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.

Are we making ourselves into techno-monsters?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, parenting, education, technology

It took me an incredible amount of time to read i-Minds: How and Why Constant Connectivity is Rewiring our Brains and What to Do About It, Second Edition (AKA i-Minds 2.0), by Mari K. Swingle, PhD. Other than a brief post 14 days ago, which came 9 days after the prior "real" book review, I have utterly neglected this blog. To those few who follow it, I apologize.

This book is so big, 498 pages of 9-pt. type, and covers so much ground, it is hard to take it all in. The author is a therapist whose work begins when a "problem child" (or young adult) is brought to her, and she performs an EEG study. She can discern quite a number of odd things going on in the brain from the EEG, and she explains a few of them. One of the most important is "disregulation". A person gets out of control because the brain cannot self-control or self-regulate. An i-addicted person can only self-regulate when looking at their screen of choice. Children of all ages may throw tantrums for a number of reasons, but some of the most frightening tantrums occur when a child who spends too long with the laptop, phone, or tablet, is kept from using it for a time. In adults, tantrums are replaced by other kinds of misbehavior, some of which can land one in jail.

Side note: Recently the electrical grid failed in most of Texas for three days, parts of it for longer. I wonder how many homes were host to an extreme form of "cabin fever" when all the batteries ran down?

Although the book is very big, I could have read it faster if it were better written. The author presents a great deal of good and useful information and advice, very badly! Soon after I began reading, I was ready to drop it entirely. It just seemed she was so impressed with herself she had to write every fleeting thought. The writing style swings between clinical and colloquial. Just as I'd get going at a good clip, I'd encounter a word such as neuroatypicality or psychoneurophysiology, or a sentence with missing prepositions, or a half sentence ending in a period, only to find it taken up again after a subordinate clause with its own period. I guess the author took to heart the advice to avoid run-on sentences, somewhat too literally! By the way, look at the way I used a comma in the prior sentence. Try covering the comma with the corner of a piece of paper and reading it again. There is a difference in connotation. In this book commas are sometimes overused and sometimes neglected. My advice to the author: Before preparing version 3.0, hire two people in sequence: Firstly, a good copy editor, and then secondly, pass the edited copy to someone who can produce Reader's Digest Condensed Books and have it condensed. Most of the content of this book could have been said in half the space or less.

Herewith, to save space, I will do little more than reproduce my notes and comment on them:

• ch 6, "Boxed In – Anxiety in the Masses", on collecting hobbies. She is derogatory. She doesn't distinguish actual field collectors from "silver pickers". I am a collector of several categories of things, so perhaps my reaction is to my own ox being gored. The more sedentary things I collect are stamps and coins (world variety, not gold/silver coins). But in each case, I make it social by belonging to stamp and coin clubs, and even going to auctions (to be resumed after the pandemic), both as a buyer and seller, but usually a kibitzer. I also collect photographs, which gets me out and around, though I do spend a lot of time with "digital darkroom". My first love is rock collecting. "Silver picking" is buying mineral or fossil specimens from others. I've never bought a rock, though I traded for a few. I prefer to get out there and hit rocks. Any of these hobbies can be conducted without ever turning on a computer or looking at a phone. A cousin of mine's main hobby is long-distance high-altitude hang gliding (sometimes oxygen is needed!). Try doing that on your phone!
• p108, ch 8, "The Narrowing of Minds", on children who grow up gaming more than playing: "Today, many kids don't lose the creativity, they never find it!" Further, a "grouping quiz" example: 3 yellow squares of different sizes, then the choice of "which is the most similar?" a pink square or a banana? Is it the banana? Yes, according to the test the author saw, because it is the right color. If a child chooses the pink square, the ugly beep and WRONG appear, even though the shape is right. Who is to say that color supersedes shape? Particularly if no other information is given, either with this "question" or in the context of the rest of the "test".
• p140, ch 10, "Of Systems and Process", on writing (scribing) versus keyboarding, "…studies clearly show that we remember more, and significantly more, by writing than by keyboarding." I used to visit a typesetting shop. The proprietor was able to typeset in Spanish while conversing with me in English. Clearly, he could not possibly retain anything of the Spanish document. In my own case, though I can type very fast, I find I retain more by taking sketchy handwritten notes than by taking a laptop to a lecture and transcribing chunks of it verbatim.
• p202, ch 13, "Learning, Play, and Parenting", compares nature with "screen stuff, summarized in a keen table. I imaged the entire page, which is inserted here without further comment. Tap or click to see it larger, or to download it.

• p263 +/-, ch 17, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Esports and the Business of Gaming", on the relabling of i-games as "eSports": a cynical attempt to coopt the positive image of sports. The author decries "…the deviant brilliance of early game design ensuring that children legitimately would be penalized for leaving a game mid-play (or not returning…". This triggers extreme peer pressure. When a child (of any age less than 200 years) cries, "But I HAVE TO!!", he or she fears becoming a pariah more than death. It is time for some extreme re-training.
• p296-7, ch 19, "Breaking the Trance", "Ten things parents learned in science class the gaming industry wants them to forget (aka Lost Lessons from Research 101)". I scanned this pair of pages also, but I'd better not include them here. Put an e-mail address in a comment and I'll send you the image. The "Ten things" boil down to ten of the most popular fallacies of logic, exploited by the game-writing-and-selling industry to keep regulators at bay.
• p310, ch 20, "i-Tech and Healthcare – To Care or i-Care", "Why do we want to replace ourselves with interactive technologies? Why do we want i-tech taking care of our children and … our elders?" This fosters dissociation and vanquishes healthy attachment. Isaac Asimov foresaw this, blurrily, in his very early story "Robbie", about a robot babysitter to which the child became attached, moreso than to the parents. But Asimov's point was introducing the concepts that became his "3 laws of robotics", so he sidestepped whether the child in question was in any way harmed; I suspect he thought not, as he was himself famously neurotic and might have preferred a robot caretaker to a human nurse.
• p 356, erratum, "Zukerberg" for "Zuckerberg". Spelled correctly in other places. [grammatical errors and other solecisms would have filled pages]
• p394, ch 26, "Community, Communication, Digital Mediation, and Friendship", to txt or not to txt? Are emojis replacing facial expressions such that we no longer can read actual faces? A factor tending towards autism. I have long asserted that I get along with machines better than people. But I recognize it and have taken steps for 60+ years to learn to relate to people in spite of my own autistic tendencies. I fear that, had I been born in 2020 rather than the 1940's, I'd have become a clear case of Aspergerism, or "high-functioning autism", or worse. We can all exhibit autistic behaviors under stress, such as the autistic rocking of someone who has suddenly lost their beloved spouse, child, or pet. Such should be rare.
• p459-50, ch 31, "i-Addiction and i-Life", levels of i-addiction:

