Cocktail Party Physics

a lab of their own

Well after Groundhog Day, the cocktail party's founder, long in absentia, emerges from under her nice shady rock, rubs her eyes and blinks in the bright sunshine, and demands a mint julep for her trouble. Okay, a mojito or pisco sour will do just as well. I just need a bracing pick-me-up after being deluged for weeks on end, with no time for blogging (although I have been hoisting the bloggy banner, still, over at Twisted Physics). My fellow bloggers have been equally under the gun; if it weren't for the intrepid Lee, we might have gone dark completely the last few months!

Sure, the new job is uber-demanding, but the Spousal Unit and I decided things weren't insane enough with his-and-hers book-writin', his ongoing physics research, and my matchmaking between Hollywood and science, and thereby embarked on a home-buying adventure. In the current economic climate, such a path is fraught with anxiety-inducing peril. Yet we have emerged victorious and are moving into our new townhouse in Echo Park this Friday. And I have a new assistant starting on Monday to relieve some of the administrative pressures of the Science and Entertainment Exchange. (Jen-Luc Piquant has been AWOL shooting her own cyber-movie but she assures me she'll be moving into post-production next week, so everyone will be back on board!)

There are umpteen topics for future blog posts in the works; my fodder file runneth over. But I had to re-emerge from my unplanned blogospheric exile to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. For those not "in the know," Ada (as I prefer to think of her) was known in her day as "the enchantress of numbers," and helped inventor Charles Babbage refine his designs for his thinking machines -- precursors to our modern computers, way back in the 19th century.

Babbage was pretty eccentric -- a typical inventor -- and people tended to love or hate him. He was an ugly, toad-like man, according to contemporary accounts. Indeed, the poet Thomas Carlyle (one of the loathers) described him as "a cross between a frog and viper." Charles Darwin, however, was a fan. And so was young Ada Lovelace, who counted among the rare few to fully grasp the significance of Babbage's "thinking machines" while others were ridiculing the single-minded little man for his obsession.

Ada was a rare creature for her day; women just weren't encouraged to study math or the sciences; it was just too, too unfeminine, don't you know, and really dashed a girl's marriage prospects in the bargain. No sane man wanted a brainiac for a wife in Victorian England. But Ada had a few things going for her: first, she had a privileged position in society, being the daughter of the famed Romantic poet Lord Byron and a well-born mother.

However, she never actually knew her father; her mother's family saw to that. They didn't want the nefarious Byron wanton-ness rubbing off on the young girl. That's the second reason she had an advantage: to counter the perceived "wilder" aspects of her character inherited from the dissolute poet, young Ada was actually encouraged to study math and science. Those subjects were believed to have a tempering effect on "Romantic excesses."

Finally, she had a strong role model in Mary Somerville, the so-called "Queen of Science," her overcame her own family's objections to become a great populizer of scientific treatises by LaPlace ad Newton, for example. Somerville was one of the first women to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society (the other was Caroline Herschel, sister to famed astronomer William Herschel), and took young Ada under her wing.

For all her accomplishments, however, Somerville still had very traditional ideas. She encouraged Ada to work at sewing, not just sums, insisting that "a mathematician can do other things besides studying x's and y's." (True enough, but it's telling that Somerville didn't encourage Ada to, say, become a detective, or a ship's captain, or even a lowly actuary -- roles traditionally reserved for men.) Ada, in contrast, embraced her literary lineage and called herself a "poetical scientist," one who united reason with imagination. She dreamed of developing a "calculus of the nervous system", demonstrating mathematically "how the brain gives rise to thought, and nerves give rise to feelings." She fell short of that vsionary goal, but that's why she found Babbage's work so compelling.

