The wings stabilize the center

kw: sociology, extremism

My father's friend Henry was probably the most brilliant doctor I've known. He was a radiation oncologist who practiced in the 1940s to 1990s. I got to see his "cobalt bomb", which was the state of the art in radiation sources in the late 1950s; I was probably 11. But Henry had a fatal flaw, and I mean this literally. He allowed himself to hate. In my father's opinion, it shortened his life. At the very least, it blighted his waning years. From the day the 2000 Presidential campaign began until his own death, Henry hated George W. Bush. He hated him even after Barack Obama was elected, frequently ranting that all the nation's problems were "Bush's fault." Dad tried to tell him, "Henry, you are saddening yourself without reason. Do you think all your anger bothers Mr. Bush? Not a bit. It just makes you waste your days in fruitless worry and fury."

A few days ago I was at lunch with some people in Washington, and one person mentioned he'd met Sean Hannity. One woman, a prominent scientist, practically jumped, "Oh, now you have ruined my lunch!" A few people snickered, but I saw the mingled fury and disgust on her face. I decided I'd wait for a better opportunity to tell her about Henry. It would be a pity for her to burn her energy in the politics of hate.

If I wanted to, I could hate a few people. Some years ago, I knew Tom Daschle when he was a Senator from South Dakota. A true snake, who believes all the "excess" money should be taken from the rich and spread around (of course, not any of his excess money). Then there is the quite un-Revered Al Sharpton, chief exponent of the politics of revenge. Another Tom, this one Carper, a vicious in-fighter for every cause I detest. I don't know the names of any of the environmentalist wackos who think "humans are the problem" and that animals are superior. Anyone who has a dog knows that dogs know much more about unconditional love than any human, but no dog will ever invent penicillin or the telephone (wired or not). I could almost muster up some hate for those wackos, but I realize they are shortening their own lives with their own hatred of humanity, so I just leave 'em to it.

But we need them. We need wackos of all persuasions. They have the energy, and many are willing to spend their own resources, to ferret out abuses by whatever "other side" they are against. So they tend to keep the rest of us honest (but Congress is beyond even their powers). We need our vocal radicals, and vocal reactionaries, and vocal whatever they may be. It is all part of the political Bell Curve, also called the Gaussian Distribution, discovered by Carl F. Gauss in 1809.

It is an amazing bit of mathematics that so many phenomena really are distributed in this way, symmetrically distributed about an average value, with 68% of cases inside a boundary called "one sigma", and 95% within "two sigma" ("Sigma" is statistician's shorthand for Standard Deviation). Ah, but in political sociology it is that other 5% that I am talking about. Half make up the extreme Left Wing, and half make up the extreme Right Wing. Henry was one of those 2.5% on the far Left, so far Left that he thought centrist GW Bush was equivalent to John Birch or Sean Hannity.

The middle 68% are the Moderates, from mildly Left to mildly Right. Further to the Left and Right, but inside "two sigma", are the Liberal Base and the Conservative Base. I am Conservative, but pretty close to the "one sigma" point on the Right. Two of my brothers are pretty close to the "one sigma" point on the Left. That means we often disagree, but can argue without rancor. My youngest brother, a small business owner, is probably a bit to the Right of me. He once said to me, "I can't afford to be anything but conservative if I want to keep my business afloat."

The political "conversation" in this country has become dominated by people near and beyond the "two sigma" points at either end. These are people who cannot imagine how any opinion of their opposite number could be correct. They do not even allow for Churchill's Maxim: "Even a fool is right once in a while." Fortunately, the "wingers" seldom have what it takes to gain sufficient popularity to be elected to anything. To those who think Ronald Reagan was a Fascist, I place him near "1.5 sigma" on the Right. Fascism is at "three sigma"; Hitler and Mussolini were at or beyond that point. To those who think President Obama is a Socialist, I place him near "1.5 sigma" on the Left. True Socialism is at "three sigma" and beyond; that is where Lenin and Mao were. By the way, Communism is Socialism with cynical leaders.

The United States of America as defined in the Constitution is Centrist. The separation of powers articles contain provisions that keep extremists from getting many of their pet projects approved. The bicameral legislature keeps both populist and elitist elements from dominating for long periods of time. The two-party system that has arisen is actually more stable than the multi-party Parliaments of most European nations, and it provides further balance. The Constitutional Commission of 1787 didn't foresee a two-party system, but I suspect that most of them would grudgingly approve. Even the more, they would approve of the continued power of the First Amendment to allow gadflies of all persuasions to vex and goad the rest of us into noticing abuses that perhaps we'd rather ignore. The examples of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and other totalitarian states shows us the brilliance of a system that has (so far) not allowed the gadflies to get any power, but has not stifled them, either.

Let us rejoice in our gadflies. Let us continue to permit them their forums. When one occasionally draws blood, it shows where something needs to be corrected. That is a good thing.

The LoC gets the word

kw: mayan history, eschatology, lectures

In Washington, D.C. yesterday, near noontime I made my way to the Madison Building of the Library of Congress for a lecture by Professor Mark Van Stone about the Maya and the alleged 2012 apocalypse. He has published a book and an iBook (not an eBook; it is only for iPad at present) on the matter. The event was a part of Hispanic Heritage Month at the LoC, and Dr. V was introduced by the Director, Barbara Tenenbaum.

Until recently, only one Mayan inscription had anything to say about the "13th Baktun", the year 13.0.0.0.0. in their calendar. The Mayas counted by twenties, so 13x20x20x20x20 = 2,080,000 days or nearly 5,695 years. The prior instance of a calendar reset would then have been some time in 3,684 BC (remember there is no year 0 between BC and AD). According to that single inscription, the two readable characters after the date tell us that a certain god is going to dress in a ceremonial costume. What ceremony? No data.

In June, a second monument was found, equally enigmatic. Considering that other Maya inscriptions discuss events they expected some 3,000 years further in the future—and perhaps much further—, at the very least we understand that they did not expect time to end, nor their civilization. However, their status as prophets is a bit suspect, for they did not foretell the end of their own dominance in the 900s, nor the Spanish conquest of the 1490s.

Anyway, once December 21, 2012 (or maybe the 23d or 24th; some scholars calculate differently) has come and gone, there is always the end of the Aztec calendar in 2027 to worry about, if you are a worry wart…except that the Aztecs also predicted some kind of dire event for the year 2039 (I'll be 92 by then, if I am still around).

Does the apparent path of the Sun crossing the Galactic equator have any significance? It happens that, on or near December 21, the Sun will appear to pass the center of the Galaxy—well, within about three degrees. Some folks state that precession of the equinoxes means this only happens every 22,000 years (4 sets of 13 Baktuns is 22,780 years). Actually, the Sun's crossing near the Galactic center has been going on for millions of years, every single year. This year is not even the closest pass, as the Earth's orbit slowly shifts. The date of this passage drifts around the calendar on the 22,000 year cycle. But it is a kind of "so what" sort of fact.

A good occasion and a very enjoyable lecture. A number of other prominent Mayanists were there, including at least a couple of folks who appear in videos inside the iBook, titled Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya. I guess Dr. V will have to get as much book selling done as he can in the next ten weeks. By Christmastime, there won't be any market for his book, whether time stops or not!

Precisely what did Joe win?

kw: politics, debates

I had a long day in D.C. yesterday (more about that in another post), so I'd pre-recorded the Vice-Presidential debate and watched it late. That got me to bed pretty late, and I'm squeezing in a long coffee break at work to make a belated comment.

There is a funny old film in which a seasoned swordsman displays all kinds of exaggerated techniques and fancy footwork. Meanwhile, his opponent either parries or stands back to watch the show, before stepping in to behead him.

There is no doubt that Joe Biden is a seasoned debater. He is also a bully and a clown, but as Delawareans like to say, "Yeah, he's a buffoon, but he's our buffoon." And for close to forty years they have been voting for him over candidates who had the temerity to display a smidgen of intelligence.

In the few post-debate minutes that I watched, the ABC folk were all saying, "Oh, yeah, Biden won hands down." Really? If this had been a debate rated according to the rules of Toastmasters International, I suppose you could say he out-pointed Paul Ryan, in the narrow sense of asking more questions, but with Ms Raddatz continually cutting Ryan short, a wise debate judge would have replaced her in the first quarter hour with an unbiased moderator.

Then there was all the grinning and grimacing. Does Joe really think we fall for his hamming it up? Paul Ryan mostly ignored Joe Biden's antics, concentrating on making the points he could, but occasionally just "let Joe be Joe", before snipping off his head. The moderator complained that Ryan was short of specifics, but he actually did have some specifics, while Biden had none. And Ryan pointed out repeatedly that Biden was using empty attacks to cover a total absence of reason.

