Lance Mannion

Math as liberation and resistance

Posted Friday night, August 16, 2019.

Soviet junior high school history classroom, circa the mid-1970s.

To a Soviet child, the afterschool math club was a miracle. For one thing, it was not school. Every morning Soviet children all over the country left their identical concrete block apartments a little after eight and walked to their identical concrete school buildings to sit in their identical classrooms with the walls painted yellow and with identical portraits of bearded dead men on the walls---Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the literature classrooms, Mendeleev in the chemistry classroom, and Lenin everywhere. Their teachers marked attendance in identical class journals and reached for identical textbooks that they used to impart a perfectly uniform education to their charges, of whom they demanded uniformity in return. My own first-grade teacher...actually made me pretend my reading skills were as poor as the other children’s, enforcing her own vision of conforming to grade level. The first time I spent an afternoon solving math problems...I sat for what seemed like an eternity, holding a pencil over a drawing of some shape. I do not remember the problem, but the solution required transposing the shape. I sat, unable to touch my pencil to paper, until a teaching assistant came by and asked me a very basic question, something like “What might you do?”

“I might transpose it, like this,” I answered.

“So do it,” he said.

Apparently, this was a place where I was expected to think for myself...I hunched over my piece of paper, sketched out the solution in a couple of minutes, and felt a wave of relief so total that I think I became a math junkie on the spot...The joy of feeling my brain rev up, rush toward a solution, and be affirmed for it felt like love, truth, hope, and justice all handed to me at once.

---Masha Gessen,  “Perfect Rigor”.

Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything

Posted Sunday night, August 11, 2019.

VASILY FEDOSENKO / REUTERS

That Russia produced some of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversation that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this is what made mathematics in the Soviet Union uniquely appealing to those whose minds demanded consistency and logic, unattainable in virtually any other area of study. It is also what made mathematics and mathematicians suspect. Explaining what makes mathematics as important and beautiful as mathematicians know it to be, the Russian algebraist Mihkal Tsfasman said, “Mathematics is uniquely suited to teaching one to distinguish between right and wrong, the proven from the unproven, the probable from the improbable. It also teaches us to distinguish that which is probable and probably true from the which, while apparently, probable, is an obvious lie…"

---from "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century" by Masha Gesson.

The Amazing Doctor Wood and his Optical Cat

Posted Saturday morning, August 10, 2019.

For illustrative purposes only: Never mind the box, this is not Schroedinger’s cat. It’s not the Amazing Doctor Wood’s living dust mop either. It’s my brother Luke’s cat who just happens to like climbing into boxes and making a den of them and would, without doubt, volunteer to clean the spider webs out of Luke’s spectrograph, if Luke had one. The trick would be coaxing the cat out the other end.

Physicist Robert W. Wood was one of the first celebrity scientists that I know of. Einstein was news. Wood made the news. His hey-day was the first three decades of the 20th Century. He made a name for himself in the popular imagination as a debunker of junk science. He was an inventor as much as he was a scientist. A filter he invented for mercury lamps was used by the military for signaling during World War I but turned out to be useful for the theatrical stage. Florenz Ziegfeld used it for lighting effects in his "Follies". In “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II”, in which he figures prominently, author Jennet Conant says he was regarded as the “most brilliant American experimental physicist of his day.” She also describes him as handsome and charming and a bit of an eccentric. He wrote poetry and two sci-fi novels. He liked making kites. He was a cheerful and self-mocking self-promoter and titled his autobiography “The Amazing Doctor Wood”. If they ever make a TV miniseries out of “Tuxedo Park”---and somebody should---Wood would show up as a one-episode wonder, played by an aging but still dashing leading man---Clooney would be good, Daniel Day Lewis even better---who’d be the hero of that episode by virtue of his eccentric and attractive personality and his importance to the life of the main character. The Wall Street tycoon of “Tuxedo Park’s” subtitle is Alfred Lee Loomis. A lawyer turned inventor turned military engineer turned lawyer again turned investment banker turned scientist, Loomis had mustered out of the army after World War I, determined to make money, made a lot of it, grew bored making it, and made the switch to science. He used the money he made to convert a decaying estate in Tuxedo Park, New York into that secret palace of science---actually, it wasn’t that secret at the start. Loomis just didn’t make a big deal of what he was doing to his neighbors and the local press, just as a tinkerer of more modest means and ambition wouldn’t think it worth broadcasting that he’d set up a new workbench in his garage. The work that went on in Loomis’ palace of science during World War II, that was secret. At any rate, before Loom set up his workbench, he had to learn how to do science. He taught himself science---the theories, the formulas, the problems, what might be called textbook science---focusing on physics. Loomis was one of those polymaths who mastered everything he set his mind to. But he needed someone to teach him how to do the practical work of sciencing---turning the theoretical into the experimental. The teacher wound up being Wood. Wood was another one who was successful at whatever he put his hand to. His main interest and most significant work was in optics...