In the end, alas, poor Ada did prove to have inherited some fraction of the Byron wildness. Benjamin Woolley's excellent biography, The Bride of Science, poignantly recounts the more tragic aspects of Ada's life, including ill-fated love affairs and near-elopement. By 1851, she'd figured out that her math skills could be useful in betting on horses, devising an elaborate gambling scheme that proved disastrous; she lost a great deal of money on those ponies. And she died in her thirties of ovarian cancer. She certainly deserves some measure of honor in the historical pantheon of women in math and science.

But Ada Lovelace Day isn't just about honoring Ada herself. The idea is also to honor other women scientists and mathematicians who bucked social pressures to follow their bliss. There are any number of good candidates to choose from -- hell, every woman physicist I know is a candidate, including co-blogger Diandra -- but upon reflection, I'd like to take this opportunity to honor Shirley Jackson, currently president of Rensselaer Institute of Technology in Troy, NY, right next to Albany. She has the distinction of being the first black woman to earn a PhD in physics from MIT, back in 1973 -- just one of a lifetime of "firsts." I wrote a profile of Jackson back in 2000 for Industrial Physicist magazine, and traveled up to RPI for an in-person interview. I've never forgotten it; Jackson was that extraordinary.

The daughter of a postal supervisor and a social worker, Jackson inherited her father's acumen in math, and both parents fostered her innate curiosity. She designed her own scientific experiments in the family's backyard as a child -- all of Nature was her laboratory. She conducted nutritional experiments on mice (her father built the cages for the little creatures) and kept honeybees under the family porch, adjusting their habitats, diets and exposure to light and logging in her observations in a journal. She has compared experimentation to "a good mystery novel, a tangible unfolding narrative of what [makes] Nature tick.... And best of all, I was at the controls... changing the plot and scenery according to the directions of my own interests."

Jackson proved to be a stellar student, one of only two black women admitted to MIT in 1964. If you just charted her rise by perusing her resume, she moved easily from success to success: a PhD in elementary particle physics, postdocs at Fermilab and SLAC, then a switch to condensed matter physics and a few years at Bell Labs studying the behavior of electrons on the surface of liquid helium films.

From there, she branched out into public service -- "I'd always been raised to believe that if one had talent and opportunity, one should not be striving strictly for oneself," she told me -- chairing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But she missed interacting with students, and accepted the presidency of RPI, where she has reigned with grace and aplomb for nearly a decade. (In fact, she just voluntarily took a 5% pay cut, donating the savings to a student scholarship fund to cope with the current nasty economic environment. AIG scumbags, take notice!)

However, "It hasn't always been a smooth road for her, and people don't often see that aspect," MIT physicist Milly Dresselhaus told me back in 2000. Dresselhaus was Jackson's mentor at MIT back in the 1960s; even as a professor, there were plenty of male students who refused to take physics from a woman. Dresselhaus persevered, and so did Jackson, despite social isolation -- nobody would be her study partner -- verbal abuse, and even a vague reference to a "shooting incident."

Jackson was understandably reluctant to dwell too much on the pain and injustices of the past in our interview, and I hated having to even ask such questions -- basically amounting to, "So, um, what's it like to be black, and a woman, at MIT in the 1960s?" (Answer: not a hell of a lot of fun!) In a fair and just world, this would simply not be relevant; but we do not live in a fair and just world. So I asked those questions -- awkward, embarrassed, stymied by white liberal guilt, and resenting the questions on her behalf -- and Jackson graciously answered, choosing her words carefully, gently setting the neophyte science writer straight on a few things about life as the ultimate "Other" in physics.

Honestly, I was impressed by her lack of bitterness. It had to have been lonely, not to mention discouraging. One of her professors actually advised her that "colored girls should learn a trade." Jackson didn't take that advice, but she did acquire some measure of perspective by volunteering (in her copious spare time -- not!) at Boston City Hospital's pediatrics unit, to better "understand what real trouble is." And she kept at her studies, because "If I give up, what have I done but allow the other guy to win?"