In the next-to-last exchange, Paul Ryan did miss an opportunity. Joe Biden made five quick complaints against Romney and Ryan. Ryan's best answer would have been, "You just heard five bald-faced lies", but perhaps he'd decided not to call Joe a liar outright. If you count blows thrown (ignoring that they all missed), sure you could say that Biden "won". He left the stage with a trophy in his hand, and his head on the floor.

Everything is a disease or deficiency

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, drugs, polemics

It has been only 15 years since drug companies began directly marketing their products to consumers. My wife and I recently made the strategic decision to not use any medicine seen in a TV ad. I have sat there with a stop watch; in a 30-second ad, at least 15 seconds are taken up with the (fortunately) mandatory warning messages, and often there is little time for any "positive" message. Many ads have to be a full minute to have time for all the warnings! In nearly every ad, particularly for medications for asthma and cholesterol, one of the "side effects" is "sudden death".

Now we are wondering if the situation with foodstuffs is equally dire. We have been using chicken and turkey products in preference to beef for decades, primarily because of levels of saturated fat in "red meat". We'd read about the controversy over growth hormones, and recently began getting our milk from Trader Joe's, which has this notice, along with a quisling statement required by the FDA, that claims recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) doesn't make a difference and can't be detected anyway. Both parts of that statement are false. In particular, rBST is detectable, but the test isn't cheap. As they say, do you want cheap milk or not? Well, as it happens, Trader Joe's milk costs less than all the alternatives at ordinary supermarkets, except when they have a sale. No need to test if the stuff won't be there in the first place.

A couple of times we bought eggs from Eggland's Best, but I decided to look into it. At the Egg Scorecard at Cornucopia.com, I found that they refuse to allow anyone to "score" their eggs, and other less official sources rate them poorly in the hygiene and humaneness of their operation. One of the best egg producers from an organic and humane treatment perspective is the Vital Farms brand sold at Whole Foods stores. Fortunately a WF store recently opened nearby.

Our experiences square pretty well with information found in a curious new book, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks (sic), Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health by Martha Rosenberg. Concerning the subtitle: the word is Flacks. Flak is antiaircraft fire, or opposition from a heckler at a speech, by analogy; it is never pluralized. The character string "flaks" never appears elsewhere except in dictionaries as a phonetic hint as to how to pronounce "flacks".

Ms Rosenberg is also a cartoonist, and this item, from p.144, shows her rather clumsy style. I suppose some folks call it "endearing". Fortunately, the writing is anything but clumsy. It is polemical, but without the strident, fanatical edge of most polemics.

For "Big Pharma" and "Big Food", polemics are richly deserved. Big Pharma has been coasting on its "miracle drug" laurels since all the easy pickings of the 1940s and 1950s. The result has become thousands of branded drugs, most of which do very little good, and sometimes a lot of harm. Numerous other books detail that most "research" supporting new drugs is falsified. Then there is AgriBiz: less than 1% of Americans are now farmers, producing our food on just under 20% of the U.S. land area.

When I was a child, one tenth of working Americans were farmers. Prior to WWII, farmers were 18% of the work force. 1880 was the first year that fewer than half of American workers were farmers. In 1790, they made up 90%. From 90% to under 1%. Wow. Another 1% live on farms but aren't farming (their underage kids, in other words; from age 7 or so, even the kids work on the farm). Ironically, the number of hunters in the US is about 4% of the population, and we can assume that another couple of percent—spouse or children—help dress the game. But that means more than 90% of Americans never see where their meat comes from, never see an animal killed so they can eat, and most do not even cut meat any more, because you can buy it pre-cubed or pre-sliced or even, as the chicken breast cutlets we ate last evening, pre-spiced and ready to bake.

I guess I am one of the lucky few committed carnivores who does know. I've worked in a slaughterhouse; I was even there when they ran a truckload of bison through. We have usually lived in rural areas, so I have had neighbors show up with a brace of freshly shot rabbits or pheasants, which we then dressed out on the kitchen counter; we have helped friends butcher deer and hogs.

But back to the book. It is extensively researched (80 pages of notes and references). The Pharma section dwells primarily on four kinds of drugs: Antipsychotics that are now used for "depression" because "ordinary" antidepressives don't work very well, anti-menopausal drugs of several kinds, PTSD and the deadly drugs (including the antipsychotics) used to "treat" it, and the new bisphosphonates used for "bone health" but which frequently lead to even more fractures or bone death in the jaw. The Food section dwells on beastly treatment of animals throughout, whether the topic is milk, eggs, meat and the hormones in it, mad cow disease, or food labeling (or the lack thereof).

The biggest lack: Any "what to do about it" information. On one hand, it is a relief that the author isn't selling a product. However, spending 300 pages to raise a dozen kinds of alarms, without offering any remedies, does no service. Am I better off for being made even more paranoid? Let's see, we've already decided to eschew advertized drugs. We've done a few things to eat better, and with a little effort we can do more, because we live only an hour's drive from a cluster of Amish farms. Big Pharma and Big Food have woven themselves into society to the point that everything imaginable is either a disease or a deficiency.

My generation, the Baby Boomers, has aided and abetted BP-n-BF at every stage. Ms Rosenberg names a number of FDA and USDA officials who have allowed or even helped corporations bypass what few regulations exist. They are all Boomers. To a Boomer, aging is a disease; menopause is a disease; feeling even slightly bad is a disease; a passing mood is due to some deficiency; being too short, too tall, too thin, too fat, too sociable or too lonely are "challenges" to be met with this new drug or that tastier food or a more concentrated food supplement. Plastic surgery is booming (wrinkles and wattles and various sagging places are a disease). To millions, Western medicine is inadequate, so alternative medical treatments abound.

The sad truth is, there is no "cure" for decline and death. The death rate remains stubbornly at one per person, no more and no less. "Convenience" is the name of the game. Faster fast food, the tastier the better (too bad fat tastes so good); bigger portions; more variety on the buffet—and a Tums or "purple pill" to keep it all from waking you at midnight.

I realize we are in the midst of an evolutionary experiment. There is a significant chance that the tendency to get the most out of an exaggerated Western lifestyle is based on inherited tendencies that will soon become mostly extinct. When our kids get too fat to reproduce, they won't leave descendants. When they get too zoned out on mood drugs, they also leave fewer offspring. How many generations will it be until the majority of Americans and wannabe Americans actually exercise self control and responsibility? The future is theirs.

Care before clicking

kw: worms, malware

There probably isn't any communications software that is totally secure. The current warning is about Skype Instant Messaging. See this CNET article. Just in case you are wary, that link is supposed to contain

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57528353-83/worm-spreading-on-skype-im-installs-ransomware/

The upshot is this: A worm is being spread by a link contained in a Skype IM text. It installes "ransomware" on your computer, and you soon get a demand for a few hundred dollars to "unlock" your files, or they will be erased.

I don't know about you, but I use Skype only for video chatting with family members and a very few friends in distant places. My family and I never use its IM feature. Now it sounds like a convenience that is a bit too risky anyway!

The Skype people are recommending that we all get the most recent version. That is easy to do: with Skype running, open Help and click Check for Updates. Then follow directions.

The lonely path of righteous refusal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disenfranchised by caution

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, personality, introversion, extroversion

Once in a while a book comes along that simply reminds me who I am. Such a book is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. From one aspect, the book constitutes a long protest against the deification of extroversion (the "academic" spelling is "extraversion") in the United States. From another, it is a powerful affirmation of the value of introversion in society, particularly American society.

This graphic, from an article in The Journal of Research in Personalty by Robert McCrae, shows the level of extroversion in many countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. The criterion is the E score on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory scale (MBTI). Had the study included the New World, the U.S. would be in the darkest red category, right up there with Turkey, Spain and Sweden. On this map, lack of any color means no data.

Seeing that China is in the next-to-lowest E range, and Taiwan and India are in the lowest, reminds me of an incident when I was in graduate school. It is a stereotype, yet true, that introverts study more persistently than extroverts. I was visiting a friend, a student from Taiwan, who told me that a recent influx of students from India was scaring them all. Formerly the Taiwanese got most of the A grades. Now, the Indians were dominating the highest rankings. "Those guys study day and night," my friend said, "I wonder if they ever sleep!"

A word about MBTI. Based on the ideas of Carl Jung, it ranks people on four scales based on preferences expressed on a self-administered test. The scales are:

• Introversion versus Extroversion
• Sensing versus iNtuition
• Thinking versus Feeling
• Judging versus Perception

The data for this table were drawn from a page kept by the Ancona family, using data for Americans. The largest cohorts for both men and women are highlighted in red: ISTJ and ESTJ for men, ISFT and ESFJ for women. That also matches a common stereotype. Whether extroverted or introverted, women tend to "feel" and men tend to "think". Overall, Sensors outnumber intuitives about 3-to-1.

