Why are there so many important numbers?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, numbers, short biographies

A subject that is exercising many physicists and cosmologists is why so many peculiar numbers are needed to define the physics of the Universe, and why they are so seemingly unrelated. Even more, some of them, according to the current theories, need to take rather precise values or the Universe cannot exist, or if it can, it cannot support carbon-based life.

For example, the efficiency of conversion of hydrogen to helium in stars like the sun is very nearly 0.007. (A proton weighs 1.00739 AMU, where the C¹² nucleus is defined to weigh 12.0, and a helium nucleus weighs 4.0015 AMU; 4×1.00739 = 4.02956; subtracting 4.0015 gives 0.02806; dividing by 4.02956 yields 0.00696). Were the efficiency as low as 0.006, to quote James D. Stein, "The neutron and proton would not bond to each other, deuterium would not form, and the Universe would consist of nothing but hydrogen" (We'll get back to the error in this statement later). And were it a little higher, at 0.008, "…it would be far to easy for protons to bond together," and the "big bang" would seemingly have gone on to bang away all the Universe to helium and heavier elements in short order: no hydrogen means no water, and any life that forms would need a different fluid.

Given that nobody has yet determined some tiny (five or fewer) set of really fundamental constants, from which everything else can be derived, we have quite a number of them. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was supposed to pave the way for a more fundamental physical theory, but that seems about as far off as it did before. My most recent printout of the CODATA list of "important" constants runs to several pages.

The book is Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define Our Universe by James D. Stein, a mathematics professor at CSU Long Beach. Out of the zoo of CODATA constants, he has chosen 13 to explain to us, and even better, he presents short biographies of the scientists whose work led to an understanding of each of them.

Some numbers have dimensions, meaning that their numerical value depends on the system of measurement. Such is Avogadro's Number, 6.0221413×10²³, the number of atoms in 12 grams of the carbon-12 isotope. It is the ratio of the gram to the AMU. By extension, it is the definition for a mole of any substance, where a mole is the weight in grams equal to the atomic or molecular weight of the atoms or molecules. Thus, one mole of pure isotopic iron as Fe⁵⁶ is 56 grams (or, strictly speaking, 55.9349393 grams, because the atomic weight of that isotope of iron is 55.9349393 AMU). Now, suppose instead of grams, we had in history defined a unit mass to be something else, call it a marg, with a mass about 1.66 times as large. Then Avogadro's Number would be, nearly exactly, 10²⁴, and it is likely that scientists would lobby hard to get the marg redefined to make that number exact. Something similar happened fifty or so years ago, when the inch was redefined to be exactly 25.4mm.

Other numbers are dimensionless, such as absolute zero. This is an extrapolated temperature, defined according to the ideal gas law, at which no more heat can be extracted from a substance, and the atomic or molecular motions that define what we mean by "temperature" would cease completely, except for the tiny gyrations needed to avoid violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The "temperature" 0K (K for "kelvins", which have the same size as Celsius degrees), AKA 0R (in which a Réamur is equal in size to a Fahrenheit degree, but the scale begins at absolute zero), needs no units. Zero is zero.

Another dimensionless number is 1/137, the Fine Structure Constant, initially derived from spectroscopy in a magnetic field. Its actual value is 1/137.036 and about six more digits. Though it can be derived from more fundamental constants such as the unit charge and the speed of light, all the units cancel out, so it is the same numerically in all possible systems of units. This isn't one of Dr. Stein's examples. He presents only two dimensionless constants, Avogadro's Number and the efficiency of hydrogen fusion, discussed above. In the latter chapter (Chapter 10), I was surprised at a number of errors that the physicists among his reviewers ought to have caught.

One was the fusion of proton with neutron, mentioned above. Highly energetic P-P collisions are required for the protons to physically approach close enough for one to emit a positron and become a neutron. Then the strong force can take over and fuse the two. The value of actual interest here is the efficiency of P+P→D+e⁺ conversion. A deuteron weighs 2.01355 AMU, so the conversion efficiency is 0.00061. I suspect it is this number, not the 4P→He⁺⁺ efficiency, that matters most. Another error was quite a long discussion of the mechanics of the P-P chain, in which the text uses "electron" instead of "proton" throughout. Electron collisions don't matter in the core of a star. The substance is a plasma. In essence, it is a mass of colliding protons (and deuterons and other nuclei) in a thin soup of unbound electrons, where there is nearly (or entirely) no impediment to P-P collisions except their own positive electric charge. At much lower energies (temperatures up to a few hundred degrees rather than tens of millions), H-H collisions that occur are primarily mediated by interactions between the electron clouds of the H atoms.

OK, gripe over. I confess to being rather staggered by that, but the rest of the book is a delight. We learn, not just the scientific endeavors of Boltzmann or Newton or Boyle, but their lives and something of their personalities. Science is a human activity, and one could say it is the most human of activities: figuring out how things work is our stock in trade (even if we devote our adolescence to figuring out how the opposite sex works!). The beauty of the numbers Dr. Stein has chosen lies in the sheer brilliance needed to first see the requirement for such a quantity, then to ferret out a way to determine what it is. We may see them as obvious in hindsight, but, for example, prior to Newton's insight, a law of common gravitational attraction just didn't fit in anybody's head.

A story is told of Napoleon, challenging his generals to make an egg stand on end. After they'd all given up, he held the egg and rapped it gently on the tabletop, enough to crush the end just a little. Then it stood. One general protested, "Well, that is obvious!", to which Napoleon replied, "It wasn't obvious before you saw me do it."

Does the Devil know he is evil?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, evil, villains

The title of this post is a question I like to ask people when the subject of evil comes up. Think of the great villains of history, distant and recent: Athaliah (a genuine evil queen: see 2Kings 11), Herod, Nero, Caligula, Pope Boniface VIII (who "came in like a fox, reigned like a lion, and died like a dog"), Catherine the Great, Lizzie Borden, Hitler, Mao, Stalin or Osama bin Laden. With the possible exception of Ms Borden, each of these persons, and a great many other "meanies", was convinced he or she was good. There's a Crip hit man who wrote the book Monster while in prison. It is his nickname. He likes it. Most of the book is an attempt to convince the reader that he is really a good guy.

Then there's the corner drug dealer/hit man. If you dare, catch up to him and interview him. He'll go to great lengths to show you he's just a guy trying to make a living, giving people a product they want very, very much. I wonder if Earl Bradley, the Delaware pediatrician who raped at least 100 2- and 3-year old girls, thinks of himself as fundamentally good? He even videotaped many of the rapes. What was he thinking?

Flitting thoughts along these lines went through my head when I saw the book I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) by Chuck Klosterman. I've been hoping to find a book that delves into the possibility that some people actually choose to be evil. The jacket blurb raised my hopes, claiming the book is about people who wanted to be evil. That is as far as it went.

Starting with a discussion of rock bands he hated, the author primarily discusses people who are hated by others, whether or not they actually did anything evil. He derives a rule (we can call it Chuck's Rule of Evil): The villain is the one who knows the most and cares the least. The poster boy for this rule is supposedly Newt Gingrich. Howzatt? His "Contract for America" did more good for this country than any congressional action since. There is no mention in the book of something many folks consider evil, Newt's tendency to have affairs, but wait to file for divorce when the current wife is badly ill.

Klosterman goes on to various other public figures and groups, including a couple of really witless comedians and the rap group N.W.A. (who practically invented Gangsta Rap), and mid-book he discusses sports teams, dwelling on the Oakland Raiders. Now the Raiders' owner Al Davis seems to revel in a bad boy image, with his rule book centered on "Just Win, Baby!". But I suspect, inside, he thinks, "I am such a good coach" (Or thought, since he has now died).

The obligatory chapter on Adolph Hitler, which also mentions Stalin and Mao, really goes nowhere. Hitler is the exception that tests the Rule, because, whether he really knew the most or not, he certainly cared the most. But everything that can be known about Hitler has been written hundreds of times, so all that is left are speculations.

In the end, Klosterman admits that the adage, "he who writes of others writes of himself" is true. The book isn't about whether the hated people he writes about are/were really bad, but about the hatred (or not) he and others feel towards them. We are left with the question, who is worse, the hater or the hated one? In most cases, if there is someone or something you really hate, you'd do well to take a long, thoughtful look in the mirror.

Why the war on terror is an illusion

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, terrorism, crime

Cast a net wide enough, and everyone will be in it. This is the single flaw in Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat by Jeffrey D. Simon. I'll get to that anon; otherwise, this excellent book is a comprehensive survey and diagnosis of a phenomenon that has always been with us, but could become much greater in the future.

We all know what is the greatest terrorism incident in U.S. history: the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al Qaeda members in NYC and Washington, DC (the Shanksville, PA crash was probably intended to terminate in DC also). What was the second? The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and abetted by Terry Nichols.

It is hard to imagine a blast that large. I was in Stillwater, OK that day, and I heard the sound. Hearing what it had been on the radio later that evening, my wife and I went the next day to see it. The sight was amazing. So is the thought of a sound heard more than fifty miles away!

Simon introduces three themes:

• The lone wolf is changing the dynamics of terrorism.
• Technology plays a key role in terrorism, and this will increase.
• A lone wolf can me more creative and innovative than a group.

