Squeamish? Skip this one

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forensic anthropology

Having been honed for survival over the eons, a body is hard to get rid of. I understand that, even after incineration at 1800°F (1000°C), AKA cremation, the "cremains" are a recognizable skeleton, though it is a bit fragile at that point. This is ground to a crumbly powder before being "inurned" and turned over to the heirs or ensconced in a mausoleum.

The bones of dinosaurs and other fossil creatures have been petrified, or filled with minerals and thus turned to stone (though oftentimes the original bone is still there, intercalated with the stone). Not all fossil bone is petrified. I've handled non-petrified bones from the Badlands of South Dakota and Nebraska. After 13 Million years, they're a bit crumbly, but still hang together rather well.

Thus, it is a bit ironic that so many killers try to dispose of "evidence" with fire, by torching a car or house containing the victim(s). Bill Bass and other forensic anthropologists are in the business of proving that the most dedicated body-destroying murderer (or natural disaster) will still leave behind enough bits to determine the sex of the remains, the approximate age and stature, and usually the time/date of death and the person's race.

A side point: "race" is a much-disfavored term these days, but it happens that, by measuring your bones, and comparing the results to a database of such measurements, an anthropologist can indeed determine whether you are predominantly of European, African, Asian (including "Native American"), or Austronesian ancestry. In particular, although "black Africans" (which are not all as black as you might imagine) include dozens of ethnicities whose anatomical characteristics differ from one another more than most of them differ from European, all differ significantly from the range of European characteristics and can be clearly distinguished from them. American blacks who are descended from slaves range from near-European to near-African in type, being nearly all of mixed ancestry.

Some disasters, though human-made, are nearly on the level of "acts of God" such as tornadoes, in destructiveness. In Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores, Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science, Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson record one such, an explosion in an illegal fireworks factory in Tennessee blew eleven people to bits. A twelfth lucky fellow was "only" blown over the house into the front yard, landing on soft ground with some injuries and fractures but alive and with no parts missing. Those nearest the blast were found in several locations each. One flying body snagged on a branch and left a trail of entrails...OK, that's enough!

The point here is, with both flesh and bone to work with, Dr. Bass and his helpers were able to put everyone back together like 11 jigsaw puzzles, and get everyone identified (even one guy whose face was never found) so the right family buried the right body.

More frequently, an investigator has only the bones to work with, and often enough, not very many of those. These days, the DNA in the pulp of a single tooth (even after a fire) is enough to ID someone, though few watchers of CSI realize that DNA analysis can take weeks or months. For most of Dr. Bass's career, he has had to use dental records and old X-ray records to confirm an identification, and DNA has not always been the solution to even modern cases.

He is most frequently called on to determine approximate time of death. Since setting up the Body Farm he has become the foremost expert on modes and timing of the decay of human corpses. From his web site:

On the campus of the University of Tennessee lies a patch of ground unlike any in the world. The "Body Farm" is a place where human corpses are left to the elements, and every manner of decay is fully explored—for the sake of science and the cause of justice.

The rate at which a body loses its flesh, the timing and order of insect attack, and how all these depend on average temperature, are now well known. Only at temperatures substantially below freezing will a corpse's decay be halted, even for an "embalmed" body (the degree of embalming is quite variable, it turns out).

As "Jefferson Bass", Bass and Jefferson have written a series of mystery/detective novels based on cases involving Body Farm expertise. However, thirteen the actual cases detailed in Beyond's sixteen chapters make reading that I find more fascinating than any fictional treatment. The most touching is the exhumation and X-ray analysis of the body of "Big Bopper" (J.P. Richardson, Jr.), a process that brought comfort and closure to his son and grandchildren. The son was moving the body to another location, and asked Dr. Bass to take advantage of the opportunity to either confirm or put to rest rumors of conspiracy and murder. The analysis showed that Big Bopper, along with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, died of incredible injuries suffered during the crash of a small airplane in 1959. Rumors of gunfire and death after the crash skittered about for years, even decades. The first glances at X-rays of Richardson's legs made it clear he could not have walked away from the crash.

The book is not for the faint of heart. I was hesitant to read it, but found I am not so fainthearted as I thought...at least when it is someone else's demise and decay I am reading about (At age sixty, I still cannot watch myself being injected or getting an IV put in. Seeing the inch or so of blood that goes up an IV tube before they push it back in with saline solution can make me faint).

The skills of Dr. Bass and his colleagues—who now number in the dozens if not a hundred or more—are phenomenal. Say somebody finds a couple of ribs and an arm or leg bone, perhaps parts of a skull. Using modern database analysis (helped by fast computers), a forensic anthropoligist can tell enough about a person that a search can be made, for example, for records of someone "asian or asian-white mix, male, thirty to forty years old, 64-68 inches tall, slender build, died July 4-8)" rather than "Middle age asian, short, died midsummer", which was state of the art before the Body Farm was set up. But as Dr. Bass states, it is fortunate that he has a poor sense of smell...

Trading partner or predator?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, foreign trade

The top trading partners of the US are now, in order, Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany. However, on the Imports side, China just tops Canada, $296 billion to $289 billion. My first "I wonder": why do I so seldom see "Made in Canada" on something?

I found the answer to this and lots of global trade questions at the Foreign Trade page of the US Census Bureau web site. In a section with country-by-country breakdown, I found that the bulk of our imports from Canada are things and materials you won't find at Target or Big K: resources such as crude oil and natural gas, iron ore and bauxite (aluminum ore) and other metals, and then "behind the doors" stuff like industrial machinery, tractors, and building supplies including lumber. Far down the scale we find textiles, rather than finished clothing, to the tune of a mere half billion—no $10 dresses or $5 shirts—, and a billion in toys and sporting goods. Canada-produced apparel totals no more than a billion.

For China, the biggest single area is computers, computer peripherals and other electronic goods and supplies, around a tenth of the total budget...$30+ billion means lots of laptops and phones, and even more ink cartridges. The next huge area is apparel, also about $30 billion (so that's about a hundred $10 Chinese dresses for every $30 Canadian flannel shirt). Toys and sporting goods are in the $28 billion range. All these are on-the-shelf items. Chinese imports are now the visible face of American retailing. (My figures are for 2006)

Based on a more down-to-earth analysis ("Why can't I find anything in the store made somewhere besides China?"), Sara Bongiorni decided to cajole her family into a one-year boycott of Chinese goods. Her book A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy chronicles that year, 2005. On January 1 of that year, as the result of a week of discussions (badgering), the New Year's resolution of Sara and her husband Kevin was to purchase nothing from China.

The twelve chapters, one per month (she must keep good journals), reveal that they really didn't make it, but they came about as close as is possible. She didn't just cajole her husband (and two small, uncomprehending children) into making the resolution: She embarked on a 365-day cajoling adventure. The story is by turns hilarious, maudlin, and white-knuckle gripping.

To avoid being totally estranged from family and friends, they (Sara) opened a huge loophole: gifts (birthdays, Christmas, what-have-ya) were exempt. The loophole expanded when Sara persuaded her sister-in-law to bring certain materials (candles, etc. which are only made in China these days) for a birthday party... Her outspoken mother drove a truck right through the loophole. And when donations for Katrina-disaster relief exceeded needs, well-meaning (and giggling, I suspect) friends dropped a few boxes full of toys and other stuff on their doorstep; every item "made in China".

However, they went to great lengths to locate kids' shoes cleaper than designer ones from Italy; ink cartridges that were not only filled in the US, but filled with ink made in Canada rather than China; dolls from anywhere but China. Yep, your kid sister's Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls—and Barbie—are made in China now.

The closing scenes, after as close to a China-free Christmas as they could manage, are of a couple considering "What next?". After a year as "weakest link", Kevin proposes an attempt to continue the boycott. They compromised on shopping more thoughtfully.

This book makes you think. If we all shop more thoughtfully, there's no way we'll avoid buying lots of Chinese merchandise, but we will have a better idea of just how global our economy really is. And if you do find an ink cartridge with genuine Canadian ink, frame it.

Nature vs nurture in architecture and art

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history

This is one of the better pictures of an orb web. Dr. James E. Carrel of U. Missouri has this image on his Biology of Spiders page there.

So tell me, how much intelligence is indicated by these webs? In Built by Animals: The natural history of animal architecture by Mike Hansell, you'll read that, while humans are the only...the ONLY mammals that build trapping structures (nets, snares, deadfalls, etc.), thousands of species of invertebrates do so. Spiderwebs, of thousands of varieties, are the major realm of animal-built traps with which we are familiar, but by no means the only one.

In addition, while an orb web may be considered a home in addition to a trap, many spiders, such as tarantulas, make silk-lined homes in burrows or other cavities. Lots of nonhuman animals make homes: bird nests, chimp and orang nests, burrows by rabbits or moles or mice...and even fish!

