Cocktail Party Physics

wonder of wonders

Sometimes one makes spur-of-the-moment media decisions that do not, in the end, prove worthwhile. A couple of days ago I received the following email from one of the producers of the Mancow Radio Show:

The Mancow Radio Show invites you to join Mancow on the air for a brief guest phone interview to promote your article "Big Game Theory" in Discover Magazine, discuss physicists and poker, and promote your additional work. The Mancow Show is based out of Chicago and nationally syndicated to millions of listeners, with high ratings in top markets across the nation. Mancow is a passionate, opinionated, culture-engaging, and patriotic truth-seeker who thrives on quick-witted conversation with intriguing guests.

Sounds pretty good, right? I love quick-witted bantering, and am happy to do my part to promote Discover and similar publications (including my own books, natch). Now, granted, the reality is that Mancow is pretty much your average right-wing shock jock. The wit is limited to cheap shots about "National Politically Correct Radio", how annoying wives are, and the occasional off-color gag. In between is the usual ranting about "real" America, picking yourself up by your own boostraps, how homeless people choose to be that way because they're all drug addicts, and trumpeting one's right to shout as loudly as possible to drown out any potentially opposing views -- and maybe stomp on a few heads of dissenters just for larks. Because, you know, free speech is only for those who agree with you. But what the heck, I was still game -- Mancow's just playing to his core audience. That doesn't mean we can't have a good exchange. It's poker, after all. Everyone loves poker, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian and moderate Independents like me. How could that be politically charged? It's always possible to find common ground when everyone's acting in good faith.

Sadly, not everyone acts in good faith. My expectations were pretty low going in, and Mancow didn't even meet that lowest of bars. Here's the gist of our "conversation" this morning, which lasted maybe all of one minute:

Mancow: Hey there, so what's this Discover magazine thing? Related to the credit card company? I subscribe to lots of magazines, never heard of it.

Me: Oh, well, it's a science magazine. You can find it in lots of airports.

Mancow: Uh-huh. So what's this Big Game Theory story??

Me: (gamely attempting to be chipper and upbeat at 6:30 AM) It's about poker-playing physicists! Turns out there's quite a lot of them who are finding that poker is a challenging, intriguing game.

Mancow: So they're, like, card-counting and stuff to make money off the casinos....

Me: Actually, no, poker is more about the probabilities, game theory, human psychology, and physicists find that --

Mancow (interrupting): Oh, guess I'm thinking about blackjack. I'm a blackjack man. That's a MAN'S game. <click>

And he cut me off. Yep, I got the Bill O'Reilly treatment for the crime of Not Fitting the Right-Wing Narrative. Over poker. I have no idea what Mancow thought this was supposed to be about -- he mentioned card-counting, so maybe he was thinking about those MIT geniuses a few years ago who tried to rip off casinos while playing blackjack? Maybe he was annoyed because I didn't play along and kept earnestly assuming this was a real interview (my bad)? It doesn't matter, because the import of his final comment was clear: those high-falutin', pointy-headed intellectual elites, with their fancy math and their strategy and their stupid human psychology and their knowing-what-the-fuck-they're-talking-about -- they are Not Real Men (TM). (Corrollary: Real Men (TM) do not read Discover magazine.) At least he didn't try to make lame sex jokes like he did with the previous (male) caller.

Look, it's not like Mancow ruined my day; he just wasted my time, and not very much of it. So I just shrugged and went back to bed to grab an extra hour of sleep. But it was one more encounter with rampant anti-intellectualism that's been popping up in my life over the last few weeks, starting with a long article in the Guardian about "Miracles," the controversial music video by Insane Clown Posse. (I wonder if Real Men (TM) listen to Insane Clown Posse. Can they read the Guardian?) That's the one with the classic lines,

"Fucking magnets/How do they work?"

And I don't wanna talk to a scientist

Y'all motherfuckers lying and

Getting me pissed

Never mind that anyone with access to the Internet and the ability to type keywords into Google can easily discover how magnets work. Or gravity. Or that electromagnetism and our ability to not only understand it, but control it, is why Insane Clown Posse can make a music video and release it on the Internet in the first place -- and why Mancow has a career in radio broadcasting. Maybe what they should be saying is "Thank you, Science, for creating our jobs!"

Understandably, most people with a lick of common sense found these sentiments ridiculous, and weren't shy about saying so. Saturday Night Live even lampooned Insane Clown Posse with this:

The skit makes the point better than I could in 10,000 words. ("Isn't a volcano just an angry hill?" Um, no.) Much has been made of Jon Ronson's entertaining Guardian article and their anti-science rants -- not to mention the fact that they claim to be evangelical Christians. (Remember in the Gospels, how Jesus went around cussing and inciting his followers to violence, just so he could win their trust and then BAM! bring them to the Lord? Actually, I'd wager their faith runs about as deep as their lyrics.) Apparently, Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J are very sensitive, prone to depression, and all this mocking has hurt their delicate artistic feelings. They are Misunderstood. See, they thought they were being deep and philosophical and stuff when they wrote "Miracles." Gravity and magnets are cool and all but don't mess up their sense of wonder with actual understanding! 

I've got news for the Insane Clown Posse. All this, "Whoa, dude, check out that giraffe! Aren't the stars awesome?" nonsense? That's not deep. Or philosophical. And it's definitely not wonder. That's -- well, frankly, that's called "being high." ("Fuckin' Ecstasy/How does that work?")

Real wonder is something quite different; it can't be diminished or killed by science; it is only enhanced by science. It reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of House, where Dr. House is debating a magician who has refused to tell House how he achieved a certain trick. "If I tell you, then you'll lose the actual magic," the magician protests. House replies, "Magic is cool. Actual magic is an oxymoron. Possibly only moron." Later in the episode, the magician explains that people come to his shows to feel a sense of mystery and wonder, and knowing how a trick is done would spoil that sense of wonder. It's the same basic message as Insane Clown Posse -- just more articulately phrased. House's rejoinder should become the mantra of everyone who values rationality and critical thinking: "If the wonder is gone when the truth is known, then there never was any wonder." When I learn about the underlying science of something, it makes me wonder more -- not less -- and deepens my appreciation for the beauty and mystery of the world.

Shaggy and J can take comfort in the fact that they're clearly not alone in their sentiments. The anti-vaccination crowd is still misleading well-intentioned parents trying to do the right thing by their kids, urging them to trust their "gut instincts" rather than medical science. The wackjobs at Conservapedia are working hard to prevent right-leaning folks from encountering any uncomfortable "facts" by setting forth their own (laughably ignorant) take on Einstein's special and general relativity -- apparently part of some socialist Obama-genda (snort) -- and bashing the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics because sometimes the recipients vote Democratic, or hail from communist countries, and therefore must be punished for their blasphemy. New York magazine just ran an article making fun of the titles of various math courses, clearly demonstrating they didn't know the first thing about what those courses actually entailed (hint: topology is hardly "math for jocks"). It all adds up to a very vocal minority, fueled by incoherent rage, with the potential to do a great deal of damage -- particularly when it comes to things like vaccines.

It's really been getting on my nerves lately. We had dinner last night with our friend Carol Tavris, a psychologist and author (Mismeasure of Woman, Mistakes Were Made... But Not By Me) who writes about denialism, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, memory, decision-making, and all the other oh-so-many ways we trick ourselves into reinforcing our most cherished beliefs, because it's just too damned uncomfortable to admit otherwise. She's one of my favorite people: she's tough, scrupulously honest, and has the sharpest bullshit-detector I've yet encountered. Carol will never tell you the comfortable lie you most want to hear -- but she will be compassionate when dealing out the painful truth. I told her how, several months ago, an interviewer asked me why surveys showed that "scientist" is one of the most trusted professions, and yet there is such a strong anti-science rhetoric sweeping the mainstream media. I didn't have a good answer at the time, but now I do. It's this:

Science has a lot of fair-weather friends. People love science so long as it's wowing them with cool nifty insights or bringing awesome new gadgets and technology to market. But sooner or later, science -- by its very nature -- is going to tell you something you don't want to hear. It's going to challenge an easy assumption, or a deeply-held belief. It's going to make you question your personal reality that you've so carefully constructed up to that point. And that's the acid test. That's when you find out if you truly love science, if you're a genuine seeker of Truth and Wonder, or just someone who's content with the cheap ersatz substitutes. You can choose Option A: recoil against the truth and shoot the messenger, metaphorically speaking, by demonizing him or her and everything science stands for. Or you can choose Option B: grudgingly accept that you might be wrong, and if those facts turn out to be true, changing your beliefs and behavior accordingly.

