Cocktail Party Physics

tit for tat

Good Internet humor never really dies; it just languishes for awhile in the dusty archives until a new crop of browsers stumbles upon its cheeky goodness. Such is the case with Simon Dedeo's "Physical Theories as Women" essay on the McSweeney's Website, which has been making the rounds again in the science blogosphere. (At least, the Spousal Unit assures us it's an older article, and he, like, knows Dedeo from their Windy City days.) Far be it for us to take umbrage at the amusing characterizations of our gender contained therein -- c'mon, we all know those stereotypical females exist in one form or another. But I do think, in the interests of fair play, the women should have their own version while we're having fun with the battle of the sexes.

Ergo, I offer today's frivolous blog post: "Physical Theories as Men." And I offer it with a disclaimer: Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is sheer coincidence, and greatly exaggerated for comic effect. Except for the Irish artist. That totally happened.

0. Newtonian gravity is that guy you had a crush on in high school. You never really dated, but you spent a lot of time together, and once you even made out in the science lab after school over a partially dissected fetal pig. It didn't go well. Things were kinda awkward after that, but you remained friendly from a distance. Or so you thought. Years later, you find out he told everyone you were a frigid lesbian -- even though he was the one who wouldn't go past second base because he "respected" you too much. To paraphrase Whistler, the helpful demon from Buffy (Season 2): "Newtonian gravity is like dating a nun. You're never gonna get the good stuff." You suspect he may have been gay.

1. Electrodynamics is your first real boyfriend, and all your friends swear he's quite the catch: well-educated, ambitious, clean-cut, amusing, great chemistry, plus you love his mom. Alas, he is Mr. Traditional Family Values, and you are still going through your experimental "finding yourself" phase -- frankly, you're just not ready to settle down. Sure, opposites attract and make the sparks fly, but there has to be some complementary areas, too. You think he cares too much about what other people think. Your electro-shock blue Mohawk and multiple body piercings pretty much take you out of the running for Long-Term Potential, given his conservatism and career ambitions. When your differences become too great, you chalk it up to life lessons learned and move on to greener pastures.

2. Special Relativity is the wild, free-thinking rebel intent on smashing all those outmoded "rules" that say he can't go faster than the speed of light -- preferably while listening to the dulcet tones of The Sex Pistols and Rage Against the Machine. He's colorful, exciting and just a wee bit dangerous after the rather plodding predictability of Newtonian gravity and electrodynamics. So you fall for the flash -- at first. But after awhile, his inability to sit still wears thin. It seems the more he rushes about, the more constricted you feel, and your "dates" just seem to stretch on for eternity. The sex isn't all that great, either, frankly: you've never been a size queen, but a girl's still got standards, and length contraction has clearly taken its toll.

3. Quantum Mechanics is that weird, nutty counter-culture guy who's always got his finger on the pulse of the Latest Thing, before it hits the mainstream and "sells out." He just can't commit -- not to you, not to anything. Sometimes you're not sure you even know who he is, because every time you try to study him closely, he changes. Is he a particle or a wave? Aquarius, or Pisces (he swears he was born on the cusp)? Good guy or spherical bastard (or perhaps an asymmetrical asshole)? Gay or straight, or rabidly omni-sexual? You spend months, sometimes years, fretting over this romantic superposition of states. When the wave function finally collapses, it's never in your favor. He makes you feel hopelessly mainstream.

4. General Relativity is the solid salt-of-the-earth type of guy that you know you should probably be crazy about -- especially after that jerkwad quantum mechanics shattered your heart into a million pieces. You have a good time with him: he's smart, orderly, disciplined, and can bend and warp with the flow when life gets too heavy. But there's just no romantic spark there, and a dire lack of physical chemistry.  Face it: you're not in love. It seems a cruel, cruel irony.

5. Quantum Field Theory is that scruffy wannabe Irish artist spending the summer in New York City mooching off various acquaintances and far-too-trusting females. He actually brags about being on the dole back in London. That should have been your first clue. But he's cute, and smart, with a lilting Irish brogue, and makes you look at Rauschenberg with fresh appreciative eyes, although you still think Ellsworth Kelly is a crock. You decide he's worth a tumble, because it's been awhile, plus he assures you he's going back home in a couple of days and you need never see him again.

Alas, he gets so drunk telling you all this, spinning his web of deceit, that when you finally get down to business, he literally passes out on top of you -- in flagrante delicto. This, after you paid for all those drinks because he didn't have any cash and his credit cards were maxed out to the limit. You console yourself by recalling that the same thing happens to Liv Tyler's character in Stealing Beauty. Two weeks later, you run into him at an art-house film festival with another girl in tow. He pretends not to know you. It's not like you were all that into the guy, but your pride takes a bit of a beating. Quantum field theory is a cheap, lying bastard. And they're saving a chair for him in Alcoholics Anonymous.

6. Analytical Classical Mechanics is the self-absorbed, older intellectual that you date because you've decided you're tired of immature physical theories who refuse to grow up and take some responsibility. He's a bit pretentious and likes to pontificate about science as a social construct. He's also a snob: he listens only to classical music, and despises all popular culture (excepting the films of Ingmar Bergman). You know, the type that brags about not owning a TV whenever one of your pals mentions their favorite program. This gets awfully tedious very quickly and you start to get snippy and irritable. Sensing your boredom, he dumps you first, condescendingly assuring you that "one day you'll understand," and get over the heartbreak. In fact, you feel liberated and celebrate with pitchers of margaritas and a marathon viewing of MacGuyver.

7. String Theory is the sensitive, complex emo guy with an impossibly brilliant mind and lots of emotional problems. In fact, he's been in therapy practically since birth. He constantly complains that nobody understands him, and he's right: sometimes it's like he's speaking an entirely different language. You're fascinated because he's got so many dimensional levels and seems to vibrate with a mysterious energy. Besides, you think you can help him overcome his intractable problems. You are deluding yourself. His interest in your simplistic three-spatial-dimensioned presence wanes in record time, and he starts passively-aggressively acting out. You suspect he wants to break up with you but just doesn't have the balls to say so. He denies this when you confront him, insisting you can "work things out," but then you find out he's been having a fling with Loop Quantum Gravity, after swearing he hates her GUTs.

8. And Cosmology? Well duh. That's the guy you marry. Because you know he sees the Big Picture, and he'll be in it for the long haul.

big, big reads

It's been a busy week, what with trips to Vegas, looming deadlines, a global warming kerfuffle, and such. It's still busy, which is why I probably won't be posting again to the cocktail party until Friday or Saturday. In the meantime, on the off-chance you missed them (or think I'm a slacker), here's what I've been blogging about over at Twisted Physics:

-- Loop the Loop (closed timelike curves and an X Files episode)
-- Weird Science (an ode to crackpottery)
-- GLAST-nost (classical composer pens prelude inspired by
-- A Bug's Life (extremophiles will inherit the earth)
-- A Legacy Lives On (Jodrell Bank is saved! Huzzah!)
-- X Marks the Spot (astronomers have had x-ray vision for years)
-- Splitting Image (Hugh Everett's Many Worlds doctrine is the topic of shiny new film)

Of course, if you're feeling particularly ambitious, there's always that quaint tradition of reading books instead of blogs. The National Endowment for the Arts sponsors The Big Read, and via Tom at Swans on Tea, I came across this book meme of the NEA's top 100 books. (A couple of the NEA's choices are a bit, um, questionable, but hey -- reading is fundamental!) The rules are simple:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
3) Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [I am the child of fundamentalists. Of course I've read the entire Bible. Twice.]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [English major; 'nuff said.]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby 0 F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
*37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
*41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [oh, the wasted hours of my life I'll never get back]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
*51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [saw the film]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding [not a fan. sorry.]
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [absolutely brilliant]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
*86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [what the hell is this doing on here?!?]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The upshot? I read too damn much. Seriously, many of the books on the list I read while still in college,  majoring in English lit, when it was my "job" to be well-read and -- let's face it -- I had a lot more leisure time on my hands. But I'm still a voracious reader. So is the Spousal Unit. Which explains why our loft is constantly in danger of collapsing under the weight of the all the books. Then again, I've only read two books on Gwyneth Jones' recent Top 10 list of science fiction by women writers: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, and Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary.

