How to Write a Good Text

How to Write a Good Text for a Website

People read about 20% of the words on a website. Since there’s really no telling which words they’ll read, you can’t just have a few sentences designed to act as winners. They all need to be winners. So a bit of good editing will help you create SEO-friendly content.

Editing programs, like Hemingway Editor or Grammarly, cut to the heart of grammatical and readability issues. You won’t need to read the piece with a fine-toothed comb, just fix the problem areas that the editors highlight.  You can then take it a step further and run the piece through a tool like SEMrush’s SEO Content Template for specific SEO recommendations.  

Note that polished writing doesn’t represent a single form. In fact, business blogs, comedy websites, and news articles all require different tones, levels, and styles of writing. So if you’re trying to break into a crowded space, push the boundaries of acceptable content.

Add humor, edge, intelligence, confidence, sarcasm, or charisma. Loosen up the writing and let the metaphors sing. Add soundbites in-between text for interactive content. Shorten up paragraphs and use bullets. Use loose and colorful prose. Find a unique, engaging voice that mimics the demographic lingo. Use Long-form & Short-form Content, but don't forget that with increasingly crowded web spaces and demanding searchers, Google’s algorithms have begun privileging longer and longer content.

If your goal is to satisfy the searcher’s query, and you get to pick between a 250-word article and a 3,000-word article, there’s generally a higher chance that the 3,000-word article contains something in it that satisfies the intent of the searcher.

Yet, sometimes that 250-word article delivers the bullet point answer in a beautiful featured snippet, and those other 2,750 words are no longer needed and definitely not read.

According to an aggregation of research, the ideal content length for high-ranking pages should be around 2,000 words. This is a good starting point and a great place to gauge your word count, but it isn’t the holy grail.

You need to A/B test with your specific visitors to see which kind of content they like best – short or long.

Find clear-cut answers to any question. Photo by Elena.

Originality versus Authority

On the one hand, you’ve been told to value citing sources, authoritative links, expert advice, and claims that are backed up. On the other hand, you’ve also been told to value original research and content that adds value through new claims. Basically, you need to avoid scraping content and avoid unverified claims. Go ahead and lean on the experts, but exceed them. Never overwrite your links and research, but add something new and original, something your specific audience would want.

You need the sources to back up your content, but you need to go beyond the sources to tell a new and compelling story. A few creative links and a compelling story will help your content walk the line between authority and originality.

Mobile Traffic

Mobile traffic is a big business, though keep in mind that mobile searches are generally more specific and targeted than desktop searches. Phone searches are generally more integrated into lifestyles, and things that people are already doing.

If you’ve got content that people will mostly access from a desk, focus on those long-form pieces and keep the shorter informative responses for the mobile users.

Make the Form Match the Content

When we talk about form, we’re talking about:

• Word count.
• Structure of the content.
• Tone of the piece.
• HTML tags.
• Title and meta tags.

If you understand what the content seeks to communicate and what kind of search the content satisfies, you can develop the form of the page around the content.

If its a technical article about plumbing or stock trades, get right to the point in the opening paragraph. If you’ve got a comedy listicle, your audience will be a bit more forgiving about slow starts.

Google’s advice to “make pages for users, not search engines” is still some of the best advice you can get.

Creating a good outline for your content before you begin plugging words into a page will ensure that the article maintains integrity.

The best articles don’t just read like a nice essay, they look like a crisp painting, with tags, titles, font, and headlines that create a unified piece.

Source: searchenginejournal.com/6-tips-for-creating-the-best-seo-friendly-content/314813.

Follow the guidelines for good texts and you'll be able to travel every day of your life! Photo by Elena.

Changing Level of Conscientiousness

Can You Change Your Level of Conscientiousness?

Changing one's personality traits is never easy. They are thought to be enduring patterns that ultimately come from stable patterns of brain function, But in the Terman study, researchers found that people can indeed increase or decrease their conscientiousness over time. Many were able to do this and I have witnessed it in myself. As I have learned more and more about brain function and developed brain envy, I have personally developed better habits and my behavior has been more consistent. I feel much more in control of my own behavior than I did even a few years ago. I have seen others' conscientiousness deteriorate after a head injury, big drinking or drug use, being exposed to an environmental toxin, or at the onset of developing dementia.

Before discussing how to boost your level of conscientiousness, let's first define what it is. Conscientiousness concerns the way we manage our impulses. Impulses are not inherently good or bad. It is what we do with the, that makes them that  way. Sometimes we need to make a snap decision and cannot think about it over and over. Other times we want to be spontaneous and fun, especially when we are relaxing. But when it becomes a way of life, it can take a seriously negative too on your health. Giving in to immediate desires, like the doughnuts, often produces immediate rewards but undesirable long-term consequences. Impulsive behavior can lead to being fired from your job, divorce, drug or alcohol abuse, jail, or obesity, all of which have a negative impact on your health. Acting impulsively often brings regret because you failed to entertain all of your options. The accomplishments of an impulsive person are often smaller, more diffuse, and less consistent.

A hallmark of intelligence and what separates us from other animals is our ability to think about the consequences of our behavior before acting on an impulse. It is the internal dialogue that accompanies “Then what?” Effective decisions usually involve forethought in relation to your goals, organizing, and planning, which helps you not only live in the moment but to continue ten or even fifty years from now. “Being prudent” is another label for conscientiousness. It means being wise and cautious. If you are conscientious, you are more likely to avoid troubled situations and be perceived as intelligent and reliable by others. If you go overboard, of course. Others will think you are a compulsive perfectionist or a workaholic.

Your mind is powerful and it makes happen what it sees. Photo by Elena.

