An outside-in panorama

kw: photographs, panoramas

This looks like a straight wall, but it is not. For some time I have wondered if it is possible to make a panoramic photo of the outside of a curved object, so when I saw this wall in a parking lot I gave it a try.

The wall curves 90°. I took three photos, the middle one looking inward at 45° and the right one at 90°. So I moved a distance much farther than the wall goes. The stitcher in Windows Live Photo Gallery did a fine job of making the wall look straight. This could also be applied to subjects like the bark of a tree; you could, with 8 photos, take a panorama that wraps right around the tree. The key is to be close enough to your subject that no background objects are photographed, as they have the potential to confuse the stitcher.

The naturalist's dilemma

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, population genetics

A young scientist's education is primarily an exercise in becoming expert at reductionism. This is a necessity. The skills of keenly observing the minutiae of nature are a necessary foundation for all scientific inquiry. Most youngsters like to take things apart, and a good gift for an inquisitive pre-teen is a mechanical alarm clock, to be taken apart, and reassembled. Getting it back together so it works properly is a satisfying accomplishment.

But reductionism is just the beginning of education. In the natural world, there are few things you can disassemble, then reassemble properly. This goes without saying for living things and living systems (ecologies), but even many inorganic systems simply can't be reproduced by human art, and this will always be so.

As a scientist matures, his or her view must broaden, and the syntheses that result from scientific study must become more comprehensive. It is one thing to study one class of enzymes, or some few species of fishes, or the minerals that compose certain ore bodies. It is quite another to fit the enzymes into a metabolism, the fish into an ecology, or the ore body into the creation of a continental province.

I have always considered naturalists to be the most fortunate scientists. Just to be any good at their trade, they need the gifts of a good mind and a humble attitude. They gain the pleasure of a more comprehensive education than most. Then they are privileged to work in a variety of interesting, if not always pleasant, surroundings. Books I read by naturalists frequently mention the beauties of the environments that they study. Finally, they gather and synthesize the data and information needed to learn what is really going on and how we humans fit into nature; for it is certain that we remain a part of the natural world, for all our efforts to insulate ourselves from it.

John and Mary Theberge are a naturalist couple, scientists whose honeymoon now spans a generation or more. How fortunate to do work you love, with the person you love! They say it takes five to ten years to become an expert in one's field. It takes another ten or twenty to begin to see "the big picture". The Theberges have had thirty years of observing natural systems, and in my view, are accomplished experts in the ecological view of Earth. Their new book The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Exploration Into How Life Organizes and Supports Itself presents the best of their work as a series of studies in population dynamics.

The book is a bit bigger than most, and it took me a while to get through. It rewards careful reading. The population of cells that produce a tissue, the tissues that make up the body of a plant or animal, the assemblage of living things that blanket a mountain side or jungle landscape, and domain after domain of such assemblages that become the ecology of a continent, all have to solve the same problem: capture energy so as to carry out the processes of life and avoid extinction or extermination.

In one statement that resonates with me, the authors write, "[P]opulations are either regulated directly by the environment, or indirectly by internal mechanisms that the environment triggers. In either case, population control is necessity for biological order on Earth." Loss of population control leads to cancer in a body, to decimation of a landscape by a weed species, or to the growing environmental disaster we call modern civilization.

We humans like to think we control nature, but are not under nature's control. If our population were merely the nearly seven billion of us, that would be one thing. But worldwide, we tend about 1.4 billion cattle; that is just one "domestic" species. Those cattle outweigh humanity by 30%. Around the world, we also tend sheep, llamas, elephants, emus, salmon and catfish, which probably weigh in at a similar total mass to the cattle.

The authors take a little more moderate view of climate warming than many. They are alarmed by it, but not alarmist about it. It is, as they state, the largest-scale experiment yet to be conducted by the human race. It will certainly lead to many fascinating studies of how populations around the globe respond to a climatic shift. For example, migrating bird species have had several thousand years to get used to the current interglacial warm period. How soon will they adapt to the new climate?

I wonder how many generations it took the Red Knot (a bird that flies from South America to the Arctic, with a stopover along the Mid-Atlantic shore) to adapt to the great shift in biome productivity that occurred 11,000 years ago when the latest ice age switched off in less than a century? Will they have to adapt even more quickly to the northward biome shift we are forcing right now? Will the Horseshoe Crabs, upon whose eggs the Red Knots feed, change the beaches on which they spawn? In a generation or two, we will know, but we cannot predict what will happen, or how.

For most of the history of Earth, the changes have been more gradual. One sea turtle (I think it is the Loggerhead) has had 100 million years to adapt to the widening Atlantic, and now swims half an ocean to lay eggs on a small cluster of mid-Atlantic islands. When that turtle species first evolved, the swim was just a few miles.

In chapter after chapter, recounting the stories of their charges, the authors help us understand the dilemmas all creatures face to send forth their offspring, hostages to an uncertain future. The Ptarmigan of the title lives on the edge of freezing, and the mother birds make constantly shifting choices for their chicks. The chicks are precocious, and must get their own food from birth. But in a cold springtime, they chill quickly, and the mother calls them to brood under her warm feathers. The authors undertook a study to determine just how close the chicks come to freezing, and how close they come to starving as the weather cools. They found there is still a bit of margin in favor of the chicks; the mother birds don't nest so far north that they'd be unable to raise their chicks.

Another point of interest arose when they studied coop-raised Rock Ptarmigans, a control group for their work. Wild Ptarmigans don't have a gall bladder. Autopsy studies of coop-raised birds showed that they did have gall bladders. It is an example of epigenetics, in this case an organ that is potentially there, but is not grown unless the environment demands it. There was a lot more fat in the coop-raised birds' diet than a wild bird gets, so they grew a gall bladder to cope with the different diet. Epigenetics explains a lot of seemingly hidden features that are expressed only when an environmental shift requires their expression. It is a side point to this book's thesis, but is an area of much study as scientists seek to refine our understanding of natural selection.

In one chapter, the authors ask, what about Humans? Are we still subject to nature's laws? We most certainly are. While we have tried to produce a global perpetual motion machine, we will never be able to extract energy that simply isn't there. What is the world's carrying capacity for Homo sapiens? It is likely that we have already exceeded it. Food may not be the crucial factor. I have been predicting for several years that we will soon enter an era of Water Wars.

Liberal democratic political philosophy is based on the principle, the greatest good for the greatest number. Right now, there is great good for a relative few, a growing "middle class" that is at least comfortable, but an even more rapidly growing underclass for whom the term "misery index" is a sad irony. We measure their penury, but do little about it. There is a reason that a few of the "thirdest" of third world countries have life expectancies not much over forty years. Nature cannot be denied. If the numbers of humans continues to increase, the proportion of them that live with little misery will decrease, perhaps to zero. We are the first species with the cleverness to get ourselves into such a dilemma. Will we have the intelligence to get ourselves out? If we don't, nature will do it for us, but at a much greater cost in human suffering.

I cannot end without recalling the many more lyrical portions of the book. The authors have been privileged to work in some very beautiful landscapes, which typically means landscapes with little human imprint. There aren't many left. I pray that the remaining years of humanity's residence on Earth will be marked by increasingly wise use of the resources nature provides, and of the ecological services (such as fresh water and oxygen) that we consume. For a truly livable Earth, we must find a way to achieve a smaller "human footprint", so we can not only live well without ruining all of Earth, but have the opportunity to experience some of the lovely, wild places that have been wisely kept from being "improved" by short-sighted human ambition.

Growing up fast

kw: observations, culture, personal growth

Every generation, people say, "Kids sure grow up fast these days." Sometimes it is even true.

This forenoon I listened to a dialog on the radio, about guns and firearm education. One man spoke of growing up in Virginia. He had sex education in sixth grade, and a "hunter safety" class in seventh grade. His colleague expressed her amazement that 13-year-old kids were taught to handle guns, since they can't legally buy them prior to age 18. The man defended the practice, saying that many parents took their kids, both boys and girls, out shooting from pretty early ages. I agree with this: if there is a gun in the house, and if a youngster is strong enough to pull the trigger, he or she ought to be taught how to safely handle the firearm. In many places I've lived, there are firearms in at least half the homes.

