Mammals down under

Sometimes all it takes is one new discovery to send scientists back to the drawing board.

Of course, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson correctly points out, scientists are always at the drawing board, or should be.  "If you're not at the drawing board," he says, "you're not doing science."  But still, it does seem sometimes like things are pretty well figured out, and then...

... boom.

There was a "boom" moment in the field of mammalian evolution this week, delivered by a paper in the journal Alcheringa: The Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.  The authors -- led by the brilliant paleontologist and polymath Timothy Flannery, of the University of Melbourne -- describe a fossil find that would seemingly be of interest only to people fascinated by minutiae of paleontology; a jawbone of a tribosphene, a proto-mammal with distinctive triangular, three-pointed molars, from the early Jurassic Period in Australia.

The problem is, it kind of shouldn't have been there.  Tribosphenes, which are in a group that is ancestral to both marsupial and placental mammals, were thought to originate in Laurasia, the northern half of the (at that point, split) supercontinent Pangaea.  (Laurasia comprised land that is now found in North America, Europe, and Asia.)  Australia, on the other hand was part of the southern half of Pangaea, called Gondwana, along with Africa, Antarctica, and South America.

This origin for the tribosphenes was considered so certain that they used to be called boreosphenes -- from the Greek word Βορέας, which was the name of the god of the north wind.

Guess it's a good thing they changed the name.

Eomaia, an early tribosphene mammal from China [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Eomaia NT, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There's no doubt that there were tribosphenes in Laurasia, too; one of the earliest, Tribactonodon, can be found in the Lower Cretaceous Durlston Formation in England.  (Others have been found in Mongolia and in Portugal.)  The idea was that they started in Laurasia and only later spread southward to Gondwana -- so Australia's iconic marsupials originally started out much farther north.

The discovery of a tribosphene in Australia sixty million years earlier than that indicates that some rethinking may be in order.

"I was re-analyzing these fossils that turned up in Victoria from the age of dinosaurs," Flannery said, in an interview with Australian Geographic.  "And then I started looking more widely for similar sorts of fossils found elsewhere and it turned out all of them were in the southern hemisphere and all are Jurassic or Cretaceous in age [from 199–66 million years ago]...  And we realized the thing that unites all these Southern Hemisphere fossils is they have these very strange, complicated molars that let the animals puncture shear and crush, all at the same time, what they were eating.  I resisted the conclusion as long as I could, but the evidence is compelling.  These shrew-like animals from Australian are actually the ancestors of both the earliest placentals and the earliest marsupials."

"We’ve been able to show that the relevant fossils that look like they are anatomically likely to be close to the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals are found exclusively in the southern continents and are from an older time period than the oldest mammal similar fossils seen the north," said Kristofer Helgen, who co-authored the paper.  "And that indicates these groups of mammals had their ancestry in the southern continents at an earlier time period and then later colonized the northern continents.  It absolutely turns our previous understanding on its head."

Which is tremendously exciting.  Far from being frustrated by stuff like this, these are the moments scientists live for -- when they find out that our previous understanding is incomplete, skewed, or flat wrong.  That's when the real process of discovery happens, and often when we gain a lens on a bit of the universe we weren't seeing clearly.

It's why I get so profoundly frustrated with the ridiculous attitude, "why study science?  It could all be proven wrong tomorrow."  To me, that's a completely backwards way of looking at it.  The truth is that science, unlike just about every other path to knowledge humans have ever utilized, has the ability to self correct.  When scientists find out a bit of our understanding is wrong, they neither throw their hands up in despair, nor do they double down on the error; they take steps to fix it.

And isn't that better than remaining in a state of error, incomprehension, or ignorance?

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Language machines

If you've ever used Google Translate, you've probably noticed that it can be a little wonky.

Take, for example, the anecdote about the French guy who was wooing an American woman long-distance, and texted to her, "Prends une photo coquine pour moi."  ("Take a naughty picture for me.")  The woman wasn't certain what that meant, so she popped it into Google Translate, and was told it meant, "Take a photo for me, slut."

I think my favorite, though, is some feedback that a company called Koyu Matcha Green Tea received via their website, from a customer in Finland.  When they ran what the customer wrote through a Finnish-to-English Google Translate, it came out as the following:

If it resonated with cold to the bone?  Matcha Latté is guaranteed fireman, green tea with hot steamed milk.  Behold, thou hast already tasted.

Um... thanks?  We think?

