Halfway down the Danube

In defense of Callisto

I mean Callisto, the fourth major moon of Jupiter.  Yeah, this is a nerd post.

So I'm a regular reader of the Planetary Society's blog.  If you're interested in astronomy and space exploration, it's full of good stuff.

But just the other day, in an article about Pluto's atmosphere -- which, yes, Pluto has an atmosphere; told you this stuff was interesting -- I came across this sentence:

It's just more data to support the expectation that New Horizons will, when it finally gets to Pluto, find something that's not a Callisto-like boring old dead-for-billions-of-years world but instead a place with a changeable, varying surface and a fascinating but complicated history.

Geez.  Poor Callisto.

This isn't anything new.  Discussion of Saturn's moon Titan -- the only moon with a real atmosphere -- often converge on the question of whether Titan has volcanic activity or not.  And the no-volcanism models use the term "Callisto with weather".  Typically in an extremely cruel and denigratory way.  "It's like Callisto," they snicker, "boring old dead-for-billions-of-years Callisto!  Except with weather.  Like that helps."

I think it's time to say a word -- just a word or two -- in defense of poor old Callisto.

Mars and Medea

So some researchers have found signs of methane emissions on Mars, which are pretty hard to explain except in terms of life.

That's sort of cool, but also sort of depressing.  If there's life on Mars, it's almost certainly tiny -- bacteria, basically -- and subterranean.  More interestingly, it's life that's almost totally irrelevant to anything but itself.  Life on Earth has totally transformed everything about Earth: the atmosphere, the oceans, plate tectonics, the composition of the crust.  Life on Mars, on the other hand, seems to have done nothing to or for Mars; the planet would probably be much the same whether it existed or not.  It's just... marginal.

Apropos of which, here's a rather overwritten but still interesting article about the new "Medea Hypothesis":

A paleobiochemistry post! I think.

[Note: this was going to be a post on obscure bizarre sponge biosynthetic pathways. They're bizarre all right, and obscure has never stopped me before, but the subject (sponges) isn't easy to fit into any paleo record. The following discussion is an old workhorse of mine, freely adapted from Karl Bloch's Blondes in Venetian Paintings, a book filled with many good things.]

The most common sugar on Earth is probably glucose, also known as blood sugar or grape sugar. It's found in blood and grapes, and pretty much everything else with a metabolism. It's ubiquitous in living organisms as an energy source.

A molecule of glucose has six carbon atoms, twelve hydrogen atoms, and six oxygen atoms. That's proportionately the equivalent of one molecule of water (H2O) for every carbon atom. Perhaps you've seen the Mr. Wizard clip where the good wizard dumps sugar into the aggressive dessicant sulfuric acid, leaving behind steaming carbon foam. Hence carbo-hydrate.

In glucose, in water solution, five carbon atoms and one oxygen atom of the glucose molecule are often arranged into a hexagonal ring. It's not a flat ring, but staggered, a little like a lawn chair. Each carbon atom in the ring is connected to two other atoms not in the ring: a small hydrogen atom and a larger carbon or oxygen atom. Each carbon atom in the ring also has two slots for further bonding: an equatorial position, like a cup-holder, or an axial position, like a parasol.

This is important, because in glucose, all the larger atoms avoid the axial position, in favor of the equatorial position. As a result, glucose the most chemically stable of the six-carbon sugars. (Picture the parasols on the lawn chair crashing against each other and tipping it over.) This stability is likely why glucose was selected by evolution to be a ubiquitous energy source in the first place, several billion years ago.

There's an odd exception. Insects, while they use glucose in their metabolisms (everything does), use a different sugar in their blood hemolymph, called trehalose.

A Philosophical Inquiry

On another blog, someone recommended this piece here.  It argues that it would be very difficult for a modern nation to undergo a national mobilization on the scale of WW2.

I wrote the following, not about the piece, but about the philosophy of science:

Day 13: Let's go to the videotape

For Andrew R., the relevant graphs from Adams et al. 1996.

More rubble, more bubble

A bit of paleo for the enthusiasts. Nearly forty years ago, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell noticed his shrimp nets kept on getting coated with sludge in Campeche Bay, off the Yucatan Peninsula. Turns out crude oil was bubbling up offshore. Today, the Cantarell oil fields are the second-largest producing in the world... and in rapid decline, but that's another story.

