Cocktail Party Physics

le fleur ephemeral

Some folks might find the purpled prose of Edgar Allan Poe a trifle overwrought by today's standards, but he's experienced a mysterious resurgence of popularity in the last couple of years. He's been the subject of two historical literary mysteries (Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow, Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye) and historic "true crime" tomes like The Beautiful Cigar Girl, about a famed NYC murder case in the 19th century that captivated Poe and inspired his short story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." I've read all three, and quite enjoyed them, but there's really no substitute for the original short stories by the master himself. Serendipitously, I found myself re-reading "The Cask of Amontillado" (written in 1846) after the Spousal Unit and I returned from our trip to Paris last week. (He was attending a cosmology workshop, I tagged along as a spousal adjunct. Because it was Paris, people! No way I'm staying home with the cat!)

Anyway, in the big climactic scene of "Cask of Amontillado," the protagonist, Montressor, walls up his enemy inside a cavity hidden deep within some catacombs. Poe describes them as being "lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris." You can see where I'm going with this. I was in Paris. There are catacombs in Paris. I'm a Poe fan. How long do you think it took for me to ferret out the entrance to the catacombs from our little boutique hotel in the Latin Quarter? (Our hotel boasted the Smallest Elevator in France. Seriously, I thought at first we'd been directed to the dumbwaiter by mistake.)

Well, I mapped it out on the plane ride over, but waited until the Spousal Unit could join me for the excursion itself -- last Friday, when his workshop was all but over. In the interim, I killed some time visiting the Picasso Museum; Notre Dame Cathedral; the Pantheon (where all the famous French atheists are buried, so really, one must pay one's respects); the Museum de Cluny du Moyen Age (which features The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry, as well as being built around the ruins of a Roman bath); wandering around the banks of the Seine (it's a most walkable city); and getting all turned around in the Dutch masters wing of the Louvre before finally locating an exit. The catacombs were by far my favorite sight, and well worth the wait.

I've long been a fan of Parisian history, particularly anything to do with the French Revolution and the era of The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers (as in the novesl by Dumas, not the chocolate bar), and the film version from the 1970s starring Michael York as D'Artagnan was awesome. But I'd never really thought about the vast network (stretching some 300 kilometers) of subterranean tunnels  and caverns under its quaint streets strewn with boutiques, cafes and boulangeries.

The catacombs are pretty much abandoned limestone mines, that limestone having been removed to build a goodly part of the city. Miners have been burrowing into the ground and creating tunnels since at least the 12th century, digging ramps and vertical well shafts as needed to reach the desired minerals and other deposits buried there -- not just limestone and clay, but also gypsum, the origin of plaster of paris. There were occasional surprises: in the 19th century, diggers uncovered the remains of a Roman-era clay mine. Less welcome surprises were the occasional collapses, the most major of which occurred in 1774 along the route de Fontainebleu. That tragedy led to the formation of a special division of architects to inspect, repair and otherwise maintain Underground Paris.

But what to do with the abandoned mines once their reserves had been depleted? It just so happens Paris had another problem -- overcrowding in its cemeteries -- that reached a crisis point in the late 17th century when the largest cemetery, Les Innocents, had to be condemned. Mortality rates were pretty high back then, after all. The last gravedigger there, Francois Pantrain, apparently buried 90,000 bodies in his 35-year tenure. We're talking centuries of bodies piling up in cemeteries all over the city, so many that the ground levels in many churchyards had risen a good 20-30 feet because of the added volume from all those human remains. It was a health hazard: improper burials, open mass graves, and all that decomposing organic matter leaking into the ground led to widespread disease. (The Spousal Unit swears there was a notorious flood in which bodies were unearthed and flooded the city streets, but I couldn't find any record of this in my admittedly brief Google search.)

Clearly something had to be done, and a police lieutenant general hit upon the idea of storing the cemetery remains in the now-abandoned quarries, or catacombs. So the ground was duly consecrated and between 1786 and 1788, Les Innocents was slowly emptied of human remains. Bodies were moved at night in a strange ceremonial procession of tipcarts laden with corpses (discreetly covered by a black veil) accompanied by priests chanting the burial service en route. And hired laborers undertook the thankless task of organizing all those decaying bones for tidy storage. It had to have been tedious, unpleasant back-breaking work, but at least the laborers could indulge in some macabre whimsy while painstakingly stacking human femur bones -- separated occasionally by decorative "borders" or grinning skulls -- to build side walls in the vacant cavities that once held limestone and gypsum. There's a Jolly Roger design made of bones, and a heart pierced by an arrow.

It was an enormous undertaking, so perhaps the city planners can be forgiven for the cavalier manner in which the bones were deposited into their new home: no attempt at maintaining individual tombstones or properly cataloging specific remains. All the bones were just mixed and mingled, noblemen with paupers. (Death truly is the Great Equalizer; we all eventually meet the same unceremonious fate.) Okay, they tried to be somewhat respectful of the remains. Once all the bodies had been relocated, mass was celebrated to honor the now-anonymous dead at a specially constructed altar bearing a rather dour inscription: "Man, like a flower of the field, flourishes while the breath is in him, and does not remain nor know longer his own place. In peaceful sleep rest great people." There are lots of plaques with inscriptions throughout the ossuary, in several different languages, all pretty much sounding the same basic theme: everything you think is so damned important in life amounts to nothing in the end, when everyone, great and small, is reduced to the same pile of dry bones. My personal favorite was a poetic medication that essentially said that life and all its trappings merely constitute le fleur ephemeral (the ephemeral flower). It sounded way cooler in French.

There's some interesting geophysics (avalanche dynamics, for example) and engineering to be found in the Paris catacombs. The constant risk of collapse led to the development of techniques to shore the walls up a bit by injecting concrete in them as reinforcement, and this also gave rise to a couple of impressive, bell-shaped galleries with curved "roofs" some 11 meters high. They're known as "bells of subsidence" (the most famous is the Cloche de Fontis). Abandoned quarries erode in a very specific manner, it seems: first the "ceiling" of a lower level tunnel collapses a bit, and since the just ground above now has little support, it too collapses into the quarry. This process continues over time, resulting in "walls" that are constantly reinforced with sprayed liquid concrete to prevent further collapse, until they almost reach street level.

Parisians certainly weren't the first to conceive of burying their dead in underground chambers. The Etruscans did it, too, along with many other European peoples. It's quite practical, actually, apart from the whole occasional caving-in thing. The Romans preferred cremation (at least early on), but the urns were stored in a columbarium. After  2 AD, the unburnt remains were stored in graves or sarcophagi. Gradually the Roman catacombs fell out of favor for funereal arrangements, in favor of traditional cemeteries. The rise of burial as a custom might be attributed in part to the spread of Christianity. When your religion espouses the bodily resurrection of the dead, you're a bit more reluctant to destroy the physical outer shell that remains after death.

The Roman catacombs were carved out of the soft rock typical of the terrain outside Rome's official city limits by fossors (excavators). These catacombs are probably famous as those of Paris: there's at least 40 known catacombs, usually named after saints or martyrs believed to be buried there, lost amid the vast network of galleries and passageways (ambulacra). Some of the catacombs are four stories deep. Graves (loculi) were carved out of the walls, often containing more than one body. Wealthier sorts usually opted for an arcosolium in which to bury their dead, a kind of curved niche enclosed under a carved marble slab, or cryptae -- chapels decorated with frescoes and sealed off. They're mostly abandoned these days, apparently: not only were the Roman catacombs ransacked by Vandals and various Goths during the sacking of Rome, and by the 10th century AD most of the relics had been moved to above-ground quarters.

Ransacking has a way of rendering such marvels of engineering and architecture to the footnotes of history -- at least temporarily. The Roman catacombs lay dormant and forgotten for a good 500 years until they were rediscovered around 1578. A man named Antonio Bosio spent decades exploring and researching them -- a kind of ballsy thing to do, considering their labyrinthine nature -- and compiled his vast accumulated knowledge into one big seminal volume, Roma Sotterranea (Underground Rome), published in 1632. They've been studied and carefully preserved ever since, currently by the Salesians of Don Bosco, as agents of the papacy. That's what Wikipedia tells me, anyway.

Czechoslovakia boasts its own famous osteo-attraction, the Sedlec ossuary, in which workers of the past assembled the scattered bones into recognizable objects: a huge chandelier, for example, made up of each of the 206 different bones found in the human skeleton. That would be quite the conversation piece and Jen-Luc Piquant would totally have one in the Cyber-salon of her dreams. We share an appreciation for that kind of morbid playfulness exhibited not just in the Sedlec ossuary and the Paris catacombs, but also in the grotesque tableaux of preserved corpses that were the forte of Honore Fragonard. (We blogged about him previously here. Before there was Body Works, the museum exhibit -- now on display in Los Angeles -- there was Fragonard.)

Then there's the painted plaster skulls and skeletons, and preserved corpses on almost theatrical display in the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a tiny Baroque-style church in Palermo, Italy. Unlike the Paris catacombs, the Palermo skeletons still have bits of flesh clinging to the bones, and the monks charged with maintaining the place have garbed them in period clothing -- albeit clothing that is also engaged in the long, slow process of decay. Somewhere on the premises, it's even possible to view the colatoio (colander), where the "soft matter drained away from the fresh corpse through the stone slats, leaving the parts of the body which the dressers would be able to work with."

That last sentence is from this article ("The Museum of the Dead") by Robert Harbison in Cabinet Magazine (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily) describing his (rather negative) impressions of the Palermo corpses: he finds the arranged bodies strangely compelling, but also dismisses the spatial layout as "monotonous," and observes, "It seems a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what lies ahead is anything but grim." Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but for all the macabre nature of the display, there's something as strangely beautiful and somberly meditative about the Palermo corpses (at least as far as one can tell from the astonishing photographs published in Cabinet Magazine) as there is about the Paris catacombs -- perhaps because they still retain some vestige of the human beings they once were. They are not (yet) stacks of anonymous bones.

I can only assume the Palermo corpses have been carefully preserved by both natural and artificial means, thereby prolonging the process of decomposition. Fellow forensics buffs will know that the first stage involves the production of vapors -- usually pretty foul-smelling and giving rise to bloat -- followed by the solid flesh gradually melting into an icky viscous liquid (putrefaction). Exposing a body to air will speed up this process (not to mention bring increased "insect activity" -- Grissom would heartily approve!), while buried bodies can decompose as much as eight times more slowly, depending on the composition of the soil and surrounding temperature. The final stage is dry decay (diagenesis), in which the bones, now stripped of all soft tissue, begin to dry out and deteriorate. It can take a very long time to complete this stage and reduce the bones to ashes. Basically, the protein-mineral bonds in the bonds weaken and organic protein starts leaching away.