One of my favorite anecdotes was one she told to illustrate why it's important not to be too easily offended. Sometimes what seems like overt racism/sexism is simply poor social skills or awkward phrasing (we all suffer sometimes from foot-in-mouth syndrome). Case in point: she applied for a summer job at MIT in a physics lab as an undergraduate. She didn't have any specific lab experience, but the professor asked, "Well, can you cook?" When she said yes, he told her she was hired. Jackson, confused, replied, "To do what?" It was not, as it happens, to whip up some tasty grits for his breakfast each morning; rather, the professor assumed that if she could cook, she had the practical skills necessary to learn her way easily around the lab.

I also liked Jackson's take on affirmative action; at the time, it had become synonymous with meeting racial quotes regardless of merit, and many women and minorities disliked being tagged as someone with an unfair advantage. Of course, the whole point of affirmative action was to promote a more level playing field. Jackson certainly benefited from affirmative action (although it did not make her journey any easier from a socio-political standapoint). She prefers to talk about "affirmative outreach," a phrase that preserves the original altruistic intent of the policy while removing the stigma of favored treatment.

Some kind of policy was needed; women in math and science (especially hard sciences like physics) have historically been incredibly rare, and even 50 years ago, their percentages were in the low single digits. The numbers aren't as dire as they used to be. Back in 1975, for instance, lss than 8 percent of bachelor's degrees in physics went to women. By 2002, that number had risen to 22%. And the number of physics PhDs earned by women has climbed from less than 4% in 1975 to around 15% in 2002. (There are probably more current statistics available from the American Institute of Physics, which regularly tracks these demographics.)

The number of women physicists who are also black? You can probably count them on your fingers and toes. If they are more numerous today, it's because Shirley Jackson and other courageous women like her blazed a trail and gave young girls the role models they needed to believe they could succeed. Jackson always quotes her father to her students: "Aim for the stars so that you can reach the treetops." That is, if you don't aim high, you don't go very far. Aim high, my sisters. Be strong.

standing stones in the (inland) sea

Though I don't like to admit it, I grew up in Michigan a quarter mile from Lake Huron. I also have thing for shipwrecks and stone circles like Stonehenge and Avebury. So what do the three factoids have in common? Water. The Great Lakes, shared by Minnesota (barely), Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, are five of the top twelve largest bodies of freshwater in the world, and hold something like 22% of the world's fresh water. They're a little boggling to land-locked folks; you can't see across them in most places and they act more like seas than lakes, but without the daily tides and the salt; 350 million years ago, they were seas that left fossilized coral colonies called Petoskey stones. What you see now, though, is the remnant of glaciers that covered most of North America 10,000 years ago and gouged out those lake beds before filling them with meltwater.

The Great Lakes are deceptively deep and each has a personality of its own. Huron, the one I lived on, is a known ship swallower of oceanic proportions. Of the approximately 4,700 known shipwrecks (with an estimated six to ten thousand total) in the Great Lakes, more than a thousand ships, from ocean-going iron ore freighters to pleasure boats (and airplanes), have been documented as sunk in Lake Huron alone, a large number in the area known as Thunder Bay, just to the north of where I grew up. Lake Michigan, though, gets some of the fiercest storms. It's estimated that 3,000 ships lie in the sands of Lake Michigan.

But ships aren't the only things the waters of the Great Lakes have drowned. The lakes' mean levels rise and fall (PDF) in an approximately 20-year cycle that has to do more with annual snowfall than gravity, so houses and docks and boathouses have a tendency to disappear cyclically as well. Shoreline appears and disappears, is reshaped and eroded and built back up again; wetlands come and go. And as the glaciers pulled away, the lakes rose even more drastically than during this cycle until they reached their present levels, leaving being a number of isolated islands.