The fields themselves are carbonate breccia -- pieces of rubbly limestone embedded in a natural cement -- several hundred feet thick, sealed by dolomite, a tougher chemical relative of limestone. Their formation dates from the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. When the dinosaurs became extinct.

You got it: the dinosaur killer meteor impact at Chicxulub made Cantarell. To quote Grajales-Nishimura et al.:

On the basis of the unique stratigraphy and distribution of impact material within the calcareous breccia, the following sequence of events and products can be visualized as having taken place within few minutes or hours after the time of the impact: (1) carbonate platform collapse due to shaking, resulting in deposition of the lower breccia; (2) arrival of ballistic impact ejecta (ejecta layers with impact minerals); and (3) reworking and mixing of the ejecta layer with coarser material by one or more passages of the impact-generated tsunamis that were reflected back and forth across the Gulf of Mexico paleogeography.

65 million BC, a real bad year to go to Cancún.

Reference: Grajales-Nishimura et al., "Chicxulub impact: The origin of reservoir and seal facies in the southeastern Mexico oil fields", Geology; April 2000; v. 28; no. 4; p. 307–310.

More rubble, more bubble

A bit of paleo for the enthusiasts. Nearly forty years ago, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell noticed his shrimp nets kept on getting coated with sludge in Campeche Bay, off the Yucatan Peninsula. Turns out crude oil was bubbling up offshore. Today, the Cantarell oil fields are the second-largest producing in the world... and in rapid decline, but that's another story. The fields themselves are carbonate breccia -- pieces of rubbly limestone embedded in a natural cement -- several hundred feet thick, sealed by dolomite, a tougher chemical relative of limestone. Their formation dates from the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. When the dinosaurs became extinct. You got it: the dinosaur killer meteor impact at Chicxulub made Cantarell. To quote Grajales-Nishimura et al.:

On the basis of the unique stratigraphy and distribution of impact material within the calcareous breccia, the following sequence of events and products can be visualized as having taken place within few minutes or hours after the time of the impact: (1) carbonate platform collapse due to shaking, resulting in deposition of the lower breccia; (2) arrival of ballistic impact ejecta (ejecta layers with impact minerals); and (3) reworking and mixing of the ejecta layer with coarser material by one or more passages of the impact-generated tsunamis that were reflected back and forth across the Gulf of Mexico paleogeography.

65 million BC, a real bad year to go to Canc�n. Reference: Grajales-Nishimura et al., "Chicxulub impact: The origin of reservoir and seal facies in the southeastern Mexico oil fields", Geology; April 2000; v. 28; no. 4; p. 307�310.

The Milwaukee Protocol

I had 90 minutes to kill at the US Embassy yesterday. Between meetings, type of thing.

So after I grabbed some lunch -- the Embassy has a rather decent little cafeteria -- I parked myself in the little library with my laptop. The library is all reference books and magazines, and seems to be mostly used for language lessons. Still, it was a place to be.

After an hour or so, I decided to give myself a short break. Strolled over and browsed the magazine section. National Geographic, no. Time, definitely no. The Economist, would take too long. Scientific American... sure, okay.

And that's how I found out about the Milwaukee Protocol.

The Milwaukee Protocol

I had 90 minutes to kill at the US Embassy yesterday. Between meetings, type of thing. So after I grabbed some lunch -- the Embassy has a rather decent little cafeteria -- I parked myself in the little library with my laptop. The library is all reference books and magazines, and seems to be mostly used for language lessons. Still, it was a place to be. After an hour or so, I decided to give myself a short break. Strolled over and browsed the magazine section. National Geographic, no. Time, definitely no. The Economist, would take too long. Scientific American... sure, okay. And that's how I found out about the Milwaukee Protocol.

Late night thoughts on "Well, I read..."

Two weeks of a chest cold, and one of bronchitis. It's a wonder I can even type. Some quick thoughts on the recent post:

The fastest form of learning I know of is the Garcia effect: taste aversion after one trial of a nauseating substance. Individual vocabulary terms during language acquisition can be that fast. Acquiring and learning to use new concepts, however, tends to take rather longer.

At least two types of bad knowledge acquisition seem to happen among readers. In the first, the reader trusts the author to present accurate knowledge about the world, and the reader extracts new but incorrect knowledge from the material by context. However, the reader might lack the skills to evaluate the correctness of the knowledge, or the reader might overvalue the reliability of the author. An infamous mainstream example of this would be Robert Browning's use of the word "twat" in his poem Pippa Passes, which he thought meant "a nun's headgear" from its context in an earlier poem. (NB: it doesn't.)