Six Facets of Conscientiousness

1. True Confidence. You have a true feeling of being self-efficacious. You know you can get things done.
2. Organized, but not compulsive. Keep an orderly home or office and keep lists and make plans.
3. A high sense of duty. You have a strong sense of moral obligation.
4. Achievement oriented. Drive to be successful at whatever you do and have a strong sense of direction.
5. Persistence. You have the ability to stay on track despite the obstacles that might come your way.
6. Thoughtfulness. You are disposed to think through possibilities and the consequences of your behavior before acting.

Here are steps to optimize both your PFC and level of conscientiousness to boost the control you have over your life:

1. "Then what?" Always carry this question with you. Think about the consequences of your behavior before you act.
2. Protect Your Brain from Injury or Toxins. This should be obvious by now.
3. Get Eight Hours of Sleep. Less sleep equals lower overall blood flow to the PFC and more bad decisions.
4. Keep Your Blood Sugar Balanced Throughout the Day. Research studies say that low blood sugar levels are associated with lower overall blood flow to the brain, poor impulse control irritability, and more unfortunate decisions. Have frequent smaller meals throughout the day that each have at least some protein.
5. Optimize Your Omega-3 Fatty Acid Levels by Eating More Fish or Taking Fish Oil. Low levels of omega-3 fatty acids have also been associated with ADHD, depression, Alzheimer's disease, and obesity.
6. Keep a “One-Page Miracle”. On one piece of paper write down the specific goals you have for you life, including for your relationships, your work, your money, and your health. Then ask yourself every day, “Is my behavior today getting me what I want?” I call this exercise the One-Page Miracle, because it makes such a dramatic difference in the lives of those who practice it. Your mind is powerful and it makes happen what it sees. Focus and meditate on what you want.
7. Practice Using Your PFC. Self-control is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. This is why good parenting is essential to helping children develop self-control. If we gave in to our eight-year-old every time she wanted something or threw a temper tantrum, we would raise a spoiled, demanding child. By saying “no” and not giving in to tantrums. We teach the child to be able to say no to herself. To develop your PFC you need to do the same thing for yourself, practice saying no to the things that are not good for you, and over time you will find it easier to do.
8. Balance Your Brain Chemistry. Illnesses such as ADD, anxiety and depression decrease self-control. Getting help for these problems is essential to being in control of your life.
9. Try to use willpower to control your behavior when you sleep or brain chemistry is off, or when your omega-3 fatty acids or blood sugar levels are low, is nearly impossible.

(From Use Your Brain by Daniel G. Amen, M.D.)

Try to use willpower to control your behavior. Toronto, view from the 17th floor on 50 Hillsboro St. Photo by Elena.

Evolutionists and Creationists

Evolutionists vs. Creationists

In 1830 the Englishman Charles Lyell published the first volume of his epoch-making Principles of Geology, in which he showed that the force that had shaped Earth in the past were the same as those at work today. By then it was becoming clear that man had coexisted with many animals long vanished, and in w836, the Dane Christian Thomsen laid the foundations of modem archaeology by his scheme of successive Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, with the Stone Age reaching extremely far back in time.

Public as well as scientific interest in prehistory grew apace. More and more fossils were collected, in the Old and New Worlds alike, and reconstructions were made. When the Crystal Palace exposition opened in London in 1856, it included several life-sized statues of dinosaurs. Since they were not labeled, many visitors were puzzled by them. One man guessed that they were intended as an object lesson in temperance, to show what drunkard might expect to see.

In the same year, remains of Neanderthal man first came to light, in Germany. Initially, most biologists denied that this could be an extinct form of human, and various fanciful stories were devised to account for it. Yet evidence continued to accumulate, while the growth of geological knowledge made it less and less easy to believe that such creatures as the dinosaurs had perished in the Biblical flood – that they were, in the phrase of that day, antediluvian.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This stunning demonstration of evolution as an understandable, natural set of processes – a hypothesis which had occurred independently, in less detail, to Alfred Russel Wallace – was followed four years later by another intellectual bombshell, Lyell's book The Antiquity of Man Proved by Geology. At the same time, field workers such as the Frenchmen Boucher de Perthes and Edouard Lartet were turning up ever more traces of archaic humanity. When Darwin issued The Descent of Man 1871, he did not “prove we are descended from apes”. What he did was describe how humans and simians could have stemmed from a common ancestor; the idea that this had happened was, by then, current.

Humans and simians stemmed from a common ancestor. Illustration by Elena.

Of course, it had met with much opposition, both popular and scholarly. Southerners during the American Civil War were fond of saying that maybe Yankees came from monkeys all right, but Mar'se Robert E. Lee couldn't be related to anything with a tail. Most clergymen combated every suggestion that the Book of Genesis was not a straightforward piece of reporting.

In fairness we must add that not all did : indeed, some made important contributions to knowledge in this field, especially in France. For that matter, Thomas Henry Huxley's debating opponent, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, was by no means a bigoted ignoramus, but a cultivated and philanthropic gentleman.

Nonetheless, the data were accumulation remorselessly. In a paper read in 1865 the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel established the basis of genetics. His work went almost unnoticed for a generation, but came back to light after the Dutchman Hugo de Vries had identified the phenomenon of mutation, about 1895. Here was the decisive last factor that Darwin had not known of, the material on which his principles of natural selection and sexual selection operated. Meanwhile, in 1891, another Dutcham, Eugene Dubois, had found in Java the relics of a being that was unequivocally related to man yet far too primitive, too apelike, to be Homo Sapiens.

Meanwhile, too, knowledge was rapidly growing of the world as it had been long before anything like us existed. A clear-cut example in the evolutionary lineage of the horse, established through fossil find by the American O.C. Marsh.

Out of all this, an understanding developed of much more than fossils. Evolution could be seen in action: that is, the principle of evolution made sense out of observations in science and even everyday life. As obvious case is that of industrial melanism. The peppered moth of England darkened, for better disguise against predators, as trees grew coal-sooty during the Industrial Revolution. In our own lifetimes, with decreasing air pollution, the same species is growing lighter again.

