Cocktail Party Physics

prime time science

[A note from your AWOL blogger: I got stuck with jury duty last week, plus, I am supposed to be working on the new book, ergo, blogging has been a bit infrequent of late. As penance, here's another monster post on a subject near and dear to my heart.]

For those with zero interest in the first presidential debate, Friday night's network lineup included a re-airing by CBS of its brand-new series The Mentalist. Like Phil Plait, who raved about it over at Bad Astronomy, I think this show is easily the most promising of fall's network debutantes, precisely because it overtly espouses what one might call the "rationalist mindset" -- and it does so via an especially dreamy (and sympathetic) mouthpiece: Aussie actor Simon Baker, who stars as Patrick Jane (a.k.a., "McSleuthy"), a former stage psychic turned police detective. (Jen-Luc Piquant sez: *swoon!*)

The pilot makes no bones about the fact that Jane's past "career" of "speaking to the dead" was a scam. He's just very observant and adept at reading people via their mannerisms, personal photographs and so forth, and was able to leverage this skill into a convincing act. He was pretty darned successful, too, until he made the mistake of insulting a serial killer during a TV appearance; the killer took revenge by murdering Jane's wife and daughter. Jane quit the psychic gig and became a detective, as well as a fervent antagonist of his former profession. And now he's the anti-Ghost Whisperer.

In one telling exchange, he coolly tells a gullible young policewoman who asks how he reacts when he meets "real" psychics, "There are no such things as psychics." She persists, arguing that her own sister has "the gift" and has been "right" about things she couldn't possibly have known. He counters by pointing out the combined phenomenon of selective memory and wishful thinking: people tend to remember the "right" guesses and forget the wrong ones, thereby shoring up their propensity to believe in psychic phenomena. Cognitive psychologists call this confirmation bias. It's a very real phenomenon, but you're certainly not going to hear about it on The Ghost Whisperer.

That makes The Mentalist a refreshing departure from what used to be the usual prime time fare. I use the past tense because The Mentalist isn't the only show on network and cable television that unapologetically espouses a pro-science rationalist worldview. My inner geek thrills to a mix of science, compelling narrative, strong characters, and good writing; there are so many series now with these elements that said inner geek is positively intoxicated by the sumptuous feast laid out before her: the C.S.I. franchise ("follow the evidence"), House, Bones, Numb3rs -- and those are just the ones with the best ratings.

Here's why I think this is significant. Networks aren't altruistic; they're out to make money by appealing broadly to their viewers (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the kinds of shows, therefore, that become breakout hits reflect the preferences of the general public. The fact that so many successful science-themed shows are resonating with viewers is an encouraging sign that there is a significant fraction of folks out there who are interested in science and at least willing to listen to a rationalist viewpoint. Science is not only perceived as marketable -- it is perceived as cool and hip. I won't go so far as to call this a cultural paradigm shift, but as someone who cares deeply about science, culture, and communication, I find the current trend heartening.

The USA Network, for example, offers Psych, a light-hearted comedic version of The Mentalist, in which a young, brash private detective passes himself off as a psychic to help the police solve cases -- using many of the same powers of observation and "tricks" employed by Patrick Jane. (The premise is that he does this to get around the legal technicality of not having a PI license.) Psych strategically airs new episodes during network "off seasons," when much TV fare consists of reruns, which has helped it garner a healthy audience -- plus, it's a terrific, entertaining show.

Hearts and Minds

Most of the other prime time science-y series are rolling out their season premieres. Bones was first out of the gate a couple of weeks ago with a two-hour episode that found Booth and Brennan in Merry Olde England, on the heels of an explosive finale in May in which a major character turned out to be in league with a serial killer. This surprising development played into one of the show's central themes: the search for balance between head and heart, thinking and feeling, brain and brawn, personified in the various cast members. For instance, Booth evolves from sneering at the "squints" and their academic, cloistered view of the world, to appreciating their expertise and single-minded devotion to uncovering the facts -- even if it means accepting that one of their own is the guilty party. Brennan, for her part, started out as a coldly analytical scientist who squelched her emotions (although not her sex drive), learning through her collaboration with Booth to cut less-brilliant folks a little slack, and that it's actually okay to be human and just a little bit vulnerable.

In that sense, Bones follows in the footsteps of C.S.I., whose main character, Gil Grissom, constantly exhorts his team to "follow the evidence," put their emotions aside and rationally assess the facts of the case. But even Grissom has had to face the head/heart conflict, first by letting down his walls to fall in love with team member Sarah Sidle, and -- in the explosive season finale -- by losing a beloved team member. The season premiere promises to be a doozy as everyone deals with the fallout from the shooting death of a major character. [I am trying very hard to avoid major spoilers, although the truth is out there on the Internets for those who wish to know more details.]

Monday night was the season premiere of last year's breakout sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which proved to be something of a lightning rod for controversy when it debuted last year, at least within the physics community. (My own take in Symmetry magazine can be found here.) Normally, scientists content themselves with nitpicking various aspects of the science in movies and TV shows, but in this case, the science is largely correct, thanks to the efforts of technical consultant David Saltzberg, a physicist at UCLA. So most of the complaints about TBBT have been of the "negative stereotype" variety.

As I've said before, such criticisms might have an element of truth but they are entirely missing the point: these characters appeal to viewers. They are likable just the way they are, and that is a Good Thing for Physics. If the goal is to make physicists feel good about themselves, then okay, maybe this isn't the best approach. But if the goal is make physics and physicists more palatable to the general public and win their hearts and minds, these characters are fantastic ambassadors. I vote for the latter.

Granted, the pilot episode painted the characters with the broadest possible strokes, but as I predicted, those characters have evolved into far more complex versions.  It's no longer just about the nerdy physicist Leonard longing for the unobtainable pretty blonde, Penny. Turns out she might not be unobtainable. In Season 1, they became friends, as they learned to look past appearances, their own stereotypes, and the inevitable culture clashes. And in the season premiere, Penny and Leonard go on their first official date, with disastrous results. (C'mon, there's a long-standing tradition in TV to drag out the romantic suspense.)

They are now grappling with the unavoidable gaps in their respective educations, in an interesting role reversal from the first season. Penny confides in Sheldon (of all people) that she feels insecure about not even graduating from community college, worried that Leonard will grow bored with her because he's always dated women with PhDs. Once he finds out, Leonard blows it by handing her a brochure for college classes, thereby reinforcing this impression -- when he's really only trying to help address the issue. It's an entirely believable point of contention, and I'll be interested to see how it plays out.

Ambivalence Abounds

I was a hard-core fan of The X-Files, but I have mixed feelings about FOX's new series, Fringe. On the one hand, it's got a couple of great characters, most notably Walter Bishop, a brilliant scientist whose unethical (more accurately, criminal) experiments landed him in the loony bin for 15 years. He has a delightfully loony, macabre sense of humor, which balances out the sometimes over-heated plot lines. Much of the "science" goes well beyond speculative and slips into the realm of the silly and implausible, but this is the prerogative of science fiction, so one can't criticize that overmuch. On the other hand, it could be argued (and has been)  that the best science fiction is speculative but doesn't cross that critical boundary. Furthermore, for all his charm, Bishop is literally a "mad scientist," and several of the plots thus far have involved the fallout from his earlier research -- he's kind of cleaning up his own mess.

Among the converts to the show are the irreverent folks at io9; a recent post listed four reasons why they think it is the "most reassuring show," at least when it comes to science fiction on television. Reason #1: "Everything weird can be explained away," with science, no less. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's a convincing explanation. I was especially struck by Reason #2, which I suspect cuts to the core of my ambivalence about Fringe:

Science is Magic and Can Do Anything. Need to see the last thing a dead person saw before they died? Need to psychically project your own mind into a coma victim's? ... It's all possible, with science! Yes, science can make the dead walk again (literally, as long as you do it within six hours) and fulfill all of your wildest ambitions.... So now there's quite definitely nothing that we can't do if we just put our minds to it."

Uh, no. That is not what science is about; it's what science fiction is about. I love both, but let's not confuse the two. By all means, confess your love for Fringe; we all have our guilty TV pleasures. I recently confessed my affection for the highly uneven, yet strangely compelling short-lived series Witchblade (about as supernatural and non-scienc-y as you can get, and more than a little silly at times), and I wrote a whole book about physics in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. But I would never claim that science is like "magic."

Fringe isn't anti-science, but it's not pro-science either. It's far more ambivalent, and thus potentially more interesting, depending on how the show develops. I definitely don't find it "reassuring." A prior io9 post described the science depicted therein as "out of control and scary." In fact, writer/producer Jeff Pinker is on record saying that he thinks science "doesn't seem to have a goal anymore." Of the kind of research being done today, Pinker observes, "Some of it seems to be morally good and some of it seems to be morally a little bit careless. But anything that we can imagine be it good or bad, seems like the real world is already two steps ahead of our imagination." I'm reserving judgment on Fringe -- it has yet to win me over -- but the scientific community should be paying attention to Pinker's sentiments. I suspect they reflect the mixed feelings of lots of other people when it comes to the brave new world of science.

