him as an purported expositor of Christian faith.

It is a pity. We need clear analysis of Left Behind and its errors, both theological, historical, and moral. Dr. Morgan's diatribe doesn't cut it.

Coda: A few things come to mind, as I consider Left Behind series, which I've read in its entirety.

• The "taking away", too often called "the Rapture", and wrongly so, must be understood according to Jesus's word, "I come as a thief." Couple this with God's righteousness: there will be no "unmanned vehicles", no pilotless aircraft, no surgeons snatched from the operating table. Christ will gather His precious ones in secret. I expect Him to take his time, stealing His lovers away like an elopement, not some magical vanishing act. There is no manifested, visible "coming of the Lord" until much later. And as to timing, it will occur primarily "at the last trump", the seventh trumpet near the end of the "tribulation" period, however that transpires. Some are promised to be "taken from the hour of trial." This most likely refers to an early "taking".
  
• Subpoint: harvesting in biblical times was in stages; firstfruits, general harvest, and gleaning. The Revelation uses harvesting terms, so it is logical that the taking away occurs in stages. Certainly the two witnesses that die in Jerusalem, lie rotting for three days, then arise and ascend, are taken away at a different time from others.
  
• The word Rapture comes from Latin raptus, meaning theft or kidnapping (it was used for both). Its meaning has been mightily changes since the early Brethren coined the term in the 1820s. By the way, the leading expositors were JN Darby and BW Newton; both were part right, part wrong. The two disagreed, and excommunicated one another, but a proper understanding is a synthesis of both their teachings.
  
• The Beast of Revelation is nowhere called Antichrist. Those who teach that Jesus is not divine, or that he is inferior to God, are called antichrists, but only by John in his Epistles. You'd think, if he wanted to use that word for the Beast, he'd have done so, since he coined the word. That Beast is some kind of Caesar, and is probably the one called "the man of sin" by Paul, writing to the Thessalonians.
  
• The frequent use of 216 in Left Behind books is never explained by their authors, nor by Morgan. It is the cube of six, that is, 6x6x6. Clever, but too clever by half.
  
• The Left Behind books contain much too much derring-do, more than I could stomach. God doesn't need this kind of trashy behavior from His children.
  
• The "kingdom of the Beast" is described in a way that points to Europe, or Europe plus Palestine and North Africa, as the limits of its sovereignty. It is never stated that the Beast rules the whole earth. Rather, he pursues continual warfare with nations that remain outside his kingdom.
  
• It is a very difficult puzzle to determine which prophetic passages in Daniel, Zechariah, and other Old Testament books refer to events found in Revelation. In particular, which verses might refer to the Beast, such as whether he is also the "little horn"; and which refer to Antiochus IV; which to Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem and was later Titus Caesar; and which to other wicked kings God addresses with symbolic language. It is likely that all commentators have at least a few mistaken attributions.
  
• Is there anyone out there willing to allow God the right to surprise you? It was Darby who first wrote clearly that "prophecy is given, not so that we may prophesy, but that we may recognize events prophesied when they transpire, and act according to their warnings." (My paraphrase; I don't recall the exact quote.)
  
• Do you think you have it right, cover to cover? I regard doctrinal fixity to be a deadly disease. God pity us!

All too often, the Ocean wins

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, waves, ship design

I know nearly nothing about sailing or cruising, and have only a very amateurish body-surfer's acquaintance with waves. I don't think I've ever been more than a mile from shore, except on one ferry ride from Kobe to Tokushima, Japan. Thus, I was quite interested to read Extreme Waves by Craig B. Smith.

A lifelong sailor and student of the sea, a highly respected engineer, particularly of marine engineering, Smith has not just the experience, but the access to professional and governmental sources, to present a highly readable and informative account of the four kinds of extra-large waves, and the conditions that spawn them.

Large storms on large seas produce large waves. Statistically, a few of these will be two or three times as large (with as much as ten times the energy) as the "significant wave height", defined as the average of the largest one-third of waves in a Rayleigh distribution. Thus, a storm with winds of 50 knots (58 mph) will, over a time of two or three days, if it has a long "fetch" of a thousand miles or more, produce waves whose significant height is 50 feet or more. The "expected maximum" height, exceeded by fewer than one percent of the waves, is 99 feet, but a very few waves over 100 feet can be expected to occur. Note that this is quite a bit less than the winds of a hurricane, which exceed 64 knots (74 mph).

