Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin

For book club this month we chose a book titled Genesis: The scientific Quest for Life's Origin by Dr. Robert Hazen

The topic of the book is a discussion of the current theories of how life may have emerged from the non-living chemical rich primordial earth. The word for this transitional event is autogenesis.

I've read a lot about evolution, but I was really interested to learn more about the beginning of life, specifically its creation. What does it even mean to be alive? It's easy to clarify in terms of humans, and mammals, but when you get down to smaller, simpler things, the answer becomes fuzzy. How did the first life form on earth organize itself? And how do scientists even begin to answer that question a few billion years later?

These were all questions I had going into this book, and I have to say that for the most part my curiosity concerning them has been satisfied. That's not to say the book had complete and definitive answers to my questions, but rather that it addressed them, and gave the best possible answer (as it is understood by scientists today), or answers if there were more than one possibility. It was both an overview and a history of the subject, and for the most part an easy read. The only difficulty was when the author explained certain chemical reactions, and used names like isoprene and phenathrene etc. But they were necessary to document in that they supply the "proof" to the claims the scientists are making concerning the origins of life and ultimately ourselves.

I wrote in the previous blog about emergent systems. Well, this seems to be the prevailing theory on how life on Earth came about. Through an unique combination of chemicals and the right influx of energy, life was able to emerge. I find that utterly fascinating. It was also really interesting to me how large a role geologists are playing attempting to answers to the origin of life questions. By examining rocks and the chemical signatures entombed within them they are helping biologists and chemist find clues to how life evolved. If I ever go for my PhD, I think this is where I'd focus.

The book begins by exploring a few of the many ways that life can be defined. From philosophical, religious, and scientific views come all kinds of answers. But the one that was used as a “working definition” by the author came from Dr. Gerald Joyce a member of a NASA exobiology panel. He said; “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution”.  And that works for me. It’s not very romantic sounding, but it gets the job done.

The book also recounts the history of some of the earliest origin-of-life experiments, back in the 1950’s. Among them the most famous Urey-Miller experiments where an early Earth atmosphere was simulated using ammonia, methane and hydrogen. When they sparked the mixture (as a proxy for lightning strikes) they were able to produce many amino acids, which are the building blocks of life! Those experiments, while inaccurate (the composition of the early atmosphere has been refined in recent years) created a lot of interest and basically began modern hunt for the origin of life.

The book also discusses the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, spending a lot of time to examine the evidences for and against life on Mars through the inspection of the famous Allen Hill’s meteorite, or ALH84001.

The book discusses the methods of teasing out information from rocks millions of years old, and explains in pretty extensive detail the current experiments that are being conducted and what they hope to tell us about the origin of organic life.

There were really interesting chapters on chemosynthetic life (i.e. life that gets its energy from chemical reactions rather than the sun) and discusses microbes living miles beneath the Earth’s crust in in tiny pockets of otherwise dense rock.

There was a chapter about the possible mechanisms that evolved RNA (the precursor to DNA) that led to more complex life.

There was a discussion about how clay particles might have been the template for DNA, and how minerals could have substituted for membranes before primitive cells knew how to make their own!

There was so much unique information that I feel bad not covering it all in this review, but to go into any more depth would require a lot more explaining on my part, and I think in that case you’d probably be best off just reading the book yourself.

Anyway, in closing, I give this book four out of 5 stars. It was well written, easy to read (for the most part), extremely interesting, and I think it covered the subject thoroughly and in depth enough to be educational without being too technical. It also provided a history of how we got to where we are now, and a window into the future research on this mind boggling subject.

ATTENTION: If you are super lazy or don't like reading, but want to learn more about this I found a talk on the book given by the author on YouTube! You can check it out HERE.

Emergence

Termite mound: Example of an emergence system.
(borrowed from getintravel.com)

The book I read for book club this month touched on something called emergence. And because it's so interesting to me I thought instead of trying to incorporate it into my book review I'd write a separate blog about.
Emergence has come up briefly in a couple other books I've read recently, and I'm pretty fascinated by it at the moment.(Like I was with strange attractors a couple years ago;) But what is it? To borrow the definition from Wikipedia emergence is:
"...the way complex systems and patters arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple reactions."
What this means is that in many systems patterns will begin to emerge that could not be predicted beforehand by looking at any single component of the whole system. Saying it another way, emergence is the production of a pattern or a complex systems by many individual components that could never create anything on their own. Moreover, the system cannot work unless all of the components are in place. It's slightly more complicated than just that, since to create emergent properties a specific amount of energy must be added to the system, but I'll try to explain that below. This is a really cool thing, so I'm going to take a minute to give a couple examples.
Sand ripples: If you look at the components that form sand ripples in the bottom of a lake or ocean you have: Water, wave action (i.e. your energy source), and sand grains. If you  look closely at a sand grain, or a molecule of water, it is unlikely that you could predict how they could ever organize themselves into coherent rows of ripples. But they do. The thing is, they only do it when the right amount of energy (i.e. waves) are present. Too little energy and they will not form. Too much (think big crashing storm waves) and the ripples will be destroyed. But just the right amount, and suddenly sand grains can organize themselves into ripple patterns. Cool right?
Termite nests: This works for hives as well. The components to these systems are earth and millions of individual insects. The energy to the system is how much work each individual can do. Now if you took a single termite and inspected it closely you'd never guess that it could build a mound twenty feet tall. It doesn't even know how to "build"! And you'd be right, a single termite can't build a mound. Even several hundred couldn't, but a few million can, and do. A bunch of individually simple termites can build gigantic mounds taller than a giraffe!
The human brain: Same thing. Your components are individual neurons, and of course the energy comes from the food you eat. If you look at a single neuron you can see how it basically works, but it can't create complex thought...or even simple thought for that matter. All it can do is send and receive chemical signals. You can't make a "sort of brain" with a few hundred neurons. You need a whole skull full of them, all connected together, to be able to think, and learn and know. A brain is not a neuron, a brain is an intricately connected assemblage of many neurons that when acting together produce thoughts and regulate body functions.
So why is this important and interesting to me? This subject of emergence is critical for the transition from non-living to living. The primary reason being that it explains how the evolution of life was able to occur and not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e.entropy of a system never decreases). To be clear, technically nothing gets around the second law, so ultimately everything does increase in entropy. But small isolated systems like termite mounds, or shallow shore lines, or human brains, can under the right circumstances, for a time, produce amazing and complex things. Using only specific quantities of energy, and relatively simple parts amazing patterns and functions quite literally emerge! I think that is so cool.
Anyway, I'm probably not explaining this super well, but it's my hope that if you find this subject interesting, you will look it up and do some reading on your own! I am sure there are authors out there who have done a much better job than me. On is Dr. Robert Hazen who wrote the book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin that I read for book club this month.

