Dream Dance

Day 450 - The Politics of Biochemical Populations

Lexocytes had shown up fairly early in the human research on Crab biology, and it's now clear that the probe itself had initiated a line of inquiry that would have discovered them in short order as well. Lexocytes are fundamental to the Crab life cycle, development, evolution and society. One cannot understand Crabs without understanding the role of Lexocytes.

It's well known that microbes can alter behavior, even human behavior. The feline protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii has an affinity not just for cats but for any warm-blooded mammal. In mice and rats it reduces fear of cats -- and only cats -- the more the parasite can re-infect its primary host. Human infections exhibit a sexual dimension, making women more outgoing and promiscuous and men more aggressive and jealous. One can only wonder what this says about how the relationship between humans and their feline pets has affected parasite evolution.

Lexocytes ceased being parasites millions of years ago and instead established a symbiotic union with Crabs of unprecedented intimacy. The team on the E.O.Wilson painstakingly broke it down to its simplest details. Lexocytes live mostly in Crab brain tissue. Crab neurology is complicated, but the role of the Lexocytes can be explained in relatively simple terms. Each Lexocyte cell sits at the junction of Crab neurons, mediating the signaling between them. Sometimes a signal will come to the synapse and the Lexocyte will do nothing, letting the signal pass. Other times a signal will come in and the Lexocyte will throw up a chemical smokescreen to block it.

But how does the tiny microbe know which signals to allow and which to block? Fortunately this was a technology with which humans are well-versed -- genetics. Lexocytes contain a huge amount of kDNA. Some of it is used for normal purposes, like keeping the cell alive, but the rest operates quite differently. Instead of being transcribed into proteins like ordinary genetic sequences, these are converted into what were named "tapes". Tapes bind with enzymes called "read heads". Excitation from the giant neuron triggers the read head to move ahead one step on the tape. The "symbol" -- like a codon in Earthly genetics -- can represent one of six possible states, and the read head enzyme either emits a hydroxide ion or doesn't depending on the state. Ultimately it's the pH of the cell from the tens of thousands of simultaneous read heads ticking over that determines if the signal is inhibited or not.

When a signal comes in, all the read heads advance a symbol on the tape and cast their vote. Majority rules.

But what decides which tapes to run? The Lexocyte genome is enormous, dwarfing the genetic sequence of their Crab hosts. That mechanism is also very simple. The pattern of accept/reject answers that the read-head enzymes generate alters their chemical structure. As they release hydroxide ions a structure called the "hydroxyl tail" can change to take on up to 12 different configurations. As the tape completes it is released by the read head, but not before it binds with the tail. The tail and the tape form a new complex, and that -- by decoration with potassium and a set of other markers -- has a role in determining which tapes among the millions possible will be selected next.

As each tape's term expires, it elects it's successor.

In general, in fact, most tapes elect themselves. The tail only has 12 states so there are very few possible outcomes given the accessible pool of tapes. The other common outcome is a pair of tapes, with tape A electing tape B and B electing A. Biologists called this a "nepotistic mobius," although it seems very familiar to anyone who understands politics. But these are just molecules, so we shouldn't imbue them with any motives beyond replication of their genotype.

Tapes may run over and over again for hundreds of cycles, but eventually they change. The outcomes start to become unfavorable for the current population of tapes and new tapes start to be selected. Eventually they bring in all of their related tapes and a new population dominates, at least for a few milliseconds. They then give way to a new population and so forth. Typically one population is stable for a while until there is a shift, and then populations change one after another in quick succession until a new equilibrium is reached.

But what's the point of all of this detailed biochemistry? This is just organic molecules doing what they do based on nothing but eons-old genetic programming. And yet, this simple biochemical churning is why the Crabs are different from their closest ancestor. The latter scavenges the shoreline for trash, the former builds spaceships. It behooves us to understand the difference.

After all -- that's all we are too. The difference between us and chimps is some small biochemical activity that can be described in no less simple terms. Sometimes it seems like we understand Crabs better.

Day 446 - I Spake as a Child

Jargon has been an ongoing political problem for as long as I can remember. Despite scholarly theories that scientific knowledge would unify over time, different fields of endeavor have become even more disparate. It's reached the point where it's almost impossible for researchers to talk across interdisciplinary lines. It was thought that improving people's minds would solve the problem. But it didn't -- it made it worse. Jargon overlap goes down as measures of mental enhancement go up.

