Primed Staplers and Superstitious Pigeons

The stapler wasn't working yesterday. In any busy office, that isn't news. But it's a new sort of stapler: a Cartridge Electric Stapler. It has a roll of 5000 staples, one of which it's supposed to spit out when the edge of the paper to be stapled pushes a metal tab in the business end of the little machine. Pow! Papers stapled. The coil of 5000 staples is intriguing stuff – a thin, flat, flexible metallic strip – and if all goes well it's a l-o-n-g time between refilling staples. Yesterday all was not going well. The stapler had a fresh cartridge but all it did was gum the paper.

Investigating the problem, I found some instructions on the cartridge. Are we all tired yet of fine-printed instructions on everything, everywhere, and nothing sufficiently intuitive that it just works the way it seems it should?

PRIMING INSTRUCTIONS

Pull out 1"
Bend down
Twist off

Prime a stapler? OK, pull out an inch of the staple roll, bend it down and break it off. Then insert the cartridge so it snaps into place.

Alas, priming the stapler did not work too well. Now the stapler gummed the paper four times out of five or so, but the remaining time it stapled. Knowing that the last automatic stapler we used in our office wanted paper inserted in a counterintuitive way – you had to proffer the leading edge, not just the top corner; that way the tab was activated – I tried different ways of inserting the paper. Edge first, corner first, press hard, press lightly; adjust staple position back and forth with a lever on the bottom of the stapler.... Nothing worked perfectly or failed completely. Pow. Pow. Pow..... Finally a crisp Pow! A staple! But then back to flabby pows.

I determinedly experimented until my boss looked over and chuckled. Then I remembered reading about a famous experiment where pigeons were given bird food at totally random intervals. The birds ended up with odd mannerisms that they had incorrectly associated with making food arrive. Hungry pigeons walked around in circles, cocked their their heads, or whatever else they had happened to be doing once when the food appeared. Because the food kept coming randomly, their superstitions seemingly worked just often enough to encourage them.

Human religiosity can unfold like that. On the other hand, many religions have a least one time-honored strand that says stay far, far away from magical thinking.

So. The stapler is doing what the stapler is doing; nothing more and nothing less. No blame.

Where is the old manual stapler?

Space Junk

Devo was right. It's not all Blue Danube up there.

NYT: "Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat"

Lord of the Rings

Courtesy of the Planetary Society, yet another stunning image of Saturn from Cassini. Yet another image we didn't even know we needed to see, but there it is. If Cassini keeps sending back these marvelous gems, it might even take the sting out of Hubble's going blind. Might. Click through to get a significantly larger version. Trust me, it's worth it.

On January 20, 2007 Cassini's orbit took it 60 degrees above the plane of the rings to capture this top-down view, composed of 12 separate wide-angle camera footprints. The resolution is about 77 kilometers per pixel. In the upper right corner of the image, Prometheus, Pandora, and Janus skirt the edge of the rings. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / Ian Regan

Bang! Bang! Maxwell's nano demon came down upon his head

We live in an age of wonders. Retro-themed wonders to be sure, but wonders nonetheless. First, it was an anchient Greek difference engine, and now it's Victorian nanotech. It seems that way back in 1867, a physicist by the name of James Clerk Maxwell postulated a molecular "demon" that could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. Today we can look back and see he was effectively proposing nano machines, but not only that, we (specifically, David Leigh) can build them, too.

His mechanism traps molecular-sized particles as they move. As Maxwell had predicted long ago, it does not need energy because it is powered by light.

"While light has previously been used to energize tiny particles directly, this is the first time that a system has been devised to trap molecules as they move in a certain direction under their natural motion," said Leigh who reported the findings in the journal Nature.

"Once the molecules are trapped, they cannot escape."

Leigh credits Maxwell for establishing the fundamentals for understanding how light, heat and molecules behave.

My next question is obvious, but it must be asked: How long before the first NanoSteam story hits the newsstands?

The Mujahideen of Melrose Avenue

Futurismic has opened its fiction year with a new story of mine, "R.P.M.," which the editors pitch as "a near-future post-mediapocalyptic mind-bender about celebrity, freedom, America and meaning." Check it out.



>>>>
I wake to the sound of vintage Hall & Oates blasting at me so loudly I can feel the waves pound my flesh, each beat an aural tsunami.

Private Eyes. The synth-drum feels like it’s being played on my head with a rubber mallet.

I emit a screaming yawn, squinting my eyes open into the bright lights.

Which lights silhouette a sarcastically dancing policeman. Adding his own voice the chorus.

They’re watching you.
<<<<

Growing up in the GWOT

Roll Over, Art Linkletter



From a conversation last night with my son Hugo, age 11.

"Hey, Dad."

"Yeah?"

"You know how the Vice President's lesbian daughter is having a baby?"

"Mary Cheney? Yeah."

"Do you know who the father is?"

"No."

"Dick."

"Get outta here."

"Really. It's part of an inbreeding experiment."

"A what?"

