Phil Klass, aka William Tenn 1920-2010

I made a jackass of myself the first time I interviewed — hell, spoke with — Phil Klass.

“You have no idea who I am, do you?” he asked, frustrated, after I’d posed a few questions over the telephone. I hadn’t yet connected him with his pen name.

To be honest, I hadn’t read much William Tenn at that point, even if I had known he and Phil were one and the same. And as a relative newcomer to Pittsburgh, I didn’t yet have an internal map of the local SF community’s leading lights. It wasn’t until later, when I looked Phil up in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that I tumbled to how badly I’d blown the interview.

For all his multicultural sophistication — he went to war as a socialist, Jewish U.S. soldier, the son of a Brit and a Russian — Phil Klass was an American original. He embodied so much of what makes me proud of this country. He had his opinions, and stated them courageously no matter what anybody thought; during the McCarthy era, he was one of a few SF authors openly parodying the Red Scare. He claimed no special courage, on the grounds that the folks who would have objected didn't read, and wouldn't have understood, science fiction.

Having done some intelligence work on captured Nazis, and despite the fact that he and they were each other's worst nightmares, Phil had utter contempt for torturers and their ultimately craven arguments of “utility.” Yet he told a story about dragging local townspeople in to see what had been happening in the death camp next store to them, belying their claims of “not knowing.”

Phil also told a captivating story of a major SF editor of the classic era — I think it may have been Campbell, but I'm not sure — confiding in him that “Jews probably are Homo superior” — an embarrassingly common trope of SF in its sophomore years — and how, despite his best attempts, he couldn't get the man to understand why this was so wrong, how it insulted rather than honored the memory of the Holocaust's victims. “I told him I was sorry to hear that, because it meant we'd learned nothing,” Phil said decades later.

Phil also was generous in advice, and gave good advice. I wish I could tell you how his tips transformed my SF career — but sadly, the industry is too much of a train wreck for anybody to provide the magic words. Suffice it to say he was bullish on nonfiction, bearish on creative nonfiction, and absolutely gloomy on science fiction. I've seen nothing to indicate that he got anything even slightly wrong in that.

Of course, Phil Klass, under pen name William Tenn, was a gifted science fiction author, a David-Bowie-like figure who maybe didn't get read as often as the Asimovs, Heinleins, and Herberts, but who was read by, and influenced, just about every subsequent major SF author. He was as honest in his fiction as he was in real life, arguing at a time when SF stories typically had genius inventors creating the first moon rocket in their back yards that it was going to take the finances and physical resources of a large government bureaucracy to reach the moon. It pissed people off to have someone puncture a cherished trope like that, but I note that it was a bloated, inefficient, can't-do-anything government agency called NASA that got the job done, and not private-sector venture capitalists.

But I digress.

Going over my notes from that first interview with Phil and my subsequent research, I had an inspiration: I would fight my every instinct. Rather than side-step my cluelessness, I would confront it. I opened the article with Phil’s exasperated words. It gave me a perfect entree into talking about the many reasons people come to an SF convention, and the uphill battle those of us with the SF-writing compulsion face.

After the piece ran, I ran into Phil at ConFluence, and introduced myself. He said simply, “I read your article, and it was mostly accurate. I was surprised!”

Phil, wherever you are, I'm going to take that as an indictment of modern journalism. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Expectations

Literally snowbound, it's hard to come up with excuses not to blog. And I suppose, on a frigid day, it's not too unusual to be put in mind of old flames.

Mind you, this wasn't someone I actually dated — more an unrequited torch, before th'wife, even before the Before Time. We're talking what cosmologists call Deep Time, back around the point when God was thinking maybe the neutron might be a good idea.

Her name was Kathy Ewing, and she was my Self, Culture, and Society lecturer at Hogwarts [1]. She was young, pretty, and smart as all get-out — and I had a fantastic crush on her, though doubtless she wouldn't remember me at all by now.

At least, I hope to God she wouldn't, the reasons being imminently obvious.