In this picture taken about 1932, my father and his favorite cousin were photographed by the cousin's father just as they were going out into the field to do some "plinking" (shooting at tin cans), probably under the father's supervision, but maybe not. My father was ten years old at the time, and his cousin, holding the pistol, was nine.

This was the same year my father first drove a car, with some help from his dad. Kids (at least boys) his age were expected to be able to take a turn with the tractor. With that in mind, I began to teach my son to drive when he was twelve. We have only stick shift autos, and it takes a bit longer to learn to use them. But mainly, I wanted him to have a few years of experience before he took the official driver training course and got his license. I think it worked out; he is a good driver (now 22).

What I would cut if I were cutting

kw: rocks, minerals, lapidary

It has been a couple decades since I did any stone cutting. During the few years that I was a lapidary hobbyist, I soon found that I got the most satisfaction from cutting cabochons from precious opal.

Common opal is a whitish variety of hydrated silica (quartz plus water) with a very smooth texture. Precious opal, or fire opal, blazes with any or all colors of the spectrum. The difference is internal structure.

All opal is composed of spheres of silica, usually smaller than a micron in size, with a combination of amorphous silica and water in the spaces between the spheres. Two characteristics make common opal "common". Firstly, the spheres are larger and have a range of sizes. By "larger" I mean large enough that, no matter how they are packed, they will not diffract light efficiently; this typically means larger than one micron in average diameter. Secondly, the spheres, particularly because they are not uniform in size, are packed in a rather amorphous of chaotic arrangement. For this reason, common opal is rather soft, typically about 5.5 on the Moh's scale.

If the spheres are more uniform in size, they are likely to pack well into a closest-packing arrangement (like a well-stacked pyramid of oranges at the market). Their average size will then determine how much of the spectrum they diffract into the blazing colors of fire opal. Larger spheres diffract mainly red and yellow light, making red or orange fire opal. Smaller spheres diffract more green and blue light, while still diffracting some of the longer (redder) wavelengths. The smallest spheres produce mainly blue-green and green appearing stones.

When I was cutting opals, I found that they varied in durability. Not so much due to varying hardness, but because of how well the water content was bound in the stone. I learned to ask the dealer how stable the material was. An honest dealer will tell you, and point out which stones have to be kept in water to retain their fire, and which can be cut into a cabochon that will last the longest. Of course, the latter will cost more. Like a lot of rockhounds, I wound up with a jar of water containing nice looking opal rough sitting on my mantel, stones I'll never be able to cut, but they do look pretty.

During those years, I got to know one man who didn't own any lapidary equipment, but was cutting fine stones that won awards at rock shows. He said he'd buy a likely-looking piece of rough and grind it on the sidewalk next to his front step. If the fiery layer was buried too deep in the "common" portion of the stone, he'd pay the dealer to cut some of it off first with a diamond saw. At home he would simply hold the stone by hand and grind it on the wet pavement. He had one section of the pavement that was well worn from years of grinding, which was now his "fine grind" section. A light touch helped also, to achieve a nearly smooth finish. When he was satisfied, he'd go back to the dealer and pay to have the stone polished on a rouge-loaded felt wheel. The cost wasn't much, because a good polish took just a few minutes to produce.

Even the hardest opal is no harder than Moh's 6.5, so it cuts a lot easier than agate or jasper. I found I could make a finished opal cabochon in a quarter of the time it took me to finish a jasper "cab". If I ever return to the lapidary hobby, rather than collecting just those pre-finished items called "mineral specimens", opal will be first on my list of materials to cut.

Calico capers

kw: photographs, animals

We recently got a calico kitten who is now 15 weeks old. I'd come to understand a long time ago that the calico coat was four colors, but all the recent material I have read says that a calico is a three-color piebald, the piebald meaning the white background. But I am not clear whether "three-color" means in addition to the white or not.

The tiger striping on the head, neck and side show that she has a tabby parent. If I count the gray tabby stripes, she really does have four colors: white, brown, near-black and gray. I guess a non-tabby calico is white, brown and black only. In the Wikipedia articles Tortoiseshell Cat and Calico Cats, the brown color is called either gold or ginger. The first article states that calico cats are tortoiseshell cats with a lot of white (piebald), while the latter article states that they are not tortoiseshells, but are a distinct variety with slightly different genetics.

The genes for piebalding apparently do not reside on X chromosomes, because both male and female cats can be piebald; that is how you get black-and-white or brown-and-white cats of either sex. The extra X chromosome in females can carry a different color than the other. The mosaic X-inactivation pattern determines which portions of the coat will be either black or brown, and the piebalding gene(s) determine how much white there is. See the next pic:

This shot, while she was playing with a piece of packing foam, shows the entirely white belly and inside the legs. I have looked at a lot of pictures of calico cats, and I have yet to see one with much color on the belly. That indicates to me that piebalding is a bottom-to-top phenomenon, but I have not read anything about this.

As interesting as the coat color is, I am more continually enthralled by the playfulness of this kitten. She has long legs and big eyes, so I expect a rather large adult cat in a few months. My wife would prefer a smaller cat; our last cat never weighed more than five pounds (2.2 kg). This kitty already weighs four pounds (1.8 kg). Large or small, we're glad that so far, she is an affectionate cat. I take my blood pressure at home from time to time, and since we got her, it has dropped by about 15 points.

When will US population reach one billion?

kw: analysis, population

World population reached one billion shortly after 1800 AD, probably in 1804. It took just over 120 years to double to two billion, by about 1927. The next doubling was quicker, 47 years to 1974. The eight billion point, another doubling, will probably occur in 12-14 more years, for a doubling time of 48-50 years. The current rate of average world population growth is about 1.25% per year, which implies a doubling every 56 years. But there are pockets of higher growth, such as a major portion of Africa, where the yearly population growth is 2% or greater, just as there is a major portion of Europe in which population is actually declining. That's the world.

Let's consider the U.S., where I live. When I was born, the population was about 145 million. Today it is more than double that, just under 310 million. But population growth rates have declined since the founding of the Republic in a stepwise fashion:

• 1800-1860, 3.05%/yr
• 1860-1910, 2.26%/yr
• 1910-1960, 1.31%/yr
• 1960-2010, 1.09%/yr
  

The current rate is about 0.98%/yr. Will this rate continue to fall? It must, sooner or later. If social measures do not induce people to reduce their family size, the environmental arsenal of disease and starvation will eventually do so. We have all benefited from improved medical care and improved farm yields for about a century. It is time to return the favor, or our needs will finally outstrip the best our technology can do.

I found this graphic in the Wikipedia article Demographics of the United States. Go there to see an active graphic that shows the population pyramid for each year from 1950 to 2010 (you'll need to scroll a bit).


The 2010 graphic shows a mature population, for which each 5-year cohort is about the same size (~20.5 million), until nearly age 60, then there is a steady decline to about age 90, with a small number of extreme elderly to age 100+. The raw shape of that pyramid indicates that the U.S. population is near stability. However, until the death rate matches the rate of birth plus immigration (minus emigration), the whole pyramid will slowly fatten.

Do you think the U.S. population will ever reach one billion? Can we feed that many? We are feeding that many now, because we export so much food. We'd have to reduce our exports dramatically, absent a significant improvement in farming technology. That may happen, but don't bet your life on it.

At the present growth rate of 0.98%/yr, in 100 years, U.S. population would grow by a factor of 2.65, to 820 million, and it would reach one billion in about the year 2130 (in 120 years). Can we push that date out to 200 years away, to 2210? We can, by immediately reducing population growth in the U.S. to 0.59%/yr. Ask your friendly local politician just how drastic that is! If we could somehow reduce population growth to 0.12%/yr, the one-billion point would be staved off by one thousand years. The trouble is, immigration is presently about 0.33%/yr, so if we could achieve genuine zero population growth among U.S. residents, we'd still have to reduce immigration to about a third of its present level. Your local politician won't even answer that one!

