Lee's Blog

Yay! I was not convinced by the mDNA evidence. Indeed, I think I even commented on that here, although I can’t easily look back on this iPhone. But now the evidence is in: non-African populations (by which they mean populations that moved out of Africa in the past 50,000 years or so) are 1%-4% Neandertal. They are not extinct! We have met the Neandertals, and they is us!

Update: I should clarify that I was not convinced by the mitochondrial DNA absence of evidence.

No living human being has been found with mDNA sufficiently different from the rest of us to suggest that he or she has Neandertal mDNA. But all that proves is that no Neandertal female left descendants that have continued down to the present in the purely female line. When you consider how few varieties of mDNA there are among the billions of people now living, that must be true of the vast majority of women who were living at that time, Neandertal or sapiens. It does not prove that no Neandertal woman has descendants of any kind living today.

Just as mDNA is passed in the maternal line, the Y-chromosome is passed in the paternal line, and there are no known cases of men today who carry a Y-chromosome that is suspected of being a Neandertal chromosome. But that just proves that no Neandertal man has descendants in the purely male line, which is equally true of the vast majority of men living in that time.

But again, I’m thrilled to learn that I’m part Neandertal.

As I was heading home a few weeks ago, one of my co-workers was headed the same way and we got to talking. He was going to pick up boxes of Girl Scout cookies for his daughter, who was of course the Girl Scout in question. I observed that there is a particular type of cookie that I especially love, and I described it although I could not remember the name.

The next day, as I was cleaning out my desk, he brought me a box of Samoas. Yes, that was exactly the type I like, so I immediately bought the box. I shared out my cookies with my neighbors, who asked suspiciously if I had found them in the back of my desk. I assured them that, no, the cookies were completely fresh, and pointed out that I had gotten them from Steve.

They immediately called Steve over and wanted to order cookies from him. He was totally unprepared — he had no catalog and no order forms — but we’re computer people, so someone googled up the Girl Scout cookie website so everyone could see what was available, and he wrote the orders on a piece of scrap paper.

Having escaped from that group, he bowed to the inevitable and sent out an email offering cookies to everyone in the office. He told me later that in an hour and a half, he had orders for 130 boxes.

He had not been prepared to take orders because he had thought it an imposition on his co-workers to expect them to help out his daughter. But free enterprise will out …

Well, I’m officially snowed in. Or at least iced in. This was a record-breaking snowfall, which is on top of the freezing rain and sleet that preceded it. I’ve been outside, and there is ice everywhere that there isn’t snow on top of ice. At last report the Interstates in and out of OKC were still closed, so I couldn’t get there even if I could get to the nearest paved road, which I don’t think I can.

I read various unkind comments about Oklahoma’s preparedness, but seriously — we don’t have storms like this. If we had infinite resources, sure, we’d have sanding and salting trucks to deal with one such storm in fifty years, but we don’t, so we don’t. We just have to deal with this with what we’ve got.

We have a real, live white Christmas today. I read on the Internet (and is not the Internet always right) that this is only the sixth white Christmas in 106 years. Hmm, I guess my recollection that we never had a white Christmas when I was growing up is probably accurate. I do recall a white Thanksgiving, and even one white Halloween, however.

My bedroom is unusually dark this morning, due to the snow stuck all over the windows. The temperature is below freezing, though not much below, and predicted to stay that way, so I’m not sure how safe it’s going to be, trying to drive to the City.

On the other hand, at least I’m here, safe in my own home, unlike one of my friends, who’s sitting in a hotel room in Houston. All flights to OKC were cancelled last night, and the first two flights in from Houston this morning are cancelled too.

… but I was hoping for some snow.

I concede that the ground is turning white, though. Enough sleet has piled up to cover it pretty well. I suspect that we won’t get any snow until the howling winds die down.

Not that I’m complaining, however. I’m snug in my house, and I know it’s much worse in most of the rest of the country.

Years ago, I read a book about, among other things, the origin of human intelligence. The book pointed out that human beings, uniquely among primates, can throw hard and accurately. See, for instance, baseball pitchers. 

Now, the book explained, the ability to throw hard and accurately is not an easy ability to acquire. Other primates don’t do it naturally and can’t even be taught to do it. Not that all of us can do it either, of course, but we can generally be taught to do it better than the other primates.

The difficulty with throwing is that you cannot use feedback. If you wish to pick up a cup, say, you could watch your hand move toward the cup and, when it got close enough, you could stop it and change to a grasping motion. That is, you could use feedback from your eyes and the sensations in your hand to tell you when to change your motions. 