There's also the "double bind", described below, which -- hypothesis -- induces psychological stress in order to convince the reader of a counterintuitive premise. (A stage magician will "force" an audience member to choose the three of clubs during a card trick.) This is not a simple extraction of (incorrect) knowledge from context. Note that if one already accepts the premise, the double bind acts as a reward, not a stressor. Note, too, the meaningful content of the premise is not closely related to the form of the double bind.

The knowledge learned from the double bind appears to be more deeply held than knowledge taken naively from context. Is knowledge learned from the double bind more quickly learned than knowledge learned from context? Anecdotally, texts with double binds appear to be texts readers are prone to re-read. Perhaps because these crucial passages are read multiple times, the premise is 'naturally' reinforced in the mind of the reader, rather than any deeper psychological association caused by the method.

(The ideas in the last two paragraphs could, in principle, be tested experimentally, I think.)

I feel like there's something important just below the surface here: learning theory, theories of mind and autism, structuralism, and psychological projection all seem connected. It'll be interesting to learn what the neural correlates are, if any. Hopefully the physical functioning of the higher processes of the brain will be able to be understood by the higher processes of the brain, i.e., there will be a high level of abstraction. But that's just a hope, and if anything there's empirical evidence against it.

Late night thoughts on "Well, I read..."

Two weeks of a chest cold, and one of bronchitis. It's a wonder I can even type. Some quick thoughts on the recent post: The fastest form of learning I know of is the Garcia effect: taste aversion after one trial of a nauseating substance. Individual vocabulary terms during language acquisition can be that fast. Acquiring and learning to use new concepts, however, tends to take rather longer. At least two types of bad knowledge acquisition seem to happen among readers. In the first, the reader trusts the author to present accurate knowledge about the world, and the reader extracts new but incorrect knowledge from the material by context. However, the reader might lack the skills to evaluate the correctness of the knowledge, or the reader might overvalue the reliability of the author. An infamous mainstream example of this would be Robert Browning's use of the word "twat" in his poem Pippa Passes, which he thought meant "a nun's headgear" from its context in an earlier poem. (NB: it doesn't.) There's also the "double bind", described below, which -- hypothesis -- induces psychological stress in order to convince the reader of a counterintuitive premise. (A stage magician will "force" an audience member to choose the three of clubs during a card trick.) This is not a simple extraction of (incorrect) knowledge from context. Note that if one already accepts the premise, the double bind acts as a reward, not a stressor. Note, too, the meaningful content of the premise is not closely related to the form of the double bind. The knowledge learned from the double bind appears to be more deeply held than knowledge taken naively from context. Is knowledge learned from the double bind more quickly learned than knowledge learned from context? Anecdotally, texts with double binds appear to be texts readers are prone to re-read. Perhaps because these crucial passages are read multiple times, the premise is 'naturally' reinforced in the mind of the reader, rather than any deeper psychological association caused by the method. (The ideas in the last two paragraphs could, in principle, be tested experimentally, I think.) I feel like there's something important just below the surface here: learning theory, theories of mind and autism, structuralism, and psychological projection all seem connected. It'll be interesting to learn what the neural correlates are, if any. Hopefully the physical functioning of the higher processes of the brain will be able to be understood by the higher processes of the brain, i.e., there will be a high level of abstraction. But that's just a hope, and if anything there's empirical evidence against it.

Project Orion at the Guggenheim, teaser

Saw Freeman Dyson last night at the Guggenheim. "How We Might Have Gone to Mars in 1965". It's taking an effort of will not to quote Dave Chappelle.

Lint answers 2

I get more comments! Andrew Reeves, sometimes I backtrack references, or check forward citations. Sometimes I do keyword searches. Sometimes I'll flip through online tables of contents. And sometimes, hell if I know where I got that. I see there's a swell of interest in Hideyoshi's personal letters.

Cleaning the sock drawer, Callaghan to Durand

Yeah, I'm only through the D's. Now you know why I'm using the blog for structure.

