Serengeti Rules

Sean Carroll talks about his book Serengeti Rules in the videos below. Some notes follow.

Google Talk:

Royal Inst Talk:

Royal Inst Q&A:

• Half the world’s animals have disappeared since 1970.
• There are plans to build a road through Serengeti
• Carroll visits Serengeti with his family
• Notices so many wildebeest, so few topi
• What rules regulate ecosystems?

In 1950, Grzimek father-son duo film a documentary named Serengeti Shall Not Die.They count animals from an aerial survey and wonder if there are enough resources for the animal population to be sustainable.

In 1965, biologist Tony Sinclair notes that number of buffaloes had increased since 1950. His findings indicate that cattle vaccination led to the Rinderpest virus being eradicated in buffaloes by 1964.

The virus had come to Africa 1889 causing the cattle plague which also affected buffalo and wildebeest.

The wildebeest population grew from 263 thousand to 1.4 million during in 1961-77 due to the Rinderpest virus being gone from the population by 1963.

The rinderpest eradication in wildebeest led to shorter grass, causing fewer forest fires. This in turn led to more trees, and more food for giraffes leading to a increase in the giraffe population as well.

Carroll calls this Serengeti Rule 1: Some animals more equal than others. Such species are called keystone species (like a keystone which holds an arch together). The term was coined by Robert Paine of UW who found starfish to be a keystone species in the Washington coast. Another example of keystone species is the Pika in Himalayas.

Serengeti Rule 2: Some species have strong indirect effects on other species through trophic cascades . For example, disappearing sea otters led to increase in sea urchins which led to kelp disappearing.

Similarly, pesticide aimed at a rice insect planthopper caused it to actually increase because it wiped out it’s predator – spiders. Introducing wolf led to fewer elk – causign increase in aspen tree height and also leading to increase in willow and cottonwood trees. This also led to increase in beaver population which depends on willow trees.

Going back at the wildebeest population, it leveled off at 1 million  – down from the high of 1.4 million noted earlier.  So what is it that regulates wildebeest population. It turns out that some species are entirely regulated by predation e.g. Topi, Oribi etc. On the other end of the spectrum larger animal populations are entirely by food. Serengeti Rule 3: The regulation of some species depends on their density.

The population growth seen in wildebeest was not seen in buffaloes. An explanation is that this is because wildebeest migrate, buffalo don’t. Migrations ensures adequate food supply, and also safety from predators. Lions are not likely to follow migrating herds. In general, migrating species achieve higher densities than similar non migrating species.

Next, Carroll talks about a nature restoration project in Gorongosa Park in Mozambique. Due to a Civil War after independence from Portugal in 1975, animals were eaten, poached, and killed due to collateral damage. By 2000, there was a dramatic decline in large animal population – lions disappeared totally, and fewer than 1000 large animals remained.

In 2004, American philanthropist Greg Carr decided to work with the government to restore this park. By 2014, the populations had bounced back to around 71000 large animals.

Serengeti Rule 4: Given a chance (habitat, protection, time), population can rebound dramatically e.g. humpback whale, bald eagle, wolf.

An interesting statistic is that 60% of the elephants in Gorongosa are tusk-less – perhaps poaching selected against tusks.

 

Always On, Always Connected

These days, we are always connected to the internet via smartphones. We are always checking blogs, feeds, notifications. This is mostly just useless information that could do without.

Not only is this time wasted, but being bored is important for creativity. It is important to let your mind wander at times.

In this talk (and also in the NYT article Stop Googling, Let’s Talk), Sherry Turkle talks how this is affecting our conversations:

There was a study sometime back – people were asked to sit alone in an empty room. There was nothing they could do except administer themselves an electric shock. Most people could sit by themselves only for a few minutes before giving themselves an electric shock.

Not only is this harmful to us, it might be lowering the amount of empathy we have for others.

A 30-year study found that college students score 40 percent lower on empathy, with most of the decline taking place after 2010. In middle schools, teachers have reported 12-year old kids behaving like 8-year old kids in terms of lack of empathy.

The good news is that if kids are left without phones for 5 days (e.g. in summer camps), the empathic markers come right back up.

Turkle talks about the “seven minute rule”:

A college junior told me that she shied away from conversation because it demanded that one live by the rigors of what she calls the “seven minute rule.”

It takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold. You can’t go to your phone before those seven minutes are up. If the conversation goes quiet, you have to let it be.

For conversation, like life, has silences — what some young people I interviewed called “the boring bits.” It is often in the moments when we stumble, hesitate and fall silent that we most reveal ourselves to one another.

The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone

People have come up with the Rule of Three, which says that it’s only okay to look at your phone during a conversation of four or more people if at least three other people are paying attention.

