Cocktail Party Physics

two things

I've got seven minutes left on my coffee break before I need to plough through my to-do list to make a dentist appointment, but I've missed you, and wanted to write a quick love note.

Thing the first: I got a new tattoo to celebrate the completion of my next book. Cesium would have been more meaningful, but also more painful. I went with lithium to ward off the crazy. It isn't working.

 

 

Thing the second: After my horrible experiences in online dating, I decided to further abuse myself with OKCupid. I did end up on some lovely dates so far, but felt the need to share the following instant message with you, so we may all have a good cry:

(5:01:50 pm) Him: you are awesome

(5:02:25 pm) Me: thanks?

(5:02:50 pm) Him: wat you like chatting about?

(5:03:41 pm) Me: physics

(5:04:18 pm) Him: ok. i am cool with that. i used to watch the physic friend network with dione warwick

(5:04:36 pm) Me: WOW.

(5:04:53 pm) Him: do you think physics can predict the future?

Okey dokey! So with that, I'm off to the awful to-do list. Away.

all in the family

Jen-Luc Piquant was tres desole in mid-August when she learned (via The Perfect Silence) that pioneering violin maker/acoustician Carleen Maley Hutchins had died at age 98. For those who follow the acoustics of musical instruments, and violins in particular, Hutchins was a legend -- unorthodox, innovative, and completely unapologetic about her work, which occasionally met with skepticism, if not outright hostility. As Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times obituary for Hutchins: "Working intently and noisily in her home in Montclair, NJ, she helped reimagine the idea of what a violin could be. In the process she designed and built an entire family of violins, eight instruments proportional in size and pitch known collectively as the new violin family or the violin octet." The eponymous Hutchins Consort performs exclusively with her instruments.

My favorite description of her personality comes from Gabriel Weinreich, a professor of physics/acoustician at the University of Michigan: "No respect for authority; a long attention span; scrupulous honesty; enthusiasm for intellectual collaborations; and the willingness to spend a lifetime beating a path through the jungle." I had the honor of interviewing Hutchins (then a spry 94) by phone at her New Hampshire home in 2005 for the American Institute of Physics' Inside Science News Service, and Weinreich's description fits my impressions of her. I never did get around to meeting her in person, which I regret.

It's the no respect for authority and stubborn perseverance that impressed me most: you can't be cowed by the The Man if you're going to be a trailblazing pioneer, and Hutchins had the deck stacked against her from the start. It's easy to forget how far we've come in the last 100 years in terms of women being welcomed in the professional/academic sphere. Hutchins was born in 1911 in Springfield, Massachusetts, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and stood out from her peers even as a child. For instance, she loved woodworking and played the trumpet -- both highly uncommon pursuits for girls of that era.

Even more unusually, she attended Cornell University, where she studied entomology and earned a degree in biology in 1933, followed by a master's degree in education from New York University in 1942. This enabled her to land a decent job as a teacher at a private girl's school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She married chemist Morton Hutchins in 1943, a man who shared her love of woodworking: the couple built their own house together. At the Brearley School, Hutchins made friends with several other faculty members who invited her to join their chamber group. She showed up, trumpet in hand, but it was far too loud for a chamber group. They really needed someone who played the viola. Rather than bow out, Hutchins learned to play the viola, buying an instrument for $75.

While she enjoyed the musical interludes, Hutchins became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of her bargain viola, and asked her uncle, a violin maker, to build her a better one. I guess he didn't want to enable her or something, because instead, he suggested she build one herself -- she did have all that woodworking experience, after all -- and gave her the name of a Russian violin maker in New York City who could help her get started. The Russian man wasn't exactly encouraging, but Hutchins wasn't easily dissuaded. "He didn't think much of a woman making an instrument, but at least he sold me a blueprint and a book and told me how to get started," she told me. And gosh darn it, she succeeded in building her very first viola over the next two years.

From the start, she was serious about the science behind building violins, striking up a long association in the late 1940s with Harvard physicist Frederick Saunders, who studied violin acoustics. She specifically designed instruments he could analyze and pick apart to determine just what gave rise to the distinctive quality sound associated with Stradivari violins, for example. Nor was Hutchins above the occasional scavenging. The New York Times obituary relates my all-time favorite Hutchins story. In 1957, she became enamored of a maple shelf in a phone booth in Columbia University's medical school; it was just the thing for the back plate of a new viola she was building, and she had an "in" at the school: her good friend Virginia Apgar, a doctor at Columbia and herself an amateur maker of violins. As Fox tells it:

One night [Apgar] and Mrs. Hutchins stole into the building with some tools and a replacement shelf stained to match. As Dr. Apgar stood guard, Mrs. Hutchins set to work. To their dismay, the new shelf was a quarter-inch too long. Mrs. Hutchins had a saw and there was a ladies' room nearby. As the New York Times reported afterward, "a passing nurse stared in astonishment at the sounds coming through the door." Dr. Apgar could think quickly. (She had, after all, devised the Apgar score, used worldwide to measure the health of newborns. "It's the only time repairmen can work in there," she said. Spirited out of the hospital, the shelf made a magnificent viola back.