Creationists object that this is not a valid example, but represents mere variability. Nobody, the say, has ever seen a whole new species come into existence. That is true enough, as far as it goes – with some possible exceptions among microscopic organisms. However, evolution takes thousands and millions of years to bring about most of the unmistakable changes that evolutionists describe. The evidence is necessarily indirect. But so, just as necessarily, is the evidence for the reality of events chronicled in the Bible.

(By Poul Anderson).

Nobody, the say, has ever seen a whole new species come into existence. Illustration by Elena.

Evolution is a Basic Principle

Evolution is a Basic Principle

Creationists generally talk of the “theory of evolution”. Many who disagree with creationism reply that evolution is no such thing, but a fact. Thereby they fall into the same dogmatism as certain of their opponents, and become subject to the same refutation. After all, what is a fact? Nobody alive has ever met an Australopithecus or watched prokaryotic cells develop in the pre-Cambrian seas. It is a rather feeble retort that nobody has met Adam and Eve either, or watched the world coming into being by fiat.

In the last analysis, those of us who accept the idea of evolution do so because it is an inference, based on many different accumulated observations, which enables us to account for those data, fit them into a scheme that makes sense. The creationist can quite legitimately reply that this is what his beliefs do for him.

However, at this point in the history of science, it is a mistake to agree that evolution is a mere “theory”. That concedes more to the creationist than he deserves.

What is a theory, anyway? To answer that question, we must take a look at the scientific method itself.

Now, a number of distinguished scientists have denied that there is any such thing, and I rather agree with them. That, though, would take us too fat afield now. Let us just glance at the traditional paradigm, oversimplified though it is, the purpose will only be to make clear what we mean by certain words.

In this paradigm, scientists begin by making observations of nature, as exact as possible. Then somebody formulates a scheme which summarizes those observations, preferably in mathematical terms. That is because mathematics is the language par excellence of precision. Somebody else takes such a description and tries to explain it by a hypothesis. That is, this person proposes the existence of a mechanism or a relationship which would logically produce the observations themselves. A good hypothesis also yields predictions; it tells us what further observations we should try to make. If we make them, and the results fit the scheme well enough, then in due course the hypothesis gains the status of a theory. That is, we accept it as depicting, more or less correctly, some aspect of reality.

Evolution is no longer a mere theory. Illustration by Elena.

Later discoveries may prove irreconcilable with the theory. In that case, we have to discard it – or, at least, drastically modify it – and look for another.

The standard example comes from planetary astronomy. For untold millenia, observers had been gathering data about the motions of the heavenly bodies across the sky. This effort culminated, for the time being, in the magnificent work of Tycho Brahe in the 16th century. Meanwhile, of course, there had been many attempts to account for the data. The idea that everything revolves around Earth grew increasingly unlikely as information accumulated; the picture had to be made too complicated, with epicycles. As early as the 13th century, Alfonso X, king of Leon and Castile, remarked that if he had been present at the Creation, he could have given the Creator some good advice.

Eventually Nicholas Copernicus offered a much more satisfactory description, in which the sun was at the center. Galileo Galilei and others refined this system and added to it. Finally Johannes Kepler put it into elegant mathematical form, in his three laws of planetary motion.

Isaac Newton then accounted for those laws by his hypothesis of universal gravitation (even though he himself denied making hypothesis) together with his own three laws of the motion of all bodies, not just planets. Soon observation confirmed this so well that it became a basic theory in physics. By means of it, later generations discovered new planets and explained the behavior of distant stars.

There remained a few loose ends, such as a slow change in the orbit of Mercury. Early in the 20th century, Albert Einstein proposed a whole new theory, general relativity, which included Newtonian mechanics as a special case, and which accounted for those anomalous phenomena.

Thus far the usual description of science in action. As said, it is much oversimplified, and in many instances is scarcely true at all. Still, if nothing else, it does help us give clear meaning to our words.

The important point here, though, is that even taken as face value it is incomplete. It omits a further stage of thought which is of primary importance.

Before going on to that, let us very sketchily review the history of the evolutionary concept. That way we can compare it to the development of astronomy. If nothing else, we will be reminding ourselves that the idea of evolution was not invented by a few subversives in the 19th century, but has a long and honorable pas of its own.

By 1800 the concept was already in the air. There had been some speculation along those lines as far back as Classical times, if not before. During the Renaissance and after, men gradually realized that they were coming upon the petrified bones of beasts which no longer existed. Early in the 19th century, the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier advanced the hypothesis that more than one creation had occurred in the past: that life had appeared several times, to be wiped out by worldwide catastrophes, and that the account in the Bible refers only to the latest of these eras. Regardless of this deferral to religion, Cuvier was considered blasphemous by many. Once some of his students decided to throw a healthy scare into him. One of them costumed himself like the traditional Satan, entered the professor's home at night, woke him, and roared, “ I am the Devil, and for your impiety I have come to eat you!” Cuvier looked him up and down and replied scornfully, :Hmf! Horns and hoofs. You can't. You're graminivorous.”

His catastrophism was denied by a contemporary compatriot, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. A war here at age sixteen, Lamarck later boldly maintained that living species, had developed from less specialized ancestors. However, he thought that the causes lay in environment and the actions of individual organisms. This was so unconvincing that few accepted it until the 20th century, when for a time a version of it became official dogma in the Soviet Union.

(By Poul Anderson).

Evolution has become just such a basic principle. It is as much a fundamental of the universe, as we conceive the universe to be, as are the laws of thermodynamics or relativity. There is no scientific argument against it, only antiscientific one. Illustration by Elena.

Science and Creation

Science and Creation

One of the less endearing – and more dangerous -features of the 20th century has been a worldwide tendency to substitute rhetoric for discourse. By now, reasoned debate is a rarity. There is seldom even any effort to understand an opposing point of view. Instead, a person attributes opinions or attitudes to the other fellow and proceeds to heap billingsgate upon him because of them, although they may not actually be what he means at all. Living near Berkeley, California, I have over the years watched this sort of thing develop in the academic community and its hangers-on, until I am inclined to agree with a fictional character of mine who remarked, “Sure, I'm anti-intellectual. I prefer people who think...”