He traces the history of terrorists who worked alone, or with only minimal help, such as the help Terry Nichols gave to Timothy McVeigh in helping him construct the fertilizer bomb. The early examples are primarily assassins, such as John Wilkes Booth. But he includes John Gilbert Graham, the first person to bomb a commercial aircraft in 1955, whose motive was entirely pecuniary; he'd heavily insured his mother who unknowingly carried the bomb onto the plane. This is because he has produced five categories of terrorism:

• Religious – those such as radical Islamists or certain white supremacists who claim a religious motive for their racism.
• Secular (i.e. political) – those such as the assassins of presidents or other public officials, including Timothy McVeigh, and Joseph Stack, who flew a small airplane into an IRS building in 2010.
• Single-Issue – such as those who bomb abortion centers or sabotage logging equipment in old-growth forests.
• Criminal – those who perform terroristic acts for financial gain.
• Idiosyncratic – insane persons, such as schizophrenics or those with "antisocial personality disorder", driven by their delusions to kill or destroy. The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, is included here.

J.G. Graham was a criminal terrorist by this scheme. For that matter, so is the Mafia when its depredations erupt into the public sphere, though they are usually more circumspect in their tactics of intimidation. I find myself troubled by this classification.

I understand his reasoning, to a point. He includes as "terrorists" all who commit acts that cause public terror. If, for some reason, a group of organized criminals had committed the 9/11 attacks, then issued a demand for, say a few billion dollars ransom in return for not doing it any more, is that a terrorist incident? I think not. It is a kind of extortion. There is an entire category of actions for which people who intimidate others too severely are charged with "terroristic threatening", but they are not considered terrorists; they are considered extortionists or other kinds of criminal. So I would deny the category of "criminal terrorist". Otherwise, it will develop into a wide net that includes everyone who goes on a destructive spree, like the guy who blew a gasket and used a tractor to tear down a neighbor's house.

Setting that matter aside, I was (properly) unsettled by his analysis of lone wolf creativity. A loner is not bound to the decisions of a leader or a committee. Thus it was a lone wolf, Bruce Ivins, who first committed bio-terror in the modern era, by sending anthrax spores through the mail in 2001. It is not certain, though, whether his intent was criminal (seeking publicity leading to quicker acceptance of an anthrax vaccine he'd developed) or political (anger at those blocking his research). I wonder if the distribution of "smallpox blankets" among Indian tribes in the 18th Century qualifies as bio-terror, or was it "just" attempted genocide? Simon predicts it will be a lone wolf who first creates havoc with Cyberterror (haven't hordes of virus coders already done that? Most of them work alone).

In the late chapters, Simon turns his attention to ways to prevent lone wolf terrorism—indeed, of terrorism in general—and, failing that, ways to ameliorate the conditions that lead to terrorism. This I find most useful. Terrorism, particularly by small cells and lone wolves, is an arms race between law enforcement agents and the terrorists. For example, it took a generation, but you can now take training courses in defeating a Polygraph. And terrorists are always coming up with new ways to smuggle bombs or bomb-making materials into airplanes and other public venues; the police and TSA and Homeland Security are engaged in a "catch up" race.

I liked the discussion of biometric identification by video, coupled to a hot computer. The way people walk is characteristic, for example. But then I remembered things like putting a tight piece of duct tape between someone's shoulder blades, or taping two of their toes together, to change their posture and gait. These methods are pretty old hat, but could easily defeat a biometric ID scheme.

Simon considers the ways our government and society have aroused ire in others. It is pretty well known, for example, that a lot of Osama bin Laden's hatred for America arose from our cavalier treatment of Muslims and rather open denigration of Islam. But the fire in his belly was because of what he saw as a promiscuous, excessively sinful society. So we may be able to reduce some of the resentment by treating the Muslim countries more respectfully. But what do we do about those who plan to impose Sharia law on the entire world?

By the way, my Islamic friends: this sort of thing was tried by the Christians, several times, most recently by John Calvin in Geneva in the 1600s. It has never worked. The Catholic Church imposed Canon Law for a few hundred years on much of Europe, but it fell apart as people learned more and more about science and psychology. Ironically, much of the impetus for the overthrow of Canon Law during the Enlightenment came from rediscovery of Greek scientific texts that had been preserved by Islamic scholars. The current generation of Sharia promoters are trying to bury the effects their remote ancestors brought about!

I have wondered for a long time, if a society could be developed in which the greatest number of people could develop their genuine abilities and use them to the fullest. Even those we consider unsavory. During the long ages in which European laws required death for a wide range of infractions, kings and governments employed great numbers of executioners. The squeamish need not apply; there were plenty of psychopathic killers whose urges could be in some measure satisfied by such work. I don't know what we would do with people who like to pull wings off butterflies, but such activities are sublimating something else and better understanding of psychology just might ferret out the real motive, and help such a person find a calling that makes him happy without harming others. We Americans claim to believe that the basic rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While it is foolish to believe we can help absolutely everybody actually to achieve happiness, it is worthwhile striving to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Yet a very good society, were it achieved, would not eliminate terrorism, either by groups or by individuals. "There is no pleasing some people." So the continuing "war on terror" is actually a branch of criminal jurisprudence, where the action is domestic, or of international diplomacy. Overcoming criminality, including terrorism, is a permanent game of Tetris. The blocks keep falling, and you never quite get them all. And I remember a saying from the Vietnam War: "It is costing us a quarter million dollars for each Viet Cong we kill. We could pay them off for less than that." Is it too crazy a notion to think we can just bribe most of the potential terrorists? I mean, we could have BOUGHT Viet Nam for what the war cost us.

Yeah, I know, the ideologues and single-issue (e.g. anti-abortion) folks will never be satisfied. But a happier society would go a long way toward removing two or three of the five categories above. Worth thinking about.

Sometimes it is just easier to walk

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, air travel, airline industry

I first rode an airplane in 1953, aged 5. I barely remember it. I am told it was a DC-6. At a cruising speed of 270 kts (311 mph or 501 kph), it would have taken about 2 hours to fly from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, assuming it went straight through. I probably slept through most of the flight.

I sure wish I could still sleep on airplanes. In my longest ordeal, we flew a 3-leg flight: Tokyo Narita to LAX, then to Dallas, then to OKC, where a friend picked us up for the drive home. I didn't even sleep in the car, nor during the layovers. Starting when my wife's brother drove us the 3 hours to Narita, 2 hours before flight time, I was awake and in one way or another on the move for 24 hours. My wife and our son did get some sleep. I am glad we weren't returning from Sydney! After that trip, I began to say, "The worst part of travelling is the travel." And this was years before 9/11! Security check-in was "show your ID and walk through", family members could sit with us at the gate until boarding, and there were real meals on board two of the flights.

Well, I won't go on about what has changed. That's the job of Mark Gerchick, in his new book Full Upright and Locked Position: Not-So-Comfortable Truths About Air Travel Today. He has been in the industry all his career, including some time as chief counsel to the FAA.

The author might have provided us a checklist of discomforts that now accompany air travel – and this would  be an even bigger book! Instead, he has focused on the important stuff, such as our changing status, from "guests" or even "clients" to "self-loading cargo"; or the tremendous economic effect of the steep rise in fuel cost plus a global recession, a double whammy that is still being ironed out.

You don't need me (or him) to tell you that even "business class" is less comfortable then the "coach" seats and service of the 1960s and '70s; that it might be better to be anesthetized upon arrival at the airport, and awoken at our destination (except we wouldn't be self loading any more!). But after going over all the changes of the past half century, he is actually hopeful that things are getting better. For example, newer planes, built of carbon fiber more than of aluminum, and thus more resistant to repeated stress, can house a higher cabin pressure and a bit more humidity. The airline keeps the pressure low, not so you'll be too groggy to make a pass at the attendant, but because an aluminum airframe develops cracks much more quickly if the pressure is like Denver's altitude rather than Nepal's. There is a bit of hope that airplanes will back off a little bit from being "flying buses".

And there are things that are better than before. Unless you are a total computer-phobic, online ticketing and online check-in really reduce the hassle we used to endure to get tickets and boarding passes. Imagine all that added to modern TSA procedures! We would need to arrive 3-4 hours early instead of just 1½ or 2. But our Internet advantage when finding tickets is eroding. I have noticed that Southwest was the first of several airlines that don't fully cooperate with Travelocity or its clones any more. You want the best deal, you go to their own website. That means I have 4-6 tabs open when I am looking for a flight. And I have to read a lot of fine print to unravel the surcharges and extras. It is an arms race.

Mark Twain said, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." We actually have better control over the airlines than we do over the weather. They do depend on our good will to stay in business. So there is hope.

Countering the China syndrome

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, radiation, radioactivity

A couple of years ago, in answer to fears expressed by friends and relatives, I posted Uranium 101, to explain what we should fear and what we should not fear, about Uranium and the possible release of radiation in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.

I am gratified to read a comprehensive summary and explanation of these matters in Radiaton: What it is, What You Need to Know, by Robert Peter Gale, M.D., and Eric Lax. The authors discuss the sources of background radiation, and the things we do that add extra radiation exposure, such as getting X-rays and CT scans, flying, and smoking. That's right, smoking increases exposure to radiation. Tobacco plants do not take up uranium from the soil, but the "daughter elements" radium (4 million times as radioactive as uranium) and polonium (5,000 times as radioactive as radium) do get into the tobacco leaves, and into cigarettes. If this really worries you, but you can't stop smoking, do this: the half life of polonium is 138 days, so just stockpile your smoking materials, write dates of purchase on the packages, and don't use them for 4 years. Then the polonium content will be less than 1/1000 of what it was when you bought it.