1. Generalized Internet Addiction: "Excess internet use is not an addiction in itself, but rather, the internet is the space where an individual can engage in addictive behavior." The Net facilitates access to one's fetish, but does not create the addiction.
2. Fantasy Internet Addiction: Addictive behaviors that would otherwise not occur, such as engaging in role-playing games (less frenetic games such as Dungeons & Dragons, that can be played as a board game, came after their online counterparts); and chat rooms and similar sites with pseudonymous interaction including cybersex.
3. Technological Internet Addiction: The technology itself is the addicting element. The Poster Child is compulsive follow-the-white-rabbit searching, which for some people can consume hour after hour, even day after day. [unbounded exploration] Here process itself is the bait on the hook.

• p463, same chapter, "Scientific Corner" [a feature found scattered throughout the book], an introduction to IAT, the Internet Addiction Test [search for "Internet Addiction Test Young" to find one you can take online. Many versions are behind a paywall]. My score is 18 (out of 72, see below). Paradoxically, many of the most addicted persons who are single young men have a lower score than you'd expect on the IAT, because all the questions about their relationships are answered with "no effect" or "not relevant", because they have no relationships!

• p491, ch 33, "Our Future Our Selves", The coolness factor is overcoming prudence in applying technologies that are dehumanizing us. [Many parents who work for Google, FB, etc., send their own children to private schools where screens of any kind may not be used prior to 8th grade, and the school strongly encourages that the home environment ought to be nearly screen-free. What do they know that the rest of us don't?]

Human intelligence, like all natural intelligence, is embodied. The body is a part of nature. Send your kids outdoors! Free-range children grow up the best adjusted! To grow up as an appendage of digital culture is to become more like the machine than like a human.

You have what you need from what is written above. For the research and references, do get the book, but be prepared to use it as a resource. Only read it through if you're as much a glutton for punishment as I was, reading the whole thing! I hated the presentation, but content kept me going.

Screening the Screens

kw: education, technology

I am halfway through a book I recommend to anyone who is the least bit concerned about how technology affects learning: i-Minds 2.0 by Mari K. Swingle, PhD. Two points stick in my memory:

1) In Silicon Valley, the most popular private schools have a policy for grades 1-7 that PROHIBITS screens inside the school buildings (phones, tablets, laptops, everything), and strongly suggests that parents limit "total screen time" to one hour daily for children younger than 10. The parents are those folks who labor to make social media addicting...to YOUR kids, and to you also.

2) Overuse of i-tech increases the tendency to autism. No matter where a child may begin, on the "autism spectrum", he or she will move progressively toward more and more autistic behaviors, the longer the overuse continues.

I write more when I finish the book and can produce a more fitting review.

Getting your veggies in liquid form

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, mixology

A favorite country tune, Rocky Top, has the lines

Corn don't grow so well on Rocky Top,
  Ground's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folk on Rocky Top
  Get their corn in a jar

Corn isn't all that gets into corn whiskey. As we read in The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks, by Amy Stewart, if a plant can be ingested (and sometimes if it can't), it has been used to produce an alcoholic beverage.

My drinking days are long behind me. I recall preferring port wine to all other wines (I particularly didn't like "dry" wines), and smooth Scotch whiskey to the rest of the "hard stuff." That ended before I was 21 years old. Port is fortified (higher proof), but also sweeter and more "grape-y", and of course, one could call Scotch "barley in a jar", although there is much more behind these drinks than grapes or barley. That "much more" is what the book is about.

In orderly fashion, Ms Stewart starts with the plants that produce the alcohol, from agave to wheat, including apples, grapes, sorghum and a few others, and then introduces some that are a bit more strange, such as bananas, jack fruit and parsnips. If it'll ferment, someone's tried to drink it.

There follows a series of chapters on every kind of plant product that has been used in a beverage. The only one left out seems to be bark (Oh, yeah, Cinnamon is made from a bark). Stems. Flowers. Spices. Roots. Fruits.

Many recipes are found throughout, and also gardening tips for growing certain otherwise hard-to-obtain plants. There are also tips in a few places about brewing your own, frequently by doing little more than harvesting, grinding or mashing some plant part, and leaving it alone for days or weeks. The yeast varieties that grow on the plant are frequently the ones that ferment it best. This points up that the first domestic organism was almost certainly yeast!

I don't want to get further into this. I have some fond memories of "non professional" mixology, such as learning by accident how easy it is to produce cider ("hard cider" is a redundancy). But for me the drawbacks of an imbibing life outweighed the pleasures. If you enjoy "adult beverages" and mixology, this book is a delightful introduction to the botany behind the beverages.

The other cDc

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, information technology, hacking, clubs, politics

There were hackers before there were computers. Many were golfers, which is where the term "hacker" originated. It meant "enthusiast", and in golf, a player with more zeal than accuracy would just hack away at the ball. Soon "hacker" meant any non-pro enthusiast in many endeavors, frequently a hobbyist.

Once people could build their own hobby computers in the late 1970's, they also came to be known as hackers, and within a few years, a hacker was someone who programmed for the fun of it (I was one such). Among programmers both amateur and professional (we weren't called coders until the early 2000's), a bit of nicely-written code or a routine that did something really well or even with elegance was called a "good hack" or a "clever hack".

