The anti-shrink case

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychiatry, history, polemics

In my prior review, of a book about psychiatry written by psychiatrists, I wrote (perhaps more than I should have) of my experience with psychiatrists. To sum up my takeaway: of at least ten shrinks that I have worked with, all of whom accepted ComPsych "insurance", I consider only two to be "normal", and only these two were of genuine help. Furthermore, when I asked family doctors to recommend psychiatrists whom they thought weren't crazy themselves, in each case, the ones recommended wouldn't accept ComPsych referrals, and their fees were extremely high, in the $400/hour range or more.

Side note: Do you know that guy who goes in with a screwdriver and needle-nose pliers to defuse a bomb? His work is worth $400/hour, and perhaps even more. Anybody else on the planet, no matter who, should not be paid more than half that. Period.

The last one I saw, I was pretty impressed with, at first. At our first visit he reviewed my case in detail, and we talked for a half hour. Then, thinking out loud, he ran through a differential diagnosis to reach the conclusion Dr. Valentine had reached several years earlier, of Bipolar II (the milder type, but still distressing enough). He suggested Abilify, an "atypical antipsychotic", which is also useful for reducing the distress of depression, but doesn't much affect mild mania. As he put it, "We'll let you have your fun," because hypomania is a happy state, while full-blown mania is torment (as I've been told by two friends so afflicted). The main side effects of Abilify for me were a little weight gain and the need for a daily nap. Otherwise, it was pretty good. However, after a year, going in for a third visit, I was planning to ask if there might be something better. He was gone. Vanished. No trace. No sign or note on the office door. Other doctors I've had who moved away or left the business at least had the grace to inform their patients. At that point, I decided I had learned enough about mood management to live without psychoactive medications, and I have done so ever since, for almost 15 years.

Reading Psychiatry and its Discontents, by Andrew Scull, I find that the differential diagnosis used by this doctor may have sounded good, but whether it was scientific or even medically accurate is not so certain. Based on my experiences over the years, for at least this condition (Bipolar II), I think the basic criteria the doctor (and Dr. Valentine) used are useful. In other cases, perhaps not so much.

Professor Scull's book mainly consists of prior articles and book reviews, edited for coherence, and it is a historical review of the various incarnations of psychiatry. Prior to the late 1800's those who worked with the insane were called Alienists, because the older meaning of "alien" was "insane". Once the word "alien" picked up the meaning "foreign", the ambiguity gradually led some to seek a new term. The Greek word "psyche" refers to the soul or mind, so that was a good prefix, and on it went.

Whatever one calls them, those who treat the insane (and the "sorta insane" like me), have always been sort of stepchildren of the medical profession. Apparently, after decades of working empirically (at best!), in the mid-1900's psychiatrists felt the need to establish their work on a more scientific basis. The process is dealt with, over the space of several chapters, and is a sad history at best. The result was a total of eight editions of a guidebook called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The current edition is DSM-5, a thousand-page tome. In the view of our author, the first "official" version, DSM-III, released in 1980, was "an anti-intellectual collection of categories jammed between two covers". Later editions only compounded its errors, and much greater errors were gathered to comprise DSM-5.

It is a rather difficult for a layman to consult DSM-5 to see for themselves what is going on. Firstly, it is enormous, 947 pages, covering 297 named "disorders"; it is expensive at $199, or $149 for the paperback. There is a little bit of information available without cost. I took a look at some of the Fact Sheets found at this page. One of them is titled Personality Disorder, though the sheet itself is titled Personality Disorders, and lists ten items in the first paragraph. Look at this list, mentally appending the term "personality disorder" to each item:

• paranoid
• schizoid
• schizotypal
• antisocial
• borderline
• histrionic
• narcissistic
• avoidant
• dependent
• obsessive-compulsive

If you dig into the characteristics and criteria used to "diagnose" any of these, they are nearly all rather mild extensions of ordinary tendencies we all pick up over time. In the discussion on the Fact Sheet, four of these are somewhat deprecated—frankly, they are redundant, being covered by other items dealt with elsewhere—leaving the six I have highlighted to be dealt with in the body of DSM-5. Prof. Scull states several times that most of the 297 categories in DSM-5 are inventions of the drug companies that effectively "pathologize" common behaviors so drugs can be sold to the "anxious well", people who are quite sane, but easily convinced to worry about their mental health.

Why is DSM-5 important? The insurance companies have adopted it as the "standard" upon which they are willing to pay. Shrinks everywhere have to put a diagnostic number on a prescription or treatment schedule or they won't be paid by the insurance company, and in most cases, the patient can't afford to pay. Sadly, most of the categories are, in my view (developed years ago), bogus.

The Autism Spectrum was invented, practically out of whole cloth, during the production of DSM-5, which was released in 2013, but "the spectrum" was being bandied about earlier. Before the 1990's about one child in 500 was counted as autistic. A much smaller number, formerly called "high functioning autistic" were later said to have Asperger's Syndrome. "The spectrum" produced millions of new "victims", such that one person in 90 is now "on the spectrum". I have several friends or acquaintances who are considered "on the spectrum." Actually, with one exception, they are just shy and a little withdrawn. Big deal. So was I. I suppose I could, even now, go get diagnosed and get some kid of Federal "help". I'd be mortally ashamed to do so.

My grandmother, using an old term for "mildly crazy", would say, "Everybody's pixilated except you and me. Sometimes I wonder about you." Extend that to the psychiatric profession. Most (not all!) of the psychiatrists I've known are earnest and honest, but it is certain that a significant number are just cynical enough to be willing to profit if the entire population were to be brought under their "care."

I won't get into the horrors that "mental care" entailed in the past, nor many other aspects of the book. Psychiatry has the lowest rate of "true help" of all the medical and fringe-medical professions. It did help me, even though I eventually learned how to do better without any more "help".

I don't agree with some who say there are no mental illnesses (neither does the author). There can be organic problems with the brain, which is physical, after all. Some afflictions such as schizophrenia and bipolar and chronic depression may be organically-based. Also, there are stresses, particularly if they are severe enough or chronic, that require some people to develop defense mechanisms, and defensive habits are hard to break, even though their cause is no longer present. This is how most neuroses arise. We still don't know enough to go beyond that with any pretension of scientific credibility.

The book is, then, a history of a failed profession, and a polemic against its present incarnation as a practice enslaved to DSM-5, and a polemic against DSM-5 itself. I happen to agree. The two psychiatrists that I respect had a human dimension to their practice that went far beyond totting up a checklist of my symptoms to get me in the right pigeonhole. They did their best, with both hands tied, to treat the whole person that I am. The current state of psychiatry, as seen in this book and in the prior one, is well described as a tiny candle in a dark forest. Nobody yet knows how to bring any more light on the subject. Our brain and mind are still almost total mysteries.

Been Shrunk?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, psychiatrists

I am pretty sure the number of psychiatrists I have engaged approaches ten. Only two were "normal", whatever that might mean. I have also had talk therapy with several other psychologists, and I remember only one who was someone I'd be willing to befriend.

Over the years I did, finally, come to understand that a psychologist or therapist is empowered only to offer talk therapy, while a psychiatrist, who may also conduct talk therapy, is an MD who can prescribe medication if needed, or prescribe visits to a therapist. I was rather slow on the uptake. I thought of them all under the derogatory heading "head shrinkers."

Up front disclaimer: I am considered "crazy" by many, and looked at askance by many more. The label I've earned is Bipolar 2: I am a middle-of-the-road mood cycler. Bipolar 1 is the more extreme version and shades into what I call Bipolar Zero: someone with maniacal energy for a few weeks at a time, followed by months of melancholy and reclusiveness, culminating in deep depression and perhaps a suicide attempt (or several); only to pop back into mania almost overnight. That is one pattern of the classic Manic-Depressive syndrome. My "mania" is called "hypomania", meaning sorta-kinda-manic, and my depressive periods are more a kind of introversion and withdrawal. I also cycle rapidly, with several cycles yearly rather than one or at most two, the more usual pattern. I suspected this about myself beginning about age 30, but it was more of an "I wonder" sort of idea for a long time.

At about age 55 I saw a psychiatrist and it was confirmed. This was the wise and lovely Dr. Valentine (I don't mind using her name; I'll defer for the others). She confirmed that I was Bipolar 2, and discussed several courses of action with me. I had gone to her when a short stint using Zoloft had the unexpected (to me) result of triggering full-blown mania. My GP, who had suggested trying Zoloft because I felt very depressed (more than my usual month-or-two-of moodiness), saw that I was manic when I saw him after taking Zoloft for two weeks. I was interrupting him—heck, I was interrupting myself!—and making all sorts of grandiose statements. At my most effusive, I had not been so grandiose before. Dr. Valentine prescribed a mild mood stabilizer. I don't remember which one (this was almost 20 years ago).