You can’t do that if you want to throw hard. To do that, your hand and arm must move very fast; so fast that your nerves cannot carry the visual signal from your eye to your brain and the motor signal from your brain to your arm quick enough to change your motion and release the ball when you see that your hand is in the right position. Instead, you must “program” your arm to swing *this* far and then release. To do that, you need an accurate timer. Given that you have only neurons to work with, many neurons are required to make a good timer, and more neurons make a better timer. So the suggestion was that pre-humans started throwing things in the course of hunting – not very accurately, of course, because apes do not throw accurately, but well enough to eat. There was then selection pressure within the population to throw more and more accurately, so brains got bigger and bigger.

But in between hunts, those big brains were just sitting there, not really accomplishing anything. They began to occupy themselves with other things, like language and culture … and here we are. 

I rather like this hypothesis, though I don’t know how it’s stood the test of time. My friends who were pro and semi-pro baseball pitchers especially like it. But perhaps it’s wrong. 

Still, it seems to me that something like this happened with the iPhone. Cell phones have to be computers, since they have to keep track of various cell phone towers and switch seamlessly from one to another. Making them programmable is nice since it allows you to patch them on the fly, and people like pretty colors … and once you’ve got all that, it seems a shame to let all that capacity sit unused when the owner isn’t talking. So, turn it into this multipurpose device.

Presented for your approval: the theory of the evolution of the iPhone.

My experience with blizzards is fairly limited — I am from Oklahoma, after all — but I have to say that this would probably qualify. Visibility is down to perhaps two blocks, and at that distance all I can see is lights, not anything illuminated by the lights. The wind is howling and even though I am in the lee of the building (heh), the wind swirled up and hit me with a very cold and snowy blast when I went outside. I heard some children laughing and shouting earlier; I guess they were having a snowball fight, but I could not see them.

I was reminded of this question by something or other today. It is the question that Enrico Fermi raised about the absence of any alien contact. Given the number of Sun-like stars in the Galaxy, any reasonable estimate of the probability of habitable planets around those stars, any reasonable estimate of the likelihood of life evolving, and most estimates of the probability of intelligent life evolving, it seems that there should be many, many civilizations out there. So, where is everybody?

In early science fiction, especially science fiction from the Forties and Fifties, which I read growing up, the answer seemed more or less obvious: they aren’t there because they all destroyed themselves through nuclear war, as it appeared likely that the human race would destroy itself. In the Sixties and into the Seventies, the answer still seemed obvious: if they didn’t destroy themselves through war, then they destroyed themselves through ecological disaster.

By the time I read those stories, it seemed less obvious to me that every intelligent species would destroy itself. After all, if war or ecological disaster threatened, shouldn’t reasonable beings start setting up colonies off their home planet? Colonies that could survive, with however much difficulty, regardless of what happened back home? So the question remained, where is everybody?

But then, one day I heard someone say, “If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we do X?” and someone else answered, “But we can’t put a man on the Moon today; we don’t have the resources.” I don’t remember the exact context because my mind instantly wandered to this: Here may be the explanation to the question of “where is everybody?”

It occurred to me that the Earth is probably unusual in a couple of ways. For one, it has two continental masses: the Old World, which is Eurasia plus Africa, together with the island of Australia (not normally included, but it is for my purposes); and the New World, the Americas. The intelligent species (there were a group but they were all closely related and we are the only survivors) arose in the Old World and spread out over it. This is why I include Australia as part of the Old World, since human beings reached it about 70K years ago.

Over time, the intelligent species developed more and more advanced technology, which they used to extract and utilize more and more resources. With more and more resources, the population grew and grew, and more and more resources had to (and have to) be devoted just to keep all the population alive. Every advance in technology, every new resource discovered, produced a population increase that ate up all the new resources, so that the average person was no better off, and often less well off, than their ancestors had been.

But then, there was the New World. Human beings had spread there too, but much later and with a very small founding population, so they had had a low technology base when they got there, and hadn’t had the same large population exchanging knowledge. So they had begun to use up their resources, but to a comparatively small degree. And then the advanced civilizations of the Old World happened upon the New World. Suddenly they had a massive, instantaneous influx of resources, without the population growth that had always accompanied the slow resource increases in the past. Suddenly, for one of the few times in history, there could be civilizations that were truly wealthy, that is, that had far more resources than people. This was a civilization that might be able to expend the resources to travel to another astronomical body.

