Neighborhood birds – not so ordinary

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ornithology, birds, bird watching, photographs

This is how baby robins look the day they hatch. On most monitors this image will be just a little smaller than actual size.

We had the good fortune that a pair of robins built a nest on the kitchen window ledge. They anchored it to the thermometer support. Four blue eggs were followed by four pink nestlings, covered with sparse white fuzz. We kept the window shade down, except when taking pictures, to keep from spooking the parent birds, and later, the fledglings.

I am not much of a bird watcher, but I pay attention to them, particularly the ones in my yard and neighborhood. In Jack Gedney's book The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live, the author wants, most of all, that we all pay attention. Birds are all around us.

When we step outside in the morning (or if we have an open window at sunrise), do we notice the birdsong? When we turn a corner at the end of the house and hear a flutter from a nearby bush, do we bother to look for the rapidly-exiting bird we just spooked? When a catbird is crying nearby, do we crane about, hoping to see it? Do we thrill to see a cardinal in the birdbath?

The book has the stories of 15 common birds of California, where the author lives. A few, the towhee and two species of native sparrow, were new to me. The rest were familiar. Hmm: Chapter 10, on the White-crowned sparrow and golden-crowned sparrow, is two-for-one, so that's 16 bird species.

Although I've lived in California three times, for a total of eleven years, I never learned of the California towhee. Gedney calls it "the brown bird", which reflects its principal characteristic. However, the average songbird is a "little brown thing"—think of common (English) sparrow and wrens—which makes sense. For prey birds, being inconspicuous is a life strategy. So I was probably in the presence of towhees daily and never noticed.

I love the way he writes: lyrically, without being maudlin. In Chapter 6, about the House Finch, he invites us to "reenchant our lives": "You can choose to peel away the concealing layer of quotidian gray and rediscover the brilliant core that's been present all along." From any distance farther than halfway across your yard, it's hard to tell this is a red bird. Particularly in fall and winter, its winter coat is more of a stately pink than this blazing red.

Writing of owls, he remarks on the way they add their own sounds to the night (the stereotypical "Hoo-hoo Hoooo!" is generally a great horned owl; hard to spot in spite of its size). Yet with the spread of artificial light, the monthly cycle of the moon's phases is lost on us, and the changes in owl song that were once so familiar: "[We] lose the evening, erase the quiet time between activity and sleep. Moonlit groves grow lonely in an age of off-and-on." He turns to a poet, Pablo Neruda, to limn the Anna's hummingbird: "You are / a seed in the sun / a fire / dressed in feathers." Although mourning doves have the fastest level flight of any bird, Anna's hummingbirds fly faster relative to their size than any other bird. Put another way, the hummingbird is a bit slower than the dove, but is 1/3rd the length and 1/30th the weight.

I suspect if almost anyone put their mind to it, they could recall at least a dozen birds with which they are at least a little familiar.

I live some 10 km west of the Delaware River, near the PA-DE state line. This is the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic region. The ranges of many populations of northeastern and mid-southern birds overlap, so folks that keep life lists have a rich harvest without going far.

The larger birds we see are typically turkey vultures, such as these two (photographed by my wife), after chopping up some small carcass in our yard, peering in the neighbor's window. I've seen bald eagles in nearby areas, but never from our neighborhood. Even from far away, it's easy to distinguish eagle from vulture. The eagle's wings are held flat and its flight is very steady. The vulture's wings are held in a shallow "V", and it tends to teeter in flight, catching every tiny shift in the updrafts that keep it aloft. The turkey vulture, if close enough, sports long, white triangles on the rear of its wings. Half the tail is also white.

We also have black vultures, with black skin on the head rather than red. Turkey vultures have the best sense of smell of any bird, and black vultures keep an eye on them because they can smell what no vulture can see.

Slightly smaller raptors in the area include this Cooper's hawk, that was sitting our our fence, and both red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks. Cooper's hawks are bird hawks, but one day a friend and I were in the driveway talking, and heard a thump. We turned just in time to see the Cooper's hawk flying off with a squirrel. That's a lot of load for this hawk, for they are smaller than red-tailed hawks.

Middle sized birds are dominated by robins. In certain seasons, it's interesting to see a nearby schoolyard hosting 20 or more feeding robins, which keep 10-20 feet apart, while not far away, a flock of 100 blackbirds, with much closer spacing, could fit in the area of a garage. We also have cardinals—this picture is of two cardinal eggs in a nest in our privet hedge. There are also catbirds, starlings, mourning doves, tree swallows, blue jays, and occasional goldfinches.

Smaller birds include several "little brown things": English sparrows, Carolina wrens, and another wren species I haven't identified. We also have chickadees. Neighbors have reported seeing bluebirds, but I haven't.

That's nineteen. Not much of a life list compared to many folks I know. But for me, it's enough. I can't identify them all by sound, but with observation that ought to improve. I hope Mr. Gedney would approve.

The irresistible impulse to predict

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, speculation, prediction, futurism

The second chapter of The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow, by Dr. Steven Novella and his brothers Bob Novella and Jay Novella, begins with a quote by the sage of the ball park, Yogi Berra: "The future ain't what it used to be."

I can think of three facts about the 1969 landing on the Moon by astronauts of Apollo 11, that were not anticipated by science fiction writers, nor by futurists in general:

1. Between 10% and 30% of Americans believe it was all a hoax.
2. The sponsor was not a corporation nor a "rich industrialist" but the Federal government.
3. The world watched Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder on color TV.

It took only 50 years for a few "rich industrialists" to gather both the financial muscle and the personal will to start spaceship companies, and at present there are three! In the golden age of space fiction, mainly pre-1960, nobody dreamed the combined Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs would cost about a trillion dollars (in current dollars).

What did science fiction get right? Arthur Clarke foretold telecommunications via synchronous satellites in 1945, 12 years before Sputnik 1 surprised the world. On the dystopian side, George Orwell wrote in 1948 of a pervasive surveillance state (he was mixing Stalin with his expectation of immense progress in video technology); now it is upon us. More prosaically, in 1911 Hugo Gernsback wrote of video chatting; of course the inimitable Hugo made dozens of predictions in everything he wrote, so getting it right once in a while is simple statistics in this case.

What approach do the Novella brothers take? I'd call Skeptics' Guide a catalog of futurist ideas sorted by plausibility. I am amused by the title of Chapter 3, "The Science of Futurism." To me, that's an oxymoron. Science is about what we know, or think we know. Stuff that hasn't happened cannot be a scientific subject. To me, futurist speculation is fun, and when folks in a position to know more than most of us about technological and sociological trends speculate that one or another trend "has legs" and is likely to affect all of us, it's worth taking note. Some decent fraction of the time, the speculation turns into fact.

The authors sagely note that it's hard to distinguish robust trends from fads. I look back at a number of things I once thought were "neaty-keen!", that have vanished from the scene, with decidedly mixed feelings. I tried out a Segway at a science park once. I like them. The business model was fatally flawed, though, and my insurance company would probably have charged me more than the cost of the machine...per year. So as much as I hope for the rapid development and spread of self-driving autos, I suspect I won't live to see them "take over" (but I'll get one of they do!).

Or maybe I'll live long enough for many more trends to play out. The next-to-last chapter deals with indefinite life extension. Scale that back to "let's make it possible for most people to live 100-120 years in good health", and I have a decent chance to use or own (if we still own cars in 2040) a self-driving car, and to have not a robot butler but instead several (affordable!) robotic appliances, such as one that can make a decent omelet. Maybe I'll live to see actual, true, artificial general intelligence (AGI). My goal post for AGI is that a mechanism, entirely without "handlers and minders", does research, produces something new, and obtains a patent. A secondary goal post: one that can carry on a discussion on numerous subjects, and hold its own at a meeting of an intelligent, well-read Book of the Month Club.