Hutchins excelled at finding the critical balance between two key resonances when making her instruments. First and foremost is the natural wood resonance which can be tuned when the instrument is in pieces; the unattached wooden top and back of the instrument are known as "free plates" during this stage of the process. Traditionally, violin makers would "tune" the plates by carving away the wood underneath to specific thicknesses in order to get the desired natural resonances, flexing the wood plate in his/her hand and tapping them with a fingertip close to the ear to detect the telltale "ring." But it as much an art as a science; Hutchins thought there might be a better, more precise way to tune the plates to the natural resonance, and invented "free plate tuning." She used a loudspeaker to get the plates to vibrate, and spread glitter on top of them, watching where the tiny particles settled in order to find the exact lines that would give her the desired resonances. You can see the process firsthand in this nifty YouTube video featuring Hutchins herself, hard at work, talking about her process and her abiding love for wood:

The other critical resonance for a violin is the air resonance that is produced once the instrument has been assembled. That's the resonance that arises from the body cavity -- kind of like what happens when you blow air across a glass bottle with a narrow neck to produce a tone (and that tone will be higher or lower depending on how much fluid is in said bottle). A violin has two holes that serve a similar purpose. After studying hundreds of master violins, Hutchins and her collaborators concluded that the best resonances always occurred within a very narrow range: the two open middle strings. The D string, second from the bottom, provided the fundamental air resonance, while the wood resonance fell one-fifth higher, on the next highest violin string (violins are tuned in fifths).

Another of Hutchins' innovations came in 1974, when she and collaborator Daniel Haines developed a graphite-epoxy composite to replace the usual spruce wood favored for the top of violin bellies. Choice of wood, and how that wood is treated, has long been a hot area of study by acousticians eager to uncover the "Stradivari secret" -- what gives a Strad that unique quality of sound. (I've written about this topic before here.) Granted, it's a highly subjective analysis -- the BBC organized a blind listening test in 1974, where not even world-famous violinists and violin dealers could all correctly distinguish between a Strad and a modern instrument -- but there does seem to be evidence that treating the wood can enhance an instrument's acoustical qualities.

This was bolstered by the news that made the science headlines a couple of weeks ago during an annual conference in Germany on, um, forest husbandry. Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and a Swiss violin maker named Michael Rhonheimer collaborated on building violins with wood treated with fungus for up to 9 months, and pitted their modern instrument against a Stradivarius in a blind listening test. (Star British violinist Matthew Trusler did the playing honors.) Of the 180 or so people in attendance, 90 chose the fungal violin (dubbed Opus 58) that had been fungally treated for nine months to be the best of the lot, and fully 113 actually thought Opus 58 was the Strad.

Per Horst Heger of the Osnabruck City Conservatory, this could make acoustically superior instruments available to talented young musicians who would never be able to afford their own Strad; now they could have the same tonal quality for less. It all comes down to the quality of the wood, he explains. The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity, thereby giving an instrument made with that wood a "warmer, more rounded sound." Antonio Stradivarius might not have benefited from fungus, but he did get help, apparently, from the "Little Ace Age" that hit Central Europe from 1645 to 1715. Trees grew more slowly and uniformly as a result of the longer winters and cooler summers, and that makes for wood with terrific acoustical qualities.

I don't know what Hutchins would say to that, with her instinctive feel for trees and wood. But she knew a little something about re-learning the lessons of the past. One of the most fascinating things she told me back in 2005 was her rediscovery -- while building the first violin octet at the request of composer Henry Brant in the late 1950s -- of lost musical principles once described bby the 17th century German composer Michael Praetorius. (The week Hutchins died, I listened to Praetorius on my morning commute in her honor. It seemed fitting.) Another musically inclined colleague told her about the composer's three-volume treatise, Syntagma Musicum, published in 1619, which detailed musical practices and instruments of the period. 

In particular, Praetorius described an octet family of violins tuned to the same ranges Hutchins was developing. For instance, Hutchins' baritone violin -- similar to a large cello -- featured the same dimension and string length as that pictured in the 17th century text. Ditto for the contrabass violin. "He was writing about something that was common knowledge at the time. That knowledge was lost," she told me. She figured that the tone of these early octets was not up to snuff acoustically, and thus they were replaced when the great 17th century violin makers began building instruments with exquisite resonances ideally suited for the performance needs of the era. Those earlier designs were abandoned, only to be rediscovered over 300 years later by a stubborn violin maker named Carleen Hutchins.