The fact is, we're in for hard times no matter what we do. Everyone with any power (and most of everyone else) is addicted to growth. We need a growing economy to avoid recession, so they say. But keeping this planet a habitable place will, sooner or later, require permanent recession.

The UN and other "world bodies" project that world population will peak in fifty years or less and then decline or hold steady. They are probably right, but it is quite unknown whether all the world's families can be convinced to confine their reproduction to two children per couple (or one per wife/husband in polygamous families). If they cannot, total world population will grow beyond whatever "sustainable" bounds the "world bodies" promote, then be held in check by starvation and disease.

A significant portion of the human race has had a hundred-year run of great prosperity. It can't last.

Some say, If only

kw: opinion, popular culture

Some say, "If only..." but I say it is too silly for words. As I write this The Bachelorette 6 is showing on the local ABC affiliate, and my wife has been watching on and off. I looked in about an hour ago, for five minutes, which just about doubled the total amount of time I've watched either The Bachelor or The Bachelorette.

With a bit of Googling, I determined that one couple of seventeen has actually married and stayed together long enough to produce a couple of children. They say they are happy. I wish them well. For most of the rest, the TV exposure helped them land hot jobs, so they got some benefit from the experience, not just what they expected going in.

The fact is, folks, building a relationship is hard work. Building one that will last a lifetime of sharing child-rearing, juggling jobs and trying to snatch some leisure time now and again, and aging together, takes the most work of all, and guess what? The work doesn't half begin until after the wedding. For those who don't bother with a wedding, face it, you're doomed. You've already failed the first important test of lifetime compatibility: trusting another person enough to commit the rest of your life to him or her.

Building that kind of trust takes time. I like long courtships. Six months or a year just starts to scratch the surface. And the other secret is this: the real courtship begins after the wedding also. You will spend the rest of your life courting each other, if you're smart!

The overheated, camera-laden atmosphere of the TV shows makes any semblance of real courtship impossible. The ordinary course of dating is bad enough, but ABC has managed to produce something even worse. All the stage-managing and coaching that go into making the show work as a show simply ensure that, if it results in a newly-engaged couple, the two of them are in for some shocks as they find out just how their new love interest actually operates without all the interference. Sixteen out of seventeen found the differences were too great.

Y'know, thinking about it, spending time with a dozen or more beauties in exotic locales would be a lot of fun. Choosing whom to send home wouldn't even be too hard at first. Even with everyone on their best behavior, someone will slip up, and Boom! out they go. Being a control freak, though, I'd be sure to send away anyone who had any gumption, any girl with the temerity to challenge a whim of mine. I am soon to celebrate 35 years of marriage to a woman who stands up to me a lot. And I need it. I even (this takes time) thank her for her help; she has helped me avoid a number of bad decisions. I'm sure glad I found her. She'd never have survived in a Bachelor setting.

Box of bones or bag of bones

kw: observations, superstition, science, faith

A dozen years ago or more, our son, age six at the time, came running up to me carrying some bones and said, "Look! We found a dinosaur!" The bones were rather small, still articulated, and composed most of a skeleton of some smallish animal. I asked him and his friends to see if they could find the rest of the skeleton, and they did. Once they brought the skull, it was clear that this was the remains of a house cat. He still has the bones in a box in the garage, with other boxes containing a dried-out snake we found once, and a dozen skulls from mice, voles, shrews, birds, and one squirrel. He has spent a little time comparing them, but he didn't turn out to be very scientifically inclined, so his budding naturalist's collection never went further.

In some cultures, a use would have been found for the bones, besides being objects of study. Some of them might have been incorporated into an amulet, some might have been burned in a ritual, and some might have been ground up to be used as medicine. Of course a domestic cat doesn't carry much magical weight, not like a wolf or a wildcat.

One definition of superstition is "A belief, not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, that future events may be influenced by one's behavior in some magical or mystical way." I contend that the words "human reason" do not belong in this definition, because magical beliefs are definitely based on reason. It is just that the reasoning is founded on false premises. So, even though I come from a strong scientific background, I understand that those who try to influence events using means we call "superstitious" are behaving very rationally in their own system of understanding.

There are two sets of premises that underlie our interest in influencing or controlling our future. Both have this underlying premise: that to influence events one must influence the causes of events. The world view we (scientifically oriented) call superstitious holds that those causes are personalities, whether gods or demons or jinni, who may be appealed to or appeased or even controlled by the use of objects of power or by rituals. The scientific world view holds that events transpire according to natural laws, not based on nonhuman personalities, and that by study we may learn the workings of natural laws, so as to predict, or sometimes to influence events by taking advantage of the workings of natural laws.

For example, it was long thought that a projectile such as an arrow or a thrown ball was carried through the air by an invisible spirit or angel. If you wanted your arrow or ball to hit its target, you had to appeal to that spirit to help you. Those who happened to be more skilled at aiming or throwing accurately were thought to have the favor of the spirits.

It required years of experimentation and study by investigators such as Galileo to determine that a projectile that began with a specific speed in a specific direction always followed the same path. Eventually, those observations led to the sciences of ballistics and orbital mechanics, which can predict with great accuracy the path of a moving object, as long as the forces which act upon it are known.

What does this have to do with bones? Let us consider the realm of medicine, a much more murky science. Four times out of five, if you get ill, you will get well if you do nothing about it. That fifth time could be a killer! In the days before antibiotics and other modern medical techniques, that was it. You survived a few illnesses and injuries, until one came along that killed you. Consider the poor medicine man or herbalist. One-fifth of one's patients are going to die no matter what he or she does. However, it pays (literally) to be an active practitioner, because four out of five times you get to take credit for saving a life.

If I could be right four out of five times in the stock market, I'd become filthy rich! If I try some herbal remedy on all my patients, and it works 80% of the time, I already have that much credit with my "customers". If I get lucky a few times and an influential person or two recovers under my "care", my reputation grows. But that is not all there is to it.

People were keen observers since before they were people (meaning that apes are pretty good observers themselves). There is a great stock of lore from pre-"modern" times about medical methods and materials that do genuinely help. Their use is based on reason, acting with what nature provided. However, the notion that spirits are also involved has led to some seemingly weird practices. That 80% rule means that some things you do, simply by chance, are going to seem extra-helpful. That includes prayers, rituals and incantations. And, of course, objects deemed to have power.

An amulet is a collection of things that the maker believes have power or influence with spirits. While all kinds of objects might be included, bones are a big factor here. A talon from an eagle, a claw from a bear or big cat, or the entire paw of a smaller cat (such as an ocelot), might be included. I am not sure if anyone would have been interested in the backbone of the house cat in my garage. But the skull, maybe. It just takes one extra-skillful bloke carrying a cat skull in a bag, and pretty soon lots of young folks want one for themselves.

How many people still carry a genuine rabbit's foot, for luck? I was given one when I was a child, but I don't recall what happened to it. I wasn't very lucky whether I carried it or not, so the result of my human reason was to not burden my pocket with it! Not too many years later, becoming a scientist in high school and then college, I shed a lot of my superstitions. By the time my young son found the cat skeleton, I had no fear of handling bones, other than matters of simple hygiene. I had instead an interest in how it all went together, an interest that I, at least in part, imparted to my son.

Now, with all that said, how can I call myself a Christian? Is my faith not just another superstition? What can I base it on, since faith is not scientifically testable? Here we enter the realm of the inner man. I studied all sciences in college, not just my majors (chemistry, physics and geology). I paid particular attention to psychology and anthropology. I've always been rather poor at relationships, so I wanted to understand people better.

It was during those years that Western psychology shifted from dualism to monism, from the mind versus body of Descartes to the body-mind of the modern synthesis. I came to understand the currently reigning paradigm, that the mind is simply software running on the "hardware", AKA wetware, of the human brain and endocrine system. My present profession is information science, so I understand this all too well. I also recognize its weakness.

