Cocktail Party Physics

FROM THE ARCHIVES: out of sequence

NOTE: Still working my way through the galleys for The Calculus Diaries, but the process made me remember this post from April 2006 about the Fibonacci sequence, an obscure mathematician named Gopala, and fun with "Fibs" -- short six-line poems based on the Fibonacci Sequence. More below, and we'll be back with original posting later this week!

"April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot declared in the opening lines to "The Wasteland" -- unless you're a poet or mathematician. Or both. In which case, you've got double the reason to celebrate. April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month. So it seems especially appropriate that there is currently an explosion of original amateur poetry on the Internet based on the famed "Fibonacci sequence." They're called "Fibs," six-line poems whose syllables follow the Fibonacci progression. After the first two terms (1 and 1), each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the two previous numbers, so 1+1 = 2; 1+2=3; 2+3 = 5; 3+5 = 8; and so on into infinity. (Jen-Luc Piquant is relieved that the fibs mostly stop at 8 syllables instead of stretching into infinity, otherwise we'd never finish reading them -- although it might be amusing to attempt an infinitely epic version of, say, The Odyssey, in this "Fibonacci meter."  Odysseus would never find his way back to Penelope.)

Apparently, more than 1000 Fibs have been written so far this month, thanks in large part to a whimsical blog posting by LA screenwriter Gregory Pincus inviting readers to submit their own six-line poems using the sequence. His original post was then linked on slashdot.org and the notion spread like a virus from there. That's the power of the Blogosphere.

Equally amazing is the fact that so many people have heard of the Fibonacci sequence, no doubt due in large part to the staggering success of Dan Brown's bestselling The Da Vinci Code, which introduced us "non-math-y" types to what was once a relatively obscure mathematical oddity -- at least to those outside rarefied academic circles. Perhaps you recall the scene in which the hero, Langdon, and the love interest, Sophie, discover a seemingly random string of numbers at a murder scene: 13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5. Because this is fiction, and therefore not even remotely realistic, Sophie quickly realizes it is the first eight numbers, in jumbled order, of the Fibonacci sequence. Divide each number in the sequence into the one that follows, and the answer will be something close to 1.618, an irrational number known as phi -- a.k.a. "the Golden ratio," which also figures prominently in Brown's book.

It's nice to see mathematics get some attention, even if it's by way of a controversial potboiler. And while we should be skeptical of some of Brown's more questionable assertions about the prevalence of the Golden Ratio in the arts, for example, Fibonacci was a real historical personage: a 13th century mathematician also known as Leonardo Pisano, or Leonardo of Pisa. He was the son of a diplomat, and therefore studied under Arabic mathematicians in North Africa and traveled widely throughout what is now modern-day Algeria, as well as Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence.

Upon his return to Pisa, the now-grown Leonardo wrote the Book of Calculation (Liber Abaci) in 1200, which, among other useful elements, introduced the use of Arabic numerals to Europe, along with the base-10 system for commercial bookkeeping. (The Fibonacci moniker apparently derives from the fact that his father was nicknamed "Bonacci," so young Leonardo was dubbed "filius Bonacci" -- "son of Bonacci" -- or Fibonacci.) The Fibonacci sequence appears in the third section as the solution to a hypothetical problem on how fast a (highly idealized) population of rabbits will grow. It proved to be one of his most lasting contributions. There is still a modern journal, The Fibonacci Quarterly, devoted entirely to studying the mathematics related to this sequence.

Fibonacci deserves every bit of the attention and respect he's received of late. But it would be incorrect to assume that he "discovered" this quirky little numerical sequence that bears his name. Like Sir Isaac Newton some 400 years later, he stood on the shoulders of giants. A century before he wrote the Book of Calculation, an ancient Indian scholar named Gopala had calculated the series of meters used in some 12th century Sanskrit poetry -- a specific meter called the matra-vrttas -- in which each subsequent meter is the sum of the two preceding meters. The pattern follows the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21....

There's precious little information available about Gopala; he's the shortest of stubs on Wikipedia, and even the exhaustive collection of historical biographies of mathematicians throughout the ages compiled by the good folks at St. Andrews College in England contains very little information. (Ironically, that same database reports that Fibonacci's work in number theory was in turn largely unknown during the Middle Ages; it was "rediscovered" 300 years later by the mathematician Maurolico.) There's only a wee bit more information about Gopala's fellow Indian scholar, Hemchandra, who studied the same sequence 20 years later while looking at the various possible ways of exactly bin-packing certain items of two given lengths. Hemchandra authored a proliferation of textbooks on science and Indian philosophy, as well as an epic poem and several Sanskrit grammars.

The latter is a fascinating field of study on its own, and doesn't lack for significance in both the arts and science. "Sanskrit" means "perfected," "refined," or "polished," and it may very well be the oldest language in the world, dating back to 2000 BC, although its formal rules weren't recorded until about 400 BC. But it's hardly a dead language: it's still spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Goethe borrowed from the Sanskrit tradition when writing portions of Faust. I opened this post by quoting "The Wasteland." Eliot was a student of Indian philosophy and ended his masterpiece with the Sanskrit lines, "Shantih Shantih Shantih." (A college pal of Jen-Luc Piquant's, known affectionately as "Red," once wrote a parody of this famous poem, declaring, "Eliot is the cruelest poet/Breeding art out of dead legend...." Even more fun can be had with Sanskrit via an online interactive game, "The Trials of Vajra.")