The drug eventually had side effects I didn't want to cope with, including the need for a daily nap. However, when I called for an appointment I found Dr. Valentine had moved her practice to another state. The mental health appointments were being paid for through a program at DuPont called Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which contracted work through ComPsych. I had to go through them to find an in-network doctor. No doctor I saw after this came even close to the combination of caring and expertise. Though they were competent, they were all rather off-center, and some were downright looney. I realized that ComPsych draws mostly from the bottom of the barrel: doctors who need the referrals because they couldn't stay in business otherwise. I could seldom stay with a doctor for more than a year or two, sometimes because I wanted someone less crazy than myself, and sometimes because they left the business or moved elsewhere. I live in an area that is poorly served because state laws are not very doctor-friendly. That means, whether a family doctor, a psychiatrist, or any specialist, about half the doctors around here are really altruists, serving where they know they are needed, and the rest are here because they couldn't make it in a more competitive environment. I have had some of both, in all areas (Luckily for me, when I needed cancer surgery, I got a true expert! But that's a story for another day).

I have to mention one example of "barrel bottom" psychiatry. I was sent to a psychiatrist because I had a suicidal episode. I was stopping a drug that made me gain weight and didn't help with depression all that much anyway. After a short, almost cursory interview, the doctor prescribed Depakote and gave me a bag with some samples. I was shocked. A friend of mine, who has more severe Bipolar than I, had been on Depakote and gained 90 pounds. I already weighed about 30 pounds more than I liked. I started to leave, and then I put the bag back on the desk and said, "You must be insane. This medication will make me even fatter than I am already. How will that improve my depression?" I walked out and I didn't pay the copay.

With many decades of experience with psychiatrists and psychologists under my belt (starting at age 12, but with significant gaps before middle age), I was quite interested to see Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work, by Drs. Dinah Miller, Annette Hanson, and Steven Ray Daviss. The book is based upon the blog Shrink Wrap and the podcast My Three Shrinks, but it is much more than a simple compilation.

Each chapter uses one or two example "patients" to illustrate various facets of the work of the three doctors. Each "patient" is a composite, so as not to expose too much about any one person, who might be harmed by public exposure. Considering that some of the "cases" are mild, while others are quite severe, this is a valid concern. Consider "Josh", who is mostly pretty ordinary but has had some reverses. It is quite usual these days for an extended period of depression to prompt a doctor to prescribe Zoloft. "Josh" and his doctor found out what I and my doctor did: hidden Bipolar gets manifested by the general mood-lifting action of Zoloft. Josh's experience was more extreme than mine. And then, when he had a medical condition that was treated with steroids, he went full-blown manic, and needed to be hospitalized for a while. He missed a semester of college. The doctors who treated him had quite a job on their hands. It is kind of like accidentally starting a raging fire, and then trying to put it out without drowning everybody. And this was one of the milder cases.

I've had experience with clinical and therapeutic psychiatry. I was most interested in the discussions around forensic psychiatry. Previously I knew nothing about it. The word "forensic" conjures up doctors sifting for clues to a crime, or using DNA to confirm an identity, or not. "Forensic" is derived from an old word for "legal", so forensic psychiatry is its practice related to legal matters, such as determining the competence of a defendant whose lawyer is claiming an insanity defense, or judging the fitness of a parent in a divorce case who is accused of criminal abuse (if there is no criminal complaint, a different psychiatric specialist is consulted). A forensic psychiatrist will also interview a newly-arrested suspect who exhibits abnormal behavior.

There are a couple of chapters that weigh the relative merits of talk therapy versus medications. Both have their uses, but it is often quite a puzzle to determine which might be more effective. It has been said that the human brain is so complex that if there were only one human brain in the universe, it would contain within itself more than half the total complexity of the universe. Dealing with brain malfunction is thus the most difficult task of all. For many decades people have been studying human personality and its ills (actually, many millennia, though we usually set the starting point "only" two millennia ago with Aristotle). The study intensified in the past two centuries, beginning with Freud and Jung. Now in the early 21st Century, we are about an inch beyond the starting line in a "race" to figure out how to help people with emotional, personality, and brain malfunctions.

There is a lot more I could go into, and it is all very interesting, but I will bow out here. The book is like a textbook in some ways, though it is mercifully brief by comparison, and yet comprehensive. I came away with a better appreciation for the complex decisions that these doctors must make, and the great gulfs of unknown they must navigate. Heart surgery has been likened to doing an engine overhaul while the engine is running. Psychiatry is similar, except you can't even lift the hood to get at the engine. That limits things. I am glad that not every psychiatrist I dealt with was a bottom feeder; at least two or three were very helpful to me, in different ways and quite different times. The three authors of the book are based in the Baltimore area. If I need a shrink again (I hope I don't; I manage well without medication now), I might contact one of them!

Robot anarchy

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

In my away-from-other-books times I read The Robot MEGAPACK, which consists of 19 stories. Their publication dates range from 1934 to 1962, clustered a bit in the mid-1950's. Ordinarily I might comment on their length. I think at least one is a novelette, but a quirk of production meant I could only guess. The "pagination" is by section rather than by virtual page (2-3 screens), so for the entire set of stories the page indicator was stuck at "7 of 7". There is another indication that this volume was slapped together a bit too hurriedly. There are typos of the kind that nearly always indicate the text was scanned without adequate proofreading. Things like "dear" for "clear" and a few non-letter characters. Some of these could be handled if the text analysis software had an attached dictionary; some need a human proofreader.

No stories by Isaac Asimov appear. Indeed, these stories show no indication that their authors cared for the Three Laws of Robotics, which were hinted at in "Robbie" in 1940, and formalized in the stories that make up I, Robot (1950). Rather, most of these robots are potentially harmful, and many of them are quite harmful, even deadly. A prime example of the latter would be the "tickler", initially a PDA-like device in "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (1962) by Fritz Leiber. The device begins as a reminder-and-pager, is soon developed into a smart phone-like device, but then becomes a manipulator of moods (businesses and governments pre-load it with "stimulating, wholesome" stuff that it whispers to you subliminally). As predicted by a co-protagonist, the ticklers are eventually produced with enough brains to become sentient, and even apparently telepathic. The human bodies they control are now enslaved. The denouement is amusing, in a nice twist on the dark direction the story seemed to be following.

In "The Mad Robot" (1944) by William P. McGivern, it is one of the scientists who is insane, not the robots. Robots have been coupled to slivers of brain tissue to improve their cognitive abilities. There is a back door to their programming interface, used by the evil genius to commit occasional mayhem, for reasons he loquaciously describes in a climactic scene. This is the story that I was referring to in my riff on getting to Jupiter in a week. Although the action takes place on Jupiter (how, I don't know, since it lacks a surface, and gravity's force at the top of the visible clouds is about 2.5 G's), it could really have been located anywhere.

Nearly all the robots in these stories are humanoid (as they usually are in nearly all SciFi about robots). However, the needs of industry have mandated that actual robotic equipment is much less general-purpose. Welding robots can't walk around; shelf-loading-and-unloading robots are more like smart forklifts (centrally controlled, though, not autonomous). I'll riff elsewhere why we don't need a "Rosie" like the one in the cartoon show "the Jetsons", so much as a number of more specialized devices.

For me this was pure escapism. I know too much about AI, about actual robots in use, and about the Uncanny Valley that it is better not to approach. But I could suspend all that to enjoy the novel ideas these writers presented. I'm all about ideas.

Science me up a story

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling, writing, scientific approach

"You can't catch fish with a straight pin." This Evangelical trope about Gospel preaching applies to all storytelling. A fish hook has a bent end and a barb. Author and educator Will Storr writes in The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better that the way our brains work makes us pay attention to stories that hook us and then snag us, while we're bored with what I would call "straight pin" narratives.

There are reasons the ancient Five-Act Play model of telling a story works so well. Author Storr tries to explain them to us. In the process he gets into the metaphysics of how an "I" emerges from the brain in its dark and silent box, the skull. Of course, bereft of communication with "the outside", a brain could do nothing but cogitate on whatever might occupy its memory materials. He tells how the product of all our senses is a "hallucination" (his word) that is a rough map of "the outside". In this conceptual world built of our sense impressions, we are the hero of a continually-running play. We can't abide not being the hero, so change is threatening.

The key to story is that stories are about change. If nothing changes there is no story to tell. Stories that catch our interest, that grip us, that move us, are about changes in persons caused by changes in their circumstances coupled with their reactions thereto, particularly when their control methods fail.