The difficulty is that languages are complex entities, full of idioms and peculiarities and exceptions, so trying to find a mechanistic, totally rule-based way to characterize them is somewhere beyond tricky.  But because of the work of a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, we have come one step closer to doing exactly that -- at least for Sanskrit.

About 2,500 years ago, a man named Dakṣiputra Pāṇini living in what is now northwestern Pakistan wrote a work called Aṣṭādhyāyī, which created a set of rules for the morphology -- the way words, prefixes, suffixes, and so on combine -- of the Sanskrit language.  An example of linking together these fragments, called morphemes, in English is the word incomprehensibly -- made up of in- (prefix meaning "not"), comprehend (stem of the word, altered to replace /d/ with /s/), -ible (suffix meaning "capable of"), and -ly (adverbial marker), in that order.

Imagine trying to come up with a list of rules for all the ways morphemes can combine in English, such that the rules only produced well-formed words and not garbled messes like iblecomprehendlyin.

That's what Pāṇini tried to do for Sanskrit.

The problem is that Pāṇini's rules seemed sometimes to lead to self-contradictions.  Given a particular combination of morphemes, there are often two or more rules that apply, so which should you use?  Linguists analyzing the rule-set discovered that Pāṇini had written a "metarule" -- a rule determining how other rules should be applied -- which said that if two rules seem to conflict, the "later rule should take precedence."  Everyone had interpreted this to mean that the one mentioned later in the book was the more important.

But that sometimes led to ungrammatical words.  So something was off, but what?

Enter Cambridge student Rishi Rajpopat, who had been toiling over Pāṇini's rules for months.  Then he had a brainstorm; what if the problem was that the metarule itself had been mistranslated?  He altered the metarule to read that if two rules are in conflict, the one that applies to the latter part of the word (the suffix) takes precedence over the one that applies to the first part of the word (the stem).

With that one change in interpretation, Pāṇini's rule system works to combine morphemes and produces grammatically-correct words almost one hundred percent of the time.

Which, of course, is a cause for much rejoicing amongst both linguists and people who are attempting to create high-quality translation software.

I wonder, though, how any such attempt would fare for English.  English is an amalgam of a Germanic root language, with heavy borrowing from French, Latin, and Spanish, and less-frequent (but still significant) borrowing from Old Norse, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Gaelic, and several Indigenous American languages.  This has introduced spellings, pronunciations, and morphologies that defy easy characterization.

Even some of the simple rules you learned in elementary school can't be applied with anything like real consistency.  "I before e except after c" -- unless your weird foreign neighbor Keith forfeits eight beige sleighs to a feisty caffeinated weightlifter.

You see the difficulty.

So as much as I'm impressed by Rajpopat's accomplishment, I don't think it's going to go very far toward fixing Google Translate's problem.

No matter.  The delight of being told the tea is so good it's "guaranteed fireman" makes up for any potential awkwardness incurred because you accidentally called your girlfriend an unpleasant name while attempting to initiate sexytimes.  You gotta take the good with the bad.

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Ken Paxton's registries

When the Nazi party first came into power in Germany in the mid-1930s, one of the first things they did was to dramatically improve the efficiency of record-keeping, especially with regards to people they considered "undesirables."

A 1946 report on their practices by Robert M. W. Kempner, which appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, is as impressive as it is horrifying. Kempner writes:

The most important are the Gestapo card indices: the register of persons politically undesirable to the National Socialist regime, such as former members of democratic parties, lodges, etc.  This register consists of five different sets of alphabetical card indices for (1) highly dangerous persons, (2) less dangerous persons, (3) dangerous persons, (4) Jews, (5) part Jews (Mischling).  These card indices were kept in the offices of the Secret Police (Gestapo), i.e., in the central headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin, Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Duplicates were kept by the supervisory offices (Staatspolizeileitstellen) or the approximately 100 district offices of the secret police (Staatspolizeistellen) which are located in the larger cities throughout Germany, e.g., in Munich, Stuttgart and the seats of the district governments...  The index cards are brown for males and green for females.  The first item is year, day, month, and place and county of birth.  Then follow the statements about occupation, name, marital status, school, and professional education, examinations passed, residence in foreign countries, knowledge of foreign languages, special abilities, service in the armed forces, or in the labor service, and residence...  Cards of Jews are marked by black index tabs.

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust were only possible because of the extensive records the government had on damn near everyone in the country.