Sadly, the vast majority of people choose Option A: it's easier, less work, less discomfiting to never challenge one's assumptions -- and therefore never change. Change is scary. Change is hard. And our brains are hard-wired against accepting new viewpoints once we have a "framework" in place. We live in an amazing era when information is available to just about everyone -- much of it free -- and there's simply no reason to remain willfully ignorant of well-established facts (things that are a matter of opinion are a different beast altogether). Do we take advantage of that tremendous gift? Or do we only seek out sites and facts that reinforce our biases? Do we twist what we read and hear to fit our pre-existing framework, and attack any source that contradicts it? If we're human, our default mechanism is bound to be Option A, unless we're very self-aware and work to counter those natural instincts.

And no, scientists are not immune to this. However, the best means of combating it is, in fact, training in science, logic, critical thinking. The process of science is carefully structured to account for human bias, and remove it from the equation, so to speak. Lots of physicists hated the implications of quantum mechanics when it was first proposed in the early 20th century. But when experiment after experiment confirmed the theory, they had no choice, as scientists, but to accept that yes, at the subatomic level, this really is how Nature works. Because they did so, you are now reading this on a computer monitor or electronic gadget, made possible by quantum mechanics. In the same way, you have to work at being self-aware, conscious of your biases. I work really hard at it, and I'm only partially successful. But at least I'm trying. I'm not taking the path of least of resistance. And I work equally hard to share my journey with others, in hopes of inspiring them to do the same. So yes -- it's sometimes depressing to see and hear that cacaphony of willful ignorance, day after day. It led to the following exchange with Carol:

Me: So, is there any hope?

Carol: No. (seeing my chagrin) But doesn't that make you feel better? You don't have to keep beating your head against the wall!

See? I told you she doesn't mince words. It didn't really make me feel better -- but she told me the truth. Then I came home and found a couple of lovely emails, from complete strangers, who'd read my work and been inspired to learn more about math and science -- two more candles to offset the darkness of willfull ignorance. Thanks to those people for choosing real wonder, and for making me realize my efforts aren't for naught. Sometimes, when you bang your head against the wall, you achieve the occasional tiny crack. It's not much -- but it's enough.

ADDENDUM: Carol admits that she was half-teasing me with the answer "no", and assures me there is always hope, although the challenge is indeed a daunting one: "As Stephen Jay Gould said to me when I asked him a similar question: Don't you ever feel like Sisyphus? Steve: Yes. But how much further down that mountain we would be if we didn't keep pushing the rock upwards."

 

boyz will be boyz

Since joining Twitter earlier this year, I've become a Tweet-happy fool, easily overtaking the Spousal Unit in sheer volume of Tweets. (It helps that so many science-writing pals are Twittering fools, too.) But while that medium has its strengths, it's really not the place for any kind of substantive debate. So when the folks at Quirks and Quarks sent me a link to this op-ed in the Globe and Mail, I really couldn't sum up my reaction in a series of 140-character tweets to do the topic justice. Because honestly, it kinda pissed me off.

Let me set out some caveats upfront. What I know about Quebec's current educational crisis could fit in a couple of paragraphs, tops. Apparently there is a significant high school dropout rate, a problem that is "particularly acute among boys." (This is no doubt a situation that exists in other major cities in the US, as well as Canada.) And the author, Sumitra Rajagopalan -- a biomechanics professor at McGill University -- is well-intentioned and to be admired for putting her money where her mouth is and working with underachieving teens in her far-from-copious spare time. My problem isn't even with the "complete rethink" she advocates for science education, namely, focusing on hands-on activities. I am all for finding creative and innovative ways to get students engaged and thinking deeply about math and science. Sometimes you need to get your hands dirty. She's right: at-risk students in particular "find regular classrooms stifling, and are often starved for hands-on activities."

No, what got my knickers in a twist was the constant harping on the "feminization" of the classroom and the repeated hearkening to outmoded (and unhelpful) gender stereotypes throughout the entire article -- and it wasn't all that long an article. This is not conducive to a thoughtful critique. At all. It's an unnecessary distraction that merely serves to undermine Rajagopalan's broader message. Consider just these few sample quotes (and if you suspect I'm being unfair and taking them out of context, follow the link to read the whole thing): 

"Boys are born tinkerers. They have a deep-seated need to rip things apart, decode their inner workings, create stuff." I think we can agree that many boys do have this tendency -- although we could debate whether such behavior is culturally learned vs. innate. Those are the ones that tend to gravitate towards science. Or mechanical engineering. Or NASCAR garages. But note the implicit assumption that these interests are for boys -- what about the girls who like to tinker with stuff, and be creative? Where are the hands-on learning activities for them?

I humbly offer my co-blogger, Diandra, as an example of a compulsive tinkerer. She's an experimentalist who works in condensed matter physics and nanotech, and builds stuff in her lab all the time. She also wrote The Physics of NASCAR (see sidebar) because of her curiosity about the sport, and impressed all the tough guys at the track with her deep knowledge and intelligent questions about the intricate workings of car engines, tires, auto bodies, and so forth.

Also? I am married to a (male) theoretical physicist. The Spousal Unit generally does not enjoy this sort of thing; his expertise lies in pondering deep questions about time, entropy, and the origin of the universe, augmented with well-chosen equations. Hanging picture frames or towel rods is the extent of our combined expertise in the tinkering department -- and we called my construction worker brother to ask a couple of questions about the towel rod project before drilling (questions about the structure of the wall; the drilling/installation was self-evident). The point is, this has less to do with gender than Rajagopalan makes it out to be. People learn differently -- not girls and boys. Some like to get their hands dirty and build stuff, others don't.

That goes for the folks who teach math and science, too:

"Enter today's typical math/science teacher. She's young and female with a social sciences background. She went through high school believing that 'math sucks' and 'science is for geeks.' Like most girls, she's never held a wrench.... Forget tools-based activities -- this teacher has hardly done any herself." There is so much contempt dripping from these sentences, I'm frankly shocked they were written by a woman scientist. Again with the unnecessary gender stereotyping! No doubt there are some math and science teachers in high schools who fit this description, but there are plenty of others who don't. I've met quite a few high school math teachers in recent weeks, while touring for The Calculus Diaries, and they were both male and female -- and the female teachers had just as strong backgrounds in math, science or engineering as the male teachers who showed up. I guess the "social science" types just stayed home, lest they be asked to solve a differential equation on the spot, or be ridiculed by Rajagopalan and her ilk.

Here's where we get into her beef with the so-called "feminization" of the math and science curriculum:

"Gone are the math drills and abstract problem-solving. Instead, there's the socio-cultural context of science and math. So solving a math equation becomes an essay question -- complete with the reasoning behind the reasoning and how this is related to the student's life experiences." Ahem. First off, what, exactly, is uniquely "feminine" about this? Framing "hard" science and math as uniquely "male" is (a) incorrect, and (b) fosters exclusionary behavior for women who might otherwise be interested in those fields. Note also the breezy dismissal of historical and cultural contexts -- they're just so girly! -- and the strong preference for "rigor," which, in Rajagopalan's mind, apparently only extends to math drills and problem sets.

As a science writer with a humanities background, I believe very strongly in bringing science back into the broader culture, not setting it off as something scary or separate -- which is not the equivalent of "dumbing down." Understanding the history of math and science can actually enhance learning and student comprehension. Ditto for exploring deeper questions of why something is so, the reasons behind the math and science, and for tying what one learns in class with one's own daily experiences. As I wrote in The Calculus Diaries, I did quite well in my high school math and science courses, but I still ended up with math anxiety, because I was just blindly following rules and figuring out the "tricks" -- my deeper comprehension was entirely lacking. (And it's not a gender thing: Chris Mooney interviewed me recently for the Point of Inquiry podcast and admitted his experience had been similar.) The entire book is about finding math in the world around me, then building my own problem sets (with the help of the Spousal Unit), and it's also chock-full of historical and cultural references. The rigor of a math or science class should include those aspects as well.

Which is not to say we should dispense with the traditional forms of "rigor." (The book doesn't include many derivations, because there's plenty of other math books available that cover that; but it does include a "further reading" list of the resources I found most useful.) I studied classical piano as a child (from age 8 through my sophomore year of college) and I'd compare a traditional math class to practicing scales. It's absolutely essential to do those rote exercises, over and over again, no matter how tedious, because without them you will never develop the technical proficiency needed to execute a decent performance of, say, Chopin's Ballade #1. But if that's all you ever do -- if you never stop to think about why you are practicing those scales, or have the chance to see them used creatively in a brilliant musical composition -- you will never have a deep appreciation of music, and, more critically, you will never be able to write your own symphony some day. You need both elements. It's not either/or, any more than the problems in math and science education can be reduced to male vs. female.