The big controversy of today is the origin of consciousness. Why do I feel like an "I"? It is trite to say we don't understand this. Of course not, that is why there is any controversy. Will we ever? Will we ever be able to say, "This collection of neurons runs the 'I' program"? or "This kind of electrical pattern represents the sense of self"? Maybe, but people of faith such as myself consider an additional thing, that the human soul and spirit are real things, psychological and spiritual organs, if you will, that yield experiences that the body-mind is too limited to endow.

I care for no ritual or liturgy. My relationship with God does not depend on them. I do not, as the Catholics do, depend on having genuine relics (bones of saints) in an altar to make it somehow a holy place; there is no bag of bones that interests me. I found many years ago that I can experience the divine presence in my daily life, in a way that has come to seem quite natural and normal. I forget how completely at odds it is with my life before.

I do pray. I do call upon God. I expect an answer when I call. I understand that frequently the answer will be "No" or "Not yet." I have learned a little about how to relate to God, which has also helped me relate to people. This is important to me. I understand, all too clearly, that there is no science of God, that there cannot be, because, as Isaiah wrote, "You are a God who hides himself." I didn't find God by scientific means, and nobody does. Yet I find my faith entirely reasonable. Spiritual exercise is as reliable as dropping a stone. The stone falls to the earth because of gravity, and to call upon God brings his presence because he is living. Peter said to Jesus, "You are the son of the living God." It is based on my own inner experiences that I can say, "Amen."

Deep conclusions from simple questions

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, physics

Little toys like this were popular when I was a youngster, and similar toys still are. Suppose you opened a matchbox toy box and a full-size truck popped out? This is analogous to what happens every time a photon is emitted from any light source, such as an incandescent bulb or LED. Light we can see has a wavelength around half a micron (or about a 2-millionth of a meter). The atoms that release photons of this light are much smaller, by a factor of several thousand. The photons are actually emitted by the electrons in these atoms, and an electron itself is a great deal smaller than that, but we don't know quite how small. The classical radius of an electron is about 3x10-¹⁵m, or 20,000 to 30,000 times smaller than the atom in which it (usually) resides, but quantum mechanically, it has a radius of exactly zero!

All this underlies the title of Marcus Chown's fascinating book The Matchbox that Ate a Forty-ton Truck: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe. Thinking about it, I found it curious that the same principle operates on a scale we can see, except we aren't able to visibly see the actor: The little radio antenna in your bedroom or kitchen has an antenna not much bigger than your hand, but when you are receiving an AM station (in the US at least), the radio-frequency photons it absorbs by the trillions to convey the program have a wavelength between 1/6 and 1/2 km. The station at 1210 that I often listen to has a wavelength of 248m, which is 2,500 times the size of the antenna in my kitchen clock-radio. This is similar to the ratio between the size of a photon of blue light to that of an atom of tungsten.

The book is in three sections, one on atoms, one on stars, and one on the universe, in a total of eleven chapters. A number of the points the author makes relate to randomness, specifically the "uncaused action" of random choice in quantum events. For example, when you look out a window and also see your face being partly reflected, it means that about a twentieth of the photons that leave your face are being reflected back to you, while the rest pass through the window. Of course, someone standing outside and seeing you, also sees the landscape behind them, by the one-twentieth of "landscape" photons moving toward your window that are reflected outward. How does a photon choose whether to bounce or pass through? Nobody knows. We have math to describe what happens, but how? Ha!

In a later chapter, the richness and complexity of the material universe is shown to have its source in such random choices. Just the fact of a window pane doubles the possible places a photon can choose to go. But there is a subtler effect. Consider a photon zipping along, that passes "near" something ("near" meaning at a distance that is not too large compared to its own wavelength). It is likely to be deflected, or diffracted, but by an amount that cannot be predicted. You can predict that some percentage of the photons taking that path will be deflected through an angle greater than one degree, but which photon takes which angle? No can figure.

Now let us suppose that photon is not scheduled to pass "near" anything for the next five seconds (it can go a long way in that time). There is still some finite probability that it will deflect by a degree or more. Maybe that probability is a few trillionths of a percent, but it is not zero. That photon could be miles (it just doesn't feel right to say "kilometers") from the nearest atom of matter, and still "feel" the tendency to diffract.

Now, consider that every photon in the universe is subject to such diffraction effects arising from every object in the universe. The fact that our telescopes show us objects millions and billions of light years away tells us that these effects are unimaginably small, but we have the math to predict exactly how small!

How does this affect the richness of everyday objects? Louis de Broglie found that one out. Quantum choices affect all particles, not just photons. Electrons have a wave nature, but so do photons and even baseballs and trucks in motion on the highway. It is just that things big enough for us to see have very, very small wavelengths, because wavelength is inversely related to kinetic energy. The proportionality constant is 1,240 eV-nm; a wavelength of 1nm is borne by, not just a particle, but any object with a kinetic energy of 1,240 eV, such as an X-ray photon, or a baseball moving so slowly that it would take it six hours to move a millimeter. How about a nearly-visible wavelength, like 1mm, or a million nm? Energy goes down by one million, velocity goes down by a factor of 1,000, and 6,000 hours to go one millimeter? That's almost a year.

Thus, while matter particles can also make quantum choices, it happens on a scale to subtle for us to see in everyday life. But the fact is, huge numbers of quantum choices have been made, because the universe is more complex now than it was a long time ago. The chapter in question goes into quite a discussion of this, which I can't hope to summarize in a blog post.

Every point in the first ten chapters is backed up by solid science. Things may not suit our intuition, but then, our intuition is based on problems bigger than whether one-twentieth of the light bounces off a sheet of glass. Our ancestors had to learn to avoid being eaten by predators or trampled by large herbivores, and to catch a few of them in the process, to stay living. But in the last chapter, there is no science to go on, and we are as free to speculate as the author is, or indeed anyone.

You can buy this bumper sticker from Uncle Shlomo if you like. It is the title of Chapter 11, which discurses on Fermi's most famous question: when his colleagues were talking about whether there were Martians or other aliens anywhere, Enrico Fermi considered a while, then blurted out, "Where is everybody?"

Maybe there's a big "Earth is full" sign (or a bunch of them) at the boundary of the Solar System. Maybe there's no sign, and nobody to read it. Maybe the nearest aliens live too far away for detectable radio signals to reach us, or they aren't trying anyway. Could we detect old episodes of I Love Lucy from a distance of even a parsec or two? (That's 3.25-6.5 l-y.) Will a technology every be developed, by anybody, that would allow some kind of space probe to travel between the stars, even at 1% of the speed of light? (A mere 3,000 km/s, or 100 times Earth's orbital velocity.) That's a kinetic energy of half a million kWh per baseball, or 2.5 million kWh/kg. The daily energy budget of a small city would be needed to boost a 1kg object to 0.01c. Then it needs to use similar amounts of energy to stop when it gets somewhere interesting. Making a replica of itself is easy compared with making the energy source for its replica to go on its way.

I take it as a given that not many civilizations (probably none) would consider such space probes as worth the trouble. That leaves us with no visitors. So how about those old radio and TV programs? Will we ever detect an alien All in the Family? I have supported SETI through SETI@home on and off for years. They face great odds, because they aren't looking for inadvertent broadcasts; they are looking for purposeful signals, attempts to communicate. While that narrows the search to some "magic" regions that would be likely targets of such attempts, it also narrows the field of possible communicators to those who are willing to support gigawatt transmitters pointed everywhere. Will alien environmentalists try to block operation of giant transmitters in their courts? That's a lot of "wasted" energy!

The great thing about a book like this is the myriad of spinoff ideas. My posts over the past few days were triggered either by things I read in the book or by articles I read to find backup for some of the author's points. Just consider the triple-alpha process (which I didn't post on yet). It is the reason you and I exist, for it is absolutely required for carbon to be created in stars.