Wood had become interested in physical optics, especially spectral studies. In the barn [behind Wood’s house that he used as a laboratory], he was busy putting the finishing touches on a forty-foot grating spectrograph---then the largest and most powerful in existence and capable of giving better results than anyone had ever seen before. While it appeared crude, in Wood’s capable hands it performed superbly, and Loomis was transfixed. As unconventional as Wood’s methods were, the results were always near perfection. For example, his preferred method for cleaning the giant spectrograph---which when unused for any extended period became clogged with spiderwebs---was to simply drop the family cat in one end. In order to escape, the poor animal had to make its way through the whole length of tubing, effectively running a fur duster through the works.

---from “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” by Jennet Conant.

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Related Mannion re-run: "Edison sent back to the drawing board".

Filed under That's SCIENCE!

A scientist confesses to an individualistic bias

Posted Saturday morning, August 3, 2019.

A young physicist among the diapers. Freeman Dyson in Ithaca, New York. 1952. Verena Huber-Dyson via the New York Review of Books.

A substantial part of this book is autobiographical. I make no apology for that. It is not that I consider my own life particularly significant or interesting to anybody besides myself. I write about my own experiences because I do not know so much about anyone else’s…The important thing, to my mind, is that the great human problems are problems of the individual and not of the mass. To understand the nature of science and of its interaction with society, one must examine the individual scientist  and how he confronts the world around him. The best way to approach the ethical problems associated with science is to study real dilemmas faced by real scientists. Since firsthand evidence is most reliable, I begin by writing about things that happened to me personally. This is another effect of the same individualistic bias that leads me to listen to poets more than to economists.

---Freeman Dyson, from “Disturbing the Universe”, his memoir of his life as a scientist, ethicist, and public intellectual.

Edison sent back to the drawing board

Thursday morning, June 20, 2019.

Thomas Edison experimenting in his lab, circa 1921. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

The war is World War I. Loomis is the scientist-businessman-philanthropist Alfred Lee Loomis who founded and funded  a secret civilian laboratory that helped develop the atom bomb during World War II but who was an officer in the Army during the first world war supervising the development and testing of new weapons technology for the Army Ordnance Board. Aberdeen is the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where Loomis was stationed and where that technology was tested. Edison is, well, Edison:

On January 1, 1918...Loomis was sent to Aberdeen. His “inventiveness,” along with a constant stream of ingenious ideas for new armaments and new solutions to old tactical problems, had earned him one of the most important jobs: chief of the development and experimental department. At Aberdeen, he joined some of the most distinguished physicists and astronomers in the country, who had been mobilized to help adapt the army to the needs of modern warfare. One of Loomis’ responsibilities was to test ideas for new weapons submitted to the Army Ordnance Board. Among the luminaries whose novel recommendations Loomis had to take into account and duly try out were those of Thomas Edison, who was by this time a genuine folk hero, his life story and list of major inventions...known to every schoolchild. Although he was already seventy years old and crustier than ever, he was still hard at work in his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, and throughout World War I contributed technical advice and suggestions.

Loomis followed up on one recommendation and recalled that the “perilous experiment” not only blew up Edison’s scheme, it also almost annihilated a number of Aberdeen personnel as well. As the story was later recounted in Fortune magazine, “Edison’s idea was to work up a terrific spin on a large TNT-filled drum, and then suddenly drop it from a height. The theory was that the drum---trailing wires attached to a detonator---would bounce along of its own momentum until it reached the enemy lines, when it could be exploded. Put to the test, the drum dug a deep ole in the ground where it fell, bounced out, traveled about 200 feet, dug another hole, and then let go.

---from “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” by Jennet Conant.

"You live by political motivations, you die by political motivations...”

Posted Sunday morning, June 2, 2019.

NASA charged them room and board?

[Jack Burns, the director of Network for Exploration and Space Science], who is sixty-six years old, remembers the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions—the Cold War-era efforts, beginning in the late fifties, that put men in space and finally landed them on the moon. He teaches a course on the history of space policy. “The U.S. had already lost the start of the space race,” he said, of the origins of Apollo. “The Soviet Union was first with a satellite in space. They were first with an astronaut in space.” Yuri Gagarin’s journey into outer space took place in April, 1961. President John F. Kennedy delivered his moon-shot speech the following month, and Congress eventually allocated 4.4 per cent of the national budget to nasa. “But, if you live by political motivations, you die by political motivations,” Burns said. “Apollo died. Nixon killed the program.” Only twelve people have walked on the moon, all of them between the summer of 1969 and Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon; they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft. Since the last moonwalk, humans have launched crafts that have orbited the moon, crashed probes into it, and taken increasingly detailed photos of it. But no one has been back.

---from “The Eighth Continent” by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker.

Image up top is a detail from a photograph of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, in the Sea of Tranquility, July 1969. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, can be seen reflected in Aldrin’s visor, taking the picture. Courtesy of NASA via Wikipedia.

To read Galchen’s article about the race to develop the moon follow the link.

Filed under Your Morning Paper and That's SCIENCE!

Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: A Greek alphabet of famous physics professors I have known...of

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Posted Wednesday morning, April 24. Revised and corrected below, Thursday morning, April 25.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967, around, I’d guess, fifteen years after the young RPI physics major Pop Mannion attended one of Bethe’s seminars. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

“Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoe. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organizer as well.” ---from a letter by Freeman Dyson dated September 25, 1947, collected in Dyson’s autobiography in letters, “Maker of Patterns”.

I wonder if Pop Mannion would have recognized Freeman Dyson’s description of the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe. It’s from a letter Dyson wrote in 1947, when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was his professor. That was at least around five but maybe ten or even fifteen years before Pop himself met Bethe.

Pop counted Bethe as one of his teachers. It was a minor point of pride with him. Minor as in he kept it in perspective. Bethe taught at Cornell. Pop earned all three of his degrees---Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.---at RPI. But at some point in his career as a student, Pop took a week-long seminar with Bethe. I can’t remember exactly when. My impression has always been it was when he was an undergrad. That would put it in the early 1950s. But it might have been while he was working on his masters. At that point, Pop was running the computer department at GE’s atomic power lab (and, incidentally, managing the department’s softball team to the company championship.) That would put it in the late 50s or early 60s and Pop would have been around thirty years old. I like thinking it was when he was a degreeless student, no more than twenty. It’s hard for me to imagine Pop as a college student. Not because he was “born older” like George Bailey. He was. But that’s not the point. It’s simply that he didn’t tell us many stories about that part of his life that didn’t include the girl he was dating at the time, and Mom Mannion wasn’t in college with him, or the United States Air Force, which had him in its ranks as an ROTC cadet. His post grad career I remember because he worked on his Masters and Ph.D. at night and on weekends when I was a little kid and that meant he often wasn’t at home when we Mannion kids wanted to play with him, he was at class or in the library or lab at RPI, and when he wasn’t there he was working and studying at his desk in his “den”, not to be disturbed. The other thing about his seminar with Bethe I can’t recall is where it was held. Bethe might have visited RPI. He might have visited GE. But I like to imagine Pop went down to Cornell when he was an undergrad because Pop lived at home when as an undergrad and I like picturing him making his first long trip away from home. Like I said, having taken that seminar with Bethe was a minor point of pride for him, and he didn’t crow about it. What he was prouder of---well, vainer about, as much as Pop allowed himself a vanity---was the joke he got of it.

Pop also counted George Gamow as one of his teachers, along with Ralph Alpher, who was a friend and a colleague at GE. Gamow he knew through Alpher. It’s more accurate to describe both as mentors. But it was better for the joke to call them his teachers. Here’s the joke:

Pop liked to tell people the list of his physics teachers was so long it ran the whole twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.

His jokes were usually funnier than that.

He was proud of the joke, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. It bothered him that he didn’t have any famous professors whose names could be used for a pun on Omega.

Think about it.

I took my copy of “Maker of Patterns”, Freeman Dyson’s “autobiography through letters” with us on our trip up to the Old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with Mom Mannion and various friends and relations. I’d have taken it up to show him if he was still with us, expecting of course that he already owned it himself. “Maker of Patterns” would have been a perfect gift for his birthday, which is coming up on Saturday. That’s why I’m convinced he’d have owned it already. Pop had a habit of buying himself books that would have been perfect birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day presents for him. It was frustrating. But he didn’t do it to be perverse. He bought books for himself regularly---too regularly in the opinion of Mom Mannion, who had to find a place for them all. If it was left to Pop they’d have piled up in the living room to the point that eventually they have walled him in in his favorite reading chair and eventually one of the towers would have toppled and crushed him where he sat reading his newest acquisition. It was one of his indulgences, of which, like his vanities, he allowed himself few. But if, wonder of wonders, on the off-chance he didn’t already own it, I’d have gotten a kick out of showing him the series of letters Dyson wrote to his family in the late 1940s when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was not only his teacher but the head of his dissertation committee. And I’m sure Pop would have especially enjoyed this story, because it includes as a character another physicist he greatly admired:

Dyson writes:

The event of last week has been a visit from [Rudolf Peierls, an old physicist friend of Bethe’s who’d, at about the same time as Bethe, escaped Hitler’s Germany to England where he’d become one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project] who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learn a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming, and finally he had to be sent to bed, since Dick...did not materialise. About half an hour later [Dick] burst into the room just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

The one-man percussion band was---you guessed it---Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman with students at a coffee hour at Caltech’s Winnett Center, June, 1964. Photo by Kent McCaulley, courtesy of Caltech Magazine.

It’s possible Pop met Feynman at Cornell. Barely possible. But only if Pop took that seminar with Bethe at Cornell and when he was a freshman at RPI. Feynman left Cornell in 1951. Fact is, however, I’m pretty sure he never met Feynman. He’d have never stopped talking about it if he had. It would have been more than a minor point of pride for him and he wouldn’t have cared if he got a good joke out of it. Feynman was one of his heroes.

So he’d have enjoyed this from Dyson’s letter home, dated November 19, 1947:

“Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester [New York, about a two-hour drive from Ithaca]. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.”

