A Devilishly Smart Pope

A DEVILISHLY SMART POPE

One of the books I'm reading now is John D. Barrow's 'The Book of Nothing'. The subject is  a look at the concept of 'nothing', the void, emptiness, zero, the vacuum and so on. There's actually quite a bit to say about nothing, and book ranges from a history of the mathematical sign for zero, through the 'philosophic concept' of nothingness, to the idea of the vacuum in physics, its explanation by the 'ether' and the eventual overthrow of that concept. Temperatures (absolute zero) and the place of the vacuum in quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology come on stage, and the book ends with a return to the philosophic concept itself. Yes, quite complex, and I've barely gotten to chapter 2. Nice to have a roadmap to a blank space. I'll be reviewing the book when done.

But one of the matters that did come up was the story of Pope Sylvester II, one of the few admirable holders of the keys of Peter in the Middle Ages. This is a story appealing enough to shove its way to the front of the 'Molly Line'. Sylvester II was born Gerbert de Aurillac (945 - 1003). He reigned as Pope from 999 to 1003. Yes the Pope in the Chair during the turn of the millennium. The world didn't end, and Gerbert/Sylvester was definitely one of the more capable Popes of the age. A lot of his accomplishments were political and hardly bear mention here. Defending the property of the Church. Playing off one ruler against another though he was usually in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor of the time.  The politics of Italy at the time were particularly chaotic, and once both he and the Emperor had to flee Rome during one of the revolts. He even tried to reform the Church's organization and reduce abuses such as simony, concubinage and nepotism. This was an Herculean task, and even with the assistance of St. Jude (the patron saint of the impossible) the Church remained just about as corrupt as always. He did, however, succeed in significantly increasing the Church's title holdings. Maybe this goal was in direct contradiction to the idea of making the Church into a more 'Holy' outfit. He also played a major role in the Christianization of Eastern Europe, appointing Metropolitans for both Poland and Hungary, and in the later case naming that country as a 'Kingdom'. Thus the Crown of Hungary became dependent on the Papacy.


His political accomplishments were minor compared to his intellectual contributions to European culture. He had early on spend considerable time as an envoy to the far more civilized Muslim states of southern Spain, and he turned his natural curiosity to good effect there, absorbing much of the culture of Andalucía. When he returned to France he was appointed head of education for the Archdiocese of Rheims, and from there he significantly elevated the clerical level of education throughout the French Kingdom.

 When his patron died he was considered the natural successor, but the Capetan monarchy had other ideas, and a relative of the King was appointed in his stead even though Gerbert was a supporter of Hugh Capet whose reign marked the end of the Carolingian dynasty. Barrow has this matter somewhat confused as he lists this Episcopal position without mentioning that Gerbert's appointment was overthrown. Consistent with the political level of the time the King's appointee was later removed because of suspicion of treason to his sponsor. Gerbert who initially was himself accused of treason to the House of Capet was reappointed, but this was challenged and his appointment declared invalid. When he did finally become Pope he pretty well washed his hands of the matter by declaring his competitor as the legitimate Archbishop. Barrow also confuses another appointment of his, as Archbishop of Ravenna, supposing him to be the 'Abbot' of Ravenna. All this is quite forgivable as the politics of the time, clerical and lay, were by their very nature confusing.

Gerbert was lauded for his scholarly contributions in a number of fields. He became the tutor of both Emperors Otto II and his son Otto III, and, as mentioned above, he was elevated to the Papacy with the support of the latter. Gerbert was a true polymath. He was the accepted authority in the liberal arts in his day and a major influence on theology. He was also something of an engineer, designing a hydraulic organ that didn't require air to continually be pumped in as it played. He is also credited with advances in the art of clock making due to one which he designed for the Cathedral of Magdeburg. Even this is confused. Some sources such as the 'Catholic Encyclopedia' say that he was the inventor of the pendulum clock. Others say that his clock was mechanical but weight driven rather than using a pendulum. Still others say that his clock was actually simply a sundial. It was, however, in the field of science and mathematics that he made his greatest contributions.

Gerbert was credited with a number of innovations. He introduced the abacus to Europe, and also the use of the Arabic/Indian number/decimal system. Both were necessary foundations for the later rise of commercial enterprises in the Renaissance. Hard to do proper accounting with Roman numerals. Not that they were always appreciated. In 1299 the decimal system was outlawed in Florence supposedly because it was more vulnerable to fraud. The worry about this matter delayed the adoption of decimal numbers in northern Europe until the sixteenth century. For Gerbert, however, they were a Godsend, and he was the foremost expert on mathematics, geometry and astronomy of his day. Much of this was based on what he had learned in southern Spain even though he was creative enough in his own right.

He is credited with the reintroduction of the 'armillary sphere' to western Europe. This is a 3D model of the heavens, and fitted with viewing tubes it was an early prototype of the telescope. It should be noted that such a sphere would imply that the Earth itself was a sphere. Not that the idea of a flat Earth was universal in Medieval times, but it was common enough even though the use of spheres such as this proliferated.

Barrow's book corrected a misconception of my own, one that I had held for more than a few years. I knew that Sylvester II was a remarkably educated and knowledgeable man well ahead of his time. I also knew that one of the medieval Popes had been dug up from his grave and the corpse put on trail. I'd always assumed that the uncommunicative defendant was Sylvester. During his lifetime and after his death rumours circulated that he was in league with the Devil, that he had even constructed a bronze head that would answer questions posed to it. Sort of an early robot I guess. I assumed that this was the reason for the exhumation. Wrong I was. The corpse was that of one Pope Formosus, and the charges were much more mundane. After the guilty verdict was pronounced the hapless cadaver was chopped to pieces, burnt and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. That will teach him.

The accusations of witchcraft would certainly be a likely medieval explanation for Sylvester's brilliance, but no - he stayed in the ground. Not that he rested easily though. The legends of his life followed him into the grave, and typically they are also confused. One legend says that when a Pope is due to die that Sylvester's bones rattle in the tomb. Another says that the walls of the crypt weep on the sad occasion. I guess there's no reason they can't both be right.

EVIDENCE ON THE EVOLUTION OF SNAKES

     Snakes belong to the suborder Serpentes in the order Squamata (the scaled reptiles). There has been a considerable controversy over their evolutionary origin. The two basic theories are 1)they evolved from terrestrial burrowing reptiles and 2)that they evolved from aquatic reptiles and are closely related to the extinct mosasaurs. In both cases the loss of the legs would aid rather than inhibit mobility. The paleontological evidence is equivocal. In 1997 Michael Caldwell of the University of Edmonton reported a 100-million-year-old fossil of an aquatic snake that retained its hind legs. In contrast others reported a 90-million-year-old fossil of a terrestrial snake that also retained vestigial legs. Molecular studies find little similarity between snakes and living mosasaur relatives such as the Komodo Dragon.