The smallest cohorts are highlighted in green: INFJ and ENFJ for men, INTJ and ENTJ for women. My own type is INTP (see the tan highlight), a rather uncommon type, but not the rarest. I am Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinker, Perceptive. If the characteristics were exactly evenly distributed, all the figures would be 6.25%. Although my wife has not taken the MBTI, I estimate that she is ISFJ or ISFP. Curiously, I am pretty sure our son is ESFJ, the exact opposite of my type. More on that later.

According to some scholars, the number of introverts is America is about 30%. The table above indicates it is almost exactly 50%, within the margin of uncertainty. Whatever the true figure is, there are a lot of us. Furthermore, according to study after study, introverts get better grades, are awarded more patents, and attain more Nobel Prizes. Yet the ideal of the extroverted, glad-handing life-of-the-party has forced many introverts to masquerade as extroverts to get or keep their jobs.

In the first section of the book, Ms Cain traces the rise of the "Mighty likeable fellow" to the influence of Dale Carnegie. The Dale Carnegie Course is still offered, and when I attended, I found it a great help. But not everything they teach suits what I can do. Other social trends that followed were not so helpful. Group brainstorming, for example, which relies on hyper-extroverted give-and-take, turns out to be just about the worst way to generate creative ideas. More measured approaches, such as the facilitated Thinking Hats method of Edward deBono, produce more copious and better results, while a combination of individual and group effort, properly facilitated and proctored, works the best; this last requires a facilitator who knows how to draw out the thoughts of all the members, whether quiet or outgoing.

A second section covers the contributions of Nature and Nurture. About 20% of infants are "high reactive", and typically grow into cautious, thoughtful adults. About 40% are "low reactive", apparently fearless, and usually become stereotypical party animals. That leaves 40% who were not discussed, but I reckon that there is actually a spectrum of reactivity and sensitivity, such that roughly half of Americans (at least) are able to behave in both extroverted and introverted ways, as the situation demands.

Yet even the most introverted of us—and by that I do not mean autistic or Asperger people, who are afflicted with a disorder, but I mean those who prefer their inner life over outward activity—are able to learn to speak in public, to assert ourselves, and to socialize and mingle as needed, as long as we get enough downtime to recover.

The book's third section of a single chapter contrasts Asian with Western culture. There may be a significant genetic component at work here, but both Chinese and Indian cultures, for example (picking the two with which I am most familiar), strongly stress the good of the group over the individual, and each has a version of the proverb, "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down." Among my colleagues and friends who are Asian, the extroverts (there are plenty!) are less likely to steamroll over a quieter person than an American extrovert. These cultures have a greater respect for teachers and scholars than is true in the West (although the result of two generations of Federal meddling in education in America has led to a great increase in poor teachers; many many of the good ones have left the system).

The last section of the book is like an extended advice column: how to act more extroverted when you need to (and how to carve out "me time" to recover); how to communicate with an opposite personality type (the burden is on the introvert); and how to raise an introverted child, particularly for extroverted parents. The glaring thing that is missing here is how introverted parents can raise an extroverted child. I'd have really appreciated some help there over the past 20+ years! Some may think a young extrovert can take care of him/herself. Not so. A child still needs guidance. What kind of example and guidance can be offered to a child when everything around leads him to despise the quietness and caution of his parents?

Personal Notes

If you have been itching to know more about me, read on. Otherwise, skip to the closing heading. I am the most introverted of the four boys my extroverted parents raised. Yet, as I only learned about 15 years ago, I am also bipolar, so there were periods of much more intense sociality and activity. I am a rapid cycler, with about ten cycles yearly (3-4 is more usual).

At the age of 12, my parents had a psychoanalyst spend some time with me, because I was "withdrawn" and "in a shell". To this day, my favorite comic page characters are Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes and Snoopy of Peanuts, both of whom live rich internal lives. It is pretty clear that these two characters exemplify their creators Bill Watterson and Charles Schulz.

My parents and teachers gradually learned that I did best with smaller numbers of people around. Yet, there are a few famous incidents, such as the day I led a group of children to play Santa Clause down the chimney of a large barbecue on school grounds, after which we all tracked ashes into the classroom. Everybody just scratched their heads, "He is usually so quiet." This was an early incident of bipolar mania.

Once I learned about my MBTI scale, and then later was diagnosed Bipolar 2 (milder than the flaming "1" version), I began to study the phenomena. I learned that the old designation Manic-Depressive is quite inaccurate. I learned to think of my moods as Expansive or Contractile. I am Expansive about a quarter of the time, Contractile about half, and in transition the rest. In my Contractile phase, I am more prone to depression, but for me at least, depression is a choice. I am able to embrace the need for quiet and reduced stimulation as needed. In such a phase, if I need to perform in a more Expansive way, I am able to do so, but I know there are consequences, so I schedule time for an extra nap, or a longer time reading a cerebral book. At such times I avoid the TV; it is too "hot". Even in an Expansive mood, I am still an introvert, albeit one who is much more able to bear intensely social situations such as large dinner parties.

I was lucky to stumble on computer programming as a profession, starting in the late 1960s. It exactly suits my need for long periods of focused work. I wrote scientific software for nearly forty years. For the past several years, I have taken advantage of my classical education (bless St. John's Lutheran School in Salt Lake City!) and worked in Knowledge Management. I get plenty of quiet keyboard time!

When I have time to plan, I am able to prepare my mood for an Expansive stretch when it is necessary to do something like make an important speech or meet a room full of customers or vendors. I was an active Toastmaster for more than ten years. It was interesting, being socially involved on a weekly basis, and on the bubble to do a Table Topic or lead a portion of the meeting upon demand. I learned to perform well regardless of my mood. On a particularly contractile day, I could promise the part of me that wanted to cower in a cave that "we" would be back in the office in just half an hour, and could even lie down if needed (I keep a pillow in my office, though now it is a cubicle, but I still take a short "flat" break if I need to).

I have mentioned before that I have started a few churches, and currently lead one that has gradually grown to a membership of about 40. What few of the congregants know is that I take a 2-hour nap right after I get home on a Sunday afternoon. Any church leader will tell you that the congregation reflects its elders. This congregation is probably 70% introverts. Since we practice a participatory style of meeting, that makes it harder than usual to get people to participate. I may go into what I do to make that work some other time. I know most of them think I am extroverted. Some day I'll give instructions on how to be an outspoken introvert, again (it has been a long time. Hmmm. Maybe sooner than later).

As mentioned above, my wife and I have one child, a son, who is very outgoing. We were 42 when he was born. I would have been totally out of my depth at age 22 or 24! When he brought his 8th grade yearbook home, I looked through it. He had nearly half the pictures circled, so I asked him why. He said, "Those are my friends." I decided not to tell him that in any grade, I never had more than three people I'd have called a friend! He was nice enough to let me be a Facebook friend. I have just over 100 FB friends. He has more than 1,000. Curiously, he has enough of a studious streak to endure five years of a rather monastic existence in College and get two degrees, with honors. I suspect he does something analogous, but opposite, to what I do: he can make himself do the quiet work when needed, and recover by partying! I guess that is the normal extrovert way.

I recently checked the keyword statistics on this blog. I have reviewed more than 830 books in seven years, since June of 2005. That averages a book every 3.2 days (It doesn't count a dozen or so books I didn't review because they were so bad I didn't want to give the author any publicity, even to pan the book). You could say I am bookish! Bottom line: I have learned to take advantage of my unique personality, and even to thrive.

Concluding…

Are American introverts victims? Making almost everybody out to be some kind of victim is a popular political game these days. Over the past half century or so, the pendulum has swung to favor the E's. But let us not forget that Einstein and Milton and Bill Gates are introverts. So is a billionaire I once went to school with; he and Gates each make more money in a year than Michael Jordan or Tom Hanks made in their entire careers, so I guess introverts can succeed. They just need to know who they are and keep their center. Famously extroverted Oprah just might catch them, though.

But introverts are less likely to value money over their pursuit of excellence. We like to live well, but not ostentatiously. I think of an article in the September 2012 issue of National Geographic, which showed some of the palaces rich Roma (formerly called Gypsies) have built since the fall of Communism in Romania. Or the huge homes built by emigrants from Hong Kong to southern California prior to the 1997 PRC takeover. An introvert who does very well is likely to get a better house and car, but would think a palace was overdoing it.

There is a reason evolution has kept a wide spectrum of personality types in all animals. In every animal so far studied (a hundred species or so), from mammals and birds to fish to insects, some members of every litter are explorative and outgoing, and others are cautious and observant. It makes sense. Sometimes, the outgoing ones get eaten sooner by waiting predators, and the quieter ones survive; other times there are fewer predators because of declining conditions, and the outgoing ones explore farther and are more likely to found new populations where conditions are better. Back and forth it goes, and all different personality styles are favored in turn.