Tsunami were suddenly much in the news since the day after Christmas, 2004, when a series of huge tsunami took nearly 300,000 lives in the Sumatra-Thailand area of the Indian ocean. These waves are triggered when an undersea earthquake or landslide causes a sudden shift of a few cubic miles of seawater. The Sumatra earthquake of 2004 ruptured along a thrust fault 170 miles long, suddenly lifting a large area as much as twenty feet. A long swell raced outward at 300+ knots, and its interaction with sloping beaches pushed up waves that ran up 200 feet above sea level in some places, and carried objects far inland, over ridges and structures fifty and more feet high. One hotel situated on a "safe" ledge fifty feet above high tide was demolished.

Confused seas result from the interaction of storm waves. Two storms within a few hundred miles of one another, each producing waves whose significant height is forty feet or so, will interact at distances of a thousand miles or more to produce a confused sea, with waves from two directions leading to a choppy sea. Some waves will cancel each other out, while others will add together, producing waves of eighty or more feet...perhaps under a blue sky!

Finally, rogue waves can arise out of nowhere, it seems; actually they also result from the interaction of multiple wave trains. Modern radar measurements from satellites show that these are more numerous than once thought.

From all these sources, there are just a handful of reports of actual measurements of waves exceeding 100 feet, and one "post-mortem" measurement, based on a run-up of 1,700 feet (!) that indicates the wave(s) responsible exceeded 500 feet...this was in 1958, in Alaska.

The second message of the book is the human and economic toll of such waves. I was surprised to learn that several large ships are lost every week! Of tens of thousands of cargo ships in use, it seems we need to build about a thousand new ones every year, just to keep up with founderings and sinkings.

The author has numerous descriptions of the ways large waves overturn, break up, or swamp ships, even supertankers and 'super Panamax' ships, those too big to go through the Panama Canal, which must then traverse the most dangerous waters north of Antarctica, to get around South America. He ends the book with a call for better design, in a time of increasing "false economics" of shaving ship design. Deep-sea sailing is seen to be riskier than coal mining or warfare, often thought to be the most dangerous professions. Sadly, it is getting riskier, not less, because of too great a focus on the 'bottom line' in this global economy. We're consuming the blood of sailors to buy our fruit from Argentina and our shoes from Malaysia.

Junk politics getting junkier, a small example

kw: opinion, news, politics

I just saw this blurb on an online news article:

Top Democratics and Republicans say they prefer oversight, rather than repealing part of Patriot Act used by FBI for illegal monitoring.

Let's think about that. If it is illegal, there is no law that allows it. If the Patriot Act is law (it is), and specifies that it may be done, it isn't illegal. It's legal until that law is repealed. The blurb is an oxymoron.

My big dog can outrun your little dog

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, scaling

Item: A nice 4-m yacht, under full sail across a brisk wind, leaps along, dashing merrily amidst the spume. It's really fast! But should it run parallel to a 300-passenger liner, the big ship will steadily, grandly leave it in the spray.

Item: A mouse can live four to five years. In that time its heart beats at most two billion times. A medium-sized pet dog can live fifteen to eighteen years, and its heart beats a billion to 1.3 billion times. Humans are said to experience two billion heartbeats, seldom more; at 80 beats per minute, or 42 million per year, that's only 48 years, so the two billion limit is obviously off by a factor of about two, even for folks with a slower heart. But the funny thing is, how can the longevity of a mouse's heart, in total beats, be anywhere close to that of a human's, when the human is sixty times as long and weighs 2,000 to 3,000 times as much?

Item: The walking speed, for animals that walk, and the running speed, for animals that run, depends on only two things: whether two or four legs (four is faster), and how long it is from hip or shoulder to toe. Interestingly, the variation in walking speeds is much greater than the variation in running speed.

A most interesting Item: The attribute that correlates most closely to life span is the weight of the brain. A tiny shrew with a 1-gram brain lives 2-3 years; an small wildcat with a 50-gram brain lives about fifteen years (in a zoo, much less in the wild); and an elephant with a 7-kg (7000-gram) brain lives at least sixty years, and we don't know how long one could live if its teeth didn't wear out at that age. Oddly, a human with brain weight of 1.2 to 1.6 kg, is above the trend, living 80-110 years (the trend predicts 40-50). The shrew-wildcat-elephant trend, appropriately crunched, yields an allometric exponent near 0.4; Yrs Wbrain^0.4, which means the brain has to be more than five times heavier for a doubling of life span. A good rough guide.

Where'd all this come from? John Tyler Bonner, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, has studied scaling in plants and animals all his life, and recently written Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to......Blue Whales. I distilled the Items from his book, all except the first, which I threw in to illustrate that scaling affects everything, not just living creatures.