OK, back from digression. Americans living at sea level are exposed to 3-4 mSv (millisieverts) of radiation yearly. Higher elevations take us above some of the protective atmosphere, so nationwide, the average is about 6 mSv. When you fly in a jet plane at 36,000 ft, you are above 3/4 of the atmosphere, so more space radiation reaches you. However, now you are shielded from most of the radiation coming upward from the ground. Still, you receive a lot more radiation during each hour of flight than you get from the X-ray backscatter scanner at the airport. Better news: many airports are replacing the X-ray scanners with T-ray scanners, which cannot cause harm.

Many people are afraid of all kinds of radiant energy. The electromagnetic spectrum is very, very wide, and only about half of it (in logarithmic terms) is harmful. Too see how wide, we need to talk units. Two sets of units are used, wavelength and energy per photon. Wavelength is used for the longer, less energetic photons, and energy is used to discuss the higher energy, very short-wave photons. The "center" of the spectrum is visible light, and in this region, both units are used depending on the reason for discussing them. So let's start with visible light, and the near-visible regions of near infrared and near ultraviolet.

The limits of normal vision are considered to be at wavelengths of 400 nm at the blue end, and 700 nm at the red end. Actual visual response at these limits is about 0.4% of the response to yellow light near 580 nm. The unit nm is the nanometer, or a billionth of a meter. To convert to energy, the proportionality constant is 1,293.7 eV-nm, and we divide this number by the wavelength to get energy. So blue-limit light's energy per photon is 1,239.7/400 = 3.1 eV, and at the red limit, it is 1,239.7/700 = 1.77 eV. The eV is the electron-volt, the energy an electron has when accelerated by a 1-volt potential. Old CRT type TV sets used an electron gun with about 30,000 volts, so the electrons were hitting the front plate with an energy of 30,000 eV, usually shown as 30 KeV, for Kilo-eV. We'll get back to this.

Near-infrared (NIR) is typically considered to range from 700 to 5,000 nm, AKA 0.7-5 µ (microns; the "consistent" term micrometer hasn't really caught on). Near-ultraviolet (NUV) ranges from 400 to 280 nm, the range of UV that can easily pass through the atmosphere. It has two components, UVA and UVB, with a cutover at 315 nm. UVC that you may have read about is the germicidal UV used in hospitals, ranging down to about 240 nm, where the atmosphere blocks it even over short distances, such as across a room. The UVA-UVB cutoff has an energy of 3.94 eV. Organic chemical bonds have energies in this range, which makes UVA and UVB risky for our skin. The thinner ozone layer is letting through a little UVC from the Sun, also, which is why sunblock is needed more now than in the past. The energy of UVC is at least 4.43 eV per photon, and it can damage exposed skin quickly.

Energetic as these wavelengths may be, they are not ionizing radiation. That takes a lot more energy per photon. Although the C-C bonds in organic materials can be broken by UVC, that produces free radicals, not ions. True ionization needs at least 10 eV/photon, or a wavelength shorter than 124 nm. This is the boundary between Far UV and "soft" X-rays. The X-rays used by your dentist are generated by an electron beam hitting a tungsten anode at 70,000 volts. They have a range of energies peaking at about 40 KeV. These are called medium X-rays, while hard X-rays are in the range above 100 KeV. Such X-rays are used by industrial inspection X-ray machines.

Remember the CRT TV? It produces small amounts of rather soft X-rays at about 20-25 KeV. That's why parents used to tell their children to stay farther from the TV set. Today's flat-screen TV's, whether Plasma, LCD or LED, do not produce any X-rays.

Now, how about your cell phone? Can it cause cancer? While you are talking (not listening), the phone is signaling to the tower using about 1 watt of microwave radio. While "microwave" may sound scary, that just means it is at a wavelength shorter than the UHF band used for analog TV signals (channels 13-65), in the pre-cable days. Microwaves have wavelengths over a wide range, from 1 m to 1 mm. Let's convert the shortest wavelength (most energetic) to nm and check the eV formula: 1mm = 1 million nm, so 1,239.7/1,000,000 = 0.0012 eV per photon. This is much less energetic than visible light. You'd suffer more damage by shining a flashlight into the side of your head! By the way, T-ray scanners use a wavelength near 1 mm.

Other kinds of radio use even longer wavelengths, and their tiny photon energies are why this unit is not used in this range. The longest common frequency to which we are exposed is the 60Hz signal from AC power transmission, which has a wavelength of 5,000 km. Thus the range of non-ionizing radiation is between 5,000 km and about 500 nm, a range of 1 quadrillion to 1. Now let's look at higher energies than X-ray.

There is a big gap in the spectrum of natural radiation to which we are exposed, because of blocking by the atmosphere, and because common radioactive elements produce energetic particles starting at a rather high point, though typically at a low level. Three elements form the foundation of natural radiation in Earth materials, mostly rocks: Uranium, Thorium and Potassium.

First and foremost, we cannot avoid Potassium (symbol K). The human body contains 0.25% K. Thus, I weigh 200 lbs (91 kg), so my body contains half a pound of potassium, or about 0.23 kg. The radioactive isotope of potassium is K-40, and makes up 0.0118% of the total, or 0.027 g; just over 1/40th of a gram. That isn't much, and K-40 is weakly radioactive, with a half life of 1.28 billion years. But that 40th of a gram is about 4x10²⁰ atoms, of which nearly 7,000 decay each second. Now we get to energy. K-40 decays by the beta process, ejecting an electron or positron (it can do either, to become either Ca-40 or Ar-40, both of which are stable). The ejected particle has an energy of 1.3 or 1.5 MeV (million eV), some 1,000 times as energetic as a hard X-ray. It also produces energetic photons with an energy of 0.5 or 1.5 MeV. The beta particle stays in the body, while the gamma photon can exit, meaning that during a hug (or sleeping together) we receive some gamma radiation from our partner!

K-40 gamma radiation is near the low end of the range of natural radioactivity, but is not the lowest. Uranium and Thorium in the soil, particularly in areas with a lot of granite, produce energetic alpha particles, but these are absorbed by almost anything, such as a sheet of paper. A typical room with gypsum sheetrock contains a tenth of a gram of U and half as much Th, but their alpha radiation is stopped by the paper and the paint on the wall. Not so their gamma photons, which are actually in the hard X-ray region, at 48 KeV and 59 KeV respectively. Also, they have long half lives, 1.41 billion years for Th-232 and 4.51 billion years for U-238.

What about Radon? When U-238 emits an alpha particle, it becomes Th-234. That emits a beta particle (24 day half life) to become Pa-234 (Protactinium), and the chain continues. After a few more decays, Radium (Ra-226) is produced, which has a half life of 1,600 years. After an alpha emission, the next daughter element is Radon, specifically Rn-222, with a half life of 3.8 days. This is a gas, and is a concern everywhere there are soils derived from granitic rock (most of the U.S.). Radon is the primary cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. Although it produces gamma radiation, with an energy of 500 KeV, it is the 5 MeV alpha particle, with nothing to stop it, that damages the lung. In sum, the ionizing range of radiations goes from about 10 eV to about 10 MeV, and there are cosmic rays with much higher energies. This is about a million-to-one range, a much smaller part of the entire spectrum than the non-ionizing range.

All this, a combination of salient facts from the book plus things I knew or dug out of the literature, set the stage. When you put everything together, people worldwide experience a background radiation level of 2.5-8 mSv. That is a combination of exposure to K, U and Th in soils and rock, to Rn in the air, to Ra in some rocks, and a contribution from solar radiation more-or-less blocked by the atmosphere and depending mainly on the elevation above sea level. That unit, milliSieverts, is a complex measure of the potential damage from ionizing radiation. The radiation of your cell phone is ZERO mSv, because it is not ionizing. A dental X-ray is in the range of 0.005 mSv, or about 0.1 mSv for a set of 18 over your full mouth. If you live in Florida, with little granite, and your background exposure is 3 mSv, you'd have to get 30 sets of dental full-mouth X-rays in one year to double your dose. Of course, that is skewed because most of it would be to your head, particularly if the dental technician puts a lead shield on you like mine does.

CT scans are another situation entirely. A chest-abdomen spiral scan totals 50-60 mSv, equal to 5-10 years of background radiation for most of us. This is the greatest radiation exposure most of us will ever have. When your doctor orders a CT scan, make sure it is for a good reason!

The authors of Radiation dwell much on what was learned from the casualties and survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions. This sets another baseline, the high end of survivable exposure. The LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of victims) for whole-body radiation dosage is 5 Sv or 5,000 mSv. That's only about 100 CT scans! However, that is a single-event dose; little is yet known about doses spread over years or decades. It seems the body can repair radiation damage up to a point.

The authors stress several times, when a doctor prescribes any kind of radiation beyond a simple X-ray, you need to ask what the exposure is, as compared to background (stated in mSv or in milli-Grays, which is equivalent). If the doctor can't state that, or won't, you need a different doctor! The doctor also should be able to explain the expected benefit and how it outweighs the risk of the radiation dose, whether from a CT scan, radiation applied to a cancer, or an ingested or injected radioisotope for some therapeutic or test purpose. This is a general rule, but is particularly important regarding such therapies and tests: if your doctor can't or won't explain, get a new doctor!

