///
What is Mind?  No matter.  What is Matter?  Never mind.
–Bishop Berkley

A Meating of Mind
Jim Culleny

If my brain
does not tell my arm what to do
nothing much will happen.
Without a brain my arm is
not much smarter than
a leg of lamb

In fact, meat
without mind
is never going to get
much done, while
mind without meat
wouldn’t have any
point in space/time

but when they mate
-when Mind and Meat meet,
when they kiss and make love
things fecund soon become
and run the gamut from
dumb-and-dumber
right on up to the sublime:
from Rush Limbaugh to
Albert Einstein

It’s just the way it is with
sentient being:
Mind needs Meat
to do its work
and Meat needs Mind to
have the inclination to do
anything

but Mind-meets-Meat
is a crap shoot

sometimes it’s a match made in heaven
sometimes it’s a hell of a thing

///

My brother in law (BIL) has ‘flu’: his dry throat and raspy cough bother him, but it his mucus laden stuffy nose that is the cause of his misery. He cannot smell and food has lost its flavor. If I were sentimental about food like BIL, I would sympathize; instead, I congratulate him, “Celebrate your anosmia BIL, you will loose a few pounds and come out slimmer.”

“Anosmia, what is that?”

“The loss of ability to smell.”

BIL, the laid off hedge fund manager, cannot unshackle himself from the clutches of his limbic system and hates any loss. He fears, he would not be able to enjoy the aroma of Indian cuisine during his first trip to India, where we plan to travel together in two weeks. I console him, “It is temporary, and you will get your smell back in a week.”

Sense of smell is perhaps the first sensory system where the molecular mechanism of the process of olfaction has been established. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck jointly published the fundamental paper in the journal “Cell” on the functioning of olfactory system in 1991. They won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1994 for their work on “Odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.” The researchers, working on mice, discovered a pool of more than 1,000 different genes (about 3% of all genes) that encode olfactory receptors in the nose, which can distinguish over 10,000 distinct odors.

BIL carries right number of genes but cannot smell; mucus has stuffed his nose, which prevents air from reaching the olfactory membrane at roof of his nose. Nerve cells or neurons, that line this area of about 10 square centimeters, dangle hair like projections (cilia) into the nasal cavity, where they work as receptors of smell. Odor molecules, mostly volatile organic oils and some inorganic compounds, fit snugly into of receptor sites – a pocket made by a chain of amino acids (protein molecules) – which triggers the coupling of G protein and the process of olfaction through a chain of chemical reactions generating electric signals, which the biologists call ‘transduction’. These olfactory receptor cells are the only neurons in the nervous system that regenerate regularly and replace the old ones every 4 to 8 weeks.

Most of the nasal cavity – about 95% – works as a conduit for air and does not participate in the act of smell. At normal air speed of 250 ml per second in the nose, only some inhaled air comes in contact with the olfactory membrane. Sniffing or deep breathing enhances turbulence in the nose, which gushes more air to contact olfactory receptors.

Nerve processes (axons) from about 10 million odor receptor cells travel into the base of skull to regroup into about 2000 micro-bunches (glomerulus) and form olfactory bulb. Each receptor cell carries only one type of odorant and signals from the same types of receptors end in same glomerulus.

The nerve extensions from the olfactory bulb emerge to form an olfactory tract, which relays information to two parts of the brain: primitive regions of limbic system and neo-cortex. Biologists believe that direct limbic connection of smell is due to its earlier appearance in evolution compared to sight and hearing.

Most common odoriferous substances emit complex mixtures of hundreds of different smells, which activate multiple receptors leading to a combined odor pattern. The cortex recognizes it as a pattern relying on about 10,000 patterns in its memory.

Olfactory sensitivity deceases with age; older people over 70 have over 10 times less sensitivity compared to young adults and older males are less sensitive than females. Alterations in the sense of smell carry various names: hyposmia for diminished sensation; dysosmia suggests distorted sensation; cacosmia is sensation of foul smell and parosmia describes smell without a stimulus. About 2 million people in the United States have no sense of smell, called anosmia.

