None Of The Above

The last ice age might have killed us all. All of us, then and now and for all time. It might have been the end of all multicellular life on Earth. We came close. Way close. I’ve always been surprised that almost no one else talks about this. (I’m reading a book that talks about it—a little. I’ll review it as time permits.)

I’ve been planning to write about this for at least five years, when the idea first occurred to me. I didn’t because almost nothing gets Certain People more screamingly upset than challenging any least part of the Climate Catastrophe narrative. If reading this makes you furious, please go somewhere else. I’ve decided that it’s about time to bring it up.

The bullet we dodged during the last ice age was the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As you may know from high school chemistry, cold water absorbs more gas than warmer water. Cool the oceans down, and the oceans will suck up a lot of atmospheric gas, including carbon dioxide. And what do ice ages do? They cool the planet, including the oceans. A lot.

At the depth of the last ice age, atmospheric CO2 went down to 180 parts per million. We know that at about 150 ppm CO2, photosynthesis just stops. Plants die, and in a plant-based ecology like the one we live in, so does almost everything else.

The missing CO2 was dissolved in the oceans, and as the oceans warmed, the CO2 returned to the atmosphere. This is pretty simple stuff. But there’s a problem: CO2 is also being removed from the atmosphere, constantly and permanently. This happens in a number of ways, but a lot of it goes into the carbonate shells of ocean plankton and other carbonate-shelled species. The organisms die (as everything dies eventually) and their shells sink to the sea bottom and stay there.

What this means is that every time we get an ice age, there’s less CO2 in the air to begin with, and therefore less CO2 in the air once it dissolves in the colder oceans. If a future ice age takes that atmospheric CO2 concentration down lower than 150 ppm, it’s all over for life on Earth. I call this the Ratchet of Doom.

But…but…we fixed that, right? Yes, we did. But if homo sapiens hadn’t evolved an industrial civilization, the next ice age could well have destroyed the ecosphere.

There’s a well-known graph of atmospheric CO2 concentration over the last 500 million years. It’s interesting, as it graphs CO2 concentration against temperature. Take a look:

This is usually used to demonstrate that CO2 levels are not closely related to global temperatures. But it also demonstrates that we are living in an age where the CO2 levels in the atmosphere are about as low as they’ve ever been. The little uptick at the end of the purple line is us, now. We’re up a little, sure. But compared to earlier geological history, not by much.

There’s another graph that highlights the effects of the ice ages on CO2 levels. I have some quibbles with the scale of the concentration line, but if you look closely, you’ll see that each ice age’s peak brings the CO2 line down a little lower. That’s what gave me the idea: That a planet’s ecology brings CO2 levels down gradually but inexorably. At some point those levels cease to be able to support photosynthetic life.

Obviously, we are no longer in this particular danger. We’ve released some of the carbon that was laid down during the aptly named Carboniferous age. My point is that it was a pretty narrow escape, which got narrower with every passing ice age.

I’ve often wondered (and this is mere speculation that can’t be proven) if the Little Ice Age was actually the infancy of a Big Ice Age, which we aborted by burning coal, oil, and methane in quantity. The upturn of temperatures is weirdly coincident with the time period when the Industrial Revolution rose to full roar.

It’s possible to argue that more CO2 is beneficial in terms of crop yields and even good weather, or at very least not dangerous. Again, I’m reading a book that makes all those points in detail far better than I ever could, and I’ll review it when I can.

The Ratchet of Doom is no longer ticking. Let all of us who believe in the future—even the distant future–at least be glad of that.

I had some dead time today, but not enough to start writing on the novel. So I went to my spam bin and pulled out a message that came in earlier this morning, offering me that canonical “one weird trick” to get rock-solid sleep. Do this 20 minutes before bedtime and you’ll be a new man!

You’ve seen that sort of thing in your spam bin. These days it’s hard not to see it.