The traditional violin family includes the violin, the viola, and the cello, each different quite a bit in timbre. In contrast, the instruments in Hutchins' octet family range from the seven-foot contrabass to a tiny treble violin tuned a full octave above a standard violin. The sizes are graduated at each half-octave, filling in the gaps in timbre. The result (quoting the New York Times again) is "an even, densely woven tissue of sound, almost like choral music without the words."

An unexpected consequence of the redesign is that the placement of the key resonances shifts in the violin octet instruments. (Fans of the octet claim the instruments correct the acoustic imbalances of traditional violins.) Classical composers wrote music specifically tailored to the strengths of traditional instruments on those key resonances. For instance, Hutchins told me that in Mozart's two-viola quartets placed the first viola through the upper of the two main resonances and the second viola through the lower. With the octet, those resonances shift, which means most classical pieces must be transposed and rearranged before, say, the Hutchins Consort can perform them on this new family of violins. (There are modern composers now writing specifically for the violin octet instruments.)

Similarly, even world-class musicians like cellist Yo-Yo Ma must reacquaint themselves with these new instruments. Ma recorded Bela Bartok's violin concerto using one of Hutchins' alto violins (it has the register of a viola but is played vertically, like a cello), and found he had to play the instrument a bit differently in order to achieve the resonances he needed, for example. Robert Spears, a violin maker who trained under Hutchins (who I also spoke with back in 2005) thinks that the shifted resonances give the octet violins more tonal uniformity across the strings than traditional instruments. "A common complaint among musicians is that as one goes from string to string,  each one can sound like it's on a different instrument," he explained. "Skilled players do a terrific job of minimizing these effects. When suddenly they don't have to compensate for it anymore, it's almost a handicap at first until they realize that particular problem is gone."

Not everyone is a diehard fan of Hutchins' work; I think it's safe to say that she offended her share of colleagues over her long, distinguished career; even her fans would admit she could be abrasive. But even the skeptics admire her fortitude, her perseverance, and there's no doubt she made lasting contributions to the ongoing study of violin acoustics and instrument building. Hutchins herself made seven full octets over the years -- no small feat, since it requires a good 2000 hours to do so. Her "disciples" have built even more. Several of her creations are now housed in museums collections, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musik Museet in Stockholm, the University of South Dakota, and at the Edinburgh University Collection of Historical Musical Instruments.

The remaining three octets she built are in the capable hands of the Hutchins Consort. Hopefully we can look forward to their continued use in performance (and in the lab). After all, Hutchins said that her instruments "still need to be explored in depth and played seriously by a group of dedicated musicians who will give them the same treatment that is given to learning any stringed instrument." Carleen Maley Hutchins may have shuffled off this mortal coil, but her spirit lives on with the violins she built -- particularly every time they are played.

sex and war and genius

 

So, the good news is that I turned in the manuscript for The Damn Book last week. The bad news is that I've been pretty much brain dead ever since after months of feverish writing. So instead of blogging this weekend as originally planned, I napped and indulged in DVD marathons. My bad. I will be back this coming week, refreshed, and ready to tackle one of the many blog post topics in my teeming fodder file. One of those would have been an acknowledgment of Gordon Brown's belated apology to Alan Turing, but intrepid guest blogger Alex Morgan beat me to it with the following personal rumination.

 

Only once in my life have I ever heard a mathematician refer to a contemporary as a "genius." The person doing the referring was the well known topologist, Peter Hilton. He was visiting Yale for a few days in the early 1970's, and, since I was a graduate student doing my dissertation research in topology, I was invited to the supper in his honor. I remember a broad-faced man who laughed easily and was brightened by conversation. I told him I was interested in applications, an eccentric impulse by the standards of the mathematicians then at Yale, who were proudly "pure."

 

Hilton surprised me by saying that he himself had done some applied mathematics. He was British, and during World War II he had been enlisted into the group at Bletchley Park (north of London) working to break the German secret codes and ciphers. He didn't disapprove of my interest in control theory and differential equations, but he urged me to complete my work in topology. He assured me that to be a good applied mathematician, you have to be a good pure mathematician. (I would respectfully debate the point with him today.)

 

 

It was in recounting his experiences with the British cryptographers that he let drop his unusual comment about genius. He said something like, "Normally, somebody tells you about a result he's proven, and you think 'I could have done that. I'm just as bright as he is.' Of course you wouldn't say it out loud. But Alan would do something, and I'd be forced to admit to myself: I never would have been able to think of that."

 

Hilton went on to tell the story of how Alan Turing had taken a set of documents encoded with the German Enigma machine, went away by himself to think, and proved something important about how they had been generated -- proved in the sense of a mathematical proof and important in the sense that it led to breaking the German naval codes, allowing Britain to defeat the German U-boat blockade in 1941 and thereby survive the war.