The book is built around five "size rules":

• Strength varies with size.
  
• Rates of gas and food ingestion vary with size, because of lung and digestive membrane scaling.
  
• Complexity varies with size.
  
• Metabolism and other life process rates vary with size.
  
• Abundance of individuals varies with size.

Dr. Bonner's key message is that all these trends are governed by the principle of allometry, that changes in size are accompanied by changes in proportion. Thus, a baby's head is about a third of its body length, while a typical adult's head is one-seventh or one-eighth the total height (fashion models are selected from rare cases of extra-small heads, as small as one-tenth the total height, as long as their other proportions are pleasing).

A less-obvious allometric trend is that very tall persons have thicker limbs, in proportion to their size, than very small, yet otherwise "normal-looking" midgets. If you take a photo of a basketball player and a non-dwarfed stage midget, the midget looks skinnier, with twiggy arms and legs. That's because weight increases as the cube of length, but strength (muscle or bone cross-sectional area) increases only as the square of length:

Suppose a five-foot-tall young girl weighs 90 pounds, a normal weight for that height. If every proportion is increased by 6/5 so she is six feet tall, the cube of 6/5 is 1.728, so she'd weigh 155 pounds. That's thin enough to be almost unhealthy; a more normal weight for a six-foot young woman is 175 pounds. Let's consider their relative strength, by looking at the leg just above the ankle, where it is thinnest. Suppose at five feet, the cross section is about three square inches (the leg diameter is close to two inches). Then at six feet, the diameter is just under 2.35 inches, and the cross sectional area is 4.32 sq. in. That's 1.44 times the 3 sq. in. from before, because the square of 6/5 is 1.44.

Here is the important fact here: when standing on one leg, the 90-pound 5-footer is putting a stress of 30 pounds per sq. in. (psi) on that part of the leg. When the 155-pound 6-footer stands on one leg, the stress is 36 psi. The extra factor of 6/5 showed up as extra stress. This isn't much difference, but suppose we "blow up" the poor girl to thirty feet tall, with all the same proportions. Then the stress would be 180 psi, which is nearly enough to break the leg bone.

Going back to the six-footer: I wrote above that a more normal weight would be 175 pounds. She needs stronger legs to bear her weight with the same safety factor, so we want a stress of 30 psi. That requires 5.8 sq. in., or a diameter of 2.73 inches. This is 1.4 times the ankle diameter for the five-foot girl, which explains why taller people must be extra-wide.

That's just one of the five size rules. The author develops each one, in much simpler terms than I(!), making this a very informative and enjoyable book.

Still lost? (yawn)

kw: book reviews, essays, collections, popular series

I watch so little TV that I don't think I've seen more than one episode of any of the popular series, and few enough even then. I watch AFV when I can—it's my laugh therapy—, a little news, and an occasional sports event with my son. I avoid dramas and dramatic series: I don't like having my emotions messed with. They are sufficiently messed up already! (I wonder if other Bipolar folks watch less TV than ordinary.)

So, Getting Lost was my wildcard book, when I saw it on the "new" shelf at the library. I haven't seen a single episode. The full title is Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage, and Starting Over in J. J. Abram's Lost, and it is edited by Orson Scott Card, one of my favorite writers of SF (In this case, that means Social Fiction: group and personal psychology in a future or fantasy setting), even though his themes come from Mormon history and Mormon mythology (Alvin Maker is just Joseph Smith redux).

Reading the essays, I realized, "These folks are really into it!" I didn't read the final chapter, one-third of the volume, which is a detailed glossary and character study of the series. Are you into Lost? Get the book for that chapter alone.

The essays bring up some fascinating insights: TV Series as replacements for the serial novels that made Dickens and Doyle famous; Lost in particular as a modern Canterbury Tales (quite a good insight, really); explorations of leadership, a kind of beyond-Secrets-of-Attilla manual. Well!

I remember having the insight (and perhaps I wrote about it, I don't recall) that TV nearly killed of live attendance at race tracks, and that TV plus legal off-track betting will almost surely do so. TV is also killing off many kinds of reading. Why buy Analog or Omni when you can watch the SciFi channel? Simply apply Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is junk) as a filter, and you'll come across an idea worth thinking about every day or so. Well...YOU could. I won't! I am a reader.

Anyway, I am much less enamored of this book than a dedicated Lost watcher is likely to be. The writing is superb, and the ideas are stimulating.

The glove on the gearshift

kw: experiences, ideas

One consequence of my hand operation is wearing a brace at least part of the time, during my convalescence. I find that could be months. This leads to curious circumstances.