Henry David Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita. So did physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project, who famously quoted that timeless work after the successful Trinity Test ushered in the nuclear age in 1945: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." In the early days of the periodic table, scientists used Sanskrit prefixes to refer to as-yet-undiscovered elements. NASA researchers are considering the possibility of adapting Sanskrit as a possible computer language because its structure leaves little room for error -- there are some 3959 rules to define the basic elements of sentence structure, consonants, nouns and verbs, all laid out like a mathematical function -- and bears some similarity to modern programming languages.

I bring up Gopala, Hemchandra, and the grand Sanskrit tradition mostly because (a) I find it historically fascinating, and (b) we tend to be far too Western-centric in American culture, and ignorant of the rich diversity and flourishing culture of other ethnic traditions. I'm no exception: I would never have heard of Gopala had I not read Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio. nor is that an isolated instance. The Independent recently ran a fascinating article detailing the many ways in which forgotten Islamic inventors changed the world, inspired by a new exhibit featured at the Science Museum in Manchester in March and still making the rounds of Merry Olde England. It seems we honor certain historical breakthroughs and inventions out of sequence, like the jumbled Fibonacci numbers in the opening pages of The Da Vinci Code.

Leaving aside the more obvious contributions to algebra, architecture, and cryptology, Muslim scholars assumed the Earth was round some 500 years before Galileo realized it. One of the earliest pinhole cameras was invented by a 10th-century Muslim scientist named Al-Hazen (or Ibn al-Haitham). Around 800, Muslim scientist Jabir ibn Hayyan invented the process of distillation (separating liquids through differences in their boiling points), technically making him one of the founders of modern chemistry. An ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari invented a rudimentary crank shaft to raise water for irrigation, and also invented a prototype of the combination lock. And while I'm a big fan of Eilmer of Malmesbury, an 11th century English Benedictine monk who fashioned a pair of makeshift wings and jumped off the roof of Malmesbury Abbey, he wasn't the first to attempt such a stunt. In 852, a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba with nothing more than a loose cloak fitted with wooden struts. It fortunately served as a parachute, so he escaped with minimal injuries. But really, what is it about early aviation attempts and jumping off the roofs of religious structures? It lends a whole new meaning to the term "leap of faith."

Jen-Luc Piquant largely eschews poetics in favor of the highly diverting -- for those with a mathematical bent -- Fibonacci Puzzles Page. But she was nonetheless inspired by Mr. Pincus, his poetical followers, and the forgotten fathers of Fibonacci to pen the following lines:

        We

        should

        honor

        Gopala

        and friend Hemchandra,

        not just Fibonacci's sequence.

a few choice words from the red pen brigade

Okay, the Semester From HellTM is over and I'm back to my usual teaching schedule, which means you'll be hearing from me more often. Part of my Semester from HellTM involved teaching basic computer skills (mostly Microshaft's Office Suite) to remedial freshmen, along with a little computer history. While I don't have a degree in computer science, I'm eminently qualified to teach this class, because I've been a power user (and often the only troubleshooter) of PCs since 1986. It was great fun recalling my earliest adventures with floppies, command lines, and ASCII in the context of a history lecture, and I felt oddly subversive as an English major and amateur geek talking about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and the Difference and Analytical Engines. But it was also somewhat fitting, I believe. After all, Babbage felt free to comment on Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poetry. Wikipedia (my students' favorite source of information) recounts the following story about Babbage:

Babbage once contacted the poet Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem "The Vision of Sin". Babbage wrote, "In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

 ... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

I fear Randy Olson's retort to this would be, "Don't be such a scientist!" but I think it's lovely that Babbage felt sufficiently competent in poetics to comment on the work of a master like Tennyson. But then, this was an era when expertise was not so tightly focused as it is now. Scientists were well- and widely read in literature, and most were fine writers themselves; poets were not strangers to the practices of science. Writing (or rhetoric, more specifically) was one of the major constituents of the liberal arts education one received at a good university.

The hardest thing about teaching anybody anything is finding the right level of communication, and the right way to express the concepts. It would seem logical that you don't go all jargony on a rank beginner, anymore than you have to spend time explaining the basics to an expert. But you'd be surprised how  hard it is to put that into practice. How much knowledge do you assume? And how clear an idea do you as an instructor or writer have of what each level of knowledge actually includes? One of the tricks of being a good teacher is to remember what it was like when you were just starting out. What didn't you know then that you know now? And then you determine the correct order in which to teach it.

But that's not all that you have to worry about, either. The next problem is expressing that knowledge clearly in a way that will allow the listener or reader to follow your argument and build on what they already know. When you're teaching, you tend to do this in a number of ways, using various media. You drag in handouts, you assign textbook readings, you draw pictures, you write concepts and key vocabulary on the board, you use PowerPoint, videos, diagrams, whatever you can get your hands on to reinforce what you're saying in your lecture. But in the end, it all boils down to words, and if you're not using them effectively and clearly, your students or readers are sunk.

I say "readers" because this is just as true in written communication as it is in oral, and I was reminded of that by a recent conversation on one of the professional editors mailing lists I belong to. As a some-time freelance editor, I occasionally proof and copy edit dissertations and so do many of my colleagues. This would have been unheard of for an English major when I was in graduate school, but apparently isn't uncommon anymore, especially in the sciences. One list member confessed, "I work in the Medical Communications/Education industry. We hire PhDs in our scientific services department. Many cannot write an acceptable abstract much less a full length scientific paper. In my day if you did not have the writing skills to write a dissertation you did not graduate." Damn straight, I thought, accompanied by the usual visualization of hand baskets on their way to hell.