I have far less time on my hands these days, this week in particular. But I did find time to play with Wordle, like all the other cool science bloggers. Here's the Wordle for my new book:

I am such a slacker.

klimate kerfuffle

Jen-Luc Piquant is tres, tres fache at the moment because a group of unprincipled global warming denialists is spreading lies about our beloved American Physical Society (APS). Readers familiar with my backstory might recall that I took a job with the APS many years ago when I was struggling to make it as a freelance writer in NYC. What started out as a short-term office job to pay the bills turned into a fabulous shiny new career and ignited a love for science in general, and physics in particular, that I would not have thought possible otherwise. I'm still a contributor to APS News (membership newsletter) and to Physics Central's blog, Physics Buzz, part of the Society's outreach efforts. So yeah, I have a bit of a soft spot for APS, and hate to see its good name unfairly tarnished.

Now, every organization is going to have its unsightly warts and such, but the APS is a solid citizen by any standard -- and it puts good science above all else, especially in the case of policy decisions. So imagine my surprise to read this paragraph at Daily Tech:

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

Say what?!? Did I accidentally stumble into Bizarro World? There is no way in hell the APS would ever officially sponsor or support any kind of global warming denialism. For starters it would directly contradict the Society's own November 2007 policy statement:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Believe me, it takes ages to get the APS Council to agree on a statement, bless their independent-minded hearts: they quibble over every word, including "and" and "the." I found it hard to believe they could have had such a total change of heart so quickly, i.e., in less than a year. So I did what any clear-thinking person would do when faced with a suspicious bit of information: I went straight to the source material, which turned out to be the latest issue of Physics and Society, the humble (relatively speaking) in-house newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society.

I'm not knocking the publication, mind you: it has some very interesting, thought-provoking articles, and traditionally the editor seeks to foster debate and discussion on issues of science policy. But it clearly states in each and every issue that the newsletter is a place for members to express opinions, and that the APS does not officially endorse anything that appears within its pages. It is neither a peer-reviewed scientific journal, nor a mouthpiece for the APS Executive Board and Council. Nor does it pretend to be.

Anyway, the current editor, Jeff Marque, apparently decided to run opinion pieces focusing on both sides of climate change -- one by well-known (and handily debunked) denialist Lord Monckton. Marque indicated in his editorial comment introducing the issue that there were "a significant number" of physicists who disagreed with the IPCC conclusions about global warming due to CO2 emissions from human activities. (Note: "overwhelming consensus" still handily trumps "significant number," for those unfamiliar with physics-speak.)

This was the phrase that the Daily Tech blogger jumped on, and proceeded to willfully mis-represent with malice aforethought. (Incidentally, the last couple of times I tried to access the post in question, I got a blank page, but all the other posts on Daily Tech load just fine, so I suspect the post may have been pulled in the aftermath of the kerfuffle.) Soon, the sewer-brain that is Matt Sludge Drudge jumped on the story and it proliferated throughout the blogosphere. (We have never stooped to linking to the Drudge Cesspool Report here, and I'm not going to do so now.) And then it spread like a fungus to a bunch of other denialist sites and blogs. Most couldn't even get the Society's name right, which doesn't say much for their attention to detail.

Fortunately, Climate Progress was paying attention and sounded the alarm, urging readers to write to the APS objecting to such an article appearing in an APS publication. Joseph Romm, who heads Climate Progress, is a former APS Congressional Fellow, so he felt pretty strongly about this, even calling for the firing of Marque. I think that last part is a bit of an over-reaction. For one thing, Marque, like most of the APS leadership, is a volunteer. For another, he's mostly just guilty of a lapse in judgment. Marque is not the one who mis-represented the Society. The Daily Tech blogger did that. Direct your anger at the appropriate target, people.

But otherwise, kudos to Romm and Climate Progress for keeping a sharp eye out, and moving quickly to counter the smear. Once it became aware of what had happened, the APS Council posted a notice on its Website clearly stating that it has not changed its official position on climate change. And it added a disclaimer to the offending article in Physics and Society:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

Got that? Really, it couldn't be more clear. This episode is just a minor kerfuffle, of course, but it demonstrates a useful principle: always, always go to the source material before putting your faith in what some blogger or news reporter tells you. That goes for me, too, by the way...

pretty poison

[NOTE: The Spousal Unit and I are off to Vegas for the next five days. It's book research, I swear! Well, mostly.... Here's an uber-long post to fill the gap in our absence.]

Elevators are an odd sort of public meeting space. I had an interesting exchange the other day when I stepped into an elevator with a couple of burly guys who were moving a few big boxes, and inexplicably debating the differences between the words "shiv" and "shank." One insisted they were both nouns for a makeshift stabbing weapon, while the other argued that the latter was a verb ("to shank"). (Dick Hickock, one of the murderers in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, purportedly fashioned a shiv out of a toilet brush during his imprisonment and hid it under his mattress. It was discovered and confiscated pretty quickly.)

Without thinking, I blurted out, "Actually, 'shank' can be used as both a verb or a noun, but the more common usage is as a verb -- you know, to shank someone with a shiv." They stared at me in shock -- not so much at the interruption, but at the fact that this information came from a slim, light-haired woman in downtown Los Angeles, wearing a flowered top and sandals and carrying a bright blue patchwork handbag. Then one of them shrugged, chuckled, and said, with just a hint of condescension, "Okay, then, I guess you learned that during your last stint up the river."

Well, no: I learned that from 10 years of jujitsu in deepest, darkest, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where folks know their shanks from their shivs, and the Club isn't so much a deterrent for car thieves, but a popular weapon of choice. The guy was quite friendly, and he didn't call me "sweetie" or "hon," plus, I'm used to men not taking me as any kind of threat, even after I tell them about my training. Usually, they think it's cute. ("Well, she's a feisty little filly, ain't she?")

There's just something about that Y chromosome that blinds them to the reality that a woman might actually be able to hurt them. (I got around this problem in the dojo by, well, hurting them -- much to their surprise, and eventual respect. My nickname was "the headhunter.") Perhaps that's because they think aggression is all about force -- in which case, superior size and strength do become significant factors. The laws of physics are pretty clear about that. Women throughout the ages have known, however, that stealth, cunning, and a concealed weapon can be far more effective -- whether one's enemy's superior size and strength is physical, or a more intangible power advantage.

I don't fashion my own crude stabbing implements, but I do own a gorgeous, hand-forged poniard (dagger), with a small green stone set in the hilt. It's a traditional "woman's weapon": decorative, but deadly. Theoretically, one could dip the tip in a poison to make sure one's enemy didn't survive the initial stab wound. Not that I would ever do such a thing; mostly, I think it's pretty. And it reminds me of the sort of thing Lucrezia Borgia might have carried. By virtue of her gender and time period, she was pretty much doomed to limited social/political power in the lawless environment of 15th century Italy/Spain, but her name nonetheless became synonymous with corruption, infidelity, incest, and murder. Rumors about Lucrezia abound, and endure, even those lacking any historical evidence whatsoever.

My personal favorite is that she owned a hollow ring filled with poison (usually arsenic, a white tasteless odorless power first concocted by an Arab alchemist named Jabir) -- the better to poison an offending guest's drink, my dear. Street vendors used to sell cheap replicas along St. Mark's Place when I lived in NYC. (I owned one that was shaped like a spider, and used to fill it with salt and offer to sprinkle it on friends' food when dining out. Because what's the point of having a pretend poison ring if you can't use it to pretend-poison people?)

There were rumors of incest with her brother, Cesare (who had her second husband strangled), and while her third marriage proved solid enough socio-politically, both partners had numerous affairs. Yes, the poor woman was treated like chattel and married off to one husband after another to gain political advantage for the male branches of the Borgia family tree. She died at age 38, after giving birth to her eighth child. Who could blame Lucrezia if she took her power wherever she could find it?

Lucrezia was blonde, beautiful, and able to charm hostile in-laws in a pinch. But she wasn't just a pretty face. I'm sure her poisoning victims -- had one been able to ask them (and assuming the rumors are true) -- would have substantially revised their assessment of her capabilities after dining chez Borgia. Apparently, she employed both a full-time chef, and a separate, full-time poisoner. Per Wikipedia: "During the Renaissance, social climbers would commonly boast, 'I'm dining with the Borgias tonight.' A smaller number would boast, 'I dined with the Borgias last night." (Incidentally, actress Brooke Shields is a descendant of Lucrezia, so maybe all the critics who panned Lipstick Jungle might want to hire official "tasters" during meals for awhile.)