How do our friends and foes – dogs and mosquitoes – compare with us?

The size of the olfactory lining and the number of receptors determine the prowess to smell. Dogs have 170 square centimeters of olfactory lining and have one hundred times more receptors per square centimeter than humans, hence their ability to recognize more odors.

Sensory organ of the mosquito is the maxillary palp on its head, which probably works as a long range smelling system. The palp contains specialized receptor cells that detect octenol and carbon dioxide, which leads it to its target: human prey. Knowing this, I had advised BIL to apply a mosquito repellant and wear long sleeves while in India.

When our plane landed, I was ready for the forthcoming assault: in a few moments my olfactory system would be overwhelmed by the first smell of Delhi. The volatile, water-soluble and partially lipid soluble molecules would fly into my nose and attach to the smell discriminating nerve receptors at the roof of my nose.

If a perfume maker were to imitate the aroma, he would have to mix early morning dew, tall grass, gasoline fumes, charcoal smoke, runway tar, summer dust, construction steel and human sweat. The product would be a mixture of nostalgia and hope; poverty and progress; a juncture of future and past.

Having landed often at the Palam airport, I should have got used to this expected welcome. But no: not to the nostril-piercing gust. India evokes strong emotions. Love or hate starts at the first whiff.

I wanted BIL to love his first trip and was grateful that BIL had anosmia.

I enquired to confirm. “Can you smell?”

BIL paused, stared at the steel scaffold holding the granite walls of the new construction. The greedy glint in his eyes betrayed his limbic system.

“Yes, I can smell opportunity.”

For those America-Bound

Justin E. H. Smith

Hi-ho, brave trail-cutters! Won’t you please tell us whether it is true what the French explorers say, that America is “une nation avec quantitez de beuffles,” so many buffaloos in fact that one can scarce walk from door to street without risking a sharp poke in the rump? Is it true they have descended upon the great cities, and greedily muzzled the garbage there, as in New-Jersey’s Camden, and the Dutch strong-hold of Coxsackie?

Can you please tell us also, whence comes this place-name, Coxsackie? Does it have to do with cocks? With sacs? Why does it reduce even learned men to puerile snickering? (Why, even as I dictate this, my loyal old secretary, Isaac, appears on the verge of an infarctus!)

But let us come to the pressing matter of that land’s electoral politics. We have heard that all men in America have “the vote,” and that this was the result of a tragic twist of fate some years ago in which “the vote” was rudely and unexpectedly “rock’d.” Won’t you please tell us wherein this rocking consisted, how many were injured, what was the role of the Red Indians, what the Negroe’s, &c.?

Our explorers in the Great Northern Ocean –sent there to collect samples of Iceland spar, which, we are told, is a stone with many rare qualities, such as the power to produce “electricity,” and to make men lactate– have met there travellers from Minsk, who tell them that the leader of all White Russians, Alexander Lucasenckough, correctly predicted some months ago the outcome of the Americans’ primary elections. How did he exercise such prescience? Do the Bello-Russians, perhaps, have some “friends on the inside”?  Were they “pulling the strings” in Denver and Saint-Paul? Could their immense reserves of Iceland spar be giving them the “upper hand” in world affairs?

We have heard that Americans wish for their political leaders to be “like them.” Do they wish for them to grow corpulent like Bahama mer-cows, then, and to ignore the manners and customs of men beyond their shores? Do they wish for them to pass their time watching situation comedies on tele-vision? It is clear from reports that Barack Obama is not at all like them, whereas John McCain is, so it is said, like their uncles. Sarah Palin is reported to have “shaken things up” by the alarming likeness of her person to the Americans who would elect her. Wherein does this likeness consist? We know that a French adventurer has recently returned from those parts, and has been causing the women of the Parisian salons to drop to the floor in obscene laughter with his report that she looks like nothing so much as “un cochon maquillé.” Could this be the likeness that pleases the Americans?

