Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go. Robert M. Pirsig

I know Peter Sagal primarily from his Tweets although I first met him – not in real life, but in the cyberverse – listening to him moderate Wait, wait…don’t Tell Me on NPR and the Nerdette Podcasts in which he had a weekly discussion about Game of Thrones with Greta Johnsen and Tricia Bobeda. They covered each episode the day after it was broadcast with my kind of humor and wit. So, when last January, as a good way to start the year, he suggested a lecture on YouTube from Robert M. Sapolsky, I went along.

It turned out that the lecture was the first lecture of a class on Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford and it was very entertaining (really, very entertaining, watch it, you’ll see). Sometime during the lecture, Dr. Sapolsky gave his reading list and I’m repeating it here in his words: There are two books that I have assigned for the course. One is by me. And you don’t even have to read it. Just go buy a bunch of copies of and bring me the receipt, and you’ve got a great grade in here. OK, so that’s what is going to be pertinent to the second half of the course. We’re going to give you a list of the chapters that make the most sense to read.

The other book is a book by an author named James Gleick called Chaos. Chaos, year, after year, after year, in this class provokes the strongest opinions. A quarter of the people decide it is the most irritating, irrelevant thing that could possibly have been assigned in the class and hate it. About half the people never quite figure out what’s up with it. And a quarter of the people, their life is transformed. They no longer have to meditate. They no longer have to have a — they are at peace. At peace, I tell you. Because what this book does is introduce this whole radically different way of thinking about biology, taking apart a world of reductionism. For 500 years, we all have been using a very simple model for thinking about living systems. Which is, if you want to understand something that’s complicated, you break it apart into its little pieces. And once you understand the little pieces and put it back together, you will understand the complex thing.

And what Chaos as an entire field is about — and this was pretty much the first book that was meant for the lay public about it — what Chaos shows is that’s how you fix clocks. That’s not how you fix behaviors. That’s not how you understand behaviors. Behavior is not like a clock. Behavior is like a cloud. And you don’t understand rainfall by breaking a cloud down into its component pieces and gluing them back together. So read through that book. A lot of it is from physical sciences rather than biological, so we’ll just be suggesting the chapters you should read. I will tell you it is the first book since Baby Beluga where I’ve gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front. Because along with Baby Beluga, it’s had the greatest influence on my life. I found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college. So that is a sign.

Obviously, I bought the book. But, as I started to read it, I began to worry that I was in the group that would never quite figure it out. I’m dyslexic and got confused and bogged down by the details of the various experiments. I understood the words and the description of the basic theory, but I needed help to really internalize it or grok it. I’ve had the same problem with many things like the Theory of Relativity, Morphic Fields, or Basketball. When I first started watching the Warriors, I knew how the game worked but it was mostly just a bunch of guys running around and I didn’t really understand why. . . until I did, then there were patterns everywhere.

Chaos – and, for that matter, chaos – is like that.

The book starts with Edward Lorenz trying to predict the weather. The basis of the Scientific Method – the basis of most science, really – is repeatability. I’m not sure if Chemistry is still taught in High Schoo but it was when I went to High School. The teacher would explain a principal and we would pair up and duplicate an experiment that illustrated that principal. Everybody got the same answer. That was point, if somebody got a different result, they had obviously made a mistake. But, it turns out, this is not how life actually works. To quote near the opening of the book:

Yet, Lorenz created a toy weather in 1960 that succeeded in mesmerizing his colleagues. Every minute, the machine marked the passing of a day by printing a row of numbers across a page. If you knew how to read the printouts, you would see a prevailing westerly wind swing now to the north, now to the south, now back to the north. Digitized cyclones spun slowly around an idealized glob. As word spread through the department, the other meteorologists would gather around with the graduate students, making bets on what Lorenz’s weather would do next. Somehow, nothing every happened the same way twice.

Michele talks about only really understanding calculus once she had to use it in a physics class. I had a similar experience reading this book; I began to understand Chaos Theory when it started to talk about biology and Evolution. One of my biggest beefs with classical – read that as Darwinian – evolution is that it is based on completely random mutations but the fossil record seems to say that evolution only goes one way, towards complexity, from atoms to molecules, to cells, to sentient beings. That is against the Second Law of Thermodynamics and so is chaos.

Chaos by James Gleick is not an easy read; it wasn’t for me, at least, but it is a book that I’ll recommend to anyone interested in how the world works. I want to end this with a very short quote by Joseph Ford, the past Regents’ Professor of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, and a lovely, long quote by the playwriter, Tom Stoppard.

Evolution is chaos with feedback.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds -daffodils – waterfalls- and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks…The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.

The BLM will invest $161 million in restoring the resilience of 21 landscapes across the West, where we can make the most difference for communities and resources. The future of multiple use and sustained yield is #RestorationLandscapes. A Tweet from the Bureau of Land Management – National@BLMNational·May 31Learn more http://ow.ly/kra250OvWvZ.

I don’t think that the Bureau of Land Management even exists east of the Mississippi, but, in the West, the BLM – as it’s affectionately called – is everywhere. For much of it’s history the BLM, under the guise of multiple use, has considered its mission to be be kind to the extraction industry. I think that is starting to change.

