Consideration of Works "Past": Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Usually I talk about works I read when I was younger now rediscovered. But in this case, I'm going to talk about something that I've read relatively recently-- not the film version of Nausicaä.The manga.

In a way, this is a cop out. I've been working on a set of posts involving regulation based on science and physics rather than on whim and appearance. I was going to attack gun regulation but it's more work than I anticipated. So I'm taking a break from that one and talking about Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is primarily a film director and animator and it's by his film work that he is best known. If you haven't seen a Miyazaki film, stop reading this blog right now and go rent one. Kiki's Delivery Service is a good one. Or Castle in the Sky. I have a weak spot for Porco Russo, since it's about seaplane pilots. Or you could go straight to the big guns and get Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. Or, of course, you could also watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Oh, hell. They're all terrific. Go watch them.

The manga is in seven volumes. If you've seen Nausicaä the film, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the first couple of volumes are pretty much a recap of the film. There are more than one story about why Miyazaki did the manga. Miyazaki couldn't initially get funding for the film and so put out the mangas. Miyazaki couldn't get funding for a film that didn't have an associated manga. Etc. The mangas were written from 1982 to 1994. The film was made in 1984.

A thousand years before the story starts there was a terrible war fought, in part, by God Warriors: giant mechanisms with horrific weapons. Vast areas of the world are now filled with poisonous forests inhabited by giant insects. The forests appear to be fungal in nature and spread by spores, often carried by insects or unwary travelers. However, the poison is everywhere and people eventually die of it.

Nausicaä is a princess of the Valley of the Wind-- the royalty component of the story seems to not have a direct connection to rule. Her father did rule the valley but there are hints toward the end that there may be other paths to being a sovereign than heredity. Regardless, she is looked up to and admired by the folk of the valley.

War breaks out and there are treaty obligations that the Valley send troops. Nausicaä goes with them. The war was between the Torumekeans and the Doroks. As she proceeds through the different convolutions of the war, encountering spiritual battle, biological warfare and enormous cruelty, she becomes more and more important, a force for good in an amoral conflict. Eventually, her influence, the power of the insects and the suffocating horror of the war all come together and she prevails.

I'm not going to get more detailed than that. The plot is intricate and clever but I think is actually a side note to the issues Miyazaki is handling.

Miyazaki has always had environmental concerns. Pretty much every movie has some sort of component that can be construed to be environmental. Even Porco Russo, a story about a seaplane pilot who's become a pig, has a continuing discussion of the balance between selfishness and selflessness-- which, I think, is a stand in for Miyazaki's issues with the environment.

In Nausicaä these issues are front and center. Humans have to live on a poisoned planet-- poison that is of their own making. The poison is killing them. Yet they still war. Religion is a political means to an end. The personal and selfish pursuit of power is the source of the world's evil.

But it's not a screed. It's a story where these bits come out as important plot details. Nausicaä never says "If only humans will somehow sees the immorality of their ways and learn to help one another. Ah, Atlantis." She does lament human behavior more than once but it's more in the vein of "Come on, guys. Stop hitting yourselves."

The film handles some of this but much of the rich and detailed tapestry of Myazaki's world is given only token treatment. The God Warrior is just a prop. The sword master Yupa a part of the chorus. This is the cost of making it into a film. The manga is much more detailed.

One of the interesting things in Nausicaä's character is her continuing avoidance of killing-- not because she's a pacifist. But because she finds out early one the killing rage she has in her own heart and how easily it can be released. She decides that this is something to struggle against and from then on she keeps trying to find different ways to make things better. Not easy in the middle of a war.

This continuing attempt to not kill anybody and to stop people from killing one another, coupled with her own forceful personality, begins to have knock on effects. People start to take her seriously and, by doing so, take her point of view seriously.

Nausicaä is, no doubt, some sort of Christ figure in this. But it's a Christ figure that we're not used to. Nausicaä is not passive. She's not going to volunteer for the cross. If she goes down she's going down trying to save everyone around her whether they want it or not.