This illustration from the Project Gutenberg Ebook A Book of Natural History: Young Folks' Library Volume XIV, edited by David Starr Jordan, shows a female stickleback fish laying eggs in a nest built by her mate. The females of this genus of fish choose a mate based on the best nest.

I have seen, in shallow streams in springtime, what look like sunken auto tires covering large sections of the stream bed. These are also fish nests, but of a species I don't know. The males go to great trouble to clear and defend a circular area, and to heap a ring of debris around it, to attract females. Each ring is about 2/3 of a meter across or more, the size of a tire. How much smarts is needed by these fishes?

Dr. Hansell, author of several book on animal architecture, surveys the breadth of structures built by nonhuman animals, from termite mounds to mole rat burrows to the more familiar nests and webs. Many, many structures are found to result from repetitive actions that take advantage of material properties. Such structures fit the "good materials, small brains" hypothesis.

For example, the hexagonal cells in honeycombs aren't specifically shaped into hexagons, one by one. A group of bees will build waxen walls between one another, and when they are high enough, the bees will "shiver" together, raising the temperature until the walls soften and sort of relax into the hexagonal shape we see. Though a comb looks very uniform at first glance, a closer look reveals the kinds of small variation, including occasional 5- and 7-sided cells and small differences in diameter, that indicate their more "emergent" nature.

Stereotyped actions with specific materials indicate that such structures need little in the way of intelligent planning. While we need hundreds of planners to direct thousands of workers to build a skyscraper 350-300 times the height of a person (complete with plumbing, electricity, ventilation, and elevators), a nest of tropical termites that numbers in the millions, taking advantage of the properties of mud-plus-saliva and sometimes guided by air flow, can erect a structure 1,200-1,500 the height of a termite (if it could stand up to its full 5-6mm height).

In the last chapter of the book, the author goes 'way out on a (scientific) limb, discussing beauty. The subject is bowerbird bowers.

This male Satin Bowerbird (see Australian Natural History Safari for more information and images) is busy guarding and decorating his bower. Soon a female will arrive to inspect it. She will visit several bowers, watching from within each as the male puts on a lively performance, before choosing one to mate with.

Dr. Hansell's thesis is that the experience is, for the female, pleasurable, and she seems to be guided by aesthetic pleasure in choosing a mate. Consider if she must use a "better bower & builder checklist": (1)size of bower, (2)pretty decorations, (3)vitality of male's display, (4)versatility of male's repertory, (5)who knows what?... She has to keep track of several factors each for several bowers and performances.

On the other hand, while the male's genetics and strength go into making the bower and the display, perhaps her genetics produce a synergistic emotional response: "Not bad", or "Very nice--worth a second look", or "Oh, BABY!" This is borne out by two observations: bower building and display performing both require practice on the male's part, and younger females are more attracted to flashier decorations and displays while older ones pay more attention to factors indicating strength and endurance on the male's part. (This sounds like human females, too)

Along the way, the author discusses the problem of aesthetic sense in animals. Just how likely is it that female bowerbirds take pleasure in a "good" bower? If pleasure takes less brain power than checklist tracking, it is actually quite likely, just as we use the pleasure of taste to choose good foods (and in the absence of modern manipulations of that sense, it's a pretty good one).

Is this painting beautiful? Would you want it hanging on your wall? Would you pay for a copy? Somebody recently paid a few thousand dollars for it. It was painted by a chimpanzee under the care of Desmond Morris in the 1950s. Did the chimp think it beautiful?

There are numerous opinions about the chimpanzee's feelings, and little to go by. There is more than one way to interpret his actions. When he stopped painting, was he satisfied it was complete, or did he just get bored? Sadly, this chimp wasn't taught sign language, and is now deceased, so we won't know...assuming signing chimps can truthfully describe their feelings!

A good book like this one raises as many questions as it answers. Good questions, that a lot of future work can spring from to gain more good answers, and even better questions.

The middle-aged Earth

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geological history, deep time, plate tectonics

OK, here is the capsule history of the Earth. The abbreviation Ma refers to "Mega-annum" or million years in the past, and Ga refers to "Giga-annum" or billion years in the past. I'll add the word "future" for future times:

• ~4.8 Ga: Solar system formed. Earth and other planets begin to form from dust and other junk surrounding the proto-Sun.
• ~4.5Ga: Beginning of Hadean era. Earth is molten throughout.
• ~4.4 Ga: Radioactive-isotope age of the oldest minerals and rocks.
• ~4 Ga: By this time, the crust has differentiated into lighter "continental" granitic rocks and denser "oceanic" basaltic rocks. This implies copious water was present.
• 3.47 Ga: The earliest "chemical fossils", durable organic chemicals that are produced by cyanobacteria (the first photosynthesizing organisms). Coincidentally, the "rusting of Earth", the earliest Banded Iron formations, began at this time.
• 2.3-1.9 Ga: The "rusting" event slows and stops, and Oxygen in the atmosphere rises from less than 1% to about 15%. The continents reached nearly their maximum total volume, and a combined supercontinent has formed; there may have been one or two slightly smaller ones earlier. Others would follow, because plate tectonics is now well under weigh.
• ~1 Ga: The first "somewhat well characterized" supercontinent comes together, called Rodinia from the Russian for Motherland. This is probably between the fifth and tenth supercontinent to form since ~2.5Ga.
• ~0.4Ga or 400 Ma: Formation of Pangea (or Pangaea), the most recent supercontinent.
• 250 Ma: Breakup of Pangea, first in to Gondwanaland in the south and Laurasia in the north. The Permian "great extinction" may be a consequence of the breakup.
• Today: There are seven Continents, and people on them to wonder how they came about (very few folks, admittedly, do so).
• 250 Ga future: Formation of the next supercontinent, called variously Novopangea, Amasia, and Pangea Proxima (among others).
• ~500 ma future: Probably, the continents will be well-scattered, as all but Eurasia are today.
• ~1 Ga future: Another supercontinent. But things may be slowing down.
• ~5 Ga future: It is likely that radiogenic heating in the mantle has dropped to a quarter or less of today's figure, but the solid inner core is probably still releasing plenty of heat as it grows (at the expense of the liquid outer core). If it has grown fast enough, and too little core liquid remains, Earth's magnetic field will nearly disappear, sustained only by remanent magnetism in "recent" rocks. The point is moot, however, because the Sun is about to become a Red Giant, and will reheat Earth to a near-Hadean condition. End of Earth as a life-bearing planet.

This is just the barest outline of historical Geology as I know it. This and much more is explained in fascinating detail in Supercontinent by Dr. Ted Nield, editor of the journal Geoscientist. He surveys the progress of geological knowledge, and particularly the understanding of the "Earth system" (he doesn't use the term; it's one with which I am familiar), primarily since the Enlightenment .

The understanding that Pangea was preceded by Rodinia, and that supercontinents tend to form and break up on a cycle of half a billion years, has naturally led a few scientists to project the cycle into the future. How can a future configuration of continents be projected? The primary method is to extrapolate present trends and their past rates. It is particularly important to discern what is constant (e.g. the gravitational constant), what is cyclic (e.g. seasons and orbits), and what changes steadily (e.g.Sun's increasing brightness, or decay of radioactive substances).

Plate tectonics encompasses all the theories and evidence of the Earth system. Though the term "Earth system" is most frequently used by meteoroligists, it is a geophysical term (geophysics encompasses meteorology).

Visible evidence that clearly points to plate tectonic processes is rather hard for non-Geologists to come by, but the advent of Google Maps makes it easier in at least one instance. Go there and in the search box enter Djibouti, then zoom out a few steps, and click the "Satellite" button. You'll see something like this image (click on it for a much larger view).

The city of Djibouti is near the center of the most visible Triple Junction on the planet. If you spread a few inches of moist sand on a blanket with a large balloon under it (connected to an air hose), then slowly inflate the balloon, the sand will usually crack open in a 3-armed split. Northeast and northwest of Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea form two arms of such a split. The East African Rift, which passes just east of Adis Abebe (Addis Ababa on older maps) is the third.

The dark blue-to-black physiography for the ocean floors show that both seas harbor rifts down their middles. East Africa is splitting off from the rest of the continent. On your Google map, drag around to see the rift system that underlies all oceans. It is particularly striking under the Atlantic Ocean.

What is happening? At the center of a rift, magma rises from time to time, forming new oceanic crust. Follow along a plate away from a rift (you may need to cross a continent), and you'll find either a trench (e.g. off the coast of South America or Japan) or a new mountain range such as the Himalayas.

Nice thing about oceanic basalt: it contains lots of magnetic minerals. They record the orientation of Earth's magnetic field as they cool down and solidify. Nice thing about Earth's magnetic field: it reverses direction a couple times per million years.

