Cheese Ends, 20220328

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Our local grocery store has an item in the deli called “cheese ends.” These are the ends of cheese wheels of blocks that become too small to cut easily. They bundle them together and sell them as a package. Good cheese in bits and pieces but of good quality.

 

That’s what I’m calling this new section. Rather than the long-winded and exhaustive approach to a single subject, these are interesting bits and pieces that came over my desk, packaged up for your consumption.

 

Before we get started, a shout out to two readers in Luxembourg and Australia. I watch my tiny set of sales closely and I’ve been seeing someone out there buying one book after another. As if, *gasp*, they might be reading them.

 

Thank you. I think I’ve doubled my readership.

 

Both of you—no, I have to correct that. The four of you—who read this blog know I have no trouble acknowledging the fact of climate change—so far without the help of magical thinking. There are a lot of greenhouse gases to consider but the two main ones under discussion are CO2 and methane. (CH4.) Emission of CO2 is pretty well nailed down. Partly because there is so much being emitted that we can see where and partly because the CO2 measured is easily discerned from the CO2 coming from natural sources.

 

Methane is a harder nut to crack. Methane derives from a lot of natural sources: disintegration of peat bogs, post-forest fire recovery, natural seepage from ancient deposits. But it is also pumped out of the ground both for its own sake and as a byproduct of oil extraction. This is important because though the volume of emissions is relatively low, methane hits far outside its weight class in its climate impact—as much as 30-80 times the effect of CO2. It’s low-hanging fruit as far as mitigating climate change.

 

A recent study has used a satellite has shown on the order of 1800 “ultra-emitters”—large methane plumes from single sources. Two-thirds were from the oil and gas industry (surprise!) and three countries, including the US, were responsible for the majority of the problem.

 

While this isn’t happy news, it’s the kind of issue that can be addressed. It would be nice if, maybe, that $20 billion in subsidies for the O&G industry could be made contingent on them cleaning up their act.

 

When we read about stone tool culture, we get the idea that all humans derived the same tools over time. This is a Clovis point. This is an Oldowan chopping tool. This is an Acheulean hand ax. As if all humans in the culture pick up the new technology at the same time.

 

This is like saying that as soon as oil paints were created, all artists in the world became oil painters overnight. There are a lot of ways to create art. There are a lot of ways to create tools. Not all of them survive for us to unravel them in the modern world.

 

Enter the site in Xiamabei, China.

 

40,000 years ago, the people in this locale used tiny bladelets of stone less than four centimeters long to do everything: cut meat, whittle wood, scrape hides. Not big, heavy hand-axes. But tiny bits hafted onto bone handles apparently using ochre as an adhesive component. No one else has ever seen these sorts of tools used at this period. Not Neanderthal, Denisovan, or Homo sapiens. There’s no direct evidence of who these people were, either, though there is evidence of some contemporary humans a few hundred kilometers away.

 

What I find interesting here is that humans will create tools out of local stuff and for their own needs in isolation. Sure, there was probably an invention of the Clovis point and it spread around. But if it hadn’t, enterprising humans would have created something different that worked as well.

 

Years ago, Stephen Jay Gould was on an NPR talk show and I managed to get in. The question I put to SJG was, okay, the dinosaurs (and a lot of other species) managed to get wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous. But that’s only half the story and the least interesting half at that. The important part is why did birds and mammals survive? What made them so special? He did not have an answer—which is not surprising since there is no good answer. Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, and marine reptiles were eliminated, while mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles survived. How come?

 

Recently, though, there is a hint.

 

It looks now like the timing of the Chicxulub Meteor might have had something to do with the selectivity of the extinction. Analyzing fossilized fish killed in the impact, the meteor struck in the spring, smack in the middle of Northern Hemisphere reproductive activities. Animals that required long hatching times and rearing, like non-avian dinosaurs, would have been disproportionately affected compared to short-timers like small mammals and birds.