Two months ago Ramandeep made a comment about something quite opaque to me. Reviewing the records it was "4-neuro-chi". I asked him at the time about it and he translated it roughly as "common animal nerve model", which was very exciting to me. I would love to know about how the biochemistry mavens understood the neurology of the native life forms. So I looked up their research.

I may as well have been staring at a blank wall. Jargon modi simply don't adapt fast enough, and there may have been a lot of new coinage since we came to this planet. It was as impenetrable to me as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This was probably the main way that Pi made her reputation. In face to face meetings she assured that there were always enough experts of the right type to act as translators. It was at her parties that top researchers were able to find a way to communicate with those in related fields, or even in the same field but from a different jargon tradition. It's ironic that as science has reached a zenith of understanding we have also reached a nadir of simple talking.

I've been pestering Camil for weeks. She knows that her group needs to prepare a paper for general understanding, and yet somehow it's never quite done. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one behind schedule.

In any case, I finally have a draft of their preliminary report on "Neurological Modeling in Common Animals". It's still a bit dense, but the modi do a pretty good job with it. It opens up a lot of interesting research questions.

Day 440 - Headcase on the Sports Team

Coach had promised a bit much. He had at first described a comfortable system where I could run normally on a treadmill and he could slowly change the gas mixture without interfering with my workout, like a big glass cabinet that in no way impinged on my daily life. It was a nice fantasy. As it turned out, when it came time to breathe Martian standard atmosphere -- at that point I had to wear a mask. A big bulky mask with a long hose.

To give him full credit, he had managed to arrange passage to Mars. This was non-trivial, given a proposal that involved nothing much more than training an e0 to perform like an e1. Everyone I knew in what they thought of as serious biology would scoff at the luxuries of these lesser so-called "bio-mechanical" sciences -- research related to, you know, sports. I did too, at first.

I perused Coach's data and observations. Even though it was about me, and about my rather goofy training program, the scholarship was quite professional and the conclusions were fairly interesting. I was a case study -- what my own field would have been mockingly called an anecdote. It turns out in the field of human performance case studies are the way a lot of pioneering research is done. It's hard to test implausible theories on large groups because controlled experiments on humans are difficult, and doing something especially arduous cannot be implemented on a large sample size. But a single case study can be like gold, especially if it shows exceptional results.

It was clear that Coach had high hopes for me. Thinking about that was what kept me going during the months I ran in place with the elephant trunk stapled to my face. And that was the easy part.

Day 435 - The Resonance of Fear and Desire

Falling into resonance was one of the scariest things I have ever done. There was nothing to see, there was nothing to do -- there was just the quiet voices of the pilots and their modi muttering checklist items and counting down, and my own pounding heart. The only feeling was vibration as the power output cranked up to maximum and then a slight sensation of falling which was weird since were already in free fall. Our greatest moment of danger was objectively quite boring.

I'm told that our starship briefly became a comet -- a tiny speck of matter with a huge tail of luminous hydrogen glowing against the Jovian tableau. It wasn't rocket thrust; it was just the spent coolant from our reactor. Antiprotons wheeled around the magnetic donut in one direction, colliding at a predictable rate with the protons injected in the other direction. A beryllium/lithium ceramic converted some fraction of the radiation into electric potential and the rest got wicked away as heat, released as a giant plume.

We have enough antimatter for the return trip -- now locked into a perpetual magnetic racetrack in a storage orbit -- but we cannot make any more. The small amount we have was synthesized at the L4 facility, a giant physics lab kept a constant and safe distance from Earth. Starships need vast amounts of power but must also be compact and light, so energy at a planetary scale gets compressed into just a few grams of irreplaceable fuel. We represent the honed cutting edge of the entire human industry.

Remarkably, a single exotic material isn't enough. Interstellar travel relies on one even more strange: QED's, the charged quantum singularities that can be found only deep inside stars or gas giants. The population that powers our loop drive was mined from the depths of Jupiter using billion-Gauss coils the size of small moons. In theory there should be many more in our Sun, but the power to harvest them would be astronomical.

Travel to the stars is cramped, dangerous and enormously expensive. It robs us of our lives by throwing us forward and backward in time, depriving us of any continuity with the friends we may leave behind, or the future humanity that we may seek to join on our return. Yet it's worth it. I still feel ashamed of my cold feet, and of the terror I felt as I risked non-existence at the start of this voyage. The knowledge we have gained over the last century has made all the risk worthwhile.

