Linear thinking in a non-linear world

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, prediction, forecasting, disciplines

My colleague at work had a poster: "Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first." We hate uncertainty, which is why we want to find out what is going to happen. We hate lack of control, which is why we try to control the future. Unfortunately, the future is unknowable and beyond our control. We aren't even very good at self-control. How could we hope to control a world composed of billions of others who are just as uncontrollable as ourselves?

What do you see here? Suppose this represents the general state of someone's health, projected over a long lifetime. Where is its end? If this shows the life of someone who is "fated" to live 85 years, they had a near-death experience around age 35.

Sliding toward the bottom of that valley—was it an illness, an accident?—, it may seem like the end is near and that good health is irretrievable. But, hey, things get a little better almost immediately, and later, a lot better. But that's not where these data came from.

Suppose instead it represents some factor of the economy. Is this part of a bigger picture? What comes after, and what came before? Did you notice that the end of the diagram is close to the level of the beginning, though a little bit lower? There are a couple of big, sustained "UPs", and a couple of big, sustained "DOWNs". In the middle of one of those sustained runs, whether up or down if you had to bet on the future of the rest of the diagram, how would you bet? Would you have any idea what the value would be at any point on this chart?

As a matter of fact, this is a financial chart, and adding the axes shows more context:

This is the Google Finance chart of the weekly closing price for Apple, Inc (AAPL), from 1/1/2021 to date (6/3/2021). It looks pretty dramatic! But check the left axis: the low for the year, in early March, was 116, the high in late January was 143, and the June 3 closing was 123.5 (pretty close to the average for the period of 128.6). If you knew just those figures, you could make a "bet with sideboards" that, for the short term, the stock price would be within ±11%. A final chart will show a little more context:

I downloaded the YTD historical data and charted it in Excel. When a stock price chart includes a zero, it looks less dramatic. From this perspective, this stock has been "flat" for five months.

How long will it stay "flat"? I couldn't hazard a guess. Do this: pick a time frame, such as a year, or five years, or (being more canny) the Midterm Election in late 2022 or the Presidential Election in 2024, and call that "the end of AAPL flatness." Write it down (or put a memo in your phone's calendar). Check it on that date and see if AAPL is still flat, or if it entered a period of serious gyration.

Now think about possible "black swans", such as someone buying Apple, or a competing product blowing the iPhone out of the market, or more globally, a new war, a recession, or a suddenly booming economy and the Dow Jones goes to 100,000. I don't have any idea how possible any of these things are, but if the possibility of any of them is more than a few percent, it would call any prediction about this stock or any other into serious question.

Consider this. The moment-by-moment price of a stock is influenced partly by the market as a whole, made up of investors that represent only a couple % of the population, and partly by the emotions of investors in that particular stock, which number a few dozen to a few hundred people. Wouldn't you expect that predicting the outcome of larger questions might be even harder? A year or five years from now, what will be the health of the economy of the nation or of many nations; what is the likelihood of war between two rival nations; or what of the effects of offshoring or onshoring a major segment of the work force? All of these depend on the decisions of thousands to millions of people!

About two months ago I reviewed a book about forecasting and "superforecasters", the kind of people who are better at making predictions that are at least a little more accurate than guesses. The author of that book referred to another, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better, by Dan Gardner. I spent the past two weeks reading this book, with some care. I think it best to begin with a few statements that caught my eye:

On Behavioral Economics, "In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, Richard Crutchfield, and other psychologists conducted … experiments that revealed an unmistakable tendency to abandon our own judgments in the face of a group consensus—even when the consensus is blatantly wrong. …three-quarters of test subjects did this at least once." (p. 99 in Chapter 4)

On "predicting 'more of the same' ", "…[such] predictions are more likely to be right when current trends continue and least likely to be right when there is a drastic change. That's most unfortunate, because when the road is straight, anyone can see where it is going. It's the curves and corners that cause crashes. …predictions are most likely to be right when they are least needed and least likely to be right when they are essential." (p. 105 in Chapter 4)

On Chaos, or the unexpected influence of small differences, "Like most of what's interesting in life, weather is subject to chaos and all sorts of nonlinear weirdness that limits how far we can peer into the future. Those limits will never be eliminated." (p. 105 in Chapter 8)

The first item above refers to "groupthink", which led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs "invasion" of Cuba early in the Kennedy administration, and to the under-planning of a tragic rescue attempt in Iran during the Carter administration. Do note the successful rescue operation in 1979, of two EDS employees being held in Iran, an operation ordered and sponsored by H. Ross Perot: his decision, carried out under the command of one experienced "hired gun". No groupthink.

