A Day at the Opera

By: | October 11, 2012

“Bern. 1905.”

This simple declaration of setting—space; time—comes about a quarter of the way into Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson currently in revival on a world tour. The brief spoken passage is one of the few, if not the only, that is unaccompanied by music. (Actually, the line in the revival is “Bern, Switzerland. 1905,” but I prefer the original for its abruptness.) The line is immediately followed by a frenetic 13-minute ballet in which ten dancers, always at nothing less than a gallop, trace and retrace geometric patterns with slight variations. As I watched their exertions during a recent matinee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I thought, “What they’re doing is superhuman.”

And then I thought, “And yet they’re human.”

Not that the word superhuman implies doing something that humans can’t do. But it does imply doing something that humans don’t do—at least not without pushing themselves beyond what we otherwise think that humans can do.

Which, I realized with a start, is what Einstein did in Bern in 1905.

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The Latest Thing in E-Readers: Scanning Electron Microscopy

By: | October 10, 2012

Have you ever turned a buckskin whincher, or cradled a chicken-egg recursion device in the palm of your hand? Or caught a quantum of anti-matter and held it by the tail?

They’re all quite possible, it turns out, though you need Big Science for one, and a quite a lot of art for the other two. Come to think of it, my brother might be the only person ever to have done all three.

Mike is a physicist, see, so trapping anti-matter is just part of his day job. Buckskin whinching though? That’s where his friend Rob Chaplin comes in. Rob’s day job, at least part of it, is inventing things that don’t exist, but probably should. The original buckskin whincher appeared in three stories from Carl Sandburg’s 1922 book, Rootabaga Stories. Only it’s never pictured or described, so Rob reverse engineered it from first principles.* Because that’s the way he thinks. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Time Cure

By: | October 9, 2012

Most scientists are reluctant to talk about “curing” mental illness, and rightly so. The mountain is too steep: These disorders have a range of genetic and environmental causes, and symptoms vary widely from person to person. But for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — in which people are haunted for months or years by memories of a life-threatening event — that framework is all wrong.

So says The Time Cure, a book out later this month claiming that people with PTSD can find long-lasting relief by simply re-framing their concept of time. The authors outline a new clinical approach, dubbed Time Perspective Therapy or TPT, which they say is far more effective than any other treatment.

The book includes a lot of common-sense advice: Focus on good rather than unpleasant memories, find enjoyable hobbies, fraternize with a supportive community, make realistic goals. Following these simple directives would no doubt help many people, sick or not, improve their lives. Still, given the millions of people who suffer from PTSD, heralding a cure seems an act of hubris — especially when the evidence is limited to a small (and not peer-reviewed) clinical trial and more than 100 pages of poignant personal stories.
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Buddha, Space, Meteorites and Nazi Science

By: | October 8, 2012

Sometimes even the very best researchers can’t resist the temptation to be a little cheesy, a little celluloid even, unleashing their inner publicity hounds for a short romp. For how else can one explain the more bizarre titles that occasionally adorn the top of scientific papers: “Acute Conjunctival Inflammation Following Contact with Squashed Spider Remains,” for example, or “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.”

More often than not, such titles are merely playful window-dressing to lure overworked colleagues into picking up said paper and paying attention. And perhaps that’s what first crossed the minds of the readers of Meteoritics & Planetary Science, when their eyes fell on a title in the September issue: “Buddha from Space—An Ancient Object of Art made of a Chinga iron meteorite fragment.”

But principal author Elmar Buchner, a geologist at the University of Stuttgart, and the members of his scientific team were not joking. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 6, 2012

October 1 – October 5

Virginia attends a Story Collider, listens to a scientist who picks up roadkill armadillos to study the erectile tissues in their penises, wonders why more scientists don’t tell stories, advises them how to go forth and do so.

Christie was pissed off before about the Komen Foundation’s insistence that screening prevents breast cancer, and she still is.  Because she still has reason to be.

Two brothers argue over and over about which is the better way to live, via science or via religion.  I think whatever gets you through the very real night.

Our boy Abstruse Goose ventures once again down the rabbit hole of the many-world interpretation of the quantum theory.

In spite of most of us being non-geniuses, Jessa says, we still have a meritocracy based on intelligence.  Which we can hardly define and which might not even be necessary, let alone sufficient.

_________

Photo:  J. Centavo

 

Abstruse Goose: Many Damn Worlds

By: | October 4, 2012

Roughly — very roughly — the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that any given measurement of reality depends on the observer doing the measuring.  And if no observer measures a reality, that reality just sort of disappears or collapses or something.

The many-worlds interpretation says wait! maybe the unobserved measurement really just goes off and exists in its own reality, its own world.  And that all worlds with all possibly observed measurements all kind of co-exist simultaneously.  AG is mildly obsessed by this stuff.

Anyway, this time AG has a guy in one world meeting himself in another but — well, you see where it goes.  And I looked up Russell’s Paradox for you, and apparently it has to do with statements that aren’t lies and aren’t truths and are simply inconsistent.  But on the whole, you’re on your own here.  I’m not cut out for these kinds of shenanigans.

__________

http://abstrusegoose.com/457

Science Plus/Versus Religion

By: | October 3, 2012

I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass.  But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; I’m preoccupied by whatever it is that will  happen or might happen or could conceivably happen.  I really, really don’t like the feeling that I care, I’m invested, I’m involved, and that things go wrong and I’m not remotely in control. Actually I think I just have a heightened case of the human condition. Continue reading →

The false narratives of pink ribbon month, redux

By: | October 2, 2012

Back in February, a scandal broke out at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, the breast cancer advocacy group with the trademarked pink ribbon. That scandal centered around the group’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening efforts.  But the flap over Planned Parenthood obscured an even more scandalous problem at Komen — the group’s outright denialism of tumor biology.

I wrote about the problem here on February 8. On August 2, Dartmouth researchers Steven Woloshin and Lisa M Schwartz published an editorial echoing the points in my post. Komen’s response? Silence.

Schwartz tells me, “We never heard from Komen.” If leaders at the group read the Dartmouth paper, they didn’t seem to draw many lessons. According to Schwartz, the group’s new website, I Am the Cure, contains no survival statistics.

“They now seem to be highlighting breast cancer in young people (1 of their 5 quiz questions is about how women in 20’s can get breast cancer),” Schwartz says, “And one of their big ads is about a college senior with metastatic cancer.” There’s nothing wrong with giving a voice to young women facing breast cancer, but it’s deceptive to imply that these stories are typical. The median age at diagnosis is 61.

The deceptive ad that I criticized in February continues to be featured on the Komen website. With National Breast Cancer Awareness Month once again upon us, it seems like a good time to revisit the issue. What follows is my original post from February. 

-Christie

Is breast cancer threatening your life? This Susan G. Komen for the Cure® ad leaves no doubt about who’s to blame —you are. Over the last week or so, critics have found many reasons to fault Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. The scrutiny began with the revelation that the group was halting its grants to Planned Parenthood.  The decision seemed like a punitive act that would harm low-income women (the money had funded health services like clinical breast exams), and Komen’s public entry into the culture wars came as a shock to supporters who’d viewed the group as nonpartisan.*

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