The spammer was bloodsugarfit.com, which sells all sorts of natural remedies. I didn’t click their link but went to the web site, which looked reasonably legit. As best I could tell, they had an affiliate relationship with an outfit called Fisico, which makes a sleep aid supplement called PhysioSleep. The site says Fisico was founded in 2009 by a Greek MD named Dr. George Karanastasis. Good grief! It was one weird Greek ritual! (I get spam pitches for those almost every other day.)

They have a video about PhysioSleep. I said wotthehell and started it. Dr. Karanastasis introduced himself, and he talked…and talked…and talked…

…and talked…and talked. He repeated himself a lot, told us his life story, and mentioned that he was a bad sleeper and grouchy to the point his wife almost left him. I sympathize, though lack of sleep in the wake of the Coriolis collapse did not make me grouchy but depressed and lethargic. He mentioned a conspiracy by the Ivies to prevent natural remedies from being taken seriously. I’ve not seen anything about that, though I could certainly believe it. And he talked…and talked…and talked…

The video window had a run/pause button, but no progress bar. I had no idea how long the video was. So I just let it run. While it ran, I opened another tab and looked up whatever might be out there on PhysioSleep. Turns out it’s an OTC sleep aid with two active ingredients: melatonin and zylaria, which is an extract from some fungus or another. I get pitches all the time for supplements containing Turkey Tail extract and several other fungal extracts. Haven’t tried that one and probably won’t.

Every minute or so I looked back at the tab running the video.

It was still running. He talked, and he talked, and he talked…

I didn’t find anything crisp on Dr. Karanastasis. There is a Dr. Georgios Karanastasis, an internist in Tinley Park, Illinois, who mostly treats headaches and joint pain. No mention of Fisico or PhysioSleep. I looked for product reviews, and found none. Amazon does not sell it.

Glanced back at the video. He was still talking. It was going on twenty minutes by then, and still hadn’t mentioned the product itself. I finally said to hell with it, this is a total waste of my time.

For me, the big puzzle is this: Why did somebody think that a long monotonous video would sell a sleep supplement similar to (if not identical to) stuff they sell on Amazon? Is it due to the sunk cost effect? Are people who watch until its end (whenever that might be) figure, “Well, I sat through half an hour, so to keep it from being a total loss, maybe I should buy some?”

Note well that I didn’t buy any and have no opinion on PhysioSleep or Dr. Karanastasis. I tried melatonin back in 2001 and it didn’t help me sleep. Mostly it messed up my biological clock. Zylaria, well some people who use it in other formulations from other companies think it works, judging by reviews on Amazon. Maybe it does. If so, I wish him well and hope he sells a bunch.

But boy, for busy people like me, that video would be a total showstopper.

Yes, I know I haven’t posted since the end of June, but I had a very busy July. So bear with me; I’m trying to get back in the Contra saddle on a much more regular basis. A fair bit of good stuff has piled up in my notes. Perforce:

• WordStar 7 for DOS can now be had as a free download, thanks to the work of SF author Robert J. Sawyer. The product has changed hands a great many times down the decades, and as best we can tell it’s now abandonware. Caution suggests that if you’re a retrocomputing fan, better snag it now, before somebody pops up with a copyright objection.
• The Heartland Institute has a very nice free 82-page full-color PDF overview of climate issues from a skeptical perspective. Beyond global warming it covers sea levels, droughts, violent weather, crop yields, and much else. A lot of the data cited comes from the NOAA, which I still consider a reliable source.
• There’s a new image-generating AI called FLUX from Black Forest Labs that apparently knows how many fingers and toes humans have. Sorry, guys: I’ll believe it when I test it.
• Chris Martz put together a map displaying the record hottest day in August for all 50 states. The hottest August temp we’ve ever seen in Arizona was in…1905. Not much of a climate apocalypse, eh?
• Solar cycle 25 has handed us the highest sunspot count in 23 years. This cycle was supposed to be weak. And we haven’t hit the likely peak yet. We may not see that peak until 2025 or 26.
• New research shows that elenolic acid, found in olives and olive leaves, brings down blood sugar and reduces body weight. I have to wonder if this is why the Mediterranean Diet appears to work. Elenolic acid is available OTC, and I’m tempted to try it and see if it will trim a little fat off my waistline.
• Here’s a nice BBC piece about an obscure British clergyman who predicted the existence of black holes in…1783. The guy should be way better known than he is, given that he also identified the inverse square law in 1750.
• For any of several reasons, electric vehicles are dangerous. [Link removed by me; see comments.]
• Copyright issues in training AIs are ongoing. MIT summarizes the use of "copyright traps" that embed nonsense sentences into text by hiding it somehow. (White text on white?) This allows software to determine if a piece of text was used in training. (Just how is too complex to explain here. Read the article.) My response is that finding "invisible" text in blocks of text is an easy challenge for software, especially with Web content. I envision a Web crawler that checks for copyright traps and either refuses to add trapped content to an index, or else scrubs the traps outright before copying the scrubbed text to a local database used for AI training. Bottom line: There is no easy solution to this problem.