Of course, artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is beginning to do some very interesting things. One is the language understanding behind "art generators" such as Dall-E and "text generators" such as ChatGPT, and the object recognition behind image sharpeners such as Sharpen AI. Would life in a settlement on Mars such as the one shown here appeal to you? I prompted Dall-E to create this image. It's a portion of a larger image I "created" with "outpainting". ANI is beginning to push our culture in new directions.

After the introductory part of the book, each of the four sections deals with matters that are less and less likely. The last section discusses the impossible, at least until new laws of physics are discovered: time travel, transporters, and faster-than-light travel for example. My, how prone we are to wrestle against the constraints of the universe!

The point is often made that fiction writers and futurist writers cannot escape putting today's people into their future scenarios. A small number of people are fanatical about "living forever", but do they have a way to predict the social disruption that would result, if even 0.1% of humans became effectively immortal? The authors discuss both positive and negative views of this, and are careful not to draw conclusions. It would be a Black Swan moment for the human race. While I'd like to "not die", I am not willing for evil people to live long enough to get really, really evil. Imagine if Stalin or Mao Zedong were still alive...

As good as the writing is, the book is rather insipid. The authors didn't want to be sensationalists. They succeeded at that.

Yogi Berra also said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Backyard gravitational energy storage

 kw: analytical projects, energy, energy storage, batteries, gravitational energy storage

The Federal subsidy for installing solar panels on houses' roofs continues. I can't take advantage of it because the huge trees in my back yard shade too much of the roof too much of the time. I was told there is an extra subsidy to pay for removing big trees. Hmm, I wonder what the carbon "pollution" balance is between removing several 150-foot trees and using solar power…produced with panels that were manufactured using large amounts of fossil fuel-powered equipment. Is anybody producing solar panels using only solar power?

Anyway, at my latitude, I must use air conditioning about one-third of the year. On the warmest days, the A/C runs periodically all night long, particularly when the overnight low temperature is in the 80's (°F of course; that's about 30°C). It's no longer possible in most states to have the solar panels "run the meter backward" during the day, to build up an energy credit with the utility. Thus, I would have to purchase electricity to run my A/C, and the rest of the house, at night.

I'd like to store energy during the day to use at night. The Tesla Powerwall is one expensive option, and it is probably insufficient. Let's do some figuration.

My electricity bill shows monthly usage between 500 and 1,100 kwh/month. The smaller amount is characteristic of spring and autumn. My A/C unit is a heat pump, so my highest usage is actually in slightly warmer winters, when the heat pump usually runs rather than the backup oil furnace. Let's take 600 kwh/month as the top end of A/C-heat pump usage. That's about 20 kwh/day on the "worst" days, from an energy consumption perspective. Not every day is the same, so there are probably peak days with usage in the 30-40 kwh range. In the summer, more cooling is needed during the day; in winter, more heating is needed at night. Considering that these are very approximate figures, I can begin with the likelihood that an energy storage solution in the range of 20 kwh is appropriate.

First possible option: Tesla Powerwall 2. At a web page for This Old House, I find that the Powerwall 2 has a current (early 2023) price of $11,500 for one battery with a capacity of 13.5 kwh, and $18,500 for a unit with two batteries (27 kwh total). The warranty life is 10 years, with a guarantee of 70% remaining capacity at the end of 10 years. That brings the effective storage of an older unit as low as 9.45 kwh or 18.9 kwh. My benchmark figure of 20 kwh thus requires a two-battery system, with replacement needed 9-10 years down the road. Also, such a unit weighs about 500 pounds (230 kg).

If you're enough of a maker (we used to say "handyman"), what about buying a bunch of car batteries and wiring them together with a charger and a large inverter for converting the DC output to AC at 110 volts (or 220V, for your A/C)? Lead-acid batteries have an energy density of about 40 watt-hours per pound (wh/lb) or 88 (or 90) wh/kg. To achieve 20 kwh we need 500 pounds of car batteries. Hmm, that's about the same as the Tesla unit. Of course, adding the charger and inverter will probably add 100 lbs, and the supporting structure would be another hundred or so. A typical car battery costs $200 or more and weighs 45 pounds; we need 11 of these, perhaps 12 for good measure (even numbers are better for balancing charging and discharge circuits). Not knowing what large, fast chargers cost, nor large inverters, this is still looking pretty good at a battery cost of about $2,400.

That sets some sidebars on direct electricity storage. But I've been wondering about gravitational energy storage. This picture shows one company's proposal for using concrete cylinders and a six-arm crane that uses wind turbine-generated electricity to raise the cylinders, and generates electricity when they are lowered during periods of less wind. They claim overall efficiency of 90%.

The concept is by Energy Vault. The tower is 33 storeys tall (about 100 meters). However, I couldn't make much sense of the numbers in the report, which describes 5,000 concrete blocks with a total weight of 35 tons. That doesn't add up; it works out to 14 pounds per block. I suspect the actual weight of each block is 1,400 lb (640 kg). Such a cylinder would have a volume of a little less than a third of a cubic meter (or about 1/3 of a cubic yard), which is almost twice the volume of an oil drum. From the picture, that looks about right.

What kind of weight would I need to make a backyard gravitational power "tower"? In most neighborhoods, one cannot construct anything taller than a 2-story house; perhaps 30 feet (9 m) at the very most. More figuration is needed, to convert weight and distance to watt-hours.

• One horsepower is 33,000 ft-lbs per minute, or 550 ft-lbs per second
• One kilowatt = 1.36 HP = 738 ft-lbs/s
• 1 kwh = 738×3,600 = 2,692,800 ft-lbs = 372,400 kg-m
• 20 kwh comes to 7,448 Tonne-m (nearly 7½ million kg-m)
• Divide by 9: About 830 Tonnes (910 tons) raised to a 9 m height

Ok, just to run my overnight energy storage, I need to be able to raise and lower upwards of 900 one-ton blocks, using motors that can function as generators with a 4000-watt capacity. Standard concrete weighs 2,400 kg (2.4 Tonnes) per cubic meter, or 4,000 lbs (2 tons) per cubic yard. 830/2.4 = 346 cubic meters of concrete, a mass 18 by 19 meters, one meter thick (English units: 455 cubic yards, about 64 by 64 feet, and 3 feet thick).

My back yard is rather small, only 30 feet deep, though it's 90 feet wide. I do have a side yard that's plenty large enough. I wonder what my neighbors would think if I built a structure as tall as my house, with a footprint of more than 4,000 sq ft. And the big electric motors/generators would most likely whine when in use. I'd probably have to remove some soil and seat it 2-3 feet below grade (with drainage infrastructure for rainy weather) to keep the total height below 30 feet.

Maybe I can use iron (I can't afford 900 tons of lead!). Iron's density is 7,874 kg/cubic meter, or 3.28 times that of concrete. This would shrink the volume needed to 105.5 cubic meters or 138 cubic yards. Reducing the vertical depth to 2 feet means the footprint would be no longer 4,000 sq ft but 1,860 sq ft, or about 43 feet square. My 2,000 square-foot house is two storeys, so it's size is only 25 by 40 feet.

The picture is a bit ridiculous. The primary virtue of such a system is that its energy capacity doesn't reduce over time the way the Powerwall will. But it illustrates the amazing energy density of batteries, even lead-acid car batteries, compared to big blocks of iron or concrete and big motors to lift and lower them.

This is a fun mental exercise. It convinces me to wait for better batteries to be developed. Systems based on something besides lithium, for sure! Sodium-sulfur can have 2-4 times the energy density of lithium-ion, and sodium-ion is in the two-times range. Recent research has produced prototypes that don't have to be kept at 300°C (570°F) to operate efficiently. I can wait.

