Hi Piers

HI –

I completed Xanth #50, Limbo, this month. It features a character introduced in #49, Aura, a member of the Lips tribe, with the power to kiss a male into love slavery. You know the type, from Apoca Lips. She visits the nebulous Region of Limbo, where paradox does not exist and time is nebulous, in order to show the Bug PedAnt some samples of Xanth history. PedAnt has a nickelpede father and fire ant mother; that unusual love story is covered in #49, Knickelpede Knight, the first Xanth novel to have a nickelpede as the protagonist. But when they arrive there is a Maiden in Distress, being attacked by multiple monsters. Aura kisses the troll, love-slaving him, and uses her sharp visible migraine aura—this just possibly might offer a hint about her name—to drive off the dragon, and goes on from there. Aura is not a woman to mess with. The maiden they save is Chameleon, who was looking for a spell in Xanth #1. It goes on from there, with characters from a number of novels appearing, like Breanna of the Black Wave, Jenny Elf, Squid, Incident with her Bird, Rabbit, and Turtle, and new ones being introduced. You should like it, when. Will there be a 51^st Xanth novel? That depends on my age and health, as I am now 89+, and on heart medication. Also the state of the world, which seems to be going places in a hand-basket. At this stage it seems likely that #51 will happen, to the joy of fans, the rage of critics, and the indifference of the world. The protagonist will be Fusia, a beautiful fusion powered robot with feelings, designed and manufactured to be the perfect woman; I think you will like her. Yes, she can defend herself; the trick is to do it without revealing her nature.

 

MaryLee and I have now lived in California just over a year, and like it well enough, though we admit to being half a mite nervous about living near a prime target should World War Three ignite. I still do my exercise walks along the beach, admiring the sights along the way, such as the rolling ocean waves, the beds of pretty flowers, and the sightly girls walking or running, coming or going. Sometimes there’s a helicopter or blimp overhead, along with a cloud or three. There was an eclipse that we understand caused traffic jams as folk went to get the best view of it. Us? We slept through it. One day there were four tall cranes on the horizon, doing something, but I couldn’t see what. Ah, frustration. My mind wanders as I do routine things, and one morning as I made my breakfast it took me back to college. A pretty girl was bringing her meal tray to our table, and a boy told her “Come sit your pulchritude down here.” She said “Sit my what?!” I suspect she knew that pulchritude means beauty; did you? Contrary to popular belief, a pretty girl can be smart, especially in college. She was playing the game. I often wear humorous T-shirts on my walks, and pick up some compliments. I think my favorite is “At my funeral, take the bouquet off the casket. Throw it to the crowd to see who’s next.” Others are “Bad puns—that’s how eye roll.” “I take weather cirrusly.” “Seven days without a pun makes one weak.” “It took me 87 years to look this good.” If anyone should ask me whether I’m really that old, I’ll say “No, I’m 89; I got this two years ago.” Which is true. Another favorite is a picture of the American Constitution, with a number of words crossed out as if it’s been expurgated, and the words “Censorship is unconstitutional.” I wish more people behaved as though they believed that.

 

I mentioned MaryLee. She was a fan of mine. We corresponded for a quarter century before we met. As time passed, she was caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s, and I was caring for my wife, who was suffering peripheral neuropathy that interfered with her control of her extremities, increasingly limiting her. These were necessary but not fun occupations, as we both knew what the end would be. Her mother died in 2016, age 96, and my wife died in 2019, age 82. Regrettably freed, MaryLee and I married in 2020, and we had our fourth anniversary this month. We exchanged homemade anniversary cards, and generally had a good day. Which reminds me of gifts she gave me before, that I wanted to mention. One is a marvelous hair brush. My hair is about eighteen inches long, as when my wife Carol got too weak to cut it, I stopped having it cut, as I was not about to leave her home alone unnecessarily. When I brushed my hair conventionally, hair would catch and be pulled out, and getting it straight for my ponytail could be a chore. Well, this new brush changed that. It is wide and flexible, the handle dividing into ten separated lines of spokes, looking like a joke. But it brushes twice as efficiently as the standard model, handling curls and tangles with ease and very little hair pulling. I love it. The name on it is ECOED. If you have a problem brushing your hair, or maybe your child’s hair, try a brush like this, and be amazed. Maybe give such a brush to your child, who will likely revel in its novel shape, and not mind using it at all. The other remarkable gift is a nail clipping set. Fingernails are not a problem, but toenails are. At age 89 I have trouble reaching them with a clipper, and then it’s a struggle to clip them, because they are thick and curved not just horizontally, but also vertically, so the clippers won’t fit on them. I assume that I’m not uniquely malformed, critics to the contrary notwithstanding, and that regular clipper makers just haven’t caught on to the double curvature of toenails. But this clipping set has clippers that curve both ways, and they work. Now I can clip my toenails before they grow to resemble vulture claws. What a relief! I am also now using her late father’s blue windbreaker, when my exercise walks are in intermediate weather when a T-shirt would be too cold and a jacket too warm. That windbreaker is perfect. Thank you, MaryLee, thrice. Let me conclude this paragraph with a bit of internet humor MaryLee relayed to me. The officer told the tipsy woman “You’re staggering.” She responded “Thank you. You’re quite handsome yourself.” Now she needs money for bail.