The bones in the Paris catacombs are noticeably dry and brittle, clearly well on their way in the process of decay, although they won't be disappearing completely into ash any time soon. Today, the remains of some 6 million Parisian remains are housed in the Paris catacombs. Walking through the corridors is like getting a stark visual representation of just what 6 million bodies looks like (and, among other things, reinforces the horror of events like the systemic extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II). But there's nothing garish or exploitive about the catacombs. Instead, there's a kind of hushed reverence in their dimly lit passageways. Somehow the macabre flights of whimsy and dour plaques on the futility of life strike a perfect balance: the catacombs are respectful of human life and death, but not in a way that trades on glorifying (now long-forgotten) individuals; the focus is on the universality of death. Even men who were sworn enemies during the French Revolution find themselves sharing crypt space in the catacombs. There's a strange beauty in that. We are all, ultimately, just les fleurs ephemeral. And that's not necessarily a bad thing to be.

flights of fancy

A couple of weeks ago -- May 14, to be exact -- a Swiss man named Yves Rossy (a.k.a., "Fusion Man") made headlines (and secured a little piece of history) when he strapped on an 8-foot jet-powered wing and leaped from an airplane, soaring over the Alps. Rossy spent years developing his device, and successfully flew the first jet-powered wing in November 2006. There's been a smattering of R&D on jet packs to propel human beings dating as far back as World War II; Rossy's invention is the first to combine a jet pack with actual wings.

It's been a big month for would-be aviators. In April, another Swiss man -- what is it with the Swiss these days? -- jumped from a hovering helicopter and floated to earth using a pyramid-shaped parachute he built himself, based on a design by Leonardo da Vinci. Olivier Vietti-Teppa found the specifications in a da Vinci text dating back to 1485: four equilateral triangles, seven meters on each side, that Vietti-Teppi made from modern parachute fabric, using a square of mosquito netting at the base of the pyramid. Furthermore, later this year, Red Bull will hold three "flugtag" competitions in the US -- Tampa Bay, FL, in July, Portland, OR, in August, and Chicago in September -- whereby aspiring aviators build their own flying machines and then push them off a 30-foot platform (deliberately built over water) to see how far -- or if -- they can fly. Most drop like a stone into the water, but generally, a good time is had by all. And some of the whimsical designs can be a lot of fun; there have been machines shaped like Homer Simpson, a pimped-out Cadillac, a giant Oompah-Loompah, and even a big red lobster named Larry. (For those not inclined to build their own machines, there's now an online game.)

Almost as long as mankind has been sentient, I'd wager we've been trying to find some means to fly, with more than a few casualties along the way. My personal favorite historical aspiring aviator was Eilmer of Malmesbury, a medieval monk who jumped off the 150-foot rooftop of his Malmesbury, England, abbey in 1010 wearing a pair of crudely fashioned wings he'd put together from willow wood and cloth. All things considered, Eilmer didn't do too badly: he glided a good 600 feet before crash-landing near the river Avon. True, he broke both his legs, but for those brief moments, he must have felt like the king of the world. About a century later, a Constantinople man tried a similar stunt with wings made from fabric and wasn't quite so lucky: he jumped form atop a high tower and was killed. Perhaps the most memorable design was that of a French locksmith who built winds modeled on the webbed feet of the duck. His design didn't meet with much success.

There used to be an amusing, very quirky BBC radio program (several episodes were later adapted for BBC Television) -- "Is there any other kind?" Jen-Luc Piquant murmurs -- called People Like Us which featured a tongue-in-cheek interview with a fictional airline pilot, who is asked how his plane manages to stay in the air. The interviewer, like most of us, took physics and was interested in flight, but complains there was just too much theory, so he lost interest. "Well, theory is why it stays up!" the pilot snaps back. "If you took away, the theory, even for a moment, it would just plummet like a stone!" But the fictional pilot got the physics right, at least the sound-bite version: "Basically, it's all to do with pressure differences between the top and the bottom of the wing."

I'm going to annoy aerodynamic theorists here and bring up the Bernoulli principle -- it's a simplified explanation of how airplanes stay in the air, but we'll leave the bickering over the details to the experts, shall we? Besides, it gives me a chance to show this snazzy image drawn by Daniel Bernoulli himself, an 18th century Swiss physician who loved math but went into medicine at the insistence of his father. His pivotal insight occurred when he punctured the wall of a pipe filled with fluid with a small straw and noticed that the fluid rose up the straw -- also, how high it rose depended on the fluid's pressure in the pipe. The higher the pressure, the higher it would rise, just like your standard tire gauge.

Soon physicians all over Europe were annoying their patients by sticking glass tubes into their arteries to measure blood pressure. But Bernoulli went one step further and realized that per Isaac Newton's laws of motion, a moving body exchanges kinetic energy for potential energy as it gains height, and the same holds true of a moving fluid, like air: it exchanges its kinetic energy for pressure. So Bernoulli principle is this: the pressure of any fluid decreases when the speed of the fluid flow increases. High-speed flow is linked to low pressure and low-speed flow to high pressure. And an airplane can fly because it's wings are designed to create an area of fast-moving (low pressure) air above the surface of the wing, buoyed by the higher pressure air underneath the wing, producing "lift." It's a bit more complicated than that once you figure in drag, thrust, the weight of the aircraft and so forth, but that's the basic underlying principle.

Obviously, all those losing flugtag projects failed to achieve aerodynamic lift. But the physics of freefall is frankly just as interesting, and (for the fall-ee) can be even more exhilarating if done under controlled conditions. The Six Flags theme park in New Jersey has a terrific ride designed to put you into freefall. You're strapped into a body harness, then lifted to the top of a very tall tower structure. The best part: you get to pull the release yourself, which sends you hurtling down toward the ground at faster and faster speeds. Before you hit terminal velocity and/or go splat, the rope catches and swings you out in a lovely arc, where you can see out over the entire park. I did this several years ago, and frankly, it was quite the rush. Loads of fun! I did not, alas, have the foresight to order a video of my brief adventure in freefall (or possibly, the funds), but here's a grainy YouTube video of two guys taking the same "ride."

There are freefall rides at amusement parks all around the world, including one at Disneyland (or perhaps it's the California theme park adjacent to it) that mimics an out-of-control plummeting elevator, and another called the Hell Drop in England's London Dungeon intended to imitate what it's like to be hung -- dropped suddenly from a height. (I just visited the London Dungeon last week, but alas, the ride was out of order. Another time. There's plenty else in that particular "tour" to keep one amply entertained.) Or you can opt for an even less controlled environment and try bungee jumping. Or skydiving. It's probably one of the easier things to simulate, since a freely falling object is doing nothing except moving under the influence of gravity alone, with no other energy sources contributing to that motion.

When you're strapped in that harness at the Six Flags featured ride, and the mechanism starts to lift you, your potential energy is increasing along with your altitude. All that potential energy converts into kinetic energy as you fall after the "release," so you fall faster and faster until you hit terminal velocity. Unless you hit the ground before that point, in which case, it's best to have some survival tips on hand to increase your chances of survival. My favorite bit of wisdom from author David Carkeet: "Don't let negative thinking ruin your descent."

Should you happen, say, to fall out of an exploded jetliner -- just like Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant, did in 1972 -- and plummet 33,000 feet, you'll have a good amount of time to reflect on things as you fall. Far better to focus less on your almost certain demise, and on more pleasant thoughts. I suggest reflecting (even reciting!) this poem by occasional guest blogger (and personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, i.e., she creates the avatar "looks") Lee Kottner, called "On the Fringes, Falling Up."

I am untethered here, solitary. ...

No earth hugs my knees like children;
no tug on my limbs but
my own sinews, muscles,
neurons.

I stand on aurorae with my back to oases
not green but other spectral colors,
blue Spica, orange Arcturus, yellow Procyon,
white Altair,
with a waste black as volcanic sand
between.

The air's envelope blues as I view it:
haloed Tibet
so close to nothing,
where snow falls like meteors,
fast, trailing vapor,
the air too thin to hiss:
or grows in layers like shed pelts
left as clouds scratch against peaks.

From this vantage, this pedestal,
this lookout, this exile
on the fringes,
old air sulfurous with smelting steel
clears --

My Roman 'chute skids on the orbiting wind,
half-open, half candle.

Copyright 1985, Lee Kottner. Reprinted with permission.

 

 

mind the gap

Madrid is home to many marvels of human ingenuity, but among the most striking is a kinetic sculpture by Eusebio Sempere, built entirely of hollow steel cylinders arranged in a periodic square array. In 1995, a handful of researchers at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid decided to study the acoustic properties of the sculpture: specifically, they hypothesized that the periodic organization of the cylinders should give rise to a sonic "band gap": in other words, the sculpture would block certain frequencies of sound and let other preferred frequencies through. Sure enough, they found that the sculpture caused sound waves traveling perpendicular to the cylinders' axes were strongly attenuated at a frequency of 1670 Hertz. It basically behaves like a sonic mirror.

That study proved to be the first experimental evidence for the existence of what are now known as phononic band gaps, or phononic crystals. Note the spelling; that first "n" is important. Scientists have known for quite some time now that certain materials in which the atoms are arrayed in a precise periodic lattice structure gives rise to photonic band gaps: blocking certain frequencies of light while letting other frequencies through. This is what gives rise to examples of iridescence in nature, those flashes of bright colors one sees in butterfly wings, kingfishers, peacock feathers or opals. (Prior blog posts on photonic crystals can be found here and here.) But who knew the same would hold true for sound?

True, both light and sound travel in waves, and thus exhibit things like frequencies and wavelengths; and just as light is made of individual photons, there's a quantum equivalent for sound: phonons (basically a quantized mode of vibration). Yes, there is wave-particle duality even for sound. Who knew? But sound is mechanical, a pressure wave, and thus requires some medium through which to travel, unlike light, which can travel even in a vacuum. Even if there is a phononic bandgap that corresponds to the photonic version, would it still be useful? That is, could scientists exploit this feature to exert greater control over sound?

Scientists have exploited refraction to guide light -- the basic of fiber optic communication -- ever since experiments in Paris in the 1840s, when the Swiss physicist Daniel Colladon and his French colleague, Jacques Babinet, first demonstrated it was possible to bend light.  (Colladon and his friend Charles Sturm were honored with an award from the Academie des Science when they measured the speed of sound in water in Lake Geneva in 1826.)

