Some Turkeyı Pics

Keeping up here has been difficult.  We’re just too busy, but let me just give you some selected pictures and comments.  

We met with a travel agent our trusted hotel guy recommended.  He put us on a whirlwind tour of the places we wanted to go.  Konya and Cappadocia.  Fortunately I’d done a bit of research and knew we could get a fast train to Konya and then a bus the rest of the way.  On the map below, Konya is to the lower left of the red circle showing the Cappadocia region.  We stayed in Göreme, which is northeast of Kayseri.  Istanbul is in the upper left between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.

These men whirled slowly, like they were connecting with the universe.  See more on Sufi dervishes here.

Konya proved a true highlight.  I’d seen that Çatalhöyük was closed on Mondays, so we left Saturday.  Our travel agent arranged for a guide with knowledge of Çatalhöyük who picked us up at the train station.  WhatsApp proves to be very helpful communicating.  Çatalhöyük is a world heritage site.

Our guide turned out to be a Sufi teacher who teaches college level - not only was he knowledgeable, but he practiced his Sufi - with lots of care for us.  I’d also read that there were whirling dervish (performance isn’t the right word,). There’s a huge modern building where they whirl on Saturday evenings from 7-8 or so.  Our guide showed us where it was before dropping us off at the hotel.  We had a delicious local meal
next door to the hotel and then walked to the Mevlana Center.  (Mevlana, as I understand it, is the Turkish name for Rumi, the founder of Sufism.)

The next morning we walked a bit after breakfast and I was duly impressed by this blue motorcycle.

We were scheduled to go to the Mevlana Museum, which was across the street from the hotel.  We didn’t realize that - we thought it was a mosque.  And it had been a mosque, but is now a museum for Mehvlana (Rumi).  But the name ‘museum’ doesn’t do it justice.  It had been a like a monastery for men studying to become Sufi dervishes (I need to be careful here with my terminology.  My understanding is they would become monks, though again I’m not sure that’s the right word.)  So in addition to the old mosque, attached to it are a series of cells for the acolytes. 

The picture below shows Mevlana’s tomb inside the old mosque.  Rather than requiring people to remove their shoes, they provided paper shoe covers to wear.  

There is a mosque right next to the museum.  There’s a pic below showing the mosque (to the right) and the museum from the night before when we walked back from the dervishes. 

The picture above is Çatalhöyük. This is a site that dates back to the Neolithic period.  (Yes, I had to look it up to better understand what we were looking at).  But 9000 years ago, people built this community of 3500 - 8000 people.  The living spaces are all connected to each other.  There were no streets.  People had ladders inside to the roof, and the roofs were the ‘streets’ of this place.  There’s a museum which explains a lot, then there are some reconstructed dwellings that you can go into to see how people lived.  Finally, there is the actual archeological site.

I’m going to let people who are interested, go to the link to find out more.  The picture above is a tiny part of the complex under a large cover that visitors are allowed to see.  There’s another section open to the public, but it wasn’t open when we were there.  

I’m still trying to grasp people who were only just beginning to transition from hunter/gatherer to growing some of their own food, and developing this complex housing system.  

The picture below shows the mosque, to the right, and the Mevlana Museum.  The green tiled turret in the museum area is from the original building, which if I got it right, was build in the 1200s. The rest was built later. Later = 1500s.  

Think about it.  The turquoise green turret in the back of the museum complex was built over 200 years before Columbus’ reached what became ‘the new world.,’. Humans back then were just as clever and just as emotional as we are today.  Not really much difference from what I can tell.

 

There is a lot referenced in this post that people know little or nothing about, so I won’t feel bad if I don’t post again right away and give you time to check out the links.  

Why Truth Is So Illusive? Braun- Blanquet Scale

[I found this draft post from July 2012.  It appears never to have been posted.  But it's interesting to see how what I wrote 12 years ago is still relevant today.  Probably more so. And posting it today - August 3 - is fitting as you will see if you read it.]

Getting the facts right - whether it's in an old sexual abuse case or an attempt to see how ground vegetation has changed over a period of time - is the first step.  Once the facts are established, then models - whether scientific theories, religious beliefs, or the unarticulated models of how the world works we carry in our heads - are applied.

For example, did your son lie to his teacher about his homework?  If the answer is yes, then you must go through various models you have about topics such as lying, education, changing the behavior of young boys and apply them to this situation to get the desired result.  It's not as easy as you might initially think.  You may have a clear value that lying is never good.  Or you may think there are times it is ok.  Do you think his teacher is wonderful and working hard to teach your son to be a great human being with all the necessary skills?  Or is he part of a corrupt educational system that expects all students in the class to be at exactly the same level at all times and finds fault with your son because he's brighter than most and bored in class, or slower than most and having trouble keeping up? Or do you think he is picking on your son because he's a different race from the teacher?  And finally, will you talk this over with your son?  Restrict his internet access for a week?  Or whup him with a belt to help him learn this lesson?  Or maybe you'll go to the school and defend your son and attack the teacher. 

Things get much more complicated when we deal with the collective problems of a community.  If king salmon aren't returning to their rivers in the numbers expected, how should state fish and game authorities deal with this?  First, is their method of counting salmon working right?  Perhaps the salmon are getting through without being counted?  Then, do you restrict subsistence fishers?  Which models do you use to explain the shortage?  Is it climate change which is affecting the water temperatures?  Is it overfishing by commercial ocean fishing vessels?  Is it that these salmon are being caught as by-catch by bottom trawlers?  And when you think you know, what model do you use to decide whether subsistence fishers are allowed to catch any?

All this is introduction to Josias Braun-Blanquet who in 1927 devised the Braun-Blanquet scale.  The Botany Dictionary tells us about the Braun-Blanquet scale.

