Lakes for all seasons and reasons

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, limnology, lakes

I considered starting with a definition, that limnology is the scientific study of lakes, but I realize that "scientific" adds a redundancy. "Study", all by itself, is scientific. Whether we then draw conclusions scientifically, or some other way, is another matter.

Still Waters: The Secret World of Lakes, by Curt Stager, helped me understand that lakes are like the proverbial duck: seemingly serene on the surface, but paddling like mad underneath. Thus, a duck gliding along expresses the reality of the pond. A lot is going on under there!

"Lake" refers to the larger water bodies that are not oceans. The related words "pond", "pool", and even "tarn" refer to smaller ones, but I know of no clear dividing line. The state of Minnesota is called "The land of 10,000 lakes". Perhaps for that reason, in the area around Lake Minnetonka, a pretty big lake at 23 square miles, almost everything big enough to float a canoe and paddle around in is called a lake. By contrast, one of America's most famous lakes, Walden Pond in Massachusetts, has an area of 61 acres and is something over half a mile long. Yet it is called a pond. My own criterion is this: a pond is small enough for an ordinary person to own in its entirety. So if it fits on a farm, for example, I think of it as a pond.

At the upper range of sizes, the largest lakes are too big to see across. The largest, the Caspian Sea, is 745 miles long and has an area of 143,000 square miles. However, its water is brackish; it used to be an arm of an ocean. The largest freshwater lake is Superior, centered on the US/Canada border. Its length is 383 miles, and its area nearly 32,000 square miles. The deepest lake, Baikal in Russia, is more than a mile deep. While it is of similar length to Superior (395 miles), it is much narrower, but because of its depth, contains more than twice as much water.

The largest lake of my experience is Erie, between northern Ohio and Canada. With length of 241 miles and area of 9,900 square miles, it seems oceanic to me. It is not possible to see across it. From points west of Cleveland, Ohio across to Point Pelee, Ontario, the distance is about 33.5 miles. The curvature of the Earth makes the water midway across "rise" 187 feet above shoreline points at either end. There aren't any near-shore hills high enough to see over that; there would have to be one at each end of the sight line.

The author's studies of lakes are pretty comprehensive. I used to joke that the bailiwick of geophysics, my primary area of expertise, is "from the center of the Earth to the edge of space, and a little beyond." However, geophysics has little to do with life. Limnology, on the other hand, encompasses not only the geology and geomorphology and geophysics of the land under a body of water, but also its biology and chemistry and hydrology (how water moves).

One aim of the book is to show the impact people have had on lakes. We tend to think of human impact in Eurocentric terms, as though every lake on Earth was pristine until the colonial empires were formed between 500 and 200 years ago. The fallacy of this was brought home to me when I visited relatives in North Carolina, some 50 years ago. My uncle-in-law has collected arrowheads and other prehistoric stone tools in every one of the fifty United States. We went to the shore of a pond near his home, where he dug around a bit, sifted some of the soil, and brought forth a few yellowish flint arrow points. He said they were about 8,000 years old. He told the story he could read in the shape of the landscape. He had known where to dig because it was a good spot to put a tent or cabin above the shoreline, with good sight lines. He pointed out another few places that would probably have been repeatedly visited by the people of that time, plus or minus a few thousand years. The people that lived in the area would have fished in the pond and used it and connecting streams for transportation via whatever kind of small boats they had. Their wastes also ended up in the pond, changing its chemistry, often in seasonal ways.

The author of Still Waters uses seven lakes or lake areas to tell the stories of how lakes change through time, in particular, how the fish, insects, and other living things in a lake go about their business...or not, if some humans happen to decide to poison a lake and replace the fish with some they'd rather have there; or if they decide to drain a shallow lake; or build a dam to raise its water level. All these things happen to thousands of lakes. The "game fishing" business is especially troubling, because people would rather fish for trout, bass, or even crappie, rather than the things they call "trash fish". It is pretty well known (finally!) that many, perhaps most, lakes contain one or a few fish species that are endemic, meaning that they occur nowhere else. A chapter on Heritage Lakes tells us of one of them, one that hasn't been (yet!) poisoned out or "over-loved".

The deadest of dead lakes, the Dead Sea of Israel and Jordan, has no fish or insects living in it, but it does have a few species of extremophile bacteria (or archaea) that occur nowhere else. A project being considered by the two countries, to create a hydropower facility that uses Red Sea water, flowing more than 1,100 vertical feet over the 100 mile distance to the Dead Sea, is certain to change or eliminate them.

I have ruminated too long of matters that are mostly peripheral to the author's concerns. He aims for more people to realize just how much we have changed every one of the hundred-plus million lakes on this Earth, and how much we continue to do so. The fascinating stories of the lakes, and their histories as told by studies of the sediments that line them, underscore first, just how dependent we are on lakes, and secondly, just how dependent they are on us. The lakes of Earth, even the most remote, are much different from what they would be were we not here.

Compared to him we are all math-challenged

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, mathematicians, memoirs, short biographies

The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, by Karen Olsson, is part biography (of André Weil and his sister Simone), part memoir, part rumination. The one thing it is not, is a description of the Weil Conjectures. Let's see why, beginning with this statement, not from the book, but from the Online Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Weil believed that many fundamental theorems in number theory and algebra had analogous formulations in algebraic geometry and topology. Collectively known as the Weil conjectures, they became the basis for both these disciplines."

The four (not two) disciplines mentioned are utter mysteries to everyone but a literal handful (really!, like four or five) of mathematicians who have a sufficient grasp of all of them for the quote above to make sense. Ms Olsson is not one of those few, but if she were, she might find describing these things to a popular audience (including me, an accomplished mathematician, but not in this league) a task similar to that shunted aside in 1965 by Dr. Robert Feynman; when asked after the Nobel Prize ceremony in which he was awarded the Prize, "Can you tell us briefly what it was that you did?", he replied, "Buddy, if I could tell you that in one minute, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize."

In nearly every page the book switches gears, between a mini-biography of Simone Weil, one of André Weil, the author's memories of mathematical study (which she dropped after receiving her degree at Harvard), her more recent attempt to rekindle her early love of math, and vignettes about historical mathematicians whose work underlay that which André Weil labored upon.

The word "mathematics" literally means "learnings", emphasizing plurality. The power of the Weil Conjectures lies in making connections between and among areas that have been treated as separate, to show that they are all one. With that in mind, I find a multi-threaded book like this to be just the vehicle needed, to induce in someone like me at least a bit of the feeling that must have inhabited Weil as he considered his conjectures and the way the disciplines so treated reflected from one another to show mathematics as a conceptual whole. The satisfaction of finishing this book lies not in comprehending Weil's work, but in seeing that whole, though from afar.

The increasing field of good short SF

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, short stories

For a longish generation that I call the "trash years," a great deal of science fiction/speculative fiction/semi-hard fantasy was published by authors who were feeling their oats after the restrictions against overt sexual content were lifted in the wake of what we now quaintly call the sexual revolution. A wet dream fantasy in a sci-fi setting is still a wet dream fantasy.

Now writers who were mostly born after The Pill hit the market, and after Gender was uprooted from biological sex, are filling the market with books and short stories based on good ideas, well presented…and I mean "good" in both a conceptual sense and an ethical sense. Being an old-fashioned, conservative, spiritually active fuddy-duddy, I keep my distance from roughly half the social trends out there, but I am also aware that, in the context of the various subcultures that now make up Western society and American society in particular, most characters in these stories are presented as "doing good" (or trying to) according to the environment in which they find themselves.

Thus, the new collection The New Voices of Science Fiction, edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman, gathers twenty stories of Novelette length and shorter by writers that may not be household names yet, but most of them have the potential. Seventeen of the stories were new to me; three are also found in other collections I read in recent months. I do have a quibble with the word "The" in the title. Too exclusive. These are "Some" of a large number of new voices, and as a series title (which I suspect is where this is heading), I'd like it better if "The" were removed.

I'll limn a few stories that I find worth special mention. "Openness" by Alexander Weinstein explores the results of over-sharing, aided by technology that permits near-telepathic contact. It is probably where some folks would like FaceBook/Instagram et al to take us. The concept of "bubbles" of privacy has been around for a long time. In an office, awaiting an appointment, if you sit far from the receptionist, you'll be ignored. Sit closer than about ten feet, and the receptionist will almost certainly talk to you, or ask if there's anything you need. That's one bubble. Then the arm's length bubble is for close friends and intimates only, at least for most of us. Various cultures have these bubbles, usually just the two, but the sizes can differ, as can what is permitted and what is discouraged within each. This is reflected in the "layers" of sharing that the technology of "Openness" assumes. We don't need technology to realize that most relationships need boundaries, and "TMI" can drive people away. The story's technology just facilitates it happening even faster.

