Musing's musings

I felt the earth move

Not exactly under my feet, as I was in bed at the time, but I did wake up when this morning's earthquake hit. At the time, I thought it was just a very strong wind gust, since we'd been having those all night long and my bedroom is on the north side of my building, which was the direction from which the prevailing wind was blowing. It was a fairly loud rumble, but it stopped, and it was four in the morning--so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Then when I heard the report on the news just now that an earthquake had struck, I got up and checked things around the house. Didn't see any obvious damage, and nothing had fallen off the walls or shelves (or even moved, really, except for a couple of pictures that were slightly askew). I did notice that my bedroom door had swung a few inches away from the wall, but otherwise everything was as I had left it when I went to bed last night.

Blizzards, snowstorms, hail, tornadoes: those we expect. Earthquakes, not so much.

"Go and make disciples of all nations"

That's not an exact quote from Al Gore's address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this evening, but that's the take-home message I'm distilling from his remarks.

This will be a short post, as I'm meeting friends for dinner in half an hour, but I'll either come back and update it later or do another one. I'm going to make one brief remark about politics and history, and then it's on to Gore's address. That remark is this: If he had been able to display the level of conviction and engagement during the 2000 presidential campaign that he displayed in front of this audience tonight, the last eight years would have looked considerably different. Quel dommage!

The gist of Gore's remarks is that we are facing a historic moment: not just for our nation, not just for a coalition of allies, but rather for the whole human race. We have three interconnected and interrelated crises going on at the moment: one is economic, one involves national security, and one involves the environment. That's the bad news. The good news is, we have three interconnected and interrelated crises going on at the moment: economic, national security, and environment.

(Again, those weren't Gore's exact words, that's my spin on them.) We have, to quote The American President, serious problems and we need serious people to solve them. But the magnitude of the crises facing us, and the literally global consequences of the decisions we make in response to those crises, are rapidly moving toward a critical mass such that we can find the political and social will to do the very hard things that need to be done very quickly if there is, literally, to be a tomorrow.

And that's where the "Go and make disciples" quote popped into my head, as Gore started his concluding remarks. The facts are known, by and large, and the science behind them is, again by and large, irreproachable and conclusive. What we need now is for scientists, and people who work with scientists, to blend their working lives and their social lives more effectively and completely. There can't be an "office mentality" and a "home" or "cocktail party mentality" that are virtually wholly separate and distinct from one another. Gore quoted an African proverb that says if you want to go quickly, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together. And the problem, as Gore himself pointed out, is that we have to go very far very quickly. So all of us who work in or around science have got to do our part to get the word out and to help combat the propaganda (my word) coming from those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

An interesting tidbit from Gore's remarks, made as he was showing a slide of one of the Apollo 11 astronauts standing on the surface of the moon facing an American flag. Cheers went up, he said, in Mission Control in Houston when that image was beamed back from the moon's surface. But the average age of the engineers in that control room in Houston in 1969 was 26. That means that when President Kennedy issued his call to put a man in that very position within a decade, the average age of those engineers was 18. That's a hell of a lot of talent developed and deployed in not a long period of time. Surely we can do it again, even given that the world is a far more complex place, and the state of knowledge is both greater and far more complex and interconnected than it was in 1961.

I think we can. And I'm going to do what I can to help that happen.

Stop the presses! McCain lied. Again.

One of the signature moments (of the few that he had) for Senator McCain in last night's second presidential debate was the accusation (which he repeated twice) that Senator Obama had gotten a $3 million earmark for an "overhead projector" in Chicago. After the first accusation, McCain paused for rhetorical effect and asked "My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?"

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Senator McCain was in fact lying when he made that claim. On multiple levels.

First off, when he said "overhead projector," either he didn't know enough about the subject (unlikely, given that he also mentioned that the projector was for a planetarium) or he was deliberately trying to mislead the audience into thinking that $3 million was an awful lot of money to pay for something you can probably buy at Staples for a couple hundred bucks. The "overhead projector" in question is a replacement for the Zeiss Mark VI projector in the historic Sky Theater at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. This projector is 40 years old, and the manufacturer is no longer making it or supporting it. That's hardly surprising, considering the advances in technology that have been made since 1968.

When the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles reopened a couple of years ago, the New York Times reported that they spent $7 million to upgrade their planetarium projector, which was of an age similar to the one at the Adler. If Adler found something as good that it could get for $3 million (or else had found alternative funding to cover the other half of the costs), it would have been cheap at twice the price.