 

Animals, however, in the Southern Hemisphere would have been getting ready to bed down for the winter and presumably be better able to survive the effects.

 

It’s not a perfect explanation but it’s a step in the right direction.

 

In the category of flat out strange experiments, a Nature article described a team that took an antiproton—an antiparticle of the mass of a proton but with a negative charge—and put it in orbit around a helium ion. Then, they watched it dance through the orbitals spitting out photons. The reason they tried something like this is to get very precise measurements of the qualities of antiparticles. One big hole in modern physics is why is there a vast preponderance of normal matter instead of an even mix of normal matter and antimatter.

 

But it’s a strange idea for essentially a negatively charged proton wandering through the electron orbitals of a helium atom like a fat electron. I can’t get my mind around the quantum mechanics of that. What sort of bonds would be possible? Would a covalent bond between a carbon with antiprotons and an oxygen with electrons be possible? I.e., would they instantly annihilate one another or would they be able to share for some finite period of time? The mind boggles.

 

I’ve made allusions in my fiction that I think language didn’t evolve by itself but had antecedents in song and gesture—we sang before we spoke.

 

A recent paper from the Royal Society suggests that gestures may predate spoken language.

 

This is not a new idea. Scientists have hypothesized this since the eighteenth century. But it’s been hard to get any hard evidence. These researchers set up what I would consider a fairly rigorous mechanism. They created two groups of producers from Vanatau that would attempt to present a word both orally and gesturally. Two groups of receivers were matched from Australian undergraduate students by age and sex. The producers’ efforts were recorded. Gestural production was recorded without sound. Vocal production was recorded without video. The matched interpreters were to attempt to guess the words being presented in the recording. There were Australian/Australian combinations as well as Vanatau/Australia combinations. The details are in the paper.

 

The results were interesting. First, there was a significant signal similarity in the way the producers attempt to communicate the same words. Second, gestural modality was more successful than vocal modality. Third, the gestures used to communicate had a significant commonality for the same words. There was signal similarity in both vocal and gestural communication but there was more commonality with gestures than with vocals.

 

So, maybe we didn’t only sing before we spoke, maybe we gestured.

 

Speaking of gestures—are at least manual dexterity—there is a new paper that investigates some interesting wrinkles in our hands.

 

Archeologists and paleontologists have long discussed why Homo sapiens, out of all the primates, get the fat end of the stick. Big brains? Upright posture? Ability to sweat well? Our hands?

 

All of these have been important and none of them are more important than our lovely, lovely hands. We have a precision grip, a wonderful combination of stability, strength, and flexibility. How do we do that?

 

This paper investigates a small piece of that action: how fingers apply force at the tip. If you view a finger as a set of cylinders held in place with a mechanical linkage, one interesting feature is that as the force increases, the assembly tends to suddenly buckle. Human fingers don’t do that. Why?

 

It turns out that maintaining a strong precision grip is a dance between stability and strength that requires fine neural control. In effect, the system positions the hand in a way as to prevent buckling such that the mechanics of the system provide the stability.

 

Moving off-planet, unless you’ve been living under a rock, there has been a continuing buzz for some time now about the detection of gravity waves.

 

These were postulated by Einstein long ago. If space-time acts as a sort of fabric warped by mass—resulting in gravity—then sufficiently large changes in energy or mass could cause a shift in that fabric. A wave analogous to the ripples in a pond caused by dropping a rock. Those waves could propagate through space at the speed of light.

 

Two black holes merging could produce such ripples and these were detected at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) when it first became operational.

 

LIGO operates with two perpendicular lasers interfering with one another. A gravity wave is a distortion in space-time and when it rolls over LIGO, it distorts space, causing the space between the lasers to stretch and contract. This changes the interference pattern and, lo, gravity waves are detected.

 

The very first gravity waves were detected in 2015 resulting from the merger of two black holes of 35 and 30 times the mass of the sun at a distance of 1.4 billion light-years. The energy carried away from the event by gravity waves was 50 times greater than the combined power of all light radiated by all stars in the observable universe. While that is an inconceivable amount of energy, gravity waves follow the inverse square law such that by the time it reached us, the amount of energy contained was very, very small.