72 today. I am quietly rejoicing for having logged another year. Each year we survive is a win. But each year I ask myself: Am I old yet? and every year, well, I can’t in all honesty say yes. I used to think that 65 was the border separating middle age from old age. But when I turned 65 in 2017, I couldn’t shake the feeling of still being middle-aged. So I shoved the border back a few years, to 72. Here I am. And damn if I don’t feel a whit different than I did at 65.

I’ve written about several of my birthdays at some length, and make a few points in those entries that I don’t intend to make again. Here’s 58, 60, 66 (I didn’t do an entry when I turned 65) 69 and 70.

So when does a person become old? My hypothesis: There comes a point when it becomes impossible to live without a little (or maybe more than a little) help. That’s when you become old.

It’s not a dumb question. As we age, things lose functionality. Little failures accumulate, with an occasional larger failure as a sort of quantum leap. A lot of those you can see coming and dodge; I’ve never smoked nor done drugs and don’t drink much. Low-carb has kept my weight down. It’s unclear how much getting plenty of sleep helps, though from all I’ve read it’s a lot.

A few you can reverse with medical help. I’ve been told I’ll need cataract surgery eventually, and whereas my sight isn’t strongly impaired yet, I’m not looking forward to the surgery itself. Joint replacements exist for knees and hips and probably a few others. So far, my joints are in reasonably good shape. Carol and I have been doing some intense weight training since 2003, and I’m pretty sure I now have more muscle than I did when I was in my 40s.

As I’ve written before, sure, I’ve been lucky. That said, a lot of luck you make yourself. Simple caution and not doing stupid things have kept me from spraining or tearing anything essential. I practice sanity, refuse to engage in tribal screaming matches, and don’t take myself as seriously as I might. Laughter feels good, even if you’re laughing at yourself. I keep my brain busy.

Yes, I now have a certain amount of metal in my mouth. In truth, that metal works better than the teeth it replaced. The rest of me is still original stock. I still have my tonsils and my appendix, granting that neither buys me much beyond peculiar bragging rights.

All of which suggests that I’m not old yet. I may someday need a cane or braces of various kinds. 75? 80? 85? Who knows? I’ll take it as it comes. As a grade school friend of mine often says of life, Enjoy the ride. I’m a contrarian optimist. I am enjoying the ride. And as long as I’m enjoying the ride, I suspect I will not think of myself as old.

• Spooky or creepy music in SF/Fantasy/Horror flicks is assumed to rely on the theremin. I just discovered the Ondes Martenot, which sounds like a theremin but is easier to play. Furthermore, it’s been around for most of 100 years. Not sure how I got into my 70s without ever stumbling on it. Good link on YouTube.
• Carol and I don’t go out to the movies much anymore. We stream or buy a DVD for anything we want to see. This writer offers a cogent explanation for why theaters are largely to blame for this phenomenon. (Crappy movies are the rest of the explanation.)
• This sounds a little (or more than a little) grandiose: A meteotsunami subjected the shore of Lake Michigan in Holland, Michigan to—oh, no!—a 2-foot wave. When I was a kid this phenom was called a seiche, and Chicago got its share, rare though they might be. Certain types of bad weather including strong winds and rapid changes in atmospheric pressure are to blame. Again, I’m surprised I made it to my 70s without ever seeing the word.
• No small number of people have claimed that "return to office" mandates are back-channel layoffs, a way to reduce headcount by having heads quit voluntarily. Now some research seems to indicate that this is the case.
• Ok, this is mondo weird: I spun through the McD’s drive-thru not long ago for an iced coffee and got two pennies (and some other coins) in change. Both pennies were 1981-Ds. What are the chances?