Another example is where the company BCG tried an experiment of Predictable Time-Off, where employees were supposed to take a fixed time off from work.

Predictable time off is the name we gave to the designated periods of time that consultants were required to take off. This was in addition to time the consultants took off with the natural ebbs and flows of their work. These predictable periods were established at the start of a project and required individuals to be off completely–no checking of e-mail or voicemail. The concept was so foreign that we had to practically force some professionals to take their time off, especially when it coincided with periods of peak work intensity. Eventually, however, the consultants came to enjoy and anticipate having predictable time off, particularly as the benefits for their work became evident.

Where do words come from

Talking about Urdu, and how a language is not defined by it’s vocabulary, Javed Akhtar gives this interesting example to show how many everyday words come from so disparate origins:

एक मकान के एक कमरे में एक गोरा चिट्टा आदमी और एक नन्हा मुन्ना बच्चा नाश्ता करने के लिए बैठे।

बावर्ची नाश्ता लाया, नाश्ते में उरद की दाल.

नाश्ता करने से पहले नहा लिए – एक बाल्टी पानी से , उसके बाद बावर्ची नाश्ता लाया , उरद की दाल और टोस्ट था।

नाश्ता करने के बाद वो उठा, चिक हटाई संदूक खोला उसमें से के पिस्तौल निकाला , दीवार पे टंगी बन्दूक लिया और चला गया।

बच्चा बेबस देखता रहा।

In this ordinary sentence of 80 words, there are 14 that have come into popular usage from various other languages:

मकान – Arabic
कमरा – Italian
बाल्टी – Portuguese
नन्हा – Gujarati
चिट्टा – Punjabi
बच्चा – Persian
उरद – Tamil
टोस्ट – English
चिक , संदूक – Turkish
पिस्तौल – English
दीवार – Persian
बन्दूक – Turkish
बेबस – Sanskrit

***

This reminds me of the piece of text called Uncleftish Beholding, which is composed of words that are only of Germanic origin – which is what English would look like without French, Greek or Latin loanwords:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

.
.
.

With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. In the sun, through a row of strikings and lightrottings, four unclefts of waterstuff in this wise become one of sunstuff. Again some weight is lost as work, and again this is greatly big when set beside the work gotten from a minglingish doing such as fire.

Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.

Soothly we live in mighty years!

***

I was watching a movie which had some Russian dialogues, and I noticed that the Russian (and other Slavic language) word for defeat sounds very similar to the Hindi word पराजय (parājaya). This turns out to just be a conincidence because Sanskrit पराजय =  परा- (parā-) + जय (jaya) while поразить = по- (po-) + рази́ть (razítʹ).

поражение (porazheniye) – Russian
porážka – Slovak
poraz  – Bosnian
паражэнне (paražennie) – Belarusian
porážka – Czech
poraz – Croatian
porażka – Polish
поразку (porazku) – Ukrainian

Bogotá Change

These days we see initiatives like Cycle Day, Open Streets, Bus Rapid Transit (improved access and dedicated lanes for Buses) across Indian cities. Much of this originated in the capital of Colombia – Bogotá. (Note: The first BRT system was implemented in Curitiba, Brazil)

There were two maverick reformers who were mayors of Bogotá during the 1990s – Anatanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa. Both of them won mayoral elections in the 90s as independents – although Penalosa had a more political background.

Penalosa seems more reasonable of the two – but he is very headstrong and antagonistic in his approach. Mockus, while being the crazier of the two, says that we must show that “morality is compatible with efficiency”.

Basically, there are two approaches to bring about change – one is to take on the world and turn it on its head (revolutionary), and the other is to slip in changes slowly and steadily (evolutionary).

The revolutionary approach is all or nothing – you get big changes or you get nothing, while the evolutionary approach ensures steady progress.

This documentary talks about how Penalosa and Mockus brought about change to Bogotá in the 90s in their different ways.

In the 1990s, Bogota was in urban decay – beset by drugs, cartels, and poverty. It was probably one of the worst major cities on earth.

In 1994 a political metamorphosis started to happen. Penalosa was a candidate for Mayor. He started a door to door campaign – a first for Colombia – while skipping televised debates with other candidates.

Meanwhile, Mockus was the chancellor of the University of Bogotá. During a university event, where the students were constantly booing him, he decided to turn around on the stage and moon the audience. Promptly, he was fired.

In doing this, he somehow became a symbol of honesty. Loco (“Crazy”) Antanas – as he was named – decided to run for Mayor as an Independent candidate. He soon emerged an a popular opponent to Penalosa.

