The Measure of All Things

On Friday a white sedan with “County of Morris Weights and Measures” painted on the doors was parked outside the supermarket where I most commonly shop. An inspector was likely inside the store checking the scales. There is also a statewide agency and a national one. Inspectors from various levels of government in all parts of the world have been performing much the same job for thousands of years. I’ve seen the car in the parking lot before, but it caught my attention more than usual this time because of an item in the news about weight – or, more accurately, mass. This past week the world got a new kilogram. Regrettably, it isn’t different in value from the old one, so if you have a metric bathroom scale (which I recommend just because the number in kilograms is so much lower than the number in pounds) you don’t get to recalibrate it. The value remains the same but it is calculated differently.

Standard weights and measures existed in Sumerian times. They were a necessity for trade then as they are now. There had to be some way of expressing how much of this one would trade for how much of that, and of course taxes (originally in goods – usually grain) had to be calculated somehow. Sumerian inspectors, like those of Morris County today, existed to counter the perennial temptation of traders to tinker with scales. Even after the invention of coinage in the sixth century BCE, the coins commonly were weighed when delivered because of the illegal but common practice of shaving gold and silver coins in hopes of passing them off at full face value while keeping the shavings. Larceny has never been far from the human heart. Inevitably there were discrepancies from port to port when measuring weights, lengths, and even time, since all standards were local. These problems continued into the 18^th century when the need for better standards grew more important not only for trade and industry but for scientific inquiry. Perhaps the most lasting benefit to have come from the French Revolution is the metric system adopted in 1795. The U.S. made the metric system official (yes, it really did) in the Metric Act of 1866; the English system is not official and never has been even though Americans cling stubbornly to it in everyday use, but for regulatory purposes its units are defined by metric conversion factors.

The metric system from the start was intended to be based on natural properties: the gram, for example, originally was the weight of 1 cubic centimeter of water and the meter was 1/10,000,000^th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Physical conditions can affect these measurements, however, so they were swapped out for physical objects by the end of the 19^th century. The meter became a platinum-iridium bar and the kilogram until this past Monday was a cylinder of 90% platinum and 10% iridium sitting in a case in Sèvres. These, too, presented problems. The length and mass of these objects are not constant but change slightly due to contamination and oxidation, so in the latter half of the 20^th century an effort was made to define metric units in terms of constants. In 1960 the meter was redefined as the distance light in a vacuum travels in 1/299,792,458 second. But what is a second? It is not enough to say it is 1/86,400^th of a day, because the length of a day varies as earth’s rotation rate varies with changing sea levels. In 1967 a second was redefined as the time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom, even though this means International Atomic Time drifts slowly from Universal Time (the common clock based on the earth’s rotation). The kilogram for a long time resisted efforts at redefinition since various proposed redefinitions proved to be ultimately circular. On Monday, however, the kilogram finally got a non-circular redefinition in terms of the Planck constant. We also got new definitions of the kelvin, ampere, and mole in terms of natural constants.

Happy Retirement

It’s often said that the important things in life can’t be measured, such as the value of freedom, affection, kindness, and contentment – or for that matter hate, meanness, and anguish. This might not be entirely true. One frequently can determine a cash value of something like stress or some aspect of freedom by seeing how much money a person will demand to suffer the former or surrender the latter. There may well be an exact number. However, there is little doubt that such measurements are subjective: your dollar figure will be different from mine, whereas your kilogram is exactly the same as mine. The new definitions don’t much impinge on my daily routine. I won’t be buying a cesium atomic clock to tell time; I’ll continue to rely on my $11 watch even though I need to adjust the hands a little every couple of months. Nor will I be calculating my mass from scratch in terms of the Planck constant; I’ll step on my bathroom scale, which is probably off by 1% or so. Nonetheless, it’s nice to know those things in principle can be done. In a largely subjective and all too often polarized world, it is reassuring that some things, at least, are objective.

Lord of The Lost – The Measure of All Things

Double Vision

All unplanned by me, this week’s scifi dose on screen and page had parallel plot elements:

Replicas (2018)

Despite the star power of Keanu Reeves, whose John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum is currently raking in box office cash, I hadn’t heard of this movie until Amazon recommended the DVD to me. I now understand why. Replicas is easily a candidate for a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