We have learned from ordinarily reliable sources, who learned from a drink-besotted Esquimau while anchored off the coast from Godthab, that McCain fathered a bastard child with Palin, a half-wit, and that she used this to black-mail him into naming her as his “first lady.” It is reported that McCain never appears in public holding the bastard, on the grounds that, so he says, “men do not lactate.” Yet there are other parts of this grotesque family epos that do not hold together, such as the story of the “red-neck” who defiled Palin’s eldest daughter, only to be suddenly and without warning propulsed into the role of a virtuous husband and father. 

We have heard that Palin bravely annulled the plan to build a “bridge to nowhere.” Could this have been the great land-bridge of Beringia? But if so, did she not know that it leads not nowhere, but to Chukotka, home of the brutish and bear-like Chuckchee tribe?

It is said that Palin hates ear-marks, yet collects eye-glasses. It is said that the American people now wish to wear spectacles that resemble hers, but that they too hate ear-marks, and moreover that these ear-marks are sometimes found on “pork.” Could it be that in that land the pigs are decorated with pendants about the ear-lobes as well as rouge à lèvre? Why does Palin promote the one sort of adornment, while combatting the other?

We have learned that Barack Obama, while “liberal,” is also “conservative” with respect to chewing-gum: he will chew upon spear-mint, pepper-mint, and cinnamon gums, but not upon the more whimsical varieties, as the bubble-making resins with fruity aromas preferred by his daughters. Won’t you please explain to us how, in the face of a matter of such great importance, the American voters are content to simply “look the other way”? 

A man named Barney Smith, we are told, was called from his home in Indiana to the Democritickal convention in Denver, in order to declare there his support for Barack Obama, and to announce common cause with this candidate in the war against his arch-rival, the hog-farming baron of Terre-Haute, Smith Barney. Broadsheets here have described Smith as a “king-maker,” and as a veritable “American Richelieu.” Can you please explain to us why this man –who, after all, is said to have the physiognomy of a regular imbecile– wields so much power in that land?

Obama also has the firm support of Teresa Asenap, a woman from New-Mexico (as if Mexico were not new enough!) with, as she is said to have declared triumphantly, a “Doctorate in Education.” How, we would like to know, does he attract not just vulgar cretins like this Smith, but also such a learned and wise woman as she?  In this very important matter, we ask you to confirm for us, and to be very precise: is it certain that this woman has obtained not the degree of Master in Social Work, nor yet that of Associate in Hotel-and-Tourism Studies, but a true Doctorate in Education?  If so, we are dumb-struck with awe and trembling with anticipation, for this is bound to be a union of wisdom and power undreamt of since the immortal Platon founded his Republick. 

It is said that Americans vote for such rough and common candidates as McCain and his consort Ms. Palin not because they agree with the ratiocinations of these persons in matters political, but because their world has been “dis-enchanted” by the onslaught of “modernity,” beloved of the atheistickal party of Democritus, and they are now looking for a means to re-enchant their world with “values,” to see themselves (to quote another learned American doctor) as “part of a normative whole that includes man and nature in a unified and intricate web of meaning.” What do McCain and Palin propose in this connection?  What vital principles do they see as governing natural motion? Souls, perhaps? Entelechies? Psychopyric semina? Hylozoickal archaei?

We must know: What is McCain’s position on hylozoism? If he is against it, then what, pray tell, does he propose to get nature moving again? We have heard reports of his proposals for giving the economy a “boost,” but in God’s name what use will this be if, in the end, our world is nothing more than a great mass of corpuscles rudely knocking each other about?

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

I am a nerd. I used to be an engineer and so I like calculating stuff in my head. I hardly ever use electronic calculators, even when exact calculations of something are needed, preferring to do them by hand (try it, it can be a soothing thing) on chit’s of paper, backs-of-the-proverbial envelopes, etc. But a lot of the time, I am just calculating really stupid things for fun in my head, especially if I am sitting somewhere (doctor’s office, airport, porcelain throne, bed-before-sleep) with nothing to do. I also have other ways of amusing myself in such situations. For example, I might endlessly rewind and replay a conversation I had with someone over and over in my head, like a TV program, which I realize makes me weird but also remarkably patient with things like flight delays. But mostly, I calculate.