"Fewer male graduates now would mean fewer scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in the future." Well, yes, it might very well mean that -- unless the girls step up and become scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, too. You know, like Rajagopalan herself. I'm glad she's concerned about the boys, but traditionally, girls are far more likely to be pushed out of math and science fields. Why isn't she concerned about the impact of that on the number of scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs in the future? It reminds me of all the hand-wringing generated by a series of 2006 articles in the New York Times about how boys were suddenly at risk of being overtaken by the girls in academic achievement, and who will hire them/marry them then? Huh? Won't someone think of the poor emasculated boys?

Look, it's not that I don't care about the boys; I just don't see why they're being singled out for special concern. We need to do a better job educating all our students about math and science, steering them toward careers in those fields -- regardless of gender.

So what is Rajagopalan's vision for the ideal Future Science Classroom?

"Instead of spotless science labs, how about a workshop in every school, replete with metal sheets, machinery, and Krazy Glue? Here, boys could roll up their sleeves and get down to some real work. And never mind those soot-stained hands, dirty fingernails or even the occasional bleeding finger. This is their way of learning." Um, I believe those classes used to be called "shop." They are, indeed, excellent for the kid who likes to get his -- or her -- hands dirty. Because once again, Rajagopalan is traffacking in gender stereotypes. But apart from that, here's where we find common ground. I just wouldn't limit it to one kind of lab. I mean, Neil Gershenfeld has had smashing success with his "fab labs" at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where male and female students can play, build and create to their heart's content -- learning more about math and science -- and the process of math and science -- than they'd ever learn in the standard curriculum. And today, the New York Times has a story about a chemistry and physics of cooking class at Harvard -- a class that draws both male and female students. Let's dispense with these meaningless labels of "masculine" and "feminine" and just support any kind of hands-on activities that foster student involvement and deeper learning in math and science.

Having ragged on the poor woman for an entire blog post, I'm willing to bet that, when cornered, she'd concede at least some of the above points. She's a woman in science, after all; she can't be blind to those concerns. She also didn't have a lot of space in her Op-Ed for nuance. But it's unfortunate that the substance of her message was drowned out -- for me and many other readers --by the constant harping on boyz, boyz, boyz and the gratuitous digs at "feminization."

Comics courtesy of the gifted (and sometimes NSFW) Zack Weiner, evil mastermind behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

 

we are in...like...so much in trouble... episode two.

In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can't do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance.

I've devoted a significant part of my career to education: working with K-12 teachers, teaching at a university, developing programs for the public.  I'm beginning to wonder whether we are not all just wasting our time and we would do much better to focus on developing an elite cadre of high-powered science literate researchers who will discover wondrous things and save us all from ourselves.  Of course, that won't work because the people who know the science will be prevented from fulfilling this task by the science-ignorant who comprise the public, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the government.

I'm tired of hearing from people how hard math is.  Do you ever hear people saying things like "oh, yeah, reading.  I was just never good at that."  Admitting that you are illiterate is harder than admitting that you are an alcoholic or a drug addict at this point.  But admitting that you can't do math - well pfftt, I could never do math either, so that's just OK.

The truth is that most people don't want to be bothered, just like most people would rather state their opinion about things without wasting time looking up the facts.   The NASCAR race I'm watching features the AT&T ‘Fastest Pit Crew of the Year Award’.  Fans VOTE for the fastest pit crew.  The last I looked, time is not subject to human opinion.  Sure AT&T donates $20,000 at the end of the program to a deserving charity.  But how silly do you have to be to think that 'fastest' has anything to do with your opinion?  How about sponsoring something mathematically meaningful, like showing us a histogram of all the pit stop times, showing who was exceptionally fast or slow.

ADDITION:  Anonymous Coward noted in the comments below that there could be different definitions of fastest.  I should have given more information.  The contest is per race and the voters are given no information about either what 'fastest' means or numerical information as to the pit times.  I'd have no problem if they just switched it to "most valuable" because -- as you point out -- people can make their own interpretation of what is most valuable.  Perhaps it is because I am a physicist:  In my mind, "fastest" is a pretty precise term. Thanks for the comment!

A Dallas Morning News article on September 15th about dove hunting contained the following in an article by one Ray Sasser.

Remember your old geometry lesson about the long side of a triangle being equal to the two shorter sides. That means a dove 40 yards out and 10 yards high is 50 yards from the gun and clearly out of range.  -- Dallas Morning News

Umm... No.  Even if you don't remember the formula, just draw the picture.  Or, God forbid, use some common sense.  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right?  If you had to walk 40 feet East and 10 feet North, but you had the option to walk directly th ere, wouldn't you just intuitively know that it was shorter to take the direct route?  (Yeah, those ought to be 'yds' not 'ft' in the drawing, but I am in the middle of moving and trying to do this in a big ol' hurry.)

Apparently not if you work at the Dallas Morning News.  The point of the DMN article was that people shouldn't try to kill things that are out of their accurate shooting range.  Shooting something incompletely is worse than shooting it dead, as the injured animal generally dies an agonizing death a few hours or days later. 

I realize this is the state that thinks that history textbooks have a pro-Islamic slant, and that  creationism should be taught in science class; however, I am confident that there is nothing in the Bible that casts doubt on the validity of the Pythagorean theorem.  That's it on the right, where d is the distance to the shooting target.  The distance to the target is 41.2 yards, not 50 yards. (Thanks to Brian for pointing out my error in units.)

 

I don't think I'm being too demanding.  This is pretty simple math.  Squares and square roots are not beyond the ken of ANYONE who wants to understand them. 

And that, unfortunately, seems to be the crux of the problem.  I know plenty of people who can calculate how much the 40% off sweater on sale at Neiman Marcus will cost, but claim that things like mortgages or interest on their bank account are just too hard to understand.  If you don't understand percentages (and compounding), perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to take out a mortgage.  (I know, not feasible because it would lead to another financial crisis.)

Maybe we need to start applying intense social pressure to science and math illiterates. What we really need is branding.  Let's recruit personalities from the fields of music, acting and sports who are willing to stand up for math and science.  Great advertising opportunity:  "If Paris Hilton can understand it, certainly YOU can."

Or maybe I've just been watching too much television lately.

what do we mean by "how much oil is left" in the gulf?

If Shakespeare were alive today, he might suggest that PR/branding/marketing people should go before lawyers.  The spin doctor's job is to make their company look good - even when it shouldn't.  The existence of spin doctors is reason number one why we must fix our badly broken education system.  If science teaches one thing, it is skepticism:  People shouldn't be so anxious to be told what to think.

This week marked the first peer-reviewed study of the Gulf Coast oil spill.  Big disclaimer here - it takes weeks (sometimes months or years) for research to make it from research to print, so the results are from measurements made in June; however, there are many more research reports to come.  The Truth is likely to be known only after multiple research groups have published on different aspects - probably on a timescale of years - and all of their data is analyzed in aggregate.  Science aims for precision, not speed. 

The last few weeks have brought heated debates on radio and television arguing over exactly "how much oil is left in the Gulf".  Estimates vary from "none" to "more than seventy-five percent".  How can people looking at the exact same system come up with numbers that are so different?

How much oil was released into the Gulf?  The National Incident Command (mostly the federal people in charge of managing the cleanup) uses a figure of about 5 million barrels and, on August 2nd, noted that about 17 percent of the oil released from the spill has been removed.

On August 19th, Ian MacDonald (a biological oceanographer from Florida State) testified in Congress and presented a very interesting fact:  the 5 million barrel total includes oil that was pumped directly from the well onto ships after the first capping attempts.  Initially, this larger figure doesn't make sense - why would the government use a bigger number? 

Because if you include the oil pumped directly from the well to a tanker, you've "removed" a higher percentage of the oil.  MacDonald (who argues that the total amount of oil that actually was released into the water was 4.1 million barrels) says that six percent was burned and four percent was skimmed.  If you use his numbers, a total of 10 percent of the oil was 'removed' from the environment.  The government number of 17 percent isn't wrong - but you can't compare the two numbers head to head.  The higher number sounds better, but it's important for the consumer (of information) to know what that number actually represents.

A report from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in early August estimated - and that's an important word - that 74 percent of the oil from the leak had been: captured directly from the well; skimmed; burned; dispersed chemically; dispersed naturally; evaporated;  or dissolved into microscopic droplets. The rest of the oil washed ashore.  On August 4th, Carol Browner said on the Today Show that "more than three-quarters of the oil is gone."

