Primes of Life

            The house I grew up in as a kid was #7, then for a few years I lived in Gibraltar in apartment #3.  Later, when I no longer lodged in college but rented a house in town, its number was #41.  Why am I telling you this?  Because all of these numbers are prime numbers, numbers that can only be divided by one and not by any other number.  So, I guess this was the prime of my life.  Since moving to the U.S., with house numbers like 2527 and currently 1001, I no longer live with a prime number.  I suppose I have to admit that I’m now past my prime!

Hiking through burnt trees toward Valles Caldera, New Mexico

            As Martin Gardner has said, “No branch of number theory is more saturated with mystery and elegance than the study of prime numbers, those exasperating, unruly integers that refuse to be divided evenly by any integer except themselves and 1”  If you have any interest in primes you might want to check out the article “Ode to Prime Numbers.  Primes offer poetry both subject matter and structure” in American Scientist, July-August, 2013.

This week’s quote:

            “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
Karl Popper, philosopher

Trivia:

            In 1911 Bobby Leach plunged over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel and survived.  But 14 years later he slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

                                                     The watcher outside my window

NASA is an acronym because you can pronounce it as a word, but NFL is not because it can’t be pronounced—it’s merely an abbreviation, like DNA, PBS, NBC, and on and on including AAA and KKK.  I suppose you could pronounce GOP or DOE or even POV, though nobody ever does.  But then there’s the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, usually called “LackMa” and, of course, “moma”—MOMA—the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

                                              The morning after the night the rains came
             Anyway, I like cunning acronyms.  NASA has a satellite they named WISE.  Sounds smart, but actually stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.  And if you want to swim upstream with this agency, there’s always SALMON—a Stand ALone Mission of Opportunity Notice.  In my novel Icy Moon I named one group of researchers CROSS, which is an acronym I made up for the Center for Research On the Solar System.  Other favorites include: BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (but the people in Fresno better be cautious about the Fresno Area Rapid Transit), and there’s the sportsmen’s WAGS, the Wives And Girlfriends.  We’ve all heard about ET, which gets extended into SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.  And then, all environmentalists know about LUST — Leaking Underground Storage Tanks.  And, of course the radio stations have fun with their letters, like KRZY, KLAP, and KOOL.

            But be careful, in the tourist-frequented town I live in, Santa Fe, there are so many restaurants that CIA is more likely to refer to the Culinary Institute of America than the federal agency.  And then there’s the FBI, the Food and Beverage Institute.

 Quote:

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
                                                                        James Joyce commenting on his work

 This week’s trivia:

Every human being is born with the ability to wiggle their ears.  If they don’t figure this out early and practice, then the muscle atrophies.

Writer buys Cinema

            George R. R. Martin is a Santa Fe based writer who recently bought the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe and used his own money to refurbish and open it.  It had closed in 2006.  Best known for his science fiction and fantasy works, Martin wrote “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which HBO made into the television series “Game of Thrones.” Martin has been recognized in many ways, including half a dozen Hugo Awards and several Nebula Awards.

The Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico

                                        

            I was lured into the Jean Cocteau Cinema to view the film “Europa Report”, since in my novel “Icy Moon.  Murder in the Astronomy Department,” the moon referred to is the ice-covered Europa that orbits the planet Jupiter.  The film “Europa Report” is  unabashed sci-fi.  My novel “Icy Moon” is not.  In any murder mystery there has to be something worth killing for, and in this case it’s a message from space that’s come from the icy moon Europa.  Clearly this is something of major importance—but the scientist in the astronomy department who recorded the message (in a very surprising way) is murdered.

            The Cocteau cinema has only 120 seats, and most of these were empty on the Saturday afternoon I went to see “Europa Report.”  Directed by Sebastian Cordero, the Ecuadorian director, it’s a relatively low budget production that lacks over-the-top special effects and uses a documentary-style format.  It succeeds in conveying the feeling of a manned space ship on its way through space and the inevitable problems faced by the astronauts.  I found a few aspects unrealistic, like the huge size of the spacecraft launched by a rather small-looking rocket.  It also seemed unreasonable that all of the crew would descend to the icy moon’s surface in the landing module.  (Even on the Apollo moon landing one of the astronauts stayed in orbit.)  But I did like the fact they discovered bioluminescent organisms.

