MarketWorld

What is MarketWorld? It’s the new cage we’ve become beholden to these days, where the rich become richer, the poor become more disenfranchised, and globalization fueled by free-market capitalism turns into a tyrannical system that widens the gap. Blame is laid everywhere, proposed solutions are myriad, but an underlying problem is that the fox is now in charge of the hen-house.

 

This is the story painted by Anand Giridharadas in his book Winners Take All, subtitled “The Elite Charade of Changing the World”. Anecdotal stories teased from interviews describe (mostly) young enthusiastic do-gooders born into, or who find their way, into the intoxicating world of riches and power, who don’t see themselves as perpetuating the system. Rather, they use the language of doing good (while doing well for themselves), standing up for social justice, helping the poor and less privileged. But this “elite” problem-solving lens is heavily blinkered by being ensconced in the high echelons of the system.

 

What is the Matrix? In the words of the legendary Morpheus: “The Matrix is a system… The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” But in our real-world, it’s the 1% who are fighting to protect the system; the 99% haven’t had much success because… well, they’d like to be like the 1%. I mean, who wouldn’t? Giridharadas has lived in that 1% and he’s trying to give you the red pill.

 

Should we trust him? It’s hard to say. While he lifts the veil on trends such as being on the elite speaking circuit, getting book deals, and having a mass following of wannabes, it’s not clear Giridharadas has left that world. True, he may no longer be employed by one of the big-name consulting companies promising world-class expertise to solve your problems for a hefty fee. The few times I’ve experienced being in a “workshop” or a “listening in” or a “presentation” organized by such entities brought in to institutions I’ve worked for, it honestly feels like amateur hour. Giridharadas description of the so-called secret sauce confirms my suspicions. I’ll simply say: atomic reductionism, missing the forest for the trees, with an aim at so-called Taylorist optimizing efficiencies. Enough said.

 

Several parts of the book resonate with me. I see my students, young and enthusiastic, looking to change the world, but also getting overwhelmed by the ratrace and the tyranny of merit. No one’s trying to opt out. We all want to live comfortable lives. I’m not sure I can credibly advise students to forgo their pursuits, when I’m personally not willing to give up my present lifestyle. At my age, I also no longer have anything to prove. Not that I’m terribly successful, but I’m comfortable in my own little world, which may be a self-damning statement. It’s hard to leave the system for a colder, bleaker, world. Although then you might truly be free, or so says Morpheus.

 

The most interesting part of the book is Chapter 6, “Generosity and Justice”. One thing I don’t know much about is elite philanthropy. Given two recent high-profile divorces in elite-world (Gates and Bezos) that involve different ways of giving money to good causes, I found Giridharadas’ tracing of philanthropic history enlightening. The star of this story is Carnegie, as in robber-baron Andrew Carnegie. Using well-chosen quotes from Carnegie, I’ll now quote Giridharadas as he summarizes the “… principles that one day would govern MarketWorld giving: the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism; that callousness and injustice in the cutthroat souk are excused by later philanthropy; that giving should not only help the underdogs but also, and more important, serve to keep them out of the top dogs’ hair – and, above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution.”

 

Why this generosity? At heart, it’s not so much about justice as preventing terrorism to bring down the system. Bread and circuses. MarketWorld has been with us for a long time. I don’t know how we’ll get out of it.

Trilogy of Life

I mentioned the “trilogy of life” proposed by Capra and Luisi three blog posts ago. Today I follow up with their three “perspectives” of life – before adding a fourth. (For the interested reader, this is 14.3 in their Systems View of Life book.)

 

The first perspective is structure. We can think of it as the physical “stuff” of matter – the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up living systems. The second perspective, organization, has to do with specific arrangements of structures. The authors put it this way: “The structure of a system is the physical embodiment of its pattern of organization.” Organization, then, is an “abstract mapping of relationships” between the physical structures. Organization is associated with function. They use the components of a bicycle (frame, pedals, wheels, chain, etc) – but not what they’re physically made of – as an analogy for the organization of what makes up a bicycle. In contrast, the structure of the bicycle can be made of different materials with different shapes and sizes. So bicycles might look very different structurally, but we can still identify them all as bicycles functionally.