Ten years later, an Irish inventor named John Tyndall publicly displayed a similar effect using water fountains. He made many studies of air and the earth's atmosphere, and was particularly interested in the scattering of light by dust and other large molecules in the air; in fact, this is known as the Tyndall Effect in his honor. That's what led him to develop a means for refracting light through a flexible tube of water, a device he called a "light-pipe." It was the precursor to modern fiber optic cables.

Just like photonic band gaps, sonic band gaps are the result of interference: certain frequencies of wave are blocked and others are allowed through, just like one of those annoying hip clubs with velvet ropes manned by bouncers, who scan the crowd and make sure nobody "unhip" gets through the social filter. (We should note, for the sake of thoroughness, that certain semiconductor materials also produce band gaps for electrons with energies at certain frequencies.)

In the case of sound, you needn't have an actual crystal (although you can). You create a phononic bandgap by adding periodic "air holes" in an otherwise solid material, like the array created by Sempere's steel cylinders. Those air holes produce variations in the density and/or speed of sound; like light, sound travels at different speeds through different mediums. (Isaac Newton, back in the 17th century, hypothesized that sound waves might travel through air in the same way an elastic wave would travel along a lattice of point masses connected by springs -- essentially a crystal structure.)

The size of the periodic air holes determines which frequencies are preferred. For instance, Sempere's sculpture is large enough to create a sonic bandgap within the range of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz); for architects, it's a whole new way to approach their designs. But this also means that phononic band gaps are unlikely to prove useful for things like headphones or microphones; those devices are too small to block frequencies within human hearing range. Once you get down to fractions of millimeters, the sound wavelengths are so short (in the ultrasonic regime) that -- when combined with other nifty advances like adapting optic superlenses for sound-- they might find some interesting applications.

In the case of light (optics), the laws of physics pretty much limit the resolution capabilities of conventional lenses: they can't produce an image that contains details finer than the wavelength of the light being focused through the lens. Recently, there's been significant progress in the develop of new materials with a so-called negative index of refraction -- imagine dropping a pebble in a still pond and instead of rippling outwards, the wavelets ripple inward. That's how bizarre these materials are. But this unusual property makes them very useful when shaped into a flat thin slab-like lens: they can overcome the conventional diffraction limit for better resolution.

Now physicists think it might be possible to build sonic lenses with a similar negative index of refraction. They're looking into building hypersonic phononic crystals for the optoelectronics industry; among other uses, they could be used in thermoelectric devices to improve the conversion efficiency of heat into electricity, or to make "phonon lasers." Scientists aren't there yet: it's tough to make these sorts of structures, since you have to create the 3D periodic patterns at the nanoscale. But if they can solve the problem --perhaps by developing better holographic techniques for phononic structures -- the next step would be to combine photonic and phononic crystals to create "blind" and "deaf" materials: a material that has bandgaps for both sound and light at similar wavelengths.

Apparently, MIT researchers have made such a prototype crystal, featuring square or triangular arrays of air holes in silicon that create both sonic and photonic bandgaps, and can also trap light and sound at areas where there are defects. (In 2005, Physics World published a nice feature article detailing some of this cutting-edge research.) If nothing else, further development of phononic crystals will let scientists build devices that give them the same level of control over sound as they currently have over light using mirrors and lenses and such.

So, what about sound in Cyberspace? Does it have a "speed", too? Can we control how it propagates? Some researchers think so. Chris Chafe studies so-called "internet acoustics" at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and maintains that sound waves traveling across the Internet can bounce off edges, boundaries and obstacles in this virtual realm, just like they do in the "real world." Last November, Chafe gave a talk at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in New Orleans about how to use these virtual "reflections" to create "a configurable sound world of rooms with enclosing walls and other kinds of objects which can vibrate." So anyone with a really fast Internet connection can enter into this type of "Internet music hall" -- similar in concept to a chat room -- and make music together even though the "musicians" are separated by several hundred miles. "One can actually 'play the network' as a guitar or flute stretching between San Francisco and Los Angeles," per Chafe.

Chafe's Stanford group has developed special software to create SoundWIRE (Sound waves on the Internet from real-time echoes), networked virtual auditoriums with the same acoustic echo properties as an actual concert hall. Even if they're separated by an entire continent, musicians can "rehearse" together in Cyberspace -- due in large part to recent advances in high-speed streaming. This isn't your daddy's teleconferencing. That is so, like, 1999.

"Just as someone might clap to get a sense of the size of a darkened room or knock on an object to know its rigidity, network users can tap on their Internet connections and listen to the vibrations that result," Chafe explains. He and his colleagues have created a "network guitar" using physical modeling synthesis; the pitch of the "string" is determined by how long it takes the sound to travel round trip between the two nodes of the network. The longer it takes the sound to return, the lower the pitch.

One practical application of Chafe's work might be to "ping" a network connection to detect any problems in real time -- the speed of virtual sound isn't uniform, so Chafe's synthetic instruments tend to exhibit a wavering kind of vibrato. But who  are we kidding? The best possible application would be  live concerts played  in places like Second Life, musicians from all around the world jamming together in a single  acoustical chat room, even if they remain physically separated in actual space.

c is for carbon: part deux

Blogmeister's Note: Today, we bring you Part Deux of Jen-Luc Piquant's hard-hitting interview with author Eric Roston, about his new book, The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threats. Pre-order your copy today! And check out Eric's blog, Carbon Nation. You can read Part 1 of the conversation here.

Jen-Luc: What was the most surprising thing that you discovered about carbon while researching and writing the book?

Eric: Carbon is so ubiquitous in life and civilization, it's easy to forget it's actually sort of rare on Earth. It doesn't even make the top 10 elements. It's commonly known that diamonds are carbon crystals. Less well known is that they are potentially the oldest surviving minerals on Earth -- more than 3 billion years old, possibly made from carbon in once-living organisms, and they also occur naturally in space, around the cooling envelope of large carbon stars.

Jen-Luc: Were there any especially colorful personalities or amusing encounters along the way?

Eric: My goodness, yes. Forced to choose one, out of the 10 or so that come immediately to mind, I volunteer Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor (of the environment, energy, food, population, economics, natural cycles, technological history...) at the University of Manitoba. He was a "Prague Spring"-era dissident from then-Czechoslovakia, and came here to earn his PhD. He is an iconoclast, hilarious, rhetorically fearless, and a breath of fresh air in a world of people less willing than he to share their actual interior monologues (though I might have passed on the details of prostate surgery). I've never met him in person, but enjoyed our several phone calls, and was always inspired by his breadth of knowledge and willingness to deploy it, crushing many in his path.

Edwin Saltpeter first postulated how carbon forms in stars. We spoke several times at length. He is a delightful gentleman-scientist and his life story is equally inspiring. As a young teenager his family fled Nazi Austria. To name just one more, the interview that really first put me on the right track, in May 2004, was with the late Richard Smalley, in Houston, Texas, a co-discovered of the soccer-ball-shaped all-carbon molecule C60 ("buckyballs"). At the end of the bibliography of The Carbon Age, I have a long list of all the other people who helped shape the book, one way or another.

Jen-Luc: You've written that "Today's Carbon Age is the Carboniferous Period in reverse." Care to expound on that statement for the benefit of our readers? How did you arrive at that particular insight?

Eric: This is a pivotal question. What do we call the coal, oil and gas industries? They collectively belong to what the business press calls the "extractive industries." Companies extract these unique (carbon-heavy) fuels from the ground. Then there is the take that geologists, over several generations, from around the world, have assembled based on accumulated physical evidence, logic, and computer modeling.

The geological time span that dates from 359 to 299 million years ago is called the Carboniferous Period. They call it that because the Earth saw a catastrophic drop in the partial pressure atmospheric carbon (dioxide) -- a 90% drop. Here's part of the story, and as global carbon cycle scientists tell it, not even the most important part. In this period, woody plants populated bogs around the Earth's then-supercontinent. They lived their leafy lives, collapsed, perhaps one into another, face-planted in the muck, and over a couple of hundred million years became coal.

So, by extracting coal and burning it into atmospheric gas, we are reversing the photosynthesis that first captured solar energy (and atmospheric carbon) in living tissue 350 million years ago,  in the Carboniferous. Except, we are doing it several orders of magnitude faster than it took to bury all that carbon to begin with. Big problem, by the way, if you are used to the stable climates in places humans have built settlements and cities for the past 10,000 years. (Oil and gas are more "recent" geological phenomena. Most of the oil came "only" in the last 70 million years or so.) On the face of it, it's not illogical that atmospheric composition should change dramatically and acutely if you decided to pack it with 100 million years' worth of gasified sediment.

Jen-Luc: Carbon is found in all kinds of everyday materials: Kevlar vests, soft drinks (carbonation), our computers -- the list is endless. What's the secret to its breathtaking versatility? Isn't it bizarre that the same element can be found in the furthest reaches of the galaxy as well as in a common soda can?

Eric: Yes, it's absolutely bizarre. All things being equal, you would be reasonable to expect that all 92 naturally occurring elements mix and match in equal proportions to make us and everything around us. But that's not the case, at all.

Here's the secret: Carbon is atomic Velcro. It's very good at holding things together but is also perfectly happy to let go under the right circumstances, and re-attach. That's the key. It holds atoms together into molecules, but it also "knows" when to let go. Cholesterol is built on a network of four rings of carbon, and it turns up in rock samples 3 million years old. That's a great example of how well carbon holds together. TNT blows up because highly energetic carbon bonds to nitrogen-oxygen groups are unstable. That's because making and breaking carbon bonds allows the 700 gazillion chemical transformation that occur in every body every second.

Jen-Luc: Speaking of the body, carbon is also related to carbohydrates, which have a serious image problem these days in the public eye. Is there really such a thing as "good" vs. "bad" carbs? Aren't we just really talking about burning fuel for energy?

Eric: Food is fuel. There's about as much chemical energy stored in a 64-oz bottle of soda as in two spoons of gasoline. On a basic level, what's going on in cells is identical to what's going on in an internal combustion engine. Oxygen attacks bonds of carbon and hydrogen, releasing energy and producing CO2 and H2O. French chemists realized that respiration and combustion are the same thing in 1780.

There are good and bad carbs, or at least carbs you should eat more of, and carbs you should eat less of. Most of the "carbs" we eat should be the complex variety, found in grains, beans, etc. -- fibers and starches. Simple carbs are basically sugar. Don't want too many of those, but we pack them away by the tablespoon anyway. Fats are mostly "carbs" -- carbon, anyway -- hydrocarbon chains tied together in a way the body can break them down.