I've read this series twice now and this aspect of Nausicaä's character is what stays with me. She's like the members of Doctors without Borders, going out there and working until they drop to save people's lives.

The work has its limitations. There is little introspection regarding motive-- people just do, knowing what they must do instinctively. In my experience there's just a little consideration of what must be done. The ending is a bit abrupt. It feels wrongly shaped-- I think everything happens that has to happen but it seems clunky in execution. Miyazaki did all of the drawing in pencil and the artwork is wonderful. But you want to just see the precise definition of ink in some of the action sequences.

But these are quibbles. It's a terrific read rendered by a master story teller at the height of his powers.

The Snowden Perspectives

Here are some articles that have interesting perspectives on the whole surveillance state.

Edward Snowden probably didn't commit treason
500k contractors have access to top-secret stuff
Booz Allen Hamilton
Five ways to stop the NSA from spying on you
Is a democratic surveillance state possible?
Has the US become a nation from which you must seek asylum?
Will PRISM damage tech companies' reputations for privacy?
Obama is wrong about NSA oversight
NSA asked Verizon for records of all calls in the US

And just to make sure other things are discussed:
The people have taken over American politics and they hate it
Infrastructure Hawk vs Deficit Hawk

Webcomics Of Interest

(Picture from here.)

I follow about four hundred web comics. A bunch of them can be seen here.

Fortunately, the update schedule for most of these brings it down to about fifty or so a day. Is that a lot? Not sure. It takes me about forty-five minutes or less to get through them. Maybe I just read fast. Or, at least, read comics fast.

At any rate, I'm going to start a new subthread on this blog. I'm going to talk about certain webcomics that I follow.

One of the problems of webcomics is that there's not a good mechanism to pay the authors for their time and trouble. (In my example, if I paid a dime to each webcomic I read every day it would costs me $5/day or $1800/year. I can't afford that.) While this can mean that webcomics creators are free from deadlines, publishing oversight, etc., it also means it's a labor of love unless and until they make some money on it. There are some definite success stories in webcomics (PVP and Sluggy Freelance leap to mind) but many webcomics just last until the life pressures on the creator consume them.

Another scenario is that a given webcomic starts, goes for a period and then is actually ended. (My God! A comic that actually has an ending!) A terrific example of this is Anders Loves Maria by Renee Engstrom, a wonderful story that has an actual beginning, middle and end. You know. Like a story. Another is Ursula Vernon who wrote Digger. Digger won the Hugo in 2012.

Often, webcomics have support mechanisms embedded on their site. This can be print versions or donations or other means.

So. Here is today's list and discussion. Go read them. If you like them, figure out a way to support them.

Since Science Fiction webcomics are relatively rare, I'll talk about them today.

Cleopatra in Space: Take Queen Cleopatra from Egypt. Put her in space cadet school. Send her out for adventures. That's pretty much it. The bad news is it doesn't update enough.

Darths and Droids: Imagine Star Wars as a D and D game. You remember them, right? You play in your living room and all sorts of things happen? Some of them within the game like killing rebels or something. But personalities come out. Marriages come and go. Little sisters grow up. Now imagine that using as illustration actual pictures from the Star Wars movies.

Blue Milk Special: Same Star Wars venue in that the same rough plots are followed. But Leia is a rough girl who smokes and is tougher, much tougher, than Han. Han, for his part, bumbles. Think of it as an orthogonal reimagining of Star Wars. Man, I never thought I'd get to say "orthogonal" quite that way.

Decrypting Rita: This comic is, in part, science fiction. It's the life of a woman over several planes of simultaneous existence. In one she's a robot. In another she works in a store. You get the idea. The comic is drawn with these pieces of her "life" crossing over themselves. The character doesn't seem to interact with her other selves but the art does.

Dresden Codak: A terrific comic that doesn't update enough. It's fringe SF rather than true SF. Aaron Diaz plays with scientific concepts and art at the same time. He had one long arc, the Hob story, that is closer to true SF than most of the arcs.

