The Steinbeck classic. I chose it because my 12-year-old seventh-grader was assigned this book. She is reaching the age where I will enjoy reading (or, usually, re-reading) books from my school career.
I had never read this Steinbeck story, but had a pretty good guess to its ending based on a film I saw as a youngster.
"The Pearl" is my favorite Steinbeck story. I tried re-reading "The Grapes of Wrath" a few years ago but could not complete it, it made me too sad. I may try again.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Pari-mutuel betting and social proof
I am reading "Influence" by Robert Cialdini. One source of influence is "social proof". Think of commercials that state, Tide is the best-selling detergent. The commercial is not stating directly that the product is any good. The fixed-action-pattern is that is everyone else is thinking a certain way then that thinking must be accurate. Cialdini describes many ways this fixed-action-pattern can be exploited, and one is at the racetrack.
Horse racing tracks are examples of pari-mutuel betting. The odds paid on any one horse are based on the betting. If many bettors bet on horse A and few bet on horse B then horse A winning will pay less per dollar bet horse B winning. For example, horse A may pay 4-to-1 odds while horse B pays 25-to-1. The racetrack calculates the odds to ensure that, whichever horse wins, it will have collected enough from the losing bettors to pay the winning bettors, with some left over as profit (or, more accurately, revenue).
Many bettors know little about horses and are content to bet on the horse with the smallest odds, figuring that the smaller odds represent a lot of bettors thinking that horse is likely to win.
A sharp bettor can take advantage of this fact by, at the start of betting, wagering heavily on an unlikely winner. This betting will drive the odds down; amateur bettors will take these odds as evidence of a likely win, bet on this horse, and drive the odds down further.
Then, this sharp bettor can bet on the horse he/she feels is most likely to win and receive better odds than if that original, distracting bet had never been placed. This strategy, if employed repeatedly, should generate higher-than-average payoffs.
Horse racing tracks are examples of pari-mutuel betting. The odds paid on any one horse are based on the betting. If many bettors bet on horse A and few bet on horse B then horse A winning will pay less per dollar bet horse B winning. For example, horse A may pay 4-to-1 odds while horse B pays 25-to-1. The racetrack calculates the odds to ensure that, whichever horse wins, it will have collected enough from the losing bettors to pay the winning bettors, with some left over as profit (or, more accurately, revenue).
Many bettors know little about horses and are content to bet on the horse with the smallest odds, figuring that the smaller odds represent a lot of bettors thinking that horse is likely to win.
A sharp bettor can take advantage of this fact by, at the start of betting, wagering heavily on an unlikely winner. This betting will drive the odds down; amateur bettors will take these odds as evidence of a likely win, bet on this horse, and drive the odds down further.
Then, this sharp bettor can bet on the horse he/she feels is most likely to win and receive better odds than if that original, distracting bet had never been placed. This strategy, if employed repeatedly, should generate higher-than-average payoffs.
My Wife's Foot, Part IV
Julia had her screws removed today in a 30-minute operation. An anesthesiologist gave her propofol, the same drug that Los Angeles alleges killed Michael Jackson; the surgeon then applied local anesthetic to her foot.
She is wearing a large bandage on that foot now and has been instructed to keep it dry for the next seven days. The surgeon also suggested she take it easy for the next few days. She has her ibuprofen and acetaminophen at-the-ready.
She was not anxious about the surgery and is feeling optimistic about her foot.
She is wearing a large bandage on that foot now and has been instructed to keep it dry for the next seven days. The surgeon also suggested she take it easy for the next few days. She has her ibuprofen and acetaminophen at-the-ready.
She was not anxious about the surgery and is feeling optimistic about her foot.
Ivan Pavlov
Commuting stinks, and it is made more tolerable by books-on-CD, such as Psychology of Human Behavior.
Most people are familiar with the name Pavlov and the concept of "Pavlovian response" or "Pavlovian conditioning". According to the book-on-CD Pavlov, who won his Nobel prize for physiology before he started his experiments on dogs, stumbled on to his subject. He used machines to feed dogs so as to study how the digestive system performs its work. Salivation is part of the digestive system, and he and his assistants would collect the saliva as they would collect bile and acid. One day the machine malfunctioned, but still produced the standard click-and-whirr noises, and the dogs still salivated.
Some definitions are in order:
Unconditioned stimulus: a naturally occurring stimulus.
Unconditioned response: a naturally occurring response. When food enters an animal's mouth (the unconditioned stimulus) salivation occurs (the unconditioned response). No learning is necessary for this response, it is "built-in".
Conditioned stimulus: an artificially occurring stimulus, such as a bell being sounded at the same time that food is presented.
Conditioned response: a response generated from the conditioned stimulus (often the same as the unconditioned stimulus).
There are two types of conditioning: classical and operant. Classical conditioning may be approximated as involuntary actions. For example, a sudden noise or flash of light may generate faster heartbeats, and producing such noises or light for the purpose of generating heartbeats would be called classical conditioning. Operant conditioning can be approximated as the study of voluntary actions: does increasing pay generate more or higher-quality work from employees?
Most people are familiar with the name Pavlov and the concept of "Pavlovian response" or "Pavlovian conditioning". According to the book-on-CD Pavlov, who won his Nobel prize for physiology before he started his experiments on dogs, stumbled on to his subject. He used machines to feed dogs so as to study how the digestive system performs its work. Salivation is part of the digestive system, and he and his assistants would collect the saliva as they would collect bile and acid. One day the machine malfunctioned, but still produced the standard click-and-whirr noises, and the dogs still salivated.
Some definitions are in order:
Unconditioned stimulus: a naturally occurring stimulus.
Unconditioned response: a naturally occurring response. When food enters an animal's mouth (the unconditioned stimulus) salivation occurs (the unconditioned response). No learning is necessary for this response, it is "built-in".
Conditioned stimulus: an artificially occurring stimulus, such as a bell being sounded at the same time that food is presented.
Conditioned response: a response generated from the conditioned stimulus (often the same as the unconditioned stimulus).
There are two types of conditioning: classical and operant. Classical conditioning may be approximated as involuntary actions. For example, a sudden noise or flash of light may generate faster heartbeats, and producing such noises or light for the purpose of generating heartbeats would be called classical conditioning. Operant conditioning can be approximated as the study of voluntary actions: does increasing pay generate more or higher-quality work from employees?
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Filtering
I am listening to The Great Ideas of Psychology on CD, narrated by Daniel Robinson, a professor at Georgetown University.
I have spoken in previous posts of the brain's imperfections in perception and memory. Professor Robinson summarized the case nicely: we constantly filter the information coming to us, so it should not be a surprised that, at times, we cannot later accurately restate what truly happened.
The filtering occurs at a physical and cognitive level. At the physical level, our eyes will not respond to light with a wavelength of infrared or longer, nor to with a wavelength of ultra-violet or shorter. Our eardrums will not mimic vibrations in the air occurring more frequently that 20 thousand times per second nor less frequently than 20 times per second. There are many chemical compounds in the air we label "odorless", but in fact they are detectable, just not by human noses.
Even with these limitations there is still a lot of information impinging on us at all times. We would not be able to function if we attempted to process all of it. The human brain, over eons of natural selection, has become adept at focusing on just those things we need to maximize survival. Our cognition is so adept, in fact, that we approximate it as perfect, so that cases like The Invisible Gorilla become fascinating.
I have spoken in previous posts of the brain's imperfections in perception and memory. Professor Robinson summarized the case nicely: we constantly filter the information coming to us, so it should not be a surprised that, at times, we cannot later accurately restate what truly happened.
The filtering occurs at a physical and cognitive level. At the physical level, our eyes will not respond to light with a wavelength of infrared or longer, nor to with a wavelength of ultra-violet or shorter. Our eardrums will not mimic vibrations in the air occurring more frequently that 20 thousand times per second nor less frequently than 20 times per second. There are many chemical compounds in the air we label "odorless", but in fact they are detectable, just not by human noses.
Even with these limitations there is still a lot of information impinging on us at all times. We would not be able to function if we attempted to process all of it. The human brain, over eons of natural selection, has become adept at focusing on just those things we need to maximize survival. Our cognition is so adept, in fact, that we approximate it as perfect, so that cases like The Invisible Gorilla become fascinating.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Book review: The Man in the Rockefeller Suit
Authored by Mark Seal in 2011 (ISBN 978-0-670-02274-0).
I very nearly did not read this very enjoyable book. The first couple of pages read with a overdone gasping excitement. Luckily, I had nothing else to read, and the story, to date unfinished, held me.
The author is a Vanity Fair reporter. I first read Vanity Fair a few years ago and liked it, but a few issues later I found myself regarding it as an upscale, liberal-oriented People magazine. Liberal, yet willing to exploit scantily-clad females on the cover.
Seal interviewed over 200 people in writing his book. In his Acknowledgments he thanks his magazine and editor for allowing him to pursue the story. I had not thought of it before, but authors of stories like this one put hundreds of hours of research and investigation into an effort that might not lead to a book. I wonder was the success rate is? 90%? 9%? One-in-a-million? Do they at least have an inkling that the effort might lead to at least a magazine or newspaper article (this story, in abbreviated form, was first published in Vanity Fair.
Christian Carl Gerhartsreiter is a German national (meaning he is originally from Germany but not here permanently) who arrived on United States soil in 1978. The author, despite all those interviews, could not establish his birthdate. Upon arriving he started lying about his name and history, and has not stopped. The author covered six names that Gerhartsreiter has used; perhaps there are others. As he moved from the East coast to California and back he relied on the kindness of strangers and the awe he struck with his tales of fortune. He relied on the truism that the best lies are the most far-fetched.
We was finally arrested in Baltimore for kidnapping his daughter. As part of his divorce settlement he was allowed supervised visitation. He enlisted two innocent helpers to screen (as in basketball) the court-appointed supervisor while he pushed his daughter into a waiting car that drove him to Manhattan. He took another vehicle to Baltimore. The FBI chased several dead-end leads, as Gerhartsreiter had told acquaintances different stories about where he would be: Peru, some Caribbean islands, etc. Upon arrest, and to this day, he insists his name is James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, even though there are no birth records of such a person and his fingerprints match those of Gerhartsreiter upon his entry to the U.S.
He pled insanity at his 2008 trial but was convicted and sentenced to four-to-five years. He will be eligible for parole shortly. However, seven months ago a Los Angeles county Grand Jury indicted him for the 1985 murder of a California woman, where he was living at the time.
I very nearly did not read this very enjoyable book. The first couple of pages read with a overdone gasping excitement. Luckily, I had nothing else to read, and the story, to date unfinished, held me.
The author is a Vanity Fair reporter. I first read Vanity Fair a few years ago and liked it, but a few issues later I found myself regarding it as an upscale, liberal-oriented People magazine. Liberal, yet willing to exploit scantily-clad females on the cover.
Seal interviewed over 200 people in writing his book. In his Acknowledgments he thanks his magazine and editor for allowing him to pursue the story. I had not thought of it before, but authors of stories like this one put hundreds of hours of research and investigation into an effort that might not lead to a book. I wonder was the success rate is? 90%? 9%? One-in-a-million? Do they at least have an inkling that the effort might lead to at least a magazine or newspaper article (this story, in abbreviated form, was first published in Vanity Fair.
Christian Carl Gerhartsreiter is a German national (meaning he is originally from Germany but not here permanently) who arrived on United States soil in 1978. The author, despite all those interviews, could not establish his birthdate. Upon arriving he started lying about his name and history, and has not stopped. The author covered six names that Gerhartsreiter has used; perhaps there are others. As he moved from the East coast to California and back he relied on the kindness of strangers and the awe he struck with his tales of fortune. He relied on the truism that the best lies are the most far-fetched.
We was finally arrested in Baltimore for kidnapping his daughter. As part of his divorce settlement he was allowed supervised visitation. He enlisted two innocent helpers to screen (as in basketball) the court-appointed supervisor while he pushed his daughter into a waiting car that drove him to Manhattan. He took another vehicle to Baltimore. The FBI chased several dead-end leads, as Gerhartsreiter had told acquaintances different stories about where he would be: Peru, some Caribbean islands, etc. Upon arrest, and to this day, he insists his name is James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, even though there are no birth records of such a person and his fingerprints match those of Gerhartsreiter upon his entry to the U.S.
He pled insanity at his 2008 trial but was convicted and sentenced to four-to-five years. He will be eligible for parole shortly. However, seven months ago a Los Angeles county Grand Jury indicted him for the 1985 murder of a California woman, where he was living at the time.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Book review: Sleights of Mind
Authored by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-8050-9281-3). The authors interviewed many magicians and got themselves invited to magicians' trade shows, and these experiences form the basis of the book. They provide some very nice examples on their website.