Well, that may be just a little exaggerated, a hint of the same behavior I was condemning. It got your attention, though, didn't it? Let me try to make the rest of this essay an exercise in rationality.

I propose to discuss the “scientific creationism” is so much in the current news. My conclusion will scarcely surprise you: that “scientific creationism” is a contradiction in terms. If that were all, there would be no point ins stating it yet again. Why preach to the choir? However, it does seem to me that spokesmen for the scientific establishment have generally made their points poorly, because often they themselves don't quite realize what the concept of evolution signifies. Thus the argument we'll advance against creationism here will take a turn that may prove surprising, therefore enlightening, to some readers. Indeed, it will be only the first step in a brief exploration of the philosophy of science. 

We begin by forswearing. The creationists are not a bunch of yahoos. They are generally well-educated and well-mannered individuals, a number of them with excellent scientific credentials. (While I don't know just what James Irwin's views on evolution are, we all know he believes the Biblical story of Noah is substantially true, and led an expedition in search of the remains of the Ark – after having been on the moon).  Nor do most of them want to suppress any other doctrine. Socially and politically, they have several quite valid, important points to make. Secular humanism has in fact become the teaching of the public schools, to the exclusion of crucial parts of our heritage. The effects on culture are already sad, the implications for the future of liberty and even for national survival ominous. Would it really infringe anybody's constitutional rights if children were to learn something about the roots of their civilization?

The question remains: How shall we persuade a lot of perfectly nice people that they are undermining a cornerstone of their entire civilization? Illustration by Elena.

But this does not mean they should learn things, at taxpayer expense, which simply are not true. By now, the scientific attitude and the body of discoveries to which it has led are themselves basic to society, and not merely Western society. “Scientific” creationism is not content to maintain that the universe is the work of God. It claims that this Earth is, at most, a few thousand years old, and that the species of living beings we know today came into being in their present forms. Of course, the First Amendment guarantees any American the right to believe and argue for that, and teach it privately. But the notion has no more claim on “equal time” in public education than do, say, astrology, psionics, or Marxism.

It is scarcely necessary here to repeat what has often been pointed out: that if the creationist assertion were true, then our astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and archaeology must be false. For example, evidence for geological ages includes matters as diverse as the well-established laws of radioactive decay and a cosmic red shift observed by familiar techniques of spectroscopy. Much has been made of certain unexplained anomalies in certain mineral formations – far too much. Science is always coming upon such phenomena, and needing time and effort to learn what brings them about.. We don't yet understand ball lightning very well, either; but nobody says that, on this account, we should throw out our meteorology. Instead, what understanding we do have provides a context within which to seek explanations of countless details.

Thus the claim that our planet is less than a million years old, and has undergone no significant changes during its existence, is incompatible with science. At best, a person might declare that God created the universe recently, full of misleading clues to something quite different. Emotionally, I am inclined to think this is an insult to the Creator. In the famous words of Einstein, the Lord is subtle, but He is not malicious. Logically, we need only note that the declaration is, by its nature, untestable, incapable of being disproven; therefore it is devoid of empirical meaning.

We might, though, find it worthwhile at this point to refute one statement frequently made by creationists, that the development of matter and life from primitive to complex forms would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Even some who have accepted evolution as a fact, such as the late Lecomte de Noüy, have maintained that it would have been statistically impossible without supernatural guidance. They should have known better. 

Part of the problem arises because the second law is deceptively simple looking but has profound and far-reaching implications. It can be expressed in confusingly many ways, and has been. In one of my college textbooks (Physical Chemistry, by Frank MacDougall, Macmillan, 1944) the phrasing of the law goes: It is impossible to devise any mechanism or machine by means of which a quantity of heat can be converted into the equivalent amount of work without producing other changes in the state of some body or bodies concerned in the process. Another book (Introduction to Theoretical Physics, by Leigh Page, Van Nostrand, 1928) puts it as: No self-acting engine can transfer heat from a body of lower temperature to one of higher temperature. Here a “self-acting engine” means, essentially, one which is isolated from outside influences and which takes its working substance through one or more complete cycles.

There are numerous other, equally valid versions of the same truth, but these two should be enough to show that we are dialing with something which is quite basic and not at all self-evident.

There is no scientific argument against evolution, only an antiscientific one. Image by Elena.

About Perpetual Machines

About Perpetual Machines

Were it not for the first law of thermodynamics, we could build perpetual machines of the first kind, as they are called, whose driving power comes from nowhere. Were it not for the second law of thermodynamics, we could build perpetual motion machines of the second kind, which would draw their energy from anywhere. For instance, a motor at room temperature could be driven by the air molecules that happen to collide with is piston. The impossibility of this is not immediately obvious, which is why it was not established until the 19th century and is still overlooked in many science fiction stories.

Numerous people who understand the second law as a principle governing heat engines can get bewildered about the wider applications. These involve entropy, about which science fiction has also perpetrated a great deal of nonsense. Actually entropy is a measurable quantity, though you need calculus to describe it mathematically. In any thermodynamic process where an amount of heat Q is exchanged at a temperature T (which may vary throughout the volume and during the time in which things happen), the increase of entropy is equal to the integral of dQ/T.

Now “increase” can be negative, that is, represent a decrease. When something occurs thermodynamically in a system, entropy can and often does decrease somewhere. However, it increases elsewhere, and the second law states that the total gain in entropy is always positive. That is, whenever a change involving an energy transfer takes place in a system, entropy always is greater at the end of the process than it was in the beginning.

A “system” can be anything: an atom, a molecule, a machine, a living organism, a galaxy, the cosmos as a whole, anything. But we must consider the entire system, not just a selected part of it.