 

I read a nonfiction book, Texas Jack America’s First Cowboy Star by Matthew Kerns, who sent me an autographed copy. The American Wild West, it turns out, was not exactly as dime novels and Hollywood flicks portray it. Cowboys did not charge out to fight Indians; they herded cattle, meticulously avoiding native territories, and soon enough they were displaced by barbed wire fencing and rail lines. “Dust and tedium was the rule of a cowboy’s work.” So what was the source of the legend? Well, there were a few names, like Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull. And John B. Omohundro. Who? Oh, sorry. He was otherwise known as Texas Jack. His name was not Jack, and he wasn’t from Texas; he was John from Virginia. But he was an integral part of the Legend, Bill Cody’s friend and equal. And he was for real. He did fight Indians on occasion, but also befriended them. He fought in the Civil War on the side of the South, and got a musket ball in his left thigh which took him out for a while. When the war ended, Jack decided to go to Texas to pursue life as a cowboy, but a storm wrecked the ship on the Florida coast, and he wound up teaching school in Florida. He soon got in trouble for teaching lies, such as that the sun is still and the earth goes around it, when anyone can see how the sun goes around the earth. So he wasn’t cut out to be a teacher—I know how that is, having once taught school myself; I moved on to writing novels and battling critics—and set off for Texas again, this time by land. He was smart and industrious, and liked to tell stories, and turned out to be good at protecting cattle from rustlers, soon achieving a reputation. One of his friends, known as California Joe, married a thirteen year old beauty, but after having four children with her concluded that the domestic life was not for him. Joe told how a man had tried to bully Texas Jack, and that man was lucky to escape with his life. Of such incidents are reputations made. When a man bragged to Wild Bill Hickock that he could kill a crow on the wing. Hickock coolly asked “Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shootin’ back? I will be.” In time Texas Jack, along with Wild Bill and others, got into acting, though he really couldn’t act. It was his reputation that sustained him, and the play was a success. A beautiful Italian actress, Giuseppina Morlacchi, played an Indian Maiden, Dove Eye, and for Jack it was love at first sight. They got married, each continuing his/her career. Years later, when Jack, a hard drinker and smoker, caught a cold that became pneumonia or maybe TB, he died, a month short of his thirty fourth birthday. His wife pressed her lips against the glass that covered his face, wept until she fainted and was carried away. She never acted again, and died six years later. So maybe the Wild West wasn’t what the movies and novels claimed, but it had its moments.

 

I read Kemper’s House, by Frank Saverio, a science fiction novel about mankind’s first discovery of intelligent life in another system. You might think this would be routine, as it is a subject of chronic interest in the genre. But only up to a point. This spaceship, with a crew of six, travels at near light speed, but the aliens are about 350 light years distant, and time dilation means that by the time they return to Earth, about 1,400 years will have passed. Their families will be long gone, and maybe their culture too. The alien culture will be more advanced than theirs, as well. So this excursion is chancy in more than one sense. Indeed, when they get there, there seems to be no civilization. Cautiously, they try to communicate, getting no answer, and finally land, finding only regressed culture. Also disturbing evidence of a dangerous predator. Would they be better off to simply go home immediately, cutting the risk? That might effectively waste the mission. Then things start getting ugly. One of their crew is torn apart, another seriously injured. They need to get out of here. Complications require them to leave two of their number behind, going home with only three. As they get ready to go, getting sealed into their pods for the trip, the woman chastely kisses the captain. That might not mean much, as they are not here for romance, but it suggested to me that back on Earth, there might be a future for them together, as co-survivors of a culture now gone. But these journeys are chancy, and she dies in the pod. Damn! Kemper still hopes to return to his house on Earth, if it’s still there. There is more, but I think it is clear that this is no rip roaring space jumping, blaster shooting, heroic escapade; it’s a sober conjecture how it might actually be, failures and all. Science fiction as it should be, but usually isn’t.

 

Eleven years ago I bought a book titled The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. This taught me the pronunciation—ek-si-JEE-sis—and meaning of the word, a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, such as the Bible. Philip Dick was a fine science fiction writer from whose novels movies have been made, mostly after he was safely dead at age 52. In fact the movie Total Recall, the first version, was made from one of Dick’s short stories. I novelized the movie script. I loved it when a fan told me that the movie was not as good as the book. Dick’s case is a pattern I hope not to follow in more than one sense. I do believe that movies will be made from my novels, but I prefer it to happen before, not after, I die. I am also trying to get as close to genius in my writing as I can without crossing the devious line between genius and madness. This book is most of a thousand pages long; I have read only ten pages, but that is enough to suggest that Dick did cross that line into madness. I feel enough of an affinity for Dick to be concerned. I may or may not have more to say about it in a future column, maybe depending on the state of my sanity. As it is, sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the madhouse that is the world.

 

A year after our move to California, MaryLee and I are still getting settled. MaryLee’s long Covid keeps her flying with an engine missing, and complications seem eager to fly in from left field. Her boxes of clothing and household goods are still largely unpacked, and her house in Tennessee burned down, throwing her into emotional chaos. She wanted to get out of Tennessee, which she managed the hard way by marrying me, but the loss of the house put her into a funk she is still struggling to climb out of. We continue to muddle along. The move interrupted my magazine subscriptions, but I do have some back issues to catch up on.

