Silver Jacket

Category: Science

  • Funny Boning

    ChesspieceLast week my friend Liz wrote in her advice column: "Questions, questions, questions. Men and women alike love to be drawn out from their selves with QUESTIONS. I keep a file of questions ready for occasions like this." They range from the timely ("Do you identify more with Generation X or Generation Explains-Your-Wearing-Stupid-Clothes?") to the timeless ("Who’s your hottest underage relative?") I have not yet tried any of them as pickup lines, but if you do, please let her or me know how they work out.

    Recently a bunch of pickup approaches actually were put to the test. In February, researchers at Edinburgh published their results on which "opening gambits" work best. Surprise surprise–situations where men organically display generosity or a cultured background work better than preformed pickup lines. (Summary here, full list of gambits here.) But then, the lines included schlock like this:

    M: What has 148 teeth and can hold back the incredible hulk?
    W: I give up.
    M: My fly.

    In Hulk’s place, I would have liked to see one from Nick Sylvester’s infamous Village Voice story about Neil Strauss’s The Game, in which Sylvester refers to someone’s "new signature move, a pickup line that takes over 15 minutes to tell and wraps up like this:

    "Anyway, my friend has had this mustache for as long as I’ve known him but he just shaved it and now he’s freaking out because he has a really bad tan line on his upper lip. He has a date in two days so we were discussing what he can do. My question for you is: Should he wear a fake mustache on the date?"

    (Reconstructing the first 15 minutes of that line would make a great exercise for a creative writing class, but "reporting" on its existence was a riff that lost Sylvester his job.)

    Or the Edinburgh team could have relied on the old fave The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines, which already has a smattering of data on the utility of many lines. Skim through and you will find that "I wanna put my thingy into your thingy" is surprisingly effective, working 100 out of 120 times. Unsurprisingly, "Chick do now" has worked 0 out of "804,147 (or so one guy claims)" times.

    You’d think "Chick do now" would have amused one of those thousands of women and led to a hookup. Two scientists (Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine) published a study last year in which people rated potential partners on desirability. Subjects viewed head shots with funny and not-so-funny quips attached. Women liked funny men, but apparently men didn’t give a shit whether women were funny. These data didn’t mesh with claims from both men and women that they like partners with a good sense of humor. So B&B did a follow-up study and found that men and women mean different things when they say "good sense of humor." Women like men who say funny things; men like women who think the things they (men) say are funny. (Good summaries of the research here and here. Full PDFs available here.)

    French maximizer La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "We often pardon those people who bore us, but we cannot pardon those who find us boring." Modern-day research has now demonstrated the utter male-centricity of this particular maxim. (Whereas the male-centricity of this Maxim was never in question.)

    The flirting research came to bear in an IM chat with Liz last month:

    liz: what do you think about the notion:
    men: use conversation to establish dominance
    women: use conversation as gift to establish togetherness/equality
    me: ya
    me: like that humor study
    me: girls like funny guys, guys like girls who think they’re funny
    liz: humor is the ultimate trick – it tricks guys into thinking they’ve become dominant by making girls laugh. it tricks girls into thinking they’ve been offered a gift by the man to induce togetherness
    liz: what happens though when i tell a humor-joke?
    me: no effect
    me: guys don’t care
    liz: is gilda radner funny?
    me: ya
    liz: is that good?
    me: ya
    me: i need funny. i am not most guys
    liz: oh so you’re saying certain guys, it’s a plus
    liz: but guys guys don’t care
    liz: how can i know the difference
    me: you cant
    me: ok you can
    me: do they attempt to elicit humor from you
    liz: seems so simple, and yet i’d never have come up with it
    me: i have lots of experience attempting to elicit humor from chicks
    me: its my litmus test
    me: if they fall flat, too basic, i lose interest
    liz: how do you do it
    me: leading, snarky questions can work
    liz: example?
    me: last night i replied to [redacted]’s friendster message. her profile says she wants to meet someone who can procure a butterfly knife. i said:
    me: "Why do you wish so badly to procure a butterfly knife? What do you have against butterflies? (Or is it merely a person who can easily obtain one that you wish to find? You’re into bad boys/girls.)"
    me: not brilliant, but it should work
    liz: but isn’t that just showing off your creativity/humor, more than eliciting hers?
    me: its both. thats the key.
    liz: yeh

  • Cootie Fever

    Christina_1There are already many reasons to do Ritalin. It improves focus, mood, and motivation. It’s also stronger than blow and, with health insurance, cheaper than Starbucks. But in case you haven’t heard, it produces hallucinations too, free of charge. According to the Times last week:

    Dr. Kate Gelperin, an F.D.A. drug-safety specialist, [said] that the agency had discovered a surprising number of cases in which young children given stimulants suffered hallucinations. Most said that they saw or felt insects, snakes or worms, Dr. Gelperin said.