Salad dressing made with oil and vinegar (or water) presents a challenge in mixing, as I've written about in the past.  Oil molecules don't like water molecules and water molecules don't like oil molecules.  You need to either whisk in the oil or shake it vigorously to form an emulsion.  An oil-in-water emulsion consists of very small droplets of oil suspended in water.  Most salad dressing recipes include dispersants of some type. Homemade dressings rely on things like mustard and egg yolk.  Commercial salad dressings use more exotic dispersants.  Few people call them dispersants, but these additives encourage the formation and persistence of the emulsion, which is pretty much what a dispersant does. 

I don't see any oil after shaking the bottle of vinaigrette in the fridge.  Is it 'gone''?  Evidently not, because the calorie count doesn't have separate columns for 'shaken' and 'not shaken'.  It's definitely 'not visible', but it sure the heck isn't 'gone'.

I happen to like my vinaigrette more on the vinegar side than the oil side, so I typically use a lower ratio than the recommended 3:1 oil:vinegar ratio for a classic vinaigrette.  My eating companions rarely agree with my acidic preferences, so I usually make the salad dressing with the 3:1 ratio and then add additional vinegar to a small container just for me.  That decreases the oil concentration, but not the absolute amount of oil - it's just spread out more than it was before.  That's not 'gone' either.

It would be really nice to have an equation that predicts how long oil takes to break down in seawater.  Such an equation does exist - in fact, a number of different models exist.  MacDonald's Congressional testimony makes the point that federal report (which makes no secret that its numbers/predictions are based primarily on theory) doesn't indicate which scientific formulae, models or predictors they used for their estimates. 

The Science paper researchers (along with researchers at other institutions that have peer-reviewed papers coming out soon) dropped sensors into the water and some even sent a submersible to look various 'plumes'.  The lead researchers on the Science paper (from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) reported on over 57,000 chemical analysis on a plume "only" 200 meters thick and about 2 kilometers wide over two weeks in June.  The plume measured was about 3,600 feet below the surface and extended more than 20 miles southwest of the well, traveling at about four miles a day.  The caveats, of course, are that this study occurred before the well was capped and two months ago. 

The use of the word 'plume' may be a little misleading because this is a collection of small oil droplets, presumably formed by the dispersant or natural actions.  It's not the billowing cloud you might picture. The Science paper reports significantly higher concentrations of a number of toxic compounds, including benzene at a rate of 50 micrograms per liter (which is 0.05 parts per million).  One part per million is about one drop in 40 gallons. The maximum allowable concentration of benzene in drinking water is 5 parts per billion, which is 0.005 parts per million or ten times less than the concentrations they measured. (Incidentally, commercial salad dressing is required to contain 30% oil.)

Dispersing is (in my opinion) not the same thing as removing.  How do we actually remove oil?

Crude oil is a collection of many different types of hydrocarbons, the exact composition of which varies from location to location.  The molecules, all of which are carbon and hydrogen atoms in various configurations, are separated into fractions according to their boiling points. The lighter fractions have fewer carbon atoms (and by association, fewer hydrogen atoms) and lower boiling points.  The pie chart below is representative of what might flow through a pipeline carrying Gulf Coast crude (See Appendix 6-A). Boiling points are shown in parentheses after the specific fraction name.

The light ends through medium naptha generally have a composition like gasoline, while the heavier components are more like oils.  A representative molecule from the gasoline range would be octane or isooctane (both C₈H₁₈), while a representative molecule from the oils side would be paraffin wax (C₂₅H₅₂).  The heaviest components of crude oil are like the binders for asphalt.

What everyone is counting on to actually 'remove' the oil are specific types of marine bacteria that eat oil.  The bacteria with the best PR appear to be Alcanivorax borkumensis, which loves hydrocarbons for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  They prefer alkanes, which are saturated hydrocarbons and very prevalent in crude oil.  David Valentine of UCSB has a nice video showing the dispersant and the bacteria's effects on oil in water on the PBS Newshour website.

If you've ever watched bacteria grow on bread (either due to a science project or reluctance to clean the fridge), you know that the growth of a bacterial colony depends on specific environmental conditions.  A. borkumensis likes water temperatures in the range of 20-30 C, and a 3-10 percent salt concentration, which makes it ideal in marine applications. 

A group at Bangor University studies the limiting factors this bacteria's growth. We already know that the bacteria population won't grow unless there is plenty of food (not a problem in this case).  The Bangor group has been studying whether you can 'fertilize' these bacteria to get them to grow faster.  They are examining how nitrogen and phosphorus may stimulate growth of the bacteria to allow them to deal with very large oil spills.

These oil-gobbling bacteria need oxygen to survive.  You may also have heard reports that scientists are concerned that the bacteria colonies could grow so large that they significantly de-oxygenate the water.  So far, that doesn't look like a problem.

The federal report, which has been widely quoted, says that early signs suggest the oil is “biodegrading quickly."  A number of scientists quickly challenged this assertion.  Bacteria's metabolism decreases as the temperature decreases.  Water gets colder with depth, so bacteria metabolizing oil will be less efficient at lower depths. One of the problems with dispersants is that, at some oil droplet size, the force of gravity exactly counterbalances the buoyant force, so droplets are stuck at a particular depth.  It may take a very long time for these smaller droplets at lower depths to be eaten - remember that the Science paper looks at a plume 3600 feet below the surface.

There are also a lot of unknowns.  We have precious little data about how the dispersants used may change the bacteria's ability to digest oil.  I've been looking for hard information about exactly which components of crude oil the bacteria eat and - sort of importantly - the by-products of the eating process. Some groups have engineered bacteria so that they eat oil and produce plastic. I am suspicious that CO₂ might be a by-product of the metabolism, since it's released in human metabolism of sugars (hydrocarbons with oxygen) and combustion of gasoline. 

This is an interesting case study in communicating science.  The federal report that came up with the 75% 'gone' number was very specific about what they meant by 'gone', even though they included some things I wouldn't necessarily include.  By the time the information got reduced to a soundbite, though, the details were 'gone'.

Research scientists have been pretty unanimously vocal about their skepticism of the 75% figure. It is interesting because we usually go out of our way to emphasize the limits of validity of our conclusions, we make all kinds of caveats and generally put so many conditions on our results that our PR people want to pull out their hair (or ours).  I think the vocal outcry from the scientific community is because conclusions are being presented as 'known', when in fact, they are very tenuous.  There is nothing like drawing conclusions before the data are all in to get scientists riled up.

A very important role of science education - usually overlooked because it isn't easy to test - is teaching people how to think logically and rationally.  This becomes even more important when people are inundated with information from all sides, including professionals whose job it is to promote specific agendas.  It ought to be an attractive theme for today's students:  Don't take anyone's word - prove it for yourself.

the shoe bomber theory of purchasing regulations

A couple years back when I switched jobs from the mighty JPL to a small (but still mighty!) private lab, they handed me a couple of corporate cards and quickbooks for purchasing equipment, services, and other odds and ends for the scientists. The approval process went something like this:  "HEY DAVE, DO THEY REALLY NEED THIS CRAP?" If Dave agreed and lectured me on how this wasn't in fact crap but a VERY IMPORTANT WIDGET, I'd then ask Debra, "HEY DEBRA, DAVE SAYS WE NEED THIS STUFF THAT IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT CRAP, WHICH ACCOUNT DOES IT GO ON?" And then Debra would check the contract, make some calculations, sigh, and tell me which account to use for the purchase. 

The entire process took about ten minutes or so. Then I'd call a vendor, place the order, enter all the needed info for inventory and accounting and whatever it was that they needed would arrive the next day, sometimes longer if it was coming from someplace not on the West Coast. Auditors would come in every now and again and make sure we weren't ordering booze and pole dancers.

Purchasing is easy in a small lab because when you have fewer than a couple dozen humans involved, it's easy to provide the necessary checks and balances in a very short period of time. The bureaucracy is me, checking things off on a list, and because I have to face the scientist at lunch in a half hour, I want to be able to say the thing they need is on its way and not make excuses. Because the scientist needs to face the CEO at the same lunch table, s/he wants to be able to look him in the eye and say that the things they purchased will bring us that much closer to the deliverable/bottom line. Monkey business is rare. 

Now that I'm back at the mighty JPL, I'm faced with the longish delays that come with a Rube Goldberg-like  maze of an approval process for purchases. Large government labs use the Shoe Bomber Theory of Government Spending.

In 2001, a jackhole named Richard Reid got on a plane and attempted to make it go 'splody by lighting a bomb in his shoes.  Now we all have to suffer the indignity of standing barefoot in line at the airport while the security goons X-ray my Hello Kitty flip flops. An appropriate punishment for Mr. Reid would be to chain him to the metal detector at various airports and then we could all smack him in the chops with our shoes before boarding the plane. 

Likewise, somewhere out there, some jackass probably used his government p-card to buy a hooker, forty-eight pounds of veal, a case of absinthe, and a weed whacker for a groovy night of debauchery at a conference in Madrid. 