Farewell to Manzanar

I read Farewell to Manzanar by  Jeanne Houston this past week. It was one of those books that just caught my eye at the library, and so I checked it out. It's a true story written by a woman who's family was put into, and lived in, one of the Japanese interment camps (here in the U.S.) during World War II.
I've actually driven by the remnants of the camp that they lived in. It's in the Owens Valley ironically located near a town called Independence, and I remember passing it by on a geology field trip. It's a hot, dry, dusty valley.
Anyway, the book was really good. You always think of the "bad guys" having camps, and placing people there on a racial bias, but we did it too to Japanese-Americans. Granted there was no intention of killing anyone, or hurting them even, but still. People, American families (many of which did not speak Japanese, nor had ever even been there), were plucked from their homes and their jobs and forced into barracks in the middle of the desert. And most of what they had "on the outside" was gone by the time they were allowed to go back home. Loans had been defaulted on, cars, boats, etc repossessed or stolen, storage lockers raided or burglarized. I can't imagine how devastating that must have been for them.
It's interesting though, because in a way the story is not entirely sad. It's told by the author, but based on memories from when she was a little girl. And like most kids, it didn't seem as bad to her as it probably did to the adults. She talks about attending school inside the camp, and joining a baton-twirling class. The people living in Manzanar transformed it into a town, with parks and parades and all the normal things that Americans value. She recalls lots of things that she understands now in a different, more serious way , but she also includes those few glimmering memories all kids have, no matter what the circumstances, that even adulthood can't erase.
Anyway, this was a short read, but a really interesting one as well. It's part of our history as a country, and we shouldn't forget about it. Otherwise we will inevitably make the same mistake all over again.

Don Quixote

(Borrowed from blog.multimedia.com)

It might be hard to believe, but at the same time as I was reading Black Holes and Time Warps I've also been reading Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.
And what a story! It's considered the first novel ever written. And on length alone that statement must be true. It's a monster of a book. But it's also so fantastic! I almost don't even know where to begin. From a literary history aspect it is brilliant because it is the first epic-length book about a totally fictional person. I believe there were other short stories, myths or legends that were told in a fictional manner before Don Quixote, but none that....blatantly based a several hundred page book about them. That took effort, and frankly, some cajones.
And it is hilarious! That has to be a first. I mean, do you think of the early 1600's as a particularly funny time? To be honest I was skeptical that people back then even had a sense of humor, much less one as perfectly developed (and still relevant) as Cervantes. But holy...cheese and crackers! He is one funny dude! He's like the Mark Twain of Spain in the 1600's.
I am only half way through, but already I've laughed enough to last me six months, and I've contemplated my perspectives on lot's of things that I wouldn't have otherwise, and formed some surprisingly new opinions on life. And all of this from a book written in 1605. That's pretty amazing to me.
I don't think I've ever described a book as a "gem" before, and I don't think I ever will again. But this book is a gem. It really is. The story itself is entertaining and amusing, but in addition you can almost feel the experimentation and evolution in writing style as you go through the text. In spots there is too much misplaced information, in others too much reiteration, but it's so....enchanting kind of.
I know there was a movie made. A musical I think. Peter O'Toole was the  Don, and Sophia Loren was Dolcenea. I might have seen it, but I don't remember anything about it. From what I recall O'Toole was a good choice, Loren was not, unless she only played the part of the "Dulcinea" that Quixote imagined....but I don't remember if that was the case or not.
Either way, in my reading they are my mental images of the characters, and it's pretty fantastic.
All I'm trying to say is that it is totally worth the read if you are into fiction and have a sense of humor. The historical education is an added bonus. But the story itself is great. And don't worry if you don't have time to read the whole thing, even reading half of it is worth while!

Black Holes and Time Warps

Last month for book club we read Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne. It was a behometh of a book. 500+ pages. I confess I didn't make it to the "time warps" part. I got to about page 400.
It was an excellent book in the sense that it gave a more than comprehensive history of black hole research. The book also included a pre-history as it were of astrophysics, a detailed description of the world-wide scientific community, it's complexities, and tendencies during the 1920's right up through the 1990's. It discussed Einstein, the Cold War, the Soviet versus American race to make the biggest most destructive bomb ever, and vignettes into the lives of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, , Karl Schwarzchild, and Borisovich Zel'dovich.
The historical accounts were easy to read, and very interesting. The parts that actually delved into the  physics of black holes and neutron stars etc. was a little bit more difficult to get through. That being said, it's not on account of the math on which most of the subject is based. In fact, that may be the greatest triumph of this book! For as mathematical as the subject is, there were very few equations in the book. Awesome!
That being said, the concepts (on which the math is based) were pretty...out there. No pun intended. Any time you are dealing with relativity, space, time, space-time, and all that, things get pretty weird.
I can't explain everything in the book, but I'd like to relate a few anecdotes that I think every one should know about black holes. Ha ha...

Black holes and breakfast at the Cafe!

One of the most surprising things to me was that the idea of a black hole didn't come about from people looking out into space. It seems like they would have been discovered by astronomers, but that was not the case. The first inkling of a black hole actually came from calculations done by physicists in the early part of the 20th century when they mathematically tried to describe what would happen to a large star once it exhausted its fuel and began to collapse. Their calculations were telling them that  a star above a certain mass, would collapse in on itself, and then keep collapsing down to a super small, super massive point that would curve the space around it so much that it would cease to exist in the observable universe!
At the time, most physicists figured that their calculations were wrong. But as time passed it became more and more clear that it wasn't the math that was wrong. Eventually technology caught up to the equations and optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes coroberated the existence of black holes.
The second, and last thing, I will try to explain is the relationship a few of the cool things concerning mass, space and time. E=mc2. But what does that mean? It means that anything that has mass (i.e. you , me, a chair, the earth, the galaxy) can be described as energy. Mass and energy are sort of two different expressions of the same thing. I'm simplifying this a bit (because of the c (which is the speed of light) squared) but that's pretty much the gist of it. How weird and cool is that?
And that the larger the mass of an object the more it can literally distort time! Black holes swallow up everything in their path, and shove it all down to a thing called a singularity. And that super massive teeny-tiny point creates a almost infinitely deep and narrow pucker in space-time that does some really freaky things. The one I will mention is that it bends space-time in such a way that if you had two people observing it, one outside the hole and one (unfortunate soul) descending into it this is how it would play out:

Space, seen from my patio.

