The Role of Atomism in the View of the Groups of Kalaam

The following was a required essay provided by Yasir Qadhi under the requirements of a PHD at Yale.

Introduction of the Concept
The concept of all matter being composed of small, indivisible particles called atoms most likely goes back to the fifth century B.C., when a young contemporary of Socrates, known as Democritus, first formally introduced the idea (most likely under the influence of his teacher Leucippus). He claimed that if one continually kept dividing matter, eventually a particle would be reached that could not be divided anymore: an a-tom, i.e., ‘not divisible’. He also posited the existence of empty spaces between these atoms within which they could move – a pure ‘void’. He believed that all of the workings of the universe were the result of the vibrations of these atoms through voids and their collisions with one another.
Plato, and in particular his student Aristotle, strongly disagreed. The latter, in his Physics, wrote quite extensively against the existence of both the ‘atom’ and the ‘void’, claiming that not only were Democritus’ evidences lacking, but also that the existence of atoms and voids violated physical principles. In turn, Plato posited the ‘four natural elements’ theory: fire, air, earth and water form the basis of all else.[1]
These Greek philosophers – both the atomists and antiatomists – were attempting to explain natural occurrences and daily phenomenon without the need of resorting to supernatural explanations and believing in heavenly (or earthly) deities.[2] It is, therefore, rather ironic that this tool was then adopted by a faction of a monotheistic faith (i.e., the mutakallimūn) in their attempt to prove the all encompassing efficacy of an omnipotent God.[3] However, in their adoption of this cosmological view, they ensured that they sufficiently modified it so as to conform with and eventually support their theological positions.[4]

Kalām Atomism
From its earliest inception in the second century of the hijra, kalām has always been fascinated with the theory of atoms. A cursory look at the relevant sections in al-Ash’arī’s (d. 324/935) Maqālāt shows the center stage this issue took.[5] And although the mutakallimūn disagreed about certain secondary issues regarding atomism (such as the minimum quantity of atoms required for a ‘body’, the quantity of atoms that a single atom is allowed to touch, and so forth), the broad theory was generally upheld by both the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites.[6]
The mutakallimūn posited that all matter is composed of identical, miniscule, indivisible particles (i.e., atoms), that are devoid of any quantitative or qualitative properties. They only acquire quantitative properties of width, height, and breadth when two or more of them unite (at which point it becomes a ‘body’), and they only acquire qualitative properties when an ‘accident’ is created within it. An accident is something that exists above and beyond the actual body. It is an accident that gives each atom (and, thereby, each body) its specific qualities that separates it from other atoms (and bodies); qualities such as color, temperature, speed or rest, life, knowledge, power, and so forth. Such accidents must reside in the atom itself, in fact by definition an accident cannot exist except within an atom.
Broadly speaking, the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites were in agreement with regards to the affirmation of atomism, the most prominent exception being the eccentric al-Naẓẓām (d. 230/845), who was influenced by Aristotle’s denial of atomism. Due to this view, al-Naẓẓām was forced to invent the concept of the ‘leap’ (ṭufrah).[7] Also, in contrast to the Greek philosophers (and also the falāsifa), the mutakallimūn strongly affirmed the belief that both atoms and accidents were created, and that matter was not eternal.[8]
One of the most profound and unique contributions of the Ash’arites to the atomism debate was their proposition that ‘No accident can last two successive instances of time.’[9] In other words, as soon as an accident is created, it immediately ceases to exist. There is no continuity or connection between one moment in time and another. This means that if an object were to, say, remain in a state of rest, the accident of ‘rest’ must be continually created and re-created at each successive instant in time for the object to remain so. And, of course, it is only God who could create each and every accident on each and every body in each and every instance of time. The entire universe and all that transpires in it, according to the Ash’arites, must be directly controlled by God at each specific instance.
Another philosophical (albeit not original) contribution was the idea that time itself is composed of discrete and successive units, a type of ‘atomic-time’. This was derived not only from Aristotle’s notion that space, time and movement are all existentially equivalent, but also from the problem of trying to solve Zeno’s paradox as applied to time.[10]
These two positions necessarily leads to a denial of causality, meaning that the Ash’arites completely negated a cause-and-effect relationship between any two occurrences. Everything that occurred was disconnected, time and space, from anything preceding or following it. Even a body that remained a certain color did so because God continually re-created the accident of color in all of its atoms, at each instance in time (i.e., at each ‘atomic-time’ unit). A rock thrown at a window could not cause the window to shatter; an arm lifting a cup was not the cause of its lifting; the ingestion of food was not the cause of satiation; the proximity of fire to wool did not cause the wool to alight; and so forth.
With such a radical view of the world, the Ash’arites were then forced to explain not only the continuity of the universe around us (materials did not typically vanish, or transform into another substance, or change color, or inexplicably move from one instance to the next), but also the very clear causal connections upon which the livelihood of men rests. It is only because man eats that he does not starve to death, it is only because a fire is lit that food can be cooked, and so forth. Pressed with such factual realities, the Ash’arites (and in particular al-Ghazālī) developed the theory of ‘God’s habitual character’ or ‘ādah, meaning that God had ordained upon Himself to act within certain norms.[11] Thus, an object that is at rest is recreated by God at the second instance still at rest, an object that is brought close to fire and is flammable shall be set alight by God not due to the fire, but because God’s custom dictates so, and so on..
This theory safeguarded the permanent order of the universe, and also explained the apparent ‘causal’ relationship in daily life. What man perceives as ‘permanent’ is merely God’s habit (‘ādah) manifesting itself, at each successive instant. Contingent events, which man perceives as having been subject to natural physical causes, are in fact the direct result of God’s constant intervention.

Other Theological Implications of Atomism
The concept of atomism was deployed by the Ash’arites in many different fields. In what can only be described as a pun on ideas, it is true to state that the concept of atomism itself became the fundamental building block of all other aspects of Ash’arite theology.
So, for example, based upon this cosmological view, the Ash’arites formalized more than one elaborate proof for the existence of God, the most common one being the ‘dalīl al-’a’rāḍ wa ḥudūth al-ajsām’, or the ‘Proof from accidents and temporality of bodies.’ This proof relies upon the fact that (i) existence is divided into bodies (composed of multiple atoms), and accidents; (ii) bodies are inherently composed of temporal accidents and cannot exist without them, and so: (iii) ‘that which is composed of temporal elements and does not precede it must also be temporal.’ Some of the Ash’arites sought to prove this method from the story of Abraham as he ‘searched’ for God via the celestial objects (Q. 6:71-79). They claimed that Abraham understood that the star, moon and Sun could not be gods because they were moving, and movement was an accident, hence Abraham realized that any body that carried within it an accident must be created and not a God.[12]
Furthermore, based upon this atomic conception, they proved that God is One, and cannot be more than one. This proof is known as dalīl al-tamānu’, or the ‘Proof from mutual exclusion’. A summary of this is as follows: suppose that the universe had two gods, and one of them wished to create the accident of motion within an atom, while the other wished to create the accident of rest. Logically, there are only three possibilities: (i) both of them fail; (ii) both are successful; (iii) one of them is successful while the other fails. The first two logical possibilities are actually impossible, as the two are mutually exclusive, and the object has to be characterized with one of these opposing accidents. This only leaves the third option. And by definition, the one whose will is overpowering all else must be a God, and the one whose will was overpowered cannot be a god.
The Ash’arites and Mu’tazilites also propounded a theory of understanding God’s Attributes based upon their respective understandings of atomism. The primary issue at stake for them was that God could not be a place (maḥall) where accidents exist, as that would imply that He was a body composed of atoms (since accidents by definition need atoms to subside in), and hence created. So, for the Ash’arites, who defined an ‘accident’ as that which cannot last two successive instances, to posit any ‘change’ in God or from God would constitute an accident. And since all accidents must by definition reside in bodies, any accident posited of God would imply that God was a body. It was based upon this definition of ‘accidents’ that the Ash’arites could affirm God’s never-changing attributes of Life, Power, Knowledge, Hearing, Seeing, Will, and Speech, and interpret other Attributes figuratively, especially those that implied any type of motion (such as istiwā and nuzūl).
For the Mu’tazilites, on the other hand, an ‘accident’ was defined as ‘that which is superfluous to the essence (dhāt) of a substance.’[13] For them, any meaning that was not inherent to a being and extraneous to its essence (zā’id ‘alā al-dhāt) constituted an accident. Al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār expounded on this when he said that if God actually had power, this would imply that He were a body, as power can only be potentialized when it resides in a body.[14] Hence, to affirm any characteristic to God would imply that an accident resided within God, which would necessitate God being a body, which would in turn entail that God was created. This helps explain why Mu’tazilite doctrine concerned itself with how best to phrase some of God’s capabilities, (e.g., ‘God knows with His essence’, or ‘God knows with a knowing that is Himself’, or ‘God’s knowing implies that He is not ignorant’, and so forth) as they could not explicitly affirm any meaning within God, yet at the same time could not deny that God, for example, knows everything.[15]
Yet another theological tangent that atomism provided a basis for was that of predestination. In particular, the Ash’arite understanding of qadr was directly linked to their conceptualization of matter.