This is another book in the vein of how our brains fail to grasp reality. I have enjoyed magic since I was a child. One of my fondest memories is of a David Copperfield show I attended in my 20s in Boston. Among other things, he performed card tricks with a camera and an audience member watching from inches away. The things he did were plainly impossible, yet they were happening. He closed his show by flying around the stage, through hoops to show that no wires were involved. To this day I do not know how he did that, and I am ambivalent about knowing.
The book describes how magic tricks work, both from a general theoretical perspective and a this-is-how-this-particular-trick-is-performed perspective. The latter is called out by "Spoiler Alert" in bold letters before and after each such section, and such sections comprise a good quarter or third of the book. I skipped these sections, as I hope to attend more magic shows in my life and do not want the tricks "spoiled".
The general theoretical perspective is this: our brains excel at recognizing patterns, to the extent that we tend to observe patterns even when they do not exist. Further, our brains try to reach conclusions quickly, as that gives us our best chances in identifying prey and avoiding predators. The modern world does not resemble the world of 10,000 years ago, even though our brains have changed little, so magicians, through careful analysis of how our brains short-circuit careful observation with pattern recognition, can devise sequences that encourage, perhaps demand, careless observation.
One common illusion is that our eyes see everything there is to see. The invisible gorilla is one example of this falsehood. It is true that all available light enters your pupil. But your retina contains a blind spot and unevenly distributed rods and cones. It converts the light energy into electrical energy, which triggers certain neurons. These neurons trigger certain emotions that adjusts the "plain" light energy, and that is what you "see". You are not a video camera.
Optical illusions are commonplace. Staring at a waterfall causes the objects nearby to appear to float upward. Observe a flash of light contemporaneously with hearing multiple beeps and you report that you saw multiple flashes. We learn as infants and toddlers that objects have size, shape and color constancy. The magician need only change one or more of those things to cause you to (falsely) believe an object is moving. The McGurk effect shows that what we hear is influenced by what we see.
Beyond visual illusions there are cognitive and memory illusions. For an example of a cognitive illusion, a magician named Apollo pickpockets a man on stage, taking advantage of the fact that we can really concentrate on only one thing at a time, no matter how much folks want to brag about their multitasking abilities. An example of a memory illusion is the common trick of misstating what is transpiring. The magician will pull a cloth here, wave a wand there, position a person, and so on. Near the end of the trick the magician will repeat, in words, what has happened, and will lie about it, and because our memories are confused by the constant patter and unusual circumstances, we believe the lies.
The next Informatica World conference is in Las Vegas. I attended the 2009 version, also in Las Vegas. It was my first visit to that city and I will not be unhappy if it is my last, also. If I end up going, though, I will be sure to take in a magic show.
This is another book in the vein of how our brains fail to grasp reality. I have enjoyed magic since I was a child. One of my fondest memories is of a David Copperfield show I attended in my 20s in Boston. Among other things, he performed card tricks with a camera and an audience member watching from inches away. The things he did were plainly impossible, yet they were happening. He closed his show by flying around the stage, through hoops to show that no wires were involved. To this day I do not know how he did that, and I am ambivalent about knowing.
The book describes how magic tricks work, both from a general theoretical perspective and a this-is-how-this-particular-trick-is-performed perspective. The latter is called out by "Spoiler Alert" in bold letters before and after each such section, and such sections comprise a good quarter or third of the book. I skipped these sections, as I hope to attend more magic shows in my life and do not want the tricks "spoiled".
The general theoretical perspective is this: our brains excel at recognizing patterns, to the extent that we tend to observe patterns even when they do not exist. Further, our brains try to reach conclusions quickly, as that gives us our best chances in identifying prey and avoiding predators. The modern world does not resemble the world of 10,000 years ago, even though our brains have changed little, so magicians, through careful analysis of how our brains short-circuit careful observation with pattern recognition, can devise sequences that encourage, perhaps demand, careless observation.
One common illusion is that our eyes see everything there is to see. The invisible gorilla is one example of this falsehood. It is true that all available light enters your pupil. But your retina contains a blind spot and unevenly distributed rods and cones. It converts the light energy into electrical energy, which triggers certain neurons. These neurons trigger certain emotions that adjusts the "plain" light energy, and that is what you "see". You are not a video camera.
Optical illusions are commonplace. Staring at a waterfall causes the objects nearby to appear to float upward. Observe a flash of light contemporaneously with hearing multiple beeps and you report that you saw multiple flashes. We learn as infants and toddlers that objects have size, shape and color constancy. The magician need only change one or more of those things to cause you to (falsely) believe an object is moving. The McGurk effect shows that what we hear is influenced by what we see.
Beyond visual illusions there are cognitive and memory illusions. For an example of a cognitive illusion, a magician named Apollo pickpockets a man on stage, taking advantage of the fact that we can really concentrate on only one thing at a time, no matter how much folks want to brag about their multitasking abilities. An example of a memory illusion is the common trick of misstating what is transpiring. The magician will pull a cloth here, wave a wand there, position a person, and so on. Near the end of the trick the magician will repeat, in words, what has happened, and will lie about it, and because our memories are confused by the constant patter and unusual circumstances, we believe the lies.
The next Informatica World conference is in Las Vegas. I attended the 2009 version, also in Las Vegas. It was my first visit to that city and I will not be unhappy if it is my last, also. If I end up going, though, I will be sure to take in a magic show.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Book review: Brain Bugs
Authored by Dean Buonomano in 2011 (ISBN 978-0-393-07602-8).
My wife likely picked this book for me from the library shelf because of my recent interest in psychology. I have been listening to psychology lectures via CD while commuting, enjoying Robert Cialdini's columns, and relating my recollections of The Invisible Gorilla.
The thesis running through these sources is that our brains strongly resemble the brains of humans from 10,000 years ago because little natural selection has occurred since then, both because of the relatively short time elapsed (merely 500 generations) and because few modern-day humans are unable to reproduce due to the inability to survive until reproductive age. The human brains of 10,000 years ago were well adapted to life at that time. The human brains of today, being largely the same, are perhaps not so well adapted, as the world has changed substantially during that time: agriculture, the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, and now the information revolution.
Buonomano introduces us to the brain as neural network, rather than computer. The brain primarily works with associations, and he gives the following example. Answer these questions: 1) What continent is Kenya in? What are the two opposing colors in the game of chess? Name any animal. 20% of us answer "zebra" to the third question when it is asked after the first two. If the first two are not asked, less than 1% of us answer "zebra". Plainly, the relationship between zebras, chess colors and Africa influences our answer. As another example, try to memorize these words: rest, bed, dark, snore, wake, slumber midnight, dream, snooze.
This quirk of answering "zebra" is the rule, not the exception. Our ability to recognize patterns is at the heart of our humanness. Language is all about patterns, and computers, for all their wonder, are not so good at them, as anyone who has suffered through a call-center's voice recognition software can confirm. A five-year-old is much better than the strongest computer at understanding speech (at least what words were said, if not their meaning). Likewise, a two-year-old can recognize Grandma even after not seeing her for some time, and even if Grandma changes her hair and glasses. Computers struggle, and that is the basis for CAPTCHA tests.
Recalling the list of words from two paragraphs ago, do you remember the word "sleep"? If yes, check again, it was not on the list.
This facility with patterns was probably very helpful to early humans attempting to find prey and avoid predators. Precision, as is sometimes required in our modern world, was less valuable. Even today, some hunter-gatherer cultures do not employ numbers beyond 1; everything is labeled "zero", "one" or "many". As Buonomano explains, when faced with a den of snakes or surveying a herd of deer, a human able to form the concept of "many" is just as well prepared as the one who can distinguish between 42 and 43.
As a former attorney I am particularly interested in human perception and memory, as it forms the basis for most evidence introduced in courtrooms. The legal field has long recognized that testimony is potentially inaccurate owing to defects in one or more of the following: perception, memory, communication and bias. Cross-examination is designed to allow the opposing party to highlight these sources of error. Most people recognize that memory degrades after time, but I was fascinated by the experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus.
After learning about her work I strongly suspect my memory and the memories of others. She would show a movie and split the observers into two groups, say 20 people in each group. The movie consisted of scenes from a suburban school. There was a school bus, children milling about, but no child entered or exited the bus. She would question those in the first group, including "do you remember a child entering the bus?" Perhaps a few would answer yes. (This by itself is an interesting result.) She would not ask that question of the second group. A week later she would invite both groups back; this time, both groups were asked that question. With the second group, again a few would answer yes. With the first group, those that were "primed" with the question a week earlier, many would answer yes. The conclusion: one can influence the memory of another person about a past event just by asking about that event. I have always been ambivalent about the death penalty because so many convictions rely on eyewitness testimony.
Some people suffer injuries to their brains that cause them to think abnormally. Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat covers many such cases. Buonomano describes Capgras syndrome and phantom limbs. People who lose limbs often continue to "feel" them; the feelings can be painful and no intervention has proven effective in all cases. There is a converse condition called somatoparaphrenia: patients deny that a portion of their body belongs to them, stating calmly and bizarrely that they have never seen that limb before.
Scenario 1: a plane crashes because of a never-before-observed, unpreventable mechanical failure. Scenario 2: a plane crashes because of a terrorist attack. Which scenario generates more anger? Scenario 2, of course, but why? Terrorism has killed a few thousand people over the last decade, as against 450,000 motor vehicle accidents. Humans instinctively fear other humans and animals, and that made sense 10,000 years ago when fights for territory and survival were critical to perpetuating your genes; death from mechanical failure was unknown and death from poor health habits was at the least poorly understood. Darwin commented on this instinctive fear when describing the Galapagos Islands, which contained some species with no natural predators. Guns were unnecessary to shoot birds. He could walk up to a bird and with his gun push if off a branch.
For me, the most humorous, yet dark, examples of maladaptive brain functioning is in marketing. Whereas we have the power to reason carefully and analytically, our brains have a strong preference for shortcuts: fast, contextual analysis. Baby ducks will imprint on the first thing that moves. 99.9% of the time thing will be Mom, but experiments have shown that a man in a white lab coat will suffice, too. 99.9% of the time the brain activity from 10,000 years ago is sufficient for us, too, but marketers are keen to exploit the remaining fraction. Much has been written on this subject, so I will comment on one Buonomano includes. Monkeys tend to spend more time looking at dominant members. They will do so even at the expense of missing out on a treat. "Mirror" neurons are activated by these visual impressions. And so it is with us, explaining why Accenture showcased Tiger Woods, even though we are aware Mr. Woods probably knows nothing about business process re-engineering.
My wife likely picked this book for me from the library shelf because of my recent interest in psychology. I have been listening to psychology lectures via CD while commuting, enjoying Robert Cialdini's columns, and relating my recollections of The Invisible Gorilla.
The thesis running through these sources is that our brains strongly resemble the brains of humans from 10,000 years ago because little natural selection has occurred since then, both because of the relatively short time elapsed (merely 500 generations) and because few modern-day humans are unable to reproduce due to the inability to survive until reproductive age. The human brains of 10,000 years ago were well adapted to life at that time. The human brains of today, being largely the same, are perhaps not so well adapted, as the world has changed substantially during that time: agriculture, the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, and now the information revolution.
Buonomano introduces us to the brain as neural network, rather than computer. The brain primarily works with associations, and he gives the following example. Answer these questions: 1) What continent is Kenya in? What are the two opposing colors in the game of chess? Name any animal. 20% of us answer "zebra" to the third question when it is asked after the first two. If the first two are not asked, less than 1% of us answer "zebra". Plainly, the relationship between zebras, chess colors and Africa influences our answer. As another example, try to memorize these words: rest, bed, dark, snore, wake, slumber midnight, dream, snooze.
This quirk of answering "zebra" is the rule, not the exception. Our ability to recognize patterns is at the heart of our humanness. Language is all about patterns, and computers, for all their wonder, are not so good at them, as anyone who has suffered through a call-center's voice recognition software can confirm. A five-year-old is much better than the strongest computer at understanding speech (at least what words were said, if not their meaning). Likewise, a two-year-old can recognize Grandma even after not seeing her for some time, and even if Grandma changes her hair and glasses. Computers struggle, and that is the basis for CAPTCHA tests.
Recalling the list of words from two paragraphs ago, do you remember the word "sleep"? If yes, check again, it was not on the list.
This facility with patterns was probably very helpful to early humans attempting to find prey and avoid predators. Precision, as is sometimes required in our modern world, was less valuable. Even today, some hunter-gatherer cultures do not employ numbers beyond 1; everything is labeled "zero", "one" or "many". As Buonomano explains, when faced with a den of snakes or surveying a herd of deer, a human able to form the concept of "many" is just as well prepared as the one who can distinguish between 42 and 43.
As a former attorney I am particularly interested in human perception and memory, as it forms the basis for most evidence introduced in courtrooms. The legal field has long recognized that testimony is potentially inaccurate owing to defects in one or more of the following: perception, memory, communication and bias. Cross-examination is designed to allow the opposing party to highlight these sources of error. Most people recognize that memory degrades after time, but I was fascinated by the experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus.