A method of describing an area of vegetation . . . It is used to survey large areas very rapidly. Two scales are used. One consists of a plus sign and a series of numbers from 1 to 5 denoting both the numbers of species and the proportion of the area covered by that species, ranging from + (sparse and covering a small area) to 5 (covering more than 75% of the area). The second scale indicates how the species are grouped and ranges from Soc. 1 (growing singly) to Soc. 5 (growing in pure populations). The information is obtained by laying down adjacent quadrats of increasing size. One of a number of variations of Braun-Blanquet's method is the Domin scale, which is more accurate as there are more subdivisions of the original scale. The Braun-Blanquet scale also included a five-point scale to express the degree of presence of a plant. For example, 5 = constantly present in 80-100% of the areas; 1 = rare in 1-20% of the areas.

So, essentially, this is a measuring device to calculate the percentage of an area that is covered by different plant species.  Measuring is just the first step.  Once you have the measures, then you can apply your models. (OK, I know some of you will point out that you can't measure anything unless you have models that tell you what to measure.  True enough.  But once you have the measures - in this case of percentage of species of vegetation in a certain location - you have to interpret what that means using a model or several.)

But one problem is that the measurements might not be accurate or might not be used right. 

A 1978 Study in  Environmental Management found the Braun-Blanquet scale to be adequate and more efficient than another method of measuring species in an area.  Here's the abstract:

To document environmental impact predictions for land development, as required by United States government regulatory agencies, vegetation studies are conducted using a variety of methods. Density measurement (stem counts) is one method that is frequently used. However, density measurement of shrub and herbaceous vegetation is time-consuming and costly. As an alternative, the Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale was used to analyze vegetation in several ecological studies. Results from one of these studies show that the Braun-Blanquet method requires only one third to one fifth the field time required for the density method. Furthermore, cover-abundance ratings are better suited than density values to elucidate graphically species-environment relationships. For extensive surveys this method provides sufficiently accurate baseline data to allow environmental impact assessment as required by regulatory agencies.

 So, fifty years after Braun-Blanquet's scale went public, it was still being used.  And apparently it is still in use today.  And people are writing about some of the limitations of the model.

In Monitoring Nature Conservation in Cultural Habitats:: A Practical Guide and Case Studies, (2007) by Clive Hurford and Michael Schneider, the Braun-Blanquet scale is compared to the Domin scale and both are found to have two sources of error.  First, is the observer bias that could affect the initial estimate of the percentage of species coverage that is then used to identify the appropriate cover class.  The second problem arises when the vegetation is at or near a vegetation boundary.  This is, apparently, more of a problem in the Domin scale. (p. 82)

And a February 2009 (online) article in Journal of Vegetation Science warns that the Braun-Blanquet abudance-dominance scale cannot be used with conventional multivariate analysis techniques because the Braun-Blanquet scores use ordinal numbers. 

I bring this up for a couple of reasons.  First, today, August 3, is Braun-Blanquet's birthday.  He was born in Switzerland in 1884 and died in France at 96 in 1980.  Second, and probably of more general importance, has to do with science and truth.

We are at a time when science is under severe attack by a combined force of right wing politicians and fundamentalist religious groups.   They pounce on what they call scientific errors and publicize them to 'prove' science isn't trustworthy.  The emails about global warming data is a good example. 

Now, there are scientists who for various reasons (fame, money, revenge, you know the usual human failings that lead to compromises) do cheat.  But the beauty of science is that one's work must be made public and when others try to duplicate your work and can't, then your work becomes suspect. 

But the pursuit of truth is and will always be imperfect.  Data collection and interpretation will always be dependent on the ability to observe and measure and interpret.  And the Braun-Blanquet scale shows, in a small way, that even a technique that's been around over 70 years, is not perfect.  But in science no one holds all the cards, no one proclaims truth for everyone else to accept. 

Scientific truth is always being tested and challenged.  That's its strength, but absolutists see it as a weakness. 

DePaul University Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture, has an interesting story about a project  to rid the oak woodlands of Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive shrub that was encroaching in the understory of this habitat in Killarney National Park in Ireland.  It talks about the use of the Braun-Blanquet scale.  It's posted at his blog Ten Things Wrong with Environmental Thinking.

Fictional Cabinet Nominees Seem Appropriate For Trump's Fictional World

Since President Elect Trump tells more lies than truths, it seems appropriate for him to have fictional cabinet members to match the fictional world he lives in.  He's already extolled Hannibal Lector as though he was a real person.  Which got me thinking about a where Hannibal would fit in the cabinet.  And then what a whole cabinet of fictional characters might look like.  

Such a cabinet would have benefits - though I'm still trying to figure out who will benefit most.  Probably Trump, but perhaps the rest of us will too.

• These nominees won't testify in the Senate saving Trump the embarrassment of scorching questioning of his picks and saving the upper house many, many hours and saving GOP Senators the embarrassment of debasing themselves and their honor to defend Trump's picks
• Though it's possible that before long they can be recreated virtually to testify
• The nominees don't have actual records that can be dug up by journalists trying to uncover their past misbehaviors 
• Though perhaps scholars of literature and film will be called upon to write opinion pieces about them.  
• Trump can probably have them serve without getting approval of the Senate at all.  
• And none of these appointees will take actions to block Trump's will, nor will they take action to forward it.  

This is merely a list I came up with.  My grandkids helped with a few of the nominees.  A couple of friends made excellent suggestions too.  But if readers feel they have better nominees, or alternatives if any of these can't or won't serve, be sure to let me know.  

Some of these nominees, most everyone should know, or at least have heard the name.  Others are a bit more obscure.  But they all can be easily googled.  There is one that has an asterisk because more than one person bears that name.  But I'll remind you it's a fictional character and there is only one that I know of that clearly first the position.  

I would also remind readers that this blog is called "What Do I know?" and a key theme is how we know what's real and what's true.  Many people, myself included, have said that Trump's followers live in a fictional world.  We point at evidence such as climate change, and scientific research on a variety of other subjects from medicine to crime, demographics, and paleontology, to name just a few. 