Italy seems to have boasted several such conniving femme fatales. In the 1600s, for instance, a woman named Giulia Toffana (known in some sources as Teofania D'Adamo) had a thriving household business selling a poison of her own concoction -- called aqua tofana ("Tofana water") -- to female clients throughout Palermo, Naples, and Rome. No one knows the exact formulation, but the ingredients are common enough: mostly arsenic, with a touch of lead, and perhaps even a dash of belladonna (also known as deadly nightshade, but it's significant that the name translates as "beautiful lady"). The poison was colorless, tasteless, and easily mixed with wine or water so it could be administered to the unsuspecting target during meals.

Historians estimate some 600 victims may have died from Toffana's poisonous concoction -- most of them the husbands of those aforementioned female clients. (There's a legend that Mozart was poisoned with aqua tofana, although most historians dismiss this claim outright.) Toffana was a particularly deadly sort of Renaissance feminist, who objected to the low social status of women in her culture, and their utter lack of legal rights when it came marriage (or divorce).

Eventually, one of her customers betrayed her to papal authorities, was tortured, and then executed in Rome along with her daughter and three other assistants. It might seem excessive, but Arsenic poisoning is a pretty ugly way to go. Basically, the poison inhibits certain key metabolic enzymes, and the victim ultimately dies from multiple organ failure. Before that merciful release, however, he will experience violent stomach pains, excessive vomiting (producing a greenish-yellow muck streaked with blood), diarrhea, pain when urinating, clammy sweats, convulsions, "excoriation of anus" (I don't even want to know), and delirium. Oh, and then death. Those unhappy Italian wives hated their spouses a lot. Because the symptoms so closely resembled those of cholera, arsenic poisoning often went undetected.

Arsenic has always been a popular toxin for would-be murderers. One of my favorite mystery novels is Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison, in which the fictional Lord Peter Wimsey clears the name of a young woman, Harriet Vane, who has been accused of murdering her lover with arsenic. Vane was a mystery writer, and had been working on a new novel involving arsenic poisoning at the time of her lover's death. Bad luck, that. In fact, she'd even purchased a tin of arsenic commonly used to poison rats as part of the "research" for her forthcoming novel.

I will not make the egregious error (this time) of spoiling the rest of the plot for curious readers. But I'd wager Sayers probably did something similar to research Strong Poison.  She may also have taken a look into the historical archives and stumbled upon the famous Lafarge murder case -- a notorious trial in France in 1840 that put the still-young science of toxicology to a crucial test. (The first use of chemical tests to detect arsenic in a legal trial occurred in 1752.)

A young woman named Mary Lafarge was accused of poisoning her husband Charles (yet another unhappy marriage). She, too, bought arsenic ostensibly to poison rates, except certain witnesses testified they'd seen her stirring a white powder into her husband's food.

But the defense challenged the methods of the medical experts -- lawyers never really change, do they? -- because the doctors hadn't used a new improved test for arsenic developed by the English chemist James March in 1836. It was a far more sensitive test, able to detect tiny trace amounts of arsenic. (Arsenic deposits can be found in the hair follicles and nails once it enters the bloodstream, for instance --  a key plot point in Strong Poison.) The tests conducted when Charles' body was exhumed were negative for arsenic. But a chemical analysis of the leftover food and various white powders Marie carelessly left about the house "contradicted the negative finding." Zut alors! What to do? Clearly the big guns were needed. So they called in Mathieu Orfila, the world's greatest expert on toxicology at the time.

They couldn't have made a better choice. Orfila literally wrote the book on toxicology (Traites des Poisons) in 1814, and labored tirelessly to make chemical analysis a routine part of forensic medicine. He studied the effects of asphyxiation, for instance, the decomposition of bodies, and developed tests to detect the presence of blood. And he made a crucial finding about exhumation: arsenic in the soil around graves could sometimes leak into the bodies, leading to an incorrect finding of poisoning. To guard against this, he developed a method for testing soil to rule out accidental contamination in all exhumation cases.

Orfila brought this hard-earned expertise to bear on the Lafarge murder trial. He performed Marsh tests on the samples taken from the body, as well as the soil around the burial site to rule out any contamination from arsenic in the soil. There were definitely traces of arsenic in the body, and it didn't come from the soil. Marie Lafarge was found guilty of murder, although her death sentence was later commuted to life in prison.

Since then, we've seen the development of the alkaloid poison test (for detecting quinine, morphine, strychnine, atropine and opium); of spectrum analysis using spectroscopes; and of ultracentrifuges to separate particles by mass, making it possible to precisely measure the molecular weights of complex proteins. In the 1950s, ultraviolet and infrared spectrometry, along with x-ray diffraction and gas chromotography, found forensic applications, and in 1966, scientists introduced Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy and atomic absorption spectroscopy.

Science is still giving us new ways to test chemical substances like poison and solve all kinds of unsolved mysteries -- or just to clear up some lingering rumors, like the one about Napoleon Bonaparte was poisoned by prison guards during his imprisonment at Saint Helena.  Samples of his hair did who high levels of arsenic, but, like the poison from soil leaching into exhumed bodies, it need not be the result of deliberate poisoning. Arsenic was used in lots of things, including as a pigment in some wallpapers at the time of Napoleon's death. Prolonged exposure could account for those high levels, along with the fact that his body was buried for 20 years on the island before being exhumed and moved to its final resting place.

Just this past May, physicists came to the rescue to resolve the issue once and for all. They used a small nuclear reactor at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), built to detect neutrinos for the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events. Except instead of testing neutrinos, the scientists used the machine to study particles in Napoleon's preserved hair samples. Neutron activation established that all of the hair samples -- including the control samples -- contained traces of arsenic. While the levels were pretty high, apparently they weren't unusually so for the time: all the hair samples taken from 200 years ago had levels some 100 times higher than those taken from folks today. And there was no significant increase in those arsenic shortly before Napoleon's death, as there would have been if he'd been administered a fatal dose.

So Napoleon's guards have been exonerated by science (although who knows about that wallpaper?). The medical consensus now seems to be that he died of something less glamorous, like stomach cancer. Still, at least one historical case of suspected arsenic poisoning turned out to be true, when forensic scientists determined a few years ago that famed racehorse Phar Lap died after ingesting a massive dose of arsenic. Next they'll be telling us someone poisoned Seabiscuit, or worse -- someone shanked Mr. Ed with a shiv.

s is for sizzle

What might happen to an idealistic marine biologist after he decides to leave the Ivory Tower? If you're Randy Olson, you become an independent filmmaker. First, you make a splash  with a short music video about the sex life of barnacles. Then you take on intelligent design and the failure of the scientific community to make their counter-arguments about evolution convincingly to the public with a quirky documentary called Flock of Dodos. And then you see that Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and decide there really needs to be a documentary about global warming that lets the scientists speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, in the eyes of Hollywood producers, scientists rank right down there with, well, barnacles on the list of Least Telegenic Life Forms (nor do scientists have disproportionately large sex organs to compensate for their general lack of pizazz). Olson finds there are very few people willing to invest in a documentary featuring scientists. "My neighbor's a scientist, and I certainly wouldn't pay to see him on screen," one potential investor bluntly says. Olson finally gets some meager funding from a flamboyantly gay couple, Mitch and Brian, who care deeply about the problem of global warming (when not distracted by unsightly skin rashes). "We're really, really upset about it," says Mitch. "We just don't know why."

The quest to find out why Mitch and Brian are so upset about global warming -- and why the rest of us should be, too -- provides a handy narrative framework for SIZZLE!, Olson's latest film, opening later his week. It's his bid to make his case for the environment with offbeat humor and a refreshingly light touch. Sure, it's a bit contrived. SIZZLE! is a celluloid hybrid, as much mockumentary as documentary, blending the real with selected fictional elements, and that makes for the occasional stilted scene, particularly when the non-show-biz sorts are involved. But it's not always possible to get the footage you need without a bit of staging -- especially given the microscopic budgets allotted to most independent filmmakers.

The film's greatest strength is its delightful cast of characters. You've got Mitch and Brian (actors playing exaggerated versions of themselves), so obsessed with finding a celebrity host for their documentary that they take to stalking random celebrities on the streets of Los Angeles -- who are understandably less than thrilled at being accosted. ("Okay, Christina Ricci ran away from us... that was bad....") There's the sound guy, Antoine (Ifeanyi Njoku)  and a chronically late cameraman named Marion (Alex Thomas), who is skeptical that global warming is real and keeps interrupting Olson's interviews with the scientists: "I just think it's a scam, man...." There's even a cameo by Olson's 83-year-old mother, Muffy Moose, who sneaks off with Antoine and Marion to go dancing at a hip-hop club (my favorite scene is watching "Muff-Diddy" get her groove on). 