     In a recent brief report in Science Magazine (Science 8 November 2013: Vol. 242 no 6159 p683a- available behind a paywall at Science ) a novel way to approach the question was described. At the 73rd annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology researcher Hong-yu Yi told of how she looked at previously ignored evidence - the anatomy of the inner ear. She CT-scanned the area in question in 10 modern snakes, both aquatic and terrestrial. She also look at 9 modern lizards for comparison.

     In aquatic species the semicircular canal of the ear protruded relatively far from another local structure, the vestibule. The canal protruded far less in land dwelling snakes and lizards. The difference is because of the relative freedom of head movement of the aquatic species.

     She then scanned the preserved skull of a 85-million-year-old fossil snake called Dinilsia. It fell within the terrestrial range. While the evidence isn't definite (criticisms were voiced at the meeting) it adds weight to the hypothesis that the ancestors of snakes were land-dwellers.

Measuring ghosts

MEASURING GHOSTS
     A recent article in Science Translational Medicine asks the question "Can We Measure Autism ?" To my mind this begs the question, "is there really something called "autism" that we should be trying to measure ?". The authors Isaac S. Kohane and Alai Eran inadvertently make the case in the negative. They first of all note the controversy that recent changes in the "psychiatric Bible", the DSM, have provoked. To their credit they mention the "changes in funding" behind some of the debate, though they stop short of a robust criticism of the "mental illness complex" as a money making industry. They also mention how the DSM classifications "strike at the heart of our own identities as autonomous human beings" without going on to criticize the whole enterprise as a method whereby some people exercise power over others. Finally they admit the obvious, that mental health "diseases" simply don't have the "robust and definitive" criteria that is demanded in other fields of medicine.

     The authors, however, are reformers rather than abolitionists. They lay out a series of criteria for diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (the present fashionable name). These would include 1)agreement of the key features of a disorder/disease, 2)agreement on how such features are to measured clinically and 3)a pathway from such measurements to a clinical label that provides useful information on both prognosis and treatment, including estimates of the effectiveness of such treatment. They admit that, "Until recently, ASD diagnoses did not meet most of these criteria.".

     Are the more "recent" criteria any better ? The authors go on to honestly admit that even "expert" (let alone the way that autism is usually diagnosed) ways of diagnosing (labelling ?) autism are wildly variable, and they admit the possibility and even likelihood "do not impart sufficient diagnostic or prognostic accuracy to be clinically useful". Mind you these are the efforts of the recent experts. They also admit the "remarkable individual differences" in response to such interventions. Without, of course, ever invoking the need for evidence based medicine. What is the natural course of the so-called disease if people don't work on it and its carrier ? What is the natural rate of recovery ?

     The authors mention the large body of research in real scientific fields about the supposed causes of "autism", and they edge close to saying that supposed "co-morbidities" may in  fact reflect that autism is, in fact, many different things masquerading under a label that is-my opinion- financially convenient for a large number of "people manipulators". They also state that verifying such research will require a much larger data analysis than has been done to date. The authors have great hopes that the diagnosis of "autism" will be improved through a thorough analysis and combination of the objective signs being investigated (as opposed to the subjective way that the label is presently applied). Their hopes are that coming to a diagnostic decision about autism will more closely resemble real medicine like the diagnosis of heart disease where many lines of evidence are considered. They do, however, admit reality, that "the multimodal approach remains untested".

     Kohane and Eran end their editorial with their vision of a wide data connection net that might actually make autism diagnosis an objective and useful enterprise. They, as reformers, make their bows to the various institutions which presently profit from autism - "research, clinical care, school, home". After mentioning holy four they give an afterthought to "individuals, with their consent". The mind boggles at the thought of a child or adolescent facing such a gathering of power having enough will and guile to escape their kindly embrace without bringing down the inevitable punishment hidden behind the mask of caring. It is significant that they end their essay by calling for data sharing amongst the holy four. The "patient" is left out of the loop here.

     I have to admit that the reforms being proposed can seem quite attractive. They are, however, fitted into a mindset that accepts both the power of this branch of the psychiatric industry and some underlying reality to the label presently being used. While not being an expert I can read the studies being done and recognize some glaring problems with them. An historical scepticism seems in order. I have an old medical book from the 1930s in my library that parses out over 20 different forms of the mental disease called "masturbation". The idea that there was no such disease would have seemed perverse (pun !) to the author. Nowadays the author himself would be the perverse one.

     Psychology and psychiatry are not sciences in any non-ideological sense of the term beyond some rather basic findings. These are where real science is done in these disciples. The rest is very much smoke and mirrors, the smoke coming from the burning of huge piles of public money and small piles of private money spent by those who want to fill their time with useless and usually painful pursuits. The way I see it "autism" is very much like the label "schizophrenic". Both labels conceal a reality of many, many, many different real diseases under a useless generalization. I don't doubt that both schizophrenics and autistics contain large populations that do have legitimate diseases, but the popularity of a catch-all label impedes both diagnostic and therapeutic efforts to deal with these matters. For instance many labelled "autistic" may indeed have gastrointestinal upsets. BUT giving them a secondary diagnosis of autism means that the real problem remains unaddressed. The signs become the focus rather than the cause.

     Ignoring real diseases and "treating" things that are nothing but misplaced words is like putting problems down to demonic possession and imagining that rituals of exorcism are some sort of "treatment". There is finally the question of whether there is anything wrong at all in at least some cases. I'm not of the opinion that labels like autistic or schizophrenic don't disguise at least some real medical problems- many not one. There is, however, the example of masturbation that I mentioned above. In that case the whole intricate system of medical (and popular) superstition was utterly false. How much of what is now described by psychiatric labels is also totally imaginary ? How much is also much better dealt with by literature or philosophy rather than "medicine" ?

     That is the sort of question I would like to leave with the reader. That is why I think that attempts to reform a modern witchhunt by increased rigour are very much asking us to "measure ghosts".

HUMOUR:

YOU JUST CAN'T WIN:

Click the graphic for better viewing.

HUMOUR:

BACKASSWARDS:

WORK AND HEALTH:

SHIFT WORK AND CANCER:

Molly originally came upon this little gem in, of all places, the Winnipeg Sun. The Sun Media group took up this story and ran with it, adding their own simplifications, but also doing a great public service despite themselves by making people aware of epidemiological research on "carcinogenic work patters" even if in a distorted way. The original story came from the Associated Press, and slightly less sensationalist news outlets such as the Toronto Star reported the story under headlines such as 'WHO to list night shift as probable carcinogen'. Others went with far more dramatic headlines, and it seems that the story has been picked up by every news outlet worldwide. None of the mass media stories give the reader any directions to the original source of the story so that one could read and judge on one's own. Molly will here, but first it must be noted that the whole idea behind this story is hardly "news" if that term is to mean a truly new and startling development. Researchers have been at work for decades now ever since R. G. Stevens first proposed his hypothesis of an hormonal link between breast cancer and night work back in 1987 (R.G. Stevens, 'Electric power use and breast cancer', American Journal of Epidemiology 1987; 125 : 556-61). For a good summary of the evidence regarding breast cancer see 'Shift Work and Breast Cancer' (a 2003 report by the British Institute of Cancer Research in a downloadable pdf format). Most research has focused on such common cancers as breast cancer and prostrate cancer (see 'Shift Work Raises Prostrate Cancer Risk' at Medical News Today in 2006), though there have also been studies of the epidemiology of bowel cancer in relation to shift work.

