Grunt

Posted on November 2, 2017 by smellincoffee

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
© 2016 Mary Roach
285 pages


I’ve never given much thought to the idea of military science. What might it involve? The chemistry of better weapons, the psychology behind successful strategy gambits? The science encountered here, in Mary Roach’s Grunt, is similar to that performed on the early astronauts and the materials that would take them itno space. What happens to the human body under these conditions? What kind of material is optimal, based on these variables? What if this situation happens? If that sounds plodding, you don’t know Mary Roach. Her books mix comedy and science, and achieve the comedy both by zeroing-in on subjects that are taboo (dead people and feces, say) and through Roach’s droll delivery. Here she plagues military researchers and servicemen by investigating the labs where combat-ready clothing is engineered, watches seamen struggle to escape a sinking submarine simulation on scant sleep, reviews the progress of artificial limb-building considers the virtue of applying maggots to a flesh wound, and plays with a TCAP system so soldiers in the field can communicate without destroying their hearing. The experiments conducted to improve men and materials (or in the case of submarine crews, to tax them further on less sleep) are typically interesting in themselves, but Roach adds offbeat appeal by sharing weirder studies. (One study indicated that polar bears were fantastically interested in menstrual blood, but not by blood drawn from veins. This is apparently a polar bear thing, as black bears were equally bored by drawn blood and menstrual blood.)

Interesting as ever, but — as usual — not something to read with lunch.

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The Dragon Seekers

Posted on October 31, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Dragon Seekers: How An Extraordinary Cicle Of Fossilists Discovered The Dinosaurs And Paved The Way For Darwin
© 2009 Christopher McGowan
272 pages

Ancient bones and magnets were both known to antiquity, but not until the 19th century did their importance begin to be realized.  Attribute that to a quickly-developing worldview that regarded these things not as curiosities to be put aside with a pat explanation, but mysteries that needed to be solved – and mysteries, that once poked in to, transformed our understanding of the world. The quickening pace of fossil discoveries and the rising interest in placing them accurately, were essential in shifting the western understanding of the universe from one small, young, and personal, to one incomprehensibly vast, ancient, and cold as clockwork. 

The “dragon hunters”  driving these discoveries were not pre-Victorian Jack Horners;  long before the days of science funded by governments and pursued by microspecialists,    all that was needed for discovery were simple tools and insatiable curiosity   — or at least an interest in selling fossils to tourists.  That brought together a mere villager, a clergyman, and a lawyer into the same company as natural historians – and that shared company was literal.  The people of this book were not separate actors, but corresponded and worked together;   in one chapter, a young Charles Darwin accompanied Charles Lyell along with two other fossil-hunters, and together they met another fossil hunter (Mary Anning, the villager) to poke around together, and are nearly trapped in a cliffside cave when the tide comes in.  Together, they argued about what these things in the rocks meant.

While general audiences strongly associate Darwin with the theory of evolution, this chronicle of discovery makes it clear that the  general idea of evolution predated Darwin,  and was ventured by some theorists as ‘transmutation’.   What caused transmutation was then unknown; the fossils discovered here spurred speculation. (Darwin’s  contribution was identify the mechanism of natural selection that spurred speciation.)  Some wondered if perhaps the Earth didn’t regularly shift from cold to tropical epochs and back again,  with the life on Earth following them; perhaps one day these ancient lost creatures would return, like bats at dusk and wild geese in autumn.  That was a little easier to sell than the idea that these strange beings had simply ceased to be, that Creation had chapters untold to men before.  Although the discovery of these bones did not force a shift of worldviews the way Charles Lyells’ Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Origin of Species did,  they did open the door to those inquiries given how poorly they fit in to the previous understanding.

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I Contain Multitudes

Posted on October 27, 2017 by smellincoffee
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes WIthin Us and a Grander View of Life
© 2016 Ed Yong
268 pages

For much of the 20th century, microbes were equivalent with germs – invisible threats that needed to eradicated.  As we move further into a new century ,however, there is some small and growing popular appreciation that microbes play  important roles in human biology.  Microbes aren’t bit players, though, they’re the actors, the support staff, the conductors, and even the orchestra.  That has been amply illustrated by books like 10% Human, which  demonstrated how thoroughly vital microbes are to ordinary physiology.   I Contain Multitudes looks more generally at microbes and their hosts as dynamic ecosystems that are constantly changing.