To the person going into the hole, they would approach it, pass through the event horizon, and be strung out atom by atom into the singularity. BUT from the perspective of the person outside, it would look like they approached the event horizon, and then froze just on the edge of it forever (well, almost forever)! From the perspective of the outsider, in a less curved part of space, time moves so fast that they cannot detect even the slightest movement from their counterpart. Again, I am so...baffled by that I don't even know if I could ever hope to explain it any better than I just have.
If you find this interesting then I would highly suggest you read this book to get a more inclusive and scientific account of all the things I'm saying. If you don't, well then, know that I am NOT making this stuff up. Black holes are real, they happen, there is one at the center of our galaxy, and it warps space and time. Bwaa-haa-haa. Cool.

Dick Mackey: Chance Meeting on the Haul Road

Jason and the infamous Dick Mackey!

If you've ever driven the Dalton Highway, you have a pretty good understanding of what the word remote means. It's about as remote as a person can get in a car. There are only a couple small stops north of Coldfoot Camp. There is the turnoff to Wiseman, A port-o-potty near Sukapack, and one at the base of the Chandalar Shelf, and a DOT station near Atigun Pass. That's it. So it's all the more amazing that we ran into one of the most famous mushers in all of Alaska along the way.
Our Arctic Safari Tour left Coldfoot at around 11:00 am, and as we headed up the first few miles Jason (our tour guide, and my little brother) gave us a brief history of Coldfoot. The latest chapter of that story involved the founding of the truck stop back in the 80's by a guy named Dick Mackey. As I understand it he convinced a friend to join him for the summer selling hamburgers and coffee to truckers out of a converted school bus. They set up in Coldfoot, and Mackey spent the next 9 years growing the camp and his business.
We continued on the tour, and after travelling all the way to the edge of the North Slope, we turned around and headed home.
We pulled off at the viewing are for the Chandalar Shelf, and noticed a tent, a dog sled, and pickup truck with dog box that hadn't been there earlier when we were driving up. There were two men standing beside their gear talking. They were both older, with a slightly wrinkled "Alaskan" quality about them. The Alaskan quality I am referring to is the strange way in which residents of the far north tend to look like they are comfortably chatting at a tiki bar in Hawaii when standing on the side of the road in windy -20 degree weather having a conversation. But I digress. Anyway we hopped back on the road, but only got a few feet when one of the men, the one in the circa 1990 teal, purple and pink jacket covered in patches, hailed us down.
Jason recognized him immediately, and quickly informed the rest of us that before our very eyes, was the famous, No!, the infamous, Dick Mackey!
Four hours earlier none of us would have had any idea who Dick Mackey was, but after our history lesson about Coldfoot, and learning that he'd run (and helped found) the Iditerod, we were all appropriately in awe. I mean what are the chances? We were literally out in the middle of nowhere!
We got out and talked with him and his buddy. He was about the friendliest guy you ever met. And despite his being...somewhere around 70 I think, there was a youthfulness about him and the way he talked and gestured that made him seem like a much younger man. He had a great sense of humor, and a smile to match it. His friend had a similar air.
He explained that he was up there with some friends and they were going caribou hunting on the Shelf. He told us a couple stories about being in -85 degree weather, and was a sport about having his photo taken with everyone. He was really a neat guy.
On my way home from Alaska I found a memoir of his in the gift shop at the Fairbanks airport. It was called One Second to Glory. I started reading it in the store. The Mackey legacy in Alaska is an impressive one (he has several sons who are also mushers, and his granddaughter is too), but his origins are humble. Dick went to Alaska a penniless young man with a sense of adventure, and no idea what he was doing. His start in dog-sledding occurred in much the same way. Very much like my brother actually. And his tenure in Coldfoot also began as a wild and crazy idea.
I decided I needed to buy the book, and I read the whole thing on my 3 flights back home. His story is interesting, and funny in parts, but more than that it was inspirational. It's like the theme from the Pixar movie Ratatouille where they say "Anyone can cook.", except the phrase here is "Anybody can mush."

We are our Synapses

One of the many books I have read lately is Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux. It's one of the most interesting books I've ever read about the subject of who we are. For those of us who don't believe in things like souls or spirits, the questions surrounding who we are have been difficult to answer. Of course the solution lies somewhere within the mushy folds of the brain, but where and how does it all come together to make me feel like myself?
Well, this book answers that question. And in my opinion the author does it clearly and methodically. It was simply a fascinating read. He begins simply, and sort of teaches you as you go about the different functions of brain regions, the interaction of chemicals and the processes that influence them. He interweaves the history of neuroscience with our modern understanding of how the brain works. His discussion on depression and anxiety were really interesting, as well as his explanations of how medications are taken up and used by the body.
It took me forever to read (on and off for a couple months), but I never lost interest, and I enjoyed it every step of the way. It was definitely not an easy read. In fact thinking back on it, it was more like the summary of a textbook and less like pop-science.

Stem cell neurons.

It is truly amazing how brains work. It seems nothing short of a miracle, yet it is made up of normal things, it functions using the laws and relationships that nature has provided everything else, and it was created by a universe that can't even know itself like the thing it created. Truly one of the most awesome things I have ever thought about. And to think I have a whole brain (at least I think it's a whole one), right up in my head, to keep all for myself, and use for all of my life! Sweet.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in a biological understanding of who we are. 5 out of 5 stars on this one.

The Shallows

This month for book club we read The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr.
From a pure readability factor it was pretty good. Not too heavy, thorough enough, but not too technical. And it was a quick read.
From my personal perspective in terms of content I went back and forth with being a little bored (because I already knew the stuff) to fairly interested. I wasn't so into his whole history of the Internet, or books for that matter, and I thought he repeated himself a bit too much (and stated obvious things that anyone reading this book would already know like what Facebook is...duh.)
But some of the brain imaging experiments, special studies, anecdotes from other writers, and his personal reflections on his experiences were intriguing to me. For example studies show "...that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." That goes for the Web as well as T.V, radio, and cell phones as well. You could even throw in GPS units, since it appears that spatial awareness is on a decline.
A few other highlights include:
It was interesting when the author (quoting another author) said "Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts- the faster the better." It really hit home for me, because that is exactly what I've been feeling lately. My mind is always running at full speed, looking for something to do.
I thought his commentary on the relationship between authors and readers was really interesting too. He says that back in the olden days when people read books there was an unspoken agreement between writers and those that read their work, namely that the author could write in a manner of full expression and be able to count on the patience and attentiveness of the reader. But now in the "faster is better" world of technology the readers attention is waning, writer must approach writing from an entirely new standpoint. They have to be quick, and exciting. It's less about what the writer wants to say (in terms of Internet reading) and more about what the readers are willing to read.
I found his discussion on the physical reshaping of the brain due to our modern technology, and the prolonged consequences to be really insightful. Reading on the web, with all it's distractions, makes it hard to focus. So our brains are becoming more able to multi-task. What we loose in the process is deep focused understanding. The author likens the modern memory to a Rolodex (for those of you who don't know what this is...go look it up!). We don't actually retain much information, but we are really good and remembering ways to find things out. And we are able to do it faster and faster all the time.
He also referenced another book I just happen to be reading at this very moment, that and that was cool.