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Updated and corrected Thursday morning, April 25, 2019 because DAMMIT! there are holes in my memory that need to be plugged: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow joke wasn't Pop's. He appropriated it---from Gamow. Gamow wrote a seminal paper on the Big Bang with Alpher, who was his doctoral student at George Washington University, and he added his friend Bethe's name so that it would always be cited as Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. The paper was published in 1948, when Pop was in high school. But Pop read it, although probably not when it was published, and of course understood it and appreciated its ramifications, as well as getting a big kick out of the joke, which he told me about and explained to me when I was just out of grad school and reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", one of my and Pop's favorite books. I'd asked him in he'd met any of the physicists mentioned in the book. That's when he told me about taking the seminar with Bethe and about the paper and the joke and his connections to Alpher and Gamow and how he liked to tell people about the paper, the joke, and how the joke could be applied to his own resume. Pop never took credit for somebody else's work or their jokes.

As it happens, Pop's connection to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb and probably initially to Bethe was through his boss as GE, Richard Ehrlich, known to Pop and Mom Mannion as their good friend Dick but to us Mannion kids as Dr Ehrlich and someone we had to be on our best behavior around when he visited our house, although I remember him as a kindly, avuncular, and always broadly smiling man. Dr Ehrlich had worked under Bethe at Los Alamos, amd since Dr Ehrlich and Mrs Ehrlich were regular dinner guests at the Mannion Homestead, I can claim one degree of separation form the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and isn't that special? But it makes it likely that Pop took that seminar from Bethe when he was working at GE and not when he was a student and that it was held in Schenectady. One other thing about Dr Ehrlich. His influence on Pop was political as much as professional. He was the chair of the local Democratic committee when we moved to Niskayuna and he recruited Pop to run for town board. Pop got skunked that time out. But he learned valuable lessons that he put to work when he ran for supervisor a few years later.

All this came back in a rush last night when Mannionville stalwarts Joel Hanes and Kaleburg reminded me in the comments here and Facebook pal Neil Calkin reminded me over there about Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. Thanks, old chums, for calling attention to the paper and to my incipient senility.

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“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiograhy Through Letters” by Freeman Dyson is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Another of Pop Mannion's favorite books by about science was Gamow's "One Two Three...Infinity". He cherished his first edition copy all his adult life. It was published when Pop was in high school so it may have been the first adult science book he owned. His affection for it wasn't just nostalgic either. He thought it was a classic of its kind and recommended to everyone as the best introduction to scientific and mathematical thinking about how the world works. He might have known this, but if he didn't it would have done is heart good to find out it's still in print. "One Two Three...Infinity" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop would also recommend Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted late Tuesday afternoon, January 29, 2019.

Just catching up with this one. The quote’s from an article by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist by way of Salon:

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s urgent calls to action on climate change: “Look, I don’t think we’re going to listen to her on much of anything, particularly not on matters we’re gonna leave in the hands of a much, much higher authority, and certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end.”

“Higher authority.” That would be the Right Wing Christian version of God, a capricious demon with an allegedly benevolent plan for humankind which requires millions of innocent people to suffer and die every year but which ends with Christians being rewarded in the next life while rich Republicans get richer in this one. This notion that God is in charge, he knows what’s best for us, and we should leave things up to him isn’t really an article of faith. It’s an excuse not to care about other people’s unhappiness and misfortune.

“I’d like to help you friend, but God know what he’s doing, and who am I to question God?”

At any rate, coming across the article this morning reminded me I wrote a post on the subject back in November. I think it’s worth reposting, so here it is…

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“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” said Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich greedy bastards in the choir.

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Back to today…

Ocasio-Cortez responded the way you’d think would shut a Christian like Sanders up. She quoted the bible at her. Trouble is AOC’s Catholic. Catholics think the bible means what the words in it mean. Right Wing Christians think it means whatever they need it to mean to serve their self-interest at the moment. Right Wing Christians are convinced they’re the only ones who know what God wants, which always turns out to be what they want. Convenient, huh?

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To read Thompson’s whole article, follow the link to “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders” at Grist.

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Photo up top is by yours truly. I took it back in the fall. October 24, 2018, to be precise. It's the marquee in front of one of the loneliest looking chruches I've ever seen. Seems like there's never more than five or six cars in the parking lot even on Sundays.

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted Thursday evening, November 29, 2018.

Marquee outside a local church. Shwangunk, New York. Photo taken back in October, 2018.

“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” siad Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich rich greedy bastards and their choir.

Then it started adding up to real money

Posted Friday, May 18, 2018.

Acid rain, still a thing. Photo via worldatlas.

Once upon a time, even conservative Republicans could be environmentalists. But they noticed that it was costing them real money:

Soon, though, business interests realized that these rules were just the beginning. Dirty air was succeeded by new alarms about the atmosphere, one after another. The ozone hole. Nuclear winter. Acid rain. Each was more abstract than its predecessor, but larger in its immediate economic impact. Industry, sensing a trend, became wary. What had begun as a feel-good movement against a limited tally of palpable local harms seemed to have become an endless crusade against ever-larger and ever-remoter targets. A stream of “capitalism vs. ecology” manifestos led many in the business world to conclude that destroying the corporate world from the beginning. Ranchers, farmers, loggers, and miners, touched by environmental laws, came to the same conclusion: a cabal of urban snobs was bent on destroying their livelihoods…

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

Flying our tribal flags

Posted Friday morning, May 18, 2018.