I noted in the author description that Nino Cipri uses "they" pronouns and has a gender description rather longer than average. While I don't care for such things, I read their story "The Shape of My Name," kind of like trying Brussels Sprouts for the first time (Hey, I can't stand how Sprouts smell, so why should I expect them to taste good?). Stripped of the time travel elements, which are interesting in themselves, it is a story of a young female-born coming out as a male, and having access to future medical tech that makes a complete bodily conversion possible. The crux of the story is the series of reactions of the protagonist's mother, who finally self-exiles to a future year beyond which the family time machine cannot reach. So this is also a tale of abandonment, a very real fear of many young people today, as they explore levels and directions within themselves that are either meaningless or repugnant to the prior generation. Author Cipri is a good enough writer to elicit my sympathy for the protagonist, for which I appreciate them.

"The Secret Life of Bots" by Suzanne Palmer is a triumph-of-the-unexpected tale. The "bots" are not traditional robots by any means. They are mostly about the size of June beetles, and are probably modeled on them. But a few kajillion of them, the maintenance crew of a starship, pull a very big chestnut out of the fire on behalf of the hapless humans who don't realize that yon "bug/bot" has at least as good a brain, and that instantaneous communications can overcome a heck of an obstacle. Think of a crowd of cooperating Neanderthals taking on a Woolly Mammoth, raised to the nth power.

I could mention a couple of other treatments of time travel, but instead I'll touch on the last story, "A Study in Oils" by Kelly Robson. A conscience-wracked athlete/artist is in hiding after semi-accidentally killing an opposing teammate, in a sport that one must sign a big-time disclaimer and waiver just to play. Sort of like 1930's-era boxing was, but this is moon hockey, and it's easy to think of the implications of a sometimes deadly sport moved into 1/6th-G! The fellow paints to work through his anguish, which actually helps his legal case. To say more would be too much of a spoiler.

These and other "new voices" are sure to strengthen the whole SF field in years to come.

Yes, we are still evolving

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, paleoanthropology, evolution, human evolution

The history of life is incredibly more complex than we ever thought. Just the history of this little cluster of twigs on the tree of life that we can call "humans, hominins, and their close kin" is incredibly complex. I truly enjoy reading essays by someone who knows these things deeply and tells us our stories with grace and wit. Close Encounters With Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species, by Sang-Hee Lee with Shin-Young Yoon, is just such a book. Dr. Lee is an anthropologist and department dean at U.C. Riverside. Mr. Yoon worked with her to prepare essays for the popular press in Korea and the U.S., and for this book.

One root question people have is this, "Are Neanderthals our ancestors, our cousins, or something else?" Simply put, they were "kissing cousins" when the species we call "modern humans" was being formed. Neanderthals are one of at least two ancestral species, and we are hybrids!

The book doesn't start there. The first chapter is titled, "Are We Cannibals?" I would put it this way: We cannot include human meat as a major part of our diet because that's too much like a perpetual motion machine. However, some human cultures have included small amounts of carnivory for primarily ritual purposes. Read the chapter for the gory details.

Dr. Lee doesn't sidestep controversies. Chapter 3 asks, "Who Were the first Human Ancestors?" We could thus ask which species represents the first Hominin. A Hominin (note the final "n") is a member of a species characterized by upright walking, a larger brain than a Hominid (note the "d") of similar size, and sophisticated tool use; probably also complex language. The Hominids are the great apes—Gorillas, Orangutans, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gibbons, and Humans—and all their ancestors back to the first great ape that split from the lesser apes and monkeys. The recognized Hominin genera are Homo, Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, and Paranthropus. Species in the genus Homo are H. sapiens (ourselves), H. neanderthalensis, H. habilis ("handy man"), possibly H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus. Homo erectus, "upright man" is probably the first, but various scientists argue for other possibilities, and the chief ones are discussed in this chapter.

Along the way to tracking down our Neanderthal (and other) roots, matters are discussed such as the incredibly painful birth experience, because of a combination of large brains in newborns and narrow hips due to upright walking (waddling is wasteful of energy); when different skin colors arose (I was surprised to find it was primarily 5,000 years ago); the biggest of the apes, the half-ton Gigantopithecus; and why we still have sore backs.

Once we get to the time period from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, we find that our twig of the tree of life is actually braided, or networked. Perhaps half a million years ago some people left Africa for Europe and Asia. At present it seems two groups followed similar but distinct evolutionary tracks to become the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. Later, some time before 70,000 years ago, another group left Africa. They are called by various names; the most neutral is "early modern humans" or EMH. They are considered early members of H. sapiens, and they must have had better teamwork and better tools, and perhaps a different breeding schedule with close spacing of offspring, because they multiplied until they outnumbered their cousins who already lived there.

Now that a genetic sequence has been produced for both Neanderthals and Denisovans, it is clear that they interbred with the EMH people. Whether the N's and the D's were wiped out or subsumed into the larger group is not known. What is known is that European DNA includes about 4% Neanderthal DNA and a lesser amount of Denisovan DNA, while for Asians it is the reverse, and Australians may have 6% Denisovan DNA.

At this point I wonder, was there perhaps yet another species out there, not yet discovered, that contributed to the modern gene pool? And I find another matter even more interesting: All three of these types of humans were more robust, and had a little larger brains (5%-8%) than modern humans. We don't know enough about the Denisovans to be sure how strong they were. An average Neanderthal was twice as strong as an EMH, and the average EMH was at least twice as strong as modern humans.

Not all of that is because so many of us have sedentary lifestyles (Most people living outside the West have more active lives). I live near a large population of Amish. They work hard and are all very strong. A typical EMH would be even stronger. They were genetically prepared to become stronger.

The last chapter asks, "Are Humans Still Evolving?". The answer is, "Of course!" Just because we invented culture and science and technology with all their conveniences, doesn't mean there are still no selective pressures for natural selection to work on. Remember, 2/3 of the world has only a fraction of the conveniences and medical infrastructure that an American or European would consider normal. I certainly hope that we are evolving toward having less lower back pain! But considering that it has been with us for about two million years, I suppose it will be a good while yet. I point out wisdom teeth, and our shrinking jawbones, as evidence of continuing evolution. Dr. Lee thinks we have removed that matter from selective pressure because of low-cost dental surgery. However, there are still large numbers (the 2/3 mentioned above) who have little or no dental care, but whose jaws are also shrinking as food sources change. In whatever measure infected impacted wisdom teeth reduce reproductive potential, there will be benefit to having a mutation that reduces or eliminates them.

There is reason to believe that the great increase in human population that followed the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago has led to an increased rate of evolution among us. This is just touched on in this book, but we are referred to another, The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I got a copy right away. Stay tuned!

This review just skates on the surface of Dr. Lee's offerings. What a joy to read!

What would you pay for ten more years?

kw: analysis, longevity, health

By taking one simple step, making one change, one intervention, most sedentary folks can add ten healthy years to their lives. I have several friends who are physicians. One of them who speaks at church conferences recently made a statement to those who are 50 and over. I checked on it with others, and they all agree with him. He said,

"If you are not already exercising daily, adding exercise to what you are doing every day will add, on average, ten years to your life."

Upon further checking, I found that these are not ten years of poor quality; the final decline that we all must undergo if we are not taken suddenly by accident or illness will be delayed by ten years. Even more, it is likely that the early years of decline will be better also, effectively increasing our "health span" by more than ten years.

I once heard someone scoff, "Sure, I can exercise hours and hours for some added time. But will there be added non-exercising time?" That is, must you spend so much time in exercise that your time to enjoy other stuff is the same, just occurring later on? Let's investigate.

Consider the average fifty-year-old. If male, remaining life expectancy is 30 years, to age 80; if female, it is 33 years, to age 83. Adding exercise to gain ten years could yield either 90 or 93 total years. Ten years is 3,652.5 days, and with 16 waking hours per day, that comes to 58,440 waking hours. Let's use the figures for a male. Suppose that he must devote that whole 58,440 hours to exercise, spread over 40 years. How much is that? The simple calculation is this:

58,440 / (4×3,652.5) = 4 hr/d, or 1/4 of his waking hours.

This means that, if someone must add four daily hours of exercise, and must to keep it up for forty years to gain ten years of longevity, all the waking hours of the extra ten years will be spent exercising. He could take it easy instead, and it would be a wash. But how much is actually needed?

How much daily exercising time does my friend say is needed to get the ten-year bonus? Half an hour. That is, half an hour of doing something that increases heart rate, and leads to at least a "glow", if not becoming sweaty, by the end of the half hour. A half hour daily adds up to 7,305 hours spread over the forty years.