After learning about her work I strongly suspect my memory and the memories of others. She would show a movie and split the observers into two groups, say 20 people in each group. The movie consisted of scenes from a suburban school. There was a school bus, children milling about, but no child entered or exited the bus. She would question those in the first group, including "do you remember a child entering the bus?" Perhaps a few would answer yes. (This by itself is an interesting result.) She would not ask that question of the second group. A week later she would invite both groups back; this time, both groups were asked that question. With the second group, again a few would answer yes. With the first group, those that were "primed" with the question a week earlier, many would answer yes. The conclusion: one can influence the memory of another person about a past event just by asking about that event. I have always been ambivalent about the death penalty because so many convictions rely on eyewitness testimony.
Some people suffer injuries to their brains that cause them to think abnormally. Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat covers many such cases. Buonomano describes Capgras syndrome and phantom limbs. People who lose limbs often continue to "feel" them; the feelings can be painful and no intervention has proven effective in all cases. There is a converse condition called somatoparaphrenia: patients deny that a portion of their body belongs to them, stating calmly and bizarrely that they have never seen that limb before.
Scenario 1: a plane crashes because of a never-before-observed, unpreventable mechanical failure. Scenario 2: a plane crashes because of a terrorist attack. Which scenario generates more anger? Scenario 2, of course, but why? Terrorism has killed a few thousand people over the last decade, as against 450,000 motor vehicle accidents. Humans instinctively fear other humans and animals, and that made sense 10,000 years ago when fights for territory and survival were critical to perpetuating your genes; death from mechanical failure was unknown and death from poor health habits was at the least poorly understood. Darwin commented on this instinctive fear when describing the Galapagos Islands, which contained some species with no natural predators. Guns were unnecessary to shoot birds. He could walk up to a bird and with his gun push if off a branch.
For me, the most humorous, yet dark, examples of maladaptive brain functioning is in marketing. Whereas we have the power to reason carefully and analytically, our brains have a strong preference for shortcuts: fast, contextual analysis. Baby ducks will imprint on the first thing that moves. 99.9% of the time thing will be Mom, but experiments have shown that a man in a white lab coat will suffice, too. 99.9% of the time the brain activity from 10,000 years ago is sufficient for us, too, but marketers are keen to exploit the remaining fraction. Much has been written on this subject, so I will comment on one Buonomano includes. Monkeys tend to spend more time looking at dominant members. They will do so even at the expense of missing out on a treat. "Mirror" neurons are activated by these visual impressions. And so it is with us, explaining why Accenture showcased Tiger Woods, even though we are aware Mr. Woods probably knows nothing about business process re-engineering.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
My Wife's Foot, Part III
It is now 114 days since my wife broke her foot. The cast came off in early August, replaced by a boot. She wore the boot all day for three weeks, removing it for sleeping and bathing. Then she started walking on her foot without a boot, gingerly, around the house, but still wearing the boot much of the time. Progress was steady, until a few days ago, when her foot began to ache after a long day on it (with and without the boot).
She is scared that the pain means she will never be able to walk without pain. I do not know what the eventual outcome will be. I encouraged her to take ibuprofen and keep off her foot for a few days, much as she would if she had never broken her foot.
She is scheduled to have the screws surgically removed on October 12; the pre-op meeting is October 5.
She is scared that the pain means she will never be able to walk without pain. I do not know what the eventual outcome will be. I encouraged her to take ibuprofen and keep off her foot for a few days, much as she would if she had never broken her foot.
She is scheduled to have the screws surgically removed on October 12; the pre-op meeting is October 5.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Book review: The Price of Everything
Authored by Eduardo Porter in 2011 (ISBN 978-1-59184-362-7).
Mr. Porter's thesis can be summed as follows:
* Prices are everywhere. When not reduced to dollars, implicit prices exist, and they drive much behavior. This concept is not new, see Freakonomics.
* Prices are not always rational. They are perhaps even seldom rational.
As an example of irrationality he describes the amounts we are willing to spend, or willing not to receive, in order to avoid injury or death, ours or someone else's. While you may value your own life as priceless, few of us are willing to give everything we own to save the health, or even life, of someone else.
As examples of how we value the lives of others, Superfund site cleanup runs about $1 billion per life saved. Australian air marshals, boarding flights after 9/11, cost $100 million per life saved. School buses do not have seat belts, as each life saved would cost $40 million.
Money is the root of all evil, but some money is nice, and more nicer, to a point. Some countries, such as Bhutan, measure Gross National Happiness, in contrast to the Western world's Gross Domestic Product. Then again, Bhutan is ruled by a King.
I know in my own life I am happier now than I was five or ten years ago. That is a function of settling in to a better relationship with my wife, enjoying my children, and becoming more established in my career. I am fairly certain, though, that doubling my salary would not significantly increase my happiness. Winning the lottery would be terrible: I imagine my relationships with friends and family would be strained if they knew. I would immediately give away 95% of my half to charity. I am not sure what my wife would do with her half.
This book is a quick read, and it was well-written, but its concepts did not stick with me for long.
Mr. Porter's thesis can be summed as follows:
* Prices are everywhere. When not reduced to dollars, implicit prices exist, and they drive much behavior. This concept is not new, see Freakonomics.
* Prices are not always rational. They are perhaps even seldom rational.
As an example of irrationality he describes the amounts we are willing to spend, or willing not to receive, in order to avoid injury or death, ours or someone else's. While you may value your own life as priceless, few of us are willing to give everything we own to save the health, or even life, of someone else.
As examples of how we value the lives of others, Superfund site cleanup runs about $1 billion per life saved. Australian air marshals, boarding flights after 9/11, cost $100 million per life saved. School buses do not have seat belts, as each life saved would cost $40 million.
Money is the root of all evil, but some money is nice, and more nicer, to a point. Some countries, such as Bhutan, measure Gross National Happiness, in contrast to the Western world's Gross Domestic Product. Then again, Bhutan is ruled by a King.
I know in my own life I am happier now than I was five or ten years ago. That is a function of settling in to a better relationship with my wife, enjoying my children, and becoming more established in my career. I am fairly certain, though, that doubling my salary would not significantly increase my happiness. Winning the lottery would be terrible: I imagine my relationships with friends and family would be strained if they knew. I would immediately give away 95% of my half to charity. I am not sure what my wife would do with her half.
This book is a quick read, and it was well-written, but its concepts did not stick with me for long.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Book review: Shoptimism
Authored by Lee Eisenberg in 2009 (ISBN 978-0-7432-9625-0).
This marks my second reading and first review of this entertaining title. Mr. Eisenberg penned this work during the initial stages of the Great Recession. Eisenberg felt that the "American consumer will keep on buying no matter what", in the words of the subtitle. He was only somewhat correct.
Eisenberg divides his work into two sections: 1) what sellers and marketers do to prompt buying, and 2) what motivates buyers.
A former head of marketing at Lands' End, his research included personal professional experience; interviews with executives from retailers and a advertising agencies; transparent and opaque observations of shoppers; and personal buying experience. Part of his personal professional experience includes a stint at Target for the purposes of research. He learned about loss prevention (shoplifting); treating customers nicely regardless of race, age, and disability; and where in the store the various categories of merchandise were offered. He learned nothing about individual products. When asked which blender was better he could do nothing more than read the selling points on the box.
He concludes that there is no conclusion: the sell-side folks do have their tricks, and they are sometimes successful, but not always. On the buy-side there are classic and romantic buyers, but even those labels can seldom be applied without error to any individual.
Eisenberg uses clever phrasing throughout. Classic male buyers, such as myself, are "grab-and-go" types during solitary shopping and "wait-and-whiners" when accompanying their wives. Women who buy too much are impulsive/compulsive shoppers; men who buy too much are "collectors". Retailers, marketers and advertisers struggle to discover/describe the "Unified Buy Theory".
On the "sell" side he describes the various companies that attempt to throw buyers into buckets, and what strategies buyers tend to respond to. I remember, as a law-school student in Boston, being asked to view videos for thirty minutes, for which I would be remunerated five dollars. While I watched videos consisting of, for example, orange juice containers of various brands on store shelves, video cameras pointed at my eyes recorded which containers I focused on first, presumably giving a retailer tips about the kind of packaging that will move merchandise fastest. That was quantitative research, or as Eisenberg calls it, "Quant". "Quals", on the other hand, talk to consumers about their likes and dislikes.
When a retailer wants to encourage a sale it "anchors" the price. Classic buyers for sure, and some romantic buyers as well, do not want to overpay. What, then, is a fair price? How much should a jacket cost? Buyers in general are not familiar with the costs of material, labor, shipping, finance, etc., and so need help. That help comes in the form of anchors. While at Lands' End Eisenberg observed that a jacket would be placed on a page with two other jackets (decoys). The "hero" is the jacket the retailer wants to sell. It is priced between the other two, has features the cheaper one does not and lacks features available in the high-end model. The retailer wants you to buy something and does not particularly care which. By placing the three products on the same page the consumer is presented with an idea of what these things should cost, and the mid-priced option suddenly seems reasonable.
Pricing is an art. Odd prices, such as $4.78, tend to be viewed as bargains. All of us are familiar with prices that end in nines; the nine signifies bargain. Zero signifies quality. Hence prices at upscale restaurants are even dollar amounts; at McDonald's they end in a nine.
There is no price better than free, but why is that. What difference does it matter if it costs one penny. The answer is that risk inheres with all buying: you might be disappointed, and classic/tightwad buyers feel this disappointment more acutely than romantic spendthrifts. A price of zero shouts "no pain here!"
This marks my second reading and first review of this entertaining title. Mr. Eisenberg penned this work during the initial stages of the Great Recession. Eisenberg felt that the "American consumer will keep on buying no matter what", in the words of the subtitle. He was only somewhat correct.
Eisenberg divides his work into two sections: 1) what sellers and marketers do to prompt buying, and 2) what motivates buyers.
A former head of marketing at Lands' End, his research included personal professional experience; interviews with executives from retailers and a advertising agencies; transparent and opaque observations of shoppers; and personal buying experience. Part of his personal professional experience includes a stint at Target for the purposes of research. He learned about loss prevention (shoplifting); treating customers nicely regardless of race, age, and disability; and where in the store the various categories of merchandise were offered. He learned nothing about individual products. When asked which blender was better he could do nothing more than read the selling points on the box.
He concludes that there is no conclusion: the sell-side folks do have their tricks, and they are sometimes successful, but not always. On the buy-side there are classic and romantic buyers, but even those labels can seldom be applied without error to any individual.
Eisenberg uses clever phrasing throughout. Classic male buyers, such as myself, are "grab-and-go" types during solitary shopping and "wait-and-whiners" when accompanying their wives. Women who buy too much are impulsive/compulsive shoppers; men who buy too much are "collectors". Retailers, marketers and advertisers struggle to discover/describe the "Unified Buy Theory".
On the "sell" side he describes the various companies that attempt to throw buyers into buckets, and what strategies buyers tend to respond to. I remember, as a law-school student in Boston, being asked to view videos for thirty minutes, for which I would be remunerated five dollars. While I watched videos consisting of, for example, orange juice containers of various brands on store shelves, video cameras pointed at my eyes recorded which containers I focused on first, presumably giving a retailer tips about the kind of packaging that will move merchandise fastest. That was quantitative research, or as Eisenberg calls it, "Quant". "Quals", on the other hand, talk to consumers about their likes and dislikes.
When a retailer wants to encourage a sale it "anchors" the price. Classic buyers for sure, and some romantic buyers as well, do not want to overpay. What, then, is a fair price? How much should a jacket cost? Buyers in general are not familiar with the costs of material, labor, shipping, finance, etc., and so need help. That help comes in the form of anchors. While at Lands' End Eisenberg observed that a jacket would be placed on a page with two other jackets (decoys). The "hero" is the jacket the retailer wants to sell. It is priced between the other two, has features the cheaper one does not and lacks features available in the high-end model. The retailer wants you to buy something and does not particularly care which. By placing the three products on the same page the consumer is presented with an idea of what these things should cost, and the mid-priced option suddenly seems reasonable.
Pricing is an art. Odd prices, such as $4.78, tend to be viewed as bargains. All of us are familiar with prices that end in nines; the nine signifies bargain. Zero signifies quality. Hence prices at upscale restaurants are even dollar amounts; at McDonald's they end in a nine.
There is no price better than free, but why is that. What difference does it matter if it costs one penny. The answer is that risk inheres with all buying: you might be disappointed, and classic/tightwad buyers feel this disappointment more acutely than romantic spendthrifts. A price of zero shouts "no pain here!"