This nuclear process depends on three things: the isotope ⁸Be having a half life near 10^-16s (rather than 10^-24s), ¹²C having a metastable resonance at 7.65MeV, and ¹⁶O having such a resonance at a higher energy (it is in fact 9.64 MeV). The 7.65MeV resonance was predicted by Fred Hoyle based on the fact of his own existence, and such was his stature that a team of scientists spent ten days to find out if that resonance existed. It does. It remains the only successful prediction of the Weak Anthropic Principle. If its energy were much lower or much higher, there would be lots less carbon in the universe. If the oxygen resonance were at a lower energy, there'd be less carbon also, but if it were much greater, there'd be too little oxygen to form silicate-based planets such as Earth.

I do believe I'll simply close before another digression occurs to me. Great book!

Fine day for an outing, so went to Hagley

kw: photographs, museums

Today was the first Dollar Thursday at the Hagley Museum and Powder Yard, so I took the day off and my wife and I spent a nice afternoon along the Brandywine. Thursdays in July and August, admission is just $1. You may consider this a plug for them.

The powder mills, build throughout the 1800s, face the creek. The rock walls are three feet thick on three sides, but the roof and creek-facing wall were light wood construction, so if the gunpowder being milled or mixed were to explode, the force would be directed in a "safer" direction. From time to time a careless or unlucky worker would "cross the river".

There were few accidents, but one explosion in 1920, not in a mill but in a packing house, was felt as far as Philadelphia, 20 miles away. About 20 tons of powder went up in that one. It is the DuPont company's experience with powder making that underlies their strong commitment to safety. The company began winding down its explosives businesses after World War II, and sold the last one in the 1990s.

These old structures are just history now. Ferns grow in the mortar between the stones and mature trees are growing all around, where none would have been allowed when the mills were active. It makes for a somewhat unrealistic setting, but an enjoyable one.

They point every which way

kw: musings, physics, electrons

This is my 1,000^th post! Recent reading about the behavior of electrons in atoms reminded me of work I did many years ago (as well as triggering my prior post). My first paying job (besides newspaperboy) was in spectroscopy. Though I worked primarily in infrared spectroscopy of molecular species, I did some visible and UV work, and got to know that field a little. Years before I took the relevant physics courses, I became familiar with the S P D F designations for the various series of atomic spectral lines.

It is amazing what early spectroscopy workers were able to discern about electron orbitals from the lines they examined on photographic film. SPDF is the earliest indication of substructure in the electron "orbits". These four letters refer to the terms "sharp", "principle", "diffuse", and "fundamental", as explained by Grant R. Fowles in Introduction to Modern Optics (1989):

The sharp and diffuse series are so named because of the appearance of the spectral lines.

The principal series is the most intense in emission...

...the frequecies [ratios] of the lines of this [fundamental] series are very nearly the same as those of the corresponding series in hydrogen. This is the reason for the name "fundamental."

[The bracketed words are mine.]

This image, from the article "Light and the Modern Atom" at Chemistry Land, shows the original designations of four series of spectral lines as seen in the absorption spectrum of sodium at high resolution. The two dark bands in the warmish yellow portion of the spectrum, one of which is designated as an example of a Diffuse line, are the diagnostic sodium D lines near 589 nm wavelength.

What is really happening here? The four spectroscopic series have a relationship to the quantized energy levels surrounding the nucleus, which allow electrons to have certain electrical and angular energies, but not others. There are shells and subshells in which electrons can reside, both in spectroscopic terms and as more and more electrons are gathered by heavier and heavier nuclei. However, the spectroscopic energy levels do not correspond exactly to electron subshell orbitals, so more modern nomenclature relies on quantum numbers. Shells are numbered n=1,2,3… and subshells as l=0,1,2… and there are other quantum numbers. Detailed quantum designations are a side issue to the point of this post, so please refer to the Wikipedia article Electron Configuration for a thorough discussion.

Now that we can use computers to calculate the probabilities of electron locations quickly, and to visualize them, I find the images we can create show most compellingly what the spectra are telling us. For example, the S series is sharp because the subshell that generates it is the simplest. It has spherical symmetry in all cases, and can be occupied by either one or two electrons, no more. The D series is more diffuse (and indeed, P and F lines are also broader than S lines) because the shell has a substructure, in which pairs of electrons occupy a shape that is distinguished not only by distance from the nucleus, but angle also. A few images will illustrate.

These images of S orbitals (quantum number l=0; that is an "ell") for the L, M, and N shells (n=2,3,4) show the spheres cut in half so you can see the inner shells of alternating phase that nestle inside. The boundary of the colored area is not a hard edge. It represents the 3-D contour of 90% probability that the electron is "located" within it. For any S subshell, there is both an inner sphere and an outer sphere that together define the 90% probability region. However, any electron can actually be anywhere in space with some probability, but that statistic is very close to zero for much larger distances or for locations much closer to the nucleus.

A characteristic of the other subshells that allures me is that a filled subshell has spherical symmetry. A particular orbital within such a subshell is, however, very far from spherically symmetric.

This illustration of the orbital shapes for the P subshell (l=1) shows the shapes of the 90% probability regions of these orbitals for L, M, and N shells. There are no P orbitals for the K shell (n=1). If we call this set of three orbitals a, b and c, then when we work through the periodic table and the P subshell is being filled, one electron goes into each of a, b and c, before a second electron is added to any of the three.

I recall my awe when a physics instructor went through the math to demonstrate that the actual probabilities for the filled P shell of neon actually added up to a purely spherically symmetric entity, with none of the bumps we might expect from seeing the component orbitals. He wryly pointed out that while "it may be shown" that any filled subshell is the same, he personally didn't know anybody who could actually work the math to perform the demonstration.

The orbitals of a D subshell, for M, N and O shells (n = 3,4,5) are more complex, with more lobes. The plethora of ways a D subshell could relate to the ground state of an atom explains the diffuse nature of the spectral lines. The broad D lines of sodium, under very high resolution study, are seen to consist of a veritable forest of lines. The energy splitting that underlies this line broadening is due to quantum effects caused by the other electrons in an atom with D subshells.

Finally, the F orbitals, here just shown for an N shell (n = 4), are dauntingly complex. So, why are the F lines in the spectrum above not even more diffuse than the D lines? It is mainly because the physical size of the F orbital greatly reduces the quantum effects of the other electrons, so that though the F lines have very complex structure, it all fits into a narrower spectral band. This also leads to a simple relationship between the wavelengths (or energies) of a series of F lines, that led to their being called "fundamental", as mentioned in the quote above. By the way, after F, the rather faint spectroscopic series just continue through the alphabet (G, H, etc.) but I've never seen any attempt to illustrate orbital shapes.

I wonder if anyone living can really add up the seven sets of probabilities analytically, to demonstrate that a filled F subshell has spherical symmetry, without any lumps? I know that computer solutions of the appropriate Schrödinger wave equation can be performed numerically, but that is almost cheating.

An atom of platinum (Z=78), with four completely filled shells and the first three subshells of shell 5 filled, is like a Matrushka doll: thirteen concentric spherical regions of high probability for locating any of the 78 electrons. This very high symmetry results in platinum having a less complex spectrum than elements 77 (iridium) or 79 (gold), though all of them have more complex spectra than much less massive elements such as iron.

Superconductors everywhere

kw: observations, physics

I read in an article an analogy to explain the orbital restrictions of electrons in atoms. The electron's "orbit" was compared to an organ pipe, which makes a particular tone because of a standing wave within it. Just as a standing wave doesn't "go anywhere", the electron forms a standing wave and doesn't go anywhere. Thus, it does not experience acceleration. This is important because a charged particle that experiences acceleration must emit radiation. Our entire electrical economy is built on this principle!

The electron, then, does not orbit the nucleus, strictly speaking, but forms a standing wave and remains stable. However, the source of the analogy, the organ pipe, is not stable. One must supply energy because the tone it emits removes energy from the system. There is, however, a standing wave system, which can be the size of an organ pipe, that does not emit any energy and is stable. That is a superconducting magnet. One uses conventional leads to feed current into a superconducting magnet to build up its magnetic field, then adds a superconducting link to short across the leads' terminals and switches out the leads. This system is stable, emits no radiation, and maintains the magnetic field until a resisting link is introduced to absorb the energy. Both charging and discharging a superconducting magnet must be done carefully, because some of them store the energy of a few sticks of dynamite.

