Heliophage

While it has nothing to do with what this blog is notionally “about”, it seems a good idea to link to this fine piece about Google by Tom Slee, for reasons that may become apparent to any reader who clicks through, and if you are a reader with a blog I urge you to do so too (especially if by chance your blog is a searchblog). However, by happy coincidence, I find that Tom’s fine self-pimped piece about toilets says wise things about how to drive environmentally friendly innovation which fit into the themes of this blog on their own merits:

The story shows that the state/market dichotomy is false, and that the phrasing of the question is at fault. Posing the issue as “state versus market” loses touch with reality in the face of this intricate cross-pollination between municipalities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (who is likely to develop a labelling system based on the Veritec tests), Veritec itself (which is a private consultancy) and quasi-state bodies such as the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association. The closer we look, the more dependent on the specifics it becomes…

Perhaps the message is that, when we look closely enough, economics falls apart and gives way to sociology and psychology. Perhaps it is that history is, after all, made by individuals, specifically individuals who are prepared to spend hours developing “test specimens” and flushing them down toilets over and over and over again. Perhaps it is that we need to seek a Buddhist-like middle way between the Scylla of the market and the Charybdis of the state, but a middle way that has a more human side to it than the metric driven public-private partnerships.

On the basis that this could be taken to mean “let a thousand flowers bloom”, here are some photosynthetic toilets as a final adhesive with which to cement these ideas firmly into the fabric of this blog.

Image from (nz)dave under a creative commons license

A page in the Culture section full of kind words and interesting takes by Jeremy (pictured). I’d love it even if all there was was the pull quote:

“I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights.” Excerpts:

Oliver Morton has chosen, by his own admission, to write three books in one… Each informs the others, to some extent, but with a little filleting each would also stand alone, and perhaps a lesser writer would have gone for three safer, smaller books. Morton is not one for safe and small.

He gives us the big picture, and no mistake, whether he is tunnelling into the extremely intricate workings of the molecular photo-synthetic machinery or striding over the South Downs to explain the planet’s long journey from the almost lifeless waters of the late Permian ocean (250m years ago) via the shallow seas of the Cretaceous (100m years ago), through the rise of the grasses (8m years ago) to the Battle of Lewes (271,549 days ago, as I write). At times this tendency makes for jarring disjuncts, as one swoops from electron transfers to a lyrical cycle ride to the Cambridgeshire garden of a photosynthesis pioneer. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights…

I didn’t know that alamo is Spanish for poplar, a favourite tree of biofuel boosters. Casually dropping the little factoid that the mesa on which Los Alamos, the facility, sits is surrounded by los alamos, Morton makes his clarion call for a vast and directed scientific effort, a Manhattan Project for the solar age, one that will explore a plurality of options in search of truly renewable energy (and the fuels to store it), and that will allow the entire global population to live like Californians… This is where the detailed understanding of the inner workings of photosynthesis gain importance, for how can we change the world, as required by book three, if we have not understood it, as book one asks us to? I do wonder, though, whether the big picture of molecular machinery might possibly put some people off…If you find yourself skimming Eating the Sun in a bookshop, and you come across one of those scientific graphs, off-putting even with their avowedly user-friendly hand-style lettering, ignore it. Indeed, ignore the whole of book one, if you prefer. That way you can avoid the fascinating detail of photosynthesis, avoid an apoplexy provoked by the realisation that a writer as talented as Morton doesn’t know the difference between a pestle and a mortar, avoid the remembrance of long-forgotten biochemistry lectures, and enjoy an informative, fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Read the whole thing here.

As others have been, Jeremy is unconvinced by the necessity of the more biochemical parts of the book, or unconvinced by the idea of leading with them, or unconvinced of my ability to pull that off. When enough smart people start making a point like that you’d best take it on board… I must say that I had originally thought of putting a note to the reader at the front of the book that would have been very much along the lines of the advice Jeremy provides, somewhat in the spirit of the note on equations that Roger Penrose provides in “The Emperor’s New Mind”, and then worried that it looked arch and preemptively apologetic and decided against it. I may reconsider for future editions. (And FWIW I don’t think that applies at all to the Penrose warning, which sums up how to deal with unwelcome equations embedded in text brilliantly)