But within a society, truth, ultimately, is what the vast majority of the population believes it to be. And sometimes there's a gap between the truth that people profess and the truth their eyes (and other senses) tell them.  Hans Christian Anderson's story The Emperor's New Clothes gives us that example.  

Different religions believe their holy books describe truth.  Truths which are not compatible with the truths of the holy books of other religions.  Yet hundreds of millions of people believe without a doubt the different truths of the different major holy books in the world.  

So by electing Trump, many USians have created a reality that we will all have to endure.  It's a reality in which Donald Trump is president.  A man who, in his first presidency build pieces of 'wall' along parts of the US border with Mexico, which the Mexican government didn't pay for.  

There were also over a million US residents who died of COVID, many of whom would have lived if Trump had lived in a different mental world.  And more people will die in Trump's second presidency because that's how his world thinks it should be, or because the laws of science in my world, won't bend to his will.  

Spices Keep You Healthy

At some point, after three years in Thailand, I was convinced that science had ignored the health benefits of capsaicin - the part that makes hot peppers so spicy.  Surely, I thought, this heat helped to preserve foods, in a different way than salt does.  

Today this 24 year old paper popped up on Twitter that confirms my assumption.  What I didn't recognize was that garlic and onions are even better at the killing and/or inhibiting the growth of microbes.  Though I did assume the high use of garlic in hot climates had some health benefits too.  

The authors write in the overview:

"We wondered if there are any predictable patterns of spice use and, if so, what factors might underlie them. In this article, we summarize the results of our inquiries. We found that spice use is decidedly nonrandom and that spices have several beneficial effects, the most important of which may be reducing foodborne illnesses and food poisoning."

Prediction 1. Spices should exhibit antibacterial and antifungal activity.

And this chart shows that 

Prediction 2. Use of spices should be greatest in hot climates, where unrefrigerated foods spoil especially quickly.

They looked at cookbooks from 36 countries to see what spices were used, how many recipes included spices, how many spices per recipe, and which spices.  The used a climate atlas to rate the climate in each of the 36 countries. 

Prediction 3. A greater proportion of bacteria should be inhibited by recipes from hot climates than from cool climates.  

". . . the mean fraction of recipes that called for each one of the highly inhibitory spices used in those countries increased significantly (Figure 8a). However, this correlation did not hold for less inhibitory spices (Figure 8b). There was also a positive relationship between the fraction of bacterial species inhibited by each spice and the fraction of countries that used that spice, indicating widespread use of the spices that are most effective against bacteria."

There are a number of other things they looked into (ie. cost of spices, lemon/lime juice increases anti-microbial power of spices).  

So one question I have relates to the fact that our bodies rely on microbes to keep us healthy.  My awareness of this came well after 1999 (when the spice article was published) and I'm not sure how well it was known in 1999 or by the authors.  Do spices harm the gut biome?  

The article is written in clear language that should be easy for most people to understand most parts.  It also has pictures of spices as well as straightforward charts.  

Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices: Spices taste good because they are good for us 

Paul W. Sherman,   Jennifer Billing  Author Notes  BioScience, Volume 49, Issue 6, June 1999, Pages 453–463, https://doi.org/10.2307/1313553   Published: 01 June 1999

They use' microbe' in some places and 'bacteria' in other places.  Since I wasn't completely sure about what each term meant, I found this American Society for Microbiology page "What Counts As A Microbe?"

Chicago Pics And A Bit On Percy Julian

 This is basically going to be photos of the last couple days in Oak Park and surroundings.  

I always thought the Continental divide was in the Rockies and up on through Canada and Alaska, but the folks in Oak Park think it's there.

I think John Dewey got it just about right.

We walked about 2.5 miles yesterday to meet J's brother and sister-in-law for lunch, so we saw a lot of things we'd have missed in a car.  Like these church doors.

A dog park in Oak Park.  Our friends ran into friends they hadn't seen in a long time and it seemed like a happy coincidence.  Numbers were exchanged.

I seem to be the only one excited about the new Halloween decoration on our friends' balcony.  

This only makes sense if you know that Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Oak Park and there are lots of his buildings (mainly houses) in town.  I think some of my Anchorage friends are trying to make this point as the Assembly is taking on redoing the zoning codes.  Right-sizing isn't necessarily NIMBY.

Today, October 1, we went to Evanston - just north of Chicago - for a birthday party and walked along Lake Michigan by Northwestern University.   It was a warm day!

Downtown Chicago is in the distance.

We drove along the lake to downtown. 

Best I could do from the car.  

As we wandered on home we passed through a part of town known as Ukrainian Village.  I believe the rest of this sign said "Institute of Modern Art."

Finally, our friend took us by a large house and yard in Oak Park.  It was bought by Percy Julian.  

Julian was a chemist with degrees from Harvard, and Vienna. From Science History:

 

"A steroid chemist and an entrepreneur, Percy Julian ingeniously figured out how to synthesize important medicinal compounds from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass produce.

In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances—the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of these compounds was clear, but extracting sufficient quantities of them from animal tissue and fluids was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs. . .

"Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a railway mail clerk and the grandson of enslaved people. In an era when African Americans faced prejudice in virtually all aspects of life, not least in the scientific world, he succeeded against the odds. Inadequately prepared by his high school, he was accepted at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as a sub-freshman, meaning that he had to take high-school courses concurrently with his freshman courses.

Majoring in chemistry, he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1920. After graduation he taught chemistry at Fisk University for two years before winning an Austin Fellowship to Harvard University, where he completed a master’s degree in organic chemistry. After Harvard he returned to teaching at West Virginia State College and Howard University.

Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the house.  But there are lots of pictures of Julian and of the house in Oak Park.  

