Silver Jacket

Category: Science

  • Common Sense is Relative

    IcetraysRecently someone on an email list I’m on posed the following question:

    "So, how come we don’t dump large quantities of ice in the water when we know hurricanes are over it gaining their strength from warm water?"

    Good idea. Also, how come we don’t counteract the winds with big fans blowing in the opposite direction? With enough fans, we could stop a storm in its tracks. Oh, and how about preventing global warming by everybody turning up their air conditioning?

    Now, contributors to this email list are almost exclusively well-educated, especially in scientific fields. And I knew from previous posts that the ice questioner was no dummy. So I assumed the question was a joke.

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  • When is a cliché not a cliché?

    CatsuitSo yesterday I’m reading an article in Slate itemizing government idiocy, and I come across the following sentence:

    We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliché.

    Really? We are?

    Has the writer successfully avoided cliché by couching a cliché as he did? (My vote: No. The sentence is clumsy and hackish.)

    On a deeper note, can a cliché ever not be a cliché?

    (Actually, I do recall one other rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" could possibly have been uttered without lapsing into cliché. Years ago, in an attempt to manifest a version of the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment for a school science fair project, I locked a clown in a large wooden box. I arranged the triggering device so that it had a 50% chance of launching a cream pie at Hobo Jim’s face, and a 50% chance of hitting him with an exploding baby. [Not everyone is familiar with quantum mechanics, so here is some background: Pies in the face are funny. Gruesome infant fatality is horrendous.] Until I opened that box to witness the results, I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. So I did both.)

  • The Man Who Takes the Science out of Scientology

    Cruise_lauerFor years I’ve had a recurring dream in which, outlandish as it sounds, Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise debate the finer points of neuropharmacology on national television. Crazy stuff, fodder for a Spielberg movie, I know. But today my odd dreams retroactively became premonitions.

    Okay, there are a few differences. Replace "finer points" with "coarser points." Replace Cruise in a flight suit with Cruise in a creepy stupor, sporting bags under his eyes and a cult-addled stare. And replace Lauer dressed as a court jester with Lauer as my new Hero. [Also, remove the weird sex stuff.] There you have what transpired this morning on "Today."

    Scientologists notoriously hate psychiatry. Lauer breaches the topic and eggs Cruise on, revealing Cruise to be pedantic, myopic, and apparently illiterate. I’m still not sure how a man who says "you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay?  That’s what I’ve done" in the same conversation as "there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance" can figure out which tube is for food and which tube is for air.

  • Memory is Treachery

    Persistence_of_memoryThis week The New Yorker, the creme of the fact-checking crop, perpetuates the common misdiagnosis of Memento‘s protagonist. According to movie critic David Denby, an otherwise careful judge of character and plot, Leonard "suffers from short-term memory loss." Um, no.

    As any cognitive neuropsychologist worth his salt–or any attentive adult, or, come to think of it, your average inattentive six-year-old–can tell, Leonard’s short-term memory works just fine. How else would he carry on a conversation? What he suffers from is an inability to transfer things from short-term memory to long-term memory. A few minutes after a conversation is over, he forgets it.

    Now, maybe I’m a stickler for details. After all, I did spend two years in a lab that studied learning and memory. And the professor I worked for, Anthony Wagner (now at Stanford), was interviewed on NPR about Memento. And he collaborated with Sue Corkin, known for her studies with the most famous anterograde amnesia sufferer in the annals of science, patient HM. (Leonard in Memento has anterograde amnesia.)

    But, really, is it all that complicated? The concept of short-term memory? Remembering things for a short amount of time, as Leonard so capably demonstrates over and over throughout the entirety of the film? The real question is: How did this Memento misdiagnosis meme begin? It’s easy to hear "short-term memory loss" and repeat it without stopping to think about it (as nearly every movie critic has done), but who was the first person to say, yeah, that’s what it is! Leonard has no short-term memory!

    Sure, "short-term memory loss" is easier on the ear than "anterograde amnesia," but you know what’s even easier? "Amnesia." And, it’s–get this–accurate. If you’re into that sort of thing.