For example, most of us know how to handle a rainy day. We look outside, see that rain is falling, so we take an umbrella, a raincoat, perhaps galoshes, and we're usually good to go. We leave early so we won't be late, because we know getting somewhere will take longer in the rain. Now suppose what we see out the window is no ordinary rainstorm, but a historic hurricane, with torrential rainfall in the three-inch-per-hour range and hundred-mph winds. And we absolutely, positively, somebody-will-die-if-we-don't, need to go somewhere. I don't own appropriate gear to venture into such a storm, which would need to include a car that will stay on the road in those conditions. But what if you simply can't go, and somebody really does die as a result. Now what? Do you berate yourself? Commit hara-kiri? Blow it off with an "Oh, well, things happen" attitude? If we have just described Act I and Act II of a 5-Act story, the next three acts will follow a person who changes, or one who does not change, as a result of the foregoing action.

We are resistant to change, particularly change to who we are and how we want to be perceived. We typically can't endure the thought of being seen as "bad." When a big enough change occurs, even a tragedy, it's hard for anyone to come out a true hero.

My wife and I and a dozen others were seriously affected when a close friend and his wife and children died in a carbon monoxide gas poisoning event in their home. Everyone was badly shaken. Some blamed themselves, except among them, nobody (other than my wife and I) even knew that carbon monoxide existed. Some got angry at God, "for letting it happen." Some learned from it and others walled it all off inside themselves. Of the 14 of us, my wife and I and three others did the inside work, the spiritual work, to learn and even gain something valuable from the experience. The rest soon "vanished into the woodwork." None of us 14 knew initially how to cope with such a tragedy. The coping skills we had were inadequate or were dramatically unhelpful. We had to grow and to change…or to decline to do so.

Someone could have written 14 stories about the extended event, or a 14-part story. I could not do so. Having read the book, and having done my best to pay attention, I realized I don't have the right personality or skills to actually craft such a story. I'm a straight-pin kind of man; if I had read this book fifty years ago, perhaps I could have incorporated the author's work into my skill set, but these things take time to learn effectively.

Mr. Storr calls his work "The Sacred Flaw Approach". We are all flawed. Our inadequate coping skills are examples of such flaws. What worked before isn't useful in the new situation. Good stories show us a flawed person, let us observe them in action, bring them into a new situation (often with the opening sentence), let us observe their failure, and then show us how they either permit themselves to change, or deny the change.

When I have counseled others who are struggling to cope, I've told them the definition of a neurosis: a defense or coping mechanism that is out of date. One woman asked, "Am I neurotic, then?" I said, "In that sense we all are." And I remember what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, "Be transformed by the renewing of the mind." This is the meaning of "repentance," a change of mind. It happens to be just about the hardest thing anyone can do. It was no "easy believe" gospel that Jesus proclaimed, when His first word was "Repent." So the kind of stories that this book analyzes come down to practical repentance when the old ways stop working…or to failure to repent.

The book's four chapters, and 40 sub-chapters, discuss all the pieces. The extended Appendix details a kind of recipe for the 5-Act story, and uses the book The Godfather by Mario Puzo to brilliantly show how it fits that formula (the film is simplified and takes a sidestep, which actually enhances the story's power). One could have as easily used Jurassic Park; a colleague of mine many years ago had been the college roommate of Michael Crichton, who at that time was building his skills and methods for writing, and he told some of us the formula Crichton used for his books.

So we are all control freaks, and when our control methods fail, we may grow or we may descend into depression and obscurity, the true opposite of a happy ending. The best stories, according to Will Storr, tell of someone who is faced with such a transition, however it may turn out.

Another couple of days of Russian snooping

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I noticed when I added a book review yesterday that there had been a sudden burst of interest, from Russia as usual. Today I find it is still going on. Here's the hourly plot for today:

This adds up to more than 900 hits in the past 24 hours, just from Russia, and the usual 50-70 hits from everyone else. Here is the world chart for the past week:

Take away the Russian activity, and we have a fairly normal week, with around 400 hits.

Outside the U.S., Europe (exclusive of Russia) has a lot of hits, then Australia and Canada. South America (mainly Brazil) and the rest are in "Other", which I didn't look into.

To Jupiter in a Week?

 kw: analytical projects, space travel, solar system

I began reading a bit of space opera from the early 1950's, in which a space pilot goes from Earth to Jupiter in seven days. I wondered how that would be possible. My first thought was, "Jupiter is around half a billion miles away. What does it take to speed up to around 70 million miles/day (~3 million mph)?"

For perspective: About fifteen years ago, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Earth and boosted to a speed of about 45 km/s (about 100,000 mph). Thirteen months later it approached Jupiter, still going just under 20 km/s, and was directed into a slingshot flyby that boosted its speed to about 22.5 km/s.

From this point we go metric. Jupiter's distance from Earth varies between 588 and 968 million kilometers (Mkm). For what it is worth, when Earth is at quadrature with Jupiter, one can gain an extra 30 km/s of takeoff speed, and at that point the distance is near the average of about 780 Mkm. For this analysis I'll be dividing by 7 and by two numbers divisible by 3, and to have an even-numbered result, I'll pick a distance that is divisible by 126 million (126=9x7x2). I chose 126x6 = 756 Mkm.

First simple analysis: 756/7 = 108. Thus, average speed needs to be 108 Mkm/day or 1,250 km/s. That's almost 28 times as fast as the starting speed of New Horizons (Clearly, science fiction writers in the pre-Sputnik days expected great advances in rocket fuel technology). Suppose the rocket can accelerate at 1G for as long as needed. How long does it take to get up to 1,250,000 m/s?

Basic velocity formulas:

• 1G acceleration (a) = 9.8 m/s²
• Velocity (v) = 9.8*t m/s
• Distance in time t = 4.9*t² m

Turn the second formula around: t = v/9.8, which comes to 1,250,000/9.8 = 127,550 sec = 35.43 hours. It takes about a day and a half to get up to speed. Without going into detail, this means that actual travel time would be more like 8.5 days. But this puts us in the right ballpark.

Let us figure what acceleration is needed to go half the distance at constant acceleration, then turn around and slow down in the same amount of time and distance. Half the distance is 378 Mkm. Solve the third equation for a, the acceleration needed to go 378 Mkm in 3.5 days, or 84 hours, or 302,400 seconds: a = 2*dist/t², which comes to 8.27 m/s². That is about 0.84 G. With that level of acceleration, our pilot can have the comfort of a near-1G environment for the whole trip, except for turnaround at the midpoint, and other maneuvers at both ends. Peak speed would be 8.27*302,400 = 2.7 million m/s or 2,700 km/s, or more than twice the average speed.

So there we have it. We just need a fuel-&-engine system that can accelerate at near-one-G for a total of a week, and repeat the performance for the return trip.

A secondary consideration is, what would be the consequences of hitting a dust particle, or worse, a sand-size particle, at a speed of 2,700 km/s? An average grain of beach or dune sand is half a mm across and weighs about 180 micrograms (µg). 180 µg is 180 billionths of a kg, the unit we need to calculate energy. Silt particles are 1/100 the diameter and weigh one millionth as much, or 180 trillionths of a gram.

Let's start with a sand grain. Kinetic energy E = m*v²/2, or 0.000 000 18*(2,700,000)²/2 = 656 thousand joules; a joule is a watt-second, so this comes to 182 watt-hours. This is the energy of a 1 kg mass at a speed of 1,150 m/s, a little faster than the bullet from an AR-15 rifle, but that bullet weighs only about 4 grams. This sand grain deposits the energy of 250 rifle rounds in an area half a millimeter across. That would melt a chunk of armor plate and make a hole you can stick your finger in. The ship's pilot would feel a bit of a jerk from the impact.

A grain of silt or dust, with one-millionth the weight, has one-millionth the kinetic energy, which comes to 2/3 of a joule. It doesn't sound like much, but that's the energy of a BB dropped about a foot. You'd hear it. It would strike off a bit of material, which a BB wouldn't do. Intermediate-sized grains would do correspondingly more damage. Sand size grains are very scarce in the asteroid belt, but silt-size grains are probably abundant enough that the wear on forward armor would be significant.

So, as enjoyable as such tales are, with people bombing around the solar system as though one were driving from Idaho to Florida, there's a lot of reality in between where we are now and the technology needed to accomplish it.

The buck stops in the blubber

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, whales, ecology, environmentalism, pollution

A few years ago a half-grown humpback whale died in Delaware Bay and washed ashore near one of the little towns that are scattered along the shoreline. The Fish & Wildlife service soon found a more out-of-the-way place to take it, and towed the body there, using a tractor and nylon straps to pull it fully onto the shore. The body was 37 feet long and weighed about 16 tons, which is rather emaciated; a healthy humpback this length weighs closer to 20 tons. The curators from the Delaware Museum of Natural History "visited" the remains over the winter, when the smell was less, although the flesh had not yet all rotted away. A year later they organized a field trip for some of us to see the skeleton, now nearly flesh-free.

This is one of my colleagues from the museum next to the remains. About half of the skeleton is shown in this photo; the skull is to the right. You can see that, even in this rather small whale, the vertebrae are 2-3 feet (a little under a meter) across. A few ribs show.