The point of this being, that the family may lose the house because his daughter is having trouble paying the taxes.   From Chemical and Engineering News:

"The family home of Percy Lavon Julian sits on a corner lot in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago. Julian was already a renowned organic chemist when he bought the two-story stone house in 1950. His daughter, Faith Julian, remembers a time when the home was not just the center of their family life, but also a place where her father thrived as a scientist and entrepreneur until his death in 1975. Despite multiple racist attacks to push them out of the neighborhood, Percy Julian would not leave his home, she says. “My dad never wanted to move. He loved this house,” she says.

Now Faith is fighting to stay in the Oak Park home, where she still lives. Taxes, home repairs, and medical expenses have left Faith struggling to maintain ownership."

You can read more of the details at the link.

Frank Lloyd Wright is, rightfully, an icon in Oak Park, Illinois.  His house and the many buildings he designed and were built in Oak Park attract a lot of tourists.  

Like many important, but unsung Black American scientists, Julian's house and legacy are not as celebrated in Oak Park or other places  One would think that the city leaders of Oak Park could work with the Chemical community and Black organizations to work out a way to preserve the house and let his daughter live there as long as she wishes.  Certainly there are pharmaceutical corporations that have earned tens of millions of dollars if not much more, from his discoveries.  

This is precisely the sort of thing that people like Ron DeSantis are trying to make sure the students of Florida never know about. 

Here's an August 2023 Editorial at OakPark.com that offers some hope things will be positively resolved.  

Cancelled Wiz Leads To Seattle's Pacific Science Center

 The Wiz was not high on my todo list.  It wasn't even on my todo list.  But when invited to accompany my daughter and granddaughter to see the Wiz, I, of course, said yes!

The ferry into Seattle was jammed with Seahawks fans.

We made our way to the Art Museum restaurant for lunch and while eating my daughter got a voice mail saying that the afternoon performance of The wiz wasn't.  An hour before the show we learn it was cancelled? That's even more bewildering because looking on line today I find this at the 5th Avenue Theater site:

"Masks will be encouraged but optional for audience members at The 5th for performances of The Wiz. We strongly recommend and encourage the wearing of highly effective masks such as N95, KN95, or KF94.  Please CLICK HERE for further details.

Please note, the performances of The Wiz on November 19, 20 and 27 matinee have been canceled."   

If the matinee was cancelled last weekend, why didn't they notify us sooner?  (I suggested to my daughter that they hadn't sold enough tickets and she responded that they'd been sold out.)

Oh well.  Flexibility.   

The Pacific Science Center at the site of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair was my granddaughter's immediate alternative destination.  That meant a short rail ride to the monorail, then the monorail to the Space Needle.  

A walk over to the Science Center and to the laser show.  

I was underwhelmed.  I  expected a laser show in 2022 to be more than lots of moving squiggles and primitive cartoons backed with lame electronic music.  (Note:  I like good electronic music.)

A bathroom break.  This was probably the best surprise of the Science Center.  Most surfaces had great sciencish cartoons.  Though this one leaves a sexist conclusion that lacks some key context.  Did they have this same example in the women's room?  (I think you can click on this to enlarge and focus it, but I won't know until it's actually up.)

Then we engaged in various science activities while waiting for a 4pm planetarium show.  Some time in my favorite spot - the butterfly garden.  

Parts do look like they were built 60 years ago for the World's Fair.  

A four o'clock planetarium show was going to get us to a late ferry back to Bainbridge. And we found out that planetarium had an open house, so to speak, where people could drop in and ask questions.  So we got to visit various planets and moons.  It's been a while since I've considered how amazing and humbling the universe is.  All those stars and planets out there that we only have a tiny inkling about.  

From there, we wandered over to the Space Needle.  It seems the women decided that this was a good opportunity for my  granddaughter to go to the top of the Space Needle since both her parents have separate reasons for not taking an elevator 60 stories up in order to look 60 stories down and Grandpa was a perfect escort.  

It's been 60 years since I went to the top of the Space Shuttle, when three friends and I drove up to the World's Fair in 1962 in a '32 Model A Ford.  My memory of being up there is rather hazy.  

But I remember yesterday pretty clearly still.  There are three public floors.  In the top one you can wander around inside with glass walls, drinks, snacks, photo opportunities, or wander around semi-outside, with large glass walls and benches.  The picture above was from that level.  

I'd point out that if you find the green ferris wheel you can see one of the ferries to Bainbridge and Bremerton right behind it.

Here's another view of that outside top area of the Space Needle.

Then there is a middle level that didn't seem to have windows, but did have bathrooms.  

Finally, the lower level also had windows all around.  And it had a ring of floor, sort of like a ring around Saturn, that was glass and slowly rotated.  That took some instinct erasing to step on.

Then back on the monorail to the light rail and a walk back to the ferry where we encountered the Seahawks fans once again.  You couldn't tell their team had lost.  They were loud and chanting - one person shouting "Sea" and the crowd answering "Hawks."  There also seemed to be some testosterone at work.  Though a women managed to push one of the excited ones back until a security officer took him off somewhere. 

And finally, as the ferry left the terminal in downtown Seattle, we could look back up to the Space Needle - that tall tower just left of the center.  

A long and busy day with two of my favorite people.  

E. O. Wilson Died Yesterday. I'm Reposting This 2010 Post In His Memory

[And I've added a video of a conversation between Alan Alda and Wilson  at the bottom.]

The Future of Life - Why is this so hard for people to deal with?

It's a battle between two narratives:

Narrative 1:

The free market is the most economical system for bringing prosperity to the world and government regulation just screws things up.

Narrative 2:
The free market has many positive benefits, but it also commodifies our collective resources resulting in the catastrophic destruction of the Earth's species and if we don't stop this trend immediately, we will destroy those things that makes life possible on earth.

I am much closer to the second narrative than first.  One of the most persuasive arguments in Wilson's book (he favors Narrative 2)  comes in the chapter "How Much is the Biosphere Worth?" A 1997 study estimated the annual value at $33 trillion.