Atomism and Predestination
The Ash’arite position on predestination is that God creates the actions of the servant directly without the servant himself causing that act, and that the servant then ‘acquires’ the reward or punishment of that deed. Hence, there is only an illusion of free-will, for in the end all actions are a direct result of God’s will and action. This theory, propounded by al-Ash’arī himself, is known as the theory of ‘acquisition’, or kasb. It is, of course, based directly on Ash’arite belief of God re-creating accidents within atoms at each and every second. Man, being merely the agency upon which these accidents are created, cannot actually be the cause of any of his own ‘actions’.[16] Hence, atomism was the key factor that led Ash’arites to deny both natural causality and human free-will.
This understanding led to another ethical dilemma, and that was the accusation of God doing something evil.[17] How was it possible, the Mu’tazilites charged, that God would Himself create the actions of His servant and then punish them for it? This was the essence of evil.
In response to this charge, or perhaps pre-empting it, al-Ash’arī developed his doctrine of what constitutes ‘evil’. For al-Ash’arī, evil was merely what God had prohibited, and good was what He had commanded.[18] Therefore, according to him, no act is inherently judged as good or evil – human intellect and rationality play no role in this regard. Later Ash’arite authorities concurred.[19] Hence, for the Ash’arites, unless God explicitly states so, there is nothing that is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ in the first place! God does not punish or reward based upon a deed – God’s rewards are a gift from him, and His punishment an indication of his Justice, and nothing is required or obligatory on God.[20]
Therefore, for the Ash’arites, based on their definition of evil, the charge that it is evil to deprive man of free-will and then subsequently punish him for actions which God created holds no weight. Man does not have the capacity, or even right, to say what is evil and what is good.
The Mu’tazilites took the exact opposite view. Before explaining their position on free-will, it is interesting to note that, unlike the Ash’arites, the Mu’tazilites did not reduce the concept of causality to a simple and wholly unequivocal scheme, hence it is rather difficult to piece together the relationship between their version of atomism and their position on qadr; for this response, some general observations will be made.[21]
The Mu’tazilites were, of course strong proponents of free-will, hence they denied that God created man’s actions. Instead, they supported the doctrine that man created his own actions with the power that God had given him.[22]
This led to a detailed discussion of the concept of tawallud amongst them: whether (and to what extent) a human action could cause other actions. As an example, suppose a man shoots an arrow, and another person diverts it, and an innocent person is killed, who is morally responsible for his death?[23] Despite the differences that the Mu’tazilite had amongst themselves, as a whole they affirmed causality and believed that substances posses properties that have the capacity to affect other properties.
In contrast to the Ash’arites, they viewed that it was rationally possible to judge actions as evil or good (the issue of al-tahsīn al-’aqlī). This basic premise played a profound role in their understanding of qadr. For the Mu’tazilites, if God were to directly create man’s actions and then punish him for those actions, while man himself has been deprived of free-will, this would be the height of tyranny and injustice. Therefore, God cannot be the creator of man’s deeds. For the Mu’tazilites, the Sacred Law only confirms what the intellect has already judged; it does not play any extra role in this decision.[24]

Atomism was accepted by all factions of kalām and incorporated into their theological models. Even though it was the Mu’tazilites who began the discussion, it was the Ash’arites who took it to a whole new level, and relied upon it even more than the Mu’tazilites.
For the Ash’arites, the only perpetual object is the atom. The atom itself is created at a specific point in time, but after that time, it remains in creation until God wills otherwise. Everything else in the world besides the atom is ‘accidental,’ meaning something that lasts for only a fleeting instant. And time itself is composed of discrete, successive units that are not directly connected to each other. It is God who must create and re-create each accident, on each atom, at each instance of time. Based upon this understanding, they extracted proofs for God’s existence, His Unity, His Attributes, and His all-encompassing power (i.e., predestination). Additionally, they denied natural causality.
For the Mu’tazilites, although they did use their understanding of atomism to derive similar proofs for God’s existence, since they defined ‘accidents’ in a manner different to that of the Ash’arites, their understanding of God’s attributes differed as well. Additionally, they did not elaborate upon the relationship of atomism with free-will as much as the Ash’arites did.
Other issues, not directly related to atomism, also played a role in conceptualizing their respective positions on predestination versus free-will. For the Mu’tazilites, if God demanded obedience from man yet simultaneously created his actions and deprived him of any free-will, it would be the height if injustice and contradict Divine Wisdom. All of this is clear and incontrovertible, according to them, because the intellect is capable of deciding what is praiseworthy and what is not. For the Ash’arites, since the intellect plays no role in deciding good from evil, it was not possible to judge any of God’s actions. Therefore, if God requires us to do something and, at the same time, does not grant us an independent will to execute it, that is permissible, for God can commit no injustice, and we cannot judge the actions of God.

The debate of whether this elusive ‘smallest indivisible object’ actually exists remains alive up until today. The belief in such objects survived, even as it adapted and modified itself through many controversies, via medieval Christianity, Jewish philosophy, and the Renaissance. Finally, in the post-Enlightenment period, John Dalton (d. 1844) formulated his concept of the atomic theory, which was then developed and held sway for much of the 19th and early 20th century. For the first time, atoms were discovered to be of different types, and molecules to be combinations of atoms. Daltonian physics still considered the atom to be the smallest indivisible unit, but claimed (unlike kalām) that atoms of different substances were different from one another. From the early part of the 20th century, physicists, starting with Rutherford (d. 1937), discovered smaller sub-atomic particles from which atoms were made, namely, electrons, protons and neutrons. This then gave way (largely due to the efforts of Max Planck (d. 1947) and Albert Einstein (d. 1955)) to quantum mechanics, and later to the discovery of even smaller sub-atomic particles, such as quarks and leptons, which are currently believed to combine in specific ways to form protons and neutrons. Research is still being done in this field, and daily discoveries and experiments continue to shape and challenge current theories.
For those theologians who based aspects of their theology on atomism, it is interesting to posit how these new scientific discoveries might possibly affect their theological models and positions.

[1] See: John McDonnell, The Concept of an Atom from Democritus to John Dalton (New York: 1991) p. 1-4, 21-25.
[2] Bernard Pullman, The Atom in the History of Human Thought (Oxford University Press: 1998), p. 17.
[3] Wolfson, Philosophy of the Kalām, p. 468.
[4] It should be noted that there is a very strong possibility of Indian atomism heavily influencing the mutakallimūn as well, as Pines (p. 117) and Wolfson (p. 473) show.
[5] Al-Ash’arī, Maqālāt, p. 314-321.
[6] Much has been written on this. The standard introduction is that of Shlomo Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: 1997). Also see Richard M. Frank, “Bodies and Atoms: The Ash’arite Analysis;” Bernard Pullman, The History of the Atom, p. 107-114; Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalām, p. 466-518; EI2, s.v., ‘Djuz’. It is interesting to note that the most accessible and elaborate explanation of kalām atomism has been written by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed. D. Macdonald has translated and analyzed these passages in his article “Continuous Recreation and Atomic Time,” Isis, v. 9 (1927).
[7] Wolfson, Philosophy, p. 495. The ṭufrah is the belief that an object has the capacity to move from point A to point C without traveling through the intermediate point B but rather ‘leaping’ over it. This belief was needed in order to explain how a body could traverse from point A to point C when, according to al-Naẓẓām, there were an infinite amout of points between them.
[8] Ibid, p. 471.
[9] See, for example, al-Ash’arī, Maqālāt, p. 358; al-Baghdādī, Uṣūl al-Dīn, p. 50, al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut, p. 88.
[10] Macdonald, ‘Continuous Re-Creation,’ p. 320.
[11] See al-Ghazāli’s Seventeenth Discussion in his Incoherence (tr. Marmura), p.171-3.
[12] Al-Bāqillāni, al-Inṣāf, p. 44. I have written a paper on this specific issue elsewhere. Also see: Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalām, p. 386-390; Herbert Davidson, Proofs for eternity, creation, and the existence of God in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy.
[13] Al-Ash’arī, Maqālāt, p. 369; Frank, “Bodies and Atoms,” p. 42.
[14] Sharḥ Uṣūl al-Khamsah, p. 162.
[15] It goes without saying that both the Ash’arites and Mu’tazilites had other concerns as well, all of which led them to formulate their respective doctrines regarding the Attributes of God; the point here is to stress how their theory of atomism directly affected their conceptualization of God’s Attributes.
[16] Watt, The Formative Period, p. 315.
[17] It also led them to develop a unique understanding of God’s justice: for the Ash’arites, God was never unjust, not because He chose not do show injustice (the Mu’tazilite position), but rather because whatever He did was always just. Hence, if He rewarded a sinner or punished a just man, that recompense in and of itself would constitute Justice on God’s part. This of course solved the conundrum of how God could (from the Mu’tazilite perspective) ‘force’ someone to do something and then punish him for it.
[18] Al-Ash’arī, Risālah īlā Ahl al-Thaghr, p. 74.
[19] See, for example, ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Bahdādī, Uṣūl al-Dīn, p. 149; ‘Aḍad al-Dīn al-Ījī, al-Mawāqif, p. 323.
[20] See, for example, al-Bāqillānī’s description of this in his al-Inṣāf p. 48.
[21] See Pines discussion of this in his Studies, p. 32-34. I believe this issue certainly warrants further study.
[22] al-Qāḍī Abd al-Jabbār, al-Mughnī, v 2, p. 340.
[23] Pines, p. 37-8; al-Ash’arī, Maqālāt, p. 408-10.
[24] See al-Qāḍī Abd al-Jabbār, al-Mughnī, v. 6, p. 26, 30 – 34. Also, it should be borne in mind that the Mu’tazilite authorities differed amongst themselves on some of the finer details of this issue. In particular, is an act inherently good or evil, or is it due to external consequences that such a description can be made? The former view is held by the Baghdadian authorities, while the Basrians held the latter view.