You may be thinking, by this point, "how is this so different from the records governments today keep on citizens?  Most of this same information is now routinely kept by government agencies, and no one bats an eyelash."  It's a reasonable question.  Census and tax forms, drivers' license registration, school registration, job applications... unless you somehow have avoided all that, which is hard to imagine, you're a known quantity.

The difference, of course, is intent.  What do the governments of the United States and other democracies intend to do with the information they have?  My own probably Pollyanna-ish idea is that most of the time, the answer is "nothing."  As long as you pay your taxes and abide by the law, the powers-that-be have neither the time nor the interest to worry about what color your eyes are, what your marital status is, or what exactly you're doing.

It's the exceptions that are downright terrifying.  Which brings us, unsurprisingly, to Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas.

It was just revealed that earlier this year, Paxton demanded a list of all of the people in the state who requested a change in their gender designation on their drivers' licenses.  In other words, trans individuals who wanted to have legal documentation of their gender identity.  It's disingenuous not to see the comparison to the "black index tabs" on Jewish registration cards in Nazi Germany.  Add to this the fact that earlier this year, Texas passed one of the harshest anti-trans laws in the nation -- it explicitly forbids gender-affirming medical treatment for teenagers, and mandates criminal prosecution and jail time not only for medical professionals who carry it out, but for teachers, counselors, therapists, and so on (people considered "mandated reporters" for child abuse) if they find out about a teenager's trans status and fail to notify the authorities.

Don't tell me that LGBTQ+ people are "overreacting" if they're terrified by Paxton's demand for a trans registry.  And if you think I'm engaging in hyperbole by comparing it to the Nazi registries, you're being willfully blind.

"This could be a mass outing of a whole bunch of trans people because a lot of us change our documents and then choose to live in private," said Eden Rose Torres, a trans Texan who chooses to be out.  "We don't have to disclose our transness."

The only good news is that the request from Paxton's office was denied -- but not on the grounds of its being potentially used to harm trans Texans and the people who aid them, but because of practicality.  "Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced," said Travis Considine, of the Department of Public Safety, to which the demand had been directed.  "Thus, no data of any kind was provided...  It [would] be very difficult to determine which records had a valid update without a manual review of all supporting documents."

What really needs to happen, of course, is that Paxton be required to produce, in writing, a statement (1) justifying why he has the right to the information, and (2) outlining in detail what he intends to do with it.  Not, frankly, that I trust Paxton as far as I could throw him.  But at least then it would push him into defending his actions, rather than what's happened thus far, which is giving him carte blanche.

The refusal of the DPS to cooperate is not going to be the end of this.  People like Ken Paxton are never, ever going to give up their campaign against LGBTQ+ people, despite the fact that all we queer people want is to live our truth in peace and safety, the same as straight White Americans do, and to be in control of when and to whom we reveal our private lives.  Paxton sees himself as the leader of a religious-inspired crusade, and if he succeeds with his attempt at a trans registry, that's only going to be the beginning.

We have only to look back ninety years to see where this kind of thing can lead.

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Ignorant and proud of it

Way back in 1980, biochemist, writer, and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote something that is even more accurate today than it was back then:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I remember the first time I ran headlong into the bizarre American "ignorant and proud of it" attitude Asimov describes, during the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.  Even Bush's supporters admitted he wasn't an intellectual; I heard one person say he was voting for Bush because he wanted someone in the White House who was one of the "common folk," someone he would want to sit down and have a pint of beer with.  I responded, in considerable bafflement, "Don't you want the president to be smarter than you and I are?  I know I'm not smart enough to run the country."

His response was that the intellectuals are out of touch, and don't understand on a visceral level the problems ordinary people face.  This, I have to admit, contains a kernel of truth.  Politics is a money game, and most (not all; I'm sure you'll find counterexamples) elected officials come from some level of wealth and privilege.  And it's true that this privilege can create a set of blinders.  People who have never been down to pennies at the end of a pay period -- as I, and many others, have -- don't understand what it's like for financial worries never to be far from your mind, twenty-four hours a day.

The problem, of course, is that while an "ordinary person" might empathize with the plight of other ordinary people, that doesn't mean (s)he knows how to fix it.  Experiencing a problem doesn't mean you have a clue how to solve it.