This topic is really interesting to me on a personal level because I have lately noticed a shift in my mind, particularly a "loudness", (a scattered feeling like my attention is being pulled in many directions at once, all the time)  that I believe is the result of too much time surfing the net, and playing around with my phone etc. I'm not saying I don't love email and shopping on Amazon, but I think it would do me a bit of good to cut back. I find that I am often sacrificing the physical present for some distraction in cyberspace, and it bothers me. It's like when you get together with friends to go to dinner and then you all sit at the restaurant texting and "checking in" on Facebook....only I'm doing that to myself. For example I'll be trying to read a book, and then it suddenly occurs to me that I might want to marinade a tri-tip for dinner tomorrow, and so off I go clicking around on the Web looking for a marinade recipe. Then I decided to check the weather, then I get an email, then a couple texts, then I get a notice from Facebook so I sign in, and post a few comments of my own...You get it. Next thing you know I read for 15 minutes and was online for 45. The only time I really feel focused is when I am running or at kickboxing.
And as a side note the fact that information and technology is so portable is also changing us. I don't necessarily like that I am accessible to everyone all the time through several different mediums no matter where I am. On the rare occasions when I am focused and my mind is quiet, it is often disturbed by the ding on my phone that I have received a new email, or a text alert, and I get sucked in. Again, I am glad I have my cell phone for emergencies, but I just don't like the distraction of getting emails and texts when I am on the road.
I don't mean to sound antisocial, and I certainly do appreciate it when folks think about me, I'm just saying that it alters my focus and sometimes makes it hard to really be somewhere, doing something. Maybe the proactive thing to do is stop whining about it and just limit my internet use, and turn off my cell phone when I don't want to be disturbed.
Some people really thrive on technology and all of the amazing things it allows us to do. I am amazed by all my friends that manage it so well. But I don't. I appreciate it, but I don't "love" it.
I prefer a little more quiet.

Overall this was a good book, but I'd probably go with 3.5 starts out of 5.

Richard Feynman

In between the books for book club I have been reading The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by the late Richard Feynman. He was a theoretical physicist who did great things (that neither you or I would probably understand) in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics. He was also on the Manhattan Project, which you will recall was a group of scientists commissioned by the Army to build the first atomic bomb.

But the thing that I like about him, and about reading about him is that he seems like he was a cool (but quirky) guy. Sure he could do calculus in his head, but he was also really funny, and almost...like a kid. He wasn't arrogant, nor did he act super intellectual. He was just a big curious kid that happened to be good at math!

The part of the book I am reading now is about his time in Los Alamos when he was working on the bomb. And the story I just read was so funny I just have to share it with you!

So the way things were back then was that all the scientists were in Los Alamos, but the location of the plant where the Uranium was to be processed was elsewhere, and the people handling the stuff had no idea what they were doing. At the time the Army didn't want the two groups to mix, because they were afraid it would become easier for secrets to get out. They wanted the plant people to be in the dark. But it became apparent that they had to learn at least a little bit about what was going on in order to design the plant properly and not blow themselves to smithereens accidentally. So they sent Feynman up there to explain it all to them. Apparently they were amazed by him. In his own words "So I sat down and told them how it works...yak yak-all stuff which was elementary primer stuff back at Los Alamos, but they'd never heard any of it, so I turned out to be a tremendous genius to them. So from being rather primitive back there in Los Alamos, I was a super genius on the other end."

After he explained everything and everyone was amazed, the contractors etc. said they understood and asked him to come back in a month so they could show him their plans. So a month later he goes back and they take him into a giant room with a huge table covered in tons of blueprints (which he, Feynman, doesn't know how to read). They started explaining their strategy to him how all these valves and ventilators work but  because he is such a "genius" they didn't bother to explain to him how to read the plans assuming he already knew. Of course he did not. Feynman tried to follow, but he had no idea what the little boxes with crosses that were all over the plans were. Clearly they were important. At first he thought they were windows but that didn't work because some were not on walls, then he thought they might be some sort of valves. But he'd waited too long to ask! In his words "I want to ask them what it is. You must have been in this situation like this- you didn't ask them right away, right away would have been OK. But they have been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll say what are you wasting my time for?"

He looks at all the plans spread out everywhere. What was he going to do?! So he came up with a plan. He decided to point to one of the little boxes and ask "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" That way they would say either "nothing" which confirmed it was a valve, or they would say "That's not a valve that's a...whatever" and then he would know what it was. 

So he chose a random box and cross and pointed to it. In his words "What happens if this valve gets stuck? figuring they're going to say "That's not a valve sir, that's a window." So one looks at the other guy and says "Well, if that valve gets stuck," and they go up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy up and down, back and forth, and they both look at each other and they turn around to me and say "You're absolutely right sir." So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out."

Isn't that hilarious? He found the one mistake on the entire plan set by accident!

As he was leaving the Lieutenant that he was with said "You're a genius. I want to know how, how you do something like that." And Feynamn responded " You try to find out whether it's a valve or not."

The book is filled with stories like that! There is another one about how he stole top secret papers to prove that the security was less than stellar, or he used his wife's lingerie to secure a room for himself instead of sharing like everyone else did. He really just seems like a fun-loving likable brilliant guy.

The book before this one is called Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! and also has some great stories in it.  His books have very little to do with describing physics. They are more a memoir of his life while he was doing physics. If you are looking for some light and fun reading, I highly recommend either of these books!