Of course, pushing the ethical envelope comes along with any enthusiastic pursuit, and all kinds of shady behavior showed up. To many folks, locks exist to be picked. In his autobiography Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist wrote of a practice he had while he worked on the Manhattan Project, of figuring out the combinations of the locks on all the filing cabinets in his colleagues' offices.

When people who used either computer skills or social-engineering skills to break into computer systems (either determining/stealing a password or finding a way around the password authentication) began to be called "hackers" in news reports, those of us who wore the term proudly protested that they should be called "crackers", by analogy to "safecrackers" (safecracking was what Dr. Feynman was doing). It was to no avail. For close to 40 years, "hacker" has come to mean "criminal interloper".

Curiously, many of the famous "hacking" exploits didn't involve computer skills, but rather fooling someone into revealing privileged information a criminal could use to penetrate a phone system or computer network. But programmers were also busy learning various ways to extract passwords. An early "window into Windows" took advantage of a lazy error by Microsoft programmers in the way passwords were processed. That may have been corrected, but laziness by computer users still provides a wide-open door. Let me explain.

Modern encryption methods produce a "hash", turning a password into a string of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 bytes (when you read of "128-bit encryption", for example, that's 16 bytes). Of course, 32 is best. One would think that would make it hard to decrypt, but brute force attacks work this way:

Someone with access to a server (legal or otherwise) copies the pwd file or its equivalent. It contains hashed passwords for all the accounts. The cracking procedure is to create all possible passwords of a specific length, hash them, and see if any of the hashes match those in the pwd file. Specially-built hardware can generate and test billions of combinations every second. The fastest I've read about can "crack" more than 300 billion per second, using a big stack of GPU's (Graphical processing units).

Do you still use mainly 8-character passwords? I hope you at least use both upper- and lower-case letters. Here are some numbers you need to know.

• 8 lower-case letters, 26^8 = 210 billion possibilities. All passwords of this sort in a pwd file can be found in less than a second.
• 8 letters, both cases, 52^8 = 53 trillion possibilities. The time to crack them all is about 3 minutes.
• 8 letters, both cases, plus digits, 62^8 = 218 trillion. Crack time is now 12 minutes.
• 8 letters, all typeable characters (excluding é, ø, etc), 95^8 = 6.6 quadrillion. Crack time 370 hours, or just over two weeks.

That two-week epic cracking session has already been performed. I suspect someone somewhere has a room full of disks with all the resulting hash decryptions stored in about 160 petabytes. This is why you need passwords longer than 8 characters. I use passwords ranging from 12 to 15 bytes. I call them "million year passwords".

Some of the specialty cracking work was done by members of hacking groups with various quirky names. One group that is probably not quite as unethical as others is one of the oldest, named Cult of the Dead Cow, or cDc. In the book Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, Joseph Menn outlines the formation and history of cDc and many of its prominent members.

Ignoring for the moment the first chapter and last two chapters, the book does dig into fascinating history, that of cDc and a number of other groups, and into the conferences and other events that made them famous, at least in IT circles. It seems that cDc members mostly straddled the boundary, some working with government and industry in a "white hat hacker" rôle (breaking in to show how it is done and to advise on how to prevent future intrusions), and some feeding hardware and software to what I prefer to call the cracking community, the black hats.

I was puzzled by the "save the world" bit in the subtitle, until I read the last two chapters and saw their connection to the first chapter. An early member of cDc was Robert "Beto" O'Rourke (AKA Psychedelic Warlord), who had left the group after around a decade and gone into politics. You may remember him from the Presidential primaries. He hasn't been named yet, but during the Biden campaign last year, Beto was to be Biden's front man for disarming the American people. Whether that makes you love him or hate him depends on your own political leanings.

It became clear that the book is more properly viewed as campaign material for the future political aspirations of Beto O'Rourke. It opens and closes with fund-raising being carried out on his behalf by a prominent member of cDc, and ends with a long musing on his prospects in future (and now, present) administrations and Presidential ambitions.

The history is interesting. The politics, not so much. For that reason, I can't recommend the book.

How real is dark energy?

kw: cosmological musings, dark energy, spectroscopy, universe evolution

I approach cosmology from a recreational perspective. I was introduced to extremely basic astronomy and cosmology during early primary education at a private school that followed the Classical model. But for a third-grader, a basic introduction to the Big Bang—early enough that Fred Hoyle's contention on behalf of a Steady State universe was still well regarded by many—was about as far as that instruction got. It piqued my interest, and I have enjoyed amateur astronomy, and also followed cosmology, sporadically and from a distance, ever since.

The apparent discovery of cosmological acceleration and "dark energy" just over twenty years ago got my attention. Over the past two decades I have pondered numerous aspects of cosmology, and while I still have my wits about me, it is time to record a few ideas. Allow me to state my bias at the outset: I think the analyses so far performed are incomplete, and that eventually the Cosmological Constant will be returned to zero, from the present hypothesis that it is either -1 or -0.3, depending on the units chosen by various authors.

I collected my thoughts on the matter and wrote this list of discussion topics. I don't plan to discuss each topic in detail, and not in this order. But the first item on the list is a good place to begin.

Photon "Experience"

Albert Einstein began by imagining he could follow a beam of light in a rail car. From the speculations that followed, he applied appropriate mathematical treatments to derive the theory of Special Relativity.

With a much more modest goal, I began by considering what it would be like to "be" a photon. What does a photon experience? From our point of view, a photon is emitted, typically by an accelerating charged particle (I include quantum transitions as "acceleration"), it then travels some distance before being absorbed, either by being converted to heat energy or by causing a quantum transition in an electron orbital. I will take advantage of my experience as a spectroscopist, primarily of near-to-medium infrared (NIR and MIR), but also plenty of visible and near-ultraviolet (V and NUV) spectra, and even some time spent working with vacuum UV or far UV (FUV).