My Greek NT reference

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, references, greek new testament, translations, commentaries

A number of years ago I contacted a Bible scholar to ask if there is a reference book that explains the variations between the numerous Greek texts of the New Testament. I was particularly interested to find out if any of the variations—and there are thousands of them among the 5,000 or so Greek manuscripts—had any bearing on the primary elements of the Gospel: The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, His justification and sanctification of the children of God, and His sonship in the Triune God, in particular. The scholar assured me that Bible truth is not threatened by manuscript variations, and suggested a wonderful resource that I was able to purchase through a used bookstore, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce M. Metzger. Published in 1971, it is still in print, but buying a used copy saved me about half the price of a new one.

I used the book on and off for several years, and just before the end of 2021 I decided to use it along with my reading of the Bible, and gradually work through the entire volume of 775 pages. Each year I read through the Bible, using a different plan each time. Sometimes I use different translations (most recently the English Standard Version, ESV, in 2018 and the World English Bible, WEB, in 2020). Most frequently I read the Recovery Version, RcV. I also vary the schedule and criteria for daily selections. For example for a couple of years I would read a certain number of verses daily (plus or minus 15-20% depending on chapter divisions), and in 2022 I used a copy without footnotes and minimal apparatus, and read a set number of pages daily (with some variation), 3 OT pages and 1 NT page daily. I'm doing a similar scheme this year, but reading the New Testament first, followed by the Old Testament. Throughout 2022, after each day's reading, I read the notes in Textual Commentary relevant to the NT portion for the day. Thus over the year I completed the whole book.

This is what a bipage of the book looks like:

At this size it is a bit hard to read. You may click on the image to see it full size (150 dpi).

The longest item on these pages refers to Acts 3:14, "But you denied the holy and righteous One and asked that a man who was a murderer be granted to you". This is from the opening words of Peter's speaking on the day of Pentecost. The word being discussed, which is transliterated 'ern'esasthe, means "denied". It seems that some copyists of early times disliked repeating this word, which had appeared in the prior sentence (3:13), and so substituted ebarunate, which means "oppressed", a rather inappropriate word. The translation committee studied not just the Greek but Hebrew and Syriac versions to winkle out the best explanation for the variation. What looks like an ink smear at the bottom of page 310 and the top of 311 is Syriac text, which is vaguely related to Arabic. Note that later on in the article several Hebrew words are also shown. This book is not for the faint of heart; we may not be able to read the snippets of Hebrew and other languages, and perhaps not even Greek, with any felicity, but we should at least be able to see them in the text without panicking, and trust that the Committee knew what they were doing!

Codex Bezae is a famous manuscript, primarily of the Gospels and Acts, an edited 5th Century text compiled from multiple earlier manuscripts. It has Greek on one page and Latin on the facing page, which makes it valuable to understand what the copyist and translators of the era may have been thinking. Abbreviations such as D and H and Aleph-star (see the 3rd line of the article) refer to manuscripts that would be known to a scholar. The text also frequently refers to groups of manuscripts of different copyist traditions, such as majuscules and minuscules (there are many of each) that were copied using different letter styles. The volume contains about 2,000 such articles of various lengths, covering all the important variations in manuscript texts.

Here is another example I found interesting:

This refers to Revelation 5:10, "And have made them a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign on the earth." The word in question, basileusousin, means "they will reign". Greek word endings are numerous and cause difficulty to copyists. The numeric codes refer to Bible manuscripts, and Aleph is a different manuscript from Aleph-star. One more example brings out a couple of important points:

A few manuscripts of Romans 8:1 include one of the most famous glosses in the New Testament. A gloss is a bit of text that a copyist introduced into the body text from a marginal note found in an earlier manuscript. Romans 8:4 reads, "That the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the spirit." Some very early manuscripts have the second phrase of this verse copied as a marginal note next to 8:1. In the Textus Receptus, which is the basis of the King James Version of the New Testament, these words were put into the body text. This is a serious error, because it makes the release of condemnation based on the sacrifice of Christ into a result of our performance. The words are appropriate in 8:4, not in 8:1, which properly reads, "There is now then no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus." Period. No qualification based on our "walk".

The article also mentions two text types, Alexandrian and Western. About half of all early manuscripts are either Alexandrian or Western. The other half are either Caesarean or Byzantine. These four text-types were current in various regions. The introduction to the book discusses them in an introductory way. Other reference books discuss them more fully. Most later manuscripts are of the Byzantine type, and until about a generation ago, a "near-majority text" such as the Textus Receptus was based primarily on Byzantine manuscripts. The problem is, Byzantine Greek arose as the Greek language changed in the eastern Roman empire in the 4th Century. Byzantine manuscripts containing more than a few scraps of the New Testament date from the 8th Century and later. Significant differences between Byzantine and other text-types indicate that Bible manuscripts were translated into Byzantine Greek, probably before the 5th Century. For modern English speakers, reading Middle English of 600 years ago is a chore. There is a similar difference between Byzantine Greek and First Century Greek (often called Koiné)

My reference library includes four Greek texts of the New Testament, including one that is a full Majority Text, treating words as if they were voters in an election. It is almost entirely Byzantine in character. The United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, Third Edition was published in 1975, based on the scholarship of the Committee mentioned frequently in this volume, which was published in 1971 as a companion volume. Dr. Metzger is the most prominent of the scholars of the Committee.

As a reference, it is unsurpassed. Reading the New Testament with the companionship of this volume impressed me with the wisdom of God in the inspiration and preservation of His book to us.

Numbers too dangerous to imagine

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, number theory

For us ordinary folk, and for most scientists, the numbers on the balance are the limits of practical need. On the right: Avogadro's number, the quantity of protons in one gram of hydrogen. On the left, the long number with lots of leading zeroes is the weight of a proton in grams. Note the little "1/" above it: that makes the quantities balance. I left neutrons out of the discussion because the mass of a neutron is 0.14% greater than that of a proton.

For our more day-to-day experience, we've become accustomed to hearing "trillion" (a million millions) in news about government spending (but I remember a time that the entire Federal budget was much less than one trillion dollars), but few of us ever handle amounts larger than a few hundred thousand dollars, such as writing the check (heavily underwritten by our bank loan) for a house. And we may be familiar with numbers like milligrams or even micrograms (the weight of an average sand grain). That's about it.

Antonio Padilla would like to expand our horizons. A lot. A whole universe/multiverse of a lot. He begins his book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest From Zero to Infinity by promising to describe a number so compendious that, if it were possible to memorize it in total, the mass of the information would collapse our brain into a black hole. Yes, information has mass. One "bit" of information stored in a computer memory chip has a tiny mass, much less than that of a proton. So does the same information held in our memory. However, the number of neurons available to hold memories (most are used for various thinking tasks), may be a few billion, although the "bits" of memory may be in synapses, at the rate of a few thousand per neuron. So perhaps we have the equivalent of several trillion bits of memory. Some think it is more like a quadrillion (1,000 trillion). Regardless, the mass of our memories is less than the mass of one proton. How many digits must be in a number that "weighs" 67,331,765,482,045,288,639,033,395 kilograms? (I got this number from the Schwarzschild Radius Calculator, using 10 cm for the radius of the "brain".)

Time for a sidebar about scientific notation. We don't readily comprehend numbers written out in full when they have more than 4-6 digits. Zeroing out most of the digits above, we can write that number as 6.733x10²⁵ kg. The exponent 25 tells us how many digits are after the decimal point. Similarly, the number on the left of the scale above is easier to comprehend as 1.672623x10^-24, the mass in grams of a proton. The exponent -24 tells us how many digits, including the leading "1", follow a decimal point far to the left. Its companion on the right is 6.022x10²³.

The "black-hole-in-a-brain" number has so many digits that the exponent has more digits than there are protons in the observable universe. It is called Graham's Number, and is so far the largest number used in a mathematical proof.