  

• I was looking for Revolutionary War flags and stumbled upon a list of flags on Wikipedia that would do Sheldon Cooper proud.
• Beethoven was a classical music composer, but his body was full of heavy metal, specifically, lead. The Mayo Clinic analyzed a few strands of the maestro’s hair, and found 64 times the lead found in a typical American today. This likely led to the many medical problems Beethoven had, including deafness.
• Lazarus 3.4 is now available, built with FreePascal 3.2.2. It’s a bugfix release and there isn’t a lot of New Stuff, but get it anyway! There’s nothing else quite like it in the OSS universe.
• A few days ago I received an email inviting me to the—wait for it–Lane Technical High School Milwaukee World Naked Bike Ride. I thought it was a hoax but no—naked bike rides are evidently a thing in big cities. Now, Lane Technical High School (which I attended 1966-1970) is in Chicago, not Milwaukee. There is in fact a World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago on my 72nd birthday tomorrow, but they didn’t invite me. I don’t own a bike, and I’m a long damn way from Milwaukee, or Chicago. That said, I doubt there will be a World Phoenix Naked Bike ride any time soon. It was 113 the other day. People would die.

…to Robert Williams, Jr. of Necedah, Wisconsin, who gave his life for his country in 1944. I’ve mentioned him before and will mention him again; he was my mother’s high-school sweetheart, and had he returned from the War, I am pretty sure they would have married—and I would not now exist. Does this bother me?

Don’t be silly. Love and honor matter.

I don’t know a great deal about Bobby Williams. My mother did not talk about him. I’m pretty sure she moved to Chicago from Wisconsin in 1945 once she knew Bobby was never coming back. I knew nothing more until Craig Williams, one of Bobby’s grand-nephews, contacted me in 2020, and explained how he died during the war: His Navy torpedo bomber crashed into the Pacific on March 9, 1944. Craig sent me a number of photos, including the Navy’s 21-gun salute at his funeral (below) and one of my mother when she was 17, in her prom dress for the Necedah High School Senior Prom. (At right.)

In a slightly weird coincidence, both Bobby and my father were radio operators during the War, Bobby on a torpedo bomber in the Pacific, and my Army father first in Italy and later North Africa.

I’m not sure how much more I can say. WWII was a horrible thing. The best I can say about it is that after VJ Day, people understood that the world might not survive another World War. So far so good. I still worry sometimes.

Alas, millions of good people like Bobby Williams had to die to put that lesson across. I honor all of them, and always will. But Bobby Williams loved my mother until his last breath, for which I honor him, and also hold him in tremendously high esteem. He looks like the kind of guy I could hang out with, trade stories, and knock back a couple of glasses of wine with over dinner. Knowing that I can never meet him doesn’t in any way change my honor or my esteem.

Or…who knows? He’s on my prayer list. Maybe “never” is too strong a word.

Yup.

By popular demand, here come a few more triumphant and mostly triumphant (or at very least stirring) works of classical music, each one with a link to a recording on YouTube. I’ve considered all suggestions and rejected several for not having enough melody (Adams’ “A Short Ride on a Fast Machine”) or enough energy (Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Procession of the Nobles”) to carry off the feel of triumph. I like those too, but I’m on a mission here, and feeling sprightly tonight.

I’m about out of time for fooling with Contra today and want to post this before supper. I’m still looking for candidates and still considering a few, like Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome” and Aaron Copland’s “Outdoor Overture,” which is a touch peculiar but deserves way more play than it gets. Again, I’ll start collecting pieces for a third entry, though it won’t be soon, since I’m at 104,000 words and struggling to finish The Everything Machine. So let’s have at it!