We need to learn the wisdom of diversity, not only in "ethnicity" but in thinking and feeling of all kinds. It takes all types, it really does!

A debate that promised more

kw: politics, debates

I have vacillated for most of the day over whether to write about last evening's Presidential Debate, the first meeting between Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. I have read and heard a variety of opinions, including a headline "Romney Wins!", and a diatribe by former PA Governor Ed Rendell about how badly the President did. I judge that people of both political persuasions wanted to see blood run across the stage, and they didn't see it.

Firstly, the debate itself was much closer to a real debate than many I have seen in the 52 years since the original Kennedy-Nixon debate. I am partial to Gov. Romney, and I think he did well. I also recognize that the President did equally well, and I think Ed Rendell's comments are misguided. The President has two key advantages. He is a sitting President, and has experience being Commander in Chief. This played little part in this debate, but I expect it will come out in the future two debates. He also has a better poker face, an ability to appear unfazed no matter what his opponent says. This is something the Governor would do well to work on, if he can avoid looking stiff. However, he has his own advantage, an ability to make his points more succinctly, so he can get more said.

A key moment came after the debate (which I watched on ABC; I am not sure every network kept the cameras going as long). Michelle joined Barack on stage, and quite a gaggle of Romneys came up with Ann to greet Mitt. I could hear a commentator saying, "Mr. Obama requested that as many Romneys were welcome as he liked." I watched the whole group mingle. Mr. Romney introduced quite a number of his offspring to the Obamas, and I could see they all were relaxed and enjoying themselves. I can't read lips, but I wonder if either candidate said, "Boy, was that fun!" These men do not dislike each other the way some pairs of opponents we have seen in the past.

People, if you want to see blood, wait for a future debate (2016 or beyond). This is rightly turning into a battleground of ideas (finally!), and both candidates are working on presenting clear ideas to the American public, and particularly those who still can't make up their minds. They also both know that some who answered polls one way or another are likely to change their mind in the next few weeks.

I expect this election will be a squeaker, whoever wins. The next President is very unlikely to have the kind of mandate that Mr. Obama had four years ago. That's a good thing. He doesn't collaborate across the aisle as well as he claims to, so if he becomes a Lame Duck President, I think we are in for some surprises; he may become a better collaborator than before. And unless there is a strong mandate that sweeps Mr. Romney into office with a "turned" legislature behind him, he will be in for a first term very different from what he might expect. He'll need a heck of a mandate to be able to overturn "Obamacare" (which name the President now claims he likes), for example.

Do I expect more of the same for the coming debates? Only partly. The Vice-Presidential debate next week could be a very different affair. I don't yet have a feeling for whether Messrs. Ryan and Biden like or dislike one another. The coming two Presidential debates could be sharper and stronger, but I don't expect a "Mondale Moment" (when Ronald Reagan's one-liner about Walter Mondale's "youth and inexperience" cracked up Mondale, and effectively blew him out of the race). I do expect a heady set of comparisons between the ideas of two men who have quite different views of the direction America ought to go.

Of oceans and crystals

kw: geology, earth, crystal chemistry

In a number of recent discussions some basic questions of Earth science have arisen. Putting together a number of ideas, I realized that on the grossest scale, the Earth consists of three oceans and five crystals.

From outermost inward:

• The first ocean is the atmosphere. This is of geophysical and biological interest, but air is not a "rock". However, atmospheric processes have a lot to do with the movement of mineral materials on and in the upper parts of the crust.
• The second ocean is "the Ocean", primarily the saltwater that covers 71% of the surface to an average depth of 4 km. Low-salinity and fresh waters make up a fraction of a percent, and ice constitutes more than half of that. When I lived in South Dakota, we thought of snow as a special kind of sand, and just drove on it. The interaction of the water ocean with oceanic crust produces continental crust.
• The first crystal is the continental crust. To a first approximation, it is composed of feldspar with impurities. It averages about 20 km thick, ranging up to 40 km or so beneath large mountain ranges. Why do I call it a crystal? Most of the "rock forming" minerals are actually a framework of oxygen ions held together with metal ions, chiefly silicon, aluminum, magnesium and iron. Due to the activity of water and living things on shallow minerals, there is also a considerable component of calcium oxide, AKA limestone. But this is also a framework of oxygen held together by calcium ions. This immense oxygen has a comparatively low density, around 2.6. It was distilled from the minerals in the next crystal by tectonic activity coupled with water's dissolving power.
• The second crystal is the oceanic crust. It is primarily a mixture of olivine and pyroxene, which are also oxygen frameworks held together by the same metallic ions, but in a denser configuration, with a density of around 3.2 to 3.4. The thickness of oceanic crust is about 8 km, but quite variable. It is formed by expulsion of mantle materials into the depths of the water ocean by tectonic activity.
• The next two crystals constitute the mantle. The upper mantle grades from primarily pyroxene to enstatite, as the pressure and temperature increase downward. The density of enstatite approaches 4. 
• The lower mantle is primarily magnesium silicate with the structure of Perovskite, and its density reaches 6 in the very deep mantle. This mineral is a close approximation to a close-packed structure. Think of cannon balls stacked in a 3-sided pyramid. This is "cubic closest packing" (CCP); the pyramid is a corner cut off a cube. Each ball is touching 12 others. In high-pressure Perovskite, each oxygen is touching eight other oxygens and four magnesium (or iron) ions, which at this pressure are similar in size to oxygen. Together they form a CCP network with the tiny silicon ions fitting into the spaces between.
• Next we have the third ocean, the outer core. This is generally considered a liquid, particularly because it will not transmit S-type seismic waves, only P-waves. However, it is a stiff liquid, and a chunk of it suddenly brought to the lab would sit there (burning a hole in even an asbestos bench) and flow even more slowly than cold molasses – although that might change very rapidly once the huge pressure is released. Nonetheless, its fluid motions are apparently what create the Earth's magnetic field. It is composed of iron and nickel, with up to 10% sulfur. Although it is less than a tenth of Earth's volume, with a density more than 10, it is more than a quarter of the mass of the planet.
• Finally, the fifth crystal is the inner core. Also composed of iron and nickel, it probably has much less of a sulfur constituent. It is crystalline, and measurements of its seismic anisotropy indicate it may indeed be a single huge (2,400 km diameter) metallic crystal. It is not known if its rotation rate exactly matches that of the rest of the Earth. Its density is about 15, and its temperature may exceed 6,000K, or 11,000°F. Subtracting the amount of heat we think is generated within the earth by radioactive elements (U, Th and K, mainly), it is thought that this central crystal is growing at a rate of a few cm per century.

To sum up simply: an ocean of air, an ocean of salty water, four crystals consisting of ever-denser packings of oxygen held by metal ions, an ocean of nickel-iron, and a metallic crystal.

The quiet King

kw: spiritual musings, human personality

I am reading a book about personality, and a comment made by someone the author interviewed set off a train of thought. When someone interviews for a job as a pastor at a certain church, if their Myers-Briggs score starts with an "I", they are told, "think twice…I am sure our Lord was an Extrovert."

I immediately thought, "Really? Read your Gospels again, fool!" Jesus frequently withdrew from the crowds that came to hear him speak, to "desert places". He often arose early to pray alone, and more than once the disciples went out looking for him. He avoided the crowds when his miracles made him popular, but spent half the night talking privately to Nicodemus. At Sychar in Samaria, he refrained from going into the city, sending his disciples to buy food.

The extroverts I know avoid time alone. Those extroverts who are spiritual much prefer prayer in a group to private prayer. A defining characteristic of an introvert is, not total avoidance of people, but the need to recharge from time spent socially, by time spent alone. Extroverts get a charge out of social contact. Some almost cannot abide periods of solitude, while introverts require them.

Jesus an introvert? Yes, most assuredly. The Bible is full of effective, introverted leaders. Moses comes first, terrified of being sent to Pharaoh. Isaiah preferred writing to speaking. Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet", tried to avoid public speaking, but found that the word of God was "a fire in my bones". Even Paul the Apostle wrote that he was despised when he spoke, and that his writing was more effective. I sympathize with that; my father trained all of us boys to speak publicly, but my experience is, I need downtime after a speech, where my more extroverted boss loves to jump right into a glad-handing working of the crowd.

In our local church, I am considered the leader (we don't have formal pastorship), yet I find delegation of almost everything suits me better than "running the show". Now being in my mid-sixties, I'd retire from it if I could. Fortunately, the congregation seems to be mainly stamped in my mold, so they understand my quietness. I think of the church here as a protected enclave from an "Olympic athlete" model of Christian life that has come to be the norm. I'd rather be in the "upper room" with a few, than in the crowded marketplace, though I can handle either one. Am I like Jesus? I don't know, but I recognize that his personality was best suited to private teaching, once a public speech had got the attention of a curious few.