 

What is the connection between structure and organization? In the bicycle, it’s the blueprints of the designer. Blueprints need not be “physical”, designs can live abstractly in the mind of a designer. In living cells, the fundamental unit of biological (as opposed to artificial) life, the connection is process – the third perspective. The authors call it “the activity involved in the continual embodiment of the system’s pattern of organization.” (We’ve now seen the idea of embodiment come up twice. We’ll get back to it.)

 

So what is a living system? The authors integrate these three interdependent perspectives: “[The] pattern of organization is that of a self-generating (autopoietic) network… the material structure of a living system is a dissipative structure – that is, an open system operating far from equilibrium… living systems are cognitive systems in which the process of cognition is closely linked to the pattern of autopoiesis.” You might be surprised to see the word “cognition”. While this may conjure notions of human cognition, the authors use the term much more broadly. Process, the third perspective, may involve chemical reactions, or the emergence of higher order organization in a cybernetic system.

 

As a chemist, it’s easy for me to think about structure, the first perspective. Function is a little trickier and I suppose my conception of this is mainly Aristotelian. In my jumbled mind, it’s part organization and part process, depending on the system “level” that you’re analyzing. While there may be no privileged level of causation, I find myself as a chemist constantly going back to molecular-level structure. Maybe because that’s what I find the most comfortable and what I think I know most about (I might be wrong). Capra and Luisi address this head-on. Here’s what they have to say.

 

“To give equal importance to each of these perspectives is difficult for most scientists because of the persistent influence of our Cartesian heritage. The natural sciences are supposed to deal with material phenomena, but only the structure perspective is concerned with the study of matter. The other two deal with relationships, qualities, patterns, and processes, all of which are nonmaterial. Of course, no scientist would deny the existence of patterns and processes, but most scientists tend to think of a pattern of organization as an idea abstracted from matter, rather than a generative force. To focus on material structures and the forces between them, and to view the patterns of organization resulting from these forces as secondary phenomena have been very effective in physics and chemistry, but when we come to living systems this approach is no longer adequate. The essential characteristic that distinguishes living from nonliving systems… is not a property of matter… it is as specific pattern of relationships among chemical processes. Although these processes produce material components, the network pattern itself is non-material.”

 

All that being said, the nonmaterial second and third perspectives are embodied. In a living system, you can’t cleanly separate from the first perspective. I’ve been grappling with this idea for a while, especially since my reading diet often includes neuroscience and cognitive processes related to learning. What does it mean that cognition is embodied? Can it be disembodied? Can it be translocated to a different type of embodiment? As a computational chemist, there’s a clear distinction between how I think about hardware and software. I suppose one could conceive forms of artificial life that maintain such a distinction.

 

Even as I’ve been pondering this wrinkle, the authors throw in a fourth perspective. They call it meaning – their “shorthand notation for the inner world of reflective consciousness”. I don’t quite grasp their meaning here (pun intended), but it has something to do with extending living systems to include social relations. The remainder of the book chapter goes into social theory. I think I understand what they’re saying, at least at the surface level, but I suspect that my non-expertise in this area means I’m missing a whole lot. [LINK] Hard to say. They do have one picture illustrating the “interconnectedness” of these four perspectives as the corners of a tetrahedron. This made me think of tetrahedrally-shaped methane with carbon in the center. Carbon, central to life, is perhaps not just a carrier?

Reverse Final

My college is planning for a fully in-person semester with students vaccinated before they arrive on campus. There’s always the possibility that a student will still catch Covid and be required to isolate, assuming that’s the protocol (as it was this past year when a residence hall was set aside for this purpose). I’m planning to have in-class midterms and final exams, interspersed with some take-home annotated self-tests that have worked well, even pre-Covid.