The reply from another editor floored me:

The graduate program that [the previous poster] referred to confused writing in the sciences with writing in the humanities. In the sciences, generation of original research and knowledge is the goal, which is separate from writing about that goal. For this reason, it is acceptable to not have writing skills to write a dissertation. Working scientists use writers and editors to communicate the thoughts of their (the working scientists') thoughts. In contrast, in the humanities, the author of the thought is also the author of the words that express that thought. Poets do not use writers to express their (the poets') thoughts.

Many thanks to Tom Lang, internationally recognized biomedical communicator, for explaining the essential difference between writing in the sciences and writing in the humanities.

(Tom Lang, I should note, is in the business of medical writing, so it's to his advantage to make excuses for bad scientific writing.) But there was more from the original poster that I think really goes to the heart of the matter:

It is NOT acceptable to not have 'adequate' writing skills (not exemplary, just adequate). In  addition to generating original research and possessing the required analytical skills the scientist must also be able to communicate both the essence and significance of that  research - regardless of which industry you work in.

This ignited a very opinionated discussion with a number of other editors. Katharine O'Moore-Klopf, another medical editor, opined:

Hmmm. I'm not sure which era ("in your day and mine") that [the first poster] is referring to. But as a medical copy editor, I encounter plenty of manuscript[s] written by researchers--MDs, DOs, PhDs--whose strength is in research, not writing. It is accepted practice in research institutes and medical schools for such researchers to have their manuscripts heavily edited by professionals like me before the researchers submit those manuscripts for publication. This is a practice conducted in the open, not in the privacy and shame of dark back rooms, because we medical copy editors are not writing manuscripts *for* the authors but helping them *rework* what they have already written. Indeed, several medical journals routinely refer such authors to freelance medical editors like me so that the authors can pay us to help them get their writing up to speed. These researchers are professionals whose scientific research skills use a different part of the brain than is used in writing, a part that in some researchers is rather underdeveloped. Inability to write stellar prose is not necessarily a reflection on a researcher's intelligence.

In defense of the researchers' bad writing, Mark Farrell added:

. . . [C]ompetency in one field doesn't necessarily translate to competency in another, nor should we expect it to do so. I could care less if someone with a talent for science or medicine or whatever can't write their way out of a paper bag--or be able to write at all, for that matter. They could be functionally illiterate, but if they are able to accomplish things in their field that others can't, things that could benefit humanity, why on earth should they be hindered or discouraged from achieving those things because they don't know how to write?

And Laurie Rendon, a social sciences academic editor, agreed:

I don't think good scientists are, by definition, able to express themselves well in their native language. I've edited reappointment documents for professors, and I'm amazed at the variety of things profs are required to do: develop courses, teach, supervise grad students, serve on committees, apply for grants, design experiments, do research... and then present the results of the research. Writing is not everyone's strong suit. And almost no one can decipher a style guide or thick style manual; maybe one in 10 of my professor clients does a half-decent job with reference list or footnotes, and none get it right. Keep in mind that one professor will submit to various journals over the years. Cross-disciplinary journals and even journals in the same field use different style manuals, and many journals have their own style guide, so it isn't a matter of learning to follow a single manual. As for schools and professors encouraging grad students to find an editor, yes they do. I used to make a living working for grad students. Many were sent to  e by their professors; others were told in their information sessions to hire an editor if they weren't good writers.

I have some quibbles with this comment because this is one of the things I teach: how to write research papers, and most of my students are in the social sciences. They know they have to get their references right, whether it's APA, AMA, or MLA and that's what they make those manuals for; nobody memorizes them, not even editors. You get to know them quite well through usage after a while, but master them? Hardly. Getting the reference style right is about following directions and examples; that's all. And surely if you have a Ph.D., you have the spare intellect to format your references correctly. Isn't that what junior authors are for? But  I'll also admit that reference styles are absurdly detailed things and need extremely careful proofreading, if nothing else, by at least one fresh set of eyes.

The discussion, which had shifted from dissertations to professional communications (not communications with the general public; that's another issue) went on over several more digest emails, but by the time I twigged to it, it was over, and not worth reviving on that particular list. I do, however, have some very strong opinions on this topic, as my students could probably tell you. I suspect that editors and teachers of writing have some different (but not completely) views on the topic too.

First of all, I think we both agree that everyone needs an editor, regardless of how good a writer you are. No one except the most arrogant of writers (who often aren't very good) disputes this. Even the best writers need someone to rein them in, point out their inconsistencies, and to say, "hey, this isn't very clear; can you break it down better?" Writing is necessarily an extremely interior activity and what every writer is trying to do is to convey their own mode of thought, their point of view, to everyone else. When we write, we know what we're trying to say, but that doesn't mean our readers will follow our train of thought exactly. Sometimes we're less successful at conveying our meanings than at others. That's where your editor comes in.

An editor's job is not usually to completely rewrite your prose for you, even in what's called a developmental edit. Rewriting is another job altogether and involves working closely with the putative "author" to get inside their head. The problem with rewriting or ghostwriting is that sometimes ideas get lost in translation or twisted beyond the original meaning. I think this is especially true when writing about science. Look at how often reporters twist the original meaning of research (PDF). Even specialists can do this unintentionally if they aren't especially well-versed in the particular field, and if the author can't explain himself adequately, how do you correct this or better yet, prevent it? The tricky part of writing about science is not necessarily describing the experiments or the research, but interpreting the data. If the researcher can't do that in a clear way, how can his audience be expected to trust his conclusions? More importantly, how easy is it to distinguish fraud or sloppy science from sloppy writing? It's one thing if you're working in your second language, but if you can't put a coherent thought together in writing in your native tongue, that's a big-time FAIL in my book.

