A Visit to the Jules Verne House

Jules Verne lived, in the latter part of his life, in Amiens, north of Paris. I live in France now, but do not have a car. But I can get from Strasbourg to Amiens by train, some of it really high speed—something that would have fascinated Jules Verne, though not quite as much as the digital camera on which I made this video.

For those few of you who do not already know it, Jules Verne was one of the greatest French writers. He is often considered the father of science fiction or science adventure. This is certainly the case with his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The English translation was one of the first books I read that was not a little kid book, when I was in sixth grade. I was fascinated by all of the things Professor Arronax saw while on board the submarine Nautilus. I was also fascinated by the complex psychology of Captain Nemo (nemo means nobody) who used his submarine as a weapon against all of civilized mankind. The ending was so gripping that I had to read it three times. He also wrote From the Earth to the Moon. This is also easy to classify as science fiction. He also wrote some speculative fiction, such as Paris in the Twentieth Century, a work that did not see the light of day until it was found in a locked drawer after his death.

But readers were and are puzzled by some of his topics. How to explain, for example, Carpathian Castle? A lovelorn youth yearned for a beautiful woman who sang beautifully. When he climbed up to a mysterious castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania (Transylvania, in fact), he saw her, and heard her singing. Science fiction? Only in the sense that he was seeing a slide projection of her and hearing her voice on a phonograph, both of which were existing technologies when Verne wrote the novel.

While moon rockets and submarines were technological fiction from Verne’s imaginary future, other things were well in the past. People have puzzled at the novel Michael Strogoff about the czar’s courier carrying a message across Siberia. Adventure, yes, but not new technology, just as montgolfière balloons were not new when he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon. But Michael Strogoff and Five Weeks fit right in with the other books in being an adventure that filled in big empty spaces on the map.

In each of his novels, most of which are still in circulation, his adventures were driven by character and struggle—like most other novels. What made Verne’s stand out is that the adventure was not all human drama: Verne added in the wonders of nature as well. The world is full of marvels, not just human struggles.

But these adventures had to be believable. The one exception to this pattern that I have found is Master of the World, in which an incredibly brilliant and evil man invented a machine that was a fast car when on land, an airplane while in the air, and a submarine while underwater. At least, I did not find this compelling, nor did the possible handful of other people who have read it.

I got to see Verne’s writing desk, at which he labored for many hours every day. I saw his telescope and globe. What I remember most, however, is his card file. I had one of those when I was in graduate school. In case you don’t know it, that is what we used as an information retrieval system before the interweb.

Verne was incredibly famous during his life. But movies were just becoming popular when he died. He could not have imagined how many movies, in how many countries, were made from his writings.

 

Visiting the Jules Verne house and museum was one of the things on my short bucket list. But it is amazing only to those of us who grew up admiring Jules Verne.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

 

The author, Stan Rice, explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course.  For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously (cover), introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl and his willful ignorance.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part four

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, what do we do with the data?

(This is a photo of the just-opening buds of black hickory. Oaks have lots of bud scales, but hickory just has two big scales for each bud.) 

My statistical analyses indicated quite clearly that all but one of the 22 tree species had earlier budburst over the course of 16 years—an average of about one day earlier each year. But this is an average. Budburst came later in silver maples—but this is because they died in the summer droughts. Pecan trees opened their buds about one day earlier each ten years, whereas sweetgums opened their buds about three and a half days earlier each year. This means the makeup of our forests might change with global warming, since not all tree species will react to it the same way.

Also, it is completely incorrect to assume that global warming means that each year is warmer than the previous year. One year can differ strikingly from the next. What we are looking for is an overall trend. This is obvious from the data presented in my graphs in the paper.

Science must also avoid what is called extrapolation. We cannot simply take this one-day-per-year rate and extend it into the past or the future. Particularly, the future. If, for example, sweetgums opened their buds three and a half days earlier each year (with the average date in my study being February 24 in 2009), this would mean that in 2029 they would open in the middle of winter, about December 19, and back in 1999 they would have opened at the end of March. I was on site in 1999, though I’d not yet begun my measurements. But I know they opened before the end of March. And they cannot open their buds in December unless winter completely vanishes. This is unlikely to happen. At least, not soon.

What this means is that one-day-per-year earlier budburst is what I observed in the study period, but there were earlier times, and may be later times, when this rate did not occur. Extrapolation is invalid, as Mark Twain explained. If the Mississippi River gets 10 miles shorter each year, then at some point, Twain quipped, St. Louis and New Orleans would be next to each other and need a joint board of aldermen. If it gets 10 miles longer each year, then in a few years it would stick out over the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America?) like a fishing rod.

Scientists should not extrapolate beyond their data. We can interpolate, within the range of data, but not extrapolate outside of it. All I can say is, this is what happened during my sixteen-year study period. As you can see from the figures in the paper, budburst dates sometimes came earlier (especially 2017) and sometimes later (for example, 2018). It changes every year, but these changes are against a background of earlier budburst, as indicated by the statistical analyses.

Yes, sixteen years in which at least twice a week, during February and March, I walked past each tree and looked for budburst. It sounds like a lot of boring work. But it was not, for me: I came to know each of these trees as an individual, and I looked forward every year to its emergence from dormancy.