The End: This is straight SF. Aliens have a humanitarian mission. When they see the end coming they save some of the species. Our number is up.

Freakangels: One of the ended strips This one is by Warren Ellis who's done a lot of other things in the entertainment industry. Remember Village of the Damned or The Midwich Cuckoos? TMC was  a story about psychic kids that resulted from alien intervention. VOTD was the film version. At the end of both the kids are killed. Now imagine they lived and grew up. That's Freakangels.

Freefall: Freefall has been around forever. It's basically about a larcenous squid starship captain and is first mate an AI housed in a humanized wolf body. It's very funny. It also usually gets the science spot on.

Galaxion: This one is a more traditional SF story. Woman is an admiral. Her husband was captain of a crew testing a new star drive. They disappear. She finagles an appointment to a new star ship to go after him. She finds them. Sort of.

Jump Leads: Parallel universes abound. We have trading relations with many of them. We're always looking for new ones. The explorers are called Jump Leads. Two of them (a sort of Lister/Rimmer pair from Red Dwarf) get lost and try to find their way home. Think Sliders done right.

Moon Town: This one is new and I don't know how it's going to be yet. It's about miners on the moon. One if them is always bring in more material than the others. So a second miner decides to find out how he does it.

Carpe Chaos: Strange little strip about all sorts of alien races. Each race has its own mythology and cultural history. Inevitably there are conflicts. Beautifully drawn.

O Human Star: From the comic's self-description: "Alastair Sterling was the inventor who sparked the robot revolution. And because of his sudden death, he didn’t see any of it. Until he wakes up 16 years later in an advanced robotic body that matches his old one exactly." He looks up his old business partner and lover, thinking he did it, and finds out that there is mystery here.

Quantum Vibe: This is also straight SF. Several hundred years in the future the planets are colonized. There are L5s everywhere. Space transportation is easier than flying shuttle between Boston and New York. Nicole Oresme gets a job with scientist Seamus O'Murchadha and they have adventures across the solar system. It bears a strong resemblance to John Varley's work but is in no way a rip off.

Space Mullet: Another one that's a bit new. So we'll see. Jonah is a washed up space marine who's ended up with an alien partner Alphius. They do the odd jobs and then get hammered by the unexpected. We'll see how it goes. Think of Firefly meets the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby on the road movies.

Space Trawler: Oh this lovely comic. This work is by Christopher Baldwin who did Bruno a while back. I had issues with Bruno but those issues are in the past and more than made up for with the deft touch he's brought to Space Trawler. Essentially, a group of humans are shangied into serving the galactic community with hilarious and poignant results. Come to think of it, a cup of tea does sound good.

Whither Came We?

I apologize for not putting up a post last week. Without getting too deep into the personal space, life intervened.

Anyway: Back to Science!

At least one of my two readers may remember the series I did on Biological Revolutions. You may recall one I did on the transition of proto-life-as-we-know-it to the prokaryotes (See here.) and the rise of the eukaryotes. (See here.) From there I talked about when multicellularity occurred. (See here.) I made a leap then to neurozoans: animals who had differentiated a system of "perception" of the world that allowed integrated responses.  (See here.)

Now I left out many other Biological Revolutions in that series. One of which was the development of, well, development.

Organism development is the process by which a proto-organism, such as a zygote, develops into a larva and eventually into an adult. The core of this process is the development of an embryo, termed embryogenesis. Since an embryo is a proto-organism that is pre-directed towards developing into a larva, this is clearly the first step.

Most embryos begin as a zygote: an egg fertilized by sperm. Some embryos begin via parthenogenesis, in animals this starts asexual development from an unfertilized egg. The egg spontaneously doubles so that it resembles a zygote and development proceeds from there. This is called psuedogamy. There is a similar process in plants where pollination is required to get the ball rolling but the DNA of the pollen has no role in the developing embryo.