Lint answers 1

I get letters! Cosma: "Eurocentrism in the history of mathematics, the case of the Kerala School" has less explication of the mathematics than I would have liked. (The recent Pingree article in Daedalus is much better in that respect.) They go into detail how earlier European historians systematically belittled the accomplishments of Indian mathematics -- unsurprising but infuriating -- discuss current (lacking) presentations of the material, and propose a possible channel for the flow of Kerala mathematics to Europe in the early modern period, through the Jesuit presence in south India. Their case that this actually happened, however, is in my opinion slight. Strong enough for the plot of a Tim Powers novel, but come on, people. It's not like the Jesuits didn't write letters. They would have had to, for this conduit to work. Dig something up in the archives, and we'll talk.

Cleaning the sock drawer, Bahn to Byler

I gave up book-buying for Methodist Lent. Again, if anyone sees something they want my opinion about, ask.

Cleaning the sock drawer, Abu Shouk to Bagnold

In my newfound Copious Spare Time (TM), I have discovered I have accumulated nearly 1.4 gigabytes of unsorted academic papers on my hard drive. Fortunately, I still have some aspirin left over from my last job. To structure this task, I'm going to list all the papers here in alphabetical order by author, starting with the A's. If anyone sees something they want my opinion about, ask. I might answer! No really.

Hello Mütter!

Yesterday I went with Peanut and Bad Mama to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. It's a respectful museum devoted to medical anomalies, utterly fascinating if you like that sort of thing, which all three of us do. I was deeply struck by a unique method of tissue preparation devised by Werner Spalteholz, not a name I was previously familiar with. One of the great German anatomists -- his Hand Atlas is still regarded as a classic -- he devised a method to render tissue transparent, which is still used to this day. The trick is to permeate the tissue with chemicals of the right index of refraction, such as oil of wintergreen, which 'clears' the tissue, like a grease spot on a paper placemat. You stain or dye the things you want to highlight, and they appear like a floating three-dimensional hologram in the preparation. Spalteholz's method was used extensively in Dresden's German Hygiene Museum, the original home of the Transparent Man which freaked so many members of my generation out as children. Between Hitler trashing the Otto Dix murals, the Billy Pilgrim incident, and the Soviet aftermath, eighty percent of the museum was destroyed. Interestingly, the Soviets thought highly enough of the museum to rebuild it. Spalteholz patented his method in the U.S. (#1021952), after being given an honorary doctorate at the University of Wisconsin a few years before. Not a whole lot of information on the history of this sort of innovation out there.

Hello Mütter!

Yesterday I went with Peanut and Bad Mama to Philadelphia's M�tter Museum. It's a respectful museum devoted to medical anomalies, utterly fascinating if you like that sort of thing, which all three of us do. I was deeply struck by a unique method of tissue preparation devised by Werner Spalteholz, not a name I was previously familiar with. One of the great German anatomists -- his Hand Atlas is still regarded as a classic -- he devised a method to render tissue transparent, which is still used to this day. The trick is to permeate the tissue with chemicals of the right index of refraction, such as oil of wintergreen, which 'clears' the tissue, like a grease spot on a paper placemat. You stain or dye the things you want to highlight, and they appear like a floating three-dimensional hologram in the preparation. Spalteholz's method was used extensively in Dresden's German Hygiene Museum, the original home of the Transparent Man which freaked so many members of my generation out as children. Between Hitler trashing the Otto Dix murals, the Billy Pilgrim incident, and the Soviet aftermath, eighty percent of the museum was destroyed. Interestingly, the Soviets thought highly enough of the museum to rebuild it. Spalteholz patented his method in the U.S. (#1021952), after being given an honorary doctorate at the University of Wisconsin a few years before. Not a whole lot of information on the history of this sort of innovation out there.

Astonished 2

When Doug wrote me, saying, "post something obscure", I am not sure if he really meant this obscure. Be that as it may.

Because I'm sure all of you can't get enough of ancient Greek advanced mathematics, let me point out this recent article in the journal Nature about the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2100-year-old geared calculator found in a Roman shipwreck in 1901. And yes, Hipparchus seems to have been involved with that one too.

To my non-stalker critics, you all should be glad I haven't posted about Neolithic dragon dice yet. (Yes, a millennium before Plato discussed the five regular solids, the inhabitants of Aberdeenshire were messing with d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20. To the world's relief, no Ogham Monster Manual survives.)