He would campaign in the streets – sometimes dressing up as a superhero. He invited reporters to interview him at his mothers house – but his mother had none of it and threw the reporters out.

He would throw excrements in the face of candidates, and at an election event a student took away his microphone. He got into a fight with the students and a pandemonium broke out on stage.

Landing on a Comet

Mark McCaughrean: “Rosetta: to Catch a Coment”

Last year, the space probe Rosetta was in the news for landing Philae on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Mark McCaughrean talks about the mission in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

This was not the first time that a probe has been sent to a comet. In 1986, ESA sent a probe to fly by Haley’s comet which lasted a few minutes. One of the discoveries was that comets are pretty dark objects due to the amount of dust on the surface, and due to organic materials.

In 2005, NASA sent a probe Deep Impact to the comet Tempel 1. The probe carried an “impactor” which collided into the comet with the probe studying the impact. The idea behind colliding was to get to the core – the material on the outside is not representative of what’s on the inside.

Comets contain things like water (ice) and amino acids. In theory comets could have brought water to earth – it would take 100 million comets to account for all the water on earth.

Water on earth has a consistent deuterium-to-hydrogen(D/H) ratio (it’s a very small ratio – on the order of 10^-4). The D/H ratio on asteroids tends to be similar to earth, but higher on comets.

The launch of Rosetta was delayed when one of the Ariane 5 launches (not the one carrying Rosetta) failed. They had to wait until the failure was investigated, which meant that they missed the comet that they had originally picked.

Rosetta has the biggest solar panels ever used on a spacecraft but not enough to power a direct flight to the comet. The comet 67P’s orbit extends between Mars and Jupiter and the sun is pretty weak near Jupiter.

They decided to use gravitational assist which involves “slingshot-ting” around a planet. During this they flew by earth 3 times, Mars once and visited two asteroids.

During the final phase of the flight – when the probe was near Jupiter’s orbit, they decided to put the probe is deep space hibernation. This was done to save power. They had enough power to keep going, but not enough if they faced any problems.

Hibernation involves switching off most of the equipment on board – except heaters for fuel lines. There was an alarm to wake up the probe before rendezvous time. During hibernation, they also switched off the stabilising system, which meant that the antenna no longer pointed towards earth, and they had no way to communicate with the probe until it rebooted.

The rendezvous was far out in the solar system and they had a 3 month period to prepare for it – a process that normally takes years of preparation.

When the rendezvous time arrived, the reboot was delayed by 18 minutes which caused nervous moments at ESA.

They discovered that the comet was duck shaped instead of being potato shaped as expected. It’s the size of Mont Blanc but half as dense as water.

The craters on the comet not from impacts, but rather from escaping Carbon Dioxide.

Defining the “down” direction on 67P is tricky because it has such an irregular shape – the “down vector” is local. The gravity is pretty low too – a vertical jump of 4cm would be enough to reach escape velocity. A base jump from a cliff on the comet would take forever and you would arrive at the bottom at a walking pace. There is a lot of hydrogen sulphide and hydrogen cyanide which means that 67P stinks!

The D/H ratio on 67P is the highest observed on a comet.

Due to nature of its shape, 67P will eventually fall apart – and ESA hops to look inside for further scientific insights.

Landing Philae from Rosetta to 67P was like throwing a dart  (the distance ratios are similar). It ended up landing in the 25 (area marked yellow):

Philae landed successfully, but tumbled and ended in shadow. Since there wasn’t enough sunlight, it went into hibernate after the 60 hour battery was discharged.

Google displayed a doodle marking the landing – but they delayed it till successful landing.

Currently Philae is off but might be woken up one day. They might also decide to land Rosetta on the comet.

Fighting dangerous chemicals in consumer products

Arlene Blum: “Breaking Trail: Peaks, Public Health, and Policy”

Arlene Blum is a researcher, mountaineer and founder of the Green Science Policy Institute. She talks about her work in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

She attended Reed College in Portland where one of her teachers had a PhD in Chemistry from MIT. She (and the other three women in her class), went on to get PhDs in Chemistry.

Mt Hood, in Portland, was the first mountain she she climbed. She went on to climb Denali (in Alaska), and Annapurna (one of the 14 8000m tall peaks). She had a career in Chemistry in the 1970s, from which she took a 26 year break to climb mountains.

She published a paper in Science about the cancer-causing effects of Brominated Tris – a flame retardant added to children’s pajamas. This chemical was soon banned, but later manufacturers started using Chlorinated Tris which is also flame retardant that causes cancer.

The lesson here is that banning chemicals is incredibly hard – it takes a long time, and often a similar alternative emerges – which has similar health risks associated with it (Regrettable Substitution).