Allied to this is the need for certainty, which means the most confident (and loud) voice typically carries the day. But turn the last phrase of the around: one-fourth of the experimental subjects did not succumb to groupthink. Their voice may not have prevailed to "turn" the others (who were all confederates of the experimenters), but they did not give up their view. In the terminology used by Gardner, they were probably "foxes", as in the proverb, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing." As one might expect, the hedgehog's "important thing" may or may not be correct, but when it is wrong, the hedgehog will not change his mind. Foxes are more flexible. They are willing to consider whether their thinking is wrong. Using the same analogy, the "superforecasters" I wrote about in April are foxes.

Let us consider the idée fixe, or fixed idea: an idea or desire that occupies one's mind, often to the point of obsession. This is the hedgehog's specialty. It takes work to break free from an obsession, but successful forecasters are willing to do the work, and the extra work to gather knowledge from numerous sources (the fox's "many things"). However, foxes have a hard time getting through to the public, which prefers the certainty of hedgehogs, no matter what their track record (which is uniformly abysmal except for the occasional lucky guess).

I recall that the root word for "fool" in the book of Proverbs is "self confident". It is used about 70 times. Not only are hedgehogs such fools, so are all those who listen to them uncritically.

For the second quote, I'd call it self-evident, but we all have "hindsight bias", which is its basis. There is a road I sometimes take to work. It goes over a rather steep hill. Just at the top, the road jogs just a little to the right, which means if you aren't paying close attention, you will suddenly be halfway into the other lane. A great place for head-on collisions. It would be better if the roadway on either side of the hill were curvy, forcing drivers to pay better attention. Even better if the highway department tore out fifty feet on either side of the crest and smoothed that transition.

Life doesn't usually provide smooth transitions. Look again at the stock charts above. Any two points more than a tenth of an inch apart would seem to have nearly no relationship to each other. In a few cases, a tenth of an inch is enough for a rather dramatic swing. The basic rule of thumb we need to guide us is, "The more confident an expert sounds, the less we should trust the prediction." Let me repeat that:

The more confident an expert sounds,
the less we should trust the prediction.

As fun as it would be to belabor the third quote, about Chaos, I'll forbear. I realize that only the "choir" would take such a word, and everyone else would ignore it. Instead let's realize that Chaos is a manifestation of Nonlinearity. We have linear minds. From many years as a working mathematician, I know how hard it is to think nonlinearly. It isn't natural to us. Even when we know something is cyclical, like the march of the seasons each year, the day-to-day variations of sunlight, clouds, rain and high or low temperature are tough to predict. The best weather forecasting computers do OK for a day or two. After that all bets are off.

Mark Twain wrote about a period of around 100 years in which the Mississippi River's length was reduced by dozens of miles, because a few long, loopy bends in the riverbed were cut off when the river flooded and cut shortcuts. He said that if the trend continued, in another couple of centuries St. Louis would be practically a coastal town on the Gulf of Mexico, and that millions of years ago the river must have been sticking out over the Gulf "like a fishing rod." 

We know that is illogical, and we laugh at it. But we neglect to consider that seemingly regular trends don't persist. Any measure we might look at is more like the stock chart above, with ups and downs that nobody could predict. Over the entire five months charted, the stock price went from 129.4 to 123.5. That's about a 5.5% reduction. But there were a couple of spots in there where a day trader could have gained 10% or more in a week's time, and a couple of others where a day trader would have had to ride out a 10% loss.

I apologize if I keep returning to the stock market as an example. It is an area I'm familiar with. It is seldom referred to in Future Babble. The author's interest is in the way we react to predictions and the way we almost always forget that they very rarely pan out. Most pundits are so wrong so frequently, it is amazing that anybody buys their books. So I'll end with a prediction: 

The pundits and "experts" who are the best at sounding confident will get rich on the gullibility of a public that craves certainty where there is none to be had.