Then some bored reporter showed up to blow the lid off this travesty as if s/he had discovered a Woodward and Bernsteinesque plot, it all ended up on the evening news, and suddenly I need to get sixty-eight approvals from the head of NASA all the way to my mom (hi mom!) to order a box of Kim Wipes. I hate waiting for stuff. 

Don't get me wrong, I sincerely believe that controls need to be in place to ensure that purchases on the government dime are transparent for public edification and a just use of funds to make science happen. I bear no ill will toward the approvers who have been tasked with signing off on Kim Wipes, step stools, Matlab software, or lasers. Everything has to be carefully inventoried, everything has to be purchased with attention to price and quality. 

Still, I've been waiting a week and a half for my full version of Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop and I AM GOING MAD. I COULD HAVE CRAWLED TO THE MAC STORE ON MY HANDS AND KNEES BY NOW. Sorry. Sorry. I know. There's a contract and it's in place to ensure we get it at the best price. I know. It's my tax dollars at work. I appreciate it. Hear that sound? No, it's not a sonic boom...it's my deadline, breaking the sound barrier as it whizzes past my desk and dear god I just need to modify this PDF...

Until there's a better way to purchase what we need, I would like to suggest something that would not speed up the process, but at least allow me the opportunity to channel my rage in the appropriate direction. 

Whenever a new control is put in place that causes me to wait additional time for an approval, I believe that the new approval process should be named after the jerk who caused the problem to begin with. 

For example, say I requisition a golf cart, a length of fiberglass tubing, and a twenty pound sack of Yukon Gold spuds using DARPA funds so I can careen around the lab with a potato gun shooting people who are wearing socks with sandals. 

Now, a new tuber control point will have to be put in place with an approval from the Department of Agriculture if I need to get some potato salad and sandwiches for an all day review of a project in which fifteen scientists will be locked in a room yelling at each other about the wording on Powerpoint slide number seventy-two. The side-order approval process should be called the "Allyson Beatrice Is An Ass" Control Point and available in the drop-down menu of my request form. 

This way, everyone will know who to hate on. Instead of being irritated with Joe Blow from the Goverment Aggie for taking two hours to get to my side-order request, we can commiserate on the unfairness of his additional job duty, having to interrogate secretaries about whether or not there will be paprika and mustard in the potato salad. It'd be like Team Building!

As an addendum to this rule, if I have to wait more than three days for software, the software contract should be named after the person who struck the deal, so I can send all of my work to that person to do until I get what I need to do my job. I think this would speed things up a lot. 

sing a dirge for the unused adipic acid

I'm just wrapping a 70+ hour work week. Our offices and labs were moved this weekend.  The labs, machine shop, and clean room are bright and cheery with spectacular views of tree tops and mountains...perfect for creative work. Okay, the RF lab is a bit more like a bat cave, but it's much bigger than the previous location, with tons more storage space. 

I spent ten days in the clean room, carefully packing fibers into padded ESD bags. I was instructed to treat every widget in every cabinet as if it were a premature infant, and to gingerly place every rusted screw into plastic as if it were a warm isolette. I practically had to whisper. Of course, once move day came, crazed scientists were heaping these precious fibers and widgets onto filthy carts as if they were sandbags guarding against an imminent flood, and hoping for the best. 

I am exhausted. I need a vacation, a pedicure, and a cherry coke. 

I also need to rant. I have to get this off my chest, as it is making me crazy.

Have I mentioned that I'm the Safety Officer at my job? I drew the short straw because I took some safety classes during my years at JPL, and had a general idea that shit with the suffix -ethane will probably not react well to a lit match. So I print out all the MSDSheets, keep an inventory, update regulatory agencies with our inventories, and periodically walk through the labs and ask people to pick their crap up off the floor before someone trips and cracks their skull open on the concrete. Mostly I just make sure the eyewash is fresh and the first aid kits have full supplies of band-aids.

I'm also a secretary, the document review department, and up until recently, I was also the purchasing department, company librarian, marketing assistant, and a conference secretary. Such is the way with small companies. Everyone pitches in, everyone wears a half dozen hats. 

The Safety Officer hat is the ugliest one I wear. When I'm wearing that hat, I transform into something like Millhouse Van Houten with a Hall Monitor sash. I become a joke, a pain-in-the-ass, and suddenly, my usually open and affable tech staff become cagey and less likely to answer a straight question than a politician running for reelection in Illinois. Safety Officer = Enemy. Bureaucrat. Humorless killer of fun. 

Seriously, I don't get it. Reasonable questions are treated as accusations. Chemicals are hidden in nooks and crannies, I suppose out of fear that I will have them taken away, or make them fill out some sort of paperwork, or...I don't know what else. It's bananas. 

During the move I found epoxies that had expired the year I graduated from college, and when I moved them to the recycling bin, arguments broke out about whether or not they might still be used. 

Me: You haven't opened this box in a decade. It went bad seven years ago.

Scientist: Still, we could use it. 

Me: It went bad seven years ago. If you actually need this epoxy, I will buy you a new kit and it will be here the next morning. 

Scientist: But that would be a waste of money when we have this.

Me: IT WENT BAD SEVEN YEARS AGO.  

A horrible look of pain crossed his face as I placed it in my bin of chemicals to be picked up for recycling. It reminded me of hoarders I've seen on the news who look as if they've had an arm torn off when the health department comes in to remove hundreds of cats or stacks of mildewed newspapers. My scientists are perfectly reasonable about many things, but our chemical inventory and my insistence on keeping careful records of what we have, what we need, and when we need to recycle reduces them to crazy cat-lady status.

I found hydrofluoric acid stashed in the back of an epoxy fridge, a tank of deuterium carefully hidden behind a cart, and a few unopened, never used in the history of the lab, bottles of adipic acid. 

And you know what? I don't give a shit that they have these things. I really don't. Also, since I do the purchasing, I already know you have it. Why are you squirreling it away, hiding it?  I only want to get rid of the stuff we don't use and don't need so we can keep our status as a conditionally exempt small quantity generator. It makes the paperwork lighter. 

If you need it, I'll make sure you have it. I will take care of the mountains of paperwork, inform all the regulatory agencies, and you'll never know it. You'll just get your cylinder, tube, jar, bottle, or jug as fast as it can be delivered, and go about your merry way making science out of widgets and goo. 

So what's with the look of terror, the stuttering, the panic, and the defensive whine when I ask, "Are you using this adipic acid? We have three unopened bottles of it."

"WHAT? It is NOTHING! Look! You can use this to clean your pots and pans! It is harmless!" says my scientist.

First, I'm not putting adipic acid in my Circulon pots and pans. Second, I didn't ask whether or not it was harmless, harmful, explosive, toxic, a threat to the continuing rule of mankind, blah blah yawncakes. 

I just want to know if we keep ordering this shit because you don't know you already have some because you keep hiding it from me on a back shelf as if I'm the Chemical Grinch come to steal Corrosivemas. 

So two of the three bottles went into the recycling. All in all, I had three drums of complete horse shit taken away.  Expired epoxies, dirty acetone, countless half used bottles of goo used for projects that ended years ago. 

When the chemical transport and recycling team came to box up the things that were being moved or taken away, we talked about some of the worst jobs they had ever done. Sometimes it's the "home chemist" puttering around in their garages for fifty years while chemicals crystallize and become time-bombs. Streets get blocked off while hazmat teams shake their heads and remove unmarked barrels of ick. 

It reminded me of JPL founder Jack Parsons, blowing himself to smithereens at home, probably stoned on peyote, tinkering with rocket fuel. 

When the bottles and cylinders arrived at the new facility, I carefully wiped down the bottles, placed flammables in the huge steel cabinet, polished the fume hood and lined up the corrosives, put the epoxies in their refrigerators, and neatly laid out all the commonly used stuff in easy reach. The furniture movers wheeled the benches in, giving wide berth to the Scary-Looking Tubes of Certain Death. Cylinders were strapped into their earthquake-proof nooks, safety goggles unpacked, gloves, coats, and other personal protective gear laid out in the dressing rooms. 

Safety Officer is the worst part of my job, and the part I'm worst at. I hate having to tenderly negotiate through the weird hoarding nonsense, the "someday, we might possibly have a use for that thing we have never used and no one can remember why we ordered it" crap. There's a strange emotional tie to these substances that I don't get. We're not a poor lab, we're expanding. No one feels this way about empty boxes of Kim Wipes, old toner cartridges, or dried up sharpies. I can't find whatever empathy is required to help mourn the loss of the long-forgotten kit of glue. 

Should I sing a dirge? Perhaps play Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah? Throw a fistful of dirt on the box as I lower it into the recycling bin? Stop by the chemical recycling center and place a stone on the site in memory of the glue?