  • Sperm Like Porn Too

    WoodyallenspermNews @ nature reports today on a paper published in Biology Letters showing that "men looking at explicit pictures of two naked men with a naked woman have been shown to produce higher-quality sperm than those watching pornographic images featuring women only." Apparently males of many species produce better sperm in the face of competition. Not literally in the face of, but, I mean, er, you get my drift.

    Why stop with two competitors? When I fall in love and settle down to start a family, I’m totally stocking up on gangbang videos. Only the best for my progeny. I can see it now:

    "Darling, it is time for that most special moment, when we spark the life of our first child, whom we will love and care for with unyielding attention. A new, wonderful person shall flourish before us.  Oh, how I love you. Hold on a sec while I put on The Lonely Slut’s Pile-It-On Cum Drainage 7."

  • Ligers, Tigons, and Genomes, Oh My!

    Dyson_supermanLegendary physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson wrote recently in Technology Review about evolution. Based on a 2004 article by microbiologist Carl Woese, he refers to a pre-Darwinian era as the age before species, when organisms traded genes freely. According to Dyson, genetic evolution will soon piggyback on cultural evolution, leading to a post-Darwinian era that will resemble the pre-Darwinian era in one important way: the prominence of horizontal gene transfer. As culture makes the distribution of ideas (in particular those underpinning genetic engineering) more fluid, biology will follow. Species will no longer exist, as ligers and tigons and tomacco-ti-ligers rule the earth and reproduce in orgiastic laboratory love puddles. Kids can even get in on the action (no not that way):

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  • Vanity Plates at Fermilab

    Cquark_1The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, outside of Chicago, is home to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. One of its biggest successes was the discovery of the last of the six quarks, the top quark, in 1995. (They also discovered the bottom quark in 1977.)

    When I worked at Fermilab (03-04) I did a fairly comprehensive survey of physics-related vanity plates among the staff and users. The number of ways people referenced “quark” on their plates approached the number of ways people spell “Britney Spears” in Google.

    Physicist Michael Tartaglia has owned “DO TOP 1” since he came to the lab in 1990. “I thought it would globally advertise Fermilab’s mission to study the top quark, and locally advertise my affiliation with DZero [one of the particle detectors],” he said.  (He no longer works with DZero, but the ring in “DO” doubles as a letter O, making "DO" a verb.)

    Particle physicist Rajendran Raja has had “TP QUARK” since 1995, the year of the discovery. “I was the top quark convener in DZero from 1990-1994 and felt proud of the achievement of the whole collaboration,” he told me.

    Particle physicist Harry Cheung got “CQUARK 1” in 1997.  He works on an experiment called FOCUS, where they study the charm quark, “though it could stand for ‘See Quark 1,’” he said.  “CQUARK” was not taken, but adding the 1 actually reduces the licensing fee.

    Oh, the equivocating.  Theorist Zach Sullivan kept it simple: “QUARK.”  When he picked it up around 10 years ago, the people at the registry apologized for misspelling “quirk.”  But at Fermilab, there can be no misunderstanding.

  • You Spin Me Right Round

    Copter2Um, so does anyone know anything about physics? Please speak up, because everything I know about physics says that this is not possible:
    http://mediax.muchosucko.com/movies/512-alan_vegasfunflydemo_2004.mov
    [copy and paste it. the webmaster blocks direct links to the movie.]

  • Girl vs. Machine

    ArmwrestlingI’m writing an article for HowStuffWorks about artificial muscles (known in the field as electroactive polymers, or EAPs). The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) held their Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) Conference here in San Diego this week, and on the first day they had an arm-wrestling competition between a human and a trio of EAP robotic arms. Panna Felsen, a local high-school senior, defeated each arm in mere seconds. RoboCop, look out! So who is this super-human? Well, it turns out it doesn’t take much strength to overpower artificial muscles, but check this: Felsen designs robots, she gets straight A’s in half a dozen AP classes a year, she teaches ballroom dancing, she’s been a competitive swimmer for eight years, and she builds "EXTREME SAND CASTLES!" Plus, look at that headshot. Modeling can’t be far behind. How do I console myself? I consider she’s probably much uglier in real life. Besides, I heard the Internet subtracts 20 pounds. Ego spared! 

    UPDATE: After finding more photos of Felsen on the Internet, my hypothesis has fallen. She is genuinely attractive (for a 17-year-old of course…) Ego crushed!