Redux Baltimore: Drugs, Guns, and Real Life

By: | March 16, 2015

This was originally published 8/23/2011.  More should have changed by now.  This is a sort of permanent redux.Today is my birthday, a good time to reflect. And one of the things I have found myself brooding over lately is my love of Baltimore. As fans of The Wire know, the city has more than its fair share of problems — drugs, violence, and HIV, to name a few. I moved to Baltimore in 2006. And I spent a healthy chunk of the nine months I lived there trying to understand why those problems exist. Specifically, I wanted to understand why Baltimore became a hotbed for heroin and how the city’s heroin addiction fueled the spread of HIV. I interviewed dozens of people and tried to make sense of what they told me. The end result was my graduate thesis.

The following piece is a chapter from that document. I’ve changed the name of the main character to protect his privacy, and I’ve shortened it a bit to make it more blog-friendly (though it’s still a long read).

Readers of LWON, meet Leroy.

Leroy Wallace, standing in the lobby of the Baltimore’s Moore Clinic, is bird thin beneath his dark jeans and cream sweater.  A gold cross, suspended from a fragile chain, hangs halfway down his chest.  He introduces himself, shakes my hand, and we follow a nurse to a quiet room where we can talk.  Leroy is eager and his false teeth, one of which is gold, clack rhythmically as he tells me the story of how he became a heroin addict. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 14, 2015

IMG_2033March 9-13, 2015

On Friday the 13th, Cassie told us the sad story of the people who died after taking a perfectly reasonable-seeming medicine, and what that means for the drugs we take today.

Ann told us what today’s brilliant young astronomers are up to: crazy stuff, like figuring out a rule of thumb for guessing the density of faraway planets.

Jessa followed up on the quiz from two weeks ago with a brief lecture on symmetry, and how big of a deal it is for both arthropods and humans.

Cameron considered geography and personality and why, as an introvert, she prefers the ocean (above), then asked her friends what kind of landscape they like.

On Monday, Richard reached into the vaults to rerun a post on science, America, and the Enlightenment. Remember the good ol’ days, when people thought empiricism was important?

photo: Cameron Walker

 

Watkins’ Lethal Elixir

By: | March 13, 2015

Elixir_SulfanilamideOn September 27, 1937, Susie Mae DeLoach caught her leg on a strip of barbed wire. The wound festered, and the infection spread, eventually reaching her heart. None of the remedies DeLoach’s doctor recommended seemed to have any effect. And by the time her family called Dr. Johnston Peeples for a second opinion, she was gravely ill. Peeples prescribed a new medication—a sweet, ruby liquid called Elixir Sulfanilmide. DeLoach’s kidneys began to fail, and a little over a week later, she was dead.

Others in the South were dying too—a farm laborer in Mississippi, a butcher in Tennessee, an eight-year-old boy in Oklahoma. More than 100 people died in the fall of 1937. They suffered from a variety of maladies, but all exhibited remarkably similar symptoms toward the end: vomiting and an inability to urinate. And all shared a common remedy—Elixir Sulfanilmide. Continue reading →

Another Brick in the Anti-Copernican Wall

By: | March 12, 2015

8480735637_c2f3a78185_cThe Hubble Fellows are — forgive me — young stars: young PhD astronomers granted the money to go to whatever astronomy-doing place they want to go to and do whatever astronomy they want to do.  And once a year, the Hubble Fellows give public talks about what they’re up to, so any astronomy writer with a brain knows that these young folks are doing the next science and will be all over those talks.

The first thing I notice, because I’m unbearably trivial, is that the young men scientists in their shirts and chinos/jeans with stuff in their pockets are dressed more casually than the older men scientists wearing sports jackets which they clearly keep handy in a pile under their desks.  And the young women scientists are dressed unlike the older women scientists who seem to feel the necessity for dressing as much as possible like the older men scientists.  The second thing I notice is how hard I have to work to figure out what they’re talking about but once I do, it’s often so ingenious that I can see what evolution saw in humans. Continue reading →

A Leg to Stand On

By: | March 11, 2015

scullingFor all those who suffered through my impossibly obscure quiz questions a fortnight ago, my heartfelt thanks. 120 readers sat the quiz to the end, and the average grade of 44% is no disservice to your knowledge level.