Ecosystems services are defined as the flow of materials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence.  They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate;  the purification and retention of fresh water;  the formation and enrichment of the soil;  nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of water;  the pollination of crops;  and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel. [p. 106]

Reading this book as oil floods the Gulf of Mexico and eight years after it was published, my basic view of the world was reinforced and my frustration with my fellow humans who choose to ignore the impact human population increases have had on the earth and who choose to ignore the impact of their gluttonous consumption of the world's resources.  It's as though we have been selling off pieces of our back yard garden where we've been growing our food and now we are taking the wood off our house for heating fuel without thinking about where we will get our food and where we will live in the future. When will we realize that consuming our resources like this can't end well? 

I sympathize with people who cling to the material things that were part of the American dream as they were growing up.  But I'd also point out that happiness can be found at lower levels  of material consumption.  Sure, we need a basic level of comfort - housing, food, security, etc.  But where is that basic level?  How is it that generations of humans lived well without big screen televisions, without SUVs, without 2200 square foot homes, etc?  Are all these things worth an unsustainable exploitation of the earth's resources?  Wilson says strongly no. 


My book group met Wednesday night to discuss E. O. Wilson's book The Future of Life.  It's a short (189 pages) but difficult book.  It's data heavy and could use, as one of the group members suggested, much better headings and titles.  For example, Wilson talks about biodiversity for much of the book and I was looking for where he was going to tell us why this is important.  It wasn't obvious.  I finally found it in the chapter called "For the Love of Life" which would more usefully have been titled "Why Biodiversity Matters."   

Wilson also doesn't do a good job of clearly telling us his key points.  They're there, but hidden in all the data.  I did read the book carefully, taking lots of notes, so I did get some of them.  But without Wilson spelling them out, I have to guess that these are the ones he thinks are the key points.


1.   Biodiversity* is shrinking.  We are losing species and genetic variety at a faster and faster pace every year.

2.  The Causes of Biodiversity are summarized as HIPPO;

Habitat destruction.  Hawaii's forests, for example, have been three-fourths cleared, with the unavoidable decline and extinction of many species.

Invasive species.  Ants, pigs, and other aliens displace the native Hawaiian species.

Pollution.  Fresh water, marine coastal water, and the soil of the islands are contaminated, weakening and erasing more species.

Population.  More people means more of all the other HIPPO effects.

Overharvesting.  Some species, especially birds, were hunted to rarity and extinction during the early Polynesian occupation.  [p. 100;  Hawaii is just the example of what is happening around the world here]

I need to emphasize population because he spends a lot of time on this.  The increase in human population underlies the other four factors.  

3.   It's late in the game to stop this destruction of biodiversity but if humans become aware and have the will, it is possible.  The final chapter is called "The Solution."  I have problems with the idea of a "solution" in human affairs.  We don't solve issues as though they were math problems.  Rather we better balance the factors that affect the issue, and we may well unbalance it in the future.  And given the negativity of most of the book, one wonders whether the author really believes things can be changed or if the editors said it needed a happier ending.  But here are some of the things he offers in that chapter.

• Ethics - Humans, he argues, have a genetic propensity toward fairness.  If people see that some people are destroying the planet by using more than their fair share, they will fight for fairness. (But what if they are the ones gaining unfairly?)
• The way is to change people's narrative. We think of the environment (all of its resources) as capital.
  
  

  Having appropriated the planet's natural resources, we chose to annuitize them with a short-term maturity reached by progressively increasing payouts.  At the time it seemed a wise decision.  To many it still does.  The result is rising per-capita production and consumption, markets awash in consumer goods and grain, and a surplus of optimistic economics.  But there is a problem:  the key elements of natural capital, Earth's arable land, ground water, insects, marine fisheries, and petroleum, are ultimately finite, and not subject to proportionate capital growth.  Moreover, they are being decapitalized by overharvesting and environmental destruction.  With population and consumption continuing to grow, the per-capita resources left to be harvested are shrinking.  The long-term prospects are not promising.  Awakened at last to this approaching difficulty, we have begun a frantic search for substitutes.   

  This leads to two problems:
  • Economic disparity and
  • Accelerating extinction of natural ecosystems and species
  
  He suggests adding statistics that take into account the value of the biosphere into our  evaluations of economic assets and deficits as one way to change how we use our resources. 
  
  He then goes on to list the action that can be taken to turn things around
  
  
  
  • Salvage the world's hotspots - those habitats that are both at the greatest risk and shelter the largest concentration of species found nowhere else.
  • Keep intact the five remaining frontier forests (combined Amazon Basin and the Guianas; Congo of Central Africa;  New Guinea;  the temperate conifer forests of Canada and Alaska combined;  the temperate conifer forests of Russia, Finland, and Scandinavia combines.)
  • Cease all logging of old growth forests everywhere.
  • Everywhere concentrate on lake and river systems, which are the most threatened ecosystems of all.  
  • Define and prioritize the marine hotspots of the world.
  • Complete the mapping of the world's biological diversity
  • Use most advanced ecosystem mapping techniques to ensure full range of the world's ecosystems are included in global conservation strategies.
  • Make conservation profitable.
  • Use biodiversity to benefit the world economy as a whole.
  • Initiate restoration projects to increase the share of the Earth allotted to nature.
  • Increase capacity of zoos and botanical gardens to breed endangered species.
  • Support population planning

There are other issues the book raised for me:

1.   What is a reasonable human population on earth where humans can live a comfortable live style that doesn't use up the Earth's resources?

2.   How do we get there?

3.  How do we get people to see the collective impact of individual behavior as we try to balance saving the biosphere and biodiversity with the market economy?

4.  How do we conceive the difference between the death of individuals and the death a species?

5.  How do we understand what is a normal rate of species extinction versus a human caused rate of species extinction?

All of these are addressed in the book to some degree, but need much more discussion.

Some group members expressed the bittersweet hope that the oil spill might help raise people's awareness of how our resource use endangers the planet.  