January: A Prompt in Itself

Prompt Others; Prompt Myself

I first used the word “prompt” when teaching high school English as an educational tool for students to jumpstart their individualized, brainstorm-like induced stories.

“I remember….” is an often-used prompt for fiction and nonfiction.

A photo of a man standing by a human-made wooden structure with artificial eagles perched by a real eagle’s nest is a visual prompt.

After I left the classroom and pursued my own writing, I joined a newly-formed writers’ group with two former students. I made the third and was happy to follow their rules of organization. We met every Monday at Tim Horton’s. We came with copies, read our work aloud and offered verbal comments.

The final act of every gathering was my favorite. Each of us received a small strip of paper on which to write a prompt right on the spot. We placed it in one of the writer’s fedoras and picked a prompt that wasn’t our own.

The following Monday, we shared the story coming out of the prompt in addition to anything else we’d written.

Just Because I Taught English

Just because I taught writing and wanted to write a novel, I wasn’t exactly schooled in how to accomplish 70,000+ words of engaging fiction.

Short stories were practices in creating beginning-middle-ends, in characterization, in dialogue and narration and in showing description.

I’d take my writers’ group chosen prompt and spend a week on it and have a full story completed by Monday.

After nine months, the group broke up, but I came away with a portfolio of several short stories in various stages of polish. Over the years, I’ve gone back to that file and tinkered with some and submitted some.

A Prompt From Anywhere

Out my window, a dingy white car with a noisy muffler makes its second of a minimum of three daily stops next door. My neighbor is an elderly woman and the mother of the daughter driving up the driveway to check on her.

Or is she?

Prompts come from anywhere and everywhere. As seeds, they bloom stories and stories and stories.

It’s January.

The first month of the year prompts us to make resolutions to rededicate our energies toward specific goals.

I am prompted to exceed my number of accepted story submissions.

Many good memories remain of that early writers’ trio. One of the most significant is realizing the power in the prompt.

I am never without story ideas. And if I get stuck somewhere along a story line, I look around me in hope of a prompt to lead me forward.

Finalizing the Final Draft

IMG_0412The final draft of my first (as yet to be published) novel is done. Or is it? If you are a future debut novelist, you know how vague the term “final draft” can be when it applies to your own work. Or at least, to mine.

Learning the Craft of the Draft

I hope not to embarrass myself by saying I’ve been writing this mermaid novel for at least four years. [Being Mermaid: From Out of the Sea]  The journey has included taking workshops, seminars, a webinar or two, having conversations with writers and reading or scanning lots and lots of books, blogs and magazines.

In spite of all the information, my early writing felt like a crazy, all-over-the-place groping for meaning and the only way I could go in order to A) learn the fiction writing process and B) get the novel done.

Was it the right thing to do?

Between Draft and Manuscript

Sara Megibow, an agent with KT Literary, spoke at a conference session entitled “Biggest Mistakes” that writers make when pitching or querying a work. In my paraphrasing, one of her reasons for not being interested is the work’s incompleteness. She said, “You’re at draft only. Your manuscript isn’t ready.”

The year was 2013 and I was preparing to pitch my completed manuscript, or was I?

The Early Draft

“A Four-Step Plan for Revision” by Raymond Obstfeld In The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing (Writer’s Digest Books. 2002) elaborates on draft distinctions:

“Early drafts lay down the basic story and characters while the final drafts fine-tune what’s already there.”

As I was writing this post, an article on my favorite blogger’s site, Jane Friedman, popped up. “How to Finish Your Book in Three Drafts” is great material and great timing by Stuart Horwitz who calls “the first draft the ‘messy draft,’ which is all about getting it [the story] down .”

I was definitely messy as I wrote, rewrote, ditched, scratched out a section of, scratched out a lot of sections of, returned old material to and started all over again.

The Final Draft

When the beta readers had done their work, I revised again and again.

At last, my final draft was done, the one Stuart Horwitz calls the “polished draft,” which [had been] all about making the story “good.”

I was ready to query and pitch my manuscript.

When the Story Goes Nowhere

My mermaid novel received mild interest.

One queried agent asked for the whole book after reading the first fifty pages before it was rejected. Another agent was excited about my pitch but later turned down the novel. An editor said it wouldn’t get past “acquisitions.”

I knew I was getting close but also felt something may still be lacking. Perhaps, as Sara Megibow had told a large audience of writers that year, the error may be in my thinking the novel was a manuscript when it remained a draft.

Final Draft as Plural

I was back at the books, blogs, workshops, etc., to seek an end to my story. To stamp FINAL on the final draft.

Raymond Obstfeld said, “Although the phrase ‘final draft’ suggests the last time you’ll revise, that really isn’t the case. Final draft really refers to the final process of revising.”

Seek Professional Help

A professional editor is currently reviewing my mermaid novel as the journey continues.

Afterward, I will be back at it again. This time will be the final, final draft.

Thank goodness, I really believe in my mermaid novel and will do all I can to learn how to tell her story most effectively.

“Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity, edit one more time!”  ~C.K. Webb

Where Will She Sit on the Shelf?

I’ve sat in on enough writing sessions facilitated by writers, agents, editors and other workers in the publishing industry to know that if my book doesn’t conform to market standards, good luck on getting it published.

Today’s post is on meeting that challenge and moving forward.

Maybe a Story Really Does Tell Itself

My original intention when I began telling my mermaid story was for it to be a romance. A beautiful fishlike young woman washes ashore where a beautiful young man discovers her and along the way love arrives.

The story didn’t unfold as I’d planned.

My mermaid remains a young female but her story focuses on her journey toward the realization of who she is and where she belongs in the ocean world.

A young man is a part of her narrative, along with issues of ocean pollution and extinction and motherhood and love.

Genre Dilemma

My novel is complete. But what kind of novel is it?

Women’s Fiction?

Adult Mainstream?

All of the above?

None of the above?

I can’t imagine anything worse than a story being refused because the marketing department has no idea how to advertise it and the bookstores have no idea where to shelve it.

What do I do?

Change the story?

Keep the story?

Forget the story?

Advice from Experts

I expressed my dilemma with book editor, Rebecca Heyman. Her response was a recommendation to read three novels. One is Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

Erin Morgenstern’s story doesn’t fit a standard type; it’s fantasy, romance, maybe even steampunk.

No spoilers here: In Night Circus, two old competitive peers, artists in magic and illusion, pit their apprentices against each other for an eventual showdown.

The story itself is magic. It enchanted me with its vivid details, compelling storytelling and mystical tone.

The structure of the story is also as unique as the tale itself.

Have readers found this strange, unusual novel in their bookstores, real or digitalized?

They certainly have.

Forging Ahead

My focus now isn’t on whether or not there’s a specific shelf for my mermaid novel but on how compelling and memorable my story is for the audience who will read it one day.

Being Mermaid: Manatee Born

I’ve written a yet-to-be-published novel about a mermaid in today’s ocean whose story is as much about being a woman as it is about being a mermaid, maybe more. Being Mermaid: Creating Story

I’ve spoken about worldbuilding in previous “Being Mermaid” posts. Today’s focus is about the mermaid herself.

Characterization is an element of the writing craft referring to the description of the characters in a story, which can encompass a wide range of personality traits, actions, looks. My mermaid character needed to be as plausible as possible, so I went looking for researched facts and my imagination to develop this half-fish, half-human creature.