One of these islands is Big Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, home to Michigan's very own stone circle. Now there may be another, this one discovered underwater by Dr. Mark W. Holley of Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City during the course of surveying the shipwrecks and other debris in Grand Traverse Bay. Ah, see? It all comes together: Michigan, shipwrecks, stone circles. Maybe I should clarify before you take a look at the photo of it at right. Don't expected Stonehenge, capital S. It's as much a stone alignment as a henge, which are circular or oval in nature. But standing stone arrangements come in numerous configurations, most of which seemed to have some kind of astronomical significance. Many, like the familiar Stonehenge near Salisbury, UK, were both grave sites and astronomical markers. One acoustics scientist, Rupert Till,has discovered that Stonehenge, at least, reflects music almost perfectly, "making the stone circle an ideal setting for listening to repetitive trance rhythms," as the Discovery News article points out. Rave on, Dude! Of course, whether that's actually what went on there is impossible to tell.

(That circle in the middle of the sonar photo above is an artifact of the imaging tool, a Kongsberg-Mesotech MS 1000 sonar, which produces some eerily vivid images of underwater objects (including a very spooky image of a downed plane on their home page) by pinging soundwaves off them. From watching old  submarine movies, I'm used to seeing a sweeping green line with little blips on it as sonar images, not something this high-def. That high definition is, of course, thanks to software processing programs rather more sophisticated than the echolocation sonar used in WWII subs. Unlike the side-scanning sonar that's towed behind a surface vessel or sub that can give wide, sweeping views of the seafloor, this is a more or less stationary sonar dropped overboard to scan a circular area. Sound waves blanket an area and the time they take to bounce back to the transmitter/receiver tells you how high off the surface the objects returning the sound are, as well as how dense they are, since different materials absorb and reflect sound differently. The software is calibrated for the type of surface that's being pinged, so harder objects, like stones, form clearer pictures than the background sand, for instance.)

Just what function North American stone circles had is still up for grabs; there are very few of them. What there are a lot of is medicine wheels, which may have served a similar function but have a very different design. What you're seeing here looks very similar to the remains of other medicine wheels across the Great Plains (left). What's doubly interesting about this particular set of standing stones is that one appears to have a picture of a mastodon with a spear in its side carved into it. Mastodon remains have not previously been found that far north, so this could be a significant find. There's some question about whether the stone really shows a mastodon, and it's hard to verify the fact since it's in 40 feet of water and covered in algae.

The truly mystifying thing about most stone circles is how the heck they got where they are. North American stone structures are generally made of rocks that could easily be carried by hand from the surrounding area, but European megaliths often weigh from several hundred pounds to several tons, and some of the stones were quarried hundreds of miles away. It's cases like this that really show up human ingenuity and give the lie to the idea that people in history were less sophisticated or dumber than we are. First, they've chipped this slab of bluestone (which describes the color more than denoting a particular type of stone in this case) out of a quarry 250 miles away in Wales. What now? Using gravity, bits of wood, and some rope, a former construction worker in Flint, Michigan shows you how to move two ton rocks with your bare hands:

This isn't exactly an unknown technique; the Egyptians probably used something like it to erect their obelisks, like the one now residing in London, or the one in New York's Central Park. When the Vatican wanted one moved from behind the sacristy of St. Peter's to the piazza in front, it took "900 men, 75 horses and untold numbers of pulleys and lengths of rope," and a lot of scaffolding. So Wally Wallington's feat is pretty impressive. The stones he's moving weight as much as a minivan. Of course, you could just go directly to the minivan itself.

I shudder to think what future archaeologists might make of Carhenge. Maybe it'll wind up underwater too, with a little luck, and rust can take its course. In the mean time, I wonder how a rave there might sound?

[h/t to Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG]

measles, mumps, rubella—or autism

Yes, that's a deliberately provocative headline. I chose it because that's what the media would like you to think your choices are. You can vaccinate your kids and risk giving them autism, or protect them against a number of dangerous, miserable, and potentially crippling communicable diseases. Does that protection cause autism? Is that really the choice? Or is it a false hypothesis hyped by the media and unsupported by real research? Is the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine a commercial conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies to make money, or are vaccines an actual health benefit?