Astonished 2

When Doug wrote me, saying, "post something obscure", I am not sure if he really meant this obscure. Be that as it may. Because I'm sure all of you can't get enough of ancient Greek advanced mathematics, let me point out this recent article in the journal Nature about the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2100-year-old geared calculator found in a Roman shipwreck in 1901. And yes, Hipparchus seems to have been involved with that one too. To my non-stalker critics, you all should be glad I haven't posted about Neolithic dragon dice yet. (Yes, a millennium before Plato discussed the five regular solids, the inhabitants of Aberdeenshire were messing with d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20. To the world's relief, no Ogham Monster Manual survives.)

Unusual and beautiful solutions

Unusual and beautiful solutions to the Three-Body Problem.

He has seven pages with multiple examples on each page. Take a few minutes -- they just get wilder as you go.

(Three planets chasing each other around a figure-eight orbit can be stable. Who knew?)

Unusual and beautiful solutions

Unusual and beautiful solutions to the Three-Body Problem. He has seven pages with multiple examples on each page. Take a few minutes -- they just get wilder as you go. (Three planets chasing each other around a figure-eight orbit can be stable. Who knew?)

Astonished

An obscure passage from Plutarch’s De Stoicorum repugnantiis:

But now he [Chrysippus] says himself that the number of conjunctions produced by means of ten assertibles exceeds a million, though he had neither investigated the matter carefully by himself nor sought out the truth with the help of experts. [...] Chrysippus is refuted by all the arithmeticians, among them Hipparchus himself who proves that his error in calculation is enormous if in fact affirmation gives 103049 conjoined assertibles and negation 310952.

Hipparchus flourished in the second century BC. Today we would probably call him a mathematical physicist. Plutarch wrote some two hundred fifty years later.

In 1870, the mathematician Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schrder showed that the number of possible ways to bracket a row of ten symbols, e.g.

(AA)(AAA(AA)A)(AA)

and not including singletons or the whole row, was equal to 103049. This is sometimes written as s(10) = 103049.

In 1994, David Hough at George Washington University noticed that these two numbers were the same.

In 1998, Habseiger, Kazarian and Lando noticed that Plutarch's second number, 310952, was very close to half the sum of the tenth and eleventh of Schrder's numbers: (s(10) + s(11))/2 = 310954.

The modern branch of mathematics which deals with enumerating combinations is called combinatorics. It was once thought that the ancient Greeks had no interest in the subject.

(Hat-tip to Alexandre Borovik, who comes from the opposite end of the Tea Road as some of my forebears. The passage from Plutarch comes from F. Acerbi, "On the Shoulders of Hipparchus: A Reappraisal of Ancient Greek Combinatorics", Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 57 (2003) 465-502.)

Astonished

An obscure passage from Plutarch�s De Stoicorum repugnantiis:

But now he [Chrysippus] says himself that the number of conjunctions produced by means of ten assertibles exceeds a million, though he had neither investigated the matter carefully by himself nor sought out the truth with the help of experts. [...] Chrysippus is refuted by all the arithmeticians, among them Hipparchus himself who proves that his error in calculation is enormous if in fact affirmation gives 103049 conjoined assertibles and negation 310952.

Hipparchus flourished in the second century BC. Today we would probably call him a mathematical physicist. Plutarch wrote some two hundred fifty years later. In 1870, the mathematician Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schrder showed that the number of possible ways to bracket a row of ten symbols, e.g.

(AA)(AAA(AA)A)(AA)

and not including singletons or the whole row, was equal to 103049. This is sometimes written as s(10) = 103049. In 1994, David Hough at George Washington University noticed that these two numbers were the same. In 1998, Habseiger, Kazarian and Lando noticed that Plutarch's second number, 310952, was very close to half the sum of the tenth and eleventh of Schrder's numbers: (s(10) + s(11))/2 = 310954. The modern branch of mathematics which deals with enumerating combinations is called combinatorics. It was once thought that the ancient Greeks had no interest in the subject. (Hat-tip to Alexandre Borovik, who comes from the opposite end of the Tea Road as some of my forebears. The passage from Plutarch comes from F. Acerbi, "On the Shoulders of Hipparchus: A Reappraisal of Ancient Greek Combinatorics", Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 57 (2003) 465-502.)

