If He Only Had a (Clue About the) Brain

By: | June 3, 2013
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David Brooks from the neck up

David Brooks has done it again. In his New York Times op-ed column last Monday, Brooks portrayed psychiatry as a “semi-science” suffering from “Physics Envy.” He pointed to the publication of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—or DSM-5—as evidence that psychiatry misrepresents itself as hard science. The column opens, “We’re living in an empirical age,” and it goes south from there. (Does he really not know that empiricism as the basis of science dates at least to the seventeenth century? Or is his definition of “age” so broad as to be meaningless? “We’re living in an empirical age,” declared William Bradford, as he stepped off the Mayflower, citing the observations of the moon, sun, planets, and stars over the previous decade by the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei.)

Physicists and biologists, Brooks continues, “have established a distinctive model of credibility,” whereas “the people in the human sciences have tried to piggyback on this authority model.” If by “piggyback on this authority model” he means “emulate the scientific method,” then yes, I would agree. In my experience, scientists do tend to try to be scientific.

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The Last Word

By: | June 1, 2013

May 27 – 31, 2013

7572983836_47e1ce21f8_zHeather’s last post is a case-in-point for why we’re going to miss her so much.  It’s something you’ve never heard of before, told expertly and with great empathy: India’s great population explosion is being calmed by — who knew? — soap operas.  Come back soon, Heather, and tell us another story.

Some scientists have said that we can’t wipe out species in the 3-D undersea world the way we can in the 2-D flatlands.  Erik says we can but try.

Recidivist Guest Anne Casselman opens with a quote:  “In the 1960s we noticed there was a problem with time.”  Turns out the underlying problem is with the earth’s spin.  So what’s a 30-hour day going to feel like?  Anne says you don’t want to know.

I talk to a scientist who digresses into a story about how the government knows what happens to forests when a nuke explodes above them.  They know because did the experiment.  I should stop talking to digressing scientists.

A younger Michelle read a sci-fi story about “feeds” — you know, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. — that connect you with all sentient creatures and take over your brain.  An older Michelle decides to get the hell out of Dodge.

 

Your Guide to the Future

By: | May 31, 2013

feed-new-coverI used to think M.T. Anderson was prescient. Now I’m convinced he’s psychic.

Anderson is the author of the young-adult novel Feed, a very funny — and deeply disturbing — book about the seductive power of social media. In the world of the novel, the fortunate have a “feed” implanted in their brains at birth, connecting them to a network that allows them to communicate with one another, influences their consumer decisions, and, over time, takes over parts of their brain function. Complications ensue.

Sound familiar? Right, it’s not quite reality, but it’s a pretty good approximation of modern life.

Feed was published in 2002, and it’s been a mental metaphor of mine for years. When I’ve spent an entire day chasing stories online, or when I catch myself discussing Facebook posts during a real-life conversation, I think: I need to take a break from the Feed. It’s a useful private joke, a way of drawing a boundary around the online world.

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Blown-Down Trees on the Dark Side

By: | May 30, 2013

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About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons.  Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study back in the mid-1960’s, more or less on their own hook; no one had asked either them or Jason to do it.  They did it anyway because they’d overheard a Pentagon power honcho remark off-hand that it might be a good idea to throw in a nuke once in a while just to keep the North Vietnamese guessing.  The remark reflected loose talk at the time that the few nukes dropped on mountain passes might block the passes and stop the enemy army from coming south.  “You can do that wonderfully well with a few bombs,” Dyson said. “You blow down all the trees.”  And I thought, “How does he know that?”

It turns out that while tactical (i.e., little) nuclear bombs do blow down trees wonderfully well, the large enemy army only has to clear a path through the blown-down trees and keep moving south.  “It’s only bought you a couple of months,” Dyson said.  “And you can’t blow down the same trees twice.  After you’ve blown them down, that’s it.”  He was snickering.  I didn’t bother asking him how he knew this and didn’t think about it again until a couple of weeks ago.

I was interviewing another scientist who started digressing into the old nuclear bomb tests out in Nevada. “Tree blowdown was experimental,” he said, meaning they knew how nuclear bombs blew down trees because they’d done it.  Continue reading →

Guest Post: Enough With the Spin

By: | May 29, 2013

7572983836_47e1ce21f8_z“In the 1960s we noticed there was a problem with time,” says Witold Fraczek, an analyst at Environmental Systems Research Institute in Greater Los Angeles. In 1948 Harold Lyons at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. built the world’s first atomic clock, an instrument that keeps time based on the vibration of atoms or molecules. But the atomic timekeepers noticed that every year was slower than the last. “They said what is wrong with the clock, only to realize that actually earth is slowing down and there was nothing wrong with their atomic clock,” says Fraczek.

The sun rises in the East. And sets in the West. And that’s because the earth spins as it circles the sun. It completes a rotation every 24 hours. But this scenario, this earth-spinning business, it hasn’t always been like this. It used to be considerably faster. And it will be slower in future. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind. Like by five billion years. Continue reading →

Is There Such A Thing As Extinction Proof?

By: | May 28, 2013

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Last year, I reported a story about sharks disappearing in the Sea of Cortez. The story deals with one little spot near the bottom of the Baja Peninsula called El Bajo. El Bajo is famous for two things, I suppose. One, it’s the site where scientists discovered a now-famous behavior in which hammerhead sharks from all over the ocean gather and circle in an amazing slow-motion mating dance (see above and below).

Nowadays we know that there are other spots where this happens, the Galapagos, Guadalupe Islands, and a few others. But the second thing that El Bajo is (or should be) famous for is this: today there are no more hammerheads there. All of them are gone. The story is now on the cover of Discover magazine (marking a sharp divergence from my recent streak of NOT publishing stuff) so I won’t ruin it by telling you why. But in the story I ran across this rather interesting fact. Never in the history of humans-screwing-with-the-world have we managed to send an open-water ocean species into extinction. Continue reading →

Soap Operas versus the Population Bomb?

By: | May 27, 2013

shutterstock_112517477It’s early morning in a Mumbai train station. The video is grainy, but you can clearly make out a dense swarm of humanity along the platform.  By my count, the crowd stands at least ten or twelve people deep, males for the most part, many dressed in light short-sleeved shirts, the kind you’d wear in an office.  As the train rumbles into the station, the men surge forward as if one.  It’s the first stop along the route, and in seconds the train is sardine-can full.

Local observers say that if you want to understand just how congested Indian cities are today, try squeezing into one of Mumbai’s commuter trains. And indeed such Indian scenes of teeming humanity have become enduring memes for the problem of human overpopulation.  In 1960s, for example, Stanford University ecologist Paul Erhlich and population biologist Anne Ehrlich gazed from a car in growing horror as they wound through the streets of New Delhi.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 25, 2013

DSC_0221May 20 – 24

Paleo-BS or solid science? This week, Cassie investigated the new obsession with intermittent fasting.

Cameron examined the void that lurks on the far side of achievement.

Christie revealed some of the most surprising and least expected effects of guns.

Heather told us how experimental archaeology is helping answer the question of what people wore on intercontinental boat trips during the ice age.

Richard tells us that Einstein and Freud met once. Draw your own conclusions.

Happy Memorial Day, Americans!