And that brings me to the second way in which the Earth is probably unusual. We have the Moon. It is big and it is, relatively speaking, close. It has lots of resources, even water, which had long been expected and was recently proven. It has a respectable gravity, so although living there would take some adjustment, it would take a lot less adjustment than would be needed for a satellite like, say, Deimos. We could have established a colony there and from there spread out into the Solar System and ultimately perhaps to the stars.

Could have. Forty years ago perhaps we could have. But forty years ago the Earth’s population was less than three billion and now it is pushing seven. Population has grown to absorb all the resources of the New World, and, as any number of people have been pointing out during the Copenhagen Conference, our descendants will be far poorer than ourselves.

We don’t have the spare resources anymore, and it seems probable that we never will again. We had a chance — a sudden massive influx of resources into a relatively technologically advanced civilization, and a nearby satellite that is almost perfect for colonization — and we blew it. We will never reach the stars.

Other civilizations, on other planets, likely didn’t have the Old World/New World split, so they had probably filled up their entire planet by the time they developed enough technology to think of reaching for the stars, and they never had the spare resources. Even if they had, they’d likely have been looking at either colonizing a tiny satellite like Deimos, or making a big jump equivalent to a Mars shot as their first extra-planetary trip. Either way, they couldn’t do it.

Where is everybody? Trapped on their planets forever.

Just like us.

1:06pm EST: The Verrazano Narrows bridge just almost disappeared, but the Statute of Liberty is still clearly visible.

1:08: The bridge has disappeared entirely and the boats are visible only because they have lights. Still see the Statue.

I expected it would not snow here, because I am here and it never snows where I am.

1:10: The New York shore is fading out. The Statue is beginning to fade. New Jersey in front of me is still perfectly clear. The boats in the harbor beyond the Statue are invisible even with their lights.

1:13: It must be lightening up. I can see the boats again, and the Statue is clearly visible again.

1:17: Still no snow.

1:19: Snow! Well, sort of. Tiny, tiny flakes — it looks almost like dust, but it is definitely white stuff falling from the sky. I can still see the Statue clearly, though.

1:22: I still have to concentrate to see the few tiny flakes blowing around, but the Statue is fading and the boats are invisible.

1:24: The tiny flakes are more noticeable now.

1:28: I’d say this could probably fairly be described as snow. No one in their right mind would call this blizzard conditions, however.

1:40: There is no doubt that it is snowing now. I can barely see the Statue and the New York coast. So far it doesn’t seem to be sticking to the rooftops, even though it is 26 degrees so you’d think the roofs at least would be cold enough.

1:47: It’s seriously going to have to do better than this to impress me with East Coast winter weather.

1:52: And now it’s stopped again.

The owner of the farm store near my house runs a charity on the side. It started out many years ago, and I believe it was initially his “burn closet” — furniture and staples for people who had suffered losses in fires. It was a way of helping them back on their feet. I donated to that.

Additionally, he runs his “Christmas project” every year, where he puts up the Christmas tree, but instead of ornaments, he hangs little cards with the first names and needs of people in group homes around the State. One can buy a card for $25, in which case he or another volunteer will use the money to buy a present, or one can simply take a card, buy and wrap (or not wrap) a present, and bring back the card and present for delivery.

I used to just buy cards every year, though one time I actually took a card and bought a present. It was for a twelve year old girl in a shelter (I assume this was an abuse case and she was with her mother) and I bought her all of the Narnia books in a single volume with beautiful color illustrations, and I wrapped it and taped a beanie baby on top. I really hope that brightened her very unhappy Christmas a little.

But the heartbreak … I used to read the cards when I bought them, just to kind of relate to the person I was helping. But I haven’t done that for two years. Last year I just took them down without looking at them, and this year I didn’t even go near the tree. I just put my check in the donation jar and left.

The reason is that two years ago I was reading the requests: “he would like a wallet”, “she would like a sweater”, and I came across one that said “he hopes Santa will bring him something nice”.

Sorry, I had to stop and wipe the tears away.

This breaks my heart. Here was a man in his forties, who should have been in the prime of his life — like my co-workers, for instance — and his Christmas consists of hopiing that a stranger will care enough to give him something nice.

Life is good for me. Christmas reminds me of how fortunate I am and have always been, and how very unfortunate so many others have been. I raised my donation again this year, because I know the donations must be down, and I want these people to have their presents.

Santa must bring them something nice.