Frankly, Marion steals the entire movie. He represents the Everyman, asking the "Man on the Street" sort of questions that most scientists would never think to ask. If there's global warming, how come it snowed two weeks ago in Johannesburg? Why was this past winter so cold? How can what I do in Los Angeles affect the polar bears in Antarctica? Does it really matter if the Earth's temperature goes up a couple of degrees over a century? These are all excellent questions; some of them are even answered.

Olson wisely lets his cast take center stage and opts to play the straight man: the quintessential buttoned-down scientist with an uber-tight sphincter and earnest belief that data is all that matters. He wants to call his documentary The Heat is On? -- because that question mark is, like, the perfect punchline. (Considering all the other alternatives suggested in the mock-brainstorming session -- GloboCop, Emission Impossible, Honey I Shrunk the Glaciers, To Live and Fry in LA -- we should be grateful everyone settled on SIZZLE!)

Given their tight budget, and his belief that Marion has ruined all the footage from their interviews, Olson's focus for the film's visuals shifts to (what else?) PowerPoint slides, because data is "what always works." The kicker is when Olson soberly announces he's snagged yet another interview with some scientists in Seattle: "The data these scientists have got is going to blow everybody away." The same sub-theme ran through Flock of Dodos: exasperation with the all-too-common assumption among scientists -- and even scientific organizations -- that all they need to do to effectively communicate with the public is get the facts out there.

Olson has a valid point. Like it or not, the public doesn't actually make up its collective hive-mind based on careful factual analysis; they're more inclined to favor a nebulous "truthiness." (Thank you, Stephen Colbert, for coining such a perfect word for it.) Most people have a far more complex relationship with "facts" than the average scientist, a la these timeless lyrics from Talking Heads:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just turn the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
  -- "Crosseyed and Painless," from Remain in Light

This is only partially an excuse to groove nostalgically to Talking Heads in the middle of an ostensible film review. There's a connection! As Olson's film makes clear, the "facts" of global warming "come with points of view": even the denialists don't dispute the scientific consensus that global warming is real. They disagree vehemently, however, on how those facts should be interpreted, and that disagreement can make it very difficult for John and Jane Q. Public to grasp the gist of the science. Is it any wonder the public becomes confused and opts to base their budding views on global warming with whatever best fits with their pre-existing assumptions? (EG: "I hate Al Gore and therefore I don't trust anything he has to say about global warming.") Facts don't always do what we want them to, and for a non-scientist that can give rise to some serious cognitive dissonance. (Heck, it can even make some scientists go a bit dissonant now and then.)

If Olson had decided to make a global warming edition of Survivor, pitting proponents against denialists, viewers might decide to vote denialist Pat Michaels (of the Cato Institute) off the island because they find him abrasive, or don't like how he chews his food --  not because of their careful assessment of his analysis of the data on climate change. This is why it's so very important to show the human face of science; "likeability" matters.

Case in point: John Q. Public would be far more likely to warm up to the eccentrically charming "Dr. Chill" --  a.k.a., denialist George Chillingarian, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California, who believes we are headed for another Ice Age. With his lilting accent, meticulously groomed mustache, retro suit, medals, and Honduran cigars, he cuts a far more colorful and appealing figure than poor, well-meaning Richard Somerville (Scripps Institute of Oceanography). Sure, Somerville is one of the top climate scientists in the world, but he is stiff and humorless in his featured scenes, clearly uncomfortable with the on-camera shenanigans. And that adversely affects his ability to connect with a broader audience. It's not enough that he's right.

Fortunately, Antoine convinces Olson to let Marion fully participate in an interview with Naomi Greske, a history of science professor at the University of California, San Diego -- because when the subjects answer Olson's questions, they respond as scientists; when Marion asks the questions, they respond like human beings. The "experiment" is a smashing success. We see footage of Greske earlier in the film, speaking before a scientific audience about her analysis of almost 1000 scientific papers from both sides of the debate -- all of which conclude that there is a definite warming trend. Her demeanor is perfectly appropriate for that professional setting, but it's unlikely to resonate with the general public. Her message doesn't really sink in with the viewer until Greske makes the same points while informally chatting with the filmmakers in a cafe. Here, she is relaxed, laughing, and eminently likeable -- and she is finally being "heard."

Naomi (because now we think of her on a first-name basis, as someone we might hang out with in a coffee shop) urges them not to interview still more scientists in Seattle, and to go to New Orleans instead to document the human toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina, because people aren't interested in an endless recitation of scientific facts, graphs, and climate models. They want to know how global warming will affect them personally. She is 100% correct about needing to make that human connection. So it's ironic that I found this segment of the film to be the weakest and least compelling.

I think it's partly to do with the fact that the scientific jury is still out on whether global warming is giving rise to an increasing number of severe hurricanes (see Chris Mooney's excellent Storm World for an exhaustive examination of that issue), although it does seem likely that we will see an upswing in the number of natural disasters, which can exact a hefty toll on heavily populated areas. Olson carefully makes this point at the end of the segment, but it comes a bit too late, and leaves one feeling vaguely misled -- even though the intent is to be thorough and honest. Facts, again, muddying up the waters.

Furthermore, the footage of Katrina's residents, while deeply affecting, focuses as much on issues of poverty, racism, and the apathy, ineptitude and broken promises of the Bush administration. These are all critical issues that tug at the heartstrings -- "Wealth is health," indeed -- but they detract from the film's central focus: global warming. "Staying on message" might be a GOP cliche, but if you're trying to influence people's opinions, it's sound advice. It's best to tackle one politically charged issue at a time.

The thing is, Olson makes the same point much more effectively earlier when Muffy Moose is talking to Antoine about how winters have changed in her hometown in Kansas. "Winter time isn't winter time anymore," she observes, reminiscing about how folks used to routinely break out sleds and ice skates when the lake froze over -- equipment now rusting and gathering dust in storage because the lake is no longer freezing over. Maybe Olson and Crew should have gone to Kansas instead, especially if Mitch and Brian tagged along in their "loud and proud" kaleidoscopic party shirts. Muffy Moose could have taken them square dancing. Good times!

It's easy to sit back and pick nits; ultimately, only the message matters. In the end, I enjoyed watching SIZZLE!, even more so on the second viewing, because I was better able to appreciate its understated subversiveness. Sure, a couple of points might have been made more clearly, but at least the film doesn't feel the need to club you over the head with didactic preachifying. People might not get it! Oh noes! We have to drive the point home again and again! But sometimes it's easier to win over a hostile audience -- and make no mistake, certain sectors of the public can be quite irrationally hostile when it comes to climate change -- with a more indirect approach. It's harder to pull off, but worth the effort.

Hopefully we will see more films from Randy Olson. His offbeat sensibility owes more to the low-key pointed satire of Christopher Guest (This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show) than the brilliantly provocative but more ham-fisted, fiery approach of Michael Moore. Besides, I like films that dare to take artistic risks, even if the risks don't quite work in the final product. It's far more interesting to me than achieving perfection by playing it safe. Olson isn't afraid to take risks. I mean, really: how often do you find a documentary about global warming that includes a surreal dream sequence showing the beleaguered director being ravaged by an angry polar bear? Now that's fearless dedication to the cause.

he sells sanctuary

Saturday afternoon, the Spousal Unit and I took our visiting mother-in-law to see Wall-E, the new Pixar animated feature that is, to put it mildly, sweeping the nation. Not only did I get all dewy-eyed at the plucky little robot with the expressive googly eyes who falls in love with a a sleek newer model named Eve -- I sobbed uncontrollably, especially when it looked for a moment like our hero might not, you know, pull through. You can never tell with Disney. I've never forgiven them for Bambi's mother. [MAJOR SPLOILAGE DELETED BY POPULAR DEMAND. Oops. My bad.]

Given this message of hope and rejuvenation, I find it odd that so many conservative pundits choose to take offense at the movie, just because it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where the Earth has become so toxic, humans had to go live in outer space for 700 years while an army of robots cleaned up the mess. Except the robots break down until only Wall-E is left. He survives because he develops intelligence, and figures out how keep himself going, making repairs, recharging his solar battery, and so forth, even befriending a pet cockroach -- all the while dutifully cleaning up the mess, one sector at a time.