Microbes had the planet entirely to themselves for most of Earth history, and long after plants and animals have seemingly taken over, they’re still in control.  Microbes are present in the oceans,  allowing coral to flourish and fish to find their way in the dark; they’re within insects,  often a vital part of their maturation process; they’re in human babies from the word go, receiving them with their mother’s milk. (Actually, a lot of human milk seems to feed not the baby, but microbes inside the baby, which then secrete something that the baby digests. Thus even breast-feeding mothers employ bacterial wet-nurses…)   That’s only part of the story, though.

Previously,  people thought of the immune system in military terms: our white blood cells were soldiers on guard, watching out for any intruders. Yong suggests we appreciate our immune system more as a park ranger, one that monitors the status of its microbial wards,  encouraging and protecting some and weeding out or barring others.  He suggests further that our immune system in doing this is working more on the ward-microbes’ behalf than on ours, for microbes too contend with one another.  They’re constantly jostling for space, and humans unwittingly participate in the battle:   with every meal, we alter our micro-biome.  In the name of healing, w occasionally carpet-bomb our bodies — but the body is its own ecosystem, so dependent on microbes that many illnesses  should be viewed as a mismatch of populations than an invasion.

It is as grave a mistake to regard microbes as an easily-manipulated friend, says Ed Yong, as it was to regard them as an implacable enemy who must be hunted down and killed.  Although symbiotic associations are rife in nature, and abound in our own bodies,  they are not relationships.  Many microbes live inside us, and we depend on many of them as they do on us – but we are not ‘friends’. Instead, like nation-states working together, we merely enjoy a collusion of interests, and occasionally that collusion lapses.   In the macro world, for instance, tickbirds that ride on large mammals and groom them for ticks occasionally nip their rides, too. Further, no one has ‘a’ population of microbes; the pool of microbes in our guts and in our orifices fluctuates widely from hour to hour,  depending on our activities.

Reading this book made me marvel, literally. The image Yong conveyed of the dynanism of our bodies made me think of the sun — an ongoing nuclear explosion that is maintained by the sheer weight of its ingredients. The contests inside us for dominance, the side effect of these material struggles on our brains and feelings, boggles the mind.

Note:  I read this book much earlier in the year, but never posted my review for reasons which escape me. I decided to publish this week given that I’ve been in a science mood.

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The Disappearing Spoon

Posted on October 25, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Disappearing Spoon
© 2010 Sam Kean
400 pages



A massive poster of the periodic table is as elemental to the image of a science classroom as the rows of graduated cylinders and microscopes,   but there is considerably more to that table than other reference materials —  like  a table of statistics about planet volumes,  orbital velocities,  and composition, for instance.   The periodic table’s peculiar shape, its neat columns and rows,  are not only orderly in themselves but speak to cosmic order;    elements which are very near each other in terms of their number of protons, neutrons, and electrons are worlds away from one another in their physical characteristics – and the reverse. The Disappearing Spoon is a human history of the periodic table, built on the author’s suspicion that every element had a story worth telling associated with. Perhaps it was discovered on accident; perhaps it consumed generations,  or lead to the collapse of armies and the failure of expeditions to the South Pole.    Many of the stories here address the elements’ discoveries, including rivalries to isolate them first – rivalries between men and nations alike.  The stories cover a lot of ground between them, and include as much history and literary references  as they do chemistry.    All in all, it’s great fun…but despite the title, there’s no Matrix jokes.  Turns out the disappearing spoon is made of gallium — just pop a gallium spoon into a cup of tea, and it melts away.  