Required background: Like many of the common-core courses [2] at the University of Chicago, Self, Culture, and Society had two hour-and-a-half discussion sections each week, in which Kathy and about a dozen of us would discuss, argue, and hash out the course materials — in this case, a “Great Books” [3] mix of psychology, anthropology, and social science.

A side-note: the U of C is the intellectual equivalent of someone throwing a knife to you and hollering, “Now, come at me!” It's exactly the kind of place that pussy little right wingers like to bitch about being hostile to their ideas — only they're missing the point: it's hostile to everybody's ideas. It's all about forcing you to defend your beliefs, structure your arguments so that they make sense somewhere else besides the addled interior of your head ...

Anyway.

I don't remember whether it was every week, every two weeks, or what, but every once in a while all those little discussion sections met in a big hall for a lecture. The professors and lecturers teaching the study sections [4] would rotate this duty, each taking, I suppose, a topic of particular interest or expertise on which to hold forth.

So this particular upcoming lecture was Kathy's, and I was determined to sit front and center, nodding sagely at all the appropriate points, impressing her with my interest in her topic — and, strange as it seems now, thereby my interest in her. Not that I had it planned out even that clearly.

Only the night before, a good friend who will remain nameless had the latest in a series of fights with her boyfriend, another nameless good friend, and I spent much of the night and next morning sitting in a stairwell offering fantastic advice [5]. Didn't really get any sleep to speak of that night.

So picture me the next morning, bleary eyed, too late to get coffee at the dining hall, stumbling into the lecture hall, only just barely conscious enough for a fogged corner of my mind to remember the plan of the previous day.

Unfortunately, all it remembered was, “Sit front and center.”

I'm sitting there, then, about 10 minutes into Kathy's talk when the realization comes over me that there's no way I'm staying awake. Just can't keep the eyes open. I did my best to hide it — the old, cover-your-forehead-with-your-hand-while-you-look-down-at-your-notebook thing, the hunch-down-over-the-table thing, every trick I could think of. Needless to say, even five minutes afterward it didn't seem likely that I'd had much luck at hiding from Kathy that I was sleeping through her lecture.

Dashed expectations are the subject of today's entry, a bit from C. Eisenegger and pals at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Zurich and other environs, about testosterone.

Now, in the words of Robert Sapolsky — of whom I'm an admirer — in his wonderful essay The Trouble with Testosterone, here's the gist of the results when you inject testosterone into a submissive male monkey:

“Take that third-ranking monkey and give him some testosterone. None of this within-the-normal-range stuff. Inject a ton of it, way higher than what you normally see in rhesus monkeys, give him enough testosterone to grow antlers and beard on every neuron in his brain. And, no surprise, when you check the behavioral data, he will probably be participating in more aggressive interactions than before.

So even though small fluctuations in the levels of the hormone don't seem to matter much, testosterone still causes aggression, right? Wrong. Check out number 3 more closely. Is he raining aggressive terror on everyone in the group, frothing with indiscriminate violence? Not at all. He's still judiciously kowtowing to numbers 1 and 2 but has become a total bastard to numbers 4 and 5. Testosterone isn't causing aggression, it's exaggerating the aggression that's already there.”

So you get the background here: testosterone as a vehicle of aggression, of conflict, if not social dominance.

Imagine Herr Eisenegger & Co.'s collective surprise, then, when they gave sublingual testosterone to a bunch of women [6] and then had them play one of those social-strategy games: In this case, they gave one woman $10 [7] and told her that she had to make an offer to another — to give that other woman $5, $3, $2, or nothing. If the second woman refused the offer, nobody got anything. If she accepted, she got what was offered and woman number one kept the rest. So there are two separate motivations: the less woman one offers, the more she gets to keep; but if she doesn't offer enough, woman two can play the spoiler.

The expectation, of course, is that testosterone will bring out woman one's inner total bastard, to use Sapolsky's words, and offer less, even at the risk of losing it all.

You've probably guessed that it didn't come down that way: in fact, testosterone made woman one offer not less to woman two, but more. On the average, she offered about fifty cents more than when she hadn't been given the testosterone.