Before he gets to Graham's Number, though, Dr. Padilla takes us through some "easy" steps. His first chapter deals with the number 1.000 000 000 000 000 858. There are 15 zeroes in there. Scientific notation doesn't help here! This is the amount of time dilation experienced by Usain Bolt at his peak running speed of just under 30 mph (13.4 m/s). In sub-chapters, we read of various phenomena besides relative velocity that affect the flow of time, such as changing gravitational force on mountain tops or in ocean deeps. Chapters for Googol and Googolplex follow. A Googol is a one followed by 100 zeroes, or 1.0x10¹⁰⁰. A Googolplex has a Googol of zeroes: 1.0x10^Googol or (I have to use a graphic):

Think about that repeated exponent for a moment. It gets one somewhat ready to think about Graham's Number. Using a somewhat different notation, there are 64 levels…or perhaps 64 groups of levels of increasing size. I wasn't too clear, but, I don't want to be swallowed up by a black hole anyway. Graham's Number represents the extreme limit of the number of steps that may be needed to solve a particular problem. Needless to say, no physical computer system will even be able to count the steps, let alone perform them. Perhaps God's computer could do so, but I can't imagine Him being willing to devote the resources to perform the task.

The second section of the book starts with Zero, "a most beautiful number", and goes on to a few special numbers that are very, very close, but not quite there. One is "the most embarrassing number", 1x10^-120 (it has 119 zeroes before the "1"). That is the ratio between the amount of "vacuum energy" we can measure using the Casimir Effect, and a calculation of what the energy ought to be, using quantum theory.

It's the biggest blunder in physics! If quantum theory is true, right down to the smallest scales, no universe larger than a golf ball could exist without immediately collapsing back into a "big crunch". Clearly, we are missing something. Even if we limit the reach of quantum theory to the scale of a proton, no universe larger than the size of Manhattan is possible. The author and others think string theory will rescue the situation. I doubt it; not anytime soon. The last I learned, the number of possible variations of "string theory" is about 10⁵⁰⁰. That's a Googol to the fifth power (Googol⁵). It isn't even possible to make a list of string theory candidates so they can be compared.

So what could come next? Infinity of course! The famous sideways-eight (∞). One chapter is plenty, even though, as we come to find out, there is more than one kind of infinity. Rather than try to explain the difference between Georg Cantor's Aleph-null and Aleph-one infinity—and we don't know if there isn't a "real" Aleph-one, or more, in between!—I'll leave it to you to read this enjoyable, idea-packed book.

-----------

Now I must touch on less pleasant matters. I wish Dr. Padilla had employed a copy editor; if he had one, that person needs a new day job.

1. While discussing time dilation (Usain Bolt's running speed), he dwells on a solar sail that might reach 1/5th the speed of light. Then he goes on to say that time dilation would mean a bacterial stowaway (or an onboard clock) would experience time slowed such that the 20-year journey to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light-years away) would seem to take less than nine years. He slipped a decimal somewhere. The time dilation factor is the square root of [1 - v²/c²], which I calculate to be √[1-0.04] = 0.9798. Now, 4.37x5 = 21.85 years (classical), which time dilation reduces, for shipboard bacteria and clocks, to 21.4 years. To reduce the time to nine years requires about 90% the speed of light, not 20%.
2. Two places I find the phrase, "The precise value of..." something, and a number with two or three digits of precision. The number "precise" should have been left out, or even it should have been stated that "The value of [whatever] is about..." The numbers in question are known to a precision of nine digits. This I attribute to the author.
3. This is a little less consequential: "100 billion neurons in the human brain." An up to date number is 86 billion, plus or minus a couple of billion. Also, 80% of our neurons are in the cerebellum, where they regulate our bodily functions and communicate with the 16 billion (more or less) neurons of our cortex, which is where thinking happens, and where all memories seem to be stored. Our vaunted intelligence primarily resides in those 16 billion.
4. This is a biggie, but it comes down to a simple copy/paste error. On page 190 we find "A quick reference guide to all the particles you'll encounter in this chapter", along with a chart of the Standard Model of particle physics. However, the Lepton portion of the chart is a copy of the Quark portion. The Lepton portion should show the electron, the muon and the tau, and their associated neutrinos. Big oops! I can't believe all the folks who wrote glowing blurbs praising the book (for its back cover) didn't see that. I suspect none of them read the book in full.
5. In the chapter on 10^-120 I find the phrase "external to spacetime", about an "external mechanism". As I understand cosmology, there is nothing external to spacetime. This is nonsense.
6. Finally, a simple typo. At the bottom of a table on page 282, "…infinities of site [Aleph-1]" should read "…infinities of size [Aleph-1]".

This is what I noticed without "looking for trouble." I have edited for others. In "editor mode" I might have found 2-3x as many items needing attention. Now, for those who've read this part, please don't hold it too much against the author. The book is full of wonderful ideas. I still mightily enjoyed the book.

The usefulness of very old animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging, gerontology, longevity

This old fellow, assuming he isn't one of the patriarchs in Genesis, is probably half as old as the tortoise. Among terrestrial mammals, humans have the longest lives. Among all land animals, giant tortoises are probably the longest-lived. It is likely that "Darwin's tortoise" wasn't really brought back from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, to live to age 175 in a zoo. But it is known that these big tortoises can live at least 150 years, and possibly as long as 200.

No human (at least since the time of Moses) is known to have lived longer than 122 years, the known age of Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997. The second-longest, in the past few centuries anyway, seems to be a living woman currently aged 119. No (recent) man is known to have exceeded 113.

A side note on the great ages reported for Biblical patriarchs. The progression of ages tells a story, which may be more important than whether anyone actually lived 900+ years. What is commonly called "The Fall", the sin of Adam and Eve, is the first of four Falls. Here I'll focus on the longevity of the generations, the story within the story:

1. The first couple disobeyed God and were exiled from the orchards of Eden. Lifetimes went from "undetermined" (potentially endless) to mostly 900-969 years.
2. Cain killed his brother and fled from the presence of God. No lifetime of any of his descendants is recorded.
3. The earth became "filled with violence", motivating God to bring on the Flood, saving only one family. Noah was the last person to live more than 900 years (950). His son Shem lived 600 years, then 3 generations lived 433-464 years.
4. The tower of Babel ("to make ourselves a name") motivated God to confuse the languages. The next five generations lived 148-239 years, ending with Terah (the father of Abram), who lived to age 205.

Each Fall was followed by a reduction in life span by about half. Then Abram/Abraham lived 175 years, Isaac lived 180 years, and Jacob/Israel lived 147 years (his brother Ishmael lived 137 years). Thereafter, a few others including Moses lived to ages of 110 to 120, no more than that. In Psalm 90, composed shortly after God called Moses to return to Egypt, Moses, age 80, declared that the usual life span was 70, or as much as 80 years, "according to strength".

The progressive shortening of life span in Genesis drives home that disobedience to God leads to a shorter life.

Now to the book: Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives, by Steven N. Austad. Dr. Austad is the first professor at his university (Alabama) to hold the Chair in Healthy Aging. His central theme is that nearly all our laboratory studies are of dismally short-lived animals: fruit flies (weeks to months) and mice (less than a year in the wild, less than 3 years in the lab) predominate; but we should be studying animals of exceptional longevity. At least some of them may have something to teach us about living long lives with good health.

Animals with short lives do have a little bit to teach. A mouse in the wild is most likely to wind up being eaten by an owl or a fox. It's well known that larger animals live longer, if only because there are fewer predators that can overcome them. But in a protected laboratory environment, a 3-year-old mouse is positively geriatric: thinning, graying hair; cataracts; feeble gait. Whatever aging is, mice do it fast, like everything else.

The book is full of stories of the unexpectedly long lives of certain animals. It opens with a bird called a fulmar. No firm conclusion is drawn about the longevity of fulmars, but we are introduced to one that might have been nearly as old as the ornithologist pictured with it in two photos taken 35 years apart. The bird outlived the scientist by a year or two, and may have lived 60 years or more. Fulmars are the size of seagulls. We have better information about other birds. A particular cockatoo lived to age 83.