Halfway to the Permian

Continuing with HDTD's focus on that obscure yet fascinating subject, paleoecology (see 1, 2), friend of HDTD Will Baird live-blogged a teleconference on paleoclimate simulations, recently held in the less-snowy-than-Yerevan paradise of Madison, Wisconsin. I've included a copy of the conference's agenda below the fold, with hyperlinks to WB's comments.

Crazy medicine

Both Doug and I enjoyed John Burdett's recent Asian thriller Bangkok 8, set guess where. (It has weird sex, snakes. and revenge! What more do you need?) Anyway, one of the subplots in the book deals with the Asian amphetamine trade. This is not a matter of guys with bad teeth setting up trailers in the middle of nowhere. Well, OK, it is, but instead of manufacturing the crank from scratch, in Asia they extract a precursor from local Ephedra shrubs first. Which brings me to the real point of this post, phytochemistry! The Ephedra are weird-looking shrubs, sometimes called the joint-firs in English. You can see why. Ephedra itself is a living fossil, one of only three (maybe four) surviving genera of the gnetophytes, until recently thought to be the closest living relatives of the flowering plants. Ephedra have been found from the Cretaceous period, over 65 million years ago. They also have a remarkably odd biochemistry: they produce cyclopropyl amino acids. This may require some explanation.

Terrestrial Ecosystems through Time, the money graph

It's been a while since I've read a paragraph that has wildly changed how I look at the world. I'm so jaded! Anyhow, here it is:

The Recent is a poor analogue for nearly all aspects of Paleozoic ecosystems except for those of the latest Permian. The lack of tetrapod herbivory, the narrow spectrum of plant-insect interactions, the importance of detritivory as the base of the food chain, and the strong partitioning of ecological resource space along widely divergent phylogenetic lines in plants are themes that run throughout most of the Paleozoic. Because of these and other fundamental differences, ecological models based on the present cannot be applied to Paleozoic examples in a uniformitarian manner.

Rough translation: life on land, until about 250 million years ago, was to modern land-based ecosystems much like what a mercantilist, caste-based economy is to a modern market economy. You know the kind: this ethnic group does this, while that ethnic group does that, and those guys? they take care of the horses; and there's never a winner without a loser. Of course, right after a modern ecology got established in the late Permian, the Earth got whacked with the largest documented extinction event ever. Ah well.

Never say anything

For reasons which are unclear even to myself, I decided to use Google Scholar to get a list of all archived scientific journal papers with the words "National Security Agency" published before 1975. There's a big cluster of papers funded by the NSA dealing with solid state physics, semiconductors and superconductors, from 1957 to 1961, with one paper on the properties of lithium hydride in 1959. Then there's a dry spell, followed by a steady flow of papers on mathematical techniques tangentially related to cryptography, computer security, and, of course, "Real-time recognition of ten vowel-like sounds in continuous speech". It's known that the NSA developed the cryptographic technique known as differential cryptanalysis before IBM rediscovered it in the early 1970s during the development of the Data Encryption Standard. The NSA told IBM to keep it secret, which it did. The method was independently discovered in the late 1980s, by Biham and Shamir, who published in 1990. So the NSA is pretty good at keeping things mum. But I'm a little curious if the NSA was trying for a quick run towards quantum entanglement technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and if so, did they find anything? And why the burst and lull? Anyway, here's the list of papers for my readers Bernard:

Be still my beating heart

Danica McKellar answers your math problems.

Credit where credit is due

I don't have much use for Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan. Not because he's Australian, mind. That's correctable and sometimes even endearing. No, Egan annoys me because he's a sectarian who converted to atheism, but kept his old structures of thought. In Egan's case, this is less caesaropapist-cum-Leninist, and more "here is a cunningly reasoned pamphlet I'd like to give you showing the error of your ways". Very Anglosphere. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of his fiction explores themes of eschatology and transcendence -- but without that nasty 'god' business -- or that it's been embraced by the "Rapture for Nerds" contingent of geekdom. On the other hand, Egan has done some very solid stuff for University of California physicist John Baez. Most recently, check out his animations of Klein's quartic curve, and his comparison of said curve to the Fano plane (scroll down).

The Lord God Bird

Reported today in the online edition of the journal Science (the international science magazine so prestigious, it only has one name):

Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America Abstract: The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), long suspected to be extinct, has been rediscovered in the "Big Woods" region of eastern Arkansas. Visual encounters during 2004 and 2005, and analysis of a video clip from April 2004, confirm the existence of at least one male. Acoustic signatures consistent with Campephilus display-drums also have been heard from the region. Extensive efforts to locate birds away from the primary site remain unsuccessful, but potential habitat for a thinly distributed source population is vast (over 220,000 ha).