This isn't necessarily a surprise; some experts the investigators had polled beforehand had actually predicted this result, on the grounds that testosterone would enhance the women's desire to take leadership: and one way to establish leadership is to make a more generous offer that makes the other gal more likely to trust and follow you.

But that's not the interesting bit. Eigenegger etc. then took their data, and sorted it differently. Instead of separating the “women one” who'd gotten testosterone vs. those who got a placebo, they separated by which of the two the women thought they'd gotten. And guess what? The women who thought they'd gotten testosterone acted, if not like total bastards, then at least like bastards: on average they offered a dollar less than the women who thought they'd gotten placebo.

That's right, the expectation of testosterone was more potent in terms of both size of effect and statistical significance than the real thing was. And it had the opposite effect of the real thing. For all the world, it looks like testosterone's bad rap in popular culture carries more weight than its biological effects in our little brainbones.

Deep waters here: did expecting testosterone make gals one a bit on the bitchy side, or did the bitchier girls expect they'd be given testosterone? And since the anti-placebo effect was stronger than the real thing, what thence?

Our authors did a bunch of work to control for various complications; you can read more about it in their paper. As always, a single experiment isn't going to be gospel. But it does give us a wallop of a lesson in being careful about our expectations.

I don't know what expectations Kathy had of me, if any — for obvious reasons I never had the guts to ask her about that day. But I got a disturbing window on the question a few years later, as a senior, when I ran into a fellow student from Kathy's study section.

When we figured out that we'd been in the same class, his eyes first narrowed, a bit angrily. Then the light bulb went on, and he said, “Oh, I remember you — you always asked the stupidest questions!”

Oh well; expectations be damned.

[1] A prospective student I was interviewing for the college put this metaphor into my head. Geeks surrounded by stone: God, yes. At Harvard, Heather may have been a resident tutor at Slytherin, but we had Lord Voldemort — I mean, Milton Friedman.
[2] U of C is one of those liberal-arts-and-a-bit-angry-about-it places — everybody shares the same common core of science, social science, and humanities courses before they get to take their major requirements and electives.
[3] Mostly dead white European men, though there were a few chicks in there — Mary Douglas and the like. And I understand they've been broadening it since.
[4] And I think most of them actually were lecturers or professors of varying type, and not grad students — that's another thing U of C is serious about to the point of it being a “thing.”
[5] I don't know what's harder to believe — that we actually did this, or that anybody would want to hear my advice.
[6] This, of course, is a loose end to the study: would the result have been different had you done the experiment with men? It's a quandary, though, since in men there'll be a normal variation between individuals and from day to day, and so, like the monkey, you have to give a snoot-load of it to make sure you're significantly changing what's already there — and then you have to worry about non-natural effects of what amounts to an OD of testosterone. And they won't let you do that with humans anyway. Women, at least, are more of a blank canvas, though you do have the possibility that their brains won't react in the same way that mens' will.
[7] Actually, it was “monetary units” — maybe euros — but you get the idea.

Who You Think You’re Fooling?

The excellent Smartdogs’ blog has cited an interesting — if ill-advised — new way the government is wasting our money: building robots to train animals without human involvement.

Ba-rother.

Mind you, I do differ with Janeen in one important way: I’m not so sure you can’t, given the amazing robotics advances on their way in the next 10 to 20 years, build a robot that can train a dog. Given that the Japanese are starting to build robots with facial expressions, and even pheromone signals are beginning to make sense, I’m not so sure that this task is beyond near-future technology.

Now, I agree with Janeen in that the project is hopelessly naïve: at best it will take much, much longer than its creators realize (partly if they waste time with an all-operant box rather than starting by building a robot that looks and smells like a human trainer) [1]. But one important thing that a robo-trainer can have is perfect timing. Never a cue too late, never one too early. Never tired. Never distracted, pissed off, sinus-infected ...

As th’ better half is fond of pointing out, accurate communication with the animal is a fundamental — and good timing of such can produce results in the face of muddy-headed methods, unsavory personality, and much else that’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

I think it could work.

I’m already a bit off-message: my point today has to do with building a machine that looks and smells like a person, at least to a dog. Before you say “could never happen,” recall the cuckoo.