Regardless, once we have the moral equivalent of a zygote the process proceeds with the "goal" of a target embryo that can then continue to a larval or adult form.

When you think about it, embryogenesis is really, really strange. It starts with a single cell that looks not much different from a single celled organism. But it is programmed very differently. The zygote is packed with special proteins that are intended to shepherd the first few divisions of the cell into a multicellular collection of cells. There's a terrific experiment that one can do with frog eggs (I did this in college.) where you wait for the egg to do its first division and then carefully separate those two cells. Each of the two cells will then develop independently into a separate (and largely identical) frog.

This can occur for multiple divisions. Depending on the species and technique one can divide two, four, eight, etc., cells and get viable larval forms that grow into identical adult frogs. These cells are totipotent.. Any one of these cells can become any cell in the developed body. At some point, totipotency is lost and the cell becomes pluripotent. In animals, this means the cell can be become any cell in any of the three germ layers. Think of germ layers as the next step. They are also called primary tissue layers. At this point the embryo has formed a hollow sphere called a gastrula. (Before this it was called a blastula. I skipped that step.) The "layers" refer to the placement of the cells in the sphere. In animals, they are:

• Endoderm: Forms the organs of the animal's internal tube such as the stomach, colon, liver, bladder, etc.
• Mesoderm: Forms organs not associated with either the internal tube or external skin such as the circulatory system, kidneys, gonads, etc.
• Ectoderm: Forms the organs associated with the outside skin. The skin itself, central nervous system, peripheral nervous system.

These pluripotent cells are the stem cells that everybody talks about.

This is the process for animals. Plant embryogenesis is somewhat different (See here.) but the overarching process is the same. A single cell proceeds to a larval form (i.e., a seed) which under the proper circumstances grows into an adult. (See here.) But I have to say I know animals better than plants so I'm going to stick to animals for the time being.

The critical feature here is the process by which the original single cell is programmed and the subsequent cells dance to each other's tune until the target stage is created. Remember, that there is no plan written into the genes. There are very few genes that are only used during development. Most of them are used throughout the organism's life. However, the choreography of development is exquisitely precise. I like to think of the genes as individual notes in a symphony where each note determines which other collection of notes is played.

Embryogenesis is the first step of a life cycle. Once you have an organism that can generate a life stage that can then act as a precursor to another life stage, changes can be introduced at one point that have knock on consequences down stream. The bones of the middle ear are called the auditory ossicles. There are three bones: the malleus, incus and stapes. Of the three, only one is used in the ear in reptiles. In reptiles it's called the columella. In mammals the columella is referred to as the stapes. The malleus derives from the lower jaw bone of earlier forms and is still there in reptiles and birds. The incus derives from the upper jaw bone.

In this case, "derives" means that if you take careful not of the process of jaw development in reptiles and follow the migratory path of the cells, you'll be able to identify the cells that form the articular and quadrate bones of the reptile jaw. If you follow the same cells in a mammal embryo, those same cells eventually become the incus and malleus. If you follow the cells that create the columella in reptiles you'll seem them form the stapes in mammals.

Where it can, evolutionary pressure ruthlessly forces efficiency. It is far, far cheaper to derive a structure from the embryologic development of an existing structure than create something new. Most vertebrate eyes derive from exactly the same tissue. One exception is the eyes of snakes (See here.)

The evolution of embryological development appears way back in the Cambrian (600 MYears ago.) The first clear fossil record we're familiar with is, in fact, a mark of embryogenesis. Of course, it happened earlier than the Cambrian since when we see Cambrian fossils it's already in full swing. (See here.) The article referenced talks about a bunch of circumstance that might have enabled or selected for embryogenesis but they do not address how these mechanisms might have happened in the first place.

Okay. Now I'm going to link this discussion back to the evolution of the prokaryotes and eukaryotes I mentioned in the beginning.