"Yeah." Smiling. "They are trying to breed a super-Republican of the future."

"No way."

"Do you know what they are going to name it?"

"What."

"MaryDick. One word."

"Is it going to be a boy or a girl?"

"No."

"The paragon for prehistoric human induced ecological catastrophe"

No ponderous tome of a blog entry for me this time around--the Muse ain’t down wit’ me today, and I’m having a hard time finding a hook for the piece I want to write. So instead, I’m going to ramble a bit.

You all know (or should know) what an invasive species is. They are “an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health." (That definition, btw, came from Executive Order 13112--signed, naturally, by Bill Clinton rather than the current placeholder). They are a problem--perhaps not as pressing as our disappearing supply of fresh water (see this Popular Science article for some of the depressing details, and this Worldchanging.com article for China’s possibly dire future), but more important than the worldwide shortage of tungsten.

The example of an invasive species which most people know about is the rabbit invasion of Australia, but there are a number of other examples, such as the house gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus, wiping out the native night gecko Nactus populations on the Mascarene Islands. For more current examples, see the 100 Worst Invasive Alien Species list on the Global Invasive Species Database.

The news doesn’t always have to be bad, nor does every introduction of an invasive species end up being catastrophic. In Arizona, zoologists played around with the drying cycles of local ponds and prevented invasive bullfrogs from wiping out tiger salamanders (Maret, Biological Conservation v127n2, Jan. 2006), and Japanese arthropods are being brought to the U.K. to fight Fallopica japonica (Kurose, Mycologist, 22 Jan. 2007).

And sometimes nature creates its own equilibrium. The effects of invasive species on the Galápagos Islands are well known, and the Galápagos are host to numerous attempts to wipe out invasive species--some successful, others not. Feral pigs in the Galápagos were responsible for wiping out numerous native species, and it took thirty years to kill every feral pig just on Santiago Island. However, Santiago Island also saw something unusual: more-or-less peaceful coexistence between rattus rattus, the black rat, and Nesoryzomys swarthi, the Galápagos rice rat.

Rattus rattus, despite being cute as the dickens--just look at him! Don’t you want to scritch him and cuddle him?--is a ecological threat. Quoting from Harris, “Space Invaders?" (Oecologia v149n2, Nov. 2006), “the introduction and spread of the black rat...is believed to have caused the worst decline of any vertebrate taxon in Galápagos," including nearly a dozen native rodent species. But on Santiago Island, the black rat and the rice rat successfully coexist without the rice rat having to (again quoting Harris) “adjust its space use, habitat preferences and activity patterns." (The black rat is larger and more aggressive, but the rice rat is a more efficient consumer of local flora, especially cactus).

So yay for N. swarthi. Unfortunately, disaster is more common. And sometimes worse than disaster.

Most of you know the story of Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Easter Island, and how the local civilization and the island’s trees rapidly declined in the 18th century. And, per Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the most widely-known explanation for the collapse of the ecology is man’s shortsightedness: “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources." The natives of Rapa Nui stupidly used up the land and wood too quickly for it to regenerate. Shame on them, such self-annihilation is dumb, we’re so much smarter now, etc etc etc.

However. Terry L. Hunt puts forth an alternate and quite convincing theory in “Rethinking Easter Island’s Ecological Catastrophe" (Journal of Archaeological Science v34n3, Mar. 2007). After extensive research he concludes that what ultimately destroyed the ecology--the cause of the ecocide--was...wait for it...our old friend, the rat, specifically rattus exulans, the Pacific rat. The (well-sourced) theory goes that rats were brought to Rapa Nui as an easy source of protein for new colonists. There were no native predators for the rats, and “an almost unlimited high-quality food supply in millions of palms each producing abundant nuts." Rats, of course, are fecund, and in ideal situations (such as this Rapa Nui) they double their population every 47 days. So one mating pair can produce almost 17 million (17,000,000) rats in about 1128 days, or just over three years.

How bad could the impact of rats have been? Hunt gives a list of field studies where the rats drove both plant and animal species to extinction, one of which notes that substantial amounts of native vegetation on the Hawaiian Islands are common only at higher altitudes, above 1500 meters, which happens to be the elevation range of R. exulans. Words like "deforestation," “extirpation," and “habitat destruction" are used in regard to rats’ effects.

How did the rats do it? “Unlike birds, rats can penetrate hard, thick seed cases (even coconuts)...and destroy the reproductive potential of the majority of seeds they consume...numerous studies have shown that plant materials are the primary food for R. exulans...experimental enclosures on Little Barrier Island show that Pacific rats strongly depress nikau seedlings by destroying seeds, underground stems, and leaves."

The rats wiped out the trees and major foliage, which led to environmental “fragility," which, combined with drought, wind, and soil erosion, led to Rapa Nui the way it is now. And all because the settlers brought some rats to eat. (Just as the rabbits of Australia were brought there to be hunted).

So, remember, you writers of alien invasion novels. What gets humanity may not be the aliens, but the food stock they bring with them.