This is the bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, getting free child-rearing in the process (often, the cuckoo chick will kick the lawful denizens of the nest out, so the mama bird is actually losing her babies as she raises the changeling). But it’s all the more amazing in that the cuckoo chick doesn’t look anything like the chicks of the birds it parasitizes: it’s bigger, uglier, just a different, um, bird entirely.

How in the hell can mama bird not tell the difference? Could it be that easy to fool dogs as well? Granted, most dogs are smarter than most birds (though consider the amazing intelligence of the corvids and the psittacines, and don’t be too sure of yourself), but this seems to be well within the ability of a bird to sort out.

Except if they tried, it would be a disaster.

Today’s entry, courtesy Diazaburo Shizuka and Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, explains why. Not content with basking in the permanent sun we’re told they enjoy out that way, these folks took a look at coots — no, not volunteer dog handler/firefighters pushing 50, but the water birds. Coots are a special case because they sometimes parasitize the nests of their own species.

What the California Dreamers discovered is that mama coot actually does a fair job of kicking changelings out of her nest, even though they look a lot like her own. How? She uses the first-hatched chick as a template, and boots chicks that don’t look enough like it to the curb.

Why does this work? Because, of course, you don’t parasitize an empty nest — you sneak an egg into one that’s already got eggs in it. You therefore start out with a younger egg than the rightful owner’s. And because of that, the first-hatched is likely to be a chick who belongs there, and not an interloper.

Why can’t it work for the birds that cuckoos parasitize? Because cuckoos grow fast and big, the better to muscle out the competition. There’s a good chance that the first egg hatched in a cuckoo-parasitized nest will be a changeling — and if mama uses it as a pattern of whom to keep, fewer, not more, of her babies will survive.

Bird-brained indeed. Maybe I was hasty in rejecting Data’s cat; getting a dog to accept a robot trainer may have less to do with how convincing it is than with picking the right cues, and understanding how dogs think.

[1] Another thing: as I’m fond of telling people, technology is likely to put us dog handlers out of business, but not by creating a robotic searcher. Why? Because by the time they could develop one, it’ll be too easy to find people in other ways, such as reading the location of their GPS-equipped cell phone. (Though this, too, isn’t quite as easy as you’d think.)

Assumptions

So on our way back from Jersey, visiting the Sicilians [1] for the holidays, we decide to take a little detour across the river into New York City to visit my old friend (and co-Best Man at my wedding) Mike Gelfman for an afternoon.

We met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was my clever way of getting spousal brownie points, hanging with an old buddy from the Before Time, and getting to look at cool old armor and weapons all at the same time.

In the event, though, we never got to the Met's amazing medieval arms exhibit because we got sucked into the far earlier pottery and artifacts exhibits from Egypt, Greece, Tuscany [2], and so forth.

I didn't feel cheated.

Tucked away in a case, one vase among thousands, was this customer [3]:


Heather immediately noticed that the descriptive signage, while full of interesting bits about the religious symbolism, left out an important, if puerile, fact: what seemed obvious to us was about to happen in the depicted scene.

We went back and forth over whether the writer was assuming that tidbit would be obvious to museum goers; while we often decry the rather pathetic state of the art in museum signage these days, the fact is the Met's signs mostly date from some time ago, and it seems far mor likely to me that the author, in a Looney Tunes kind of way [4], was presenting information that a proper, if educated and cosmopolitan, city slicker parent can read to a child while “getting” it at a more adult level.

'Course, that's an assumption, and assumptions can be dangerous. Leading us to today's entry, a study of how the smell-reactive structures of the mouse olfactory epithelium map to the sensations reported by human subjects coming from Yuichi Furudono and pals at, of all places, the Japan Tobacco company's [5] Science Research Center and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Amagasaki, Japan.

They found, interestingly enough, that the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse olfactory epithelium caused by 12 different odorants matches quite well with similarities and differences in the smells experienced by their human subjects when exposed to those odorants. It's a remarkable finding in its own right, in that it's a kind of Golden Spike that verifies what we're learning about the brain's encoding of olfactory experience by explicitly connecting a series of events in the nose and brain.