The ivory-billed woodpecker was sometimes known as "The Lord God Bird", because (it's said) early Southerners would exclaim, "Lord God!" when they saw one. Something to see. The video of the Lord God Bird is available from the supplemental materials page to the Science article. I shan't direct link to it, because I suspect the AAAS's website will be slashdotted shortly by anxious amateur ornithologists. I've seen it, and yeah, that's a big damn bird all right. More trained observers had this to say:

Of at least 15 reported visual encounters between 11 February 2004 and 14 February 2005, seven contained sufficient detail for the authors to treat them as authentic. In addition to the two February 2004 sightings described above, these were: 5 April 2004 (James M. Fitzpatrick saw overflight along a lake edge; with naked eye at 100 m he noted large size, broad white trailing edges of wings, and steady "loon-like" flight of otherwise black woodpecker); 10 April 2004 (Melinda LaBranche saw overflight at site of 5 April sighting; through 10-power binoculars at 100 m she observed broad white trailing edges of wings and narrow red crescent on rear of folded crest); 11 April 2004 (Melanie Driscoll watched a large woodpecker fly across a 50-m gap in the forest where she was stationed, and through 10-power binoculars at 120 m she saw broad white trailing edge of wings, white line extending from wings up the long neck, and small flash of red on crest, with head otherwise black); 9 June 2004 (Harrison saw a large woodpecker flush from near the base of a bald-cypress, Taxodium distichum, about 15 m in front of him, and with naked eye he noted broad white trailing edges to wings, especially visible as the bird swooped upward to land; 14 February 2005 (Casey Taylor heard double-rap display drums for 30 min near power-line cut and then saw a large black-and-white woodpecker crossing the cut while being mobbed by American crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos. Through 8-power binoculars at 80 to 120 m, she noted broad white trailing edges to wings, long neck with white stripe running its full length, and black head with long bill.)

As I've mentioned before, I'm not the birder of this blog. But I still find this incredible news. (Perhaps the birder of this blog will copy some of his comments from Jim Henley's website and repost them here?)

The missing posts, or, I won't be fooled again

There were things that I was going to post about in the past two weeks, posts which will have to be postponed, since my source materials are now scattered across two boroughs of New York City. But the basic theme was, "Why Jared Diamond is a jackass". Here are the main sections:

1) What Diamond knows about Chinese history could be written on the back of a matchbook 2) A foray into Sino-Tibetan linguistics 3) A foray into the concept of the Sprachbund 4) Southeast Asia a millennium ago, or those swarming Indians are wiping out native cultures left and right! 5) The strange case of Taiwan 6) The Nicobar and Andamanese languages, or what the hell? 7) The historical settlement of Fujian province, or how Diamond can't be expected to read the references he gives 8) The Austronesian languages 9) Blust and Bellwood's accomplishment, and Diamond's free ride on their express train 10) Why do people take a New Guinea bird guy like Diamond seriously on subjects far outside his expertise?

Mind, this only covers two chapters of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Don't even get me started on Collapse. This fuellow won a Pulitzer. Why?

The fussy baby, or Machiavelli and Darwin in the cradle

The superlative science journalist Carl Zimmer has an article in the New York Times about the evolution of colic. It's an interesting read. (Get it while it's hot; the NYT's links fade after a week.) But Zimmer also has a blog, where he goes much more in depth about the sources he used to write the article. And you know, I'm all about depth. One source Zimmer didn't use in the NYT article, but describes on his blog, was a recent paper by Hillary Fouts and her colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. They studied baby crying among the Bofi people of the Central African Republic. The Bofi have two lifestyles, farming and foraging. It turns out that "Bofi farmer children exhibited high levels of fussing and crying when abruptly weaned while Bofi forager children showed no marked sign of distress." On the other hand, forager children were more apt to cry after weaning, while farmer children were much less fussy. Zimmer explains:

The foragers nurse their children many times a day and wean them by gradually taper off nursing. The farmers, on the other hand, cut off their children abruptly -- in part because the women need to get back to working in their fields. [...] Fouts and her colleagues see a subtle strategy at work here. The farmer children may cry in response to weaning because it represents the end of a reliable milk supply and perhaps even because weaning raises the odds of their mothers will get pregnant with another child that will compete for the mother's investment. But once the farmer children are weaned and it is clear that their cries will not do them any more good, they don't waste any further effort on the tears. The forager children, on the other hand, don't get that clear signal of an impending cut-off, and so they don't fuss and wail more in response. But it's also important to bear in mind that in the foraging community, the children are always around some relative who will be quick to pick up a child. So even after weaning, crying still has some value as a signal, and so the children keep it up.