Spotted Owl: Symbol of the movement or Public Enemy Number One, depending on how your tribe ranks its totems. Photo copyright Max Leibowitz, courtesy of the Macauley Library, via All About Birds, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Yeah, I know. One party elects many more tribalists than the other, but the point holds:

Environmental issues became ways for politicians to flag their identity to supporters---less statements about practical problems with solutions that people could debate than symbols of identity. They signaled membership in a cause: taking back the country, either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed.

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

"Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair"

Posted Sunday afternoon, May 6, 2018.

An abandoned hacienda on a still-thriving farm in the Bajio region of Mexico. Photo courtesy of photographer Andres Gonzalez via Wikipedia.

In 1945, the environmental scientist Norman Borlaug, the wizard of Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet”, was working for the Rockefeller Foundation as a field botanist in the Bajio, a wheat-growing and wheat-dependent agricultural region of Central Mexico, trying to figure out how to beat the stem rust that afflicted the wheat crop and caused poor yields. His own living conditions in the were rough. The heat was suffocating. The food was lousy. The work itself---planting maize and then inspecting the young plants for stem rust---had to be done on hands and knees and was exhausting and painful. But it’s what he saw of how the farmers lived and how a culture based on centuries of economic abuse and political injustice and nature’s cruelty affected their thinking and their spirits that got to him...

Much worse was the poverty. Borlaug had been poor all his life but always well fed and decently clad. In the Bajio he first encountered  destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational. If Borlaug offered to procure steel plows and hoes, they told him that metal siphoned “heat” from the soil. If he asked about fertilizer, they told him it was a government plot against the farmer. Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair…

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

The REAL scientific method

Posted Saturday evening, March 31, 2018.

A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull.

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

Me and the mice, in it for the long haul

Posted Thursday morning, March 29, 2018.

“What a mouse! WHAT A MOUSE!”

I was only planning on making it to seventy-five, but the way things are going it’s looking like I have to last until at least I’m a hundred and twelve. So this article by Sharon Begley in STAT got my hopes up…

In the latest advance, biologists reported on Thursday that a molecule already sold by supplement makers (even as scientists scramble to understand it) restored youthfulness to blood vessels in 20-month-old mice, an age comparable to 70 years in people. The research supports the idea that boosting certain genes and molecules that fade with age could keep people functional, resilient, and even spry well into their 80s, even without living longer.

“I think it’s quite an important paper,” said Dr. Eric Verdin, of the California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s probably not the magic pill everyone is looking for, but it’s one more brick in our efforts to understand aging and healthspan,” or how long people can stay biologically young(ish) even as their birthday candles proliferate.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? The supplement is Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, popularly known as NMN.

After two months of NMN, more blood vessels sprouted in the old mice’s muscles. The density of the smallest vessels — capillaries — became comparable to that of young mice. Blood flow increased, and the animals’ endurance, measured by how long they could run on a treadmill before becoming exhausted, was 56 percent to 80 percent greater than that of untreated old mice: 1,400 feet compared to 780 feet.

The treated mice also benefited from exercise like mice half their age. In young animals, exercise spurs the creation of new blood vessels and boosts muscle mass, but that effect weakens with age in both people and mice. NMN restored the blood-vessel- and muscle-boosting effects of a good treadmill run, basically “reversing vascular aging in the mice,” said study co-leader David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School.

But then I read on…

New blood vessels could also be a mixed blessing. They support the growth of tumors, which is why anti-angiogenesis molecules have become cancer drugs. The scientists found no excess cancers in the mice given [NMN], but “more study is warranted,” they wrote.

As Rosanne Rosanadana used to say, “It’s always something.” Still, it appears that NMN boosts Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+, a coenzyme naturally found in all living organisms that’s important for metabolic energy production in a way I don’t understand and which NMN appears to increase the body’s production of:

Thanks to negative studies, the jury is still out on whether anything related to sirtuins will extend lifespan, but the Cell study offers some hope for extending healthspan. If boosting NAD+ promotes blood vessel formation via SIRT1, it might “rescue muscle mass” that otherwise decreases as blood vessels atrophy, Guarente said. That could prevent the bone loss, frailty, and falls that can be fatal in old age.

“Anything that contributes to muscle health through vascular health is likely to be quite important,” said the Buck Institute’s Verdin, who takes a daily NAD+ precursor…

Sinclair and his team are now studying whether raising NAD+ might also spur the creation of blood vessels in the brain. There and in other organs, said Sinclair, “the lack of oxygen and buildup of waste products” that results from loss of small blood vessels “sets off a downward spiral of disease and disability.” In the brain, that would include vascular dementia.