 

One wonders what it would have been like to be just a few light-years distance. Would there be anything left?

 

Regardless, this is the problem faced by LIGO and other like gravity wave observatories. They need to be incredibly sensitive even to detect fairly large events.

 

Enter the Moon.

 

Researchers at the University College, London, have come up with a way of measuring quite small gravity waves by measuring the perturbations in the Moon’s orbit. LIGO and its sister observatories are sensitive to specific frequencies of events. Slower events, such as those that may have occurred in the early universe, are beyond them.

 

But the moon has a 28-day orbit, translating to a frequency of interest to early universe scientists. The device is right there to be used. All we need is to instrument it.

 

Finally, some very interesting news on the origin of life front.

 

I talked a little about the origins of life back in the day. (See here and  here.) To boil it down, there are two very basic actions life has to execute: metabolism and reproduction. There have been discussions as to whether this required a cell boundary or not. Whether the metabolism came first and reproduction came later. Whether reproduction came first, etc.

 

One continuing interest is if RNA came first. RNA is interesting. It can be used to retain information. (RNA viruses do exactly that.) It has some enzymatic capabilities. It’s a good candidate. But RNA is not terribly stable.  One of the discussions involves how RNA information had to be handed over to DNA. DNA isn’t all that stable, either, but it is more stable than RNA.

 

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created RNA that appears to be able to engage in natural selection. This means RNA can reproduce, diversify over generations, develop complexity, and be subject to Darwinian evolution.

 

This is big for several reasons. As stated previously, RNA has some enzymatic capability as well. Thus, this research presents the exciting possibility that reproduction and metabolism could have arisen together. We just need a boundary to contain it and we have a very simple living cell. Maybe. We’ll see.

 

That’s it for this edition of Cheese Ends. The next will come… someday.

Consideration of Works Present: Moana vs Encanto

 

(Pictures from here and here.)

 

Today, I want to look at the two Disney Animation Studios projects, Moana and Encanto. I think there are some story lessons to be learned here.

 

First, though, both are supernaturally beautiful films. Both attempt to do honor and homage to the culture from which the stories emerge. Both are musicals and attempt codify their themes with music—themes that without the music might be taken as childish or simplistic. 

 

The themes, themselves, are neither but music engages our emotions before reason has a chance to dismiss them. This enables stories to pierce our heart. Thus, we can think about them more clearly.

 

There will be spoilers.

 

Both films are mythical fantasies. By this, I mean they are fantasies where the magic derives from an underlying cultural significance. In Moana, this comes from Polynesian culture. In Encanto, the cultural matrix comes from Colombia but also seems to engage most of Latin America. I saw resonances to stories I’d heard from Ecuador, Mexico, and Guatemala.

 

Encanto takes place in essentially modern times. While the environment doesn’t have a lot of modern trappings—transportation is by mule, donkey, or horse, for example—the clothes, tools, layout all look modern. People use hammers and saws. Archaic, fantasy modern, to be sure, but modern none the less. The fundamental conflicts in Encanto are familial: people in the family do not feel seen by others in the family, feel pressed into roles that do not represent their authentic self, and can only pursue their gifts within the context and boundaries set by the family. The gifts are magical but the gifts could be seen as symbolic of any human potential.

 

Given that Encanto is modern, there would have had to be considerable torquing of the story to introduce any true mythological mechanisms—like some found mythology stories like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, where there is an entire magical world hidden inside modern costume. The makers of Encanto wisely just tossed that idea into the dustbin. The magic is what it is because it derives from family and sacrifice. Any mythological analyses are left to the devices of the intelligent viewer.