But as Asimov pointed out, the "we're equal as people, so my ideas are as good as yours" nonsense is woven deeply into the American psyche, and the result has been that increasingly you run into people who seem to be not only oblivious to their own ignorance, but actively proud of it.  I was just discussing this with my athletic trainer, Kevin, this week.  One of the points I made is that I know there are a lot of areas about which I am ignorant.  The internal workings of cars, for example.  I have only the vaguest notion of how automobile engines work -- which is why when something goes wrong with my car, I go down to my mechanic and say, "Car not go, please fix."  What I don't do is start blathering on to my friends and acquaintances about carburetors and alternators and fuel pumps, and getting all defensive when one of them tells me what I'm saying is bullshit.

This, surprisingly, is often not the approach people have.  Kevin told me he was at a party a while back, and someone was pontificating about how the problem with the COVID-19 vaccination was that it was a vaccine.  On the other hand, he said, he was fine with getting a flu shot, because that wasn't a vaccine, it was a shot.

Kevin said, "The flu shot is a vaccine, too."

The guy responded, "No, it's a shot.  COVID is a vaccine, which means it does stuff to your immune system."

A little goggle-eyed, Kevin said, "But... doing stuff to your immune system is what shots are supposed to do."

Undeterred, the guy said, "No, that's vaccines.  The flu shot just stops the flu virus from making you sick, it doesn't mess with your immune system."

At that point, Kevin decided that the guy had the IQ of a peach pit and gave up.

What gets me about this is not that some person had a goofy misconception about something.  We all have goofy misconceptions about some things, and a complete lack of knowledge about others.  But -- hopefully -- most of us know better than to broadcast our ignorance in front of a large group of people.

Or on a major news network.  Just a couple of days ago, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who is himself no stranger to broadcasting his stupidity, had a guest who made Carlson's own beliefs look positively Ph.D.-worthy by comparison.  The guy's name is (I'm not making this up) Joe Bastardi, and you'll get a good idea of his scientific credibility when I tell you that he's the author of a book called The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War.  (He chose this title when it narrowly edged out his second-favorite choice, which was 99% of the Earth's Scientists Are Big Dumb Poopyheads.)  But what he said went way beyond just claiming that "the climate's just fine, keep on burnin' those fossil fuels."  Here is a direct quote, which (once again) I swear I'm not making up:

I’ve been giving [climate change policy] a lot of thought today, because I had to drive from Iowa City all the way to Pittsburgh, and when I went by South Bend, oddly enough it hit me.  There are three possibilities here, in my opinion, just looking at this, okay.

First is, they’ve all got climate vaccines.  We don’t know about them, but unlike the COVID vaccine, they actually work, so whatever they do, they’re immune from it.  So that’s a possibility.  That’s a long shot.

The second, Tucker, is, that if bad weather stops air travel, and it stops car travel, if you can cause more bad weather, right, then guess what?  Everybody can’t drive.  For instance, next week, and the week after?  Watch how much bad weather comes into the United States.  It’s going to be the coldest, snowiest period around the Christmas time since 2000.  So we’re gonna see planes, and trains, and all these other things shut down.  So if you just dump all this CO2 in the atmosphere, your assumption is, hey, CO2 causes bad weather, if I could cause more bad weather, then guess what?  Other people won’t be able to fly, and we’ll have less CO2 emissions.

Or the third possibility, exactly what you said: it’s a phony climate war, it’s fraudulent.  When we talked back in July, we talked about how it’s going to get cold earlier this year across the United States, that has nothing to do with CO2, what it has to do is the natural cycles of the weather, and what happens is these people are taking advantage of people who fall prey to this, and this is what they’re doing.  There’s no logic or reason for it except they are trying to establish a caste system that destroys the greatest experiment of freedom and individuality, which is this country.

I have a few responses to this, to wit:

1. How the fuck do you vaccinate someone against the climate?
2. Winter is frequently the coldest, snowiest part of the year in the United States.  That's because we're in the Northern Hemisphere and that's how seasons work.
3. So, what he's saying is that the environmental scientists have created the whole climate change thing in order to destroy the United States.  Even though a great many of them live here.  Because that makes total sense.
4. Does he really think that somehow, the climatologists are engineering bad weather across the entire United States?  Simultaneously?  How are they doing this, using magical laser beams from space, or something?
5. No, wait -- it's not magical laser beams from space, he says.  It's something way less plausible than that.  What we're gonna do is dump carbon dioxide into the air to make travel difficult, which will stop travel, which will cause us to emit less carbon dioxide. 

Now that's what I call a cunning plan.