Another thing I do is collect weird quantitative facts about stuff in my head (I have a pretty good memory for numbers; for other things… well, not so much–as unfortunately many people have found out upon meeting me for the second time! ;-). Quick, how much does a fully loaded 747 weigh? How much of that weight is fuel? How dense is gold compared to water? What is the radius of the moon? What is Avogadro’s number? I happen to know these and many other (mostly) useless things. I don’t know why, but I suck them up out of magazines and things like that, and some I remember from high school and college textbooks. (It helps that I am a big rereader of books.) I am also the type of person who reads his car manual from beginning to end, and idiotically remembers what the capacity of the windshield-washer-fluid tank is.

I use these useless things to calculate even more useless things (while waiting in the aforementioned doctors’ offices, airports, etc.). But I don’t calculate things exactly (most of the time), I just like to estimate stuff very roughly. Today, for example, I estimated (by looking while sitting on my balcony) that the amount of water flowing by in the river next to me (the Eisack) every minute is enough for everyone living in my city of Brixen to flush his/her toilet about 10 times each day (or enough for about 200,000 flushes). This was pretty simple to do:

• Sometimes, the water management authorities dam up most of the water temporarily in the river, so I have seen the bottom of the river (or at least the larger rocks on the bottom–some water is always flowing), and so I can estimate the (higher today) average depth of the river just by looking at it. I’d say it’s about 2 feet.
• The river looks about 50 feet across over here. (It’s wider in the photo at the right, which I took at a different spot.)
• I timed a bit of driftwood floating down the river and in 10 seconds (one-thousand one, one-thousand two…) it went about 60 feet–it flows fast because of the steep downhill grade in this mountainous area–so about 6 feet per second.
• I confirm my estimate of 60 feet in ten seconds in my head by noticing that the driftwood is floating just a tiny bit faster than a person walking fast in the same direction on the path next to the river. A fast walking person goes about 4 miles per hour, and 6 feet/second X 3600 seconds/hour = 21,600 feet/hour, and 21,600 feet/hour X 1 mile/5,280 feet = (approximately) 4 miles/hour. Checks out. Good.
• The cross-sectional area of the river is 50 feet X 2 feet = 100 square feet.
• The volume of water flowing by in a second is therefore 100 square feet X 6 feet = 600 cubic feet.
• Newer commodes often have written on them the amount of water they use per flush. Most often I have seen the figure 6 liters/flush. Now, the problem is converting cubic feet to liters.
• To do this, I think the following: I know that a cubic meter is 1000 liters. How many cubic feet are in a cubic meter? Well, I remember that there are about 3.3 feet in a meter, so 3.3 X 3.3 X 3.3 = (approximately) 36 cubic feet/cubic meter.
• So, we have 1000 liters/cubic meter X 1 cubic meter/36 cubic feet = (very approximately) 30 liters/cubic foot.
• Now 1 flush/6 liters X 30 liters/cubic foot = 5 flushes/cubic foot of water.
• 5 flushes/cubic foot X 600 cubic feet/second (from above) = 3000 flushes/second.
• 3000 flushes/second X 60 seconds/minute = 180000 flushes/minute of river flow.
• 180,000 flushes/20,000 persons = 9 flushes/person, from a minutes worth of water flow, which I rounded up to 10 just ’cause it sounds better when I tell my wife this astoundingly impressive fact. 🙂 (Yeah, yeah, I know she’s sick of crap like this…)

Incidentally, it just occured to me as I write this that the amount of water flowing by every second (600 cubic feet) in the river weighs as much as about 18 Toyota Corollas (and this is not a very big river). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to convince him/herself of the approximate truth of this.