An increase in entropy corresponds tp, or measures an increase in disorder, or a decrease in the orderliness of the system. Therefore, whenever something changes, we find there is less order afterward than there was before.

Here is a very rough example or analogy. Think of a house whose lady has brought it to absolutely perfect arrangement and cleanliness – not a single item of furniture out of place, not a speck of dirt or dust anywhere, Then her children come home from school and her husband home from the office, and the family starts using the place. Things happen in it The immaculate condition doesn't last long, does it?

True, next morning the lady can restore her dwelling to its former orderliness. However, to do so she must expend energy, both her own and the energy of whatever appliances she uses, such as a vacuum cleaner. That energy comes from the conversion of food in her body – or fuel in an electric generator somewhere – into disorganized gasses and masses. The house may become neat again, but the environment as a whole is more chaotic than it was.

This is not an argument against good housekeeping! It is simply a reminder that everything has its price.

All biological processes require entropy increase. Illustration by Elena.

Evolution of Evolution

Evolution of Evolution

If we take a look at the process of evolution, many anomalies could crop up, but most have turned out to be explainable. Thus, Piltdown man was always an embarrassment, because he did not fit into onto any reasonable human evolutionary tree. At last chemical analysis showed that Piltdown man was a hoax. Without the great guiding principle of evolution in general, who would have paid attention to him at all?

Likewise, we have seen the evolutionary principle in sometimes tragically practical application today, as pathogenic microbes gain immunity to antibiotics through the selfsame process of natural selection that Darwin found. On a still deeper level, we find that we can best understand the details of protein chemistry as between different species (for instance, cytochrome-c) in terms of their differentiation through geological time; but it was the concept of evolution that caused researchers to look for such divergences in the first place.

So we have very briefly reviewed the development of evolutionary thought – the evolution of evolution, so to speak – and seen how fundamental it has become to biology. Now we must return to the comparison with physics, and to the philosophy of science in general.

As we have seen, theories are subject to disproof. Else they would have no meaning. (Thus, if I told you that space is pervaded by a fluid so subtle that no instrument or experiment can possibly detect it, you could not prove me wrong, but you would not be obliged to take me seriously, either. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what happened to the luminiferous etcher about which 19th century physicists had speculated. It turned out to make no difference whether the ether existed or not; therefore nobody had any further reason to imagine that it did exist).

Voyages from sun to sun will always be few, women's love for the shoes will always exist. Photo by Elena.

Thus many theories have fallen by the wayside. But some reveal themselves, in the course of time, to be more fundamental than that. They become basic principles, by which theories themselves are tested. They become touchstones by which observations are evaluated. They become a context within which everything else, in a given field of science, is understandable.

Examples within physics are the two laws of thermodynamics, already mentioned. Without them, we simple could not make sense of our observations of any process involving energy exchange. With them not only do we comprehend what we see, we are led to new discoveries.

For instance, back in the 1930s, physicists noticed certain curious features of recoil during radioactive decay. The energies and momenta did not balance our as they were supposed to. Either the principles of energy (and momentum) conservation were wrong, or else some ultra-tiny particle was involved, carrying off the excess. Rather than give up their basic principles, which were far too helpful to discard, scientists hypothesized that such a particle did exist: the neutrino. This idea proved fruitful in gaining more knowledge of the nucleus – although not until a generation later was the neutrino actually detected, and then only indirectly.

Granted, basic principles originate in empirical observations. Indeed, the laws of thermodynamics came out of grubby engineering work, and rather late in the history of science at that. Nor are the basic principles Holy Writ. They are subject to modification as our knowledge grows. Thus the separate principles of conservation of mass and energy were unified – modified – into the single principle of the conservation of mass-energy, by Einstein.

However, such principles become so fundamental that the complete overthrow of any of them would mean the complete overthrow of the sciences with which they are concerned. We would be practically back to Square One. It is therefore both understandable and sensible that scientists will not – cannot – set them aside without an absolutely overwhelming, and hence unlikely, body of evidence.

I submit that evolution is no longer a mere theory.

(By Poul Anderson).

Our very survival, let alone our eventual modernization, is in doubt. Where evolution will eventually lead us? Photo by Elena.

Person-centered Approach

A Directional Process in Life

Practice, theory, and research make it clear that the person-centered approach rests on a basic trust in human beings, and in all organisms. There is evidence from many disciplines to support an even broader statement. We can say that there is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities. In human beings, too, there is a natural tendency toward a more complex and complete development. The term that has most often been used for this is the “actualizing technology”, and it is present in all living organisms.

Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that lie is an active process, not a passive one. Whether the stimulus arises from within or without, whether the environment is favorable or unfavorable, the behaviors of an organism can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself. This is the very nature of the process we call life. This tendency is operative at all times. Indeed, only the presence or absence of this total directional process enables us to tell whether a given organism is alive or dead.

The actualizing tendency can, of course, be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism. I remember that in my childhood, the bin in which we stored our winter's supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout – pale with sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become.

Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in the can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons, the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself. This potent constructive tendency is an underlying basis of the person-centered approach. 

(Aspects of a Person-Centered Approach, the Foundations of a Person-Centered Approach. A Way of Being by Carl R. Rogers).

Organisms are always seeking, always initiating, always "up to something." Picture by Elena.

Thoughts Regarding Death

Thoughts Regarding Death

… And then there is the ending of life... Ten or fifteen years ago I felt quite certain that death was the total end of the person. I still regard that as the most likely prospect; however, it does not seem to me a tragic or awful prospect. I have been able to live my life – not to the full, certainly, but with a satisfying degree of fullness – and it seems natural that my life should come to an end. I already have a degree of immortality in other persons. I have sometimes said that, psychologically, I have strong people close to me all over the world, Also, I believe that the ideas and the way of being that I and others have helped to develop will continue, for some time at least. So if I, as an individual, come to a complete and final end, aspects of me will still live on in a variety of growing ways, and that is a pleasant thought.