Compare with a hydrogen atom. Its single electron is a stable standing wave that emits no radiation and maintains a magnetic field. A lone atom of hydrogen is a tiny magnet (but hydrogen normally exists in H2 molecules that pair up like two magnets stuck together, leaving no residual field). In this atomic magnet, the electron is effectively a superconductor! Superconductivity is a quantum property of electrons in their stable orbitals. It is fundamentally different from Cooper pair-induced superconductivity.

If this kind of quantum superconductivity could be expanded to large scales, room-temperature (and above) superconducting devices could become a reality. Ferromagnetism is one expression of intrinsic electron magnetic orientation, but is inefficient, because the electron that produces the magnetic field needs at least 25 "friends" to support the magnetic asymmetry required.

Good enough for me

kw: opinion, technology

Just about a year ago, in an article for Wired, Robert Capps discussed "the good enuf rvlutn", and why cheap was beating out superior on many fronts. This is nothing new; it has always been the case. Not only does the Flip outsell Sony camcorders that will record movies in HD, and the Kindle outsell some E-book readers with glitzier features:

• Chevy outsells Cadillac, Ford outsells Mercury and Lincoln, and Camry outsells Lexus, in spite of the fact that each pair is produced by the same manufacturer.
• Lower- and mid-level point-and-shoot digital cameras will always outsell more advanced models, and in fact many people with 5+Mpx cameras in their cell phones have "better" cameras sitting at home collecting dust.
• Beer outsells wine.

In each case, the product that provides something a customer wants, and which passes a foggily defined "good as it needs to be" threshold, will succeed wildly, compared to "the best there is." It explains why the VW Bug (the old one) was the best-selling car to young Baby Boomers in the 1960s and early '70s: it got you from point A to point B and left you money in your wallet for something besides transportation.

It is said that MP3 files sound terrible compared to a CD. I guess I don't have a very good ear (in spite of the fact that I have been a professional musician): I can't tell the difference once the quality level reaches 128 whatever-it-is (Kbps?). So I have a ton of old (1930s and earlier) songs on MP3 to satisfy my Western Swing appetite, and a smaller amount of newer stuff in the Country/Family genre.

All this does not totally take account of the appeal of mid-level stuff, however. A significant factor is focus. I once belonged to a very active lapidary club. Most of the members were retirees, and their passion was spending frequent weekends in the Mojave Desert, collecting large amounts of "agates" (lotsa rocks get called that which are only agates in the loosest sense), and cutting-n-grinding cabochons or faceted stones to show off to each other, or at regional shows. Many of these folks had two expensive things: A motor home or camper truck, and a gem cutting workstation. At a time when I could barely afford a $2 lunch more than every other week, I spent $100 on a Diamond Demon (this is forty years ago). Many of them had spent $500 and more. But none of us had a really good camera, coffee maker, or pair of hiking boots. Oh, yeah; we did all have quite good rock hammers and chisels!

Most people don't really care to have the best possible example of everything. They want things that meet their needs and desires, affordably, and only splurge on a very few things. There will always be a market for products that support the focus of people with a dedicated passion, but the market for everyone else, for "good enough" products, will always be larger by far.

Go jump off a building for fun and profit

kw: opinion, entertainment

There are very few TV shows that I watch with any regularity. One I took a liking for in its first season was Wipeout on ABC. Its new season has just begun, and it is being followed by another "win a million" sort of show, titled Downfall.

I've only seen the trailers, which indicate that you start with a lot of cool stuff on a conveyor belt at the edge of a skyscraper, and you have to answer trivia questions. Wrong answer? Something is shot off the roof to crash below. Too many wrong answers? You are also shot off (wearing a harness so you can scream all you want, but don't hit bottom).

I decline to watch Downfall. The premise is terminally silly. Now, Wipeout I like!

Half a review for half a book

kw: book reviews, fantasy, thrillers, religion

A family friend who knows I've read The Da Vinci Code said I should read Map of Bones by James Rollins. Well, I tried, I really did, but about halfway through I jumped to the last twenty or so pages to read the denouement, and to be done with it. Too much bloodshed, much too improbable in its hairbreadth escapes, and too sadistic.

It is in the genre made popular by The Da Vinci Code: an ancient conspiracy with roots buried deep in the Vatican, makes a discovery that threatens the world order, and tries to consolidate their power using it; an elite force of spies and "special operatives" defeats them in a thrilling climax.

In this case, the action centers on bones purported to belong to the Magi, the visitors "from the East" who brought gifts to the baby Jesus, and on themes in Christian and pseudo-Christian pagan art (such as labyrinths) which provide clues to an ageless crypt that magically protects its secrets. Nowhere is it explained how the ancients (including Moses) converted gold into an inert white powder (an "m-state metal"; a hoax so far as I can determine) or how they produced the lasers and room-temperature superconducting materials that protect their secrets. By the way, large amounts of m-state metals such as iridium are stated to reside in our brains. Not so.

Along the way, a harmless club of aging aristocrats gets slandered as the origin of some really gruesome monsters (human variety, such as Vlad Tepes, the original Dracula). Surprisingly, this novel has a more sympathetic view of Roman Catholicism than is common among the Da Vinci spinoffs. And, in a common sort of ploy, a few random Bible references are used to blow out of all proportion the historical excesses of some who followed the apostle Thomas and mixed his teachings with gnosticism. Much mischief has been done through the ages by taking verses that seem hard to reconcile and supposing a duality, where God's intention has always been inclusiveness.

Our friend certainly dotes on thrillers. Me? Not so much.

To know the unknowable

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cosmology, philosophy

When I was a geology student in the late 1960s, the environmental movement was gaining traction, and the word "biodegradable" became fashionable. My classmates and I had just learned of the tectonic cycle, the understanding that on a scale of between 50 million and 200 million years, mountains rise, they are eroded to near sea level, all the sediments eventually wind up being subducted by trenches into the upper mantle, and new mountains arise. Somebody said, in a bull session, that there is a lot of waste "out there" that is not biodegradable. Someone else said, "Well, it is mostly geodegradable," to which I added, "and everything else is theodegradable."

Endings get better press than beginnings. A very popular country song of a few years ago crooned, "Let's go out in a blaze of glory," and quoted the proverb, "All good things must end." Just ask Chris Impey. In his book how it ends: from you to the universe (capitalization of the book's cover) he tells us not just that everything ends, but how it does so. Yet in the best tradition of the philosophy of science, you have to know what you have before you can predict where it is going, so much of the book is devoted to exploring what exists. It is a very good survey of the breadth of science as it relates to existence of people, species, planets, stars, galaxies, and universes. The doleful matter of how each might come to an end is nearly swallowed up in the discussions of how they are.

Let's begin with the biggest ending of all: the Universe. Can it end? Not too surprisingly, the jury is still out on that one. Hubble's discovery 80+ years ago that the universe is expanding led to much work (and speculation) about whether the expansion was being brought to a halt by gravity. Visible matter (stars and gas clouds) constitutes only a few percent of the mass needed to halt the expansion at any time. But star movements in galaxies and other lines of evidence indicate that a kind of matter we cannot detect except by its gravity, usually called dark matter, outweighs visible matter by a factor of six or seven. But that still falls short of the mass needed to "close" the universe. That would seem to answer the question negatively: the Universe cannot end; it will expand forever.

But wait, there's more. Just under twenty years ago, accelerated expansion was proffered to explain the unexpected dimness of distant supernovae. This would seem to emphasize the point, but some versions of "cosmic acceleration" postulate a singularity, perhaps one or two billion years from now, when the acceleration rate will rise infinitely (better stated as "without limit"), leading to a "Big Rip", after which spacetime cannot exist, at least not in any form that we can calculate (after all, the theory itself is simply a calculation). Dr. Impey follows his discussion of the big rip with a reference to data that it probably can't be so. Whew! So maybe something can be genuinely eternal after all.