This cold morning, the first day I got to drive myself to work in 18 days, I found the <20°F steering wheel and gearshift too cold to hold without gloves. But with the brace on, I couldn't put a glove on my right hand. I've long since got used to keeping my right hand in my lap and steering with the left, after two years of pain and therapy that led up to the surgery. But my car is stick shift, five-on-the-floor (my wife's car also). I can't do all that shifting with my left hand (ever tried?).

It didn't take me long to realize the glove for my right hand could still work, on the gearshift lever! So that's how I drove to work. It's good to know the old neurons can still think outside the box on occasion.

Do you dare eat mindfully?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, farming, hunting, gathering, cooking, industrial agriculture, organic agriculture, polemics

When I can't easily categorize a book, I know I am on to something good. The library classification is (DD) 394.12: Culture:Food:History, which goes to show how much they know.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan is chronicle, psychological journal, history, exposé, and thanksgiving paean all in one.

What is the omnivore's dilemma? In two parts: "What shall I eat (given I can eat almost anything)?" and "What must I avoid eating?" A large chunk of our overlarge brains is devoted to the latter question: a powerful recognition and memory organ. Once that question is answered, the first is easy: "Whatever yields the most nutrition for the least effort."

In a sense, you could make a decision tree: Fruits first (fast calories), then fat (dense calories), then starch (calories to store plus protein), finally meat (protein plus fat). Why fruit before fat? Fat has twice the calories per gram. However, fat is slower and usually a small proportion of a food, whether you're eating it from plant, fish, fowl, or mammal.

The dilemma today is, in the West and America in particular, there's so much food the farmers are going broke because we can't eat it all, so prices are low, lower than the cost of farming. Thus, Pollan pursues the matter in three stages: the Industrial Agriculture establishment, the "beyond organic" end of the "organic foods" spectrum, and the hunter-gatherer opportunities that still exist on the margins of Western society.

Most foods eaten by most Americans are produced from corn grown on mega-farms. Much of this (2/3 or more) is fed to cattle—which don't do well on a corn diet, thus the need for humongous amounts of antibiotics and supplements. Of the rest, a little actually is found in the produce section of your local grocery, or in cans in the canned foods section. Most is "refined" and "processed" to make corn syrup, "high fructose" corn syrup (HFCS, that gets into almost everything in some amount), and tens of thousands of "additives" such as xanthan gum (a thickener) and the wax that makes apples shiny. A small amount is made into ethanol, for fuel or for tippling, or as a chemical feedstock. Chapter 1 tells the story: "Corn's Conquest".

The author's growing disgust with this phenomenon is clear in the seven chapters devoted to it. I recalled the summer I worked at a slaughterhouse. I was a night worker, one who gathered scraps and bones for the hasher. The "hash" was rendered into a food supplement to be fed back to cattle in the corn-driven feedlots. This is the source of Mad Cow Disease, though nobody knew that thirty years ago.

One night, I got there early, and wandered over to the killing floor. Things have changed since, and the modern process is well described in Pollan's book. What I saw was this: animal after animal brought into the squeezer through a door that dropped behind him or her. A Killer (that's the title) with an air-powered stunner (8" rod, 3/4" diameter) "stuns" each animal, right between the eyes. It drops, a Hooker loops a metal chain about a rear ankle, and the animal is hoisted overhead. A Slitter takes a long knife and cuts the top of the aorta, releasing the blood, which sluices into a floor drain. The blood empties in seconds, and the overhead conveyor swings the animal to be skinned, and so on through the process. In ten minutes, two new "sides" are in the cooler, any desired bits of offal (mainly heart and tongue) are packaged for their particular use, and the rest goes into a hash hopper: head, guts, tail, hooves, and extra fat.

One animal didn't drop right away. The Killer had missed. A backup Killer shot the animal with a .30-cal rifle, but only after a third backup fellow had hit it a couple times with an electric prod to shock it to momentary stillness. I didn't eat beef again until a few weeks after I left that job.

Since it began thirty years ago or so, the "organic" movement has become industrialized also. A few farms have resisted becoming quasi-"inorganic", and are showing the way one may build a farm economy on grass rather than corn. Few people realize that mixed grazing grasses yield quite a bit more calories per acre for animal feed than corn does. But you need to manage it differently. One place that is doing so, in the East at least is Polyface Farm in virginia.

The author really throws himself into his subject. In the first section, he bought a calf and paid for it to be fed, first on a grass farm, then in a feedlot in Kansas. He visited it in the feedlot, and did his best to track the various branches of the river of corn that the beef, pork, and chicken industries rely on. Company secrecy prevented that.