William Foster (Reeves) is a scientist at Biodyne where he is attempting to reanimate the dead. His method is to scan the brain of a recently deceased body, upload the deceased’s personality and memories into a digital storage device, and then download the whole works into a robotic body. The experiments do not go well; the robots self-destruct. Meanwhile his fellow Biodyne scientist and friend Ed Whittle (Thomas Middleditch) is working on cloning, though so far not on humans. When William Foster’s wife and three children are killed in a car accident, he scans their brains and convinces Ed to clone new bodies for them. Foster believes the problem with the robots is that they are robots; he is betting that if he downloads the scans of his family into copies of their own bodies everything will be hunky-dory. Ed has only three handy-dandy cloning tanks, however, so William has to pick by lot one family member not to bring back: his youngest daughter Zoe. To spare the others the pain of missing her, he removes their memories of Zoe because…well, he’s a scientist and can do that. So Ed sets up cloning tanks in Foster’s garage, and, presto-chango, in just weeks most of the Fosters are reborn. Ed is so good at his job that the three Fosters come out at the same time all at the appropriate ages and even with the same haircuts. They don’t even know they were gone. Uh-oh, Biodyne might be less in the dark about their employees’ extracurricular activities than William imagines.

The dialogue is ludicrous and there are plot holes big enough to fly an Antonov-225 through. No friend or neighbor wonders where Zoe is? What happened to the crashed car? The re-animated family doesn’t notice the changed date? Through all of it Reeves plays his part with intensely earnest seriousness. The result is unintentionally hilarious. Rotten Tomatoes reports 10% approval by critics and 37% by audiences along with the remark that it “isn't even bad enough to be so bad it's good.” I disagree. It is plenty bad enough. One simply ought not go into it with false expectations of genuine merit. I think the disappointment at Rotten Tomatoes comes from viewers who hoped for something like The Matrix or John Wick. It’s not.

Split score: Thumbs down if judged seriously. Thumbs up for the unintended laughs. (The trailer, btw, fails to capture the full absurdity.)

**** ****

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

In the future minds can be uploaded into computers and downloaded into clones. The minds of the clones can be imprinted with false memories and secret directives, but the main point of the technology is immortality: you keep a spare body in the fridge, and if you die your consciousness can be downloaded into your spare and you can go on your merry way. Of course, you’ll be missing a chunk of memory between your last brain scan and your death, but that is a good reason to update your scans regularly. Certain social questions arise for which rules have been written, but rules and ethics are not the same. For example, suppose you committed a crime between your last scan and your death. Should your next body be held legally responsible even though the new you has no memory of the crime and, strictly speaking, didn’t commit it? Future law, according to Lafferty, does hold you responsible but many moralists are uncomfortable about it.

Questions of this type figure into the events aboard a peculiar type of sublight generation starship en route to Artemis. The passengers are to remain in hibernation the whole flight, but the crew of three women and three men must stay on the job. They are to live out repeated lives on the long trip by growing clones. Each downloads into a new cloned body when he or she dies. One day all six wake up in their cloning chambers only to find their previous six violently dispatched bodies floating around. Someone (perhaps the last or next to last survivor) had activated the emergency system to awaken the new clones. Having no memories since their last scans, the crew has no idea what happened. Presumably one of them is a murderer, but why? And will the same person strike again?

Of course I won’t reveal the resolution to the murder mystery. I will say, however, that the events strike me as having been instigated by (given the scale of the action) petty motives, but humans can be petty, so this doesn’t too seriously undermine a novel that otherwise is well plotted and presented.

Thumbs Up. Not way up, but up.

**** ****

The downloading of individual minds into new bodies, whether robotic or biological, has been a staple of science fiction at least since the 1950s in literature, movies, and TV. (Of the many 21^st century examples, my first pick would be Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.) Why does the idea recur so often? In the short-lived (but very good) TV series Dollhouse (2009-2010), the scientist Topher, as he downloads an electronically stored mind into a young new body, is asked, “So, we can give you life after death?” Topher answers, “Only if we really like you.” Inherent in the exchange is both the central fantasy and the central concern. The fantasy is, of course, to cheat death. (Whether a “download” really achieves that or just makes a totally different person/machine think it is you is usually an unaddressed question.) The concern is over who will be manning the toll booth. The fantasy is not going away, so I have no doubt there will be abundant scifi to come with the same plot device. I’ll bet money on that. Should the technology ever become real, I also have no doubt there will be a very pricey toll booth operated by all the wrong people. As for the chance of it becoming real…well… I wouldn’t bet money on that.

Replicas Trailer

Pedigree

Like many – perhaps most – Americans my handle on my direct ancestors reaches as far back as the ones who arrived in the United States. Beyond that, things get a bit murky. Mine straggled over between 1850 and 1920. I know from what towns the emigrants hailed (Greifenhagen [presently Gryfino], Pressburg [Bratislava], Budapest, and Glasgow) and in a couple of cases the names of a few of the relatives they left behind, but that is about it.