If it is legitimate to do so, we can put this figure into simple terms: Each year gained was "paid for" by 730.5 hours of exercise, or a half hour daily for four years. Four years of daily exercise gains an added year of healthy life.

Now, take care: This is not a linear relationship, so going for an hour instead of half an hour isn't going to give you twenty added years. It could add some, but I don't know how much. I remember Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru of the 1950's and '60's. His daily exercise routine was 4-5 hours of all kinds of exercise. He lived to age 96 years and 4 months. How long would he have lived without so much exercise? I don't know. But I do know that he enjoyed exercise, so it wasn't drudgery to him.

Exercise is drudgery to most of us who aren't already gym rats. But that half hour isn't too high a price to pay for the extra time it yields. This is the take-away message for someone fifty or so:

Break a sweat each day for four days, and gain a full day of life! Do so for the rest of your life, and you'll have lived an extra ten years.

A dud, and then some fun escape lit

kw: book reviews, fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, collections, short stories

The books now on my reading table are nearly all short story collections. I began to read one, then set it aside in favor of another, and didn't return to it.

Firstly, I picked up Exit Wounds, edited by Paul B. Kane and Marie O'Regan, a collection of murder mysteries, as the title clearly indicates. Alongside it I set Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, edited by Kirsten Berg, Torie Bosch, Joey Eschrich, Ed Finn, Andrés Martines, and Juliet Ulman; a collection of stories from the Future Tense column sponsored by Slate and others. I don't care for a steady diet of crime stories, so I decided to intersperse them.

At the first sitting I read four stories in Exit Wounds. "The Bully", by Jeffrey Deaver takes a turn midway that makes you realize you are inside the mind of a serial killer. However, it is rather cerebral and pensive. The next three were also told from the killer's point of view, and each was progressively darker. Then, in Future Tense, I read first "Mother of Invention" by Nnedi Okorafor; a smart house with the directive, "Protect the occupant" does just that, to the detriment of the house's designer, but to the benefit of the occupant, his spurned lover. I didn't care for "No Me Dejes" by Mark Oshiro, though the technology of memory capture from a dying person for retention by a chosen descendant is intriguing. I had read "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis" by Annalee Newitz, and re-read it with much enjoyment.

At that point, a day or so later, I decided to skim and skip in Exit Wounds to confirm a suspicion I had. While not all the stories are first-person-killer, nothing matches "The Bully" in quality. I decided, "enough is enough" and set it aside.

With the exception of "Domestic Violence" by Madeline Ashby, which I'd also read before and don't care for, the rest of the stories are full of interesting ideas. "Safe Surrender" by Meg Elison adds a dimension to the longing many adopted children have to know their natural origins, and "Overvalued" by Mark Stasenko explores ramifications of putting a monetary value on—and a futures market for—prodigies and other brilliant people.

I grew up on SciFi in the Campbell mold: "Pose a problem, then solve it." In more modern fiction, whether specific problems are solved, or even solvable, takes a back seat to the growth (or not) of those involved. Not all of the stories even end with an ending, seeming to be instead ending at a beginning. I am coming to realize that life is like that. What's the good of finishing a great task if you're left with no more than endless resting on your laurels? And life itself is a project without a definite ending, usually. Though it does end, all to often it ends ambiguously. Stories that reflect that may be less satisfying, but can be more gratifying.

Showcasing the perceived outsiders

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, collections, short stories

The title of New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl, is actually modest. When I saw the title, I figured the writers would be predominantly African-American, with a smattering of Latinos, but I found they also included several sorts of Asians and a Native American or two.

Reading the stories was a heady experience, like attending a tasting with unfamiliar wines and liqueurs. I read most of the stories, but not all. From the opening I could tell that some worlds were much too occult or horrifying. I nearly skipped "Burn the Ships" by Alberto Yañez, but found it to be a magical fantasy Holocaust, with a different outcome.

Similarly, "Kelsey and the Burdened Breath" by Darcie Little Badger borders on occult horror, telling the tale of "shimmers", a different word for ghosts, that are either vampires or cannibals in their own sort of afterlife. In the story's milieu, they are visible if one knows how to look. The evil ones become "burdened" and cannot rise into the sky, as is usual. But it is really a story about Kelsey's growth.

I delighted in the premise of "The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations" by Minsoo Kang. The title tells a story in itself. Would that producing lying translations could actually avert war!

The breadth of vision is sufficient that most folks will find at least a few stories to savor, no matter what their ethnicity.

Hi Spiders! Welcome back!!

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Since I saw the beginning of some spider scanning activity a couple of days ago, I decided to check into it. It may not have ended yet. Here is the overview for the past week:

Overall, about 85% of all activity in the past day or two has originated from Russia. Over the whole of the past week, activity from the USA has totaled 87 hits to Russia's 201.

We can focus on the past 24 hours for an even more stark contrast, below.

No numbers are needed to show that the USA has 20-some hits; a normal day of activity. When I looked at the Audience view, no other country exceeded 2 hits.

On the weekly view, the top five posts had between 6 and 9 hits; in the past day, no post had more than 2 hits. This indicates that we have wide scanning here. In the past, when I was writing daily and getting 200 daily hits, there would usually be one or two recent posts that had 5-10 hits, and the weekly "most popular" list topped out at 20 or more. So I surmise a single agent snarfing up 20-60 posts in a particular hour, and going for different ones each time.

Will Greenland get greener?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, exploration, geography, science, greenland, global warming, climate change

The main title of The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner, embodies a double entendre. Even today, to be in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet puts you at a "pole of inaccessibility", really at the end of the Earth; and what happens to that ice could indeed portend the end of the world (though not the Earth).

World versus Earth: The Earth is the physical planet, "third rock from the Sun", from its core to the edge of the atmosphere a few thousand miles above the surface, including the biosphere, of course. The world is the collection of human civilizations and systems that form the environment for human life and living. The Earth is incredibly robust. The biosphere is very robust. The world is fragile. Even the much-vaunted "western world" that provides comfort, sustenance, and amazing conveniences to about one-third of the total human population, is remarkably fragile.

About a tenth of the world population, nearly 700 million, lives at or below an elevation of 10m above sea level. For every meter of sea level rise, about a tenth of these (more at first, fewer later) will have to move uphill. But the three laws of real estate value, "location, location, location", meaning "higher ground for better view (except for that seaside vacation home!), close to conveniences (stores, etc.), and close to work" will drive costs up, and up and up.

The Ice at the End starts with the history of the exploration of Greenland. While it is called the largest island, I think of it as the smallest continent. It is nearly 1/3 the size of Australia, and is about 3 times the size of the New Guinea island. Being mostly covered with an ice cap about two miles thick makes its exploration extremely arduous at best, any time prior to the use of aircraft and tracked heavy vehicles; now it is merely "very arduous". One of my favorite turn-of-the century scientists, Alfred Wegener, died there at age 50, in 1930.

Once the early explorers, combining European and Inuit materials and methods, showed it is possible to cross the ice sheet, scientists made up a growing proportion of "visitors", a proportion that exploded once the American military began pouring money into Arctic exploration right after World War II. Now the ice volume can be measured daily by satellite, on-ice expeditions can continue to determine snowfall accumulation and compaction rates, and ice cores have been drilled to bedrock in a few locations. Now the true significance of Greenland and its ice are becoming clear.

To cut to the chase: Even if we ignore Antarctica, progressive melting of Greenland's ice alone can cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of every nation that has a coastline (nearly all of them). I gathered a number of calculated amounts for the amount of water in that ice. If it were all put into the ocean at once, without heating up beyond melting temperature, the seas would rise by 27 feet, or 8.2 meters. Then, as it warmed to the 40°F (4°C) average temperature of the ocean, sea level would rise about another couple of inches (5-6 cm).

Compare that to current rates. Since the 1960's, sea level has risen between 3 and 3.3 mm/yr. About a third of that is from Greenland, about half from ocean thermal expansion, and the rest from Antarctica, mainly the Thwaites glacier and a few lesser ones. See this montage:

The four images of Greenland plus Iceland were made in December of 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2014, from left to right. It may be hard to see the decrease in ice cover from decade to decade. The total difference in ice volume over these thirty years is 0.75%. Here is a closeup of the northeast quadrant, where the difference is more evident:

On first sight, one may say, "It's just a difference in snow cover," but with a careful look, one may see that the ice front has also receded, and we need to note that the entire ice sheet has gotten thinner by more than a half percent (30 ft or 9.5 m) in that time. Over that same interval the sea has risen nearly 100mm, or 4". And a third of that was Greenland's ice melting, over and above the snow that fell.