But let's take a moment to pick apart exactly what they were doing: they were watching the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse's nose, using that information to figure out how the brain transforms those signals into the smells that we experience — as if we were certain that what happens in the mouse nose reflects perfectly what happens in the human nose, and to some extent brain to brain as well.

Now, the authors are careful to point out that this assumption carries some dangers, and discuss the issue at some length in the paper. But what really pops for me isn't that they're making this assumption, but that the odds are so fat that it's likely to be a sound assumption: from everything we know about the remarkable similarities in the sense of smell among vertebrates, I don't think anybody's losing sleep over the formal possibility that something vastly different can be happening in the mouse brain vs. human to produce similar patterns.

How far we've come.

Anyway, let me wrap up by taking a moment to wish everybody the best New Year Possible — Lord knows, we all could use a better year — and a belated Happy Other Holidays. And please, consider donating some dough to Wikipedia so that this remarkable resource can be there for us all.

[1] Aka my relatives.
[2] The Etruscans, who are a new interest of mine and worth a check-out.
[3] It's a krater, not a vase, apparently. Whatever.
[4] There's a New Year's Day marathon on today.
[5] Check out the link, there's an interesting, if coincidental, connection with the dumpling poisonings in Japan in 2008.

Let’s Start a Fight

I’ve bought myself a bit of reprise in doing a blog entry this week by getting my latest nonfiction project into print: an article about my former town and what it’s been doing to stop the wholesale devouring of its woods. It’s certainly nice to get back on that horse — I’d done a bunch of work for the Pittsburgh City Paper back in the late ’90s and early aughts, but not recently.

Seems I’ve been scooped by th’wife — “Professor Chaos” indeed. Let me say this about anything that might be said on that particular blog: I remember the day she talks about, and will admit I purposely avoided the farm for a long time because I knew I’d react the same way she did. As Treebeard said:

“Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”

The reasons for my unwillingness entirely to condemn the new wave of developers are now a matter of record; I don’t feel it necessary to respond to comments from the Peanut Gallery.

Context

On a summer day quite a few years ago, Lilly and I were waiting for Mel and Heather to find us on a beautiful fallow farm that today is rapidly become a bulldozed memory. Sitting on the lee side of a collapsing barn, I knew they’d have a bit of trouble getting us — scent tends to get trapped on the downwind side of structures — and that therefore Lilly and I had some time to kick back and just enjoy a golden southwest Pennsylvania afternoon.

Lilly, as she often did, was chowing down on the tall, broad grass leaves (they were, I found out later, timothy) growing around the abandoned farm buildings. Now, usually we humans have a (justified) skepticism about the culinary preferences of someone who finds cat shit an irresistibly crunchy snack; but just that once, I decided to give it a try.

I chewed the tough, raspy leaves, and soon got a wonderful note of garlic and green. Very tasty, actually.

That day, I got one of many ongoing lessons about giving my dog the benefit of the doubt.

Heather gave me minor hell for the framing story in What Died? — my skeptical account of Lilly apparently detecting 20-year-old graves. Her basic point was, “Why didn’t you just trust your dog, idiot?”

I think she missed an important point of context, a point that a lot of dog handlers get chronically wrong: when and how you express your skepticism matters to the level of trust you’re showing your dog. To make it more concrete, handlers tend to build their dogs’ performance in retrospect: pure confusion the day of a search becomes, with the hindsight of knowing the subject’s eventual location, a clear indication that the dog was on the right track. Some dog handlers compound it by historically revising their level of certainty: “I knew Sparkie was onto it.”

No, our dogs don’t lie to us: but neither do we always understand what they’re trying to tell us.

Though I can’t hold myself forward as any sort of example, I think we need just the opposite approach. In the context of a search task, we need to be respectful of the dog’s abilities but coldly honest: if it had been a real search, the proper report for the potter’s field alert would have been, “I could be wrong, but Lilly sure looked like she was detecting cadaver. I think we need to check it out.” The proper line to take now, nearly 20 years later, is that I don’t really know for sure what she was doing, though the corroborative evidence I’ve seen encourages me to take that alert at face value.