As far as what we would eat, it will be tough for anyone to top Michael Pollan's lead in a New York Times Magazine article last year: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But there's also body-builder Jack Lalane's advice for longevity: "If it's manmade, don't eat it, and if it tastes good, spit it out."

Jen-Luc: Since we're on the subject of fuel, gas prices are topping a record $4 per gallon these days. How do we break the stranglehold that oil and gas have on our society?

Eric: Rising gas prices were one impetus for writing The Carbon Age. Mostly, I wanted to add to the conversation context I felt was missing. The papers, magazines, and other books do a great job of talking about the oil crisis, the climate crisis, the this-and-that crisis. My goal is to complement these familiar stories by broadening the conversation, showing how seemingly far-flung parts of our experience are part of a singular tale -- carbon's story.

One question I'm asked sometimes is, "Do you propose solutions [to climate, energy crises] in the book?" The answer is unequivocally yes, but not in the way that the question is usually meant. Understanding what science is, and what it currently tells us, is an often overlooked part of solutions, or at least an enabler of carbon-reducing solutions.

A couple of years ago, I noted a "teaser" at the beginning of the arts section of a magazine. ("Teaser" is news jargon for the front-page snippets that make you want to read inside.) It read something like, "What's the hottest crop of science books? Here's a hint: it's not geology." The story was about the boom in economics books, such as Freakonomics. There's nothing wrong with that teaser. It does a good job. What's messed up is that we live in a culture where that works as a teaser.

The fact is, economics is, or has become, the study of how carbon minerals can drive material wealth, without taking into account the cost of waste. I wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now -- or 20, or next week -- people look back and say, "What the hell were they thinking, treating economics as if it weren't a wholly owned subsidiary of geology? How is it possible that generation after generation of students graduated into a carbon-mineral economy without ever being required to take an Earth science class?"

Jen-Luc: Carbon is on everyone's mind these days because of climate change/global warming. There are still a few staunch hold-out denialists, bolstered by the latest news predicting a brief cooling trend in the coming years. How would you counter-argue that point? What, ultimately, is the significance (if any) of this predicted cooling trend?

Eric: In my wildest dreams I never imagined the book would come out the same month that the US Senate undertakes debate of a rigorous and comprehensive carbon-mitigation bill. It has been very heartening to watch how quickly the climate conversation has moved in the last two years. But, you're right, the disinformation machine is still working overtime.

In April, the journal Nature ran a research article by German scientists who fine-tuned computer models to tentatively predict a cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere in the next decade. Forget any caveats about this study for the moment -- that they were just beta-testing their model, that it's even possible to initialize sea-surface temperatures, etc -- science-y stuff. Say hypothetically that they are 100% right. This reveals a very important point about the complexity of the atmosphere and climate change.

Manmade global warming is occurring and will continue to occur, possibly for thousands of years to come. While this process is occurring, short- and even long-term natural variation of the climate is also occurring. A powerful natural variation toward regional cooling can mask the long-term warming signal. It did in the third quarter of the last century. Think of it like this: Say you're boiling water to make pasta, but you ritually forget how much water to put in. So you've got that burner on setting #7, and it keeps adding heat to the water. But you've got to add more water to accommodate the pasta. So you add the water. This lowers the temperature in the pot -- but it's a temporary cooling and that heat just keeps on coming. It'll boil. It just may take longer.

Jen-Luc: We are both former New Yorkers. I couldn't help noticing in your bio that you were an eyewitness to the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. In fact, you were part of a reporting team that won a national magazine award for your coverage. What impact did that have on you, both personally and professionally?

Eric: 9/11 caused so much devastation, trauma and dislocation, that something feels not quite right about my calling it a personal tragedy, too. But it was, both because of what I saw and heard, and because of how much I love New York. I was reporting several blocks from Ground Zero when the towers fell.

I've always been a student of war. I majored in the history of the World Wars in college. And I always knew that the bright-line distinction between our generation and my father's, and probably every one before his, is that our generation had no compulsory military service during wartime. On 9/11, with the southern tip of Manhattan about to go into Martial Law, I remember wandering around Tribeca, my sweatshirt wrapped around my nose and mouth, after residents and workers had fled north and across the rivers. I remember staring into a dust cloud, and at a trail of debris left in the exodus, thinking that war has come.

 

c is for carbon: part one

Back when I was living in Washington, DC, and writing the first two books, I had the privilege of receiving invaluable input from a group of local writers. We called ourselves Roomful of Writers, and for awhile there we met each week, critiquing each other's submitted works. They're the reason Black Bodies and Quantum Cats ended up being such a quirky, pop-culture-laden collection of physics essays -- and also why it ended up being so readable, since most of our members had an almost pathological aversion to scientific jargon of any kind.  Seriously? The folks at ROW made me a much better writer, and for that, they will always have my gratitude and loyalty. Just as I was finishing The Physics of the Buffyverse, a new member joined our ragtag team: Eric Roston, a former reporter for TIME, who was writing a book about carbon. As in, the element. It was nice to have another science writer to even out the ranks a bit. (Check out this fun piece he wrote for TIME last year about carbonation in soft drinks and how it relates to climate change.)

Unfortunately, Eric joined just as the group was unraveling, with members going their separate ways: to Africa, to New York City, to motherhood, and in my case, to marriage and sunny Los Angeles. Still, Eric is a professional: he muddled through on his own without our help, wrote his book, and we kept in touch as he did so. Last fall, I had the privilege of reading the entire manuscript. And now? The book is being published next month! It's called The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat, it's available for pre-order (go on, you know you want a copy!), and the preliminary reviews have been terrific. Jen-Luc Piquant smells best-seller.  Go Eric! Not only that, Eric has gone to the dark side and become a blogger at Carbon Nation.

Anyway, as a special treat, we're featuring a two-part Q&A -- more like a conversation, really -- in which Eric chats with hardcore bibliophile Jen-Luc Piquant about his new book, the writing process, climate change, rising gas prices, and what carbon could possibly have in common with MySpace doyen turned reality TV star Tila Tequila. It's lengthy, but substantive, and well worth the read. Bon appetit!

Jen-Luc: What possessed you to write a book about carbon?

Eric: The short answer is that I wanted to read a book about carbon, but nobody else had written one.

Jen-Luc: Okay, so what's the long answer?

Eric: Alfred Hitchcock movies all have what he referred to as a "MacGuffin": the thing the characters in the movie are after, whether it be microfilm, uranium in wine bottles, or papers. It never matters to the audience. It only matters to the characters. The news media treat carbon like it's a MacGuffin. It's the reason we have to reduce our industrial emissions, or the gee-whiz supermaterial that convinces us to drop another $200 for a carbon-fiber tennis racket, or the "carbs" we avoid (or embrace) in food.

But carbon isn't a MacGuffin. It's the central structural element of all life and civilization, and as such, the quickest path to learn the most about virtually everything larger than an atom and smaller than a planet.

Jen-Luc: What makes the topic particularly timely? Not just why this book, but why now?

Eric: At the end of 2003, carbon-dioxide induced global warming was bleeding into the private sector. The Atkins "low-carb" diet was careening towards its spectacular blowout. Oil (read hydrocarbons) prices began their steady ascent, after the Iraq invasion. And Lance Armstrong rode to victory in Paris in the Tour de France year after year on a $6500 carbon-fiber Trek bike. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about carbon, but in stovepipes, completely removed from each other. I wanted to start a project that would tease out the connective tissue between all these stories. We think of these as far-flung topics, but you can build a singular narrative, "carbon-based," that unifies and explains vast swaths of our experience. Looking at what carbon is, how it does that crazy thing it does, and how it gets around, allows you to talk about energy, climate, personal health, materials, and much else all in one conversation.

Jen-Luc: Okay, so I see the attraction, and the relevance, but it must have been daunting. I mean, isn't that like writing a book about air, or hydrogen?

Eric: Richard Feynman said, "No matter what you look at, if you look at closely enough, you are involved in the entire Universe." In the last 20 years or so, there have been a lot of nonfiction books -- microhistories -- that illuminate vast swaths of life, the universe and everything by peering through nontraditional lenses: salt, gold, walking, the computer chip, oxygen, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Jen-Luc: Anyone who invokes both Hitchcock and Feynman in the first 10 minutes wins mega-points with us, plus you subtly plugged our second book. But how did you narrow the scope of the book sufficiently to produce a compelling narrative?

Eric: The simple answer? An enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of time. I ended up with a balanced, structured narrative across 12 chapters -- a wink at carbon's atomic mass (12), which is the official standard by which all others are measured. Filling those chapters was a little like filling an ice cube tray with water. You have to swish it around quite a bit to get all the cubes to the same level. the first half of the book ("The Natural") is basically about evolution and its effect on the global carbon cycle. The second half ("The Unnatural") looks at what technology is within evolution, and technology's effect on the global carbon cycle (i.e., meteoric).

Before I stumbled upon this structure, thinking about the narrative was like trying to cut soup with a knife. Check this out: as of May 19, 12:45 AM, there were 35,421,960 known substances. This number grows by about 3000-4000 every day. But only about 100,000 of them are inorganic, science-speak for "not containing carbon." That means, essentially, I had a practically infinite pool of things to write about, needed to pick a dozen, build stories around them, and make sure that the stories flow out of carbon's singular narrative. I don't know what's crazier, how much work this book took, or the fact that I loved almost every second of it.

Jen-Luc: Here's more evidence of your very high tolerance for pain: Most of your research is comprised of peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals. Isn't that a bit masochistic of you?

Eric: I got into it. First of all, journal articles are primary documents. I wanted to avoid secondary literature, media, to the extent possible. (I supplemented the diet of journal articles with many books by writer-scientists and science writers.) Also, I wanted to emphasize how important peer review is. Never mind for a moment the debates going on in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the future of peer-reviewed journals. Scientists appeal to each others' professional judgment as a way to drive forward, into the unknown. It's kind of like the US justice system, where the highest, most noble authority is the jury of our peers. So by concentrating on peer-reviewed literature (despite all the imperfections), I also wanted to defend professional judgment, which is under attack in this country, be i in science, journalism, and other areas.

Jen-Luc: You have firsthand experience with the mainstream media. How do you feel about the current level of public discourse on scientific issues in general, and the topic of climate change in particular? As a faux-French, intellectually elitist avatar, I get discouraged when these sorts of issues fail to get covered as frequently as the Starlet du Jour's latest randy exploits. Can the blogosphere help fill in the gap left by the dearth of substantive media analysis? 