The next lie is even bigger. As the Adler announced today (PDF link), the earmark that Senator McCain found so appalling was not funded. It should also be noted that the staff at the Adler approached legislators in both the House and Senate, from both sides of the aisle, in an attempt to get funding for this critical replacement. Any reasonably intelligent grants specialist would have told them that was the way to go. Strange, isn't it, that there were no words of criticism from McCain's lips for his fellow Republicans who went along for the ride with Senator Obama?

I should also point out that, according to the International Planetarium Society's directory of planetaria around the world (PDF link), there are two planetaria in Alaska and eight in Arizona, including three in Tucson alone. I wonder what we might find if we were to go digging around in their funding history? Seems quite likely to me that at least one of them sought support for something, and that some legislator helped to get it.

And why wouldn't they? After all, it's not like we've been fretting in this country over our abysmal record at producing students interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields for the last couple of decades or anything. And why should anybody care that, as the National Science Board announced in its STEM action plan this time a year ago, 30 percent of students have to take remedial science and math classes in their first year of college because their secondary education was so deficient? Exactly where does Senator McCain think the ideas and the people are going to come from to develop those alternative fuels he's so certain he can provide for? Who's going to be developing the cars that can go more than a hundred miles on a gallon of whatever they run on? At the rate we're going, it sure as hell isn't likely to be an American scientist. (Truth in advertising: I work at a research university, and my area of responsibility is the mathematical and physical sciences. I myself hold a B.A. cum laude in chemistry and an M.S. in library and information science, among other academic credentials.)

When it was opened in 1930, the Adler Planetarium was the first modern planetarium located in the Western Hemisphere. Judging from the fact that the IPS's public directory of planetaria runs to 52 pages (and that's just showing country, state or province, city, and a web and/or e-mail address for each), I tend to suspect that an awful lot of people in the intervening three-quarters of a century have thought it was a good thing to emulate. As they state on their education page, the Adler Planetarium "...seeks to inspire the next generation of explorers and scientists" and "...is a national leader in science education. Teachers and community groups from across the country can sign up for interactive videoconferences designed and led by Adler educators and/or scientists. We also sponsor symposia and lecture series for adults. Interested members of the general public are invited to download Adler-produced podcasts of videoconferences, lectures and symposia." I was unable to find visitor statistics on their site, but I can state from personal experience that every time I've visited, they've been packed to the walls.

In short, Senator McCain, even if it were true that Senator Obama had helped the planetarium get $3 million for its "overhead projector," it would have been cheap at twice the price. And the payoff would potentially have been huge. So perhaps you'd care to share with your few remaining friends and, incidentally, the rest of us, why you don't think science education is an important priority for our nation and why anyone should have to apologize or be ashamed for having worked to get more funding for it?

Better living through chemistry strikes again

No, not that way!

Two chemists at MIT announced today that they have discovered what appears to be a new kind of catalyst that allows for a process called "water splitting." This process mimics what green plants do as part of the photosynthetic process--they split molecules of water into their component hydrogen and oxygen atoms and then store energy in the bonds holding the hydrogen and oxygen molecules together until that energy is needed, at which point the plant cell catalyzes the reduction of hydrogen and oxygen back into water. Ridiculously easy to do inside a plant cell. Tremendously difficult to accomplish anywhere else--at least as long as you insist on the reaction happening at normal or ambient conditions and in a neutral or relatively mild environment.

Perhaps not anymore. The chemists, Matthew Kanan and Daniel Nocera, published a paper today in the online edition of Science (which means it's got legs--Science rejects something like 98% of the papers submitted to it for publication) announcing such a catalyst that is apparently a complex of cobalt and phosphorus, with a little potassium thrown in for good measure. (If you have a subscription to Science, you can read a news brief about the discovery or the full paper.) If you're not able to get access to Science, there are stories at the Boston Globe, Forbes, and Science Daily, among other sites.

There are still bugs to work out with this discovery, and the discoverers themselves aren't entirely sure how or why it works--but it does work, at least on a laboratory scale. And unlike the constant whining from the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer about drilling for oil offshore, this discovery does seem to have the potential to do something about ameliorating our energy issues. Imagine what we might now be seeing if the Hedgemony hadn't been so eager to slash alternative energy research funding in order to give even more corporate welfare to Big Oil. I find it ironic that this discovery was announced on the same day that ExxonMobil reported second-quarter profits of $11.68 billion and a 14% rise in income over last year. Funding for the National Science Foundation, on the other hand, has been effectively flat for the last three years. Seems to me that we have our priorities in the wrong place.

(Hat-tip to litho at Big Orange.)