One of the interesting mechanisms that might have occurred to cause the creation of both groups is the creation of viruses. I mentioned in the prokaryote post that the majority of the DNA in the virus families has little similarity to the DNA the viruses target. Patrick Forterre has suggested that the viruses were instrumental in catalyzing the creation of the prokaryotes and may have been instrumental in the creation of the eukarotes. A virus happily floats around using cells to make other viruses and something breaks. It gets stuck in the cell. The virus DNA machinery becomes incorporated into the host cell and a new, hybrid, group is formed. His argument is the current viruses are those that didn't get incorporated into modern cell machinery and the modern cell machinery reflects viruses that did.

There is a type of virus that is abundant across the genome of various animals. These are endogenous retroviruses. "Endogenous" meaning part of the current genome. "Retroviruses" are those that are RNA based and then transcript into DNA. So the DNA that represents the ERV is the resulting DNA from an RNA virus. Some very interesting research has been published in the last couple of years showing that in humans, HERV (human  ERV) is a precise marker of pluripotency. (See here. And here. And here.) In fact, it is so active that there's evidence that HERV is, if not necessary, extremely important in stem cells. (See here. And here.)

HERV has been implicated in carcinogenesis, immunity and the creation of the placenta. (See here.)

This relationship to pluipotency is not limited to humans. It's been shown for other mammals as well (See here.) to the point that several scientists are wondering if the ERVs drove mammalian evolution. (See here.)

We don't have to stop at mammals. Two active endogenous retroviruses have been found in fruit flies: gypsy and tirant, though it's not clear if they're related to pluripotency. The research is still new.

But that never stops me from speculating.

What if the embryonic development derives from viral interaction with early eukaryotic cells? What if the reasons the phyla are so different from one another derives from the original root viral material that triggered their embryology?

What if we're really viruses underneath?
 
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By the way, if anybody is interested in how we did in the solar vote last time: we won. Hard fought but we did better than the Senate with over a 2/3 majority.

Rationality triumphant.

Rationality Bias

 (Picture from here.)

We humans have a strong bias that our decisions are based on an intelligent, rational cognitive process. It's embedded in our language-- that was a "stupid decision."

However, anybody who has lived a fairly full life must at some point slap their foreheads and say "What was I thinking?" about that boyfriend, that marriage, that job. Even when that boyfriend, marriage or job looked like the best decision at the time. We comfort ourselves thinking that we didn't have all the facts, we were young, in love, or whatever. But in the cold light of day when no one is around, we pull out that decision and look at it and realize just how dumb that decision was.

We're running into that in our little town here in Massachusetts. Here's the situation.



Massachusetts has put together over the last couple of years a set of incentives for individuals and communities to put up solar power stations. These can be on the roofs of buildings, acreage that isn't being used, etc. We put up panels on our house, for example. Several businesses and the local school has done the same.

But these incentives are coming to an end next year. A company has proposed that we lease to them a beat up old sand pit for them to build a solar farm on. In return, they would sell the electricity back to the town at a reduced rate. There's a proposed clause in the contract that whatever the price the company would sell to the town it would be unable to sell it for more than the local power company. There is no monetary investment to the town. No outlay of effort. Just give them permission to use this land-- land that has been deserted and fallow for a quarter century-- for twenty years. At the end of twenty years we can buy the installation for a dollar or tell them to haul it away. The savings can be as much as $500k/year. And if fracking suddenly made electricity as free as the rain (and probably as toxic) it wouldn't cost us a dime.

The only potential downside is that the land is out of circulation for two decades. There is some possible opportunity cost if some magic fairy came down and wanted to put up a pixie dust factory or something. Factories are sources of revenue. Homes and apartments do provide revenue but that's more than offset by the cost of services-- which has been shown by several studies.

This is like somebody handing you free money.

Now, you would think that this idea would be embraced by everyone concerned. But it's actually been quite a battle to get this approved-- we have to push it through town meeting and there is a fair amount of resistance. Why? You ask.

Good question.