Finally, I have to tout nuclear power generation. The authors make it clear that we are much more likely to get radiation-induced cancer from coal burning power plants than from nuclear power plants. There are radioactive elements in coal, and they go right into the air when coal is burned. Also, the slag remaining from burnt coal contains heavy metals and other toxins, and these don't have a half-life like U or Ra, so they are toxic forever and ever. A nuclear power plant produces a few tons of high-level radioactive waste per year. A coal fired power plant produces hundreds or thousands of tons of toxic waste per year. The waste dump for a single coal plant could be used to store all the output from all U.S. nuclear plants for decades or centuries, and not run out of room. Just put the canisters on pallets on the ground, fence it off, and guard the stuff.

Really, we ought to be recycling spent uranium. 95% of its energy is still in there, just "poisoned" by the fission products. The problem isn't scientific; the science and technology are well known and safe. The problem is political. Even better, we ought to be using breeder reactors, to turn U-238, which won't "fizz", into Pu-239, which will. There's 140 times as much U-238 as there is U-235, the usual fuel. I suggest having the U.S. Navy oversee the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants. They've been running aircraft carriers and submarines with nuclear power for more than half a century, and they seem to be able to do it without meltdowns or other accidents.

OK, I really like this book, and got quite inspired as you can see above. Without minimizing or distorting the risks, the authors make it clear that current fears about radiation are unfounded. Knowledge is the enemy of unwarranted fear. This book belongs on everybody's reading list.

How many philosophies are there?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophers

The Wikipedia article "List of Philosophies" has nearly 450 entries. But this list is more of a grab bag of philosophical terminology: it includes Descartes' summation of Rationalism "Cogito ergo sum" and the Empiricist's shibboleth "Occam's Razor"; there are 37 collective terms such as "German Philosophy"; and it includes the major category terms Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics, plus Meta-philosophy (AKA Meta-metaphysics). Checking just terms ending in "-ism", I find 257. That is a more appropriate list of actual philosophies. Of course, it is in no way complete, but we'll return to that.

Long ago I learned that the major categories of philosophy are Metaphysics—concerning the causes and nature of things—, Epistemology—concerning knowledge and knowing—, and Ethics—concerning moral choices. To these some would now add Meta-metaphysics or Meta-philosophy—concerning philosophy itself, particularly the boundaries of Metaphysics. Having just read The Philosophy Book, I find another 11 categories added by the six authors/contributors, and a total of 59 "isms", all of which are on the Wikipedia list. The contributors of the 107 short articles in the book are Will Buckingham, Douglas Burnham, Clive Hill, Peter J. King, John Marenbon, and Marcus Weeks. In addition, another 58 very brief items are listed in a Directory assembled by Stephanie Chilman. These include the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, not covered in the main text.

The 11 extra categories are Chinese Philosophy, Eastern Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Islamic Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Ontology, Philosophy of History, and Aesthetics. The only one of these that I would include as a major category is Aesthetics. The others are in-between categories, as they incorporate elements of the major categories, or, indeed, cross with them in a mathematical sense. Methinks the taxonomy of philosophic terms is in need of cleaning up!

The articles, ranging in length from one to six pages, are gathered into six historical eras, showing the progress of philosophical thought over the centuries in the major cultures. A seventh era could have been included, a set of entries under the heading Egyptian Philosophy. Several of the earliest philosophers of "ancient" Greece studied in Alexandria, a hotbed of pre-European philosophy.

This leads to a side thought. I wonder what philosophical traditions existed in Africa south and west of Egypt, prior to being mainly eliminated first by the slave trade, then by misguided missionaries from Europe. I do recognize that there were a few truly godly apostles to Africa, but most missionaries were actually agents of colonial powers and destroyed the cultures of those they were trying to "save".

I considered discussing some of the articles, but I realized my motive was mainly to take cheap shots at those I don't like. In every category, the spectrum of thought is more broad than any of us could comprehend. Ethical thought, for example, ranges from a few kinds of Absolutism to a Relativism that denies Ethics exists. This book is like a flea market. It has a wide array of "products"—as wide an array as possible, according to the contributors' goals—and I am free to "buy" what I like and ignore the rest. On one hand, I don't consider myself a philosopher, but on the other, everyone is a philosopher, to whatever extent we think about why we do things and what we know and how we know it.

Any discussion of "reality", particularly if religion is involved, leads to someone saying, "Well, I have my own philosophy." My typical reaction has been to say (or at least to think), "That just means you don't know what philosophy is." But in more recent years I have realized that human thought exhibits such incredible variety, it is very likely that every one of the seven billion of us does indeed have a unique, personal philosophy.

Build me a memory

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memory, memory studies, psychology

We describe memories by relating them to the familiar, and these days, that means a computer is involved. But the way a computer functions is about as different from brain work as it can be. The most enduring metaphor for memory is the storehouse. We imagine opening drawers and cupboards to find a memory, and pulling it out whole, to be viewed or even re-experienced. With more thought, we might consider that some part of our brain has many cubbyholes where memories go. People with "good memories" then have a better index than the rest of us, or are quicker sorting through all the cubbies.

Think instead of a warehouse full of spare parts: boxes of different kinds of sunsets, bins with collections of similar sounds or smells of people and places we've experienced, piles of "the feel of walking in narrow lanes" or holding hands in various ways, and albums of the look and feel of loved ones and friends and acquaintances. At one end of the warehouse, a catalog index directs us to the various bits, so we can relive or review that walk, hand in hand with a lover, speaking together, turning down an alley to stop at the verge of a hill and seeing just that sunset together. Many memories start with a smell, and you are suddenly in that bakery with, say, your long-deceased grandmother on shopping day. I imagine the warehouse might resemble the workshops in Mythbusters.

Charles Fernyhough set out to write a book about the science of memory, and has delivered a book of stories, with the science to explain them: Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts. I confess I didn't fathom the interplay of the Medial this and the Posterior that. I have a vague idea of the Amygdala and Hippocampus, but as a diagram in the book shows, some dozen named parts of the brain are involved in "Autobiographical Memory". I suppose I ought to have studied a bit as I read along, but I was so taken with the stories (Charles, that is a compliment) that I did not.

But I think the view from 10,000 feet is enough for now. The "Pieces of Light" of the title aptly summarize the way a memory surfaces: bits of various kinds are brought together at some switching center—which is probably the Hippocampus—and reviewed. Such a process affords us much more space for storing memories than if each memory were a five-sense videotape record. Thus, those parts of an experience that we pay attention to, or that thrust themselves into our attention, are picked apart and stored in some sorted manner, and indexed for retrieval. Repeated experiences of the same place or kind of event are in part blended together, and in part kept separate when there are singular experiences on certain occasions.

Quick: try to remember every one of your own birthday parties. If you have a family like mine, there were at least 15 or so that occurred while you were in your parents' home, and a few others since you began to live on your own. Though I have been the "target" of at least thirty birthday parties, the only one I remember is when my beard caught on fire as I was blowing out the candles (so I was 23 that year); my dad clapped both my cheeks with his hands to put it out, growled, "I have been waiting a long time to do something like that", and gave me a grin. Otherwise, the parties are a mishmash of the kids I knew and a vague feeling of too much cake and ice cream and soda. I don't recall any of the gifts!

Another notion: try to remember the second time you did something, such as driving by yourself or making love or hang-gliding. Aren't a lot of our memories all about the novelties? This makes sense from a biological and evolutionary perspective, as the author explains. When we are tiny, everything is new, and we struggle to make sense of it all. We are automated categorization machines, and work at increasing efficiency as we gather memories with which to compare new events.

While studies of people with various kinds of brain damage or under the spell of certain drugs may indicate the function of various parts of the brain, we find that the workings of the intact brains that most of us have are not really geared toward faithfully recording our life. We don't really have a camera crew tucked inside, laying down tracks of videotape (or SD card MPEG files). Later experiences influence the way we remember those "first times". And, because we store the imaginings we have about others' stories in the same way we store our own, the record may be quite faithful for certain details, but rather sloppy about others.

Fernyhough's focus is autobiographical memory, the memories that tell our own story. They are different, in quality if not in kind, from memories such as the times table or the way we make apple fritters. We could say that our memory is not so much a textbook of "My History" as it is a historical novel: many genuine events (or portions of them) strung together with fabrications and borrowings to make a coherent whole. Coherence matters to us more than exactitude. And we tend to remember what happened a lot better than when it happened. In my story of the beard fire, I had to think to recall my age, and had I worn a beard for more than just that year, it may not have been possible.

It makes sense that our memory serves us according to the needs our ancestors had. It is usually less important to recall the exact year of, say, each time the family camp was flooded, and more important to remember what was done to rescue this or that person or to restore the damage. I think of it as akin to managing by exception: we remember the first flood, and recall the others by how they differed from it.

Shocking events that lead to "flashbulb" memories illustrate the extreme edge of memory use. Something in our brain realizes, "This is so unusual it must be VERY IMPORTANT. Record it faithfully!" At least the first time. Thus, people my age have clear memories of the assassination of JFK—where we were and who we were with and how we heard it—but are less clear when recalling the assassination of Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King. The events were just as shocking but were no longer novel. Similarly, the Challenger explosion produced sharper memories for us than the incineration of Columbia.