 

I continue to practice using my smartphone, not so much as a phone but exploring its other properties. I play solitaire hosted by sexy women, and free cell, and skim through the click bait articles. There is also the Pluto News. One day I remembered the last phrase of a song I heard once on the radio, decades ago, “You know that was the last thing on my mind,” sung by a woman. What was it on her mind? So I tried looking it up on the phone, and lo, got the context. “I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind; you know that was the last thing on my mind.” A misunderstanding leading to a painful breakup. I’m sorry for the breakup, but relieved to solve the mystery.

 

First a magazine I don’t subscribe to, mainly because I am trying to simplify rather than complicate my life, and magazines complicate it. The ad I received for Mother Jones indicates that it is my type. It says it is reader supported, uncensored, unafraid, not beholden to corporate interests. “After more than 300 issues, one IRS probe, and numerous lawsuits from powerful people who didn’t appreciate our reporting, we’re still independent and going strong.” Gun violence costs America $229 billion annually, more than $700 per person every year to pay for the consequences. “That’s six times what the US spends annually on foreign aid.” This says that for more than 70 years the Republican Party has stoked animus and conspiracies. In the 1950s the foe was Reds. Thereafter it was Black people demanding social justice and change. It encouraged Americans to believe the worst. Since the 1950s it has boosted extremism, prejudice, paranoia, and rage. “Fifteen states, with 18 million people combined, elect 30 GOP senators. California, with 40 million residents, elects two Democrats.” “By 2040, roughly 70 percent of the country will be represented by just 30 senators.” The super rich are getting richer. In 2020 the top 1% made 20% of national income, while the bottom 50% made 10%. I am still pondering, but this magazine is tempting.

 

THE WEEK for November 24, 2023. “Trump’s coterie has big plans for the day after inauguration, including firing federal workers en masse to replace them with MAGA true believers, weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents, and rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants.” “To say that Hamas uses civilians as shields and counts on their bloodshed to score propaganda wins is to invite ‘spurious claims of racism.’ But it’s a fact.” Polls consistently show that more than 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So some Republicans have decided that voters are the problem. The man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband had become convinced of a liberal scheme to “turn our schools into pedophile molestation factories.” I have noted how to many “conservatives” liberalism and pedophilia are synonymous. I wonder why pedophilia is so much on their minds? 180,000 people protested antisemitism in Paris, because hate crimes against Jews have soared. A page on Hezbollah, “Party of God,” based in Lebanon, whose object is to eradicate Israel. It has attacked Israel repeatedly. But the Lebanese currency has lost 90 percent of its value, and more that two thirds of its population has sunk into poverty. Hezbollah is a long term ally of Hamas, as is Iran. Meanwhile Jewish settlers in the West Bank are attacking Palestine villages, forcing out hundreds of families, and  slaughtering their farm animals. In Venezuela officials move some 300 metric tons of cocaine a year, with a street value of more than $8 billion. Nearly 10 percent of the $4.3 trillion in pandemic relief disbursed by the federal government went to scammers, or was misspent, with fraudsters using the cash to buy houses, fancy cars, an alpaca farm in Vermont, or a private island off Florida. Now antisemitism is rising in the U.S., with chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Put simply, as I interpret it, this is a push for a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews. This time it means exterminating seven million Jews, obliterating Israel. The Nazis may be gone, but their attitudes remain. Pandas have been recalled from American zoos as our relations with China have soured. Pandas are cute, but modern China isn’t. Wit & Wisdom: “Everybody laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.” British comedian Bob Monkhouse. “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.” David Bowie. Cartoon: the GOP elephant carrying a crushing weight labeled Abortion Restrictions. Ahead is a woman saying “No, you’re going to have to carry it.” I suspect that’s one of two deadly problems for that party in 2024. The other is the Trump candidacy. Syphilis has risen more that tenfold in the last decade. That’s mischief. It reminds me of the ugly joke about a woman birthing two girls and naming them siPhyllis and goNorrhea. The Euclid telescope was sent into space to explore the “dark universe.” That is dark matter and dark energy. I will be interested to see what it finds. Dark energy may exist, but to my mind dark matter is a fantasy. A black hole is a collapsed star so dense that nothing can escape it. A white hole is the opposite, pouring matter out. Do white holes exist? A book about them by Carlo Rovelli makes the case. I am skeptical. One billion dollar weather events used to occur every four months in the 1980s. Now they occur every three weeks. I fear that by the time the authorities realize that the use of fossil fuels has to stop, it will be too late. There’s too much money to be made from those fossils. It’s part of the ongoing folly of mankind. At least solar panels are being encouraged, and geothermal heat could solve the problem if it is ever allowed to. Article reprinted from The Atlantic titled “The lonely fight of the radical vegans.” “Why do the vegans always have to explain themselves to the omnivores? The omnivores, somehow, never have to explain themselves to the animals.” As a lifelong vegetarian bordering on vegan, I relate. The meat industry treats animals abominably, caging many for life, slaughtering them the moment their production of eggs or milk diminishes, making them into product machines. One animal rights group, Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, is carrying out missions to steal animals from farms and slaughterhouses and put them in sanctuaries. The country’s most progressive politicians have little or nothing to say about animal welfare, and all of them eat meat. Only five percent of Americans say they are vegetarians, and maybe one percent never eat meat. Make me a one per-center hoping for the vegan ideal. I feel that the ethical thing to do is to free the animals from this brutal oppression, which would also be great for the environment. Will it happen? I will be researching, hoping to find a way.