It’s a matter of context.

Context of a different sort is the gist of today’s entry, care of Jostein Gohli and Göran Högstedt at the University of Bergen, Norway: namely, when does garish coloration make a prey animal safe rather than lunch?

The classic explanation is that prey critters like the monarch butterfly use bright colors to warn predators (a strategy called aposematism) that they taste very bad — short-circuiting the potential problem that tasting bad is a little late to really help you not get killed or seriously hurt by a predator. But that explanation poses its own problem: a bird that tries to eat one monarch won’t try for a second. But that still leaves the first pretty much screwed.

The predators could be genetically disposed to avoiding the bright colors — but that argument just moves the issue further back in time, since at some point the first, behaviorally and genetically naïve, predator had to give it a try.

Gohli and Högstedt put it extremely well: “When aposematism first evolved, all predators were inexperienced and the population of aposematic prey would have been very small. Sampling (killing) would likely have led to an early extinction of this fragile population.”

Word.

The explanation, as you may have guessed from the context that I’m talking about it, hinges on smell. If a bad-tasting prey animal also smelled bad, that smell would double down with the bright colors to warn even a truly naive predator off. Both individual associative learning and evolution of the population would strengthen the predators’ reluctance to take the first bite.

But why bother with the color when you already smell bad? While you could argue a number of ways that you get from camouflaged and stinky to neon-bright and stinky, the Norsemen have provided a compelling explanation via mathematical modeling: the stink may actually have driven the evolutionary change in color.

In their computer model, bright colors only tended to get you killed more often, up until a certain level of stink — at that point, the e-animals with subdued coloring tended to get munched more often. And once that potential is there, the small variations generated by genetic drift will inevitably start to push you toward brighter and brighter colors.

It all hinges on the idea that a garish prey animal makes a predator stop and assess rather than jump in to feed, giving it a chance to notice the bad smell. This makes sense; I’ve seen videos of divers chasing after fleeing great white sharks in clear water — while I wouldn’t think this is a bright thing to try in any case, nobody would venture it in murky water, where the fish are known to bite first and ask questions later.

Predation is, after all, an extremely dangerous lifestyle; it pays for a predator to be a bit conservative. Prey fights back, so if you see something you don’t already know is tasty and relatively easy to catch, it makes sense to stop and think rather than risk tangling with something that may seriously injure you (or, in the case of aposematism, poison you).

The theoretical argument even pays itself back. The Viking Veracitators note that, to work on completely naive predators, you need to excrete your stink continuously, even though almost no insects with chemical defenses do this today: they use it only when they need it. The authors’ suggestion: as the heavy lifting shifted from smell to color, continual stink became less necessary to ward the predators off. While they haven’t reported that calculation, it would be nice to see, in future work, whether the bright coloration, once it comes, eases the pressure on the animal to expend the metabolic cost of permanent funk.

Of course, computer modeling ain’t the real world. The experimentalists will need to take this model and run with it, see if it plays out in the field. But it’s a nicely self-consistent argument that seems more than worthy of the experimental verification.

In the context of plausible ideas, it’s a winner.

Still Ticking

Doing well on surgery +5, now on one crutch -- huge in terms of improved mobility, I can climb stairs and sleep in the bed instead of downstairs like another of the dogs. Hopefully the stitches will come out next Friday, but we'll see.

Heather and Pip are in Virginia, helping look for a kid who went missing after a Metallica concert in October. Sucks for a lot of reasons, but there's always the hope that they'll find something that helps the family -- mainly, evidence that the kid just ran away and will be calling home sometime.

Right now I have some writing to do -- stay tuned for a post on a freelance project that hopefully will be web-posted so I can send yinz there.

Thanks for all the well wishes -- hoping I'll be back on something like a normal routine shortly.

By the way, anybody know how to take your own picture using that @$#%^$ little camera at the top of the Mac screen? I can't find anything in iPhoto that refers to it, and the search function in Macs always seems to miss the point for me ...