Look, people: it's just a cartoon. It might poke fun at human foibles, but in the end it celebrates humanity's ability to beat the odds -- with the help of our robot friends. It's really not about promoting one party's message, or the other's, and the people saying it does are just reading their own biases into it. The film is a smash hit because it's fantastic movie-making, and weaves a terrific tale of overcoming nigh-impossible odds (a common theme in Pixar movies) -- even when the human race stacks the deck against itself. Wall-E is the  little robot that could. In fact, the more hardcore liberal pundits are annoyed that the humans get off so easily. *sigh*

Personally, I don't understand why everybody wouldn't want to do their utmost to help the environment. It shouldn't be about political affiliation, but about our survival as a species. It makes sense to clean up after ourselves because it's in our best interests. Period. Who cares if you don't like Al Gore, or hate the Bush administration?

I'm sure Gore loves the movie. So does Frank Rich of the (supposedly liberal) New York Times, as well as uber-conservative Charlotte Allen. Writing in The Los Angeles Times, she hits the nail on the head:

"[T]he point of art, whether movies or books or paintings or television shows, is exactly not to preach anything. Art can make social points, or poke fun satirically, as Wall-E does, at societal weaknesses. But to the extent that art becomes mere ideological drum-beating it fails. [Wall-E] is simply too accomplished a work of art to be reduced to mere propaganda by either the left or the right."

So apparently Wall-E has done the impossible and found some common unifying ground between the two ends of the political spectrum -- a kind of political sanctuary where we can forget about all the divisive infighting and cheer our plucky robot friends. Go, Wall-E, go!

As Allen says, there are some pointed elements in the film that reflect aspects of our world today -- that just doesn't make them propaganda. For instance, disposal of hazardous waste is a serious issue, and we certainly could run out of landfill sites to dump our tremendous amount of waste. And it's true, when Wall-E hitches a ride onto a spacecraft to follow Eva when she's "collected" and returned to the Mother Ship, the craft has to blast its way through a thick field of space junk (which I've blogged about previously). You know what else reflects our present-day world? The helper bots! Roomba has been available from i-Robot for years now, and per this io9 article, there's also paint-stripping robots, ship-cleaning robots, and even swarm robots that communicate wirelessly. Surely there's no hidden liberal agenda in that.

There's other environmental threats that don't get mentioned in the movie, such as noise pollution, specifically, the impact human activity has on natural habitats. I bring it up mostly because the current issue of New Scientist features my Q&A interview with Bernie Krause, a bioacoustician who spends the bulk of his time collecting recordings of wildlife soundscapes for his archive, Wild Sanctuary. Krause is a colorful character: he was a musician in the 1960s, one of the first to play the Moog synthesizer, playing first with the Weavers, and later teaming up with Paul Beaver (Beaver and Krause). They recorded a record in 1970 called In a Wild Sanctuary that featured recordings of wildlife sounds, made by Krause -- because Weaver was a bit too citified for field work, apparently.

Making his first field recording literally changed Krause's life, and he eventually left music to earn his PhD in bioacoustics. He's worked in the field with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, among other famous names, and is currently the CEO of Wild Sanctuary, the largest archive of natural soundscapes in private hands. Krause isn't focusing on the vocalizations of specific species, like birds or frogs, but on what he calls "biophony": what the world sounds like in the absence of human-generated noise. He makes spectrograms of wilderness recordings, mapping each of the component sounds according to pitch, and the result, per this Wired reporter,"looks like the musical score for an orchestra."

He's been telling biologists for years that natural soundscapes are at risk, and since human noise diminishes the ability of certain species to communicate, some populations are declining rapidly -- such as the spadefoot toad in Yosemite. "It's getting harder and harder to find places that aren't contaminated," he says. Back in 1968, it would take him 15 hours or so to collect usable material (i.e., natural soundscapes without human generated noise). Now his quest is taking him further and further afield, into ever-more remote regions, and getting usable material can take a year or more.

Anyway, Krause has clearly thought deeply about this issue and feels strongly about it. He's currently trying to transfer his sound collection -- over 3500 hours of material from all over the world, spanning 40 years -- to Purdue University, to "create a global center for the study and recording of the remaining untrammeled sites across the planet. We believe that in order to fully understand our human impact, we need the holistic acoustic baseline recordings by which to explore these shifts in the soundscape." It isn't mentioned in the article, but Krause is currently trying to raise the funds to complete the transfer. So if you've got a spare $5 million or so lying around gathering dust, you can reach him through the Wild Sanctuary website -- although naturally, they also have a blog. Wall-E would totally approve.

pack mentality

Yes, it has its naysayers, but Wikipedia is an amazing repository of odd and little known facts to amaze and delight the perpetually curious. For instance, apparently there is a mythical African tribe called the Bouda comprised of "werehyenas," i.e., able to transform into hyenas. A similar notion can be found in the folklore of the Bornu tribe in Nigeria; they even have a specific word that translates, "I change myself into a hyena" (bultungin).

Perhaps such myths endure because the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) in particular has a very rich repertoire of sound the use when communicating with each other. Hyenas have a bit of a bad rap as low-life scavengers -- a trio of them were villains in The Lion King, in fact, whose high-pitched shrieking maniacal laughter gave my 8-year-old niece nightmares. But in fact, they hunt and kill most of their prey, usually by cooperating with each other in the hunt. Hyenas are very complex social animals, living in large clans, each dominated by an alpha-female. Go, matriarchy! 

And like any organized society, a certain number of rules have evolved to govern the pack interactions. Quarrels are rare and easily resolved with a few loud noises and a couple of well-placed nits. There's a certain amount of socially acceptable grooming between mothers and cubs, and like most canine pack animals, the standard greeting involves lots of sniffing and careful inspection of the genitalia, although Wikipedia notes that "adult males rarely greet with females in this matter." (Quel turnoff!) Males rank dead last in the social hierarchy. So male hyenas tend to be smaller and less aggressive. Interestingly, the calmer and more docile males are preferred as mates, rather than the more aggressive ones. They tend to be patient, too, since the females will let the courtship drag for as long as a year before succumbing. 

Such a complicated social structure requires a fairly sophisticated communication system. We've already mentioned the giggling: that high-pithed cackling laugh that freaked out my young niece. Ironically, it appears to be a sound associated with intense fear, since it's usually emitted by hyenas who are being chased by predators. There's also yelling -- more of a roaring scream emitted by hyenas seeking to evade attackers.

Lowing indicates impatience ("It's my turn to feast on the kill!"), while the whoop is more of a contact call. It can vary in pitch and intensity, but a fast whoop seems to be rallying cry during a kill or other type of conflict. And each hyena has its own unique trademark whoop used for identification purposes. The most common sound hyenas make is the groan, but there are several different types, ranging from a low growling noise to softer, more tonal sounds used when greeting. Bioacousticians have classified them into different groups, based on acoustical characteristics of the various groans. It seems the hyenas can modulate the sounds they make depending on the behavioral contexts.

We tend to associate hyenas with giggling -- the laughing hyena -- but it seems that a hyena's giggle might be less telling than its groan. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have studied the acoustic properties of the various "vocalizations" of the spotted hyena. They find that the giggle is used more frequently in competitive situations -- haggling over prey, shooting hoops on the Savannah -- while loud whooping calls are used more for long-distance communication.

Hyena groans were the focus of UCB's Frederic Theunissen's talk last week at Acoustics '08 in Paris. To decipher the meaning of these vocal signals, Theunissen and two colleagues -- Suzanne Page and Steve Glickman -- presented adult hyenas with three different objects: unfamiliar spotted hyena cubs (who might not have enjoyed being thus objectified), big meaty bones, and an empty transport cage in which bones or cubs had been housed on other experiments. The results: the cubs elicited more groans from more hyenas than any of the other objects, and those groans had a lower fundamental frequency, and were less "tonal" than the groans produced in response to the bones or empty cage. (You can hear sound samples of the vocalizations here.)

Theunissen acknowledges that the exact meaning of the specific types of groans isn't quite clear; it's not like they can ask the animals, "So, what did you mean by that?" And so far they on;y have a limited number of recordings of the vocalizations -- not enough to draw many definitive conclusions. One might assume that the groans directed at the cubs would be friendly, particularly from female hyenas, except in this case the cubs were unrelated. The groans might have been a warning signal instead. (I guess it depends on how hyenas feel about adoption -- and as an adopted child, I can joke about that.) Per Theunissen:

It is possible that the lower pitch and less musical growls produced to the meaty bone signal a more aggressive approach ("that bone is mine") while the more tonal and higher pitch groan signal signifies a friendly approach ("it is ok little cub"). But given that our cubs were unrelated to the subjects in the experiment, and that deception is also a possibility ("it is okay little but I might kill you"), we have to be careful when we attempt to associate a meaning to the sounds.