The "first time effect" is critical, and goes a long way to explain the juvenile bump in our collection of important stories. The way our brains develop allows only a few very early memories, so the "formative years" are from about age 10 to 20 or so. In a late chapter we read of the author's grandmother, recalling many events in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was a girl, and the world was in crisis, particularly for a Lithuanian family in the midst of emigration and assimilation into a new culture. He tries bringing a Yiddish-speaking acquaintance to meet her, thinking she may remember some things better if asked in the language of her childhood. A few new memories do surface, but she'd been fluent in English from such an early age that she no longer understands Yiddish very well. A visit from a woman she'd been in school with is another story (or a lot of stories!). They hadn't met in 80 years (one was 93 the other 94), so once they got the small talk out of the way, they had a lot to talk about as they shared those childhood and pre-teen memories.

So here is a clue, if you have been gathering stories from an aged relative. At some point, round up a childhood friend or favorite cousin, and get them reminiscing. I had some hopes of doing this for my father a few years ago, when I visited his childhood home town. He had given me a list of people whom he thought might still live there, and I hoped to find one and call Dad for them to have a chat. At the end of the trip, I reported to him that I'd found them all…in the cemetery. By age 88 he had outlived his entire home town. Now he is 91½, and still pretty sharp, at least for old stuff. I'll be with him for the next few days (I have to cross a continent to see him), and I'll see what I can gather.

Meantime, we all need to realize that it is hard to keep most memories "pure". Later experiences of an event or place, or with similar import, can influence the way we recall just this experience in that place. This is important. State justice departments are only now changing how they make proper use of "eyewitness" testimony. The Biblical requirement that two witnesses had to agree was very wise.

We are like the 7 blind men encountering an elephant. To one it seems like a wall, to another it is like a snake. We each remember different stuff about a shared experience. Nobody gets it all right. We even edit our stories about ourselves, and when we forget the editing, whose story are we telling? Ah, that's the fun part, for we are who we remember we are.

It is right in front of your eyes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, observation

Do you remember getting your first car? Maybe you shopped and dithered for a while, before settling on this model of that make, at a price you could (barely) afford. Maybe it was a nice, affordable Honda Civic. After that, for weeks, it seems every second car you see on the road is a Civic, "just like mine!" You got eyes for it.

I remember another experience of getting eyes for something. On a field trip, some classmates enticed me to take a side trip to collect trilobites. I rode along, imagining the iconic "oversize pillbugs" that seem to define the notion of "fossil." We stopped at a road cut, and everyone got out. I looked at an expanse of light gray rock with a peppery texture, asking, "Where are the trilobites?" Someone said, "Right here," pointing at a dark double-speck. I looked closely, seeing two dots with a couple of lines between them. It was a trilobite, all right, no more than a centimeter in length.

It was similar to this Perenopsis (cropped from a photo found at fossilguy.com). Stepping back, I saw that the texture of the rock face was peppered with thousands of them! I now had eyes for them.

Sometimes we look and look, and finally see. Sometimes we just need someone to point out what was there all along. Alexandra Horowitz sought about a dozen someones to help her see what she had been missing on the 3-times-daily walks she took with her dog, around her block in New York City. Now she kindly brings us along on those walks in her new book On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes.

Not all the walks were around her own block. Sometimes she went to the block where her expert lived or worked. The first and last of the book's 13 chapters are walks she took alone. First, she walked on her own, observing her very familiar block, and finally, on another solo walk, remarked on all the things she now has eyes (and ears and nose) for.

Her first expert was her toddler son, Ogden. To a tiny child, all is new, all nearly equally absorbing. A block you can walk in 5 minutes can take a couple of hours with a toddler…I almost wrote "with a toddler in tow," but of course, Ms Horowitz did her best to be "in tow" to her son. After all, he was the expert on this occasion. The infant brain seems to hoover up everything, struggling to make sense, to discern what is important. Young Ogden had a wide array of interests. Triangles at one point (the bracing in a railing), at others dump trucks (particularly their unique sounds), an insect, or a weed growing in a crack. All could stop him in his tracks. It seems little ones either haven't learned to make quick observations while moving along, or just prefer to stop still for long enough to fully appreciate what has just caught their attention. There's this thing about toddlers, though. They aren't specialists yet.

Geologist Sidney Horenstein is a specialist, and a walk with him shows the author that there is a great lot of geology to specialize in.  From the crinoids and brachiopods that decorate the foundation stones of her apartment building, and that she'd never noticed, to the various colors and textures of the limestone, marble, sandstone, granite and so forth that formed their structures. Urban geology is a history of the distances people were willing to go to get building stone. Then a walk with type designer Paul Shaw opened her eyes, not to the signage with which a city is festooned, but to the shapes and forms of the letters used. Crinoids in the stones, and Garamond or Helvetica on the signs. Did the signmaker create text that faithfully evokes the character of a business? To Shaw, many were too slapdash to do a proper job. And artist Maira Kalman opens a world of observation, to expand what we think of as aesthetic. To some people, most things are ugly or at best commonplace, and it takes an uncommonly lovely scene to evoke any positive feeling in them. Not Ms Kalman. Maybe she doesn't quite find everything lovely, but she does her best to come close. A discarded couch on the sidewalk catches her attention, and prompts a painting (found before page 87).

Entomologist Charley Eiseman ought to be named "Wiseman", for he makes Ms Horowitz wise in the ways of the little animals that outnumber us, even in our most crowded cities. Probably, just the sidewalk ants outnumber human residents. The next time you sweep for cobwebs, think that there are probably a dozen nearly invisible spiders (and maybe some that are all too visible!) sharing your rooms. Outside, there are even more. Funnel webs abound in a city, tucked into inside corners or at the roots of bushes, or where railings attach to walls. And every spider needs many insect "clients". I learned something I'd never thought of. City trees come in two varieties: those with many signs of insect damage, and those that appear pristine and unchewed. The unchewed are the imports. Insects (and mites and other eaters) in the local environment are not specialized to eat them, as they are the native plants. This is why "invasive" imports invade so well. They are free of enemies to slow down their spread. Larger animals are the province of naturalist John Hadidian, with whom the author walked in Washington, D.C. In a city, they may not outnumber us (well, maybe the squirrels and pigeons do), but they are surprisingly ubiquitous. (I don't know as much about cities, but my suburban yard houses squirrels, rabbits, mice, voles, shrews, frogs, toads and a dozen or more kinds of songbirds, and we've seen visiting foxes, raccoons, vultures, hawks, crows and deer.)

Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces is an urban planner of another sort. He and his colleagues study the way people interact in cities. They discern how an apparent obstacle can facilitate foot traffic, and which kinds of spaces make a place more or less friendly-seeming. He is a fan of food vendors' carts and restaurants with outdoor tables, for their ability to foster interaction. He is in favor of social streets.

Take a walk with a doctor, and you get eyes for something else entirely, particularly with a classical diagnostician like Dr. Bennett Lorber. He, like my uncle's father, diagnoses first based on what he sees, hears and smells when he first meets a patient; then he listens closely to the patient's story. On a walk, taking someone's story isn't possible, but by seeing how people walk, Dr. Lorber can tell that this man will soon need a hip replaced (or suffer badly if he doesn't) and that young woman is pregnant and probably doesn't know it yet. Ridges on fingernails can indicate a number of conditions (when I was on chemotherapy, ridges on my thumbnails chronicled every treatment). This chapter takes a long digression with Dr. Evan Johnson, the author's back surgeon. Sometimes, your walk reveals problems in your back, and sometimes, problems in your walk cause problems in your back.

To really learn about seeing, take a walk with a blind person. Arlene Gordon, sighted for about 40 years, then blind for another 40 or more, was the perfect companion for a different kind of walk. Our visual cortex occupies 1/4 to 1/3 of our brain's capacity. When the eyes aren't keeping it busy, it finds a way to help out other senses. By helping out hearing, for example, it enables many blind people to echolocate, seeing the way bats do. I've seen a TV program about a blind man who can ride a bicycle, all the while clicking with his tongue. Ms Gordon uses a cane and her ears. The cane has two functions. It is a feeler, but it also clicks when it touches down, and the blind wielder learns to build up a visual image from the return echoes, even if born blind. The ambient sound changes with our surroundings also. Ms Gordon knew when the walk took them under an awning or past the edge of a building at a corner. Walking with a sound engineer exposed the author to another dimension of sound. Scott Lehrer helps us understand the different sounds of auto tires on pavement that is wet or dry, or, more subtly, macadam or concrete. He finds charming a much wider array of city noises. After a walk with him, the author is less offended by "noise", having become attuned to a greater variety of aesthetic qualities. She also learned more about protecting her hearing. Don't be shy about putting your fingers in your ears when a shrieking motorcycle screams by. It may just save you from partial deafness or tinnitus later.

The last expert is a dog, Finnegan. His world is a world of smells, though dogs' vision is as keen as our own (but less richly colored). It is a pity to see someone dragging a dog along on a brisk walk, when the dog would much rather first check the pee-decorated fireplug and curb corner, and then briskly trot to the next signpost. The author's walk with Finn almost wasn't a walk at all. Rather than prompt him to go right or left, she stopped on the stoop to see where he would go. He was content to sit there and take in the smells as the passersby passed by. Dogs expect us to take the lead, when they are on a leash, so she had to lead out. Once on the move, the dog had plenty of opinions about where to go and when to stop or start. Would it surprise you to learn, that the way most of us make a visual map in our brain, is mirrored in the brains of bats and blind people by an auditory map, and in the brains of dogs and many other animals by a scent map?

The map is the thing. The more richly we learn to experience the world, the more rich and detailed our mental map will be, and the more ways we can continue to build it. These walks were, for Ms Horowitz, an education you cannot obtain in any classroom or from any lecture. To learn how to observe as you walk, you need to get out and walk.