Mermaid as Manatee

As legends go, sailors on the old wooden ships declared they’d seen mermaids, and in some stories they’d said they were sung to and lured into the sea, whereupon these mermaids would attempt to drown them. Such deadly woman-fishlike creatures were also called Sirens in mythology Being Mermaid: From Out of the Sea

Have you ever seen a manatee? Hard to imagine anyone, except maybe a sailor who’d been on the sea for months and months, could mistake a manatee for a mermaid.

Yet, there had to be something to the stories, and the legends were where I sarted to develop the background character of my mermaid. As a result, three main aspects of a manatee’s life became a part of a mermaid’s life: diet, environment and reproduction.

Vegetation Diet

Like manatees, the mermaid characters eat strictly sea plants, particularly the sweeter seagrasses.

Manatees have a wide range of travel in the U.S., going as far north as the Carolinas and west to Texas but they tend to live mostly in and around Florida’s waters and canals, especially during winter. The key to their envrioment is the temperature of the water. They can die from cold stress if water temperatures drop below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Manatee facts have become a part of the mermaid’s character as well. She is more at ease in salt water than the versatile salt or fresh water manatee, but a mermaid cannot survive long if the ocean temperature drops below 68 degrees Fahrentheit.

To ensure the lifespan of the mermaids in my novel, I’ve located them on an isolated island in the Caribbean Ocean, unless something freaky happens to drop the temperature.

A significant issue in my mermaid novel is the role of the female mermaid and her ability to reproduce, the key to the survival of any species.

The mantatee gives birth to one calf every two to five years; twins are rare. After a gestation period of almost a year, a mother nurses her young for one to two years before the baby becomes independent.

Reproduction is a problem for the mermaids on my made-up island of Little Mangrove. A mermaid has an on- and off- fertile cycle. If she does get pregnant, her gestation period is one year, and she cannot become pregnant again until two years after giving birth. Twins are a much-heralded birth when they occur, which, like the manatee, is rare.

About that Tail

A manatee is a slow-moving, gentle, playful animal who normally swims at three to five miles an hour but can hit up to twenty miles per hour in a short burst. Its tail looks as thick as its fleshy, barrel-shaped body.

A mermaid is not the same, except for having a tail. Somewhere along the evolutionary trail of the mermaid, she grew fish scales on her bottom half, not the fleshy skin of the manatee, and though the mermaid has a tail, it is lighter, filmier and more fishlike than a manatee’s.

A mermaid swims fast, very fast, able to keep up with the dolphin at twenty-one miles per hour and the shark at thirty-one miles per hour. However, some of the big game fish, such as the marlin at fifty miles per hour and the sail fish at sixty-eight, can out-swim a mermaid in the long run.

Building Character

Building characters is a challenge for any writer. Sometimes the details of a character’s life come quickly; othertimes, there’s a lot of research necessary to make a character believable, especially when that character is a mix of legend, heresay and reality.

“Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.” ~Glen Keane (Animator for Walt Disney, incuding “The Little Mermaid.”)

[Photo credit: Andrew Imanaka vis VisualHunt.com]

Being Mermaid: Creating Lore

Worldbuilding is an element of the writing craft referring to the creation of an imaginary world within which the characters live. Today’s post is about lore, the accumulated knowledge and tradition held by a group that’s passed from generation to generation in the oral tradition.

Mermaid Lore

What is the history of my mermaids? How do they know where they’ve come from and what is important in their lives? How do they share their stories? express their beliefs? What are the traditions and rituals that set them apart, as a family of mermaids and as one mermaid from another?

Before I began to work out the answers to these questions, I knew for certain there would be no history books, journals, diaries, nothing written. Mermaids do not write or read.

What they would do is express music.

The Oral Tradition

The term “oral tradition” is a means of passing on one’s heritage only by word of mouth or example.

To specialize the oral tradition for my mermaids who, in part, stem from the mythology of Sirens Being Mermaid: From Out of the Sea, I focused on music. Rather than talk about their past, mermaids sing, chant and use body movement.

“Subtle flips of her tail and twists of her arms and hands emphasized specific notes and images.” ~from When Oceans Sang (working title)

Every aspect of a mermaid’s life resonates music. The family sings praise as the sun rises and sings hope for a safe sleep when the sun sets and the moon rises. They have songs about the taste of sweet seagrass and enjoying freedom. Music reflects their moods and expresses their history.

A Mermaid’s Personal Lifesong

The mermaids of Mangrove Island know the lives of the past and present mermaids. How?

As a mermaid ages, she chooses from the experiences of her life and creates lyrics and movements to express them, called her lifesong.

“Her personal lifesong ebbed and flowed with her movements.” ~from When Oceans Sang (working title)

The song is as individualized as she is.

The Eldest female mermaid and the Elder male mermaid possess the longest repertoire of mermaid lore because they know the personal lifesong of each member of the family.

A lifesong is s key aspect of the death ceremony. As a mermaid’s body is taken to the bottom of the sea in a ritual I’ve described as “Born of the sea; given back to the sea,” the mermaids sing her lifesong in honor of the being she was among them and will continue to be thereafter.

Creative Challenge

The creative juices are at work here as I imagine a family who lives in the ocean and communicates through music. From conception until death, a mermaid expresses herself through song.

Music is the strongest link to mermaid lore.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”  ~Phillip Pullman (The Golden Compass)

Being Mermaid: Creating Story

DSCN0959I’ve written a yet-to-be-published novel about a mermaid living in today’s ocean whose story is as much about being a woman as it is about being a mermaid, maybe more. Being Mermaid: From Out of the Sea

She has a fish tail, lives on an isolated island in the Caribbean and struggles with issues dealing with family, their expectations of her and those of herself.

Like many women today, she is faced with the results of the choices she makes. They challenge her. They develop her. They define her.

Worldbuilding is an element of the writing craft referring to the creation of the imaginary world within which fantastical characters live. For the next few posts, I’ll be sharing my mermaid’s world.

As the ocean life came alive in my mermaid’s story, I had one goal: Make it as believable as possible.

I want you to believe that mermaids could, indeed, exist among us today.

Being Mermaid: From Out of the Sea

I’ve completed an unpublished novel about mermaids who live on an isolated mangrove island in the Caribbean Sea somewhere between Cuba and the Grand Cayman Islands.

The writing of their story has taught me the amazing power of fiction in its freedom to develop lives and places out of fact, legend and nothing at all.

The mermaid Tanis is one of those beautiful and mysterious females of the sea. She lives in contemporary times, though she doesn’t know what a minute is or a day; her life is counted in moon cycles and sun cycles and seasons. The size of her favorite fish, the tarpon, isn’t five feet but two mermaid tail lengths long. When she’s hungry, she eats seagrass, which is sweetest when its young.

I’ve made up basic facts like these about her life because they make sense for a family of ocean creatures.

I’ve also incorporate myth. Why not?  Myth serves a purpose in our lives. It must or it wouldn’t have endured since its origins during the eighth century.

Like Sasquatch and Yeti, mermaids are a part of mythology to me. No matter how outlandish a myth may be–Really, Hercules held the world on his shoulders?–there exists a kernel of truth in the telling.

One ancient myth concerns mermaid-like women called Sirens who use their seductive singing to lure sailors to their deaths. In Homer’s epic Greek poem, The Odyssey, Odysseus’s crew stuffs beeswax in their ears as they sail toward the land of the sirens. Unlike his men, Homer goes without the wax; he wants to hear the sirens’ enchanting sound. To survive, Odysseus’s crew tie him to a mast and promise not to release him no matter how he begs.

Like the Sirens, the mermaids on mangrove island are also musical; singing is their main form of communication. They resonate their emotions musically. Music is so vital, every mermaid creates her and his personal song throughout life. When mermaids die, their personal song lives after them. These intimate tunes are like scrapbooks and are sung again and again throughout the generations.

Tanis is a modern-day mermaid with an ancient background.


Tag Archives: Paleo

Protect Gold Butte

“from sunset or sierra?
What is the line between ourselves
and the terrain from which we come?”

He thought he knew, but something in her eyes
transfixed him in a way he knew too well.
Deep and dark and wet they stuck him fast.

In parts of California, long ago,
impressive monsters ambled in the hills:
placid armored sloths two people tall,
cats with teeth as long as boning knives,
dogs the size of bears. Now and again,
a glint of water tempted them, or else
a furry piece of meat held strangely still,
and only after the imprudent pounce
would the tar entomb them.
Now, the graduate students pick their bones.

When the land thus asserts your membership
in the vast assemblage of dust and bark,
of feather, fur and rock in which we live,
it’s best not to struggle overmuch.
The land is patient, yet insistent.
Fighting off the tar will muss your hair.
Paleontologists an era hence
will find your clothes awry. Embarrassing!
Far better just to let oneself be swallowed
in all-consuming pitch, placidly slurped
into the balm of Quaternary ages.