Sinclair takes NMN to boost NAD+ levels. “In someone my age [49], it’s probably harder to see immediate benefits,” he said, though he said he feels sharper and younger on it. After his 78-year-old father began taking NMN “he started climbing mountains and going whitewater rafting and looking forward to the next five years,” Sinclair said. “It might be psychological, but it isn’t hurting.”

Climbing mountains at seventy-eight would be nice, but I’ll settle for being able to climb stairs. So should I rush out and get hold of some NMN?

One concern is that boosting sirtuins could backfire. An excess of the molecules, Verdin said, can promote autoimmunity, which causes diseases such as Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis.

Swell.

And science is littered with examples of compounds that worked in mice but not people.

Even sweller.

Sometimes I hate science journalism. See what you think. You can read Sharon Begley’s whole article by following the link to A dietary supplement makes old mice youthful. But will it work in people? at STAT.

Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist.

Just another briefly successful species

Posted Saturday morning, February 24, 2018.

“A three-foot deep pile of zebra mussel shells about 50 yards long are piled up along the Lake Winnebago shoreline in April 2012 at Wayside Park just north of Fond du Lac. Scientists want to use an experimental chemical on an inland lake in Wisconsin in hopes of finding a way to stem the spread of the invasive mussel.” Photo by Mark Hoffman courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

This is objectively, scientifically fascinating, until the end, when it gets subjectively, scientifically scary…

By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while…Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environments as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. The drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

When I lived in New York City, zebra mussels invaded the lower Hudson River, the western boundary of Manhattan island. An inch or two long with wriggly bands of brown and white, zebra mussels are capable of spitting out a million eggs a year apiece. The species originated in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas on Europe’s Russian- and Turkic-speaking periphery. Globalization has been good to it. Escaping their native waters, zebra mussels hitchhiked around the world in ship bilges and ballastwater. They have been recorded in Europe since the eighteenth century. The Hudson first saw them in 1991. Within a year zebra mussels constituted half the mass of living creatures in the river. In some places tens of thousands carpeted every square foot. They covered boat bottoms, blocked intake tubes, literally smothered other species of shellfish with a blanket of striped shell…

Bust followed boom; the population collapsed. In 2011, two decades after the mussel was first sighted in the Hudson, its survival rates were [according to one long-range study] “1% or less of those in the early years of the invasion…They [exhausted] their food supply, but they were also attacked by a local predator, the blue crab, which had learned to eat the newcomers…Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river---the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowdays at the park the creatures are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel’s collapse.

Humans are no different [microbiologist Lynn Margulis believed]. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one species among many, no different at base than [zebra mussels]. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate…Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes was just another briefly successful species.

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

Pro protist

Posted Monday morning, February 19, 2018.

Blepharisma japonica, “a free-living ciliated protozoan” found in Japan. Protozoans, according to Wikipedia, are “single-celled non-photosynthetic protists.” And protists, according to Charles C. Mann in his book “The Wizard and the Prophet” are “anything living that is not an animal, plant, fungi, or bacterium.” Got that? Me neither. Photo via Wikipedia.

Remarkable a scientist as she was, Lynn Margulis isn’t one of the two remarkable scientists of the title of the book the quote below is from, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World” by Charles C. Mann. The two are the influential environmentalists Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet). Mann brings Margulis into his story as an ironic commentator on how Borlaug’s and Vogt’s fields of inquiry and their visions of how to solve what they both saw as the major threat to human survival, overpopulation, were narrowly circumscribed by their individual biases and why what should have been complementary approaches to the problems caused by more and more people coming into the world and needing to eat, drink, wash, and irrigate crops, clothe themselves, go from here to there, heat and cool their homes, and occasionally treat themselves to a movie or ice cream or whatever turned into competing visions, a competition, Mann posits still persists even though both Borlaug and Vogt have long since shuffled off this mortal coil.

A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists of the last half century---she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria)…

…Margulis couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ fixation on birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and portists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms, Margulis liked to remind people. Heck, there are as many bacterial cells in our body as there are human cells.

Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant super-colonies, reproduce either sexually or by swapping genes with others, take in genes from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings---the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to [say], pandas and polar bears were epiphenomena---interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

---from The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann.

I’d have thought cities counted as super-colonies, but like I would know.

Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time again...and again...and again

Mined from the notebooks, October 5, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, November 5, 2017.

“Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist, holds a 2,000-year-old bronze arm recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck.” Photo by Brett Seymour EUA/Argo courtesy of the New York Times.

I know I come across as a solid citizen of the Reality-based Community. Mr Facts. Mr Logic. Mr Does His Homework. I follow the links, do the reading, listen to the experts and trust the scientists. I'm a hard-headed materialist. If it can't be seen, toughed, tasted, measured, and quantified, it doesn't exist. If I'd been the thirteenth apostle, the expression would be a Doubting Mannion not Doubting Thomas. Only I'd have put my hands in the wounds. That Thomas, he calls himself a doubter? What a piker.

