Congratulations to me - I took my last final exam of my second year on Saturday!
I don’t think I’m going to count myself as halfway through yet, though. For the next two and a half weeks, I’ll be studying for Step 1 of the US Medical Licensing Exam, more commonly known as “the boards.” After that I’ll go visit Cleveland and celebrate.
Today I’m studying biochemistry, starting with nutrition. I just took a break to read some news articles, and came across this (via BoingBoing), in which one of the congresspeople doing the food stamp challenge had his peanut butter and jelly confiscated by the TSA:
You aren’t going to believe this, but all I have left is cornmeal.
I was doing SO well! I had everything rationed out perfectly and knew that I was going to be able to stretch my food out until the end. That was of course, until the TSA decided to step in….
Sure enough the very nice TSA agent explained to me the 3-1-1 regulations for liquids. … He politely put the peanut butter and jelly to the side, closed my bag and gave it back to me. I was too astonished to talk. I took my bag and walked towards the gate thinking about the 4 or maybe 5 meals that she had taken from me. What am I going to do now? It’s not like I can just go to Safeway and grab another jar. I have .33 cents and a bag of cornmeal to last today and tomorrow.
My reaction: He’s going to get pellagra! It’s a deficiency in niacin, also known as vitamin B3. Historically it’s been associated with eating a corn-predominant diet, though I believe now corn is actually treated to make niacin bioavailable (and you wouldn’t get the disease from a few days of living on cornmeal anyway). The classic presentation is the three D’s: diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia. I love when I get to apply what I’ve learned.
Nerdity aside, this is ridiculous:
I’ve been laughing about this all day, it’s one of those funny little “Murphy’s law” moments you have to take with a bit of humor. I’d like to thank the TSA for doing an exceptional job protecting our nation’s airports and allowing me to illustrate that not even Congressmen get any special treatment at the airport.
I guess the starvation is getting to his brain, because I don’t see any other way he could seriously believe that the nation is any safer because the TSA took away an elected official’s sandwich ingredients.
This recent NY Times article, A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin, had me rolling my eyes.
First of all, I find it a bit strange that the author followed the conservatives’ lead in referring to the theory in question as Darwinism. Leaving out direct quotes and references to social Darwinism, I count 12 uses of “Darwinism” and similar phrasings, with 8 uses of “evolution” or “natural selection” (three of those were in the same sentence as “Darwinism” and presumably chosen to avoid repetition). I have no objection to using a variety of phrases, and “Darwinism” isn’t particularly wrong, since the guy was, after all, brilliant and current theory bears great resemblance to what he came up with. But the current theory is generally known as “evolutionary theory” (with natural selection being one piece of it). So I don’t understand why that phrase wouldn’t be used, especially to provide some variety given that the conservatives quoted almost invariably use the eponym.
Second and more importantly, it drives me crazy that so many prominent thinkers appear not to have a basic understanding of philosophy. I was fully able to grasp the is/ought problem when I read Hume in high school; I think that people who make a living pontificating on the relationship of science and politics should educate themselves on it.
Mr. West made a similar point, saying you could find justification in Darwin for both maternal instinct and for infanticide.
It is true that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be quite pliable. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy. Francis Galton based his “science” of eugenics on it. Arguing that cooperation was actually what enabled the species to survive, Pyotr Kropotkin used it to justify anarchism.
It’s certainly true that an understanding of science can inform policy decisions, but it’s important to understand that what science can tell us involves how things are now, how they were in the past, and how they got from there to here. It may be able to make predictions about what will happen if we make certain changes, though it should also remind us that such predictions are often wrong because the real world is complex. It has nothing whatsoever to say about how things ought to be.
This confusion exists on both the pro- and anti- evolutionary theory sides. I think Darwin would be shocked to learn that Mr. West believes his theory provides “justification” for maternal instinct and infanticide. The theory may be able to explain why those things exist, but it’s silent on their moral status. Then, Mr. Arnhardt thinks that “human nature” is a reason to push policies like an all-male military or traditional social sex roles. He’s making the added mistake of believing that because certain trends (like males being more powerful) evolved in the past, they must continue to be helpful now. A better understanding of the theory would show that fitness depends on the current environment; now that for humans, physical strength is dwarfed in importance compared to attributes like intelligence, it’s not at all clear that males will continue to be dominant or that traditional divisions of labor will even make sense.