 

Now, if a student has to miss a midterm, there have been various workarounds. If the student can schedule a time in my office to take it before I return the entire the graded exams for the whole class (a turnaround of two days), that’s fine. If not, I’ve sometimes given an oral exam, or sometimes lumped in the midterm grade into that student’s final exam. Rarely if ever has a student missed a final exam. If a major illness occurs, the student takes an Incomplete and schedules a time early the following semester to take the exam (written or oral).

 

But what if a student tests positive while being asymptomatic, required to isolate, and therefore can’t take the exam in person? I suppose I could Zoom with the student(s) while we’re all in the Final and send them a pdf; they would write down their answers, take pictures, and send it back in the allotted time. This worked reasonably well last semester when all students were in the same situation of all-remote classes; but I’m wary of doing this when most of the students will be taking the final in-person. (This wouldn’t just be for Covid or illness but for some other good reason the student might have.) I’d certainly want to discourage students looking for a way to take the final online rather than in-person.

 

Here’s my idea: Instead of taking the final exam, the student has to write a final exam. It should cover the most important things, and ask reasonable questions that could be solved in a reasonable amount of time. This forces the students to really think about what is important throughout the entire semester (which is also true for the students taking the exam). I would grade it based on how well it might match what I deemed important and what I expected students to be able to demonstrate on the final. Few students would want this option, so that should dissuade those looking for an excuse. It’s clearly harder than taking the final exam.

 

I don’t want to penalize a student who through no fault of their own, gets into a situation where they’re unable to take the final. And it’s the last day of finals. Or they are very ill. Or for some other specific reason. (They’re not common, but I have encountered them in my career, so I have some idea of the situations students could experience but I won’t elaborate here.) The Incomplete route is still a viable possibility here.

 

While I’m not planning on revealing such reverse finals as an option, I still plan to have students submit mock exam questions in P-Chem. I will be tweaking the instructions and expectations so they will be (hopefully) more useful this coming semester. I’ve never had a student miss a P-Chem final, but in G-Chem I have had the occasional student miss it for one reason or another. Also, the P-Chem final tends to be on the first day of finals week, so someone who misses it (usually if they get sick) can usually schedule to take it later in the week. G-Chem finals are spread across the week because we teach so many sections. This coming semester I will have one on the last afternoon of finals week. I imagine a student or two might try to argue for taking it remotely and I want to dissuade those arguments. The reverse final will be in my back-pocket if I need to pull it out, but I hope I won’t have to. In any case, I should write up the potential instructions/guidelines before such an event arises.

Data Detective

I’ve followed Tim Harford’s blog for many years. He’s an engaging and interesting writer, and exudes a curiosity about the world around him. I was expecting to enjoy his latest book The Data Detective, and I was not disappointed even though I’d read many of the anecdotes he shares. The book is subtitled: “Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics”. You might think that hard data and statistics are in opposition to anecdotal stories, but the blend in Harford’s writing illustrates why both are important.

 

The rules are really rules-of-thumb. That’s important, because things are often more complicated and more interesting – something that an iron-clad hard-and-fast rule cannot capture. I could wax unpoetically about this in theory, but instead I will pick out four rules that caught my eye along with tidbits of personal commentary. For Harford’s excellent writing, I recommend reading his book in full.

 

Rule One. Search Your Feelings. The chapter begins with a quote from Darth Vader: “Search your feelings, you know it to be true.” The opening anecdote is about an art dealer, a forger, and a top Nazi commandant. I won’t spoil the story. The key point that Harford makes in this chapter is that stood out to me: “Experts are not immune to motivated reasoning. Under some circumstances their expertise can even become a disadvantage.” All this made me think about times I had gotten hot-around-the-collar about some topic. This doesn’t happen often, making these moments all the more memorable. In a bad way. Because it made me harden my position while spewing out information to support my digging in, and less open to listening. It clouded my judgment. In hindsight, I’ve been wrong some of the time. And even when I wasn’t wrong, I was less right than I thought.