Who are the real monsters?

kw: book reviews, urban fantasy, werewolves, supernatural creatures, mysteries

Fair Game by Patricia Briggs is apparently the third novel in her Alpha and Omega series. Charles is not quite the Alpha wolf here; his father Bran is that. I suppose Charles is Beta, and he is married to Anna, the Omega. Unlike natural dogs and wolves, where the Alpha male only takes the Alpha female as his mate, and the Omega of either sex is the one all others pick on, among Ms Briggs's werewolves the Omega is the peacemaker, the one everyone can't help but like. She is kind of like the ideal Yenta: knowing most everything about most everyone, and a wise counselor to all.

In this constructed world, werewolves and fae (fairies, but not like Tinkerbell; tall and powerful like the elves in The Lord of the Rings) and others such as vampires have "come out", attempting to be integrated into ordinary human society. Attempts to attain some good press are sometimes hampered when younger or newer werewolves lose control and eat someone they should have left alone. Most werewolves are happy enough chasing rabbits or deer when the moon is full, but not all. Charles has become the one meting out justice to those with "poor impulse control", and it is breaking him. He is not sure those he must kill are always worthy of dying.

The diversion Charles needs arrives when Anna and Charles are asked to help the FBI track down a remarkably long-lived serial killer. After thirty years of torturing and killing young women and a few young men, the killer has begun killing young werewolves. Early in the investigation, the new lupine detectives learn that most, perhaps all, of the earlier victims were fae. Then things get truly interesting. It is particularly puzzling that so many supernatural beings could have been taken, over so many years, and left nearly no trace.

It takes the help of a couple of witches to locate the lair of the killers. When you have werewolves, fae and witches amidst a few ordinary humans, it gets very dicey indeed. And in fact, if you just substitute sundry mutually wary ethnic groups for the various "alternative humans", it is quite like a murder mystery in a foreign land with a number of exotic characters. Kind of like Agatha Christie meets J.R.R. Tolkien.

Of course, it mostly turns out well. After a steady diet of hard science for the last few books, a good romp in a well-crafted fantasy world has been great for helping me unwind.

You lie, you cry

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, intelligence services, detection

Ten years ago I saw an interview of Art Linkletter on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. He was asked how he could get children to open up the way they did for him. He said, "I'll tell you, but you won't be able to do it. They have to know that you are on the same mental level." I had an eerie feeling of déja vu as I was reading Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Cernicero, with Don Tennant. Yeah, I could read all about it, and I can understand all the principles involved, but having the right mental and emotional equipment to make it work for me? Well, It is kind of like teaching a fish to fly.

The authors frequently stress the need to avoid being judgmental. I have been told I am a natural-born Pharisee, and Judge is my middle name. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and it doesn't take much to make me frown. It became clear within the first few chapters that "the Model" is a stimulus-response system, and is designed for interview situations. The stimulus is a question. The cluster of behaviors that your "subject" makes are your data to determine greater or lesser likelihood of deception. There is no certainty either way, of course, unless you can elicit a confession. And even then you have to watch out for pathological confessors. Every time there is a sensational theft or murder, the police have to deal with a rash of people who "come forward" to "confess", who are really just hungry for attention and publicity. I suspect the authors interviewed few such people, because their subjects were applicants for the CIA or for promotion within it, or foreign "assets" who were suspected of being double agents, or were otherwise in need of vetting.

On the other hand, they provide a running commentary upon the televised interviews of several famous cases, among them Anthony Weiner and Jerry Sandusky, showing how they tried to deceive their interviewers. It is clear that it takes a clear strategy, and a practiced facility in ignoring behavior that is not directly related to the question, to dig out attempts to misdirect or mislead you. For most of us, we are most likely to get in an "interview" situation if we feel the need to ask our teen about drug use, or if we need to hire a babysitter. The authors provide possible scenarios to help us prepare (but remember my Linkletter moment).

A comforting element is learning that reading Spy the Lie will not help a perpetrator learn to beat a skilled interviewer. The Model relies on the way our mind and body work together, particularly when we need to keep our story straight. It is said that while we all lie, some folks lie constantly, just to keep in practice. But in the presence of these folks, even secret agents, who must lie to stay alive, when they have something extra to hide, cannot hide everything. My Mom used to say, "Remember Lincoln: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool ME!" I wonder if the authors got some of this stuff from their Moms.

The three CIA authors founded QVerity, which provides training in interview techniques and deception detection in particular.

Governors of universal evolution

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cosmology, astronomy, black holes, kerr black holes

Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Centaurus A and its X-ray jet. Centaurus A, at a distance of 11 million light years, is the nearest powerful active galaxy. Credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al. The more visible jet is more than a million light years in extent, but only about half of it is clear in this x-ray image. The "bubble" on the opposite side is quite a bit larger than the galaxy as seen in visible light.

This image is much better than any amount of words to describe the subject of Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars and Life in the Cosmos by Caleb Scharf. In a synthesis of discoveries about the formation and growth of black holes, a subject of continued and avid study, the author shows how some of the physically smallest objects in the universe govern the development of stars and galaxies on the largest scales.

Black holes are indeed small. The Event Horizon radius is a simple function of mass: r = 2.95km/Ms, where Ms refers to solar masses. Physicists like to use radius. The rest of everybody thinks in diameter. So I'll primarily use diameter when writing of an object's size. If the Sun were squeezed into a black hole, its diameter would be 5.9 km, which is about 3.7 miles. That is the size of a small city.

Black holes come in two ranges of size, so far as we know. Stellar-mass black holes range from about 2 to 20 or so (probably not exceeding 100) solar masses. Their diameters thus range from 12 to 120 km, to perhaps 300 km. Galactic black holes are much, much heavier and larger. Those so far known range from about 1 million to 20 billion solar masses. The diameter of their event horizon is thus anywhere from 6 million km to 120 billion km. An average one, if that makes any sense, would be about the size of the Solar System, but weigh a billion times what the Sun does. On the scale of a galaxy, that is tiny!

It is not known how mass is distributed inside the event horizon of a black hole, but in a non-rotating black hole, it may indeed all be concentrated at the center, in a "singularity" of zero size. Physics really cannot describe it.

I have used the term "event horizon" a few times already. Its radius is also called the Schwarzchild Radius, the point from which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. Let's think about that. An object falling from far away toward a black hole would approach the speed of light as it approached the event horizon. As it crossed the event horizon, would its velocity really exceed the speed of light? I have read descriptions that state that space itself gets dragged in, so that the object falling is exceeding the speed of light relative to "outside", but not relative to the infalling space. Such descriptions imply that space is a kind of something, which makes no sense. Whatever is really happening near and within an event horizon, we cannot describe it with any known science.

Two paragraphs earlier I mentioned a non-rotating black hole. Actually, no such thing exists. Every object we have observed, from moons and planets and galaxies and clusters of galaxies, is rotating. A huge rotating star that collapses into a black hole when its fusion fuel runs out will keep rotating, and its RPM's will increase dramatically. Dr. Scharf writes that black holes probably start out rotating near their maximum rate, at which any matter just inside the event horizon will have a speed just below that of light. For stellar black holes, that can be a million times per second, while for galactic black holes, the rotation rate is in the range of one RPM.

Deep in the center of a rotating black hole, there is not a point singularity. Instead, there is a ring. Whether it is a torus or a ring of infinite thinness is not known, but this gets us away from having all matter fall to a dimensionless point. In fact, if rotational energy is extracted from a black hole, and its RPM's decrease, the ring shrinks, but the slower it goes, the harder it is to get more energy out, so I suspect there is no such thing as a truly non-rotating black hole. Kind of like a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for angular momentum! (The HUP explains why temperatures of absolute zero are unattainable. This is similar.)

There is one other characteristic of a rotating black hole. There are two horizons. The inner one is spherical, just like a non-rotating event horizon. The outer one is an ellipsoid, shaped like a doorknob, and when rotation speed is the maximum possible, its outer radius is twice the radius of the inner sphere. The ellipsoid is tangent to the sphere at the rotational poles. Between these two horizons, space and time get mixed up, and matter that falls in off-center can pass through this Ergosphere and back out again, with more energy than it had going in. This is how energy is extracted from a rotating black hole. I have yet to read an explanation of these two horizons in which their size was clearly explained, but I think I understood that the outer edge of the ellipsoid is at the Schwarzchild Radius, and the polar radius is smaller. At maximum RPM, the inner sphere has half the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole. I think...someone correct me if I got it backwards!