Yes, Virginia, it's safe to eat ice cream in public

In the issue dated tomorrow (which appeared awhile ago, obviously, or I wouldn't be talking about it now), The New Republic cast quite a bit of asparagus at the 577-page report of the President's Council on Bioethics entitled Human Dignity and Bioethics. There is certainly cause to cast asparagus. As TNR noted, a quick look at the list of contributors produces a list of people notable primarily for the fact that none of them, with one or two exceptions, actually works in bioethics or any related scientific field, while a preponderance of them are, wait for it, faculty members at Christian institutions of higher education (and mostly we're not talking about Notre Dame or Georgetown).

However, the big brouhaha that's come about on this report revolves around a quote that Steven Pinker attributes on page 4 to Leon Kass (University of Chicago, the American Enterprise Institute, and formerly a contributor to TNR), but which Pinker fails to source:

[Kass] is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

That second paragraph has had a huge airing around Left Blogistan in the last couple of days. And it is deservedly mocked, if for no other reason than that if we take it to its logical conclusion, the Hedgemony would have to shut down the entire restaurant sector, ban concessions at sporting events and other public venues, and mandate something along the lines of what Robert A. Heinlein described in his 1948 juvenile science fiction novel Space Cadet:

Tex wandered on into the second room. "Hey, Oz--come look at this."

Matt and Oscar joined him. There were rows of little closets down each side, ten in all, each with its own curtain. "Oh, yes, our eating booths."

"That reminds me," said Matt. "I thought you had wrecked everything, Oz, when you started talking about eating. But you pulled out of it beautifully."

"I didn't pull out of it; I did it on purpose."

"Why?"

"It was a squeeze play. I had to shock them with the idea that they were indecent, or looked that way to us. It established us as 'people,' from their point of view. After that it was easy." Oscar went on. "Now that we are accepted as people, we've got to be awfully careful not to undo it. I don't like to eat in one of these dark little cubbyholes any better than you do, but we don't dare take a chance of being seen eating--you don't dare even fail to draw the curtain, as one of them might come popping in. Remember, eating is the only sort of privacy they observe."

--Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1948, 1975, 1981), p. 188

Touchdown!

It's probably about an hour and a half before we might be able to see images, but NASA's Phoenix probe has landed in the north polar region of Mars. Touchdown was circa 6:53 Central Daylight Time tonight. NASA has a signal from the spacecraft. Now they're waiting (circa 20 minutes) for the dust from landing to clear, at which point they will direct the lander to begin opening its solar panels to take in power.

This was a huge success, considering that the mission's name reflects the fact that it arose from the ashes of the Mars Polar Lander mission when that probe crashed (or otherwise was rendered inoperable) in December 1998. The Phoenix team had to cannibalize leftover parts and software from the MPL mission and from one other Mars mission that was cancelled. A lot of the instrumentation they had to work with was less than ideal for their mission, which is to explore beneath the Martian surface for traces of ice or water--and signs that there may at some point in the past have been life on Mars.

Come on, Phoenix!

Update: We've got pictures! Here's a mosaic image of the view on the right side of the lander:

This isn't how it's supposed to work

Something else I spotted in that issue of Science the other day perked me up a little. It was a news item about a graduate student in the NIU Geology Department who was wounded in the shootings on February 14. Despite having been shot five times, Brian Karpes, 27, not only survived, but managed to get his poster presentation completed in time for last month's Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Texas. Regrettably, Karpes's injuries prevented him from going to the conference and presenting his poster in person, but an NIU professor made sure it got to the conference. And, as Nature reported on its blog, dozens of colleagues stopped by to sign the poster and express well-wishes to Karpes. A note tacked to the middle of the poster quipped, with understandable pride, "He gets shot FIVE times and he still turns in his homework!!"

Not bad for a graduate student, getting noticed in the two most prestigious journals in science. What a pity that it wasn't solely on the basis of his results--but still, it's a great story and one of many little rays of light and hope that have begun to shine from the darkness surrounding our brush with tragedy earlier this year.

Who says science and the humanities don't mix?

One of the nicer perks of my job is our departmental subscription to Science, which comes to me first each week. I even occasionally get time to read it before somebody else bugs me for the last issue. Since I had a little downtime yesterday afternoon, I was perusing the March 28 issue when I stumbled across this little item (subscription and/or membership required).

It seems that there may have been a reason why composers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance composed the way they did. And that reason may have had something to do with the size and shape and construction of the buildings in which their works were performed--which may in turn have had something to do with the way that cathedrals and chapels were designed. An architectural historian took the choir of St. John's College, Cambridge (along with a bunch of acoustics people and some musicologists) on a very special choir tour to Venice, where they sang a variety of works in 11 different churches and chapels around the city.