We tend to have a love/hate relationship with science, often forgetting the many great things we owe it, like longer life spans, safe food, sanitation, miracle drugs, and technological wonders like the device on which you're reading this. As Louis CK pointed out in a video that's making the rounds, we're happy to bitch about our airline delays as though it were a day spent in Auschwitz while forgetting the mind boggling fact that we can fly. We're quick to point out the fact that thalidomide causes horrible birth defects and to ignore its effectiveness as a treatment for myeloma and skin lesions associated with leprosy. And in this case, we're eager to see a conspiracy of greed behind the rise in autism, instead of remembering that the lives of thousands, if not millions, of children have been saved and improved by vaccines. Even though a special US court has ruled that there is no evidence linking vaccines and autism, that disinformation is still being spread around, maligning a public health initiative that's really vital.

Let me throw just a few statistics at you, just to illustrate how important vaccines have been in the increasing quality of public health in the US alone.

• The incidence of polio dropped to nearly zero by 1960 (polio vaccine introduced in 1955)
• Measles cases dropped sharply between 1955 and 1970 (measles vaccine introduced in 1963)
• The incidence of congenital rubella syndrome dropped from an estimated 20,000 in 1964 to 7 in 1983 (the rubella vaccine was introduced in 1967)

Many of these diseases were already beginning to disappear when their vaccines were introduced, due to better sanitation, better nutrition, less squalid living conditions, germ theory, and better treatments, but diseases like polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, smallpox, and TB became virtually non-existent in developed nations (and in the case of smallpox, were completely eradicated except for a few frozen samples) thanks to public health programs of mandatory vaccination, and in the case of TB, mandatory treatment. As a result, I missed out on all those childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, scarlet fever (which my mother had, and which left her with some heart damage), and whooping cough. I did get chicken pox because I'd already had it by the time the vaccine for it arrived in 1974. Born in 1960, I still remember the dread my mother expressed about the possibility of being struck by polio, or TB, and her stories of her siblings' sicknesses. We're so accustomed now to our children not having to suffer those diseases that we forget how frightening they were, and how devastating the consequences could be. We think of it as just one of those things you get as a child, but measles kills a quarter of a million people each year in undeveloped countries.

In developed countries, thanks to the prevalence of vaccinations, there's a pretty solid herd immunity, in which unvaccinated individuals are protected from catching diseases by the immunity of those who have been vaccinated. But there's a tipping point for herd immunity to, when the number of unvaccinated people begins to outstrip those vaccinated. This can occur on a small scale in communities, as it has with a measles outbreak on Long Island in 2008, which was part of a larger national epidemic, the largest since 1997. In this case, the carriers implicated were unvaccinated travelers. But there were unvaccinated individuals they brought it home to, as well. When that happens, a disease becomes endemic and a reservoir of infection is maintained that can spread once again when conditions are right, because no vaccine is perfect. Ideally, measles should not be endemic in the US, since we have effective vaccines for it. But not if there are people who don't get vaccinated because they think the risks from the vaccines are higher than the risks from the disease.

Here's how easily outbreaks can happen:

In 2005, a 17-year old unvaccinated girl visited Romania, caught measles, returned to her home in Indiana, and proceeded to infect at least 34 more people, most of whom were also unvaccinated.

I wonder how many of those people she infected were on the plane with her? I wonder how many of them took that infection home with them to their communities. We saw this kind of worldwide infection pattern happen with the SARS epidemic, which began in China in in November 2002. "Eight months later, the international spread of Sars-CoV had resulted in 8,098 cases and 774 deaths in 26 countries."

Controversies of this sort have happened before, with predictable consequences. For instance, "[i]n the early 1970s uptake of diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine in the UK was 81% and the incidence of pertussis was low. After a report in 1974 ascribing neurological reactions to the pertussis vaccine the public lost confidence in the vaccine and uptake fell to 31%: pertussis epidemics followed." in Africa, when a polio vaccination programme was derailed by suspicion of HIV infection in the vaccines, cases of polio soon skyrocketed from a few dozen to more than 800, many of them in countries where it had not been seen in years.