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She Can’t Say No to a Soldier

Posted on October 23, 2017 by smellincoffee

A few months back I posted a collection of oddities from my hometown newspaper throughout the 20th century,  mostly to illustrate how local papers have radically changed in their offerings. From time to time I see little curiosities I like to share — usually just via email.  I’ve been saving a few with an idea of making a “Yesterday’s News” feature here, with funny or intriguing pieces of old papers offered. Today I spotted something in that vein that reminded me of an old song…

From the July 16, 1941 edition of the Selma-Times Journal. The caption reads: “Barbara Dillon has yen for men in uniform, and is dating draftees these days. She’s  member of Atlanta’s ‘I Want to be Drafted’ club, girls’ group providing dates exclusively for service men.’

What comes to mind is Joan Merril’s  WW2-era “You Can’t Say No to a Soldier“:

“You can’t say no to a soldier, a sailor, or a handsome marine
You can’t say no if he wants to dance —
 if he’s gonna fight, he’s got a right to romance
Get out your lipstick and powder
Be beautiful and dutiful, too
If he’s not your type, then it’s still OK
You can always kiss him in a sisterly way..”

That last line always amuses me. But, there are dissenting views about saying no to those boys in uniform! From the same paper, a few weeks later:



“Private George W. Morrow stubbornly refuses to ogle beauties June Reichbacher, left, and Jean Perry. They ankle past St. Louis home where George sits on leave contemplating 15 mile hike discipline handed him and Camp Robinson, Ark, buddies by Lieut-Gen Ben Lear for yoo-hooing at shorts-clad girls in Memphis.”

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Energy Myths and Realities

Posted on October 20, 2017 by smellincoffee

Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Debate
© 2010 Vaclav Smil
232 pages

Nothing lasts forever, including coal and oil. Regardless of their environmental impact (as noxious fumes or released greenhouse gases), ultimately humanity will have to transition away from fossil fuels for want of supplies. Vaclav Smil warns in Energy Myths and Realities, however, that a shift to renewable energy is a long-term project, not something that can be done in a mere decade. In this brief on the intersection between science and public policy, Smil analyzes the prospects of various energy alternatives, and takes apart viral hopes and hysteria.

Immediately after the Fukushima disaster, Germany announced that it would be abandoning nuclear power and replacing it in toto with renewable energy. The fact that certain economic realities have instead forced the planning of new coal power plants is not surprising; historically, every transformation of the energy sector has taken decades, and at the early stages there’s no way of knowing which application of a technology will prove the best. Smil is therefore not optimistic about the prospects for an all-electric automobile fleet; it would require supporting infrastructure (networks of charging stations, for instance), and such an increase in energy that only doubling down on coal and oil could meet. Because wind and solar are still struggling to make inroads into the energy market, they can hardly be relied on to supply a greatly expanded electric fleet. An expansion of coal and oil to power these new cars would thus only transfer the pollution. The right approach to the cars themselves is still being tinkered with, from fuel cells to hybrids. A more recent approach, used by the Chevrolet Volt, is to use gasoline as a generator inside the car, recharging the battery.

Smil is more dubious about biofuels, which he argues are both inefficient and disruptive to food markets. He is ambivalent about wind and solar, either, at least at the national-grid scale proposed for them. In certain locales and markets, they can make sense and pull their weight, but the chances of their supplanting coal and oil in terms of reliability and affordability are remote in the extreme. Smil is more hopeful about hydroelectric (when geographically possible) and nuclear energy, though the latter has a serious public relations problem. Even so, there’s a chance for revival: even in Japan reactors are coming back online, with more scheduled for the future. In addition to analyzing the prospects for various alternatives, Smil also addresses popular misconceptions relating to energy, from peak oil to nuclear energy too cheap to meter.

Ultimately, the author says, the world will move away from fossil fuels, particularly oil; economics and technology may expand our current capacity, but it is a finite resource. He does not expect any drama, however, — neither a sudden peak oil global collapse, or a sudden leap forward into the bright and happy carbon-clean future.