But there's a final limitation. The Schwartz-deSegas ratio means that loop drive will top out at just under 1000 light years. Tuning the resonance for our own 500 light-year trip was like matching a note exactly using a piano with trillion keys -- it's clear that however great our technical competence we will soon reach the practical limit. Once that 1000 light-year bubble is fully explored we'll have to strike out from someplace else -- from a center other than Earth. We'll need a habitable star system, one with an affinity for humans and the resources we need for our most basic technologies. It should be far from Earth but not too far, and it should have a ready source of QED's for building starships and a suitable jumping off point for future expeditions.

What humans need, to continue their outward exploration, is a planet like Sigma 957.

Day 428 - I Control my Inner Pyromaniac

I'm building an oven. Not a dinky little EM/convective IR oven -- I have one of those. I don't need to explain the energy cost of that thing. Although roasting results in nicer flavor it's far more efficient to boil the blasted things. No, I'm building a real, old-fashioned wood-fired oven.

Sigma 957 is a hot planet, and despite the humidity there is generally a severe fire danger almost all the time. Forrest fires happen, but when they do they are hotter and more devastating than Earthly events. As result the aspergum trees -- pretty much all I have around here, looking like giant asparagus with sticky sap -- are built in layers. Some of the layers are filled with structural polysaccharides full of flame-ready energy. Alternating layers contain flame-retardant polymers. You could use up a whole field of kindling and never get them to burn.

Fortunately Lieff is a pyro, and he worked out in detail a method for building campfires from the native flora. First you cut the trees into logs. Then you age the logs 3 to 12 weeks, which lets natural enzymatic activity break down the polymers. Then you cook the logs to remove any remaining moisture and further break down long-chain molecules. At first you can use your electric oven, but preferably the cooking is done by piling the green logs next to your hot fire. After they are aged and cooked they are ready to burn, and hopefully cook another batch of aged logs.

With an oven running on native fuels I can roast tangroot -- even if it still takes hours -- using a tiny fraction of the energy I'm using now. It's ultimately not sustainable, and yet I think it's worth the small amount of harvesting required. Nonetheless I'm building the oven using local rocks and closer to my blind than my hab. I'm not really sure I need everyone's approval at this point.

Day 422 - Grift and Murder as a Plausible Alternative

How do Tanzen deal with cheating? One of the signal characteristics of human civilization is the management of anyone who would shirk the social contract, or otherwise try to make illicit gains at the expense of others. There have been many different approaches to the problem, from religious sanction in traditional societies, to industrial-scale incarceration in post-industrial societies, to the sometimes oppressive openness of our own. In every case there is an issue that has to be managed.

The Tanzen are no different. They live in large complex societies where each individual gains substantial benefits from the whole, but which is only possible because enough individuals contribute to the whole. But what if a specific member -- because of personal history, personal choice, or just aberrant genetics -- took advantage of the rewards of living in a community but did not contribute to it? Every society must have mechanisms in place to handle this kind of parasitic interloper in order to be stable.

It's not completely understood how the Tanzen deal with this problem. In fact social aberration is rare, so it has not been observed very often. There have been cases where the members of town will brutally murder one of their own. It doesn't happen often, and we don't have enough related observations to understand the context, but it seems obvious that this is at least part of the Tanzen system of social equilibrium.

I've been watching Shell and Sen intently recently, and it seems like there is some interesting data there if I can tease it out. The mother/child relationship is relatively long-lived. Sen will stay with his mother for perhaps another two or three seasons, and although she will not be the sole provider of his food she seems to be his intermediary in the social domain. Like many offspring, the Tanzen infant is incapable of participating in the complex social dynamic that is practiced by adults. In fact he acts more like an animal -- like the primal basis from which the Tanzen evolved.

He will quite often engage in anti-social behavior; sneaking or hiding food especially, but also hitting other youths or breaking pots or other craft articles. Shell brings him into line with a sharp smack -- not to him but to herself. This was at first read through the human filter as being symbolic; she was hitting herself to symbolize what she was going to do to him. The problem is that there is almost no record of Tanzen adults brutalizing their young. To be symbolic an act must relate to a real act, and in the absence of the real act the symbol is meaningless.

The primal but predictable anti-social behavior of youth disappears almost completely at about ten seasons of age. Do they learn to live in the Tanzen society, or is it a more physical change, like a kind of social puberty that alters their goals and perceptions? It's still unknown. It's clear that something happens to them as they mature, as transformative for them as learning to speak is to us.