The Origin of AIDS

As a change from the physics kick my book club has been on the last few months we read a book about virology, biology, and the history of disease. The Origin of AIDS by Jacques Pepin, was an...I don't want to say "awesome" (because it is truly tragic)...but a brilliant book. I love a book that has more references than it does text!
Pepin chronicles the history, not only of the disease but of the research, the forensic investigation into the origin, and propagation of the deadliest disease to touch the modern world. He sleuthed out the truth buried in mounds of reports and papers published in the early to mid-20th century, and in long forgotten blood specimens hidden in freezers in central Africa. He presented data, clearly and fairly, and he warned against interpreting data that you don't understand (which was an excellent point!).
I thought the book was not only insightful in terms of the obvious topic, but also a fantastic example of the use of the scientific method, and an informative history of Africa during the era of colonialism.
Contrary to what many Americans might think, HIV and AIDS didn't originate within the homosexual community, but rather it was a disease acquired from chimpanzees, and initially transmitted through the unsterilized needles of colonial doctors trying to control (then) known diseases like African sleeping sickness, yaws, syphilis, malaria and leprosy. Only then did it spread to prostitutes and then later to Haiti where it finally encountered the US homosexual community. The story is a sad one, and tragic in the true sense of the word, but it was also encouraging in that science has been able to understand HIV and AIDS to the extent that has, and in such a short time. Only 20 years ago AIDS was considered an un-curable death sentence. But (and unfortunately this only applied to non-3rd world countries) now it is something that can be controlled and people can live long relatively healthy lives. Just look at Magic Johnson. He was diagnosed in 1991 I think.
Technically the book was profound too. It got scientific, but not in a gratingly boring kind of way. I'll admit that there was much more information than I really needed, but at the same time, in some cases I really appreciated it. For example I didn't know that the primate version of HIV is called SIV, and there are many variations within the chimp/gorilla/monkey populations around the world. I didn't know that because SIV has been around in primates for a couple thousand years, most of them are immune to it now (the ones that weren't died off long ago and never reproduced). Hopefully the story of HIV and humans will eventually play out in the same manner. I didn't know there was an HIV-1 and HIV-2. I didn't know that HIV-1 had subtypes, the most common being HIV-1 M, but additionally there is an N, O, and P each indicating a different cross-species transmission from ape (or monkey) to human. That fact was especially amazing to me for some reason. There was just tons and tons of fascinating information like that throughout the book.
Like I said before, at the same time that the story was tragic, it was also inspiring. The contrast between the devastating topic, and the medical genius that finally discovered it's MO, was a little difficult to navigate emotionally at times, but it was absolutely worthwhile read.
I definitely recommend it, not only as an interesting scientific topic, but also as a wonderful example of the use of the scientific method, and a piece of recent history. It's a piece of history we still are a part of, and I think it is worth while to try to understand it.

The Story of the Earth

My mom got me a couple really neat old books. One was written by T.H. Huxley aka "Darwin's Bulldog", and the other by a geology professor from The King's College in London called "The Story of the Earth". The latter was written and published in 1895. Quite an interesting read!
Being a post-tectonics geologist, it is almost impossible for me to comprehend what geology was before anyone knew that the crust of the earth was broken up into plates and moved around forming mountain chains and building and breaking apart continents. I mean how else can you explain the Himalayas?
In some ways the geologists of 100 years ago understood our field so well, to the point that their "laws" of original horizontality, cross cutting, and uniformity are still true today.
But then I read about their explanation for how mountain chains form, or the mechanisms for deformation and I'm struck by how wrong they were. (Not that I think this is a fault of theirs. Certainly not. They were doing the best they could with the information and technology they had.) They cited everything from shrinking and expanding rock (somehow due to infiltration of water) to tides to explain volcanoes and mountain building!
It's amazing that geology has come so far so quickly. And I am glad I got to be in on it on this side of the "Tectonic Revolution". It's been really neat to look at a subject I love so dearly through they eyes of an expert in the field that lived over one hundred years ago. It's may not be scientifically accurate, but it's still such an enlightening window into my chosen field. It's an early chapter from a story about a group of scientists searching for the truth about the earth. Maybe they didn't quite make it there in 1895, but those that came after them kept searching, and thinking and trying, and eventually they (we) figured it out. As Newton (Sir Issac, not Wayne or Cam) famously said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Book Review: Turing's Cathedral

Last month for book club we read Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson. It's basically a history of the invention of the digital computer. To be honest I thought the book (not the subject) was pretty awful. It was tough to read and there were a lot of tangents, and unrelated information. It was sort of all over the place, and for no reason. One of the members in my book club (after watching an interview) even thought the author George Dyson, might even have a learning impediment. But I did still manage to take away a few interesting points. The first is that I didn't realize how much of our technology came about because of military projects. Computers and then the Internet etc, all of that came from military programs and research. The digital computer was invented to help calculate blast radius of hypothetical nuclear explosions, and to decode encrypted German messages. Crazy hu? It's interesting to note too that when the military "declassified" information the technology it became available to everyone, whereas if the Internet,or computers would have been invented by a private company, they would have had a monopoly and control,and things would be very different (much more expensive) now I think. So that's one cool thing about it all coming from where it did.

The other thing I thought that was interesting albeit sad, was the tragic end of Alan Turing himself. Apparently despite his genius, and his contributions as a mathematician and scientist the thing that most people of his day remembered him for was the fact that he was gay. In the 1950's in Britain, being gay was actually illegal. So he was stripped of his security clearance, kicked off his job and humiliated, and given the choice between the spending the rest of his life in prison or being chemically castrated. He chose the latter. Two years later he committed suicide. 

It makes me angry that his sexual orientation was allowed to overshadow everything else in his life including his professional and scientific accomplishments. It's so ridiculous. Look at all the progress he made, who cares if he's gay? In a way I feel like we've come a long way form those times, but then just last week, I saw all this stuff about the CEO of Chick-fil-A being anti-gay marriage, and I think to myself WTF? Why is this still an issue? Sigh...

Anyway, like I said, the book itself wasn't great, and I wouldn't recommend it really, but at the same time, it was a good starting point to learn something interesting about how our good old PC's came about.

John Muir

As is my wont to do, I was aimlessly perusing the bookshelves at the library the other day and came across a compilation of nature essays by the naturalist, and early conservationist John Muir.
This past winter while visiting the Visitors Center in Yosemite Valley I had a chance to look at an exhibit about him, and thought to myself that I should look up some of his writing...it only took me six months!
Anyway, he is a wonderful writer. I especially loved his essays on Yosemite. His writing style is a mix between textbook accuracy and a romance novel (the old-fashioned kind, not the seedy modern ones), and you can really sense the love he had for all things natural and wild, and the gentile, quiet, no-frills kind man that he was. His  flowery way of describing the wilderness is sort of peaceful to read, and is such that I can picture it easily in my mind. The sharp blue of the sky, the specific degree of fluffiness of a squirrels tale, the sound of a  stream as it flowed, all clearly imaginable and at my mental fingertips!
He was a great nature writer, a precursor to the likes of Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey, and a true lover of the wild. (If you are interested I am sure you could find examples of his essays on the Internet.)
Here are a couple quotes that I jotted down while I was reading two essays about Yosemite. One was about the High Sierra, and the other about the kinds of animals in the Park. Enjoy!

"Former experience had given good reason to know that passionate storms, invisible yet, might be brooding in the calm sungold."


What a fine traveling companion [the creek] it proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountains own joy!"