Related:
Book review by Bill Gates

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Lockout

Posted on October 19, 2017 by smellincoffee

Lockout
© 2016 John J. Nance
412 pages

Something very strange is happening at 35,000 feet. A lost and unresponsive Airbus is feeding false data to its pilots, assuring them that they’re halfway over the Atlantic and nearing New York, but any glance out the window tells the crew they’re headed across France and seemingly towards Tel Aviv. The Airbus is carrying an ousted Israeli prime minister, who did everything he could to push Israel and Iran over the brink of war while in office. In DC, three intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense are scrambling over one another’s toes and endangering innocent lives trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do next. If the Airbus continues on its present course, it could very well pass over the border of Iran and trigger a nuclear war between the mullahs and the Israelis. Such is the story of Lockout, in which a couple of pilots and their passengers become the unwitting collateral damage of one or more black ops projects.

Confession: I didn’t realize aviation thrillers were a genre. I’ve seen plenty of crisis-on-an-airplane movies course — Air Force One, Taken, Flightplan, Nonstop, etc — but didn’t imagine that kind of drama could be rendered in books. Well, John Nance has certainly proven me wrong. Lockout’s narrative takes readers through diplomatic intrigue, technical puzzles, street chases, counterespionage schemes, jet combat, and ordinary “whodunit” questions. The author, a Vietnam pilot turned airline pilot, doesn’t shy away from putting his technical knowledge about jet aircraft to work; the key problem of the story is that computer controls over the Airbus have ceased to function, and manual control systems…well, those are soooooo 1980s. Restoring control of the plane to the pilots involves descending into the pit of the electronics bay and figuring out the power and wiring relays down there enough to interrupt the automatics without reducing the plane to a falling airframe. Admittedly, characters working through circuit logic with one another might not reach a large audience, so these scenes are only part of the ensemble of mystery. The main plot takes place over a matter of four hours, as several on-the-ground mysteries converge into the one — a plane that delivered where it shouldn’t have been, whose electrical work doesn’t match Airbus specs, who had intelligence agencies looking for it before they even knew it was in trouble, and which might provoke World War 3. For fans of thrillers and airflight, this is a fun one.

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The Transhumanist Wager

Posted on October 18, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Transhumanist Wager
© 2013 Zoltan Istvan
300 pages

Imagine a protagonist who made Howard Roark seem like a warm and cuddly pushover. That’s Jethro Knights, a red-bearded, icy-blue eyed Ubermensch who is determined to live forever — and if anyone gets in the way, he won’t hesitate to terminate them.  Dedicated to transcending biological limits, Knights’ five-year plan — funded by a Russian gangster/oil  mogul — involves building a floating city and taking over the world.  Those who are useful will be invited to join the quest; those who are not useful will die. “That’s evil!”, you say?  Only if you subscribe to  ‘baggage culture’ —   Knights’ ideal ‘omnipotender’ recognizes no limits to his will, and those who do are mere sheep who deserve to be slaughtered.  Did I mention he’s the good guy?

I stumbled upon this novel while trying to find a story about transhumanist themes. While I’m not a transhumanist myself — that is, someone who believes in integrating technology into the human body to make ourselves super-machines,  with the possibility of immortality —  I have an academic interest in what other people will be doing to themselves as the 21st century continues to metastasize.  Unfortunately, this novel does not provide much in that vein besides robots and magic pills that cure cancer. The bulk of the novel is instead arguments in favor of Knights’ philosophy, integrating the technological aspirations of technohumanism with egoism.    Those who have read The Fountainhead will instantly spot the transparent borrowing of structure: we have a red-headed superman who argues  for the worship of Self, and advocates for its conquest of anything inferior;  he is opposed by a sniffing weasel who does whatever he is told by the third bad guy,  an insincere humanitarian whose public passion for helping the poor is really a platform to make him powerful.  Knights’ also has an ally in an exotically beautiful woman who shares his philosophy in part, but not in full, and thereby challenges him as an intellectual sparing partner. If that weren’t enough, Knights is put on trial and defends himself in lieu of a lawyer, spends much of the book speechifying, and will eventually create a Galt’s Gulch-like sanctuary for his fellow Ubermenschen to devote themselves to science and global conquest. (That’s more Atlas Shrugged than Fountainhead, however.)