*************************************

Here is one more example: recently (on a train) I wondered how much the air in the Empire State Building weighs. Here is how I went about estimating the answer:

• I read somewhere that a north-south NY city block is about a 20 of a mile. I confirm this rough figure in my mind by thinking that Manhattan is about 12 miles long and the northernmost streets are numbered around 215 or so. Since there is a bit of Manhattan below 1st street, I figure 200 blocks divided by roughly 10 miles gives a nice round number of 20 blocks per mile. Good.
• A mile has 5280 feet, so a 20th of that is half of 528 feet, about 250ish feet. (It’s a rough calculation!)
• It seems to me that the area of the footprint of the building (from having seen it many times) is probably close to the square of a city block (it actually is more rectangular, with the north-south dimension a bit less than a block and the east-west one a bit more), so let’s just say 250 X 250 feet, which is 62500 square feet, or roughly (remember, I have to keep this stuff in my head! And I’ll round up this time, since I rounded down last time) 70,000 square feet.
• It’s a little broader at the bottom floors and tapers sharply starting at the 86th through the 102nd floors, I think, so I’ll just say it is 90ish stories.
• Let’s say 10 feet (surprise, a nice round number!) of height for each floor, so multiplying by the area of the footprint, we get 10 X 90 X 70000 = 900 X 70000 = 63,000,000 cubic feet of internal space. You with me?
• I’ll say about a sixth, or roughly 13 million cubic feet of this is probably taken up by solid stuff including people, internal supports, furniture, etc., so we’re left with a nice round number: 50 million cubic feet of air.
• Now I just happen to know that the  density of air is about 0.08 pounds per cubic foot (at sea level and normallish temperatures), but even if I didn’t, I just remembered reading somewhere that air is about 800 times lighter than water, and knowing the density of water I could have figured it out easily enough.
• So, the weight of all the air in the Empire State Building is… 0.08 X 50,000,000 or 8 X 500,000 which equals… (drumroll, please) 4,000,000 pounds!

Which, as it happens, is 2,000 Toyota Corollas, or ten times the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 767 (by now you know not to ask why I know this!), like the one which crashed into the World Trade Center. Each tower of the WTC was bigger than the Empire State, so it is interesting to note that the weight of each of the planes that struck it (the other plane was slightly smaller), was less than a tenth of just the weight of the air inside the building.

What’s surprising about such estimates is how often they are very close to the reality. This is especially true in a multi-step approximation, where over- and underestimates at various steps tend to cancel each other out, usually resulting in something not too far off from the truth. To convince you of this, I emailed my friend, the mathematician John Allen Paulos, and asked him to estimate the weight of the air inside the Empire State Building. I told him he could look up the density of air, but nothing else, and to tell me his reasoning. This is what he wrote back:

Here’s my quick back of the envelope rough calculation of the weight of the air in the Empire State Building:

The building is about 1200 feet high and at ground level it a large square which then tapers as the building rises. I guess that on average it is about 200 feet by 200 feet. This gives us 48,000,000 cubic feet for its approximate volume. Since the density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/cubic meter or, translating into English units, roughly 2.5 pounds/35 cubic feet, the approximate weight of the air in the building is 48,000,000 x 2.5/35 or about 3.4 million pounds, somewhere around 3 or 4 million pounds.

The thing to notice here is that while John’s individual assumptions are significantly different from mine (for example, my estimate of the area of the footprint of the building, 70,000 square feet, was 75% greater than his estimate of 40,000 square feet), in the end things kinda’ even out and my answer of 4 million pounds is less than 20% greater than his answer of 3.4 million pounds.

But how can we know the actual figure? We cannot. We can only get closer and closer approximations by measuring things more and more accurately (the volume, not just of the building, but of everything in it, which must be subtracted). It’s not like there’s an easy way to pour the air out of the building and weigh it!

The fun in doing these estimates is in NOT looking anything up, and instead trying to answer questions by using, along the way, what we do know to estimate everything we need to know to answer our question.

*************************************

Suppose you have a baterium cell of a kind which divides into two every minute. (Normal bacteria like E. Coli divide about twenty times slower than that, but it’s just an example.) Now you put this cell into a large jar (with lots of bacterium food) at 11 AM. In one hour, at 12 noon, the jar has just completely filled with bacteria. Can you work out the time between 11 AM and 12 noon when the jar was half full? Can you estimate it? Go ahead and keep the figure in your head. I’ll give you the answer later.