The World is not Magic

The io9 folks applaud Fringe for being the antithesis to Lost: "removing paranoia and showing that there's no such thing as a magical time-traveling island anyway.... After all, House can't do it all alone." Say what? Comparing Fringe to House? (Quoth Jen-Luc, that faux-gallic hothead: "Oh, no, they didn't!") Look, Fringe has its way-out-there sci-fi charms, and House is a clearing house for the most bizarre, rare medical conditions imaginable, but the two are apples and oranges in terms of their worldviews. A more apt comparison would be with Eureka: it has the same near-term futuristic, "Ooh, isn't science kooky and kinda scary" vibe to it -- and the same charming flashes of dark humor. (The Website Notcot has an amusing interview via Twitter with S.A.R.A.H., the "smart house" on Eureka, in which S.A.R.A.H. dishes on the selection of beers on her premises.)

House has far more in common with The Mentalist than with Fringe. In fact, it could be argued that Patrick Jane exists because Gregory House proved such a popular, compelling character -- despite being an unhappy, embittered atheist who likes to manipulate people and pops way too much Vicodin than is good for him. This understandably bothers some atheists, but as with The Big Bang Theory and physicists, if the audience doesn't love the character, the show simply doesn't work. Audiences love Greg House, precisely because he's so nastily outspoken, saying and doing things we often fantasize about ourselves (except in the real world, he would be so fired). Which means there are plenty of folks out there for whom his stark rationalism resonates.

One of my favorite episodes is "You Don't Want to Know," when a magician's heart stops mid-performance for no apparent reason, and he ends up under House's curmudgeonly care. House's first theory is the magician faked his illness because he's a hack who botched the trick. The magician counters by performing a trick House can't explain (even though he dabbles in a bit of sleight of hand himself, we discover).

The magician refuses to explain how he did it: "Oh, if I explain it becomes mundane, and you lose the actual magic." This prompts a typical House observation: "Magic is cool. Actual magic is oxymoronic. Might not even be oxy..." The magician claims that the fun is not knowing; for House, the fun is in knowing. He demonstrates by making a series of astute observations about the patient's diet, dental care, and sleep habits, then explains how he deduced these facts. "That was way cooler before you explained it," says the magician. "It was meaningless until I explained it," House retorts. The magician explains, "People come to my shows because they want a sense of wonder. They want to experience something that they can't explain." But once again, House isn't buying it: "If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." Now that's a fantastic exchange that cuts to the heart of the Great Divide between scientific thinking and wanting the world to be magic.

Culture Clash

At least Fringe and its creators aren't openly hostile to science, unlike rising Hollywood player Mark Millar (Wanted and Kick-Ass), who recently penned the following screed on his message board, calling for a "jihad" on those involved with the Large Hadron Collider:

Am I the only person who thinks God Particle, possible Black Hole on the French/Swiss Border, Recreating the Big Bang, etc. are all phrases I only want to read in New Gods? ... These freaks genuinely risk ending the world!!! And for what? To see how the universe might have begun? Who gives a fuck? ... Get outta here, egg-head! I don't care about dark matter, dark energy or even other dimensions. Best-case scenario is we're sucked into a black hole, every atom in our body screaming as we die in a nanosecond. ... Europeans creep me out, but none more so than Euro-SCIENTISTS. I declare a Jihad on all these boffins who risk reality in the name of their curiosity. No wonder Pol Pot killed everyone with glasses.

I hope Mr. Millar managed to wipe all the spittle off his monitor after that sadly uninformed, xenophobic rant -- and then went back on his meds. He's pretty much Exhibit A for why we need some sort of long-term cultural exchange program between the scientific community and Hollywood. Granted, Millar and his ilk are a lost cause -- you can't reach out to teh crazy, they'll bite your hand off and then claim you attacked them first -- but I think the creators of Fringe, for example, would benefit from interacting with the real-world scientists who are actually conducting this "scary" research they find so interesting and yet unnerving. We fear the unfamiliar, so obviously, one of the best ways to allay people's fears is to better acquaint them with how science is actually done. And the Fringe guys could return the favor by enlightening scientists to how TV shows are actually made. Much of the criticism leveled at how science is depicted in Hollywood is a bit off the mark because scientists have no clue about the inner workings of television, or the criteria for what makes a hit series.

When I invited Saltzberg and TV writer David Grae to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara for a workshop on science in Hollywood (streaming video is here), one of the most illuminating moments for the assembled scientists came when Grae laid out the standard framework for a one-hour TV drama. Metaphorical light bulbs went off all over the room: "Oh, there's an underlying theory!" Like physicists, TV writers have their models, and their work has to fit within those boundaries. For his part, Grae was enthralled by the KITP atmosphere of open inquiry, and excitedly took a picture with his cell phone when he saw two physicists arguing vehemently and scribbling equations on a chalkboard: "Oh my god, they really do that!" See? We need more cultural exchange.

For Saltzberg and his pals at The Big Bang Theory, it really is like a cultural exchange. Saltzberg brings a visitor to the set every week during taping of a new episode -- he calls it "the geek of the week." The Spousal Unit and I were featured geeky guests last year, and got to hang out with the cast and writers (a fun, creative bunch) afterward. It was a wee bit tentative on all sides, and we didn't all instantly become best friends, but as a first step in bridging the gap between two very different worlds, it served a useful purpose.

Saltzberg also influenced the set and wardrobe staff as the series was being developed, inviting them out to his lab at UCLA so they could see actual scientists working in their native habitat. You'll notice that Leonard mostly dresses like a typical physics grad student (a wee bit exaggerated for comic effect), and there is nary a white lab coat in sight. The wardrobe mistress came back from the visit and told her underlings, "No lab coats! I didn't see a single lab coat while I was there!" Set designers were astonished to find the equipment old and out of date, with researchers blocking laser beams with grubby business cards, and they designed their sets accordingly. As a result, when Leonard asks out female physicist Leslie in the lab one day, it looks far closer to an actual physics lab than one might expect from a TV sitcom. And Leslie is preparing a meal using liquid nitrogen. What grad student hasn't done that, given the chance?

Many scientists I encounter seem to incorrectly think that the scientific details are all that matter. While those are important for lending verisimilitude -- particularly for procedural dramas like C.S.I., Bones, or House -- network television isn't an educational vehicle. Hollywood's purpose is not to teach viewers about science, and TV shows are not documentaries, and should not be held to the same exacting standards -- although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, provided both sides are willing to compromise a little. Good television is ultimately about igniting the imagination with a truly kick ass story. If we can enhance the appreciation of science (and by extension, scientists) in the bargain, so much the better, but that is not the industry objective.

True story: a year ago, I met one of the writers for Bones at Grae's birthday party. He was initially pleased to find that I really was a fan of the show, and not just being polite. (I knew all the characters and plot twists -- a dead giveaway.) But when I mentioned I was a science writer, he suddenly became guarded and defensive: "Yeah, yeah, I know, we take liberties with the science, DNA test results never come back that fast...." I reassured him that I wasn't one of those sorts who compulsively nitpick the writers to death, and he relaxed a little. But the exchange saddened me a little. Here was this very smart, really nice guy who loves his work and finds the scientific elements fascinating. Yet his personal encounters with actual scientists have been unilaterally negative and alienating -- so much so, that he physically recoiled upon first learning about my science writing credentials. That has to change, or the cultural gap will just continue to widen.

Don't Blow Up Your TV

One last point: Scientists (and frankly, academics in general) need to get over their disdain for television. Honestly, I am so bored already with listening to folks insist they "never watch TV," or only watch NOVA (the Discovery Channel is just a bit too populist for them), etc. -- as if this somehow makes them morally superior to the rest of the unwashed lumpenproletariat. In reality, by ignoring such a hugely influential popular medium, you are cutting yourself off from a highly significant aspect of American (and, increasingly, global) culture. And that makes it far more difficult for working scientists to connect with the public at large.

Writing for The Smart Set, Morgan Meis (whom I know through 3 Quarks Daily) offers an apology of sorts to novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace, who recently committed suicide. Meis cites an essay by Wallace called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction" (it can be found in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), in which the author grapples with his ambivalence towards TV and popular culture. Per Meis:

"Bravely, he begins the essay talking about television. He likes television. Goddamit, we all like television. He will not join the ranks of those who simply dismiss the boob tube as nothing more than that. ... For Wallace, the central problem is not whether television is good or bad. Television, he wants to say, is constitutive of who we are, and that which is constitutive of who we are is beyond simple value judgments -- it has become the necessary ground from which we proceed.

"You can't be a writer, you can't write about how the people around you experience the world, without taking into account that simple but massively important fact. You have to deal with television and other aspects of American popular culture, truly deal with it. And yet, Wallace doesn't want to be reduced to television. He is confused about just how much he should accept it and how much he should reject it. He is trying to find the right balance in the midst of his confusion."

It's okay to be ambivalent about television, provided one doesn't ignore it. It's time for the scientific community to start grappling with that ambivalence and make its peace -- because there has never been a more auspicious time to reach out to the fine folks in Hollywood. Science-themed shows are a hot commodity. Scientific expertise is thus suddenly in demand, provided it's the right kind of expertise: a true collaboration, with no hint of condescension, and mutual respect between the two worlds. It's not an easy thing to achieve, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The long-term benefit of doing so is influencing millions of TV viewers, assuring them, in the words of Gregory House: "Trust me -- it's way cooler to know."