Thankfully, the article does point out that “nature is morally neutral” and cite writers who understand this. John Derbyshire, whatever his other failings may be, is doing good work:
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has been on a roll debunking claims about gender differences found in the popular press. (That link goes to a post that has a list of all his posts on the subject at the bottom.)
Shockingly, it turns out that when you read a claim about gender differences (like “women say 20,000 words a day and men only say 7,000″) and decide to go check the research, most of the time the research says nothing of the sort. That particular claim appears to have been made up out of whole cloth; the available research is not totally conclusive but tends to show that men actually speak slightly more.
There are also many instances of actual studies being reported in so misleading a fashion as to make the news stories essentially lies. (Any time you hear somebody claim that men really do have trouble hearing women, don’t believe it.)
In a few cases, there are fairly-well-supported findings of gender differences, with the typical caveats that while the means are different, there’s a ton of overlap, and other traits besides sex are also good predictors of differences. Liberman concludes that post by stating:
But the most important lesson, in my opinion, is that the facts matter. Where the facts turn out to support consequential cognitive differences between human females and males, let’s try to look clearly at what those differences are, where they come from, and what individual, social and political conclusions we should draw. But let’s not let popularizers of brain-sex differences bring overgeneralizations and outright fallacies into the discussion as if they were scientific results.
Bravo.
For whatever reason, “scientific” findings about gender differences are more popular than just about anything else (except maybe diet claims). People find this stuff fascinating, and can’t seem to help projecting their prior commitments about gender onto the research, no matter what (if anything) it actually says. The chaff so greatly outweighs the wheat in this field that anyone committed to scientific accuracy really shouldn’t believe any claims without taking a look at the research.
A week or two ago I heard an NPR show with Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame, and for awhile it was all “long tail = awesome” (which was my initial response as well). Then somebody called in and got hysterical about how long-tail marketing would destroy the local bookstore and all that. I don’t think I’d go that far, but it got me thinking about what the implications would really be.
Today, via Marginal Revolution, I found this very interesting post on that very topic: “self as niche-market”, by Rob Horning. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I like the way he looks at it.
The rarity of the physical object once lent fascination to otherwise mediocre relics. Long-tail marketing (which makes copies of ultra rare stuff available immediately to whoever hears of it—which itself is easier through search engines and the Internet’s harvest of links and filters) ultimately will destroy the significance of the content of collector’s items; make them more like baseball cards or beanie babies—objects with no relevant use value. As bigger companies begin to market to the niches, the small players who used to service that market—little record stores and book stores and antique stores and so on; Dave Hickey’s cherished cultural underground—will be squeezed.
I don’t really see it as a problem that mediocre stuff would stop being attractive to collectors once it’s easy to get. People who like things just because they’re obscure or unpopular are obnoxious, and I’d be happy to see them have to find a new hobby.
To be more serious, not every collector’s item is vulnerable to this sort of thing. Unpopular music used to be scarce because physical copies of LPs were limited; now that it’s digitized anyone can get it immediately. So it won’t be impressive to track down obscure recordings. And the stuff that’s valuable to some collectors and junk to others (old dishes or whatever) will be easy to transfer, so that won’t be exciting anymore either. But there are some things that are truly scarce, and just making the transfer easier isn’t going to make the items less valuable. For example, one of the things I’d love to collect some day is medieval manuscripts. The outstanding ones are museum pieces, but there are enough mediocre ones floating around that they can be affordable for normal people. But there already are as many manuscripts as there are going to be - new ones aren’t the same thing at all. And nobody has them in their attic just waiting for the time when it will be profitable to sell them on eBay. Of course, once people realize that collecting old Beanie Babies is pointless maybe I’ll have more competition, which would be unfortunate.
Paradoxically, the vastly increased access to underground cultural goods may make the cultural underground itself disappear altogether, since people will need no longer such stores to buy these things, stores that also served as places to congregate and swap interests and develop networks that fostered the emotional support required to resist the mainstream.The Internet makes such resistance easy and trivial. It also isolates you in your rejection rather than unite you with like-minded malcontents. So rather than find an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them, you end up alone in front of your computer, gorging on loads of esoteric information suddenly made meaningless.
I’m not sure about this. I think the people who like things because they’re obscure are people who aren’t going to be happy with buying them from Amazon. People enjoy the experience of going to a little store and hanging out with other people who are weird in the same ways as they are. Resisting the mainstream isn’t always something that requires support, it’s something plenty of people do on purpose.