    Dr. Gelperin described the case of a 12-year-old girl who said that insects were crawling under her skin. Another child was found by his parents crawling on the ground and complaining that he was surrounded by cockroaches.

    Fun times.

    The specificity and commonality of the delusions are striking. One could be forgiven for blaming South Park as a common priming stimulus. In a particular episode, Cartman takes Ritalin and sees an insect-like Pink Christina Aguilera Monster crawling around. Perhaps this cartoon creation, this media meme, has burrowed into the psyches of kids across the nation.

    Or not. What should be more striking is the recency of the reports of these delusions. Common stimulants (coke, meth, Ritalin, caffeine) block neurons from deactivating the neurotransmitter dopamine. An excess of synaptic dopamine can cause psychosis. Doctors have even given a name to the particular wig-out reported above: delusional parasitosis. Speed freaks have a name for it too: crank bugs. According to a 1969 article in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, "It is common to see speed freaks with open running sores or scabs on their faces or arms as a result of picking or cutting out these hallucinated crank bugs." Word to the wise: if you ever catch one, I hear they go great with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

    But you don’t need drugs to see bugs. This article titled "Insects in Psychiatry" explains: "Insects have profoundly influenced our culture through time, and it is therefore not surprising that they feature prominently in some psychiatric disorders." The author draws the history of delusions of parasitosis in the med mags back to a pub date of 1894, years before vitamin R was invented, and even longer before Christina Aguilera infested our lives.

  • Tuskegee, Take Two

    BizarroRemember Tuskegee? No, not the huge explosion in Siberia (caused by one of Nikola Tesla’s experiments–wink wink.) That was Tunguska. In the Tuskegee Syphillis Study (1932-1972), hundreds of poor black men in Alabama were given shitty treatment for syphillis to see what would happen. In bad faith, the men were told they had "bad blood." No diagnosis, no informed consent.

    Earlier this month, science writer Rebecca Skloot made a couple of blog posts covering the ethical implications of a new study. PolyHeme, a blood substitute, is being tested on unwitting ER patients, mostly in inner-city hospitals. The bizarro blood is creating bad press.

    Meanwhile, testing on brown people has gone global, and human guinea pig positions are being outsourced overseas. Jennifer Kahn has a story in the March issue of Wired called A Nation of Guinea Pigs (not to be confused with Jeffrey Kahn’s story in the March issue of Seed called The Case for Human Guinea Pigs) about how big pharm uses the population of India for cheap drug trials. They receive informed consent, but, as one doctor in the article says: "Nine out of 10 times, the patient will just ask me to make the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a physician, concentrating on what’s best for the patient? Or am I a researcher interested in recruiting patients?"

    Now, where did I put my PharmAmorin?

  • Take Two and Love Me in the Morning

    Happy_pillPsychologist and writer Lauren Slater published an essay in the Times a few days ago with a warning to psychotropic pill poppers: "Buyer beware." Hype followed by disappointment fills the historical landscape of pharmaceutical wonderdrugs, from chlorpromazine to Ambien. She notes: "I’m surprised we haven’t yet created chemical cures for those mourning their chemical cures."

    Oh, but dear Lauren, we have! On March 6, The Onion reported: "The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers." Side effects include "ignoring the side effects of prescription drug medication."

    Snarky aside: Slater is a great writer, and I’m sure she’s a great psychologist, but I’m glad she’s not a psychiatrist. She writes, "I like the idea that human hope has a half-life of about 10 years and is fully excreted in two decades". I like the idea of a doctor who understands what half-life means.

  • The Mannequin Within Us All

    What happens when you lock a woman in a tiny room with a mannequin for 11 days? This:

    Mom never fully recovered from this experiment. Neither did Mandy. (She disappeared in 1998; the last time I saw her she was modeling a dress made of pretzels for my friend Yvonne in an art show. (My mannequin, not my mom.))