I've heard a bunch of arguments that don't hold the least bit of water. At least, they hold no scientific or financial merit. That does not change the arguments' power to those who hold them in their heart. As I've read the discussion, it seems to me that there are two populations of people talking at cross purposes with one another:

1. People who don't mind government operation and control of resources
2. People who believe that government should never control resources or have as little control of resources as possible.

The people in group two seem to believe that any control of resources by government is tantamount to government control of all resources.

This is all very curious to me since, as Heinlein said it, "facts do not sway them in the pursuit of a higher truth."

It reminded me a lot of some rather interesting human research that also involved people who acted without regard to self-interest. Notably, the inequity aversion experiments.

These are fairly controversial experiments with diverse outcomes. There's one called the ultimatum game. Two people play in this game. One proposes a split of a pot of money and the other must approve for the money to be received. Without approval neither player gets any money. The game is only played once so no future reciprocity is involved.

The researchers found, in one iteration of the experiment, that when the proposed split was too inequitable (say $100 to $1), approval was denied. In other words, the approving player was willing to part with money in order to deny money to the proposing player. There have been variations on the game that erased this inequity aversion as well as variations that enhanced it. What's also interesting is that there is a sort of "fairness" perception in non-human primates. Capuchin monkeys will fail to cooperate when the reward discrepancy is too great.

I'm not suggesting inequity aversion is at work here in town regarding the solar array. I am pointing out that there are circumstances where an individual will sacrifice their own self-interest to deny another theirs. If altruism is defined to be when an individual sacrifices his own self-interest for another, this is its reverse.

We should not be surprised that humans are somewhat irrational in making their decisions. There's been a lot of research in this area. While we know the frontal lobes of the brain are important in human decision making and rational cognition, we also know that the amygdala, one of the seats of emotion in the brain, is equally involved. The nature of this involvement is still in the process of being understood. For a long time there was a two system model with a rational, long term thinking system corrupted by a short term emotional system.

A 2008 paper in Cell cast doubt on this two system model. Instead, they suggested that classical conditioning  plays a large role as well.Classical conditioning takes a stimulus and associates it with a response. Ring a bell every time you serve food to your dog and after a while he'll drool when the bell rings whether food is brought or not.

What's interesting about classical conditioning is it is predictive. The dog is drooling as a predictive response to the receipt of food. The amygdala has been shown to be crucial in cue-outcome associations-- and are likely involved in our hypothetical dog-drool experiment. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily an emotional response. Though many experiments have shown that the amygdala is involved in emotion-- fear, especially-- as well. Humans overly weight loss over gain in gambling scenarios. People with lesions on the amygdala lose this asymmetry. In point of fact, patients with a poorly function amygdala cannot gamble intelligently. (See here.)

The role of fear, the amygdala and decision making has also come under scientific scrutiny. It's been shown that the ability to make "rational" decisions is dependent not only on a functioning amygdala, it is also dependent on an amygdala that's not consumed with fear. The amygdala executes multiple duties: it helps associated cue and response, it manages the fear response and it aids in weighting outcomes in decision making. If the amygdala is busy processing fear would we expect it to execute its decision making function properly?

(I will leave here the exercise for the reader on why political fear techniques are so successful.)

The amygdala connection (among other neurological studies) tell us something we should already know: humans are not rational creatures. But we have bias to think we are so we fabulate arguments to explain the point of view we want to have and then defend them religiously.

Which brings me back to my irrational town, bless its pointy little head.

We get to fight it out in town meeting on Monday.

Interesting Things

Here are some thought provoking articles that have come across my desk lately:

• Silicon Valley Sex Workers
• Ways to reduce crime and not annoy the NRA
• Eight facts about terrorism in the USA
• IMF dumps austerity
• Evidence based government
• The George W Bush presidency in 24 charts: We thought he was bad. Yup. Still is.

Enjoy.

Combat Juggling

Article on it here.

I was going to write a post and use combat juggling as a metaphor but it's just too awesome.

Go check it out.