Phil Plait, over at one of our favorite blogs, Bad Astronomy, has been highlighting this issue for a while now, citing British doctor Ben Goldacre's media crusade against vaccine misinformation. Goldacre recently made an excellent video about the issue in response to what he sees as inflammatory and dangerous misinformation on a London radio station. One of the comments (by James Pannozzi*) on this particular post is really telling, as it expresses disgust with the the media for not giving equal time to "both sides of the story." What many people don't seem to understand, and what Goldacre highlights, is that the so-called controversy is now a manufactured one. There is no reasonable "other" side; there is only unsupported conjecture and outright falsehood. The facts of research show clearly that MMR is not implicated in autism. Any other opinion is just that: opinion, not fact. Science is all about debate, until the debate is resolved. Then the so-called debate becomes willful ignorance vs. proven fact.

One of the most telling statistics, for me, is the number of cases the original assertion about MMR was based on. It's actually worth quoting Goldacre's award winning article on the subject:

Wakefield [source of the original allegations] and his team found some traces of measles virus in the gut of 12 children with autism. That's the measles virus, not MMR. This lab finding has proved extremely hard for other labs to replicate. Professor John O'Leary of Coombe Women's Hospital in Ireland, a collaborator of Wakefield's, seems to have replicated the finding, and might have shown that the virus was from the vaccine, but it turns out maybe not. It's a very complex technical dispute, because it's hard to do the laboratory studies to prove if the traces are from a vaccine or infection, and it's not known what effect measles virus in the gut would have anyway. Either way, these are inconclusive laboratory findings on their own. And that, along with a number of understandably distressed parents, is the sum total of the case against MMR. It proves nothing about causation. It's all circumstantial: I'm sure you could find 12 children who hate Harry Potter, or have a missing toe, and have measles virus in their gut. That would prove nothing about MMR and hating Harry Potter, or missing toes. And children were starting to talk, or not, at about 18 months, for millennia before MMR was even dreamt of.

Twelve children. This entire controversy was based on findings from 12 children. In the world of statistics and medical studies, twelve is not enough to to even represent a true anomaly in the hundreds of thousands of cases of autism diagnosed each year. It's such a small fraction of 1% as to be insignificant, except to the families of those suffering with those diagnoses. Understandably, for them this is non-trivial because it represents some sort of explanation, no matter how tenuous. And humans always want an explanation for our suffering.

But refuting this number was a study in Finland that looked at "3 million MMR vaccinations, found only 31 cases of related gut symptoms, and not one of these children went on to develop autism in the next 10 years." So that incidence of virus traces in the gut actually means nothing other than that traces of the virus appeared in the guts 31 children out of 3 million who had received the vaccine, some of whom had autism, many more of whom didn't. Again, the occurrence of the virus in the gut is a tiny fraction of 1%, and the incidence of autism in those cases is . . . zero. Only a tiny fraction of children who received MMR showed traces of the virus in their guts, Wakefield's ostensible causation factor, and none of those went on to develop autism in 10 years. Coincidence is not causation, and it's never been clearer than in this case. So as Goldacre puts it, "In the meantime, do you want the small risk of a small risk, or the definite risk of measles, which kills, blinds, and causes brain damage?"

Goldacre's evisceration of the bad science behind this manufactured controversy is really well done. Take a quick look, and then go read his award-winning article. And then go get your kids vaccinated, for all our sakes.

*Incidentally, the claim that Panozzi makes about Goldacre winning an award sponsored by GlaxoSmithKlein for his journalism on MMR is false partially true. The award Goldacre won was from the Association of British Science Writers, sponsored in later years by Syngenta, an agribusiness firm which has no connection to vaccines of any type. The 2003 award was sponsored in part by GSK, but none of the judges for the award were associated with GSK and GSK had no input on the final selection. Sponsors have changed many times over the years.