Secondly, as a teacher of writing, I believe you can teach just about anyone to be a competent, adequate writer. Not brilliant, because that takes some innate talent, but certainly competent enough to express oneself clearly and concisely. Like anything else worth learning, it takes some effort and practice, but the effort is often not even made because there seems to be a general contempt for the efficacy of good prose in the sciences. When I was teaching science writing at Michigan State 20 years ago, one of my students brought me his lab manual which, in the introduction, plainly stated that "scientists have no time for crafting elegant prose." It would seem to me that scientists have no time for inelegant prose. Who wants to waste precious hours laboring through poorly communicated research results when you can spend half the time with a well-written article and be more certain of what you've read? It doesn't even have to be elegant prose, but it does have to be clear prose. Everyone should know how to express themselves adequately and clearly in writing. Sadly, more people outside the than inside the sciences do, even though universities spend a lot of time and money on writing workshops, tutoring centers, and writing centers.

I'm sure you've run into plenty of impenetrable prose yourself, but if you'd like some concrete examples of how it can be fixed, George Gopen and Judith Swan have thoughtfully provided examples of both errors and fixes in their article "The Science of Scientific Writing: Writing and the Scientific Process," in American Scientist. In it, Gopen and Swan discuss how keeping in mind reader expectations and interpretative processes can help make your prose more accessible and clearer, and how making it clearer actually changes your own thoughts as an author about the subject. Their examples also show you how an editor's mind works and how their transformation of your convoluted prose may actually give a different meaning to your data than you intend. A knowledge of how people read, of how stories are structured, of the rules of grammar and punctuation, can not only improve your writing but your own thoughts. Their two concluding paragraphs are worth quoting:

The substance of science comprises more than the discovery and recording of data; it extends crucially to include the act of interpretation. It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot "exist" without the interpretation of each reader. In other words, writers cannot "merely" record data, even if they try. In any recording or articulation, no matter how haphazard or confused, each word resides in one or more distinct structural locations. The resulting structure, even more than the meanings of individual words, significantly influences the reader during the act of interpretation. The question then becomes whether the structure created by the writer (intentionally or not) helps or hinders the reader in the process of interpreting the scientific writing.

The writing principles we have suggested here make conscious for the writer some of the interpretive clues readers derive from structures. Armed with this awareness, the writer can achieve far greater control (although never complete control) of the reader's interpretive process. As a concomitant function, the principles simultaneously offer the writer a fresh re-entry to the thought process that produced the science. In real and important ways, the structure of the prose becomes the structure of the scientific argument. Improving either one will improve the other.

In other words, we do well to remember that communication of any kind is a two-way street: information is both presented and interpreted and the more clearly it's presented, the more likely the interpretation will be similar to what's presented.

This is something Isaac Newton grasped intuitively, as Thomas Levenson points out in his book Newton and the Counterfeiter. Early on, Levenson describes Newton's structure for his most famous work, the Principia. Levenson writes, "Nothing in Newton's science depends on the shape of this narrative. In any order, his proofs would be just as valid. But to take the reader on an odyssey that begins with the orbits of the planets and extends to bring the entire cosmos into view allows the larger implications of the Netwonian idea to emerge." Newton realized that he was telling a story, and that the structure and order of it mattered as much as the presence of his mathematical proofs that formed the core of his argument. He was consciously guiding the interpretation of his words, so readers would see the same significance and usefulness of the discoveries that he did.

Third, scientists bemoan with great regularity the scientific illiteracy (and innumeracy) of the general public, and frequently insist that they are the best communicators of that science.Gil Watson, in the UK journal The Humanist, writes (in a somewhat cumbersome sentence) that, "most scientists have been perfecting the communication of their particular area of science for the majority of their working lives to their colleagues." Er, not according to all those editors I quoted above.

And are you sensing a disconnect here?

How can scientists be the best communicators of their disciplines if they don't learn how to write well enough to communicate even with their own colleagues? If they need specialist editors to clarify their prose for people in their own general field, then it doesn't bode well for the non-experts. Sorry, people, but you don't get to have that both ways. And you don't get to complain about people knowing nothing about science when your lack of communication skills is a large part of the problem.

Finally, there's the cost. In case you haven't noticed, scientific journals are not cheap, even the electronic ones. This is because of something called the "first copy cost": the initial costs of refereeing, rewriting, typesetting, copy editing, and proofreading set up for that first journal issue of which all others are but pale copies. The cost goes down with each subscription, but the range is still pretty hefty: from $420 to $2,500 per article, and it can be as high as $4,000 per article. Per article.  (PDF) While most authors who need help with rewrites shoulder the costs themselves (and line the grateful pockets of scientific copy editors), this still adds to the administrative costs of the journal with the to-ing and fro-ing. Hardly anyone gets a piece of writing right the first time, but a lack of intelligibility can waste a lot of time for staff and referees as well as risk having your research misunderstood and rejected.

Ultimately, as Gopen and Swan point out, writing is a form of thought, one that helps clarify what we know even to ourselves. Teaching does this too; you never have a clearer idea of what you know than when you have to teach it (read: explain it) to someone else, which is what a good scientific paper does. It's teaching your colleagues about a new result, a new idea, a new approach, a new hypothesis. The best and most creative scientists have not just not just mastered the art of explaining verbally but usually excel in it. This, in fact, may be an indicator for extraordinary creativity in the sciences. In their blog at Psychology Today, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein quote physics Nobel Prize winner William D. Phillips on his own training:

In high school, I enjoyed and profited from well-taught science and math classes, but in retrospect, I can see that the classes that emphasized language and writing skills were just as important for the development of my scientific career as were science and math. I certainly feel that my high school involvement in debating competitions helped me later to give better scientific talks, that the classes in writing style helped me to write better papers, [emphasis mine] and the study of French greatly enhanced the tremendously fruitful collaboration I was to have with [a French] research group.