 

Rule Three. Avoid Premature Innumeration. The opening quote is from Deep Thought via Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.” I was reminded of the pitches and arguments I’ve made throughout my career as a faculty member and administrator. They’ve often “data-driven” because I try to take full advantage of the scientific veneer, justified or not. More often than not, I succeed in getting what I want. Sometimes I don’t, but I feel smug about my parting Cassandra-like warnings of the impending doom. Needless to say, hindsight reflection on the way I’ve marshaled statistics isn’t as flattering. I haven’t told lies or damned lies that I’m aware of, but I had blinkers. I was also reminded that my forecasting ability isn’t as good as I think it is. 

 

Rule Seven. Demand Transparency When the Computer Says No. I won’t tell you the opening quote except that it comes from HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can guess what this is about. I’m a computational chemist who thinks about problems in complex systems; I submitted a grant on machine-learning approaches a few months ago (hope it gets funded!); I’ve been reading about algorithms and their limitations. The anecdotes in this chapter are particularly interesting – from the errors in determining “normal” body temperature to a story about a risk-assessment algorithm aimed at predicting re-arrest rates of offenders. I’m suspicious whenever anyone tells me the inner workings of their analysis are a little complicated to explain. Try me! But then I do the same thing when I’m presenting, sometimes because I’m trying not to get sucked down into a rabbit black hole, sometimes because I’m sensitive to time-constraints, sometimes because I’m obfuscating on purpose, sometimes because I don’t understand things as well as I should. Now that’s complicated. I’ll quote Harford: “Trust should be discriminating: ideally we should trust the trustworthy, and distrust the incompetent or malign.” Easier said than done though.

 

Rule Ten. Keep an Open Mind. The chapter opens with a comparison between two economists who lived through the Great Depression in the early twentieth century: Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes. Most of us have heard of the latter, but not the former. There’s a reason for that (read Harford’s book for the details). My reflection on this story is that if you’re successful early on, and have “often been right”, you’re ripe to colossal close-minded failure. A few setbacks along the way provide a dose of reality that can hopefully make one more circumspect. It was useful to look back at my career, recognize some of the main ups and downs, and learn some open-mindedness. (There’s also an interesting story about the Millikan Oil Drop experiment and the process of determining a fundamental constant, which reinforces the point of how we humans filter data to our own liking.)

 

Harford’s epilogue is titled: “Be Curious”. He sketches an outline of how we might reduce political polarization. I mention this to pique your curiosity. But what I’ll reflect on is the distinction Harford makes between scientific curiosity and scientific literacy. I’ve been involved in two major core curriculum designs – one from scratch for a new college, and one major redesign at my home institution. There was much wrangling over how we educate college student to be scientifically literate citizens; there wasn’t as much talk about how we encourage scientifically curious citizens. I think we want both, and I think they go hand-in-hand. I also think that many of the contemporary science education discussions muddle the distinction. This is something I’d like to chew on a bit more, before possibly blogging about it at a later time.

 

All in all, I highly recommend The Data Detective!

 

For a selection of previous blogs on books about statistics, see:

·      Science Fictions

·      Naked Statistics

·      Lying With Statistics

 

Circular Logic

The word autopoiesis was coined by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana almost half a century ago. It essentially means “self-making”, a key characteristic associated with life. I’ve been working my way through The Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. Autopoiesis is introduced in Chapter 7; the authors summarize it like this: “… the cell’s main function is to maintain its own individuality despite the myriad of chemical transformations taking place in it.” While the basic unit is the cell, this concept can be extended to multicellular organisms as a hierarchy of autopoietic units.

 

Earlier in their book, Capra and Luisi tackle the problem of reductionism – the idea that the whole can be reduced into its parts, and nothing but its parts. Emergentism, in contrast, argues that the whole cannot be reduced as such. One way to acknowledge the usefulness of the former without dissolving the latter is to distinguish structure versus property (sometimes called function). While most chemists utilize the rule-of-thumb that structure leads to function, in reality this causal relationship is not so straightforward. Capra and Luisi aver that reductionism is kosher (and useful) when “it limits itself to structure”. On the other hand, “emergent properties cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts”. It then follows that “life as a property cannot be reduced to the properties of the single chemical components.”