Almost another year later the museum received permission to collect the skull, some vertebrae, and the bones of a flipper. A shed was built to house the remains, which were brought into it late in 2018. I took this photo from the door to the shed. One of the long jaw bones is on the left; its opposite number was carried off by someone before our visit the prior year. If the museum decides to put the skull on display, the remaining jawbone can be scanned and a mirror-image duplicate can be 3D printed.

There was still quite an oily smell about it in 2018. It takes years for all the oily material in the bones to either rot away or leak out and evaporate.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, begins with the story of her visit to a dying humpback whale near her home in Australia. I am not sure what I was expecting when I checked out the book; I should have been wise enough to expect a very environmentalist tone, particularly from someone who is probably a younger member of the X generation.

The book's chapters each have a subject, but the subjects are secondary to the overall theme, which is introduced on page 47, where a word that is new to me, and to most of us I reckon, is defined: defaunation. If you know that "fauna" refers to animal life, the word defines itself as the removal of animal life. The whales are harbinger species, and their downfall portends the general downfall of everything. It is happening all around us, but most people don't notice.

Some of us have lived long enough to remember very noisy Spring and Summer mornings, with dozens of species of birds singing their territorial songs. Our family lived in Sandusky, Ohio in the early 1960's. The southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland westward to Toledo, and around the tip of the lake, is a concentrating flyway for songbird migration, so the morning chorus was very intense. These days, although I live under one of the East Coast flyways, the morning chorus is pretty, but quite "thin" by comparison; I seldom hear more than four species. Ms Giggs also points out that, in her lifetime (perhaps half of mine), the level of splatter on car windshields has dropped almost to nothing. I do remember that on road trips my Dad allowed for a stop every hour to clean the windshield and the grille. We didn't even try taking road trips during the heavy grasshopper and locust season of midsummer! Now when my wife and I drive from near Philadelphia to the town near Cleveland where some relatives live, we don't need to clean until the end, when we wipe off the remains of half a dozen insects at most.

Some species of whale are verified to live 200 years or longer. That means that some "pod elders" may remember the decades of intense whaling that they managed to survive. I suspect they also find the ocean as comparatively voiceless as I find a modern Spring morning. Whales communicate over hundreds to thousands of miles, and the enchanting (to us) "songs" of the humpbacks are just one version of their globe-spanning conversations. But voiceless doesn't mean silent. The thrum of a 50,000 horsepower engine driving a supertanker or container ship fills an entire ocean—yes, even the mighty Pacific—with noise that causes the whales to lower the pitch of their voices. Lower pitch travels farther, and engine noise has a higher pitch. Even when they do that, thousand-mile "gossip" just isn't happening any more. In most of the seas, the whales can hear each other "only" 100-200 miles away. You might say, as we humans have globalized electronic dating, "swiping" Tinder profiles from anywhere on Earth, we have crippled the water-borne Tinder that whales were using to find mates, at a time when there are fewer mates to find.

Just by the way, there are 770 supertankers and more than 5,200 container ships in operation, nearly all of them on the move nearly all the time. Their combined engine power is about 300 million horsepower. The fuel they burn is many times as polluting as gasoline. A container ship is how the rubber ducky made it from China to your bathtub.

Speaking of pollution, whales are also great concentrators of waterborne pollution. Their prey are polluted, no matter where on earth they may be. Many common pollutants are oil-soluble so they wind up in the blubber. While that means the whale is somewhat protected from adverse effects from those pollutants, when a whale dies, not from whaling but in the ocean, its blubber is the first thing to be eaten by an enormous number of scavenging organisms, all of which concentrate the stuff even further. People are also affected, some directly. The author tells of Inuit women, who eat a lot of whale blubber in the winter, when you need a fatty diet just to keep from freezing: their breast milk is so contaminated that, if they pump it into a jar, it would be illegal to carry across a state line. For that matter, most beached whales now must be treated like toxic waste!

The "Save the Whale" efforts that began in the 1970's have ironically saved them but not their environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970 (51 years ago this coming Thursday) nobody dreamed that the oceans would be filled with ships powered by 50,000 hp engines, ships that would outnumber some of the species of remaining whale! There are less than 400 northern right whales alive today, though most other species number in the tens of thousands to a quarter million or more. But most species of large whale were hunted down to populations of less than 1,000 by the 1920's to the 1960's. That cluster of population bottlenecks is in itself a great risk to the existing whales. Less genetic diversity results in greater susceptibility to diseases, for example.

This is not a happy book. The outlook for whales may be better than it was half a century ago, but the picture is still not rosy. I can't predict what the future holds, but a book like this is sobering, and may motivate some, at least, to drive even more toward a planet that is safer for both whales and people.

A third MEGAPACK

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera, space aliens

My original purchase from the MEGAPACK® series included three e-books. I already finished and reviewed two of them. This is the third. Like other early volumes in the series, it is titled The 13th Science Fiction Megapack. Later collections of classics have a theme or author as a focus. This volume contains 26 stories, eleven published in 1963, and the rest scattered from 1930 to 2010. All were new to me.

A goodly proportion of the stories experiment with taking the alien's eye view. Two of these, sitting back-to-back, are "The God-Plllnk" by Jerome Bixby and "A Guest of Ganymede" by C.C. MacApp, both published in 1963. In both stories, the invaders from Earth are either consumed or subsumed. Sobering.

Others take a recent discovery or trend then present and extend it. One of these, "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station", by Mary A. Turzillo, published in 2009, riffs on the effects of infection by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that afflicts cats and eventually nearly everyone who owns a cat. With just a little studied exaggeration, and imputing to Toxoplasma characteristics of a few other parasites, including the one that turns rats from cat-fearing to cat-seeking, we find an entertaining tale of psychology and motivation. The cats and their "guests" take over Mars.

From time to time writers tackle the possible interactions between archaic humans and Neanderthals, some 30,000 years ago or more. "The Day is Done" by Lester del Rey, published in 1939 is one of the earliest and best. (My second-favorite, "The Ugly Little Boy" by Isaac Asimov, is from 1958). del Rey's very moving story is set as the last of the Neanderthals are vanishing.

One of the stories of 1963, "The Girl in His Mind" by Robert F. Young, is based on a sort of dream "technology" that seems to foreshadow a dreamland called "the Commons" in stories by Matthew Hughes (see this review from 2006). In both 1963 and 2006, the writers take lucid dreaming a few quantum leaps beyond anything actual lucid dreamers (such as myself) experience. Lucid dreaming as we know it permits the dreamer to have some control over the story line and content of a dream. In my case, most frequently, I "stick a toe" into a dream that presents itself, and if I don't like where it may go, I open my eyes briefly and banish it. Once a dream starts up that I am more happy with, I let myself fall the rest of the way to sleep. Often, but not always, I know I am in a dream and I direct it more to my liking. Other times, I have "ordinary" dreams, that just happen with me as more of an observer than a participant. Any of this is a far cry from the long quests described by authors Young and Hughes.

I think I enjoy classic science fiction so much more than most "modern" writing because the authors aren't grinding an axe, at least not in the overt way that is nearly universal today, which is why I read so little modern science fiction. Writers of the world: present your views and your reasoning; do not attempt to impose them or shame your readers – I am shameless anyway, and I'll shame you right back!

Favorites of a Grand Master

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

If you know who Ben Bova is, no introduction is needed. If not, I cannot presume to provide one that is adequate. Once called "the last of the great pulp fiction writers," he shaped science fiction as a genre beginning late in the "Golden Era", around 1960, and continuing until his death in 2020. His last book (of 120), published in 2020, is Ben Bova: My Favorites.

Fourteen short stories, fourteen quite diverse topics. Lengths range from 8 to 42 pages. A couple are space opera, with spaceships that fit in the same conceptual space as automobiles; they just need to get you somewhere. A few are alternative history, including the only story with aliens, "The Great Moon Hoax, or, a Princess of Mars," in which not only do Martians help NASA fake the surveillance of Mars and Venus, but also to confine Moon landings to places that won't expose them…and, just by the way, a couple of other big things are faked also, but I don't have the heart to do that level of spoiler.

One touching story is titled "Muzhestvo". We learn at the end what the word means, and why it is important. This didn't have to be a science fiction story, but in that setting it is fitting.

However, without pointing fingers, even though Bova has now passed away, a few stories are definitely not among my favorites. They are just crass; he had an axe to grind, and no writer is helped by grinding his axe in public.

That's enough from me. Whether you'd agree with which stories I might like or not like, this book is definitely worth reading.

Seeing farther, maybe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, disciplines

Forecasting means different things in different realms. "Prediction is hard", said Yogi Berra, "especially about the future." If you're on a high hillside, looking down at a bend in a river, and a canoeist is paddling industriously downstream, you can see pretty well what he has in store, at least for the next few hundred yards. If there's a waterfall around the bend, it isn't hard to predict that he'll be in trouble if he doesn't soon pull to shore. But there's another factor: You don't know his plan. He may know the waterfall is there, and he is either planning to go ashore and portage around it, or he may have a plan for going over, either because he's really good at riding the rapids, or because he is suicidal. He may not know it is there, and is just exploring, in which case you can hope he has good hearing. Perhaps you can think of other possibilities.