One wonders if those "better papers" weren't a factor in Phillips's success as much as his insights into methods of slowing down atoms. So really, it's not just about being able to communicate your thoughts to others; writing well should be part of every scientist's training to foster more creativity and clarity. It might put some of my fellow editors out of business, but overall, it could only be a boon to science.

And really, if I were a scientist, I'd be just a bit embarrassed to know that editors think so little of my abilities. I mean, some of these people are . . . poets! Imagine Tennyson commenting on Babbage's work: poets commenting on your scientific communications. C'mon, aren't you just a little embarrassed? Just a little?

science secretary haiku blues

I'm working on a post about hosting/hiring foreign national scientists, which is epic, but I feel Pantone 282 blue. I have an epic amount of work to do on Monday, I wasted the weekend on frivolous crap, and am now desperately running around the apartment trying to cram two days of chores into two hours. BLEH, I say. So instead of what will eventually be a hilarious post on the time I almost lost a poor French student in the middle of the night and learned that according to the Department of Homeland Security, fingerprints can expire(!), you get this cheap collection of lame haiku. 

I really do adore my job, but like any job, it can sometimes be slightly annoying. That's why they have to pay me to be there. If it wasn't annoying, it wouldn't be called work, it would be called Happy Fun Time and I'd have to pay the security guards for the pleasure of parking on Cardiac Hill and trying not to sweat through my suit jacket on the half-mile trek to my office.

Sometimes, I have to vent about the small irritations so I can keep up my sunny secretarial disposition when I clock in.  Keep in mind, they are very small irritations in what is normally a pretty damn highly rewarding way to earn a living. But if I can't bitch to you, who can I bitch to?

Ph.D means shit

When the copier is jammed

Don't cry, I'll fix it

Foreign national

J1 expired

Please help me help you

Of course I don't mind

Proofreading your LaTeX doc

Fig. 1 makes no sense

Your reimbursement

Would be a pleasure to do

GIVE ME YOUR RECEIPTS

Polka dot high heels

Click Clack, linoleum tile

Stealth smoke break? Busted.

I think I just proved

Your theory of entropy

The clock is slowing

Hottie scientist

Meaty brains make my knees weak

Low EQ, clueless

MSDS blues

Out-of-date chemical stew

Christ! What is that smell?

the origins

It's Poetry Month, peeps, and somehow, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and signed up to write a poem a day, from prompts, over at Writer's Digest's blog Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer. Tonight I'm frantically composing at the last minute because I had a long day teaching and grading papers. There will be an instant replay tomorrow night, probably, but here's the first one, anyway. It's an origin poem, as per the prompt.  I thought, what the hell? Why not go for the ultimate origin? So I've committed science poetry, and I thought the Cocktail Party might be amused, though truthfully, there's nothing more tiresome than a poet declaiming their own stuff to a captive audience. Just pretend we're all sloshed and I have a lampshade on my head. (And it's a first draft, which even more egregious, so be nice.)

Start Here

It always starts with light
real and metaphor:
a minuscule point
floating
in the deeps,
one moment quiescent,
the next—
the universe
cracks open.
Fractions later, the shrapnel flies
at the speed limit of sight,
us and anti-us,
bangs around like bumblebees in a bottle
(those will come much later)
smashing itself
back to nothing first, then
smaller, hotter, faster, fortunately
more us than anti.
Baryons
shimmer into being,
condensing like raindrops
(again, much later). The universe
quarks.
A chill sets in, the particles dance
for warmth, and couple
the way everything does
in long, cold nights.
Hadrons and leptons snuggle;
deuterium is born,
grows up to be hydrogen.
Soon there’s a periodic family
at the table.

In the space of
a hundred breaths:
light and matter, and
all that matters.

© Lee Kottner, 2009

This poem brought to you courtesy of Chris LaRocco's and Blair Rothstein's Big Bang Page over at U of M. Meaning that's where I got my quick and dirty summary of the aforementioned events.

Cross posted over at Dowsing and Blogorrhea

REPOST: flea collar

[NOTE: I'm all better now, or mostly so, but now must scramble madly to catch up on all the work I couldn't do when I was being an ailing slug-a-bed. So I must ask my readers to forbear just a bit longer, and endure one more repost, this one from waaay back in the earliest days of the cocktail party: i.e., March 2006. We'll be back with original posting later this week. Lots of neat science stuff happened while I was in a drugged-up fog!]            

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Ya gotta love John Donne, who was quite possibly the first English poet to find romance in a blood-sucking, disease-carrying insect. He penned the above lines (from his aptly titled poem, "The Flea") in 1633, two years before the English scientist Robert Hooke was born, and a good 30 years before publication of Hooke's magnum opus, the Micrographia, a rumination on the wonders of nature that Hooke had witnessed firsthand with what was then a relatively new scientific instrument: the microscope.

What does Hooke's masterpiece have to do with Donne's famous verse, you might be wondering? Well, the Micrographia contained the now-famous microscopic drawing of a flea, rendering its anatomy in such vivid detail that it might have given even the rather flinty Donne pause about using it as a poetic image/motif for purposes of seduction. Then again, Donne is the guy who compared himself and his lady love to "stiff twin compasses," so maybe not; he wasn't exactly squeamish. And by all accounts he scored with women quite frequently, possibly even with the daughter of Sir Thomas More, so his pick-up lines were clearly effective. I guess some things still manage to retain their aura of wonder under the harsh light of day.