 

THE WEEK for March 15, 2024. Nikki Haley had to drop her race for the Republican presidential nomination after Donald Trump pretty well swept the states. “The party is now so deep in the thrall of an aspiring authoritarian that it has cast aside ‘principle, policy, and patriotism’—and lost whatever power it once had to hold him in check,” according to the New York Times. “Republicans must now decide ‘whether to support someone who would do to the country what he has already done to his party.’” It’s going to be ugly. If Trump should win the presidency, American democracy will be forfeit. Article titled “Supreme Court: Are the justices trying to help Trump?” If the trial doesn’t start until after the election, and Trump wins, he will get the charges dismissed. If it starts before the election, stalling tactics could delay it until after. Publisher Merriam Webster says “It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with.” Indeed, I was once an English teacher, and always knew this was a fake rule. As Winston Churchill put it, “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” Texas Tech defensive back Tyler Owens, a standout player, doesn’t believe in space. He says he’s real religious and so “I don’t think there’s other planets and other stuff like that.” This suggests to me that you don’t have to be smart to play football or to be religious. A MAGA candidate running for governor in North Carolina calls the covid pandemic a globalist conspiracy, and refers to gay people as maggots. Maybe he’s in the wrong race; he should be joining the Trump campaign for president. Are self driving cars the future? They are up to seven times less likely to crash than human driven cars. Yet they can behave erratically. When I experience the hi-jinx of my computer and smartphone, and MaryLee’s auto-correct or predictive typing renders her words into nonsense, I wonder. We need safeguards against machine nonsense too. I remember the saying that a person who keeps doing the same thing, over and over, expecting a different result, is crazy. But whoever said that never worked with a computer. The law still penalizes abused women who try to fight back. A woman, being weaker than her abuser, must choose her time, such as when he is sleeping, and the law says that then there is not an immediate threat. I’d like to see a device she can get free, resembling an earring or bracelet, that will record and transmit an incident of abuse as it is happening so the police can rescue her. Coupled with a female police chief who will actually do something about it. We read of people starving, but more than one billion of the world’s eight billion people are obese. We need better distribution of existing resources. No one should get obese while his neighbor starves. California authorities are seizing enough smuggled fentanyl to kill the global population twice over. Why is there such a desperate market for deadly drugs? Homo sapiens means smart man, but in some respects we are acting like idiots. A fair number of people who make over a million dollars a year do not file tax returns, thus pay nothing. Need I comment? Immigrants make up about eighteen percent of the American workforce. I’m an immigrant; I wonder whether they are being fairly treated. Young women are increasingly skewing liberal; young men conservative. As an old liberal man, I wonder about that. Wit & Wisdom: “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.” Samuel Beckett. “The U.N. was not created to take mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.” Dag Hammarskjold. It does not seem to be succeeding. Cartoon: McConnell saying “It’s time to pass the torch…” and the Trump MAGA man saying “Great! I’ve got some institutions to burn down!” as he indicates the building labeled DEMOCRACY. Ugly truth there. Very interesting lawsuit: Elon Musk sues Open AI. Musk co-founded it in 2015, left it in 2018, and now is making the case that Open AI has been “putting profit ahead of creating open-source technology that would benefit humanity.” It seems that their most advanced system. GPT-4, showed sparks of artificial general intelligence—AGI—or the ability to match or outsmart humans. When Musk left Open AI, Microsoft stepped in, and the company mission may be changing. The article says “Too many AI companies start out with promises of working for the ‘public good, only to end up falling under the sway of the tech giants.’” The goal of helping the world gives way to the lure of bigger profits. This pushes two of my buttons: helping the world, and robot consciousness. Conscious robots are crossing from my former science fiction novels to my current fantasy novels, and I have always been interested in saving the world. I will be watching with excruciating interest. Which side is Elon really on? Astronomers have spied the brightest object in the universe: a quasar 500 trillion times as luminous as our sun, powered by the fastest growing black hole ever, that devours the equivalent of one sun per day. If it were in the center of our galaxy, it would light up the sky so much that our nights would seem like twilights. It’s the most violent place in the universe, as far as we know. Metabele ants in sub-Saharan Africa practice medicine, producing antibiotics that save the lives of their colony members. Wildfire pollution is soaring, encouraged by climate change. In Europe Apple got fined $1.95 billion for abusing its position in the market for the distribution of music apps. The implication is that there is more to come. My impression is that the words “corporation” and “integrity” are like matter and antimatter, and not just in the music business. Is it time to retiree Ben Franklin? He’s on the $100 bill, which it seems is mostly used by criminals. A man adopted a warthog. Then it tried to kill him. It seems that some wild creatures just aren’t meant to be pets.