Not so fast. Let us suppose that there is no cosmic acceleration, or that it stays within bounds, so that spacetime expands at some calculable rate, and just keeps doing so. In a few billion years, not much happens, but in a trillion years or so the galaxies have run out of non-star matter (gas and dust) to make new stars, and the oldest stars existing are running out of their own fuel. The lights go out and the universe cools, forever, toward absolute zero. Yet matter itself may also evaporate. In a trillion trillion trillion years (36 zeroes), half of existing matter will have turned into neutrinos and photons; add a few more zeroes and it is effectively all gone. Double the number of zeroes and most black holes will have evaporated via Hawking radiation. Do you dare to double the number of zeroes again? Spacetime may still be expanding, but there is no matter around to impede the passage of photons, most of which have wavelengths measured in billions or trillions of light years. Not too exciting. So photons are apparently eternal. Big whoop!

Well, with that for a backdrop, we can consider items with briefer existences, and more interesting ones. Stars, for example. The biggest stars that can exist burn off their nuclear fuel in a million years or less, briefly forge elements ranging to iron, then blow everything into space as a supernova. That allows planets to form that are made of something other than H+He. The smallest stars that can burn nuclear fuel might last a trillion years, but eventually just fade away as dimming cinders. In between, the Sun and similar stars can cook along for a number of billions of years, then they puff up into red giants and puff away a third of their mass into a planetary nebula before subsiding into white dwarfs, which slowly fade to black (in a few dozen billion years). But in midlife they provide a haven for planets that might harbor life for a while, say one to ten billion years.

But what of life? Earth has been a living planet for about four billion years. The Sun will probably cook all life off the Earth long before becoming a red giant. Theories differ: it may take as little as another half a billion years, or as many as 2-3 billion. Will humanity survive to that point? Here things get interesting. Will our technology allow us to overcome evolution, which so far seems to produce mammal species that last no longer than ten or twenty million years, and tend to average about two million years before going extinct or mutating beyond recognition, becoming a different species? Is there a "technological singularity," as Ray Kurzweil projects, that will make humanity into something different (and possibly part or all machine) within the lifetime of people a little younger than I am? Will these post-human creatures be longer-lived than we?

How long can a human live? Shigechiyo Izumi and Jeanne Calment are the only humans in the modern era who are thought to have lived more than 120 years. Darn few of us live more than 90 years. A few species of bird, turtle, and whale seem to have produced individuals that have lived 150 years or more, but the complex organ systems needed to keep a metazoan animal living are apparently not able to fend off irreparable damage more than 100-200 years.

There are two indicators of general senescence that, if you want to pay for a test or two, will probably simply cause depression. One is the Hayflick limit. Fetal cells in culture divide 40-60 times, then stop, enter senescence, and eventually all die. That 40-60 range is not quite absolute, but covers nearly all of us. Statistical analyses indicate that if nothing else gets you, you'll just wear out at some age between 60 and 120 years. The other test is to get an electron microscopic look at your mitochondria. Mitochondria look like crisp little sausages about two microns long, with baffles inside. They start looking rather ragged in your forties, and get positively snaggly with the passing decades. They are your energy system, and when they fall apart, so does everything else.

The amazing thing is, that we are continually driven to learn such things: the inner workings of mitochondria, the survival of species, the evolution of stellar interiors, and the structures of galaxies and universes. Even the least technical among us are interested in how things work, and indeed, many members of the local Astronomy club are not science majors. Same with the local Lapidary society. Humans are curious, and the best stimulation is to learn things. I read that Robert Feynman said on his deathbed, "I'd hate to die again. It is so boring." We are driven, and that makes us what we are.

Coal burning cars

kw: opinion, technology, environmentalism

In the July 2010 issue of Scientific American, Michael Moyer has written an article that speaks directly to a concern I have long had about electric cars: Where does the electricity come from? The article, on pages 55-56, is titled "The Dirty Truth about Plug-in Hybrids".

To cut to the chase, the amount of benefit, or lack thereof, simply depends on where you live. A plug-in hybrid vehicle is expected to use about half the gasoline used by a first-generation hybrid such as the Toyota Prius or a Honda Civic Hybrid. An all-electric car, of course, burns no gasoline at all. Thus, in most parts of the U.S., an all-electric uses no gasoline, but not all. In New York state, in particular, where 2/3 of the electricity is generated by burning petroleum products similar to gasoline, you may as well be driving a gasoline-burning car.

In most of the rest of the highly-populated, industrial Northeast and in the deep South and upper Midwest, while little or no electricity is generated using petroleum, from half to 75% is generated using coal, making an electric vehicle that plugs in a worse producer of carbon dioxide than a pure hybrid vehicle.

The areas where an electric, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid, will have a benefit in both reducing carbon dioxide and greatly reducing petroleum consumption are those areas that use no petroleum or coal to generate electricity: the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, and Florida. In the lower Midwest and desert Southwest and New England, though a little coal is used, little enough is burned that an electric car is also a benefit there.

Now consider population. The coal-burning areas are mostly high-population areas, and the natural gas-burning (and nuclear-powered) areas are mostly areas of lower population density. The only highly-populated area in which an electric car is a distinct benefit is California.

If you are considering getting a greener car, find out where your electricity comes from. If you are in a coal-burning area, a pure hybrid is probably the best. Otherwise, a "more electric" vehicle just may be the right thing to get.

Planets, planets everywhere

kw: speculation, planets

I read an article in which the author used a chart like this one to argue that many small extrasolar planets are yet to be found. While the conclusion is right, some of the reasoning is flawed.
This chart shows a frequency diagram of the 432 exoplanets so far catalogued, plotted by their line-of-sight masses (mass times the sine of inclination). The "1" bin includes all those with a mass of one Jupiter or less. The strong inflection in the shape of the distribution is said to indicate that the smaller masses are underrepresented. And they are, as we will see.

The appropriate analysis of wide-ranging data is not linear but either logarithmic (power law) or lognormal. The same data, collected into bins with a range of 2:1 in mass, show a more useful picture:
Here, "1" is again "one Jupiter", but the mass range is 0.71-1.41 rather than 0-1. The parenthesis points out that one Earth mass is 0.0031 Jupiter mass; one Mj is 318 Me. Here the sharp inflection to the left of 0.5 Mj also indicates that the mass distribution is artificially cut off at low masses. But now we have the ammunition needed to estimate just how much.

The only stellar system for which we have a reasonably complete catalog of planetary masses is our own. This chart of the distribution of planetary masses is based, not on Mj but on Me, the mass of Earth. Looking closely, we see four pairs:

• Mercury and Mars have very small masses, 0.055 and 0.11 Me.
• Venus and Earth are the second pair: 0.815 and 1 (of course).
• Uranus and Neptune are next, at 14.5 and 17.1 Me, respectively.
• Saturn and Jupiter are the heaviest: 95 and 318 Me.
  

These fit a lognormal distribution with a logmean (base 10) of 0.57 and a logSD of 1.36. The confidence interval about both these parameters is rather large, but I'll use them to produce a fit from which we might learn something useful.

Here a Lognormal distribution with our system's parameters and the exoplanet data are cast in the same coordinates, re-figured so that unit mass is one Earth. The lightest exoplanet on this list (which includes only those found by astrometric means, rather than eclipses) is just under 2 Me. Making the quite unfounded assumption that the larger exoplanets are fairly sampled, I fitted a distribution with the logmean and logSD of the Solar System. This chart tells us that if our own Solar System is at all representative, a complete census of the stars already searched would yield about 4,000 planets, with a statistical peak near 4 Me (3.7).

Is this reasonable? For it to be anywhere close to true, we must also assume that the preponderance of "hot Jupiters" so far found is also due to selection bias, because they are so much easier to find than any other kind. I sure look forward to the first data from the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission (canceled last week by the President, but sure to be reinstated by a future administration).