I think that no one can know weather he or she fears death until it arrives. Certainly, death is the ultimate leap in the dark, and I think it is highly probable that the apprehension I feel when going under an anesthetic will be duplicated or increased when I face death. Yet I don't experience a really deep fear of the process. So far as I am aware, my fears concerning death relate to its circumstances. I have a dread of any long and painful illness leading to death. I dread the thought of senility or of partial brain damage due to a stroke. My preference would be to die quickly, before it is too late to die with dignity. I think of Winston Churchill. I didn't mourn his death. I mourned the fact that death had not come sooner, when he could have died with the dignity he deserved.

My belief that death is the end has, however, been modified by some of learning. I am impressed with the accounts by Raymond Moody (1975) of the experience of persons who have been so near death as to be declared dead, but who have come back to life. I am impressed by some of the reports of reincarnation, although reincarnation seems a very dubious blessing indeed. I am interested in the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the conclusions she has reached about life after death. I find definitely appealing the views of Arthur Koesler that individual consciousness is but a fragment of a cosmic consciousness, the fragment being reabsorbed into the whole upon the death of the individual. I like his analogy of the individual river eventually flowing into the tidal waters of the ocean, dropping its muddy silt as it enters the boundless sea.

So I consider death with, I believe, an openness to the experience. It will be what it will be, and I trust I can accept it as either an end to, or a continuation of life.

(A Way of Being, by Carl. R. Rogers. Personal experiences and perspectives).

Being alive involves taking a chance, acting on less than certainty, engaging with life. Illustration by Elena.

Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?

Where Are They?

Enrico Fermi was a brilliant Italian physicist who is known to the public as the man who led the team that first harnessed nuclear power under Stagg Field in Chicago on December 2, 1942. His impact in physics was actually much broader than that, and he has been honored (among many other tributes) by posthumously lending his name to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. America's preeminent laboratory for studying the basic building blocks of the universe. In addition to sheer brilliance, Fermi had a gift for trying to ge at the bottom line, using simple estimators. Physicists call “a Fermi Problem” a question that is easy to ask, hard to know definitively, but able to be estimated by thinking it through. The most repeated example of a Fermi Problem is “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” By knowing the number of people in the city and then estimating how many households have a piano, how long a piano holds its tune, how long it takes to tune a piano, and the length of a work week, you can come up with a reasonable estimated answer (current estimate, about 125).

Fermi lived in an elite academic world – an active mind surrounded by others of similar caliber. They would talk about all manner of things, looking at them from every angle, trying to get at the truth. From a casual lunchtime conversation, one of the most famous questions involving extraterrestrials was asked. The story goes something like this.

One summer day in 1950, Enrico Fermi was visiting the Los Alamos Laboratory, which had been the secret government facility at which much of the first nuclear weapons had been developed. He and three companions one of who was Edward Teller, were on their way to lunch. They were talking about a cartoon seen in the May 20 issue of The New Yorker, which explained a recent spate of thefts and trash cans in New York City as being perpetrated by Aliens taking them into their flying saucers. (The UFO mania of the late 1940s was still fresh in the public's mind). The conversation then meandered to Teller and Fermi bantering back and forth over the chances of mankind exceeding the speed of light in the next decade, with Teller suggesting a chance in a million and Fermi guessing 10%. During the stroll, the numbers changed as they intellectually fenced.

After sitting down to lunch, the conversation went in a different direction, with Fermi sitting there quietly. Fermi then suddenly burst out, saying “Where is everybody?” to general laughter, as they all instantly understood that he was talking about extraterrestrials.

The premise of Fermi's paradox is the following. The Milky Way is about 13 billion years old and contains between 200 and 400 billion stars. Our own sun is only a little over 4 billion years old, suggesting that there have been stars around for a very long time. If Aliens are common in the galaxy, there has been plenty of time for them to have evolved – perhaps hundreds of millions of years or more before humanity – and have visited Earth. So where are they?

To figure out what sorts of data are needed, it is helpful to have a guiding paradigm. Photo by Elena.

While Fermi's outburst in the origin of the paradox, the question was revisited in 1975 by Michael Hart (leading some to call this the Fermi-Hart Paradox). Hart published “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrial Life on Earth” in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In this article, he explored some of the reasons why we hadn't contacted yet, from reasons of simple disinterest of the Aliens to either colonize the galaxy or to contact us to the idea that the Earth is being treated as a nature preserve. Perhaps some form of Star Trek's Prime Directive applies, whereby civilizations are not contacted until they develop the capability for interstellar travel. These kinds of explanations were offered in The Day the Earth Stood Still and, of course, Star Trek. What Hart was able to show was that technology wasn't the problem. Taking some simple assumptions, Hart showed that a civilization that sent out two craft traveling at 10% of the speed of light to nearby stars and then spent a few hundred years developing infrastructure to build another pair of slow-moving starships could completely populate the Milky Way in just a couple of millions years.

If intelligent extraterrestrial life is even slightly common in the galaxy and only a few species have mankind's curiosity and exploratory nature, it seems that we would know by now that we are not alone. Hard concluded that it was a distinct possibility that mankind might well be one of the earliest-developing intelligent species in the galaxy. In short, The X-Files tagline “We are not alone” could well be gravely incorrect.

Of course, the answer to the question is unknown and hence the reason why the term “paradox” is applied to it. Another Steven Webb explored the question in his delightful 2002 book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's 2003 book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe is equally enjoyable, and this book takes the position that it is difficult for a planet to develop intelligent life. The book describes the many ways in which planetary disaster can interrupt the development of sentient life on a planet.

No matter how carefully thought out, arguments of the sorts advanced in these books and others like them must defer to data.

Given the fact that there are stars that are billion of years older than the sun, it seems impossible that we should not not have been visited before. Photo by Elena.