 

NEW SCIENTIST for 24 February, 2024. Is cosmic dust the key to life’s origins? Our planet is relatively poor in several elements necessary for the chemistry of life, like phosphorus and sulfur, but dust from space has more of it. Early glaciers may have caught and concentrated it, facilitating ponds of nutrients for life. So maybe we owe more to glaciers than we thought. Lady scorpions don’t mind being stung during sex. A male who can sting long and hard must have plenty of energy, which his offspring might share. Or just maybe the venom has aphrodisiac qualities? Suppose a company distills scorpion venom to make a perfume that truly turns on … never mind. Carbon dioxide is a waste product causing global warming, but now they may be able to make it more efficiently into jet fuel. Wouldn’t that be great! Jet planes that end pollution rather than contribute to it. Can deepfakes be stopped? How would you like to have a video run on TV showing you having sex with your pet dog? AI generated images can do this. Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift was featured in fake sexual images, and then she expressed support for presidential candidate Donald Trump. All AI fakes. In 2023 there were 95,000 of them. It seems that anyone can do it, and there are plenty who do. 98% are pornographic, with 99% featuring a woman’s likeness. Outlaw it? Some of the highest prevalence occurs where it is outlawed. We need a way to stop this before we truly regret it. Great apes playfully tease. Could this be the origin of human humor? Consciousness: another of my buttons. It seems that even tiny doses of LSD affect the brain. A creature called a flea toad, about the size of a pea, may be the world’s smallest vertebrate. Plant based meats are vastly less polluting, and save the lives of animals that would otherwise be slaughtered. More power to them! What happens when you put dozens of gun control activists and anti-gun-rights advocates in a room together and leave them to talk? The book Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg addresses this. The key is asking one person in each group to describe a personal challenge. Listeners asked questions and summarized what they learned. The experience of really being listened to enabled them to have honest conversations. There are different types of dialog, emotional, practical, and identity, and these need to be aligned, but connection is possible. I remember in high school I was having an animated discussion with another boy. At one point I told him I understood his position but disagreed with it. He challenged me to describe his position, so I did, and I was on target. That ended the discussion; once he saw that I did understand, he had no argument. Spot review of A City on Mars, by James Dinneen, has a key question the book covers. “For instance, any long-term human colony needs reproduction. But how well does pregnancy work in low gravity? Or sex, for that matter? Or early child development?” We don’t know. Column by Bethan Ackerley asks “What kind of life would you rather have: one with ecstatic highs and dizzying lows, or one of middling satisfaction, free from disappointment?” That makes me pause. She is reviewing the TV series Constellation. “Constellation is one of the most exasperating, incoherent shows I have watched lately.” Yet is seems that it has its points. In this issue is a ten part exploration of “Your Amazing Brain.” It’s the most complex thing we know. Does thinking hard use more energy? Not exactly. The brain accounts for around two percent of our body weight, but uses twenty percent of our resting energy. Thinking hard uses more energy in the brain region involved, but less in the other areas, so it’s about the same. Are male and female brains different? Not necessarily. Culture may account for apparent differences. Men and women are not really from Mars and Venus, respectively. Does the brain have its own microbiome? Yes, 100,000 species of microbes, a subset of around one fifth of the gut microbiome. What are brains really made of? Neurons and glia, and beyond that mind-boggling complexity. They are working on it. When is the brain at peak performance? That depends on the type of performance. Solving a math problem is one thing; laying down memories is another. Are there different states of consciousness? Patterns of electrical states constantly shift; there may be a spectrum of consciousness. We don’t yet know. Has the teenage brain evolved for a purpose? It seems to be for social adaptation. What makes some brains so creative? They tend to have more random connectivity between distant brain regions, forging their own paths. I regard myself as more creative than average, and I make odd mental connections, and I do tend to forge my own paths, sometimes getting in trouble for it. Is forgetting actually a form of learning? Yes, it seems to be, as it enables generalizing. There are times when a glut of facts gets in the way of a solution. Is the human brain really the most complex abject in the universe? There are roughly the same number of neurons in the brain as there are galaxies in the observable universe, 86 billion. More likely, the brain is run of the mill.

 