Life in the slow lane can be longer. Tortoises are one example. I have a friend whose pet tortoise, about the size of a softball, was thirty years old the last time I saw him. Giant tortoises live longer, at least the aforementioned 150-175 years. Their heart rate is six beats per minute. Being exothermic (not self-heating like birds and mammals), they have low energy needs. It is said that we each get a potential 2-3 billion heartbeats; for humans that's from 60-90 years. For a giant tortoise, with a heart that beats at 1/10th the rate, maybe they can actually live 600-900 years!

I was intrigued by the animals that don't seem to get feebler with age. Old fulmars and old cockatoos don't have menopause in females (or E.D. in males). Neither do old tortoises. Other long-live mammals and birds do seem to end their lives with a number of years of infertility. I hope there is something useful to learn about genetic (or something else) differences between animals that age and animals that seem not to. It won't come easily or cheaply. Scientists study mice because they don't live long. It's at least 100 times as costly to study lifelong matters with naked mole rats that seem to live 50-100 times as long as field mice. Such studies would be multi-generation endeavors…multi-HUMAN-generation!

Then there's cancer. We don't yet even know the cancer rate for elephants or whales. A bowhead whale, weighs more than 1,000 times as much as a human, and one might naively think they ought to get cancer 1,000 times as frequently. Nope. They live more than 200 years, but we know little more than that. There are a few genetic clues about the cancer-avoiding (not quite cancer-proofing) of huge animals, such has their possession of multiple copies of certain cancer-suppression genes, where humans have one copy only. But our ignorance is typically as colossal as their size.

Even more mysterious are small animals with extraordinary longevity, such as a one-ounce bat that lives 40+ years, or centuries-old mollusks no larger than a teacup. One concept dwelt on throughout the book is Longevity Quotient, LQ. If most one-ounce mammals live at most 3-4 years, and a one-ounce bat species can live 30-40 years, that is an LQ of 10. Humans have an LQ of about 4, although Jeanne Calment's 122-year life indicates an LQ of 5.5.

It is still not known whether there are two intermixed human populations, one with a typical longevity of about 85 years, and another that can make it routinely to 100. I have numerous ancestors who lived into their 90's, and an aunt who died last year at age 101. A friend of mine, who is 65 years old, is already older than everyone in his family tree that he knows about; his parents both lived about 60 years. Maybe there's a third population of shorter-lived humans.

Whatever our ultimate life span may be, recent trends in longevity seem to be based more on health span. Just keeping us from "untimely death" has been a triumph of public health measures including clean water systems, at least in some countries, and vaccination for many former scourges of humanity such as smallpox, measles, and polio. Most of the long-lived ancestors of mine that I mentioned above lived in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, when such public health measures weren't even dreamed of.

The author makes an important point about "life expectancy", which is different from longevity. Life expectancy is the average age that will be reached by a cohort of the population born at the same time. If infant and child mortality is high, even if some will reach ages greater than 100, the AVERAGE will be low. Population pyramids show this, in part:

A rectangular population pyramid like the one on the left shows that the death rate is low at all ages, until one reaches age 70, and then increases. A triangular distribution, or a "scooped triangle" such as the one on the right, shows a high death rate at all ages. The life expectancy for the US is about 78.5 (average of both sexes). One might initially guess that the life expectancy for DRC is below 30, but we must remember that each horizontal tier is a different cohort. This pyramid shows high death rate, but also high birth rate. The WHO figure for life expectancy of the DRC is 62. That is for the cohort in the bottom tier only, and it takes a lot of actuarial calculation to determine it. Regardless, the more triangular a population pyramid is, the lower the life expectancy. Both charts show a very few people living to 95 and beyond; fewer in DRC than in USA, of course. But there are some. The ultimate longevity in both countries is similar.

This just scratches the surface of a book full of information, well presented. Just finding out how long some animals can live is very time-consuming (decades to centuries!) and can be very costly. The author hopes we will soon begin to learn why some animals live so long. Will learning that help humans become bicentenarians (200+ age)? Perhaps. That makes it worth doing.

One small error I wish to correct. On page 186 it is stated that carbon-14 decays to carbon-12. No, it decays to nitrogen-14, by emitting a beta particle—a high-energy electron—which changes a neutron into a proton. The rest of the analysis in that chapter is correct.

Measuring my metabolism…crudely

 kw: analytical projects, weight, metabolism

For decades we've had a bedroom scale, the kind with a spring. Over the years I found that the weight it showed was a little variable if I leaned one way or another. Naturally, being overweight, I soon learned how to lean so the weight shown was as small as possible, without me falling over. I finally realized I was fooling myself, particularly because my weight in the doctor's office, adjusting for clothing and shoes, was about five pounds greater than my "home weight". That made a big difference to me, emotionally, because it pushed me over a boundary: I am just six feet tall. At home I would get a weight of 215-216 pounds, for a BMI of 29.2-29.3. That's near the top end of "overweight". A couple of years ago the medical scale showed 226 pounds, and with shoes on and my cell phone in a pocket I had five pounds of "accessories", for a naked weight of 221. That's a BMI of 30, which is "obese". Boo-hoo!

Over a period of about a year I did my best to eat more moderately, and my doctor said one day, "Oh, you've lost a little weight." I weighed 224 clothed, or 219, a BMI of 29.7. My "home weight" was 213-214. Better, but not good enough. Then I caught Covid-19, to which I reacted by fasting for several days (low blood sugar reduces the chances of getting pneumonia). That brought my "home weight" below 210 pounds.

I bought a digital scale. Its reported accuracy is 0.2 pounds, which is 3.2 ounces. This scale helped me calibrate the old spring scale, which is actually surprisingly good. If I stand straight on the spring scale I get the same reading, within a pound, as the digital scale. Of course, I am rather enamored of that extra digit, and the digital scale is much easier to read.

I had read enough of recent literature to realize that it is eating sugar and "fast carbs" like potatoes that cause weight gain, not eating fat. I went nearly full-carnivore for a while. When I had eggs for breakfast (I typically fry 3 eggs in olive oil), rather than buttered toast I had breakfast sausage: two of the little links, which each have the same number of calories as a slice of the bread I'd use for toast. I quit having sandwiches; just some lunch meat and cheese, which I'd take to work in a baggie, or prepare on the spot when I ate at home (I work 3 days/week). I began losing about a pound weekly. My present morning weight is 195 pounds.

I've been weighing myself morning and evening for some time, and I took note of a certain regularity. After a morning pee, I weigh a pound less (plus or minus 0.2 pounds) than in the evening before bed. Then for a few days I checked my weight in the morning before visiting the toilet, and found it was either 0.4 or 0.6 pounds less, and another 0.4 to 0.6 pounds would go into the toilet. I thought, "I am losing half a pound overnight just by breathing!"

I realized that I was measuring my metabolism, in a crude way. That 0.4-0.6 pounds (6.4-9.6 ounces, or about 180-270 grams) represents glucose being oxidized and its oxidation products being exhaled.

If you have had any exposure to biochemistry, you'll find this formula familiar:

Glucose, the primary sugar in grapes, is the energy currency of life. Plants use photosynthesis to add carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to water brought up from the roots, producing glucose and releasing oxygen to the atmosphere. Animals consume plants, from which they obtain glucose (and lots of other chemicals); they add oxygen to the glucose to break it down to water and carbon dioxide. This simple chemical formula hides the complexities of the Krebs cycle, and the energy input by ATP to keep it running during respiration, or the production/activation of ATP during photosynthesis.

To see where the weights come and go, here are the atomic masses of these molecules:

• glucose - 180
• oxygen - 32 (a 2-atom molecule)
• water - 18
• carbon dioxide - 44

In chemistry, a mole is the weight in grams times the molecular weight. Thus a mole of hydrogen atoms weighs one gram, and a mole of carbon dioxide, which has a molecular weight of 44, is 44 grams. If we multiply the last three numbers above by six, to correspond to the equation above, we find this:

In respiration, 180 g of glucose combines with 192 g of oxygen to produce 108 g of water and 264 g of carbon dioxide. In photosynthesis, the opposite happens. The two gases outweigh the sugar and water.