What is the photon's point of view? If we imagine a photon as having sufficient awareness to "experience" anything, what does it experience? Let us first consider emission by a quantum transition, such as an electron of a hydrogen atom in the first excited state, dropping to the ground state. The energy of the photon is 10.2 eV, and it has a nominal wavelength in FUV of 121.6 nm. This is the Lyman-alpha (Lyα) transition. As a spectroscopist I primarily worked with cesium. Considering its ground state of five filled shells plus one s-electron as a lower-energy "virtual hydrogen atom", the first-level-to-ground transition energy is 1.39 eV, with a NIR wavelength of 895 nm. The higher-energy transitions of cesium's outer electron to ground have wavelengths in the visible spectrum, with the strongest being a bright green 540 nm.

I'll analyze the "experience" of a 540 nm photon. Although we tend to think of photon emission as instantaneous, it is more reasonable to consider that it occurs in a tiny slice of time. How tiny? The travel time at c across one wavelength at 540 nm is 1.8x10^-15 s, or 1.8 femtoseconds (fs). If the photon is to "experience" its creation, it must think very fast because it has only a fs or two of "assembly time" before it begins its journey.

Skipping over the journey for the moment, it is reasonable to assume that "disassembly" occurs on a similar time scale of 1-2 fs. Now, as to the journey itself, what might the photon experience? Special relativity dictates that time dilation at velocity c is infinite; from the photon's point of view, the duration of the journey is precisely zero, and it experiences nothing!

Thus we can say that the "life experience" of a photon consists of at most 1-2 fs of assembly (birth?) followed immediately by at most 1-2 fs of disassembly (dissolution). Whether it is consumed in pushing an electron into a higher orbital, or exciting vibrational states in a molecule, which then turn into phonons and heat things up a tad, the photon itself experiences nothing whatever on its journey, whether the distance is a micron or a gigaparsec.

This in itself is quite tangential to cosmology. However, as a concept, wherever it might prove useful, I'll refer back to it.

Cosmological Red Shift

Note: For calculations of the age of the universe at different red shift I used calculators provided by NED at CalTech. NED is the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database.

The first date of interest to a visual observer is the formation of the first stars, which ionized the hydrogen and helium filling the young universe so that light could travel with little absorption. This date is widely considered to be about 400 My (0.4 Gyr, or 2.9% of current age) after the Big Bang, and if any light from this era is observable, its red shift ought to be about z=11.3

The second date of interest is at the completion of ionization by the first stars, now being formed into galaxies, at about 1Gy (7.3%), at a red shift of z=5.7.

The studies of supernovae used to winkle out the Cosmological Constant, and thus Dark Energy, have typically been undertaken between 0.1<z<1.0 (as compared to supernovae closer than z=0.1). This corresponds to ages between 5.87 Gyr (43%) and 12.4 Gyr (90%).

Mechanism of a Type Ia Supernova

This is relevant at this point, because so much hinges on the peak brightness of these phenomena.

The two principal mechanisms that produce supernovae are core collapse and thermal runaway. Core collapse supernovae may have spectra that contain hydrogen lines, meaning the star exploded before running out of hydrogen; these are Type II. There are several subtypes, but they don't pertain to this discussion, and there is a wide variation in their peak luminosity. If a core collapse occurs after the hydrogen is exhausted, no hydrogen spectral lines will be seen; such supernovae are Type I. These also have a few subtypes, which don't concern us.

A supernova that contains no hydrogen lines in its spectrum, and also has a strong line of singly ionized silicon (615 nm), is interpreted as a thermal runaway supernova of Type Ia. What is thermal runaway?

The basic mechanism starts with a white dwarf. This is what remains after a main sequence star with an initial mass less than 8 times that of the Sun (M*<8M☉) has used up all its fuel. The time this takes varies depending on the mass of the star. The initial mass is called its "Zero-age mass", setting zero at the point hydrogen fusion begins. 

This chart shows the time, in billions of years, that a star spends on the Main Sequence, fusing hydrogen exclusively, until it begins to fuse helium in its core, at which time it "leaves the Main Sequence" and grows to be a Red Giant. The data for this chart came from one of many reports about computer modeling of stellar evolution.

Depending on the star's mass, it takes between a few million years and half a billion years for a red giant to complete helium fusion, at which point it will erupt in a gentler way than a supernova, "whooshing" away up to half its mass or even more (which often becomes a planetary nebula), and then it shrinks into a white dwarf. A new-born white dwarf is actually rather blue, with a temperature of around 100,000K.

The blue line tracks stars of similar composition to the Sun, but a little less initial helium (parameter "y"). The green line tracks stars with very low amounts of "metals", by which an astronomer means all elements heavier than helium. The symbol for metallicity is "z" (don't confuse this with z, for redshift), and for the Sun it is about 1%, called "hi" in this chart. The green and violet lines are for z=0.00001, or 0.001%, which would represent the second generation of stars in the early universe. The first generation had a metallicity of zero, and behaved very differently from stars with even a few parts per million of "metals"; for one thing, they couldn't really get fusion going until their mass exceeded 50-100 solar masses, and they then burned very brightly and used up all their fuel in just a few million years. At that point they exploded as a supernova (I don't know what type). That explosion synthesized elements of the entire periodic table in a very short time, so the first generation of stars seeded the universe with elements that let all succeeding generations of stars "work" the way stars now operate. Over time, supernovae of types I, II and III added more and more metals, so that five billion years ago when our Sun was formed, that part of the galaxy had a metallicity of about 1%.

I am interested in the formation of the earliest white dwarfs. These would have been produced from middleweight stars, with mass between 4 and 8 solar masses (M☉). Their main sequence "dwell time" would be about 100 million years for those near 4 M☉, and just 10-20 million years for the heaviest stars. Just as the main sequence dwell time is much shorter for more massive stars, so is the period of helium burning. While the red giant that the Sun becomes will spend perhaps half a billion years burning helium, a star 6-8 times as massive will burn through all its helium in a million years or so, and become a white dwarf soon thereafter ("soon" meaning probably less than a million years). When we're looking back to a time before the universe's age was about 6 billion years, a few million one way or another is negligible.