My Wife's Foot, Part II
It is now 46 days since Julia broke her foot. The diagnosis was Lisfranc with a total of three breaks. Ligaments were damaged, but will heal, we are told. Cartilage was damaged and will not heal and could cause problems down the road. The likelihood of a "good" outcome is "good", in the words of the surgeon. An excellent outcome is unlikely and, in any event, it will be a full year before Julia returns to something resembling normal. After just six weeks of immobility the muscles in her right calf have shrunk considerably.
She had surgery one week after the break. Julia feared not waking from the anesthesia. The young, fit anesthesiologist seemed confident, which I have learned means nothing, and viewed answering Julia's questions as a necessary evil. The surgeon marked Julia's right foot with his initials to verify, 1) he was the one doing the surgery, and 2) it was the right foot that needed it. After surgery she spent an hour in a recovery room and then the evening in a private room. That stay was optional, but she did not feel like going home and she enjoyed the attentions of two nurses who had no other patients to look after. The anesthesiologist applied a "block" to her leg that (by design) made her unable to feel her foot for about 24 hours after the surgery. She took oxycodone (generic version) for pain as sparingly as possible, as one side effect for her (and some others) was constipation.
The surgeon inserted three screws and three pins (closeup). Those pins will come out in a couple of weeks, apparently he just pulls them out, no anesthesia or pain-killers necessary. There is some debate among the medical community about whether the screws should be removed. They provide additional stability, but restrict movement, and have a tendency to wiggle out of position over time. Removal involves anesthesia.
Julia traveled to Ottawa with us last week. She had asked the surgeon what he thought of the risks of blood clots at airplane altitude. He said he could not guarantee she would not form blood clots; the risk is reportedly higher; what would keep him from flying is the inconvenience that comes with all flights coupled with being in a cast. The connections
were horrible and Julia did not die from a blood clot.
Through this process Julia has had five casts applied to her foot:
1) The emergency room.
2) An immense white one after surgery.
3) A blue one after the first post-op X-ray.
4) A green one after the second post-op inspection.
5) An American flag.
She had surgery one week after the break. Julia feared not waking from the anesthesia. The young, fit anesthesiologist seemed confident, which I have learned means nothing, and viewed answering Julia's questions as a necessary evil. The surgeon marked Julia's right foot with his initials to verify, 1) he was the one doing the surgery, and 2) it was the right foot that needed it. After surgery she spent an hour in a recovery room and then the evening in a private room. That stay was optional, but she did not feel like going home and she enjoyed the attentions of two nurses who had no other patients to look after. The anesthesiologist applied a "block" to her leg that (by design) made her unable to feel her foot for about 24 hours after the surgery. She took oxycodone (generic version) for pain as sparingly as possible, as one side effect for her (and some others) was constipation.
The surgeon inserted three screws and three pins (closeup). Those pins will come out in a couple of weeks, apparently he just pulls them out, no anesthesia or pain-killers necessary. There is some debate among the medical community about whether the screws should be removed. They provide additional stability, but restrict movement, and have a tendency to wiggle out of position over time. Removal involves anesthesia.
Julia traveled to Ottawa with us last week. She had asked the surgeon what he thought of the risks of blood clots at airplane altitude. He said he could not guarantee she would not form blood clots; the risk is reportedly higher; what would keep him from flying is the inconvenience that comes with all flights coupled with being in a cast. The connections
were horrible and Julia did not die from a blood clot.
Through this process Julia has had five casts applied to her foot:
1) The emergency room.
2) An immense white one after surgery.
3) A blue one after the first post-op X-ray.
4) A green one after the second post-op inspection.
5) An American flag.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Book review: Billy Bathgate
Authored by E. L. Doctorow in 1989 (ISBN 978-081298-117-9).
I picked this title because of someone's review. When I brought it home I was disappointed: the jacket described the story as one of gangsters set in the 1930. I have seen and read many such stories, but for lack of other reading material I dove in. I was not disappointed. Doctorow writes long sentences that flow very quickly. I tried to mimic his style with this post but was unable. He either has a gift or practice or both. The story included violence and threats of violence, but the voice of the main character, a 15-year-old boy, was compelling.
I picked this title because of someone's review. When I brought it home I was disappointed: the jacket described the story as one of gangsters set in the 1930. I have seen and read many such stories, but for lack of other reading material I dove in. I was not disappointed. Doctorow writes long sentences that flow very quickly. I tried to mimic his style with this post but was unable. He either has a gift or practice or both. The story included violence and threats of violence, but the voice of the main character, a 15-year-old boy, was compelling.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Book review: The Privileges
Authored by Jonathan Dee in 2010 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6867-1).
I read a positive review of this title which encouraged me to read it. My review is less positive, though I am glad to have read what is perhaps representative fiction in today's (Western, U.S.) world.
The story was artfully written, interesting, fast, but a bit implausible. The author also fixated on the main character's substantial wealth, speaking of apartments in New York and houses in the Hamptons and helicopter rides and millions donated to charity. The first few mentions were helpful; the remainder were distracting.
The main character made his money by using inside information to (illegally) trade in the stock market. A little background from the author would have been helpful; I have worked in the industry and wonder how a novice reader would understand the practice and its place in the wider world of securities trading.
I read a positive review of this title which encouraged me to read it. My review is less positive, though I am glad to have read what is perhaps representative fiction in today's (Western, U.S.) world.
The story was artfully written, interesting, fast, but a bit implausible. The author also fixated on the main character's substantial wealth, speaking of apartments in New York and houses in the Hamptons and helicopter rides and millions donated to charity. The first few mentions were helpful; the remainder were distracting.
The main character made his money by using inside information to (illegally) trade in the stock market. A little background from the author would have been helpful; I have worked in the industry and wonder how a novice reader would understand the practice and its place in the wider world of securities trading.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
My Wife's Foot, Part I
I could see on my phone that the call was from my neighbor Noel. Ordinarily I would pick up, but I was already on a voice call and instant-message chat at the office.
Either he called again or I called Noel; he reported that my wife has broken her foot. At first he said an ambulance had taken her, then that the ambulance was on its way. I asked to speak with her, he said one moment, and I could hear my wife moaning and he reported that she could not speak. I told him I would leave immediately and asked if he could put the phone to hear ear. He did and I said "Hi sweetie, I'm leaving now and I'll see you soon". My mother-in-law, visiting from Florida, was out. Nine-year-old Charlie was at school. Twelve-year-old Abby was home, having stayed away from school on account of feeling poorly.
I did leave the office immediately. I felt a little sad that I would be missing my former supervisor's going-away party. Traffic was light as I was traveling at 1pm. About halfway home Noel called again to say that the ambulance was taking Julia to Rose Hospital, so I headed there. I drove a little faster than normal, but still safely, and still slower than the maniacs.
I parked at the hospital and ran inside and inquired at the front desk. They had no record of Julia and suggested I check with the emergency room. I inquired there; they also had no record, but the staffer said that loved ones arrived ahead of the patient 90% of the time. Another staffer behind the desk, listening over her shoulder, asked "last name White?" Julia was there, and the first staffer led me back to her three-walled-one-curtained room.
Julia looked sad and distressed. A young male doctor was pushing on various parts of her foot and asking about pain. A young female nurse was typing at a computer. Julia answered "yes" to three spots and "no" or "not sure" to the remainder. She said she felt faint and nauseous. They offered anti-nausea medication, which she declined.
Julia told me a little of what happened. She was standing on one of the tall chairs near the kitchen island when she fell. She had an intuition that the injury was very severe. She called out to Abby and had her find a neighbor. Julia felt faint and saw white, like a nuclear explosion.
The hospital staff wheeled an X-ray machine into the room and asked me to leave because of the radiation. Made sense, I thought, although I wondered later that none of them nor Julia wore lead vests. The machine was directed at her feet, so perhaps that was the reason. They took three pictures and wheeled the machine out. It was made by GE (General Electric?) and was self-propelled; possibly it was shielded by lead and too heavy to comfortably push.
Julia and I separately asked how long until results were back. Maybe we were aware that the images would be crucial to the diagnosis. The answer: "soon" or "not too long". And, it wasn't. The doctor returned to say that, although he was not qualified to render a definitive opinion, the second metatarsal was broken. An on-call podiatrist, Dr. Jaakkola, would look at them, too, although when could not be guaranteed. His opinion came within a few minutes and he confirmed the diagnosis. Even better, his office was in the Wolf Building, very close to the hospital, and he was available.
The original nurse assisted a new nurse with the application of a splint. Doing so was painful for Julia and she was angered that the second nurse did not explain what she would be doing before doing it. The splint consisted of a pad made of cotton and some other material. They wetted the pad, fit it around Julia's foot, ankle, and lower leg, and waited "three-to-five" minutes for it to harden, but I would say it was closer to six. They issued her a brand-new set of crutches, adjusted them to Julia's size, and sent us on our way. Except for the splint incident the care was first-rate and I told them so.
We walked to the waiting room, I left Julia there, ran back to the car, and drove to the emergency room parking lot. An attendant came over and quietly, but insistently, took my keys and gave me a receipt. It took a few moments for me to realize that, although the nurse had told us we could park in that lot, it made sense that the hospital would not want cars parked indefinitely, blocking space for ambulances. I walked in to the waiting room, helped Julia out, and the attendant offered and did pull the car closer for her comfort. I considered whether I should tip him and did not, not out of cheapness so much as perhaps he felt his role as a profession above receiving tips.
For several minutes I drove looking for the Wolf Building, only to return to the parking lot to ask for directions. The same attendant said to turn right at the end of the street, instead of left as I had assumed. The Wolf building provided valet parking, and only valet parking. We hobbled into the elevator, up to the fourth floor, and then a considerable distance to Dr. Jaakkola's office (ironic, given most of a podiatrist's patients must have at least some difficulty walking, but understandable given not all the doctors on the floor can have the one closest to the elevator). I completed the initial patient forms for Julia; I am still curious as to why most doctors use paper forms given how technologically advanced their work has become. For "emergency contact" I put myself, and was reminded of Steven Wright's joke: "When they asked for emergency contact information I wrote 'doctor'. How is my mom going to help?" The form asked, "Marital Status". I wrote "married", though I considered "happily married". The form asked, "how long has this condition existed". I wrote "3 hours".
I led Julia down the hallway to the examination room. The doctor stopped me and said "don't I know you from somewhere?" I tried but could not remember him. "Do you live in Stapleton," he asked. I said I did and we agreed that perhaps he had seen me around the neighborhood. He unwrapped the bandage around Julia's foot and examined it and the X-ray. He pointed to the spot where the break occurred and said he was further concerned by the inward slant of the bone leading to the bid toe. That might be an indication of a Lisfranc fracture. I had heard the term but did not know what it meant and told him so. The doctor suggested an MRI to get more information. Julia asked about a CAT scan and he said that would not be helpful. He also suggested another X-ray, this time with all of Julia's weight on the broken foot, if she could tolerate the pain. We asked if that X-ray could wait until a negative MRI result, and he said yes.
Julia and I returned to his waiting room while his staff sought an MRI appointment for us. We were hopeful we could get in today, or at least tomorrow (Friday). Still, we knew that if surgery were recommended that it would need to wait until the swelling subsided. The urgency was more in wanting to know, rather than needing to act.
I commented to Julia that the doctor did not seem 100% confident, and that we should take that as a good sign. I was recalling what I read from the invisible gorilla, that assuredness was, if anything, negatively correlated with accuracy.
Either he called again or I called Noel; he reported that my wife has broken her foot. At first he said an ambulance had taken her, then that the ambulance was on its way. I asked to speak with her, he said one moment, and I could hear my wife moaning and he reported that she could not speak. I told him I would leave immediately and asked if he could put the phone to hear ear. He did and I said "Hi sweetie, I'm leaving now and I'll see you soon". My mother-in-law, visiting from Florida, was out. Nine-year-old Charlie was at school. Twelve-year-old Abby was home, having stayed away from school on account of feeling poorly.
I did leave the office immediately. I felt a little sad that I would be missing my former supervisor's going-away party. Traffic was light as I was traveling at 1pm. About halfway home Noel called again to say that the ambulance was taking Julia to Rose Hospital, so I headed there. I drove a little faster than normal, but still safely, and still slower than the maniacs.
I parked at the hospital and ran inside and inquired at the front desk. They had no record of Julia and suggested I check with the emergency room. I inquired there; they also had no record, but the staffer said that loved ones arrived ahead of the patient 90% of the time. Another staffer behind the desk, listening over her shoulder, asked "last name White?" Julia was there, and the first staffer led me back to her three-walled-one-curtained room.
Julia looked sad and distressed. A young male doctor was pushing on various parts of her foot and asking about pain. A young female nurse was typing at a computer. Julia answered "yes" to three spots and "no" or "not sure" to the remainder. She said she felt faint and nauseous. They offered anti-nausea medication, which she declined.
Julia told me a little of what happened. She was standing on one of the tall chairs near the kitchen island when she fell. She had an intuition that the injury was very severe. She called out to Abby and had her find a neighbor. Julia felt faint and saw white, like a nuclear explosion.