These are the gram weights appropriate to the oxidation of 0.4 pounds of glucose. For those of us who are not as familiar with metric, I'll take advantage of the fact that all the weights in the prior paragraph are divisible by 12, and use somewhat greater actual weights, for the following:

In respiration, 7.5 oz of glucose combines with 8 oz of oxygen to produce 4.5 oz of water and 11 oz of carbon dioxide.

7.5 ounces of glucose is 0.47 pounds, so this is similar, and gives me a feel for what is going on.

How much energy does this represent? We are told in nutrition tables that a gram of sugar has four calories (the dietary calorie is a Kcalorie, or the amount of heat that must be used to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water 1°C). I found that the oxidation of a mole of glucose releases 280 calories. One mole of glucose, as above, is 180 grams, almost exactly 0.4 pounds, so at the low end of my nightly weight loss (before urination), my metabolism has produced 280 calories. When I sometimes get a reading of 0.6 pounds, that converts to 420 calories. I suspect that the actual amount is the same each night, but when I have a bedtime weight of 195 pounds, it might really be anywhere between 194.9 and 195.1. Then, if the actual amount of glucose "burned" is 0.5 pounds, my morning weight would read either 194.4 or 194.6. Half a pound of glucose converts to 350 calories.

I sleep 6-7 hours. Let's use an average of 6.5. Dividing 350 by 6.5 yields 53.8 calories per hour. Multiply by 24, and we find 1,292 calories per day. That seems to be my basic (not basal!) metabolism when at total rest. A Basal Metabolic Rate calculator tells me 1,628 calories per day. Further, for an entirely sedentary man my age, daily caloric need is 1,989. Explanatory text points out that "body maintenance" for most people is about 70%. If I understand that correctly, let's see what I get by dividing 1,292 by 1,628: 0.79 or 79%. And then 1,292 / 1,989 = 0.65 or 65%. So it seems to be in the right range.

There is a second factor to consider, which is nitrogen metabolism. Small amounts of protein are discarded daily. They are the source of the nitrogen in urea, the main non-water component of urine, and creatinine. The urine of a healthy and properly hydrated person contains 9.3 g/dL of urea and 0.67 g/dL creatinine. The latter can be ignored for practical purposes. I don't have a general molecular formula for protein, so I'll just do a simple "bonehead" analysis.

Molecular weight of nitrogen: 28
Molecular weight of urea: 60

Thus a half-pound of urine (one cup or about 120 ml, or 0.12 liter) contains about 11g of urea, or 5.2 g of nitrogen. Roughly speaking, protein is 16% nitrogen, so that represents the discard of about 32 g of protein. That is insignificant compared to the amount of glucose metabolized, at least in terms of energy/calories.

Daily urine production for a man my size is about 1.4 liter, and it will apparently contain about 130 g of urea, which contains 61 g of nitrogen, derived from the discard of 380 g (13 oz) of protein. This emphasizes that we need to consume at least that amount of protein daily, because it can't be produced by converting either carbohydrate or fat; they contain no nitrogen.

These numbers are quite at variance with the recommendation that adult men need 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight. That converts to about 70 g/day for me (195 lbs = 88 kg). I need to do more research, because the discrepancy between 70 g and 380 g is huge. This could take a while…

Bottom line: Someone who weighs about 200 pounds can expect to lose a half pound of glucose overnight, expelled in the breath as water vapor and carbon dioxide. In addition, about an ounce of protein is lost overnight and expelled during the morning pee.

Behavior is as behavior does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, animals, behavior, evolution, nature-nurture debate

A fellow showed up half an hour late for his regular poker game with friends, and found they'd started without him. For a fourth, they'd recruited the host's dog. The man told the host, "Wow! That's some talented pup!!" "Oh," he replied, "Old Groaner isn't so great. Whenever he has an ace he wags his tail."

We are amused by pictures or stories of animals doing "human" things (or the converse!). Yet until recently, while most people with pets seem to easily understand that the animals have feelings and purposeful behaviors, scientists have been slow (by centuries!) to come around.

Marlene Zuk's new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters, drives lots of new nails into the coffin of the Animal-as-Automaton view. Let me state at the outset that, for two good reasons I hold that animals, even the rather elementary ones we call "bugs", all fit along at least three scales (none of them is the scala naturae, the "natural ladder" so beloved of ignorant biologists). Firstly, as to consciousness, one end might be called "Human-level self consciousness" (assuming it's truly the end point; maybe toothed whales are beyond us, for example); the other end we can call "barely conscious of more than the basic drives of hunger and the 'urge to merge'". Secondly, as to emotion, just as some animals have abilities we don't, there ought to be some that can have feelings we don't have. Thirdly, considering behavior, which is often divided into "purposive" (the scientific jargon for "purposeful") and "instinctive" (which really means "purely genetic"): everything living behaves. Animals are practically defined by behavior. It is what they ARE. "Lower animals" are the product of 4 billion years of evolution, the same as humans. So are the things that they DO.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have the seminal volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men by E.C. Tolman, published in 1932. This book is not referenced by Dr. Zuk, more's the pity. If she's not an intellectual descendant of Tolman, she's at least a grandniece. He was far ahead of his time, as witness the still-nearly-pervasive use of the canard "anthropomorphism" to discredit much work on animal behavior.

My two reasons: To hard-line creationists, many of whom also hold the Calvinist position that God has no emotions, I would say, "Are we not created in the image of God? Did our emotions and behaviors come from nowhere? Are they not part of that image?" Of course, some would double down to say that all such things are part of "original sin" or whatever Protestants call it. (Though I am a believer, I am neither Catholic nor Protestant.) They are fools. To take a further step, "If we have feelings and behaviors that are something other than automatic, why would God deny such abilities to animals?"

To hard-line Skinnerian scientists I would say, "I subscribe to evolution, as carried out by natural selection. Do you? If so, you must realize that our feelings came from somewhere. Where? Of course, from our nonhuman ancestors. We emote and behave because they did." So much for anthropomorphism. And as I said before, animals that are attuned to greatly different environments than humans could survive (without costly technology) are likely to have feelings and behaviors that are so foreign to us that we are unlikely to recognize them as such.

So, a bit about the book—which I urge everyone to read!—what is the Dead Man Test? Some, wishing a less macabre moniker, call it the Teddy Bear Test: If a Teddy Bear can do it, it isn't behavior. Substitute Dead Man for Teddy Bear if you prefer. Definition by exclusion.

How does behavior evolve? Just like anything else! Behavior is a physical attribute. It is just as real as height, eye color, and whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your middle finger. These things, plus all other "genetic traits" are influenced by environmental factors. This is the central emphasis of the book. Genes alone don't determine anything. Neither does environment alone. Everything is a mix, an intertwining of the two. She has to say it over and over, because many folks won't get it otherwise!

For an example of this intertwining: One of my great-grandfathers was prone to drink. The family was Methodist, and Methodists were, until the 1960's, required to sign a Pledge that they would not touch alcohol. Great-grandpa Joe fought his addiction mightily, but he would go on a bender on occasion. His daughters kept their Pledges; it helped that they never tasted "the sauce" as young people, and that they took their father as a cautionary example. Having a strict mother helped. My mother was also raised to be a teetotaler, as was I. But in college some friends persuaded me to have a beer to celebrate my 18th birthday (I lived in a state that allowed 18-year-olds to drink "low beer"). I soon found a way to get harder stuff, and I was off, headed for a life as an alcoholic! Except, I couldn't afford it. Also, returning home after the school year, back in a teetotaling home, I took a hard look at myself, and decided not to use "anything that hinders thinking clearly". At that time I didn't know about Joe. Later one of my brothers became more of an alcoholic than I had been. His own story is fascinating, but won't fit here. He and I are both "recovering"; one never fully "recovers".