Eric: By design, The Carbon Age is a book that I hope (a) people will enjoy, and (b) is filled with all the stuff I wish could be taken for granted by mainstream media, policymakers, and captains of industry. You have to take your hat off for a number of people and institutions who in the last decade have emphasized the importance of putting more science into public discourse and fixing US education. They include but are not limited to: the February 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission report on 21st century threats to the US; Tom Friedman's The World is Flat; the October 2005 NAS report Rising Above the Gathering Storm; and work in the blogosphere by the "Sciblings" (SEED's stable of science blogs) and other science bloggers.

Because I worked for several years in the corporate media, I think about these questions from a different angle. For example, why does science rarely get covered? I would argue that looking at the bigger economic picture might help answer this question. The business model for news media in the US is broken. Newspapers and magazines are still profitable, but not as much as they have been historically, and many have had to take draconian measures to cut costs in order to stay profitable. So science coverage gets cut. But so do legal affairs, government (versus politics), local coverage, investigations, education, art, international events, etc. We're not getting as much of virtually everything -- except the randy exploits.

To me, this speaks of a problem much deeper and more complicated than how science and scientists are portrayed in the media. It speaks to how we teach students science, and how they take it (or don't) into the labor force and culture. The media are losing their shirts everywhere, so I think they are just one star in the galaxy of problems with education standards. Nations need to invest in their citizens. Ours hasn't so much lately, relative to the competition. That's the ultimate reason many people think the corporate media don't cover science well.

A friend of mind is a pollster and quite cynical. He said recently that the problem with Washington isn't politicians, it's voters. Americans get the political leaders they deserve. The same might be said of media. If editors sense that people don't want to read about science as much as celebrities, there will be less science and more celebrities. On a positive note, I would emphasize strongly that there is more good journalism going on today than possibly ever. It just has smaller, fragmented audiences.

Jen-Luc: That said, we're not above mentioning the occasional Shameless Starlet to boost our blog traffic a bit. Your book was linked on shop.MTV's Website to the DVD release of Season 1 the reality show, Tila Tequila's Shot at Love. Why isn't she in your book? After all, Tila (see photo above) is a carbon-based life form, albeit with a more synthetic enhancements than most. And Carl Sagan once said that we are all made of star stuff.

Eric: I was happy and amused that shop.MTV noticed that if you like soft-core porn, you'll love The Carbon Age. There actually is sex of a sort in the book. And certainly it's true that every atom larger than hydrogen in a starlet's body was forged in a sun. From what I gather, though, at least in the Hollywood sense, Tila Tequila is not "star" material.

NEXT UP: Things get serious! "C is for Carbon: Part Deux," in which Eric tells Jen-Luc Piquant all about good and bad carbs, global warming, and what it was like to interview Vaclav Smil, former Czechoslovakian dissident turned distinguished professor.

physics gets festive

So, yesterday I was chatting with my pal Lee Kottner (personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, and an occasional guest blogger at the cocktail party), who lives in New York City, and I asked her which of the myriad of events she was planning to attend at the upcoming World Science Festival. Her response: "Festival? There's a science festival?"

Hell, yeah, there's a World Science Festival! It takes place May 29 through June 1, and it is going to be teh awesome. It worries me that Lee, of all people, hadn't yet heard of it, because she's pretty plugged into that sort of thing. Time to get the word out people! Alas, I will not be able to attend the festival personally, but here's my Top Ten list of the events I would be attending, if I lived anywhere within easy driving (or Amtrak/subway/bus) distance of NYC (and could split myself into multiple clones since many of them directly conflict with each other). You can see a complete schedule of all events here; there's even a blog.

1. Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Thursday, May 29th, 6 - 8:30 PM, The Paley Center for Media. Any fans of the multiverse out there? This event is tailor-made for you (and all your doppelgangers in parallel universes). Hugh Everett III was a theoretical physicist who devised the Many Worlds theory in the 1950s as a way of explaining what happens to all the other possibilities once the wave function collapses in quantum theory. His son, Mark Oliver Everett, is a musician with the alternative band Eels ("Souljacker Pt 1" has been on my cardio workout playlist for a couple of years now). Many Worlds languished for a very long time as kind of a fringe theory, but it's enjoying a bit of a resurgence. So much so that NOVA has produced a documentary about Everett pere et fils, detailing the younger Everett's "personal journey to understand the the astounding contribution that his reclusive father... made to physics." PBS will air the documentary this fall; now is your chance to see it first, and also participate in a panel discussion with Mark Everett, Michio Kaku, and Max Tegmark, moderated by Brian Cox.

2. Toil and Trouble: Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong, Thursday, May 29, 7:30 - 9:00 PM, The Moth at Symphony Space. Failure is an integral part of the scientific process: without it, no progress would ever be made. But for some reason, we only hear about the successes -- maybe everyone's concerned about losing their funding. The Moth is a renowned storytelling collective, fostering the art of the raconteur in the 21st century, so it's a perfect venue for scientists to tell their stories of experiments gone wrong -- horribly wrong! -- and other writers to explore, in narrative form, their ongoing relationship with science. String theorist Jim Gates will be on hand, along with cosmologist Michael Turner, Lucy Hawking (a.k.a., "Spawn of Stephen"), and novelist Nathan Englander.

3. The Brain and Bourne, Friday, May 30, 5:00 - 8:00 PM, The Museum of Modern Art. As a proud princess of pop culture science (I'd wear the tiara more often, but it itches), it is killing me -- just killing me, I tell you -- to miss this fantastic session. They'll be screening The Bourne Identity, and afterwards, the producer/director Doug Liman and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi will participate in a panel discussion exploring the science behind the entire Bourne trilogy: brain function, memory, personality and identity, among other issues. Award-winning screenwriter and producer James Schamus, CEO of Focus Features (Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation, Atonement), will moderate. Maybe if we close our eyes and wish really, really hard, Matt Damon will show up, too. Hey, we can dream. Apparently MoMA's Film Department has acquired the trilogy for its permanent collection. They've got taste, those curators. Bring your own popcorn and Twizzlers.

4. IJK, Friday, May 30, 7:00 - 8:30 PM, The New Victory Theater. French theater troupe Compagnie 11 will present "a witty, physics-inspired showcase of sonic juggling." Sonic juggling, people! That's gotta be pretty cool. The name "IJK" refers to mathematics' designators of direction in a 3-D world. Apparently, "the show explores space and movement in a balancing of light and dark that weave whimsy with geometry." Once Compagnie 11 has wowed the audience with their skills, Heidi Hammel of the Science Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, will talk about some of the connections between the acrobatic antics and cosmic motion: the planets, comets, and galaxies.

5. Armitage Gone! Dance: The Elegant Universe, Friday, May 30, 7:30 - 8:30 PM, Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum. You've read the book (or the first few chapters anyway), you've seen the NOVA special, and you've been wondering what the Brian Greene string theory franchise would dream up next. Wonder no more: string theory meets modern dance as famed director/choreographer Karole Armitage debuts a new work inspired by Greene's bestselling book. The performance "blends music, dance, text, and projected imagery to create a vibrant portrait of the universe as revealed by cutting-edge physics," and will include discussion by the aforementioned Jim Gates and composer Lukas Ligeti, who wrote the score. (Jen-Luc Piquant wants to know which dancer will play Peter Woit. C'mon, he has to be in there, too! Every performance piece needs some central conflict.)

6. Science of Disney Imagineering, 12:30 - 1:30 PM, NYU Skirball Center. (Also at 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM on the same day) The kids should love this one. Scientists and engineers from Walt Disney Imagineering will pull back the curtain and reveal the science behind that Disney theme park magic. They'll talk about the chemistry of creating colors and of fireworks, and how to make smog and other special effects. Maybe they'll even explain why the animatronic Jack Sparrow recently added to Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride looks so creepily more lifelike than the older ones. (Animatronic technology has come a long way, baby!)

7. Cool Jobs, Friday, May 30, 4:00 - 5:30 PM, NYU Kimmel Center for University Life. Okay, I already have a pretty cool job, but in an alternate universe, I'd totally be a forensics specialist like Peter Diaczuk. He's the real deal, director of forensic science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he spends his days (and probably the occasional night) researching everything from underwater fingerprints, blood spatter patterns (we just blogged about this!) and how bullets ricochet off different surfaces. He won't be the only cool scientist on hand for this multimedia event, intended to inspire curious minds of all ages: oceanographer and marine botanist Sylvia Earle will be there, as well as Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist with NASA Ames Research Center, molecular biologist Betty Pace, and one of the Walt Disney Imagineers, Ben Schwegler, who specialized in developing sustainable, energy-efficient theme parks.

8.  Science of Sports, Saturday, May 31, 3:00 - 4:30 PM, NYU Coles Sports Center. How often do you get the chance to see Olympic athletes and NBA players in the same room as physicists and physiologists? This program promises "a lively mix of action, audience participation and video, creating the excitement of a live sporting event." Physics, biomechanics, biochemistry and so forth all have some bearing on all kinds of sports, from running and skiing, to basketball and bicycling -- even the martial arts.

9. QED: A Reading, Saturday, May 31, 8:00 - 9:30 PM, Columbia University's Miller Theater. It's Feynman. It's Alda. It's Alda playing Feynman in a reading of the classic play by Peter Parnell. 'Nuff said.

10. Plague in Gotham, Sunday, June 1, 2:00 - 3:00 PM, New York Historical Society. The NYHS has a new exhibition about the deadly cholera outbreaks in 19th century New York City -- I actually wrote about cholera epidemics last year -- and they figured, what a nice way to bring in leading epidemiologists and disaster-preparedness officials to discuss how well we are equipped, in the 21st century, to deal with a possible global pandemic. (Hurricane Katrina's aftermath did not inspire confidence in our organizational infrastructure.) They will also be showing excerpts from a new TV miniseries version of The Andromeda Strain.

There's so much more to choose from. Oh, and there's also a Science Street Fair, Saturday, May 31, 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM, Washington Square Park/NYU. Two years ago, I participated in a similar event, manning a booth to demonstrate the physics of the fight (i.e., martial arts). We won't be there this time around, but there'll be lots of other cool stuff going on. Jen-Luc sez check it out!

jacaranda daze

It's that time of year in Los Angeles again, when the jacaranda trees are in full bloom, strewing their ultraviolet blue petals along sidewalks and roadways with wild abandon. I moved here from Washington, DC, known for its April cherry blossom festival, so it's nice to have a floral equivalent in my new hometown. Pasadena alone has some 3500 jacaranda trees, and they only bloom two months out of the year -- it's about as close as this region gets to bona fide "seasons," apart from the bit of rain that falls around January/February.