*From his glossary at the back of the book:

Biodiversty:  All of the hereditary variation in organisms, from differences in ecosystems to the species composing each ecosystem, thence to the generic variation in each of the species  As a term, biodiversity may be used to refer to the variety of life of all of Earth or to any part of it - hence the biodiversity of Peru or the biodiversity of a Peruvian rainforest.  (p. 213-214)


NOTE:  Blogspot sent out a notice that they have a new agreement with Amazon to enable bloggers mentioning books to automatically link to Amazon so that readers can easily buy the  book and the blogger would get a percentage.   I have resisted ads on this blog for various reasons - including aesthetics, conflicts of interest, and the fact that the size of my readership isn't large enough to earn me significant profits anyway.  But I thought I'd mention this.  There are some books I mention I wouldn't encourage my readers to buy.

But this one I think everyone should read.  Including our governor and mayor who strongly support economic development without calculating the costs to the biosphere of the projects.  Neither cares if we wipe out the Cook Inlet beluga whale population - which NOAA has declared an endangered species - if it means that we'd have to think more creatively to maintain our current economic situation.  But the governor has vetoed money that would have added about 1200 kids and about 100 mothers to Denali Kid Care health insurance because some of the money might be used for an abortion.  The intentional loss of one potential human being is more important to our governor, it seems, than the loss of a whole species.

The original post had a few comments. 

I'm adding this conversation between Wilson and Alan Alda.

Not Learning From History. Not Knowing Statistics

 The Anchorage Daily News headline today:

"Sicker and younger:  Unvaccinated people drive new trend"

I couldn't help but mentally edit  Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous quote about the Nazi's victims.

First they [it] came for the socialists [nursing home residents], and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.[a nursing home resident]

Then they [it] came for the trade unionists, [other seniors and immuno-compromised] and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.  [a senior or immune-compromised]

Then they [it] came for the Jews,[unvaccinated] and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. young

Then they [it] came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

A major problem driving all this is STATISTICAL IGNORANCE.  People simply don't understand statistics, so terms like 'flattening the curve' or 'cases per 100,000' don't really mean anything.  The graphs are just pictures of curves and straight lines.  

And newspaper headlines and Tweets don't help.  Either the writers and editors don't understand statistics or they are intentionally trying to mislead.  (Sure, it's rarely either/or, they might just be rushing and not thinking)

Do I need to explain these Tweets?  Yeah, I guess, some folks won't get this.  

The original tweet (Ken Dilanian) highlights that 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans tested positive for COVID.  There's no mention of: 

1. what the time period was
2. how many of them were asymptomatic
3. how many had minor symptoms
4. how many were hospitalize
5. how many needed a ventilator
6. how many died

And Derek Willis also points out that if you realize that this was .08 percent of all the 164 million people who have been vaccinated, the amazing effectiveness of the vaccines are highlighted instead of making it sound like the vaccinations are ineffective.  

One last thing that I've mentioned before, but isn't talked about enough.  The longer the virus is able to find refuge in human hosts, the more potentially deadlier and more contagious variants can evolve.  (And you have to understand and believe in evolution to understand that point.)  So, the more people who are vaccinated (locally, but also world wide, cause people travel and virus hitchhike on those travelers) the fewer refuges there are for virus to mutate.  

It seems to me we're all in a leaky boat together in the ocean.  The water is up to our ankles.  A small but vocal group of the passengers want to drill holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water drain out.  Those are the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers.  

Applying Factfulness To Why People Might Vote For Trump Part I

[I thought I would just take a few of the ideas from Rosling's book and them apply them to Trump supporters to see why he still has so many.  But as I started making the list, I realized that so many of the obstacles to good decisions he mentions are relevant.  And because the book has great end of chapter summaries, it's easy to give an outline (though that leaves out most of the examples that help readers understand the points.)  So I'm adding this note on top to say, this post will outline those key points I wanted and I'll do a follow up post applying them to our current political situation.  As I went through them again, I realized they also illustrate problems among those opposing Trump as well.  And I recommend going to the links - particularly to the fact test and to lgapfinder.]

Factfulness::  Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think  by Hans Rosling, starts out with a self test on facts about how the world is doing, which you can take here.  The first question is:

1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary

school?

 a.  20%

 b.  40%

 c.  60%

In the book he relates the many different places he's given the test - to college students, business people, bankers, doctors, heads of international organizations, Nobel Prize winners, etc.  All the groups, he tells us, scored worse than chimpanzees.  (Who randomly choosing one of three options would get 33% right.)

The questions all relate to how human beings are doing around the world.  He argues they are doing much better than most people think.  And everyone in the West, he argues, think everything is getting worse, because we have mental models of "US" and "THEM" - US being being relatively rich (mostly) Western societies and THEM being the poor starving masses in the rest of the world who will never, ever be able to catch up to how we live in the West.  

Reality, he argues, is much different.  Rather than US and THEM with a giant unbridgeable gap between the two, he presents us with a different model.  One without a gap.  Instead, he says there is US which he calls (income) Level 4, then Level 3, Level 2, and finally THEM in Level 1.  The gap is filled with five billion people.  Levels 1 and 4 have one billion each.  So, most people are in that gap most people mistakenly see.  In fact, the website he and his co-authors (his son and daughter-in-law) set up to present the data they use to convince people their world views are wrong, is called Gapminder.  (Any one who's ridden a subway in Britain or a relatively recent British colony will hear in their heads the warning "Mind the Gap")  

Here's how he describes the levels:

Level 1 - making $1 a day

Five kids, spend hours/day walking barefoot to get water with the single family bucket.  They gather firewood for cooking, little or no access to medical care, the same porridge for every meal. (1 billion people)

Level 2 - making $4 a day

Buy food you didn't grow, raise chickens, sandals for kids, bike, more buckets, less time getting water, gas for cooking, kids can go to school instead of finding firewood. Electricity, but not reliable. Mattress to sleep on. (3 billion people)

Level 3 - $16 from multiple jobs.  Cold water tap. Stable electricity improves kids' homework.  Buys fridge, motorcycle, can travel to better paying job.  (2 billion people)

Level 4 - >$33 a day

Rich consumer.  >12 years education.  You've been on an airplane on vacation.  Hot and cold indoor water.  Can eat out once a month and buy a car.  (1 billion people)

At the Gapminder website on Dollar Street you can see pictures of families at all four levels (it seems that each column is a level) in different countries.  And, of course, you'll notice that there are people living at all four levels in most countries.  