The hospital staff wheeled an X-ray machine into the room and asked me to leave because of the radiation. Made sense, I thought, although I wondered later that none of them nor Julia wore lead vests. The machine was directed at her feet, so perhaps that was the reason. They took three pictures and wheeled the machine out. It was made by GE (General Electric?) and was self-propelled; possibly it was shielded by lead and too heavy to comfortably push.
Julia and I separately asked how long until results were back. Maybe we were aware that the images would be crucial to the diagnosis. The answer: "soon" or "not too long". And, it wasn't. The doctor returned to say that, although he was not qualified to render a definitive opinion, the second metatarsal was broken. An on-call podiatrist, Dr. Jaakkola, would look at them, too, although when could not be guaranteed. His opinion came within a few minutes and he confirmed the diagnosis. Even better, his office was in the Wolf Building, very close to the hospital, and he was available.
The original nurse assisted a new nurse with the application of a splint. Doing so was painful for Julia and she was angered that the second nurse did not explain what she would be doing before doing it. The splint consisted of a pad made of cotton and some other material. They wetted the pad, fit it around Julia's foot, ankle, and lower leg, and waited "three-to-five" minutes for it to harden, but I would say it was closer to six. They issued her a brand-new set of crutches, adjusted them to Julia's size, and sent us on our way. Except for the splint incident the care was first-rate and I told them so.
We walked to the waiting room, I left Julia there, ran back to the car, and drove to the emergency room parking lot. An attendant came over and quietly, but insistently, took my keys and gave me a receipt. It took a few moments for me to realize that, although the nurse had told us we could park in that lot, it made sense that the hospital would not want cars parked indefinitely, blocking space for ambulances. I walked in to the waiting room, helped Julia out, and the attendant offered and did pull the car closer for her comfort. I considered whether I should tip him and did not, not out of cheapness so much as perhaps he felt his role as a profession above receiving tips.
For several minutes I drove looking for the Wolf Building, only to return to the parking lot to ask for directions. The same attendant said to turn right at the end of the street, instead of left as I had assumed. The Wolf building provided valet parking, and only valet parking. We hobbled into the elevator, up to the fourth floor, and then a considerable distance to Dr. Jaakkola's office (ironic, given most of a podiatrist's patients must have at least some difficulty walking, but understandable given not all the doctors on the floor can have the one closest to the elevator). I completed the initial patient forms for Julia; I am still curious as to why most doctors use paper forms given how technologically advanced their work has become. For "emergency contact" I put myself, and was reminded of Steven Wright's joke: "When they asked for emergency contact information I wrote 'doctor'. How is my mom going to help?" The form asked, "Marital Status". I wrote "married", though I considered "happily married". The form asked, "how long has this condition existed". I wrote "3 hours".
I led Julia down the hallway to the examination room. The doctor stopped me and said "don't I know you from somewhere?" I tried but could not remember him. "Do you live in Stapleton," he asked. I said I did and we agreed that perhaps he had seen me around the neighborhood. He unwrapped the bandage around Julia's foot and examined it and the X-ray. He pointed to the spot where the break occurred and said he was further concerned by the inward slant of the bone leading to the bid toe. That might be an indication of a Lisfranc fracture. I had heard the term but did not know what it meant and told him so. The doctor suggested an MRI to get more information. Julia asked about a CAT scan and he said that would not be helpful. He also suggested another X-ray, this time with all of Julia's weight on the broken foot, if she could tolerate the pain. We asked if that X-ray could wait until a negative MRI result, and he said yes.
Julia and I returned to his waiting room while his staff sought an MRI appointment for us. We were hopeful we could get in today, or at least tomorrow (Friday). Still, we knew that if surgery were recommended that it would need to wait until the swelling subsided. The urgency was more in wanting to know, rather than needing to act.
I commented to Julia that the doctor did not seem 100% confident, and that we should take that as a good sign. I was recalling what I read from the invisible gorilla, that assuredness was, if anything, negatively correlated with accuracy.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Book review: 3 MPH
Subtitled "The Adventures of One Woman's Walk Around the World".
Authored by Polly Letofsky in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-9841543-2-6).
She did not walk on the water. The Guinesss Book people and others who decide the rules regarding amazing feats (elbow-licking is not eligible for a world record) decided that to claim one has walked around the world one must:
* Walk at least 14,000 miles,
* on at least four continents,
* have someone verify each day's walk,
* and start and finish in the same place.
Flying between continents is acceptable; further, Letofsky decided that it would be okay to accept rides to lodging at the end of a day, so long as she could also catch a ride back to that same spot in the morning to resume her walking.
Letofsky's story is both sweet and compelling. She designed her walk to raise awareness about breast cancer after an odd encounter with a doctor who told her that, because she had no family history of that disease, she herself need not worry about it. She told her friends about her good luck, and they set her straight.
Thus started her walk from Vail to Vail, via the desert southwest, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand ... Greece ... Germany ... Britain ... New York and her home state of Minnesota. Twenty-two countries in all.
She had a number of companions and helpers. Her first helper stole her money and the copyright to her walk's name. A second helper, a bisexual woman, left because Polly spurned her sexual advances. Her biggest helpers were the Lion's Club members who accompanied her to New Zealand, Australia, Thailand and Britain. They would call the next club down the road; a member would pick her up, drop her off, house and feed her, and arrange for press coverage so she could increase her collection of donations. While walking up to 26 miles per day was expectedly tiring, also draining were the daily press conferences and answering "how many pairs of shoes have you gone through" from every stranger.
She enjoyed the Indian food but she complained about "Indian Hearing Deficit": she found that Indians did not want to relay bad news, and a trip of her magnitude would have bad moments, and she found their unwillingness to admit to mistakes frustrating. She was amused by the constant questions of her marital status (single, no children). Questioners could not believe a 36-year-old woman was not interested in marriage and children. Letofsky said: "if someone doesn't know they're [sic] being offensive, do you have the right to be offended? [The questions are] offensive in my culture, not theirs."
Europe was the most challenging part of the trip, perhaps because she did not expect it to be so. She had no Lion's clubs to lean on. People were not as friendly. Prices were high. Maps were hard to obtain, and more necessary than in places like India and Thailand where only a single road might connect two points.
In addition to raising over $200,000 she raised awareness of the disease in places, especially the Third World, where awareness is low. Her's is a remarkable story and a very entertaining read.
Oh: she used 29 pairs of shoes.
Authored by Polly Letofsky in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-9841543-2-6).
She did not walk on the water. The Guinesss Book people and others who decide the rules regarding amazing feats (elbow-licking is not eligible for a world record) decided that to claim one has walked around the world one must:
* Walk at least 14,000 miles,
* on at least four continents,
* have someone verify each day's walk,
* and start and finish in the same place.
Flying between continents is acceptable; further, Letofsky decided that it would be okay to accept rides to lodging at the end of a day, so long as she could also catch a ride back to that same spot in the morning to resume her walking.
Letofsky's story is both sweet and compelling. She designed her walk to raise awareness about breast cancer after an odd encounter with a doctor who told her that, because she had no family history of that disease, she herself need not worry about it. She told her friends about her good luck, and they set her straight.
Thus started her walk from Vail to Vail, via the desert southwest, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand ... Greece ... Germany ... Britain ... New York and her home state of Minnesota. Twenty-two countries in all.
She had a number of companions and helpers. Her first helper stole her money and the copyright to her walk's name. A second helper, a bisexual woman, left because Polly spurned her sexual advances. Her biggest helpers were the Lion's Club members who accompanied her to New Zealand, Australia, Thailand and Britain. They would call the next club down the road; a member would pick her up, drop her off, house and feed her, and arrange for press coverage so she could increase her collection of donations. While walking up to 26 miles per day was expectedly tiring, also draining were the daily press conferences and answering "how many pairs of shoes have you gone through" from every stranger.
She enjoyed the Indian food but she complained about "Indian Hearing Deficit": she found that Indians did not want to relay bad news, and a trip of her magnitude would have bad moments, and she found their unwillingness to admit to mistakes frustrating. She was amused by the constant questions of her marital status (single, no children). Questioners could not believe a 36-year-old woman was not interested in marriage and children. Letofsky said: "if someone doesn't know they're [sic] being offensive, do you have the right to be offended? [The questions are] offensive in my culture, not theirs."
Europe was the most challenging part of the trip, perhaps because she did not expect it to be so. She had no Lion's clubs to lean on. People were not as friendly. Prices were high. Maps were hard to obtain, and more necessary than in places like India and Thailand where only a single road might connect two points.
In addition to raising over $200,000 she raised awareness of the disease in places, especially the Third World, where awareness is low. Her's is a remarkable story and a very entertaining read.
Oh: she used 29 pairs of shoes.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Book review: The Disappearing Spoon
Authored by Sam Kean in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-316-05164-4).
I like chemistry more than I remember from school. My high school chemistry teacher spent the first six weeks of school instructing us in the phonetic-mnemonic memory system. He could use the system to memorize the order of a deck of cards. The purpose of the instruction was to prepare us for memorizing the periodic table.
Looking back, that was a waste of time. The system is useful; maybe he could have used one class to introduce it and encourage all of us to practice on our own time. But memorizing the periodic table seems useless to me. Even in that 1983-pre-internet age, printouts of the periodic table were not hard to come by. Maybe professional chemists, over years of constant use, commit some or all of the table to memory. Maybe. A failure to memorize that table would not close the door on a chemistry profession for any us who would have chosen to go in that direction.
I also took the standard Chemistry course that all engineering students were required to take. My recollection: difficult.
I enjoyed reading this book because chemistry is neat. There are 103 naturally occurring elements, each with their own story. (There are an additional 14 or 15 human-created elements, depending on your standard-of-proof.) The titular example is as follows. Most metals are solid at room temperature, the only exceptions being mercury and bromine. Most other metals become liquids only high temperatures; for example, the melting point of iron is 2800 degrees Fahrenheit. A notable exception is gallium, with a melting point of 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Gallium is white/silver in color and not terribly expensive at about $1 per gram. If one were to fashion a lump of gallium in the shape of a spoon and put such a utensil in an empty tea cup, no one would notice. However, upon pouring the tea into the cup, the spoon would melt and disappear into the cup.
The discovery of the periodic table is one of the triumphs of modern science, organizing seemingly random materials into order. With the table we can predict, and explain, that carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead will behave chemically in similar ways. This is so because chemistry is the study of how one atom's electrons interact with another atom's electrons. Electrons "circle" the nucleus of an atom, which consists of protons and neutrons. The electrons circle in different orbits, each representing different energy levels, and the electrons in the highest orbit are the ones free enough to join up with the highest orbiting electrons of another atom. The elements carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead all have four electrons circling in their highest orbits. The structure of the table to the modern scientist is intuitive, but to the scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries the structure had yet to be agreed upon. The work of Russian Nobel prize-winner Dmitri Mendeleev and others provided theoretical explanations for the work of experimental chemists. Further, gaps in the table showed experimental chemists where to look for new elements (the prize: for a while, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry named new elements after the discoverer).
Most of us have read on some packages of salt: "this salt does [not] provide iodide, a necessary nutrient". In addition to preventing many types of birth defects, iodine is necessary for proper thyroid function. (Iodide is an ion of the element iodine; it is what you get when you mix iodine with some other chemical, such as potassium.) Improper thyroid function can lead to (among other things) goiter and mental retardation. Starting with Switzerland in 1922, many countries required the addition to iodide to table salt as a cheap and effective way of insuring a sufficient intake. The British, while in control if India, in their infinite wisdom, taxed the production of salt. This tax was one of the policies Gandhi protested against, so that after the years of independence, as Western scientists pushed India to iodized its salt, it resisted the colonial intrusion. To this day, iodine deficiency is a public health issue in India.
Marie Curie was one of the few people, and the only woman, to receive two Nobel prizes. She shared the first, in physics, with her husband; they discovered that uranium's physics (radioactivity) was different than its chemistry (how its electrons interact with the electrons of other elements). Thus, to study the radioactive properties of uranium, it was not necessary to separate it from whatever it was found in, such as pitchblende. Scientists need only study the radioactivity of ninety-some elements, not millions of chemical combinations. She earned her second prize in chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium. You have probably heard her name before, even though you can name but a few other Nobel prize winners. This is probably due to her travels throughout the world, including the United States, where she introduced crowds to her glowing radium samples. She enjoyed barely-secret trysts with many men, including colleagues. She died in 1934 at age 67 from radiation poisoning, one year before her daughter, Irène, won her own Nobel prize in chemistry. Irène herself died from radiation poisoning at age 59.
Despite her fame and her accomplishments, Madam Curie seems to have little interest among biographers. I just now searched the Denver Public Library for additional titles. All of the first ten listings, and seventeen of the first twenty listings, came from the juvenile/youth section. Only three of the first twenty listings were books targeted to an adult audience.