Jeremy also sort-of takes me to task a little for not writing enough about agriculture. I can see his point, I think (and appreciate that, for someone who works at the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, it is a pressing one). Maybe there should be more agriculture in the book. In my defence, I suppose I’d say that only rarely is photosynthesis the limiting step in agriculture. Also, there are other pretty good books about future agriculture out there (though I remember not entirely agreeing with it, I’d recommend Colin Tudge’s So shall we reap (Amazon UK | US) ). But I’m all for more better books about food in the future. Indeed I’d love to read the one Jeremy has in mind, if he’d care to write it…

It always feels a bit tedious to point out that science can be fun but it’s worth repeating when doing so is quite fun itself. Here (via Jon Eisen) are some people having fun telling the world about their science. I’m quite charmed that this seemed like a good way to spend an Oregon afternoon, and the questions and concepts make me think I’ll keep an eye on the lab. You might think a few powerpoint slides could have done the trick, and you may be right. But I bet the vibe in the lab was better the day after they did this than it would have been if they’d just done that…

If you want some of the hard stuff to go with this, here’s a review from Nature Reviews Microbiology by lab chief Jessica Green and others on the need for theory if one is to understand microbiological biodiversity, a goal that matters for studies of soil, of ocean phytoplankton, and of much else. (abstract | PDF)

Incidentally, David O’Connell and his colleagues at Nature Reviews Microbiology have just brought out a terrific special issue on marine microbiology (thanks to the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Agouron Institute, it’s free, I believe). I have been intending to blog about it for a bit and still hope to get round to, but go and have a look anyway if that’s your sort of thing.

Update: here’s some backstory on the video

In a post on soil chemistry over at Transect Points, (via Gary) Philip Small delves into the mysteries of pH and pE, buffering and poise. It’s interesting stuff which I point you to in part because how microbes do their stuff is something it’s important to understand, in part because this sort of thinking has relevance to the Terra Preta stuff I was extolling a while back, and in part because of a fear that some readers of Eating the Sun will feel that I downplay the importance of soil, and I’d like to show I appreciate it. On top of all that, though, it’s because I just liked reading him pivot fact into image as elegantly as this:

To many of us, what makes soil different than geologic material is that it is in an excited state, excited mostly by solar energy as facilitated by living processes.

The terrible thing about the molecular evidence on early photosynthesis discussed here is that the young man who was the lead author, Sky Rashby, a grad student at Caltech, took his life shortly before it was published. At the end of the paper his co-authors write:

With profound sadness we record that Sky Rashby passed away on
August 25, 2007, while this manuscript was in press. This is his work
and his first scientific publication. We mourn the tragic loss of this
talented young scientist and compassionate individual.

I’m not quite sure why it says first scientific publication, as he seems also to be an author on this discussion of whether we might be able to deduce the presence of photosynthesis from the spectra of other without knowing the details of the pigments involve. These are questions that have become more widely speculated on in the past year or so — a pair of big papers in Astrobiology, discussed by John Raven in a News & Views piece in Nature (subscription required) — touching as they do on both the theoretical question of what the limits to photosynthesis are and the practical question of what we will be able to say about alien biospheres when or if we detect them. Rashby was definitely looking at some of the key questions concerning photosynthesis in a planetary context.

There’s an account of Sky from the Topanga Messenger here, and a website put together by friends and family here. There’ll be a memorial service on the 22nd of September. His death has obviously been a terrible shock to those who worked with him and taught him, as well as those who grew up with him and loved him. I never knew the man, but he was shaping up as a contributor to debates that fascinate me and working with people I’ve met and will meet again, which is why I feel the diminishment that comes from all such sadnesses more strongly in this case. As an outsider there’s not much more to say with ending up sounding like the pastor at the beginning of The Big Chill; I just hope the people left behind find the healing they need.

Image from Crystal Gammon and the Remembering Sky website

Catch-up blogging: a month ago I was at SciFoo 2007, which I didn’t blog at the time because I was too busy having fun, and haven’t blogged since because I am well known to be of a dilatory nature. Also, it had been blogged at the time by various people, such as Jon Eisen, and written up nicely by George Dyson on Edge, and you can get more views and pictures on the subject than anyone might really need on Nature’s SciFoo page. But my colleague Lucy cajoled me into writing a short piece for the little magazine Nature distributes to its authors, and having written it I thought I’d post it here too.

Twenty years ago, I would have thought there was pretty much nothing cooler than to be in a room with the physicist Freeman Dyson and the science fiction writer Greg Bear. And I’d have thought flying a UAV over the Googleplex with the editor in chief of Wired was pretty cool too – if any of those words had meant anything at all back then. And at this year’s SciFoo I got to do both.