A roughly mixed SF collection

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

My "when I can't read anything else" book this past few weeks has been The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack, an e-book I got for a promotional price of 99¢…and that's about what it is worth. It contains a few classics such as "Out of All Them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress, "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "The Syndic" by C.M. Kornbluth, and a couple of the lesser-known stories by writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. Most of the other stories are by authors I had never heard of, and I find that is for good reason. They were definitely bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Usually when I skip the bulk of a story it is because it is vulgar, but in this volume I skipped out of several stories simply because they were either based on bad ideas or too badly written to make them worth ingesting; sometimes both.

Let this be my shortest review so far. I hope this volume represents the nadir of the MEGAPACK® series.

1984 plus fifty - how very apt!

 kw: book reviews, novels, warfare, cyber warfare, world war 4, chinese-american relations

I grew up in the shadow of Communism. Our big fear was the USSR, but even in the 1950's some wiser ones foretold that the bigger danger would eventually be from China. I have many, many church friends from both sides of the Strait of Formosa, and that is the view of them all. I remember the "liberalization" in China after Mao's death in 1976. I remember wondering how long it would last, because Deng was getting old already. Sure enough, in my estimation, each Chinese leader to follow Deng has been worse than the prior one, and Xi is poised to do more damage to the human race than Mao did.

The timeline of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, is set just over a dozen years in the future, so perhaps the authors expect a future Chairman to arise who will outdo even Xi, who will be 80 in 2034, should he live so long. The authors do mention Putin, the Russian President, who will be 82; he plays a part in a side drama.

The premise of the novel is simple: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which already (2021) has the world's largest navy, plus formidable cyber warfare capabilities, will think itself invincible, particularly once the US is found to have a weak President ("…whose greatest weakness is her fear of being perceived as weak."). The weakness of Biden does not bode well…

If I were to go into my reactions and learnings from 2034, I'd have to drop spoilers right and left. Maybe the authors would be OK with that, but I think it better to say that the scenarios of the novel are plausible, and fit right into what I have learned about China and the CCP from friends and acquaintances. I find it very unsettling. The Chinese tactics described rely on their cyber warfare capabilities. All that is keeping events like those in the book from happening right now are that the CCP's cyber warfare and cyber silencing techniques aren't yet quite up to snuff. I don't think it will take a dozen years for that gap to be filled.

A Chinese (not Taiwanese) friend told me recently about the Chinese GPS system, called BeiDou; the CCP will not permit the use of the "Western" GPS system in China. I replied, "It would behoove our military to get a bunch of BeiDou equipment, then, in case their first act of war is to silence GPS!" Needless to say, the NSA would need to take a whack at making sure there aren't any "surprises" buried in BeiDou software. I know of a couple of areas for which my GPS navigator is consistently in error by one mile. I presume it is for a military reason. It is a mistake to make cruise missiles and armed drones, let alone bombers and fighter jets, dependent on GPS.

I can surmise a few reasons for the authors picking 2034 as the year it all begins. For one thing, although Xi and Putin could still be in power, all the senior leadership of both American parties, including Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, and Schumer, will almost surely have died by then. That frees the authors from accounting for the personalities of any of these folks, and of the Clintons, whose last gasp may not yet have been heard. But I think the reason for settling on 2034 in particular, rather than 2040 or even 2027, is that 2034 is fifty years after 1984, and I think it is the right choice; I favor the mantle of George Orwell falling upon their shoulders. My bottom line:

AI is misnamed

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, polemics

Mechanical brains, they called them. Starting with ENIAC, dubbed the Giant Brain when it was made public in 1945, computing machinery has been compared to our brain, and computers were often called "thinking machines" in the first few decades of their existence. That's ironic. The one thing they most definitely do NOT do is Think! They are not thinkers, they are computers. They Compute.

ENIAC was indeed a giant: a row of cabinets 3 feet thick, 8 feet high, 98 feet long, wrapped around the walls of a big room. Running it took 150 kW. Much has been said about its speed: It performed ballistic calculations 2,400 times as fast as a human using pencil and paper, though I never saw it compared to a skilled operator of a Marchant mechanical calculator (my father's company had one of those; running a division problem made a wonderful noise!). Since that time, various computers have been compared to human speeds. Not once has anyone mentioned that arithmetical calculations are what the human brain is worst at! A very few people are "lightning calculators", able to use a bit of their brain to calculate rapidly. They are hundreds to thousands of times as fast as the rest of us. But even ENIAC was faster.