Suppose instead you were asked, "How likely is it that Iran will produce a nuclear weapon in the coming 12 months?" Assuming you can find people without a political investment in that question, and you ask ten of them this question, will you get similar answers, or will they range from, "No way, nohow!" to "I am certain they will."? You may get at least one person who says, "Maybe." I think you are most likely to hear, "How should I know?"…but there I am, making a sort of forecast myself!

Then there is the weather, and there is the climate. When a weather forecaster says, "70% chance of rain tomorrow," what does it mean? Is she talking about your city, your neighborhood, or the whole state (easier to contemplate about Rhode Island than about Texas!)? Let's assume it is a local forecast. Decades ago a weatherman explained on a radio program, "70% chance of rain means that 70% of the area will get rained on." I wonder if that is still true? In these days of supercomputers producing a fresh forecast over the whole earth about every hour, it may mean something else. For example, it may mean that when they run the forecasting software over and over again with tiny adjustments to the initial conditions, 70% of them predict rain in "your area". Or it may mean, of the several hundred supercomputers being used with numerous versions of the modeling software, 70% of them predict rain. Or it may still mean "It will rain over 70% of the several square miles surrounding such-and-such a place."

That last version, akin to the version of half a century ago, is probably still what they mean. The prediction is often based on a squall line passing through. A loose squall line will produce a string of small storms that drop rain for a few miles between formation and dissipation. That might mean 30% to 50% of the area will get rained on. A tighter line will have larger storms, closer together, and we're in the 70% range. A heavy squall line will bring rain almost everywhere, and the forecast is 100% rain.

What about climate? It is the average of "weather" over a period of decades. You can't tell from one year to the next whether changing weather patterns mean the climate is getting warmer or cooler, dryer or wetter. I recently saw an article about cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan. They are blooming early this year, during the first week of April (today, the 7th is the expected peak). The article stated that the "usual" peak is between April 10-17. Of course, "global warming" was mentioned. That's funny. Kyoto is south of Tokyo and warmer, and the cherry trees there bloom a few days earlier. We visited the Tokyo area from March 28 to April 11, 1992. The peak of the cherry blossoms was March 31. I presume the peak in Kyoto was closer to March 25. With that in mind, if this year's peak in Kyoto is more than a week later than the peak thirty years ago, neither datum means much about a changing climate.

Back to Iran. There is a reason for stating the question like I did, particularly "in the coming 12 months". The political winds are shifty. If the time frame were 10 years, the answers would, I hope, be different (maybe not!), and much less certain. Too many things can happen in a decade. Lots happens in just one year! But the study and research one would need to do to answer that question are, just barely, possible. Having studied and formed an answer, though, how good is it?

"How good is it?" is the subject of the work of Professor Philip E. Tetlock. He has conducted experiments with numerous forecasters for the past few decades, and has discovered factors that make some people better than others at it. Some are "superforecasters", and with Dan Gardner, he was written Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

It so happens that superforecasters have certain characteristics. Super-intelligence is not one of them. Of course, they are intelligent, but the important factors include the humility to question their own assumptions and premises, the willingness to break out of false dichotomies, and the diligence to do lots of study and research. The book has a couple of lists of these factors, which in themselves constitute a good introduction to learning to make better predictions…if you're willing to do the work.

We have to forecast to be able to plan. I have two friends I should mention here. One expects the country to descend into anarchy, and soon. It's not just about President Biden, because he expected the same thing when Donald Trump was President. This conviction colors his thinking. His long-range plans include getting rich enough quickly enough to afford land in some out-of-the way place.

The other friend is older and has a longer view. Remembering the decades of the Vietnam War, and the times that preceded it, and those that came after, he is more optimistic. He also likes suburban living. His long-range plans are very different, including his expectation of a long retirement filled with volunteering and service. If you were to place these two men in almost any situation you choose, unless you know their backgrounds and attitudes rather well, it would make no use to make forecasts about the situation itself. Their own internal landscape would be more important than the external. I dare say, if you were told just one thing about these two men, that one is a paranoid prepper, the other a contented suburbanite, it could greatly improve the accuracy of your forecast. Maybe.

That is a big maybe. Dr. Tetlock found that for most people, if someone had already researched a situation and made a prediction, new information was unlikely to have much effect. Superforecasters, by contrast, would frequently incorporate new information and revise a forecast. Some would do so daily or oftener.

It is helpful to remember that forecasting is like other skills, that practice is needed. To learn to forecast, make lots of forecasts. BUT make them in a particular way: the result needs to be quantifiable. Don't say, "There is a significant chance of X happening." To you, "significant" may mean "a 75% or better likelihood", to someone else, 15%, and to others, as little as 5% or even less. If 75% is what you mean, state it that way. Then keep score. One result isn't too useful. It takes three to see the inkling of a trend, and twelve to begin to do decent statistics. The book contains basic instructions on calculating a Brier Score, a measure of a forecaster's accuracy. It is also useful to learn to use Bayesian methods of revising a prediction. Superforecasters that revised their estimates didn't indulge in large adjustments; they were more likely to change a 40% likelihood to 42% or 37%.

It is also helpful to know that these methods are all about the "what" and sometimes the "how" of something. The "why" of something is outside the realm of science or technology. It is frequently more of a theological matter.

Dr. Tetlock is noble enough to introduce a monkey wrench into this whole matter, by discussing his relationship with Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, a book I reviewed in 2007. The idea of a Black Swan is something nobody could have predicted, but it changes everything. Fourteen years ago I was quite taken with the notion. Now I have a more nuanced view. Dr. Taleb contends that because Black Swans can't be predicted, one cannot account for them, and because they matter more than other events, nothing that can be predicted is going to matter enough.

One of the conceptual ills we encounter is either-or thinking. The idea that Black Swans make forecasting useless is either-or thinking. A superforecaster will weigh the possible influence of something unprecedented throwing everything else out the window, without needing to know just what that might be. This is the realm of the "unknown unknowns" of Donald Rumsfeld. This is also why, as stated in The Art of War (I paraphrase), "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Yet a good battle plan puts you in a position to re-evaluate and succeed anyway. I find it fascinating that neither Dr. Tetlock nor Dr. Taleb points out that as historical Black Swan examples accumulate, they allow us to re-adjust our knowledge of the expected range of possibilities, to take a better view of the distribution of possible events, and so make better forecasts and more robust plans. We just need to have or to gain the wisdom to discern whether a particular Black Swan is truly unprecedented, or if it is a case of an extreme event that happens more frequently than we'd been led to believe.

For example, the original Black Swans were discovered in Australia in 1697. They were not new to Australians, of course. They were new to Europeans, who knew only white swans. The Western white swan, Cygnus olor, and the Asian black swan, Cygnus atratus, are related species in the genus Cygnus, but have been separated by half a world for tens of thousands of years. There are four other species in the genus Cygnus, including the black-necked swan, C. melancoryphus. Its existence could have clued the Europeans into the possibility that swans somewhere else on Earth could be black, but it did not.

Other examples used to illustrate Black Swans include stock market booms and busts, and extreme flooding events.  Just last year I discussed a series of mega-floods that caused large boulders to move across a flood plain south of Sturgis, SD. The context, however, was discussing a new way to analyze daily (or weekly or even monthly) changes in the price of stocks. Considering the floods, I realize that the extreme flooding events in the Black Hills may not be extreme examples of the usual flood frequency regime. They are just as likely to be symptoms of extreme weather events that just "work differently" from the ones that occur yearly and decade-to-decade. It wasn't just a thousand-year flood that moved 20-ton boulders half a mile or more. It may have been a 5,000-year flood, except that this happened twenty times in 5,000 years. So something different was happening, and I don't really know what it was. However, we now know that floods of that magnitude occurred about every 250 years in the past, so it's best to take that into account if you want to build anything on the outwash plain east of the Black Hills.

How could you become a superforecaster? An appendix in the book describes the basic skills, and another invites any reader to join the Good Judgment Project, at www.goodjudgment.com. Enjoy!

Cyril may have died too young

kw: book reviews, science fiction, megapack series, anthologies, short stories, collections

Cyril M Kornbluth didn't have a middle name, but his friends have written that his use of "M" was a tribute to his wife Mary. This wasn't his only quirk, but this piece isn't mainly about him but about what he wrote. He died at the age of 34, of a heart attack, after shoveling snow and then running to catch a train. During the nineteen years during which published stories and novels, his writing was characterized by sideways thinking that still stands out. He published nearly ninety stories, nine novels, and seven works of non-fiction.