There is one question in particular, though, whose most popular response surprises me. A remipede is a pale crustacean with no eyes, and 37 people guessed that correctly. Interestingly, 51 people (42.5% of the respondents) chose “an insect with an odd number of legs”.

May I direct your attention to the Last Word on Nothing banner image above – a display of the types of symmetries in life, from the Field Museum in Chicago. Let’s talk about bilateral symmetry. Continue reading →

These Are a Few of Our Favorite Places

By: | March 10, 2015

IMG_1934
When my husband finished grad school in 2006, we spent a lot of time talking about where we should go next. We knew we wanted to leave the college town in Oregon where we’d lived for the last few years. Should we head to the Cascades, move north along the Willamette River, or go south and west, to the edge of the sea?

We ended up choosing the water. Here we are still, perched above the Santa Barbara Channel, with views of oil rigs, islands, and most of all, the sea.

Many factors went into the decision. There were our families to consider. There was the weather–we flew up through thick Portland clouds and descended to a sunlit California tarmac lined by swaying palm trees. And maybe even that we’d spent several weeks that summer binge-watching the OC had some sway. But research presented a few weeks ago at the Society For Personality And Social Psychology meeting in Long Beach suggests that our personalities might have had something to do with it as well. Continue reading →

Redux: The Beginning of the End of Science

By: | March 9, 2015

Some things never change. And sometimes the things that never change still somehow change for the worse. This post originally ran on January 5, 2011—an anti-science era that now seems almost quaint. Those were the days!

I blame David Letterman. Less than a month before the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, one of the guests on his show was the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. After the usual banter, Letterman got down to business: the death penalty (2:51 in the clip above). “Did they ever determine whether or not it deterred crime?” Letterman said. “Is it a deterrent?”

“I think that’s a hard statistic to prove,” Bush answered. “If I could be convinced it didn’t deter crime, I may change my opinion about the death penalty.”

“But Governor,” Letterman didn’t say, “everybody knows you can’t prove a negative.”

Actually, everybody doesn’t know that. Maybe Letterman did know it, but didn’t think fast enough to say it. Certainly Bush didn’t know it, and he continued not to know it. And the consequences of that ignorance will be taking their oaths of office today, as the 112th United States Congress convenes.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 7, 2015

A sheet of iceMarch 2 – 6, 2015

“Maybe I’m wrong, maybe hidden in laboratories and in front of chalkboards around the world there are scores of undiscovered hot, charismatic scientists hiding from the spotlight,” says Erik.  “We need these people. Because God knows the pseudoscience nut jobs will take them if we don’t.”

Abstruse Goose gets snippy with tech assistance.  I, however, have “resolved to save all telephonic unpleasantness for the rat bastards who say they’ll take you off their list but who have an infinity of lists.”

“As the climate changes, so will our vocabulary,” says Michelle.  “Here in Washington State, in the Columbia River Gorge, we already need words for ‘the color of bare mountain slopes in midwinter’ and ‘daffodils that bloom in February.’ East Coasters could probably use more words for ‘public-transport-crippling storms’ and ‘the smooth mound of snow covering a long-buried car.’”

“No hot tubs, the experts advised. No queso fresco. No Advil. No deli meat. Limit the caffeine. These losses, so numerous and unexpected, were harder to bear,” says Cassie. “But then the doctor took away something even more precious: my autonomy.”

“Walked. Strode, one might say. As if I were still in Paris, where I’d been the day before. Across a nice slick patch of ice. Nooot the heeeeaaaad!!!! I thought, as I toppled inexorably backward,” says Helen, who’s Fed Up. To. Here.