What is the composition of such a white dwarf (WD hereafter)? Their basic composition is carbon and oxygen, formed by helium fusion. In the heaviest "middleweights", a little fusion of the C and O can occur, yielding magnesium (C+C→Mg) and silicon (C+O→Si). In the earliest WD's we would not expect other elements in more than trace amounts, but in later ones, minor element abundance will be similar to that of the original star.

Now we are ready to talk mechanisms. When the Sun becomes a WD, it will have a mass of about 60% of its present mass. In the late stages of being a red giant it will expel the rest of the mass in a big "whoosh". Heavier stars expel a larger proportion, and no WD gets formed with more than about 1.4 M☉. This is because the only thing keeping a WD from collapsing into a neutron star or black hole is electron degeneracy, a quantum-mechanical effect. The 1.4 M☉ limit, first calculated by Chandrasekhar, and named for him, is the limit of the strength of degeneracy. This is the key to the fixed value of the luminosity of a Type Ia supernova.

Once a WD forms, if it is isolated, it remains forever, slowly cooling to a black dwarf (which takes a few trillion years). But many stars are members of a doublet. The companion star of the WD can do several things to add mass to it, and once its mass exceeds the Chandrasekhar Limit, it will collapse, from the core first: Beginning at the core, rapid deflagration occurs and soon consumes the entire star. The detonation outshines a typical galaxy and can be seen across the visible universe. That is a Type Ia supernova.

There are two principal ways a companion star might add mass to a WD.

1. The companion will itself eventually become a red giant. If the orbit with the WD is small enough, material from the giant will be swept onto the WD. This can go on until the WD detonates, incidentally giving the companion a "kick" that sends it careening away at a good fraction of the speed of light.
2. The companion may not push enough mass to the WD to make it detonate. Instead, when it begins its late stage "whoosh", some of the cloud thus released can stay behind, and friction will result, such that the WD and the fading red giant, on the way to becoming a WD itself, spiral toward one another. In time they will merge, combining their masses into one larger WD. It is very likely that this combined WD will have a mass greater than 1.4 M☉, and it may even approach 2.8 M☉ if both stars' initial mass exceeded 6 M☉. The new WD doesn't even settle down, but detonates right away. 

Interestingly, all the literature I have read indicates that the second mechanism is apparently much more common than the first. Perhaps only 5% of Type Ia supernovae occur by the first mechanism. That presents a problem, because we now have a 2:1 range of "mass detonated", which ought to have a big influence on the peak luminosity of the supernova.

If that were all there is to it, I could say with confidence that the spread in luminosity is too great for these supernovae to be a useful "standard candle." However, the studies that led to the discovery of apparent cosmological acceleration, and later researchers seeking to confirm it, have another ace up their sleeve. They use spectroscopic criteria to distinguish different subtypes of Type Ia. If they aren't fooling themselves with circular reasoning (and I do not claim they are), the selected supernovae do seem to exhibit extra dimming with distance, consistent with the acceleration hypothesis.

For example, this figure from a short publication by the Dark Energy Survey shows the effect. The authors used spectroscopy to identify more than 250 supernovae with redshift between 0.1 and 1.0 (1.4 Gyr ago to 7.9 Gyr ago), shown by the red symbols. They used the same criteria to gather a sample of similar size of more recent supernovae, shown by the yellow symbols.

They normalized the data to the hypothetical model with acceleration, so their hypothesis follows the horizontal line in the lower diagram. The lower, dashed blue line shows where they would expect these data to fall if there were no acceleration and the universe were flat.

Faced with a chart like this, I have to accept the hypothesis, don't I? Not necessarily. The article has a comprehensive, but exceedingly compressed, discussion of the computational methods used to correct for intergalactic extinction (dimming of the light by gas and dust 'way out there'), for example. They may have corrected for the effect I am soon to discuss, but I could not determine if this were so. I also have a point to discuss relating to the composition of WD's.

I am quite impressed by the tightness of the error bars, a result of the selection criteria, considering that the pre-selection luminosity data must have had a scatter exceeding 2:1, for reasons noted a few paragraphs above.

White Dwarf Composition

The initial counter-idea I had, nearly 20 years ago, was, "Does the metallicity of the star that formed the WD have any effect on the actual value of the Chandrasekhar Limit for that particular WD?" Secondarily, does the composition modify the rate of deflagration, and thus the peak luminosity?

I don't have the mathematical or computation tools to delve into this directly. Perhaps someone will do so, or maybe someone has and I haven't seen the literature. However, I'll ask the questions in another way, and leave it as something for future resolution: "For a white dwarf with a mass just below the nominal Chandrasekhar Limit, and a metallicity very near zero, perhaps no more than a few ppm, will its diameter differ from that of a WD of the same mass but metallicity near 1%?" Similarly, "Will the exact value of the Chandrasekhar Limit differ between the two WD's?"

Either effect introduces systematic error. However, metallicity ought to affect the spectroscopy, so perhaps it has been accounted for, wittingly or not.

Density of Earlier Universe

In the second section above, I wrote that the lookback time represented by a redshift z=1 is 7.9 Gyr, when the universe's age was 5.87 Gyr, about 43% of its current age, here considered to be 13.77 Gyr. A simplistic understanding of the distances represented by redshift, based on neither acceleration nor deceleration, is that the light reaching us from the early universe has traveled one billion light years per gigayear, so the radius the observable universe would have been 43% of the present value at z=1. The cube of (5.87/13.77) is 0.077. Inverting this, the density of the intergalactic medium at z=1 then would be 12.9 times as great as it is now.

Things aren't that simple. The cosmological calculators I've been using for these figurations use the Friedmann equations to factor in the effects of the cosmological constant and general relativity, such that the "distance" light has traveled since the big bang isn't 13.77 billion light years (GLy), but about 46.1 GLy. The "extra" 33 GLy is from cosmological expansion of space, which carried the light along with it. According to the Friedmann equations, the lookback distance to z=1 is 11.05 GLy, which means the distance light came to reach that point was 35.05 GLy, or 76% of the full distance. The cube of (35.05/46.1) is 0.440; inverting this yields 2.275. If these are the right figures, the universe was only a little more than twice as dense then, compared to now.