(Jen-Luc Piquant points out that even the high self-regard of some people is immune to the magnification of their flaws under a metaphorical microscope, as evidenced by the fatuous ravings of a drunk girl at 47th Street and 9th Avenue, which Jen-Luc stumbled upon while trolling the fabulous Website, Overheard in New York. Quoth the girl: "Sometimes, when I look at myself through the microscope of cold, hard objectivity, I think to myself, 'God, you are awesome!'" So, too, the humble flea.)

The entire genre of popular science books might be traced back to Hooke's tome, which caused a sensation among the general populace when it appeared in bookstores in January 1665 -- not just because the writing style was accessible (at least for the time), but because it had pictures. Everybody loves pictures. Plus, they provide a handy visual aid to any discussion of science. Thanks to his earlier apprenticeship to an artist -- before he quit, claiming that the paint fumes irritated his chest -- Hooke was a gifted draftsman and, in his pre-photographic era, had been able to draw whatever he observed under his microscope, offering others a fresh perspective on common objects they took for granted: from fleas and woven silk, to carrots and common mold. Micrographia literally changed the way people looked at the world.

Nonetheless, for centuries Hooke's stature as a scientist was largely overshadowed by his contemporary rival, Isaac Newton, who penned the massive, three-volume Principia, one of the most influential scientific books ever written, yet ironically one of the least read. The famous 18th century mathematician Joseph LaGrange described the Principia as "the greatest production of a human mind." There's no denying that Newton's work laid the foundations of modern physics, but from the standpoint of accessibility and readability, it fails miserably -- at least to a layperson like me. Three volumes of mathematical theory on the nature of gravity and the laws of motion, rendered in excruciatingly pedantic 17th century prose is hardly summer beach reading. Plus, there are very few pictures to break up the monotony of all that gray text. Micrographia is a miracle of clarity in comparison. So I was pleased when there was a resurgence of interest in Hooke over the last several years, culminating with the publication of Lisa Jardine's excellent biography in 2004.

Hooke's long rehabilitation in the annals of history is nearly complete: he actually made headlines in England some six weeks ago when The Guardian reported that long-lost handwritten minutes from the meetings of the Royal Society -- spanning the years 1661 to 1682, when Hooke was one of the original founding members, and in charge of taking said minutes -- had been discovered wedged into a dusty nook in an old house in Hampshire. Among the more fascinating tidbits contained within the yellowed pages is correspondence with Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity. Wren suggested they fire bullets into the air and measure where they landed to test Newton's hypothesis.

One hopes the notoriously prickly and hot-headed Hooke wasn't invited to participate in the shooting experiment. Given the bitter rancor between himself and Newton, the possibility of one of the men "pulling a Cheney," such that a seeming "stray bullet" hit a deadly mark, wasn't exactly far-fetched. Among other heated quarrels, they haggled over the nature of light: Newton said particle, Hooke (along with most others of that era) said wave, and it would be another four centuries before quantum mechanics mediated the dispute by declaring light was both particle and wave. Their professional debates quickly became personal: jealous of his rival's growing scientific reputation, Hooke may have tried to block Newton's election to the Royal Society, and impeded acceptance of the latter's work on optics among the members of that body -- one reason Newton published his second masterpiece, Opticks, only after Hooke's death.

Hooke had some cause to feel threatened: his varied practical (applied) contributions to science were indeed overlooked in favor of Newton's mathematically-oriented (fundamental) gravitational theories. Then there was sheer vanity. While Newton cut a distinguished, imposing figure, Hooke was small and hunched; even his friends described him in less than flattering terms. And Micrographia's popular appeal didn't save Hooke from being mercilessly satirized in a 1676 play by Thomas Shadwell called The Virtuoso, through the oft-ridiculed character of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, an amateur scientist who "spent two thousand pounds on microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar, mites in cheese, and the blue of plums, which he has subtly found to be living creatures." This less-than-flattering portrayal irritated Hooke greatly when the play premiered in London.

The newly discovered manuscript also lays to rest a long-standing controversy over whether Hooke or the Dutch physicist/astronomer Christiaan Huygens had designed a highly accurate watch with tiny spring mechanisms, that eventually led to the first measurements of longitude. Timepieces were among Hooke's many hobby horses. He was considered one of the finest makers of precision instruments in London, inventing a reflecting telescope, the sextant, the wind gauge and the wheel barometer, among other innovations. Even as a child, he tinkered incessantly, taking apart a big brass clock and applying what he'd learned of its inner workings to build a replica out of wood. (He was a skilled lens-grinder, too, and believed the long hours he spent bent over a lathe caused the pronounced stoop he developed later in life.) And he knew a lot about the physics of springs, having devised the eponymous Hooke's law, stating that extension is proportional to force. So when Huygens claimed to have invented a spring watch in 1675, Hooke flew into a rage, claiming someone had leaked his earlier design to Huygens. The new pages contain Hooke's notes on the minutes from that earlier meeting on June 23, 1670, proving that he indeed had proposed such a device before Huygens.

All of which makes the manuscript priceless. (Yes! Just like in those MasterCard commercials!) That didn't keep Bonhams, the auctioneers who discovered the pages, from pricing it at upwards of $1 million, and offering it for auction. The pages rightly should have been returned to the Royal Society, being part of that organization's long history, but the asking price was beyond the Society's limited financial resources.