The first half or more of the book explains all this in an engaging way. It is all leading up to the explanation of the jets and bubbles seen in the image above, which requires one more parameter: magnetism. Whichever size of black hole we are talking about, the matter than came together to form it had a magnetic field. All known planets and stars and galaxies have a magnetic field. It is part of the territory, so to speak, when you have rotating mass. You may have read that Mars has no magnetic field. It's field is weaker than Earth's, by a factor of a hundred or so, but it is definitely not zero. So when a black hole is formed, the magnetic field doesn't vanish. Its total extent remains the same, but in the vicinity of the horizon, its intensity grows dramatically. A rotating magnetic field sets things up for an enormous dynamo.

I don't  pretend to know the physics of it, and even this author glides right by it, but when the spinning magnetic field gets spun up enough, it twists into a "tail" at each rotational pole. Any matter in the vicinity of the black hole will either orbit it, or fall inward. Most of this is likely to be gas and thin dust. The dynamics of this orbiting stuff and the "frame dragging" of the black hole's rotation (a mysterious effect of general relativity) will force most of it into a disk in the plane of the hole's equator. Friction within this disk will heat it to a few thousand degrees. As the innermost material gets inside the ergosphere, it gets sped up a lot, and some of it gets caught up in the twisted magnetic field and squirted out into the jet within the magnetic tail. Here, it can approach the speed of light, and temperatures of millions of degrees. This jet crashes through any gas and dust it finds surrounding the area, and blows a bubble in it. These big bubbles interfere with star formation, and also reduce the rate that stuff can reach the black hole.

What does that have to do with stellar or galactic evolution? Just about everything! A distant object that Dr. Scharf and his colleagues studied, called 4C41.17, showed that galactic black holes formed very early. Their jets and bubbles slowed down the formation of stars and guided the development of the earliest galaxies. Distant, and thus early, galaxies are seen to have active nuclei, and the ones for which we are looking down the throat of the jet we call quasars. The bottom line is that the activity of these huge black holes, tiny as they are compared to their host galaxies, regulates the rate of star formation. Without them, most of the Universe might have burned out by now, leaving just quintillions of dim red dwarfs to sputter away for the next few trillion years.

Now I'm going to leave the author a few things to say. This all is just what interested me most. There is just one thing left I wonder about. So-called dark matter is posited to react only to gravity. It seems to make up between 80% and 90% of the mass of the universe. Isn't it also being pulled into black holes of all sizes? Does it contribute to their mass and perhaps other properties?

Am I moving left or did Bubba move right?

kw: current events, world events, articles

I just read in the current (Oct 1, 2012) issue of Time Magazine the article "The Case for Optimism" by Bill Clinton. I was quite unfavorable to President Clinton while he was in office, but I did notice that he moderated quite a bit during his second term, to the point that George W. Bush began his first term seeming to be to Clinton's left. Of course, 9/11 and the two wars changed all that. A wartime President has to govern from the right, as FDR and Truman both did.

In the article, Mr. Clinton stressed five items, which I'll list along with their subtitles:

1. Technology: Phones Mean Freedom
2. Health: Healthy Communities Prosper
3. Economy: Green Energy Equals Good Business
4. Equality: Women Rule
5. Justice: The Fight for the Future is Now

To some extent, the article could be considered a long plug for the Clinton Global Initiative, because CGI efforts are mentioned throughout. However, that is the arena where he spends his time, and what he knows the best. It is amazing that more than 85% of everybody has access to a cell phone. This is good for business, it is good for the economies of developing countries, and it is making the notion of a Digital Divide obsolete. Similar things could be said for green energy. And listen: resource conservation was originally a Conservative cause (just ask Teddy Roosevelt). The level of personal responsibility that widespread communications make possible just makes a Conservative grin. The other three areas, while appearing more "Liberal", are treated in an even-handed way that nobody is likely to argue with very much.

It is a funny thing, that a decade or so of being out of office has gone a long way towards rehabilitating the former President. There were a few storm clouds overhead by the end of his second term, mostly because of personal failings. But he is attaining stature as a statesman, a "wise old head", and people seem more ready to forgive (me, too, slightly grudgingly).

The CGI is worth a look, not because they are a charity but because they aren't. CGI is a connection machine for those wishing to do good and those who know how to go about it. Perhaps it is not a FaceBook for the philanthropically inclined, but that gives a bit of its flavor.

A hierarchy of energy

kw: references, energy, combustion, fission, fusion, kerr black holes, annihilation

From time to time I find or gather a synthesis of related ideas, and this is as good a place to store them as any. Reading recently about the energy released from matter falling into a spinning black hole, often called a Kerr black hole after the New Zealander who first worked out the math, I sought to place it in the context of more familiar sources of energy. Not that a Kerr black hole is going to be easy to harness as a "source" of energy, but perhaps a sufficiently advanced civilization could do so.

Sundry classifications have been made of speculative levels of civilization, and they frequently hinge on the level of energy use. Here I present one based on energy source. The characteristic figure for an energy source is the fraction of the mass-energy that is made available at each level.

Level 0 would have to be pre-Human, based on what follows. The only source of energy is food energy, a type of slow combustion; overt, external combustion is not used.

The primary energy source of Level 1 civilizations is combustion. The genus Homo began using combustion (very) roughly a million years ago, and that is still the primary source of energy used by the human race, though our fuel supply has changed from time to time. One of our most efficient combustion systems is hydrogen-oxygen, so far primarily used for rocket propulsion. Burning a gram of hydrogen releases about 142 kJ of energy, while also consuming 8 grams of oxygen. By Einstein's energy equation, e=mc², we find that the combustion products must be lighter than the uncombusted gases by 15.8 trillionths of a gram per gram of hydrogen burnt, or 1.75 trillionths of a gram per gram of combined gases. Note that hydrocarbon combustion is somewhat less energy intensive on a gram per gram basis, when oxygen consumption is included.

Some nations are on the boundary of Level 2, in that a large fraction of their total energy is derived by nuclear fission. In the fission of U-235, a large variety of reactions may occur, but on average we find that the fission products and neutrons emitted weigh about 0.2 AMU less than the original uranium nucleus. Thus the mass conversion is about 0.00085 grams per gram of uranium fuel. This is about 490 million times as much energy per gram as hydrogen combustion.

Nuclear fusion has been a holy grail for many. Success in developing economical fusion power would yield a Level 3 civilization. Note, however, that the 4H-to-He system is only about 8 times as powerful as uranium fission, or 0.0071 grams per gram of H consumed. The methods being studied are mostly based on deuterium fusion, which has very little advantage over uranium fission, on a grams released per gram converted basis. If we could, however, capture large fractions of the Sun's energy output (such as by a Dyson sphere), we could sidestep our way to energy use characteristic of this Level, as the Sun uses the 4-hydrogen reaction.

Now we come to Kerr black holes. The theoretical maximum energy that could be extracted is 28% of the rest mass of the infalling matter. Thus, if a Level 4 civilization could harness a rapidly spinning black hole (in the range of 10,000-100,000 rotations per second if it is stellar-sized), 0.28 grams of effective mass-energy per gram consumed is 39 times the energy available from hydrogen fusion.

Is a higher proportion of energy release attainable? Could a Level 5 civilization arise that makes effective use of total annihilation? In the Star Trek civilization, "antimatter generators" produce antimatter fuel for use in starships (at least), moderated by "dilithium" and "rubindium" and other special materials. The matter-antimatter reaction does result in annihilation, but if you are generating the antimatter somewhere, rather than having found an antimatter mine, it may be assumed that you are using energy characteristic of a lower Level to do so.

For those of us on the threshold of Level 2, we find there is no political will, and great public opposition, to expanding energy sources that release large amounts of radioactivity or produce radioactive waste. Thus I favor sidestepping our way to Level 3 by effective use of solar energy. So far, we barely have a bit of a toe in the water on this. The side of earth facing the Sun at any one time intercepts about 64 quadrillion watts of solar energy, at ground level. Total human energy use is presently less than 20 trillion watts, or about 1/3200 of what is available. Of course, paving land and sea with solar cells is a formula for ecological suicide, but covering 0.1% of the total (because much is in darkness at any one time) would be enough to meet all our needs and then some.

Innocent fall fun

kw: seasonal activities, corn mazes

Putting in a plug for a fun place I've been, Ramsey's Farm, just across the border in northernmost Delaware.

This image, which was taken just about a year ago, is from Google Earth. Last year the Ramseys had two corn mazes, a little one for warming up, and for younger kids, and the bigger one, a few acres' in extent, which doubles as an advertisement if you happen to find them in Google Earth or another aerial mapping site. This image is oriented with South up.

We went with a church group when our son was in high school, 8 years ago. We cooked campfire food, took a hay ride, and of course, made our way through the maze by flashlight after dark.

That year the maze was a map of the US. It was too detailed, making it easy to push through the corn and cheat your way through the maze. This one looks much better designed. There is enough corn between the paths that cheating is harder. It's never impossible, of course. If you jump up enough to see the bridge and get your bearings, you can just push through the corn in a straight line to get out.