Looking too hard, and not looking

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

We are remarkably good at cutting through the clutter in many situations. For example, we can talk to someone at a crowded party and pick out what they are saying in spite of the noise all around; and we can often spot a familiar face in a crowd. However, we sometimes see (or hear, etc.) things that are not there. When I was a child we would look for faces or other shapes in clouds. In a few minutes of looking, something suggestive is bound to appear. And there is a painting by my father of waves breaking on a rocky seashore. One of the big rocks looks like a leopard's head, and once I'd seen it, ever since I always see that leopard's head whenever I glance at the painting.

My father had no intention to hide faces in his paintings. Seeing the leopard's head is an example of a Type 1 error. If my father did actually hide faces in all his paintings, and I have noticed only this one (I have several others), then missing the faces that are there would be Type 2 errors. If I become so rapt in searching clouds for faces that I don't notice a friend approaching until he taps me on the shoulder, I have fallen victim to both kinds of error! We lazy, sedentary Westerners tend to do this frequently. Not so someone living hand-to-mouth in the woods.

For nearly everyone, through all the one or two million years of our evolution as brainy apes, hyper-alertness was required. Where it matters most, a Type 1 error does no harm, but a Type 2 error might be fatal. Running from a rock that looks like a leopard can make you look silly, but not running from a leopard that looks like a rock will probably get you eaten. Strangely, though we have kept our strong propensity to make Type 1 errors, as the risk of not noticing a real leopard has fallen, we are more and more likely to make Type 2 errors. In our modern world, in which we increasingly rely on forecasts and predictions, this leads to trouble.

Nate Silver, in his new book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don't, presents a number of similar examples that display our modern tendency to pick faces out of clouds while ignoring the approaching friend (or foe). I'll simplify matters and mention that he finds successful forecasting in only two areas: weather and baseball. Politics and stock picking and a number of other areas come in for a drubbing.

This simple diagram tells me all I need to know about "technical analysis" of stock prices. The data are the day-to-day percent change in the price of DuPont stock, from 1962 to mid September of this year. That's just over 13,000 data points. The X axis is the change on any particular day, and the Y axis is the change on the following day. This diagram shows perfect non-correlation! It is a 2-D bell curve, though with thicker tails than a Gaussian bell curve.

During those 51 years, the stock rose nearly 4,200%. That averages out to 7.7% per year but only 0.032% daily. Someone who bought $1,000 of DD stock in early January 1962 would have $43,000 today. Now, there's been a lot of inflation. That $1,000 in 1962 had the buying power of $7,740 today. So a half-century of waiting produced an effective multiplier of 5.5. That's 3% yearly after adjusting for inflation. Better than the bank.

The most extreme daily jumps are -20% and +10%. Stock speculators, particularly day traders, dream of taking advantage of the many days that a stock's price changes more than a percent or two. And such days are more common than if the distribution were strictly Gaussian. DuPont stock moves up at least 2.5% in a day about 5% of the time, and downward with similar frequency. That means, if you could pick just those up days, about 12 days each year, you could earn at least a 20% return yearly. That's 2-3 times what a buy-and-hold strategy will earn. Then, look at this:

The chart shows the historical record of DuPont stock, adjusted for splits. Focus on late 1974, late 1987, and late 2008 to early 2009. These show DD following the herd during market crashes, and represent downturns of 50%, 41% and 65%, respectively. If you could have avoided them, by selling just at the peak and buying back in at the bottom, your final return would be 9.69 times greater, for a total value of $416,000! Adjusted for inflation, that's over 8% return yearly (12.5% dollar-for-dollar yearly return).

Such figures stoke the dreams of day traders. But the first chart, showing no day-to-day correlation, dashes those dreams. Day traders work very hard for little return, and most lose. Some lose, big time, and some gain, but it is by accident either way. There are millions of day traders and other stock speculators. As Churchill wrote, "Even a fool is right once in a while."

Now we must differentiate prediction from forecasting. A prediction is a flat statement that a specific happening will or will not occur at some time or in some time horizon. For example, "There will be a magnitude 7 earthquake in Fremont within the coming year." A proper forecast includes the forecaster's uncertainty and is stated in probabilistic terms, as, "Projecting the trend of earthquakes in Fremont indicates that an earthquake of magnitude 7 or greater occurs about 3 times every 200 years." [Fremont was the imaginary State in the novel Space by James A. Michener]. One might add to such a forecast, a hybrid statement such as, "Fremont has not experienced an earthquake of magnitude greater than 6 in the past 100 years," which implies that "the big one" may be overdue. But it may indicate that conditions deep down may also be changing.

Earthquake prediction is the poster child of unpredictable phenomena. Intense study and research over decades, even centuries, have failed to yield a single valid prediction. Sports betting is close behind, except in the arena of baseball. Nate Silver once created a system he calls PECOTA, that rates the strength of teams against one another according to the past statistics of their players, and a well-known "aging curve" of the way performance changes over a player's career. Because baseball has such a rich data set, going back a century, and the principles needed to make useful forecasts are also well known, PECOTA and similar systems can evaluate players and teams at a level nearly equal to the best scouts. The computer can't quite replicate the humans, but it does give 'em a run for the money!

Why are forecasting and prediction so hard? Even though we have randomness at the deepest level of atomic phenomena, that randomness is constrained by the statistics of large numbers, and physics works very accurately to predict many systems, such as planetary orbits. Thus, though the path of an electron after passing through a hole may be uncertain, the distribution center of the paths of trillions of electrons (say, a millionth of an ampere for 0.1 second or so) will be very sharply defined and can be accurately measured, and the shape of the distribution tells you additional facts: the hole's size and shape. The much larger "distribution" consisting of the atoms making up a baseball mean that its flight, once thrown or batted, will be easily predicted.

The geological setting of an earthquake is not as simple as an electron. Perhaps this year, an earthquake might occur, large enough that the two sides of a fault will slip by each other by half a meter. That may be enough to put two kinds of rock in contact, that were not in contact before, which changes the likelihood of the next earthquake.

What about the weather? Air is in constant motion; its humidity and temperature, and thus its density, change constantly. How can anyone make a useful weather forecast? In some ways, we are still dependent on the "signs in the sky" that Jesus mentioned. In modern (18^th Century) terms, "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor's delight." Lore such as this is a compilation of patterns that happen over and over, so that generations of our ancestors took note and remembered. Yet now we can get a forecast up to a week or two ahead, complete with expected high and low, precipitation chances and intensity, and wind strength.

It's all done in a computer. Air may have complex behavior, but the physics of air motion and how it changes with temperature, pressure and humidity are well known. The 3D-gridded-cell models that run in supercomputers use surprisingly simple physics to determine how a 3D cell is influenced by the 6 cells it is in facial contact with, and the 8 cells at its corners. The reason supercomputers are used is that Earth is big. The surface area of the planet is 4πr², where r is 6,370 km: about 510 million km². Cells of half a km on a side, plus 0.1 km in depth (up to 12 km altitude) result in a Global Circulation Model (you'll see the acronym GCM in some weather web sites) with 1/4 trillion cells. It takes a lot of calculation to determine what will happen in the next quarter hour. There are 96 quarter hours in a day, and 672 in a week. To do all those trillions and quadrillions of calculations in only an hour or two requires today's largest computers. And the forecasters' computer gurus don't do it once, they run it several times with very small variations (the formal practice of selecting the variations is called Design of Experiments), to test the stability and sensitivity of the forecast to perturbations.

Weather forecasters have an incentive to get it right that others don't have. The reality is going to arrive tomorrow or the next day, it is visible to all, and it is no fun getting a call such as, "I have ten inches of 'partly cloudy' that I need to shovel off my driveway. Want to come over and help?" They also get a ton of research money from the Dept. of Defense, because good forecasts are crucial to military activities. Earth dynamic studies are different. Students of earthquakes can't observe the day-to-day conditions of a fault line. Its active zone is typically 8-15 km deep, and we can't yet drill a well that deep. Earthquakes are also rare. Sure, there are thousands of little ones, at the bottom of "measurable", every day, but there are trillions of weather events around the globe, every few minutes.

Mr. Silver entertains us with many, many stories of the vagaries of forecasts of all types. In the end, most phenomena are too difficult to forecast appropriately. Some involve living things. The cardinal rule of animal studies is, "Given any particular set of temperature, lighting, food availability and ambient noise, the rat will do whatever the rat wants to do." And this is in spite of lab rats being so inbred that their genetics are practically identical. The statistics of playing poker yield a few big winners, who work hard for the kind of edge they need to beat their fellow experts. But they love to be in a game that is well supplied with "fish": overconfident amateurs. A well-written computer package might tell a poker player the optimum betting strategy, but only if it is betting against other computers. The social aspects of the game, bluffing and speed or slowness of a bet for example, often provide a lot more of an edge than the math does. Carefully crafted intimidation works wonders. I don't expect a computer to master these aspects of the game for a number of decades (that's my forecast!).