 

I thought of my chat with Prof. Hilton when Turing was mentioned recently in the news. The Baltimore Sun headline on Sept. 11, 2009, was "British government apologizes for 'inhumane' treatment of gay wartime codebreaker Alan Turing." The article, credited to Jill Lawless of The Associated Press, begins: "British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a posthumous apology Friday for the 'inhumane' treatment of Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality and forcibly treated with female hormones. The mathematician helped crack Nazi Germany's Enigma encryption machine -- a turning point in the war -- and is considered a father of modern computing."

 

Turing's early academic work centered on the logical foundations of mathematics, an area far removed from the physical world. Yet, if you look at his papers, what jumps out is his range of interests, his "eccentric" insistence that machines, quantum physics, neuroscience, extrasensory perception, biology, and "the soul" were all worthy of careful consideration. If you want to encounter Turing "face to face," there are two papers worth looking at: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (1936) and "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). Turing's writing has a striking clarity, so that a "general reader" can glean the gist of his ideas, even without understanding the details.

 

The 1936 paper focuses on a "challenge problem" posed in 1928 by the venerable German mathematician, David Hilbert. This problem is referred to in German as the Entscheidungsproblem, in English "the decision problem." Its spirit is something like: Can big hunks of modern mathematics be derived from postulates, like Euclidean geometry? The logician Alonzo Church solved this problem (the answer: "usually not") and published his results some months ahead of Turing. Normally, this would be a disaster for a young graduate student, and Turing was disappointed. However, the actual "result" was far less important than Turing's method of proof  and his overall perspective (which were different from Church's).

 

In his paper, Turing defines an abstract "machine" -- now always referred to as a Turing machine -- and he then proceeds by reinterpreting the decision problem in terms of different possible ways his machine might function. Turing wrote his paper on two levels: he establishes the mathematical result that is the "official" point of the paper, but he also describes his vision for a computer as we know it today. Much of his explanatory language is less dauntingly technical than a typical mathematics research paper, as if Turing is hoping for a more general audience. Hilton notes in his memoir, Reminiscences of a Codebreaker: "What very few knew then [in 1936], and somewhat more know now [in 1998], is that, even in those early days, his machine was not merely, in his mind, a metaphor but also a blueprint for a machine which could actually be built, that is, a computer."

 

"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was written for the philosophy journal, Mind. By 1950, Turing had hands-on experience building and working with digital computers, so in this paper he can give an even better conceptual overview of their design. To most people in the 1950's who knew about computers, they were simply "computers," that is, devices for generating tables of numbers using mathematical formulas. Although wonderfully more powerful than the human "computers" that preceded them -- the word was first used in English in 1613 to refer to people who compute -- they were crude and slow by the standards of the Twenty-first Century.

 

Imagining one of these early computers to be a "thinking machine " is a remarkable extrapolation. Turing proposes a clarification of what it would mean for a computer to think (afterward, called the Turing test), formulates responses to various objections to the idea that a machine might think, estimates how large a memory and how fast a processor a thinking computer would have to have, and finally considers how a machine might be programmed to learn.

 

In this paper, Turing makes the overly optimistic prediction that human-level machine intelligence would be achieved in fifty years; that is, by the year 2000. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was founded six years after "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published (and two years after his death). Many of his ideas were further developed in the following decades, especially his perspective that thinking was "logic processing," that is, a step-by-step application of rules and deductive reasoning. AI has achieved many fine successes, but the development of human-level thinking machines remains elusive.

 

In 1952, Turing's house was robbed. He reported the theft to the police, who, in the course of their investigation, uncovered evidence that he was having a relationship with one of the men associated with the robbery. Turing was charged with homosexuality and eventually convicted of the "crime." The hormone treatment he was forced to undergo as an alternative to prison was not his only penalty. He lost his British security clearance and thereby his access to government support for his research. The U.S. authorities refused to grant him a visa, on the grounds that he was a felon, to continue joint work at Princeton. Isolated, lonely, and depressed, he committed suicide on June 7, 1954.

 

Britain hounded its war-hero genius to death because he was gay. Of course, no citizen should be so persecuted. Still, I can't help but be astonished by yet another example of the self-destruction implicit in a tribe's impulse to repress its outliers. Turing's colleague, Jack Good, summarized this way (as quoted in Hilton's memoir): "Fortunately, the authorities at Bletchley Park had no idea Turing was a homosexual; otherwise, we might have lost the war."

China report

  I've been back from China for about a month and I'm still processing the experience, but I thought I'd tell you all a little about some of my observations in and out of the classroom. I was hired to teach English language and culture but really, in three weeks, there's not much language teaching you can do, so it mostly winds up being an English culture summer camp and conversation program. Which is great. There's a lot more learning of language that goes on in informal sessions than formal ones, and it was really a pleasure to get to know both the students and faculty of the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

Harbin is an industrial city in the north of China, with a population around the same size as New York's. As Chinese cities goes, it's pretty new, springing up in the late 1800's when the Russians built a railroad from Vladivostok to a sleepy fishing village on the Songhua River for trade purposes. Russian Jews migrated there and helped build the city, giving Harbin its first hospitals, schools and libraries as well as two synagogues and a sizable cemetery that's still lovingly cared for by the Chinese. At one time the city housed an international, multiethnic population and was called the Paris of China, and passed through both Russian and Japanese hands before becoming wholly Chinese. Now, its population is almost exclusively Chinese, with a few Japanese and Korean residents. (If you're interested in pictures, you can see what I took at my Flickr account, or our fearless leader, Marcy Bauman's. You can also take a look at my blog posts about the trip.)