"In so wild and so beautiful a region was spent my first day, every sight and sound inspiring, leading one far out of himself, yet feeding and building up his individuality."


"But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illuminated with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone."


"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains. To behold this alone is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over!"

A Primate's Memoir

I just finished reading A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. I've read some of his other stuff, and even purchase a neuroscience lecture series he did for the Teaching Company. But this was by far the most entertaining. Some of his other books are more informative, but this one was..pure pleasure to read. I got a happy feeling every time I flipped it opened and started the next chapter.
The book is generally about his years working in Africa studying baboons. But it's so much more than that as well. It's about him personally, the transition from starry-eyed grad student to Stanford professor. It's about the recent history of the African nations, it's about the native and indigenous people he met and befriended.  It's about triumph and tragedy, human nature, and animal nature. It was both super funny and incredibly sad.
Sapolsky is a scientist, but he's also hilarious. And he has a no nonsense, no embarrassment sort of approach to everything whether he is talking about injustice, death, race, sex or feces. Sometimes it's sort of shocking, other times it's really funny. I found the paragraph where he describes getting horrible diarrhea in the middle of the night while his camp was being overrun by curious elephants to be particularly entertaining.
It was a wonderful book, and I 100%....no, 200% (if that were possible)  recommend this book to anyone who likes travel writing, science writing, or just a darn good read. You will not be disappointed!!!

A Universe From Nothing

Last month's book for book club was called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It was an interesting book, one of those astrophysics type where half of what you read you can't quite wrap your brain around, and the other half seems like it should be physically impossible, but apparently it's not.
Our book club was undecided about whether they loved it, but we are a pretty critical bunch, and I think over all it was a pretty good book. And ,since it was fairly short, I'd recommend it to those of you that are interested in the history of the search for dark matter and energy, and the origin of the (our) universe as well.
One of the biggest questions in cosmology is what produced the Big Bang? Most of us generally think in terms of cause and effect, and it only makes sense to us that if there was a Big Bang it had to come from somewhere, and be made out of something that was there before...only it's turning out that may not be true.
(See, this is what I mean about seeming physically impossible!) It certainly isn't true on a quantum scale where in the empty space between quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) particles pop into and out of "thin air" all the time! (The photo below was borrowed from a website called omnispace.org and if you click on the link below the image you can see a gif file animation that's pretty amazing!) That was one of the most interesting things I learned from this book. That empty space isn't really empty at all. WTF? Right?!

Click here to see animation!

So the idea is, if it can happen at a small scale, then why not on a scale the size of the universe? The only thing that seems to matter is that the total energy of the universe must always remain at zero, which apparently does.That might seem counter-intuitive too, but it's not once you begin to think about it. Stephen Hawking likened it (loosely) to making a hill out of dirt. In order to do that you must dig a hole of equal mass. So even though the hill might be high, it is balanced out by a hole equally deep. You are not bringing anything into the system or taking anything out of it either, you are just sort of shuffling it around. Yet still you appear to "make" a hill where there once was none. And so it might be with the universe. There was nothing needed, no outside cause to make the Big Bang, as long as the total energy remained at zero.
Now you might be thinking "Well, where does..."dirt" come from? Where does the system that totals zero energy come from?" And that's where it gets a little tricky. Because maybe the answer is that it comes from nowhere. Just like the particles and antiparticles that appear between quarks, so might our universe be. How could that happen you wonder? No one is exactly sure yet, but many think they are close. And it's all based on solid science, and observation (which the book goes into detail on, things like the Cosmic Background Radiation, and gravitational lensing etc...)
Part of it though, depends on which theory you buy. And each involves ever more complex physics . There is M-Theory and multiverses, string theory and so on, all of which can only truly be understood through some pretty hair-raising mathematics (and so becomes quite difficult for a lay-person such as myself to understand). It also depends on how you think the universe will end: with a"Big Crunch" or a "Big Freeze"? Will the universe collapse in on itself and form a giant black hole encompassing everything? Or will all the galaxies keep moving farther and farther apart until space cools, and all the starts die out? Does it even matter? Well, certainly not for us, or our grandchildren, or the rest of the human race, or any other living thing on our planet, or our sun, or our own home-sweet Milky Way galaxy. But for some distant future galaxy and  civilization it might. Krauss says in a mere trillion years (if the universe keeps expanding as it is now) those aliens will look up at the night sky and only see the stars from their own galaxy. If they develop the technology to gaze father out into the universe they will see....absolutely nothing.

The Birds and the Bees...Literally.

Chapter 2 in The X in Sex

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a book called "The X in Sex". Well, I finished it. And I know I say this about almost every book I read (and it's true!) but this was so interesting! Plus it was well written, and even funny in parts....I mean who can't appreciate a chapter entitled "The Duke of Kent's Testicles?" It's even more amazing to me because the subject of the book (minus the portions about testicles of course) is actively, at this very moment, doing all the things that I am reading about...inside every cell in my body. It's weird feeling to learn about my insides, and understand myself in such a way. I mean, there are processes going on in my body right now that...even with the aid of a book, I'll probably never understand. But somehow it's still me. How could I not know myself?!? Ha ha...It's just so weird...and awesome. I love it.

I learned so many cool things from this book that I am afraid if I try to cram them all into one blog it will be...sort of long and unfocused. So instead I am going to try to break it down into a few segments.

But before we start talking about the familiar males and females, X and Y and all of that, I thought it might be worth while to go into a little more depth on the multiple ways a living thing can create progeny. Bear with me if it seems a little redundant to the last post about this book. I'm going to try to be a little more specific.