That’s what her eyes felt like, he thought;
a sudden lack of individual
identity: nothing sets us apart
one from the other, nor from the land around.

Breaking Pleistocene Update

I Am Zed's Mandible

Major cache of fossils unearthed in Los Angeles

From the Los Angeles Times:

Here is a fine, very well-fed individual of the species Spermophilus variegatus, also known as the rock squirrel. This one happened to be working the crowd outside the El Tovar on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, but the species ranges throughout the Southwestern states and Mexico, edging just barely into that part of the state of California that fronts the Colorado River, for instance my neighborhood here.

The rock squirrel is one of 18 or so Spermophilus species in the western part of North America. There are currently 42 species worldwide.  Spermophilus itself — the name means “seed lover” — is one of three genera of true ground squirrels, along with Ammospermophilus, the antelope squirrels of the desert Southwest, and Cynomys, popularly known as prairie dogs. Close relatives of the three genera include marmots and chipmunks. Taxonomists group ground squirrels, chipmunks and marmots into a “tribe” within the squirrel family called Marmotini, which sounds like something you’d find on the menu in a spaghetti joint in Bozeman, or maybe a mixture of gin and wheatgrass juice.

Anyway, there are Spermophilus of various species living everywhere in Western North America from the beaches of the Arctic Ocean to southern Mexico. Their appearances vary widely, with some looking very much like your basic tree squirrels, some — the golden-mantled ground squirrel, S. lateralis, for instance — looking like glorified chipmunks, the flickertails (S. richardsonii) essentially trimmed-down prairie dogs, and the thirteen-lined and Mexican ground squirrels (S. tridecemlineatus and S. mexicanus, and I bet you can guess which is which) looking like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I found myself facing down a Spemophilus day before yesterday up at Cima Dome. I didn’t get a chance to ask it to display its tail. A tail with short hair would have made it a round-tailed ground squirrel, S. tereticaudus. Rock squirrels have bushy tails like tree squirrels. On reflection, though, I’ve decided it was probably a rock squirrel. Round-tails are low-elevation denizens, from what I can tell, preferring warmer, sandy wastes like the one I nearly got the Jeep stuck in about two hours before I saw the squirrel. The squirrel and I were up a bit, at around 5,500 feet. Also — another clue — it was hanging out in a big pile of rocks.

Still, I was a little hesitant to make the call because my squirrel field guide, Tamara Hartson’s Squirrels of the West, has a range map for the rock squirrel that implied it was unlikely I’d find any Spermophilus variegatus near Cima Dome. I decided, though, that the maps in Hartson were — how do I put this kindly? — drawn without reliance on primary sources. The range map provided for the one other Spermophilus living in the Mojave Desert, Spermophilus mohavensis, was, well, inaccurate. It shows the Mojave ground squirrel as ranging south and east of Joshua Tree National Park, almost to the Colorado River at Blythe. The actual southeastern limit of the Mojave ground squirrel is pretty much the Mojave River. That’s about a 130-mile error, about a two-fold increase in the actual range of the species.

The southeastern limit of the Mohave ground squirrel’s range is, and not by coincidence, the northwestern limit of its closest relative, the round-tailed ground squirrel. To a first approximation, each species lives on its own side of the Mojave River and nobody fishes in the middle. This becomes a little confusing when you remember that while there is water flowing in the Mojave River, it mainly does that flowing beneath several feet of gravel and sand. There’s nothing in that riverbed, 364.5 days out of your typical 365, that would provide the kind of barrier to migration — and thus gene exchange —  that usually causes one species to diverge into two sibling species. A squirrel spotting a likely mate on the other side wouldn’t even have to get its feet wet to exchange some genes.

And in fact, there is a little bit of interbreeding going on along the river, which is a pretty romantic spot when you get right down to it, and squirrelologists have found a few hybrids between the two species here and there, mainly in disturbed areas where the typical behavior of each species may have been disrupted. The breakdown of the natural order of things has likely resulted in interspecies mating, and yet the Mormon church is strangely silent on the matter.

If there’s no barrier to the populations of squirrels meeting, and they can still interbreed, what was it that split the original species in two in the first place?

The Mojave River is still a possibility despite its current lack of, well, current. Before 6,000 years ago there was water flowing in the river, lots of it, running down off the slopes of the Pluvial-era San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, filling what are now dry washes and alkaline playas with water too broad for a squirrel to ford. There was a vast network of lakes and streams in the Mojave then, with water off the east side of the Sierra Nevada joining in from the northwest, filling Owens and Searles lakes and spilling over into the Panamint Valley and Lake Manly on the floor of Death Valley. For its part, the Mojave River filled immense lakes where Harper Lake is now, near Hinkley, and Coyote Lake, north of Yermo. Its main flow continued past them and cut a gorge now called Afton Canyon, filled up Soda and Silver Lakes near Baker, and ended up in Lake Manly as well.

It may be that there were other factors beside swollen rivers keeping the squirrels apart. The heart of the Mohave ground squirrel’s habitat in the northwestern Mojave, smack dab in the rainshadow of the Sierra, is thought to have remained somewhat arid during the Pluvial, and may have been a refugium of sorts where desert-adapted critters were able to escape competition from less-droughty species taking advantage of the wetter Mojave elsewhere. But when you map out the boundary between the ranges of the Mohave and round-tailed ground squirrels, it’s never farther than about 30 kilometers from the Pluvial Mojave River System waterline. Things dried up 6,000 years ago, so that’s a migration rate of about five meters a year, not unlikely given ground squirrel behavior as we see it today.

I love this kind of story so much. Who but a complete geek would take note of seemingly arbitrary boundaries between the ranges of two very similar squirrel species? The Mohave is a little more pink-gray than the round-tailed, and the underside of its tail is white where the round-tailed’s is solid cinnamon-colored; the first likes gravel and the second sand. These are differences all but invisible to the vast majority of people, especially in a genus as diversely-appearanced as Spermophilus.

But when you start paying attention to why the ranges of animals and plants and other living things are the way they are, when you start paying attention to how the arrangement of life on today’s Earth came to be the way it is, epics unfurl themselves before you. Caruthers Canyon, a valley near here full of incongruous oaks and manzanitas and other usually-coastal chaparral plants, reveals itself to be a redoubt, a place where hundreds of generations of plants have held on as mountain ranges rose, blocked the rain, made two hundred miles of desert between them and their nearest kin. Uninspiring, ratty rings of creosote bush become impossibly ancient matriarchs, already 5,000 years old or more when the First Dynasty struggled to power in Egypt.

And a vague line between the ranges of two drab species of burrowing rodent becomes mythic, Noachic, the heavens opening up, a millennia-long flood separating brother from brother, sister from sister, two histories diverging from a common root, one nation cleft into two and the two meeting again as strangers.

The desert is woven of these stories, and I could spent the rest of my life reading them and be content.

By A Nail

Canis latrans, running, by Carl Dennis Buell
A running coyote, painting by Carl Dennis Buell

The ancestor of all dogs climbed trees like a cat.

Or so the experts hypothesize. The raccoon-sized, foxy omnivore Prohesperocyon is as likely a candidate for the ancestor of all dogs, wolves and foxes as any fossil species known. It lived in what is now the American Southwest. It probably had retractile claws. The later, closely related species, Hesperocyon almost certainly had retractile claws. It had only been about ten million years since caniforms and feliforms had diverged, and most feliforms can sheath those daggers.

If you had to sum up the history of the world since Prohesperocyon‘s time in two words, the phrase “grasses won” would be as accurate and all-encompassing as most phrases you might choose. Cold spread, and with the cold came dry. Moist temperate and subtropical forests receded. Dry open woodlands became more common. Grasslands spread out from their riparian Eocene habitats. By the Miocene savannas covered much of the Earth.

As grasslands expanded, animals ventured out into them. It’s harder to hide in the grass than it is in the forest. In the forest, you can hold still and hope the trees hide you from the animal trying to eat you, or from the animal you’re trying to eat. In the grassland, you’d better run for your life.

Prohesperocyon‘s successors ran. It was, to mix a metaphor, an arms race. Grazing animals died if they couldn’t outrun the predators. Predators starved if they couldn’t catch their prey. Natural selection favored the survival of the fastest.

Prohesperocyon‘s successors ran, and natural selection sculpted them for running. Strides grew longer. (As legs grew longer necks grew as well, to accommodate running with the nose near the ground — a boon to scent-hunting.) Dog’s ancestors began running on their toes, adding the length of their foot bones to their effective leg length. Toes became less about grasping surfaces for climbing and more about cushioning the shock of impact while running, with frequent sideline use as digging tools.

Eventually, dogs lost the ability to retract their claws.