My grandfather had a similar mentality caused by depression-era fear of hunger. If half a box of Cheerios went stale, he'd put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven to crisp back up rather than toss them, even though he had no intention of eating them. Just to not "waste" them. Even though he didn't want them. The thought of tossing out "perfectly good food" was anathema. My grandmother would have to toss them when he wasn't looking. The same thing went for old gas caps, bits and pieces of cars long sold off, rusted screws. A shed full of "perfectly good" items that we could "possibly need someday." Perfectly good Cheerios. Perfectly good adipic acid. 

When my grandparents sold their home and moved into a condo, the shed full of "perfectly good" junk was hauled away, and no one ever desperately needed a gas cap for gas cap apocalypse that was never going to happen.

I have a strong feeling no one will ever work themselves up into a sweat over a desperate need for expired epoxy, either. 

by invitation only

I thought I'd start out the new year with a little old news and and old, old rant. Just let me just get on my flameproof suit before I get going.  Please read carefully before you turn on the flamethrower. A little background, first. I recently decided to give up my ties to organized religion without completely eschewing some sort of spirituality (though that's not the current topic), and one of the reasons I finally got fed up was the rampant misogyny and exclusivity practiced by most organized religion. In short, I got tired of being told that because my 23rd chromosome pair happened to by XX and not XY and my genitalia internal rather than external, that I was somehow unfit for duty.

It's not just religion, obviously, that's misogynistic, but it's always been interesting to me that this is one of the characteristics that religion and science—often so antithetical to each other—share, and for so many of the same reasons. Of course, this is because both spring out of the culture around them and are carried out and structured by the people in that culture who have the power to make the structure. Need I say that for thousands of this years, this has been, almost exclusively, men? So if men decide women are too inferior in whatever way to have a personal relationship with God either through study of the texts or through participating in the mysteries (exemplified by Milton's "He for God only, she for God in him.") little wonder scientists should (even unconsciously) think the same way about what many see as a new, improved replacement system.

The reasoning, though, is strikingly similar and you'd think male scientists would pay more attention to that. Of course, it's to their advantage not to. It's convenient for them to claim that women's brains are not made for math (an old saw rapidly being dulled) or that we don't do science the way it "should be done," i.e., the way men do it. Probably true, but not necessarily bad or wrong. Just different. I'm not talking about the scientific method here, but about the culture of science and the way men and women approach problem-solving. This is a factor not just in the scientific establishment, but in medicine and business as well.

And of course, there are social and cultural pressures on women now that men don't have to deal with, as the Gender Equity report by the American Physical Society (pdf) I recently helped edit shows quite clearly. This is a factor just as often conveniently forgotten in the interpretations of key scriptures that seem to ban women from positions of authority in the church, while just as conveniently ignoring the scriptures that show them in those positions.

There are also some striking similarities between the two areas in their jealous guarding of knowledge. In both cases, men are are frequently the gatekeepers of the more esoteric aspects of knowledge (see, physicists), intentionally or unintentionally. Personally, I think this is partly because guys like secret societies and all that. They're forever making exclusionary clubs, from the Royal Society to the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks. But religion and science are public endeavors, affecting all of us. (Just look at the Evangelical Right's influence on elections in the U.S., if you don't believe me.) Faith that asks no questions is merely blind, stupid obedience; science that allows no free sharing of knowledge is not just bad science, but dangerously blind itself. In both cases the idea that "it's too complicated for you to understand" is used to keep the general public from asking uncomfortable questions: "Why is Junia, a woman, called an apostle?"  or, "What are we going to do with the waste generated by nuclear power?" Ultimately, both science and religion are closely bound up in the culture, politics, and social mores of the society around them and reflect those values. Claiming that either of them is neutral or value-free is delusional.

All this is by way of saying that Richard Dawkins' selection of writers for the new Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is damned odd, if not downright insulting. For one thing, there's nary a mere science writer among them; they're almost all scientists, even Rachel Carson, who started her career as a biologist. This is one example of the "father knows best" attitude so many scientists have toward the public: only scientists can truly communicate the beauty and wonder and complexity of science to the rest of you ninnies. This is far from the truth. It is, in fact, usually a hell of a lot easier to teach good writers about science than it is to teach most scientists to write well, particularly for the public. Most of them have a tendency to include too many advanced details that chase people away, rather than broad, interesting ideas that draw them in. My fellow Cocktail Party Physics blogger Jen waxes eloquent about this frequently in our conversations and here on the blog. The advanced details are important, but you don't start out with those for people with no or little background in the subject, and getting the concepts if you're not a scientist is far more important than understanding the technical details right away. Scientists often have a bad case of "can't see the forest for the trees" when it comes to writing for the public, particularly in their own subject.

And, of course, there are too few women, three, to be precise: biologist Rachel Carson, Helena Cronin, a philosopher who works in sex selection (and who happens to think there are more smart men than smart women—to be fair, she also thinks there are more dumb men than dumb women); and Barbara Gamow, not a scientist, but wife of physicist George Gamow, who is included because of the poem she wrote in response to one of George's lectures. How cute. I say this not to denigrate Barbara Gamow, who was, like many women married to male scientists, extremely supportive of her husband's work and no doubt a sounding board for it, but to illustrate the attitude prevalent about women's role in science (which oddly reflects their view of women's place in art, too): strictly supportive; observer not participator; muse not partner.

Rachel Carson got in, I suspect, because she's hard to ignore; she was so prolific (and a fellow alumna of my alma mater!) and so pivotal in the early days of the ecology movement. But where's biologist Lynn Margulies, who, with James Lovelock, developed the Gaia theory? She's a wonderful writer. Where is primatologist Dian Fossey? Hello? Gorillas in the Mist anyone? Child psychologist Anna Freud? Primatologist/ethologist/anthropologist Jane Goodall, who, like Fossey, wrote extensively for the public? For that matter, where's Margaret Mead? I see physician Lewis Thomas on the list (one of my favorite writers, though he wrote as much about life as about science) but not doctors Perri Klass or Michelle Harrison. Where's oceanographer Sylvia Earle? Or forensic anthropologist Emily Craig? And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

And we haven't even gotten to the non-scientist, women science writers: Natalie Angier, Dava Sobel, Heather Pringle,or Mary Roach, to name a few, not to mention my eminent and articulate Cocktail Party Physics co-bloggers.

Hawkins' selection is pretty heavy on evolution (no surprise, given that he's an evolutionary biologist), genetics (again, no surprise), physics, neuroscience, and biological systems. There's not much chemistry, straight-up biology, medicine, and no ocean science or any of the so-called "soft" sciences like sociology or anthropology. If what he was aiming for was a balanced picture of the wonders of modern science, this book is hardly that, but it's not even a balanced picture of the best science writing. Like the hard sciences, it's very male-dominated (and white males at that). Enough with Peter Medawar already. He's not that brilliant. He's taking up space with his multiple selections that could easily have been given to a woman or two, scientist or not.

Dawkins could have done much for women scientists everywhere by recognizing their work in this volume. Instead, he just dragged out a lot of the old war horses: Eiseley, Watson & Crick, Gould, Thomas, Hoyle, Haldane, Snow. That's fine to a point in an anthology like this. One does need to include the classics and the big guns like Hawking and Einstein. But if you're going to include the likes of Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Brian Greene, Lee Smolin and Kenneth Ford (Full disclosure: I used to work for him), all fine choices in their own right, then you need to include some contemporary women scientists or science writers too, dammit. If we want science to matter to everyone, we have to include everyone.

Why make a fuss over this? Because this is how women (and minorities) are systematically pushed out of history and out of the present consciousness, in exactly the same way we were pushed out of recognition of a place in the early church: simply by excluding us first from memory and then from the party itself. That's all it takes. Just ignore us. But don't expect us to like it. Or to keep quiet about it.

behold my data, for it is MIGHTY!

I have been working on a symposium for just about two years, and as far as I can tell, it will never, ever end. It may in fact be that I died two years ago, and this is one of the circles of Hell that Dante missed while sliding down the spiral in The Divine Comedy. My symposium might not be a circle, exactly, but a corridor on the sixth floor, where the heretics roast. 

It all began when my boss accepted an invitation to chair this exclusive symposium that only takes place once every seven years. The first time that I had heard of it was just after 9/11, when my boss and his colleagues were trapped in Scotland during the no-fly order and had no way home to the States. I was new to the Lab, and was still sorting out the expense reports from the Symposium that would come back to haunt me five years later.