 

Encanto centers on the Pedro and Alma Madrigal and their triplets—along with their companion townfolk—that flee a vague persecution to a remote mountain valley. Pedro sacrifices himself through unexplained magical means to protect the valley from their persecutors. From this sacrifice, the three children gain magical gifts. These magical gifts propagate down through the next generation with the exception of the film’s protagonist, Mirabel. Each child’s magical gift is symbolized by the illumination of the door to their room. When the time comes for the gift to be bestowed, the door glows and the gift is given. When this happened to Mirabel, the door disappears: Mirabel has no gift.

 

The film proceeds almost like a detective story. Mirabel can see degradation of the magic when no one else can. Her uncle, Bruno, left years ago. He’d had the gift of prophecy but disappeared. People remember his prophecies being universally bad. When Mirabel investigates beyond his door, she finds a shattered glass image that shows the breaking of the magic with her involvement. Then, she talks to her siblings and aunts, finding in each case, flaws in the way each is treated according to their gifts.

 

Eventually, the source of the problem is shown to be the familial restrictions on the usage of the gifts and the way the gifted must behave, forcing each member of the family to struggle for an authentic life.

 

Moana hearkens back to deep Polynesian time. During research to develop the story, John Musker and Ron Clements were intrigued by the mystery of how Polynesians colonized throughout the Pacific for a while and then stopped about the time Samoa was settled. Travel restarted about a thousand years later. This odd stutter suggested to Musker and Clements a mythological approach to the story: a people who had lost an ability and then regained it.

 

This puts Moana smack into deep fantasy or science fiction. The peoples described in Moana are not modern Polynesians. They are the ancestors that from their regained ability became modern Polynesians. Placing this story in the past like that, at a point of momentous change, allows the introduction of mythological mechanisms denied in Encanto: symbolic magic, gods, and demigods.

 

Moana lives on the island of Motunui. People do not venture beyond the reef. They have everything they need on the island: crops, coconuts, pigs, and fish. Moana loves her island. She loves her family. She is the daughter of the chief being groomed to be the next leader—something she will clearly be good at.

 

However, she longs to voyage across the sea. It calls to her—both spiritually and magically. The sea is a conscious entity that has chosen Moana for some task. She feels compelled through the love of her family and place to follow the path set out for her even though that leads to an inauthentic life. She cannot help be feel what is missing in her life would be completed by the sea.

 

The dark side of the story is that the demigod Maui who had done many wonderful things for Moana’s people attempted to steal the heart of the nature goddess Te Fiti. He succeeded. But Te Fiti disintegrated and Maui was attacked by Te Kā a volcano demon. He lost the heart and his magical fishhook and was never heard from again. Left behind is the darkness which eventually will infect all islands but has so far left Motunui alone.

 

Moana grows up in the conflict between her love for home and place and her true heart, the sea. Whenever she attempts to follow her heart, she is blocked. When the darkness finally comes to Motunui, she is the first to say they must go beyond the island but is rebuffed. Her Grandmother sends her to a cave where the voyager ships of the ancient islanders have been hidden, revealing her people’s secret: they were once voyagers. She again presents this as proof they must go beyond the island but is, again, rebuffed. Her Grandmother takes sick and, as she dies, sends Moana to find Maui, regain the heart, and restore their people to their voyager origins.

 

The rest of the story involves exactly that: finding Maui, gaining trust between them, fighting Te Kā, then discovering that Te Kā is really Te Fiti without her heart. The heart is restored, the darkness lifted, and Moana returns to her people showing them a new way. Her people are voyagers once again.

 

These stories have a lot in common. Moana and Mirabel are both constrained by family expectations. Both must overcome these expectations to expunge the rot at the heart of the problem. Both have estranged magical beings that must be brought in from the cold: Maui in Moana and Bruno in Encanto—that are necessary for the emotional resolution. Both succeed in the adventure by returning to the origin of the problem—Te Fiti’s island in Moana, the river of Pedro’s sacrifice in Encanto. They’re not exactly “the magic was in you all along” sort of stories but you can see them from here.

 

However, there are some very stark differences and I think those differences make Encanto a fundamentally weaker film than Moana.