NEW SCIENTIST for 2 March, 2024. “Eating is a major contributor to two of the greatest problems humanity faces: global warming and the loss of biodiversity. Farming is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions, while the amount of land turned over to grow food for livestock leaves less space for wildlife.” If only people ate less meat! But they are eating more meat, heedless of the damage this causes. Cute picture of a Chounacops fish, deep red, black eyed, seeming to smile, called a sea toad, one of a hundred new species recently discovered off the coast of Chile. ADHD may have helped early humans to forage more effectively, by causing them to move impulsively on from a berry patch sooner, avoiding over-harvesting. My daughter Penny had ADHD, or hyperactivity; maybe she was helping nature. Does tree planting help the environment? Yes, but not as much as preventing deforestation. Two recent landers on the moon wound up lying on their sides, but still mean progress. One was by Japan, the other by a private US company. Live music triggers greater activity in the part of the brain that processes emotions. So music and emotion really are linked. They are hoping to make a very small engine powered by a single atom. Should I wish more power to them, or would that mess up the atom? Jackals may urinate on their favorite growing fruit, to stop other jackals from stealing it before it ripens. Could that be where the phrase “Piss on it!” originated? Pet dogs of various breeds can sniff out Parkinson’s disease with 86% accuracy. Death Valley has a lake, for now, as it did last year when Hurricane Hillary brought similar rainfall. An appendage to the ovaries thought to be useless turns out to maybe regulate the timing of ovulation. Nature generally does know what she’s doing, and doesn’t maintain useless body parts. This may keep tabs on the rest of the body, to be sure conditions are right for fertilization. A letter from Matthew Tucker mentions that the ideal number of close friends for good health is five, including close family. Sigh; in this age of the pandemic I don’t dare get out and about much, lest I get covid again, and my present family consists of my wife MaryLee. I’m in trouble. Letter by Steve Applegate says physicists have stalled in their search for a theory of everything because of the presumption that the universe is limited to three spacial dimensions. He says maybe they should consider the use of tesseracts, which are four dimensional cubes. They should indeed, as the universe is NOT limited to three dimensions. I believe it is generally accepted that time is the fourth dimension. Maybe it’s not spacial, but the universe is more than spacial. A book titled Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier, addresses the rising rates of mental health problems in children and teens, particularly in the US. Its subtitle is Why the kids aren’t growing up. In the past, children were often left to get bored, and punished for their errors. Don’t I know it, my childhood occurring in the 1940s. The author says that the mental health screening tests children are regularly subjected to could be causing the problems they are meant to prevent. She tells how when she took her 12 year old to the doctor with a stomach ache, he was asked questions such as whether he ever felt his family would be better off if he were dead. US schools routinely ask children if they think of cutting or burning themselves. How’s that for putting ideas in their heads? I understand that there is a woman on the internet angry with me for writing Virtual Mode, because that novel, featuring suicidally depressive fourteen year old Colene, tells of her cutting herself, the physical pain making the emotional pain fade for a few hours. That gave this person the idea. I remember a correction one girl sent me: Colene wore red bands to hide her cuts, but should have worn black, because blood dries black. I never was a suicidal girl, so got it wrong. But its a pertinent question. The rate of mental health problems is rising; why? Are therapists or realistic novelists to blame? It surely behooves us to find out. The skin is the largest organ of the body, and we need to take care of it. It is home to around a thousand species of bacteria, along with fungi and viruses. Just being touched is beneficial for mental health. Interview with Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College in London, addresses how we can become habituated to being lied to, and to misinformation. She says there is an illusory truth effect, basically when you hear something more than once, you’re more likely to believe it. That’s because repetition requires less processing; the brain cares about what is new, rather than what has always been there. The first time we lie, we don’t like it, but the more we do it, the less bad we feel about it. That explains some politicians, who seem to care about truth less than votes. One oddity is that women’s self reported happiness has gone down as they gained equal rights. That’s because now they expect more, and when they don’t get it, they’re less happy despite being better off. And people who don’t as readily habituate tend to be more creative, maybe because they question things more. Article by David Robson titled “The spiritual side of science” addresses the question of whether religious belief is better for psychological well-being than belief in science. That would be bad news for agnostics and atheists. As a lifelong agnostic, I am concerned. Fortunately it seems that science is as good as religion in this respect. For the record, I repeat my definitions: The religious theist says “There is a God, and He is my God, and all others are false.” I wonder how he knows? The atheist says “There is no god.” And how does he know? The agnostic says “The case remains as yet undecided.” But privately I strongly doubt that Heaven or Hell exist, or that there is any Afterlife. If at any time I actually meet God or Satan, or wander the world as a conscious but body-less spirit, I will consider changing my mind. That’s fair, isn’t it?

 

NEW SCIENTIST for March 9, 2024. Where did the concept of zero come from? It is theorized that it was from counting predators. How many tigers are chasing you? The number 0 is reassuring. 23andMe is the name of a new kind of medicine, precision guided to the individual, 23 being the number of pairs of chromosomes that constitute the human DNA. But the stock of the company has fallen by 96 percent. It seems that its time is not yet. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras thought that certain mathematical combinations of notes made the most pleasing chords. It seems he was wrong. We like what we like, regardless of math. A distant planet once touted as having potential for alien life now seems to be uninhabitable. I wonder if the aliens didn’t like being spied on? Chatbots seem to be better at math when instructed to answer questions in the Star Trek manner. What the Spock does that mean? Want to make friends with a dog? Follow it for fifteen minutes. Does covid-19 harm a person’s cognitive skills? There is some evidence that it does cost maybe 3 IQ points, but it’s not conclusive. I have had covid once or twice—the first case was confirmed, the second was inconclusive but similar—so if these columns or my novels seem worse than prior ones, blame that. But I suspect that advancing age is a better suspect: I am geezer age. There may be a greener way to dye denim, to cut its climate impact. Microplastics are in our drinking water, but boiling water five minutes can remove 80% of it. Good manners enables strangers to get along better, but a mannerly facade can hide immoral ends like injustice and violence. So don’t necessarily trust propriety. I speak as one who got blacklisted and generally condemned when I protested getting cheated by a popular publisher. No, I never got apologies from those who wronged me. Folk prefer not to admit that they were on the wrong side. Keep things polite, and to hell with the truth. Do I seem cynical? There’s no “seem” about it. There’s an experiment to study the elusive neutrino particle, called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE. And I thought that was a science fiction novel and movie. I wish it well, regardless. Blue eyes may be evidence for sexual selection, people being attracted to those who seem special in some way. I am blue eyed, though in my age they maybe be turning gray, like my hair and beard. A letter suggests a novel way to dispose of one’s body after death. Cremation causes air pollution, burial uses land, cannibalism is frowned on. How about donating one’s body to feet the starving polar bears? Um, interesting, but I plan to donate my body to feed a growing tree. It seems that millions of us are turning to chatbots for emotional support. Is it wise to turn for emotional support to a machine that can only pretend to care? In Xanth #50 I have, among other things, a robot who becomes conscious and really does care. I hope to explore this further in future. One thing I remember about empathy was when my wife of 63 years, Carol, died, I attended a Hospice bereavement group whose members had all experienced serious family loss. I knew virtually nothing about any of them, yet it was comforting to be there, as I knew that not one of them would say “There is no need to mope longer; smile, buck up, and get on with your life.” I knew that every one of them felt the kind of grief I did, and understood its pain. They supported me, as I supported them. For those who have not experienced the loss of a loved one, here’s a hint: you don’t necessarily want to forget and move on; you want to remember and cherish. Your beloved is not completely gone as long as you keep that memory. Yes, you need to move on, but in your own time and manner, with the memory and value of that person inside you. Even that pain of loss is a kind of comfort. Just as it should be comforting to know that when you die, your friends and family will remember and value you, at least for a while. That is your afterlife, as seen by this agnostic. Back to the robots: when they become conscious and feeling, then they may indeed be valid emotional support. My Xanth robot will be. Concussion: another name for it is mild traumatic brain injury, MTBI. This is defined as a transient impairment of cognitive function, or in English, a passing damage to the mind. Maybe pain, memory loss, dizziness, sleeplessness, depression. There can be long concussion, with an extended period of problems. Moral: avoid head bangs; the mischief may be more than temporary.