Meanwhile, let me say a few words about doubling times. Let’s say you have an investment which is earning 10% interest per year. How long will it take for you to double your money?

There is a very simple little rule which works quite well in approximating doubling times for rates of growth between -25% (that’s “minus” 25%) and 35% or so (and very accurate for single digit percentage rates of growth), which goes like this: just divide 70 by the percentage rate of growth, and you have the time needed to double the quantity. (The reason this works is a little complicated and would require me to explain stuff I don’t want to get into at the moment.)

So, what is the answer to the question above: how long will it take to double your money if it is growing at 10% annually? The answer is simply 70 divided by 10, or 7 years. Say a country’s population is growing at the rate of 2% annually. How long before it doubles? 70 divided by 2, or 35 years! This rule is very useful in doing the rough mental estimates that I like to do.

I’ll give one last example: I read somewhere recently that the total energy consumption of the world is currently approximately 5 X 10²⁰ Joules per year, and worldwide energy consumption is increasing at a little over 2% annually. (This rate is expected to go up, not down, in the next couple of decades. China’s energy consumption has been growing at double-digit rates!) The following question occured to me: at this rate, how long will it take before we outrun the total amount of energy which is coming in from the sun? (Fossil fuels are just a stored form of this solar energy, and renewable forms of energy like wind power, are also just a small subset of the total radiant energy we receive from the sun daily.) Here’s how I went about estimating how long it would take:

• I know (I did some research on solar panels a few years ago) that the total radiant power coming in from the sun per square meter is about 1400 Watts (1 Watt of power is a Joule of energy per second).
• Half the world’s surface (the side facing the sun) receives energy at this rate. What is the area of this region? Well, it is just a circular cross section of the Earth, and the radius of the Earth is about 6,000 kilometers.
• The area of a circle is Pi X radius X radius, which is 3 X 6000 X 6000, or approimately 100 million square kilometers, in our case.
• One square kilometer is 1000 meters X 1000 meters = 1 million square meters, so we have a total area receiving solar energy of 100 million square kilometers  X 1 million square meters/square kilometer, or 100 trillion square meters.
• 100 trillion square meters X 1400 Watts/square meter = 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Watts of power, or 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules per second.
• So in a year we have 60 X 60 X 24 X 365 seconds or approximately 60 X 60 X 20 X 400 = 28,800,000, or about 30 million seconds = 3 X 10⁷ seconds.
• 1.4 X 10¹⁷ Joules/second X 3 X 10⁷ seconds/year = roughly 4 X 10²⁴ Joules of total radiant energy from the sun every year.
• Let’s just round it up to 5 X 10²⁴ Joules. Remember, our current world wide consumption is 5 X 10²⁰ Joules annually, or only 1/10,000th(!) of the total radiant energy of the sun that falls on the Earth every year. This seems a tiny fraction, but consider:
• At 2% annual growth in worldwide energy consumption, we double consumption every 35 years (by the approximate doubling time rule given above).
• How many times do we need to double consumption to reach 10,000 times our current level? This is just log₂ (10,000). I know that 2¹⁴ is 16,384 (I was a programmer!) and this is more than the factor of 10,000 that we need. So let’s just say we need 14 doublings.
• At 35 years/doubling X 14 doublings, we get 490 years.

In other words, given our current worldwided energy consumption, and the fact that it is growing at more than 2% per year, if it were to continue to grow at that rate, we will have outstripped ALL the energy coming in from the sun in less than 500 years! Pretty shocking, no? And if we took into account the solar energy that is absorbed by the atmosphere before reaching the surface of Earth, and things like that, we have MUCH less time during which we can sustain 2% growth in energy consumption. I know very little about economics, but I wonder if economic growth rates are related to energy consumption rates in any straightforward way. (Robin?) If so, this points to a cap on economic growth as well. So that’s my nerdy column for today.

Oh, and yes, the answer to the bacteria question: the jar will be half full at 11:59 AM. Just think about it for one minute!

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!