To be fair, this borrowing of structure, characters, and plot developments could be seen as an homage to Ayn Rand, just as his Three Laws of Transhumanism are a patent borrowing of Asimov’s laws of robotics.  I think, however, if Rand were to read it she might be inclined to shove the author off of a Roark skyscraper. Her characters could be cold, but they were consistent;  Knights alternates between demanding the government leave him alone and declaring that Transhumanism should be supported by the government — between writing philosophical treatises about the supremacy of the Self, declaring each person to be a sovereign god, and then raging because our ‘dear world’ is being held back back by naughty governments . Look,  Jethro, you can’t throw off the shackles of morality in one sentence, and then  condemn governments on moral grounds in another — and  you can’t claim to care about people when you openly champion killing those off who are not “useful”.   This inconsistency is rife in the book. Towards the end, in a speech that goes on for scores of pages,   Jethro promises to to each person of the world a college education. If you haven’t read classical literature, can’t recognize great pieces of music, and can’t do physics in your head, you will go back to school, says he.  While this is wildly impractical on its own, it’s hilarious considering Jethro has spent the entire book raging against culture, history, religion, etc — against anything that is not related to the technological conquest of sickness, death, and the world.   Jethro hates ideas like honor, hates familial bonds, hates religion, hates political debate:  why would he want to read something like The Illiad?   I’m not exaggerating his contempt: if ranting about them throughout the book wasn’t enough, as the plot reaches its climax he systematically destroys every religious and political building on the planet — and as the artistic legacy of thousands of years goes up in flames, he shrugs. “I told you. I’m a futurist, not a historian.”

The Transhumanist Wager is easily one of the least humane books I’ve ever read. Frankly, I’d have to read Mein Kampf to give it competition.  The two books have one great similarity: they’re badly written.  Throughout the book, as I encountered weird errors, I tried to forgive them on the basis of the author being  a non-native English speaker. But they pile up — the odd use of “ethnic” for “ethical”,  the spelling of Aryan as Arian (“Arian looks”), the confusion of Mobile, Al and New Orleans;  weird dialogue that has a Chinese diplomat referring to the Ubermensch as “wizard of spells”, and so on.  I began the book to see what ideas for cybernetics might be in it, but continued out of morbid fascination.  Suffice it to say, if this book’s philosophy is the attitude that prevails in the 21st century, our best hope is a coronal mass ejection.

And now, as an antidote, a verse from Walter Scott:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
    This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
    From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

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Rossum’s Universal Robots

Posted on October 17, 2017 by smellincoffee

R.U.R
© 1920 Karel Capek
120 pages

ALQUIST: . Has Nana got a prayer book?
HELENA Yes, a big thick one.
ALQUIST And has it got prayers for various occasions? Against thunderstorms? Against illness?
HELENA Against temptations, against floods!––
ALQUIST But not against progress?
HELENA I don’t think so.
ALQUIST That’s a pity.

Introducing….the robots! Literally.  This 1920 play  by Karel Capek  introduced the term into English, in a story about manufactured people who revolt against their masters. The play opens with the arrival of the President’s daughter to a remote island, the manufacturing base and headquarters of Rossum’s Universal Robots. These robots are not mechanical mock-ups of human beings, but rather living creatures  whose tissue is chemically manufactured. The creatures themselves are ‘simplified’, their insides rearranged or reduced for maximum efficiency, and all of the messy human stuff — pleasure,  ambition, et — taken out. All that remains is a super-strong body with an obsessive interest in work — at least, at first.   What began as an experiment from a pair of mad scientists is completely taking over the global workforce, reducing the price of goods to pennies. The dream of the RUR industrialist, “Domin”, is to liberate mankind from slavery to itself.   He dreams of a future where humans spend their days painting and playing the lyre or lolling about in the sun, while all of their needs are taken care of by robots.  Of course, there will be some unpleasantness first. What he doesn’t reckon with is that his own engineers’ own curiosity will mean not just unpleasantness, but the extinction of both humans and robots.