So, which is it? The Friedmann equations are used in the calculation of 13.77 Gyr as the "age" of the big bang, and they have built into them the cosmological constant and are thus are based on the existence of dark energy. Here the reasoning does seem circular. Again, I'll put that notion on hold until I learn more.

The fact remains that the density of the universe about 8 billion years ago was between about 2.3 and 13 times the present value.

That is not all. While the Milky Way is thought to have formed within 100 million years after the big bang, and many other large galaxies also, other galaxies are of more recent vintage, some as recent as half a billion years. What proportion of the primordial gas that now makes up the stars—and the supernova-processed material of the interstellar medium and intergalactic medium—had been gathered into galaxies in the first 6 billion years after the big bang? Half of it? 80%? . . . 20%? I have not seen any well-supported estimates. Galaxy formation is written about as a continuous process. If the most recent "new" galaxy has an age of 500 million years, there are others, not yet discerned, of a wide span of ages.

The universe of between 4 and 8 billion years ago contained intergalactic material that has since been swept into galaxies and used to form newer stars. Our Sun, of age about 5 Gyrs, was probably formed mainly from material that had been in the Milky Way almost from the beginning, but was more recently-gained material also included? It it likely.

Interstellar Extinction and Intergalactic Extinction

In astronomical terms, "extinction" is nothing like biological extinction. It refers to the dimming of the light by absorption as it passes through gas and dust between the stars and, for anything outside the Milky Way, between the galaxies. When measuring the brightnesses of stars we actually have to correct for atmospheric extinction also, for telescopes on Earth. Space telescopes, of course, are above the atmosphere, which removes this complication. But the effect of the atmosphere is a familiar starting point toward understanding how gas and dust in space affects starlight.

The clean air of a cloudless day scatters more than ¼ of sunlight before it reaches the surface near the Equator, and even more at other latitudes. The scattered light is the blue sky we see, because the scattering is more efficient for bluer light. Thus, at the equator direct sunlight, which began at the top of the atmosphere with an intensity represented by the Solar Constant of about 1,370 W/m², has an intensity of about 1,000 W/m² when it hits a beach in western Ecuador. The other 370 Watts has been scattered such that half goes up and half goes down, which means the sky brightness has an intensity of 185 W/m². At the latitude where I live, near 40° north, photovoltaic solar panel systems are designed for peak insolation of about 700 W/m².

If there is any dust in the air, it absorbs more of the light, sometimes nearly all of it. Scattering by dust is also more efficient for bluer light, but the spectral function is not as steep as it is for clear-gas scattering (Rayleigh scattering). We have all seen a sunset on a windy day with very dramatic colors because of dust in the air; we can look right at the deep red Sun without harm.

There is a lot of dust in the interstellar medium within the Milky Way. That is why galactic surveys are undertaken far from the trace of the Milky Way on the sky. Most of the intergalactic medium is thought to be gas, with much less dust.

If the air in the sky above that beach in Ecuador didn't decrease in pressure with altitude, the depth of the atmosphere would be about 7.8 km (4.8 miles). That is sufficient to scatter away 27% of the sunlight by Rayleigh scattering. However, the primary gas in space is molecular hydrogen, not nitrogen. The Rayleigh scattering cross section of nitrogen is reported as about five times that of hydrogen. We may thus determine that, to absorb 27% of incoming sunlight, normalized across the visible spectrum, a thickness of 39 km of hydrogen, at a pressure of 760 Torr, is required. One-third of this depth of gas will absorb 10%, so a base thickness of 13 km is a good starting point for what follows. Even then, the calculations will be pretty rough because I don't want to enter into the complexities of integrating across the spectrum.

The gas "pressure" in interstellar space is quite variable but over long distances it averages out to between 10^-10 and 10^-11 Torr. That is less than a trillionth of the gas density of the atmosphere. Fifty years ago, working as a high-vacuum technician and spectroscopist, I regularly achieved pressures in this range in a stainless steel chamber (with various sorts of viewports) that had a volume of a couple of cubic feet.

The ratio 760 T/10^-11 T is 7.6x10¹³, and this times 13 km is 9.88x10¹⁴ km. That is about 104 light years. This is convenient: interstellar extinction by hydrogen is about 10% per hundred light years, within the Milky Way at least. In areas with pressure closer to 10^-10 T, it is 10% per ten light years.

In intergalactic space the gas density is about a million times less, with a "pressure" of about 10^-17 T. When we look out away from the play of the Milky Way, the thickness of nearby gas may come to several hundred light years, and absorb perhaps half the light. Beyond that, each hundred million light years, intergalactic extinction would be about 10%.

Here I have to step back to say, "Is this reasonable? At redshift distance of z=1, or about 8 GLy (uncorrected by Friedmann equations), is the remaining light really 0.9⁸⁰, or 0.00022?" That is nine magnitudes! I suspect the material I read that compared Rayleigh scattering in hydrogen with other gases had a value too high for hydrogen. If it is even half the value I've used, the base depth of 13 km would instead be 26 km, and intergalactic extinction would be 10% per 200 million light years, leading to extinction of 0.9⁴⁰, or 0.015, which is 4.5 magnitudes, a much more likely value.

This emphasizes that the observed luminosity of distant objects must be properly corrected by a correct model of intergalactic absorption.

This is the final concern I have with the measured luminosities of distant supernovae. If the volume of the universe at z=1 was less than half what it is now, or perhaps much less than that, the density of the intergalactic medium was at least twice as great, and perhaps much more, depending on how much was already sequestered into galaxies.

The reports from the Dark Energy Survey state a scatter in corrected luminosity of their supernovae of about 20%, which is small enough that the effect can be seen. Yet, if the extinction calculations are not taking proper account of the change in density of the intervening gas (and dust) over time, a rather small error in the extinction coefficient, drawn out over billions of light years, makes a large difference.

Conclusion

It takes a long chain of reasoning to draw the conclusion that the Hubble expansion of the universe is accelerating. Is it possible that the cosmologists have thought of absolutely everything that could systematically bias the measurements on which they rely? Everything? Possibly, but it is unlikely.