Old but not obsolete

kw: history, education

Several news items recently discussed the case of thirteen Marines in leadership training who were caught cheating and discharged from the Marines. They had used the prior year's answers to the rally point identifiers in a navigation exercise. While their poor ethics are sufficient to make them unsuitable military leaders, they were also stupid. Any wise instructor will change the test answers from year to year or session to session.

I was intrigued by a point someone made, that they thought the exercise was futile because of modern navigation aids such as GPS. They considered the compass-and-pace methods they were learning were obsolete. Let me simply ask: suppose a low-yield nuclear device is detonated anywhere within a few hundred miles of your position? Do you know the result? Your GPS device will burn out; it is, after all, a very sensitive radio receiver, and the giant electromagnetic pulse from the blast will run right down the antenna and fry the innards. A side note to civilians: three properly placed one-megaton blasts, set off at an altitude of 80+ km, will destroy nearly all the electronics of any kind in the entire United States (lower 48).

So what technological device will still work after a nuclear battlefield attack? A compass (but give it an hour or so for the electromagnetic disturbances to die away). Then those "obsolete" skills learned in leadership training will be your lifeline. And by the way, don't talk to me about "militarily hardened" GPS units. There ain't enough hardening available in a 100-gram package to protect the transistors connected to the antenna. Besides, the attack itself just might blow out some of the satellites that GPS depends on; how hardened are they? Hmmm?

A couple dozen years ago as I was finishing graduate school, my major professor learned that I am an amateur radio operator, and he told this story: He had, two years earlier, been on the Glomar Challenger, the deep-sea drilling ship used for geophysical research. One day, when their "shopping list" was due to be sent to the next port, there was a solar flare. Radio communications on most bands were wiped out, and it was expected that radio disturbances would last a few days.

It so happens that Morse Code communications are about 100 times as "penetrating" as voice communications, and perhaps ten times as penetrating as radioteletype (RTTY), the usual backup. The ship's radio operator could not get through either with voice or RTTY, so he transmitted the information using Morse Code with a hand key, at 20 words per minute or so.

There is nothing like having an "obsolete" skill at your fingertips when the "modern" ones cannot be used.

Physicians, heal thyselves

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, polemics

The first general rule for finding a doctor or lawyer is to pick one who is between 35 and 60 years old. Professionals who are 35 or older have probably already made their worst mistakes, but by the age of 60, many have lost their "fire" and are more likely to be marking time until they can afford to retire (by their own lights).

The second rule is to find a doctor in a social situation and ask, "If you had [whatever], which doctor would you want to treat you?" or "If your child had [whatever], which pediatrician would you choose?" About ten years ago, with very fortuitous timing, a local group published a guide to physicians, which included, for a number of specialties, "Which doctor I would go to". The oncologist suggested by my surgeon is locally considered the best, so this helped me make the decision to have him treat me, rather than going to Fox Chase, a greater distance away. No complaints; I like him a lot, as a physician, not just as a friend.

But getting to the point where he could treat me was another matter. As I have mentioned in the past, I had to be my own doctor to get the cancer treatment I needed. My family physician at the time was not very proactive, and was taking a very slow, measured approach to finding out why I had abdominal pain. One day, after an inconclusive consultation, I asked his office scheduling clerk, "If the Doctor were to send me to a gastroenterologist, whom would he choose?" She told me, and I made my own appointment, then called that clerk to process a referral to him. It saved my life. The GE said I was days from death when he diagnosed my cancer, so I told (not asked) my doctor to get me a surgeon pronto, and went to the emergency room. They put me in the hospice! But they also gave me six days of IV feeding in two days to strengthen me for surgery. On a ward in which every program board had the notice "Comfort", mine read, "Comfort and Feed 3x". Now my GE, whom I still see for periodic colonoscopies, calls me a Trophy.

So my current doctor just turned 60. He is much more proactive, and wants me to get blood pressure medication. I'm amenable, but I decided to try a folk remedy first, and allowed our son to bring home a kitten. Three days after the kitten arrived, I checked my blood pressure. The long-term average for the past few months had been 148/90. The average of the past three measurements (post-kitten) is 132/80. While it doesn't bring me into the 120/75 range my doctor would prefer, it may mean I can use one of the less aggressive medications, with, of course, fewer side effects.

The cancer tale is one of four in which my wife and I have had to intervene in the medical process to get appropriate care. That makes Dr. Richard S. Klein a man after my own heart. It is just the kind of advice he offers in Surviving Your Doctors: Why the Medical System is Dangerous to Your Health and How to Get Through it Alive. The root of his concern is this: At least 100,000 people die every year in the U.S. from medical mistakes. Dr. Klein says this rampant malpractice constitutes a pandemic that is, numerically, equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing nearly every day. A web-based service called HealthGrades contains the claim that the number is actually closer to 200,000 yearly deaths by malpractice. Contrast either figure with 40,000 yearly deaths in auto accidents. Malpractice is the third or fourth leading cause of death.

How are we to avoid becoming a statistic in this race with untimely death? For starters, read this book. It has joined my reference library. Every chapter has, in addition to narrative and stories, particular advice in a certain area. A few themes show up repeatedly:

• Prepare for any doctor visit by writing down everything you are taking, including vitamin supplements and over-the-counter pills; and write all your questions about what's currently bothering you (medically).
• Get very, very good at finding medical information using the Internet, using sources such as MedlinePlus and the NIH and NIMH web sites, plus Drugs.com, which has a great drug interactions checker.
  
• Whenever a nurse shows up with a pill or hypodermic, first ask, "Who is this for?" In a hospital setting, it is surprising how many times Mr. Jones gets an injection or pill intended for Mr. Johnson, or even Mr. Smith. Secondly ask to see the doctor's order, and thirdly ask what this medication is intended to accomplish.
• Always ask what to expect after a medication or procedure, including side effects and expected course of recovery. Very few doctors will bring this up on their own.
• If your doctor won't communicate with you, get another doctor. Any doctor who feels threatened by a patient's knowledge or questions should get out of medicine.

Dr. Klein is an internist, so while he has made his book as comprehensive as possible, he admits he can't cover everything. He recommends, as mentioned, researching anything new by yourself, using both internet resources and asking your doctor more questions, and then even more questions. Your doctor went to school and residency for ten years after finishing high school; drag some of that knowledge out of him or her.

He refers to HealthGrades frequently, so I spent some time at their web site (see link above). Some results are free, such as reports on nursing homes, but in general it costs $13 to get a full report on your doctor, and $18 to get a report on a hospital, for which you first have to pick up to 20 conditions out of a menu of 57, so if you wanted every condition covered, it would cost you $54. However, if I were again faced with choosing a hospital in which to spend a week after having my insides re-plumbed, I'd definitely spend the $36 to get reports on the two in my area that are available to me, and maybe another $18 to get a report on Thos. Jefferson Hospital in Philly for comparison.

Along with the theme of that daily jumbo jet crash (and statements such as "While you read this chapter, five people will die of malpractice"), Dr. Klein has a full chapter on reforming the medical system, in addition to recommendations that appear throughout the book. For example, there is a very strong inclination for doctors to deny ever having made a mistake, probably because their malpractice lawyer has advised them to minimize liability by never admitting wrong. They need to be convinced that correcting a mistake quickly is less costly than going through a malpractice trial (even if they win, as they do 70% of the time). But first a doctor has to admit that a mistake has occurred. A national medical climate that encourages the acknowledgment of mistakes and encourages learning from them is needed. But so is a climate that stops the rampant covering-up for those few physicians who are responsible for the great majority of actual malpractice that occurs. It is a kind of 80-20 rule, or more likely, 90-10: 90% of the malpractice is committed by 10% of the physicians, who need to be "encouraged" to find another line of work.

Since that is very unlikely, taking the proactive steps Dr. Klein recommends will make it more likely that you, the educated client (not patient) of your doctor, a collaborator with your doctor rather than a passive receiver of medical "services", will not just survive, but thrive.