This image from the USGS shows the stripes recorded by a magnetometer as ships crisscrossed a rift in mid-ocean. The entire ocean floor is like a huge tape recorder. It is a lot like reading tree rings to see the age of the tree, and the rate at which it grew.

Correlating the stripe pattern with fossils (which litter the ocean floor) and radiometric dates from samples gives us the timing and direction of plate motions for the past 180 Ma.

"Only 180 million years?" you might ask, "Is that all?" Yes, that is all. Older ocean floor has all been consumed by subduction into trenches, though a few small (city- or county-size) pieces have been "obducted" on top of continental crusts, forming "ophiolite belts" such as the Franciscan sequence in northern California.

Reading the ocean floor allows us to rewind continental motions back in time to the Jurassic, at 180 Ma, with some confidence. Earlier motions have to be determined from magnetic materials of known age on land, and finding such rocks that are still lying horizontally and undisturbed, is a conundrum! My major professor in graduate school has given his life to finding such rocks, and has a "second office" next to his, lined with a double layer of metallic sheeting to screen out Earth's magnetic field so he can plunk a rock into a magnetometer-goniometer and measure its tiny magnetic field.

Dr. Nield explains all the lines of evidence that let us piece together Pangea, and that give us some idea of the configuration of Rodinia and other compounded continents of the past billion years.

This illustration from a Hungarian web site sketches the timing of known and inferred supercontinents of the past. There may have been several others; we don't yet have sufficient evidence to determine. However, we do know that supercontinents form in two ways: Introversion and Extroversion.

These do not refer to personality types, at least not to a geophysicist. Introversion refers to a supercontinent's pieces slowing and stopping, then pulling back together into much the same configuration as before. Extroversion refers to the pieces continuing right around the planet until they collide on the opposite side, with the new continent's center formed by the outer edges of the earlier one. And...there's more than one way to put either type together.

From the same site as the image above, this illustration shows three competing projections of the composition of the next supercontinent. Novopangaea and Amasia (It'll amaze ya!) are alternative Extroversion models by Roy Livermore (see the Future is Wild™, which mainly speculates about the critters one might find there). Pangaea Proxima is an Introversion scenario favored by Christopher Scotese (see his Paleomap Project, which includes a nice animation of the Inversion motions).

Will there be humans, or similarly brainy creatures, living on Novopangaea (or whatever they might call it)? Further on, will plate tectonics come to an end, as it did very early on for Venus, which didn't retain enough water to keep its mantle "only" as "fluid" as stainless steel? Will the inner Earth cool enough for the process to grind to a halt before the Sun takes a whack at re-melting the planet? It is very unlikely that any of our descendants will be there to find out for sure.

What you hear is what you get

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, hallucination, mysticism

Socrates, that irrepressible realist, often heard the voice of his "personal deity", his daimonion, and obeyed it explicitly. It was for this most of all that he was ordered to commit suicide ("corrupting youth" was a trumped-up charge).

The sacred scriptures of every religion, and nearly all of literature prior to the 18^th Century, are full of people hearing the voices of muses, angels, demons, and deities.

Poets and other artistic creators speak of Muses such as Erato as inspiring (literally "in-breathing") their work. William Blake, shown here, was one such. [The original image is found at InterVoice, an online resource for people who hear voices.] Another resource for voice-hearers is Hearing Voices Network.

While overly rationalistic scientists, mainly psychologists and psychiatrists, have since the 1800s defined all voice-hearing as pathological, these two organizations are devoted to helping people who may be troubled by the voices they hear; even more, they are forums (fora?) for those who are not troubled by their voices, but by people's reaction to any discussion about them.

These and other resources are mentioned in Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucinations by Daniel B. Smith. Dan Smith does not hear voices; he tried rather hard to induce the experience, without success. He was motivated (driven?) to study these phenomena because his father and grandfather heard voices very frequently; the former with torment, the latter with thanksgiving for their guidance. He prefers the term "Voice Hearing" rather than "Auditory Hallucination". So do I.

His title is well-chosen. Where voice hearing is not pathological, and sometimes when it does cause harm, it is often considered a divine experience. Mystics, Christian and otherwise, credit God or angels for the messages they hear.

Joan of Arc, seen in this painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage [image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art], took guidance from voices she began to hear at age thirteen. They trained her into the personality that could, at the age of seventeen, impose her will on the Dauphin Charles of France for most of a year. Sadly, her voices did not warn her of an ambush by the English, nor adequately guide her as, in her naivety, she spoke in terms the English clerics could only take as heretical. While fear of being burned prompted her to briefly recant, she soon returned, saying she preferred to die than to deny she had heard from holy saints and from God.

Today, "inner voices" are both feared and considered a joke. If you talk about "hearing things", you'd better be joking, or your closest friends might send for "guys in white jackets".

Because of the influence of psychiatry and its DSM-IV, any voice I might hear while someone right next to me (who is not deaf) cannot hear it, is considered a hallucination, which PsyWeb describes thus:

Hallucination can be auditory, olfactory, visual, or tactile. Hallucinations are false perceptions or unreal apparition. They do not correspond to the stimuli that is present and have no basis in reality. You have to remember that what is an hallucination in one culture, is not in another.

Despite the throw-away comment about cultural differences, the authors of the PsyWeb glossary clearly mean to deny any reality to such experiences.

I wonder if any of them is a Lutheran or a Quaker. Both Martin Luther and George Fox heard voices and accepted their guidance. So did Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Theresa of Ávila. When Jesus declared "The words that I say to you I do not speak from Myself, but the Father who abides in Me does His works", was "the Father who abides in Me" a hallucination? Was Saul of Tarsus hallucinating when he heard, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?"? He states that his attendants did not hear the voice, only he did. Were all the Hebrew prophets hallucinators?

Some researchers, such as Julian Jaynes, who wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, propose that voice hearing was characteristic of the human brain when humans were "pre-conscious": To oversimplify, their right brain acted as an inner deity, giving advice and admonition to the left. This has produced a near-cult movement, the Julian Jaynes Society.

However, the prevailing opinion among non-Theists is that all such experiences are imaginary, that they take place only in the (diseased) brain. If that were true, at least a quarter of us—and I mean us Westerners, the most rationalistic and least spiritual of peoples—are subject to such "diseased" experiences. At least a quarter of Americans have heard a voice speaking that seemed to be outside them. I have, but no more than three or four times.

Author Smith relates how two researchers told blindfolded students (one at a time) they were about to hear "White Christmas", but didn't play the tune. After a half-minute of silence, they'd ask the student to rate the experience. Half reported hearing the song play in their head, and 5% thought they'd actually heard the music play in the room. The students tested had all been screened to make sure none were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally "unusual".

For me, as a Christian mystic, but one with few "exceptional" experiences, I am sympathetic to claims of voice-hearing. I believe both God and angels can speak, and that they have done so. I think it likely that Satan (an angel) and perhaps other evil spirits can also speak. Whether they use sound through the air or some more direct influence, I don't know.

Two lines of evidence lead me to believe that voices can be heard in "unconventional" ways. Firstly, direct brain stimulation with a low-voltage probe can induce recall of memories in full sensory regalia: sight, sound, touch, smell, and/or taste. They can also stimulate seeming sensory experiences that are not memories, including heard speech.

Secondly, a signal such as a spoken message that modulates an ultrasonic carrier wave can be focused tightly, and just the person at the focus will, because of the nonlinearity of the outer and middle ear, "rectify" the signal and hear the message. This could become a way for museums to present educational messages at chosen exhibits, that one hears only if one stands "inside the blue circle" or whatever.

In the book, the author goes into quite a bit of detail about Joan of Arc and Socrates, as poles of a mystical spectrum that is not pathological; perhaps I should say, two corners of a triangle that has pathology at its third corner. I know two psychotic people who hear voices that are in no way beneficial, so I know the experience can be very damaging. But I thank the author of the book, and the two organizations linked above, for promoting the interests of people who find the experience to be salutary.

The most celebrated triglot

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, egyptology, ancient history, translations

The boy-king is on the verge of manhood. A few months shy of age 16, having "reigned" under a series of disastrous regencies for ten years already, and having bought the favor of the priests by promising massive tax reductions and rebates, he is about to be crowned in his own right.

The priests have generously agreed to institute a personality cult in his name, to produce and revere statues in his likeness for every temple and shrine in the land, and to have their "agreement" with him quite literally engraved in stone alongside each statue.

It is left unspoken that the priests, who hold all real power in the realm, will uphold his authority and keep the people (mostly) pacified. It is unforeseen at the time, but probably not unexpected, that they will have him assassinated just fourteen years later, to prevent a war.