The city has a number of universities and top-notch schools. HIT is the third-best university in China, on par with our MIT and like MIT, focused on science and technology fields. The students are chosen from the top 2.5 percent of those taking the national admissions exam, so they are smart, smart kids, and HIT tends to promote from within its graduate population. One thing the language barrier often does is disguise just how darn smart folks are, and I know I was underestimating the intelligence of most of the people I was talking to. The few technical conversations we had were as much hampered by my lack of technical vocabulary as their lack of English vocabulary. I met aerospace, civil, environmental and all other kinds of engineers, materials scientists, chemists, computer scientists and new media specialists, economists and architects, and people specializing in technological innovation, with research areas as diverse as composite materials, solid oxide fuel cells, optical thin films, and microporous and mesoporous materials. Many of my students were studying alternative energy technologies and environmental sciences.

These last two subjects are big issues for China, and you can see the need for them all over Harbin itself. The weather was beautiful during the first week of my stay: warm and dry and windy. I was really puzzled when people kept asking me if I found Harbin's air dirty. And then the next week we had a temperature inversion and I understood the question. You can see the difference in the two photos I took from my 15th floor window on campus:

There's blue sky underneath that smog, believe it or not. And that's the way it was for most of my visit. It's not eye-stinging or smelly like the air in Pittsburgh was when I lived there in the late 70's, but it makes New York on a bad day seem edenic. Ozone shmozone. Most of what's in the air is not car exhaust but coal smoke. There were several coal-fired electricity plants on campus, and that's where most of China's power comes from. At least in Harbin, cars are a relatively small part of the problem because there just aren't that many per capita yet (not so for Beijing and Shanghai). That doesn't stop the traffic from being completely insane, but that has more to do with the total disregard for signs (if there are any) and rules of the road than numbers. And the donkey carts don't help, either, I'm sure. Especially the ones on the expressway. Or the massively laden trikes.

If Harbin is any indication, one of China's biggest priority has got to be infrastructure. I'm used to not being able to drink the water when I go somewhere out of the country, but in Harbin no one drinks the water. You can wash in it, and wash your clothes and dishes, but you can't drink it because there are no purification plants and largely unregulated wastewater dumping. Cooking and drinking water is all bottled, which adds its own problems in recycling (that's what the guy on the trike is hauling, incidentally). In one of the first conversations I had with the faculty when school started, I spoke with a prof whose specialty is construction materials and engineering and we talked about the lack of regulation in China, not only in building materials and codes but in industry as well. Where we have legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (however badly they're enforced), China has nothing but local committee oversight, which is subject to bribery and corruption. (Interestingly, while I was writing this, the New York Times published the first of a series called "Toxic Waters: America's Growing Pollution Problems." So it's not like we're doing such a great job either. But the major difference is that we have the legislative framework to deal with it.) There seems to be a major push in Harbin, to correct some of these issues, at least on the wastewater front; streets all over the city were torn up both for new sewage and water lines and for a new subway the city is putting in. And many of my students were keenly interested in environmental issues and abatement technology. I got a lot of questions from both faculty and students about how pollution is managed in the States (and was grateful for 10 years of editing environmental impact statements to give me the background to answer them).

But the two issues that really struck me as an educator and a science geek were the attitude toward education in general and how different it is talking about science without religion getting in the way. I was teaching mostly incoming freshmen and sophomores, and not only were they some of the brightest students I'll ever have the privilege of teaching, I've never had students who were so eager or so respectful. This program was basically a three-week summer camp and still there was nothing my students balked at doing. Homework? Sure, no problem! Write in class? No problem. Ask me awkward questions about Tibet? Sure, happy to. Eat lunch with you? Absolutely. Students were on time, every day, or almost humiliatingly apologetic if they were late. They stood up to answer me in class. And thanked me after each one. After day one, I was reeling with culture shock. This is not to say my students here are not hungry or grateful, but in a completely different way. My students here know they've missed out on something and want to make up for that so they can get good jobs and support their families. The intellectual hunger in Chinese students is just that: intellectual hunger for new ideas, new ways of thinking, new information.They have a visceral love of learning you see in some of the best schools here and with individual students even at third tier U.S. schools. In part, that's because getting into college is so competitive, even more so than here. The major difference, and something I missed, was that Chinese students won't often argue with you. They're so respectful, and often used to learning by rote, that disagreeing with a professor seems rude to them. Teachers are really important people in China, and paid accordingly. We could really learn something from that.