As indicated in these four essays, the science of global warming is not just something to argue about—and we are all tired of arguing—but an invitation to the adventure of scientific discovery. We can, by using science, listen to what the trees have been telling us all along.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part three

I am posting this on the day on which Europe is having its warmest May on record, passing previous records by a long ways. The ways I am keeping cool is by sitting under ceiling fans and not doing much except writing. But this series of essays is not about global temperatures directly, but about their effects on the seasonal activities of plants.

I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, how do we avoid bias?

Here is a photo of mulberry buds.

Everyone is biased, including scientists. The people who proclaim themselves to be unbiased (politicians, industry leaders) are in fact the most biased people in the world. Scientists are much less biased, and for good reason. The process of scientific research requires specific steps to be taken to deliberately avoid bias. So, when I conclude that global warming is occurring, a politician (such as the infamous Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who said whatever oil companies paid him to say) could accuse me of being biased. This is true, but I, unlike him, deliberately designed my research to minimize the bias. Take that, Jim Inhofe! I cannot tell him this, because he died in 2024.

Here is how I did it. For sixteen years, I walked around and noted the budburst dates of a couple of hundred trees. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that the sixteenth year would have much earlier budburst dates than the first year. That, of course, is bias. But budburst is a continuous process. If you note down the very earliest date on which the buds appear to reawaken in the spring, you get an early budburst date; if you note down the first date that the leaves or flowers emerge from the bud, you get a medium budburst date; if you note down the date on which the leaves or flowers are fully expanded, you get a late budburst date. I had to choose some indicator of budburst; I chose the date on which the bud swelled just enough to allow the tissues inside the bud to be visible. And once I had chosen this indicator, I had to stick with it for sixteen years. You can see this in the color photos I included in the article, and in these blog essays.

The technical term for choosing a standard of measurement is construct validity. You can read about it in my book about the adventure of scientific discovery.

There is, in addition, a tradeoff between how detailed your observation can be and how many observations you can make. You cannot measure everything everywhere. When it comes to spring budburst studies, they fall into two categories:

First, satellite measurements. Satellites can measure buds turning green in the spring over hundreds of square miles. This allows the results, such as earlier budburst, in any one location to be generalizable over a larger area. This gives satellite measurements external validity, that is, they are valid not just for the area in which the measurements were made.

Second, there are ground-based studies, such as mine. I am sure of the budburst date and species for each tree. But, as I openly admit in my article, the external validity of ground based studies is limited.

I will explain, in the next essay, yet one more interesting point about scientific research into global warming.

More Evidence, As If We Needed It, of Global Warming, part two

As described in the previous essay, I conducted a sixteen-year study of budburst dates in Oklahoma deciduous trees, and I found that winter buds opened in spring earlier and earlier each year, consistent with global warming. The results were highly significant. I did not, however, have time to publish this study in a scientific journal before I retired. I decided instead to publish it on my website. Here is the link to the article, with illustrations. Please note that the mailing address on the cover page is now obsolete; you may contact me through the website email link (stanriceauthor@gmail.com).

I here address an interesting point about this research, aside from its unsurprising conclusion. And that point is, what do we measure?

This photo shows the giant buds, just opening, of black oak (Quercus velutina).

When we talk about global warming, we can mean lots of different things. It is better to talk about global climate change or even global climate disruption. For global warming, it would seem to be a simple matter of measuring temperatures and seeing if they increase from year to year. But this, by itself, is unsatisfactory, for reasons such as these:

Where do you measure the temperature? Air temperature may be warmest near the ground, and cooler the further you go up in the atmosphere. Air temperature is what affects budburst, since buds are up in the air. But soil temperature is also important, since warmer soil might mean earlier root activity and earlier rising of the sap. Aerial buds do not just open when it is warm enough but also in response to sap rising in the wood.

Temperature is enormously variable. You cannot simply measure it in one place and use this temperature to represent the air temperature. Meteorologists have little stations to measure air temperature (and lots of other things) in numerous locations, but even this is not enough. Temperatures can vary from one location to another just a few feet away.

When do you measure the temperature? The maximum temperature in the day, or the minimum at night? Also, we suspect that springtime temperatures are what matter the most, but winter temperatures can also be important. Some tree buds must have a certain number of days of winter chilling before they can open in the spring.

Other factors are always important, such as wind speed, soil moisture, and the moisture status inside the twigs.

It is not just the temperature that matters to humans, but how it makes us feel. Weather predictions indicate not only the actual temperature but the way it feels to the body. The same is true of trees. We are interested not so much in the actual temperature of the air as in how the temperature affects biological activities such as the opening of the buds.

The climate could be getting warmer even if the temperatures do not increase. Springtime could just come earlier and autumn later, without a change in the average temperature.

If all of this makes it seem hopeless to study global warming, I am happy to report that organisms themselves can transduce all the environmental variables, over time, into biologically meaningful measurements. In the case of trees, all of the variations in temperature, moisture, and wind can be summarized by budburst date, something that the plants, not we, control. Budburst date is the one variable I measured. I used weather data as background, but not for analysis.

By opening their buds earlier and earlier each year, the trees are telling us that it is getting warmer. See the next essay for other scientifically important concepts in the study of global warming.