And through the entire conversation, Tucker Carlson sat there, nodding sagely, as if what Bastardi was saying was nearing Stephen Hawking levels of brilliance, instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to say to him, "What is clear from this conversation is that if the government taxed brains, you'd get a refund."

Which explains why I am not a commentator on Fox News.

So.  Yeah.  For some reason, there are people who are abjectly ignorant, and yet who consider it critical that the entire world finds out about it.  It all brings back the well-known aphorism -- one of my dad's favorites --- that "it's better to keep your mouth and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."

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Bugs of unusual size

Although you don't tend to hear much about it, the Ordovician Period was a very peculiar time in Earth's history.

From beginning (485 million years ago) to the end (444 million years ago) it experienced one of the biggest global climatic swings the Earth has ever seen.  In the early Ordovician the climate was a sauna -- an intense greenhouse effect caused the highest temperatures the Paleozoic Era would see, and glacial ice all but vanished.  By the end, the center of the supercontinent of Gondwana was near the South Pole, and glaciers covered much of what is now Africa and South America, resulting in a massive extinction that wiped out an estimated sixty percent of life on Earth.

At this point, life was confined to the oceans.  The first terrestrial plants and fungi wouldn't evolve until something like twenty million years after the beginning of the next period, the Silurian, and land animals only followed after that.  So during the Ordovician, the shift in sea level had an enormous impact -- as the period progressed and more and more ocean water became locked up in the form of on-land glacial ice, much of what had been shallow, temperate seas dried up to form cold, barren deserts.

But during the beginning of the period, life thrived in the warm oceans, giving rise to huge ecosystems based on reef-building corals and sponges.  Just as today, back then coral reefs provided habitats to a tremendously diverse community, and fossil beds like the Fezouata Formation of Morocco give us a glimpse of a strange and wonderful world.

Here's one of the exceptionally well-preserved fossils from Fezouata, a marrellomorph arthropod called Furca mauritanica:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Didier Descouens, Furca mauritanica MHNT, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And here's a reconstruction of another one from the same group, the bizarre Mimetaster hexagonalis (the genus name means "mimics a starfish"):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Franzanth, Mimetaster hexagonalis reconstruction, CC BY-SA 4.0]

These arthropods, more closely related to trilobites than to any living species, were one of the dominant groups during the temperate early Ordovician, but had vanished almost entirely during the icehouse conditions of the end of the period.  

The reason this comes up is because of a paper out of the University of Exeter about further research into the fossils of the Fezouata Formation.  And this study has turned up something phenomenal -- another kind of marrellomorph arthropod related to Furca and Mimetaster that was something on the order of two meters long.

That is one big swimming bug.

I found this a little surprising, above and beyond simply being shocking because it's enormous.  As far as I understand physical chemistry, I would think that the greenhouse conditions of the early Ordovician implied two things: (1) higher carbon dioxide and lower oxygen levels, both in the atmosphere and the oceans; and (2) the warmer temperatures making what oxygen there was less soluble in water.  Both of these would lead to more hypoxic conditions, and -- again, as far as my layperson's understanding goes -- should result in generally smaller body size, especially in arthropods.

Arthropods have a couple of limitations that keep cockroaches from getting big as elephants (despite what you might have seen in any number of bad 1950s horror movies).  First, they aren't built to support a large body mass; a terrestrial insect expanded to enormous size, with its bodily proportions left intact, wouldn't be able to stand up, much less move.  This disadvantage is somewhat offset by living in the water, where buoyancy supports the body's mass.  (Note how much bigger oceanic mammals can get than terrestrial ones do.)

Second, and more apposite to this discussion, arthropods are limited by their rather shoddy respiratory systems.  They don't circulate oxygen using their blood, as we do; oxygen is absorbed passively, through channels called tracheal tubes (in terrestrial arthropods) and feathery gills (in aquatic ones).  Gills do have an edge, efficiency-wise, over tracheal tubes, but are working against water's much lower oxygen concentration (way less than one percent, as compared to air at sea level, which averages around twenty-one percent).  This is why terrestrial animals drown; their lungs are just not efficient enough to extract oxygen from a fluid that has so little of it.

And, as I said before, the likelihood is that the conditions of the early Ordovician would likely have combined to cause a far lower dissolved concentration in the oceans than we have now.

So how did marrellomorphs get so big?

At the moment, we don't know.  But the new study has shown that the early Ordovician seas were even weirder than we'd thought, with arthropods swimming around as long as a fully-grown human is tall.