 

The authors provide a diagram to illustrate the “cyclical logic of cellular life”. Above is a quick blurry snapshot I took in less than optimal conditions by holding the book up to my laptop camera. One might claim that such circular or cyclical systems are fundamental to the logic of biology – the “bio-logic”. No need to squint at the figure caption as I’ll provide it momentarily. Note that the larger whole includes both the cell (the “bounded system”) and the environment (yet another system?). The circle indicates that the bounded system is “operationally closed”. Note that energy and materials can still flow into and out of the bounded system. This is unlike closed equilibrium thermodynamics systems students learn about in chemistry class, where energy can flow between the system and environment, but not materials.

 

I’ve reproduced the diagram below using PowerPoint and its accompanying caption.

 

Figure 7.3. The cyclical logic of cellular life. The cell, an autopoietic unit, is an organized, bounded system that determines a network of reactions that produces molecular components that are assembled into the organized system that determines the reaction network that… and so on. The terms “input” and “output” – inobservance of the fact that the ell is an open system – represent respectively the incoming of nutrients and energy from the outside, and the outgoing of waste products. The circularity illustrated in the figure corresponds to the notion of operational closure, giving rise to the broader notion of biological autonomy.

 

A brief tangent: Did I reproduce the diagram and text or did I replicate it? I’d say reproduce if this was a physical copy because I didn’t use the same ink or the same tools. Even digitally, the 1’s and 0’s that make up my picture are quite different from the digital photo I took. But if the book and figure were themselves digital and I made a copy of it (with the same sequence of 1’s and 0’s), would this then be a replication? Hmmm… But back to living systems, I’d say DNA replicates but a cell reproduces.

 

In a living system maintaining itself, you’d expect the rate of input to be equal to the rate of output. Students should recognize that this indicates some sort of balance – we call this steady state. Don’t confuse this with the equilibrium state where the rates of all forward reactions and their corresponding reverse reactions are equal, and the free energy of the system is at a minimum. At steady state, energy and materials continue to flow through the system and the cycle likely has a non-zero change in free energy.

 

If the rate of input is larger than the rate of output, than growth can take place. Conversely, if the rate of output is larger than the rate of input, the organism is shrinking, possibly losing both materials and energy – perhaps death is taking place. That’s one way to think about life and death as a continuum of activity. Some organisms even have a period of stasis where all the rates slow down, a state between life and death that we might call suspended animation.

 

Concluding their chapter, Capra and Luisi show a Venn Diagram with three overlapping circles labeled environment, cognition, autopoietic unit. They call this the trilogy of life and claim that “it does not make sense to consider each of these three domains as independent of one another”. Interestingly, I have a similar Venn Diagram with the labels information, interaction, identity – which might substantially overlap with the respective domains described by the authors. Why do Venn Diagrams typically use overlapping circles, but not other shapes? I don’t know. But there are a lot of circles and cycles we see used to describe the logic of life.

A Hack Too Far

This is how they tell me the world ends.

 

That’s the title of Nicole Perlroth’s explosive book detailing her beat as a New York Times journalist with the thankless task beating the bushes for nuggets of cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. Most hackers avoid her. Some speak to her, but obfuscate in their answers. But a very few give up gold – enough to put together an intriguing and scary tale that will have you questioning your phone, your computer, your Nest products, and anything you do on the Internet.

 

I now see news articles related to tech in a different light – yesterday’s Kaseya ransomware attack, or today’s announcement of the Didi app under scrutiny. Hacking is big business globally and growing at an exponential rate thanks to the cyber arms race as detailed by Perlroth and others. I’ve seen how easy it is for an individual with not much experience to get off-the-shelf hacking tools. Governments and nation-states have orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal, and they use it. And there’s everything in between. Perlroth begins the story with zero-day exploits, but things get heated up with the sprouting of cybersecurity start-up outfits, both for defense and attack. The money that flows through has also increased exponentially. What Snowden reveals is only the tip of an iceberg.