    Full transcript, plus outtakes, after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Bossy Boots

    Look_aroundI have discovered what may be the Best Thing Ever. It’s a 2002 episode of the BBC’s Look Around You dedicated to the brain. Take out your copy books, as you will learn things such as the following:

    "The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."

    Watch it. 

  • Duck and Cover

    BulletappleSometimes errors in articles inspire great mental images. For example, this Nature News article describes a pair of satellites that orbit "several hundred metres from Earth." If I worked on an upper floor of the Sears Tower I might apply for relocation right about now. I picture Doc Edgerton’s famous bullet-through-the-apple photo, with glass instead of pulp. (Satellites in low Earth orbit go about 18,000 mph, 10 times faster than Doc’s bullet.)

    The gaff resembles an announcement I’ve rehearsed in my head for many years: "We’ve now reached our cruising altitude of 20 feet." The question that plagues me is: What altitude in that scenario produces the greatest comedic effect? For now, I’ve settled on 20 feet. (9/11 has rendered the absurdity much darker, but I retain the right to muse innocently. I don’t go beyond cutting off treetops in my imaginary thrill ride.)

    For the record, the two satellites mentioned in the Nature News article orbit at 300-500 kilometers (not meters.) They are part of a NASA program called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment.) GRACE’s most recently published findings reveal that Antarctica is melting. The sat duo can measure the distribution of Earth’s mass by comparing subtle changes in their orbital speeds as they fly over. Mapping the results onto a globe and amplifying the results produces pictures of a lumpy Earth like these.

    One might call the technique terrestrial phrenology. A shrinking bump on the bottom means an unstable Gaia. Apparently Mother Earth has more than just seasonal affective disorder.

  • Ecstatic Static

    EcstasyYour grandparents were right. Rock and roll will rot your brain. (And if they know what trance music was, they’d be scared shitless.)

    For years scientists have debated whether using ecstasy causes brain damage. (With no small amount of drama, thanks to the likes of George Ricaurte and his bobbled bottle debacle, the Hwang Woo-Suk-tastophe of the ecstasy wars.) But  stimulant studies regularly rely on mice and monkeys distanced from human habits of use. Who sits in a silent cage and pops pills for fun?

    To address the issue, Michelangelo Iannone and a team of scientists in Italy threw a rave for their rats. Well, with a few differences. Instead of music, there was loud static, and instead of scalp massages, there were holes in the scull and electrodes on the brain. The goal was to test if acoustic stimulation would affect the neurotoxicity of MDMA (ecstasy.)

    The results? Yes. Blasting white noise at the maximum volume Italian nightclubs allow (95 dB) decreased neural activity in rats dosed with E. Depending on dosage, the brain blotto lasted from several hours to several days. You can download the report, published last week, here, or read about it here.

    DiscomickeyIn the paper, the authors admit, "it is very difficult to indicate the mechanism underlying these effects." So I wondered whether the form the auditory stimuli took mattered. Listening to static at 95 dB can give anyone a headache, but I know subjectively (from taking E at raves as a teenager) that music can greatly enhance the experience of a trip. And I know objectively (from programming neural networks on computers) that random input like static can destroy the organization of a system. A high noise-to-signal ratio washes out meaningful relationships between neurons.

    I asked Iannone if using input with some structure, such as actual music, instead of white noise would make a difference. He replied: "We made a lot of preliminary (and unpublished) experiments to assess if there is a difference between the two stimuli, using a brief ‘techno music’ brain. And I can say that there is no difference (in our hands) between discomusic and loud noise, in terms of effects." Oh well. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s no difference. At the level of the effects that they’re measuring, the brain wouldn’t pay much mind to the informational complexity of the input. It’s all noise to the neurons.

    Fortunately, the brain works at many levels. Under the right circumstances the benefits of E and other drugs can far outweigh the risks. Ecstasy was widely used in psychotherapy until it was outlawed in 1985, and today, researchers such as John Halpern at Harvard are fighting to bring it back. Click here to read about the attempts of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to make ecstasy an FDA-approved prescription medicine.

    GlowstickIn the Italian study, the authors report: "One of the questions which need addressing by research is how other factors typical of the ‘rave scene’, such as sensorial auditory (techno music) stimuli, can affect higher neural functions…" Now that they’ve tackled music, expect future studies to involve tripping rats subjected to candy necklaces and glow sticks.