No idea what those things ate, but if I ever get in a time machine and go back then, I'm sure as hell going to be careful if I go swimming.

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Words as edged tools

Words matter.

This comes up because of a couple of unrelated social media interactions that got me thinking about the fact that many people use words and then want to avoid the implications and consequences of how they're perceived.  The first was a post from the Reverend Doctor Jacqui Lewis that (hearteningly) got a lot of responses of the high-five and applause variety, which said, "You don't 'hate pronouns.'  You hate the people who are using them.  If that makes you feel uncomfortable, then good.  It should.  You either respect how people are asking you to know and name them, or you don't.  But stop pretending it's about language."

The other was in response to a TikTok video I made for my popular #AskLinguisticsGuy series, in which I made the statement that prescriptivism -- the idea that one dialect of a language is to be preferred over another -- is inherently classist, and that we have to be extremely careful how we characterize differing pronunciations and word usages because they are often used as markers of class and become the basis for discrimination.  Most people were positive, but there was That One Guy who responded only with, "Great.  Another arrogant preachy prick."

Now, let me say up front that there are perhaps times when people are hypersensitive, and infer malice from the words we use when there was none intended.  On the other hand, it's critical that we as speakers and writers understand the power of words, and undertake educating ourselves about how they're perceived (especially by minorities and other groups who have experienced bigotry).  If someone in one of those groups says to me, "Please don't use that word, it's offensive," I am not going to respond by arguing with them about why it was completely appropriate.  I would far rather err on the side of being a little overcautious than unwittingly use a word or a phrase that carries ugly overtones.

Let me give you an example from my own personal experience.  I grew up in the Deep South -- as my dad put it, if we'd been any Deeper South, we'd'a been floating.  And I can say that it really pisses me off when I see a southern accent used as a marker of ignorance, bigotry, or outright stupidity.  I was appalled when a local middle school here in upstate New York put on a performance of Li'l Abner, a play written by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (both northerners native to Chicago).  The entire play, in my opinion, can be summed up as "Oh, those goofy southerners, how comically dim-witted they are."  If you've never seen it, you'll get the flavor when you hear that it features characters named Mammy Yokum, General Bullmoose, and Jubilation T. Cornpone.  I don't blame the kids; they were doing their best with it.  I blame the adults who chose the play, and then chortled along at sixth and seventh graders hee-hawing their way through the lines of dialogue with fake southern accents, and acted as if it was all okay.

People who know me would readily tell you that I'm very comfortable with laughing at myself.  My reaction to Li'l Abner wasn't that I "can't take a joke" at my own expense.  The problem is that the show is based on a single premise: characterizing an entire group, rural southerners, using a ridiculous stereotype, and then holding that stereotype up for a bunch of smug northerners to laugh at.

And if taking offense at that makes me a "woke snowflake," then I guess that's just the way it has to be.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kevin C Chen, SnowflakesOnWindshield, CC BY-SA 2.0 TW]

If, in your humor or your critical commentary, you're engaging in what a friend of mine calls "punching downward," you might want to think twice about it.

The bottom line, here, is that what I'm asking people to do (1) can make a world of difference to the way they come across, and (2) just isn't that hard.  When a trans kid in my class came up to me on the first day of class and said, "I go by the name ____, and my pronouns are ____," it literally took me seconds to jot that down, and next to zero effort afterward to honor that request.  To that student, however, it was deeply important, in a way I as a cis male can only vaguely comprehend.  Considering the impact of what you say or what you write, especially on marginalized groups, requires only that you educate yourself a little bit about the history of those groups and how they perceive language.

Refusing to do that isn't "being anti-woke."  It's "being an asshole."

Words can be edged tools, and we need to treat them that way.  Not be afraid of them; simply understand the damage they can do in the wrong hands or used in the wrong way.  If you're not sure how a word will be perceived, ask someone with the relevant experience whether they find it offensive, and then accept what they say as the truth.

And always, always, in everything: err on the side of kindness and acceptance.

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Ahead of the curve

I remember how stunned I was when I was in high school and found out that all energy release -- from striking a match to setting off a nuclear bomb -- goes back to Einstein's famous equation, that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.

It all hinges on the fact that the Law of Conservation of Mass isn't quite right.  If I set a piece of paper on fire inside a sealed box, the oft-quoted line in middle school textbooks -- that if I'd weighed the paper and the air in the box beforehand and then reweighed the ash and the air in the box afterward, they'd have identical masses -- isn't true.  The fact is, the box would weigh less after the paper had burned completely.