[Comic gakked from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, an excellent site!]

for whom the bells toll

Jen-Luc Piquant is tres desole that she missed the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, just because her meat-world counterpart needed to focus on more practical concerns other than blogging for the last few days. Jen-Luc consoled herself by reading about the discovery of a treasure-laden shipwreck off the Namibian coast over at Beyond Stone and Bone, the excellent new(ish) blog by Heather Pringle (author of The Mummy Congress). Meanwhile, the Spousal Unit and I were featured over at Blogging Heads TV's Science Saturday this weekend, chatting about the Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs field, the fabric of spacetime, calculus and Sean's theory of poker. (At least one blogger called it "phone sex for the mind." Hmmm.) Also, sometime between last Thursday and Friday, we passed the one millionth unique visitor mark here at the cocktail party. That is a truly staggering number considering our humble beginnings, and we are appropriately humbled.

But I don't want to talk about me and/or phone sex, cerebral or otherwise; I want to talk about bells and bell-ringing by way of one of my favorite mystery writers, and one of her best (IMHO) novels: Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. (The novel has its critics, too, but Sinclair Lewis agreed with my assessment, judging The Nine Tailors the best of his four Sayers "indispensables.") Caveat: there will be spoilers towards the end of this post, but I promise to give fair warning when we get there. Anyway, the novel opens with Sayers' star detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, getting stranded in a small English village due to car trouble on New Year's Eve. He finds himself sitting in on a record-breaking, nine-hour ringing of changes. A few months later, he gets dragged back to the village to help solve the mystery of a body that has turned up in the cemetery, which turns out to be connected somehow with a robbery of a pricey emerald necklace some 15 years before. Sayers certainly did her authorial homework: the entire novel is constructed around change-ringing, right down to the chapter titles and epigrams.

I was reminded of The Nine Tailors earlier this year when I read about a paper presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting on the soundscape of church bells. It was co-authored by David Lubman, an acoustical consultant here in California whom I've had the pleasure of chatting with at length on numerous occasions. Lubman's primary interest is an emerging field called acoustic archeology, studying things like the acoustics of Mayan pyramids -- a topic he pioneered almost 10 years ago (see my 1999 article at Salon, and this 2006 update over at 3 Quarks Daily for details). But this latest paper focused on the role of church bells in England then and now, focusing particularly on the famed bells at London's church of St. Mary-le-Bow.

Back before the days of insta-communication, English communities relied on the tolling of bells to sound alarms and mark the passing of village residents. Sayers took her title from the number of times a bell will toll to mark the passing of a man: nine strokes ("ringing the nine tailors"), followed by a pause, then the slow tolling of single strokes at half-minute intervals -- however many strokes required to mark the age. The pattern was similar for a woman, except there would be six initial tolls. (If "nine tailors make a man," then I guess six tailors make a woman.) If that sounds exhausting, remember that life expectancies were much lower as recently as the late 1800s -- especially for women.

The so-called "bow bells" of St. Mary-le-Bow are among the most famous in the world, showing up frequently in London lore. Remember the tale of Dick Wittington? In 1932 he supposedly hard the Bow bells calling him back to London to fulfill his destiny as Lord Mayor. It is said that a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the bells, and a medieval nursery rhyme ends with the line, "I do not know says the Great Bell of Bow." The first known historical reference to the Bow bells is in 1469, when the Common Council ordered the ringing of a curfew every night at 9 PM. A fifth bell was donated to the church in 1515 by one William Copland, a church warden, although he didn't live to see it rung. (It was rung for the first time at his funeral.)

By 1635 there were six bells, although both tower and bells were destroyed in the the Great Fire of London in 1666. The church was rebuilt with a new tower for 12 bells, although initially there were only eight; there weren't a fully 12 until 1881. They weren't rung very often, either: there were problems wit the tower, the bells and the bell frame, apparently, as well as a shortage of ringers. The BBC used a recording of the Bow bells during World War II as an interval signal for English language broadcasts. There are still 12 bells, cast at the famed Whitechapel bell foundry in 1956, after the church and bell tower were refurbished. So the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow still ring today.

Casting the Bells

Bells are fascinating things, right down to how they are made -- or rather, cast, since the process involves pouring molten bell metal into a mold.  In The Nine Tailors, the tenor bell is named Tailor Paul, supposedly cast in a field next to the churchyard in 1614. Once the bell has been cast, it can be "tuned" by paring metal off various parts of the bells' soundbow. As for the creation of the mold, that is an equally painstaking process. There is an inner mold, or core, and an outer one (the "cope), both made up of a mixture of clay, cow dung (!) and horse hair. This mud pie is built up into the desired shape, supported by a metal base plate ("strickle"), layer by painstaking layer. After a certain number of layers, the mold is baked in a dry oven until it is hard, then more layers are added, then baked, and so on. Any air pockets or moisture would be bad, as the finished mold would crack when the molten lead is poured into it. 

Just before the final layer has been baked hard, the mold is coated with graphite to prevent the molten metal from burning it, and any desired inscription is stamped into the mold in reverse. This is another time-honored tradition of bells, which frequently have nicknames and inscriptions, as if they were, indeed, alive. For instance, in Sayers' novel, the oldest bell is dubbed Batty Thomas, cast in 1380, and bears the inscription "Abbat Thomas sett mee heare + and bad mee ringe both loud and cleer." (The oldest bell hung for change ringing that is still in use was cast in 1325; it is the fifth bell at St. Dunstan's Church in Canterbury, Kent.) Wimsey even alludes at one point to one of the most popular inscriptions employed by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for its treble bells: "I mean to make it understood that tho' I'm little yet I'm good."

The traditional architecture of a bell tower incorporates a bell chamber with louvred windows so the sound can escape outside, instead of building up to intolerable levels within the chamber (see discussion of forced oscillation resonance in the final section, unless you want to avoid spoilers). Below the bell chamber, there is usually at least one sound chamber, through which the ropes pass as they are dropped down into the ringing chamber. Each rope has a wooden grip, called a sally. ("Wimsey could see the eight bell-ropes, their wooden sallies looped neatly to the walls and their upper ends vanishing mysteriously into the shadows of the chamber roof.") 

For full-circle ringing, a bell is hung so that it can rotate a full 360 degrees, fitted with a wheel and a rope. Traditionally, the ball begins in the "mouth down" position and must be "rung up" in order to start the tolling.  ("Wimsey brought his bell up competently up and set her at backstroke while the tuckings were finally adjusted.") The ringer then has to pull on the rope repeatedly so that the bell swings higher and higher, until it rotates the full 360 degrees each time the rope is pulled.The bell winds the rope onto its wheel as it completes the rotation, such that the sallie is lifted towards the ceiling (the "handstroke"). Then it swings back in the opposite direction as the ringer pulls the tail-end of the rope towards the floor (the "backstroke").

These bells aren't easy to ring either, according to my fellow science writer Karen Fox, who has been a modern-day bell-ringer at National Cathedral in Washington, DC. In an email exchange back in June -- we were gushing over our shared love for Sayers' novel -- she said, "You have to pull it the perfect amount so it will balance upside down. Only by balancing it to give yourself a beat of time before it swings back down can you control it at all. One has to learn the feel of the weight of the bell and slow it down perfectly as it nears the top of its arc."

Ringing the Changes

Karen also said she was drawn to the numbers of the patterns in the changes. Change-ringing in England -- at least as we know it today -- evolved in the 17th century; the first textbook on change-ringing appeared in 1671 and was called Tittinnalogia, or The Art of Ringing.  There are simple "rounds" that can be rung, but since this gets monotonous, over time, variations of the patterns emerged, and these are known as specific peals -- many with colorful names. Wimsey's fictional nine-hour New Year's peal of 15,840 "Kent Treble Bob Majors." Other peals mentioned in Sayers' novel include Grandsire Triples, Steadmans, and Grandsire Major. One wouldn't confuse the sound of ringing the changes with anything resembling "music" as the term is traditionally used, however. (You can listen to some recordings here.)

"The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example,  it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully-tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations."

This is partly a limitation of the bells: they have a lot of momentum, they're huge, and it takes about two seconds for them to rotate fully, so it's far too challenging to play melodies with them. But leave it to the Brits to take a shortcoming and turn it into its own peculiar art form. Maybe the bells can't easily play a tune, but they can be rung in succession, in various changing sequences. Each bell can only be moved one time in the sequence. Quoth Karen: "Part of the reason the patterns are limited to only changing order with your neighbor at any given time is due to that momentum thing. You can get the bell to stop just long enough to switch positions with the person before or after you, but no longer. That's why you never hear melodies with change-ringing." (You can find an Applet of change-ringing here.)

For instance, if you ring the bells in order -- from the lightest, highest pitched bell to the heaviest -- this is known as "rounds," denoted by a row of numbers. A "simple plain hunt," per Karen, would be 1-2-3-4-5-6, followed by the next row (2-1-4-3-6-5), and the next, and the next (2-4-1-6-3-5, 4-2-6-1-5-3, 4-6-2-5-1-3, etc.), "because no bell could possibly ring further than one spot away from where they rang in the last round." (A notation of rounds of the Plain Bob Minor peal is pictured below.) Sayers includes a nice summation of the peculiar aesthetics of campanology in The Nine Tailors:

To the ordinary man, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7, 5, 6 or 5, 6, 7, or 5, 7, 6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen's change.

But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and her noblest note. His passion -- and it is a passion -- finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

Killer Bells?

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS TO FOLLOW! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU CARE!