I began programming computers, initially using FORTRAN, in 1968. I've watched speeds increase, by a factor of a million between then and now, for single-processor machines, and much more than that for machines that incorporate stacks and stacks of processors, in the tens of thousands for the fastest weather-forecasting supercomputers. Before 1970 I read predictions that one day computers would be able to "program themselves". Nobody ever predicted how a computer would know what to program, unless a person "gave it the idea". To this day, no computer has "had an idea."

These are just a few of the reasons I look at all claims of "artificial intelligence" with a jaundiced eye. For more than 50 years, "human scale" AI has been touted as "no more than 10-20 years away." I always say, "Nonsense."

Finally, someone with a finger to the pulse of the AI community has written a book exposing the hype: Not only does the AI Emperor have no clothes, it has no mind either. computer scientist Erik J. Larson's book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do proves that case, quite handily. His point is not that they "don't" think the way we do, but that they can't do so. Not now, and not ever.

Dr. Larson shows, in a stuffed handful of ways, that nearly all arguments in favor of AI becoming a superhuman superintelligence run the same way: This or that program can do deductive inferences, and such-and-such a program can do inductive inferences, and if we just put enough computing muscle behind some collection of such programs, they will "evolve" or "develop" into a conscious entity that can outthink any human. The few arguments that don't follow this schema are based on efforts like Blue Brain, which used a supercomputer to simulate the activities of neurons and all their connections in a segment of a mouse or rat brain. Such projects have uniformly failed, although their promoters have tried in vain to cover up the failure by waving their hands and talking about "making a pivot" (pick your buzzword for hyping a consolation prize) in some other direction.

The characteristic of both deductive inference and inductive inference (things we all do many times daily) is their reliance on a knowledge base. Whichever kind of inference is to be performed, the entity (brain or machine) making the inference is limited to the domain of knowledge stated in the initial problem, plus any related knowledge the entity can access. More succinctly: both brands of inference can look only backward, never forward, because there is nothing in the process of inference that anticipates the future.

A key word in this book: Abduction. Abductive inference is "what if" thinking. We call it "getting an idea." Also called "counterfactual", an abductive inference follows the exhortation of Jack Kennedy, "Others look at what is and say, 'Why?' Let us consider what might be and say, 'Why not?' " (a paraphrase from memory; it's been a long time since I heard him say it.)

Nobody knows how abduction works. Until they do, there is no theory we can use to develop a machine that can do it. Abduction isn't some automatic offspring of deduction plus induction. It is something different. Only abduction can look forward. Without it, there is no progress, no invention, and literally, "nothing new under the sun." (Solomon was wrong, and he'd be the first to admit it if he were to see a typewriter, an auto, or a smart phone. But he wasn't talking about technology anyway. Hi-tech for him was a spear head made of iron instead of bronze.)

Here is a side thought I had, on a different line from the book: A brain produces and consumes Meaning. Language (Dr. Larson's specialty) is based on what words Mean. A key concept is the difference between a word's Denotation (dictionary definition under a specific usage) and its Connotation (shade of meaning depending on context, tone of voice, and other tacit matters). I connect this thought with another: Computers excel at detecting Differences; Brains excel at detecting Similarities. Based primarily on this latter principle, I built a 40-year career as a computer programmer upon writing programs that did what brains do badly, while facilitating people's ability to use their brains to do what computers do badly.

I want to dig into this idea of simulating a brain's neurons. Many brain theorists use the "column" hypothesis to understand how our cerebral cortex works. The cortex apparently consists of 50-100 million "mini-columns" made up of 100-300 neurons each, arranged in larger columns that number around a million or so. What would it take to simulate the action of about 200 neurons, in real time?

The various synchronized pulses that we can detect with EEG range as high as 40 Hz, with a lot taking place in the 10-20 Hz range. Thus, whatever you simulate, the cycle time has to be in this range or faster.