This is just one of dozens of corn mazes to be found in southeastern PA and northern DE, and thousands around the country. Most of the farms also have campfires and hay rides and other family fun events. For a great fall weekend outing, go to a nearby orchard and pick apples, then make your way to one of these places.

The Holocaust century

kw: politics, genocide, prejudice

How will the Twentieth Century be remembered in the distant future? It was certainly a century of amazing progress. Travel jumped from the rail to the air, such that millions now travel thousands or tens of thousands of miles per year, where a record-breaking traveler of the 1880s could scarcely accumulate 10,000 miles in a lifetime (Recently, Ron Akana retired after 64 years as a flight steward with United. He accumulated 20 million miles on the job). Telecommunications began with the telegraph and early telephones in 1900; it grew to nearly universal cell phone usage by the mid 1990s, plus video calling using Skype just "around the bend" in 2003. Food became more abundant in greater variety than anyone could have imagined. World population grew from 1.6 billion to about 7 billion; now about 1.5 billion are counted among the desperately poor! The other 5.5 billion are better off than nearly all those 1.6 billion of 1900.

While a lot is positive, the centralization of political power that accompanied vast improvements in technology has been primarily a negative factor. The century began with the Great War, now called World War I, was marred in its mid-to-late years by World War II and the Cold War, and closed with the first forays of a new kind of war, that has now morphed into the "War on Terror" (the American term; others call it Global Jihad). If you add up the deaths of all those killed in combat, both "soldiers" and "collateral damage", however, they are dwarfed by a different sum: what I call the Three Holocausts.

• The first of these began in 1938, when Josef Stalin began a series of "purges" that eventually led to 10-20 million deaths of Soviet citizens by 1954. The cause was primarily political paranoia.
• The second was the Nazi "final solution", in which about 17 million died. Six million of those were Jews, another about 6 million were Ukrainians, and the rest were various Slavs, Soviet POWs, Gypsies (Romanies), and smaller numbers ("only" thousands to tens of thousands) of leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics, and others considered "unfit", such as the mentally or physically handicapped, homosexuals, and political dissidents. The cause was rabid racism under the guise of Aryan eugenics.
• The third was a combination of two long disasters in China, the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" under Mao Zedong, with a death toll of at least 40 million, and perhaps as many as 100 million. The cause here was the hubris of an incompetent man. By the way, more than sixty years of failed harvests in the Soviet Union are attributed to central planning, a similar kind of incompetence. You can't centrally plan the agriculture of a continent: Mao failed, and the Russian leaders failed.

About 100 million dead, due to the insanity of a handful of improbably powerful men. The crucial social task of Western democracies and republics in the Twenty-First Century is to ensure that nobody gains such power, ever again. How can we accomplish this? Some are even now trying to spread "democracy" in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the "Arab Spring" coups (which aren't quite all over yet). This is misdirected.

It took more than 2,100 years to progress from the raw, imperfect and partial democracy of Greece to the Western constitutional governments of Europe and much of the New World today. The despotic governments of most of Asia and Africa are pre-Greek in outlook. It will take work just to get them to a social level comparable to the Athens of Solon and Cicero (minus the institutionalized slavery), and huge further effort to speed them on the way toward republican institutions that are the "atmosphere" of Western society. It will take decades if it is possible at all.

A core concept of Western civilization is social and religious tolerance. Many of the Eastern despotic governments (Pakistan is a prime example) have severe laws against religious heresy, blasphemy, and "alternative" lifestyles such as homosexuality or unmarried cohabitation. Compare: a misguided preacher in Georgia burns a Koran in public, and the Muslim world is immediately aflame. If an Imam were to burn a Bible in Times Square, most folks would say, "Oh, another Bible burner. Let's walk upwind to keep ashes off my jeans, please." Of course, there is a slight chance that a passerby would deck the guy, but that would be the extent of it.

You know what is crazy? That last scenario is touted by radical Muslims as a sign of our weakness. It actually indicates our strength. We are not threatened by theatrics. The kind of civilized attitude that underlies this tolerance is worth spreading everywhere. If that can be accomplished in this century, we just might approach the year 2100 with a more genuinely civilized human race than ever before.

Direction without destination

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, sociobiology, evolution

I was out of pocket and on a 'computer vacation' for a few days. While I was out, though, I had some time to read. While this is not light reading for most, it was an enjoyable book for me: The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson. Dr. Wilson is best known for his work with ants, but he is also a philosopher of evolutionary biology and sociology, with broad understanding of eusociality throughout the animal kingdom.

The kinds of animals that have developed at least some eusocial species ranges from termites, bees, wasps, and shrimps to rodents and primates and, or course, ants. Interestingly, flogging my own memory, I know of solitary species of bees, wasps and shrimps, and nearly all species of rodents are solitary most of the time; primates are typically found in groups of various sizes, but usually lack the kind of organization we think of as eusocial…but I know of no solitary ant or termite species. Finally, humans are eusocial to a degree found in no other primate species, though not in the kind of robotic way seen in eusocial insects.

Eusociality is an level of sociality that is characterized by a nest-focused grouping with a division of labor that includes members of multiple generations. Chimpanzees are social but not eusocial; there is no division of labor. All chimps gather or hunt their own food, though food sharing is common; where they use tools, each individual makes his or her own tools. There are status rankings, but no "Queen Chimp" who has all the babies. A certain amount of such reproductive ranking is found among dog and wolf packs, with the alpha female usually being the only one to have pups.

Dr. Wilson does not intend to classify us with the ants. Among humans, there is no "Queen" who has all the babies, no alpha couple. In fact, the human tendency to encourage everyone to reproduce is leading to pathological levels of overpopulation everywhere but parts of Europe. On the other hand, humans do have strong bonds to a home "nest" which is vigorously defended. In fact, we each tend to belong to multiple overlapping groups, each with a "nest", whether we call it home, or church, or lodge or fraternity. We typically feel that each group to which we belong is superior to all competing groups; if we didn't we would change groups! You know how it goes, "Uncle Morrie may be an jerk, but he is our jerk." You may despise your kid sister, but if a schoolyard bully gives her a hard time, you'll knock his block off. And then there is the rampant "My church is better than your church" attitude that is behind World War 3, currently under way.

Humans also have taken the division of labor to a level vastly beyond anything seen in another species. Among ants, the foragers "pay" non-foragers by sharing food with them, and the recipients further share among one another, whether their duties are janitorial, construction or caring for the young. What did humans do? We invented money, a currency easier to quantify and balance. No other species understands quantity. We have, uniquely, built our civilizations around quantitation. There are tens of thousands of job specialties. I remember when I was doing electronics design for one of the Xerox companies. We occasionally worked with people at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab. At JPL, no one person designed a whole circuit. There was a resistor specialist, a capacitor specialist, and so forth! It took 8 or 9 of them to design and build a radio. But what a radio! One of their radios is still sending signals back from far beyond Pluto.

A major, major theme of the author is to describe the evolutionary basis of everything human. Everything. To ask "What is human nature?" seems to be asking a question whose answer nobody has the time to hear. We should live so long. A list of our characteristics is not an answer, but can be used as a foil for getting there. In 1945, George P. Murdock wrote "The Common Denominator of Cultures," in Ralph Linton (ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis, that there are 67 social behaviors and institutions shared by every culture known. These are, listed alphabetically:

age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control, and weaving.

(That's curious, I don't find music on that list, nor any concept under which it might be subsumed, unless music and storytelling and other performance arts are included in folklore.) Anyway, these are not human nature. They express human nature. To quote Wilson, "Human nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species." (p 193) To use a bodily analogy, some things are fixed, such as the five-digit hand. Wherever we find someone with six digits on hand or foot, a certain clumsiness results, and the cause is a deleterious mutation. But other things are more fluid: we all have fingerprints (and toe prints), but the details of the loops and whorls and junctions differ so that no two fingerprints are identical (that's roughly 70 billion unique fingerprints on living persons today, and an equal number of unique toe prints). Some of our mental equipment is fixed. Barring mutation or injury, we have "equipment" for interpreting our senses. In fact one-third of our brain is devoted to vision. And it is pretty well established that we have a "mental machine" for language learning, which is especially active prior to puberty. But which language or languages we may learn is as variable as our fingerprints. Even among those speaking a common language, there is more than one way to say any particular thing, and we are prone to saying things in as many different ways as possible. It is amazing that we ever understand one another! (Take that into account, you folks working on Natural Language Processing and Language Generation)

While any individual human has amazing abilities and talents, it is our social organization that has subdued all of Planet Earth. Dr. Wilson seems to be saying, along with God, "Behold, the people is one…and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." (Genesis 11:6). The book closes with a section devoted to asking the biggest question, "Where are we going?" (And I should mention that the book is built around the title of Paul Gaughin's last painting, "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?") Will we attain sufficient wisdom to preserve the life-sustaining biosphere we are currently wrecking? Can we, as the most social species of large animal, overcome the conflict between individual interest and altruistic service to society? For that is the source of evil.