It is not known how many statues of the young god-king were produced, or how many copies of the royal/clerical "treaty" were produced. One stone copy of the treaty, mostly complete, survives: the Rosetta Stone, seen here in its home for the past two centures, the British Museum.

When I told my wife I was reading a book about the Rosetta Stone, she asked, "The language program?" Being from Japan, where Chinese history is taught rather than Egyptian (or British, even), she'd never heard of it. I had to do a bit of explaining. What is it that makes this chunk of granite the most famous—at least in the West—monument smaller than Mount Rushmore?

Egyptology has occupied many of the best Western and Near-Eastern minds of the past two centuries. Dynastic Egypt, whose culture and language died out fifteen centuries ago, a culture chronicled by a written history that predates Bishop Ussher's calculation of the epoch of Noah's flood, with a spoken and written language a thousand years older than Chinese, has been for several centuries the archetypical mystery of mysteries, realm of ancient masters and arcane lore.

Speculation about the Egyptian language abounded for more than a millennium, but all was swept away in a few short years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered among construction rubble in 1799. The fascinating story is told in The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt by John Ray, an Egyptologist at Cambridge University.

These hieroglyphs, from the upper section of the Rosetta Stone, represent the sole writing system used for the Egyptian language prior to about 700BCE. Thereafter, the priests continued to use them for sacred writing for another thousand years or so, but everyone else used a more streamlined written language.

Demotic, as shown here, was actually easier to use, to remember, and to read. Though it also had died out, it was understood to be a primarily phonetic script, whereas its older cousin was considered by most to be purely pictorial...until Hieroghyphs were deciphered with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

The key to it all was Greek, shown here from the bottom portion of the Rosetta Stone. I picked these three selections from similar physical locations in a large image of the stone, so there is some chance that they are saying the same thing. Regardless, those who had the whole of the triple text to work with, despite the large missing pieces, made breakthrough after breakthrough until most of the symbols' pronunciations and/or meanings had been determined.

Decipherment continues. There is a huge corpus of material, and more is discovered from time to time. The dry Egyptian sand has proven capable of preserving fragile papyrus manuscripts for several thousand years. Documents that were discarded but not burnt remain to embarrass their former owners.

Dr. Ray chronicles the history of the Stone and the students it inspired. Chief among these were the Briton Thomas Young (of Young's Modulus, the Young-Helmholtz Theory of color vision,the Young-Laplace Equation for capillary attraction, and innovations in linguistics and insurance underwriting), and the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, a much more focused Orientalist. The author shows the amazing work done by these men and others.

Champollion's understanding of both Coptic and Chinese led him to the most significant finding: that both Demotic and Hieroglyphic writing systems were a combination of pictographic and phonetic elements. Demotic, with only a fraction of the gamut of signs compated to Hieroglyphic, is much more phonetic.

It is a pity he didn't know Japanese. I consider it today's closest analogy to Hieroglyphic. This text, clipped from an ad on amazon.co.jp, contains four kinds of signs.

The first two characters, and about half of the total, are Kanji, derived from Chinese characters. There are about 7,000 of these in common use and many more known to more educated Japanese.

The three symbols that follow are phonetic characters, Hiragana, that represent the inflection of the word (its nominative and grammatical form). These three are seen at the end of the third line also, following a different Kanji word. There are 72 Hiragana, which represent syllables such as "so"; they are not "letters" as we understand them in English.

There is a second complete set of 72 syllables, the Katakana, used only for non-Japanese words, mainly names. The first five symbols on the third line and the first four on the fourth line are Katakana. Finally, the Japanese use Romaji, or "Roman letters" for certain European words and abbreviations, as seen in the fifth line. Later in the same ad "PlayStation 2" is spelled out in Romaji.

Imagine if, knowing only an alphabetic or phonemic written language, you were confronted with a Japanese newspaper. This was the situation of most Egyptologists prior to the work of Young and Champollion. Their series of inspired guesses and head-cracking deductions led to the first understanding of a language nobody had heard or read for 1,500 years.

To these men and their successors (including Dr. Ray), and to the Rosetta Stone, we owe our ability to know the ancient culture that is Egypt.

What I tell you three times...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling

Telling stories is the most human of human activities. Even autistic people tell stories (those who are capable of speech). In a disorderly, chaotic world, stories make the meaningless meaningful, the chaotic orderly, and the confusing sensible. We use stories to amuse ourselves and others, to "one-up" rivals, and ultimately to define who we are.

As a professor of American Culture and a practiced storyteller (both print and performance), Bruce Jackson is well suited to "look under the covers" of stories and storytelling in his book The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories.

As I began to read the book, I wondered if it might ruin stories for me. I remembered once, walking with a lady friend: as we passed a particularly lush lawn I noted that it was all crabgrass. I told this to my friend, stating that a grass that is so strong might as well be used for lawns; it thrived better than all our "bought" grasses. She scowled and said, "I thought it was real pretty until you said that."

Dr. Jackson delves into stories in three areas: Personal, Public, and "Too Good to be True" (but we accept them anyway).

We all tell stories, all the time. When my wife and I tell each other how our day went, we're condensing a confusing scramble of little-related events into two or three "bullet points" that meant something to us: we're telling stories. When a friend asks how my son is doing at college, most of my reply is in story form. When something amusing happens, I or a friend will recall a similar incident, highlighting the recitation to display the similarity, often with an amusing twist.

Are our stories true? Never, and always. Here is one I've told when instructing young spelunkers on the first principle of caving/climbing safety, "It IS possible to get into something you can't get out of":

My Dad sometimes took me hiking in the desert. Once, when I was 12, we took different paths. I would up climbing a cliff, until I got to a point where I couldn't go up, and could not see how to get back down. I was ~30 feet up. When he found me, he told me, step by step, what foot to move in what direction to find footholds so I could descend safely.

It is a true story, but I leave out a lot of details, such as that I hollered for a while, or the gray color of Dad's face when he caught sight of me.

Sometimes we read or hear a story and appropriate it, such as this one I have told a few times:

My family dined at Chinese restaurants a lot. I learned to use chop sticks very young. Once, right after we began eating, a waitress looked at us a moment, then dashed to the back of the restaurant. She returned with two small Chinese children, and said, "See, they eat with chop sticks!"

This could have happened to us, but it didn't. I read it in a Reader's Digest in the 1970s. But I've used it as though...Did I lie? Strictly speaking, yes. It is harder to say whether the rock-climbing story is wholly truthful because of all that I leave out. To this day (I am 60 now), Asians are amused and often remark on my skill with chop sticks. In a certain sense, then, the restaurant story is still happening.

Public stories are a more collective effort. The author dwells for a chapter and a half (and parts of others) on the story of O.J. Simpson's murder trial and the very public drama so many spent a year of their lives upon. The whole truth will never be told in full (unless someone gets to the murderer with a syringe of pentothal). But the story, a collaboration between the police, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, OJ, the victims' families, journalists, broadcasters and a hugely willing public, lives on and is still morphing this way and that, in two versions, a black one and a white one. On this stage, the race tensions of the mid-1990s were played out (By the way, I find it refreshing that, less than fifteen years later, Barack Obama is a serious contender for President. Things do change).

But OJ is not the only megastory of these times. Jackson discusses whether Bob Dylan was booed at Newport, the archetypical hero embodied in the Lone Ranger, the need to "break the mold" for some stories to be told, and the euphemisms public (and not-so-public) figures use to distance themselves from responsibility for the consequences of the stories they find themselves enacting: "Mistakes were made", or "Events resulted in the officer dying" (this by the officer's murderer).

The penultimate chapter chronicles a truly inventive imposter and the widespread fraud he perpetrated on the author and others. He was such a charming raconteur, that even those who knew he was lying let it continue for quite a while, until he got so far out on a limb nobody could keep silent any more.

Ultimately, while "the story [of our own life] is true," none of us can ever tell the whole truth—it would take longer in the telling than in the living. Somehow, most of us recognize the boundary between the lies we have to tell and those we don't. The "real liars" help us define that boundary.

We might really be exactly midscale

kw: musings, physical universe, sizes

As I prepared to review Mind, Life, and Universe, I spent a bit of time poring over a table that showed the Human size as just midway between the largest and smallest physical things, from quarks to galaxies. A few steps were missing, so I decided to produce my own table. First, some background.

The smallest dimension possible according to quantum mechanics is the Planck Length, 1.616252x10^-35 meters. However, it is unlikely that anything will ever be measured to a precision in this range, because you have to use a probe with a wavelength in this range to "see" such details. For example, microscopes using visible light cannot show us details smaller than about half the wavelength of the light being used. Electron microscopes show us much smaller details because the wavelength is much smaller.