Lithium, element 3, is a salt. It appears directly above Na, element 11 and the symbol for sodium, a more well-known salt. Doctors use it as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses, including manic-depressive (bipolar) disease. Robert Lowell, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet of the 1960s and 70s suffered from bipolar disease. He won his prize in 1974, seven years after starting his lithium use, though many critics prefer his work from the 1960s. The depressive phase of bipolar disorder arises when the brain becomes depleted after a manic phase. The manic phase arises because proteins in the brain that normally rise and fall with sunlight, do not fall. Sufferers have proteins that remain embedded in the brain; no signal for fatigue is detected, and the brain is happy to continue for days ... until depletion. Lithium helps the brain shed the proteins in the evening, when they should normally fall off.
I should note that, while Kean seems comfortable with the foregoing description of lithium's effects on bipolar users, others are not as sure. In fairness, Kean describes lithium's effects as "complicated."
I was in high school when I first read books about quantum mechanics and particle physics and about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I remember part of the explanation including the phrase "Observer-created reality". These books would describe the Schroedinger Cat thought experiment, where a cat was placed in a box along with a toxic-dose poisonous substance encased in a glass. A material with a half-life of a minute is placed in the box also; if this material decays it will trigger a geiger counter which is rigged to shatter the glass. Schroedinger asserted that after the half-life the cat was both dead and alive; the act of opening the box causes one or the other to occur. In my mind, this is a metaphysical, rather than a physics, assertion. The experiment parallels the particle-wave duality of light and applies to subatomic particles in ways not observable with human-sized objects. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that one's certainty regarding the position of an object is inversely related to one's uncertainty regarding that object's velocity.
Think of a car. We can see it as it crosses point A, and as it crosses point B. With a stopwatch and a ruler we can calculate its speed to whatever precision our watch and ruler afford. "See" means that photons of light bounce off the car and into our eyes. Photons have no appreciable mass in comparison to the weight of the car. A photon striking a subatomic particle however, is more like one billiard ball striking another. Perhaps they are not exactly sized, as in coin-operated billiards, but close enough such that the strike will substantially interfere with our ability to measure position or velocity or both.
Kean explained, to my astonishment, that the foregoing is somewhat inaccurate. The Heisenberg uncertainly principle is actually formula:
Delta-X is our uncertainty in position; delta-V our uncertainty regarding velocity. Planck's constant is very small, but not zero. The Bose-Einstein condensate, so-called because Einstein's work predicted it and Bose said so, is a form of matter that arises when one cools matter substantially. By substantially, we mean 1 billionth of a degree Kelvin. At such low temperature, atoms move hardly at all, and when the uncertainty regarding velocity is so small, the atoms become more confident about where they are positioned. In a University of Colorado experiment, scientists Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman reduced a few thousand rubidium atoms to this tiny temperature and observed them behave as a single, large "ghostly" atom. Their efforts netted them a portion of the 2001 physics Nobel prize.
I like chemistry more than I remember from school. My high school chemistry teacher spent the first six weeks of school instructing us in the phonetic-mnemonic memory system. He could use the system to memorize the order of a deck of cards. The purpose of the instruction was to prepare us for memorizing the periodic table.
Looking back, that was a waste of time. The system is useful; maybe he could have used one class to introduce it and encourage all of us to practice on our own time. But memorizing the periodic table seems useless to me. Even in that 1983-pre-internet age, printouts of the periodic table were not hard to come by. Maybe professional chemists, over years of constant use, commit some or all of the table to memory. Maybe. A failure to memorize that table would not close the door on a chemistry profession for any us who would have chosen to go in that direction.
I also took the standard Chemistry course that all engineering students were required to take. My recollection: difficult.
I enjoyed reading this book because chemistry is neat. There are 103 naturally occurring elements, each with their own story. (There are an additional 14 or 15 human-created elements, depending on your standard-of-proof.) The titular example is as follows. Most metals are solid at room temperature, the only exceptions being mercury and bromine. Most other metals become liquids only high temperatures; for example, the melting point of iron is 2800 degrees Fahrenheit. A notable exception is gallium, with a melting point of 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Gallium is white/silver in color and not terribly expensive at about $1 per gram. If one were to fashion a lump of gallium in the shape of a spoon and put such a utensil in an empty tea cup, no one would notice. However, upon pouring the tea into the cup, the spoon would melt and disappear into the cup.
The discovery of the periodic table is one of the triumphs of modern science, organizing seemingly random materials into order. With the table we can predict, and explain, that carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead will behave chemically in similar ways. This is so because chemistry is the study of how one atom's electrons interact with another atom's electrons. Electrons "circle" the nucleus of an atom, which consists of protons and neutrons. The electrons circle in different orbits, each representing different energy levels, and the electrons in the highest orbit are the ones free enough to join up with the highest orbiting electrons of another atom. The elements carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead all have four electrons circling in their highest orbits. The structure of the table to the modern scientist is intuitive, but to the scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries the structure had yet to be agreed upon. The work of Russian Nobel prize-winner Dmitri Mendeleev and others provided theoretical explanations for the work of experimental chemists. Further, gaps in the table showed experimental chemists where to look for new elements (the prize: for a while, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry named new elements after the discoverer).
Most of us have read on some packages of salt: "this salt does [not] provide iodide, a necessary nutrient". In addition to preventing many types of birth defects, iodine is necessary for proper thyroid function. (Iodide is an ion of the element iodine; it is what you get when you mix iodine with some other chemical, such as potassium.) Improper thyroid function can lead to (among other things) goiter and mental retardation. Starting with Switzerland in 1922, many countries required the addition to iodide to table salt as a cheap and effective way of insuring a sufficient intake. The British, while in control if India, in their infinite wisdom, taxed the production of salt. This tax was one of the policies Gandhi protested against, so that after the years of independence, as Western scientists pushed India to iodized its salt, it resisted the colonial intrusion. To this day, iodine deficiency is a public health issue in India.
Marie Curie was one of the few people, and the only woman, to receive two Nobel prizes. She shared the first, in physics, with her husband; they discovered that uranium's physics (radioactivity) was different than its chemistry (how its electrons interact with the electrons of other elements). Thus, to study the radioactive properties of uranium, it was not necessary to separate it from whatever it was found in, such as pitchblende. Scientists need only study the radioactivity of ninety-some elements, not millions of chemical combinations. She earned her second prize in chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium. You have probably heard her name before, even though you can name but a few other Nobel prize winners. This is probably due to her travels throughout the world, including the United States, where she introduced crowds to her glowing radium samples. She enjoyed barely-secret trysts with many men, including colleagues. She died in 1934 at age 67 from radiation poisoning, one year before her daughter, Irène, won her own Nobel prize in chemistry. Irène herself died from radiation poisoning at age 59.
Despite her fame and her accomplishments, Madam Curie seems to have little interest among biographers. I just now searched the Denver Public Library for additional titles. All of the first ten listings, and seventeen of the first twenty listings, came from the juvenile/youth section. Only three of the first twenty listings were books targeted to an adult audience.
Lithium, element 3, is a salt. It appears directly above Na, element 11 and the symbol for sodium, a more well-known salt. Doctors use it as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses, including manic-depressive (bipolar) disease. Robert Lowell, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet of the 1960s and 70s suffered from bipolar disease. He won his prize in 1974, seven years after starting his lithium use, though many critics prefer his work from the 1960s. The depressive phase of bipolar disorder arises when the brain becomes depleted after a manic phase. The manic phase arises because proteins in the brain that normally rise and fall with sunlight, do not fall. Sufferers have proteins that remain embedded in the brain; no signal for fatigue is detected, and the brain is happy to continue for days ... until depletion. Lithium helps the brain shed the proteins in the evening, when they should normally fall off.
I should note that, while Kean seems comfortable with the foregoing description of lithium's effects on bipolar users, others are not as sure. In fairness, Kean describes lithium's effects as "complicated."
I was in high school when I first read books about quantum mechanics and particle physics and about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I remember part of the explanation including the phrase "Observer-created reality". These books would describe the Schroedinger Cat thought experiment, where a cat was placed in a box along with a toxic-dose poisonous substance encased in a glass. A material with a half-life of a minute is placed in the box also; if this material decays it will trigger a geiger counter which is rigged to shatter the glass. Schroedinger asserted that after the half-life the cat was both dead and alive; the act of opening the box causes one or the other to occur. In my mind, this is a metaphysical, rather than a physics, assertion. The experiment parallels the particle-wave duality of light and applies to subatomic particles in ways not observable with human-sized objects. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that one's certainty regarding the position of an object is inversely related to one's uncertainty regarding that object's velocity.
Think of a car. We can see it as it crosses point A, and as it crosses point B. With a stopwatch and a ruler we can calculate its speed to whatever precision our watch and ruler afford. "See" means that photons of light bounce off the car and into our eyes. Photons have no appreciable mass in comparison to the weight of the car. A photon striking a subatomic particle however, is more like one billiard ball striking another. Perhaps they are not exactly sized, as in coin-operated billiards, but close enough such that the strike will substantially interfere with our ability to measure position or velocity or both.
Kean explained, to my astonishment, that the foregoing is somewhat inaccurate. The Heisenberg uncertainly principle is actually formula:
4 * Π * Δx * Δv >= Planck's constant
Delta-X is our uncertainty in position; delta-V our uncertainty regarding velocity. Planck's constant is very small, but not zero. The Bose-Einstein condensate, so-called because Einstein's work predicted it and Bose said so, is a form of matter that arises when one cools matter substantially. By substantially, we mean 1 billionth of a degree Kelvin. At such low temperature, atoms move hardly at all, and when the uncertainty regarding velocity is so small, the atoms become more confident about where they are positioned. In a University of Colorado experiment, scientists Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman reduced a few thousand rubidium atoms to this tiny temperature and observed them behave as a single, large "ghostly" atom. Their efforts netted them a portion of the 2001 physics Nobel prize.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Book review: Riding Rockets
Authored by Mike Mullane in 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7432-7682-5).
I chose this book because a staffer at my local library identified it as a personal favorite. The cover features an astronaut sitting on a chair in the desert and the subtitle: "The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut" and describes the author as an astronaut. I wondered if the book was going to cover mismanagement at NASA; as a large organization spending a lot of other people's money, I'm sure there is some. But, I did not want to read such a book. I find that kind of information depressing. I cracked it open to a random page and saw the words "fire" and "booster" and decided it might be worth a try.
It sure was. Mullane's recall, going back twenty years, is truly impressive, unless he was considering writing such a book all along. He makes no mention of his motivations or his planning. The book jacket describes his current vocation as "motivational speaker". To be fair, his recall does not rise to the level of Frank McCourt, who describes his life from three years forward in Angela's Ashes.
While Mullane is critical of certain NASA managers and policies, and NASA's response to the Challenger* and Columbia disasters, his general attitude is one of thanks. It is a refreshing viewpoint, even if I find NASA's mission a waste of money. I used to also object to the pollution the program generates, but later reading had changed my mind on that subject.
Mullane's only boast about himself was "always giving it my best effort". Otherwise, he criticizes his former attitudes. He entered the astronaut program after serving in Vietnam; he was a married man with little regard for women or for civilians. He describes himself and his buddies as characters from Arrested Development. Over time, though, as he observed the tenacity and professionalism of the women and civilians in the program, he accepted them as equals.
Mullane's descriptions of liftoff were fascinating and arguably inaccessible to all except the few dozen folks who have flown in the space shuttle. Shuttle assignments (seven from a pool of several dozen) are made months in advance. Those seven are known as the "prime crew" and receive perks such as closer parking spaces. They are also monitored more closely; illness could result in postponement or replacement. The prime crew therefore avoided the doctors at all costs; as Mullane states, an astronaut would prefer to cough up a lung than miss a launch assignment. Space travel is dangerous; perhaps 1% of all missions are fatal. In the days leading up to the launch the crew barely sleeps because of the combination of fear and excitement. Then, on the day of launch, the crew assembles hours beforehand to suit up and check their gear. Mechanical malfunction or weather can delay or scuttle the launch. Imagine, then, rising in the early morning, spending hours preparing, sitting on your back for hours as the mission control verifies the launch, countdown to T-30 seconds, then ... pause. Wait thirty minutes for the weather to clear or for a non-nominal reading to be examined or a small aircraft to clear the area. Or, have the launch canceled altogether.
And, the tension extends to the astronauts families as well. Spouses and children, well aware of the danger, gather on building rooftop a few miles from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch shuttle lift off and hopefully not explode (like Challenger). Or, they gather on a rooftop a few miles from Johnson Space Center in Houston to watch the shuttle land without crashing (like Columbia, which disintegrated before reaching Houston).
Mullane received his astronaut wings when he reached 50 miles altitude during his first mission. His opinion: he and all astronauts should earn those wings the moment the engines fire. That's when the risk commences.