Day 415 - Dreaming of Ants, Plants and Fame

My new ant habitat came together over the course of almost a year. It was a little bit of "three steps forward, two steps back," but at least as I learned I progressed. My ultimate apparatus required more resources than I had budgeted and was nothing like I imagined, but it that was OK. It was better than I could have foreseen.

I had acquired something of a mentor, and he had urged me to work on the problem of symbiosis. In fact the new research had all been about undermining the whole idea of symbiosis. Both partners benefit, certainly, and yet one was ultimately in charge. Recent theory had thrown everyone into a tizzy showing, without much room for doubt, that the queen of an ant colony wasn't really the queen. She was more the reproductive slave of the workers. An ant colony was more of a Marxist paradise than a kingdom.

I was looking at another symbiosis, the relationship between ants and their plants. Specifically some ant species and plant species have close, nearly symbiotic relationships. The plants provides the ants with nectar or places to farm their aphids, and the ants protect the plants, acting like a personal army against more potentially damaging invaders.

But who's in charge? Do the ants work for the plants, or the plants for the ants?

After McMarky-Lemming, et.al., many people were asking this question, and yet it wasn't clear how to approach the problem. But I had an idea, and I wasn't sharing. I occurred to me that the question of dominance was etched into their DNA, so the question could be asked separately for each species and the answer should be the same. It was just a matter of recording their responses to certain kinds of stresses and determining -- basically -- who cracked first, the ants or the plants.

Once I had my parameters designed I worked in secret for about six months, collecting data. I felt bad about being so exclusive, and yet at the same time I was terrified that someone else was doing the same experiment based on my previously public discussions. I didn't know what I was -- shrewd scientist or information terrorist. I was an emotional wreck, but at the end I had my data and ultimately that's all that mattered.

The ants work for the plants, in case you were wondering. I guess it's sort of obvious in retrospect, but I have data, graphs and error bars to back me up. It was a bit of a yawn in the Roam. At 18 my writing lacked a lot of the flourish that science expects today. Hundreds of people anticipated me and thousands found all the primary sources I failed to quote. My first serious result was like a drop of rain in a thunderstorm. In the middle of the ocean. When no one was looking.

Day 411 - Tearing Down the Walls of the Prison of Knowledge

Source doesn't stop at code, or blueprints, or processes. Source is everything of value in anything. Life itself is nothing but source. For billions of years the source code of life -- DNA -- has been innovating and sharing (with great gusto!) and bridged vast gulfs that we can only wistfully imitate. Ultimately our own humanity is hackable.

People living in the first half of the twenty-first century knew that what they were doing was not working. It didn't take a genius to see that burning minerals for fuel and filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide was an ongoing, slow-motion disaster, or that the yawning chasm between rich and poor was a social and economic time bomb. On the other hand, what were the alternatives? Mass producing more cheap goods wasn't the answer since none of the plastic doodads were of any use in combating the real problems, and yet that seemed to be the only solution offered by industry. It was also clear that waiting for the free market, or national governments -- which were more and more the same thing -- was simply naive. And yet patience (and buying more cheap goods) was that only council that the financial powers could suggest.

Graham Gregson could not imagine, as a child of his time, a force as revolutionary as the Reawakening, but he was able to sketch its broad outlines. His book, Open Source World: How Free Knowledge can Make us Healthy and Wealthy, is quite favorably quoted by Princeton and his ilk. I don't know what's up with the title; all the books from that period have titles like that. It's interesting to see the relative importance of "health" and "wealth", however. That health is subordinate to wealth -- that readers of the time would reject a solution for global health unless it also allowed for personal wealth -- is just bizarre.

The "source" in the title originally referred to source code, the computer instructions that perform subtle computations, or entertain us with interactive experiences, or just let us store and access our data. There's a lot in common between science and software. They both have correct results which are very hard to find, relying as they do on a combination of inspired ideas tested through long hours of painstaking experimentation. For that reason answers found by one research group can be applied by others, and open sharing of results generates a kind of exponential return. Science figured this out a long time before, which is why for the most part its informational products were open. Software, on the other hand, was a mostly a commercial venture with its source code a closely guarded secret.