For the second part, he worked a week at Polyface Farm, and learned what he could in that time of their ways. The grass there is part of a rotation that feeds cattle, fowl, and swine, so that each animal plays its part in both eating, feeding (with its manure), and cleaning up the pastures (by eating pests, for example). Sure, a Polyface chicken, egg, or steak costs more, but the author finds it is worth it.

It made me wonder: do we have farm-loving manpower enough to run a large portion of our agriculture that way? I feel lucky to live near a "farmer's market" that contains many booths with Amish providers and workers. I can visit an Amish farm and see how the animals and crops are grown.

For each section, he prepared—and served to himself and others—a meal based on that "industry". For the first, the "preparation" consisted of hitting a McDonald's with his family. For the second, he cooked "industrial-organic" foods for one meal, and grass-fed Polyface chicken, eggs, and beef for another. They were, he relates, both superior to even good restaurant food from the Corn-based agricultural industry.

For the third section, Pollan had to learn to shoot and hunt. He was determined to prepare a meal that contained (nearly) nothing he'd bought. In monetary terms, this probably cost him the most. Not a penny to a Wal-Mart, Safeway, or even a farmer's market. But guns aren't cheap, and neither is the 16-week course you must take to obtain a hunting license in California. Neither is the travel to this mountain range to hunt morels on a "burn", nor to another to hunt boar. And, he reports, the emotional costs to this formerly non-hunter, almost anti-gun fellow.

In his "hunter-gatherer" persona, he reminded me a bit of Blanche duBois, who reported she "benefited from the kindness of strangers." He was much blessed to garner the expertise of several infinitely patient mentors in the art of usufruct, of taking what the land freely offers, including a cherry tree overhanging a relative's fence.

I remember fondly the days my wife and I could wander the Black Hills, gathering fruit: chokecherries, "sarvis"berries, and wild plums for jelly or jam; and dolgo crab or feral Jonathan apples for pies and cobblers. To this day, there's nothing like chokecherry jelly. And I am happy to have a pippin apple tree (grown from a root sucker that overtook a "name" variety), source of pies and apple butter aplenty. The local supermarket planted serviceberry bushes in their parking lot one year. With their permission, I gathered fruit and made jelly. Inferior: too much pollution, I suppose. Now the fruit does little more than stain the parking lot and make wasps drunk.

In the early part of the third section, the author relates how the arguments to be found in some pro-Animal books temporarily converted him to vegetarianism. But he came to his senses. The entire argument founders on one salient fact: rights were invented by people, for people. "Animal rights" is an oxymoron.

To be moral, we must be as civil as we can to the animals we kill to eat. Industrial agriculture is founded on the cruelty of indifference...if you think you have become "just a number," consider yourself lucky to be at least accorded some small measure of freedom, particularly to choose some of what you eat, and where to walk. "Beyond organic" methods are based on growing crops and stock according to their nature—and remember, the modern Cow or Pig or Chicken is no more a "natural" creature than you are; they would not exist without many centuries of human breeding and culture. They are as much an artifact as is a brick. As brick to stone, so Pig to Boar...and so forth.

There is much to think of in this book.

Wrist wrangling

kw: experience, medicine, surgery

Two weeks ago today I had a "tendon-release" operation on my wrist. While Carpal Tunnel problems are well known, I found that there are six more tunnels, one for each tendon on the back of the hand (two from the thumb).

One of these thumb tendons got inflamed, and physical therapy, cortisone, ice packs, and ibuprofen could only do so much. My hand doctor finally said I really had to get the tunnel "opened up." What that means is, the ligament is cut, and gradually grows back, looser than before. Thus, less potential to squeeze the swelling tendon.

Doctors are funny. You'd think they were better observers. This one said I'd miss "a couple days" of work. His prognosis was based on the speed with which a 30-year-old heals. I'm about twice that old, and I was out a week, and worked half days the next week. While I can stay at the office a full day now, I need a rest when I get home.

The inventory: an inch-long incision on the side of my wrist, just below the spur of the Radius bone; seven stitches were removed four days ago. There's a numb area along the upper inside of my thumb. Its boundary is "hot", hypersensitive and prone to searing pain when brushed. The nerve had to be pushed aside during surgery, and is supposed to recover over the next few weeks. We'll see.

I wear a wrapped towel at night so I won't flex the wrist too much in my sleep. I don't know when (or if) I'll be able to resume teaching music. Until I can strum a guitar, I won't be able to show a student how to do it. Finger style I can do, but the wrist-flexing strum is out for now.