For those who are interested in their family histories, traditional genealogical research can fill out family trees to varying extents. There are problems with this approach, however, quite aside from the expense in time and money. There is a high likelihood of omissions due to missing (or sealed) documentation. There is also an inescapable degree of uncertainty on the paternal line. Late 20^th century DNA tests done for medical research purposes showed that in Western countries including the U.S. more than 5% of men listed as fathers on birth certificates were misidentified; the rule among the researchers was, and still is, to not reveal this information to the cuckolded fathers. There is no reason to believe the percentage was any lower in earlier times. This indicates a better than even chance of deviation from a nominal family tree in a handful of generations. DNA tests in the late 20^th century were expensive and slow, but of course that is no longer the case. DNA testing is now cheap and easy. Nowadays it is the usually the first step for people interested in learning more about their ancestry.

DNA sampling companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry are wildly popular as many people are keen to learn more about themselves. Identity crises are the special domain of adolescents, according Erik Erikson, which ideally we resolve by the time we are adults, but, needless to say, we don’t live in an ideal world. “Who am I?” is a question asked by adults as well as by adolescents, and DNA tests promise a limited answer – very limited. Dr. Michael Zwick at Emory University's Departments of Human Genetics and Pediatrics explains, “What most companies offer today is a measure of ancestry that maps to a geographic region. The basic data consists of genetic variants (alleles) that are at different frequencies in different geographic regions.” Given past migrations of individuals and of whole populations, this tells us less than we might imagine. The DNA tests are excellent, however, at something for which they were not initially designed: revealing contemporary family connections to other people who have taken the test. The tests have turned up previously unknown relatives and revealed biological parents of adoptees. They also have been a boon to law enforcement. Ever increasing numbers of criminals who have left DNA at crime scenes have been caught thanks to these tests, even when they themselves didn’t take the test. It was enough that a cousin did. A partial DNA match to a cousin will give the police the family of the perp and from there it is easy to narrow down the suspects. Within five years some 90% of Americans should be identifiable through DNA in this way. Assuming a particular test-taker has no cause for concern from law enforcement, he or she still should be prepared for the possibility of some unwelcome surprises: revelations from test results could (and sometimes do) include deep family secrets such as adoptions, half-siblings, parental affairs, incest and more.

Most people seem willing to take the chance of uncovering family skeletons in order to learn more about their heritage, but one should be forewarned about taking the results too seriously. Given the halving of genetic ancestry at each generational step back in time, within very few generations our ancestors have little more in common with us genetically than do random strangers. Being told what percentage of our ancestry is of what ethnicity is, as British geneticist James Rutherford puts it, “something that is at best trivial and at worst astrology.” Ethnicity always has been a loose notion whether we claim it for ourselves or are categorized by it by others. Even more dubious is the identification of ethnicity with culture. As Sarah Zhang said in The Atlantic, your DNA “is not your culture.” As an example, none of my own direct ancestors (so far as I know, what with that 5% uncertainty thing) was in the Americas at the time of the Revolution or the Early Republic but The Federalist Papers are still culturally relevant to me.

People always divide themselves into “us” and “them” for all sorts of reasons (religious, economic, ideological, etc.) and fight viciously over them, but for the past few centuries ethnic nationalism has been the single biggest killer: a source of war and brutal oppression. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with social camaraderie based on some commonalities of experience and background; this is called harmless “granfallooning” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. But such camaraderie couples all too easily with hate of an out-group. This is not just dangerous but intellectually unsound. Throwing rocks at out-group members is ill-advised not only because we all live in glass houses, but because in a larger sense it is always our own house. Our ill-defined ethnic distinctions do not really run so very deep into any of our ancestries. Everyone with a European ancestor somewhere in the past 10 generations, for example, is descended from Charlemagne. Genghis Khan has nearly as ubiquitous a presence in the ancestry of modern mainland East Asians. Going deeper, it is mathematically necessary that all living people share at least one direct common ancestor 3000 years ago. Science journalist Steve Olsen with the help of statisticians and computer specialists calculated that every person now living is descended from every person who was alive in the world in 5000 BC who left an intact line. Even the tiniest rate of infiltration over the steppes, the deserts, and the seas ensures this result – and migration was often anything but tiny. If you come face to face with an ancient Egyptian mummy or one from the Tarim Basin in China who left an intact bloodline, you are almost certainly looking at an ancestor. This is regardless of from where we consider our families to have “originated.” We may not think of ourselves as descending from farmers on the banks of the Chang Jiang River, herders on the grasslands of East Africa, and haulers of stones at Giza all at the same time, but we are. Our ancestors very likely included both besiegers and besieged at Troy.

We may not all be brothers and sisters, but we are at least cousins. Regrettably, cousins are apt to squabble. It’s in our DNA.

Screaming Females – End of My Bloodline

Speed Kills

A recent conversation with someone dealing with a particularly old-fashioned substance issue brought to mind how fashions come and go in such matters, but never go completely.