Extremophiles

Extremophiles

Extremophiles are organisms that live under conditions injurious to many forms of life. Mankind has used extreme environments for a long time to preserve food. We now know that this is because these techniques kill or suppress the bacteria that would otherwise cause spoilage. A few techniques are to heat (i.e. cook) the food, refrigerate it, salt it, or even irradiate it.

And we all know this works. We have refrigerators and freezers. We have been admonished to cook rare roast beef to an internal temperature of about 140F or as much as 180F for well done beef or all poultry. The reason is to both cook the meat – to convert it from something raw to something yummy – and to kill the bacteria living in the raw meat. 

There are other methods for preserving food that you have encountered in your local grocery store. There are dried vegetables, fruits, and meats, which have been starved of water, inhibiting bacterial growth. Nuts and other foods come vacuum packed to reduce the oxygen available in the package. Processing food by using high pressure can kill microbes. This is used for many products, including guacamole and orange juice.

Meat is cured by salting, as in the familiar bacon and ham. Alcohol is also used to preserve some fruits. This is usually done in conjunction with using sugar as a preservative.

Changing the acidity or alkalinity of the food is another way to lengthen its lifetime. Atmosphere modification is also a useful technique. Food, such as grains, can be put in a container and the air replaced with high-purity nitrogen or carbon dioxide. This removes the oxygen and destroys insects, microbes and other unwanted intruders.

The real point is that mankind has known about various ways to preserve food for millenia. Spoilage of food originates from undesirable creatures (typically microbes of some sort) “eating” the food and releasing wast products. Through some combination of the techniques mentioned above, we have learned to kill the undesirable bacteria that would otherwise ruin our food.

Our experience has led us to some understanding of the range of conditions under which Earth-like life can exist. However research revealed that life is actually hardier than we thought.

Life can be born in the most harsh conditions. Photo by Elena.

Biologists have given the name “extremophile” (meaning “lover of extreme conditions”) to organisms that thrive in environments that would kill familiar forms of life. While the study of extremophiles is still a fairly young science, we can discuss some of the range of conditions under which exotic life has been found.

At the bottom of the oceans, sometimes at extraordinary depths, there are spots where magma has worked its way from the interior of the Earth to the ocean floor. At these points, called hydrothermal vents, superheated water streams away from the magma. This water can be heated to well above the familiar boiling temperature of 212 F, but the huge pressure at the bottom of the ocean causes the water to stay in its liquid form. Water inside these hydrothermal vents can be nearly 700 F, certainly high enough to kill any form of ordinary life.

Only a few feet away from these vents, the temperature of ocean water can be very close to freezing, about 35 F. In this temperature gradient grows an unusual ecosystem.

Heat-resistant, sulfur-breathing life is not the only type that exists in extreme environments On the other end of the spectrum are the cold-loving cryophiles. Life-forms at the cold end of the spectru, have quite different problems compared with their thermophile cousins. If water freezes, it expands and can rupture cell membranes. Chemical adaptations are needed to mitigate the problems of the cold.

As of our current understanding, we know of no eukaryotic life that can exist at temperatures outside the range of 5 to 140 F. While the lower number is below the freezing point of ordinary water, water with high salinity can remain liquid at these temperatures. Microbial life has been observed over a temperature range of -22 to 250 F. An example of a cryophilic organism is Chlamydomonas nivalis, a form of algue that is responsible for the phenomenon of watermelon snow in which snow has the color and even the slight scent of watermelon.

Chemical considerations can give us insights into the ultimate constraints on the temperature of carbon-based life. Due to the bond strength involving carbon atoms, it's hard to imagine life at standard pressure much higher than 620 F; about as hot as the hottest your oven can bake. Of course, pressure can affect the rate at which molecules break apart and the decomposition of molecules can be slower at high pressure. It's probably safe to say that carbon-based life is not possible above about 1000 F at any pressure.

Water is critical to life, however it may be that there are extremophiles that don't need much of it. There are also forms of life that are halophiles (salt loving). In the Dead Sea region of the Middle East, most life couldn't survive. However, there are lichens and cellular life that have adapted their chemistry to maintain their inner environment in such a way as to thrive. Some of these forms of life actually need the high salt environment to live at all.

As with the other food-preserving extremes, life has been found in highly acidic and basic environments and even in the presence of radioactivity a thousand time higher than would kill the hardiest normal forms of life. These observations have certainly broadened scientists' expectations of the range of environments that life can successfully inhabit.

With the discovery of these extremophiles, scientists have intensified their search for the niches that life can occupy on Earth. We have pulled life out of well cores taken from a couple of miles under the surface of the Earth. Life has been found floating in the rarified air of the stratosphere. Microbes have been found as high as 10 miles above the ground. This environment is extremely harsh. The temperature and pressure is very low, the flux of ultraviolet light is very high, and there is nearly no water. Survival in this hostile environment inevitably raises questions of “panspermia”, which is the premise that life might have arrived on Earth from some other body... perhaps Mars. While this seems improbable, it is not ruled out. But life had to start somewhere, so the questions are still relevant, even if life started elsewhere. Of interest to us here is the understanding that some primitive forms of life can exist in an environment that would kill creatures that live closer to the Earth's surface. However, this primitive form of life wouldn't be an Alien. But it does give us some additional information on precisely how resilient Earth-based life, with our carbon and water-based biochemistry, can be.

(Source: Alien Universe, extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and the Cosmos, by Don Lincoln).

Presence of water and oceans are one of the conditions which create life on the Earth. Photo by Elena.

What Is Life

What Is Life?

This question is seemingly so simple, and yet it has vexed some of the most knowledgeable scientists and philosophers for decades. While hardly the first writing on the subject, physicist Erwin Shrödinger's (of Shrödinger's cat fame) 1944 book What Is Life? Is one such example. It is an interesting early attempt to use the ideas of modern physics to address the question. Both James Watson and Francis Crick, codiscoverers of DNA, credited this book as being an inspiration for their subsequent research.