Here are the factors that may be confusing the matter:

• The peak luminosity of a Type Ia supernova may depend on the metallicity of the original stars, which would have been very low in the early universe.
• Intergalactic extinction is based on the total gas column between the source and the observer. The gas density has changed through time, firstly because of thinning in an expanding universe.
• The gas density has also changed through time as gas was gathered into galaxies, and in particular how rapidly that gas was taken up and thus removed from most sight lines.
• The Friedmann equations used to determine lookback distance depend on the cosmological model, including values of Ω_o, Ω_M, and Ω_vacuum. Unless used with care, calculating distances to use for extinction calculations becomes circular reasoning.

With these in mind, I think it is very, very premature to conclude that cosmological acceleration is real.

Looking back half a generation in Science Fiction

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

The local library, from which I get most of the books I read and review here, has been doing things quite differently since pandemic struck nearly a year ago. Nobody but workers and a few volunteers are allowed in the building, so browsing the New Books section is out. The county library system has a good online catalog, although I could wish for a few more features in their Advanced Search section, but that's a story for another essay. Anyway, once I have located a few books I'd like to read, I can put a Hold on them. What next? Over the past few months they tried an experiment or two in outside pickup. They have settled on this: Once the books have been taken from the shelves, the library sends an email and/or a text message; I then drive to the library parking lot, where a row of spaces are marked with numbers and instructions; I call the library desk to tell them my name and space number, and open the trunk; finally a masked worker brings the book(s) out to put into the trunk. I wonder when we'll return to in-building browsing…

In the Advanced Search section I was trying to find the newest Nebula Awards volume. The Nebula folks (Science Fiction [and Fantasy] Writers of America, SFWA) permit the editor to modify the volume's title each year, so it's harder to find than one might imagine. As I sit here, it occurs to me I could find the book in Amazon (which has very robust searching), so I have the correct title. Anyway, I wound up putting a Hold on Nebula Awards Showcase 2005: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America®, edited by Jack Dann (SFWA formerly didn't include the words "and Fantasy"). So reading it turned into a blast from the past. Heck, in 15 years, I've slept a few times, so even the stories I'd read before were practically new to me.

About a quarter of any Nebula volume consists of essays, including a "year in review" or something similar, and a brief bio of any newly-awarded Grand Master; in 2005 the Grand Master was awarded to Robert Silverberg, and his story "Sundance" places an American Indian on a far planet, helping carry out extermination on the seemingly cattle-like "eaters" there. He descends into a fugue because he thinks they may be smarter than he was told, and that he is participating in genocide, such as that perpetrated against his ancestors. At story's end, the reality of his experience is in question.

I was quite taken by "Knapsack Poems" by Eleanor Arnason, in which the central figures are "persons" with multiple bodies. They are not telepathically connected, as we find in many multi-body stories. The narrator uses "I" and "me" to refer to the ensemble, and the scenes of argumentation amongst his/her/itself (these folks have male, female, and neuter sexes) is quite fascinating. Following Campbell's Dictum, the narrator is presented with a potentially fatal dilemma, and must solve it with grace and finality. A lovely story.

A Nebula volume also contains a few poems by winners of the Rhysling Award (named for the blind poet in "The Green Hills of Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein). I looked through the selections quickly, hoping some would have pleasing scansion. Sadly, not a one. I don't require rhyme in a poem, but I do require rhythm, or I don't count it poetry. Only a rare talent such as Ogden Nash can produce rhyming lines without the rhythm, that nonetheless evoke the thrill of good poetry. In general, if you can't sing it, I don't call it a poem.

Comparing the stories and their general tone with those in the recent volume I reviewed nearly three weeks ago, there was more hope and optimism in 2005 than there was in 2019 and early 2020. Dystopian fiction wasn't nearly so common. Considering that the stories for the 2021 volumes of all the "Best of" series, including Nebula, were written during the Pandemic Year (let's hope it isn't the first of several!), I expect a great divide, between stories of dystopian hopelessness and "so-what-we-are-still-alive-in-spite-of-it-all" optimism. The latter ones will interest me the most.

I now return to reading mostly nonfiction, for a half year or so.

Why the Democratic Party needs illegal immigrants

kw: politics, abortion, analytical projects

I have been mulling over a curious phenomenon for about twenty years, since I began to gather threads of this idea after the amnesty for illegal immigrants enacted in 1986. At that time there were three million of them. In the past 34 years a further 11-12 million people have entered the U.S. illegally. That is the curious phenomenon: The Democratic Party has increasingly pushed for a further amnesty, and many, perhaps most of the party's national leaders even call for open borders. Open borders would eliminate national sovereignty! I wondered, "Why?"

I think I know why. The population of Democrats and potential Democrats (children born to parents who are Democrats) has not been growing as rapidly as the population of Republicans and potential Republicans. As I figure it, the primary reason behind that trend is legalized abortion, which began January 22, 1973. From that date until the end of 2001, plus the first ten months of 2002, the number of abortions reported to the CDC was a bit over 34.4 million. That is the number of persons who would nearly all be living today, and eligible to vote.

34.4 million. That is more than 10% of the current U.S. population. That is a lot of "missing Americans," who simply faded into the ashcan of history (This does not take account of any children that could have been born to babies aborted before about 1984, some of whom would also be eligible to vote this year).

Who obtained those abortions? For the entire period of about 47 years, Republicans and some Democrats who are people of faith have decried the Roe vs Wade decision, and legislatures in "red states" have enacted numerous laws to restrict abortions. All that time, Democrats, and a very few Republicans, have loudly supported "abortion on demand", and have either fought restrictive legislation or initiated lawsuits to get such laws struck down.

How many of the women who chose abortion were Democrats and how many were Republican? It is inconceivable that there is an exact 50:50 split. Millions of the women who chose abortion were Republicans, but even more were Democrats, but what is the proportion? It is certain that Democrats were the majority, whether it is a slender majority or a great majority. Republican women have the hurdle of belonging to a political party that is vocally anti-abortion, and usually also belonging to a religious establishment that opposes abortion. Fewer Democrats are religious, so in general there is no such hurdle for a Democratic woman.