And yet, one of the faculty and I had a conversation about this and he insisted that U.S. schools were still superior because we taught students to think independently. Gosh I wish that were still true. As I recently said in another conversation over here, our schools are leaning more and more toward shaping students for particular careers and offering them skill sets, rather than the ability to learn quickly and think for themselves, which can be applied in any career. (I'm not saying you don't need skill sets, especially in the sciences, but along with that, you need critical thinking skills and imagination, rather than just the skill sets. It's what sets a technician apart from a scientist.)

The unit that I taught was about science in the U.S. and covered a little history of science (the development of the scientific method, major discoveries, major players); the two-way exchange between science and culture; women in science; science in entertainment (thanks, Jen!); communicating science; current controversies; and how the public views science. We watched a couple of CSI episodes, Minority Report and The Matrix, and a couple of clips from Babylon 5. Some of the entertainment was familiar, and some not, but the references that went right over everyone's head were the religious and mythological allusions in The Matrix—not surprising, since that same stuff goes right over my head in Chinese opera. More confusing for them, though, was the whole idea that people would actually disbelieve scientific fact in favor of religious teachings or myth. When I described the controversies about teaching evolution in public schools and what ID and creationism were, they were clearly boggled. When I asked how many of them had some sort of spiritual belief, whether Buddhism, Confucianism, Islamic, or Christian, not one hand went up. (Just to clarify, each of those religions is legal in China; there is an active Buddhist temple in the city, some of the faculty are Buddhist, and though the Jewish population is long-gone, their synagogues were not razed during the Cultural Revolution as were most of the Christian churches. So this wasn't fear of reprisal that kept them from professing religious belief. It was simple lack of interest.) For the Chinese, if anything plays this role in forming or deforming scientific thought, it's politics, and I think that's less true now than it was during, say, the Cultural Revolution.

And these two facts, if anything, are what's going to allow the Chinese to roll over us economically in ten or twenty years. Not their sheer numbers, but their respect for education and their lack of muddying religious issues. They're intensely proud of their country and their accomplishments, which are indeed impressive, and that pride and ambition and ability will carry them a long way. Unless the US gets its priorities straight (more money for education, better pay for teachers, more access to quality education for everyone), we're soon going to be buying more than cheap tchotchkes, outsourced electronics, and pirated movies from China. We'll be importing technology we should have invented and produced ourselves.

miles (per gallon) to go before understanding fuel economy

The rocket scientist just bought a new car.  He claims he was thinking about trading in his old Pontiac Aztek well before I bought my new car, but even if we were thinking about the need for new cars at the same time, I guarantee we had distinctly different thought processes in deciding what kind of cars to buy.  I have a much more aerodynamic dog than he does (hound dog vs. golden retriever), so a convertible made a lot better sense for me than for him. (Sorry, Katie...) 

One obvious consideration in buying a car is fuel economy.  Fuel economy is the figure of merit for everything from advertising to the "Cash for Clunkers" program.  C for C only allowed you to trade in cars with an EPA fuel efficiency rating of 18 mpg or less.  If you had a Toyota Camry and you wanted to get a new Prius, you were on your own.

So which is better:  going from a car that gets 34 miles per gallon (mpg) to one that gets 50 mpg, or changing from a car that gets 18 mpg to one that gets 28 mpg? For the precise among you, let's define 'better' to mean saving you the most money in fuel costs.  So the first one is better, right?  You've got a 16 mpg improvement vs. a 10 mpg improvement.

Not so fast.  Let's say you drive 18,000 miles each year.  The amount of gas you need to drive 18,000 miles if you get 18 miles per gallon of gas is 18,000 miles/18 miles per gallon = 1,000 gallon.

Miles per gallon	Gallons of gas needed for 18,000 miles
18	1,000
28	643
34	529
50	360

If I change from a car that gets 18 mpg to one that gets 28 mpg, I save 1000-643 = 369 gallons of gas.  If I change from 34 mpg to 50 mpg, I save 529-360 = 169 gallons of gas.  Sort of counter intuitive, huh?  That's what Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll of Duke University found in a study in which they asked people to rank order five pair of proposed mpg changes in order of "their benefit to the environment (i.e. which new car would reduce gas consumption the most compared to the original car?)"  Sixty percent of the respondents rank ordered the changes according to the difference in mpg.

If you plot (as the authors did in their paper) the amount of gas used for a fixed driving distance vs. the miles per gallon your car gets, the plot is definitely not linear. I've made a similar plot for three different driving distances - 10,000 miles, 15,000 miles and 20,000 miles and indicated on the graph where the two mileage differences I compared above are located.