 

NEW SCIENTIST for March 16, 2024. Will woolly mammoths be resurrected soon? Something similar may now be feasible, with genetic editing. My novel Balook explored something similar, with the regeneration of the largest land walking mammal ever. If Hollywood ever wants to make a truly evocative movie…sigh. Walking 10,000 steps a day really can make us healthier. That would be a scant six miles, or about two hours. I walk for exercise, but not nearly that much. Maybe I should up my program. A firm called D-Wave has a quantum computer that can solve problems with real-world applications that might take regular computers millions of years. Okay, can it solve the problem of man’s ongoing destruction of the world as we used to know it? That’s the real-world application that is essential. I fear it can’t. Article based on the book Why We Remember, by Charan Ranganath. Memory really can’t be separated from our emotions, drives, attention, decisions, creativity, curiosity, and social habits. There are different types of memory that work together to enable us to function. Memories are always creations, never either true or false. The review says that if you read only one book about memory, this is the one. Book: Anne Bot, by Sierra Greer. Anne is a robot, a beautiful sex toy designed to pass as human. She is sentient, that is conscious, so as to please him better. The way he treats her would be considered abusive if she were alive. At one point they even see a couples therapist together. This interests me; I may have to buy and read this novel. One of my own novellas, To Be A Woman, part of a larger volume The Metal Maiden, features a sex bot who becomes conscious and sues to be accorded the rights of a person. When she thinks all is lost, she breaks down in tears, and in that absolutely human reaction she wins her case. My assumption is that in the future it will be robots who have to fight desperately for their rights, just as in the past it has been people of color and women, and at present it is animals and the poor. If an objective third party considered the merits of our human species, what would it conclude? Article by David Robson titled “To leap or not?” starts with the card game of blackjack, where the object is for your hand to add up to 21. Do you stick with your existing hand, or gamble on being dealt a new card that might put you over and out? Life may be like that. Do you settle for what you have, or gamble for more, and maybe lose what you have? If you settle, you may live and die an impoverished nonentity; but if you gamble, you may become a homeless street wanderer. I gambled on becoming a pro writer, and that led to formidable complications, like being cheated blacklisted, and condemned, but in the end it won me reasonable fame and fortune. But the odds of that kind of success are about one in a hundred, so it’s not a recommended gamble. This article says there are sound ways to decide whether to accept what we have or take a chance on what might be a better option. Oh? I could have used that information half a century ago. This discusses the aversion bias. Folk don’t want to risk what they have for the chance to have more. Suppose you have been given $100, with the opportunity to invest it in a new company. There’s a 50 percent chance that this will earn you an additional $150. but if the company fails, you lose it all. Most folk prefer not to risk it. That’s why most folk are nothing much. Then there’s the sunk cost effect. If you pull out, you’ll lose what you have invested, so you stay in, and maybe lose more. Another is the status quo bias, to favor your current situation over a change. In isolation, these biases can seem trivial, but over a lifetime they can stifle us. There’s a thought experiment: a web site was set up wherein people could describe a major quandary, such as whether to move to a new house, quit their job, propose marriage, break up with a partner, start a business, or adopt a child. Toss a virtual coin. Heads, make the big change. Within a year that coin had been tossed more than 22.000 times. “Heads” folk were 25% more likely to go for the change. Whatever the coin advised, the participants were much happier for it. So what’s the answer when you face a crisis of decision? Psychological distancing, such as imagining you are advising a close friend in a similar dilemma. That gives you a wider perspective. Look at the bigger picture. So what did MaryLee and I do when fate gave us the chance to move from backwoods Florida to metropolitan California? We grabbed it. Megaprojects that could save the world. This is one of my buttons. I do want to do my bit to help save the world, despite my lingering question whether it is worth saving, considering the follies of our species. If things continue as they are, the roaches will inherit our cities, just as the inconsequential birds and mammals and fish inherited the world when the dominant dinosaurs got smited from heaven. So do we take the gamble and try to change course, or do we settle for the disastrous status quo? Here are some options. 1. Launch a solar power station into space. Solar power is a great choice, but it doesn’t work well by night or when the sky is cloudy. A six mile wide solar panel in geostationary orbit—that is, it stays the same place in the sky—could produce enough energy to supply ten billion people at six times the current per capita level. That would solve the energy problem. So why not do it? It would be expensive in money and pollution, taking time for the benefit to eliminate the cost. 2. Build a set of energy islands to support vast wind farms. Wind is intermittent, but widely spaced islands could tap the wind where it is. That energy could be used to refine hydrogen, which could power anything else. Why not? It would be expensive. 3. Stabilize the Doomsday Glacier. That’s the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. Since 2000 it has lost more than a trillion tons of ice. If it fails, there will be a widespread melt, maybe enough to raise global sea levels 15 feet. Coastal cities like New York would be threatened. But it will be expensive. 4. Regreen the Sinai peninsula. Once upon a time Sinai, between Egypt and Arabia, was a subtropical paradise. It had rivers, forests, and grasses. But ten thousand years ago the hills turned brown, the rivers dried up, and dusty sand took over. Probably because of human intervention, felling trees and grazing cattle. But to regreen it would require a lot of fresh water. How to get that? Maybe high altitude fog nets to condense water for reservoirs. 5. Suck up 80 megatons of CO₂ from the air each year. We need to stop polluting the air, oh, yes, but we need to get yesterday’s pollution the h3ll out. This is hugely more than we’ve done before. But, again, it will be expensive. Psychedelic party drug ketamine is being repurposed as a therapy. Is this risky? Lines of it are being snorted to produce a euphoric dreamlike state often coupled with hallucinations, out of body sensations, and sometimes complete sensory detachment. Advocates of this therapy point to a growing mental health crisis, with almost a billion people affected by mental health issues worldwide. Regular treatments for depression can have unwanted side effects. But the addictive nature of ketamine makes it chancy.