There are fads in intoxicants and fads in moral panics over them. There always will be another one because users and abusers of intoxicants, faddish or otherwise, are a constant. Author of Brave New World Aldous Huxley, writing about the fictional “soma,” had no doubt about how popular it would be if it were real: “Today alcohol and tobacco are available, and people spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the education of their children.”

Most people like a chemically assisted bump in happiness from time to time (alcohol still being the first choice) while some find life intolerable without it. These latter are people whose rest state is unhappy: that is to say they are unhappy unless fun things are happening, as opposed to mellower folks who are happy unless bad things are happening. We all know people who are uncomfortable in their own skins in this way, and they are the most likely to be substance abusers. I remember being in a car in the 1990s with some friends including a troubled and chronically unhappy young lady who had just left the Limelight disco in NYC. “Some guy gave me this Ecstasy,” she said while holding a pill twixt thumb and index finger. “Just throw it away,” I said. “You don’t know what that is.” Instead she popped it her mouth, entirely willing to take the risk rather than face the risk of feeling normal. By dumb luck, whatever it was did her no obvious harm that night, but the choice she made (however stupid) was not so very uncommon.

The poor results of attempting a law enforcement solution to intoxicant abuse during the moral panic over alcohol in the 1920s apparently taught us nothing about how to respond – or rather not respond – to later moral panics. In my youth the faddish panic was over psychedelics. It was followed in turn by ones over cocaine, PCP, crack, and meth. The current one is over opioid addiction. Don’t get me wrong. All these stuffs do real and sometimes deadly harm to the people who use them. Even leaving aside (which I don’t) the right of free people to make bad choices, however, it’s pretty clear that Prohibition isn’t working any better today than it did 90 years ago with alcohol. Our tendency is to get worked up politically about one substance at a time, so the current focus on opioids has diverted attention from the return of meth, use of which in the US had declined a decade ago after a crackdown on kitchen laboratories temporarily reduced supply. (One wonders how much Breaking Bad had to do with that.) The supply is once again bountiful since (as always happens after domestic crackdowns) foreign criminal cartels stepped in to meet the unfilled demand. Usage is back up.

Meth, Ecstasy, Bennies, et al. are all closely related and are at bottom amphetamines. Chemist Gordon Alles synthesized amphetamine in 1929 and tested it on himself. He was looking for an asthma treatment. It wasn’t effective on asthma, but it did make him feel alert and better. (It turned out Alles wasn’t the first to synthesize the substance, but he was the first to claim medical value for it and he received a patent for that.) It was marketed as treatment for mild depression, for which it works in the short term, though in practice it was mostly used recreationally for the euphoria. As a pep pill it also was far more effective than coffee; it became popular for this reason in the ‘30s with college students cramming for exams. In World War 2 the militaries on all sides of the conflict provided amphetamine to soldiers and pilots to keep awake and alert. After the war it became one of the go-to recreational drugs (especially in inhaler form) of the Beat Generation. It was much beloved by the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. It sped up metabolism (hence “speed”), which also gave it popularity as a diet pill. By 1962, when the U.S. population was little more than half of what it is today, 8 billion amphetamine pills were sold domestically annually by legal manufacturers. Though usually prescribed (quite freely) for various reasons (mild depression still being a big one), most continued to be used recreationally as uppers even if many of the users denied it.

By the mid-60s, the addictive nature of the drug was impossible to ignore. So were the deleterious mental and health effects of amphetamine abuse. Blood pressure related illnesses including heart attacks were among the risks; paranoia was a common effect of large doses and there were cases of full-blown amphetamine psychosis. Ginsberg changed his mind about the drug at this time, saying in 1965, “Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind.” Nevertheless, while it wasn’t the preferred drug of hippiedom, it was still present. Speed freaks weren’t well regarded in 60s counterculture but were definitely in the mix. In 1971 amphetamine was classified as a Schedule II drug along with opium, cocaine, and morphine. Yet it keeps making a comeback in one form or other thanks to its short-term feel-good effect. For regular users that’s enough. As Lenina says about soma in Brave New World, "Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am."

I offer no “solution.” I don’t think there is one. (On a societal scale, I mean; individuals always have a chance of cleaning up their acts.) As long as large numbers of people want to get high (which is to say always), mitigation of harm is the most for which we have a realistic chance. The Portuguese have done a better job than we at reducing the harm to the users and also to the rest of society by legalizing hard drugs as well as soft. They thereby eliminated much organized and petty crime at a stroke of the pen. There has been no increase in addiction rates. This approach is a tough sell in most of the world. The U.S. is still fitfully coming to terms merely with marijuana. Nonetheless, it is a model worth noting.

Canned Heat – Amphetamine Annie