Sex happens to be the one us mammals and many reptiles and birds use, but it is by no means the only (or even most efficient) way to produce offspring. And some of them are pretty incredible, at least as strange as our own way. As most of you probably know reproduction is broadly divided into sexual and asexual.
Asexual can be broken down into parthenogenisis, binary fission, budding, fragmentation and many other, but more obscure methods.
Fission and budding are mostly accomplished by bacteria, some viruses, and plants, and while they are interesting in their own right (and have many advantages), I'd much rather focus on parthenogenic species, because they are just so neat. They are animals that can reproduce without a male (or an opposite sex). Primarily they are mother/daughter species (although some can produce males once in a while, or be all male species) where the genetic material from the mother is passed directly and completely to the daughters. The classic pathenogenic species are aphids. But science has now discovered that some bees, lizards, hammer head sharks, Komodo dragons, and boa constrictors also reproduce this way!
When we move onto sexual reproduction things might become more familiar because there are boys and girls, but the methods of producing the XX/XY or ZZ/ZW (in birds and reptiles) can be totally foreign still! Besides our "normal" way of reproducing there are hermaphrodite species, like snails and many amphibians that can have both male and female sex organs at the same time (and fertilize their own eggs) or have the ability to change from male to female during their life cycle. Some species of frogs, when the ratio of male to female gets disrupted, can convert many of it's population to the less dominant sex to balance things back out again!
Or there is what is called "external fertilization" in contrast to our internal method. Salmon do this. A female will lay her eggs in the water, and a male will come by later and fertilize the eggs, and all the mating happens outside the body of the female.
Even when we finally get to talking about sexual reproduction where there are distinct males and females and the females are internally inseminated by males, the process can be wildly unfamiliar.
Humans (and all mammals) use genes to determine sex. XX and you have a girl XY and it's a boy. But there are many sexual species (with males and females) who don't use genes to determine sex! What do I mean? Well, here are two examples.
Bonellia is a kind of worm that lives in the ocean. They have males and females, but it is not genes that determine the sex of the offspring, rather it is the environment. The female creates sexless larvae that float around in the ocean. Eventually they drop to the ocean floor, and it is here that they decide what sex they will become. If the larvae falls and there are no other Bonillia around then it will become a female and root. If the larvae falls and there are other Bonillia around then it becomes a male, burrows into the side of the larger female, and essentially becomes a symbiotic...testicle! (Angler fish, as I mentioned before, also have a symbiotic relationship with each other.)
A second example is that of the Nile Crocodiles.They don't use genes or environment to determine sex, they use temperature! The sex of the baby crocks is determined by the temperature of the eggs during the middle of the third incubation period. If the temperature is above 34.5 degrees C or below 31.7 degrees C then the offspring will be female. But if the temperature falls within that 4 degree window, the babies will be male!

Often times we view the natural world with the idea that it is somehow perfectly designed, that there is an methodical simplicity in it, but I disagree. Especially when it comes to reproduction.  It seems to me life will try anything and everything. Males/females, females/females, males/males, male-females, males-then-females, non-sexed to sexed, non-sexual, clones, spores...etc. It reminds me of the game Boggle, where you use a discrete number of  letters to make up as many words as you can. So life has done with reproduction. Using the building blocks available, life tried every combination it seems,without bias. And the ones we are left with are the ones that worked better than the other possible combinations that are no longer with us.
Our human sexual reproductive ways have many advantages (primarily genetic diversity) and it is truly amazing how our bodies reproduce, but our strategy is far from perfect, and far from being the only way to get things done. And there are many weird, dramatic, and often unfortunate concequences embedded in our chosen methods. I will begin to discuss those in the next post.
But the take away point here is that there are pros and cons to every method of reproduction. None is perfect, none is flawless, and most of them are not even ideal. But the one thing they have in common (and the only thing they need to be viable forms of reproduction) is that they do in fact create survivors. You and I are one of them, and so is every other living thing on earth. Groovy. Yay for reproduction!

Life on the Mississippi

According to the experts, Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain was one of his least popular works. But after having read most of it over the last couple days, I can honestly say I don't know why. I think it's great! I especially love the middle chapters (about 4-15) where he goes into great detail about what it took to be a steamboat pilot. It was not for the faint of heart, or for those with a weak memory. The pilots had to know every inch of the river bank as well as what lay beneath the water. I can't imagine how they remembered it all! And I enjoyed the parts where Sam (Clements) would ask questions. Like how they can tell the difference between an underwater reef, and the wind, when they both produced the same looking little ripples in the surface of the water? And the pilots would answer: "You just know." It was something that you couldn't explain, but once you figured it out you just knew. A lot of piloting was like that it seems.
I also thought the book was cool because it seems to explain where Samuel Clements acquired his literary pseudonym! Apparently "mark twain" was a measurement of depth that the sailors would call out to the pilot, as they plunged a pole or weighted rope off the sides of the boat to mark the depth of the channel. "Mark" as in  "make note of" and "twain" as in the old way to designate the number two (in this case 2 fathoms or 12 feet). So mark twain literally means "make a note of the fact that there is 12 feet if water here".
For an example from the text itself where measurements were being taken and shouted back to the pilot:
"M-a-r-k three!...M-a-r-k three!...Quarter-less three!....Half twain!...Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!...Quarter-less..." And so on...
Isn't that something? Clements himself says in the book that he never had a job he enjoyed more than being a steamboat pilot, and I think taking the name Mark Twain was his own way of paying homage to that time in his life. I imagine it must have been amusing to hear all the people shout "Mark Twain!" as he passed by. It kind of makes me smile anyway.

Atlantic

I finally finished reading a book I started almost two weeks ago! It usually doesn't take me this long. But I have been busy and just didn't have time. The book was excellent though, and I have been trying to squeeze in a half hour here or there almost every day to finish it.
It is the story of the Atlantic Ocean, from it's formation a hundred and some-odd million years ago, through the eras of exploration in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, all they way up to the modern concerns about the effects of global warming and the recent discoveries at how we as humans have completely devastated many of the Atlantic's indigenous populations of fish and mammals.
It was a sweeping book, and for sure there was much more pack in there than I will ever remember, but it was worth the read even for the 50% or so I may retain for the rest of my life (ha ha..I am being optimistic!) And Winchester has such a way with words, and such an...entertaining vocabulary that it is not "textbook" like at all. Take this little paragraph for example:

Some of the historical facts were really enlightening too. For example we celebrate the discovery of the new word by Christopher Columbus, but he never set foot on North America, nor did he ever believe that he had  actually discovered a "new world" (he thought he was in some undiscovered part of what we would consider the western Pacific). And he was a cruel and terrible man. Not only did he treat his servants and slaves cruelly (which was acceptable at that time) but he abused those who worked for him and others that he had authority over. For the latter reasons he was arrested and brought back to Spain in shackles! And we celebrate a holiday commemorating this man? WTF? (It is interesting I just read an article yesterday claiming that Columbus was secretly a Jew, looking for a new land for his people....I highly doubt that, and if I were Jewish I wouldn't want anything to do with Columbus but I digress..)
I also discovered that one very interesting Lief Erikson (of Scandinavian descent) truly discovered North America (from the European standpoint, since there were Native Americans here before then), and with less brutality and bloodshed than Columbus. I kind of remember reading that somewhere before but I never actually spend any time thinking about it. I was was wondering to myself why we don't celebrate him instead, when I discovered that there actually IS a Leif Erikson Day! I am so very excited about this news! It is October 9th (Columbus Day is the 8th). (A cool side note is that Wisconsin was the first state to adopt the holiday;) SO, I think this year I will have a Lief Erickson Day party to celebrate and commemorate the first real European discoverer of the New World! Doesn't that sound like fun? Christopher Columbus can kiss my....well you get my point.