In fact, Sayers makes ingenious use of change-ringing and its notation as a plot device: a letter is discovered in the bell chamber with the body, but the text appears to make absolutely no sense. Then Wimsey, with the help of the vicar, realizes that it's written in code -- and the key to that code is a specific peal written out in change-ringing notation. The decoded letter reveals the hiding place of the stolen emeralds.

Bells can be fatal, most commonly because ringers get tangled in the ropes and accidentally hang themselves, or the bells unexpectedly swing down and squash somebody's noggin. This still occasionally happens even today. Back in May, the Independent reported that a bell ringer broke his collarbone after getting tangled up in a rope at the top of a church tower. Apparently the rope got caught in a bunch of keys attached to his trousers, and the guy was hoisted a good three feet off the belfry floor, blacked out, and fell back to the floor. Firefighters had to rig up a pulley system to lower the injured bell ringer through a trap door in the floor, since the only other entry was up a narrow wooden spiral staircase.

Both those fates figure in the mythology of Sayers' fictional bell, Batty Thomas, which the church sexton, Mr. Godfrey, deems "an unlucky bell." Batty Thomas is blamed for the death of one of Cromwell's soldiers who ventured into the belfry and -- because the bells had been left mouth up -- when his cohorts started to pull on the ropes, Batty Thomas swung down and killed him instantly. A few centuries later a beginning ringer tried to raise Batty Thomas alone, without help, and hung himself in the ropes. But Sayers came up with an especially ingenious theory of how her murder victim died. Wimsey's breakthrough occurs very late in the book, when he ventures into the bell tower as the bells are being rung in the midst of a major flood in the area. Sayers writes:

"He was pierced through and buffeted by the clamour. Through the brazen crash and clatter there went one high note, shrill and sustained, that was like a sword in the brain. All the blood of his body seemed to rush to his head, swelling it bursting point.... It was not noise -- it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable torment.... His eardrums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than the roar of heavy artillery."

Wimsey manages to stagger to safety, but not before blood runs from his nose and ears. And he concludes that the bells murdered the victim; he had been tied up and forgotten during the nine-hour peal, and the noise had proven to much for his body to withstand: "I believe it is at St. Paul's Cathedral that it is said to be death to enter the bell-chamber when a peal is being rung." Indeed, at the inquest the medical examiner testifies that the victim's brain showed evidence of "an effusion of blood into the cortex."

This is probably the most criticized aspect of Sayers' excellent mystery. It's an ingenious cause of death, but is it plausible? Well, bells undeniably have a natural resonance. Lots of factors contribute to the sound a bell makes -- its diameter, weight, profile, and thickness, for example -- which is why there are so many different bell profiles.

Because of that complex shape, what we hear when the bell is struck is a combination of notes, arising from different parts of the bell vibrating at different frequencies ("partial tones"). The partial tones combine in the end to give a bell its distinctive tone. Indeed, Sayers' fictional jewel thief, Nobby Cranton, stumbles upon the body in the belfry and in his haste to leave, drops his flashlight, which hits one of the bells hanging below. "I'll never forget the sound it made," he tells the Superintendent. "It wasn't loud, but kind of terribly sweet and threatening, and it went humming on and on, and a whole lot of other notes seemed to come out of it, high up and clear and close."

Every material object has a natural resonant frequency at which it vibrates -- like crystal wine glasses. Pump in more energy of the same resonance and let it build up, and the crystal wine glass will vibrate so strongly that it can shatter -- a phenomenon known as forced oscillation resonance. In order for this to work, the sound must be loud (at least 90 decibels) and prolonged (at least several seconds) to allow enough vibrating energy to build up to cause the crystal wine glass to shatter. And of course, the sound in question must resonate perfectly with the natural resonant frequency of the glass. If it doesn't, the glass won't shatter no matter how long and loud the note in question. Furthermore, wine glasses have a unique "bell" shape that makes them especially able to propagate resonant vibrations -- and thus more vulnerable to shattering. That said, those famous Memorex commercials showing Ella Fitzgerald shattering a crystal glass with her voice was a bit of a cheat: they specifically used glasses with a high lead content (which vibrates better) and amplified her voice to about 94 decibels, on a par with a jackhammer.

I haven't been able to find any specific studies to back up or debunk Sayers' ingenious murder weapon. The best answer I could find was in response to the question of whether sound can kill comes from Cecil Adams' Straight Dope. I verified the salient points, to wit: the pain threshold in the ear is between 130 to 140 decibels -- about the same as a jet engine at close-ish range. The eardrum will rupture around 160 decibels, or 185 decibels for "nonperiodic blast pressure." The latter is the kind of sharp instantaneous rise in ambient atmospheric pressure resulting from an explosion or the firing of a large weapon -- or a thunderclap or sonic boom, for that matter. Sound, after all, is basically a pressure wave.

Sound, apparently, can kill. Sometimes. In World War I, for instance, soldiers were found dead in the vicinity of an explosion, yet they didn't have any obvious external injuries -- just major internal damage, especially to the ear, lungs and gastrointestinal tract. The prevailing theory as to cause of death is an air embolism, starting in the lungs. The immense pressure f the blast pushes on the chest and ruptures the delicate lung tissue, so air bubbles can travel into the arteries and thus to the heart, brain and other organs. The result is, obviously, death. The military is interested in the development of acoustic weapons for that very reason. Adams cites German physicist Jurgen Altmann's treatise on the physiological effects of high-intensity sound, who concluded that "the threshold for suffocation or embolism following lung rupture is 2.6 to 11 times atmospheric pressure, depending on pulse duration."

Could the bells in Sayers' novel have produced those extremes of pressure? Wimsey admits he couldn't know what, exactly, the cause of death might be -- "stroke, apoplexy, shock" -- but the victim was tied up there for the full nine-hour New Year's Eve peal on a night "when the snow choked the louvres and kept it pent up in the tower," making the noise even worse. And of course, if the victim had a pre-existing medical condition, it would be far easier for him to have suffered some sort of seizure and died -- although the evidence for this sort of thing remains hotly disputed. Barring any better explanation, I'll just side with Sayers' fictional Superintendent: "Matter of periods of vibration, I suppose." Case closed. For now.

some tasty tapas

So, I had planned to finally wrap up a nice long post on the acoustics of bells and change-ringing today, but then all hell broke loose on Wall Street and now I have to spend the afternoon at the bank withdrawing all my money and hiding it under the mattress. (Shh! Don't tell anyone!) Okay, maybe not, but I figure folks would prefer some lighter, tapas-style bloggy fare to take our minds off the pending economic apocalypse. We'll save the in-depth science for the weekend, okay?

* First, an amuse bouche: my latest post at Twisted Physics opens with an amusing video of comedian Brian Regan's reaction while trying to watch NOVA's The Elegant Universe. Other highlights over the past couple of weeks include a brief overview of the search for the Higgs; swooning over the new British TV series, Lost in Austen (Jane Austen, wormholes and time travel! Awesome!); revisiting a 19th century moon hoax; and honoring some notable NASA "firsts."

* Tom at Swans on Tea gets my vote for this week's funniest bit of mock dialogue with his post on "What (Not) to Say When You Meet a Physicist":

Resident: "If I let you in, you'll teach me physics!"
Burgler: "No, ma'am, I just want to ransack the flat."
Resident: "Well, alright." (opens door)

Scott Aaronson comes in a close second, though, for this dashed-off witticism while taking issue with Ray Kurzweil's conclusions in the latter's book, The Singularity is Near: "If the singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service." Even the Wall Street Journal is showing signs of a budding sense of humor with a recent article on high-energy physicists at CERN taking improv classes to loosen up their style of communication.

* Over at io9, there's a terrific rundown tracing the roots of today's science fiction back through the centuries. For those who think it all started with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells -- think again. 

* Now that the Large Hadron Collider hasn't destroyed the world, we can go back to fretting about other, more mundane fears -- like killer hybrid cars! Aiieee! Via io9 (they've been on a roll, lately), I learned that there is actually a horror movie being filmed, in which a female mechanic gets trapped in a Chicago police garage overnight with a hybrid car gone berserk, a la Christine. It's called Hybrid (not to be confused with another sci-fi flick of the same name involving a half-man/half animal). Yanno, I thought my little red Prius had been acting a little strange of late. There's a small army of Priuses (Pri-i?) in the LA area, all with sophisticated onboard computers, and should they all form a network via Facebook or something, they could pretty much take us out. I'm just sayin....

* Personally, I'd also be worried about fungi, after reading this article about how certain fungi launch their spores outward with the fastest acceleration known in nature -- equivalent to a person traveling at 5000 times the speed of sound. Apparently this is necessary because the spores are so tiny, and so light, that air resistance would quickly overcome their trajectories if they didn't have such enormous acceleration. I had visions of armies of fungi flinging their spores against our best defenses -- tiny catapults! -- and this mental picture was only reinforced by Carl Zimmer's posting of a video of this sort of behavior, set to the tune of the "Anvil Chorus" from Il Travatore. Thanks for the insomnia, Carl.

* One wouldn't normally associate burlesque dancer/fashion icon Dita von Teese with science. But now she's the star of a new commercial from Wonderbra, "The Science of Sexy." (Again, h/t to io9. Give it a rest, guys! How many times can I link to your oh-so-excellent blog?) Your eyes do not deceive you -- the lab microscope magically morphs into a Wonderbra that lifts and separates, or, in this case, causes you to strut around the lab surrounded by backup dancers waving giant black feathery fans. Oh, and the Wonderbra will magically transform you from a mousy female science nerd in white lab coat and glasses into the hot 'n' feisty Ms. von Teese. I'll go out on a limb here and say the ad is going to prove "controversial." And rightly so. Just for the record, this is not what I mean when I talk about how it's possible to be both smart and sexy (although I've always rather liked von Teese's sassy attitude).