Increasingly, often for political reasons, the BLM is managing recreation areas and Conservation Corridors (including building bridges for animals over highways). They have also become much more open to feedback from the General Public. One of the Lobbying Groups that I support is SUWA, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which has a handy form to give the BLM your two cents worth. Please use it.

“Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well.” Jennifer M. Granholm

I was going to write about how we honor our 1,237,000 war dead on Memorial Day and often forget our incapacitated Veterans. By incapacitated, I mean those Veterans who were sent into the meat grinder and came out alive but were trashed, either physically, emotionally, or mentally – or all three – by the experience. The problem, as I see it, is that we honor our war dead much more than we honor our Veterans who are still alive.

Here are a couple of numbers that bother me. Of our 1,237,000 war dead, 7,057 were killed in the so-called War on Terror, and 30,177 came home from their tour of duty and ended up committing suicide. We honor the 7,057 and pretty much ignore the 30,177. Another disturbing number is that 70% of the homeless people in California are Veterans. Seventy percent!

I’ve been writing and rewriting this for several days, getting nowhere, so I’m just going to skip to the bottom line. An excellent way to celebrate Memorial Day is to forget the dead Veterans and support the alive but damaged vets. Here are some ideas: Wounded Warrior Project, the USO, Paralyzed Veterans, and Hope for the Warriors.

Of key importance, private lands are subject to taxation. Now consider the state of Nevada. It is a public land state. According to the Legislative Counsel Bureau, 85.9 percent of Nevada is owned and controlled by various federal entities. State Bar of Nevada.

Today, Nevada contains forty-eight million acres of public land, amounting to 63 percent of the state, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). From the BLM Website

Nevada is big and mostly, empty. Well, quasi-empty anyway. A lot of it is closed airspace where the Top Gun guys and their Air Force equivalents can play. Those are No Fly Zones, and private planes are not allowed. In some of those spaces, other things are hidden by the No Fly Zones and Nevada’s vastness. They are not on most maps, and the government sort of pretends they are not there. I once flew over one of those non-sites.

 When I first discovered Utah as a backpacking wonderland, I was doing a lot of backpacking with a guy who had a plane. We started flying to Utah for long weekend trips. The plane was a Mooney, which was sort of a sports car of aircraft, a little like the airplane equivalent of a Lotus; very light, cramped, noisy, and fast. We could get to Escalante, a more than 600-mile trip, in around four hours. We would start at Sealevel, fly across the Great Central Valley, slowly climbing to 16,000 feet, to safely go over the Sierras, and then coast downhill across Nevada to a landing at 5 828 feet at the Escalante Airport in Utah.

I usually ended up doing most of the grunt work of flying over Nevada. It was an easy flight, and I loved it, but most people got drowsy at 16,000 feet and slept off and on during the trip across Nevada. On this particular flight, we had crossed the Sierras just north of Bishop and headed east on a compass heading determined by the highest mountain we could barely see on the horizon, which we thought was probably Mt. Dutton in Utah at a little over 10,000 feet.

It was a relaxing flight, when, in the distance, through the haze, I could see some strange shapes which morphed into a small airport as we got closer. We were flying around 12,000 feet, and the ground level below us was about 5,000 to 6,000 feet, so we were about 6,000 to 7,000 above the ground. I woke up the plane owner, and just as he was stretching across me to see the airport below us on our right, two planes took off and disappeared under our plane. In what was way less than 30 seconds, one plane showed up right next to us. I think – I was in shock and focused on the pilot, so think was as close as I can get – the plane was a Navy F-14 Tomcat, and we were close enough for me to see the pilot was wearing sunglasses and his visor was up. He didn’t look pleased.

We were flying east, and the jet pilot looked at me and pointed north. The plane owner stopped trying to find the right radio frequency to make contact and made a hard left to due north. We got the hell out of there, and the Tomcat rolled to his right and disappeared. The whole encounter couldn’t have taken as long as a minute except for the worrying that they would pull the pilot’s license of our pilot, which went on for a couple of weeks. (The FAA didn’t pull his license, but they did send him a letter saying not to do that again.)

Over the years, I’ve begun to think that I had probably shrunk the time frame of the whole incident and that it had taken much longer. However, now that I am reading about F-16s, because some will soon be sent to Ukraine, I’m going back to the whole thing that took less than a minute theory. An F-16 Viper is fast and can climb at a rate of 50,000 per minute. The F-14 Tomcat is slower at only 30,000 per minute, which translates into the Tomcat getting up to us in around 15 seconds plus takeoff.

And that’s it, that’s my shaggy dog story¹, I’m still looking for a payoff and I don’t have one except, maybe, Don’t trust your memory; it only tells you what you want to hear.

1. In its original sense, a shaggy dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. Wikipedia.

There is a fun article in The Washington Post about a – and my terminology may be way off here – Tik Toc Star, Taryn Delanie Smith, whose bit is that she is the Receptionist for Heaven. If you got a minute this Sunday, you couldn’t do any better than listening to a couple of her bits.