The e-book The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack: Featuring the Classic Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth contains 18 of his stories, a sci-fi novella The Syndic, and a non-science fiction novella The Naked Storm. I did not read The Naked Storm, the longest piece in the collection at 179 "pages". From the outset it began to go in a disturbing direction, so I skipped it. The total volume contains 868 "pages", about twenty of which are devoted to advertising for the Megapack series, so there was plenty of other material for me to enjoy. Note: On my phone, with the type size I like to use, a "page" includes between two and four screens, because page counts shown in a footer are based on whatever publication the series publishers scanned, whether a paperback or an octavo volume.

In the 1950's, just before I began reading a lot of science fiction, Galaxy was one of numerous "pulp" magazines full of space opera, which has a special place in my heart. Kornbluth was a mainstay of the genre, and in this issue he wrote as Cyril Judd, one of his many pen names.

I encountered a few old friends in this Megapack, including "The Marching Morons", based on the observation that people with more education and intelligence tend to have fewer children. In 1951, when Earth's population was about 2.6 billion, Kornbluth imagined a "far future" era with twice that population, most of whom would be idiots; he surmised an average IQ of about 45. The teeming billions are cared for by a small, decreasing number of intelligent folk, who seek ways to remedy the situation. It is still worth reading, even though population zoomed past 5.2 billion in 1990, and is presently pushing 7.7 billion. Average IQ also hasn't dropped precipitously, but CQ ("caring quotient", as in "Why should I care?") is much lower in the present generation, at least in affluent societies. I wonder what Kornbluth might write about that?

I had also read "The Syndic" long, long ago, so long that it was almost a new book to me. It contains a powerful idea, stated by the rather philosophical F.W. Taylor, Godfather of The Syndic and uncle of the protagonist:

"A strange thing—people always think that each exchange of power is the last that will ever take place."

A story left nearly finished when Kornbluth died, tidied up and finished by Frederick Pohl and published in June 1958, is "Shark Ship". It posits a different "solution" to the dilemma of a planet over-filled with people: convoys of ships that sail the seas, forever excluded from land-based society, catching and living upon plankton. The rigid society that must result is too fragile to survive when one ship loses its net, unless the unfortunate ship and the thousands aboard it are shunned and left to die of starvation. The story ends shortly after the ship diverts to approach land, to see if there is a new way of life possible there; the land is nearly abandoned, and there is hope. This has the flavor of a good beginning to a novel, but the author didn't live to develop it. The rather neat wrap-up is apparently Pohl's work. 

This and other stories indicate that Kornbluth had a rather pessimistic view of the coming decades and centuries. Did he die too young? Were he living he'd be 97. Even had he lived "three score and ten", it would have been until 1993, and a very different sort of science fiction was in vogue then. Maybe he'd have reveled in it, and become as productive as Asimov. Or, maybe it is best that he went when he did, a man already a little out of his element.

Residents of a parallel universe

 kw: see list at the end

Consider what these creatures might be:

They "live within their own universe...a universe that is both dazzling and complicated. Its existence is within a different time scale than ours, visible only on close inspection by those interested enough to look. [They] live their lives just as we do, surrounded by loved ones, competitors, and enemies, seeking to find harmony and health; and hoping to leave behind a legacy of well-adjusted progeny capable of carrying on after their demise."

Consider a time scale between 100 and 10,000 times slower than ours. Depending on species, "they" may reach maturity in a year or less, as many familiar animals do, or it may take many centuries. Communication is nearly always soundless, and it is slow. To converse with one would entail waiting hours to days between, "How are you?" and "I can't complain." For most, communication is chemical, via air-wafted molecules or waterborne ones. Each "word" is synthesized on-the-spot.

We are used to animals, including ourselves, that move at the speed of gravity, or a little faster at times. To reach out, or to throw something, is done in fractions of a second. "They" make motions that take hours to months to complete. Usually: some can grasp or throw even more quickly than we can, under the right conditions*. But usually not.

What are "they"? Plants. A central theme of the textbook for gardeners, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction to How Plants Work by Craig N. Huegel, is that plants are as complex as animals, and do nearly everything animals do except move from place to place (usually!), but on slower time scales (usually!!), and typically in different ways.

The Nature of Plants is not a book of stories, it is a compendium of facts, ranged in subjects from Light, Water and Soil to Reproduction, Hormones and Communication. The quote in the first paragraph above is from the Conclusion. 

The book has one tremendous lack: a Glossary. One needs a good memory to read more than a page or two into the book, because one will learn new botanical and chemical terms on nearly every page. Perhaps you are familiar with xylem and phloem, the fluid-bearing tissues that, respectively, bring water (and its contents) from the roots, and transport "processed water" throughout the plant to supply sugar and nutrients. It's less likely that most folks know what is a prothallus (the sexual generation of a fern; the fronded plants we see are asexual), or the cell types parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma that make up all the tissues of plants. Then the parts of a flower: receptacle, sepals, petals (the flower's "clothing"), stigma, style, ovary, ovules (female parts), stamen, anther, and filament (male parts). Those aren't too bad, but then for ferns (the asexual spore-bearing generation), analogous parts are indusia, sporangia and sori. And on and on it goes. I felt lucky that I studied botany early in my college years; still I learned several new terms. If you intend to keep the book, take notes: Make your own index of terms and concepts you want to remember; the book's index is sketchy.

As I said, this is a book for gardeners, written as a textbook to make us aware of all the needs a plant has. For example: When buying a shrub or tree for your yard, do you know how to check if it is root bound? If the roots are growing in spirals, around and around the pot, and you plant it in the ground without doing a little spreading and even root pruning (carefully!), then as the plant grows and the roots increase in diameter, that clot of spiraling roots will become a roadblock to growth beyond a few years. Perhaps that is okay if you got a dwarf tree in the first place, but it will be less healthy than a dwarf tree that didn't spend very long in the pot before being planted out.

Do plants think? There is some research that indicates they do have something similar to nerve impulses, even electrical communication within (an electric signal is used in the leaf of the Venus flytrap, for example). Some scientists think the roots are the "brain". If we learn to communicate with them (very slowly), perhaps they will tell us.

To repeat: plants do everything we do except move about the landscape. I read in a different book, years ago, that a shrub or tree is analogous to a colony of tiny animals, with the growing tips of the twigs being the "animals". Over time, the growing, branching tips gain genetic differences, similar to the way successive generations of animals are genetically different from their ancestors. There are also some vining plants that do move slowly about, by growing into new territory, and rooting periodically, and when the oldest roots die the plant has actually moved to a new place. Over long spans of time, the vine can migrate surprisingly long distances. But these are not mentioned in this book, which is for gardeners. We have trouble enough with English ivy and Virginia creeper and even Kudzu; they may not abandon old roots, but any of them can fill a yard if we let them, as can Wisteria (There is a Wisteria plant in Sierra Madre, California that has destroyed the house it grew all over, and covers the entire one-acre building lot).

This book is worth reading through once, and then keeping on hand to look up helpful things. It deals in principles, not in advice about specific plants. With that in mind, it's worth having.

*The Venus flytrap has leaves that can close on a small insect in a tenth of a second. A number of plants have seed pods that build up tension as they dry, and then erupt to throw the seeds several feet away from the parent plant. The leaves of the Sensitive Mimosa close in less than a second after being touched.

kw: book reviews, botany, gardening

Testing a USB digital microscope

 kw: product reviews, microscopes, digital microscopes

From time to time I see ads for digital microscopes, and I decided to get one. I have two microscopes and I had camera equipment for use with them, but since my last film camera broke down, I don't have a convenient way to take photos through them. My digital cameras don't have an adapter to mate them with a microscope's eyepiece tube. 

The ad I clicked on was for a no-brand device, made in China and shipped from China. It came in a box labeled just "Digital Microscope" that has a table of specifications on its bottom:

"Image Resolution" is a key piece of information. 640x480 barely counts as digital imaging these days, but it is OK for a $35 instrument.

"Focus Range" is actually greater than that shown, as we will see below. Also, there is no indication of the zero point, so I had to define one. I suspect my "0" is their "15mm", or close to it.

Though it says it is compatible with Android, you would have to obtain a USB-to-MicroUSB adapter.

The weight, 200g, must include the box. I found that the microscope plus cord weighs 74g, and the stand weighs 46g, for a total 120g.

Red Flag: the stand weighs barely an ounce and a half. For stability it needs to weigh more than twice as much as the microscope. I dug around in a junk box to get three 30g tire weights, and tied them to the top of the base of the stand, for a total stand weight of 164g. That made the setup much more stable.

On the side of the box is another table with check boxes, checked to indicate this is a "X4" model with 1,000X magnification.

Installation did not go according to the little sheet of paper that came in the box. The instructions mention only a website to go to and an installation file to run. That installed the HiView software, but HiView wouldn't connect with the microscope. There is a small CD in the box, and one of its files is a driver loader. After I ran that, the microscope would connect with the HiView software. With that in mind, I don't know how you would get this instrument to connect with an Android phone.