Though I am a political/social conservative, I have long known of the greenhouse effect, and what it can do to this planet. Will rising temperatures and rising seas drive human life off the Earth? That isn't likely. However, those phenomena will drive humans inland everywhere, and will likely eliminate a few oceanic nations such as the Maldives, Palau and Tuvalu. Of continental nations, Bangladesh would be one of the hardest hit: a quarter of its land area is below an elevation of 8m.

I have always been in favor of research into renewable energy, primarily solar. At present levels of efficiency, it would take less than 200,000 square miles (500,000 sq km) of solar panels to meet all energy needs for the world. That's about the area of Spain, but it would be spread everywhere, mainly within 40° of the equator. This needs to be coupled with better batteries to take care of cloudy days. At present prices, the investment would be huge, something like 200 times the world yearly GDP. However, research also results in lower prices, which can only help.

Someone who denies the importance of climate change would call this book a polemic. I do not. It is even-handed and factual, without the shrillness that pervades so much public discourse on the subject. I learned some great history and gained a better perspective on the importance of Greenland in the total ice/water/ocean budget of the planet. I recommend the book, no matter what your political stance.

Return of the Russian spiders

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I checked into my blog stats, and what did I see?
A mess of Russian (and Ukrainian) spiders, lookin' back at me!

The top of the chart's scale, 178, represents activity from Russia for the past week...or really, for the past couple of days. Another 44 hits came via Ukraine. Looking at the past 24 hours:

The 169 hits are again Russian, and another 15 from Ukraine. That spike of 56 hits around 7:00 pm EST, flanked by 15 the hour before and 15 the hour after, is about equal to two good days' activity from all sources, when the spiders are dormant.

Considering the timing, it's a good bet the spiders were sent to gather our thoughts on the political theater going on just now. After all, the Democrats used a Russian-modeled Kangaroo court to hold their "impeachment hearings", and now they are trying to coerce the Senate to do the same. I am thankful that the senior Senators remember the machinations of the Cold War well enough to recognize it for what it is, and take a more honest way (whether it is to be an entirely honest way remains to be seen).

I wonder how much spider activity the really popular blogs have been getting.

Finding Nebula

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

My long-term favorite collection of science fiction short stories (with a novella or novelette thrown in) is the Nebula Awards series. This year the new volume with last year's stories is Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Morena-Garcia.

The science fiction field has finally emerged from the gutter; starting nearly 50 years ago, writers were released from a tacit and mostly self-imposed censorship regarding sexual subjects. Many of them went wild. Even Isaac Asimov, who had utterly eschewed any sexual content, began writing bad sex scenes into the last few of his Robot and Foundation stories and books.

I avoid reading erotic writing for the same reason I don't go to strip shows: I care about my marriage vows, and I prefer not to gaze or dwell upon who/what I cannot possess. In our mid-seventies, I still think my wife is an unsurpassed beauty; I need no other.

That said: while the writers of this volume of Nebula don't hide sex, it plays about the same part in the stories that any of us might allow it to play in our public lives. Occasional mention, but not the focus. I think the past two generations of readers are finally tired of camera-in-the-bedroom writing. Besides, folks who want those kinds of thrills have about a billion free porn videos available.

I greatly enjoyed most of the stories. There were three that I began, and within a page my spirit protested, so I went on to the next story. Not because of eroticism, but either outright fantasy (which I don't like to read) or a world I preferred not to enter. So I'll mention just a few that I fancied:

• Weaponized Math, by Jonathan P. Brazee – Sniper war setting. A number-wizard turned sniper saves the day.
• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells – The cyborg calls himself Murderbot. The cloned brain and other organic components of this bodyguard of sorts (on a very interesting distant planet) clearly came from a barely functional introvert. Someone after my own heart.
• Wind Will Rove, by Sarah Pinsker – Generation ship setting. They've lost much of their cultural past due to hacking (I keep telling folks, microfilm is the only secure backup for stuff you really want to keep!). Music, and a particular tune with a mixed provenance, help the protagonist stay sane, connecting her to both past and future.
• Carnival Nine, by Caroline M. Yoachim – Wind-up clockwork people. They live around 1,000 days. I hope the days are long; that's only two years and nine months on Earth. Life with a disabled child is tough, no matter what kind of critter you are.

I hope that's enough to whet your appetite.

Delightful letters by a favorite of mine

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, letters

America's Astrophysicist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaks out for science literacy with more passion and authority than anyone else I know. As busy as he is, he corresponds with many who write to him. In Letters from an Astrophysicist he has collected and categorized a goodly number of these.

Be begins with a prologue, titled "Happy 60th Birthday, NASA", in which he congratulates NASA, but points out the political pressure that had to be applied, a decade or so into their existence, to induce them to hire people besides male WASPs for significant positions. He also alludes to his own struggles as a science-hungry black youngster, who has nonetheless succeeded in a career formerly closed to "folks who look like" him.

I'll keep this short. Here is the closing portion of one letter to him:

[writing about the 3 billion nucleotides in human DNA and a set of perhaps similar size in a daddy-long-legs] How could a mere 3 gigabytes do all that. It takes far more just to run my iPhone.

Those 3 gigs don't seem to be enough to just dictate how my brain's 100 billion neurons and their trillions of synapses behave.

A portion of the reply:

Simple sets of "rules"can lead to extraordinary complexity.

Then, after discussing the supply chain needed to deliver milk, based on supply and demand and enlightened greed, he goes on:

…the entire universe is composed of just 92 elements … there are only four fundamental forces of nature … there are only four classes of fundamental particles … nearly all behavior of electromagnetic waves (light) can be derived from a set of four equations that fit on a Post-it® note…

His conclusion: We need not be overwhelmed by the complexity, but ought to be awed by how simple it is.

A part of any scientist's "territory" is questions about God and belief. Dr. Tyson is an agnostic (a more scientific stance than atheism), and though he is frequently challenged (sometimes abused) by believers, answers with grace, but doesn't back down. I appreciate that about him.

If you enjoy science writing at its best, read this, and then others of his books, 9 others by my count.

What extremes can teach us

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, extremes, biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, most dangerous

If you want to know what is the biggest or smallest mammal, bird, tree, or whatever, it has become incredibly easy to do so. However, sometimes the answer is "it depends". You won't get an "it depends" answer from a search engine. But you will from a knowledgeable person. Then, whatever results, it's helpful to dig a bit deeper, to find out the why or how of it.

I was thinking of such a thing, starting with, "What is the heaviest land mammal?". If you look to historic times, the African elephant, which gets as heavy as seven tons (14,000 lbs, 6,400 kilos) easily tops the list. However, if we look back in time, it was probably one of the Titanosaurs. A species recently found in Patagonia (Argentina) must have weighed 85 tons (12 x the biggest elephant). What keeps a species that large from arising again? I first checked on historic oxygen levels…and found that during the "age of dinosaurs" there was a little less oxygen in the atmosphere than there is now. But that may have actually facilitated huge size, because my next thought was physiology. Elephants are mammals, and as such are exothermic; the muscles of all mammals twitch constantly to keep the body warm. This is called "muscle tone". Although larger dinosaurs were almost certainly warmer than their surroundings, they probably didn't have the level of muscle tone found in birds and mammals. If you model an 85-ton mammal, it will overheat, badly. I suppose that elephants represent the extreme end of the trade-off between large size (efficiency and ability to ward off predators) and heating. With a little less oxygen, and a slower overall metabolism, the titanosaurs were possible.

In Superlative: The Biology of Extremes, by Matthew D. LaPlante, we don't find the above comparison, but there are numerous others. For example, there are two contenders for the title of lightest mammal, the Etruscan Shrew and the Bumblebee Bat (Kitti's hog-nosed bat). Both weigh just under 2g, and stretch the limits of packing all the things a mammal needs to live into a tiny body. More to the point in the author's analysis, a 2-gram shrew has such a small brain that its cerebral cortex is less than 1mm thick, and so its neurology can be studied with certain imaging techniques. Larger critters have a cortex that is too thick to be studied that way.

Other small things reveal other limits. The smallest flying insects, fairyflies, include a species that gets as small as 0.16 mm long. The period in a printed book is typically 0.3 to 0.4 mm in diameter. So, while I don't know how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (assuming you could induce them to do so), three or four or more of that species of fairyfly could crowd onto a printed period (assuming you could induce them to do so). But it's a stretch to call what they do "flying". To a fairyfly, air is a thick fluid, and they really kind of row themselves along, using a motion similar to the sculling we might do with our hands to stay afloat in water.