Like Mark Twain's king Arthur in Connecticut Yankee, doctor's should experience what they inflict before they are conferred the right to talk about it.

First you count cows, then days...pretty soon you're doing quadratic equations

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, history

Did Pythagoras re-invent the "Pythagorean Theorem" on his own, or did he get it from the Babylonians (whom he visited), who'd already been using it for ten centuries? Do the Mayans use a "defective" base-20 arithmetic (20 alternating with 18), as most textbooks have it, or do their day counts mean "X years, Y months (of 20 days), Z days"? Did writing begin when the shapes of divers clay tokens, used for counting various commodities, were reproduced in wet clay?

You'll get probable answers to the first two questions in How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years by Peter S. Rudman. The answer to the third is in a book my brother is writing, but the issue is tangentially skimmed in Rudman's book.

Rudman is a lucid and engaging writer, and he has a lot to say. He makes it clear that his survey stops just prior to the Christian Era, to avoid getting into higher math than most people are comfortable with. So a more accurate subtitle, though less interesting, might be From 50,000 to 2,000 years BP.

Actually, considering that the Babylonians and others could solve quadratic equations using algebraic geometry, their scribes were well ahead of many modern high school graduates. When did mathematics proceed beyond simple "4-banger" arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, divide) needed by animal herders and landowners? It isn't clear, though the author makes a good case that it occurred almost coincident with writing, which goes back six thousand years (and perhaps longer on perishable media).

Of particular interest is the evolution of numbering systems, that began with counting, then added replacement (a bigger pebble meaning 5 or 10 or whatever, and bigger or differently-shaped pebbles for bigger replacements—what we call "carries" in arithmetic). Some number systems developed a zero place-holder and a point (our "decimal point" separates digits that refer to whole things from those that refer to less-than-whole, like half an apple or a quarter-acre). This allowed units to be re-used once positional notation was invented. The Egyptians went partway to positional notation, but never developed either a zero or a point. Thus a number such as 24 needed a different "2", because the leftmost symbol still had to carry the meaning of "20".

Suppose we used 1-9 for singles, A-I for tens, and a-i for hundreds. Then 365 would be written cF5, and could be written 5Fc or even c5F, with no loss of meaning, but a little longer thinking process to recognize and understand the quantity. Roman numerals have this property (365 = CCCLXV), and though they are conventionally written large-left-small-right...they don't have to be. This property plus the lack of a point makes hieroglyphic numbers tricky to decode, because if the text elsewhere says the scribe is interested in tens of sheep, cF5 might refer to 3,650 sheep!

Mathematics before the Greeks got pretty sophisticated. What the Greeks added was the rigorous proof. In about 400 BC Hippasus proved that the square root of two was not a rational number (you couldn't write it as a/b where a and b are integers). Legend has it the Pythagoreans drowned him, as their philosophy required all numbers to be rational. When they were confronted with an irrational number, they became irrational philosophers!

Prior to proof, the Babylonians and Egyptians (and others) could construct or derive many powerful results, but such derivations did not always suffice for proof. With the Greek development, Mathematics got the final foundation stone for the great range of math techniques in use today.

Different doesn't mean bad

kw: book reviews, asperger's syndrome, asperger syndrome, autism, references

Tony Attwood is a clinical psychologist, who works with many persons who have Asperger's syndrome. His book The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome is both a text and a reference, written for a more general audience than his earlier book Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals.

I found the book of interest because I am closely associated with four such persons, one at work, two students, and a fellow church member. I also have had some contact with autistic persons, and two characteristics are easy to spot: someone with Asperger's syndrome can maintain eye contact, at least for a short while, but an autistic person will very rarely glance at your face; and it is usually possible to hold a conversation with the one, but almost never with the other. Also, when stressed sufficiently, almost anyone will rock back and forth or from side to side; this is much more frequent for someone with Asperger's, and is often constant for an autistic person. It is often called "autistic rocking", and is the symptom that most directly leads one to conclude that autism may be largely a phenomenon of over-sensitivity to stressors. I recall reading that many autistic people recover more control of themselves after they have been trained to block out or ignore noise, or given dark glasses that they then wear almost constantly.

There was a time that I was working as an operating systems analyst. The top practitioners of OS programming in assembly codes are truly wizards of the craft. Typically, they are also either autistic or have Asperger's, or at least social anxiety disorder (which I have to some extent). We used to joke that certain programmers were "kept in the forest and fed raw meat." Actually, some of them are maintained in luxurious isolation of their choice, and work by telecommuting. It takes a special sort of manager to supervise their work. On occasion, when they desire human contact, I've met one or another. They are clearly weird, yet relish human contact in measured doses. I've learned to modulate things by working with my door closed as needed.