The open source movement came out of people frustrated with this state of affairs. Gregson described it as being like city-states before markets. The value in an ancient city was the people and their possessions, so you'd build a wall around the city to keep raiders from stealing them. Inside the wall there was vibrant trade, but between cities there was little. Likewise the massive corporations of the financial age knew that their information was their true value, so they built walls of privacy to keep it away from everyone else. Historically those old cities tore down their walls because they found that trading what they each had made them wealthier, and, Gregson argued, we would all come to realize the same thing about sharing knowledge.

Admittedly his ideas for how to implement this goal were somewhat lacking. He did understand the distinction between primary and secondary value (although under different names), and he did realize that innovation required an incentive structure based on the quality of the innovation itself. That his description of such a system sounded a bit Utopian can be forgiven. We see these things with hindsight and they look obvious to us now. For them, they didn't know another way.

The term "open source" may sound anachronistic, but recall that the venerable series of lifters -- the rockets that took eager generations to space after decades of confinement -- were called Oshavs. We still use the term today. That originally stood for "Open Source Heavy Ascent Vehicle."

Day 405 - A Girl and Her Glasses

I started wearing glasses at about age six and did so until I had cornea surgery when I was 19. The doctors had reviewed the literature and determined that my eyes would grow and change and that early surgery was useless. I needed to wait to grow up, so I wore corrective lenses.

My peers thought it was the weirdest thing they had ever seen. For those who don't know, corrective lenses are like safety glasses except that instead of being hard and transparent they have optical properties that affect your vision, and instead of only wearing them when working in a shop or lab you wear them all the time. Everyone I met used to ask me, "Why don't you take them off now?" and I had to explain again how I wouldn't be able to see well without them. It continued to puzzle anyone who wasn't a close friend or was uncomfortable with my condition. My "nearsightedness."

e2 children don't have vision problems.

It ended up being the most odd and yet intimate bond with my mother. She was not -- to put it politely -- a warm and open person, and yet she was an avid scholar of old cinema. It represented millions of hours of video scripted and staged for an audience steeped in its cultural milieu -- a kind of visual time capsule. It was possible to see the evolution of any idea over decades by tracking its representation in film.

Anytime my mother would drag herself away from her other projects long enough to think about me, we would be likely to look for eyeglasses and how their meaning changes over time in film. I loved it. We developed theories about the various stages -- and it was always glasses on girls, mind you. It had a long history. Glasses mean librarian, restrained and bookish. Glasses mean unrealized potential, and once the obviously pretty girl takes off her glasses she's obviously pretty to everyone (and can still see, somehow). Glasses mean a dangerous knowledge, where the girl puts on glasses to hack into a government computer. Glasses mean a fashion choice -- a girl who really knows what she's about and doesn't care about anyone else. Glasses mean pragmatic and resourceful, a girl who could fashion her own prostheses. Glasses mean a disability -- this affected me the worst -- a girl who is different and less able than everyone normal. Glasses faded away from popular symbolism sometime around the mid to late 22nd century and are simply not referenced anymore.

Of course for the most part my mother would either forget I was there, or would yell at me about forgetting my glasses in one place or another. Ultimately that's what I expected from her.

Day 399 - Fact-free Fighting and Unmotivated Defense

Earthdate: April 29, 2314. Wednesday. I'm not sure why this particular day was so difficult. Paal and I had developed a routine that worked for us. I still felt that I loved him and things would work out in the end, somehow. Our primary focus as a couple was the paper we would publish and spent most of our personal time working on. In fact just about everything we did was about work, work, work. There was no time to think about the reality of our relationship.

I guess the catalyst was my work on the Crab Database Project. CDP was a meta-hub for all things Crab -- peer-review and meta-analysis of Crab research, Crab data synthesists, auditing of anything Crab-related, as well as a forum for crazy Crab theories and unfounded speculations. For a Crab-obsessed person like myself it was heaven. I spent so much time there that just a week earlier I had been invited to be a contributing synthesist, which for me was like dream come true. I think it was nice to be appreciated, even if it was just for my nearly encyclopedic grasp of Crab research. Paal should have been happy for me.

He wasn't.

I forget what set it off -- probably just one of the many things that Paal hated. Pickles, maybe. Whatever it was he went off on me. How I was spending my time on something else, but worse, how I was betraying our results in hub forums. Normally I think I would have agreed with his attack, and I'm sure he was depending on that. But I didn't. I forget the back and forth, but mostly I asked him why he didn't audit CDP as well. Since he had no good answer he replied with bluster.

Nothing changed, of course. It was just one of many fights. But this was the first time that I really didn't understand his motives. Now it makes sense, but only in hindsight.