On the one side, the super-individualistic "survivalists" (though most of them at least care for their family) reject society at large to an evil extent. On the other, extreme forms of Communism, such as Maoism, have perpetrated appalling evils. The Chinese still have the proverb, "The nail whose head sticks up will be hammered down". As much as I admire the Amish, their overly-collective society is ultimately stultifying, a dead end that will eventually wither away. At least they do recognize that people need their own clothing and their own toothbrush. I am not sure Chairman Mao understood that (except in the case of his own clothes and toothbrush, if he used one). Most nations and societies today strive to balance individual and collective rights, with various degrees of success. Naturally, I think the U.S.A. has had it most nearly "right", at least in the past. There's no telling where we are going!

The book closes with a sort of diatribe against religion. Dr. Wilson classes religious groups as equivalent to other groupings, but singles them out for special opprobrium, saying he thinks humanity deserves better. I think he goes overboard. If the strength of the American Republic can be retained (not at all sure given current political trends), one of its foundational characteristics is toleration of religious belief and practice, without favoring any, and an explicit prohibition against establishing any theocracy. For the Muslims to agitate in favor of imposing Sharia law is just as wrong, and as anti-Constitutional, as for the Christians to agitate in favor of imposing Christian regulations (if the various denominations could even agree on what those are), as for the Jews to impose the Torah (Mosaic) law. When the founding law of the Republic draws the teeth from the monster of theocracy, the faiths still retain their power to comfort and care for one another, to a level second only to family love, and sometimes superior to it. This, too, is part of our heritage; fundamental Christians may not like the idea that our tendency to group ourselves in a family of faith is a side effect of multi-level evolution. But it is, and it is a fortunate one, wherever we have the wisdom to deny political power to religious organizations.

I like so much about E.O. Wilson's work and writings that I can forgive his anti-religious attitude. He has been a core figure in biology, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology (a term he coined) for decades. For a non-specialist, this book clears up much of the confusion around "kin selection" and some of the other theories that have come into and out of vogue during his lifetime. Wilson explains multi-level evolution clearly and succinctly. Multi-level evolution kicks in once a species attains a certain level of social organization, and in rare cases produces a eusocial species. Humanity is a fortunate benefactor of this. While at each stage of the way the genus Homo was "ready" for the next step, the stochastic character of natural selection is no guarantee that any particular step will be taken in a particular direction. Among the two most recent Homo species, the Neandertals and us, one species progressed to eusociality and one did not, and became extinct, probably out-competed.

Is there a further major step of evolution? Humans appear to be the brainiest and the best-organized species so far produced. There is really no way to predict what is next. Evolution continues. I hope the future is better than the past, and not a turn toward extinction. There is no guarantee.

The longest odds

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

What goes a light-year per minute, is operated by folks that scare just about everybody, and offers all the amenities you could possibly afford? If you have been reading Timothy Zahn's books, you know: the Quadrail. This cross-galactic "railroad" can get you across the entire Galaxy in about ten weeks. A minor jaunt to someplace nearby such as Dubhe (the brightest star in the Big Dipper, as seen from Earth) takes a mere two hours, once you get to the station, somewhere beyond Neptune. For getting to and from the station, Zahn has thoughtfully provided torch ships, which presumably can zip the required 5 billion km in a day or so (compared to a decade or so for NASA spacecraft), at a velocity in the neighborhood of 0.2 c.*

Judgment at Proteus is the fifth, and apparently the final novel in Zahn's Quadrail series. I has been quite a ride. By the middle of this volume, we understand that Frank Compton and his sidekick Bayta are up against the biggest odds I've ever seen an author get away with. A former galactic empire called the Shonkla-Raa is being revived, and Compton is nearly alone in standing against their attempt to arise again. His one ally, a chancy one at that, is a collective, self-telepathic being called the Modhri, that spreads by "infecting" members of other species, which it can then partially or totally control.

Early on the Modhri was Compton's perceived enemy, but the greater danger forced them to work together. The secret of the origin of both Modhri and Sonkla-Raa is the hinge upon which the situation is resolved.

So what can one man do, pitted against a Galaxy-wide conspiracy of powerful agents? Compton knows there is no such thing as a fair fight. As the twists and turns of the novels reveal, it is tactical creativity more than strength that makes him the warrior he is. At one point, expecting an attack using sound waves, he provides for a hefty dose of helium to be mixed into the atmosphere. You know how helium makes your voice sound? It turns the fearful sonic weapon into a squeaky, impotent joke.

I read a book like this and think, "If only…" It'd be nice to bomb around the Universe as easily (!) as we cross the skies of our lone planet. Even better if some super-engineers belonging to a million-year-old species have provided the means to do so. Now if we can just find out what it takes to be invited to join the galactic federation.

*Note, just under 20 hours at 10g acceleration will take you 2.5 billion km, reaching a velocity of 70,000 km/s or 0.23 c. It takes you another 20 hours to come to rest at the 5 billion km point. You'd better have great gravity control to live through the trip.

Dear whoever for the X and Y generations

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, columns, collections, advice

This was my wild card selection for the month, and wild it is indeed. I grew up reading "Dear Abby" and "Ann Landers" (advice columns written by twin sisters who competed fiercely most of their lives), and now that both are dead, Abby's daughter Jeanne Phillips carries on her mother's column. When I saw Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed, I wondered how it might compare. It doesn't, and we'll discuss why in a moment.

"Dear Sugar" is the advice column for The Rumpus, a literary e-mag with 11 columns and quite a list of other features and sections. I note that the most recent "Dear Sugar" column is #98, published May 17, 2012. I suspect Ms Strayed is no longer writing the column, and has not been replaced.

There is little likelihood that the daily newspaper would carry an advice column like "Dear Sugar," nor any chance that they would publish any of the questions or their answers. For one thing, most of the questions, and nearly all of the answers, are longer than the entire section devoted to "Dear Abby" in our daily paper. Secondly, the subject matter is quite a bit further afield than anything Abby or her sister ever printed. I wouldn't call most of the articles offensive, per se, but it is easy to see that a lot of newspaper readers would take offense to them. And thirdly, Sugar is a bit of a potty-mouth, a trait she shares with most of those who wrote to her. There is still a lot of implicit censorship in the Fourth Estate. I can tolerate an occasional F-word or S-word, and a few stronger expressions; in this case, "occasional" has come to mean "only" 3 or 4 times in any particular question or answer. There's no sense faulting these folks for language I've been known to utter when sufficiently provoked, but it is sad that they need so little provocation, or none at all.

I judge from internal evidence that Sugar is about 45 years old, solidly in the X generation herself. Although my generation pretty much invented the "sexual revolution", most of us have a few qualms about it. Generations X and later appear to have no such qualms. In one of the questions, after describing a painful love triangle, the writer begins her actual question by saying, "I know I didn't do anything morally wrong, but…". I can just hear the original Abby, had this letter come to her, writing "Of course you were morally wrong! You made a promise, and broke it, and tried to justify it with a lie. How do you expect your 'friend' to be anything but hurt or even devastated?" And that is just winding up for a fastball straight to the conscience.

All that aside, I found myself marveling at Sugar's wisdom. There are places where she says, "Yes, you were wrong." But it is not in a judgmental way. "Being judgmental" implies punishing someone, or at least trying to. Stating a fact is not judgmental, it is often a highly respectful act that can lead to healing. Sugar is all about healing. She makes it clear that the first target of forgiveness is usually yourself. Get that hard work done, and forgiving someone else gets a whole lot easier. And when you are the one needing another's forgiveness, go about it honestly: do what you can to right the wrong, or at least acknowledge it when "righting" it isn't possible, and then ask to be forgiven. If a scumbag who won't even admit wrong is in your life, break the connection. Who has time and energy for all the drama?

The items are full of self-revelation by Sugar herself. She frequently establishes her right to an opinion by having been there, having messed up (not her word…), having done the right thing only after exhausting all alternatives, or simply having been broken by her own choices. Yet she came out the other end alive, and her example is often enough to encourage someone else that they, too, will come out alive, and can do better.

The book consists of 56 Q-n-A items, well over half the total "Dear Sugar" collection. The questions answered online were culled from the thousands that have been sent in. Reading between the lines, it seems a large additional number were answered privately and not published. I hope someone comes along to continue the column. There are a lot of confused, hurting, lonely and otherwise messed-up folks out there, full of questions that need to be asked, and who will be helped by simply asking them, and helped even more if they can get an answer. Today's e-culture produces more than its share of lonely people. How helpful if a portion of it offers some easing of that loneliness.