Note that I haven't used the word "disorder" with Asperger's syndrome (AS hereafter). While some put it on the "autistic disorder spectrum", I think it more useful to maintain, as did Hans Asperger, and also Tony Attwood, that AS is a phenomenon in which several traits seen in everyone are present in more extreme form. In that regard, AS is no "worse" than being seven feet tall (particularly if you have B-ball skills!) or four feet six (like "Mini-Me", Verne Troyer). There are about as many AS individuals as there are 7-footers and 4.5-footers combined...

My contact with AS folks in the working world shows that they can be very valuable employees, particularly because they are exceptionally able (sometimes boringly so) able to maintain focus.

Dr. Attwood's book begins with a general "What is it" chapter, followed by one that details the diagnostic criteria. The following twelve chapters each focus on a clinical (e.g. cognitive ability) or environmental (e.g. teasing) dimension of the live of someone with AS, particularly as a child. It ends with a FAQ chapter, and a full apparatus of references and resources.

The question can be asked, "Is it OK for someone with AS to know it?" I think it is. The ones I've talked to, who know they display AS, can talk about it frankly, and then go on about any subject of mutual interest...as I have many interests, it isn't hard for me to enjoy talking about their interest.

This isn't a book you just read, it is a reference book in itself. I read parts that interested me, and found them quite valuable.

The second annus mirabilis

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, physics, relativity, quantum theory

In his famous 1926 protest, Albert Einstein wrote,

"Quantum mechanics is certianly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but it does not really bring us any closer to the secrets of the "Old One." I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing dice."

From this comes the title of a valuable, but flawed, book.

Reading Secrets of the Old One: Einstein, 1905 by Jeremy Bernstein was frustrating. I have a pretty good understanding of special relativity (very little, thought, of general relativity, but it wasn't in view here), the photoelectric effect, and statsitical mechanics. The author attempts to make the almost unbelievable work that Albert Einstein did in 1905 accessible to a lay audience. I don't find it illuminating.

The value that Dr. Bernstein brings to this mini-biography—of the 1905 work, not so much the man—is his direct connection to the people involved, his review of the discoveries that did and didn't influence Einstein, and the milieu in which Einstein's work was received. The illustration shows many of those whose work I remember studying decades ago.

After a chapter outlining the history of physics, particularly electrodynamics and mechanics, the three articles Einstein submitted in mid-1905 are discussed, first the paper on Special Relativity (the third in order submitted) plus a small fourth paper that first elucidates E = mc2; second the paper on Brownian Movement, in which he demonstrated the appropriate statistics to show that atomic rather than continuous matter best explained the phenomenon; and third the paper on Blackbody Radiation and the Photoelectric Effect, which won him the 1921 Nobel prize.

A minor frustration with the book is that it was poorly proofread. Both Bernstein and his editor (was there one?) seem to think that the past and past participle of "lead" is "lead", rather than "led". This mistake is quite consistent. Comma misuse and sentence fragmentation is rampant. I corrected very few items; in most books I read, I correct all; the volume was too distracting.

The major frustration is a great tendency to assert results with little or no justification. For example, in several pages of explanation of the simultaneity versus non-simultaneity experienced between to systems in relative motion, the reasons for the difference in perception are only sketchily described, where a simple statement that, for example, "For the signals from two events to be perceived as simultaneous in System 2, they would have had to occur at equal distances from the receiver. The geometry as seen from System 1 shows that they occur at different distances." Throughout that chapter, the rotation of axes that causes geometry and time to influence one another is poorly explained.

Thus, whereas I began hoping to learn more of Einstein's thought, I instead learned more of his social circle, which is not in itself a bad thing.

Got a used star drive frammiswidget spacer handy?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, parodies, satire

One TV show I usually watch is "America's Funniest Videos". It is my laugh therapy (there's no other source of clean comedy on TV). I wondered once what it would be like to see several shows in a row. After watching a 2-hour special, I realized there is a limit to it; it just wasn't as funny by late in the second hour. I guess there are only so many ways for someone to get "minorly hurt", and great video shorts that don't involve accidents are rare.

I remembered this while reading plumage from pegasus by Paul Di Filippo. The author is a satirist and parodist, one of the best, and his target is Science Fiction. I found it is best to have another book I'm reading, while going through this one. It just doesn't do justice to the 43 pieces in the book to read one after another after another.

I don't look to parody or satire for new ideas. This was comic relief, and I enjoyed it as such.