 

Coincidentally, I’ve been watching the TV series Person of Interest. God’s-eye A.I. is a prevalent theme in entertainment this century. While you might classify this as “action-drama”, I’m starting to think that “horror” might be an apt inclusion to the genre. There are some cool action sequences, but the interesting part of the story is the evolution of the A.I. and what people are trying to do with or to it. Some want to protect it, some want to use it, some want to break it, and I’m sure more motives will be uncovered as new characters are added to the show. (I’m in Season 2 out of 5. The dialogue is sometimes crummy, but overall the show is engaging enough for me to keep watching.)

 

There’s what we know, and there’s much that we don’t know. Perlroth gives the reader an engaging peek into the underbelly of cyber breaking-and-entering. Yet she regularly admits that she has bits and pieces, strung together by what sources are willing to tell her, or inadvertently let drop. And they’re a tight-lipped bunch. The whole point of a zero-day, before it becomes known, is to embed itself as long as it can in secret while stealing your data and possibly doing extra damage. If you’ve heard of Stuxnet, you know what I’m talking about. Yet there is likely much more, and most of us are blissfully unaware.

 

Everything is plugged in now. For automation, for efficiency, for sheer complexity, and for many other reasons. The energy grid. The food supply chain. The monetary system. Traffic lights. Air traffic control. GPS. We’ve seen how a tiny coronavirus can multiply and quickly infect humans in a globally-connected system. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before a cyber virus does something similar. Likely the only reason we know about Stuxnet is because it ‘escaped’ and spread far beyond its confines, and we’re lucky it didn’t do more damage because it was ultra-specific in what it was looking for. We might not be so lucky next time.

 

It wasn’t that long ago when I taught classes without the internet. I wrote out my own lecture notes. Made photocopies of problem sets and handouts. In class I mostly used the board interspersed with occasional overhead projector slides. I think my students would adapt, and possibly even concentrate more in class without their digitally-connected distractions. As a computational chemist, my research program in its present form would die without the internet. Adaptation would require very significant change in how I do research and the questions I would seek to answer.

 

But my work-life is only a slice of life in the modern era. The chaos of a cyber-virus gone wild is, I think, a realistic threat. A hack too far. And the boundaries are being pushed. This may be how the world of modern humanity ends.

Year Streak

Today, I completed my 365^th day in a row with Duo the owl. I haven’t had to use the streak freeze purchased in those early days; it’s still equipped. I suppose being stuck at home during the pandemic and not traveling anywhere helped the streak.

 

Lately Duo has started sending my weekly statistics. It looks like I spend just shy of two hours per week. That translates to approximately a hundred hours for the year. If this was equivalent to a three-credit-hour class, I might have completed the equivalent of first-quarter Spanish, or two-thirds of first-semester Spanish – but it took me a whole year rather than ten or fifteen weeks. All this is to say that I’m not particularly proficient.

 

My reading isn’t bad, and I can read a sign or a notice in Spanish should I encounter one somewhere around town. These are almost always accompanied by English translations. But my listening comprehension is poor. If it’s a short single sentence and I know the vocabulary, no problem. But if it’s a longer sentence, or multiple sentences are spoken, I have trouble because while I’m still translating the first part in my head and my brain shuts off listening to the rest.

 

After my first 150 days with Duo, I attempted to listen to the first episode of the Duolingo podcast. I failed miserably, because even though the narrative was at a leisurely pace, there were typically several sentences in a stretch. Now with 365 days under my belt, I tried again. Better this time around, but still not great, when my eyes are closed. I found myself regularly opening my eyes to read the text, which allowed me to follow along fine. My reading comprehension is indeed better than my listening.

 

I’m sure my chemistry students have the same experience. In introductory chemistry (especially for non-majors), it must seem like I’m speaking in a different language. Now I’m trying not to be jargon-y and I’d like to think I’m watchful about my pace, for all I know it could seem like Uncleftish Beholding to some students. Especially if they’ve never had a chemistry class in high school. Most of my students have heard the basic terms so it’s usually not too bad for them, until we get into organic chemistry and naming functional groups.