Theunissen's team also studies the groans elicited by mother hyenas to their own cub in the same situation, which turned out to be more tonal and of higher pitch than those used toward an unfamiliar cub. More studies are being planned. Offhand, I'd have to agree with Theunissen when he says, "Human language might be unique in its complexity and flexibility, but hyena vocalizations are more telling than any of us could imagine."

flotsam and jetsam

We're a bit frazzled these days, focusing more on paying writing gigs because the Resident Feline has developed a taste for high-end catnip only available on the organic black market. Believe me, you don't want to mess with Clio when that monkey is on her back. Anyway, this means our humble blog is feeling twinges of neglect. There are several substantive posts in the works, ranging from more news from the recent Acoustics '08 meeting in Paris, the "Waterfalls" art installation in New York City, and a piece on arsenic and the history of toxicology. Oh, and on Tuesday, July 15th, Cocktail Party Physics will join more than 50 other science bloggers in posting reviews of the new Randy Olson "mockumentary," SIZZLE! Good reads, people! They're a-comin'! So please bear with us in the interim.

In the meantime, what better opportunity to clear out my bulging blog fodder file? There's always way more cool stuff floating around the Interwebs than I have time to spin into full-length blog posts, and in the case of today's orphaned items, I detected a subtle theme of quirky approaches to energy-related issues.

Pimp My Porsche. Regular readers know I drive a Prius since moving to Los Angeles. Given the current price of gas, I'm pretty happy with my investment: it's the perfect car for LA traffic conditions. But last week the Los Angeles Times ran an article about a local photographer named Lefteris who's done the Prius one better. Fed up the the auto industry's slow progress on the electric vehicle front, he took the frame and body of a 1971 Porsche 914, added 22 lead acid batteries, a power controller, a charger, and a 150-pound electric motor to create his own electric car. "My wife drives the gas guzzler, the Prius," he told the LA Times. Sure, it has a limited range, and probably a few other complications, too. But for local driving and/or commuting, it's an ingenious solution. And the reporter raises the million-dollar question: "If a photographer with some basic electrical and mechanical knowledge can do this in his garage, why can't the best engineers in America do something similar?" Why indeed?

Gastropod Gusto. Meet Muriel, Austin, and Cecil. They look like every other snail out there, but they're actually quite special: they've been fitted with tiny RFID chips that enable them to send emails on behalf of visitors to their official Website. The messages are routed to the gastropods' tank to await "collection." The snails just amble around their tank at a meager 0.03 mph, occasionally coming within range of an electronic reader. When that happens, the mail is "collected," i.e., the email message attaches to the RFID chip. The snail "agent" then carriers the message around the tank until it passes close to a second reader, and the message is forwarded over the net in the usual way.

I confess, when I first heard about the Real Snail Mail project, I thought it was a joke. It's not. It's actually an experiment in "slow art" dreamed up by artists at Bournemouth University in the UK, who set up a Website called Boredom Research. The official launch is August 11, 2008, in conjunction with this year's SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. While you're waiting, you can check out their blog, and even take a peek at Muriel, Austin and Cecil in person via the Snailcam -- assuming you have a lot of time on your hands. Don't be in a hurry for your messages to be delivered, either: only 16 messages have been delivered so far, taking an average of about 4.7 days to reach the recipient. Austin is the star gastropod, delivering 11 messages, followed by Cecil with 5 messages. Muriel, that slacker, has yet to deliver a single message. It's a novel idea, but one of the artists, Vicky Isley, admits, "It could be quite frustrating for some people." (h/t: Nothing to Do With Arbroath)

Body Heat. An episode of Bones last fall featured a scene with an organic local farmer who made his own fruit smoothies by hooking the blender up to a stationary bike, using the energy from his exercise to operate the blender. He's not the first to think of this. I learned from the uber-awesome io9 that there's a nightclub opening sometime this month in England that features an energy-absorbing dance floor. It's made from a flexible material that bends under the pounding feet of dancing crowds, squeezing  "special blocks" (made from piezoelectric crystals) that then convert that motion into energy. That energy is stored in batteries, and used to power the lighting and sound system in the club. Ingenious!

There's even a device under development that uses the kinetic energy from your body while you exercise to juice up your cell phone. It weighs less than 6.3 ounces and straps onto the arm. Personally, I'd like to see more schemes like these two. No, it's not going to solve all our future energy needs, but harvesting our own kinetic energy that would otherwise just be lost as heat can chip away at excess energy consumption, bit by bit. And over time, it could really add up.

'Twixt Wind and Water. I'm often struck these days at how much natural energy there is all around us: in the wind, ocean waves, even the sun relentlessly beating down on our heads during LA's recent heat wave. And now a retired engineer in Ontario, Canada, claims he's built a tornado-powered generator (h/t: io9). Louis Michaud proposes to pump hot air into a massive cylindrical arena some 100 meters high, thereby creating a raging tornado in something resembling a controlled environment. He thinks one of his Atmospheric Vortex Engines could generate enough energy to power a small city. Harvesting the energy from natural phenomena is easier said than done, of course, especially if you're trying to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Michaud's scheme relies upon a reliable supply of hot air, and that in itself requires energy to create, hurting his cost-competitiveness (unless we can figure out a way to harvest it directly from blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly... hmmm....).

Over in Britain, scientists are experimenting with a scheme to harvest energy from ocean waves using an enormous snake-like rubber valve (h/t: Physics Buzz). They call it the "Anaconda." Really. The valve supposedly sucks energy out of the waves and feeds it through a turbine, thereby generating power that can then be conveyed to land via underwater cables. The scientists figure that an Anaconda measuring 200 meters long and 7 meters wide could produce about 1 megawatt of power, sufficient to meet the energy needs of about 2000 households.

It's still very much in the laboratory prototype stage, but it'll be interesting to see how the Anaconda concept translates to larger scale tests, and the brutal real-world environment of the ocean. The tremendous pressures and insufficient lubrication of conventional wind turbines is a chronic challenge familiar to anyone working with this type of renewable energy, and it requires ingenious solutions -- including breakthroughs in new materials. A Swedish chemist named Saeid Esmaeilzadeh accidentally cooled down a ceramic substance too quickly and ended up discovering a new kind of ceramic: a "super glass" that is harder than steel, with a very high index of refraction. He's since founded a company called Diamorph to commercialize his breakthrough, focusing at the moment on developing stronger and lighter bearings for -- you guessed it -- wind turbines.

Step Into Liquid (Film). On a much smaller scale, microfluidic devices have their own energy challenges, particularly for industrial tasks like mixing. An intriguing abstract hit the arXiv back in May about a startling discovery made by Iranian physicists at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. They started with a thin film of water in a square cell, and then applied two electric fields, perpendicular to each other. That's when things got weird. The two electric fields at right angles caused the film of water to begin to rotate -- a liquid film motor. They found they could even control and direction and speed of rotation just by changing the angle and direction of the electric fields. They don't have a clue what's causing the rotation: it's not convection (what happens when a field is applied to thin films of liquid crystals). And since adding sat water has no effect, that rules out ion movement for directing the flow. Right now, the suspicion is that it has something to do with the intrinsic dipole moment of the molecules, since the rotation only occurs in polar liquids, and not in non-polar ones. Weird! And potentially very useful on a small scale.

Okay, that takes care of the backlog of fodder items! Of course, a portion of my blogging energy these days is being diverted to Twisted Physics, my new blog over at Discovery News. In my first five weeks, I've written about such things as testing quantum entanglement aboard the space station; using LIDAR to map the surface of Mars; why astrophysicists love their Standard Candles; what Hawaiian lava can tell us about the origins of the Moon; an odd scheme to use neutrinos to detect messages from alien life forms; why teleportation is my superpower of choice (Nightstalker rules! Go ahead -- prove me wrong!); what forensic astronomy can tell us about Caesar's landing site when he invaded England; and a tongue-in-cheek debunking of the Tesla Shield, which claims to use "tachyon fields" to enhance one's life-force energy.

Um, yeah. Whatever. I offered to get Clio a Tesla Shield to help her break the catnip habit, but she's having none of it. Apparently, even tachyonic fields can't compete with the blissed-out effects of high-grade catnip.

stradivari's secret

Back in January 2007, Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten conducted a sneakily ingenious experiment, conspiring with world-famous -- and current uber-cute Cyber crush of Jen-Luc Piquant -- classical violinist Joshua Bell. He had Bell don a baseball cap ("The better to hide that dashing mop of hair that flops endearingly into his eyes whenever he plays," gushes a besotted Jen-Luc) and spend 45 minutes busking in one of the busiest Metro stations in Washington, DC: L'Enfant Plaza. (And just for the record, DC residents, it is not pronounced "leh-FONT.") Hidden video cameras recorded the reactions of passersby.

