The Periodic Table of TV Shows

Because I have a rule that I must post all periodic tables I find:

The Van Gogh Painting Hidden in the Sun's Corona

Quick question: Is the sun solid, liquid, or gas? I know, trick question ... it's none of the above, mostly being composed of plasma, a fourth state of matter beyond the typical three terrestrial states. Being its own unique state of matter, scientists are going to study it, and even something as simple as watching it heat up and cool down can yield unusual beauty.

Here's a picture of how the temperature of the sun's plasma changes:

Here's a video of how they did it:

And here's links to previous entries on the blog about how an island, the ocean and dominoes can look like Van Goghs, with various degrees of intentionality. Apparently since this is the fourth post on this kind of things, I need to create a category for "Van Gogh" in my labels section.

Angel's Glow, Under a Microscope

Sometimes the same science story can look very different depending on how you tell it. Instead of angels, you find worms. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This is what happened with "Angel's Glow." The Civil War caused a Judgment Day's worth of carnage and flesh wounds. Army doctors noticed that some soldiers' wounds glowed with a faint blue light, and that these wounds were almost always clean from infection. They called this the Angel's Glow of protection, and no doubt were thinking of angels that did it.

When science looked into the story it found no little dancers on the ends of pins, although it did find something that could dance on the end of a pin if so inclined. It found tiny "bugs," microbes that contained the glowing blue light. Science named these microbes Photorabdus luminescens, and you can find out all about them at their Microbe Wiki page (I did not know such a site existed, but it sure makes sense). That site has a nice picture of the blue glow coming from waxworms infected with Photorabdus:

Part B shows the same bacterium inside a different worm, Heterorhabditis bacteriophora. (Yes, I know it's green, not blue: they "painted" it that way with a green-glowing protein, so that shows what happens when you mix biological glows, I guess.) The interesting thing about this infection is that it's actually good for the worm. Photorabdus likes to be the only bacterium on the block, so it has developed an arsenal of potent and creative antimicrobial molecules that it lobs around the environment, taking out most other bacteria. Heterorhabditis apparently doesn't mind the antimicrobials, because they destroy bad bacteria that might infect it. So the worm has made a handshake deal with the bacterium: I'll give you a place to live (and a set of wheels to get around) IF you'll take out the other bacteria. And it seems to work very well, because Photoradbus is able to kill a lot of other things. It's an effective little bug, it just needs a worm to give it a ride.

Gardeners apparently use this worm all the time to kill ants and other insects. Now we know that this works because of the "Angel's Glow" -- the worm spreads the glowing bacteria around the garden and it goes its little glowing way, spreading insect death and destruction while sparing the life of its wormy host. Photorabdus even likes to take two forms, one of quiet little colonies inside the Heterorhabditis worm-car, but then it transforms into Superbad-Bacteria when it gets into the insect. A fascinating transformation, found in other small organisms like Malaria. I'd love to know more about how that happens at the protein level.

So how should this story be told? The blog post that first alerted me to it is titled "Worm Kills Insects by Vomiting Hulk-Like Bacteria." Well, that would work a little better if the Hulk were blue, but it was good enough to attract my attention. My thoughts on reading it is that the blog tells its story explicitly, in vivid, gross terms, dwelling on what a horrific death it must be for the insects. Ok, that's true but it's an editorial emphasis. I also found  happy gardeners, worms, and soldiers in the story. The horrific death is occurring to some organisms that have a pretty bad effect on the environment (whether they would be killing a soldier or ruining a garden given the chance). If you're pro-insect you can lobby against this process but I'm not so sure it's a bad thing for the pro-human people among us.

What this really is, is a case where the story reveals something about the storyteller. The storyteller can't help but put himself into the story. The story itself is a complex and networked mix of good and bad. It's gross but it's also beautiful, with the image of glowing wounds protected from further harm. It's something that has been harnessed by human ingenuity (and before that, by biological ingenuity) to create and maintain order. So you can talk about it with images of death and vomit, and I'll talk about it with images of well-manicured gardens and fathers who could return to their families because of a mysterious, ethereal blue glow. You may see demons-- but I see angels. It's all in the looking. (... when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire ...)

And who's to say angels AREN'T there? After all, haven't you ever seen The Ten Commandments, with its depiction of the Angel of Death? Looks pretty familiar to me ...

Book Review: Worlds Apart

The Owen Barfield reading tour continues with Worlds Apart, written by Barfield as a "dialogue" between several academics with different philosophies. Two are clearly anthroposophists like Barfield, and the rest represent different disciplines ranging from physics to psychology. I'm trying to decide if this book is a good entry point to Barfield or not. It does focus on science and the back-and-forth of the many objections to Barfield's ideas. The dialogue format of Worlds Apart plays to Barfield's experience as a lawyer, and about 1/3 of the way through there's an extended Socratic dialogue that may be the best entry to his philosophy that I've seen. The problems include a section of extended Steiner-worship at the end and a definite feeling that the other characters are straw men.

What I'd really like to see is an extended dialogue between Barfield and C.S. Lewis, which I know actually happened because Lewis alluded to it in his famous description of Barfield as his "second friend." There's a book of Barfield commenting on Lewis, and that may be the next stop on the tour.