Why weren't my mother and her mother alcoholics? In a different environment they'd have been so. We have a kind of protein that turns ethanol into a heroin-like addicting substance. Fortunately, it is kind of rare. Yeah, I know there are lots of alcoholics; some of them have this same genetic situation. But they are a small fraction of the whole of humanity.

I'll leave it to you to get the book and allow Dr. Zuk to lead you down many a lane and garden path, with her stories of dancing cockatoos (do they have something to dance to in nature? Neither do elephants, and I've also seen videos of them responding to music); of octopuses punching fish, apparently out of irritation; of how animals from flies to flying foxes vary in their behaviors based on still-inscrutable combinations of their genetic endowment and their past and present environment. This sure is an enjoyable book!

The conscience of the world

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, jews, israel, jewish american relations

At the suggestion of a friend I read The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. I read the e-book, which contains 661 "pages", although the main text is 590 pages, and the Illustrations, listed as one page in the Table of Contents, spans 20 screens. Anyway, it's a big, big book, full of big ideas.

I made 21 bookmarked notes, about one per chapter. When I finished reading, I realized that my bookmarking was much too ambitious. I don't have the competence to provide a comprehensive review. I must pare down my intentions.

Let me state at the outset that I am a Christian who honors the Jews as elder brothers in the knowledge of God. I didn't start that way. Before coming to Christ I had the typical Midwestern background, complete with casual antisemitism. That has changed. I have come to realize that the continued existence of the Jewish people, in the face of more than three thousand years of determined efforts to either exclude them or exterminate them, and the very existence of global antisemitism, prove that God exists.

(Note: This image shows a Hanukah menorah. The menorah in the Tabernacle and Temple had seven lamps, not nine.)

Antisemitism is alive and well in the good old US of A, and it seems to be gaining ground. Who hasn't heard that "the Jews" own or control Congress, or are the "hidden hand" behind world banking system, and so forth and so on. The first major topic of the book is to expose and debunk what the author calls "planet Vulcan theory". He uses an analogy, the decades-long hunt for a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which was predicted because the orbit of Mercury has a small deviation from what would be predicted by the orbital calculations of Newtonian mechanics. Astronomers could calculate the orbit of an inner planet, which they named Vulcan, and on a few occasions reports were published that it had been observed. Alas, it was all wishful thinking. The real explanation for Mercury's orbit is found in the general theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Since 1923 it has been known that there is no planet Vulcan. The "Jewish lobby" is an imaginary planet.

The continued support for Israel by the US, and the earlier welcoming of Jews to our shores (usually) has been taken as evidence of a "Jewish lobby" that bends both the domestic and foreign policy of America to "the Jewish will." The calculations seem to support the theory. However, it just isn't so. The first few chapters of the book prove that.

Quick question: Who supplied the weapons that enabled the infant nation of Israel to defeat a half dozen Arab nations in 1948? Most people (in America at least) would say, "The US!" True answer: The weapons were supplied by Czechoslovakia with the blessing of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's motive was not to help the Jews, whom he was dreadfully persecuting inside Russia. It was to bollix up American foreign policy, even to weaken America on the world stage. It worked. In fact, the US was at best a weak and neglectful ally of Israel until after the 1967 six-day war (after which Moshe Dayan joked that he'd obtained a special one week rate from Hertz Rent-a-Tank). That's two decades of America ignoring Israel.

The book is really a history of Jewish-American relations. If there were a "Jewish lobby" pulling our strings, the author makes it clear that many, many things which American Presidents and American Congresses did would have been quite different. I found it fascinating that the driving force behind American favor toward the Jews prior to 1948, and toward Israel its establishment, has been American Evangelical Christians. I happen to be one. (By the way, in case you're prone to getting offended, here is some mud in your eye: I consider the term "Evangelical Christian" to be a redundancy.)

I think it is likely that a large aim of Leftism in America today is to silence Evangelical Christians and to destroy Evangelical churches, and so reduce or eliminate support for Israel in the US Federal government. The root is antisemitism. "Wokeism" is a big part of it, but I'll take up that mess on another occasion; to be Woke is to be anti-Semite, among numerous unsavory attributes.

I half expected the author to offer policy advice. He does not. He is providing information, very valuable information. That alone will change attitudes. In my case, it increased my respect for serious, observant Jews (and my sorrow over the many Jews who have forsaken their God). God's purpose for the Jews is to teach Torah, to activate the conscience of the world. He doesn't want you to become a Jew. He wants you to be wise and good, and only in the Jewish Torah and the rest of the Bible that grew from it can wisdom worth having be found. People hate a "do-gooder", which is why a world full of godless people hates the Jews.

Whether you love Jews or hate them, this book is very well worth reading.

Computer-aided artistry

 kw: experiments, reviews, art, dall-e, artificial intelligence

I can't draw, or paint, or sculpt. All the manual artistry in my family resides in my younger brother, who is a professor of art history. However, I can think creatively, which any child can do, as can many adults, if the skill hasn't been educated out of them. Perhaps if I had taken art lessons, long ago…

But now, AI can help! I read a review of three "art generator" applications and decided to try them. Rather than write a blow-by-blow account, I'll present my progress and conclusions. The three applications are 

• DALL-E 2, the first and currently the best.
• MidJourney, which runs on a server within the Discord environment.
• Stable Diffusion, also in Discord, but a beta version of an improved product is in DreamStudio.

I planned to use three prompts. A prompt is a text instruction, which can be up to the size of a tweet. The longer and more detailed, the better the results (usually). Two of the three applications return four small images; you can pick one to edit. The editing tools depend on the application. Quite frankly, the tools in MJ and SD are obscure and apparently limited (more experienced folks can correct me on this; just comment). The tools in DE2 were easier for me to comprehend and to use, so I did a lot more with that one.

I used only one prompt with MJ and SD, and then gave up. The first prompt:

Mountainous Landscape in the style of the Hudson School

DALL-E:

I selected the second one to edit. I first downloaded the image, a 1024x1024 pixel PNG file nearly 2 Mby in size. Converting to a JPG reduced it to 475 Kby. This panel is shown about half size. I'll discuss the little bit of editing I did below.

MidJourney:

I selected the first one to (try to) edit. Saving the 1024x1024 image produced a 662 Kby WEBP file. Converting to a JPG reduced it to 517 Kby. This panel is shown full size.

I couldn't figure out whether extending the image (I'll get to that shortly) is even possible, so at this point I stopped and didn't send MJ any more prompts.

Stable Diffusion:

This single return seemed odd. It must be two halves of a panorama. Saving it produced a 1024x1024 PNG file (though I had to select the size at the outset; a slider runs from 512 to 1024). 

I couldn't do much with this. I tried a different prompt, which produced slightly better results, but not too pleasing to me.

I returned to DALL-E 2. I primarily wanted to extend the image. I'm interested in images big enough to use for screen saver wallpaper (1920x1080). In the edit toolset, you extend an image by adding a Generator Frame (AKA a Marquee), moving it where you like, and clicking Generate.

I first put the marquee next to the image and clicked Generate. The marquee filled with a different take on the prompt, independent of the image next to it. I clicked Reject, moved the marquee to overlap about 1/8th of the image and clicked Generate. Much better. I clicked Accept. This is the image I kept, 1920x1024 in size (a bit panoramic, but I like that). I reproduce it here half size.

You might have noticed that all DALL-E images have a little color bar at lower right. This is to be used if you want to print an image on canvas, to guide the color-rendering software; you'd hide the lower edge behind the frame. To make an image for use on the screen one must extend it enough to crop that lower edge out for the finished image.

The editor lets you erase part of an image and paste in other stuff. You can also start by downloading an image and editing it, rather than using a prompt.

I used the second and third prompts at this point. I'll show the final, extended images (half size).

Second prompt:

Still Life with apples, pomegranates, and bananas in the style of Paul Cezanne

This image is 1984x1280. The original 1024x1024 extends from the middle of the blue ewer to the end of the top banana, and to a little below the edge of the table.

