The Last Word

By: | October 13, 2012

October 8 – 12

This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false.

From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach, or endured it.

Tom tells us about a book made at scales small that light particles are too fat for perception.

Ginny reviews The Time Cure, a book that purports to hold the cure for PTSD.

“A Buddhist god holding a swastika as evidence of an ancient master race in Asia”: you pretty much have to read Heather’s story about the iron man.

 

A real cancer hero

By: | October 12, 2012

In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but never her sense of humor.

This month marks six years since Karen Hornbostel died. I’ve been thinking of her this week as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence showing a vast doping conspiracy by Lance Armstrong and his entourage. The affidavits, emails, bank records and other documents paint a picture of Armstrong as a bully and a cheat.

I wish Karen was around to discuss Armstrong’s downfall. She admired Lance, and in many ways, she modeled her cancer fight after his. In 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (now Livestrong) awarded Karen its “Spirit of Survivorship” award. It was an honor she proudly accepted from Armstrong himself. Like him, she vowed never to yield to cancer, and indeed she fought it to her last breath.

The USADA documents show that Armstrong cheated to win his seven Tour de France victories. The evidence is now overwhelming. The heroic, triumphant tale he (and Sally Jenkins) depicted in his books was a fraud. As Bonnie Ford explains at ESPN, “anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn’t want to know.”

Understandably, the news is difficult for many fans to hear. No one likes to feel suckered, and fairy tales like Armstrong’s appeal to us precisely because they represent the world as we wish it was. When given the choice, who wouldn’t want to believe that something good could come from cancer — that it could turn a punk kid from Texas into a virtuous warrior who fought his disease and his sporting opponents with honor and integrity?

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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.

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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.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/457