The book's final example is the climate, particularly "global warming" or "climate change" or "greenhouse effect" or whatever the next buzzword will be. Climate is not weather. It is the setting in which weather happens. Climate changes unfold over multiple decades or centuries or millennia. Weather changes take seconds. In numerical analysis, this is the Stiffness problem. When something changes suddenly, it takes time for the effects to either move elsewhere or to die down. If you are interested in something with a 5-year cycle, such as El Niño (also called ENSO), the exact location and timing of today's sudden thundershower will not matter one tiny bit. If your interest is in human-induced greenhouse warming that began in the late 1700s, ENSO is an irritation at best. In fact, weather and medium-scale cycles such as ENSO are "noise" in the context of this book's thesis. Another researcher, later on, made clear a different view, that noise is really signals, but about stuff you aren't interested in at the moment.

This is like the crystal radio I made as a kid. It initially consisted of a long wire, running to a treetop, a piece of germanium crystal, and a "whisker", a wire that formed a diode with the germanium; and earphones attached to the whisker and the ground connection on the back of the germanium crystal. The diode "detected" the audio signal by separating it out of the radio frequency "hash". There was just one strong station nearby, so I could hear them pretty clearly. But later, as more stations came on the air (this was the 1950s), I could hear all of them at once. So, following a diagram in Mechanix Illustrated, I made a coil and paid a dime for a small capacitor and a piece of copper, to make a rough tuner. It could be tuned to resonate with one AM station at a time, so I could "tune out" the "noise" of the other stations. They were actually signals, just signals I didn't want right then.

The global greenhouse has warmed about 0.5°C (0.9°F) in a century, and perhaps 1°C (1.8°F) since 1750. Some of that may be warming since the Little Ice Age, which some consider a regional phenomenon, not a global one. But the current "ForecastFox for Mozilla" forecast for the next 24 hours indicates we'll have a 20°F swing tomorrow, from 75 in midafternoon to 55 overnight. You have to average out a lot of daily temperatures to see a change of a degree over 250 years. When you want weather, that is your signal. When you want climate, weather is noise, and lots of it.

The science of greenhouse warming is partly very well known, and partly not so well known. I learned to replicate the Arrhenius calculations from 150 years ago, when I was a pre-teen. Actual warming since his day has been about twice what he expected, because there seem to be amplifying factors. These are very poorly known. Does more cloud cover cool the atmosphere by reflecting more sunlight, or warm it by acting as a further thermal blanket? Or does it do one thing at a certain latitude and another elsewhere? If we do have a further warming by 2 to 4°C, will it shift the Hadley Cell north, or south, or not at all? (The northern edge of the Hadley Cell is a range of latitudes characterized by dry, descending air that form all the world's great deserts.) I've thought of buying land in central Canada, that is currently too cold to farm. Perhaps in 20 years it will be arable…unless the Hadley Cell shifts north and dries out Canada. Then maybe the Mojave would become a tropical paradise!

Y'know how to make a complex system into a positively unsolvable mess? Make it political. Both sides of the Climate debate are so politicized that they can only talk past each other. The tiniest proposal to set any policy is vigorously fought by every vested interest, even those who might benefit (the devil you know…). Heaven help us if weather forecasting ever gets politicized! It is already true that most forecasters err on the wet side: a 20% chance of rain is reported as a 40% or even 50% chance, because the ones rained on are less likely to complain, and those that aren't will feel they dodged a bullet. What if some "weather outcomes" become more politically correct than others?

By the way, I take issue with Silver's definition of statistical rain forecasts. He writes that if 40% of the computer models indicate rain in Chicago, and the rest don't, it is reported as a 40% chance of rain. Sounds logical, but it is quite different than that. The "chance of rain" has different meanings in spring (plus summer) and autumn (plus winter). Spring and summer squall lines pass through areas that are well predicted by most GCM programs. But a squall line is not a solid front of rain. It is a line of thunderstorms. A light squall line may have storms half a mile wide, spaced 2-3 miles apart, giving 20% of the area a 100% chance of rain. The forecasters just don't know which 20%, so the whole area is given a 20% chance of rain. A heavy squall line will have larger storms with closer spacing, and maxes out at about 80% coverage (though this will probably be reported as "near certain"). Fall and early winter storms tend to be solid and widespread, but subject to ripples several miles wide in the upper atmosphere. As a system rides up a ripple, it drops rain along a solid band dozens of hundreds of miles long but only about a mile wide or so. As it rides down, it dries out. The height of the ripples determines whether the overall chance of rain is 30% or 70% or somewhere between. The ripples drift along as system after system rides through, so it is very hard to tell exactly where the rain will fall. Timing is everything. Then, a lower-level storm that just dumps (ignoring the ripples) leads to those 100% forecasts, which are generally accurate.

In most arenas, Silver advocates using Bayesian analysis rather than "frequentist" simulations or estimations. These allow individualized forecasts for particular cases. An example is the probability of breast cancer in a woman in her 40s, who has just had the unwelcome news that a mammogram is "positive". The factors of a Bayesian calculation are:

• x - Prior Estimate: the chance that a proposition is true.
• y - Type 1 analysis: the chance that new data which indicates "Yes" is actually correct.
• z - Type 2 analysis: the chance that the proposition is not true, in spite of the new data.

The data are usually noted as percents. The formula for a new estimate (a new x) is xy/(xy+z(1-x)). For this example, we find:

In this case, the woman may wish for a needle biopsy, but a bit of blood chemistry may be in order first. Enzymes in the blood can indicate whether a new cancer is likely to be slow growing, or faster. Is it slower (the most likely case)? She can wait a year for another mammogram. If the next mammogram is positive, re-do the analysis, replacing the 1.4% with 9.6%. Now the "new x" is just over 44%, and at the very least a biopsy is indicated. Most other forecasting methods don't use multi-step refinement. And by the way, if the next mammogram is negative (and no palpation can detect a lump, or any growth in an earlier lump), running the analysis with 9.6%, 10% and 75%, in that order, reverts to 1.4% as the "new x".

Those who follow this blog may wonder why it took me 3 weeks to read such a fascinating book. The writing is good and the examples are interesting, so that didn't slow me down. We have a lot going on, however, so I have had much less time for reading than usual. Retirement has been good to me so far, but I have to be careful not to take on too many projects at once. I completed a Real Estate course and passed the test in July. However, I will probably not seek a license or become a Realtor®, because there are simply too many other things I'd prefer to do. The change of style and reduced frequency with which I post is a similar effect. I used to post almost every lunch hour, doing research in off hours. I think I am working longer days than when I worked! Better busy than bored. Since retiring in February, I have put 24 items in my "job jar" file. Half of them, mostly the bigger ones, have been completed. One major item is awaiting an event that is at least a year in the future, but the preparations are nearly all completed. Others are smaller so I can take an odd half day to perform one. All things in their own time. In the meantime, I read when I can, and report what I read.

A loss for the atmosphere

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, climate change, argument

Jonathan Swift wrote, "You cannot persuade a man out of a belief that he wasn't persuaded into."

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou be like to him -- even thou. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes." – Proverbs 26:4-5 Young's Literal Translation

Let's take up the Bible passage first. It is akin to a koan, seemingly self-contradictory, and is best understood in the context of political disputation. The first sentence warns against letting your opponent (fool or not!) set the terms of the debate. For example, to answer either 'yes' or 'no' to the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" leads you into a trap. The second sentence is wiser. It is best understood in a paraphrase: "Don't be reasonable with an unreasonable person." If you suspect your opponent is crazy, you must be crazier.

That leads us to the other quote. Cases of religious conversion are but one example of experiences that people describe in very emotional terms. The most frequent phrase is, "Once I was blind but now I see." This also happens in other arenas, and in particular in the science of climate change, this is what Anna Rose was hoping for when she embarked on a month-long odyssey with Nick Minchin, a retired member of the Australian Senate, to interview scientists and others engaged in the debate over climate change, global warming, or whatever you may call it. The journey was sponsored by ABC in Australia, and led to a program aired in April, I Can Change Your Mind About Climate.

Anna Rose is chair of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. As we find from reading her book Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Skeptic, nobody's mind was changed. And as I saw at the ABC website, a poll of those who viewed the documentary TV program shows that few minds were changed at all. If anybody changed their opinion, it was probably in the direction of skepticism. Of 29,900 poll responses, 56% were either doubtful or dismissive of climate change ("Dismissive" alone was 48%) and 40% were concerned or alarmed. That leaves but 4% in the middle. This is to be expected. Even if a majority of people have no strong feelings about the subject, they are the least likely to watch a documentary with an argumentative format. The rest already had their minds made up, and probably watched to either cheer or groan as one side or another made telling points.

To tell the truth, from reading Madlands, I didn't see hardly any telling points made by the experts chosen by Ms Rose. It was clear from the outset that she was trying to bat way out of her league. She writes midway through of feeling that she was following the rules, while Nick was not. Well, of course not. He is a politician. From the beginning his agenda was winning over people who would watch the program, not answering any of the arguments made to him. He chose only one (formerly) respected scientist, and several more telegenic spokespeople.

The month of travel covered all the continents except Antarctica (I suspect ABC producers quailed at the cost of getting a film crew to the Ross ice shelf). Fairly early on, they visited the scientist most likely to make a dent in Nick's skepticism, Professor Richard Muller of UC Berkeley. A profound skeptic, Muller thought that the famous "hockey stick" graph of warming in the 20th Century was based on faulty measurements. Climate skeptic web sites abound with pictures of standard recording stations located near air conditioning equipment, or in the midst of concrete covered areas. Unwilling to believe NASA or NOAA or anybody else, Muller gathered all the data used for these calculations over the past century or so, billions of measurements, and had a team re-analyze them, eliminating the ones that were the most likely to be compromised. His team produced a temperature graph almost identical to the "hockey stick". He changed his point of view, at least to some extent. Prof. Muller now declares that the climate is warming at a surprising rate, and that our emissions of carbon dioxide are largely responsible: "…we are dumping enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we're working in a dangerous realm."