* Okay, put those popped eyeballs back in your head, because now it's time to get serious. Skulls in the Stars has an excellent post on "The Republican War on Intelligence" -- basically analyzing the weird shift within the GOP over the last decade from respecting education and expertise, to openly sneering at those who spend years and years acquiring knowledge and analytical skills (often living right on the poverty line to do so), and flaunting ignorance as being somehow superior. Excuse me? In what universe? That's where this whole "elitist" meme is coming from, and it's utter nonsense. Small wonder our educational system is going to the dogs, when the leaders of a major political party repeatedly stoke the fires of the "culture wars" by openly mocking intelligence and expertise -- and then turn around and claim they "support" education. News flash: the two go hand in hand; to value one, is to value the other. As the post makes clear, this is not about being "liberal" or "conservative"; it's not really about political issues at all, although the issue has become dangerously (and deliberately) politicized by the GOP. And it bodes ill for our continued future prosperity if such a mindset continues to flourish. Knowledge, acquired skill and expertise matter; covering one's ears and loudly proclaiming otherwise doesn't change that. [UPDATE: Sam Harris has an excellent article in Newsweek saying essentially the same thing, only better:]

"Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated."

* Which brings me to my final item: the passing of the brilliant novelist David Foster Wallace over the weekend. Lots of folks have been linking to his stellar 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, in which he explores the true value of a liberal arts education; what it really means to think critically; and how arrogance and lack of self-awareness can lead even highly intelligent, educated folks into "blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up."

I've cherry-picked just a few choice quotes below (note the "..." where I've snipped), but you should really take the time to read the whole thing:

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from....  As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language.  As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.

I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean.  To be just a little less arrogant.  To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.  Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. ...

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed....

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

We've lost one of America's truly great intellects -- one who could plumb the depths of philosophical musings with astonishing, unblinking insight, and still come up with wryly humorous touches like the phrase "totally hosed." Now that's a gift.

Everyone seems to be citing DFW's best-known novel Infinite Jest in their bloggy tributes, but I was an even earlier DFW fan, having reveled in his very first novel (written while he was still in graduate school, and before he got all crazy with the footnotes), The Broom of the System. It's a surreal, half-cerebral, half-farcical romp involving Wittgenstein, Po-Mo psychobabble (penis envy and impenetrable membranes are everywhere), an underground army of the elderly, and the search for true love, or at least sexual fulfillment -- like much of his work, it almost defies description.

My favorite character was an enormously obese businessman whose wife left him for a svelte yogurt salesman after he failed to lose weight. In revenge, he resolves to eat until he grows to infinite size and fills the universe with his Yang-Self -- except he develops a crush on Lenore, the book's heroine, and decides he might leave some small corner available for her. At one point, he sends her a box of chocolates (all eaten) with a note nestled within the empty wrappers: "Be my tiny Yin." There's also a marvelous scene early on where frat boys play the drinking game "Hi Bob": basically taking a chug of vodka every time someone on The Bob Newhart Show says, "Hi Bob...."

Anyway, in DFW's honor, I give you the following YouTube video of an ingenious Rube Goldberg device for making a "Falling Water" cocktail. Now that's some physics with a twist! I think he would have appreciated it. If I could only figure out how to do the same to make a classic Sidecar. [UPDATE: the video doesn't seem to be embedding properly, but you can see it here.]

plastic people

A month or so ago, I wrote a post about the difference (if any) between scientific visualization and science-inspired art, particularly as the former becomes sufficiently sophisticated that the lines really do start to blur. It generated some excellent discussion, although ultimately it comes down to how one chooses to define "art." I mean, lots of things can be aesthetically pleasing on the merits, including natural formations; that doesn't necessarily qualify them as "art" -- otherwise, galleries all over the world could just point to a random patch of meadow or the white cliffs of Dover and call it "art." (We've already seen certain self-styled "artists" come awfully close to that level of dis-ingenuousness in their shows. Who's that guy who displayed dissected cow parts preserved in formaldehyde in jars -- Damien Hirst? -- and claimed he was making some deep artistic statement? Jen-Luc Piquant calls shenanigans!)

So beauty is very much in the eyes of the beholder. I was reminded of this when one commenter mentioned the work of Gunther von Hagens, the mastermind behind the Body Worlds series of exhibits that have been touring science museums around the country for several years now. The Spousal Unit and I took in Body Worlds 4 at the Los Angeles Science Museum a couple of weeks ago. We've been living here almost two years, yet this was the first time we'd explored the science museum, despite the fact that it is literally a 10-minute drive away. (Were LA more pedestrian-friendly, we could have walked there, were we feeling energetic.) Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I have a morbid streak a mile wide. I've written about forensics, bugs, poisons, physics-based techniques for sorting sperm, mummies, zombies, and yes -- lovely, lovely corpses. So von Hagens' creations are right up my alley. I found the exhibit positively enthralling.

On the off-chance that there are still folks out there unfamiliar with von Hagens' work, he pioneered a method for preserving corpses called plastination back in the 1970s. It's a time-honored, human endeavor, figuring out how to beat back the ravages of decomposition after death, so von Hagens has a lot of ancestors throughout the ages. In essence, when we die, our cells release enzymes to trigger the process of breaking down all that bone and tissue -- ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- with the help of bacteria and other micro-organisms, not to mention insects and so forth. Mother Nature is thrifty that way.

The best way to offset decomposition is to get rid of all the water and fats that those hungry micro-organisms need in order to thrive. The Egyptians did this via mummification (removing the bodily fluids and wrapping the remainder in linens), although before they developed that technique, the body wold be laid out in the desert in a shallow pit so that the sun could dehydrate the body. Around 1896, scientists discovered formalin, followed soon after by color preserving embalming solutions so folks could be assured of leaving a reasonably good-looking corpse -- or at least one with decent coloring. By 1925, paraffin was commonly injected into organs and tissues to preserve them, and (much later) cryopreservation (cooling the body to very low temperatures to stop decay). In between, in 18th century France, there was Honore Fragonard, director of one of the world's oldest veterinary schools. Fragonard had trained to be a surgeon, and had a longstanding fascination with anatomy and preservation.

Back then, anatomists used to soak body parts in alcohol, mixed with pepper and herbs; apparently Fragonard had his own secret recipe for this, but if so, he took it with him to the grave. But it's obvious what he did to his corpses after that initial phase: he injected the veins, bronchial tubes and arteries with wax or tallow mixed with turpentine, then stretched them on a frame into the desired position and left them to dry. Your average anatomist would have just laid out the bodies in some conventional funereal pose, but Fragonard clearly had a sense of whimsy. He arranged his flayed and preserved bodies into intricate tableaux, or ecorches, and these are the highlight of the Fragonard Museum, located in the tiny town of Maisons-Alfort, just outside of Paris.

The museum houses all kinds of monstrous medical specimens: a pale blue horse fetus, for example, or an actual Cyclops (a colt with a malformed facial bone and one enormous eye). There are Siamese twins, sheep with 10 legs, and a host of skeletons of exotic animals: ostriches, camels, and lions, among others. For Fragonard, however, bodies were his raw materials, and he really blurred the boundary between science and art -- pushing the limits of aesthetics to the limit in the process. The museum is not for the faint of heart. A 1996 article in The New York Times reported that the museum displays a hand-lettered sign at the entrance: "Unfortunately we have too few visitors. If you enjoy the museum, why not send us your friends -- if not your enemies."

If anyone can be said to be the modern heir apparent to Fragonard, it is Gunther von Hagens. In 1978, he applied for his first US patent for a technique for preserving tissue permanently by "synthetic resin impregnation." That is, he replaces the water and lipid tissues of the body with curable polymers (plastics), hence the term plastination. He founded the Institute of Plastination in Germany in 1993 after perfecting his technique, and over the last 20 years has plastinated several hundred donated bodies.

First, the donated body is embalmed with formaldehyde and dissected to whatever degree is desired. Then the water and fatty tissues are replaced with the solvent acetone, which in turn is replaced with a liquid plastic (usually silicone rubber for the posed bodies, since it cures when exposed to a special gas). The challenge is to make sure the plastic gets into every single cell. The secret is placing the specimen in a vacuum chamber, reducing the pressure to the point where the acetone literally boils and vaporizes. The vapor is sucked out of the tissue, and the liquid plastic rushes in to fill the void. Apparently it's a very time-consuming process: doing this to entire bodies takes weeks. Then the bodies are posed with needles, wires, and foam rubber holding various muscles and nerves and limbs in place as need be. The film depicting this part of the process was even eerier than the final pieces, because the bodies look just like flayed marionettes. Once posed, the plastic is cured (with gas, UV light, or heat), and it hardens, solidifying the body into the final position.