• William Tell Overture: March of the Swiss Soldiers, by Rossini, 1829. Ok, guilty: I skipped this one the first time because who doesn’t know, well, The Lone Ranger theme song? Although nominally a march, it always sounded to me more like a mad scramble or (in most people’s minds) a guy on a galloping horse. The music world now agrees that the piece is indeed a “galop,” which was a rapid dance movement in the 1700s that became the forerunner of both the polka and …wait for it… the can-can.
• A Moorside Suite: March by Gustav Holst, 1928. The conclusion of a three-movement suite, all of which is worth hearing. This concluding march expresses both confidence and triumph right through its final bars, which don’t explode but instead say, “We won. Live with it!”
• The Running Set, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1933. Here we have, not a lead-up to an explosive ending, but an absolutely manic five minutes beginning to end that I often characterize as “an Irish jig on meth.” It is probably Vaughan Williams’ most obscure work, drawing on four folk dance tunes and cranking the meter up to 11. Here’s about as much description as I found on a quick scan. Ok, sure, no explosion at the end, just a single forward chord. But given what came before it, hey, that’s all that I require.
• March of the Trolls by Edvard Grieg, from his “Lyric Suite,” 1894. The orchestra tries to play a pretty melody, and here come those darn trolls, not marching but madly scrambling from rock to rock in their cave and making an awful racket. They go away, and the orchestra tries again. Can’t have that. Here come the trolls, back from whateverthehell trolls do, scrambling into their cave, double time. March? Trolls don’t just march. Moral: Don’t try to play pretty melodies near the trolls’ cave. They’ll win every time.
• Troika by Sergei Prokofiev, from “The Lt. Kije Suite,” 1934. It was a movie: The previous incarnation of Captain Tuttle is born, falls in love, marries the girl, and then goes for an invigorating sleigh ride! That’s the life—but make sure you stop there, because the next movement is a downer. Really, it’s ok; Lt. Kije (like Captain Tuttle) never actually existed.
• Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg, from his ”Peer Gynt Suite” (1876). Sure, how can we play “March of the Trolls” and then not go to the next mountain over and try to sell the Mountain King some solar panels? No, King Carbon lives above a coal mine and avoids the Sun. So you have to sneak out again, with the King’s bodyguard following along behind. You go faster, they go faster, and before you know it, it becomes (yes!) another mad scramble to jump over chasms and race down the mountain to the valley, where there are fewer grouchy kings (or trolls) and more pubs.
• Symphonie Fantastique 5: Dream of a Black Sabbath, by Hector Berlioz, 1830. Most people in the classical music universe consider this a musical depiction of an occult nightmare. It’s not. It’s something utterly different and better: a musical metaphor of good triumphing over evil. So it begins: the creepy crawlies skitter and gesture and finally join together in an infernal dance (1:18) The nightmare is underway, and the minor evils make themselves known, posturing to each other, some noticing a brief bit of a different force (2:27) that strikes fear in their hearts. At about 2:50, the Big Bad opens up its Eye in the tower and, with funereal bells in the background, looks down at its minions while the Deus Irae pronounces its rank as top of the evil heap. But at 4:52 something new and terrifying happens: The Army of Good arrives at the gate and makes its presence known with the rhythm of marching stallions. Sneaking around circa 6:35, evil starts to worry. That’s quite an army that Good has out there. Time to engage! Down the gates fall and in comes the army, trampling the minions and making its way up the Tower to confront the Bad Boss. Up the tower stairs the minions retreat, sneaking and hopping (8:20) and falling over the railings (6:12). None can truly face the forces of Good. At the top of the stairs, Good unleashes its power against the Big Bad. Big Bad responds (9:01) Good overpowers evil, the Deus Irae plays for the end of Big Bad, and the Tower crumbles to dust and rubble on top of the doomed minions. Good rides off triumphant. No matter how bad you think you are, don’t mess with those guys. Really. REALLY.

Heh. I’ve wanted to write that last item that for a long, long time!