On his second mission a piece of foam fell from the front of the shuttle and hit further back. Mullane and his colleagues saw it and were alarmed. They asked mission control to investigate. Mission control did and reported no danger. Mullane and his colleagues were skeptical: after all, if the damage was fatal, would the control tower say so? The shuttle could not return to earth without passing through the atmosphere and heating up. There was nothing to be done about damage anyway. Sadly, falling foam damaged the leading edge of a wing on the Columbia, resulting in its destruction.
As expected from a man whose development was arrested, Mullane's humor is often crude. His first shuttle mission occurred during the tail end of the Cold War. One crew-member had a special dislike of Fidel Castro, and as the shuttle was zipping in orbit at 17,000 miles per hour he asked Mullane to alert him to the next pass over Cuba. The astronaut protocol for handling human waste was to release bowel movements outside the shuttle.
Mullane flew on three space shuttle missions, the final two being classified. He received military awards for the final two, but the awards themselves were classified. He received them in a room and had to leave them behind when he left.
Mullane's story and attitude inspired me. Born in 1945 to a military father, his family eventually settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When he was nine years old he developed an interest in rockets, building homemade devices from metal tubes. His parents would willingly drive him to suppliers, and to the desert for launches. This, despite the fact his father developed polio and spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair. He marvels that he did not blow himself up.
Among the many humorous stories he related from childhood, he recalls an aunt visiting from the East coast. Together they look up at the sky and observe a beautiful Milky Way, something I myself have been privileged to see in Catskill Mountains of New York as a child and the Rocky Mountains as an adult. The aunt, however, is disappointed at the "clouds". She had never seen the Milky Way and assumed she was seeing clouds, rather than uncountable stars.
* A note about the Challenger disaster. For years I recall hearing about the disaster while sitting in a 7th grade class. Except, I did not. Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986. I was a freshman in college at the time. My misremembering causes me to think of the gorilla book.
I chose this book because a staffer at my local library identified it as a personal favorite. The cover features an astronaut sitting on a chair in the desert and the subtitle: "The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut" and describes the author as an astronaut. I wondered if the book was going to cover mismanagement at NASA; as a large organization spending a lot of other people's money, I'm sure there is some. But, I did not want to read such a book. I find that kind of information depressing. I cracked it open to a random page and saw the words "fire" and "booster" and decided it might be worth a try.
It sure was. Mullane's recall, going back twenty years, is truly impressive, unless he was considering writing such a book all along. He makes no mention of his motivations or his planning. The book jacket describes his current vocation as "motivational speaker". To be fair, his recall does not rise to the level of Frank McCourt, who describes his life from three years forward in Angela's Ashes.
While Mullane is critical of certain NASA managers and policies, and NASA's response to the Challenger* and Columbia disasters, his general attitude is one of thanks. It is a refreshing viewpoint, even if I find NASA's mission a waste of money. I used to also object to the pollution the program generates, but later reading had changed my mind on that subject.
Mullane's only boast about himself was "always giving it my best effort". Otherwise, he criticizes his former attitudes. He entered the astronaut program after serving in Vietnam; he was a married man with little regard for women or for civilians. He describes himself and his buddies as characters from Arrested Development. Over time, though, as he observed the tenacity and professionalism of the women and civilians in the program, he accepted them as equals.
Mullane's descriptions of liftoff were fascinating and arguably inaccessible to all except the few dozen folks who have flown in the space shuttle. Shuttle assignments (seven from a pool of several dozen) are made months in advance. Those seven are known as the "prime crew" and receive perks such as closer parking spaces. They are also monitored more closely; illness could result in postponement or replacement. The prime crew therefore avoided the doctors at all costs; as Mullane states, an astronaut would prefer to cough up a lung than miss a launch assignment. Space travel is dangerous; perhaps 1% of all missions are fatal. In the days leading up to the launch the crew barely sleeps because of the combination of fear and excitement. Then, on the day of launch, the crew assembles hours beforehand to suit up and check their gear. Mechanical malfunction or weather can delay or scuttle the launch. Imagine, then, rising in the early morning, spending hours preparing, sitting on your back for hours as the mission control verifies the launch, countdown to T-30 seconds, then ... pause. Wait thirty minutes for the weather to clear or for a non-nominal reading to be examined or a small aircraft to clear the area. Or, have the launch canceled altogether.
And, the tension extends to the astronauts families as well. Spouses and children, well aware of the danger, gather on building rooftop a few miles from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch shuttle lift off and hopefully not explode (like Challenger). Or, they gather on a rooftop a few miles from Johnson Space Center in Houston to watch the shuttle land without crashing (like Columbia, which disintegrated before reaching Houston).
Mullane received his astronaut wings when he reached 50 miles altitude during his first mission. His opinion: he and all astronauts should earn those wings the moment the engines fire. That's when the risk commences.
On his second mission a piece of foam fell from the front of the shuttle and hit further back. Mullane and his colleagues saw it and were alarmed. They asked mission control to investigate. Mission control did and reported no danger. Mullane and his colleagues were skeptical: after all, if the damage was fatal, would the control tower say so? The shuttle could not return to earth without passing through the atmosphere and heating up. There was nothing to be done about damage anyway. Sadly, falling foam damaged the leading edge of a wing on the Columbia, resulting in its destruction.
As expected from a man whose development was arrested, Mullane's humor is often crude. His first shuttle mission occurred during the tail end of the Cold War. One crew-member had a special dislike of Fidel Castro, and as the shuttle was zipping in orbit at 17,000 miles per hour he asked Mullane to alert him to the next pass over Cuba. The astronaut protocol for handling human waste was to release bowel movements outside the shuttle.
Mullane flew on three space shuttle missions, the final two being classified. He received military awards for the final two, but the awards themselves were classified. He received them in a room and had to leave them behind when he left.
Mullane's story and attitude inspired me. Born in 1945 to a military father, his family eventually settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When he was nine years old he developed an interest in rockets, building homemade devices from metal tubes. His parents would willingly drive him to suppliers, and to the desert for launches. This, despite the fact his father developed polio and spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair. He marvels that he did not blow himself up.
Among the many humorous stories he related from childhood, he recalls an aunt visiting from the East coast. Together they look up at the sky and observe a beautiful Milky Way, something I myself have been privileged to see in Catskill Mountains of New York as a child and the Rocky Mountains as an adult. The aunt, however, is disappointed at the "clouds". She had never seen the Milky Way and assumed she was seeing clouds, rather than uncountable stars.
* A note about the Challenger disaster. For years I recall hearing about the disaster while sitting in a 7th grade class. Except, I did not. Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986. I was a freshman in college at the time. My misremembering causes me to think of the gorilla book.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
The Space Program is a Waste of My Money
I take as much pride in the moon landing as the next person, but continued spending on the space program is a waste of money. What are we going to do with this research? Do we really expect to colonize the Moon or Mars? Won't that be kind of expensive. If it ends up being better than the earthly alternatives, how do we choose who goes first?
Likewise, the super-collider. Maybe quarks are the smallest component of matter, maybe they are not. What difference does it make?
I see the value of basic research. In other words, just because we cannot say in advance what information certain research will yield does not mean we should not pursue it. Indeed, sometimes the pursuit of one technology yields advances in another. I ask, though, should we not consider which technologies are cheaper to work with? Maybe the effort of building a super-collider or landing on Mars will generate useful science to be applied elsewhere. But surely, there are other technologies, such an environmental, biological and nano that have equivalent probabilities, and these cost a mere fraction of the space program.
I should add that I do not oppose other people spending their own money to send rockets into space or to sent small particles crashing into each other. I object to spending my tax dollars on such activities.
Likewise, the super-collider. Maybe quarks are the smallest component of matter, maybe they are not. What difference does it make?
I see the value of basic research. In other words, just because we cannot say in advance what information certain research will yield does not mean we should not pursue it. Indeed, sometimes the pursuit of one technology yields advances in another. I ask, though, should we not consider which technologies are cheaper to work with? Maybe the effort of building a super-collider or landing on Mars will generate useful science to be applied elsewhere. But surely, there are other technologies, such an environmental, biological and nano that have equivalent probabilities, and these cost a mere fraction of the space program.
I should add that I do not oppose other people spending their own money to send rockets into space or to sent small particles crashing into each other. I object to spending my tax dollars on such activities.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Book review: Pudd'nhead Wilson
Authored by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in 1894.
I am a big fan of Mr. Twain, but this is not a favorite. A very short novel, it contains typical Twain elements: criticism of slavery and power, a fun storyline, and clever, such clever, phrasing:
and
I am a big fan of Mr. Twain, but this is not a favorite. A very short novel, it contains typical Twain elements: criticism of slavery and power, a fun storyline, and clever, such clever, phrasing:
To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro.
and
[The judge] told them a good many humorous anecdotes, and always forgot the nub, but they were always able to furnish it, for these yarns were of a pretty early vintage, and they had had many a rejuvenating pull at them before. And he told them all about his several dignities, and how he had held this and that and the other place of honor or profit, and had once been to the legislature, and was now president of the Society of Free-thinkers. He said the society had been in existence four years, and already had two members, and was firmly established.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Book review: Portnoy's Complaint
Authored by Philip Roth in 1967 (1967 is the copyright year according to the edition notice; Wikipedia lists the year as 1969, perhaps that is the year of publication).
I picked up this book after searching without luck for Roth's "An American Pastoral". I'll read "Pastoral" later. Roth has authored more than a dozen books and this is one title I have heard repeatedly.
"Complaint" is a real page-turner, humorous and grotesque at the same time. Some libraries and schools, according to Wikipedia, banned it on release owing to its sexual content. I can understand why.
I picked up this book after searching without luck for Roth's "An American Pastoral". I'll read "Pastoral" later. Roth has authored more than a dozen books and this is one title I have heard repeatedly.
"Complaint" is a real page-turner, humorous and grotesque at the same time. Some libraries and schools, according to Wikipedia, banned it on release owing to its sexual content. I can understand why.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Book review: The American Civil War
Authored by John Keegan (2009, ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8).
The subtitle is "A Military History", which indeed it is, given the sometimes numbing description of fronts moved and bodies killed, injured or missing. But, there might be military buffs out there who enjoy that sort of thing. I skimmed through those paragraphs to enjoy the remainder of the book, for one cannot talk about the Civil War without at least some mention of politics.
Keegan has high regard for Lincoln as a politician, speaker and military leader. Lincoln had no military experience prior to his assuming office, and he sometimes struggled too long with inept generals such as George McClellan before fixing on winners such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. But, Lincoln eventually alighted on a cogent military strategy (the Anaconda plan); further, he settled on the achievable political goal of black freedom rather than the unachievable (at that time) goal of black equality, which was not something he believed personally. Lincoln sought to preserve the Union, end slavery, and cause as little damage as necessary in the process. Unfortunately, much damage was necessary.
The Civil War was easily America's deadliest: over 10,000 battles in four years of fighting saw 110,000 Union battle deaths and 94,000 Confederate. Double that number died from disease, a ratio that would hold in the First World War as well. Why did these soldiers continue to fight even after the consequences were known and abandonment was somewhat easy? Keegan's answer: "cause and comrades". In the early going Unionists eagerly signed up to preserve the Union and abolish slavery and Confederates to preserve states' rights. After initial losses it was hard to give up and say to oneself and fellows that the loss was wasted, much like a poker player who already has a substantial number of chips in the pot. This, despite speaking the same language as the "opponent" and the cases where brother fought brother. It was not uncommon, during lulls in action, for individual soldiers to meet halfway, Unionists with coffee in trade for Confederate tobacco.
Part of the reason for the large losses was a widely-held, mistaken belief before and during the early stages of the war: a single, definitive battle would substantially control the outcome. Why this should be believed was unclear. Our revolutionary battle against Britain started with a number of early American successes, followed by British victories as Britain hardened its thinking and tightened its approach, concluding with another reversal and ultimate patriot victory. Another reason flowed naturally from the Anaconda plan: naval blockade coupled with bisection of the South by controlling the Mississippi River. Within a couple of years the North had accomplished those goals, but the war dragged on for two more years. Anaconda was a brilliant approach to avoiding a Union loss, but because the Southern population spread so thinly, with no real strategic centers like Baltimore and Philadelphia in the North, the Confederacy would not capitulate until its armies reached near zero strength and, more importantly, the civilian population was destroyed by marching opposition forces.
Why did the fighting start at all? For one, on the Northern side, American tolerance of slavery caused genuine embarrassment, even if most Northerners did not see blacks as their equals. Few civilized countries allowed it (Britain prohibited it in 1833). And even though the U.S. in 1807 abolished the importation of slaves, due to reproduction the slave population grew from 1 million at that time to 4 million by 1861. The South had been using its equality in states (even if not in population) to exert influence in the Senate. The 1820 Missouri compromise provided that territories joining the U.S. north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes would be free. The South would lose its equality in the Senate as new free states joined the Union.