In addition to dealing with size, weight, and speed (cheetahs and sloths, for example), the book contains a chapter on danger. The title of "most dangerous" is incredibly hard to confer. Dangerous how? A handful of the most venomous snakes produce venom that can kill a human in a half hour or less, with an amount almost too small to see. But like other extreme animals, they reward study with discovery. Some components of snake venom are being studied for medical use, such as relieving pain, or liquefying tissue, or conversely, protecting tissues from being liquefied by other components. But there are other measures of danger. A snake species with very potent venom may be shy, and less likely to bite, so it poses less of a danger than an aggressive species.

We must remember that the most dangerous animal is ourselves. Besides that, then, what animal causes the greatest number of untimely human deaths? The hands-down winner is the genus of mosquito, Anopheles, that carries malaria. A few other insects, such as a different mosquito that carries Zika and another that carries West Nile virus, are somewhat distantly behind, as is the Tsetse fly.

There are other ways to measure danger, as in "Dangerous to whom or what?" If you're a flying insect, you're more likely to find yourself in the gullet of a bat than in any other creature. A bat consumes half its body weight in insects nightly; a nursing female takes in twice that. And there are a lot of bats, each of which must eat hundreds to thousands of insects each night. One cave in New Mexico hosts a colony of 20 million bats, and they consume 50 tons or more of insects every night! Someone else can figure out the overall world total, but the yearly "take" of insects by bats exceeds the total biomass of all mammals.

These examples just scratch the surface of a delightful book, that doesn't just tell what is the biggest, smallest, fastest, or whatever, but describes how the quantity is measured, and in many cases, "What's it good for?" Studying the extremes can help us better understand the "usual".

A collection that suits me better

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies

I wonder, is it that Neil Clarke thinks more like I do, or that the editors of the last SF collection I reviewed think so very differently from me? I remarked at the end of that review that the "quality of the editor" matters much, but I ought to have used a word different from "quality". I'll ruminate on that…

Neil Clarke's fourth collection of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (the year 2018) does indeed include a much greater proportion of stories that greatly appeal to me, compared to several of the past year's "Best of" volumes. There are actually a number of excellent writers who have returned to the Dictum of Campbell, "Pose a problem, then solve it." That would include "Okay, Glory" by Elizabeth Bear and "Umberlight" by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Other stories raise the "alien viewpoint" subgenre to new levels, most notably "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Theories of Flight" by Linda Nagata. I was quite taken with the love story within "Traces of Us" by Vanessa Fogg, with the overt theme of recorded intelligences, and how complete their experience might be.

I always recognize in Ken Liu's writing a political undercurrent, seeing that I number among my close friends a number of both Taiwan-born and China-born immigrants; that means I get Sino-centric news through channels that most in this country have no access to. In "Byzantine Empathy", though, I find a superb gut-level presentation of the unbridgeable gap between the "caring professional" and the empathy-driven amateur; the latter typically do all the heavy lifting that the former later take advantage of to advance their organizations. The use of VR technology to emotionally move (even propel) an audience will no doubt move off these pages into stark reality in the very near future.

This collection restores my optimism that writers are still having good new ideas, and some of those ideas may well move into mainstream thought. Reading this volume was a refreshing way to close out 2019.

Why we need insects

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects

I suspect that the subtitle was the author's original choice for a title, and that the punchier title came via the publisher's marketing arm. In Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (translated by Lucy Moffatt), we find nearly nothing about buzzing, stinging or biting, and a great deal about the role of insects in nature, and most particularly that vast portion of nature that we humans appropriate for our use.

For example, we are familiar to the point of boredom with the need for honeybees to pollinate many crops. And you may be familiar with the giant industry of trucking millions of beehives to central California to pollinate almond flowers—and of the need to truck them right back out again to somewhere they can get food when the almond bloom is over. But I didn't now that tomatoes taste much better when pollinated by bumblebees, which are big enough and rough enough to do a thorough job of it; nor of the few species of midges that are the only pollinators of cacao flowers—and that they are endangered so, if they go, so goes chocolate. And if you think you'd never, ever eat a wasp: you do, every time you eat a fig or fig bar. Tiny fig wasps are essential to fig production, and they die in the fig after laying their eggs, but I'll let you off the hook on this one, because the tiny bodies are mostly (but only mostly!) consumed by the fig as it matures.

Insects are the vanguard of the clean-up crew worldwide. Without dung beetles the plains of Africa would be knee-deep in the dung of elephants, rhinos, wildebeests, giraffes, and antelopes, to say the least. Similar beetles feed dung to their young in the steppes of Asia and both South and North America. Insects also lead the way when disposing of carcasses, or their remnants when the bigger predators have eaten their fill.

There is something worth learning on nearly every page.

• That the most colorfast red dye, carmine or cochineal, is produced by a bug that feeds on cactus. Fortunately, prickly pear cacti are in no danger of extinction. Not only were those old, red 1¢ postage stamps made with carmine, so were and are the red coats of British soldiers, the "redcoats" of revolutionary-war-era fame. We still use tons of carmine yearly. 
• That certain fly larvae excel at cleaning wounds, removing dead tissue and bacteria but never touching live tissue—and that Genghis Khan (probably) had a "maggot wagon" along for his armies' battles. 
• That insects may be the food of the future even in the West; they are already on the menu in many parts of the world. To produce a pound of protein, certain insects require much less feed and produce much less methane and carbon dioxide than beeves or swine.

The key takeaway: we cannot get along without insects, but they can get along very well (or even, much better) without us. Rather than wax long, I'll leave it to you to read the book. Much recommended!

The spiders of unknown origin outnumber all

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Earlier today, preparing to enter a book review, I captured these activity indicators:

That big spike yesterday was all from "Unknown Region", and was accomplished in a few minutes. The 200+ from Russia spanned 2+ days, and is seen as the broad hump, just above the weeds, from Dec 13-15. I find it interesting that all 182 "Unknown Country" hits came via Bing, and none others. Bing does seem to have the best protection for someone browsing Incognito. Apparently, either Bing allows bulk browsing, or there were a bunch of browser windows involved, all triggered at once (whether on one fast machine or on a botnet, I don't know).

Universes by the quintillions

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cosmology, multiverse, history

There is a corner of science in which I have much interest, cosmology. I usually avoid peeking into one corner of that corner. The various attempts to go onward from "What happened?" to "How did it happen?" and even "Why?" have been getting more and more strange for most of my adult life (50+ years). But I could not pass up the new book by Tom Siegfried, The Number of the Universe: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos.

I was quite entertained, and my history itch was well scratched by the author's thorough coverage of how the meanings of "world" and "universe" have morphed through the ages, at least since Aristotle. The early atomists were at odds with Aristotle, who embraced the Continuum. The atomists pointed to things like the hand of a bronze statue that had gradually become quite worn because people always touched or rubbed the fingers on their way by it.

Considering that this could equally be taken as evidence that the statue's material was continuous and thus could be removed in quantities as minute as one liked, their contentions held little water. They didn't convince Aristotle, who also declared that there could be no more than one world. The world as he understood it was equivalent to the universe, and consisted of a series of nested spheres; the outermost held the "fixed stars", the innermost consisted of the Earth, and those between carried the Sun, Moon and five planets in their pathways around the sky.

For reasons that escape me, the atomists also considered that there could be, and should be, something "outside" the outermost sphere. Perhaps other worlds like ours. Camille Flammarion in 1888 published a wood engraving that illustrated one such idea, but it is based on a flat earth, not the sphere that the Greeks understood for the earth's shape. It isn't known whether the original illustrator was displaying a true belief, or lampooning it.

Sixteen centuries were to pass until a clerical edict in 1277 threatened "natural philosophers" with excommunication if they continued to take Aristotle's anti-atomist and anti-multi-world pronouncements as truth. It is odd that, 350 years still later, Galileo was placed under house arrest for writings that contradicted Aristotle.

Mr. Siegfried takes us through the various twists and turns of the various meanings "world" and "universe" have taken on, from Aristotle onward. The "universe/world" of Ptolemy, complete with epicycles, was not far removed from the Aristotelian model. The "revolution" by Copernicus mainly caused the Sun and Earth to switch places, allowing only the Moon to keep orbiting Earth. We call it the solar system, but Copernicus called it the World.

After the telescope was invented, and rather large ones were produced, the Milky Way, or the Galaxy (from γάλα, or gala, for "milk"), was thought to be the whole universe, and the solar system including Earth was just a tiny part of that; the Earth was now "the world" and the rest was "the universe". Still later other galaxies, some found to be larger than the Milky Way, were called "island universes", but now "universe" means "everything". Now there are those who say the universe is "everything we can observe," and posit multiple universes, the multiverse.