The field is actually quite mature, and an epidemiological connection between shift work and a higher risk for at least the more common forms of cancer is pretty well established. the presumed mechanism is via disruption of circadian rhythms and a consequent disruption of the production of melatonin as well as the deregulation of circadian period genes involved as either cancer suppressors or promoters. Lack of melatonin also leads to a degree of immunosuppression which, if you believe the 'immune surveillance' theory of tumour suppression, would predispose the person or animal to malignant tumours. The latter is interesting, as animal(rodents) models show a "major" increase in tumour development by various experimental models using various ways of disrupting circadian rhythms.

The original consensus paper upon which the various recent mass media reports are based was produced by an October 2007 meeting of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO) held in Lyon France. The full monographs are published in the December edition of The Lancet Oncology. Molly wants to make it known to her readers that the original summary is available free of charge online by subscribing to The Lancet online. By doing this (even without the "premium subscription") you can see the justification for the mass media reports with your own eyes. The summary notes that 15-20% of the population of Europe and the USA is engaged in shiftwork that involves nightwork, a horrifying statistic to Molly's beady little feline eyes. It should be noted that it isn't "nightwork" by itself that is so carcinogenic but rather nightwork that is truly "shift"-work in that the times of work (and therefore sleep) are regularly shifted such that the worker is periodically taken "off-balance" in a biological (and chronological) sense. Being the classic 'night-owl', Molly would see very little problem with getting her melatonin fix by sleeping from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, but she would go nuttier than a fruitcake having to endure the "switches" in time such as people like nurses or railway workers do.

Molly highly recommends that her readers consult the original source given above if they have any interest in what the mass media has reported recently. In their report the study basically says that "shift-work" will be classified as a "probable" cancer risk. This may seems trifling to those unaccustomed to the terminology. There are actually very few "definite" risks for cancer. Most of the risks that people associate with that term are "probable" at best. The term "probable" carries a lot more weight in this context than it does in ordinary language. I also urge the reader to consult the report/monograph for the 2/3rds of it that were left out of the mass media reports. Working as either a painter or a firefighter are also recommended to be classified as "probable cancer risks". This may seem to be common sense, a hell of a lot more common and sensible than what people often go on about in their cancer fears. Yet the burden of proof is such that there are dozens (hundreds ???) of legal cases ongoing today about such workplace cancers and the rights of the workers to compensation. Looks like the lawyers for the plaintiffs will have the heavy cannons on their side in the near future.

Would such a thing as "night-work" exist in a society where workplaces were controlled democratically ? To my mind the answer is an obvious "yes". There are some services that very plainly have to be carried out 24/7, though gas bars and 7/11s are probably not amongst them. Would there be, however, any such workplaces where people were arbitrarily shifted from one work/play/sleep cycle to another ? Once more, to my mind the answer is obvious- NO. Seems very much like cruel and unusual punishment to me. The cruelty of such arrangements may not be as obvious and immediate as those of extended hours of work, but the results can be even more detrimental. Have a look at the Lancet article referenced above.

BURMA:

THE EYE IN THE SKY THAT WATCHES THE BURMESE JUNTA:

One of the sidebars to the recent events in Burma was the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had been able to use satellite imaging to document some of the ongoing human rights abuses in that country. This was carried out by the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program in association with various organizations concerned about human rights in Burma. Satellite images were provided by two private firms, GeoEye Inc. and DigitalGlobe. The Science and Human Rights program has previously used such technology to document government atrocities in Zimbabwe and Darfur. This data analysis focused on the eastern regions of Burma where the military has had a longstanding genocidal policy of attempting to clear the area of various ethnic minorities. The AAAS found substantial evidence of village destruction, military activities, forced relocation and refugee migration to neighbouring Thailand. Read THIS PRESS RELEASE for the full story as well as a link to the full (17Mb-shudder) report in pdf format. There are also links to previous reports on Darfur and Zimbabwe.

It is at least a small comfort that satellite technology means that it has become harder and harder for governments to hide their atrocities.

MORE FROM THE HARPER INDEX:

There's a couple of new and interesting articles over at the Harper Index, a site devoted to keeping a close eye on the ever devious actions of the federal Harper government. Coming up first on bat is...

CUTS "DISHEARTENING" AS PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH SHIFTS QUIETLY INTO PRIVATE HANDS:

SCIENCE ROLE OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DIMINISHING-SOMETHING BREWING AT ENVIRONMENT CANADA:

As part of its long standing initiative to "save money" by government cuts and spend more money by handing out freebies to the private sector that the Conservatives hope to bribe into supporting them the Harper government has quietly been cutting back and planning to transfer science based government initiatives into private hands. From layoffs at the National Research Council, through cuts to 17 federal departments and agencies to possible closure of five federal labs the writing is on the wall as the Harpercrats bundle up their gifts for their friends in the corporate world. Some excerpts from the article...

"The federal government may be quietly privatizing and out-sourcing basic research needed for public policy and safety. Federal science staff have been laid off as a result of last March's federal budget, and 17 federal departments and agencies have been told to slice five percent of expenditures, according to the association that represents federal professionals....

"Along with the research council layoff, she(the association spokeswoman-MM) said she is hearing rumours that something is brewing at Environment Canada. With the bad press the government is having on environmental issue, you'd think that would be the last place for a bunch of cuts. She says public servants are being asked to do more with less and be more efficient, but we have no more room to maneuver other than cutting programs or doing half-assed jobs....

"Five federal labs have been identified by the panel for possible closure, says Demers. Is this just the tip of the iceberg? She asks. There is a lot of concern and worry about where this government is going in terms of increasing cash flow for other priorities. You do not need to be a rocket scientists to figure out where their other priorities are, she said, indicating she meant the military."

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AT THE HARPER INDEX

KYOTO UNDERMINED BY RHETORIC AT APEC-GREENPEACE:

Meanwhile Harper got his chance to "shine" at the recent APEC summit in Sydney Australia. Too bad it was such a dim light, much outshone by the television comedy team that snuck a member disguised as Uncle Osama Bin Ladin past most of the summit's security in a motorcade disguised by Canadian flags. Harper's main contributions to the summit were his fawning echoes of Bush's calls to abandon the Kyoto Protocol in favour of the American President's "aspirational goals" (yes, Molly "aspires" to win the lottery as well), and his similar support for Bush's proposal to "repatriate" nuclear waste to the countries where it was mined. Not where it was used. This sets Canada up to be the nuclear dumping ground for the American nuclear industry.

Some excerpts from the article...