The end result not only perfectly preserves the corpses, but even retains most of the microscopic properties of the original form. Tendons, ligaments, fine details of the bone and sinew -- all of these are perfectly preserved, looking more like an exquisitely rendered plastic model than an actual preserved human body. The genius of the exhibit is how von Hagens exploits that life-like quality: the bodies are displayed in various athletic poses (see basketball player, below), revealing how all the bones and muscles and tendons and such interact to produce movement. In some cases, the preserved bodies are shown with prosthetics still intact: artificial hip joints, for instance, or metal pins. And the same hints of whimsy can be seen here, as with Fragonard: bodies are shown playing poker, for example, in an earlier incarnation of Body Worlds, and both Fragonard and von Hagens feature a horse and rider.

In between the full-sized tableaux are display cases featuring individual organs, or slices of tissue: a liver with and without cirrhosis, for example, or the lungs of a smoker displayed side by side with a non-smoker. This being southern California, the exhibit got a bit preachy at such times: there was a special canister for smokers to toss out their cigarettes after viewing that icky, tar-infested lung tissue, for instance, and another display showing a preserved, morbidly obese body (or parts thereof) was accompanied by signage primly lecturing attendees on the need to maintain proper diet and exercise.

Now, I'm all for maintaining a healthy weight via good diet and exercise, but really -- give me a break. Do we really need to turn an anatomy lesson into high school nutrition class? Personally, what that obese specimen revealed to me was that in death, with all the excess fatty tissue stripped away, we are all just pretty much bones and tendons and muscle. At that level, we really do all look alike: the universal human form.

a nation of winers

Thomas Jefferson may well have been America's first great wine connoisseur, according to a 2007 article in The New Yorker about the growing epidemic of wine fraud. See, Jefferson spent several years as Minister to France from 1785 until the French Revolution broke out and every sane foreign diplomat fled for this life, Jefferson included. (Jen-Luc Piquant begs to differ; she has some wild pet theory that Jefferson was the Scarlet Pimpernel, no matter how often I point out that this personage is entirely fictional. But she loves that old Leslie Howard movie -- "They seek him here/They seek him there/Those Frenchies seek him everywhere" -- and won't hear reason.) While he lived there, though, he developed a taste for French wine, particularly of the Bordeaux variety.

So when he got back to America, Jefferson started importing large quantities of Bordeaux from France for himself and his good buddy, George Washington. (If the Scarlet Pimpernel had been intent on smuggling all the good wine out of France, rather than the doomed aristocracy, Jen-Luc's pet theory might hold water.) According to the New Yorker article, in his first term as President, "Jefferson spent $7500 -- roughly $120,000 in today's currency -- on wine...." Can you say "pork-barrel spending"? Although in fairness, he probably didn't use taxpayer's money to stock his own private wine cellar. He did like to show off his knowledge, though, much to the dismay of certain dinner guests, like John Quincy Adams, who noted in a 1807 diary entry, "There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines. Not very edifying."

Jefferson, at least, seemed to genuinely know something about wine. The same cannot be said, apparently, for Christopher Forbes (son of billionaire Malcolm Forbes), who in 1985 paid a whopping $157,000 for a dusty old bottle of 1787 Lafitte at a Christie's auction. At least it was purported to be a 1787 Lafitte; the bottle had no label and had supposedly been discovered "behind a bricked-up cellar wall in an old building in Paris." But it was etched with the initials "Th.J.," evidence, said Christie's Michael Broadbent, that the bottle had once been part of Jefferson's stash. That's what made it worth six figures to Forbes, who said of his purchase, "It's more fun than the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot, and we have those, too."

The problem is that the bottle was a fake, as were the other bottles in that secret stash sold to other "serious collectors." (Jen-Luc says this is code for "really rich people with more money than sense," although I would love to be able to afford some vintage scientific instruments or weaponry, for example, so I think she's being a bit harsh and over-general with her definition.) And Christie's should have known it, since Broadbent had inquired of Monticello's scholarly experts in 1985 about references to wine in Jefferson's letters. Historian Cinder Goodwin, who specialized in Jeffersonian papers, told Broadbent that neither Jefferson's daily account book, letters, bank statements or French custom forms made any mention of 1787 vintages.

Furthermore, while Jefferson had instructed that his initials be engraved on wine bottles imported from France, he used a colon ("Th:J."), not a period ("Th.J.). Her conclusion: while the bottles might be authentically 18th century, there was no specific connection with Jefferson to be found in the historical record. But per the New Yorker article, in Broadbent's eyes, "the sensory experience of consuming a bottle of wine trumped historical evidence."

Ah, such hubris! There have actually been many studies of blind taste tests using wine; in some cases, even the "experts" couldn't tell the difference between a red and white wine, never mind different varieties or vintages. The New Yorker article specifically mentions Frederic Brochet, who as a PhD student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, conducted a study demonstrating that our perception of a "good wine" is highly influenced by whether we believe it to be expensive and of high quality beforehand.

Brochet first served his 57 subjects a moderately-priced red Bordeaux from a bottle whose label identified it as a common French table wine. The next week, he served them the exact same wine from a bottle with a label identifying it as a grand cru (a remarkably fine and expensive bottle). The participants described the first bottle as "simple," "unbalanced," and "weak," and the second bottle as "complex", "balanced," and "full." (Jen-Luc thinks they showed a pronounced lack of descriptive imagination, in addition to being fooled by the blind taste test.)

In a recent post at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer mentions an article in Men's Vogue about a bunch of real estate moguls who get together to drink ridiculously expensive wine, often consuming as much as $30,000 worth in a single evening. (Note to those real estate moguls: I like a really nice bottle of wine with dinner as much as the next person, but if you're dropping thirty grand on wine for dinner, I don't want to hear you whining about having to pay higher taxes ever again. You could feed a family of five for a year on that.) Jonah writes in the same post about an experiment at Caltech, where 20 people sampled five different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignons identified only by their retail price, ranging from $5 to $90. In fact, there were only three different wines, so sometimes the same wine would randomly appear twice, only with a significant difference in price. And of course, the subjects invariably rated what they deemed the "more expensive" wine higher in terms of taste than the wine they thought was cheaper.

Why do we do this? Jonah has a theory about that, too. See, the participants in the Caltech study tasted their wines while inside an fMRI machine. That's the form of brain imaging that measures increased blood flow in key areas of the brain during any activity, thereby enabling researchers to see which specific parts of the brain light up during specific activities. In the Caltech study, several different brain regions were involved, but only one seemed to respond specifically to the price of the win, and not the wine itself: the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The OFC got way more excited by the prospect of the $90 wine than the humble $5 wine. The working hypothesis is that "the activity of this brain region shifted the preferences of the wine tasters."

In short: we are very easily fooled by subjective things like pricing and snazzy labels. That's why some of the bolder wine forgers -- and it is a burgeoning industry -- will work with genuine labeled bottles and simply refill the empties with a cheaper wine and re-cork them, confident that the "status-conscious buyer" will never taste the difference. In China, the crooks are selling fake bottles of 1982 Lafitte (an acclaimed vintage), and in 2000, Italian authorities busted several people involved in the illegal sale of 20,000 bottles of fake 1995 Sassicaia (a Tuscan red wine much in demand by serious connoisseurs). The ringleader was selling the fake wine out of the back of his Peugeot, which should have been a dead giveaway to buyers that he wasn't exactly on the up-and-up.

Wine forgery has gotten so prevalent that last year the FBI opened an investigation into the counterfeiting of old and rare vintages. It's also become something of a joke. The head of Sotheby's wine department jokes in the New Yorker article that "more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to being with." Wealthy US and Asian consumers seem to be most status-conscious, and hence most vulnerable to fraud, but even among supposed experts, there is some fairly damning evidence that perhaps the emperor has no clothes. Via Ed Brayton, I learned that the editors of Wine Spectator inadvertently granted a prestigious award to a non-existent restaurant with a wine list featuring  overpriced bottles of what the magazine had previously panned as particularly bad wines. Hey, it could happen to anyone. (It was a very elaborate hoax, but come on -- if you haven't actually been to a restaurant and sampled its offerings, you've got no business giving it an award.)

Along with the prevalence of wine fraud, however, there is also an emerging field in wine forensics, whose practitioners are drawing more and more on a variety of physics-based analysis techniques to measure and characterize wine. For instance, French physicist Philippe Hubert devised a way to test the age of wine without opening the bottle using low-frequency gamma rays. This can tell the researcher if cesium 137 is present, an uncommon radioactive isotope that is a product of nuclear fallout. If a wine has been bottled before the beginning of atmospheric nuclear testing, it won't have any cesium 137; if it does, it is (a) not very old, and (b) given the 30-year half life of the isotope, it's possible to make a reasonably precise estimate of its age. (The technique is useless for older bottles of wine, but can help uncover obvious fraud if someone is trying to pass newer wine off as an older vintage.)

Via Physics Buzz comes word that French scientists have teamed up with a London-cased wine dealer called The Antique Wine Company to develop a new method to help authenticate wines using particle accelerators. The new technique determines the age of the glass of the wine bottle by analyzing the x-rays emitted when the bottles are zapped with ion beams, and it can make the determination without having to open to bottle or otherwise taint the wine. It turns out that vintage wine bottles have telltale "fingerprints" from the time period in which they were manufactured, so the researchers at the National Center for Scientific Research can compare their results with a database filled with information on Bordeaux-region bottles dating back to the 19th century.