Polyphonic works (for example, a Byrd Mass--though in some cases that might be a special case--or a Tallis motet) get mushy in great big spaces like the Basilica di San Marco. There's too much room for the sound to bounce around, and it makes it very difficult for the audience to make out the words. Simpler melodies, like plainchant (or Gregorian chant, or simple polyphonic works like Byrd's Masses) work better in the big spaces. The best spot to sing a really complex polyphonic work is in a smaller space, like a side chapel off of the bigger cathedral. The historian speculates that composers may well have tailored their works for the building in which they would be performed (which, really, any good composer should have done). She even speculated that it might have been possible, with a big enough choir, to achieve something like "surround sound"--which may explain some of the really gigantic works in the early polyphonic repertoire, like Tallis's Spem in alium, composed ca. 1570 for 40 voices. That's 40 voice parts (eight choirs of five voices apiece), not just 40 people singing the same three or four parts, by the by.

Having spent some time singing in spaces big and small, and having attended services in some pretty doggone big churches, the group's findings, which were reported, according to Science, at the Cambridge Science Festival last month, don't surprise me much. I distinctly remember a small chapel on the campus of a choir college or a seminary (I don't remember which it was) in Nashville, where we stopped on choir tour my junior year in college. Obviously, since at least one of the functions of the place was to train singers and musicians and directors for choral work, the chapel at the school was designed with singing in mind: all stone and glass and wood, hard surfaces that keep even a small space vibrant.

One of the pieces we were singing that year was C. P. E. Bach's 1749 Magnificat which, while it's a middle-period piece by chronology and should therefore be more in the classical style, is written in a style much closer to the Baroque or Rococo style favored by C. P. E.'s more famous father. (What that means to non-music buffs is that it's a little more florid and has a lot more weaving of the various lines than you would expect in a classical-period piece.) And I do remember that our director had the darnedest time reining in the soloists (including me), because that little space did such wonderful things for a voice that we were all hanging on to notes longer than we should have, just to enjoy the sound a little more.

By contrast, it's really been an experience going to Mass in places like the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Church of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor in the Galilee, or Notre Dame in Paris. All of those spaces are simply huge--and at Notre Dame, just as would have been done in medieval times--while Mass is going on in the central nave, the tourists and the pilgrims continue to go in and out, oohing and aahing as they gawk at the spectacle, in the side aisles. Even with modern microphones and loudspeakers, it can sometimes be difficult to follow what's going on in a space as big as that--particularly if the speaker or the singer(s) isn't careful about enunciating and allowing for the reverb time.

It's nice to know there may be a scientific basis for those empirical observations.

Brush up your Shakespeare

No, really!

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have found that Shakespeare's language "excites positive brain activity." The Bard's complex language "...causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say." According to Professor Philip Davis of the School of English at Liverpool:

"The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as 'he godded me' from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things."

[edit]

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre, (MARIARC), explains: "The effect on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited. The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak. The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word."

Just be sure not to mention the name of the Scottish Play.

Why science is important

Working with a reconstructed virus, researchers believe they may have uncovered why the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was so virulent:

LONDON (Reuters) - The 1918 Spanish Flu that killed up to 50 million people worldwide caused a severe immune response which may help to explain why it was so deadly, American scientists said on Wednesday.

The pandemic was one of the worst in recorded history and killed more people than World War I. But researchers did not understand what made it so lethal.

By infecting mice with a reconstructed version of the 1918 virus and monitoring their response, a team of scientists believe they have found some clues to solve the puzzle as well as a possible new way to fight pandemic flu.

"What we think is happening is that the host's inflammatory response is being highly activated by the virus, and that response is making the virus much more damaging to the host," said Dr John Kash, of the University of Washington in Seattle, who headed the research team.

The research was recently published in Nature, which, if you know anything about scientific research, tells you it's top-notch. (If I remember correctly, Nature rejects something like 98 percent of the papers submitted to it for publication.)

(Emergency hospital, Camp Funston, Kansas, during the 1918 flu pandemic. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., Image NCP 1603.)

That's why we need people to study science. Not to get high-paying jobs (though of course that doesn't hurt, either). Certainly not so we can brag about how much better we are than all those "other people" are at all things scientific and technological. Because, quite simply, the nation that does not know science is unlikely to prosper for any great length of time.

Far more U.S. soldiers died of influenza in hospitals here in the United States in or near their training camps (like Camp Funston, shown above) or induction stations--or overseas in the combat theatres--than were ever killed by enemy fire, poison gas, or other causes directly related to the Great War. And until today, we really had no clue as to why. Now we do, and we may be able to use that information to prepare ourselves against the possibility (if not the certainty) of another influenza pandemic in the not-too-distant future. The epidemiologists all say we're long overdue for one, so even if H5N1 bird flu doesn't pan out, we're still not out of the forest by any means.