"Rather than cleaning up Canada's and the world's environment, this week's APEC summit may have been carefully crafted to move Canada away from Kyoto commitments and closer to importing massive amounts of radioactive waste from abroad....

"Martin says Bush, Howard and Harper have agreed on an approach intended to undermine the Kyoto protocol by moving away from hard targets to what they call 'aspirational goals', which typically mean intensity based target. Looking at the example of Alberta, which adopted intensity based target in 2002, he says,"It's very clear that you can have a reduction in intensity while still having dramatic absolute increases in emissions". The efforts to undermine Kyoto coincide with pushes for so-called 'clean coal' technology and nuclear energy by the leading producers and users of these technologies, including Australia, Canada and the US."

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AT THE HARPER INDEX

THE BEST OF THE BLOGS:

Getting back to the post vacation "normality" on this blog I continued the never-ending feature of "The Best of the Blogs". Today's item is from the letter "H":

The Here and Elsewhere blog has a link to the author's 'On the DL:Power, Politics and Sport' which has now been reprinted in the 'Quarterly Review of Popular Culture'. Lottsa connections here.

The Home Schooled blog by Rolfe Schmidt has a lot of interesting comment on science. Rolfe has commented previously on this blog about science. Some of his musings include 'Teaching High School Science' and 'The Truth is There'. Much food for thought.

Finally, the left libertarian blog Human Iterations has a screed on language, including his way of decribing a free market as a "freed market" to differentiate left libertarianism from so-called anarchocapitalism with its "free market". Lots more there about how to describe certain things with certain terms. Good lesson on rhetoric in the classic sense.

SOURCES IN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY :

Molly realizes that many readers will probably be unfamiliar with the discipline of 'evolutionary psychology', something that Molly referred to in her last post and in several previous posts. I've added an excellent reference to what is a wealth of sources under the Scientific Links section. Evolutionary Psychology Sources is part of the Open Source Directory that hopes to compile useful and informative references to a wide number to different subjects. The latter has also been added to Molly's links under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. As a source of information the OSD outperforms the Wikipedia in giving access to more "original" sources that the Wikipedia usually does. Have a look at these references if you are either interested in evolutionary psychology or in many other matters.

EGALITARIAN MOTIVES IN HUMANS:

By Christopher T. Dawes, James H. Fowler, Richard McElraeth and Oleg Smirnov. Nature: 446, April 12,2007, Issue 7137, pp 794-796.

The authors of this paper begin by introducing the question they wish to answer ie,

"Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behavior has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear; punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be seperated from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we created an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others' incomes at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behavior to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strong;y influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviors, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity, and , hence, cooperation in humans."

Strong reciprocity is the tendency of social organisms to not just cooperate between kin, where it can be explained by relatively simple calculations of genetic similarity or beween unrelated individuals where there is expectation of reciprocity- mutual altruismirect reciprocity - the effect of "reputation" amongst the group. It is the tendency to cooperate/reward and to punish non-cooperators even when there is no expectation of reciprocity and when both the reward and the punishment are costly. Groups that evolve a tendency towards strong reciprocity enhance cooperation within the group by this mechanism. Not only is cooperation rewarded, but defection, the "free riders" are punished. Both mechanisms are prior to any laws or even customs amongst those animals which have culture, but they influence the direction that customs evolve towards.

The authors of this paper criticize other experiments in the "public goods" set of experimental economics "games" as being unable to differentiate " cooperative norm enforcement" from the "egalitarian motive". The experimental design that they have set up supposedly eliminates any "cooperative norm". The subjects were randomly divided into experimental groups of 4 people and just as randomly assigned a computer generated "income". They were allowed to see the results for the three other anonymous people in their group and were given the opportinity to give either "positve" tokens increasing another person's income or "negative" tokens decreasing them. Giving positive tokens increased the recipient's income by three tokens and decreased the giver's by one. Similarily, giving a negative token decreased the punished person's income by three tokens but decreased that of the punisher by only one. After each round, for a total of five rounds per session,participants were randomized into new groups of four in each round of a session None would be in the same group again and this was made plain to the participants. Evolution of cooperation was impossible.

Yet, income alteration was common in the experiment even though self interest would say that the best strategy is to never do it. 68% of participants reduced another player's income at least once, 28% did it at least 5 times and 6% did it ten times or more. Similarily, 74% of subjects increased other players' incomes at least once, 33% did it five times or more and 10% did it 10 times or more. The results of the game clustered around a tendency of subjects to attempt to bring the random incomes towards an arithmetic mean. The tendency to engage in this behavior did not decline over time as subjects would supposedly learn that it decreased their individual income- something that they were informed about in the beginning but might take some time to "sink in". Neither was the tendency to give negative or positive tokens influenced by the actions of other players towards a subject in previous rounds of the game.

Further details of the experiment can be seen in the apper cited above. The authors conclude that they have demonstrated an "egalitarian tendency" seperate from other mechanisms of reciprocity that "cause individuals to engage in costly acts that promote equitable resource distribution", the Kropkonian idea of "Justice" (see Ethics by Peter Kropotkin). They admit that "concerns for equality are clearly not the only motivation for human behavior" in the context of "public goods games"that attempt to model human social behavior.

Now, Molly would not be displeased at all if the authors' contention were true, but she is of the opinion that they have failed to prove their point. The first thing is that such an experiment should be repeated across various cultures as other experiments concerning cooperation in public goods gams have been. Those experiments have shown a wide variation between cultures in terms of the two "arms" of strong reciprocity, that of reward and that of punishment. The differences do not correlate to any "mode of production" and the two arms may vary randomly between cultures. Strong rewarders may be either strong or weak punishers and vive versa. Like any other aspect of human sociobiology the tendency to engage in what some have called "the evolution of spite" is "permissive" rather than "proscriptive". The "phenotype" will exhibit varying degrees of "penetrance" of the "genotype". Does the frequency of "spiteful" and "emphatic" acts vary significantly across different cultures ? Still an open question.

Second, and connected with the first caveat, the students that the experimenters recruited as their "experimental animals" came from a rather homogenous social group- undergraduate students at the University of Davis, California. They came to the experiment with a rather narrow spread of social attitudes towards equality, empathy and spite already fully packed into their mental baggage compartment. Even though the experimenters think that they have isolated a "pure" egalitarian motive the reader is invited to imagine how much different the results would have been if these students came from a culture that strongly disapproved of spite or one that considered the "gifts" to be degrading to the recipent.

So, in Molly's mind the results are suggestive but not yet definitive. It would be very pleasing to think that there is an internal "hard-wired" propensity for people to automatically disaprove of and try to reduce inequality. Certainly experiments in Communist dictatorship where inequality was in fact retained while being denied by a massive effort of propaganda show that people can pick up on the obvious fact despite being lied to by the best liars human history has ever seen. It also shows that this inequality was generally resented,particularily as it hardened into caste differences that reduced social mobility. This is also evidence for the sort of thing that the authors suggest, but ,like their work, it is not yet proof. Molly looks forward to the replication of this experiment (the authors' not the Communists') under different conditions.