The trouble is that shorter wavelength implies higher energy. The proportionality constant I remember from classes in X-ray spectroscopy is 1,240 eV-nm; a particle having one electron volt (1 eV) of energy will have a wavelength of 1,240nm, or 1.24µm. Such a particle might be an infrared photon. Visible light, with wavelengths of 0.4µm to 0.7µm, is composed of photons with energies between 1.77eV and 3.10eV.

A "million-volt" electron microscope (such a machine was first touted to the public in newspaper stories in about 1960) produces electrons having a wavelength near 0.00124nm, about 100 times smaller than the diameter of an iron atom. However, it is hard to focus them that accurately, and atoms weren’t imaged until twenty years later. Also, such energetic electrons tend to knock orbital electrons out of your sample, so the target gets modified about as quickly as you can make the image: electrons running loose cause chemical changes.

The most energetic particle ever observed is called "Omigod " or the "Oh-my-God " particle, a cosmic ray observed in 1991 that had an energy equivalent to a well-thrown baseball, or a few million times as energetic as the particles the Large Hadron Collider will be producing later this year. If we could produce such particles regularly, we could probe a size scale a billion times smaller than a proton, but only by breaking that proton into skajillions of tiny pieces in the process! So I pick this particle’s wavelength as the smallest "practical" size.

At the large end of things, our best telescopes will never see deeper than about 13 billion light-years, because the Universe is only about 13 billion years old; there is no older light to show us farther things, even though cosmologists think the actual "size" of the Universe is between a few hundred billion to several trillion light-years. It will be a long time before any large portion of it becomes visible!

Each Step in the table below is a factor of 1,000 in size. (In the West, this is the Engineering scale convention; in Japan, they have a word for 10,000 and tend to use steps of 10,000 instead). With the Omigod particle at the small end and a very approximate guess as to the size of the total Universe as the other, we humans really are at the middle of the size range, logarithmically speaking [I can't get rid of an unconscionable amount of white space here. Sorry. Skip down quite a bit to find the table]:

Step	Size Range, m	Name	Equivalent or Item
-12	10-36		0.062 Planck Lengths
-11	10-33		61.9 Planck Lengths
-10	10-30
-9	10-27		Wavelength of "Omigod" cosmic ray (3x10+20eV) ~4x10-27m
-8	10-24	yoctometer (ym)
-7	10-21	zeptometer (zm)	Wavelength of 7TeV particle in CERN's LHC accelerator 177zm (= 0.177am)
-6	10-18	attometer (am)
-5	10-15	femtometer (fm)	Proton charge radius 0.87fm Iron nucleus diameter ~4.5fm
-4	10-12	picometer (pm)
-3	10-09	nanometer (nm)	Iron atom diameter: 0.28nm AIDS virus diameter ~50nm
-2	10-06	micrometer (µm)	E. coli "rod": ~1 µm diameter x ~4µm length
-1	10-03	millimeter (mm)	Ball in ballpoint pen
0	1	meter (m)	Height of a 2-3 year old child
1	10+03	kilometer (km)	0.621 mile; a 10-15 minute walk
2	10+06	megameter (Mm)	1000 km. Asteroid Ceres diameter ~950km
3	10+09	gigameter (Gm)	Million km. Earth-moon distance ~0.38Gm
4	10+12	terameter (Tm)	Billion km. Jupiter orbit diameter ~1.6Tm
5	10+15	petameter (Pm)	0.106 light year (ly) = 0.0324 parsec (pc). Nearest Star 4.22ly=1.29pc=39.9Pm
6	10+18	exameter (Em)	106ly. Betelgeuse 427ly = 4.03Em
7	10+21	zettameter (Zm)	106,000ly. Large Magellanic Cloud 187,000ly = 1.8Zm; Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million ly = 24Zm
8	10+24	yottameter (Ym)	106 million ly. Visible Universe radius ~13 billion ly = 120Ym
9	10+27		106 billion ly. "Cosmic Inflation" proposes a "total Universe" this size or larger

Fantasy in ad hoc mode

kw: opinion, book note, fantasy

Once I finished reading White Night by Jim Butcher, I realized I just couldn't review it. The narrative is gripping enough, but the undercurrent of sadism easily matches anything I remember from reading my mother's collection of James Bond thrillers four-plus decades ago. The level of abuse the protagonist absorbs just getting to the end of the three-day story frame is, well, fantastic.

While there is a bit of lip service paid to rules and realms of magical arts, the fact is, every crisis is answered by another total surprise on the reader's part. This necessitates whole chapters of explainery. I found myself skimming hard to "get back to the story." Oh, well.

36 fireside chats

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, scientists, interviews

The trouble with a book like Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time is that it is all to easy to read one interview, then set the book aside and spend quite a bit of time musing. Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset are listed as the Editors, but in actuality, Dr. Punset conducted these interviews over a number of years, then he and Dr. Margulis organized them as to content. He is very well known in Spain for his science writing and on-air interviews.

Most of the chapters begin with a bit of commentary by the former, from a line or two to a page or more; the rest is a condensed interview (most of them began as a transcript of a conversation lasting an hour or two). From time to time, the latter Editor adds comments of her own as footnotes.

The content of each chapter is meaty enough to fuel a book of its own...and is often extracted from a meaty book or two by the interviewee. The Editors allowed each scientist to recommend two, and only two, books or articles, their own or others', for further reading. The seventy-plus items in "The Readings" would constitute a good starting library of science and ideas.

The "Great Scientists" of the subtitle is a bit hyped. Each of the thirty-seven scientists (one interview was of two of them together) has won renown—quite a number are Nobelists—, yet not that many are household names. I am better read than most, but recognized just under half the names. Guess I've a bit more reading to do!!

Anyway, because of the "think time" needed, I am at this point just over halfway through the book, and thought it best to report on it without further delay. It has been four days, after all. I'll begin something lighter, while I continue reading these interviews and giving each appropriate thought.

A few highlights that I have enjoyed so far:

• For those who think office work burns them out, Robert Sapolsky might say, "For the typical mammal, stress is induced by another who is intent on eating you in the next two minutes."
• Robert Hare says of psychopaths, "In a Utopian world, psychopaths would stand out, as they would be predators,... Even if we could achieve a perfect social utopia, the psychopaths would not disappear." I guess this is why Jesus said we must be "wise as serpents but harmless as doves." Those who are only "wise as doves" are the serpents' victims.
• While interviewing Kenneth Kendler, Dr. Punset mentions work that indicates people with loose joints have higher anxiety. The ensuing discussion, however, seems to indicate the loose joints are the cause; to me, they are the effect: the anxious are prone to giving up.
• I have no simple quote from the interview with Jane Goodall, but it was clearly brought out that she caused us all to re-define "human" several times during the forty years she studied Chimpanzees. Had we not done such re-definition, we'd have had to admit that chimps are human, or at least hominids (and I think they are hominids and belong in the genus Homo).
• Diana Deutsch discovered a number of auditory illusions. Her web site has links to sound files that illustrate them. My favorite is the Tritone Paradox, in which two computer-generated, slightly buzzy notes are sounded: one, then the other. For some pairs, the first note sounds higher, and the reverse is true for other pairs. I had a colleague from Korea standing next to me as four of these were played. We agreed on three, but for one of the pairs, she thought the second note had a lower pitch, while I thought the second pitch was higher.

I may have further highlights later. I plan to copy the "Readings" list, and gather at least a few of the volumes therein.

Quantum giants humanized

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quantum theory, scientists

A "simple" thought experiment: Suppose the Universe consisted of four items, two moving particles, an edge, and a sensitive screen. The first particle moves past the edge and strikes the screen. The second particle, moving in exactly the same path as the first as it approaches the edge, moves past the edge and strikes the screen.

The salient question: Does the second particle strike the screen at the same spot as the first? This question cannot be answered. Suppose both particles do strike the same spot on the screen. We must first ask, How can we know whether the two particles actually followed the same path?

The concept known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot measure both the position q and the momentum p (including direction) of any object with infinite precision. Heisenberg quantified his insight: pq≥ћ, where ћ is Planck's Constant, a very small quantity that has popped up everywhere since Planck first derived it to describe the quantization of "blackbody" radiation.

The philosophical question: does the attempt to measure either q or p by itself affect both quantities so that we can't be sure of their values, or do these quantities have a built-in "fuzziness" that attempts at measurement simply unveil?

In 1926 and 1927 Neils Bohr and a number of the giants of theoretical physics wrestled with the implications of quantum mechanics and quantum theory, and produced the Copenhagen Interpretation, which decided in favor of the latter, and furthermore, requires the presence of an "observer" to discern the result.

My own dissent against the Copenhagen Interpretation is this: In the thought experiment above, the Edge is "observer" enough. Its presence affects the path of the particle. No matter how far the particle "misses" the edge, its path will be changed, it will not continue as if there were no edge.