 

In physical chemistry, the problem is math. While all the students have taken the pre-requisite math courses, at least half of them are not fluent enough in it. Decoding is slow when they see an equation, or worse, a derivation. That’s like me trying to decode the first part of a sentence while the speaker has moved on. I always write on the board because it helps slow things down and also allows the students to follow more closely step-by-step what’s going on, but it’s still a challenge. Not that my math is particularly strong. I experience the same novice-ness when reading math-dense papers for research. All this is to say that it’s good to be reminded what it’s like to struggle learning something new. We teachers should experience it regularly to be reminded how it feels to be a novice.

 

Unlike mid-year where my motivation for Duolingo plummeted, I’ve been catching my second wind. I’m now doing around 70 XP per day, a slight uptick, but not as high as when I first started and was much more motivated (doing 100 XP per day). Here are my current stats. I have 2397 lingots and there’s nothing much to spend them on. I have no plans to upgrade to Duolingo Plus. I have 369 crowns, i.e., I’ve averaged more than a crown per day, so not too bad overall.

 

No reason to stop now. I’m not sure how far I’ll go, or whether my motivation will plummet again. I’m glad that Spanish has Stories. And I might try a few more of their Podcasts. We’ll see if I get to the two-year mark!

Shades of Gray

“What is Life?” is a difficult question to answer, perhaps because there is no clear boundary between life and non-life.

 

An alternative approach is to posit a continuum between life and non-life – shades of gray between the clear black and white cases. A month ago, a raft of sixteen co-authors published a perspective article: “The Grayness of the Origin of Life” (Smith et. al., Life 2021, 11, 498). They see this continuum in five areas of chemistry: organic molecules (biotic and abiotic), information storage systems (nucleic acids and derivatives), metal catalysts, energy-transduction molecules, and compartment-building molecules. In each case, there’s a continuum composed of different shades.

 

Their conclusion: “A grayness persists throughout biology. This is particularly true in life’s earliest transition from geochemistry to biochemistry. This grayness is associated with the degree of chemical disequilibrium. Life exists in disequilibrium from the environment and maintains this disequilibrium, using it to perform work. While the equilibrium state might be clearly abiotic, there is no inherent threshold to cross into the biological. Of these gray intermediate states, the distinction between proto-life at disequilibrium and a metastable mineral, for instance, is hard to discern.”

 

The practical outworking of this might be to come up with a question list. Does it reproduce? Is it self-sustaining? Does complexity increase? Is evolutionary change and adaptation possible? Is energy transduced? Are there cells or compartments? Clear-cut cases would check all the boxes or none of them. Shades of gray would be checking some of these boxes. Life-like might be what we call these systems or organisms. Are some of these check-boxes more important than others? I suppose there’s the rub. We might not be able to come to agreement on these, and perhaps that’s as it should be – if indeed the complex is not reducible to parts.

 

At the end of his book, Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer posits an analogous question to make the point that such ambiguous questions are common. “What is a game?” As someone whose hobby once-upon-a-time was playing board-games and card-games, I found this an interesting question to ponder. Presumably a board-game is a game that has a board; a card-game is a game that uses cards. So those were easy to define. But what is a game? (You might also ask: what is a board? what is a card?) That’s not so easy to define. Not all games have boards or cards or counters or dice, and some may not require any “equipment”. But they do all have rules or some sort of constraint. These rules are idiosyncratic to each game. Presumably they have players that engage the game, either solo or with a crowd.

 

To play a game, you learn the rules, and if the game is interesting and engaging, there will be multiple potential outcomes and layered strategies. You won’t appreciate these without multiple plays. Is our present “game” of life one of the more engaging ones? I think so, or I wouldn’t be studying it. Are we pawns in this game? I don’t know. Can some of the rules be bent or broken? I suppose it depends on the open-endedness of the system. That’s what makes it complicated. And perhaps shades of gray is the appropriate approach to such questions. Or Venn Diagrams.