In April, Weingarten's story about the results appeared and ricocheted around the Interwebs: only one person recognized Bell out of more than a thousand harried commuters bustling through the station, and only a handful stopped to listen. It was a bit of a blow to the city's pride; residents like to think of themselves as being fairly cultured and sophisticated, nay, even discriminating -- and yet nobody perceived the greatness in their midst that fateful day. (Yes, I know there are many reasons for this; no need to rehash all the excuses here.) All told, Bell collected a measly $32.17 for his efforts, while Weingarten went on to win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Good thing Bell didn't need the money. The guy travels all over the world performing, and his instrument of choice is a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin called Gibson ex Huberman, dating back to 1713 -- when the famed Cremona violin-maker Antonio Stradivari was at the height of his prowess -- and valued at just under $4 million. And it just so happens that Stradivari's name was evoked repeatedly this week at a mega-acoustics meeting in Paris.

A brief confession: We have been in deep, disappointed denial about missing the Acoustics '08 meeting, but let it not be said that we cannot selflessly set side our private pain to bring you some of the fascinating research news that's emerged as a result of all that accumulated brain power. For instance, intrepid acousticians all over the globe are still hot on the trail of "Stradivari's Secret": a.k.a., just what is it about a Stradivarius violin that makes it sound so much better than your average, run-of-the-mill version? It's been a topic of feverish investigation and much hot debate for a good 10 years or so, and the latest offering in the burgeoning scientific literature is a new Dutch study that employed medical equipment to study these priceless instruments.

Specifically, Berend Stoel from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) collaborated with a renowned luthier named Terry Borman put several Strads (and some modern instruments, for control purposes) into a CT scanner to study the materials properties of the wood out of which the violins had been made. Several current theories about why Strads sound so good rest upon the notion that it's all about the wood used to make the instruments.

For instance, some theorize that Stradivari used Alpine spruce that grew during a period of uncommonly cold weather, which caused the annual growth rings to be closer together -- so the wood was abnormally dense. The problem is that no two pieces of wood are exactly alike, so sculpting the wood -- delicately shaving the top and the back to get the best acoustical properties -- is critical. A team of researchers from Mid Sweden University has been investigating computer models of violins for years, attempting to match in simulation that telltale Stradivari sound -- including simulating that sculpting process.

Another prevailing theory has to do with the varnish: namely, that Stradivari used an ingenious cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees -- or perhaps salts or other chemicals. Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A&M University, made headlines in November 2006 when he claimed it was the chemicals used to treat the wood -- not necessarily the wood itself -- that was responsible for the unique sound of a Stradivarius violin: salts of copper, iron and chromium, all of which are excellent wood preservers but may also have altered the acoustical properties. He based his findings on studies using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the chemical properties of the backboards of several violins (the backboard is the instrument's largest resonant component).

Anyway, Stoel decided to study the wood yet again, using yet another technology: the CT scan. The problem is that it's tough to study those woody properties without risking damage to this multimillion-dollar instruments. Stoel developed a computer program a few years ago that non-invasively calculates lung densities in people suffering from emphysema, and adapted it to study wood densities from CT scans. He found that while the average wood density of the classical and modern violins "did not differ significantly," according to the accompanying press release, "the differences in wood density between early and late growth were were significantly lower in the ancient violins. Since differentials in wood density impact vibrational efficiency and thereby the production of sound, it is possible that this discovery may explain the superiority of these violins."

Since I was not in Paris this last week ("why, god, why?!?"), I missed hearing about Stoel's results in person. Instead, I lounged about the apartment fighting off early-summer ennui and drowning my sorrows with a few Pisco Sours at Ciudad. Ah, but last summer, I was a bit more proactive on the acoustics front. I drove out to Salt Lake City for the 2007ASA spring/summer meeting, and chatted for a good 45 minutes with George Bissinger, a physicist at East Carolina University who also studies violin acoustics.

Bissinger had the big Stradivari announcement last year, when he presented the results from his own investigations. Using a 3D scanning laser, he achieved what he said were the most detailed and quantitative measurements to date of the acoustic properties of the Strad violins featured in the study as they vibrate -- essentially mapping out how they vibrate to produce those heavenly tones. The measurements are so quantitative, in fact, that it's possible to reconstruct the stiffness properties of the wood used to make the Strads, perhaps finally making it possible for modern instrument makers to replicate those unique acoustical attributes.

Bissinger is tall, slim, with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and glasses, and while perfectly amiable, he's not really one for casual chitchat; he's more the quiet, deep-thinking sort. In other words, he doesn't exactly stand out in a room full of scientists -- until you get him talking about violin acoustics, that is. Then he positively vibrates with intensity and becomes the most loquacious companion on the planet. That level of passion seems to be present in many who study Strad violins, never mind those who play them, like Joshua Bell (although a delusional Jen-Luc Piquant swears his passion for her trumps even his love for his Strad). The Cremona craftsman would no doubt find this quite gratifying.

Bissinger's actual talk was only about 10 minutes, and he didn't have any sound clips on hand. But he did show some pretty nifty 3D animations of the in-plane motion as the violin is played. (It's a huge file and requires a special viewer program, but Bissinger swore it was well worth the trouble of downloading. I still didn't, but am sure it's my loss.) Conducting this sort of experiment with bona fide Strads is a major logistics undertaking; Bissinger says it took him several years of careful "networking."

First, he had to borrow two of the world-class instruments from private collectors -- no doubt having to pry the cases from the owners' panicked fingers on the train platform. Train platform as in, Amtrak. Yes, they took no special precautions in transporting them: the instruments were brought by train in plain cases. Sometimes being inconspicuous is the best security in the world. A violin organization generously footed the bill to insure the instruments for the 2-1/2 days of the experiment -- you know, just in case the scientists dropped one or accidentally destroyed their tonal purity. Bissinger also brought in three other, lesser violins of varying quality for comparison purposes.

For the actual experiment, he hung each of the five violins by elastic bands, then struck the wood of the top plate with a little hammer, recording and measuring the vibrational modes with the 3D laser scanner. Bissinger specifically wanted to measure the in-plane and out-plane motion: the in-plane motion is the source of much of the sound energy, and this converts into out-plane motion, which produces the rich tonal sounds we associate with fine violins. In addition, he hired a world-class violinist to play each of the violins used in the study for an hour so, to get the feel of the instruments, and then offer his subjective ratings for each one. The musician's subjective analysis was then compared to the objective acoustical data.

Not surprisingly, Bissinger had a lot to say on the topic of what makes a Stradivarius violin so acoustically superior. "The big secret about Stradivari is that there is no one secret," he insisted -- no elusive key or magical formula that, once discovered, will magically make it possible to reproduce the sound quality of a Stradivarius instrument over and over again on a mass scale. Bissinger believes it can never be reduced to blind routine, because there are so many different factors that go into making a world-class instrument. It's as much an art as it is science," he told me. "You wouldn't ask Leonardo da Vinci to reproduce the Mona Lisa en masse, perfectly, every time." For Bissinger, an instrument maker is just as much of an artist as da Vinci: "He is the bridge between the artist and the scientist, both of whom speak very different languages and have different concerns. The maker has to speak to both."

Certainly Stradivari was more than a simple craftsman: "He had some kind of conceptual understanding of the science behind what he was dong, even though physics technically wasn't round yet," said Bissinger. But he knew that doing one particular thing would have a desired effect, and he built on accumulated knowledge: each instrument was an improvement on the last, at least through Stradivari's Golden Period. But while Stradivari's emphasis on geometry gave us the signature shape of a violin, Bissinger says there is  little evidence this has anything to do with the famous "Stradivari sound." After all, Guarveri also produced exceptional instruments and wasn't nearly as fascinated by geometry.

Not every Stradivarius sounds alike, and frankly, says Bissinger, even a genuine Stradivarius violin isn't all it's cracked up to be sometimes. The passage of time can exact a devastating toll. Many of Stradivari's surviving instruments have deteriorated to the point where they are primarily collector's items. Play a violin too frequently, and the parts wear down and must be replaced, altering the sound; play it too little, and the sound deteriorates, too. Most of the Strads still played today do not have all their original parts, although Joshua Bell prides himself on the fact that his Strad still boasts the original varnish. Still, even Bell adapts his playing to his instrument to get the sound he desires. Bissinger claims there is no "perfect" instrument, and Stradivari -- who devoted his life to the quest for perfection -- would probably agree.