There is also some finite probability that the screen may record nothing. That is, the equation that describes diffraction near an edge has a sinusoidal shape of decreasing magnitude, but while that magnitude is zero for a series of angles, it is nonzero at all points except that specific series of angles, even near 180º.

Well, I may rant about these things further some day. These are some thoughts that arose after I finished reading Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Gino Segré. This book actually says little about such things. Segré presents to us the persons involved.

It is a combined biography, first of seven giants of quantum physics (Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, Lise Meitner, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and Max Delbrück), then to a lesser extent, of their collaborators, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Enrico Fermi.

I'd always thought Bohr something of a jerk. I just knew the stories of his notorious tendency to argue until his opponent collapsed. Indeed, once when Heisenberg fled to his bed, Bohr sat at his bedside and argued him into insensibility. I never wondered why they tolerated it and came back for more. They loved him...no, they adored him. They knew he loved them even more.

The author, nephew of Nobel laureate Emilio Segré, a lesser giant among these titans, shows Bohr as a family man (he and Margrethe had six children, including a son who won a Nobel of his own), one whose "family" included dozens of physics students. Niels Bohr is the prototype of the scientist who needs others to do his science. He simply had to discuss in order to think. So if you went skiing with him, you could be sure of plenty of physics with your evening toddy.

Even the more, this collective biography shows that genius isn't the unique possession of any personality type. Paul Dirac was the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Paul Ehrenfest was insecure and eventually suicided, and Wolfgang Pauli could be as caustic as Jackie Leonard, yet was almost as beloved as Bohr.

The human side of science is clearly shown in books written in 1929-30 by Heisenberg, Pauli, and Dirac. Their subject and goal is the same, and their understanding of the subject was equivalent, but only Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics is still in print and in use. What they say is much the same, but the way they each connect with the reader differs. It is paradoxical that Dirac, the least personable, has the clearest writing style.

And what of the book's title? The last major meeting that the seven were supposed to attend (Pauli had to miss it) was Bohr's Copenhagen conference of April 1932. Those attending wrote and produced a skit, as they had before. This one was based on Goethe's Faust, in which the Lord (Bohr) and Mephistopheles (Pauli) dispute the fate of Faust (Ehrenfest). Quotes from Goethe's play are found throughout the book.

By 1932 the Copenhagen Interpretation was considered settled truth by most (Einstein was a notable exception). The skit was a loving look back at the wrangling that produced it, a chance to blow off some steam and mend fences.

World War II scattered the attendees, and many of them became developers of the nuclear bomb, which made their choice of Faust for their last revel all the more striking.

Supergirl meets physics

kw: book reviews, science fiction, androids

Killswitch is the third novel of Joel Shepher's "Cassandra Kresnov" series. The series is approaching the limit of action-packing, on a level with books based on films like "Matrix" and "Terminator". I've commented on the author's skills and characterization before. He's gone a bit farther in the explicit sex department than before, to no good purpose that I can see...just pandering.

The prior novels established Ms Kresnov as a "best of the best" android superwarrior, tactician, cook, lover, and all-around great gal...an order of magnitude beyond "Ivan Skavinsky Skivar" in the old Crimean War ballad.

This time she has a handicap: She finds out that her brain contains a self-destruct mechanism, the killswitch, that can be activated over the network to which she is almost always wirelessly connected. So she is conveniently almost blinded at crucial times. She is also now only one of four androids at her level, and she has to fight—or ambush—a couple of them.

This time, I found myself wondering, what are the physical limits to performance of a human-size mechanism? I'll defer pondering brain power. Just how strong can her "myomer"-based muscle be, how fast can she run, and how high can she really jump?

In one scene, the author has a virtual sidebar that she has power enough to jump after low-flying aircraft, but too short a stroke to "realistically" jump higher than fifteen meters (~50 ft). If she weighs around 50kg, the gravitational potential to overcome is 7,350J. A one-meter stroke in her legs means an average 15 G's (height-to-stroke ratio), and probably double that in mid-stroke.

The leg bones of a healthy, young person can typically support about ten times one's weight, so if the muscles could supply the energy, a five meter leap (~16 ft) would be possible. Chuck Yeager brags about jumping off 15-foot fences as a youngster, and that's probably about the limit. Taking off is a much slower proposition, which is why high jumpers don't raise their center of mass more than about four feet (1.2 m).

Thus, Ms Kresnov's bones need to be at least twice the strength of a human's. Not out of the question. But the muscles? Mr. Shepherd's "myomer" must have really amazing energy storage capacity and release efficiency.

Figures are lacking for how fast she can run; it is just remarked here and there that people find her hard to follow (in a visual sense); she seems a blur in combat mode. The shoe isn't made that will allow a runner to accelerate with more than one G. That's pretty good, though: 9.8 m/s², so if her top running speed is of the order of 20 m/s (~45 mph), she can hit that in less than 3 seconds. Faster takeoffs require a wall to push off of...a very strong wall.

But how long can she sustain high energy consumption? A young woman at rest has a basal metabolism of about sixty watts. A sprinter who peaks at 30 mph (13 m/s) in a 100-meter dash must sweat about a quart of water during and after that 9-second run, because of expending a couple kilowatts for that time.

The kinetic energy reaches about 4 kJ, and much more energy goes into staying off the ground, but most of the total energy expended goes to heating the body, perhaps half a million Joules, enough to raise body temperature a couple degrees C (~4ºF). So it seems to me that a modest improvement in muscular efficiency is the main thing needed to give an android the means to run long and hard without excessive heating.

If "myomer" could be 50% efficient (compared to ~5% for muscle), the androids could run a few miles before breaking a sweat. This is more plausible than 15-m leaps. I wonder what genes we'd have to tweak to double the efficiency of actual, mammalian muscle...?

Well, it is fun to speculate. Nearly as much fun as the reading.

How many masses mean balance?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space aliens

I haven't read anything by Julie E. Czerneda before, though it seems she's been writing well-received and award-winning SF novels for about ten years. She specializes in trilogies, with three in print already, and one "singlet". Reap the Wild Wind is #1 of her newest, the "Stratification" set.

The word Stratification is used but once in the novel, during a debate over the best use of new ESP-like Talents among the Om'ray, a human-like race of the world Cerci, which is host to two others, the insectile Tikitik and the huge, sluglike Oud. Subject to an ancient Agreement, the three share the world.

The balance is upset by the arrival of Strangers, survey teams from a collaboration of space races that includes humans. An accident involving Stranger technology seemingly dooms one clan of the Om'ray. Faced with a lost Harvest, they exile a number of their "unChosen", single males who must now seek another clan.

The lead character, Aryl Sarc, a young "pre-Chooser", a single female on the verge of coming of age, is one of many with new Talents. All Om'ray can sense the presence and direction of all other Om'ray...it's like an ESP radar. Aryl can also know who each one is, and she is able to send herself and others through "the dark", a kind of teleportation. This is a new, and very dangerous Power.

The conservative Council, afraid of upsetting the Agreement, suppress Talents deemed risky. The primary political thread is the tension between a paranoically conservative faction of the Council and the increasing numbers of new Talents whose Powers can no longer be denied or suppressed. The interference of the Strangers multiplies the dangers and the fears.

This first book ends in betrayal, further exile, and a hint that at least a fourth race is party to the Agreement. That will certainly figure into the following volumes.

Technology is not the main issue here. Ms Czerneda excels in characterization, particularly of aliens with their unique senses, feelings, and ways of thinking. By the end of the novel, I can't claim I understand either Tikitik or Oud, but they have become empathetic figures. A signal accomplishment!

At least this Muslim you could talk to

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion

I have written about the threat from radical Islam a few times, and other posts about Islam. A key post is A religion struggling to grow up. It is a short version of a talk I gave in the Spring of 2006. One portion of the talk that I didn't add to that post was that we in the West need to engage moderate Muslims in dialog and mutual understanding, and to support their efforts to further marginalize Islamic radical movements and overcome them. This is the job of Muslims, just as the solution to the excesses of 600 years of imperial Catholicism came from Christians in the 1500s, and the excesses of Protestantism are still being opposed and corrected by congregational, free-group, and local church styles of faith and Christian practice.

Because of the very deadly nature of radical Islam, moderate Muslims need not just support but protection. "Moral support" is not enough. That said, I recommend Ziauddin Sardar's recent small book What Do Muslims Believe? The Roots and Realities of Modern Islam to all Western readers, particularly serious Christians. I believe evangelical Christians ought to take the lead to support the efforts of such honest Muslims to take back their faith from those who evilly pervert it.