The author points out several times that the arguments being put forth now against modern hypotheses of a multiverse are the same as those advanced time and again over the millennia. While reading the book I came to understand these comparisons as political framing. The point of the book is to defend the concept of Multiverse, even though there are between six and nine versions thereof being bandied about.

I will discuss only two of these. Firstly, what we can observe with our instruments reaches to 13.8 billion years ago, and a naïve concept of its radius is 13.8 billion light-years (Gly). However, back-calculating relativistic effects allows us to estimate that the "edge" of what we observe is actually now at a distance of about 75 Gly. That's how far cosmological expansion has carried things. But how big is the "rest of the universe"? We still have no way to know. Ignoring accelerated expansion (the dissension against this idea continues to increase, so I discount it), let's first guess that Alan Guth's inflation popped things open to such an extent that we can observe at most a percent of the whole. Even "inflation" didn't produce an infinite bubble of spacetime. One hundred times the volume is a little over 4.5 times the radius. Let's round that up to a radius of 350 Gly. That's the size of "our bubble universe".

The number of baryons (protons, neutrons and their kin) in the observable universe is thought to be about 10¹⁰⁰ (one Googol), and their number in "our everything", this bubble, may be 10¹⁰² (100 Googol).

One version of the multiverse hypothesizes that there are multiple bubbles, perhaps with differing values of the "natural constants" such as the ratio of mass of the proton/electron. In our universe, or at least on our lab benches, that ratio is 1,836 and change. If the ensuing multiverse is truly infinite, containing an infinite number of such bubbles (200-400 Gly across on average), it is thought that any particular configuration of particles and their motions will be repeated exactly an infinite number of times. Well, that's a lot of infinity. And all of it quite beyond the reach of any possible instrument.

I don't know how big the number of permutations and combinations each bubble consists of, but we can tinker with a few numbers:

• The coordinates of each particle and its velocity consist of six numbers. The position must be known with a precision of about the Planck length (1.6x10^-35 m), and similar precision for the velocity, to obtain a functional match.
• A complete specification for the state of a bubble at any point in time consists then of 6x10¹⁰²  numbers. Call this Nu, the "state number of a universe".
• The permutations of Nu are roughly its factorial: (Nu)!, a number with about 600 times as many zeroes as there are particles in "our" bubble. That's a very rough estimate based on Stirling's Approximation.

If there are at least that many universe-bubbles out there, then at least one pair of them will match exactly, at least at some point in time. Quantum effects may result in immediate divergence. It's a bit like the statement that the formulas for Earth's atmospheric interactions require that, at any one point in time, there are two antipodal points at which the temperature and barometric pressure and wind velocity and direction are exactly matched. But where those points may be, nobody can determine, and where they are a few milliseconds later, is anyone's guess. However, this hypothesis of a multiverse is one I can consider is at least possible. Highly unlikely—perhaps one chance in some number with a Googleplex of zeroes—but possible.

The other multiverse worth considering, if only as a straw man, is the one formulated by Hugh Everett III. Rather than accept quantum randomness, his model states that for every quantum "choice", both or all possible paths are taken, just in different universes. If I understand Dr. Everett correctly, every quantum event causes the splitting of the universe into two or more universes, each one holding one of those outcomes. He is quoted as stating that a "stupendous number" of parallel universes are thus produced every second, separated from one another by unknown mechanisms or materials. "Stupendous" is the understatement of the century.

Let's consider a very simple quantum event, the interaction of a photon with the surface of a sheet of glass. If the refractive index of window glass is taken as 1.5 at some wavelength of choice, then, for normal or near-normal incidence, the photon has a 4% chance of reflecting. Otherwise it passes into the glass. The Everett Multiverse works this way. Each such photon-glass interaction splits the universe into two. In one, the photon reflects, and in the other, it passes through. Or maybe there has to be a split into 25 universes; one of them gets the reflected photon and the rest get the transmitted photon. Let's go with the simple version.

I have a laser pointer with a beam that is nominally "less than 5mW", so I'll call it 4mW. I'll point it straight at my window. What happens? Here are the numbers:

• 0.004 W beam power
• 670 nm beam wavelength
• 6.242x10¹⁸ eV (electron Volts) per Joule (J); 1 W = 1 J/sec
• photon energy at 670 nm = 1.85 eV (proportionality constant 1240 eV-nm)
• 1.35x10¹⁶ photons/sec in the beam

The number of photons striking the near surface of the glass is 13.5 quadrillion per second. (In American units, a quadrillion is a million times a billion.) A slightly smaller number, 96% of 13.5 quadrillion, strike the far surface of the glass. Most of those that reflect inside the glass (about 54 trillion) pass through back upward, but a few are reflected downward again, and so forth. We can say that 27 quadrillion quantum interactions are happening, every second. That is not counting the quantum events that go into creating the laser beam photons in the first place.

I don't know how many universes were being created each second beforehand, but during the time I shined my 4mW beam at the glass, 27 quadrillion new universes were created, that would not have been had I kept the beam off. About every 37 seconds, I "create" a quintillion universes.

And some people think it incredible that God created one universe! Is it any surprise that I consider the Everett hypothesis of the multiverse as the sheerest nonsense? It violates Occam's Razor by the hugest, most incredible amount I have ever encountered.

Do I have an alternative? Indeed I do (and not the theological one)! Keeping my physicist hat on, I'll point out that I find superstring theory less incredible than the Everett hypothesis. These curious entities, if they exist, are something like a Planck length in size (see above) and vibrate at furious rates, at least as great as the frequency of the most powerful gamma rays. The "fundamental particles" that we call quanta, including protons and photons, would then be vibrational modes of one or more superstrings.

If the above is true, quanta have "fuzzy boundaries" with a lot of "buzzing" going on inside, and quantum randomness is then something related to Brownian motion caused by molecules striking tiny items such as pollen grains, in random clusters that don't quite balance out.

Consider the interaction of a photon with a piece of glass. The glass, volume-wise, consists mainly of oxygen atoms held together by covalent bonding with much smaller atoms of silicon, sodium, and a few other elements. The oxygen atoms are slightly ill-defined spheres or spheroids with a diameter of about 0.3 nm. A photon from my laser has a wavelength about 2,000 times as large. I don't know how "wide" a photon is, but the "wavicle" model indicates its "physical" length is probably 2-3 wavelengths. Suffice it to say that the photon interacts with a large number of oxygen atoms, or at least the electrons in their outer orbitals, while taking some fraction of a nanosecond "deciding" whether to turn tail (reflect) or slip past the surface (refract). During that interaction the vibrations of the superstrings involved cause a few trillion (or trillion trillion) jitters of this or that "part" of the photon against various numbers of electrons. Predicting which way a casino die will roll would be infinitely easier than determining beforehand what the photon will do (just bet the odds: 24 out of 25 times, it'll go through).

That is my superstring-Brownian-motion hypothesis for quantum randomness. I ought to copyright it (and I did, just by publishing it in this blog post).

P.S. This shows one concept of a wavicle that I found on zazzle.com. To this scale, the oxygen atoms in window glass would appear about 0.012 mm across, about three times the size of E. coli cells.

A new Eurasian spider pattern

kw: bloggins, spider scanning


I haven't posted for about two weeks. I read parts of two books, found them unsuitable to continue, and now I am partway through another that I ought to complete in another couple of days.

Anyway, I checked into Blogger and saw this: Starting some time on Friday (the 13th!) the majority of the action came from Russia and the Ukraine, with the U.S. pulling into third place.

As usual, normal hourly activity is the "grass" in the leftward 2/3 of the chart.



This is only mildly interesting. I have yet to hear from, or hear of, anyone who is keeping track of the activity on their blog, whether they notice the visiting Russians. It may be that the amount of activity is equally spread over lots of blogs, so only for low-popularity blogs such as mine can anyone even see that something a bit unusual is going on.

Spiders taking advantage of our food coma

kw: blogging, spider scanning

A week ago I briefly checked, and saw a sudden, but rather modest, uptick in usage originating in Russia. Here is what I saw today:



Just after I logged off on the 28th, Google Analytics recorded a 160-hit day. Then two days ago, a 200-hit day. At the left end of the chart we see the tail of the small "hit storm" from a week ago, about a tripling of ordinary usage over two days. The 29th and 30th is the current storm of hits from Russia and Ukraine.

It makes me wonder: are there Black Friday shoppers in Russia who use searches general enough that blogs like mine log lots of hits which are incidental? Yeah, let's call it that…this time.

What is best - depends on the editor

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

Looking for some lighter reading I picked up The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and the series editor John Joseph Adams. If there is a theme for this volume, I'd guess it is "Pouring out their pain." Even in the fantasy stories, all but a few of the twenty offerings, there are few positive endings.