With some fiddling around, I found that with shiny objects at low or medium magnifications the LEDs are too close to the objective lens and make strong reflections that spoil the image. I had made a light stand for use with my inspection microscope, so I tried that out. This is how the setup looks. The card the microscope is looking at is one of my calling cards.

This image is close to life size. The lamps are work lights that were being given away at Harbor Freight a few years ago, and later were sold for about $3, so I bought several. The base is a sheet of steel, curved to shape and painted white. On the stand behind the microscope parts of the tire weights are visible.

The microscope has a thumb wheel for focusing, and at certain distances, it also sets magnification range. Just above the plastic holder from the mounting are two buttons. One turns the lights off and on, with three brightness settings. The other is labeled "Snap", to take an image, but actually using it would jostle the 'scope. Use the software icon in HiView instead. The standoff tip is clear plastic, which is convenient for seeing what you are lining up, and letting light in.

When you run the software and connect to the microscope, you are always given a selection of image resolutions to use. I experimented with this, and found that the microscope indeed takes 640x480 pixel images, but the resolution can be set much higher. However, when you select a different resolution, the software interpolates the pixels, but there is no added information. The sensor is apparently 640x480 pixels. There must be a range of microscopes that HiView can use.

How does the microscope perform? Here are some early images:

This is at a rather low magnification, a midge. The long filament from the head toward the tail is not part of the insect. The microscope's clear standoff tip was about an inch from the specimen. When I put the tip in contact with the paper the insect was on, and shifted the focus to the higher-power area, I got this:

The magnification here is about 12 times greater than the image above. It shows the "hair" on the "knee" of one leg. Both of these images were taken using the LEDs supplied with the microscope.

Next I took a series of images to calibrate the magnification, at least roughly. I used two scales for this, sitting atop my calling card. Firstly, the four calibration images used for low range:

Most photo editing apps let you pick two points, or drag a rectangle, to get the number of pixels of width and height. I used IrfanView to "count" the pixels in one magnified millimeter. In the upper two panels, the scale is a plastic printed ruler with a mm scale. In the lower panels, I used a target that came with the microscope; the smaller lines are spaced at 1/10 mm.

This image shows the highest magnification, with the standoff tip in contact with the card and scale, and the focusing in the high range. The two long lines are 1mm apart.

The standoff distance I used was from the tip of the standoff tip to the object. The four images above were taken at distances of 125mm, 50mm, 10mm, and 0mm (contact).

I made a little table of the results, with effective magnification for two conditions. First, as displayed on my monitors, which are 22", 1680x1050 pixels, and a scale factor of 3.55 px/mm or 90 px/inch. Secondly, for publication, it is recommended that artwork have 300dpi. That means that a 640x480 pixel image will be reproduced no larger than 2.13" x 1.6". 

The microscope can probably be used more than 125mm from its subject, so lower powers than 9x (or 3x) are possible. It appears that the highest magnification possible is about 137x on the monitor, or 40x for publication. That's a far cry from the 1,000x advertised. I intend to test further, and I'll add an update whenever I learn more.

I tried putting a thickish (2mm), small item on the desktop, putting the tip in contact with the desktop, and getting the microscope to focus on it. No dice. It seems that the 0mm setting is at the end of its range, or close to it. The fly leg seems to be at a higher magnification than 137, so I'll experiment further.

I charted the "Monitor" figures, low range only, so I'd have an approximation of how much standoff I need for various magnifications, with these results:

The odd wiggle at the upper left of the curve is an artifact of Excel's low-ball spline used to make a curved line between the points. The curve is good enough for my purposes. A few data points of interest: 

• For 10x, use 100mm
• For 20x, use 40mm
• For 30x, use 18mm
• For 50-60x, use 2mm or less

In the usual case, I'll use it like a zoom lens, putting the subject at a distance such that what I want to see fits in the frame with a little freeboard around it.

I am a little disappointed in a few things, as I mentioned, but this is a workable microscope for (very) general use. One cannot expect high technical quality for $35.

Facing fears

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, social trends

What makes you worry, or at least wonder, "What if THAT happened?" Mike Pearl, with his column in Vice, "How Scared Should I Be?", is the professional worry wart we all need to take a whack at such questions. His book The Day it Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other (im)Possible Phenomena tackles nineteen such questions.

In the Acknowledgements Mr. Pearl confesses to suffering multiple panic attacks while writing the book. For someone who is disposed to think things through, then realize just how plausible many of these things are, the occasional panic attack is justified.

There is only one chapter that touches on a concern I also have, "The Day Antibiotics Don't Work Anymore". The author doesn't delve into the troubles antibiotic resistance is causing already (in the US, almost 3 million resistant infections and more than 35,000 deaths in 2019: on a par with auto accidents). Rather, his focus is what happens when every infectious pathogen is fully resistant, when getting a paper cut becomes a life-threatening event. Every chapter begins with a scorecard. For this one:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 5/5
Scary? Extremely, but probably not the Apocalypse
Worth Changing Habits? Yes

The follow-up question I have is, "Will alternative biocides such as bacteriophages be developed (re-developed) soon enough?" I say re-developed, because bacteria-eating viruses (bacteriophages) were in use and effective, and research into developing more of them was a growing technology when antibiotics were discovered and effectively torpedoed phage research. It is ramping up again.

On another matter of which I am rather fond, the author's take on our getting a confirmed signal from intelligent ET's posits a radio reception from a star 13,000 light-years away. In the early days of the first science fiction boom in America, some 60-100 years ago (the days of "Doc" Smith and R.A. Heinlein and a great many others), the universe was usually imagined to be full of alien species, some vaguely similar to us, and others more like semi-familiar animals, and others quite fanciful. This was almost taken for granted by Sci-Fi readers, but few others gave it any thought. The pendulum has swung in a more pessimistic direction since then, with a brief pro-"lotsa aliens" swing brought on by Star Trek and Star Wars. Pessimism rules at present. More and more people realize that stars are far away, very far; that getting somewhere in less than years to centuries or more is about as possible as learning to pole vault a mile; and that life like that of Earth might be so rare that no other planet in the Milky Way is likely to have living things bigger than E. coli. This is actually a pretty good time for an alien signal to be intercepted and verified.

Here's one for keeping Digital Natives awake at night: "The Day the Entire Internet Goes Down." Here is the scorecard:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 4/5
Scary? About as scary as it gets
Worth Changing Habits? It would be a disaster. How up-to-date is your disaster preparedness kit?

The only thing he finds more scary is the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Plausibility 2/5), to which he devotes 20 pages, the longest chapter. The "Internet" chapter and one about the closing of the last slaughter house (also 2/5) are tied for second, with 18 pages. He dwells at length on the way the Internet works, and what it would really take to bring it all down. One of the next books on my reading list is 2034 (Stay tuned), about WW3 (or 4?), with China, which reveals just how dependent we are on the Internet, even the military (BIG mistake, Generals!): in the novel China selectively "blinds" the U.S. This leads me to consider that an attempt to destroy the Internet is the most likely scenario at present for triggering a nuclear attack or exchange.

Personally, total annihilation is less scary than almost-annihilation. My wife, born just after WW2 ended, can tell you a thing or two about growing up in a country whose capital (and hundreds of square miles around it) was fire-bombed into oblivion. I have read quite a number of post-apocalyptic stories and novels. None of them seems grim enough to be realistic. I guess I'll leave that right there…

I'm not the sort to fret nearly as much as Mr. Pearl. Reading his treatment of things that must represent his greatest fears was enlightening and enjoyable. Really! He is clearly laboring to allay his own fears and in so doing he makes each of them, if not less fearful, a bit more comprehensible.

Russian spidering going on as I write

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I signed in to write a book review, and saw that the number of views, so far today, exceeds 1,200. I had to look further. Here is the graph for the past 24 hours:

And this chart shows the sources:

The non-Russian views represent the usual level of activity. I checked the "Now" version, which has minute-by-minute views over a two hour span:

The Russian activity is shown by the spikes of 20-30 views in a minute. Even the 5-hit spike at 2:23 is probably the Russians. Наслаждайтесь просмотром, ребята!

Enjoying space rovers

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera

In addition to the books on paper that I usually read, I keep a few e-books in my phone's library (Google Play Books). That gives me something to read when I am not at home or when it is inconvenient to carry a book. I recently encountered the Megapack series, a collection of more than 300 compilations in numerous genres, including many classic science fiction collections. I took advantage of a promotion to get a few books for a dollar or two each.

The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack contains 23 stories by Silverberg, mostly from the 1950's plus a few from the 1980's, in 460 pages. Page 460 is a gigantic "page" (30 screens) of Megapack advertising.

I recognized a few of the stories, but most were new to me. This is mainly because most of them predated the time I began reading science fiction in 1967. Silverberg wrote more novels and fewer short stories after about 1960, and gave much time in the 1970's and onward to editing anthologies.