    Prepare for a whole new species of e-tard.

  • Craptacular Design

    SnotropehopeIntelligent Design is great fodder for satire among the science set. In the new March issue of the The Atlantic Monthly, Bruce McCall riffs on the ID worldview with a short piece called "Not Conspicuously Intelligent Design." The designs that are not conspicuously intelligent include Minneapolis-St.Paul ("Only two big cities in a state of 80,009 square miles, yet less than half a mile apart") and sock static ("Wastes electricity"). I would have added Grape Nuts. No grapes… no nuts… What’s the deal?  McCall’s gags hit closer to home with these biological examples:

    THE NOSE
    • Placement in exact center of face compels unsightly public discharge of liquid waste from head

    DEATH
    • Crimps planning
    • Totally one-sided decision leaves a bad taste
    • After x-million years, exact function still debated

    GloveMy favorite attacks on ID are of the "Why do men have nipples?" type. If there’s an omnipotent designer, what’s with all the useless doodads and embarrassing/deadly oddities we find in the biological world? The geologist Don Wise pushes the idea of incompetent design ("the other ID") in an interview for Seed. He says, "No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us," and goes on to list several of the examples: We have too many teeth, our pelvises aren’t straight, we have appendices and tonsils, our retinal receptors are facing the wrong way… And he quotes a man who wrote to him, "I would write more, but I have to go pee in Morse code, because some idiot designed my aging prostate."

    The science writer Jim Holt took a more somber tone last year in an essay for the NYT Magazine titled "Unintelligent Design." He reminds us that nearly every species ever "designed" is now extinct. He mentions dying cancer patients who must suffer although the corporal status updates that physical pain provides are no longer required. And he notes that most pregnancies end prematurely. That last fact, combined with two common beliefs–that the soul originates at conception, and that one is a sinner unworthy of salvation until baptism–should lead to quite the quandary for many Christians. "Owing to faulty reproductive design," he writes, "it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined." Awwwwwk-ward…

    EngineerCall it what you want: "Incompetent Design," "Unintelligent Design," "Design By Numbers–The Dyscalculic Deity Edition"… It reminds me of an engineering joke. Three engineers were arguing over what type of engineer God would be. The mechanical engineer said God had to be an ME because of our sophisticated skeletons. The electrical engineer claimed God as an EE because the human brain is the best damn computer around. But the civil engineer had the last word. "God would have to be a civil engineer. I mean, who else would run a sewage system through a major recreational area?"

  • I like my humour dry and my yolks runny.

    Chakras_cancerFor a few years there has been a recipe on the Internet that describes how to cook an egg using two mobile phones. Here it is. Basically, you place two phones on a table, place an egg between their antennae, and call one phone from the other. Assuming a power output of two watts, the egg should be cooked in three minutes. Oh, you’re also supposed to play a radio in the background at "a comfortable volume."

    As far as comedy goes, this piece is pretty dry. I can see people missing the joke completely. (Especially those suspicious that cell phones cause cancer or harm chakras.) Well, it has been making the rounds again, and I was surprised this week to find that a couple of my favorite bloggers who happen to write professionally about science and technology are among those who missed the joke. (I will not name names, as they have already been shamed by their readers.)

    Okay, without doing any research whatsoever, here are three easy ways to use your own common sense to debunk the hoax.

    1.) If mobile phone antennae can cook an egg, why don’t you feel the slightest heat from them on your ear after using them for even an hour? You’re better off using heat from the battery.

    2.) Microwave ovens have several HUNDRED watts, and THEY take several minutes to cook an egg. How could a phone cook one in the same time with two watts?

    3.) Have you heard of cell phone towers? Cell phones communicate with them. Cell phones do not communicate directly with each other. That’s what walkie-talkies do. (Bonus, not as obvious: Cell phones don’t send data solely in a straight line to cell towers either. Do RAZRs have homing devices that know where the towers are and aim transmission straight to them as you bumble about? No, they emit signals in all directions.)

    If you do a little Googling, you’ll find more technical reasons why the gag won’t work, but any one of the above three should be sufficient.

    So before you go fiddling with the radio stations on your hifi, wondering why your egg is still cold (would smooth jazz work better?), please recognize that not everything you read on the Internets is true. And if you’re really worried about brain tumors, forget phone phobia and stay the hell away from any radio playing Beyoncé’s new single, "Check On It". That shit is toxic.