This is an example of linear reasoning being applied to a case in which it doesn't apply.  In some countries, the figure of merit is a quantity like how many gallons you need to drive 1000 miles.  (Actually, the quantity is liters per 1000 kilometers since just about everyone in the civilized world except us uses the metric system.)  I calculated the gpm (gallons per mile) in the table below and you can compare the fuel efficiency much more easily.  

Miles per gallon	Gallons per 1000 miles
18	55.5
28	35.7
34	29.4
50	20.0

Larrick and Sole argue that gallons per mile and not miles per gallon should be used to help people understand energy efficiency, but I would argue we need to take it one step further.  I used to like to ask my graduate students the following question:  "What one skill do you want your students to have when then enter the intro course in your discipline in college?" 

For me, the answer is the ability to really read graphs.  That's a little bit of a cheat for an answer because there's a lot of math tied up in understanding graphs.  But a graph gives you so much more information than a number does.  In this case, we're really not interested in just a number:  we're interested in the slopes between the sets of points -- or (dare I say) the derivatives of the curves. On the graph below, I've identified the slopes between 15 mpg and 20 mpg and between 35 mpg and 40 mpg with dark lines.  The lines are a lot steeper for the low-mpg interval than for the high-mpg interval, even though we're looking at a 5-mpg difference in both cases.

Another important thing to notice is that how much you drive in a year makes a pretty significant difference.  This graph tells me that the more miles you drive, the more important it is for you to improve the fuel economy of your car.  The little old lady with the Mercedes who only takes it out on a Sunday for church is not making too much of a dent in the petroleum stores.  The person who drives from Allen to downtown Dallas five days a week, 50 weeks a year really needs to worry about fuel economy.

The final thing I would hope people notice from the graph is the total amount of fuel.  Changing from a 10 mpg to a 12 mpg vehicle definitely saves fuel; however, you're still using a lot more fuel than if you went to a 15 mpg or 30 mpg vehicle.

Of course, there's a caveat - there always is.  Although the study focused on environmental impact in terms of fuel used, don't forget that there can be significant differences in terms of emissions.  In fact, the two best things you can do with your current car to help the environment are to make sure your car is tuned up so that if combusts the fuel efficiently, and maintain the right tire pressure.

My hopes for getting students to learn how to use and digest information from graphs is probably doomed for disappointment.  People want the easy solution:  just give me one number I can base my decision on.  Just as No Child Left Behind has reduced school performance to standardized test scores, and all universities care about anymore is how many students are enrolled and whether the students think the professors are entertaining - never mind what they learn, the average person wants things to be laid out.  I'm with Einstein:  Everything should be made as simple as possible.  But no simpler. 

Maybe we need a test before you're allowed to buy a new car.  On second thought, that would probably kill the Big Three faster than they've been able to do it themselves.

k is for kerfuffle

UPDATE: For some reason, we are being inundated by a pornographic SPAMBot this weekend. Rather than turning off comments on all posts until we can get to the bottom of this, I'm activating the CAPTCHA requirement. It's a pain, I know, but until this gets cleared up, it's necessary. Please bear with us....

I find I must emerge briefly from finishing The Damn Book -- specifically, the chapter on the calculus of zombies -- to comment on something that has been a hot topic of conversation in our household this past week. Some of you may have noticed the kerfuffle concerning Bloggingheads.tv, on which I have made frequent appearances, both with and without the Spousal Unit. If you missed it, here's the gist: last month, they featured a Young Earth Creationist on "Science Saturday." Science-minded people objected, and rightly so, myself included. If someone wants to cling to the belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and the fossil record offering direct evidence against this assertion is just some kind of cosmic joke to test our faith -- well, go right ahead. There's no law against outright silliness. But don't be surprised if people laugh at you, and don't you dare call your personal belief "science." And shame on any news organization or Website that tries to pass it off as such.

Anyway, we were all assured it was a mistake -- or "failed experiment" -- and wouldn't happen again. Scarcely two weeks later, the site aired a diavlog between John McWhorter, a linguist, and Michael Behe, the poster child for Intelligent Design (a.k.a. "creationism in a cheap tuxedo" -- probably one of those frilly powder blue numbers). *sigh* At least it wasn't on Science Saturday. McWhorter may be a brilliant linguist, but none of that was on display in the diavlog. (String theorist Jeff Harvey had the best mocking syllogism about the utter breakdown in logic: "A linguist doesn't understand skunks. Therefore god exists.")

For those who think this is an unfair assessment, McWhorter himself admitted that the diavlog didn't represent him (or Bloggingheads.tv) well, and had not gone the way he'd intended. Instead, Behe played him like a [insert musical instrument of choice here] and the whole thing ended up being one big advertisement for the repeatedly discredited theory of Intelligent Design. And yes, it's been thoroughly discredited. When someone's entire academic department feels compelled to put up a disclaimer distancing themselves from his/her "research," that's a good sign that person is on the wrong track, scientifically. It's pretty much Lesson 1 in "How To Spot a Crackpot."