The bones on the left are the phalanges — fingerbones — of a cat. On the right, a dog’s equivalent phalanges. The drawing is by Mauricio Anton, from the book Dogs: Their Fossil Relatives and Evolutionary History by Xiaoming Wang and Richard Tedford. I’ve cleaned up the scan a bit and darkened the arrow pointing to a concavity in one side of the cat’s second phalange. When a cat retracts its claws, the first phalange slides back into that concavity, more or less locking in place. (Imagine being able to retract your fingernails up behind the first joint.)

See the dog’s far more symmetrical second phalange? No concavity means no retractile claws. This is why dogs make this noise on hardwood floors:

…and cats don’t, usually.

Non-retractile claws take a beating, from hardwood floors or rocky soil. Retracting one’s claws allows them to stay protected from wear and thus sharper. Still, in the modern hardwood-based environment, they sometimes don’t seem to offer much in the way of strategic advantage:

Non-retractile claws would seem to offer an advantage in the cursorial lifestyle, offering a bit of extra traction like studded tires to help those sudden starts and stops and turns. It’s worth noting that the one cat with a truly cursorial hunting strategy, the cheetah, has claws that — while still technically retractable — are constantly exposed and probably noncoincidentally blunt. Other cats run, but rarely in more than short bursts.

There’s a lifestyle threshold for mammalian predators at around twenty kilograms — 45 pounds or so. Meat-eaters smaller than that threshold weight can sustain themselves on small prey: rodents, small lizards, invertebrates and such. Above 45 pounds, though, and moving fast enough to hunt requires more energy than small prey will provide. It’s not an entirely ironclad rule: smart carnivores will take easy pickings even if they’re the wrong size. But it’s not a bad rule of thumb: coyote-sized and smaller predators eat things smaller than themselves, while predators larger than coyotes eat things bigger than themselves.

That’s rather an abrupt change in strategy, and we see it now in Northern coyotes. Freed in most places from competition with larger wolves, and in some places hybridizing with those wolves, coyotes in the North have gotten their average weight up above that 45-pound threshold, and in places like Yellowstone those larger coyotes are now hunting in packs, taking down elk eleven times their size.

The pack thing is important. When cats evolved past the 45-pound mark, they had the tools to tackle larger prey on their own. Those sharp, protected claws let the cats get a secure hold on their intended meal, allowing the hunter to dispatch its prey with a precisely targeted bite. Tigers, for instance, will sever the spinal cord through the nape of the neck for prey of about human size, changing the angle of attack for buffalo-sized victims and crushing their tracheas. The old-school Smilodons, sabre-tooths, targeted a slashing bite at their prey’s abdomen, then stepped decorously back a bit to let it die of blood loss.

Dogs faced a serious disadvantage in taking down the larger grassland equids and camelids and gomphotheres and such. Those blunt claws were just fine for digging out rabbit warrens or slapping kittens off of coffee tables, but nearly useless for grabbing hold of a bison’s hide.

The solution, as expressed by those Yellowstone coyotes: cooperate in the hunt.

Large dog species, from wolves and coyotes and domestic dogs to African wild dogs, hunt cooperatively. They’ve done so for some time, as witness this rendering by Mark Hellet of a Miocene pack of Epicyon haydeni — members of the extinct Borophagine, or “bone-crushing dog” clade, at almost a meter tall at the shoulder the largest known dog in Earth’s history —  seriously ruining a Synthetoceras’ day near Red Rock Canyon State Park in Holocene Kern County. They work sophisticated and flexible strategies, acutely aware of the presence and activity of their packmates, and able to change plans as a group on a moment’s notice merely by communicating with one another.

Kind of like this one other blunt-clawed species of social hunting animals whose progenitors were thrown out of the forest and forced to make a living in the grasslands.

And this, this cascade of consequences of a minor modification of a toe bone, is why dogs were, despite being large, dangerous predators, the first species we humans domesticated, and the one most closely interwoven into the human lifestyle. Losing the ability to retract their claws set the stage for innovation of a social hunting strategy into which we humans could cleverly intrude.

Yes, we domesticated cats as well — one of the smallest species available, and they still haven’t quite made up their minds whether the arrangement is really working for them. Domesticated cats live with us in an arrested foster-maternal roleplay, having avoided the near-paranoiac isolation wild adult cats prefer.

Dogs, on the other hand, live with us without repressing much in the way of their basic nature. It’s as if it’s in their bones.

Desert Bones

Despite its dangerous reputation among non-physicists, the typical uranium atom is only weakly radioactive. More than 99 percent of the uranium found in nature consists of the isotope U-238, whose atomic nucleus contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons. The laws of physics make this a very stable configuration, with a half-life of 4.46 billion years. In other words, it takes four and a half billion years for half of the sample of U238 you hold in your hand to decay. U-235, with 143 neutrons, is far more radioactive: it has a half-life of just 704 million years. Anti-nuclear activists, among whose number I count myself, will often view these long half-life statistics with alarm, as they imply the material being discussed will be radioactive for a mind-bogglingly long time. And that’s true. For your handful of U-238 to become completely non-radioactive, you’d need to wait maybe eleven times longer than the universe has existed so far. But very long half-lives mean relatively low radioactivity. Stable isotopes have the longest half-lives of all, at infinity and change. It’s the stuff with the short half-lives you have to watch out for. Out in the desert, the naturally occurring uranium mixed in with minerals such as zircons and apatites and such is approximately as dangerous as lead. You wouldn’t want to refine it and pour it on your cornflakes, but if you did the heavy metal poisoning would get you long before the radiation would.

U-235 is a different matter: it’s what they make the bombs and nuclear power plants out of. U-235 spits out around seven times as much radiation as its heavier sibling, and is thus radioactive enough to support a self-sustaining chain reaction. U-238 isn’t. Of course, if you really want radioactive danger you turn to something like plutonium-239, which decays something like 200,000 times faster than U-238.

But U-238 does decay, and it does so at a known and predictable rate. Each decaying nucleus emits an alpha particle — a clump of two neutrons and two protons, a.k.a. a helium atom without its shell of electrons — to begin a cascade of decay, becoming one new unstable isotope after another as the nucleus tries to reach equilibrium. The first alpha emission transmutes the atom into thorium-234, which has a half-life of 24 days. The thorium-234 nucleus emits a beta particle, turning a neutron into a proton and raising its atomic number by one, and thus becomes protactinium-234. Protactinium-234 emits another beta particle to become the highly radioactive uranium-234, which emits an alpha particle to become thorium-230. Thorium begets radium; radium begets radon. Fourteen transmutations, in a cascade that can take a minute or millions of years, bring the decayed U-238 atom at long last to stable lead, 32 nucleons lighter. Eight alpha particles lighter.

When that decaying atom is part of a larger hunk of rock, each of those departing alpha particles tears through the surrounding rock. The particle ionizes many of the molecules it passes, slowing down with each encounter until it finally comes to rest a few micrometers from its parent nucleus. That parent nucleus recoils like a rifle, doing a bit of ionizing of its neighbors as well. The result is a tiny ionized tunnel, sometimes as long as a thousandth of an inch, through the surrounding rock. Each ionized molecule is repelled from its newly ionized, like-charged neighbors, and the tunnel widens a bit. If that tunnel, or fission track, is in a piece of rock of more or less uniform characteristics — a crystal, say, or a bit of volcanic glass, to provide a little bit of uniform background — you could see the tracks with a cheap microscope.

Zircon often has a significant amount of U-238 in it. So do obsidian and mica and titanite. Apatite, a class of phosphate minerals that together make up one of the most common substances in the earth’s crust, is another mineral that reliably contains uranium. Each of these minerals displays fission tracks rather nicely. Researchers will polish and etch a surface, train a microscope on it, and count the tracks.

Apatites are interesting for a number of reasons. Our bones, it turns out, are a sophisticated composite material consisting of organic fibers and apatite nanocrystals. Bone apatite less resistant to acid than fluoroapatites, which is why dentists encourage us all to substitute fluorine atoms for the hydroxyl or carbonate ions in the apatites in our teeth. (Fluoroapatites also have less tensile strength than do the apatites in our bones, which is why people with lots of fluorine in their groundwater have more hip fractures later in life.) Apatite is a source of phosphorus for industrial fertilizer, and those of you who are alive when we run short on available phosphorus, probably in about thirty years, will probably see the price of apatite skyrocket as lots of people starve. (Peak Phosphorus will mandate organic agriculture the way Peak Oil will mandate bicycling.)

Apatite also does something interesting when its temperature begins to approach the boiling point of water: its crystalline structure relaxes ever so slightly. It begins at around 70°C (158°F): small imperfections, scratches, and gaps in the mineral begin to smooth over. Tiny little flaws in the rock, fission tracks included, are annealed. Eventually, they vanish. The higher the temperature, the faster the annealing: at about 400°C, some apatites anneal their fission tracks in the time it might take you to eat a leisurely lunch. At 70-100°C, the time scales needed tend more toward the geological than culinary. But rocks do have time in abundance.