For example, asbestos has been known to cause cancer, but it is still not banned in US.

So, we know that it is hard to ban chemicals, and even after they are banned, a similar chemical might emerge. So how do we fight dangerous chemicals in consumer products?

The question we must ask is whether a chemical is even necessary, and if it is then is it worth it, and if so – are there alternatives?

The first one is an interesting one – Chlorinated Tris (first seen in childrens pajamas) soon found it’s way into foams used in couches. This was mostly due to a California law that mandated that the foam should be fire retardant. Since manufactures don’t want to have a separate process for California, this foam found it’s way across US. The chemicals in the couch are released by contact, and so babies and pets are especially affected.

It turns out that having fire retardant foam doesn’t help because the fabric catches fire first. Also, adding fire retardant makes the foam harder, so even the couch manufactures don’t want it. They introduced a bill in California to repeal the fire retardant regulation, but it was defeated due to advertising by the chemical manufactures. Chicago Tribune later did a investigation (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) into the tactics used by the flame-retardant manufactures

So fighting these tens of thousands of chemicals is hard – especially through the regulatory route.

This is the approach that the came up with. The dangerous chemicals are classified into six broad categories:

– Highly fluorinated chemicals (“stain-resistant, nonstick, waterproof and lethal”!)
– Anti-microbials (triclosan, triclocarban)
– flame retardants
– Bisphenols and pthalates (used in plastics)
– Organic Solvents
– Metals (used in paints)

They decided to reach reach manufactures ,large retailers ,big buyers, and consumers about the harmful effects and alternatives for these classes of chemicals.

As a result,
– IKEA has banned a lot of these chemicals in a number of their products
– Target decided to drop triclosan from all personal products.
– Brands like H&M, Levis, Puma, Adidas and others eliminated fluorinated chemicals

They have set a goal of reducing the use of these classes of chemicals by:
– 50% in five years
– 90% in ten years

How did The Martian come about

Andy Weir talks about The Martian

Andy Weir, the author of the best-selling book (also made into a movie) The Martian talks about it in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

Weir is from Livermore, California which is home to the Livermore and Sandia National Labs. He was a high-school intern at Sandia, where he started programming.

Later, he dropped out of college and became a programmer. He worked on a popular video game called Warcraft II, and later at AOL. He was laid off from AOL in 1999, and was forced to sell his stock-options at what turned out to be the peak price.

He then tried his hand at writing novels but eventually went back to a programming job in 2002. He quit his programming career in 2014 when he was working at MobileIron.

During his programming career, he continued writing fiction and webcomics. One of his fictional works – The Martian – was published on his blog 1 chapter at a time.  This became quite popular with about 3000 regular readers. It took about 3 years for the book to be completed.

People started asking for an e-reader version, since they found it more convenient than reading on the website. Once this was done, he started getting requests for the e-book to be posted on Amazon, so that it was more convenient for readers to download.

Once posted on Amazon, the book took off. It sold about 500 units per day, as opposed to other self-published books that sell only a few copies a day. Slowly, the book climbed the best-selling charts – No. 1 in sci-fi and top-20 across genres.

This started attracting agents and publishers. David Fugate became his agent and Crown Publishing (subsidiary of Random House) bought the rights to publish it. The movie rights were also purchased around the same time by Twentieth Century Fox. The print and movie deals happened four days apart, which is unusual for regular books.

The way movie deals work is that the studio acquires an exclusive option to produce the movie, and the full amount is paid only when the movie is produced. Otherwise, the author gets a smaller fee for signing the option contract. In Weir’s case, the studio activated the full contract on the day that they started filming the movie.

Even though, the movie deal was signed, less then 1 percent of options eventually get made into movies. Things started falling into place once other people started getting attached to this project.

Drew Goddard signed up as the screenwriter and was also supposed to direct the movie. However, he got an offer to direct the new Spiderman movie, so he was not able to direct this movie. Later, Matt Damon and Ridley Scott joined the project. The rest of the cast was stellar, and they agreed to do the movie for less than their normal fees.

The movie was shot between Nov 2014 and March 2015. Weir was involved during the movie for technical consultations. He mentions watching a test screen before the editing is complete. Since special effects is expensive ($100k per second), the test screenings have lots of rudimentary effects, and also plants, vehicles are visible in the Mars shots.

Water was recently found to be present at Mars, but Weir says that since Curiosity found water at Gale Crater, he can still claim that the area where the movie takes place might be a desert.

Responding to a question about inaccuracies, he found out that the process used for burning hydrogen to produce water would have raised the temperature of the HAB by 400 degree C. He jokes that the biggest inaccuracy is that such a mission would be funded at all!