There are two problems with trying to describe SciFoo, the event that Google, O’Reilly—a technology publisher and conference organiser—and Nature have held on an August weekend for the past two years. One is trying not to sound smug, and the other is trying not to sound star-struck. The format is simple: about 200 people with something to say about science are invited by the three organisations to spend a weekend at the Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. Some are graduate students, some have Nobel prizes, some have riches beyond the dreams of avarice and some are a touch on the eccentric side – but pretty much all of them have something to say that is worth listening to, and a keen interest in listening to other people opening up new ideas.

After a mammoth Friday night introduction session in which every one is asked to describe him or herself in three words (most cheat) the assembled company is presented with a set of big whiteboards divided up by time slot and by room. And they fill up those whiteboards with talks and suggestions for debate on everything from the murder in Essex that brought about the end of Britain’s 1960s pirate radio boom to the prospects for quantum cryptography, from bioterrorism to the problems of the patent system, from terraforming to Godel’s relationship with the draft board.

I wish I’d been able to go to all of them. From what I did manage to get to I learned about aspects of energy technology I was ignorant of, and picked up some ideas about asteroids and algorithms I hope to make a lot more of in the year to come. I got to introduce people who might never normally meet and have a lot in common. I hope I saw conversations which in years to come will be remembered as the starting points for collaborations, for new approaches, and for friendships.

But perhaps the most memorable thing was the unmanned aerial vehicle flight with Chris “Long Tail” Anderson. I’ve known Chris for years – we worked on The Economist together, and I’ve been a contributing editor at Wired throughout his tenure there as editor. I like him enough that I’m not terribly jealous of the fact that Time thinks he is one of the 100 thinkers shaping the world. And one of the things I like about him is his ability to focus on truly geeky enthusiasms. The current one is turning remote controlled toy planes into surveillance or mapping drones with the help of off the shelf digital cameras, GPS chipsets, various mechanical kludges and a range of autopilots, some made out of Lego. Bright and early one morning I watched him put one of his creations through its paces, flying over Google’s offices and bringing back images with a resolution of about five centimetres that Chris displayed to a packed and enthusiastic audience a few hours later.

It was an imprssive demonstration of William Gibson’s old dictum that the street finds its own uses for technology. Small, lightweight mobile imaging sensors like this will change all sorts of things, from ecological research to policing to terrorism (though Chris is convinced that the postal service is a far better way to deliver a bomb, if you’re that way inclined). But watching the drone circle through the clear Californian sky at daybreak, it also seemed to sum up the spirit of the Foo: coming together, getting things done, inspiring each other – and seeing things in a new way.

Update after writing this — there’s an interesting discussion on to what extent open-source approaches to UAVs have worrying dual use implications now going on on Chris’s blog, inspired by a very enterprising young Iranian. And you can sample blogging by a wide range of SciFooers at the campfire.

Second update: The editor of Nature in typical company

Further update: abominably, I neglected to credit the Phil’n'Martha picture: it’s by Duncan Hull, used under a Creative Commons license 

Nothing to do with photosynthesis, but in terms of book-promotion who could help falling for Miranda July? (via Neil)

Well I was planning to keep this blog soft launched until I’d convinced myself I’d manage a respectable posting rate, but I guess as far as some discerning readers are concerned I’ve been outed by Carl. What’s more, it’s at a time when I’m headed off on holiday for a while. So all I can say is that whatever normal service turns out to be will be resumed whenever. Do check back.

Main message to take away from this site so far: My book Eating the Sun — How Plants Power the Planet will be published this summer. The jacket copy says it will change the way you see the world, and who am I to argue. I can however attest that writing it changed the way I see the world, and for the better.

Meanwhile, if your eagerness to waste time extends to golden oldies from the archive, feel free to check out Mainly Martian.

Seems a long time since I last wrote those words, introducing then, as now,

A blog — in all likelihood a rather dilletanteish, low-posting-rate blog…a way to say what I want about what’s going on without professional obligation to someone else’s schedule, or to anyone else’s criteria about what sort of stories need to be written.

Anyway, welcome to a brand new blog in which, subject to the constraints of time, energy, temperament and interest, I’ll be blogging about matters photosynthetic and also about anything else pertaining to my book, Eating the Sun, to be published in July.

I, here, means Oliver Morton. I’m a science writer who has worked in the past at The Economist and Wired, has freelanced for pretty much everyone who’d have me, and has now become Chief News and Features Editor at Nature, which means I’m responsible for the news and features in print and online.