All this means that if you have a sample of apatite of which you know the uranium content, you can count the number of unannealed fission tracks and divide by the rate at which fission tracks would be produced by the sample’s uranium content. The result: a chronometer of time elapsed since that material was heated past 100°C or so. Usually, that means burial under a whole lot of rock. The rule of thumb is that each kilometer below the surface adds about 25°C to the ambient temperature, so if you determine that the apatite crystals in your sandstone show six million years worth of fission tracks, and you’ve determined by, say, the fossil content of the rock that the rock was first formed forty million years ago, then you know that the rock was more than a mile beneath the surface when it was 33 million years old or so. It’s one thing to simply know the age of the rock you’re hefting, another to gain some insight into the evolution of the landscape from which the rock came. The layers that were above your sample may have eroded away completely, no vestige of them remaining anywhere on the earth, but you have tangible proof that they existed, and evidence of their magnitude.

The few kilograms of apatite I hope to leave behind as a minor mineral deposit in the desert when I die are unlikely to be of much use to future researchers: the crystals are too nano-, and besides in my lifetime the desert has had its share of fission tracks significantly enhanced. But the phosphorus in my bones does have an infinite half-life. It isn’t going anywhere. The patience of rocks is also infinite, and I have been pleased these last few months to imagine, some few dozens of millions of years hence, some of that phosphorus deep-buried, refined and metamorphosed. That part of what was me becomes fine green crystals. The crystals await their chance to cool. Uncovered, they begin to count out the age of the earth again.

Not to scale

The Raven had come up to spend Thanksgiving in the desert, and we did. Rather than feasting, we whiled away that holiday with a long walk in the rainy creosote, watching dark winter storms trail through the Ivanpah Valley. Friday was taken up with moving belongings to my storage locker in Barstow.

Saturday was my last full day in Nipton. So, of course The Raven and I spent most of the day not in Nipton. Instead, we headed for the Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains, a visit to which I’d been promising her since she started spending time with me in the Mojave.

We stopped en route at my mailbox. The Post Office staff person was there, greeted us kindly, and asked again whether I was interested in her job. She’d offered it to me some time before, and I was tempted, but it would have been six days a week and four hours a day and less than ten bucks an hour to start and when I did the math the rosy romantic glow at the thought of becoming Cima’s postmaster faded in my mind. I told her I’d decided against it. Her attempt at PR thus made moot, she showed us a little of the conditions under which she was expected to work, including desk drawers full of rodent nests dating to the Eisenhower administration. Or perhaps the Pluvial.

Up Cedar Canyon Road a ways, I decided we’d need to fill the Zheep’s gas tank before we went on any cave tour, and so — forgetting that Fenner and its gas pumps existed — we went on past the turnoff to the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area and made for Needles.

We made it back to the park just in time to watch the sold-out last tour of the day head up the trail to the cave mouth. Our disappointment was tempered by the presence of screaming kids on the tour. “One more reason to come back,” quoth The Raven.

We went uphill to the Visitor Center instead.

The Providence Mountains State Recreation Area’s visitor center is a sweet little underfunded place in an old cabin of stone and wooden beams, with your usual assortment of natural items from the area, tortoise shells and bighorn skulls and the like. One of the items on display is a very old leg bone, labeled carefully in the display as “from either a Harlans’ or Shasta ground sloth.” I was looking at the bone in its glass case. The Raven made a noise of choked astonishment.

“Ground sloth leg bone,” I said, not particularly helpfully.

“No,” she replied, “look. On top of the case.”

In a freestanding plastic photo frame atop the case was an image the park staff had Photoshopped to provide visitors with a sense of the size of your typical ground sloth.

I got a copy of it.

Detail, WT(ATS)MFF

There may be some readers here who don’t quite grasp the effect, on The Raven and me, of walking into a stray park visitor center and finding the above image in a paleontology exhibit. I can only explain by offering a link to this painting Carl Buell did of me and my dog Zeke and a friend a couple of years ago.

I’m pretty sure I actually pushed my gaping jaw shut with my hand.

A ranger was sitting at the information desk. I called out to him. “I have a question for you.” He looked up helpfully. I grabbed the photo frame and brought it over to him. “Does this guy look familiar to you?” It took him about ten seconds.

It was a nice chat, once he realized I wasn’t upset, and that the artist probably wasn’t going to be upset either. (He wasn’t.) And what else could The Raven and I do but stage a reenactment?

A reenactment, sans Nothrotherium

I spent the evening considering what meaning I should derive from the experience.

I mean, visiting a natural history display in the Mojave Desert and finding myself as one of the exhibits? That has to mean something.

Maybe I belong there.


Pi Hydrae (also known as Norkan) is a star system (spectral class K2III) in the Beta Quadrant, near the Romulan Neutral Zone, the origin point of the Norkan outposts, the theater of operations in the Romulan Star Empire's Norkan Campaign. (ST reference: Star Charts)

Ad blocker interference detected!


Item #4: Veteran-Owned Business List (

Among all the other things we have to be thankful for this time of year, let’s not overlook the sacrifices and contributions made by our fellow citizens that serve (or have served) in the Armed Forces.  Let’s also appreciate that the process of transitioning into civilian life can present an extra degree of difficulty for such individuals, given that many of the responsibilities and accomplishments involved in military service don’t readily “translate” into the private sector.

If you’re a veteran yourself, however, or know somebody with military service who is seeking a new opportunity, one great resource to steer them to is the website  As the name implies, this site provides a comprehensive list of all the organizations in the country that are owned by veterans, and as a result, one would hope and assume that a job candidate with military service under his/her belt would get farther, faster, in terms of pitching themselves to one of these enterprises.

If you visit the Washington State page on the site, for example, you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of diverse businesses listed — and to narrow these organizations down by industry and/or product category, as I’d recommend, you can simply hit CTRL-F and search for an appropriate keyword like wireless, engineering, software, retail, or the like.

Additionally, and along the same lines, I’d also recommend that veterans in transition visit the Advanced People Search page on LinkedIn and hunt for phrases like “armed forces” or “military service” or “veteran-owned” in the Keywords box.  Or search for terms like Army, Navy, or Air Force in the “School” or “Company” fields of the site.  Such searches represent yet another way a person with military service could proactively turn up the set of local contacts and employers most likely to understand their unique background—and where it might effectively translate into a viable career within the private sector.


I sang in the car tonight to wake myself up, and it worked to a degree.

I just closed my eyes and went with whatever came out. I stayed true to the main melody, coming back to it time and time again, after numerous departures and explorations.

I juxtaposed odd combinations, for example, warm rhythms with the austerity of classical music, or a rapid twist from whatever is in our comfort zone to sticking our neck out and feeling very much alone, or abruptly doubling the rhythm and giving it a 6/8 feel while staying true to the main melody as well as to the "explorations."

To listen to DailySing - 125, click here.


G is for Gertrude

Though publishers originally deemed Gertrude Stein's To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays too complex for children, it's arguable that this whimsical survey of the ABCs, told though Stein's trademark repetitious and abstract style, was quite simply ahead of its time. Now, more than 70 years after its completion, Yale University Press has released the text with new commissioned artwork by New Yorker illustrator Giselle Potter. From Annie, Arthur, Albert, and a horse named Active, to a French girl called Zed who winds up in a zebra-painted world on her birthday,To Do is more than just a dizzying run through the alphabet. Consider it a concise and playful reader by one of the defining authors of modernist literature.

Andrew Buckler Is Thinner Than You

La Pâtisserie des Rêves


What is Entrepreneurship and its importance and features ?

Entrepreneurship is the tendency of a person to organize the business of his own and to run it profitably, using all the qualities of leadership, decisions making and managerial caliber etc. The term “entrepreneur” is often used interchangeably with “entrepreneurship”. But conceptually they are different.

Campti Field of Dreams Inc. - Sustainable Entrepreneurship

image surce:

In a way, entrepreneur precedes entrepreneurship. It is concerned with the development and co-ordination of entrepreneurial functions.

Entrepreneurship is an abstraction and entrepreneurs are tangible persons. Well designed and controlled research studies on entrepreneurship are very few. If we view entrepreneurship as opposed to management, it becomes still more difficult to define entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is a role played by or the task performed by the entrepreneur. The central task of the entrepreneur is to take moderate risk and invest money to earn profits by exploiting an opportunity. For this he must posses far-sightedness to perceive an opportunity so that he can exploit it well in time. Although an entrepreneur has to perform diverse functions yet he must manifest many qualities in himself to be a good entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship can be defined as the propensity of mind to take calculated risks with confidence to achieve a pre-determined business or industrial objective. That points out the risk taking ability coupled with decision making.