            As a species we’re very visual: our eyes and our ability to see are critical.  This is true of most other multicellular organisms and many types of eyes have evolved independently throughout the geologic record.  The first compound eyes appeared in the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, the Big Bang of evolution, about 530 million years ago.  But to use eyes to see, you need light.  Also, for life as we know it water is critical, and Europa has the largest ocean in the solar system.  However, this hidden ocean is capped by a thick layer of ice, which means the water’s probably dark.  So, if some critter has eyes and wants to see, then light has to be made.  There are chemical reactions that give off light, and when organisms do this it’s called bioluminescence.  On earth, fireflies are a good example, but a lot of deep ocean animals also make their own light.  Anything that needs to see in the deep Europa ocean will have to generate light.  Bioluminescence will be crucial.

            But back to the film.  I was very disappointed by the final scenes which were so chaotic it was difficult to know what was going on and what they were trying to achieve.  This, of course, made it difficult to feel any sense of tension since you couldn’t figure out what they were struggling to do, and so didn’t know if they were succeeding or not.  The film critic in our local newspaper has a rating system of one to four chilies—four being the hottest and best.  “Europe Report” got two and a half, and to me that seemed about right.

 Quote:

“You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”
                Said in the early 1400’s by Prince Henry (of Portugal), known as “Henry the Navigator”

Trivia

The budget for the asteroid movie Armageddon was more than the U.S. spent hunting for real asteroids over the previous fifteen years.  The potential danger of asteroids was well illustrated by the Chelyabinsk meteor that blazed across the Siberian sky in February 2013.

 

The writing challenge of scale

How many times have you heard the weather channel report “dime-sized hail” or even for some unlucky place, “golf-ball sized hail”?  Writers of both fiction and non-fiction struggle to explain situations and events to their readers, and scale is often a problem.  We are bombarded with facts from the nano-small to the mega-big, from the microscopic to the telescopic.  Comparison with the known helps.    Sport comparisons are common, like the leaking oil tanker Exxon Valdez being twice the length of a football field.  But many analogies don’t help.  I’ve just read that a T. rex dinosaur could bite with a pressure equal to 13 Steinway Model D concert grand pianos!  There, now you know exactly what it would feel like to get chomped on by that big dinosaur.  I liked the specificity of this one, even though I don’t know anything about a Model D Steinway, or even if there is a Model C and whether it’s bigger or smaller.  What about small items?  Human hair is popular, and so often I’ve read something described as “half the thickness of a human hair”.

            Then there’s “Twice the distance to the moon.”  I enjoy the romance of looking at the Moon, but I really have no feel for how far away it is, so to tell me something is twice the distance doesn’t help.  Now if a writer says the distance is the same as from New York to Los Angeles, then I have a feel for that.  Same with the height of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty—but “ten times the height of the Empire State Building” is getting away from me.

            Time can be particularly difficult to imagine.  How do you come to grips with “a million years”, or “a hundred million years,” or the age of the universe which is 13.7 billion years (with a ‘B’)?  One description I liked is to think of the time of life on earth as a thousand page book, so it’s representing roughly 3000 million years.  Then humans would have appeared three million years ago and shown up on page 1000!  And the history of homo sapiens would be written in roughly the last 50 words.  So much for “three-score years and ten”.

            At the other extreme, a radioactive element like copernicium-277 decays (half-life) in 240 millionths of a second, difficult even for scientists to measure, and certainly difficult to imagine.  And then there’s the Higgs boson we’ve heard so much about recently.  That decays almost as soon as it’s formed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  But if the subatomic particles formed are what the theory predicts, then as one senior scientist put it, we’ve got “A smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs.”

This week’s quote:

          “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom”.  Isaac Asimov said this in his 1988 book, Book of Science and Nature Quotations.  It's certainly still true today.

 This week’s trivia:

          Human brains account for only 2 percent of our bodies, but use an incredible 20 percent of our energy requirements.