There has been some serious fallout as a result of these two incidents, most notably the departure of the Spousal Unit, Carl Zimmer, and (a few days later) Phil Plait from any further participation in Bloggingheads.tv. These are not hot-headed unreasonable people; when they object to something en masse, it's a good idea to listen carefully to what they have to say. I was mostly an observer to this process, being wrapped up in book writin' and Hollywood-and-science matchmaking. But I do know that the Spousal Unit was surprised and deeply troubled by the conference call he and Carl had with BHTV overlord Bob Wright. Wright's confrontational attitude didn't help. It made the decision to depart far easier for them than it otherwise might have been. (The Spousal Unit has really enjoyed being on Bloggingheads.tv, and George Johnson is our friend.)

Today Bloggingheads.tv is clearing the air a little with a diavlog between Wright and George Johnson about the controversy. I'll give Wright props for copping to the fact that he could have handled that conference call far more diplomatically. I appreciate his assurance that there is some sort of policy -- which his staff did not follow in these two instances -- not to feature ID proponents like Behe on BHTV unless a qualified scientist is the person debating him. I also understand his reluctance to make a rock-hard promise about never having someone like Behe featured again, although I disagree with his reasoning. His argument seems to be that once you start caving into pressure from one "special interest group" (for lack of a better word), other people will start demanding that he ban any viewpoint they happen to find objectionable as well.

The flaw in Wright's argument is that this kerfuffle has never been about banning a particular person or point of view (although that's certainly how the ID crowd is spinning it). It's a question of quality control. In a world where the airwaves are filled with the crazed ravings of the likes of Glen Beck (someone get that guy some meds, stat!), and any jackhole can cause a ruckus at a town hall and end up on network news the next day as a "pundit," Bloggingheads.tv provides a welcome respite: people calmly debating valid ideas in science, politics, literature, philosophy or what have you. Sure, the format is crude and low-quality, and some diavlogs are more focused than others; in the end, it's the ideas that matter, and it's paving the way for whatever comes next. There's a huge difference between censorship -- which I think we all find objectionable -- and careful vetting of who you choose to feature on this platform. Here's the Spousal Unit's clarification of his position:

I was not looking for a “pledge” of anything at all. Rather, I was hoping — and completely expecting — to hear a statement somewhat along these lines: “Of course we all agree that when someone listens to a dialogue on BH.tv, they have a reasonable expectation that both speakers are non-crackpots.” But I don’t think we do agree on that. I am personally not interested in interrogating crackpots to understand their motives; they get more than enough attention as it is, and I’m more interested in discussions between reasonable people. 

I think it's clear from what Wright says in today's diavlog that he strives to have a policy in place to maintain quality control. That system failed in these two instances. I'm glad he admits as much. But it is wrong to lump science in with, say, a particular political viewpoint. Science is not a "special interest group." In the humanities (from whence I sprang before moving in science writing, as did Carl), it's all about arguing competing viewpoints and building a strong case for one's position, but in the end, things are mostly a matter of opinion.  In science, things are demonstrably false. And once they have been demonstrated as such, it is disingenuous (if not outright dishonest) to pretend they still have any validity. Science is not a matter of opinion. We can all vote tomorrow to suspend gravity, but we'll still be gravity's bitch.

ID has had its day in court -- literally! -- and it's been found scientifically wanting. The science-minded community has moved on, so why waste an hour of diavlog time on a thoroughly discredited idea? It has gone the way of believing in a flat earth, or thinking the sun revolves around the earth, or believing in the luminiferous ether. It is simply not worthy of discussion in a serious public forum, except as  quirky footnote in history. You might as well debate the science of unicorns. Maybe Wright doesn't mind giving a platform to discredited ideas, but surely he can't be surprised that so many in his science-centric audience mind very much.

I pretty much agree with what the Spousal Unit and Carl said, tempered a little by Chad's points over at Uncertain Principles, and by commenters who have expressed concern that if scientists collectively abandon ship, we're pretty much ceding BHTV to the crackpots. I think it was definitely the right thing to do to call out BHTV for their "failed experiments." I appreciate Wright's willingness to engage in the debate, and admit error where he felt mistakes had been made, even though there still seems to be some confusion about what his policy actually is.

Unlike the Spousal Unit, I don't feel a strong inclination at this point to withdraw from Bloggingheads completely -- although that could change, if they start debating the scientific merits of astrology or something and acting like it's a valid debate. (I know, it's like I'm an individual or something. Shocking!) It would be an empty promise anyway, since I have no time right now to participate even if the opportunity arose. But I remain uneasy in my mind, with lingering trepidation, and will be watching what happens on the site over the next few months. Maybe it's time for a new channel, in the interests of healthy competition. And it saddens me that I even have to write those words.