A neuron is not a transistor. A transistor has three connections, and is basically an on-off switch. A neuron has between a few hundred and 10,000 inputs, and from thousands to as many as 100,000 outputs. The 200 neuron mini-column we want to simulate will thus have thousands of connections just within itself, and 2-5 million connections with other parts of the brain. Further, each neuron, under the influence of its inputs, emits a train of pulses to its thousands of outputs, at variable rates.

A base-level simulation must first proceed by assuming the column is isolated, so we can ignore a few million connections, except for perhaps one, to be used to trigger the system to see what happens.

To simulate a single neuron requires all the processing power of a modest microprocessor such as a single-core Pentium CPU (in the 1990's they ran with cycle times of about 50 MHz). These days, it is no problem to string together CPU power equivalent to 200 Pentiums. Collecting the data just from all the internal connections will generate about 100 kbytes, each 1/10th to 1/40th of a second. During "beta wave" heavy thinking, that's around 40 Mbytes/sec. That's not so enormous; it's about half the write speed of a magnetic disk. But now let's remember the 2-5 million outputs from, and an equal number of inputs to, these 200 neurons and other parts of the brain. You really have to consider the whole cortex, and a few other things, to begin to simulate a human brain. Each mini-column in apparently connected to at least 1-2% of the entire brain, a few million other mini-columns.

Bottom line: to simulate the entire cerebral cortex of about 16 billion neurons, with the tens of trillions of connections between them, requires the computing power of 16 billion Pentium-class CPU chips, or something like, by my estimation, 300 million processor cores running 4-5 GHz. They would need about 40 million hard disks to handle the throughput, or about 5 million solid state drives (SSD's). At least during setup and testing you need to record it all to see what is happening. Later less of it needs to be kept.

Will processing speed and disk speed and capacity "save the bacon" in another decade or so? Not really. Do you remember Moore's Law? As originally stated, the number of transistors on a CPU chip doubled twice every three years. Amazingly, this held true for decades. A modern Intel I7 chip has several "cores" (separate CPU's), each containing about 3 billion transistors. But this hasn't changed much in the past 15 years. Clock speeds maxed out around 5 GHz before 2005. Modern supercomputers just stack larger and larger numbers of multicore processors together. The electronic brain described above would need 300 million such cores, and that isn't going to change much. And we are decades to centuries away from "quantum computers" that can exceed the power of today's CPU's, if that ever happens.

That is just to simulate the cerebral cortex and its 16 billion neurons. What about the rest of the brain? You might say, "Doesn't the brain have 100 billion neurons?" The actual number is closer to 86 billion, but most of them are in the cerebellum! See this diagram. (It neglects two items. The limbic system or mid-brain handles our emotional responses and mediates memory storage, using one billion neurons, and the brain stem below the cerebellum shuttles signals between the cerebellum and the body, also with about a billion neurons.) The cerebellum mainly runs the body, but that isn't all...a subject for later discussion.

A disembodied cortex, absent the rest, is not going to operate like a real brain. It'll probably go insane so fast, it will stop running in a matter of seconds. It will die a-borning. Just for one example, the visual cortex at the back of the brain takes up about 1/4 of the whole. What kind of eyes will you give your brain-in-a-warehouse? Without them, what will happen? If you want a truly disembodied brain, you just simulate the frontal lobes, but you need to communicate with them. A big, big issue.

I have a different question: What's the big deal about duplicating the human brain? Millions of natural ones are created every year, and much of their training and education is accomplished in 10-20 years. Our present computer hardware works very differently from a neuron-derived brain. Making a computer simulate a natural brain is incredibly difficult, costly, and probably would suck down electrical power like a steel plant. Can we take advantage of computing machinery in "native mode", to work out new ways of thinking? Until we have a theory of abduction, we need humans to come up with the ideas. Single, thoughtful, bright brains are better at that than any kind of hive mind, committee, or brainstorming team. Ideas need development, however, and we must focus on better and better ways to automate at least some of that.

I like SYNERGY. I built a career on it. If I were to return to work in the field, it's what I would focus on. A final key point of Dr. Larson's: there is not only wasted effort in the falsely-named AI field; effort is being diverted from things that matter, things that need doing, while natural (that is, genuine) intelligence is being denigrated, to the detriment of us all. That's the tragedy of misdirected AI.

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