The New Yorker article correctly says that "There are no scientific tests that can reliably determine the grape varietals in a bottle of wine," but there is a nifty high-tech way to determine whether a vintage bottle has gone bad or not. After all, there is nothing more embarrassing than giving a dinner party, uncorking your finest vintage, and discovering it's pretty much turned to vinegar unfit even for use as a light vinaigrette over the starter salad. Tom at Swans on Tea pointed me to a new technique using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure the levels of acetic acid per liter down to the tenth of a gram. Basically, a wine is considered spoiled once it hits 1.4 grams of acetic acid per liter. (Vinegar, in case you're curious, has around 12.5 grams per liter, but then, one doesn't drink it straight from the bottle, either.)

Finally, European scientists announced their prototype handheld electronic tongue last month. It's similar to an electronic nose, the latest example of electronic sensing technologies that have been developed over the last decade in an attempt to reproduce human senses using sensor arrays and pattern recognition software. An electronic nose must be trained, of course, to build up a database of samples for future reference. It can then recognize new samples by comparing those volatile compound fingerprints with those already in the database. Last year, researchers at the University of Warwick and Leicester University announced they had developed a kind of artificial snot to significantly enhance the odor-sensing capabilities of electronic noses and enable them to pick out a more diverse range of smells. Apparently our own natural nasal mucus dissolves scents and separates out different odor molecules based on when they arrive at nasal receptors. Who knew? The artificial version is a 10-micron thick layer of polymer.

But I digress. We were talking about the electronic tongue. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, designed an early electronic tongue ten years ago. They attached four well-known chemical sensors to a type of polymer microbeads used to synthesize DNA and its proteins, and mounted the whole shebang on a silicon wafer with carefully micromachined wells. Those wells were designed to mimic the human tongue's many cavities, which contain our test buds (nature's chemical receptors). Each microbead serves as a taste bud, via a sensor that responded to a specific chemical by changing color. For instance one turned yellow if there were high acidity. The resulting unique color combinations could be analyzed by a camera-on-a-chip connected to a computer database to analyze for several different chemical components simultaneously.

The newer handheld version of the electronic tongue was invented by Cecilia Jimenez-Jorquera and colleagues at the Barcelona Institute of Microelectronics in Spain, after wine industry specialists complained they had no quick, easy way to assess the quality of wines without having to send the bottles to a special laboratory facility.  So Jimenez-Jorquera and Company devised an electronic tongue that can identify the grape variety and vintage at the press of a button. Six different sensors detect substances associated with specific varieties of wine by measuring things like acid, sugar and alcohol. Because it's handheld, it's portable enough for use in the field. This could really be a game-changer for wine forensics. Fraudulent sellers, beware!

physics politico

So, the Spousal Unit and I had dinner with a good friend this weekend (a physicist), who offhandedly asked if I really thought an Obama Administration would be that much better for science than a McCain Administration. Bear in mind that he loves to play Devil's Advocate, but it is, nonetheless, a valid question. Regular readers know that I rarely delve into politics on this blog, except as an occasional aside or to highlight something that directly impacts science. I keep informed, but prefer not to immerse myself in political news -- mostly because it makes me want to take a shower to wash off all the crud and slime after just a few hours' reading. But there comes a time when even folks like me need to speak out, stand up and be counted. Consider this one of those times. (We'll return to our regular science programming with the next post. And within a week I hope to announce the Top 100 popular science books, culled from the outpouring of suggestions from the science blogosphere. A secret inner cabal of "Deciders" begins deliberations soon!)

For the record, I really, truly, am a registered Independent. It's not for reasons of "journalist integrity", but because I loathe being limited by pointless labels, and/or having some political party platform dictating what I "should" think on any given issue. The fact that so many people automatically assume I am a Democrat kinda proves my point. (The Spousal Unit, as anyone who reads his blog knows, actually is a stalwart Democrat. Somehow our marriage survives. And Jen-Luc Piquant? She follows the creed of the Rogue Ninja and considers herself above petty politics.)

I think our creaky two-party system is unnecessarily divisive, hopelessly outdated, and inadequate to serve the country's needs in an increasingly complex 21st century world, with an increasingly diverse citizenship. And I believe that blind partisanship is the enemy of sound reasoning and responsible governance. If I have opted for the Democratic presidential candidate in the last several elections -- which I have -- that is because the Republication Party has been hijacked by right-wing social extremists and morally corrupt, money-grubbing corporations. Also? I'll take a "tax and spend" liberal over a "spend and spend" conservative any day; at least the former understands that money doesn't grow on trees. Dear GOP: Kick those bums out, start showing some fiscal restraint, and become the party of Lincoln again, and you might just win back my vote.

Now, the John McCain of 2000 might have been able to do that. Sure, he was always conservative, and not nearly as much of a maverick as he pretended to be, but he had energy, verve, and he really did speak out eloquently against government abuses of power. But where does McCain stand today on the critical S&T issues? Because let's face it: science and technology are going to be key to meeting future challenges in virtually every sphere. We ignore it at our peril. [UPDATE: My sincere apologies to the folks at Physics Today, who have been laboring tirelessly to cover the current election with regards to science, for forgetting to link to them in this post. Check out their site!]

Whither the Maverick?

McCain's campaign hasn't responded yet to questions from Science Debate 2008 (in fairness, they're in the middle of a campaign muted by the onset of a hurricane, and fighting off a media feeding frenzy on the new VP pick -- they're kinda busy). [UPDATE: As of September 15, the McCain campaign's response to Science Debate 2008 can be found here. It's nice to see more fleshed-out answers on these issues than can be found on the official Website, but they don't change my conclusions below.] So I spent a couple of hours browsing his official campaign Website. Disappointingly, there's very little specific science policies outlined there, apart from space science. Tom Levenson gives a bare-knuckled breakdown of McCain's position (and Obama's) on space science (i.e., NASA) over at Inverse Square. But it's not very encouraging to find so little about science on the site.

Still, there are some promising statements scattered throughout. McCain certainly recognizes the need to cut carbon emissions as rapidly as possible and offers a reasonably detailed plan to do so, from a cap-and-trade system to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, to substantial tax credits for consumers who buy zero-emission vehicles, as well as incentives to automotive companies to get off their butts and introduce an affordable electric car already. Scientists are kinda divided on biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol, but it's certainly a worthy area of R&D investment, given the energy challenges we face, and the McCain plan will make that investment.

On the downside, he's made it pretty clear that he supports offshore drilling for oil and natural gas in previously protected regions -- a short-term, stop-gap measure that won't do anything to stem rising oil costs because those are as much the result of speculation trading by unscrupulous investors as anything else. At least McCain also supports cracking down on these sorts of abuses (the site denounces empty "wagering in our energy markets"). Too bad he makes no mention of the notorious abuses of the Bush administration on squelching scientific data on climate change, except to say that "Climate policy should be built on scientifically sound, mandatory emission reduction targets and timetables." This is so laughably vague and filled with bureaucrat-speak, it could mean almost anything. 

More pluses: McCain advocates incentives to develop green alternative technologies, the "greening" of the federal government (the largest consumer of electricity on Earth), and wants to invest in more nuclear power plants. (I am not a huge fan of nuclear power because of the waste issue, but I recognize it is necessary to include it in a broad energy portfolio for the next 50 years, until fusion or hydrogen sources become more viable. I just hope those new McCain plants draw on newer closed-fuel cycle designs, rather than just recycling the old plant designs of yore. Sadly, I suspect the latter.)

More minuses: He advocates a permanent R&D tax credit for companies investing in innovative R&D, which might be promising if he had said anything, anywhere, on his site about how important S&T is to building a strong economy. He says nothing about declining federal funds for basic research, at a time when Fermilab narrowly avoided a shutdown, and many science departments and labs across the country are struggling to keep their research programs alive. (It's not as bad as it is in England, but unless something changes very soon, it could be.) Given that, his tax credit seems more like yet another example of favoring businesses and large corporations. Hopefully he'll address that by answering Science Debate 2008's questions.

Enter the Upstart.

Unfortunately for McCain, the soundest of his science-based policies are also addressed by Barack Obama -- in far more detail, and in far more sweeping, forward-thinking ways. (Anyone who repeats the talking point that Obama is short on specifics needs to spend an hour or so browsing his Website. It's all right there.) Funding for renewable energy technologies like wind and solar? Check. Foster innovation and entrepreneurship? Check. Permanent R&D tax credit? Check. Greening the federal government? Check. Reducing carbon emissions with a market-based cap-and-trade system? Check. Invest in biofuels, nuclear power,  and new vehicle technologies? Check, check, and double check.

Furthermore, Obama supports a doubling of federal funding for basic research over the next 10 years, and vows to "embrace" science and technology expertise rather than squelch it. He also shares the goal of increasing the number of PhDs earned by Americans, particularly those in under-privileged communities. He even plans to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Oh, and he says this: "Policies must be determined using a process that builds on the long tradition of open debate that has characterized progress in science, including review by individuals who might bring new information or contrasting views." This is a man who will listen to reason and respect scientific expertise. Imagine that! Apparently he's already assembled a team of top-notch science advisors to help "shape a robust science agenda for my administration." His answers to Science Debate 2008 reflect that.

Nowhere is the difference between the two candidates more stark than in their stated policies on education. McCain predictably champions No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when every educator I know considers the program to be a major FAIL. Beyond that, his education policy is inexplicably vague and obsessed with giving parents greater control over where their kids attend schools -- so much so, that I suspect it's a bit of a "dog whistle," i.e., code for something else that only those tuned to that particular frequency can hear, especially since there is no specific mention of math and science education. (Yet there is a lot of harping about how parents are the ones who should decide what their kids should be learning.) At least he recognizes the potential for online learning through virtual schools, and offers financial support to help low-income students pay for access to those online resources. 