Most of the book talks about why people are so misinformed about facts about the world and how to counteract them.  We have a number of built in human instincts that might have been useful to human beings tens of thousands of years ago, but today can get us into trouble.  We have to learn to control them.  

The Gap Instinct - The tendency to polarize things, to see an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor, them and us.  Remember to:

• Beware comparisons of averages
• Beware of comparisons of extremes
• The view from up here - Things are distorted (as the view from Level 4)

The Negativity Instinct - tendency to see and report on the bad things that happen, not the good.  Remember:

• Better and bad - things can be getting better and still be bad, it's not either/or
• Good news is not news - doesn't get reported the way bad news does
• Gradual improvement is not news - slowly improving conditions aren't newsworthy
• More news doesn't equal more suffering - often bad news due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening.  Our news and social media bring us lots of bad news
• Beware of rosy pasts - The good old days are much better in hindsight than we people lived them

The Straight Line Instinct  - this is seeing a trend and assuming it will always be that way.  Remember to:

• Not assume straight lines - many trends are not straight lines but are curves.  We may be only looking at a short part of the line.  (He talks about various trends, but about population particularly for this one.  He argues that as people improve their wealth and move up to a higher level, they have fewer children and that all the population experts agree that at about 11 billion people the world population will level off.  

The Fear Instinct - Frightening things get our attention.  Our natural fears of violence, captivity, and contamination make us systematically overestimate these risks.  To control the fear instinct, calculate the risks.

• The scary world:  fear v reality - the world seems scarier than it is because it has been filtered by your attention filter or by the media precisely because it is scary
• Risk=danger x exposure - The risk is not related to how scary something is, but by a) how dangerous it is and b) how much you're exposed to it 

The Size Instinct - Lonely numbers seem impressive (large or small).  How to get things into proportion:

• Compare - Single numbers alone are misleading.  Look for comparisons (with past numbers, numbers in other locations, etc.)  
• 80/20 Rule - Generally, a few things account for most of the impact.  Figure out the 20% that's most important
• Divide - Amounts and Rates tell different stories.  Comparing countries, say, the numbers are misleading.  Look for rates per person instead.  

The Generalization Instinct - Categorization is necessary to survive, but categories can be misleading.  We have to avoid generalizing incorrectly.

• Look for differences within groups - find ways to break them down into smaller and smaller categories
• Look for similarities across groups - and ask if your categories are correct
• Look for differences across groups - do not assume what applies to one group applies to another (what applies to Level 4, for example, applies to other Levels)
• Beware of "the majority" - Majority just means more than half, there's another 49%
• Beware of vivid examples - Vivid images are easy to recall, but they may not be representative
• Assume people are not idiots - When things seem strange, be curious and humble and think.  In what way is this a smart solution?

The Destiny Instinct - Many things (such as people, countries, religion, and cultures) appear to be moving in a constant direction because the change is so slow, but slow changes gradually become big ones.  

• Keep track of gradual Improvements - small change every year can become a huge change over decades.
• Update your knowledge - Some knowledge goes out of date quickly.  Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.
• Talk to Grandpa - think about your values are different from those of your grandparents
• Collect examples of cultural change - Challenge the idea that today's culture must also have been yesterday's and will be tomorrow's.

The Single Perspective Instinct - A single perspective can limit your imagination, better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding.

• Test your ideas - Have people who disagree with you test your ideas
• Limited expertise - Don't claim expertise beyond your field.  Be humble about what you don't know.
• Hammers and Nails - From the saying: "If you give a young child a hammer, he will think everything needs pounding."  If you get good with a tool don't use it too often.  If you have analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating its importance.  No one tool is good for everything.  Be open to ideas from other fields.
• Numbers, but not only numbers -  Love numbers for what they tell you about real lives.
• Beware of simple ideas and simple solutions - History is full of visionaries who used simple utopian visions to justify terrible actions.  Welcome complications.

The Blame Instinct - He told a story in this chapter about a problem with a pharmaceutical company for not looking for solutions to poor people's diseases.  A student of his suggested someone should punch the CEO in the nose.  He replied, I will see him next week, but if I did that would it solve the problem?  He answers to the board.  Should I punch them in the nose too?  They answer to shareholders who want profits.  Should I go after the shareholders?  Retirement funds hold lots of pharmaceutical stocks that help pay pensions for old folks.  When you see your grandfather next week, maybe you should punch him in the nose.  The desire to find a scapegoat is universal, but things are more complicated.  

• Look for causes, not villains - spend your energy on understanding the multiple interacting causes, or system, that created the situation.
• Look for systems, not heroes.  When someone claims to have caused something good, ask whether the outcome might have happened anyway, even if that individual had done nothing.  Give the systems the credit.

The Urgency Instinct - When often rush decisions because of a perceived, but not necessarily true, urgency.  Control this by taking small steps.

• Take a breath - When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down.  Ask for more time and information.  It's rarely now or never and rarely either/or.
• Insist on the data - If something is urgent and important, it should be measured.  Beware of relevant but inaccurate data
• Beware of fortune tellers - Any prediction about the future is uncertain.  Beware of of predictions that fail to acknowledge that.  Ask how often such predictions have been right before.
• Be wary of drastic action - Ask what the side effects will be.  Ask how the idea has been tested.  Step-by-step practical improvements are less dramatic but usually more effective.

