Too much to do.

This is a wonderful book which has taken me far too long to read due to the vagaries of library ebook holds. The author is a long-time science journalist who has taken the time to survey the history and current frontiers of research in non-human perception, including a wide range of in-person interviews, both in the lab and the field. The writing is spare, expressive, and detailed, with copious footnotes, many pages of citations, a huge bibliography, and a comprehensive index. There are also a number of color photos (collected at the back of the ebook edition).

The book is organized in the logical fashion, covering each sense starting with the canonical five, which we humans have at least a chance of understanding, but then venturing into more exotic realms of echolocation, electroreception, and magnetoreception. The fundamental thesis is how difficult it is to really understand how other species actually perceive the world using senses which are so different in range, sensitivity, and even fundamental nature from our own, but by giving many examples and discussing how the science has evolved I felt I had at least made a start. Even the same sense can manifest in different ways, with a wide variety of sensory nerves and mechanisms, making it clear that there is no one true way to sense the world around us.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but to give a couple of examples I was very interested in the discussion of the technical aspects of bat echolocation, which includes shifts in frequency and cadence which allow bats to zero in on insects in mid-air in complete darkness. And the discussion of how octopus nervous systems are wired up, allowing each arm to operate in a semi-autonomous fashion, leads to interesting ideas about how these highly intelligent creatures think, and how their minds might differ from our own centralized versions.

The book does end with a warning; having discussed how many different ways there are to perceive the world, we learn how human disruption of the environment can cause terrible harm to other creatures, in the form of light, sound, and electric field pollution. The bad news is that these threats to ecosystems get much less attention that the traditional chemical pollutants and global climate change; the good news is that they are much easier to correct: just turn down the lights, reduce the noise, and simply take into account the senses of our fellow earthlings. And when the world is less illuminated and noisy we arrogant humans will benefit as well from the dark and quiet, allowing us to again see the stars and hear the sounds of nature.

Highly recommended.

Here I go again ✈️

Fennel sausage and roasted fennel 🍕

There are few problems that can’t be solved by a new Apple Watch band ⌚️

Today I said “I’m going for a walk as soon as I get out of this meeting” but here I am still at my desk two hours later.

Fifty years ago www.gocomics.com/doonesbur…

Today I learned that HTTP header field names are case insensitive, probably not for the last time.

Now that X has rebranded can we start using “tweet” as the generic term for a microblog post on any platform?

Waiting for the repair shop to call 🚗

Thunder and lightning 🌩️

There are few problems which can’t be solved by a 25 foot HDMI cable.

Time to clean the house 🧹

Using an LCD video projector for the first time. The video is great, but the only audio output is a 3.5 jack which doesn’t work on the unit I borrowed. Looking into an upstream solution…

Home again🏠

Humblebrag

This is another fast read, an old-fashioned detective story in the vein of Sam Spade, but set in a dystopian future where political and economic power rest in a handful of nearly immortal bioengineered humans, known as Titans in part due to their more than human stature, a side effect of the bioengineering process which grants youth, long life, and physical strength, but doesn’t seem to do much for wisdom and intelligence; there is still betrayal, intrigue, and murder.

That’s where our protagonist comes in, an entirely human private detective with personal contacts in both the non-engineered general population and the oversized elites. When there is a crime involving Titans he is the one the police turn too, although not with much enthusiasm, to navigate the complicated relationships between the two societies. He is everything you would expect in a hard-boiled detective: sarcastic, loyal, and clever enough to solve the crime; but although he is cynical enough to recognize the inequitable structure of society, he doesn’t seem to really appreciate how the absolute power of the Titans corrupts everything they touch.

By the end of the case we meet a host of colorful supporting characters, plausible suspects, and red herrings, along with several action sequences in which things don’t always go the detective’s way. It is a page turner in the old-fashioned sense, with each section raising questions or providing hints that surely can be resolved by reading just a bit more. As with all detective stories things are tied up in the conclusion, but I felt that the resolution doesn’t really address the horror and immorality of the biologically stratified world.

Recommended.

I need a beer 🍺

Renewed 1Password for one more year, as long as I can still use version 7 I think I’m stuck.

This is an even shorter book which I added to my library queue last month, written by a Texas-born historian of slavery in the United States, and exploring her personal relationship with the mythology and history of the state of Texas, the origin and subsequent celebration of Juneteenth, and what life was like growing up Black in a society where White is the “norm.”

One of the important points she discusses is how the traditional history of the US presents slavery as an aberration of the deep past which only affected a few unimportant (Black) people, and that the entire history of Black people in American can be reduced to that enslavement. In fact many people of African descent were on the continent well before 1619, most of them speaking languages other than English; there have always been communities of free Black people in all parts of the nascent United States; and the entire economic development of the country, in the North as well as the South, depended on the unreimbursed labor of the enslaved.

In the best of all worlds Juneteenth would be a reaffirmation of the Declaration’s central principal that “all men are created equal,” later codified in the 14th Amendment (and someday perhaps joined by the ERA as the 28th), and enforced by legislation and policies which address and correct the inequalities under which so many have lived for so long. By removing barriers which have prevented a large portion of our citizens from reaching their true potential we can at last reach the goal of “the pursuit of happiness” together.

Definite recommend.