The Southern California variety are blue jacarandas (Jacaranda mimosifolia, which Jen-Luc Piquant things sounds like an exotic dance, a la the macarena -- or perhaps a designer cocktail at a chic hipster club). Apparently blue is a very unusual color to achieve in the botanical realm, according to a local horticulturalist, David Lofgren, who told the Los Angeles Times that our local trees actually originated in Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil (where the flowers are even bluer than the LA variety). But they can be found all over the world; in fact, the city of Praetoria, in South Africa, is known as the Jacaranda City because the trees are so prolific in that region. They tend to flower right around the time of student exams, which might explain the local legend that if a flower from a jacaranda tree falls on your head, you will pass your exams with flying colors. Hey, students need all the hope they can get.

Ironically, the superstition is reversed at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where students say that they will fail an exam if a bloom from a jacaranda tree falls on their head -- unless they break the bad luck by catching another bloom before it hits the ground. Sydney University students are equally pessimistic: there, the saying goes, "By the time the jacaranda in the main quadrangle flowers, it's too late to start studying for exams."

Not everyone is a fan of the trees, despite their decorative value. That's because once they shed their flowers, it can get pretty messy, clogging drains, littering sidewalks, accumulating on the windshields of cars, and so forth.

The blooms are heavy because of the pods at their center, and can fall with a distinct thud. Step on a pod and crush it, and you'll get a sticky substance all over your shoe. Once that stuff dries, the only way to get it off is with something toxic like bug remover.

On the plus side, that juicy extract can be a very effective natural antimicrobial, particularly against E coli and Staphylococcus aureus. a.k.a., the "Golden Cluster Seed," or golden staph. It's a spherical bacterium that usually lurks on the skin or just inside the nostrils, and is the most common cause of staph infections. A plucky Scottish surgeon named Sir Alexander Ogston first discovered the staph "bug" in 1880; he found it in pus taken from surgical abscesses. It's still one of the most common causes of post-surgical wound infections. Some 500,000 patients in US hospitals get a staph infection every year.

Staph infections are nasty, causing everything from minor annoyances like skin infections, boils, carbuncles, and the occasional abscess (eww!), to more serious, life-threatening diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, endocarditis, and even toxic shock syndrome. They can usually be treated with a round of antibiotics -- unless one is unlucky enough to contract the "superbug", methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA for short. For some reason, this particular strain quickly developed a resistance to most common antibiotics. And I mean quickly: Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin mold in a petri dish in the early 1940s; that petri dish was growing a staph culture. By 1950 40% of staph bugs in hospitals proved to be resistant to penicillin, and by 1960 the percentage had reached a whopping 80%. That's some pretty rapid evolution there.

It wasn't that big a deal until the 1990s, because MRSA infections remained fairly rare. Then there was an explosion of MRSA cases in hospitals, and it's been rampant ever since -- not just in hospitals, but in gyms and locker rooms as well. It's spread from human to human contact, and believe it or not, stringent hand-washing protocols actually make a big difference. In 2007, the BBC reported that MRSA infections could be held at bay by spraying vaporized essential oils into the atmosphere to fight airborne bacteria. And epidemiologists are struggling to develop mathematical models to better understand how such infections became so rampant after decades of being held tightly in control.

Jacaranda juice might have antimicrobial properties, but we're betting it's no match for MRSA. Still, the blooms are awfully pretty, which might explain why they've inspired so many artists and writers, not to mention local superstitions and celebratory street fairs. In his book, Chronicles of the Gray Angel, the Argentine writer Alejandro Dolina narrates the legend of a massive jacaranda tree planted in Plaza Flores in Buenos Aires, which supposedly whistled tango songs on demand. It's a fanciful notion, but while a jacaranda tree might not whistle a tango tune, it probably has a "voice" -- provided one knows how to listen. 

Alex Metcalf is one man who's bothered to listen to the secret language of trees -- literally. I heard about his Tree Listening project via Geoff Manaugh's most excellent BLDGBLOG. Metcalf is a designer based in Cornwall who likes to explore the "natural world" in unusual interactive ways. His Tree Listening Installation is currently being exhibited at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Basically, he's suspended nine sets of headphones from the branches of two of the largest trees: a Sessile oak tree, and a chestnut leaved oak. The headphones capture the sounds as water moves up through the Xylem tubes just behind the bark. At first, it sounds like thunder,or the revving of a motorbike, but listen a bit more closely and you might also hear a weird kind of clicking sound because the water mixes with pockets of air in the tubes. "This water movement is what keeps the tree alive by providing the leaves with the necessary water to turn into sugar as a source of food, and as part of the cooling system on a hot sunny day," he says on his Website describing the installation.

The headphones are so sensitive, they also pick up the sound of the trees vibrating with the wind. Metcalf didn't just go to Radio Shack and buy over-the-counter headphones, of course -- that would be lazy. He designed a special sensor to place on the trunk of a chosen tree, which is then linked to an amplifying unit. And it's all solar powered. To make sure the solar cells get enough "juice" from the sun, Metcalf places the components high in the tree canopy.

The best part about Metcalf's approach is that it's not the least bit harmful to the trees. As he explained to The Guardian, "The technology for this is usually invasive. You bore into the tree and take away a section, then seal in a listening device. The thing about my device is that you don't have to cause any damage, and you can listen to any tree, anywhere, any time." Perhaps even our local jacaranda trees have some secret thing to say.

karma chimera

When I was just a wee young thing, my grade school teacher assigned us all reports on a specific animal. I got the duckbilled platypus. Can I just say? I thought my teacher was having me on at first. I mean, come on: it had a bill like a duck, a body like a beaver, and it was venomous like a snake! It could have popped right from the pages of the fantasy stories and ancient myths I devoured so regularly at that tender age. Among other tales, I was fascinated by the myth of the Chimera, a Greek fire-breathing monster described in Homer's Iliad as having a lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail, and the platypus seemed eerily similar in concept, if not appearance. But I dutifully did my library research -- this was pre-Internet, so we had to actually look stuff up on paper and use old-fashioned, musty card catalogs and everything -- and sure enough, the animal was very real indeed. I've had a fondness for the platypus ever since. Its very existence made the world seem that much more magical.

My old friend the platypus made for big science news this past week: scientists have just completed the full sequence of the platypus genome. It's a lazy Sunday, and I'm still mulling over all the excellent comments on my last post, so I'll let Juan Nunez-Iglesias, another New Voice from K.C. Cole's science writing class, weigh in with his own thoughts on the matter:

Last year I attended the 2007 conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) in Oakland, California. By far the most entertaining talk was given by Jennifer Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra. Graves talked about the platypus and how weird it is, not just in its appearance, but in its genetics.

For example, one of the first principles of genetics is that of independent assortment of chromosomes. We have two full copies of our genome in every cell in our bodies: one from our father, and one from our mother. Each copy consists of 23 chromosomes, separate pieces of DNA. When a germ cell divides, it splits our own double-copy genome in two and places each half into one daughter cell -- to pass on half of our genome (per offspring) to the next generation. The principle of independent assortment states that each of our 23 chromosomes has a 50% chance of ending up in one or the other daughter cell, independent of where the other 22 end up.

This principle was first formulated by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century, and has been shown to hold for every organism ever tested -- save the platypus. The platypus has 5 sex-determining chromosomes from each parent, and all its sex chromosomes stay together generation after generation. A platypus's young will inherit all the sex chromosomes from that platypus's father or from its mother. But never a mix of the two, as happens with all the other chromosomes.

Well, the weirdness doesn't stop there. Researchers announced [last week] the release of the complete sequence of the platypus genome, publicly available online. [Jen-Luc Piquant notes that this would be a fine time to create your own cloned pet platypus, boys and girls!] Down at the single-base pair level, the platypus continues to be weird. Half of its genome looks like a reptile's, half like a mammal's. It also has genes to make venom, which not surprise you after hearing the reptile thing, but... surprise! The platypus venom genes evolved independently of the reptile ones; they are completely unrelated and unique. You can read all this and much more in this excellent article in Nature News. Definitely an exciting time to study genomics.

That sounds suspiciously like a chimera-like creature at the genetic level, doesn't it? Except it isn't. Let me just say that right up front before PZ Myers gets all medieval on my ass. Seriously, PZ's frustration with the media coverage of our friend the platypus inspired him to write this terrific post explaining why the platypus is not the the same as a chimera:

"Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is 'weird' or 'odd' or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera.... No, no, no, a thousand times, no; this is the the wrong message.... What's interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution."

Got that? The platypus is not a chimera. Take it from someone who really knows this stuff. Okay, but do chimeras really exist? I'm so glad you asked. Certainly the mythological Greek monster isn't real, but there is a genetic anomaly that gives rise to a rare condition known as chimerism. Per Wikipedia, "A chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes." (Genetically distinct cells originating from the same zygote produce a related condition called mosaicism.) In humans, it's long been believed to be an exceedingly rare condition, with fewer than 40 reported cases.

One of the most famous is Lydia Fairchild, the subject of a documentary called The Twin Inside Me. She separated from her husband while pregnant with her third child, and took a DNA test to prove her husband's paternity, as required to qualify for welfare support. He was, indeed, the father, but according to the test, she wasn't the children's mother. She was taken to court for fraud. She was only exonerated when she gave birth to her third child, with a judge-ordered witness present to take blood samples from mother and infant for testing. And those DNA tests revealed she wasn't the mother of that child either. Except she was. I mean, court-appointed eye witnesses watched her give birth. If she was a fraud, she was a damned good one, on a par with the world's best illusionists. 

A similar thing happened (without the charges of fraud) to Karen Keegan in 1998, a Boston-area teacher who needed a kidney transplant. She had three grown sons who were tested to see if they could be donors, but the DNA showed that two of them weren't her biological children. This time doctors did additional testing on Keegan, drawing samples from other areas of the body, and discovered she had two sets of cell lines with two separate sets of chromosomes -- a mix of two individuals, fraternal twin sisters who fused in the womb and developed into a single infant. Fairchild's lawyers heard about the case, and arranged for their client to undergo more testing as well. She, too, turned out to be a chimera. For instance, the DNA in Fairchild's skin and hair didn't match that of her children, but the DNA from her cervix did.

Now that's weird -- weird enough to inspire episodes of both House and C.S.I. In "Cane and Abel," House treats a young boy who suffers from seizures and believes he was abducted by aliens; the hallucinations turn out to be caused by the "alien" brain tissue from the twin brother who had merged with the boy in the womb. The C.S.I. episode ("Bloodlines") involved a rape victim who correctly identifies her attacker, only to have him exonerated by DNA evidence, although it demonstrated her rapist was related to the original suspect, who had many brothers -- none of whom proved to be a positive match. The suspect turns out to be a chimera: two different sets of DNA. Grissom discovers the suspect's unique condition when he notices visible Blaschko's lines while photographing said suspect's torso for evidence.