Most of the authors are members of groups that are currently or formerly marginalized (and, I must say, members of most "formerly" marginalized groups still think they are marginalized, big time, whether they are or not). I'd say that gives the bunch of them the right to complain. It is interesting how some of them sought to couch their complaint. Most notably, Brenda Peynado in "The Kite Maker" places us inside the head of a human who is sympathetic to space alien refugees; they are not invaders, but fleeing a destroyed planet. The aliens resemble dragonflies, very fragile, and even though living in refugee camps—thinly disguised versions of the internment camps of the 1940's—and quite inoffensive, they are thoroughly hated by a great many. The trouble is, the story goes nowhere. The POV protagonist loses his business, but nothing is improved.

The most poignant is "On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon: meditations and ruminations while a beloved dog is being put to sleep. As touched as I was, I couldn't help noticing that the three-injection cocktail described is the one used for capital penalties by lethal injection, that is, "putting to sleep" for humans. Animals are typically euthanized by slow injection of a large overdose of an opioid or anaesthetic. It would actually be more humane to euthanize humans the same way.

I got no more than a page into some of the stories; I quickly discerned that they were going somewhere I didn't want to go. The rest left little impression. And that got me thinking. Who decides what is "the Best" for one of these compendia? The editor(s) of course. Thus the quality of the editor determines the quality of the volume. There are several other "the Best" collections being published on a more-or-less regular basis which I esteem more highly than this one.

Avian athletes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, migration, bird migration

Have you ever seen a blackpoll warbler? If you have, unless you are familiar with warblers, you may have mistaken it for a chickadee.

From this picture (from All About Birds), and the one below (same site, different page), you can see that they are similar. The warbler's body is strongly patterned, while the body of a black-capped chickadee is more uniform in color. We notice the black cap with a broad white lower face on both birds. They are so active, we seldom have time to see the differences.


But they don't sound the same. The chickadee is named for its call, which we often "spell" as "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee". The warbler's call is a series of very short, quick notes about an octave above the highest note on a piano.

Their migration habits differ dramatically. Chickadees don't migrate, except in the extreme north or south portions of their breeding range. Blackpoll warblers migrate 5,000 to 6,000 miles (8,000 to 10,000 km), each way, every year.

Both are endurance champions, just in quite different ways. Both are very small birds; a blackpoll warbler weighs 14-15 grams (~0.5 oz) most of the year and a black-capped chickadee weighs a little less at 11-12 grams (~0.4 oz). Except in the far northern reaches of its range, a chickadee stays year-round, braving winters that, in my experience living in Ohio, are about as miserable as I can imagine. The warbler, along with most warbler species, is a snowbird. I winters in the tropics and summers in or near the Arctic. Actually, our term ought to be "anti-snow bird"!

In Kenn Kaufman's new book A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, he describes a blackpoll warbler's yearly trek at length. A condensed version:

The spring migration is less of an ultra-marathon and more a series of medium-length "hops". Beginning from a winter range in Venezuela or Brazil, a bird destined to nest near Denali or Nome, Alaska flies a few hundred miles to the northern coast of South America. There it rests a day or so and fattens up for a crossing of the Caribbean, which it crosses by island-hopping until it reaches Florida. The next hop may be to Georgia or thereabouts. Then it fattens up for a longer trek, nearly nonstop to western Alaska. The winter migration is a pair of ultra-marathons. The bird begins by crossing North America, which takes about three days of nonstop flying, until it reaches New England, perhaps Massachusetts. There, it eats until it weighs about a full ounce (28 grams or more). Then it flies south, out to sea, not to see land (except perhaps Bermuda in the distance) until it reaches the coast of Venezuela, weighing less than half what it did just four days earlier.

Every living blackpoll warbler is descended from ultramarathon champions! They are not the only ones. Hundreds of species of birds, many no larger than your thumb, yearly migrate hundreds to thousands of miles. Just in body-length terms, it would be like me (a six-footer) traveling halfway to the moon and back, every year…if there were somewhere halfway to the moon to stop for a few months.

One matter the author takes up in the book is the notion of "flyways". For ducks and other water birds, there do seem to be "highways in the sky" that they tend to follow. Not so for other birds. Recent technology shows this dramatically. Here is a national radar image from NEXRAD taken in May of 2016:

NEXRAD (Next generation radar) was developed to see rainfall. Birds are lots bigger than raindrops, so they are easily seen. As it happened, there were several large storm systems over the central and eastern U.S. that day. One stretches from southern Texas to eastern Nebraska, another just east of the Mississippi River into Indiana, and a smaller series of storms from Florida north to North Carolina. These all show up as green, yellow and red. The blue blotches with green centers show where the birds are during their spring migration. The black areas between blue blotches are areas not covered by the radar. The birds are spread out over the whole area; there are very few concentrations. One is visible at Lake Erie in northern Ohio. From about Cleveland, around the shore of Lake Erie to Toledo, birds that don't wish to cross the lake turn west and fly around it. If there are any "songbird flyways", this area is one of them. Its western portion is not covered by NEXRAD, so it isn't as prominent in this image as it ought to be.

A decade ago or so Mr. Kaufman moved from Arizona to Ohio, not far from the Magee Marsh refuge (and premier bird-watching boardwalk). The book focuses on events of a few springtime migration seasons. From the big eagles, vultures, and hawk, to blue jays, to little vireos and tiny warblers, hundreds of species of migrating birds fly through and stop over at or near Magee Marsh in the springtime. The author's lyric descriptions of these marvelous creatures and their travels are utterly captivating.

Here and there throughout the narrative, he tells the tale of a struggle he and his colleagues in northwest Ohio undertook to prevent the construction of an "experimental" wind turbine, right in the middle of the area, on a military reservation. It's worth considering just how dreadful big windmills can be for migrating birds.

A 2-megawatt turbine has a rotor about 90 m (~300 ft) in diameter, with three blades, atop a tower that places the top of the swept circle as high as 180 m (~600 ft). A stiff breeze of 20 m/s (~45 mph) is about midway in a turbine's power curve. When the wind is this speed aloft, it is about half that speed or less near the ground. In this breeze the blades rotate at 16 rpm, with a blade cutting through the air 48 times per minute, or about every 1¼ seconds. In that slice of time, a parcel of air 25 m long passes through the blades. For big birds like eagles soaring on this wind, there's one chance in 15 of getting hit by a blade. The speed of the blade tip is 75 m/s or 170 mph. They can't see it coming in time to react. For a duck-sized bird, the chance of getting hit are one in 35, and for a tiny warbler, "only" one in 165. But while only a few eagles pass along the Lake Erie shore daily, and a few dozen ducks, tens of thousands of warblers and other small songbirds do so, up to a few million each season. The daily "catch" of small birds can be hundreds. Not only so, one wind farm reported that more bats were being killed than birds. Think about this: every bat eats from 100 to 1,000 mosquitos and similar insects every day. How many can we afford to wipe out? There is one wind farm in California that is known to kill 100 golden eagles every year. Whatever happened to the Endangered Species Act? Big money, that's what.

Sadly, wind turbines aren't as eco-friendly as they are billed, and not just because they kill birds and bats. A big turbine contains a lot of metal, both steel and aluminum, which required a huge amount of energy to produce, and the coke (refined coal) needed to make the steel resulted in the release of a great amount of CO₂. What holds up a big turbine? Many tons of steel-reinforced concrete in a hole the size of a garage. How does the turbine get moved into location? Several trucks per turbine, driving hundreds of miles. Much of the energy needed to produce the metals, particularly the aluminum, comes from hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. So I have called the wind turbine industry "a scheme for turning hydropower into aluminum and steel, moving it across the country, and turning the metals back into electricity…at a net loss." A turbine has a finite lifetime. I have yet to see a full econometric analysis of wind turbines that demonstrates how you get more out than you put in. If every bit of energy used for the mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, erecting, and operating of every wind turbine was required to be derived exclusively from wind power, I think the whole enterprise would shrink away to nothing in pretty short order.

Just by the way, now that solar cells are routinely produced that exceed 15% efficiency, the industry is operating at a net energy gain. We ought to be pushing for more solar, and leaving the wind to the birds.

The turbine project on the military base that the author and others were working against was eventually cancelled. Good news, temporarily.

I lived in Sandusky, Ohio during my high school years. One spring morning I was up early, and I hung a microphone out the window to record the dawn chorus. I wish I still had the tape. It was amazing and glorious. At the time I knew nothing about bird migration. I had no idea that I was living right along a concentration of migrating birds like none other. I could recognize no more than five or six bird calls (robin, chickadee, crow, jay, and hawk, at least). But I could tell that the morning birdsong had at least fifty species of singers contributing. Even if I didn't know what they were, I could tell one from another.