As for the claimed acoustical superiority of the instruments, yes, they do sound lovely, however, "There's way too much psycho in the acoustics," according to Bissinger, referring to a subfield known as psychoacoustics. Basically, the very name Stradivari instills respect and awe, and this can't help but influence how people subjectively evaluate and/or respond to the instrument. "The truth is, there are many very fine world-class instrument makers today, producing violins that can hold their own against the Strads, but their names don't evoke the same awed reverence, and thus the perception is that they are not as good," Bissinger told me. In fact, more professional violinists play Guarveris than Strads, which have only become fashionable fairy recently.

Really, who wants mass-produced Stradivarius instruments, anyway? It's always been all about the craftsmanship. Ironically, while he was still alive, Stradivari -- while hugely successful at his craft -- was not considered the best violin-maker in the world, although he certainly dominated the industry along with Amati and Guerneri. They were the Holy Triumvirate of the Golden Age of Violins, and after they died, the instrument entered into something of a acoustical Dark Age. Later instrument makers didn't share that all-consuming passion for improving the process to create ever-more-superior instruments: they just cranked out instruments the way it had always been done, with predictably pedestrian results.

Way back in 1819, physicist Felix Savard observed, "It is to be presumed that we have arrived at a time when the efforts of scientists and those of artists are going to unite to bring to perfection an art which for so long has been limited to blind routine." Here we are, almost 200 years later, still trying to map out all the details, still chasing down an elusive secret that might not even exist. Perhaps that ability to capture our imagination 300 years later is the true magic of Stradivari.

candid camera

Shortly after our wedding last fall, I was in Seattle for a conference, and naturally made time to visit with family. Somehow, I got into a debate with my mother about how she looked in some of the wedding photographs. Specifically, she felt she looked heavier than she does in real life (my mother is quite petite and slim). It's something she'd noticed in other photos of herself, too, and friends assured her she looked nothing like that. In fact, I'd wager that most of us have been dismayed at times by the fact that we look heavier -- or at least wider -- in certain photographs than we believe ourselves to be in the all-too-solid flesh. Our hips can't possibly be that wide, we insist, and loyal friends are quick to reassure us that the offending photo simply doesn't do us justice. "The camera adds 10 pounds!" they exclaim, and we are all too happy to agree.

So my mom wanted to know: why can't camera manufacturers build a camera to make her look like she "really" is? Well, at least one manufacturer has tried. Hewlett-Packard offers a digital camera with a built-in "slimming" feature that magically "takes off" a good 10-20 pounds off the subjects in the photographs, so that everyone looks thinner (see photo below). It caused a bit of a ruckus when it first came out -- how is it any different than Photoshopping (or, as some call it, "lying")? For some, it smacks of dishonesty, of "cheating," while defenders claim that it merely offsets the "fact" that the camera adds 10 pounds.

Anecdotally, this "fact" would appear to be at least partially true, although photographs are wildly inconsistent. For instance, I can personally attest that I, myself, appeared rail-thin in some of the wedding photos, and quite fleshy/voluptuous in others, whereas the "truth" probably lies somewhere in between. And I've noticed the same thing about certain celebrity photographs. But is this true from a scientific standpoint? Does the camera really "add 10 pounds"? Are those tiresome laws of physics (i.e., optics) conspiring against my mother to make her look unattractive in photographs? Inquiring minds need to know! So I set out on a haphazard quest to find the answer. Honestly? I was expecting to uncover some complicated optical secrets involving angles of refraction/reflection, lens shapes, and so forth. In retrospect, I was bound to be disappointed.

First I asked Michael Richmond, a physics professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, while I was visiting RIT for a colloquium last fall. He was skeptical at first that any such effect existed, but I assured him that there were definitely wedding photos where the same people looked lighter and/or heavier -- in some cases, considerably so -- in different pix, even though all had been taken the same night. But he didn't think there was anything particularly optical going on -- at least not with the actual camera lens. Apparently there are several factors which might influence how "heavy" a person appears in a photograph, other than the lens:  the lighting, what a particular person is wearing, or how they happen to be standing.

Richmond's main hypothesis, however, was that the effect stems from the fact that the camera only has one "eye" (i.e., the lens), whereas human beings have two eyes, roughly 7 to 8 centimeters apart. The camera, it seems, lacks depth perception. The result is a kind of "flattening" effect that can make objects seem wider in photographs.

A true scientist, Richmond wasn't satisfied to merely hypothesize. He designed a simple experiment to test that hypothesis, involving a simple coffee mug and a background pattern featuring regular columns of numbers taped to the wall a few feet behind the mug. Then he took a series of photographs from different vantage points: straight on, directly in front of the mug (the "single eye" of the camera lens); 4 centimeters to the left (the position of  a human's left eye if said human's nose was directly at the center), and 4 centimeters to the right of center (corresponding to a human's right eye).

You can see his results, complete with photos/animations, here. Basically, the left eye captures a slightly different "view" of the background behind the left edge of the right eye, which in turn captures the "view" of the background behind the right edge of the left eye. The end result is that even though the mug in each photograph stretches across exactly the same number of pixels, the background turned out very different. When Richmond combined two photographs taken from the perspective of each "eye" and then fused the images, the background appeared to be much wider than in the photograph taken from the straight-on "single-eyed" view. Richmond's conclusion: "Even though the mug is really the same width in each, it will look 'fatter' relative to the background in the camera view." (Incidentally, this might explain why actors/objects in those 3D IMAX movies appear to be quite thin when viewed in 3D, but "flatten" into wider girths when one briefly removes the special 3D glasses.)

Richmond made a pretty convincing case, but every good journalist will tell you that it's essential to have a confirming source. So I emailed Charles Falco, a physics professor at the University of Arizona, who studies all kinds of things, including optics and human perception. You might recognize the name from his collaboration with David Hockney on the use of optical tools by the Dutch masters  (a controversial theory, albeit an intriguing one), but that's really just a favorite sideline. The bulk of Falco's research lies in artificially constructing multilayered and metallic superlattice materials and studying their x-ray optical, magnetic, magneto-optic and (in some cases) superconductive properties. Suffice to say, the dude knows his optics.

Anyway, Falco was even more unyielding than Richmond when it came to dispelling my fanciful notions about complicated optics conspiring to make us look chunky in photographs. He believes the effect is entirely in our heads. "What we see owes at least as much to psychology as it does to the simple optics of our eyeballs," he told me, because we actually "see" with our brains. Our eyes merely collect the data as light reflects off the objects around us. The brain interprets the data, fusing the input from our two eyes into a single image.

And therein lies the origin of "the camera adds 10 pounds" myth: the imperfections of human perception. Our eyes really do play tricks on us. According to Falco, most common optical illusion puzzles play off the fact that our brains tend to fill in the blanks when it comes to visual information, which means we can see different things depending on how we look at a photograph or a painting. (I'm sure the folks at Cognitive Daily could verify this fact with loads of examples from their online surveys.) Check out this famous optical illusion of Leonardo da Vinci painting a man on a burro -- an image that is reflected (if one adjusts one's gaze a bit) in the face of the depicted painter:

Pretty nifty, huh? And so it is with photographs. If we see a photo of a woman in a dress, and part of that dress is in a shadow, chances are, she will appear to be slimmer than in another photograph where her dress is fully lit. That's because we only "see" the shape that is brightly lit. Similarly, if we see a picture of a large boulder, but part of the boulder is outside the frame, we automatically fill in the missing piece. In fact, we may well later recall having seen a photograph of the complete boulder, not just one part of it.

So are our loyal friends lying when they insist a photograph looks nothing like us? Not necessarily. We also store mental images of the people we know, including our own reflections in the mirror, and those mental images might not match the particular 1/1000 of a second captured in the camera's frame. We form impressions of people when we first meet them, and "Our neurons seem very reluctant to let go of those initial images and 'update' themselves with new visual information," says Falco.

So there you have it. If you think your thighs look way too big in that photograph from your high school reunion, don't smash your digital camera in disgust. It's not the camera's fault. It's your brain's. Maybe it wasn't the answer I was looking for, but the "evidence" is pretty solid. That's science for you: it's all about ignoring one's wishes and biases to uncover the truth. Even if the "truth" might not be what we want to hear.