Bizarre though it sounds, according to this 2003 article in New Scientist, chimerism might not be as rare as previously believed; in fact, some researchers are beginning to think there might be a little bit of the chimera in all of us. Most cases simply aren't detected. Usually, there aren't many outward signs or symptoms: eyes of slightly different coloration, for example, hair growing differently on opposite sides of the body, even hermaphroditism (having both male and female genitalia -- the subject of another memorable House episode in which a beautiful young female model turned out to have testicular cancer). Male tortoiseshell tabbies are examples of chimerism. It takes a DNA test to reveal the chimerism, and usually more than one, with samples taken from different parts of the body.

A more common variant is blood chimerism, when fraternal twins share part of the same placenta and exchange blood, which settles in the bone marrow, so each twin is genetically separate -- except for their blood which has two distinct sets of genes and two distinct blood times. Some 8% of fraternal twins are blood chimerism, and the number could rise given the increase in multiple births, thanks to in vitro fertilization. Fairchild and Keegan are much rarer cases.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before scientists started creating chimeras in the lab -- yes, just like the infamous South Park episode where the local mad scientist created creatures with multiple derrieres. Okay, not like that, but in 1984 scientist combined a embryos from a goat and sheep to form a "geep." Others have made rat/mouse and rabbit/human chimeras (2003), as well as pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies. Most were created not with the intention of creating living hybrids, but for the purpose of harvesting stem cells for further research. And in 2007, scientists at the University of Nevada's School of Medicine created a sheep with 15% human cells. In the UK, researchers are attempting to insert human DNA into a cow's egg using the same technique that successfully cloned Dolly the Sheep. Last I heard, they hadn't yet succeeded.

Sheesh. Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes. A creature from Greek mythology has a counterpart in modern 21st genetics. Next scientists will be telling us that vampires and werewolves are real. Which means we might be in need of a Slayer or two. Any takers?

picture this

It's been an incredibly busy week, so I'm just now getting around to writing about Chad's post about how it's not science without graphs. Basically, in a fit of procrastination, he plotted his latest blog traffic stats into a nice little graph, drew a line through the data points, and analyzed the results. It's all very meta of him. But who am I to point fingers? Chad's post made me realize that I am officially an uber-geek. See, back in late January, I got sidelined by the flu and spent a couple of days with a high, spiking fever, unable to do much except moan in between gulps of Theraflu. Bored with flipping channels and the meager offerings of daytime television, I started checking my temperature every hour and recording it, with the aim of plotting it onto a graph when I was done. I had some vague, drug-fogged notion of finding the slope of the tangent curve and thereby practicing my calculus by taking a derivative using a "real-world" example: the rate of change of my body temperature as the fever ran its wicked course.

It didn't quite work out that way: that particular calculus trick only works if the graph gives you a smooth curve. I had so few data points that the result was a series of spiked lines. If I took my temperature every 5 minutes and plotted it out, the end result might have been closer to a curve -- or not. Given the relative crudeness of my digital thermometer, the differences at that point would be so minimal that it probably would have just looked like a straight line. Still, before I started my amateur dabbling into self-taught calculus, I would not have realized that the closer one gets to an infinite number of ever-smaller data points, the more like a curve the resulting graphed data will appear. And it would never have occurred to me to try to create my own real-world calculus problem tracking the rate of change of my own body temperature. Maybe I ended up somewhere other than where I'd intended when I started my little sickbed exercise, but I learned something quite valuable from the experience -- and I'm not likely to forget the "lesson," either.

Real-world examples while learning abstract mathematical principles work for me, despite the recent findings by researchers at Ohio State University that this widespread assumption among educators may be wrong. Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent summation of the study specifics, accompanied by a thought-provoking comment thread. For instance, more than one person said that the so-called "real world" problems one finds in, say, calculus textbooks bear very little resemblance to anything most students would want to solve -- like that silly train analogy that leads off both the New York Times article and Ed's blog post on the study's results. (Jen-Luc Piquant  has her own snide response to when Train A, departing at 6 PM and traveling at 40 MPH toward Station B, will pass Train B, departing at 7 PM and traveling at 50 MPH toward Station A: "When everyone on board is long past caring.") Far from making math "come alive," it's just one more way to make students' eyes glaze over in boredom. 

I do not, however, conclude from this that "real world examples don't work." I think it depends on which examples you choose, and how you use them. They are a useful starting point for piquing student interest, but you still have to make the critical connection -- "This relates to that abstract principle, which can be broadly applied to other situations" -- and put in the work to grasp the abstractions.

Jennifer Kaminski, the OSU researcher who spear-headed the study, thinks such an approach obscures the underlying mathematical principle, rather than illuminating it, and actually hinders students' ability to transfer their knowledge to new problems. "They tend to remember the superficial, two trains passing in the night," she told the New York Times. "It's really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information." I can see how that might happen, but I think it's more of a translation problem. Honestly? I sucked at textbook story problems in my K-12 math classes, and received excellent grades in high school geometry and algebra.

But here's the thing: I didn't actually understand the abstractions; I was just blindly following the "rules," manipulating meaningless symbols. And it bored me. I needed some kind of context, just not the equally pointless exercises routinely used in classrooms. The real world examples in textbooks don't really correspond to our daily experiences, or how we might typically approach such a problem. As one of Ed's commenters put it: "If I wanted to know Frankie's and Johnny's ages, I'd ask them, not work out some weird algebra problem." Yet another commenter observed, "'Real-world examples may be treated by students as confusing symbolic concepts that look like real things they know about but act like abstract notions that are defined by the teacher."

I was pleased to read that Kaminski isn't suggesting that we eliminate all real-world examples in classrooms; rather, she thinks that they should augment the abstract principles -- which should be taught first -- rather than being deeply grounded in one specific context. I agree this might increase a student's chances of extrapolating the general principles and applying them to new problems as they arise. Perhaps letting the students choose a real-world problem they'd like to solve -- like my little experiment plotting out my changing rate of body temperature -- is a better way of incorporating a practical context.

You're more likely to pique their interest if they're involved in creating the problems and then figuring out how to solve them -- the "lessons" they learn along the way are more likely to "stick," plus it's a lot more similar to what a working scientist actually does for a living. Is it a calculus problem? A statistical one? How does one go about "translating" that situation into a meaningful mathematical format? This is more of a ground-up approach, akin to taking apart an alarm clock and putting it back together to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it works. Personally, Jen-Luc would like to see more LOLCats in math and science classes:

This kind of choose-your-own-problems approach also might address the perennial problem of over-generalization -- we all learn differently, and suggesting there is only one correct way to teach a subject like math or physics is likely to leave behind as many students as such a pedagogical approach would advance. And sometimes teachers under-estimate the difficult of new concepts because it's been so long since they learned the material for the first time themselves. As commenter Sam C. said, "Once one has learned something, it's difficult to appreciate what it looks like to someone who hasn't learned it." Something that seems perfectly obvious to the teacher, probably needs to be spelled out, step by step, for many of his/her students.

Case in point: I started my informal calculus "studies" with a DVD lecture series from The Teaching Company. The lectures were pretty good, conceptually: visual elements, real-world examples, but tying them to the abstract principles and then showing how they could be broadly applied. The first thing I learned was how I could (a) use the derivative to figure out the speed of my car from the car's position, and (b) use the integral to figure out how far I'd traveled in my car based on speed. The two are flip sides of the same coin, two different approaches to solving the same problem, depending on the information at one's disposal. And there's a handy real-world context: this is basically what's going on in your car's speedometer and odometer all the time.

Frankly, finding the integral is a labor-intensive process of multiplication and addition take to ridiculous extremes (i.e., infinity). There is a short-cut to the much-harder integral however: if I know both my beginning and ending position, for example, I could just subtract the first from the second to figure out how far I'd traveled. What if I don't know my ending position (and my odometer is broken), just my speed (the velocity function)? Per my DVD instructor, "all" I have to do is figure out which position function generates the known velocity function, and voila! I can do a bit of math-y hocus-pocus to essentially "retrace my steps" backward and use the easier derivative approach. Fair enough, but he never once explained how one goes about finding that position function. There's a lot of them. Still, he insisted it was a simple matter, and silly me -- I believed him.

My DVD instructor lied. It's actually a non-trivial thing for someone just starting out, and/or a bit rusty in their basic algebra and geometry. Don't take my word for it; listen to Johann Bernoulli, a contemporary of Newton and Leibniz who made significant contributions to then-brand-new field of calculus in the 17th century: "But just as much as it is easy to find the differential (derivative) of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential," he wrote. "Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not."

Fortunately, I know a lot of physicists and a smattering of mathematicians, most of whom are happy to weigh in now and then with their own insights and "tricks" for the kind of road-block described above. And I'm persistent. I only bring it up because I think it's always interesting to see where different people get hung up when learning new mathematical concepts. Sometimes it's just a language problem, mixing up terminology, or not realizing that you do know what a particular term means -- you just didn't realize that's what your mental concept was called. You hadn't made the connection. Sometimes the instructor has inadvertently left out a step, or doesn't realize that some of his/her students need to be walked through something a bit more carefully.

Because we all learn and think differently -- newsflash: even scientists don't all think and learn alike! -- I'm interested in hearing from readers about similar experiences in their math and science education -- or even their humanities education. I admit, I have an "intuitive" feel for words and writing, and have been guilty in the past of just not understanding why someone couldn't grasp some "trivial" aspect of composition. I've noticed that many "gifted" math sorts can make similar intuitive leaps with numbers. What were your most significant roadblocks? Have you ever stopped to really analyze what happened? How did you overcome them? What are some of the "tricks of the trade" you find useful when applying abstract math principles to "real world" problems?

I think it's a conversation worth having....

crime scene craziness

Last year, the Spousal Unit and I attended a friend's 40th birthday party here in Los Angeles. Among the many guests was one of the writers for Bones -- one of my favorite current TV shows, as regular readers may know. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, I said how much I liked the show, and then he asked what I did for a living. As soon as I said "science writer," he tensed up, with a slightly panicked, hunted look in his eye, and launched into a litany of his supposed "sins against science": "I know, I know, we take liberties with the science, DNA testing can't be done in just a few hours, Angela's holographic system for recreating faces doesn't exist...." I quickly interrupted his impromptu "confessional" to assure him I wasn't one of those sorts who constantly feel compelled to nitpick science-themed fictional TV shows for --basically -- not being science-themed documentaries.