Also, I think the internet actually serves as “an alternate society where people are more discriminating and demand more and bring more intellect and passion to the things that inspire and entertain them.” Not always, obviously, but there are plenty of pockets like that. It allows people who wouldn’t otherwise find each other to meet and create community. Personally, I’ve found that it’s difficult to discover like-minded people in real life. It happens, sure, but the weirder you are, the harder it is. But I’ve found plenty of them (including my wonderful boyfriend) online. Just to take one particular interest, I know maybe a handful of foodie types in real life. Online, there are lots - and it’s great to hang out with people who have similar interests and learn from them.
This actually brings up what I think is probably the biggest negative consequence of making the long tail accessible - the possibility of greatly increased stratification. Don’t get me wrong, I love stratification - going to college and finding a bunch of people like me, heading out post-college and discovering an even smaller self-selected group of kindred spirits, being able to assume that my friends will know what I’m talking about if I bring up what I’m reading - this makes life very pleasant. But I think it’s probably harmful in the long run, because diversity is important. Being cut off from the life experiences of a huge pool of people can’t be healthy, and communities need mixtures of people to allow everyone to succeed. If intelligent, educated people are forming their own closed communities, what is happening to the people who aren’t as lucky? And if we’re used to interacting with people just like ourselves, will we even be able to take advantage of small opportunities for human connection, like chit-chatting with the checker at the grocery store?
The last portion of the post deals with targeted advertising:
…you allow advertisers to craft ads precisely pertinient to your needs, your vulnerabilities. You become your own niche of one. The perfectly targeted ads won’t even seem like ads anymore; it will seem like just-in-time information for the consumer. …
So one won’t be able to escape the sense that everything he wants has already been sold to him, that no desires originate from inside (if that’s not already true). The illusion that you have resisted marketing by buying this instead of that will become even more untenable. Maybe this will end up pushing people out of the market for individuality and into the realm of actual activity.
I’m all for targeted advertising. Just this weekend, I happened to be walking by a store I like and noticed that they were having a huge sale. That’s information I would have liked to have. Sure I could sign up for mailing lists, but for one thing that requires me to already know what stores I’m interested in, and then I get pieces of paper that I forget about. Ads targeted to my interest would be great. I post at a forum that does this quite well already (mostly manually) - ads for cooking utensils show up in the cooking threads, clothing in the clothing threads, computers in the geek threads. I buy from there pretty often, frequently because I know I want, say, sheets, but I don’t want to go looking for them. When they show up in the decorating thread, I think “sweet” and go buy them. I’d love it if this happened elsewhere on the internet, rather than seeing ads for stupid TV shows and online college degrees.
I don’t think I’d feel that “no desires originate from inside” though. There are plenty of things I want without ever having seen an ad for them; that’s why the targeted ads are good - because they tell me where I can find the things I want!
But (as Horning says) to the extent that easily being able to find things causes people to define themselves less by what things they have, that sounds like an excellent development. People can be defined instead by what they love, what they believe, what they do. And surely exposure to more options can only help those dimensions to become more authentic.
Yesterday, the Young Scientists Program’s physics teaching team visited a local school to teach ninth-graders about electricity and magnetism. It was quite the experience.
When we first got there, we were all pretty worried about how it would go - the students were supposed to be taking a quiz, but they were all loudly talking, getting out of their seats, making comments on the quiz questions, and that sort of thing. Two girls were braiding one another’s hair, and one boy was sitting on the windowsill without any pretense of participating in the class. Other students, who were apparently having recess, threw basketballs at the windows and yelled at the students inside. It’s no wonder the public schools don’t have very good outcomes; I couldn’t concentrate in that environment, and I was very interested in what we were doing. I’m impressed that the kids learn anything at all.
We had planned to give a short introduction to the class as a whole, then split them into groups to visit different activity stations we set up. We quickly realized that wouldn’t work; not only were they not paying attention to what the speaker was saying, he couldn’t even be heard over the din. So the introduction was shortened further and we split into groups. Things greatly improved at that point.
I had worked with a couple of classmates to develop a circuits activity. We built little circuit boards with a couple of 9-volt batteries, two sizes of resistors, and a few lights (cannibalized from a string of Christmas lights with a blown fuse), plus wires with alligator clips on the ends. I wrote a handout that explained the basics of circuits and gave the students steps to follow, with questions about what was going on at each step.
Once we got our students, we realized that the handout wasn’t going to be the best way to keep their attention, so we gave them a really brief introduction to circuits (heavily relying on a water-flow analogy) and then led them through connecting a battery-resistor-light bulb circuit. They were all really excited when their light bulbs lit up.