I like happy endings. If you’ve read any of my fiction, you know that I write them. Bummers are popular in literary fiction, and were when I got my liberal arts education fifty years ago. (This is why I don’t write literary fiction. That shoe just don’t fit.) But this applies to music as well as fiction. The three characteristics I look for in music are these: Melody, Harmony, and Energy. I’ve enjoyed an occasional sad song (like “The Parting Glass”) for various reasons, but if a sad song has none of those three characteristics, I won’t buy it—and if there’s a skip button, my index finger finds it at some significant fraction of c.

Energy is the one I get the most pushback about. Who doesn’t like a peaceful tinkling Mozart piano piece? Well, if I can’t hum it…me. I have always used music to rev me up and break me out of blocks in my thinking or especially my writing. Energy in music is a very big thing for me.

So in today’s entry I present a playlist of some classical pieces that carry a special grip on my imagination: the music of triumph. No gentle fade at the end. Uh-uh. I want a musical explosion that makes me want to stand up and cheer. Yes, I’m that kind of screwball. If you didn’t know that already, well, this playlist will make it abundantly clear.

All links are to performances on YouTube. There are many others available.

• Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zoroaster), by Richard Strauss, 1896. This one has special significance for me, because it’s the unforgettable opening piece in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which may be my favorite film of all time—and the film I asked Carol out to see for our first date in 1969.
• Symphony #3, Organ, final movement, Maestoso, by Camille Saint-Saens, 1886. It was years after I saw the 1995 film Babe that I first heard this larger work from which the Babe theme borrowed. The thunderous organ sequences are like nothing else I’ve heard in classical music. It opens with an explosion, and ends with an even bigger explosion. What’s not to love?
• Building the Crate, by John Powell, from the Chicken Run soundtrack, 2000. I’ve mentioned this one before, and whereas it strikes some people as slightly goofy in spots, it’s definitely stirring. There’s a touch of klezmer in it, and for a few seconds a chorus (if that’s the word) of…kazoos. It’s all about the chickens triumphing, something one doesn’t generally associate with chickens. But triumph they do, with callbacks to films The Great Escape and The Flight of the Phoenix.
• Lincolnshire Posy 6: Lost Lady Found, by Percy Grainger, 1937. Short and to the point, and definitely gets across the triumph of finding a beloved person after a long and difficult search.
• The Planets: Jupiter, by Gustav Holst, 1917. If you’ve heard anything in this playlist, you’ve heard ol’ Jupe. Although subtitled ‘The Bringer of Jollity” (is that still a word?) its utterly explosive ending makes me consider it “The Bringer of Triumph.”
• Russian Sailors’ Dance, by Reinhold Gliere, 1927. Written as part of a ballet called The Red Poppy, it starts out low and slow, gathering speed and force as it goes, until it reaches a manic but completely satisfying explosion at the end.
• Towards a New Life, by Josef Suk, 1931. I never heard this until KBAQ played it a couple of years ago. It deserves way more than obscurity. A triumphant march for full orchestra, it has roots in Czech nationalism and lyrics in the Czech language for which there is no English translation. (The linked performance is instrumental only.) Some think the trumpet solo opening is too long; if you agree, skip the first 90 seconds.
• Symphony #9. The New World: Finale, by Antonin Dvorak, 1895. There are a few slow parts in this finale to Dvorak’s all-time best work, but they act to frame the explosive energy of the rest and make it stand out by contrast. That’s ok; sometimes we have pause for a bit to take a breath, in our lungs and sometimes in our lives. No matter; the explosion at the end makes the quiet parts worthwhile.
• Pictures at an Exhibition: The Great Gate of Kiev, finale, by Modest Mussorgsky, 1874. In spite of the countless times I’ve heard it, this piece continues to bring a tear to my eye, often as not. Especially when preceded by the creepy and subversively diabolical movement “Baba Yaga’s Hut,” (as here) to me it symbolizes humanity staring down Evil, kicking its ass across the galaxy twice, and then dropping it down the black hole at the galaxy’s core, where it belongs and will trouble us no more. Triumph you want? Triumph I’ll give you!

That’s all for now. Got any more? I’m always in the market for music like this.