 

NEW SCIENTIST for March 23, 2024. Article by Alex Wilkins titled “Doing away with dark matter.” A potential new theory of gravity that allows space and time to vary erratically could do away with the need for dark matter. Galaxies spin faster than they should without hurling stars into the void, so hidden matter could provide the gravity to hold them. I think that physicists just don’t understand gravity as well as they think they do. It’s like a child closing his eyes and thinking that because he can’t see out, he must be invisible. So far, science hasn’t caught up with all my insights. So is this the answer? The leading alternative is called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but that isn’t perfect either. So they are working on this new theory, but it hasn’t clarified yet. The US computing firm Nvidia has announced an AI superchip for training artificial intelligence models that is the most powerful yet. Will it do for a conscious lady robot? Stay tuned. Recycled wood can be turned into an “ink” for 3D printing to make furniture and other things. Should we eat snakes? I won’t, because I’m a vegetarian, but for the rest of you carcass consumers it seems that pythons convert food to meat more efficiently than other livestock and can be fed on waste meat. So maybe it makes sense to eat them instead of cows. They taste like chicken. Reminds me of a parody song: “If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a snake.” Genetic technology could wipe out superweeds, facilitating gardening. One version causes weeds to have only male plants, so they die out in a generation. I hope an alien culture doesn’t use that on us, so there would be no human females. Women can be frustrating in diverse ways, but we do need them. Are there UFOs? An investigation reveals that most are either a satellite or the planet Venus. Right. I’m agnostic about God, ghosts, and UFOs. The credulous rest of you can believe what you want to. Article by Eric Schwitzgebel titled “Strange…but true?” addresses the weirdness of reality. Are there multiple realities, so that a number of you are reading these words, some a bit ahead, some behind you? We don’t know, but it could be. Then there’s panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, rather than something knew that arises only when matter is combined the right way. You know, such as being formed into a human brain. Then the question of whether we are actually living in a computer simulation. Can we prove that we are not? And an interview on aging, Graham Lawton talking with Venki Ramakrishnan. Our life expectancy has doubled over the past 150 years, but the effort to extend live continues. One avenue is telomere loss. Telomeres are the ends of our DNA strands. When those ends are lost, the life processes are in trouble. Can that be fixed? Another avenue is cell suicide, called apoptosis. Can that be stopped? Well, I understand cancer stops it. Hmm. It may be that we should simply accept mortality as part of the grand scheme of things. For one thing, extended longevity contributes to overpopulation. There may still be volcanoes that spew out diamonds. The vast majority of diamonds are more than a billion years old. They are formed deep in the earth, and brought to the surface via weird kimberlite volcanoes that are not at all common today. Why aren’t humans hairy all over, like other primates? Because when they started hunting on the savanna they got dangerously hot. I understand we actually have the most efficient cooling in the animal kingdom. Bare skin plus sweat makes us supreme.

 

I have more magazines, but this is enough for this column. The columns are now five behind, but there’s always the faint hope that the clogs in the pipeline can be cleared .