WHAT MOLLY MEANS:

Molly is in the middle of another "hit blitz" vis-a-vis her posts on the Menu Foods recall issue. What Molly has tried to do in this matter is to be as objective as possible and give the most appropriate references for both the public and her veterinary colleagues. My objectivity doesn't detract from my "anarchist" views because I believe that "the truth" is an anarchist value, and that ANY political view has to be congruent with reality or it is of no value. Molly is critical of the centralization of the pet food industry, just as she is critical of any other centralization. She points out the problems of "globalization" in that the imports of gluten from across the world affects pets (and perhaps humans) here and across the world, and she points out the irrationalities of a market based system for commodities such as wheat that leads to such imports. She further points out the irrationality of some pseudo-oppositions such as health food cultism, which have fed into the present problem- and may be in the news in the near future.

All this is from a "scientific" point of view which is nothing more than amplified common sense. I take the "scientific" point of view because it says that one should test statements in terms of evidence and not because one likes the rhetoric behind it or because "the enemy" says something else. Everything should be viewed in the cold light of sobriety without the usual emotional buzzwords associated with politics. This is, of course, threatening to those who want to construct grand political theories such as the now almost dead Marxists wanted to. It is not , however, threatening to anarchists who recognize the "provisional" nature of knowledge and who, unlike post-modernists and other ideologues, are willing to accept reality as a test of their theories.

Molly accepts these tests. She refers people to government agencies even though she opposes government because they are the best sources of information in the here and now. Molly knows that pretty well all "anarchist" sites that discuss science are unreliable to the point of total lies, mostly because they oppose an abstract concept of "science" that is pretty well an imaginary construction of ageing Maoists in the academy - without any connection to science as it is actually done. Primitivism is nothing more than "consistent Maoism", and their "utopia" is the same utopia as that of the Kymer Rouge. This, of course, is not all of anarchism, and many younger people have come forward to oppose this ideological mindset. Whether it be the people who want to make anarchism congruent with real evolutionary biology or those who see the potential in the technology of communication, the struggle is the same. The struggle is to save the idea of freedom from those who would restrict it to a religious cultism demanding the sacrifice of "technique".

Molly's present "hit flurry" has the value of introducing people who are concerned about their pet foods to the ideas of anarchism, just as her last "hit flurry" about the lunar eclipse had the same function. But perhaps even more importantly this blog can act to introduce anarchists to the ideas- and more importantly the state of mind that lies behind modern science. Anarchists are often just not "scientifically illiterate" but actually predisposed by some people's propaganda to remain in a state of ignorance. This blog hopes to give its little contribution to correcting this problem, if in no other way than to show how "looking up" is a more emotionally satisfying state than seeing your low opinions confirmed in a cult. The sky is more attractive than your belly button.

Molly

A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SCIENCE:

Nature magazine has recently published an interesting essay under the 'Connections' column(Nature:445:Feb 2,2007, p489) The title is as above, and the essay describes how "network math" may help the social sciences in making predictions that can be tested in a scientific way. The author makes a case that internet communications can provide a field wherein the ambiguities of ordinary sociological analysis are reduced so that precise predictions can be made and tested. The author admits that the results derived from internet research are "limited" . The author also, unfortunately, calls for a loosening of the privacy protections on internet communications so that research can be conducted on these matters. NOW, Molly has little doubt that a "science of society" can be constructed that supersedes political ideologies such as Marxism, conservatism, liberalism(or crude anarchism with whatever neologisms it may devise). Time marches on after all. Part of the book that I am trying to review, "A Beautiful Math', refers to such system mathematics. But still...my first objection here is as an individual concerned about their own privacy, and whether the benefit is worth the cost. In a class society such research will be framed in terms of how it can benefit the managerial controllers of the society. I assume that such research can yield testable predictions which I don't assume for most leftoid rhetoric. What I will say plain and simply is that the doomed effort to put chains on scientific inquiry is much more applicable to this case than it is in any other case of simple inquiry. These results will come to view, and leftists are obliged to come to terms with them no matter how much they might like to hide behind rhetoric.

Molly personally is not a leftist in the sense of believing in the underlying ("lying" is an appropriate word) philosophical beliefs of leftism (which includes the so-called "post leftists"). But she is still a "leftist" in terms of believing that the ultimate goals of "the left" are both valuable and achievable. What "the left" has to do is face reality such as that presented in papers such as this and use it for their own purposes.

Molly

CARE FOR THE COMMUNITY: *
I've just read an interesting article in the journal Nature on the evolution of the adaptive immune system (1). Adaptive immunity differs from innate immunity in that the response of the immune system to encounters with foreign organisms or antigens depends on previous encounters. Adaptive immunity, in other words, "remembers" while innate immunity does not.
The article, 'Care for the Community' by Margaret McFall-Ngai claims that all vertebrates have an adaptive immune system along with the innate one while invertebrates rely entirely on the innate immune system (2). The presence of both immunological arms, according to the author,
"...has been thought to promote heightened resistance to microbial pathogens. But this assumption presents a conundrum-invertebrates are no less challenged by the microbial world, nor are they less able to remain healthy."
Why ? One answer is that invertebrates are small, short-lived and have many young at once ie they follow a "R-reproductive strategy" (3) to a greater extent than vertebrates do. In other words they have no need for the "long haul" system of adaptive immunity. The game will be long over before the first inning has barely begun. McFall-Nagai notes, however, that there are many invertebrates that are indeed long-lived, large and have only a limited number of offspring per year. She proposes a different explanation,
"...that adaptive immunity has evolved in part to recognize and manage complex communities of beneficial microbes living on or in vertebrates."
Complex microbial communities associated with vertebrates seem to be a shared feature of the subphylum while invertebrates have far fewer co-evolved partners (4). For instance there have been over 2,000 bacterial species found to exist as either commensal or mutualist partners of humans while fewer than 100 species of human pathogenic bacteria have been identified.
Invertebrates in contrast have far fewer "resident" bacteria. Their guts, for instance, have been shown to contain fewer than 8 residents to date. Most of the bacteria present are "tourists" from the outside world. Their innate immune system has evolved to limit the range of interactions to all but a few "welcome guests".
Three mechanisms have been suggested for how invertebrates "recognize and manage their resident microbial partners". One is intracellular maintenance where the bacteria are housed, hidden from the immune system, within cells. Another is a physical barrier such as the chitin layer of the hindguts of termites and their relatives. Thirdly, the ability of the innate immune system to recognize larger numbers of antigens than previously suspected has recently been demonstrated (5). The author concludes,
"The absence of these three strategies among vertebrates is consistent with the idea that the adaptive immune system has provided them with a different, more versatile, microbial-management strategy."
She suggests the following lines of inquiry to test her hypothesis:
a)Further research on comparative gut microbiota to test whether all vertebrates do indeed have a co-evolved microbial population while invertebrates rarely do.
b)Comparative physiology to see if these co-evolved populations do indeed always provide selective advantages to their hosts.
c)Finally, the price to be paid for this advantage. As she says,
"Is autoimmunity a collateral consequence of the bargain we have cut with microbes(6)."
Many other questions pop up in Molly's tiny feline mind. Like many other aspects of evolutionary biology, from the origins of organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts to the achievements of human societies, this is an example of the mutualist mechanism of evolution. Cooperation as opposed to competition will get you everywhere, even to multicellularity. How are interspecific partnerships first established ? What can be said to be evolving in these partnerships ? The vertebrate or the microbes ? It seems plain that the "unit of selection" is not just an animal but the animal along with its associated microflora. It gives a different twist to the idea of "individuality".
MOLLY NOTES:
*'Care for the Community' by Margaret McFall-Ngai, Nature, Vol. 445, 11 January 2007, p153.
1)For an interesting contrast between the innate and adaptive immune systems see Innate Vs Adaptive Immunity.
2)This is not entirely proven, as the author admits later in her article. A search can discover many hints of adaptive immunity in invertebrates. The argument backward from theory is from a lack of the molecular precursors of adaptive immunity in invertebrates. Their is no reason, however, that adaptive immunity couldn't evolve via separate pathways. Simple convergent evolution actually. Look up how many times eyes have evolved independently, with wholly different mechanisms, to see an example of such convergence. Also there is also some dispute about the immune system of "jawless fish".
3) For a brief description of r versus k reproductive strategies see Reproductive Strategies.
4)Once more this waits to be proven. Humans and domestic animals have, for obvious reasons, been the subject of greatest inquiry. To a large extent invertebrates are an unexplored continent.
5)Molly wonders if this isn't, in fact, a dawning realization that there may be an adaptive immune system in invertebrates albeit of a different type and with different mechanisms. It seems I repeat myself here.
6)And perhaps the mechanisms of cancer as well ? Not that invertebrates never develop cancer, but the rate may be significantly lower than amongst vertebrates. Why ?

THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE
BY CARL SAGAN
This is the second(1) posthumous book published and edited by Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan(2). The subtitle is 'A personal view of the search for God', and this is because the book is a compilation of the 1985 Gifford Lectures (3)on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow. Sagan himself describes "natural theology" in his introduction as "everything about the world not supplied by revelation" . A more apt description might be the attempt to read theological lessons from the natural world. I've recently finished reading this book, and these are my "midnight thoughts" on what the author says.
Sagan begins his lecture series with 'Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven'. This presentation attempts to "travel outwards" from a terrestrial perspective to the furthest reaches of the visible universe. The slides that the author used to illustrate this journey are somewhat indifferently reproduced here- with updates from more recent astrophotography. Along the way to the furthest reaches the author picks up a number of historical turning points in humanity's conception of "the heavens", and how our sense of wonder has expanded as more and more of the vastness of "creation" is revealed, a vastness that makes many(most?) of our inherited religions seem paltry and petty by comparison.
Sagan used this first lecture to present the questions that he wished to pose to "natural theology", in particular the contrast between what are the really very parochial concerns and assertions of traditional theology and the huge scale of reality. as he says,
"...a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. it is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe."
In his second lecture, 'The Retreat From Copernicus: A Modern Loss of Nerve', Sagan goes further into this idea, relating the human tendency to "project" their own psychology (hence animism) and their own sociology (hence the illusion of privilege and class "reproduced in the heavens" with the privilege of the earth and humans) to the history of what he calls "a series of assaults on human vainglory". This is the very gradual growth of the virtue of humility in the face of actual knowledge. From the dethronement of the Earth centred Universe by Copernicus to the dethronement of even our ideas of time and space by relativity the march has been pretty well invincible. Attempts at reaction, from the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on "modernism" to the present maelstrom of the "American Id" in all its technicolour varieties- from intelligent design to primitivism to post-modernism(4)- come and go and fail. Sagan devotes a good portion of this lecture to his disagreements with one of the more intellectually respectable "retreats from this advance", the anthropic principle. I guess this goes with his own cosmological concerns, though it hardly has an effect on the public consciousness, even amongst the "intellectuals". The alternative quantum theory of "many worlds" has something more of an "excitement value", though both show tendencies of where science can veer off into mere poetry.
In his next lecture 'The Organic Universe' Sagan proceeds into what was one of the central concerns of his scientific career, the origin of life and its possibility elsewhere in the Universe. He spells out the ubiquitous presence of organic chemicals in the astronomical field, and the vast stretches of time involved in the life of our universe. All this is tied in with his argument against the classical "argument from design". In lecture #4, 'Extraterrestrial Intelligence' he goes further into his own interests. This brings up the inevitable invocation of the Drake Equation and Sagan's views of it, including his own views that not every civilization will necessarily be technologically advanced and the possibility that those who are mostly self destruct.
Sagan brings up here the possibility of communication with such extraterrestrials which led him naturally into lecture five 'Extraterrestrial Folklore:Implications for the Evolution of Religion'. This is another aside into one of Sagan's other central concerns, the debunking of pseudoscience and occult faddism. Sagan uses this chapter to compare the claims that conventional religions make for their miracles with those made by obviously fraudulent modern "urban folklore", and the comparison is none too flattering for traditional religion.
In his next lecture, 'The God Hypothesis' Sagan finally goes right to the heart of the matter that is supposed to be at the centre of the Gifford Lectures, 'Natural Theology'. In this lecture Sagan goes into the full extent of the traditional proofs of the existence of God, and he also points out the very obvious point that there are many statements in the traditional Western concept of God that are actually quite separable. Omniscient is indeed quite separable from omnipotent as is the term "benevolent" and the term "eternal", and the term "omnipresent" (let alone its contradiction "transcendental"),etc.etc.. In actual fact the various terms inevitably contradict each other, and they are not always present in the description of "God" in either thinkers in the Western tradition or, especially, in other religious traditions. The heart of this is, as Sagan says,
"I therefore conclude that the alleged natural theological arguments for the existence of God, the sort we're talking about, simply are not very compelling."
In his next lecture, 'The Religious Experience' Sagan discusses the more "personal proofs" of the sacred ie "religious experiences" with emphasis on both its possible bases ie neurochemistry and evolutionary biology. This chapter is rather far ranging as it also compares these religious experiences across cultures and their content within various cultural settings and even their meaning within a broad sweep of human sociobiology. To say the least this chapter is sketchy as it is the subject of volumes of books and not a few pages.
Sagan then goes into lecture number eight, 'Crimes Against Creation'. This is a chapter that attempts to develop ideas that Sagan expressed previously, that traditional theology is actually quite a mixture of sometimes contradictory ideas, some of them benign and some of them quite toxic. In this lecture Sagan attempted to "set the stage" for some sort of alliance between humanists such as himself and those Christians who took the emotional content of "stewardship" quite seriously. This is particularly related to the centrepiece of Sagan's lifelong political commitment, the question of nuclear disarmament and nuclear war. One wonders what he would say today in the age of concern about global warming if he were alive today. Sagan had been arrested more than once in the course of protests against the American military machine.
Finally Sagan concluded his lectures with 'The Search' in which he ties all of what he has said together. He restates that his own vision of the immensity and beauty of the universe is just as valid an answer to the "big questions" posed by religion as the various dogmas are. With considerably more of the "cardinal virtue" of humility Molly may add. And with a much greater appreciation of the fragility of human life than any of the religious traditions provides. The book concludes with an appendix that consists of questions and answers from the various lectures. Molly concludes with the following quote from 'The Search',
"Now, another way of looking at this is as a conflict within the human heart, as a conflict between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others who may superficially not look or talk or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is concentrated in our cerebral cortex. Our survival is(how could we have imagined it to be anything else?) a reflexion of our own nature and how we manage these contending tendencies within the human heart and mind".