The book contains a comprehensive, if brief, exposition of Islam, its history, its varieties and its internal controversies, which are currently quite intense. The author frankly presents not just his view of "normative" Islam, but all the variety we currently see.

Points of greatest interest to me include:

• Muslims are guided by two books, the Quran and the Hadith. The former is the collection of revealed verses (all are poetic in Arabic) that Muslims consider inspired by Allah. The latter comprises all other utterances of Muhammad that are considered genuine, though Shia and Sunni sects differ in the content thereof.
• The Shariah "law" that is a current focus of much controversy was originally subject to much debate; it was intended to grow and adapt, to be amended as culture evolved, much as the U.S. Constitution is intended to be a living document. It has, however, been promoted, successfully, as inspired and unchangeable, and so is several centuries out of date.
• Islamic legalists succeeded in stifling debate on most questions of Quranic interpretation and all manner of legal appendages, including Shariah. The author writes, "The freezing of interpretation [in the 1300s] had a catastrophic effect on the development of Islamic thought. In particular, it stopped the evolution of the Shariah...in its tracks." (p95)
• The veiling of women is not demanded by any verse in the Quran or statement in the Hadith: "It was Caliph Umar who instituted segregated prayers, banned female imams and insisted that women should cover themselves. ... I see it as a perversion of the essentially egalitarian nature of Islam." (p79). The entire matter is based on two sentences in Sura 24, which enjoins men to refrain from gazing at women, and women to lower their gaze and veil their bosoms. Did the Quraysh women go about bare above the waist? Regardless, the Sura's statement is quite parallel to the longer statements one finds in the New Testament, and equally innocuous. Neither document supports the use of the heavy covering Arabs insist on.
• As stated in the Quran every Muslim is responsible to learn its contents and interpret them for him- or herself. This goes beyond the personal Scriptural responsibility of most Christians, who tend to favor more institutionalized interpretation. As stated above, it also goes far beyond the stance insisted on by modern imams.

These are but a few things I found interesting. This book is required reading. Get to know your local Muslims.

Though as an evangelical Christian I cannot consider the Quran to be inspired, I certainly can, and do, have good relationships with the Muslims of my acquaintance without engaging in religious bickering.

Apocalypse at Yellowstone?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geological history, volcanoes

For months or years, probably a decade or more, the signs accumulate. Sensitive equipment detects fifty or 100 earthquakes one month, 500 the next, then less than 100, and so forth. People sitting still might notice a tremor every few months. One rumbles through that knocks knickknacks off of shelves, and maybe someone falls off a chair. "Are they getting worse?" people ask the next day. A GPS device shows that the ground has risen another foot in just a week, but it has done that before, and often subsided.

Finally, one day a series of shocks that can knock a fellow down is followed by an eruption of smoke and a little ash. A new crack becomes a fumarole, then as the ground rises more rapidly, ash and hot rocks pop out.

This is new. This could be the beginning of a major eruption. This isn't Mount Etna or Vesuvius, which are dangerous enough. This is Yellowstone, and the modern park almost encompasses a set of three overlapping calderas (volcanic craters) big enough to hold Vesuvius and Etna both...not their craters, but the entire mountains.

It may be that these new events herald an explosion similar in size to Krakatau. That simply removed an island the size of New York City. Or it could be much bigger. Two million years ago, the oldest Yellowstone caldera was formed in the fourth largest eruption geologists have studied. It has erupted twice since, one just 640,000 years ago being about half the magnitude of the first, and one between the two in time, but about one-tenth the scale. A "smaller" eruption occurred just 70,000 years ago. That one was still ten to fifty times as destructive as Mt. Vesuvius when it destroyed Pompeii.

There are just under fifty known ashfall beds that Geologists classify as "Supervolcano" eruption debris. Each released at least 500 cubic km (120 cubic miles) of ashy lava. The largest, which spread the Fish Canyon Tuff in Colorado 28 million years ago, erupted 5,000 km³. The earlier Yellowstone ashfall was about half that, with the later one about 1,000. The ashfall 70,000 years ago was a "mere" 100 km³.

Within a few years from today, and perhaps in a much more compressed time frame, a new caldera could appear at Yellowstone, and whenever it does, an area the size of Connecticut could be covered in several feet of ash...or hundreds. Human civilization could be completely reworked as a result, or vanish entirely for generations. Then again, it may not occur for centuries. But the chances are deemed to be about five times as great as another asteroid impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

All this is my own synopsis of Greg Breining's thesis in Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park. My sketch is just a middle-of-the-road speculation, based on the history of Yellowstone and the Snake River plateau over the past 16-18 million years.

Think Hawaii: A series of islands that arose, one after another, over 20 million years or so. The Big Island is still erupting but a new island is forming to its northeast, and will grow above sea level in a few hundred years. This chain of island volcanoes is symptomatic of a hot spot anchored in Earth's mantle, somewhere at least a few hundred miles down. The Pacific Plate is moving over this stationary hot spot at a rate of about 5 cm yearly. From time to time, this starves off the heat supply to one island, so a new conduit to the surface is melted through, forming a newer island.

The North American Plate is moving over a similar hot spot, at perhaps 2 cm yearly. Our first bits of evidence for it are 350 miles WSW of Yellowstone, along the Nevada-Oregon border. Geologists have pieced together evidence of 142 major eruptions spanning about 17 million years. Many of these had Super status (500 km³ of ash or more). Events the size of the one 70,000 years ago are hard to discern because the larger ones tend to erase the smaller ones. A "70,000" style eruption would be the biggest in recorded history.

Hawaii and other island chains erupt much larger total volumes of lava, and very little ash, because the oceanic crust has a composition that, when melted into magma (when magma is ejected it becomes lava), is runny and flows readily. A hot spot that melts continental crust produces a much thicker magma. It is much hotter than Hawaiian magma, but so sticky it cannot flow at all. It allows pressure to build up until an explosion occurs. A "small" explosion reduces pressure at the top of the magma body, which allows water to expand into steam, leading to a bigger explosion; this process cascades until a large portion of the magma is blasted out. The caldera forms when the steam pressure falls and the overlying, "cooler" rocks collapse into the emptied magma chamber.

This can happen fast! The thick ash left behind by Yellowstone's largest known eruption is a single "welded tuff" that could have fallen in a single day. Near the caldera it may have been more than a mile thick.

When Mt. St. Helens erupted 27 years ago, it loosed a couple of cubic km of ash. I lived in South Dakota at the time. We had an ash fall of a quarter inch or less of fine dust a few days later. Had that been a supervolcano eruption, the thickness would have been three or four meters. Shoveling snow is bad enough! You gotta get ash like that off the roof of your house before the next rain, or it soaks up the water and your roof collapses! And it is likely to rain soon. Such eruptions usually trigger heavy rainfall.

The book's chapters survey the history of Yellowstone and of volcanic disasters through both recent Geologic time and historical time. The timing and scale of the largest eruptions points up the problem we have: There has been no super volcano eruption in the last 10,000 years, so we don't have any idea what events lead up to it, how rapidly it actually occurs, or how long the biosphere (and human culture) take to recover.

Here is the latest update from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory:

day, December 3, 2007 10:27 MST
Volcano Alert Level: NORMAL
Aviation Color Code: GREEN

NOVEMBER 2007 Yellowstone Seismicity Summary

During the month of November 2007, 69 earthquakes were located in the Yellowstone Region. The largest of these shocks was a magnitude 2.9 on November 4, 2007 at 11:43 PM MDT, located about 2 miles south southeast of West Thumb, WY. This earthquake was slightly felt at West Thumb and Old Faithful but produced no damage. There were no earthquake swarms during the month.

Earthquake activity in the Yellowstone region is at relatively low background levels.

Ground Deformation Summary: Through November 2007, continuous GPS data show that most of the Yellowstone caldera continued moving upward at similar to slightly lower rates as the past year. The maximum measured ground uplift over the past 37 months is ~17 cm at the White Lake GPS station. An example can be found at: UNAVO time series

The general uplift of the Yellowstone caldera is scientifically interesting and will continue to be monitored closely by YVO staff.

When might it happen? The timing of past eruptions is quite irregular, so we could be overdue, or it could be thousands of years. Such an eruption takes time to gather its energies, so there will be signs, but like "false labor" that can come and go for a month before a baby is born, nobody can predict which set of gathering precursors will cascade into a huge blast. Knowing human history, when Yellowstone really blows, there will probably be tens of thousands of people there, inside the present caldera, enjoying the extra geyser activity and excitedly peeking at the new, smoking, spitting fumaroles. Not even their DNA will be found afterward.