I'll put a link to Part II here when it's ready, but I'm guessing that readers can start applying these instincts to both Trump supporters and opponents.  

Why Being Right Is So Satisfying, Even When You Would Prefer To Be Wrong

As those of you who follow this blog somewhat regularly know, I've been monitoring the daily changes in Alaska's COVID-19 count. (See the COVID-19 tab above.)  I've also been trying to keep up with what various people are discovering about the virus and how it spreads, both for my own personal protection as well as to be informed when I comment on our numbers.

When the Governor loosened the isolation rules for Alaska, I predicted that we would see an uptick in our numbers.  And that's happening.  Yesterday we had a new case high of 51 (not including non-residents) and today we blew past that with 64 new cases.

As the numbers have gone up I've been thinking about the internal conflict between wanting to be right, but wanting the virus to stay controlled, with low daily new case counts.

I can only speak about myself here. I  googled "Why do people want to be right?" to see what those who study this might say, compared to what I think.  But all the hits were for "Why do people NEED to be right?"  That wasn't my question.  All those articles talk about a culture of competition, needing to win, needing to not be wrong.  Much is in the context of marriage counseling - Would you rather be right or happy?  The articles talk about the complexity of issues and different perspectives which make 'being right' far more ambiguous.

But I've never been particularly competitive.  When I played tennis, I cared more about playing well than who won.   And I've figured out that in most cases, I don't NEED to be right.  My striving tends to be for understanding.  I could argue with someone about a topic and I can be pretty aggressive about it.  But it's not to 'win.'  It's to challenge the other person to show me the flaws in my thinking so I can get closer to the truth.

After that search for studies on why people want to be right failed, I remembered that BF Skinner had said that being right can itself a positive reinforcer.  And I found this: 

"According to Skinner, simply "being effective" or "being right" may be innately reinforcing."  

 Though since Skinner was usually a stickler for objective proof, this seems a little  soft for him.  He defined a reinforcer as something that causes you to repeat a behavior, when he saw people getting the right answer repeating their actions, with no apparent rewards,  he decided being right itself was the reinforcer. Not quite as objective as rats getting food by pushing a lever.  But  I think it is true for me.


A lot of this became much clearer when I took the DISC - a management personality test -  a long time ago and found out I was on the bottom of the Dominance scale.

For each of the four scales, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, there's a list of positive descriptors for each of the four characteristic and a negative list.  The thesis is that when you're doing well, you would exhibit the positive aspects and when stressed, the negative aspects.  For instance, if you score high in Dominance, the top of the scale was a descriptor like "Leader" on the good side and "Tyrant" on the negative side.  (I'm going by the test I took over 40 years ago.  I'm having trouble finding detailed descriptions of today's versions of the DISC - maybe because they want you to take the test before revealing the meaning.)

 I was stunned to learn I'd scored on the bottom of the Dominance scale.  My descriptor on the positive side was "Meek."  If that was the positive side, I was afraid to look at the negative side.  I felt better when I read the dictionary definition of meek.  (When I check online definitions today, their more like what I was thinking back then - spineless.)

But basically as I remember the definition that comforted me was something about not wanting to dominate other people.  So the biblical quote about the meek inheriting the earth, made more sense.   I think that's a natural tendency in me that was only strengthened by living in a Buddhist country for three years.

So, when I claim that my sometimes persistent  style is not about beating the other person, I have my DISC score to back me up.  I don't want to be right as much as to find out what is right.  If you present me with logic or evidence that is convincing, I'm happy, and I'll willingly acknowledge that you were right.  (Unless you've been a real jerk about it, then I'll do it a little less willingly.)

So as I try to answer this question about why is being right so satisfying, it's not about winning.  Rather, it's about having my understanding of things confirmed.  Having the way I think and solve problems proven to be useful to successfully navigating the world.

Lots of things in the world, as the psychologists pointed out in the articles on 'needing to be right'  just aren't right v wrong issues.  There are lots of complications and shades of gray.

So when there is something where facts can bear out what your mental models predicted, it's satisfying.  I think that's one reason why sports are so popular.  At the end of the game there's a resolution.  Your predictions about the winner or the score or the nature of the game, is known fairly quickly at the end of nine innings or four quarters.

The spread of COVID-19 is also born out with facts.  Based on what the science was telling us about how the virus spread, I believed that if more people mingled in public, in closed spaces, many without masks, that our numbers would rise.  And that's what's happening.  (And it's why our president wants to stop testing - so the numbers won't prove him wrong.  I'd note that I'm sure Trump would test over the top of the Dominance scale.)

Feeling good about predicting that our numbers would go up comes from the sense of control one gets from knowing that one can examine a situation and sort through different arguments and pick the ones that predict what actually happens.  It makes me feel safer when I stay home and avoid any indoor contact with others, and limit my outdoor contact.  I can lower the odds of contracting COVID-19.  The risks I take are minimum - biking on sparsely populated bike trails, with a mask ready to pull up if someone approaches, ordering food online and having it delivered to the car in the parking lot.  Washing my hands after getting the mail or newspaper.  Probably getting a little extreme, but it doesn't take that much effort or time.

I imagine others might come up with other non-winning kinds of reasons being right feels good.

Yet I don't want our COVID-19 numbers to go up.  I guess it's like betting against your favorite team - you don't want your team to lose, but if you're going to lose, you get something positive out of it.  I wonder if those folks who bet on a steep drop in the stock market have mixed feelings when they win big on someone else's disaster.   I suspect not.  There, being right is rewarding, but mainly because it allows one to cash in.

This all gets more complicated when there are real or perceived consequence for being wrong.  Politicians who downplayed what COVID-19 would do, tend to scramble to find the right language to say they were right all along, but that circumstances had changed.

And I would say, that you needed a better model that would have considered those possible circumstances and the probability they would occur.