My boss asked if I’d help with it, and I of course said I would. At the time, I was running a small event planning business on the side, doing charity fundraising galas with the casts of various television shows, book release parties, and a few pieces of organization work for http://www.screenwritingexpo.com/ Screenwriting Expo. So I figured putting together a symposium would be a piece of cake after going ten rounds with 20^th Century Fox’s legal department, the cast of LOST being trapped in Hawaii for an unplanned 23^rd episode during an event in LA, and trying to get an actual stuffed polar bear up the freight elevator of the Hollywood & Highland Renaissance hotel without breaking it in half.

Two years later, and I am but a shadow of the woman I once was, pleading for proceedings and trying to figure out how to mail a hundred copies of this book to eight countries and stay in budget.

The first step in conference planning is the simple matter of finding a venue that will hold the expected number of attendees. You arrive at the projected number by averaging the number of attendees from the past three symposiums, multiplying it by the percentage of hope you have, and then subtracting your number of doubts. Then, you must find the appropriate venue that will be appealing to a large number of scientists who range in age from twenty-something to Methuselah, hailing from every continent except Antarctica, with travel budgets ranging from two chickens and a root vegetable to the net-worth of Bill Gates.

We went with wine country and Asilomar Conference Grounds. Gorgeous views. No television. All meals included. No television. A fireplace in every room. No television. Also, internet access in the main lodge, only. I love television and internet more than I love my mom. I live with a television writer. You have no idea how much cable we have. Name a channel. We have it. If it aired, we have it on the TiVo. Where was I?

Ah. I was in wine country with one hundred and six physicists and no television. As it turns out, if you drink enough wine, you don’t need television, but you still miss it.

But before we got to Monterey, there were three-thousand budget meetings, four hundred menus options, twenty-six wine selections, paper selection, registration, seven-hundred and twenty-eight emails (not exaggerating on the emails, I just checked my in-box), three sponsorships, two near violent yelling matches with my boss, and one high holiday I missed on my calendar, causing me to grovel for forgiveness on the Day of Atonement. So at least that last part worked out.

I spent several months on my knees, begging for abstracts, and another few weeks on my ass, sorting through a hundred abstracts with the word “clock” in the title, and nudging the registration numbers upwards by promising magic atoms producing a beanstalk to 0 decibels in exchange for the family cow.

Post-it notes, program committee meetings, printing charges, attrition rates, several denied visas, a dozen calls to the State Department. I started checking my email at 2am in fear that the LHC would wipe out 10% of my invited speakers.

The Symposium lasted five days, and oddly, it turned out fine. Better than fine. I mean, by the fourteenth technical talk that sounded like, “BEHOLD MY DATA, FOR IT IS MIGHTY!” I thought I was going to shrivel up and die. But I managed to finish writing a book I was working on, and during the meal breaks I was finally able to meet some of the scientists I had been corresponding with for years. Usually, secretaries do very little travel, so while I’ve been making arrangements for meetings between these folks for years and had warm feelings toward many of them, I had never actually met a lot of these people face-to-face. And mostly, they were a lovely bunch: gracious, kind, alternately boisterous and shy. Scientists. Except that one guy who never said good morning to me. If the Rapture happens, I’m totally not going to save him from the cannibals, and I have an anti-cannibal plan.

Things I learned while dealing with the symposium:

 

•  Everything automatically sounds pretty when said in a French accent. Try it out. Ask a French friend to say something absurd, like, “May I chop down a bouquet of herpes for your brother in-law?” It’ll sound like music, I swear.

 

•  If you stand back and cross your eyes, all metrology posters will look like a Jackson Pollock. In fact, if you have no knowledge at all of the science at hand, it is best to deal with posters sessions as if you are looking at abstract art. Wander around and put on your best pretentious face and say things like, “This piece represents the artist’s early work in the development of his  ‘red dots on blue lines’ phase. They say it’s an Oedipal thing.” 

  

• Every attendee knows that the conference secretary has suffered greatly to put the whole thing together, and speak to you with a mix of sympathy, pity, and gratitude at all times. Except the guy who never said “good morning” back to me. That guy still sucks. 

 

• Despite notice that the conference is invitation-only, you will be faced with a walk-in with registration money in his pocket who will then proceed to put his bare feet up on a dressed table and promptly fall asleep during a talk.

 

• When the proceedings are due, people will duck you like you’re the local sheriff trying to execute an eviction notice. They will shut off the lights, the phone, pretend they’ve passed away, and blow up the entire internet to avoid email. I should be annoyed, but I just find it ridiculously charming, and make calls where I purr, “Oh my sweet baby, did the dog eat your homework, again?” This does not help get the proceedings completed any faster, but I just can’t play the heavy on this matter. I have edits due to my agent and I’m placing a bundle of TNT on the internet right now. I understand their pain.

 

So that’s pretty much it. I’m still waiting for the last few papers to trickle in while ducking the publisher’s emails, and then will toss together a table of contents and send it out to print. Then I will ship the books off to the people who became an integral part of my 40-plus hour work weeks and weekends, and I’ll likely never see most of them ever again. That last part breaks my heart a little. All the months spent preparing for this thing, and it all went by in a blink. The attendees were the best part, and I almost never had time to talk with them.

There’s quite a few people I wish I had shared a bottle of wine with while I was busy not watching television, and I’m deeply regretting that, now. So do me a favor, the next time you go to a conference/symposium/annual meeting of meaty brains, invite the conference secretary to your table to share some wine and say, “May I chop down a bouquet of herpes for your brother in-law?” But only if you can do it in a French accent. Otherwise it’ll just sound absurd.

what is physics?

Well, here I am late to the party.  I can hear Jen-Luc chiding in the background “You know, there’s a fine line between ‘fashionably late’ and ‘who-the-hell-does-she-think-she-is?’.” My excuse is that I just moved my household (and lab) from Nebraska to Dallas. I know that was in May, but I’m still struggling to finding my way around.

As you might guess, there is a distinct culture change going from Big Red to Big D, from UNL to UTD and even from one physics department to another. The negative of moving is broken equipment and trying to figure out formerly simply things like ordering pump oil and figuring out how to dial local numbers that still require an area code.  The positive is that my new job came with a new family.  I have acquired a number of uncles, a little brother to protect, and a big brother I can pass notes to or kick under the table at faculty meetings. 

We’re in the process of doing “strategic planning”, a masochistic exercise I’ve never been involved with quite this intimately. (One of the benefits of academia is that you aren't asked to be one of the adults until you've reached at least 40.)But this exercise is where the big similarity with every physics department I've ever worked in has come through.  When talking about future directions, one refrain keeps coming up over and over, usually when certain fields or experiments are mentioned: “...but that’s not physics”.

My colleague the Rocket Scientist (yes, I have a friend who actually is a rocket scientist!) framed the question best. I am fairly sure RS has an honorary J.D. (Jurus Devilus), since he enjoys being the devil’s advocate so much. You can tell when he's going to do it because he looks just like the kid at the zoo standing over the fish pond dropping the fish food pellets into the water just to see the fish come rushing over, pushing each other out of the way with their mouths all agape.

RS argues that, as science rushes toward interdisciplinarity, perhaps, “to preserve the sanctity of the discipline”, we should restrict ourselves to focusing on the “traditional areas of physics”, like cosmology, relativity, particle physics, etc. I call this position “heterophobia” – the fear of diluting physics by mixing it with other sciences and/or (gasp!) engineering. Maybe, RS continues, in order for physics to retain its identity as physics and not turn into the scientific equivalent of the classics department, people working in areas one might consider “possibly not pure physics” should affiliate with other departments.

That would be me he is talking about. My research has shifted quite a bit in the last five years from basic magnetism toward nanomedicine, so I could be at home in a materials science department, a bioengineering or biomaterials department, or probably even in a chemistry department. So I had to wonder: Am I still a physicist? Although RS would also be one of the people kicked out if we decided to become a 'pure' physics department, he is a degreed engineer, so he has no idea of the epistemological crisis his mischief caused.

I’ve been traveling giving a lot of talks lately, and I always ask people I'm visiting what makes physics “physics”. Why is biophysics bioPHYSICS and not BIOphysics?

Research has always been problem driven. The big difference between the problems I worked on as a graduate student and the problems on which I work today is that today’s problems are much more complex and far-ranging.  No longer does a single scientist have all the tools he or she needs to solve a problem alone. Collaboration is not just a collegial thing to do, it is essential. We’re also being asked to look at our impact on society more closely. Those of us in condensed matter have a wide range of things to pursue from very applied to not-at-all-applied. Some people rankle at the idea of being told to work on ‘nano’ or ‘energy’ or ‘green,’ but the reality is that funding is getting harder and harder to get, and if you want to run a lab, you’ve got to have money.