I hope Mr. Kaufman's books reach a wide audience. The more of us who care about wildlife, including birds, the more likely that youngsters a generation or three in the future can wake up to a morning chorus as glorious as the one I remember.

Losers getting loster

kw: book reviews, short stories, fiction

I got two stories into Fly Already by Etgar Keret, and decided to try only one more before giving up. That story, "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot out of a Cannon" is a rather grimy dream sequence, but not the kind of downer the first two stories provided. So I started another and that was that.

No I am not glad I read any of those four stories. If someone is such a loser that reading about other even worse losers gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, go for it. I prefer reading about people who have at least a ghost of a chance of learning from their mistakes, or even better, from the mistakes of others.

Can we bring the Dodo back?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, species restoration, rewilding

So your children or grandchildren visit Yellowstone in the year 2040. A year or two previously another step in the "rewilding" of the Park was taken. Information on the "Guide to Yellowstone" app has a prominent section on "Safety in the Park". The newest arrivals, ten healthy Smilodon (saber-toothed cats), have begun taking over territory from one of the wolf packs. Special safety precautions are required. Nobody is permitted to drive their own vehicle in the area, but must be squired around in special Safari vehicles with added armoring of the doors and top, and extra-thick windows of Lexan. Nobody is permitted to leave the vehicles for any reason. So far, it is still OK to be outside in the Old Faithful Geyser area and some hot spring areas. So far…

Saber-toothed cats. How cute. They once roamed widely in North America, and were a principal predator of the over-sized elk of the time, those too big for a wolf pack to reliably prey upon. A male Smilodon would weight more than twice as much as a cougar (AKA puma). Its 5- to 6-inch (12-15 cm) fangs made it the top predator of the Pleistocene. In a head-to-head encounter, a lion would stand little chance.

At the moment, nobody is proposing a re-creation of this cat. However, as we find in The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals, by Torill Kornfeldt (translated by Fiona Graham), there are serious efforts afoot to restore the Woolly Mammoth, the Passenger Pigeon, the Aurochs (the ancestral bovine), and the Northern White Rhino (very recently extinct). Other researchers are experimenting with chicken DNA, attempting to "bring out the inner dinosaur" in them.

Of course, chickens are dinosaurs, don't-you-know, but we like "real" dinos, with long snouts, teeth, and long tails. How about a flock of chicken-sized toothy dinos to chase down the moths and mice in your back yard? Would you want one for a pet? Considering how impossible it is to house-break a chicken, I don't relish the thought of cleaning up dino poop all over the house.

Perhaps half the book's chapters return again and again to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita are working to restore large herbivores to the steppe landscape. The residents of a large enclosed area there include musk oxen and a bison. A herd of mammoths to accompany a much larger number of these grazers, in a much larger area (fenceless?) would complete the picture, because elephants and their kin do something smaller herbivores can't: they knock down trees, which opens up the landscape for the grasses to grow. The activities of all these animals together produce a much richer landscape for animals of all kinds. The Park enclosure is a much more various and interesting habitat than the surrounding area. To knock down trees, the Limovs employ a Soviet-era troop carrier. They have to be their own "virtual mammoths" for the time being.

Let's suppose George Church and his colleagues produce a furry baby pachyderm some day. Would it be a mammoth? At first, only a little bit. Not having a good understanding of the full sequence of mammoth DNA, the workers are gathering one trait after another, to see if they can be spliced into the genome of Asian elephants. One result could be an elephant that is more cold-resistant, increasing their "natural" range (the elephants in places like the Oklahoma City Zoo, or the National Zoo in Washington, DC, can't spend more than a little time outside in the winter, and require hours and hours indoors to warm up afterwards).

Making one mammoth look-alike doesn't produce a mammoth act-alike, because that requires a herd. The herd somehow has to regain tribal knowledge that was lost thousand of years ago when the last mammoths died. It has proven arduous and very costly to properly socialize zoo-born Condors. Nobody is sure they really know all that a Condor must when they are returned to the California mountains. Some live, some don't. How do you socialize a mammoth? Taking a few hundred of them to Siberia for the Limovs to oversee would be by far the easiest part of the matter!

I was quite amused to read of one fellow who wants to bring back the Passenger Pigeon. Their legendary flocks, of millions of birds, would certainly be a sight to see. So would the foot-deep guano they'd leave behind after they ate their way through a chunk of landscape...or a suburb. In the West and Midwest, and to a lesser extent out here in DelMarVa, I've seen flocks of starlings that number in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is enjoyable to watch a swooping cloud of them swirl through the sky and suddenly drop onto a cluster of trees, and then burst into the sky again. In suburban neighborhoods, they are a pest, such that some neighborhood associations employ retired folks to use special guns that shoot whistling bottle-rocket-like projectiles into the trees and drive them off (to a different neighborhood). Now, multiply that by 100. Passenger pigeons were 3-6 times the size (weight) of starlings.

By the way, to reduce starling populations, make it legal to kill and eat them. They'd be a lot easier to wipe out than the passenger pigeons were. They are an invasive bird here; European natives. But it takes a lot of them to make a meal; they weigh about 2.5 ounces each. "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", singing or not, is a good indication of their size.

Scientists are very divided about restoring extinct species, and about rewilding, a separate topic. You can restore a landscape's wildness by simply moving all the people out, and perhaps trucking certain animals in. Bringing wolves back to Yellowstone has made great changes in the way the elk and other grazers behave, and in the vegetation of the landscape. If a cold-resistant elephant is produced, woolly or not, is it a good idea to release a bunch of them in central parts of the USA? We would also need to import a bunch of Thai and Indian elephant trainers to teach the people who live there how to live alongside them! Lack of success in that area would be marked by the critters being poached back out of existence.

Maybe Siberia is big enough, and remote enough, for a true Pleistocene Park, the size of Pennsylvania or more. There's hardly anywhere else on Earth that mammoths could be re-introduced in any meaningful way. That's not the author's conclusion; she doesn't draw one. It is my conclusion.

Putting the X in eXaggerate

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, how to, humor

Troubled by drones? Maybe you want to sunbathe without being on camera. If so, lookee here:

In this drawing "from life", we have Serena Williams downing a drone with her ace tennis serve, as drawn by Randall Munroe. The tale is told, and illustrated, in Chapter 22 of how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems.

Mr. Munroe doesn't tell us how he got Ms Williams and her husband to help with this phase of "How to Catch a Drone"; it seems they were already on speaking terms. That's not all there is to the chapter, however. A lot of things can intercept a drone, most of them illegal, all of them (including a Williams serve) rather dangerous...to the recipient!

The cover of the book shows someone changing a light bulb while standing on two drones. I hope they are the ultra-high-capacity (and ultra-high-stability) kind. Curiously, there is no chapter on lightbulb-changing. That is probably just as well. In Chapter 21, "How to Take a Selfie", after discussing things like focal length, field of view, and the popularity of Selfie Sticks, Munroe takes us farther and farther afield: selfies with big towers, in which you and the tower appear of similar heights; selfies with the moon, or even the sun (ditto); and on to using other planets as backdrops, which requires bigger and bigger telescopes to image the celestial orb in question.

To use Venus as a "selfie companion", for example, you need to use the Palomar Telescope as the camera lens and stand on a mountaintop in an appropriate location four miles away, after doing the calculations to determine when Venus rises over that mountaintop. Considering that the angle Venus makes on the sky when it is in a good position to show a crescent is about one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and the apparent motion of Venus (and stars and everything) is 15°/hr or 15 arc-minutes per minute, so you'd have no more than two seconds in which to take the picture. Hmm. Make a hi-res video instead, and you can pick out the appropriate frame later. Miss the shot? You can try again in eight years.

The author gets into throwing things, and discusses the possibility that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River. At the location of the event, the river is 372 feet wide. A strong thrower, throwing the dollar with a flat spin, can send it upwards of 450 feet, so it is quite possible. Washington liked throwing things, and he was good at it. I had to figure out, though, did he have a silver dollar to throw? I looked up the history of the Philadelphia Mint. It first manufactured the "flowing hair" dollar in 1794, five years before Washington died. So, yes, silver dollars were available. Cool. The chapter "How to Throw Things", however, gets into a lot more kinds of throwing, going to extreme limits, as is done in each chapter (like, how far could Carly Rae Jepson throw George Washington?)

It's obvious, the book is great fun. It takes things a big, big step beyond the Mythbusters, but with the same motto: "Don't try this at home". Some of the things really could cook your goose (like the lava moat).