So I was delighted to learn this morning that the Royal Society has indeed collared these rare pages for their own historical archives, thanks to generous donations from various unnamed individuals and organizations. (Jen-Luc Piquant, however, is miffed that said Royal Society had to fork over $1.75 million to reclaim 520 pages of their own minutes, and suggests I be more careful at maintaining my own haphazard filing system in the future.)

Hooke's Micrographia brought a certain honor -- by way of presenting such striking visual detail in an unforgettable image -- to the lowly, flawed flea, so it's fitting that this flawed, yet equally fascinating man should now be taking his rightful place of honor with the Society he helped found. After all, there's room for both Hooke and Newton within the annals of physics of history, without dishonoring the contributions of either. I suspect even Donne would agree, per the final couplet of his classic seduction poem: "Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,/Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee."

my funny valentine

For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

The above lines were written by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1382, in his poem, Parlement of Foules. It was written to honor the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, and is deemed the first recorded association of Valentine's Day with love. Before then, it was a feast day of the Roman Catholic Church honoring Saint Valentine.  Of course, nobody's quite sure who this Valentine dude was, since there were three martyred men named Valentinus in the late third century AD: a Roman priest; a bishop of Interamna (now Terni); and a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. It was a really common name back then, like John, or Steve, or David. (UPDATE: Speaking of common names: "Spartacus." Happy Valentine's Day, Melissa! And congrats for handling a very tough situation with intelligence and grace.)

Nonetheless, in 496, Pope Gelasius I decreed the feast of Saint Valentine to honor this mysterious personage as one of those "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to god." An 18th century English antiquarian named Alban Butler started the rumor that the whole feast day was merely yet another attempt by the Church to provide the lumpenproletariat of that era with a religious holiday in place of the pagan holiday of Lupercalia, thereby further solidifying Christianity as the official state religion. (Jen-Luc Piquant has always expressed surprise at the effectiveness of this approach in converting the masses to Christianity, a strategy first employed by Constantine. It clearly made little difference to them what particular god they were required to worship, provided they got to throw a big party a few times a year.) Apparently, Butler made it up. But like just about everything associated with Saint Valentine, it makes a darn good story, which might explain why it wasn't debunked until 1981.

Today, of course, Valentine's Day is all about hearts and flowers and sappy Hallmark cards festooned with cheesy lines of verse -- and lots of science stories related to luuurve. For instance, Darksyde has a lovely rumination today on the history of roses. Over at the American Institute of Physics' Inside Science News Service, science writer Davide Castelvecchi describes recent work by Harvard University physicist Buddhapriya Chakrabarti on the physics of curling ribbons (not a skill I possess, alas). And for those who just want to get down and dirty, BuzzSkyline over at the Physics of Sex offers some useful tips to ensure a mind-blowing night of passion.

Not everyone is a fan of Valentine's Day, arguing that the holiday is just a cheap commercial marketing ploy that makes single people feel bad about themselves for not being in a relationship. It's arguably also about imposing artificial and unreasonably high expectations on couples to do something extra-specially romantic, which might explain why many pairs have huge fights around this time of year, when they don't outright call it quits. The naysayers have a valid point in that respect. I'm a bigger fan of spontaneously planning romantic moments throughout the year, because love is not a seasonal phenomenon.

Love might be a drug, however. This is also the time of year when the media resurrects the "love is all in your head, literally" stories: namely, that the body manufactures loads of dopamine and sends to all the regions of the brain associated with love -- the same regions assciated with, um, the rush of cocaine addiction. As for what happens when the initial infatuation wears off, we give you Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love:

"There are two stages of love, the first being attraction. During that stage, you get a brain bath of three chemicals that are natural amphetamines. You can stay up all night and talk till dawn, and feel giddy and euphoric. In time, these wane, and the second stage of love kicks in, attachment, and that's associated with a different brain chemistry, the endorphins, which have natural narcotic-like qualities."

Or, in the inimitable words of the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach: "So, over time, you become narcotized in a relationship. The cocaine buzz of infatuation gives way to a dull, blissed-out heroin addiction." (For more on this topic, see the Neely Tucker article in the Washington Post and check out the wisdom of OmniBrain.)

Ooh, snap! Score one for the Bah-Humbug Brigade. I admit to indulging in V-Day bashing in the past; anyone who's spent long lonely stretches in singledom can relate to feeling, well, a wee bit excluded on a holiday devoted to celebrating romantic love and coupledom. Which is why Pop Candy is offering not only a playlist of commenters' favorite love songs, but also a list of the best break-up songs. And if you mosey on over to Bad Cupid (patron saint of the Bah-Humbug Brigade), you'll find a fine selection of Breakup Haikus.

Personally, I was prone in the past to celebrating my singledom by reading Sir Thomas Wyatt: "Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare/Fond fancy's scum and dregs of scattered thought..." Now that guy was bitter (at least until you get to the sestet, which turns the entire octave rant on its head, in fine Petrarchan sonnet tradition). John Donne also had his bitter moments, penning such vitriolic lines as "Hope not for mind in women. At their best/ sweetness and wit, but mummy possess'd." (That's from Love's Alchemy, for those who keep track of such things.) In Song, he issues a challenge to find a woman both fair and faithful, concluding that even if a guy did manage to find such a creature, and report back to Donne, by the time Donne reached her she would have "false to two, or three."