Psychic kitty in the background

kw: book reviews, fiction, mysteries, cats

Sometimes I've ruminated on the kind of female characters found in male-written stories, particularly if the woman is the lead. It seems to me that women write of men better than the converse. There are now 28 books in Lillian Jackson Braun's Cat Who series, with a male lead. How does he stack up? I'd say he's less realistic than most; he is more of a woman's mind in a male body, or perhaps a man who suits Ms Braun's idea of what a man should be.

In the earlier Cat Who books, mustachioed James Qwilleran was portrayed better; he began as a journalist down on his luck, swept by events into a new kind of life. Each novel has had a murder or two for him and his cat Koko to solve. The other cat, Yum Yum, has pretty much been along for the ride, at most providing symmetry. But the books had drama enough to keep one going, providing Mr. Q. with adventures and scrapes enough to give us our occasional guilty thrill.

The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers continues a trend found in the most recent four or five books towards a more hands-off approach. About the only contact Qwill now has with the crimes is hearing Koko's "death howl", by which he knows the death that occurred just then was a murder. The narratives are so much more concerned with six or seven sub-plots, in which Qwill and his "K Fund" solve this or that problem, that the murder mystery in each has been pushed into the background, and serves nearly no dramatic purpose.

Time to re-name the series, perhaps A Mustache and his Money.

From Cautionary Tale to Folk Hero to Superhero

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, post-civil war, folk songs, archetypes

Almost everyone knows the first verse:

John Henry was a little baby
Sittin' on his Mammy's knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel.
Said, "Hammer's gonna be the death of me (Lord, Lord)
Hammer's gonna be the death of me."

This block print by Frank W. Long is the cover art for Steel Drivin' Man—John Henry—The Untold Story of an American Legend. Scott Reynolds Nelson, of the College of William and Mary, has done his detective work and produced a very readable account of John Henry, his life and times in post-Civil War Virginia and West Virginia, the songs that followed his memory, and the icon he has become, to a greater variety of causes than any one man.

Most people know that John Henry was black, a hammer man for the C&O Railroad, who died on the job. Whether he was in a race with a steam drill at the time is debatable, even after we peruse the documentary and anecdotal evidence. But who knew he was from New Jersey, or that he was just an inch over five feet tall? Actually, his small stature ensured his place in the tunnels; he was just the right size.

The story of his life isn't pretty. Convicted of theft, sentenced to ten years—a death sentence, effectively. As Virginia reeled under the economic disaster of Radical Reconstruction, John Henry and hundreds like him were sent to work as convict labor on the railroads. The free miners could strike and demand better working conditions. Convicts couldn't. Those that didn't die of overwork died of silicosis, particularly in the Lewis Tunnel, where John Henry died, probably in 1873.

The railroad was trying to cut costs, and brought in various steam drills. These early drills were inefficient and slow. The convicts regularly out-drilled them. But working alongside a steam drill was worse than working with another crew; the steam drills made much more sandy dust. Lewis Tunnel had the sandiest rock, and few hammer men lived a year before their lungs just gave out.

After John Henry died, his fate was like that of hundreds of others:

They took John Henry to the white house
And buried him in the sand
And every locomotive come roarin' by
Says, "There lays that steel-drivin' man (Oh, Lord)
There lays that steel-drivin' man."

Click on this image of an old postcard (from page 36 of the book) to see it larger. The "white house" was the white structure behind the water tower. Late-20th-Century excavations found the remains of at least 300 anonymous convicts in a large sandy plot alongside the "white house".

This brings us to the halfway point in the book. What has happened to John Henry since 1874? Plenty! His story was incomporated into "hammer songs", used by the workers to synchronize a team's work, and to keep them from working too fast. Even their foremen knew it was a false economy to work too fast and burn out before day's end.

Matter of fact, all that literature we grew up with, talking of "happy darkies singing as they work" is nonsense. Like sea chanties, work songs in general are sad, even depressing, filled with resentment of "the man", and intended to keep the work at a steady pace, not to cheer anyone up. They are the source of the Blues, and why real Blues tunes are slow. Their message is, "Don't kill yourself. Slow down."

First Carl Sandburg, then a series of "progressive" (read, socialist) performers turned John Henry into a muscular icon of the sanctified proletarian. Early comics illustrated bowdlerized versions of his life and others. Through the 1930s, the muscular heroes lost their color and morphed into Superman and Captain America.

John Henry remains the subject of more folk songs than anyone else. We owe a debt to author Nelson, to remember John Henry as he was, and let him symbolize the convict labor, sent under "black laws" to die for the building of the railroads.