Nick was not swayed. Maybe nudged just a tiny bit, but at that point, Anna should have seen the light herself, and called off the rest of the project. Muller was not one of her picks, but had a better case to make than any of them. The basic story is that Anna picked a series of reasonable and very qualified experts, while Nick picked primarily pit bulls. He didn't bother to try to convince her. He was aiming at the TV audience. The documentary provided him with a platform on which she had at most a cameo presence.

Madlands is her attempt to salvage something from a disaster. She makes point after point in the text, and in each case, I asked internally, "So why didn't you say that for the cameras?" It proved much too easy for her to be shocked speechless.

The climate debate is not about science. The science has been known for 150 years. I replicated Arrhenius's calculations more than 50 years ago. The modern refinement is to pin down feedback effects and nonlinear transitions. "Pin down" is not quite accurate. The greenhouse effect alone can account for at most a rise of 4°C if we increase carbon dioxide to 5-10 times its current level. That is bad enough. But recent (since 1980 or so) measurements indicate that changes in water vapor in the atmosphere, aerosol production, and so forth, might multiply greenhouse warming by a factor of between 1.5 and 4; the consensus is "about 3". That is the basis of the IPCC prediction of warming by a further 1.2°C to 4°C by 2050. Greenhouse effects alone would add less than a degree.

To effect a change in policy, one must convince policy makers, not just of the truth of your propositions, but that a cost-effective solution can be had, one that does not threaten to end their career. Rule Zero of Politics: "Where you stand depends on where you sit." Anna Rose's book and further work are intended to shift public opinion. She does, at least, understand that to turn a policy maker's stance it is necessary to change the stance of the constituency. Too bad it takes so long, because Rule One is "Moses in the Wilderness": it takes 40 years for the old generation and their old ideas to die out and a new generation to rise up.

The illusion of thinking clearly

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, thinking, logical fallacies

A few years ago I met someone at a reception. He told me he was a philosopher, and that his specialty was the fallacies of formal logic. I happen to know that there are 16 formal fallacies, which are errors in the logic of an argument. I also know, and had recently read a treatise upon, the informal fallacies, which are unknown in number, but there are more than 100 (the Wikipedia article "list of fallacies" notes 59). For some reason, this quite incensed my new acquaintance, to the point that I was concerned he may become violent (a common informal fallacy on his part!).

Winston Churchill said, "Even a fool is right once in a while." This caution alerts us to avoid the most common informal fallacy, the ad hominem attack, which we could describe as, "You must be wrong because you are a bad person", or, "…because I don't like you", or, "…because you are a [substitute your stereotype of choice]". Interestingly, this fallacy is not discussed in The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. I suppose he felt is has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, a great many elsewheres. But he does discuss 99 common errors that are so common, so very common it is a surprise any of us can decide anything at all!

Dobelli is Swiss and writes in German; the book was translated to English by Nicky Griffin. Kudos to the translator. Many translations from German produce nearly unreadable English. Clearly, Dobelli has a smooth, conversational writing style which Griffin has captured masterfully. It is great fun to read.

I can't hope to comment on more than a few of the items discussed. I picked a few favorites:

• Reciprocity, in the chapter "Don't Accept Free Drinks" – Dobelli calls appeals for donations that come in the mail with a "free gift" inside a "kind of gentle blackmail" (I'd call them extortion rather than blackmail). An allied principle is TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Depending on how much spending authority you have, the "free lunch" could range from sports tickets to a "free" vacation. Then there is all the "free" stuff offered if you'll spend 90 minutes listening to a timeshare presentation. It is good to learn to say, "I don't think I can afford your 'free gift'."
• Confirmation Bias, in two chapters, the second being "Murder Your Darlings" – This has two sides. One is the increasing tendency for search engines, led by Google, to keep track of your preferences and to use them to rank the list of returns from a search you make. As time goes by, you'll only get "hits" that confirm your prejudices. That's why it is a good idea not to search when you are logged in to a Google service such as Blogger, Drive or GMail (or one such as Yahoo Mail if you search using Yahoo). Search as anonymously as possible if you want less biased results. The second side is the tendency of writers to dwell on themes that they love and to give short shrift to others, even if they are trying to discuss "all sides" of an issue. Arthur Quiller-Couch devised the motto, "Murder your darlings", meaning to eliminate the redundant text that inevitably fills your writing about those most-loved themes; pare those sections down to match the less-favored sections.
• Induction, in the chapter "How to Relieve People of Their Millions" – This is a favorite of mine, based on an ancient scam. Someone who is lucky several times in a row may be considered extra favored or blessed, and if you get tricked by your own good luck, it can lead to a feeling of immortality. It also leads to unneeded depression when your luck turns. But it also explains why "financial advisers" invest each client's funds in a different collection of investments (Those who invest all funds equally are called mutual fund managers, and are more likely to have a modicum of honesty!). Here is a key datum: multiply 2 by itself 10 times, and the result is 1,024. Pick a yes/no question, such as "will the market go up or go down?" Send about 1,000 people an e-mail in which you explain why you think the market will go up in the coming week, and send another 1,000 an e-mail in which you explain why you think it will go down. After a week, it has done one or the other. Suppose it went down. Now send an e-mail to just the second group making a new prediction, again of the yes/no variety. The third week, e-mail just the 500 for whom you've been right twice, with a further prediction, and so forth. After five weeks, assuming you actually started with two groups of 1,024, you now have 64 people who have received five accurate predictions. At this point, ask to be paid for further predictions. Let's say they all agree (keep the cost low at first). Now things get complicated. After your next prediction, send an apologetic e-mail to the 32 who saw you "flub", and offer to refund their payment; send a self-congratulatory e-mail to the others, but don't lay it on too thick. You are likely to keep some of the ones who got the apology. Anyway, after a total of 10 predictions, you now have at least 2 people who think you are infallible! You can ask for stratospheric prices for your answers. Investment advisers are not so blatant about it, but by spreading around their clients' funds, they can avoid being wrong too frequently.
• The Black Swan, in the chapter "How to Profit From the Implausible" – The actual fallacy is to think that unlikely events are less likely than they really are. For example, how likely is it that someone could throw a basketball over their house, and have it go through the hoop in the back yard? One in a million, or a billion? Yet there are at least two videos out there showing just this happening. One is shown a couple times a year on America's Funniest Home Videos on ABC. Professional statisticians tend to analyze every distribution as a "normal" distribution, even though very few natural phenomena follow a bell curve. For example, women's height is found to be normally distributed, but household income is not. Also, the daily change in a stock's price is typically analyzed as a normal distribution, but large changes are much, much more likely than such a model predicts. Dobelli claims that unlikely events are getting even more likely, and even more consequential, because our civilization is more strongly affected by events outside "the usual range", like a 100-year flood. Before we began building lots of fragile houses some 10,000 years ago, a 100-year flood simply meant moving camp to higher ground for a week. Now it means high insurance premiums (if you have flood insurance in the first place). Also, those who make big incomes don't work for others. Dobelli's advice is to work in an area where a big break can bring big returns, but to save and invest as though such a big break may never come. If it comes, you can profit from it, and if it doesn't, you will have provided for your future.
• Feature-Positive Effect, in the chapter "Why Checklists Deceive You" – We notice things that are there (but not even all of those!), but it is very hard to notice what isn't there. This is the crux of the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze", where the important clue was that a watchdog didn't bark. Only Holmes would notice such a fact. Everyone else was busy about evidence they were able to collect, because it existed. Double-talk "explanations" about why something went wrong are solidly based on carefully omitting key facts in the midst of a blizzard of less relevant, but attractive, facts (a related fallacy). Dobelli tells of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. During its premier many wept. He asks, "Would we be less happy without [it]? Probably not." Had "the Ninth" never been written, we'd never know what we were missing anyway. In the same way, we notice nothing in particular when we are totally well. We really notice any disease or injury.

In a reference section at the end we find 50 pages of bibliographic information, which the author says could easily have become several hundred pages. There is a lot of "thinking about thinking" being written up in the literature. This book is the most accessible of them all in my experience.

Family drama with a wink

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, humor, family relations

As writers the mother and daughter don't compete, they complement. Philadelphian Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella write "Chick Wit" for The Philadelphia Enquirer. You know how it goes. Write a column long enough, and you can collect a few dozen into a book. These witty ladies have been at it long enough that this is their fourth book together. I don't now what other writing the daughter does, but the mother is also a mystery writer, with 19 titles so far.

'Nuffa that. Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim is a great read. One might say that Lisa and Francesca are following a trail blazed by Erma Bombeck, one of my favorite writers, though a generation earlier than Lisa. They write with the same pointed humor, but with even more warmth and joy. While their most frequent subject is each other, they discuss friends, pets, travel (with each other or with others), food, and emotions—they're Italian, so feelings worth having are worth having loudly.

If I count right, the book contains 73 articles. Short ones of 2-4 pages. That made it very well suited to the way I often read: squeezing in a few pages between other stuff, or even during TV commercials. A session on "the throne" is good for 2 or 3 items (don't tell me you don't take a book in there).

There isn't a lot else I can say. I didn't pick out a favorite essay, because it would be like picking my favorite day out of the last ten days of almost perfect early fall weather.