Reading at Panera

Reading about the slave trading that went on (for almost 400 years!) was hard to get through. Not because the text was complicated, but because reading about the atrocities that were committed against innocent families actually made me feel sick. The unbearable way human beings were stored as cargo and transported across the sea, the way families were ripped apart, and...It is such a dark and shameful period in human history. Maybe it's because I live in a world that has been more or less enlightened (at least the scientific community is), but I can't even imagine how anyone could feel it was just to treat the African men, women, and children the way they did. I guess many convinced themselves it was OK because enlightened Greek philosophers spoke about "people accepting their place in society", another justification was that the people in the Bible had slaves, and God told them to obey their masters. A rather startling fact, that John Newton, who was a clergyman no less, and who wrote the all too well known song "Amazing Grace" was a slaver. It is documented that he would say his prayers above deck while "his human cargo was in abject misery below".
The section about Pirates was both interesting and disturbing all at the same time. The heyday of pirating only lasted 75 years...I thought it was much longer, but apparently it was such dangerous, awful business that it was not to last. Several well known authors wrote about the likes of Black Beard, and the flying of the Jolly Roger, which is why they are so famous and well known today but the period in real life was relatively brief compared to the legacy it left behind. Pirate captains were ruthless barbarians, and their depravity knew no limits when it came to creative punishments when one of their sailors disobeyed, or they captured a passing ship. I won't even repeat the examples here, because they are the sort of thing that will give you nightmares, but let's just say I'll think twice before dressing as a pirate again for Halloween. Yuck.
I read about some of the more famous battles fought in the Atlantic during the early 19th century (World Wars I and II). Like the Battle of Jutland, where over 250 vessels of British and German nationalities confronted one another...Can you imagine that? Seeing 250 boats all at the same time? There were many more battles involving the German U-boats.
There was so much more, but this entry is too long already, so maybe I will save them for a different day. But this was really a great and informative book!

The Professor and the Madman

I am a fan of Simon Winchester. Ever since I read Krakatoa several years back I have found both his choice of subjects, and his writing style to be entertaining and enjoyable to read. The Professor and the Madman, about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was probably one of my most favorites ever. I read it two weekends ago, and was sort of mesmerized by it. I love words, probably in the same way that musicians love certain notes and melodies. And to read about them, how they are invented, how they are defined, how they change over the course of time, and finally how they were compiled,  ALL of them, into one book, was really interesting.
Interwoven into the more technical aspects of how the OED came into being are the lives of the Professor (James Murray) and the Madman (William Minor). The latter was by far more interesting having been a American and having served as a Captain in the Civil War, before accidentally murdering an innocent man on the streets of London. Minor was tormented by delusions which involved suffering nightly sexual abuses of all sorts and acts by people he was convinced lived in his floor. He was paranoid about the Irish stealing and taking his things, and very sexually fixated. (The man he murdered was, or so Minor thought, one of the men trying to steal from him in his sleep.) But besides these delusions, he was actually a very smart, well read, surgeon of all things! And so it ended up being that his knowledge and vast understanding of the English language was a huge help to the authors of the OED. It's a really bizarre story. It was like he knew he was crazy, but he could never get himself to believe it. On the one hand he could argue persuasively about the use, or uses of the word "about" with his friend James Murray the Professor, but then he actually thought there were people living the floor of his room and swore he could hear them, and that they molested him in his sleep. He could write elegant letters, read and understand books on all sorts of interesting subjects, and have as normal a conversation on daily things as you or I could, but then he was so utterly convinced of and haunted by his sexual delusions that (later in his life) actually cut off his own penis to prevent who knows what from happening while he was asleep!
It's remarkable how brilliant yet fragile the human brain can be. And truly frightening how many strange and specific ways it can go wrong.
The OED was a monumental achievement that took more than 30 years to complete. But it was worth every hour of work. To have documented and explained (and even have examples of use) of every word in the English language is an achievement almost impossible to imagine! We live in an era with internet and an answer for pretty much everything only a click or two away, but it wasn't always the case. At the time it was compiled the OED was as....monumental as the internet is today. Any word, any word you wanted to know was suddenly available, at your fingertips! How cool is that?
This was an excellent book! I would recommend it to anyone who likes a little history, a good story, and learning a thing or two about words.

Assembling California

This months selection for book club was Assembling California by John McPhee. You may recall that he also wrote Basin and Range. I think he is a really great writer, and despite the book being somewhat outdated, it is pretty good. Any volume on geology that can contain the words pluton, xenolith, and ophiolite, and still be interesting to the average reader is truly a treasure. Trust me I know;) McPhee mixes it up by talking a little geology, and then inserting a slightly irrelevant, but none-the-less interesting topic like the names of mining towns, or a childhood history, before going back to the geology at hand.
I also appreciate the way he chose only a few aspects of California's geologic history to focus on, letting others pass unexplained. There is just too much to say about the geology here to write an inclusive book intended for the general populace. So I am glad he didn't try. It would have ended up confusing and uninteresting. I believe his strategy was similar to the one I had for the lab classes I taught. I kept it simple, picked things that were a.) exciting, b.) not to difficult to understand, and 3.) inspiring.
The book is organized so the reader accompanies McPhee from eastern California (at the latitude of Lake Tahoe along Interstate 80) to the western coast. As he hops from outcrop to out crop, road cut to road cut, he jumps back and forth in time as well. He might be inspecting an ophiolite sequence in the present, then switch to describing it as it would have been millions of years ago, and miles from it's present location. Then he moves back up in time, but not quite to the modern day, and tells a story about an old 49er (in 1849) named Jim-Bob who had a placer mine just down the slope. In that way he weaves geologic time with historical time, and manages to tell a pretty good story.

Reading on a bench outside the library.

It's also a pretty great historical text because most of the people he interviewed for his book (and much of the commentary) revolve around the "newly" accepted theory of plate tectonics. I sometimes forget that it was only in the 1960's that plate tectonics theory was developed. Up until then geology had been stuck in a rut with several unsatisfying hypotheses for the formation of mountains and the like. As McPhee points out, there are marine fossils on the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. For a long time no one could explain how they got there. Plate tectonics changed all that.
I also thought it was interesting to learn that the origin of the state was from a story written in the 1500's by a Spaniard, about an island called California (after their Queen Califia) full of black amazon women with gold weapons and armor, who ate men and male babies and flew on griffins;)  I think it's at least partly fitting since California is a collection of island arcs accreted onto the western coast of North America, and because there is so much gold here. I tried to find a copy of the story, but to no avail. The best I could get was the summary from wikipedia. It's an interesting read though.
Anyway, it was an excellent book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the geology of California, geology in general, or the mining towns in the western foothills of the Sierra.