Based upon my experience with many people of all political stripes, I think the proportion is between 60:40 and 55:45. It is quite possible that the real ratio is even more skewed, but being a conservative, I'll be conservative in my estimates. This table of "missing" voters shows the implications.

The column "Difference" shows the impact. I estimate that if there had been hardly any abortions, legal or otherwise, since 1973, the number of Democrats eligible to vote would be between 19 million and 20.7 million more than there are today, while the number of such Republicans would be between 13.8 million and 15.5 million. Many "purple states" would have become solidly "blue," as would the country as a whole.

The apparent "loss" of between 3.4 million and almost 7 million Democrat voters over the past forty years is tough to make up. Thus the need for illegal immigrants. It is no surprise that in border states, and to some extent in the tier of "next-to-border" states, illegal immigrants can get more "services" than retired veterans. It is a national shame that homeless veterans are living in the streets not far from nice houses filled with criminals (that's what illegal aliens are).

The cynical Democrats look upon the twelve million illegals as a gold mine. It is worth spending tons of money on them, all the while reminding them that it is the Democrats who are "caring" for them. Whenever they get amnesty, and voting rights soon after that, they will remember. If just five million of them begin to consistently vote Democratic, there will be little chance for anything resembling bipartisan politics to be found anywhere in this country. They will be free to enact whatever they want without effective opposition. This alone has a greater potential to bring an end to liberal Democracy in America than any other factor.

Literature's mainstream – muddier than usual

 kw: book reviews, fiction, short stories, collections

The themes of the stories in The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld, seem to be two: Dystopia and Slice-of-Life Emptiness. Frequently a story encompasses both. Is this a reflection of the way society is viewed through the mainstream media, mainstream entertainment, and mainstream politics (not those of the recent President, but of his opponents)? Pessimism rules the party called Democratic, and it rules American culture.

One story in this volume that bucks the trend is "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It is a slightly fictionalized account of the life of Jeanne Louise Calment, from the time a lawyer proposed a "reverse mortgage" on her apartment, when she was 90, until she outlived him about thirty years later; she lived to age 122. There is another fictionalized life story, "Liberté" by Scott Nadelson. It isn't nearly so pleasing; the author gets more into motives and musings he could not have known.

Far too many of the stories relate someone going nowhere fast, or almost nowhere, and usually working their way down the ladder of success, if they were anywhere on it to begin with.

As usual in such a collection, the writing skill of the authors is excellent. However, it seems they have little to work with. In a very different genre, I read a story long ago of two people sent to contact an alien race, learn their language, and attempt to set up friendly relations. One is a skilled linguist, and goes after the language at a great rate, but at the end of the story is more of a prisoner, like a talented zoo animal. The other, who learns few words, does what he can to improve the skills and livelihood of the people around him, and becomes their trusted friend (this mirrors one of the side plots of The Ugly American by Burdick and Lederer, without the heavy political overtones). At the end, when the fellow who succeeded in gaining the trust of the aliens is asked about the difference, he says, "You have to have something to say."

This generation of writers doesn't have much to say, but they can say it very, very well.

Science Fiction on the rise

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

Considering quantity alone, the increasing number of "Best Of" collections indicates that science fiction is getting more popular. I care most about the quality, from two angles. Firstly, when I finish a story, am I glad I read it? Secondly, the quality of the writing, as writing (analogous to the art critic who said, "I can't paint, but I can recognize good painting.") In both ways, it seems the field is improving.

A comparatively new series is represented by The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke. The 2020 volume is the fifth of the series. One could say that my familiarity with no more than a handful of the authors is another indication that the genre is doing well. The new writers, many of them young, have new ideas aplenty. I was happy to see a lot more stories with believable space aliens and fewer of the navel-gazing, introspective sort that was popular for far too long. I did notice that a significant majority (16 of 28 stories) had a dystopian or post-apocalyptic milieu. I think the younger generation or two are being handed a lot of bad news, so that informs their interest; fortunately, they are coming up with very creative means of coping.

I took brief notes on all the stories, but I think I'll focus on just a few:

• The Little Shepherdess by Gwyneth Jones – A novel take on harvesting seabed nodules. The "industrial solution" is to use big trawls to scrape up everything. A creature is found that gathers the nodules into little piles, for her own purposes. The "bottom up" solution is to have many low-impact harvesters gather the piles; a robbed pile prompts the "shepherdess" to rebuild the pile. Ms Jones has been around a while, and has good ideas well presented.
• The River of Blood and Wine by Kali Wallace – Colonizing a planet is like colonizing a continent. If there are inhabitants, tragedy ensues. In this story, the colonizers pull back before genocide results, not without protest, because, of course, whatever choice is made, someone's ox is gored. This author's deft touch keeps a strong subject from getting either explosive or syrupy. The author is new to me, as are both of those who follow.
• On the Shores of Ligeia by Carolyn Ives Gilman – Citizen science comes to the rescue when a remotely-operated "rover" on Titan gets stuck. I find the idea resembles the one in "Little Shepherdess", in that a lot of little things do a better job than one big thing.
• Give the Family my Love by A.T. Greenblatt – Here I wrote one line: "Apotheosis of a bookworm". I really identify with someone who, like Jorge Luis Borges, thinks that heaven must resemble a library, and a near-infinite library certainly resembles heaven.

Some short stories are exploratory, a way of answering, "If such-and-so were different…" One of the stories (Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds, another familiar name), gradually sneaks up on the reader with the idea, "What if all the insects died?" Another (The Work of Wolves by Tegan Moore) posits animal helpers with EI, Enhanced Intelligence. If the enhancements are partly external, how small can such a critter be?

Only Old Media by Annalee Newitz opened on such a gross note that I skipped to the next story after the first paragraph. I knew I wouldn't finish it thinking, "I'm glad I read that."

The volume is a good use of nearly 600 pages.