Personally, I think it's quite telling, and more than a little sad, that this man's first reaction to encountering a science-oriented person (even one who admitted to being a Bones fan) was to recoil and start defending himself. I can only imagine how often he's encountered such individuals who dispensed with the usual pleasantries and simply attacked him for doing his job: producing a compelling, entertaining crime drama. It reflects quite poorly on scientists, frankly. Scientists mean well, but all the  judgmental finger-wagging gets pretty old, pretty darn fast. And soon, they're just not being heard because people have stopped listening. Who likes to be nagged and nitpicked all the time? Would it kill the scientific community to hand out a few kudos once in awhile, to offset the constant griping?

So in today's monster blog post, I come not to bury science-themed TV shows (death by nitpicking?) but to praise them -- specifically, to praise Thursday night's new episode of C.S.I., or, as Jen-Luc Piquant has dubbed it, "the episode that launched a thousand Google searches." Maybe it was because of May Sweeps, or perhaps the whole writing staff got exposed to laughing gas that made them collectively giddy, but the episode ("The Theory of Everything") managed to cram together a record number of weird, stranger than fiction forensic oddities. (The writers of House are probably seething with envy; extremely rare and bizarre medical anomalies are their stock in trade.) And as I discovered when I Googled the relevant terms, they're all pretty solidly based on scientific fact. [SPOILER ALERT! The rest of this post gives away key plot points -- solely in the interests of science -- so if you didn't catch the episode, you might want to hold off reading further until you've checked it out: it's available on the CBS official Website.]

We get an inkling of the craziness to come in the opening sequence, set in the Vegas police station, where Detective Brass is questioning a suspect while, in the main room, a mentally disturbed homeless woman named Evelyn expounds on string theory and the coming alien invasion. We quickly discover that the suspect is in jail for killing a deer with a bolt from a cross bow and, um, putting a dress on it. He's recently divorced, drunk as a skunk (blood alcohol level of 2.8!), and suddenly makes a break for it, bolting through the station until he's cornered. The assembled officers use pepper spray to subdue him, but he's too smashed for it to have much effect. So Brass gives the order to tase him, using the unfortunate phrase, "Light him up." As if on cue, the suspect bursts into flames. Soon he joins the dead deer in the morgue for autopsy, and Brass is taking heat for having a suspect die in custody.

First, a brief word about tasers. I tend to think of them in terms of those smaller handheld electroshock devices, but the kind more commonly used by law enforcement -- and depicted in the episode -- are a bit more complicated. A taser fires two small darts (electrodes) connected to the main unit by conductive wire, with a maximum range of about 35 feet. The darts are pointed to penetrate clothing and touch the skin. Earlier models required them to pierce the skin, but today's version uses a "shaped pulse" that is more effective in penetrating clothing. The handheld devices are more commonly marketed to the general public these days. In fact, Jen-Luc Piquant was thrilled to discover a surprisingly large number of pretty pink tasers for women, from a standard issue model, to a taser disguised as a couple of pink tampons, to this adorable pink seal taser -- and yes, it was made in Japan, along with the infamous Hello Kitty "personal massage wand." (Think I'm kidding? Think again! A Hello Kitty taser is practically inevitable.) Jen-Luc totally covets her own pink seal taser.

Anyway, tasers, or stun guns, are fairly controversial, since there have been several cases of suspects dying, ostensibly as a result of being tased -- the most recent case was last year, involving a Polish immigrant in Canada who died after being tased by police in Vancouver's airport. That man didn't burst into flames, however. Combustion isn't typically one of the risks. Nick Stokes figures it has to be either the moonshine the man had been consuming, the pepper spray, or some chemical in the man's shirt, but a controlled experiment involving three Jell-O Men shows that none of those could account for the poor man's sudden immolation.

Eventually, Stokes discovers that there is more than one type of pepper spray. This is quite true. All types contain the same active ingredient: capsaicin, a chemical derived from the fruit of plants like chilis. But the episode is correct that the sort used by the police is water-based and hence non-flammable -- precisely because of the growing use of tasers by police officers. Some consumer brands have alcohol-based propellants, however, which are highly flammable.

In the case of Burning Man, the officer at fault had used a consumer version after his girlfriend accidentally took his pepper spray with her to work. Nick repeats the experiment with the other type of pepper spray, and voila! The Jell-O Man bursts into flame. And yes, that was the Mythbusters looking on approvingly from behind the glass as Nick performs his final test -- an uncredited cameo to keep obsessive fans happy. (Obsessive? Moi? Jen-Luc is the one who writes Mythbuster-themed slash fanfic. And if that doesn't take you to a scary mental place, I shudder to think what it would take to do so.)

Really, that's weird enough for one episode right there, but when  police finally track down the unfortunate Evelyn, she's dead, the victim of a collision with a semi. The truck driver was temporarily blinded by the sun reflecting off her tinfoil costume, and didn't even see her. The clincher: she's bleeding green blood -- yes, just like Mr. Spock; perhaps she really was in touch with aliens. (Or not; certain species of lizards known as skinks also have green blood, along with some marine worms.) The whole green blood thing turns out to be a mini-epidemic: two more victims soon show up: another homeless man, dead from blunt force trauma to the head, and his killer: a pest control specialist named David Bohr, a.k.a. "Atomic Dave" (one of several cheeky nods to physics).

Bohr is alive when they find him, but not for long: he soon starts seizing and the same green blood, um, oozes out of his face. He joins the other victims in the county morgue, where we have the added twist of all his internal organs being various shades of green, including his brain. It turns out that all the green blood victims suffered from migraines and were taking massive doses of a medication without a prescription -- supplied by Bohr the exterminator, who was taking the stuff himself in enormous quantities. Except Bohr thought he was suffering from migraines, when in fact, he had a massive brain tumor -- hence the headaches, crazed behavior, and hemorrhaging. That's the danger of self-medication: what if your original diagnosis is wrong?

Hodges and Wendy (who is emerging as his unlikely love interest) conclude -- along with Grissom -- that the culprit is high levels of sulphur in the blood, caused by the large doses of migraine medication the victims had been taking. (The drug is identified as thiocyte, but this might be a fictional version -- perhaps for legal reasons? -- since the only Google hits that showed up on that drug name were related to this particular episode of C.S.I.) And naturally, they invoke Mr. Spock, although Wendy rightly reports that Spock's green blood, according to the series, arose from copper instead of iron in the hemoglobin. She knows a whole bunch else about Star Trek, as it happens, prompting Hodges to observe, "You're like a geeky nerdy guy trapped in a woman's body." Not to be outdone, Wendy zings back, "So are you."  Yeah, those two are made for each other....

This "Vulcan Blood" phenomenon isn't fictional. In fact, it's ripped right from last year's science headlines, when an article appeared in The Lancet describing a very odd case of a 42-year-old Canadian man (why are they always Canadian?) who appeared to have dark-green blood coursing through his arteries. The case was already a bit strange before the whole Vulcan-blood thing. The patient had fallen asleep in a chair for so long, and in such a position, as to severely restrict the blood flow to his limbs, resulting in localized tissue and nerve damage that required surgery to correct, before he lost his legs. The man also suffered from chronic migraines and had been prescribed sumatriptan to treat them. Apparently he'd been consuming a whopping 200 milligrams of the stuff per day, giving rise to a rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, in which high levels of sulphur wind up up in the oxygen-carrying compound hemoglobin, found in red blood cells. 

Meanwhile, Catherine Willows gets called to a nearby home where a 60-something couple has been found dead in their sleep. The husband was a physics professor, and they named their cat Schroedinger -- except poor Schroedinger in this case isn't in a superposition of states, but very much dead and buried in the back yard, which is littered with the bodies of dead squirrels.

Initially, Willows surmises the exterminator's equipment -- which employs electromagnetic pulses to chase away the squirrels -- interfered with the couple's matching pacemakers, but lab tests definitively rule that out: the pulses were too weak to have any effect on the pacemakers' operation. It's a very real health risk, however: most Websites concerned with pacemakers warn those considering the surgery to avoid MRIs altogether afterward, and use with caution such devices as cell phones, iPods microwave ovens, metal detectors, industrial welders, and electrical generators.

A tox screen reveals that both the squirrels and the couple died of cyanide poisoning, the squirrels via ingested pellets, and the couple by inhaling a hydrogen cyanide gas. Victims of foul play? Yes for the squirrels; the jewelry-maker next door admitted to using cyanide in her electroplating (a common application for cyanide) and dosing the pesky squirrels (not to mention the unfortunate Schroedinger, by accident), but as for the elderly couple -- not so much. Turns out the cyanide that killed them came from the old carpet -- since overlaid with a new one -- which contained polyvinyl chloride as a flame retardant. A fire broke out when a fleeing squirrel chewed through some electrical wiring, the old carpet kept things to a low smolder and the chemicals in the carpet fibers, when burnt, produced hydrogen cyanide gas. At least the couple died peacefully in their sleep.

All of the above is pretty scientifically accurate, give or take the occasional liberty for Purposes of the Plot -- at least as far as I could tell from my hour of Googling. If one were going to nitpick on the cyanide front, one might note that Hodges is credited with the rare gift of being able to smell the bitter almond odor associated with hydrogen cyanide. It's true that not everyone can do so, but those that can't are in a minority (one out of four). Three out of four people can detect the telltale odor; if anything, it's surprising that Hodges is the only person in the Vegas lab who can do so. Then again, Hodges is known for exaggerating his gifts, so constantly proclaiming the uniqueness of his ability is entirely in keeping with his character.

Recapping the day, the C.S.I. team marvels at the unlikely string of coincidences that connected the various cases. First, a suspect goes up in flames while in police custody, and the last person he came into contact with -- Tinfoil Evelyn -- ends up dead and oozing weird green blood from migraine medication she'd copped from Atomic Dave, hired by the elderly couple to get rid of the squirrels. The late, great Immolated Deer-Killer turns out to be the ex-husband of the couple's next-door neighbor. The Deer Killer only ended up in police custody (and thus, dead) because he was so upset about the end of his relationship with the jewelry maker. Grissom says there's no such thing as coincidences and attributes the phenomenon to (wait for it!) string theory -- thereby tying him to crazy Tinfoil Evelyn.

Okay, citing string theory as an explanation for a series of unlikely coincidences is stretching things very far indeed -- in fact, unlikely coincidences do arise quite frequently, and they are rarely (if ever) evidence of anything more than that. But the brief layperson's sound-bite summation that Grissom gives of the essence of string theory is dead-on. The writers did their due diligence, even if they added their own fanciful metaphorical embellishment. And that's good enough for me.