Lies about Astronomy

By: | October 21, 2010

The coordinate grid was laid against the sky to fix the stars and for centuries it seemed to work as planned.

Recently, slowly, almost asymptotically, the grid begins to move with respect to itself — abrading, degrading — and therefore deteriorates.

In fact, Declination -14 now sags along its whole length so that Declination +14 is taut and hums like a violin string in a high wind.  Right Ascension 23 has rusted through and swings from its jointure, knocking the vernal equinox out of line.

This year spring came not late exactly, but more toward the center. Continue reading →

Chronic Fatigue Controversy Continues

By: | October 20, 2010

Allison F. can pinpoint the exact day she fell ill. She was at work talking to her boss. “I suddenly felt like a truck hit me. I was weak, dizzy, achy, nauseous and feverish. It felt similar to the onset to the flu, but exceedingly more intense,” she writes. She went home, thinking she had a virus, but she never recovered. Eventually, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

 

Today, she lives with her mother and rarely leaves the house. She struggles with pain, migraines, exhaustion, and neurological problems. “There have been nights when I’ve had serious doubt about whether or not I would make it through until morning (and times when I didn’t care if I did),” she writes. Continue reading →

Napoleon’s legacy: ashes, tombs and DNA

By: | October 19, 2010
October 15, 1840: Napoleon's coffin was lifted on board La Belle Poule.

In perhaps the same way that Americans prattle on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the French never tire of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

In fairness, the circumstances surrounding the Little Corporal’s later years, death and burial are…unusual. At age 46, he was exiled to the godforsaken island of St. Helena. He was still under English custody when he died, five years later, of stomach cancer, and the Brits refused his final wish: to be buried on the banks of the Seine. So the body of Europe’s most famous emperor was buried, sans pomp, underneath three stone slabs and two droopy willow trees.
Continue reading →

The Antisocial Network

By: | October 18, 2010

In his October 8 New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks offered his assessment of the character of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie The Social Network:  “It’s not that he’s a bad person.  He’s just never been house-trained.  He’s been raised in a culture reticent to talk about social and moral conduct.”

This diagnosis of cultural permissiveness is consistent with Brooks’s conservative philosophy.  But not only is his definition of a generation a dubious extrapolation from the actions of one decidedly idiosyncratic individual, it overlooks a more tangible, more immediate cause for that individual’s success through self-immolation:  He’s wired that way.  The Zuckerberg character displays the three classic symptoms of someone who falls on the autism spectrum. He lacks social skills.  He has trouble with empathy.  He finds his greatest fulfillment in restricted behavior.

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The Newest of the People of LWON

By: | October 15, 2010

May we present the newest of the people of LWON, Richard Panek?  Richard thinks that the history of the telescope is a history of mankind’s view of itself; that Einstein and Freud introduced us to the possibility of things both important and invisible; that our knowledge of the universe is constrained by the cosmological Dark Sector; and that the New York Society Library’s open stacks of books talk so loudly he can’t think:  “All of history, all those voices, all at once,” he says.  We are proud to have him and I’m personally a little worried he’s going to make me and Abstruse Goose look silly.  His first post is on Monday.

Photo credit:  Tom Murphy VII

The Ladder of Incompetence

By: | October 15, 2010
Incompetency is the rule in Dilbert's office.

While browsing this year’s list of Ig Nobel awardees (improbable research is so much more fun than the kind that wins Nobels), I stumbled across a quirky little study on The Peter Principle. What’s The Peter Principle? I’m glad you asked.

In 1941, a man by the name of Laurence Peter became a teacher. He noticed almost immediately that his supervisors were ignorant boobs (ok, he may actually have used the word “incompetent”). This seemed paradoxical. “When I was a boy, I was taught that the men upstairs knew what they were doing,” he later wrote. Yet in the school where he worked, it seemed they did not. What’s more, the epidemic appeared to be widespread. Peters found numerous examples of top positions filled by blundering dum-dums who weren’t doing their jobs—or at least weren’t doing them well. Peter pondered this phenomenon, and then he came up with a theory—”The Peter Principle.”

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It Started with a Cat Bite

By: | October 14, 2010

This is the story of Massachusetts General Hospital case #31-2010: a 29-year-old woman whom I’ll call Melissa.

I’m telling Melissa’s story not for its common-sense lesson—avoid interactions with cats*—but because it shows that doctor detective-work happens outside of TV Land.

Melissa was a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital. One day, at work, a cat bit her right hand, in the meaty part where the thumb meets the palm. Bad kitty.
Continue reading →

The Observer: John Huchra, 1948 – 2010

By: | October 13, 2010
Map of the universe, at present, in theory

“The universe is what it is, and we’re trying to find out what it is,” John Huchra told me.  “The explorers of the new world weren’t trying to prove theories, they were looking at what was out there.”

Huchra was an observational astronomer, as opposed to a theorist.  Theorists say that, given physics, the universe ought to look like this.  Observers go to telescopes and look, and report back, no, actually it looks like that.  Theorists put those observations into a theory and say, then if so, you observers should also see this other thing.  Observers look and say, yes but it looks more like that thing.  And so on, back and forth, their court, our court, until the whole tennis game – Huchra liked the word, “game” — results in a theory, an explanation, a lovely story we can all believe because it’s so thoroughly grounded in observations. Continue reading →