The reason is that some (a very tiny amount, but some) of the mass of the paper would have been converted to energy according to Einstein's equivalency, and that's where the heat and light of the fire came from.  Thus, the box and its contents would have less mass than they started with.

The mind-boggling truth is that when you burn a fossil fuel -- oil, coal, or natural gas -- you are re-releasing energy from the Sun that was stored in the tissues of plants in the form of a little bit of extra mass during the Carboniferous Period, three-hundred-odd million years ago.

So to fix the problem with the "Law," we have to account for the shifting back and forth between matter and energy.  If you change it to a conservation law of the total -- that the sum of the mass and energy stays constant in a closed system -- it's spot-on.  (In fact, this is the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

How much energy you can get out of anything depends, then, only on one thing; how much of its mass you can turn into energy.  This is the basis of (amongst many other things) what happens in a nuclear power plant.  As folks like Henri Becquerel, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Pierre Curie, and others showed in the early twentieth century, the atoms of an element can be turned into the atoms of a different element -- the dream of the alchemists -- and the amount of energy required or released by that process is described by something called the binding energy curve.

This graph shows a number of interesting things.  First, the higher on the graph an atom is, the more stable it is.  Second, when you're going from one atom type to another, if you've moved upward on the graph, that transition releases energy; if you've moved downward, the transition requires energy.  Third, how big a jump you've made is a measure of the amount of energy you release or consume in the transition.  (Theoretically; as you'll see, doing this in the real world, and making practical use of the process, is another matter entirely.)

Note, for example, going from uranium (at the far right end of the graph) to any of the other mid-weight elements uranium breaks down into when it undergoes nuclear fission.  What those are, specifically, isn't that important; they all lie on the flattish part of the curve between iron (Fe, the most stable element) and uranium.  Going from uranium to any of those is an upward movement on the graph, and thus releases energy.  Seems like it must not be much, right?  Well, that "small" release is what generates the energy from a nuclear power plant -- and from bombs of the type that destroyed Hiroshima.

Now check out the other end of the graph -- the elements for which fusion is the energy-releasing transformation.

Go, for example from hydrogen-1 (the very bottom left corner of the graph) to helium-4 (at the peak, right around 7 MeV), and compare the size of that leap with the one from uranium to any of its fission products.  This transition -- hydrogen-1 to helium-4 -- is the one that powers the Sun, and is what scientists would like to get going in a fusion reactor.

See why?  I could sit down and calculate the per-transition difference in the energy release between fission and fusion, but it's huge.  Fusion releases more energy by orders of magnitude.  Also, the fuel for fusion, hydrogen, is by far the most abundant element in the Solar System; it's kind of everywhere.  Not only that, the waste product -- helium -- is completely harmless and inert, by comparison to fission waste, which remains deadly for centuries.

That's why the scientists want so desperately to get fusion going as a viable energy source.

The problem, as I noted earlier, is practicality.  The fusion reactions in the Sun are kept going because the heat and pressure in the core are sufficient for hydrogen nuclei to overcome their mutual electrostatic repulsion, crushing them together and triggering a chain reaction that leads to helium-4 (and releasing a crapload of energy in the process).  Maintaining those conditions in the lab has turned out to be extraordinarily difficult; it's always consumed (far) more energy to trigger nuclear fusion than came out of it, and the reactions are self-limiting, collapsing in a split-second.  It's what's given rise to the sardonic quip, "Practical nuclear fusion is fifty years in the future... and always will be."

Well -- it seems like "fifty years in the future" may have just gotten one step closer.

It was just announced that for the first time ever, scientists at the amusingly-named National Ignition Facility of Livermore, California have created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed.  This proof-of-concept is, of course, only the first step, but it demonstrates that practical nuclear fusion might not be the pipe dream it has seemed since its discovery almost a century ago.

"This is a monumental breakthrough," said Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, a physicist who has collaborated in other NIF projects but was not involved the current research.  "With this achievement, the landscape has changed...  comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight.  We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly."

So keep your eyes on the news.  A common pattern in science is that once someone shows something is possible, the advances take off like a rocket.  Imagine how it would change the world if we could, once and for all, ditch our dependence on fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear fission technology, and power the planet using an energy source that runs on a ridiculously abundant fuel and produces a completely harmless waste product.

That dream may have just gotten one step closer.

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