But skeptic and rationalist that I am, I have moments of weakness. When my mental discipline slackens and restless imagination takes flight. Then the universe seems to me a magical place, God exists, Martians do too, and all kinds of things are possible. It's not that I start believing in magic. It's that the magic that popular science fiction passes off as future science really does seem like future science. Warp drive, teleportation, whatever supposedly goes on to make food synthisers and the Holodeck work, truly intelligent artificial intelligence---I accept that it will all come to be. And given the way technology has developed and science has advanced in just my lifetime, it may be that the most unscientific part of my thinking is thinking that accepting it is believing in magic.

Time travel, though, I can't think of as anything but magic. Probably a result of too much TV and reading of comic books. Whether it's via the Wayback Machine or the Tardis or the Flash running backwards or the Enterprise slingshotting around the sun or the flux capacitor kicking in at the last, crucial second, it's all a version of Dorothy closing her eyes, clicking her heels three times, and saying, "There's no place like home, circa [fill in the date]."

Travel to alternate universes seems as plausible to me as falling down the rabbit hole or passing through the looking glass.

But even though I don't accept that time travel is possible, I believe the past is there to be traveled to.

I've seen it.

I see it.

Routinely.

Usually happens when I'm somewhere the past is still a physically functioning part of the present, not there as an artifact, a museum or museum piece, but as a building still in use as what it was built for or tool or machine or even article of clothing still being used the way it was the day it was first put to work. And then I see not just the things themselves but the people using them and all the things around them the people used to fashion and maintain their lives and the landscapes and cityscapes in which they lived those lives and them living their lives, which is to say, I seem living, alive in the past, the past alive in the present.

Used to happen almost every day when I lived in Boston. Happens most regularly and most vividly now when I'm driving along a country road and a remodelled vintage auto comes into view,  tooling towards me in the opposite lane.

In Boston I'd leap between centuries in a matter of blocks. One moment I 'd be jostling through Fanueil Hall and suddenly I'd see  myself rubbing shoulders with people who rubbed shoulders with Samuel Adams. Another moment, making my way to my apartment in Allston I'd pass by the doorsteps the young Jack Kennedy would have climbed to knock on the doors of the residents he was going to ask to vote for him for Congress and I'd see those steps and those doors and the people opening them and the hallway behind them and the rooms opening on those hallways and I'd see them as they'd have looked to JFK. I'd even hear the telephones ringing and the radios blaring. I would catch glimpses of the tiny screens of the TVs in the few houses that had them.

Out driving, when I see an old car approaching, a Model T, a ‘54 Chevy, any make and model with real fenders, any make and model with tailfins, any make and model pre-dating my first driver's license, in fact---because the past doesn't include my life, of course. That's still the present.---right before my eyes, the roadside changes, the road signs change, trees grow taller or disappear, farms appear and disappear, fields clear themselves or are overgrown, barns are raised or collapse or vanish into the woods entirely, the number and style of the houses change, accordingly.

Some of those roads haven't changed. The houses and farms along them have been there for a hundred years. The past isn't all in the past. It's even wrong to say Kennedy's Boston was part of the past. There were still plenty of people alive who'd voted for him in his first campaign for Congress. Still living in those same houses, very likely. There were still people alive who'd voted for his grandfather for mayor.

What I most like to see is that the people are like us. Are us. The changes in fashion, in technologies change some things about how they go about their lives, but the lives they're going about aren't that different from ours.

They don't think about all the same things, but they think along the same lines. We have lots in common to talk about. We make the same jokes. I know I'm not being profound here. I'm being sentimental. Can't deny it. Not trying to. It's what I'm being when I see the past. I know it, and I know what's going on. I want those people to be there because I want to still be here a thousand years from now when some sentimental descendent looks into the past and sees life going on in 2017. It's me imagining that life is eternal and we all live forever.

But knowing what’s going on doesn't stop me.

It also happens when I look at old photographs and certain paintings, although not, oddly, the most photographic ones like Vermeer's, probably because I'm so overawed by the technical achievement I forget to think about the subject. It happens when I watch old movies but rarely when I watch contemporary movies set in the past no matter how meticulously the designers have recreated that past. And it almost never happens when I read novels no matter when they were written, probably because I'm not seeing with my own inner eyes---the writer's vision takes over my imagination but at some level I'm aware of that happening and a stubborn part of me resists.

It happens more frequently when I read non-fiction and journalism, and then usually most vividly when I'm reading a newspaper or magazine article, probably because I'm not expecting it and I'm taken by surprise, with my intellectual defenses against it down. Which is what happened when I read this story in the New York Times, Bronze Arm Found in Ancient Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below:

Measuring an estimated 160-feet long, the ship was like the Titanic of its time. It met its iceberg in the form of a violent storm that smashed it against the island’s cliff, scientists believe. The ship then had a turbulent trip to the bottom of the ocean where it most likely rolled several times, flinging its treasure, and goods across the seafloor. In the two millenniums since, earthquakes and landslides have rocked its remains, further breaking and burying its trove of Hellenistic and Classical pottery and artwork.