Most students quickly realized that the lights were nowhere near their maximum brightness, and asked how to make them brighter. So we encouraged them to experiment with what they saw on their boards to see what they could do. Usually they tried switching from a 50-ohm to a 100-ohm resistor, which made the light nearly go out. So we explained the difference in the two resistors.
At this point, some students couldn’t figure out what to do next, so we talked through the water analogy and explained why connecting two resistors in parallel would let more current flow. Other students realized that skipping the resistor altogether would make the light really bright, and so we had to convince them not to do that. We weren’t always quick enough, though, and about one student in three burned out his or her light bulb. Luckily we’d brought the rest of the string for spares.
It was a lot of fun watching the students figure out what they were doing, and even argue over who got to connect the next wire. Several of them were impressed that I could easily figure out what had gone wrong in their circuits and fix them, so they asked how I’d learned to do that. I told them about being a computer engineer, and some of them said they thought that sounded like fun! I tried to encourage them to pursue that idea; some of them really were quite good with circuits.
I think everybody had a very good time. Hopefully the students learned something as well.
I’m currently sitting in a delightfully nerdy lecture about STD transmission. The lecturer is discussing various models drawing from different areas of study. First there was population biology stuff with assortative and non-assortative mating, and then there was graph theory to analyze sexual networks, with references “betweenness” and “centrality”. I’m very amused.
(It’s also a good lecture in general; he’s emphasized the need to respect people’s decisions about their own sexual behavior, the fact that not everyone is at risk, and the fact that while you can predict whether certain groups are likely to be at risk, you can’t definitely say that a given individual is or is not at risk without private information.)
Adrienne has a fun post on debunked myths, one of which is that saying every college student knows, “beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.” Of course that’s not really true; alcohol is alcohol and what matters is how much of that you consume.
However, as one of my friends used to explain, there is some truth to the rhyme. Steve used to draw the following set of graphs on the whiteboard (usually during parties):
The slopes of the drunkenness vs. time graph are significantly different for beer and liquor*. When you have liquor first, you get drunk quickly, but then switching to beer slows down the process, and you have plenty of warning to stop before hitting that red line.
On the other hand, starting with beer gets you just drunk enough to think shots are a good idea, and then since you’re already somewhat intoxicated, you can quickly overshoot your desired drunkenness level.
*Of course this is just because of how quickly people tend to drink; if you carefully timed things so that you consumed the same amount of alcohol per unit time the slopes would be the same. But most people will consume hard liquor more quickly than beer with an equivalent amount of alcohol.
Two exciting discoveries in the news recently:
Eureka: Lost manuscript found in cupboard
A long-lost 17th century manuscript charting the birth of modern science has been found gathering dust in a cupboard in a Hampshire home. Filled with crabby italics and acerbic asides, the 520 or so yellowing and stained pages are the handwritten minutes of the Royal Society as recorded by the brilliant scientist Robert Hooke, one of the society’s original fellows and curator of experiments.The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude
A Lost World in Indonesia Yields Riches for Scientists
A team of scientists has discovered a lost world of rare plants, giant flowers and bizarre animals — including a new species of honeyeater bird, a tree kangaroo and an egg-laying mammal — on a mist-shrouded mountaintop in a remote province of Indonesia on New Guinea island. …“Naturalists love to go to places that haven’t been visited before,” he explained. “And this was one of the last, perhaps the very last.”
These are just thrilling to read about. I can’t imagine how exciting it would have been to be one of the discoverers.
You know how the typical example of old-fashioned medical quackery is the practice of bleeding?
I learned this week that bleeding is actually a recommended (and proven) treatment in some cases, though it’s called “phlebotomy” and done with sterile needles rather than dirty knives and a basin. Evidently there are certain conditions in which you have too much iron or too many red blood cells in your blood. (Red blood cells contain a protein called hemoglobin, which contains iron and serves to transport oxygen from your lungs to your tissues. That’s why iron deficiency is a problem - not enough oxygen transportation.) In this situation your blood essentially becomes sludgy. Even though there’s more than enough iron, the hemoglobin is too crowded to work properly, and the patient literally turns blue around the edges.
The treatment for this is phlebotomy. They’ll remove several units of blood over a period of time in order to get rid of the extra stuff, and make sure the patient is well-hydrated so the blood just thins out. It’s quite effective.
(This may contain errors in the details; I’m summarizing from what a physician with a thick accent told me during a brief conversation during clinic.)