“R.U.R”. may seem like a period piece given its steamboats, steam locomotives, and telegraphs, but those are mere props.  The story irself — the slow death of humanity via dependence on robots —  is one we are perfectly capable of seeing come to fruition.  We won’t be executed by brigades of rifle-toting androids, no, but RUR demonstrates another kind of death.  The play takes place over a decade, in which robots take over so much labor and service that humans stop living. They exist, but they’re no longer working, no longer struggling for the future; most people do not even have children. Even war has become a robotic domain, as armies of drones are used to invade countries and butcher people (once it’s destroyed the opposing army of drones, of course).   Consider our own lives; every passing year brings more automation, and those who live beyond just the moment may wonder what will be the result. How  will governments cope with rising unemployment — and will we reach a point where the majority of people have nothing to do? And even if people’s material needs are met (in a Player Piano scenario, with sustaining welfare for the unemployed masses), how  will society absorb their energy, their itching will to be doing SOMETHING? Regardless of the hopes of optimists, not everyone wants to spend their time reading and painting and playing the lyre. Some people want to build, to compete, to do something mighty….but what will be left?

Though a short read, RUR remains thought provoking close to a century after its publication.

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Reads to Reels: The Circle

Posted on October 16, 2017 by smellincoffee

Trailer:

Knowing is good. Knowing everything is better.

Imagine that the movie version of 1984 had ended with Winston Smith being promised by the Party that the reign of Big Brother was through, that they would immediately hold elections to replace him, and – well done, Winston, for your patriotic rebellion! Huzzah!  Now, if you’d read the novel, you’d be confused. For one thing, the mood of this proposed ending is completely different from that of the novel’s, with its promise that the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever. Secondly…Big Brother never existed except as an all-seeing eye to frighten people into obedience and subservience. There was no dictator at the core of the party;  the tyranny emanated from the party itself, from the culture it created and its system of control. The movie  would have missed the entire point of the book!

When the ending credits rolled for The Circle last night, its ending left me with that same conviction: the screenwriter missed the point.  Dave Eggers’ novel mixed dystopia with satirical dark comedy to produce a thriller that was as mocking as it was foreboding. The movie isn’t satirical in the least, although it follows the same basic plot:  enter Mae Holland, played by Emma Watson, who gets a job at the world’s biggest and most innovative tech company.  Embracing its culture completely,  Mae rises in the ranks while being increasingly estranged from her real-life family and friends. Repeated encounters with a mysterious man who seems to know more than anyone should bring Mae to a crisis point however, and she has to make a decision.  The decision she makes seems to vary from book to movie, but the movie’s ultimate ending renders the difference moot.

Up until that point, I’d been enjoying The Circle as an illustration of the novel.  When Mae is “transparent”, streaming her every waking moment, comments from her audience appear as little floating boxes off to the side. They wink in and out fairly quickly,  but a quick eye or a pause button, can get some measure of the variety of the comments.  In keeping with the nature of youtube comments and such, few are substantive: many, in fact, are completely self-absorbed, using Mae’s feed only to moan about their lives.  The shallowness of the Circle culture is also pointed out when some outside presenters ask a group to name a historic personality; after a moment of mental paralysis, one volunteers…”Mae Holland!”   That said, I don’t think the movie would be nearly as enjoyable without having read the book,  because its plot is rushed, and the creeping dread of The Circle is…well, not so creeping. The mysterious figure from the book takes almost four hundred pages to reveal his identity; here, he offers it to Mae on their second meeting. His aura of mystery, Mae’s bookish anxiety to see him again to figure him out, are done away with completely: in the film he’s the guy from Star Wars, staring at his phone and  condemning the Circle every time they get past the  pleasantries.  Similarly absent is Mae’s constant tension with her ex-boyfriend, Mercer;  in the book he is a foil and a  burr under the saddle, and when Mae uses him to demonstrate a program in the book,   it demonstrates how corroded her own soul has become. In the movie, she and Mercer are merely disagreeable friends, and she doesn’t want to use him to test her program (basically, a crowd-sourced way to find a single person on the planet).   While it’s nice to see her and Mercer getting along, it does little for the plot of the movie.

The screenplay of The Circle  thus takes Eggers’ ominous view of the future of  the socially networked web and turns it into a light thriller with the kind of  head-in-the-clouds naivete one only ever sees on election day. Instead of prompting people to think critically about the way social networks alter their lives, it tacitly promotes life inside the glass cage — so long as meanies aren’t in charge.

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