It's an interesting article, full of fascinating details about what's down there, the history of explorations of the wreck. the work of the archaeologists, how they go about that work underwater, and what they hope to learn from what they've been able to bring up. But here's the part that launched my imagination into time travel:

The ship that carried the treasures of Antikythera was something like an ancient supertanker or luxury liner that carried grain and artwork for trading in the Mediterranean, including marble and bronze statues being shipped to the richest of the rich, according to Dr. Foley. The site thus provides a peek not just into the lives of the elite, but also into the blooming global and urban society at the beginning of the Roman Empire.

On the face of it, that’s one of the blandest paragraphs in the story. Rich people spending lots of money in order to flaunt their wealth? Where's the news in that? But here's the thing.

I didn't see those rich people. I saw their agents coming down to the wharf collect their purchases. I saw the merchants and middlemen who were there to take their orders to their shops and galleries and showrooms. I saw the stevedores and longshoremen and other dockworkers unloading the cargo. The carters there to haul away the merchandise. I saw the shops and stalls and taverns and inns that catered to the dockworkers and the sailors come ashore and the townsfolk who'd come to the waterfront to shop and gawk. I saw the waterfront come to life and behind it the whole seaport town going about its daily business. And I saw the whole culture that sustained and maintained it, the customs and traditions and bureaucracies and legal systems, and the offices where those things were negotiated and bargained and contracted, and the workers in those offices doing the negotiating and bargaining and contracting, and it was all familiar.

The people wore sandals and tunics and togas, their tools were all hand tools or hand operated, there were many more animals about, but it was still a scene I knew first hand from my own wanderings along the wharfs and docks of port towns on Cape Cod and north and south of Boston and Boston itself. The people were people I recognized, engaged in the business and busy-ness that people alive today engage in in ways that are so similar as to be almost a continuation, as if I was seeing ancient Ostia and 20th Century Boston (when I knew it best) as existing and thriving together in the same web of international trade. Ostia might as well be Boston. Both might as well be London in the 18th Century, Shanghai in the 19th, Lisbon in the 16th, Venice in the 15th...you get the picture.

Anyway, enough magical thinking. To read Nicholas St Fleur's whole article, follow the link to Bronze Arm Found in Famous Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below at the New York Times.

We should all be so smart

Posted Tuesday morning, August 1, 2017.

AS HE WAS brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades…

Royen hadn’t given the Gaussian correlation inequality much thought before the “raw idea” for how to prove it came to him over the bathroom sink. Formerly an employee of a pharmaceutical company, he had moved on to a small technical university in Bingen, Germany, in 1985 in order to have more time to improve the statistical formulas that he and other industry statisticians used to make sense of drug-trial data. In July 2014, still at work on his formulas as a 67-year-old retiree, Royen found that the GCI could be extended into a statement about statistical distributions he had long specialized in. On the morning of the 17th, he saw how to calculate a key derivative for this extended GCI that unlocked the proof. “The evening of this day, my first draft of the proof was written,” he said…

To read the whole story by Natalie Wolchover, follow the link to A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof—And Nobody Notices at Wired.

God saves the planet

Posted Friday morning, June 2, 2017

The way he takes care of tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, famine, forest fires, and droughts?

From Huffington Post:

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists.

The 66-year-old Republican, who is a climate change skeptic, made the remark at a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan, on Friday.

“I believe there’s climate change,” Walberg said, according to a video of the exchange obtained by HuffPost. “I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I believe there are cycles. Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

“Why do I believe that?” he went on. “Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

There are plenty of Americans living in the 21st Century who still think the world runs on magic and is ruled by a meddlesome but beneficent wizard---the new Congressman from Montana, for one---but Walberg’s theological maunderings here sound like the standard-issue “God's in his heaven and all’s right with the world” pieties invoked from time immemorial by the comfortable and complacent to justify their comfort and complacency. It’s all as God intended and we shouldn’t mess with his plans, his plans being that things continue as they are with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. God will provide, but in the meantime there’s no reason oil and gas companies shouldn’t keep pumping the earth dry, no reason factories shouldn’t save themselves the trouble of scrubbing their smokestacks, no reason auto companies---like the ones based in Michigan. Fancy that.---should have to waste time and money designing and engineering even more efficient hybrids and electric cars and no reason those of us with the money should hold off on buying gas-guzzling Hummers and oversized pick-ups, if that’s what we want.

The attitude behind this thinking is that this is the best of all possible worlds, no matter how it inconveniences those of us without money and power sometimes, and whatever is, is right---“an aphorism,” Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, “that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.”

Well, this explains why my solar battery-powered camp lantern doesn't work in the dark

Posted Friday morning, June 2, 2017.

Next time you’re in a debate over who’s to blame for Trump, neoliberals, the coastal elites, Democrats, point out that this man was a United States Senator and the only serious challenger to Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries in 2012---he’d have been an even more serious challenger but he didn’t have the money. So the answer is: Republicans like the ones who voted for Santorum.

Sad to be criticized by the left for something as obvious as solar (clouds & darkness) and wind (calm winds) are not reliable or consistent. https://t.co/tkNrTRbk1u

— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) June 1, 2017