 

As I said, Moana is set squarely in high mythology. This allows symbolic redemption in addition to personal redemption. In Encanto, redemption is rendered by Mirabel first confronting Alma with how she has restrained the family and then bringing her to the river of Pedro’s sacrifice, where Alma meets Pedro again. This allows Alma to open herself and in so doing release the rest of the family to follow their own destiny.

 

In Moana, Maui is brought from being selfish to aiding the effort and Te Fiti’s heart is restored, eliminating the darkness and allowing Moana to return to Motunui to lead her people to their destinies as voyagers.

 

The fundamental difference between them lies in the result. In Moana, the attempt to change results in broad cultural change deriving from people living authentic lives. In Encanto, the results are living authentic lives but the broader cultural phenomena is just a return to status quo. I.e., no net change in the world. From the point of view of the villagers beyond the family there is almost no change. A fuller relationship with the magical family but not much more.

 

This derives, I think, not so much from the scope difference between the two films—Encanto is what I call a small story and Moana is a large story. I like both—as it is a character difference between Moana and Mirabel. Moana from the very beginning is called by something. Called to be more than she is. Called to a love that she cannot fulfill on Motunui. Mirabel begins her journey discontented with her circumstance at not being a full member of the family but has no broader calling than that. She has no higher goal. Thus, the best she can hope for is a better circumstance.

 

In point of fact, no one in Encanto wants more than a nice village life where everybody is properly fulfilled in local role. They don’t really want anything different. They just want to feel better about it.

 

(With the possible exception of Isabela who seems to have a budding artist in her. But the film doesn’t give her enough air time to make much of it. An interesting different take on Encanto would be to eliminate Mirabel entirely and give the experience over to Isabela. Instead of a non-magical girl, it’s a magical girl being forced to use her gifts in a way that doesn’t fulfill her. She has to go through the journey. Instead of the outsider changing things, it’s the insider changing things. Instead of the discounted person shaking things up, it’s the person on the pedestal.)

 

Human beings are hypercooperative and hypercompetitive. We are both shared beings and individuals. The beauty of Moana is it shows Moana in both lights. As someone who loves her shared experience and her individual destiny. As someone who wants to bring both human aspects to her people.

 

Mirabel delights in her community and family and wants to heal them but her ambition goes no farther than that. The isolated mountain village is enough.

 

Perhaps this is the American in me, but I think having a higher goal in addition to community and family is a better state of being. Striving to be a better painter, or sculptor, or writer, is attempting to extract from the shared experience something singular that can then be given away. It is, in and of itself, a higher goal. A higher calling. Family is important. Community is important. I know that. These are aspirations common to everyone. But they are only part of our humanity. The other part is taking those common aspirations and distilling them into something singular.

 

In effect, Moana has a small story embedded in the large one. Like Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel, the little wheel turns the larger story. Because of these two disparate components linked together, Moana has a potential depth that is denied Encanto. For example, there’s a point in Moana where she attempts to leave the island to follow her heart and is defeated. The violence of the ocean drives her back. It is not enough to just follow your heart. She only succeeds in leaving the island when she is both following her heart and trying to help her people.

 

I have to say this reminded me of Parzifal. Parzifal becomes a superlative knight—fulfilling the goal of the world but not his character. In this mode, he attempts the adventure of the Grail and fails. It is insufficient, to pursue the adventure in service to the community only. He has to pursue the adventure by virtue of his character as well. Only with both in concert—worldly accomplishment and worthy character—can he succeed in becoming the Grail King.

 

This is exactly what happens in Moana. Every time she attempts the adventure for solely her spiritual love, she fails. Every time she attempts the adventure solely for her community, she fails. Her attempt to save her island is what brings her into the final conflict. But it is her character that determines how to succeed at it. Both are necessary.

 

This, to me, is the best kind of fiction. From Brunner’s The Whole Man, to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, when the little wheel of character drives the big wheel of cultural change.