But again, Obama also supports online educational tools, with far broader financial support for educational opportunities of all kinds, and offers many point-by-point specifics. He supports the need for accountability in schools, but recognizes that NCLB has failed in large part because funding promises weren't kept by the Bush Administration. His policies seek to address not just teacher training and retention, but also high dropout rates, soaring college costs, and the need for high-quality childcare to assist working parents (particularly single moms). And he wants to make math and science education a national priority.

Obama also specifically addresses a number of key issues near and dear to those of us in the blogosphere. He's a champion of network neutrality, for starters, and favors the "sanity not censorship" model for protecting under-aged children online while preserving freedom of expression. He wants to create Public Media 2.0, what he calls "the Sesame Street of the Digital Age," featuring Web-based video and interactive educational programming. He hopes to bring about "the transition of existing public broadcasting entities and help renew their founding vision in the digital world."

And he supports diversity in media ownership: "Unfortunately, over the past several years, the FCC has promoted the concept of consolidation over diversity. As president [Obama] will encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation's spectrum." You know, my folks are evangelical Christians and staunch Republicans of the far-right variety; mostly, we agree to disagree on key issues, and focus on our mutual love and respect for each other. But the sorry state of broadcast news coverage is one of those issues almost everyone can agree upon -- even those of us who make our livings in the media. It's been turning into a red-faced shouting free-for-all between pompous, bloviating, partisan talking heads for years, more crass entertainment than useful information, all in a desperate bid to boost ratings. Meanwhile, public broadcasting is hanging on by a thread.

Anyone who's caught the numerous clips from The Daily Show on YouTube has seen Jon Stewart's withering montages revealing just how shamelessly the major media outlets mindlessly repeat the same talking points. And MSNBC's commentators practically had a nuclear meltdown during the Democratic National Convention last week with some truly embarrassing unprofessional displays: Olbermann sniping at Scarborough, who sniped at Shuster, coming full circle with Chris Matthews butting heads again with Olbermann -- all on the level of the classic schoolyard taunt, "I know you are, but what am I?" Hug it out, guys, will ya? And grow up. We need a return to basic standards of professionalism, decency, and yes, even altruism if our profession is to survive. So I'm glad Obama has included that, even if he's uncharacteristically a bit short on specifics on that issue.

Finally, while both McCain and Obama favor more accountability and transparency in government, Obama offers more than just vague rhetoric. He provides a detailed plan for a degree of openness that is nothing short of astonishing. Live public Internet feeds as various agencies debate critical policy issues? Requiring Cabinet officials to hold periodic town meetings to answer the public's questions about issues of the day? Giving the public a chance to review and comment on the White House Website for five days before signing any non-emergency legislation? Broad use of federal blogs, wikis, and other online tools? Wow. Oh, and scientists should find this encouraging: Obama wants to restore "the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best available, scientifically valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials."

In a Nutshell.

In short, Obama offers a comprehensive, sweeping plan to bring the government, the health care industry, the media, and all Americans boldly into the 21st century, while McCain is -- well, learning how to send an email and conduct his very first Google search. His age is no excuse; my parents are around his age, and they've both been online for years. Heck, my mom even has a Facebook account. The charge that McCain is out of touch with the 21st century Internet technology that is increasingly shaping our culture and national discourse is a valid one. He clearly lacks a well-defined vision for tapping into the vast potential of Web 2.0 and beyond.

Even more damning points against McCain: he notoriously flip-flopped on the abortion issue, and now is opposed to stem cell research. Obama supports stem cell research. Plus, McCain's shiny new VP pick, Sarah Palin, is a far-right social conservative, global warming denialist, anti-choice advocate, (and is thus anti-stem cell research), plus she supports teaching creationism in public schools (via the "teach the controversy" strategy). If McCain thinks he can co-opt Obama's message on the need for change by calling it "reform," he's got his work cut out for him. Reform isn't change; it's business as usual with a fresh new coat of paint to hide the rotting wood underneath. With Palin at his side, and a party platform filled with ideological rhetoric so stale it's developing icky green moldy bits around the edges, he's offering a change, all right -- all the way back to the late 1980s. (Cue chorus: "And that's not change we can believe in!")

Honestly? Regardless of how McCain answers (if he answers) the questions from Science Debate 2008, his selection of Palin pretty much makes it impossible for anyone who values the science and technology enterprise to vote for him. I've got nothing against Ms. Palin as a person. I could care less about the tawdry family squabble that has her under investigation back home in Alaska, and like Obama, I think her teenaged daughter's just-announced pregnancy should be off-limits in this campaign. I object to her solely on the basis of her policies, particularly given McCain's advanced age. And while it's nice to see a woman in that position, it's not unprecedented: the Dems had a female VP candidate in the 1980s.

As so many have observed, Palin's selection is a bold move, a bit of a wild gamble, and it might even pay off in the short term, despite being an obvious gimmick. It's a close election, and all McCain has to do is pick up more votes than he loses with his controversial pick. But to paraphrase Scripture, "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul?" This is not the McCain we once knew. That McCain would have told the Rove Squad to go f%$& themselves, and picked the running mate he wanted (Lieberman). That he didn't, tells me he's a slave to the GOP Machine now, potentially sacrificing the long-term interests of our nation to win an election -- McCain 2000 would have found this unthinkable. How can we trust him to stand up to special interest groups in the White House if he can't even do it in his own campaign? It might explain why his campaign thus far has been curiously lacking in his characteristic energy and passion; either that, or he's been replaced by one of the Pod People. (John McCain: The Stepford Candidate.) It actually breaks my heart a little, to see the once-proud Maverick so bound and chained.

A Defining Moment.

McCain's choice of Palin certainly proved an effective strategy in one respect: drawing attention away from Obama's electrifying acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (full text here). And that's too bad, because -- whether he wins or loses come November -- his are words that will echo down through history as a defining moment in our national politics. Consider this:

"These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain. But what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and each other's patriotism. The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain."

Or this:

"America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past, for part of what has been lost these past eight years can't just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose, and that's what we have to restore."

And finally, this:

"If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things. And you know what? It's worked before, because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping and settle for what you already know.... But I stand before you tonight because all across American something is stirring."

That's the kind of soaring rhetoric you get to hear maybe once a generation, at best. You don't have to agree 100% with him on each and every issue to know that Obama is the real deal: a true leader, capable of igniting a spark of hope in people who've given up on their ability to make any kind of difference in this country's governance -- people like me, who rarely dare to hope because we've been crushed so many times in the past. Mostly, we hope the person elected president isn't too terribly awful, and at least marginally competent, so we can go about our lives with minimal interference from Uncle Sam.

Obama is right: something is stirring. The jaw-dropping failures and gross incompetence of the Bush Administration changed everything. People like me can't afford to stand on the sidelines any longer; we need to stand up and fight for it if we want our country back. That said, Obama is a politician, not the Messiah, and very much a human being. He'll disappoint folks eventually -- his vote on the FISA bill was very disappointing (and against his own stated policies). Even sincere campaign promises don't necessarily translate into concrete action -- not right away -- and he's inheriting a godawful mess from Dubya. Realistically, Obama probably won't be able to accomplish very much on his ambitious policy agenda until the economy rebounds and we stop hemhorraging funds on the Iraq war. Real change takes time, a bit of compromise here and there, an exhausting amount of effort -- and an inspiring leader to boost flagging spirits when the going gets rough.

Honestly? This election shouldn't even be close, at least among moderates and independents. (The partisan extremes will never budge from their respective positions.) Obama should win in a blowout, except he's black, and he has a funny, foreign-sounding name. Anyone who thinks race isn't an issue in this election is deluding him/herself, just as sexism most definitely played a role in Hillary Clinton's primary campaign. We are not always aware of our own partisan biases and gender/racial prejudices -- in fact, we are hard-wired to view ourselves in the most flattering light possible -- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to see past them.

I'm reminded of the climactic scene in A Time To Kill, in which Matthew McConaughey's character, a white small-town Southern lawyer named Jake, is defending a black father for killing the white men who raped his 11-year-old daughter. The odds of acquittal, frankly, are not good; the father gunned down the rapists in a public courthouse, in plain view of dozens of witnesses, and wounded a (white) policeman in the bargain. He's facing a hanging jury. So Jake asks the jury to picture that little girl on that fateful day, visualize her innocence, how horribly she was violated and left to die, and how her life was irrevocably changed in just a few terrifying minutes. Then he pauses, and delivers the coup de grace: "Now imagine... that she's white."

Okay, it's just a movie, and I would never advocate vigilante justice. But I wish those people who smear Obama on comment threads (there are some truly ugly ones on the Internet) and via mass emails, those who call him "elitist" and "presumptuous" (make no mistake, that is code for "uppity ni***er"), those who think he's a closet Muslim in league with terrorists just because his background is multicultural, his middle name is "Hussein" and his last name rhymes with "Osama" -- I wish all those people would take the time to listen to what Obama is actually saying, while picturing him as if he were white, Republican, Independent, blue-collar Democrat, or however they self-identify, instead of some scary Other. Because he is "one of us." He is the face of 21st century America. Get used to it.