Reading these stories brought me back to why I love science fiction, particularly prior to the 1990's. Space Opera is my hometown. A spaceship, to Silverberg and his ilk, was a special kind of automobile, one that could cross a galaxy the way we might cross a continent in a multi-day road trip. Little attention was given to how a rocket might cross light-years and light-decades in a matter of hours or days. Sometimes one finds mention of "subspace" or "hyperspace", but usually there is nothing about that. These "space cars" run on some kind of super-gasoline. There is even mention of an "auxiliary fuel tank" in at least one story. It reminded me of the special lever in my 1962 VW Bug, that connected a one-gallon reserve tank, so I could go 20 miles or so to find a gas station when the main tank emptied.

The focus of these stories was not really technology of space flight, but the relationships between the humans in the stories and between them and sundry alien species. This is similar to the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, with numerous aliens of many types (but most of them are "humanoid", making it easier on the actors).

The dictum of John Campbell was, "Pose a problem, and then solve it." Silverberg's earliest stories included an opponent, either someone who was the problem, or one who wanted to prevent the solving of the stated problem. Later stories are more sophisticated, but the problem always gets solved. In a few cases, a protagonist may lose his life in so doing, but most stories have a "happy ending".

I will limn just one story: "Valley Beyond Time" (12/1957) puts a few humans and a few aliens, a total of nine persons, in a magical valley, where they are thrall to a "watcher". They grow younger while there. Without giving too much away, this pre-echoes the episodes of Star Trek that feature the omnipotent alien Q.

Space opera may be out of date, but I for one revel in the clever solutions its heroes produced. Science fiction is about exploration of ideas, more than any other genre. That keeps me going.

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Just for the record, spider scanners from Russia hit my blog about 500 times today:

The sum of all non-Russian views is about normal.

The saddest book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, feathers, fly tying, salmon flies, natural history museums, crime, theft

First, some background. Points to remember:

• Salmon very seldom eat during their spawning run upriver. Those that do eat a little have been found to contain only salmon eggs in their stomachs, eggs from salmon that spawned already. This is for reasons to be mentioned below.
• Salmon are protective of their spawning areas. They will snap at something that they think is a threat, particularly if it looks like a large, swimming insect.
  
• They may also bite out of sheer annoyance.
• Salmon can see colors, but mainly in the red-orange-yellow part of the spectrum. Salmon eggs are orange, which is why they might eat a few; they can see them well. A gray "lure" would work no better nor wore than a brightly colored one.
• The so-called "salmon fly" isn't something they eat; it just happens to emerge around the time salmon are running the rivers. See the image:

The upper image is a salmon fly, of the variety found in Idaho and Montana. You can see it's rather big, about two inches; they get up to three inches. It is also drab in color, though the abdomen is kind of orange. These big insects are eaten by large trout, not by salmon.

The lower image is also called a salmon fly, one of the classic designs developed by Victorian fly-tiers. For someone who knows the natural history of salmon, one wonders, "What were they thinking?" These are for people, not for fish!

Trout are finicky eaters. The kind of insect a trout will "hit" varies almost by the week, as various species of May fly, stone fly, caddis fly, and so forth emerge, one after another. A wise fly fisherman will have tied (or purchased) dry flies that mimic the look of each insect that trout are looking for, and use the lure that fits the season. Color is no big deal to a trout; shape is.

Although a big trout looks a lot like a salmon, salmon are not trout. They don't live in the river year-round. They live at sea and eat at sea. Atlantic salmon go upriver to spawn, and they typically survive the experience. On the way back to sea they may eat, but they didn't eat on their way upriver. Pacific salmon die after spawning, and by the time of spawning their bodies have already begun to decay. As mentioned, if they eat at all on their way upriver, they eat the eggs of salmon who stopped earlier to spawn, eggs that didn't stay buried in the riverbed sediment. So they aren't looking for prey at all.

Victorian salmon flies were just artwork. Some self-promoters claimed to have caught salmon with their flies, but it is only because they succeeded in getting a salmon annoyed enough to defend itself. The truly unique attribute of the craft of tying classic salmon flies is the use of colorful feathers. The most colorful feathers come from tropical birds. Beautiful birds such as bird-of-paradise and trogon and blue chatterer.

The Victorian fly above, a replica of a classic, century-old design, was produced either from bits chicken and turkey feathers that were dyed appropriately, or from feathers of rare, endangered, or perhaps extinct birds. Most of the feathers needed for a classic "recipe" are illegal to possess in most Western countries. But guess what? That doesn't stop dedicated artists (some of whom actually fish, but not with their artworks!) from spending tons of money on feathers or even entire bird skins obtained by various means; sometimes legally for a few species, but more often with varying degrees of shadiness in a "don't-ask-don't-tell" industry.

Naturally, with big money changing hands, thievery isn't just likely, it is guaranteed from time to time. Where can feathers from rare or extinct species be found? All the attics that might have contained articles of clothing from the "feather boom" in the Victorian Era have been scoured. The usual target is a natural history museum. People have occasionally been caught leaving the research area of a natural history museum with a few bird skins in pockets or stuffed into their trousers. But there is one big heist, the one that (temporarily) rocked the fly-tying community. The Tring Museum Heist.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, an activist for refugees until about 2016, is an avid fisherman, finding solace in faraway places where he can stand hip-deep in a river fly fishing, for trout. When a guide showed him a couple of salmon flies (tied mainly to learn how), and then told of the Tring Heist, Johnson was intrigued. Intrigue soon became an obsession, which resulted in several years of travel, interviews, and tracking down a few secretive characters, culminating in the book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

The central character is Edwin Rist, who apparently carried off the theft of 299 skins of 17 species of very sought-for birds, filling a large suitcase that he took into the Tring Museum in England through a window he broke. Had it not been for a thrilling soccer match going on at the time, the night guard might have seen the alarm light (no sound alarm was used), and caught Rist in the act. As it was, it took a month for the museum to realize it had been robbed, when a researcher wanted to study some specimens of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Natural Selection. He found only an empty drawer.

I found the book very painful to read. By the end, it was clear that most "feather hobbyists" are contemptuous of the scientific mission of natural history museums. Many of them wonder why the museums don't support their hobby by "plucking off a feather here and there" and selling them. It doesn't matter to them that in the case of one species (read the book to find out which), the skins Rist stole represented more than half of all specimens ever collected, of a species now extinct.

Two-thirds of the skins that Rist stole were recovered, some when his apartment was raided, and others that were returned by his "customers" (he sold some on eBay, and others through a friend in Norway, whose reputation suffered greatly as a result). But for nearly all of them, the collecting tag or label had been removed and discarded. Without the information about where and when a specimen was collected, it is scientifically useless.

I'll give you an example. I work at a natural history museum part time, as a data manager (I have a minor in biology, which helps a great deal). One day, gathering information about certain freshwater mussels, I came across the drawers of Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), the critter that invaded the Great Lakes in the late 1980's, carried in the ballast water of cargo ships. Its home range is Croatia, Ukraine, and southern Russia. The specimens collected before 1988 are all from Croatia and Ukraine. Later ones are all from Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, except for one from Russia. Besides the definite "invasion started on X date" that flags the invasion, studies of comparative morphology and perhaps DNA can be done to see how the animal may have changed in American waters, and perhaps whether their ancestors mostly came from the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. If all the specimen labels were discarded, it would just be a bunch of boxes of small, striped shellfish, with little more one could glean from them.

Author Johnson ended his research, knowing that perhaps as many as 65 bird skins were still not accounted for, but stonewalled at every turn. He wrote what he could, and that is a fascinating, if saddening, story.

Johnson wonders if he was played by Rist and others. Edwin Rist didn't serve any prison time. His defense lawyer used an "Asperger's defense" to convince the judge that he wasn't "judicially responsible", whatever that may mean. Having confessed to his crime, he didn't have to go through a discovery trial, just a sentencing hearing. He is certainly bright enough to fool the psychologist who pronounced him a case of Asperger's Syndrome. Hmph! If he is, so am I. If the psychoanalyst who counseled me when I was 12 had known about Asperger's, she might have pigeonholed me there; as it was, I was pronounced "socially withdrawn" and encouraged to learn to understand people better. From what I read about Rist, he was, if anything, either never "on the spectrum", or got off it more rapidly than I did (and I did!).

Various figures, in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (or pounds) are found throughout the book. One cannot properly appraise such losses. One cannot go back to 1860 and re-collect a certain bowerbird or trogon. To collect in the same location today, if the species still exists, is to collect specimens of populations that have continued to evolve for 160 years, which is more significant than most folks would imagine.

If you love natural history, plus detective stories, this is a great read for both. Maybe you won't find it as saddening as I do, and that's OK; most people aren't in a day-to-day environment where the rubber hits the road for researchers.