I was going to call this a Foutsian bargain, but then I remembered that the barely lamented Dennis Miller once made the same joke about Dan "nosebleed section" Fouts on Monday Night Football. (And only Carrie Bad Mama would have got the secondary allusion.) Of course, one doesn't need a fussy baby in order not to get eight hours of sleep. But that's another post.

I'm trying to tell you now, it's tapirage

While reading Tim Birkhead's book, A Brand-New Bird, about canary breeding in interwar Germany... Yes, I read some weird and obscure stuff sometimes. But this was interesting. And hey, I'm not the birder of this blog. ... about canary breeding in interwar Germany, I came across the following passage:

There was yet another example of men changing the colors of birds' feathers that Reich probably knew about and related to Duncker. This was the trick of enhancing the color of parrots by anointing them with frogs.

This sounded kind of silly to me, like the set-up to a Monty Python skit, God help us, and Birkhead admitted this as he continued:

The very notion sounds preposterous, and it is easy to imagine Duncker dismissing Reich's story as apocryphal. But Reich assured him that since no less an authority than Comte de Buffon had described it, it must be true. Buffon's description in his 1790s encyclopedia of what he called the "artificial parrot" probably came from Dom Pernetty's account of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's voyage of discovery to South America in the 1760s. Pernetty described one particular parrot thus:

all its plumage, especially the head, neck, back and belly is sprinkled with feathers, some of them yellow like daffodil, or yellow like lemon, some others carmine red or crimson red, mixed with feathers either more or less dark green, or bright blue especially around ears. This type of plumage is due in part to nature and in part to the art. When the bird is very young, and has only got its feather-sheaths grown out after the down feathers, sheaths are plucked in several points, and instead is immediately inserted a sort of poison, like liqueur. Feathers that grow after the sheaths then become yellow or red, instead of green as they should have been naturally.

Duncker and Reich almost certainly dismissed this as nonsense and of no possible relevance to their own work. But as unlikely as it seems, the color changes in these parrots were not only genuine, but genetic in nature. The liqueur came from a frog -- one of the colorful but highly toxic dart poison frogs, azure blue with gold stripes -- aptly known as the dyeing frog Dentrobates tinctorius.

Birkhead states that the mutagenic properties of alkaloids the frog secretes are responsible for the color change. This really startled me when I first read it. Directed mutagenesis by a Stone Age South American people? Hmm. (Unfortunately the reference he gives does not go into the biochemistry of the process.) I wanted to learn more. Of course, this subject turned out to be really obscure. But I managed to track down a reference to the practice in Reina and Kensinger's The Gift of Birds: Featherwork of Native South American Peoples:

Klytus, I'm bored

God, I hate most current videogames. None of them satisfy my primal need to destroy very large objects in a realistic manner. I spent most of the past week sick, so I decided to use my enforced free time to do something about it. Turns out that there is enough information available on this Interweb thingy to reverse-engineer the hydrodynamic modeling programs used to simulate Big Things Go Boom physics. You know, shaped charges, nuclear weapons, meteor strikes, the origin of the Moon, et cetera. It's kind of funny that books on game physics ignore this. There is a niche here to be filled, people! So let's start large. Let's smash planets.

Google Scholar

These past days, Google has launched the beta version of Google Scholar. It lets you "search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." (About Google Scholar) I tried it out by searching for papers by my brother, who's an authority on cosmic ray air showers. The search string "Drescher Cosmic" brings his papers up nicely. It does not list his homepage, since that isn't regarded as a scholarly article. That's arguably correct. The string "Cosmic Ray Air Shower", however, pops up his paper "Cosmic ray air shower characteristics in the framework of the parton based Gribov-Regge model NEXUS" only on the second page, as number 12. Even without the quotes, it should be further up. Google Simplu, as we in Romania would say, pops up his webpage but not the papers. So it works, eh?