One of my constant questions would be what Barfield would make of the analysis of DNA words that I'm thinking about right now to reconstruct the ancient words. On the one hand, that's exactly what he did with English words, and he argues at the end of Saving the Appearances that evolution and Christianity naturally cohere. On the other hand, English words are a way of looking at the human mind, while DNA words are not, because these words were never formed by the human mind, and there's also that little bit about Barfield saying the past "never happened." But this passage near the end of Worlds Apart finally resolves it for me:

"Brain, heart, liver, spleen have been built into your body by the world, by the whole history of the world, and if you 'study' one of them in that intensive way, you have access to the relevant period of world-history. Access, first of all, to the building that was going on before your birth and, through that, back into their remoter phylogenesis."

"You see -- or at any rate I have argued -- that if evolution has indeed been fundamentally the evolution of self-consciousness, there cannot be that sharp break between ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, which the positivist picture of evolution assumes. The one must merge gradually back into the other." (p. 195-196)

Of course, right after this high point is when the book really goes off the deep end, with too much Steiner and too little anyone else. (Maybe even too little Barfield!) However, that part is written as a collection of unconnected observations, almost like appendices, and so I think even Barfield saw some of that as outside the necessary argument he was making. I'm starting to separate the wheat from the chaff here and I think there's a way to adapt some of the ideas of Barfield in a way that takes the good and leaves the bad. In particular, I think Tolkien ultimately did that and such an adaptation accounts for some of the strength of The Lord of the Rings. Is there a way to do that with the data collected by current biology rather than the ancient Norse sagas? I'm not sure. Stay tuned.

If a Philosophy Network is Based on Wikipedia and It Doesn't Illuminate Anything, Does It Exist?

I was excited when I saw that someone had made a graph of the influences among philosophers, but I'm a little less excited after looking at it. First, the graph, which is cool enough -- you'll have to click on it to see anything but "Plato" probably -- but then the reasons for my mild disenchantment:

This graph was constructed according to the "influenced by" section for philosophers on Wikipedia, by the method here. That's a pretty nifty (and easy) way to get a graph. But I'm not convinced the lower levels of this network have enough reliable data that they say anything. Granted, I have my own biases, but the philosophers I know anything about don't really fall in a place that illuminates anything about them. There's a distinct lack of the Christian philosophers I know best (John Calvin is way out on the edge, which I just know is wrong), so I think this graph has suffered from the biases of Wiki contributors and artificial distinctions between theology and philsophy (for some reason, Muslim theologians are more commonly classified under philosophy by Wikipedia, see the northern part of the graph). Alasdair MacIntyre by Augistine of Hippo makes sense, but what are Francis Bacon and Muhammed doing there? Ayn Rand by Richard Swinburne? I'm probably trying to stretch the graph too far, but to me that's just the point -- this graph can't be stretched very far at all. It shows interesting relationships for the top 10 names is all.

I just don't see how this really illuminates anything beyond the banal conclusion that all philosophy is connected. It should be able to say more, but it needs more effort on the back end to make it interpretable on the front end. My conclusion is that a simple analysis leads only to simple interpretation, and there's still a role for the human brain in interpreting Wikipedia!

The Evil Nazi Plan to Breed Pure Cows

Speaking of evil scars on the landscape: let's talk about Nazis. There's a B-movie somewhere about the evil Nazi plan to mutate cattle and breed a pure, extinct species called the Auroch that used to roam the forests of Europe, and to introduce this Nazi cow, wild and roaming free, in Poland (once those people who were already there were ... removed). Oh, wait, that's not a movie, it actually happened.

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman is how I first encountered this story (the Nazis were interested in the zoo for reasons related to the Auroch breeding program), but it's been covered from another angle here, in "Heavy Breeding" by Michael Wang.

What stands out about this story to me is how good Nazis were as scientists. For example, they understood the critical importance of the relationship between the environment and the organism, something that's become more obvious recently. We can now reconstruct ancestral proteins from the fragments of current genomes, and that's essentially what the Nazis were trying to do with the Aurochs, just with an organism rather than a protein. And they actually did have some measure of success in reshaping cows to become more Auroch-like, a success that can be seen today in the Heck Cattle. Early 20th-century Germany was one of the best places to do science. But that obviously is not enough. It meant that their eventual war machine was that much more formidable in both World Wars.

Some people take this kind of observation and say that because Nazis believed in evolution, therefore Darwin was wrong. That doesn't compute. The problem is deeper. It comes with the use of science, as much as with the science itself. It goes with a willingness to impose one's will on the lives and landscape of all those around you, no matter the cost, in pursuit of your vision of perfection. This vision of biological perfection is actually very intricate and, in some scientific points, correct. But that is precisely what makes the whole package so very wrong. The lie may be closer to the truth ... but all the worst lies are.

To me, it's far more important to note that the Nazis went after the handicapped and weak first than to note that they read Darwin. That's far too narrow. Their reading of Darwin aligned with and contributed to this twisted pristine vision of theirs, definitely (a point I make in third-quarter biochemistry every year, in fact), but if we're looking for the root problem we have to include other data. We have to look at their politics as well as their science, their operas as well as their breeding programs, their relationships as well as their experiments, their hearts as well as their minds. And so my ambivalent relationship with Richard Wagner's operas continues.

At the very least this story should give us pause about our own societal blinders. Now that we have more precise genetic means to pursue these ends, but we have essentially the same human will and weaknesses ... what now?

And if you want an unambiguous moral to this story: great research institutes do not a complete society make. It's the highly scientific society that can do the most evil. (GK Chesterton makes exactly this point, and warns about Germany/Prussia, in 1920's Eugenics and Other Evils -- before these horrors really began.)

The Burn Scar in Colorado

Satellite imagery of the area recently burned in Colorado.

Doesn't this burn scar just look evil? It seems to be reaching out for Colorado Springs ...

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