It was during a discussion at a physics department I was visiting that I arrived at the answer. It is ironic, because I routinely make the following argument to K-12 students and/or teachers. Science is not a body of facts: It’s a way of trying to understand the world. I’m not sure why it took me so long to extrapolate that belief to this question of what makes something physics. What makes a discipline is not the system you study, but the tools, approaches and context you bring to the study of that system.

So what makes physics physics? Without trying to suggest that one discipline is better than the others, I think the most fundamental distinction is that physicists believe that the universe can be understood and described using mathematical models. Most physicists hold a deeply seated belief that those models ought to be universal and (ideally) not complicated.

If you create a continuum between “how” and “why,” I think it’s fair to say that physics is much more strongly skewed to the “why” side than it is to the “how” side. Physicists like to look at things in terms of their fundamental building blocks (i.e. magnetism by the atom, not by the material). As an experimentalist, I would claim that a distinguishing characteristic of physicists is that we are much more comfortable designing and building what we need than, say, most biologists are.

Finally, the cosmologist down the hall took pretty much the same courses in undergraduate and graduate school that I did, even though he thinks about lofty things like dark energy and I mostly change pump oil and measure the magnetism of rat livers.  We share a very broad common background of fundamentals and that isn't the case in some other disciplines.

It’s not that biologists look at cells: It’s that biologists look at cells through the eyes of biologists. Physicists see cells differently, so they see different problems. Even when they see the same question, they go about answering it in different ways. What makes something physics is that it's done by physicists. So regardless of what department is listed on my business card, I will still be doing physics because that is what I was trained to do. Crisis averted.

nonsequitur girl

Focus is not our strong suit at the moment, at least when it comes to blogging. The Spousal Unit and I spent last weekend visiting family in Seattle -- chaos reigns, in a good way, when the whole loud rambunctious clan meets up for the annual family BBQ -- and now I'm furiously playing catch-up. Jen-Luc Piquant is on a Diet-Coke bender after finding out just how much of her favorite caffeinated beverage she can drink without croaking. Answer: a lot. Blame Tom at Swans on Tea for drawing Jen-Luc's attention to a handy little online calculator: just plug in your weight and caffeinated beverage of choice! (A few more details on just how fast you'd have to drink those beverages to reach the deadly levels can be found here.)

So, uh, yeah -- we're not focusing well, and it's turning me into Nonsequitur Girl, darting from topic to topic with no readily apparent pattern to my thought process. But there are a couple of things in the blogosphere on which we've been pondering, plus the Spousal Unit reminded me this morning that I totally suck at self-promotion, namely, providing an occasional update on my blog posts at Twisted Physics. (And did I mention I've written books? Um, yeah. I've written books. See sidebar.) Perhaps I place too much faith in my readers, but I just assume y'all would be reading it on your own, if interested. Such an assumption doesn't take into account the huge amounts of information floating around out there in the Internet firehose, however, so it probably doesn't hurt to list the latest posts here. Just skip this part if it's old news:

Gravity Wave Blues. The latest results from LIGO are null. (I'd meant to have a more coherent wrap-up paragraph about why null results aren't necessarily bad things, even if they're disappointing. But that lack of focus intervened, so it kinda ends with a vague whimper.)

We the Particles. Subatomic particles should have rights, too, in the form of their very own Bill of Rights.

Always Chasing Dust Devils. Some scientists have all the luck, getting to chase down dust devils in the desert in hopes of learning more about how they might behave on Mars.

Ghost Story. Hanny's Voorwerp, a.k.a., the "Green Goblin," is a nifty new kind of celestial object.

Rockets Red Glare. A bit of rocketry history illustrated by painter Lia Halloran.

Monumental Quirks. A bizarre monument to nuclear decay in the Netherlands, and an object lesson in why bloggers shouldn't try to dash off tricky science explanations at the last minute.

A Clockwork Antikythera. The latest news on the Antikythera Mechanism -- way better than your average ancient sundial.

A Mighty Wind. Revisiting the day the solar wind disappeared. Really. One day it just vanished.

(Anti)Material World. A bizarre new film being co-produced by NASA spurs some ruminations why antimatter isn't intrinsically evil.

Gravity's Telescopes. Why Hans Lippershey wishes he'd known about gravitational lensing back in the 1590s.

And then there's today's post, Paging Professor Frodo, all about a physics professor in Connecticut who uses the works of Tolkien to teach her students astronomy. Good times!

Moving on, here's some of the random stuff I've been pondering over the last few days, in no particular order. (If I were a normal blogger, I'd make them all separate posts. But instead, I dare to be different!)

In Which I Expound on Minor Points Concerning that Whole Science = Sexy Debate. There's been some excellent discussions going on over the whole Nerd Girls debate, both here at the cocktail party and elsewhere, including Bioephemera and Sciencegeekgirl's place. I've found the whole exchange tremendously thought-provoking. I just wanted to comment briefly on a couple of points. First, Sciencegeekgirl rightly points out that perhaps the real issue here is that female-ness simply isn't valued in our culture; "women's" books, magazines, TV shows and the like are considered silly and trivial, even when they tackle serious social issues. As Matt points out in a recent comment, nobody derides the male obsession with sports teams and the like with anywhere near the same level of ridicule. I direct interested readers to Carol Tavris' excellent book, The Mismeasure of Woman, which is the most even-handed (eg, she doesn't go in for simplistic man-bashing) exploration of this phenomenon I've read to date.

I also want to take a moment to address this notion of how we give our kids positive feedback, via telling them they are pretty or smart (preferably both). As I mentioned in my original post, this alone does not guarantee healthy self-esteem. I think it's just as important to teach kids how to fail -- because sooner or later, no matter how lovely or gifted they are, they are going to fail. We have a horrible attitude towards failure in our culture, but the truth is, failure is how we learn -- provided we pick ourselves up and plug along until we do succeed. That's probably the most important life lesson I gained from the martial arts.

And this leads into one last observation. Jongleur provocatively asks, what if someone is ugly and dumb? I made a somewhat joke-y response about how they should work on their personality, but in truth, the question itself is somewhat misguided. "Ugly" and "dumb" are in the eyes of the beholder. Maybe a person isn't conventionally "smart" -- as defined by being intellectually oriented and/or doing well in school -- but that doesn't automatically mean they are stupid. (They might be anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant, which is a different matter entirely.)

It's all about perspective; standards of beauty, for example, change with every age. There is always someone smarter or better-looking, and everyone is smart and beautiful in somebody's eyes. At least I hope so. And while my "work on the personality" comment was flippant, I'm a big proponent of fostering "inner beauty" -- those qualities that have nothing to do with being either smart or beautiful, but invariably add to a person's overall likability and attractiveness. Someone can be drop-dead gorgeous, or breathtakingly brilliant, and still be utterly intolerable as a person. Really. I've met them.

In Which I Question Whether a Scientific Study is Good Use of Technological Resources. Those wacky German scientists are at it again, per a recent item on the Improbable Research blog. Scientists at Munich University have tackled the nefarious problem of how to tell whether some prankster has replaced the jam or custard in your German Mardi Gras donut with something nasty, like mustard. Apparently this is a common prank during the German Mardi Gras celebration. Clearly, one needs a way to figure out what the filling is before one bites into the donut. And the best way to analyze donut innards involves CT scans and MRIs. The Munich scientists took CTs and MRIs of donuts filled with jam, custard and mustard, respectively, and then "diagnostically evaluated" them.

It's a fun, whimsical item, and in general, I'm in favor of doing things like this; it makes those big intimidating science machines a little more familiar to the general public. I love the images taken through optical microscopes of burgers and fries, beer (organized by country of origin) and cocktails over at Molecular Expressions, for example. But those are -- for the most part -- common scientific instruments they're using, not pricey diagnostic techniques.

I've known a couple of women over the past year who've been diagnosed with breast cancer, as has 36-year-old actress Christina Applegate. In all cases, the cancer was caught very early because their doctors recommended MRI screening in addition to a conventional mammography -- and (more importantly) all three had insurance coverage for the pricey procedure. But what about the tens of thousands (if not millions) of women who can't afford that additional screening? Not to be curmudgeonly or anything, but given the choice between finding out if a donut filling is jam or mustard, or whether or not I have breast cancer, I'll take the latter, thanks very much. I might feel differently if everyone had access to MRIs. Until then -- I will find this vaguely troubling.

In Which the Hotel Industry Falls Far Short of a Blogger's Minimal Expectations. Finally, Bora channels every traveling blogger's pet peeve in this post about how slow the hotel industry has been to catch up to the 21st century when it comes to high-speed Internet and wireless technology. This is one of my pet peeves, and I suspect many others feel the same. No more poky Internet connections and crappy wireless that fades in and out! No more exorbitant daily fees for sub-par Internet services! Bora is leading the revolution, and I say, Speak it, brother!