Little book, big ideas

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, life

Freeman Dyson tops my list of original, broad-based thinkers. Among SciFi addicts, he is probably best known for "Dyson Spheres," the concept that an advanced species will gradually surround their home star with either a solid shell or a tightly-woven maze of orbital habitats, so as to capture all of its radiation for their use. He speculated that warm Infrared stars, radiating most strongly at a wavelength of 10-12 micrometers, corresponding to a "visible surface temperature"of 280-300 K, or about 10-30 ºC, which is the comfortable living range for "life like us."

He is a classic polymath: though his main expertise is mathematical physics, he displays mastery of the sciences generally, and in any field, his "guesses" are likely to be correct. In his new book A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, partly composed from his Page-Babour Lectures of 2004, he speaks of life in many aspects, from the technological to the theological.

Known for keeping his own counsel and thinking much farther "outside the box" than others, he speculates on a near-future biotechnology when gene sequencing is cheap, and genetic engineering kits can be bought at the toy store, for kids who might want to create a purple-eyed kitten or a winged snakelet...or people of any age who wish to edit themselves. I like his characterization of scientist as hedgehogs and foxes. The foxes find all the new stuff, while a hedgehog learns everything about some new thing and makes it into practical products.

Dyson also explores Carl Woese's idea that before there were Bacteria and Archaea, there was a mega-species of cellular life that shared genetic material like we share e-mails, promiscuously, and with abandon. He thinks the segregation of DNA into cells that "kept it to themselves" has slowed down evolution. The toy store genetic kits might just return Earth to a rapid-paced evolutionary future.

In his third chapter he develops one of my favorite themes: the value of heretics (I tend to use the word fanatics, but the concept matches). Motivational speakers such as the Coveys say things like this: Innovation requires doing something others aren't doing. Therefore orthodoxy guarantees stagnation, and only the heterodox make any progress. Consider that 90% of what we now "know" was unknown twenty years ago, and that half of what was "known" then is now known to be wrong, while most of the rest has been subsumed into better theories.

In his heretic's garb, he points out that "global warming" is not exactly global, nor exactly warming. Extra greenhouse gases mean extra energy in the system, so some areas get warmer, other areas get cooler, and overall, climatic extremes get a little more extreme. He points out that if a much larger fraction of farmers used conservation tillage, the extra carbon stored in soil would begin to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In his last chapter he discusses theology and neurology. He demonstrates that people with significant "handicaps" such as autism or congenital deafness think differently than others, so much so that he calls them "alien minds in our midst." Their concepts of spirituality, for those who can express one, is quite different from any major religion. I've long said that people are worth more than doctrines. Augustine said, "If you understand, it isn't God." Dyson seems to be on to something.

This just skates the surface. I may return to some of his themes, when I am not against a deadline. I just have to get a few lines penned and take off on a trip...in a matter of minutes!

Coral versus . . . everybody

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space aliens, mysteries

Arthur Clarke said, "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." When a writer of SciFi chooses an imagined world having technologies thousands or millions of years beyond our own, it is only the stated intent, and the strong tendency to adhere to consistent rules, that makes the book Science Fiction rather than a Fantasy.

Timothy Zahn has picked a winner in the two books he has placed in a universe with interstellar train transport. An unknown technology from a vanished species' distant past is used to travel between the stars. The trains seem to move at a 100 kph rate, but a trick of morphing space near a cosmic-string "coreline" allows them to traverse a light year each minute, or sometimes faster. I read his SciFi mystery Night Train to Rigel a number of years ago (pre-Blog), in which the premise is laid out. His newest book The Third Lynx develops the theme.

The train system, its hyper-paranoid custodians and their "Spider" allies, plus the danger imposed by a secretive, telepathic coral form the backdrop of these mysteries in which Frank Compton and the part-human part-Spider Bayta seek to thwart the coralline Mohdri's plans.

Twelve species now share the use of the Quadrail trains (plus a thirteenth, the custodians and the spiders combined), making a major chunk of the Galaxy resemble Europe. For a fee, including the cost of shuttle and torch ship transport between Quadrail stations and planetary surfaces, one may travel a few hundred light years overnight.

I found it interesting to speculate on the origin of the species names. The hulking Halkas—think a bipedal 120kg bulldog—and the bellicose Bellidos from Bellico—they look like chipmunks but carry four sidearms each—seem obvious. The Seejlis and Tra'ho'seej are less so. But that's OK. Zahn himself may know, and may not.

The human/alien drama aside, the core idea in this novel is a 3-section weapon that is quite innocuous when disassembled, but once the three parts are together, it packs almost nuclear levels of firepower into a rifle-sized package. The titular Lynx is one part of such a package.

I sometimes try to outline or diagram a plot line. Not here. There are enough plot twists and unexpected turns to fill three books by an ordinary writer; Zahn is way beyond ordinary!

Megavirus to the rescue

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction

New writer, new ideas. Anachronisms abound in Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe, but it isn't too serious. The title is intended to remind of "Radio Free Europe", for the theme enters that territory.

In the early 2030s, the world is rapidly being swallowed up by Unification. As usual, the mass of humanity is either too sheeplike or too busy surviving to pay much attention. The scenario is plausible. Also, music trends have done what trends do: morphed almost out of recognition. The mix of "classic" rock/hiphop/rap/CMA country (today's trends) is giving way to more techno versions of all of the above, and that is important to the story line.

Mr. Jarpe sure knows his music, and he's a fair hand with a lyric: every chapter has a head quote from a song dated 2008-2032. They're an eclectic sample of the kinds of semi-absurdist post-post-modern rage/protest rock that is quite likely to be popular among our grandkids...except that the turn(s) music will really take over the next 25 years is 'way too unpredictable.

The prevalence of AI running at a human and post-human level is much less likely. Moore's Law has been showing signs of wear for 10-15 years, and the curvature of the "linear" trend is quite noticeable now. That simply means that the predictions of the AI gurus have to be taken with an even larger pinch of salt than before. Whenever you read predictions of what new advance will occur when, simply add a zero: ten years means a hundred, and so forth. So that part of the narrative took some getting used to. I guess I know too much about the field, from the inside.

The idea of a pervasive Net virus evolving into the Digital Carnivore is enticing. However, evolution requires a population that can mix, reproduce and be frequently decimated by selective forces. The focus in the book on one big virus masks this, though a knowledge of the way the net works makes it seem more likely to me. Any one piece of viral code is endlessly replicated, and if it has been programmed to be self-editing, and able to mix-and-match among various copies of itself, who knows...?

The three main characters in the book—Aqualung, an aging rocker and electronics wizard; Walter Cheeseman, a political and business genius who is quite credibly taking over the world; and Quin Taber (with his AI assistant Molly), one of a small number of people who can handle the info overload of a "dataspray" implant, and a former Cheeseman employee who now wants to thwart him—are all larger than life, more so than I expected.

The book is compared in the trade press with Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I can see the similarity. But Jarpe makes it more personal (in Moon the digital protagonist overshadows everyone else), and his craft is already good enough to make this quite unlikely plot seem possible. I'd watch this guy as his writing matures.

Being both sides of the dialog

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." That's a rather negative way of saying, "Pay attention." Alan Alda says it even better, summing up his new book: "Notice it." A one-word sentence (the next-to-last, but it would be better placed as the last) closes Alda's Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself: "Notice."

I found it interesting, having reviewed a book compiled from askphilosophers.org, to find one a popular cultural figure pondering the same questions. Alda's title refers to the source material. He is a sought-after public speaker, having spoken, for example, as the commencement speaker at all three of his daughters' graduation ceremonies. He realized recently that in all these talks, "...I was really talking to myself." Fortunately, unlike many celebrities, he has something to say.

He has not really had a quest for the "meaning of life." His passion has been enjoying it, and that not even in a focused way. He loves a lot of things--the animal pleasures, of course: wine, woman (one woman, Arlene), and song...and dance and acting; but also the heady pleasures of writing a script or a speech (on which he works harder than on anything else); though he had a taste for science, he bypassed a science education for the theater, so he instead grabbed the chance to interview scientists and see some of their work first hand for Scientific American Frontiers, for eleven years.

In the sixteen essays that make up the book we find glimpses of many people we've seen only on the surface, if at all. The actress Anne Bancroft, who underneath, as one who played with Alda's grandchildren, was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano from the Bronx, an amazing woman, perhaps the only one who could keep up with husband Mel Brooks. Martin Bregman, who became his agent: a complex, fun, passionate man, yet one who frequently hid his polio-ravaged legs behind a large desk; in any way that Alda did not make himself, Bregman made him. Yuan Long Ping, inventor of rice that will crossbreed and thus a hero of Chinese agriculture, who taught Alda more about Thomas Jefferson than any book he'd read...he did it by living a Jeffersonian life, with its inherent risks in Maoist China.

Alan Alda is seventy now. Now that he has a couple of books under his belt, I do hope he writes more, much more.