The definition of life is not settled even today. Modern scientists have managed to list a series of critical features that seems to identify life. A living being should have most, if not all, of the following features:

• It must be able to regulate the internal environment of the organism;
• It must be able to metabolize or convert energy in order accomplish the tasks necessary for the organism's existence;
• It must grow by converting energy into body components;
• It must be able to adapt in response to changes in the environment;
• It must be able to respond to stimuli;
• It must be able to reproduce.

These features distinguish it from inanimate matter.

Life is able to respond to stimuli. Photo by Elena.

While these properties can help one identify life when one encounters it, they don't really give us a sense of the limitations imposed by the universe on what life might be like. We can ask ourselves if a would-be science fiction writer is being ludicrous when he or she bases a story around an Alien with bones made of gold and liquid sodium for blood. So what does our current best understanding tell us that life requires? A combination of theory and experimentation suggests that there are four crucial requirements for life. They are (in decreasing order of certainty):

• A thermodynamic disequilibrium;
• An environment capable of maintaining covalent interatomic bonds over long periods of time;
• A liquid environment;
• A structured system that can support Darwinian evolution.

The first is essentially mandatory. Energy doesn't drive change, rather energy differences are the source of change. “Thermodynamic disequilibrium” simply means that there are places of higher energy and lower energy. This difference sets up an energy flow, which organisms can exploit for their needs. It's not fundamentally different from how a hydroelectric power plant works: there is a place where the water is deep (high energy) and a place where the water is shallow (low energy). Just as the flow of water from one side of the dam to the other can turn a turbine to create electricity or a mill to grind grain, an organism will exploit an energy difference to make those changes it needs to survive.

The second requirement is essentially nothing more than saying that life is made of atoms, bound together into more complex molecules. These molecules must be bound together tightly enough to be stable. If the molecules are constantly falling apart, it is hard to imagine this resulting in a sustainable life-form. It is this requirement that sets some constraints on which atoms play an important role in the makeup of any life. Hopefully after this discussion, you'll understand the reason for the oft-repeated phrase in science fiction “carbon-based life-form.”

Requirement number three is less crucial; however it's hard to imagine life evolving in an environment that isn't liquid. Atoms do not move easily in a solid environment and a gaseous environment involves much lower densities and can carry a far smaller amount of the atoms needs for building blocks and nutrition. Liquids can both dissolve substances and move them around easily.

Finally, the fourth requirement might not be necessary for alien life, but it is crucial for Aliens. Certainly multicellular life of the equivalent not be the first form of life that develops. The first form that develops will be of a form analogous to Earth's single-celled organisms (actually, most likely simpler... after all, modern single cell organisms  are already quite complex). In order to form species with increasing complexity, small changes in the organism will be necessary. Darwinian evolution is the process whereby a creature is created with differences from its parents. The first thing that is necessary is that the organism survives the change. After all, if the change kills it, it's the end of the road for that individual. Once there are changes that both allow the daughter organism to survive and possibly confer different properties, selection processes become important. Creatures who subsequently reproduce more effectively will gradually grow in population until they dominate their ecological niche.

Many forms of life exist. Photo by Elena.

The Sea Gypsies

The Sea Gypsies

The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand. A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk, and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea, where they are often born and die. They survive by harvesting clams and sea chambers. Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food, including small morsels of marine life, and have done so for centuries. By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers. They do this without any diving equipment. One tribe, the Sulu, dive over seventy-five feet for pearls.

But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles. Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent, or “refracted,” so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.

Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placard under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children. The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting from 22 percent. This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.

This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment. Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water – one more instance of the brain and nervous system showing unexpected training effects that alter what was thought to be a hardwired, unchangeable circuit.

The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception. Illustration by Elena.

Cultural activities change brain structure

The Sea Gypsies's underwater sight is just one example of how cultural activities can change brain circuits, in this case leading to a new and seemingly impossible change in perception. Though the Gypsies' brain have yet to be scanned, we do have studies that show cultural activities changing brain structure. Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain. A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini Etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute. Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond string timbers increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to “brassy” sound enlarge. Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains – the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others – that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres. 

Giorgio Vasari, the art historian, tells us that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he built a scaffold almost to the ceiling and painted for twenty months. As Vasari writes,“The work was executed in great discomfort, as Michelangelo had to stand with his head thrown back, and he so injured his eyesight that for several months he could only read and look at designs in that posture.” This may have been a case of his brain rewiring itself, to see only in the odd position that it had adapted itself to. Vasari's idea might seem incredible, but studies show that when people wear prism inversion glasses, which turn the world upside down, they find that, after a short while, their brain changes and their perceptual centers “flip”, so that they perceive the world right side up and even read books held upside down. When they take the glasses off, they see the world as though it were upside down, until they readapt, as Michelangelo did.

It is not just :highly cultured” activities that rewire the brain. Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations. Even leisure activities change our brain; mediators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

The Sea Gypsies are an entire culture of hunter-gatherers on the open sea, all of whom share underwater sight. For Sea Gypsies it is seeing under water. For those of us living in the information age, signature activities include reading, writing, computer literacy, and using electronic media.

In all cultures members tend to share certain common activities, the “signature activities of a culture.” Signature activities differ from such universal human activities as seeing, hearing, and walking, which develop with minimal prompting and are shared by all humanity, even those rare people who have been raised outside culture. Signature activities requires training and cultural experience and lead to the development of a new, specially wired brain. Human beings did not evolve to see clearly under water = we left our “aquatic eyes” behind with scales and fins, when our ancestors emerged from the sea and evolved to see on land. Underwater sight is not the gift of evolution; the gift is brain plasticity, which allows us to adapt to a vast range of environments.

(The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

The implosion of the media into us, affecting our brains, is not so obvious, but we have seen many examples in our lives. Photo by Elena.