MOLLY NOTES:
Molly apologizes if this review has not conveyed the full sense of what Dr. Sagan presented in his lectures. Inevitably one individual will concentrate on those points that interest them the most. I urge readers of this blog to go to the original book as it is far richer than I could hope to present in a brief review. Those who are interested in Carl Sagan in a fuller sense are advised to go to the Carl Sagan Portal maintained by his last wife and his children and, of course, the very enlightening and entertaining Wikipedia item on him.
1)The first posthumous book was arranged by Ann Druyan and published in 1997 as 'Billions and Billions:Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium'. 'The Varieties of Scientific Experience' was published by Penguin Press, New York, in 2006 (ISBN # 1-59420-107-2).
2)Carl Sagan had the good fortune to be married to three outstanding women in his lifetime. Ann Druyan was his third wife. His second was the artist Linda Salzman , and the first the scientist Lynn Margullis was the most prominent of all. There is little doubt that Margullis was by far a greater scientist than Sagan ever was, whatever his ability to capture the public imagination. Her concerns were with the origins of eucaryotic life as a symbiosis of various organisms. Her ideas about the origins of such organelles as mitochondria and chloroplasts have gone from being heresy to being orthodoxy. Her ideas about the origins of such things as flagella and cilia are somewhat more controversial, but they have something to be said for them, just as her rather extreme views about genetic interchange in modern organisms have. Time will tell. Margulis, by the way, stands in the tradition of Kropotkin and other Russian naturalists who emphasized the role of cooperation (symbiosis is the extreme version) in evolution.
3) The Gifford Lectures and their presenters read like something of a who's who of modern intellectual life. They have included William James, John Dewey, Albert Schweitzer, Reinhold Neibuhr, Gabriel Marcel, Michael Polonyi, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Tillich, Werner Heisenberg, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky and Roger Penrose amongst many others with which Molly in her ignorance is not familiar. Sagan's inclusion in this company is an indication of the respect in which his ideas are held today.
4)Just as there is little to be said intellectually for the Catholic Church's attempt to "hold back the tide of modernism", an attempt that the Church seems to want to repeat again, there is little to be said for most of the more fashionable trends coming out of the USA today. Whether they be the pseudo-respectable babble of post-modernist academics who decry all rational thought and proclaim a new "triumph of the will", whether they be the dressing up of biblical literalism in pseudoscientific garb of design, intelligent or otherwise or whether they be the far !!! more marginal cultists who disgrace anarchism by saying that it must oppose such abstractions as "civilization". There are probably hundreds of other examples. All of them stand in the classic American tradition of "hucksterism". Academic ex-Marxists who babble on about "texts" can best be understood as pale imitations of the more successful Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. This may seem insulting, but it is true, even though the academics make a much more immediate financial profit from their output. But they have little staying power.
Anyways, down from the heavens and back to the earth soon,
Molly