Iron in New Mexico

            I live in Santa Fe.  Those of you with good memories who paid attention in high school chemistry classes know that ‘Fe’ is the chemical symbol for iron (derived from the Latin word ferrum).  So, do I live in a city named for the saint of iron?  No, Santa Fé is Spanish for Holy Faith.  Or if you prefer the town’s complete name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis (The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi.)

            But getting back to iron, it’s something we take for granted in tools and weapons.  As Pliny, the Roman author put it, “the most useful and most fatal instrument in the hand of man”.  In the southwest, iron didn’t become widespread and affordable until the coming of the railroads—with the aptly named iron horse.  The ancestral puebloans (to give the Anasazi their politically-correct name) had no metal tools, or metal weapons, and the stone age in the U.S. southwest lasted until the arrival of the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans.  The stunning complex of buildings, irrigation projects, outliers and dead-straight roads centered on Chaco Canyon was built solely with stone tools.  My hiking group likes to go down to an old mining area just south of Santa Fe in the Cerrillos Hills.  I was surprised to learn that in the 1850’s iron from here was as valuable as lead and zinc.  Wooden tools were edged with iron and when they wore out the iron was simply reused.  Early recycling!



 

Silhouette of the Cerrillos Hills about twenty miles south of Santa Fe

            Before the techniques for smelting iron from its ores were known, the only source was what fell out of the sky—literally.  Many meteorites are dominantly iron (with a few percent nickel in the alloy).  The Sumerian term for iron was “heaven metal”, while the early Egyptians called it “black copper from heaven”.  And, of course, anything appearing from the heavens was prized.

            5000 year old iron beads were discovered in a tomb at el-Gerzeh in Lower Egypt.  These had been made by rolling thin, beaten sheets of metal into tubes.  Recent analyses showed that the iron in these beads had quantities of nickel, cobalt, and phosphorous characteristic of metal from iron meteorites, and also had the unique structure expected for these meteorites.  The beads predate the knowledge of how to smelt iron ore to metal by about two thousand years.  The importance of this celestial metal to the Egyptians is clearly shown by the gold and precious stones found buried with the iron beads.

If iron contains a percent or two of carbon it is converted to steel.  This is harder and stronger than iron, but less ductile.  It has been made since at least 500 BC.

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Other people’s thoughts:

          “ . . the fundamental property of iron is rust.”      Robert Smithson.
                             and rust evokes a fear of disuse, inactivity, entropy and ruin.

This week’s trivia—staying with metal:

          Josef Visarionovich Dzhugashvili changed his name so that it meant “man of steel”, and that’s the way he ruled the Soviet Union.  We know him better as Joseph Stalin.



Geologist as detective: "The present is the key to the past."

             When a crime scene is being investigated the challenge is to collect and examine present-day evidence, and then work backwards from the current facts and infer what happened in the past, to deduce the sequence of events that led up to the murder.  This is just like the so-called “scientific method” where you form an hypothesis, then do experiments to test it.  The results let you support or reject your initial ideas.  But some sciences, such as geology (and also astronomy and archaeology), are historical and can’t be studied this way.  And the protagonist in my novels is a geologist.

Now, a geologist could look at the rocks from a volcano and figure out a lot about what happened in some past volcanic eruption, but there’s no way he can rerun the eruption—he can’t do an experiment to see if his ideas are right.  Watching erupting volcanoes, however, can lead to an understanding of the processes, and hopefully shows how volcanic rocks were formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

So, searching for clues that lead to an understanding of the past is what geologists do.  Which is why the protagonist in my novels, a geologist, is good at solving crimes.  A detective will search for more clues and hunt for more detailed evidence, just as a geologist will try to get more data as the best way to limit the possible sequence of events leading up to the present.

This all assumes, of course, that everything in the past worked the same way as it does today, what geologists call “uniformitarianism.”  That’s a big word that can just as well be expressed by the saying, “the present is the key to the past.”  And that applies to both crime and geology.

*        *        *        *

Nobody has a monopoly on important insights, so here’s what Albert Einstein said:

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form.  The greatest scientists are artists as well.”

And a piece of trivia:

“The combined weight of all the ants on Earth is about the same as the combined weight of all humans.”  That’s right now, of course, but with rampant obesity, we could soon overtake the ants.

A mushroom discovered on one of our hikes into the Sangre de Cristo mountains in early August