The word ‘entrepreneurship’ typically means to undertake. It owes its origin to the western societies. But even in the west, it has undergone changes from time to time. In the early 16th century, the term was used to denote army leaders. In the 18lh century, it was used to denote a dealer who buys and cells goods at uncertain prices. Towards 1961, Schumpeter, used the term innovator, for an entrepreneur. Two centuries before, the concept of entrepreneurship was shady. It is only in the recent years that entrepreneurship has been recognized widely all over the world like in USA, Germany, Japan and in the developing countries like ours. Gunnar Myrdal rightly pointed out that Asian societies lack entrepreneurship not because they lack money or raw materials but because of their attitudes. Till recently, in the west, the entrepreneurship is mainly an attribute of an efficient manager. But the success achieved by entrepreneurs in developing countries demolishes the contention that entrepreneur is a rare animal and an elusive character. In India, the definition of ‘an entrepreneur being the one who undertakes to organize, own and run a business’ has been accepted in a National Seminar on Entrepreneurship organized in Delhi in 1975. Still there has been no consensus on the definition of entrepreneurship and qualities of entrepreneurship.

Importance of Entrepreneurship :

Entrepreneurship being an intangible factor is the moving force and development is the consequence. It has an important role in the context of a developing nation like India which is confronted with major socio-economic problems. Entrepreneurship can play an important role not only in the industrial sector of a country but in the farm and service sectors also.

India is being attacked by baffling problems of over population, unemployment, under-employment, poverty and the like. Entrepreneurship is consistently equated with the establishment and management of small business enterprises and setting up these units is the solution to these baffling problems.

Concentration of economic power, regional imbalances, exploitation by monopolists, and many other giant problems find their solutions in the development of small scale industry which is another name of entrepreneurship in the developing countries. Mahatma Gandhi also asserted the same, entrepreneur ship has not grown much in India but it is gaining importance fast. The factors which retard the success of entrepreneurship in India are inadequate infrastructural facilities, shortage of capital, technical knowledge, and transport, absence of cheap and good quality raw material and shortage of power etc. The government has been taking significant steps to encourage entrepreneurship as entrepreneurship is the only solution to various problems of developing countries. Entrepreneurship caught strong waves during the last three decades and became a worldwide movement spreading across countries, regardless of their level of development. Even in Europe and United States, revival of small business has been seen for more than a decade. Constant change and innovations are simply a necessity of entrepreneurship and is becoming essential to survive in a global economy. An American magazine ‘The Economist’ (1999) recently put it, “Innovation has become the industrial religion of the late 20th Century.” It is being increasingly realized that’ day’s managers and businessmen need not only managerial skills but entrepreneurial skills as well. Entrepreneurship needs to be demystified and transformed into a skill by teaching and practicing. Skill of entrepreneurship knows how to turn an ordinary corporation, managed in a routine manner, into an entrepreneurial organization. People within the organization can be trained to :

(i) detect the opportunities

(ii) Pursue the opportunities and rewarded

(iii) to lesson the consequences of failing.

Features of Entrepreneurship :

Entrepreneurship is the tendency of a person to organize the business of his own and to run it profitably, using various traits like leadership, decision making, innovation, managerial caliber etc. Entrepreneurship is a set of activities performed by an entrepreneur In a way, entrepreneur precedes entrepreneurship. The main features of entrepreneurship are as follows :

(i) Economic Activity : Although classical economists like Adam Smith and Richard Cantillon and many others didn’t recognize entrepreneurship as an economic activity but since last few decades entrepreneurship is catching up and is primarily becoming an economic function because it involves creation and operation of an enterprise.

Schumpeter’s argument was that all important changes in the economy are set off by an entrepreneur and then these changes slowly work themselves through economic system, in the form of a business cycle.

(ii) Innovative Activity : According to Schumpeter, entrepreneurship is essentially a creative and an innovative activity. There are five ways of being innovative.

(a) The introduction of a new good ;

(b} The introduction of a new method of production ;

(c) Opening of a new market ;

(d) The conquest of a new source of supply of raw-material ;

(e) The creation of a new organization of an industry.

Schumpeter’s entrepreneur combines already existing materials and thereby produces something novel and innovative. It is only at that very moment when some one actually puts together such a combination that he is engaged in entrepreneurship. He suggests that it is very useful to study the constitutive parts of entrepreneurship, different motives that drive the entrepreneur and the main types of innovative behavior that entrepreneurship may result in.

Entrepreneurs tend to tackle the unknown; they do things in new and different ways’ they weave old ideas into new patterns; they offer more solutions than exercises. However, just to be innovative is not enough unless that innovation is carried into production to benefit consumers.

(iii) A Function of High Achievement : McClelland identified two features of entrepreneurship, (a) doing things in a different and better way; (b) decision making under uncertainty. People having high need for achievement are more likely to succeed as entrepreneurs. Psychological theories assert that people’s capacity for entrepreneurship is decisively influenced by the way they are socialized as children.

David McClelland stressed that entrepreneurs are highly motivated by challenging and competitive work situations.

(iv) Creative and Purposeful Activity : Entrepreneurship is virtually a creative, and purposeful activity. Entrepreneurship is a creative response to the changing environment. Earning profit may not be the sole objective but introduction of something creative and new is the purpose of entrepreneurship. The benefit of this creativity must be enjoyed by people at large.

(v) Entrepreneurship : An Organizing Function : As J.B. Say says : The entrepreneurs function is to combine the productive factors, to bring them together. According to him, an entrepreneur is one, who combines the land of one, the labour of another, and capital of yet another, and thus, produces a product. By selling the product in the market, he pays interest on capital, rent on land, wages to labourers and what remains is his profit. Thus, J.B. Say clearly distinguishes between the role of a capitalist as a financer and the entrepreneur as an organiser.

Marshall also advocated the significance of organisation among the services of special class of business undertakers.

(vi) Entrepreneurship : A function of Risk-Bearing : Richard Cantillon, an Irishman living in France, defined entrepreneur who buys factors of production with a view to sell it at uncertain prices in future. Cantillon concerned of an entrepreneur as a bearer of non-insurable risk. Thus, Cantillon introduces elements of direction and speculation into the function of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is a dynamic and multi-dimensional concept. It is both an art as well science. It is more an art than science. In short, Entrepreneurship is what entrepreneurs do.


Category Archives: MFin

Trade and the global economy

In part of my new MFin elective Understanding the Global Economy and Financial System I explore the changing views of economists on international trade, which has been one of the most powerful causes of global economic growth over centuries. * The traditional view of trade – correct but incomplete The reason why trade works is specialisation. If… Continue Reading

Why are some countries richer than others?

The first part of my new MFin elective Understanding the World Economy and Financial System next term will explore the question, why are some countries richer than others? * One of the most important, interesting but hotly contested questions in economics is, why are some countries richer than others? The world is astonishingly unequal; the life… Continue Reading

Three interesting facts about Chinese monetary history

Former IMF Chief Economist Eswar Prasad’s excellent book Gaining Currency – The Rise of The Renminbi starts with a fascinating chapter on China’s monetary history, the longest by far of any country. The book is ultimately a persuasive answer to the question, will the RMB become a leading international currency? His answer is yes, but only… Continue Reading

What is helicopter money?

The possibility that central banks might resort to extreme monetary measures, including helicopter money, is much debated in monetary policy circles. But what is “helicopter money”? * In normal times, central banks in developed countries try to control inflation and the level of economic activity by controlling the short term interest rate. But since the… Continue Reading

Classifying funds: the type of contract – is it equity or debt?

Another way to classify funds that are provided by a saver to an investor is whether they are in the form of debt or equity. These are the two main forms of contract through which one person or company can provide funding to another. Note that governments, which are very important actors in the financial system, can only… Continue Reading

Key financial concepts: securities

Securities are a very important and useful piece of financial technology, including bank notes, shares and bonds. They make possible a wide range of financial transactions and provide competition to the other main source of funding, banks. * A security is a certificate representing a contract between two or more people which promises to pay… Continue Reading

Key finance concepts: exchange rates

Exchange rates are among the most important macrofinancial prices, influencing many aspects of an economy. This post introduces exchange rates and their importance for macroeconomic adjustment * What is an exchange rate? An exchange rate is a ratio, the price of one currency relative to another. All prices are ratios, but normally they’re expressed in… Continue Reading

Davie Bowie innovated in finance too

David Bowie, among his many other creative achievements, was an innovator in finance, with the first ever intellectual property rights securitisation. * Nearly everyone seems to have been affected by the death of David Bowie, a uniquely creative and influential musical artist. I’ll add my own personal memories to the list. I think the first… Continue Reading

The IMF includes the RMB in the SDR basket


Sheela Berry and Jessica Green have been friends since school. Sheela is mother to Ethan and Rafi, and Jessica to Jonah and Isadora. Between them they have bought and thrown away more toys than they would care to remember.

Jessica has worked in the TV and Film industry since university, and Sheela has run her own successful music PR company for over ten years.