But Donne was also one of the Great Hopeless Romantics when caught in the throes of courtly love. Which is why, this year, I find myself perusing his less acrimonious verses, offering the following as a virtual valentine to Future Spouse:

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved. Were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear
For love all love of other sights controls
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

 

rhyme schemes: science poetry

This was a post I hadn't planned to write. It leaped out at me while I was trolling the back issues of the science blog carnival, Tangled Bank, catching up and looking for other topics. There, I stumbled across the blog Science Creative Quarterly, run by David Ng, Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. The blog is an odd and charming mix of science information, educational pieces, and humor. What attracted my interest was a side project Ng is promoting called Haiku Phylogeny. I thought, Great! Two of my major areas of interest in one! Better than Doublemint Gum.

This is not such an odd combination as you might think. The things science explores are generally pretty awe-inspiring, and that's just the kind of subject poets gravitate toward. If you're not familiar with the history of poetic science and scientific poetry, click on over here [pdf] and read a nice capsule summary of the subject, which dates back at least to the Romans, if not the Greeks. Frankly, it's probably gone on as long as people were making up poems and wondering about the world around them. The urge to study and explain resides in most of us, and the urge to write about those discoveries, or just the questions, in beautiful, formalistic language coincides more often than one might suspect. There are a couple of interesting interviews with poetic scientists and poets of science over at Qarrtsiluni (which, wonderfully, takes its name from the Inuit word for sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst), where science and poetry is an occasional subject.

There's also a forthcoming anthology that's a collaboration between scientists and poets, soon to be published by Oxford University Press. I'm looking forward to this, as it's a true collaboration: each poem is introduced by the scientist whose work inspired it. "Readers can see how a poet and a solar physicist may share working assumptions; how poetic insight may inform psychiatric practice; how a poet's encounter with an MRI scanner leads to a fresh neurological experiment." The project is meant in part as an antidote to C.P. Snow's prevailing "two cultures" argument, where never the twain shall meet. I'm not very hopeful about one book bridging that gap, but at least it's a start. It could only be a good thing if the literati were more literate in science and the scientists became more acquainted with why the other subjects are called "humanities."

All kinds of poets mine science for images and ideas, without even mentioning the uncountable hordes of nature poets and their subdivisions. Some, like Lavinia Greenlaw, are well known and even commissioned for it. Diane Ackerman, who took astronomy from Carl Sagan at Cornell, is another of these. Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about contemporary scientific discoveries. Robert Browning did a snide little piece on the laboratory and e.e. cummings had the same take on it too. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote eloquently about the behavior of comets and Amy Lowell about the fish in her aquarium.

The chosen subjects range from living creatures to the strange and vast realms of the physical sciences, to the tools of the sciences themselves. The life sciences probably get the most play, but astronomy gets more than a fair share. Astropoetica an on-line journal launched in 2003, publishes nothing but astronomy-related poetry. (You can read one of mine there, in their debut issue.) In the latest issue there's a series of poems commemorating Dr. Harald Alexandrescu,  "of the greatest personalities in Romanian astronomical history, [who served] as coordinator of Admiral Vasile Urseanu Municipal Observatory in Bucharest between 1984 and 2005. . . . [I]n 1998 he invited the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM to hold astropoetry galas at the observatory, making it one of the first opened for such events. In November of 2004 he officially became “the Friend of Honor”of SARM’s Cosmopoetry Festival." Isaac Newton is commemorated in another poem by Scottish poet James Thomson. And there's one of my favorites, Robert Frost's wonderful "The Star-Splitter." Of course, poets can be a bit cranky about all the facts too, like Walt Whitman in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

Then there's the flip side, the scientist-poets, a bit fewer and farther between, unless you want to count the APS limerick contest. In that same spirit, there's good old Anonymous's "The Astronomer's Drinking Song" collected and published by English mathematician Augustus De Morgan, which was apparently sung at least once at a meeting of the Mathematical Society of London. Among the more contemporary is Paul Board, and his ode to Benzene, complete with footnotes, without which no scientific document is complete.

There tends to be a vast difference, not in quality, but in method between the two camps. The poets, unsurprisingly, are less concerned with absolute accuracy, by and large, and drawn more often to the big questions and overarching theories, and the most spectacular discoveries: the Big Bang, splitting the atom, evolution. The poems of scientists more often delve into the minutiae of research and the fine details of whatever they're studying, echoing in their structure the composition of a lab report. These are actually the kind I find most fascinating to read and to write, because it can be such a challenge to take the jargon of scientific discipline and employ the usual tools of poetry to weave it into a meaning larger than itself, without distorting the facts. And science has such wonderful words with lovely sounds to toss around: quark, gluon, nudibranch, silicate.

So I was really delighted that someone was putting together a book of haiku on phylogeny. Then I read a sample of the submitted haiku. And wept. The one that brought me to tears was this:

E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt

~Henry James

The author's namesake, though no poet, is surely rotating at high speed in his grave. I know it sent me running for my copy of The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass, where I found two appropriate beauties from Basho within less than a minute:

First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

In the first you have a perfect metaphor for the genetic similarities of primates. In the second, you have an illustration of the interesting fact of molting. C'mon people! It's only 17 syllables! It's not that hard! Truth and Beauty, shake hands here!

It used to be that a liberal arts education would give one a concentration in one subject and a smattering of everything else. But the pursuit of a science degree is now such an intensive course of study that there often isn't much room for anything else, certainly not anything as frivolous as poetry (or even a good writing class). And yet, when you mix the two cultures up—pull back the curtain on the lab and what goes on there, embrace the use of metaphor and simile in the correct context—it makes both disciplines richer and easier for the other to understand. To use a scientific metaphor: cross-pollination only makes for more robust offspring. Science and poetry are both creative human endeavors and can only enrich each other.