SOGGY NUCLEAR FIRECRACKERS:
The January, 2007 edition of Scientific American has a couple of interesting article surrounding the recent (Oct. 9th, 2006) attempt by North Korea to test a nuclear devise. The first article under the 'News Scan' section of the magazine is entitled 'Kim's Big Fizzle', and it is more than dismissive of the North Korean attempt. (Molly Note: the history of "real existing socialism" in the last century is a very exemplary example of behavioral analysis applied to humans in that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how much "operant conditioning" (the carrot) is superior to "aversive conditioning" (the stick). Western economies that offer rewards rather than threats produce missiles that fly-unlike NK missiles- and nuclear devises that actually explode properly- once more unlike NK devises. This is not a matter of a superior 'economy". It is simply a matter of proper understanding of what produces results on a "lower" biological level) The article in SA reported that the consensus was that the yield of the devise was very much lower than that usually for a 'first devise". Most countries initial tests range from 5 to 25 kilotons (the first US test 'Trinity' yielded 20 kilotons). The consensus was that the NK test had a yield of about half a kiloton. Sceptics who opined that the test had not been "nuclear" were confounded by air samples collected by satellite two days after the explosion that confirmed the nuclear nature of the event, especially detection of radioactive isotopes of xenon that can only be produced by nuclear reactions.
What went wrong with the NK devise depends on the type of nuclear material used. The consensus is that it was a plutonium based devise, and this is supported by what is known of North Korea's enrichment programs. The state of uranium enrichment in NK is unknown at this time. Plutonium devises may "misfire" because the implosion that triggers the the critical mass of the devise may be asymmetrical. This depends on engineering skill to combine both fast and slow conventional explosives that compress the plutonium core. It also depends upon a skilled labour force that can machine the designed components into a configuration that will produce a precisely !!!! spherical implosion upon detonation. The critical density is at least 2 to five times the natural density of plutonium. The higher the density the greater the final nuclear yield.
If the initial implosion is not symmetrical (by even a factor of 100 nanoseconds ie 1/100,000,000th of a second) then the plutonium core will "squirt out" in the direction where the shock wave is the weakest, and the core will not reach "critical mass".
Another potential engineering problem is the "initiator", a small area at the centre of the plutonium core that in a functioning nuclear devise will emit a burst of neutrons that will trigger the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion. If this core triggers too early, as may occur when too much of the isotope Plutonium 240 is present the burst of neutrons will occur too early, and the explosion will "fizzle". This is called "predetonation". When nuclear fuel rods are originally processed there is much more of the desired isotope plutonium 239, but as they are stored plutonium 240 becomes more abundant. Nobody knows the storage time of NK plutonium. (Molly Note: including the North Koreans because, as I have mentioned before, a system depending upon punishment rather than reward encourages lying at such a high level that few can tell truth from fiction. Certainly heads have rolled because of Kim's latest failure, but the structural problems have NOT been addressed. Sell the technology to a country such as Pakistan where there is "reward" rather than terror, and the engineering problems are solved decades before they are solved in the source country. Simple animal conditioning that political theories don't take account of).
The January edition of Scientific American goes on to describe the methods whereby the detonation of nuclear devises are detected in the further article entitled 'Seismic Sentries'. This article describes the worldwide network of seismic devises that have been set up to detect both ordinary seismic devises and nuclear explosions. The article notes that nuclear explosions "typically" produce a different seismic signature than ordinary earthquakes do. To those who are familiar with ECGs/EKGs the language is similar, but for those who are not this is the best I can do to translate. Nuclear explosions produce a initial pulse of "P waves" that propagate in ALL directions and produce intense spikes that gradually and regularly quite down. In contrast classic earthquakes begin with a VERY slight reading of P waves followed in a few seconds to minutes by "S wave" representing shear forces as the earthquake develops and faults slip side to side along each other.
The Scientific American article goes on to describe the complications of this simple model and how a nuclear detonation can create the same sort of shear forces t5hat an ordinary earthquake cane depending upon the local geology or how P waves can turn into S waves upon transmission through certain strata. There is also the complicating factor of certain strata "muffling" the much more intense S waves so that they appear like P waves.
(Molly Note: this is VERY much like how we take an ECG (a term that I!!!! prefer to EKG). The "S" waves that the speak about above are part of the "QRS" complex that we measure in the electroconductivity of the heart, and the reason why we use several different leads in these tests will become apparent as I go on in this article. Quite frankly I find this a matter of deep pleasure. To find connections between diagnosing problems in one area of a mammalian heart and "diagnosing" "what has happened with the Earth. This is ONE of the reasons I recommend people become acquainted with science rather than superstition. The connections are much deeper and more rewarding. ...but anyhow...)
The method that people have discovered to separate the effects of intervening geological strata is basically to "sum" the reading from various monitoring stations across the Earth and also to compare the signals from these stations with known events. Seismographic stations in China "located" the Korean event while American stations gave an estimate of the "fizzle" yield" od said event. Some stations may be of greater accuracy as to "location" while others, because of geological structure, may be better for "yield". Such is life and reality.
None of these methods are EXACT. During the Cold War the US missed 26 of the Soviet Union's 366 underground tests in Central Asia, mostly because there were no "local" seismographic stations available. Unlike the situation today where Chinese stations report automatically worldwide.
(Molly Note:Pull one of the leads from an ECG and see how much information you get. It isn't totally useless, but it is less than if you had all leads attached attached)
Further Molly Notes: To get an idea of the worldwide seismographic network consult http://www.iris.edu/about.GSN . The Scientific American article actually quoted outdated statistics in terms of the monitoring stations available today (2006). For the latest updates see http://ctbto.org where the most recent numbers for seismic/hydrasound and other monitoring stations are gathered.
One more further Molly Note. It may be hard for me to gauge the North American "popular press" response to the North Korean test as I was "out of the country" when it happened. Let's take the following- as may be apparent from what I have said above- I am of the opinion that commies can do nothing right without great effort. Stalinist Russia advanced their industry by the "great effort" of eliminating 10 to 15 % of their population. That's a GREAT EFFORT !!!! No fascist regime has exerted this effort and therefore no fascist regime has achieved such "success". The Chinese Maoist regime killed 50 million with far less economic effect, often a regression rather than a progression.
What I can say about the popular press is as follows. I am sure that the whole matter of North Korea and its "nukes" (whether they be be 'real nukes' or the usual 'socialist nukes' that fizzle like the SA article suggests) was far,far,far,far,far less of a matter of concern in Europe where I was when it happened than it was back in Canada. The event took place while I was in Praha in the Czech Republic, and it did not register on the news there at all. By the time we reached Venezia in Italy where I could more or less understand news broadcasts and papers I found the same thing. In Italia the news was dominated by the Pope's visit to Verona, how he had criticized "secularism" in his visit and how the right wing forces in Italia had turned his visit into a demonstration for their (his ?) views. The news was also dominated by either further revelations of the corruption of the right wing (and some lefties) forces that supported Il Papa. This is Italy. Is this news ? Fascists, Catholics, Socialists, Greenies, Communists--they are ALL the same grey money grabbers to the average Italian.
The news was also dominated by the local opposition to expansion of the American Air Force/Strike Force base in North East Italy. Whether in favour of such or against it the papers/TV/radio gave far more play to this plan than was given to the NK events.
I have no idea how the North Korean tests played out in the USA. All that I can do do is compare the play that they got in Canada "before" we left the continent and compare it to the "non-play" in Europe. The degree of hysteria would undoubtedly have been far greater in the USA without the realistic view of NK's "achievements" presented in Scientific American. I have little doubt that OVER 98% of the American population believes that North Korea is presently able to rain an infinite amount of nukes down on then as we speak. It would be a great proof of conservative ideology IF it was true. But "truth" has little to do with ideology. So much of American neo-con ideology resembles the NK devise. It exploded and produced a "puff" rather than an explosion.

DNA: THE LARGER AND "BETTER" VERSION:
The News and Views section of the November 30th edition of 'Nature' magazine(pp553-554) contains an interesting article entitled 'A broader take on DNA' that discusses the latest research on synthesis of modified forms of DNA. The article reports on a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Lynch, S.R., Liu, H, Gao, J and Kool, E.T., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 128, 14704-14711 (2006)) that describes the synthesis of an "expanded" form of DNA that can carry twice the amount of genetic information of normal DNA.
The new form of DNA which the authors have christened "xDNA" is made by modification of the four normal bases of DNA, adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, by the addition of an extra benzene ring between the backbone of deoxyribose and the active area of the bases that form hydrogen bonds. The extra rings sit perpendicular to the long axis of the polymer formed by the hydrogen bonds. The reason that this formation carries extra information is that while ordinary DNA has only two possible base pairs, A-T and C-G, xDNA has four possible combinations, xG-C, G-xC, xA-T and A-xT.
This synthetic form of DNA has a few interesting differences from natural DNA. The synthetic form is more stable than natural DNA because of an increase in "stacking" , both within strand and between strands. Also 12 base pairs are required to complete one turn of the helix as opposed to ten in natural DNA. Because of this the major and minor grooves of the helix are broader and shallower than in regular DNA. These grooves determine the interactions of DNA with both proteins and smaller molecules, and therefore xDNA will interact with such molecules in ways different from natural DNA. xDNA is also naturally fluorescent, unlike regular DNA.
There are barriers to the use of xDNA. DNA polymerases do not interact properly with the altered geometry to initiate replication of the altered DNA. While "directed evolution" of polymerases, with in vitro mutation and selection, (shades of intelligent design), has had some success in altering the normal forms of the enzyme it would be a giant step to try and engineer a polymerase that could initiate replication in xDNA.
Yet there is great promise that such synthetic forms of DNA could help elucidate the normal forms of DNA's interactions with other molecules by offering a comparative model.
Til then, Molly has to say that the synthesis of a "Rosie O'Donnell" form of DNA is a remarkable achievement on its own. Plumper and cuter. Undoubtedly Santa's DNA is a naturally occurring form of this molecule.
Merry Christmas,
Molly