Third Prompt:

Futuristic city on hilly alien planet with violet sky and two moons

This panoramic image is 2624x1024; the original square is about the middle 40%. The added moons showed up during extension.

DALL-E 2 gives a new user 50 free credits for the first month of use, and 15 free credits per month thereafter (use 'em or lose 'em). Each time you click Generate you consume one credit. Credits can be purchased, $15 for 115. Using this program can consume a lot of time, and some funds. It can easily become addicting. I have read of online artists who produce images and sell them as NFT's. That's one way to fund the addiction!

At this point I had 35 credits left. I couldn't resist trying one more prompt:

Desert landscape with mesas and saguaro cactus

The 4 returns:

These look like scenes near Tucson. I chose #3 and extended it, to both sides and below:

This image is 2624x1664, plenty big enough for me to use as wallpaper. It consumed 8 credits, leaving me with 27. Yo-ho! What to do next? Stay tuned!

The real cycle(s) of life

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biochemistry, krebs cycle, citric acid cycle

Sorry, Lion King, the circle of life is actually something hidden from most of us. There are powerful wheels that turn inside every cell in our bodies (and in all bodies, from bacteria right on up). The most important of these has a name that strikes fear in students of biochemistry: the Krebs cycle. Hans Krebs received (with Fritz Lipmann) the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his elucidation of the citric acid cycle, which is usually called by his name.

This illustration, from Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by biochemist Nick Lane, shows how the cycle produces ATP, the energy carrier used by all living beings (on Earth at least). The steps after ATP is produced (lower left) regenerate molecules used for the next go-round. Citric acid (in the form of citrate when in solution) is the master of ceremonies.

For those interested in the structural chemistry shown here, the black balls represent carbon, the small gray balls are hydrogen, and other atoms such as oxygen or sulfur are represented by open circles with a letter inside. The dashed lines with a - sign attached to all the COO groups indicate that the electronegativity is not localized to either of the oxygens.

This book is a loving biography of the Krebs cycle and related biochemistry. Dr. Lane does his best to explain the reactions within it, and in the reverse cycle, and the environment in which this chemistry is active: on both sides of the membranes of mitochondria. These cycles are the machinery that runs our cells.

A common understanding of the Krebs cycles has what we call the forward cycle transforming energy into a form we can use (ATP), and the reverse cycle gathering energy from the environment, such as the electrons pumped by photosynthesis, to make energetic molecules, mainly sugars. But there is a whole lot more to it than that.

Other crucial parts of these metabolic cycles include "red protein" or ferredoxin, which catalyzes reactions that run too slowly otherwise, forcing electrons onto many of those COO- groups seen in the diagram, or onto intermediate chemicals that pass them onward to COO-. Another is shown as CoA here; it is "coenzyme A", a somewhat larger chain of atoms and small rings, including some phosphate groups and amino (nitrogen-hydrogen) groups. The body makes CoA from vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid). Every cell on Earth needs it to function.

It may surprise those who haven't studied biochemistry that so very many of the chemicals of life are acids. In popular culture, "acids" are powerfully corrosive chemicals such as sulfuric acid (battery acid) and hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid or swimming-pool acid). We may know that the sour taste of vinegar is due to acetic acid, and that lemons are sour because of citric acid. So not all acids are that fierce! Surprisingly, every cell in your body is powered by a cycle that begins and ends with citric acid. It's about a whole lot more than oranges and lemons! The COO- group in an organic molecule is called "carboxylate", and when the minus sign is satisfied by an attached hydrogen, the COOH group makes the molecule a carboxylic acid. These are not corrosive. Rather, they are necessary for metabolism to function. Also, a protein is a long chain of amino acids, and all amino acids contain the compound group NH2-COOH. We are built of acids!

How are these molecules built? Their building blocks are produced by tools created in the Krebs cycle. This cycle has so many uses, it has to be regulated so as to avoid conflict between producing ATP for energy and producing molecules for body construction. Dr. Lane likens a cell to a city, with lots of activity going on. At the core of all the processes to run the city are motors, and the motors all have the same brand name: Krebs. A motor is a good metaphor, for as energy flows through a motor, the motor spins. In one quote from biophysicist Harold Morowitz, "Energy flows, matter cycles."

Once the opening few chapters have described the Krebs cycle in sufficient detail, and provided examples of how the "motor" runs, later chapters delve into the question, "Which came first, genetics or metabolism?" A fundamental fact about all the reactions in the cycle are that they are reversible. We learn in early Chemistry classes that when you have a reversible reaction, it can be driven either way by changing the concentration of other chemicals in its environment (typically by adding one of the products or reactants to a solution in a beaker).

Recent experiments—usually meaning in the last 5-10 years—have shown that these reactions can proceed most of the way around the cycle with very little "driving". Having a metallic or metal-oxide substrate for the acids to temporarily attach to also seems to facilitate matters. Even more recent experiments have shown that pressure and heat—here meaning pressures of several tens of atmospheres to several hundred atmospheres and heat around boiling or not much above boiling—facilitate these reactions chains, and if certain products are removed, they are like conveyor belts or assembly lines to produce the kinds of molecules that are necessary for life. This has led to the hypothesis that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean deeps.

It occurred to me as I read this that hydrothermal vents should have been much more active a few billion years ago than they are today. When I was taking geochemistry, I remarked to the professor one day that radiogenic heating (heating caused by elements such as uranium breaking down) must have been six times greater than now, four billion years ago. This would lead to much faster plate tectonics (He was surprised; he had never thought of that). At that time the deep sea "black smokers" and other hydrothermal features had not yet been discovered. Eons ago submarine vents would have been correspondingly greater in extent and activity. It seems the immediate post-Hadean era could have been ideal for biologic life to begin.

Nearer the end the book turns from life and life's origins to disease and death. It is no surprise that, if our mitochondria age and wear out, the cycling of metabolism is affected. I have been wondering for a long time, if our mitochondria age, and their DNA accumulates SNP's even faster than the DNA of our cells (nuclear DNA), how do babies get born with brand-new mitochondria? Is there a corrective mechanism? There is! And it is not quite described, but briefly outlined on pages 140-141. The author calls it a "clean-up operation in the female germline" to prepare the half-million of mitochondria that fill each oocyte (egg cell).

Also, mitochondria, and the metabolic cycling that spins endlessly around their membranes, are implicated in cancer. This metabolic cancer origin hypothesis is not yet well known, and is controversial where it is known. But it makes more sense than the chain of oncogene disruptions posited by the earlier hypothesis (and it is no more than a hypothesis, not a theory).

Further, dying and death are metabolic in origin. I can't say I grasped the entirety of Dr. Lane's description, but it made sense as I read it. We really are a lot like "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" of Holmes's poem, that was constructed to have no weakest part. If nothing external goes wrong, we may live to great age, and then rather abruptly suffer general organ failure, when everything seems to go wrong at once: "He died in his sleep." My great uncle, having outlived his wife by a few years, at the age of 102 was working a field on his farm. He stopped the tractor and walked to one of the hired hands to say, "I feel a little tired. I'll take a little nap." Inside, he lay down and passed away peacefully. I can't think of a better way to go.

The epilogue is titled "Self". It reconsiders the question, "Which is primary, genetics or metabolism?" The conclusion (stated at the outset and then supported by evidence): "Genes never supplanted the deep chemistry of cells. They conserved it, and they built on it." The primary difference between the Krebs cycle of four billion years ago, and now, is the cluster of enzymes (built by genes) that catalyze the reactions, facilitating energy flows hundreds of times more rapid. Otherwise animal life would not be possible, and plant life couldn't have produced bamboo that is able to grow a few feet per day.

The book made me wistful. I started college as a chemistry major because I wanted to become a biochemist. Three changes of major later, I graduated as a geologist. I had a great career, but I miss chemistry. This book has become my new favorite for the year.