That calculation, plus a reluctance to lose the benefits the slave economy, at least on the part of wealthy Southerners, pushed the conflict to the brink. Slave ownership concentrated thinly at the top. Fewer than 1 in 100 Southerners owned twenty or more slaves. Most Southerners had nothing to gain from military confrontation and a lot to lose, namely the ability to run a subsistence farm. However, slave owners held most of the political power and seized on states' rights as a convenient ideology. The belief in states' rights was more than propaganda, Confederate politicians accepted it as true. That belief hampered their war efforts. While in the North the entire military effort was controlled by Washington, Richmond in the South exercised only influence. States formed their own militias in large part to protect state, not Confederate, interests.
It is a wonder the war lasted as long as it did, given the North's outward military superiority. Its industrial output was as large as any nation's; its industrial centers were out of reach of Southern forces; it retained international recognition as the true American sovereign and the trade and credit that came with that recognition; its had access to professional money management, critical to funneling food and supplies across long lines.
When comparing personnel no obvious victor emerges. Robert E. Lee of the South was the pre-eminent general and the North suffered under bunglers until Lincoln's discovery of Grant and Sherman. Neither side had a trained force at the ready. The Southern soldier perhaps showed more grit and resourcefulness -- it was the South that invented the first workable submarine for river battles. Union soldiers had plenty of food; Confederate somewhat less but able to rely on the land. On the political side, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a former senator and secretary of war, was no match for Lincoln. Davis was elegant and refined but lacked Lincoln's gift with people.
The Confederacy banked on its stranglehold of the cotton trade to bring about recognition from Europe. No recognition came, though, for three reasons. First, Britain had sufficient stocks of cotton for its processing mills at the outbreak of war. Second, the British detested slavery. Third, the North's successfully encircled the South with a blockade.
Black soldiers in the Union army make great stories, but the reality was more mundane. The Union feared using blacks because of racism and because of the supposed vigor it might instill in Confederate forces; in no case were they integrated (no army units were integrated until the 1950s). Blacks did not join the armed forces until late in the war, and they were poorly led and tentatively fielded. Further, while some were undoubtedly sought retribution against white Southerners, a good number were also too afraid to fight effectively (capture or mere separation could mean death, or worse). So, while some black units achieved glory, the overall impact of blacks on the Union military effort scarcely differed from that of whites.
I had not given any thought to the notion that while the Union cleaved into North and South, and many states were firmly in one camp (such as Massachusetts) or the other (such as Mississippi). In places like Tennessee, Kansas and especially Missouri, public opinion divided sharply. As fighting started between the Union and Confederacy, so to did fighting start in Missouri, with Unionists in the Northern sections being driven from their homes. At the same time, Jayhawkers (abolitionists from Kansas) attacked secessionists in Western Missouri. The conclusion of these localized hostilities: a Union state, but secessionist elements who were admitted to the Confederate Congress.
Similarly, I had not given any thought to the motivations of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin. I came of age when a mentally unstable Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan without political motivation and thought that must have been the case with Lincoln as well. My belief was odd, given my familiarity with Archduke Franz Ferdinand and World War I. Booth was 27 years of age and a financially successful actor. He was also a fanatic confederate and a member of a gang whose purpose was to assassinate Union leaders. They had plotted for months before the attack and Union forces were chasing them. Booth entered the theater, shot Lincoln, jumped to the stage, broke his leg, but managed to mount his horse and flee. For twelve days he moved from house to house until cornered by Unionists. He refused to concede, the forces set on fire the building that held him and shot into the fire, killing him. Another of the gang was assigned the task of killing Vice-President Andrew Jackson, but that member lost his nerve.
Race relations in America would have perhaps been much different had he not. The President Jackson only thinly disguised his racism. Reconstruction was never intended for the South, but was considered for the North. Nothing like a Marshall Plan was considered, and in the end little was done. A plan would have been helpful to newly freed Northern blacks, who had their freedom but little else. Jackson's antipathy ensured it would stay that way, as would various stratagems to deny from Southern blacks in practice what was rightfully theirs by law. In the South, where many landless blacks remained, no work was available except farming and sharecropping some former master's land.
The battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in the Summer of 1963 was a turning point in the war. 64,000 Confederates under General Lee faced 99,000 Union fighters under General Lee, who had been maneuvering his men for months in the hopes of pushing into Northern territory. Each side lost approximately 23,000 men and, as Lee was unable to push through, counted as a Union victory; 46,000 dead in a few days' fighting.
Four months later notable Northern leaders gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg. Lincoln was second to speak on the program, after music and prayer and a two-hour, prepared-script speech by former Massachusetts senator Edward Everett. Lincoln spoke his three paragraphs in two minutes. Among the many things Lincoln accomplished with that speech, his refusal to differentiate between the sacrifices given by North and South sped the nation's healing.
The subtitle is "A Military History", which indeed it is, given the sometimes numbing description of fronts moved and bodies killed, injured or missing. But, there might be military buffs out there who enjoy that sort of thing. I skimmed through those paragraphs to enjoy the remainder of the book, for one cannot talk about the Civil War without at least some mention of politics.
Keegan has high regard for Lincoln as a politician, speaker and military leader. Lincoln had no military experience prior to his assuming office, and he sometimes struggled too long with inept generals such as George McClellan before fixing on winners such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. But, Lincoln eventually alighted on a cogent military strategy (the Anaconda plan); further, he settled on the achievable political goal of black freedom rather than the unachievable (at that time) goal of black equality, which was not something he believed personally. Lincoln sought to preserve the Union, end slavery, and cause as little damage as necessary in the process. Unfortunately, much damage was necessary.
The Civil War was easily America's deadliest: over 10,000 battles in four years of fighting saw 110,000 Union battle deaths and 94,000 Confederate. Double that number died from disease, a ratio that would hold in the First World War as well. Why did these soldiers continue to fight even after the consequences were known and abandonment was somewhat easy? Keegan's answer: "cause and comrades". In the early going Unionists eagerly signed up to preserve the Union and abolish slavery and Confederates to preserve states' rights. After initial losses it was hard to give up and say to oneself and fellows that the loss was wasted, much like a poker player who already has a substantial number of chips in the pot. This, despite speaking the same language as the "opponent" and the cases where brother fought brother. It was not uncommon, during lulls in action, for individual soldiers to meet halfway, Unionists with coffee in trade for Confederate tobacco.
Part of the reason for the large losses was a widely-held, mistaken belief before and during the early stages of the war: a single, definitive battle would substantially control the outcome. Why this should be believed was unclear. Our revolutionary battle against Britain started with a number of early American successes, followed by British victories as Britain hardened its thinking and tightened its approach, concluding with another reversal and ultimate patriot victory. Another reason flowed naturally from the Anaconda plan: naval blockade coupled with bisection of the South by controlling the Mississippi River. Within a couple of years the North had accomplished those goals, but the war dragged on for two more years. Anaconda was a brilliant approach to avoiding a Union loss, but because the Southern population spread so thinly, with no real strategic centers like Baltimore and Philadelphia in the North, the Confederacy would not capitulate until its armies reached near zero strength and, more importantly, the civilian population was destroyed by marching opposition forces.
Why did the fighting start at all? For one, on the Northern side, American tolerance of slavery caused genuine embarrassment, even if most Northerners did not see blacks as their equals. Few civilized countries allowed it (Britain prohibited it in 1833). And even though the U.S. in 1807 abolished the importation of slaves, due to reproduction the slave population grew from 1 million at that time to 4 million by 1861. The South had been using its equality in states (even if not in population) to exert influence in the Senate. The 1820 Missouri compromise provided that territories joining the U.S. north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes would be free. The South would lose its equality in the Senate as new free states joined the Union.
That calculation, plus a reluctance to lose the benefits the slave economy, at least on the part of wealthy Southerners, pushed the conflict to the brink. Slave ownership concentrated thinly at the top. Fewer than 1 in 100 Southerners owned twenty or more slaves. Most Southerners had nothing to gain from military confrontation and a lot to lose, namely the ability to run a subsistence farm. However, slave owners held most of the political power and seized on states' rights as a convenient ideology. The belief in states' rights was more than propaganda, Confederate politicians accepted it as true. That belief hampered their war efforts. While in the North the entire military effort was controlled by Washington, Richmond in the South exercised only influence. States formed their own militias in large part to protect state, not Confederate, interests.
It is a wonder the war lasted as long as it did, given the North's outward military superiority. Its industrial output was as large as any nation's; its industrial centers were out of reach of Southern forces; it retained international recognition as the true American sovereign and the trade and credit that came with that recognition; its had access to professional money management, critical to funneling food and supplies across long lines.
When comparing personnel no obvious victor emerges. Robert E. Lee of the South was the pre-eminent general and the North suffered under bunglers until Lincoln's discovery of Grant and Sherman. Neither side had a trained force at the ready. The Southern soldier perhaps showed more grit and resourcefulness -- it was the South that invented the first workable submarine for river battles. Union soldiers had plenty of food; Confederate somewhat less but able to rely on the land. On the political side, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a former senator and secretary of war, was no match for Lincoln. Davis was elegant and refined but lacked Lincoln's gift with people.
The Confederacy banked on its stranglehold of the cotton trade to bring about recognition from Europe. No recognition came, though, for three reasons. First, Britain had sufficient stocks of cotton for its processing mills at the outbreak of war. Second, the British detested slavery. Third, the North's successfully encircled the South with a blockade.
Black soldiers in the Union army make great stories, but the reality was more mundane. The Union feared using blacks because of racism and because of the supposed vigor it might instill in Confederate forces; in no case were they integrated (no army units were integrated until the 1950s). Blacks did not join the armed forces until late in the war, and they were poorly led and tentatively fielded. Further, while some were undoubtedly sought retribution against white Southerners, a good number were also too afraid to fight effectively (capture or mere separation could mean death, or worse). So, while some black units achieved glory, the overall impact of blacks on the Union military effort scarcely differed from that of whites.
I had not given any thought to the notion that while the Union cleaved into North and South, and many states were firmly in one camp (such as Massachusetts) or the other (such as Mississippi). In places like Tennessee, Kansas and especially Missouri, public opinion divided sharply. As fighting started between the Union and Confederacy, so to did fighting start in Missouri, with Unionists in the Northern sections being driven from their homes. At the same time, Jayhawkers (abolitionists from Kansas) attacked secessionists in Western Missouri. The conclusion of these localized hostilities: a Union state, but secessionist elements who were admitted to the Confederate Congress.
Similarly, I had not given any thought to the motivations of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin. I came of age when a mentally unstable Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan without political motivation and thought that must have been the case with Lincoln as well. My belief was odd, given my familiarity with Archduke Franz Ferdinand and World War I. Booth was 27 years of age and a financially successful actor. He was also a fanatic confederate and a member of a gang whose purpose was to assassinate Union leaders. They had plotted for months before the attack and Union forces were chasing them. Booth entered the theater, shot Lincoln, jumped to the stage, broke his leg, but managed to mount his horse and flee. For twelve days he moved from house to house until cornered by Unionists. He refused to concede, the forces set on fire the building that held him and shot into the fire, killing him. Another of the gang was assigned the task of killing Vice-President Andrew Jackson, but that member lost his nerve.
Race relations in America would have perhaps been much different had he not. The President Jackson only thinly disguised his racism. Reconstruction was never intended for the South, but was considered for the North. Nothing like a Marshall Plan was considered, and in the end little was done. A plan would have been helpful to newly freed Northern blacks, who had their freedom but little else. Jackson's antipathy ensured it would stay that way, as would various stratagems to deny from Southern blacks in practice what was rightfully theirs by law. In the South, where many landless blacks remained, no work was available except farming and sharecropping some former master's land.
The battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in the Summer of 1963 was a turning point in the war. 64,000 Confederates under General Lee faced 99,000 Union fighters under General Lee, who had been maneuvering his men for months in the hopes of pushing into Northern territory. Each side lost approximately 23,000 men and, as Lee was unable to push through, counted as a Union victory; 46,000 dead in a few days' fighting.
Four months later notable Northern leaders gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg. Lincoln was second to speak on the program, after music and prayer and a two-hour, prepared-script speech by former Massachusetts senator Edward Everett. Lincoln spoke his three paragraphs in two minutes. Among the many things Lincoln accomplished with that speech, his refusal to differentiate between the sacrifices given by North and South sped the nation's healing.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Book review: Blind Descent
Authored by James M. Tabor in 2010 (ISBN 978-1-4000-6767-1).
The author relates the multiple expeditions of two leaders in the field: Bill Stone, Ph.D. and Alexander Klimchouk, Ph.D.
Dr. Stone focused his efforts on the Cheve cave in Mexico, where he and his team pushed down to -4,869 feet, making it the 9th-deepest in the world. Klimchouk's team descending to -6,825 feet in Krubera cave in the Caucasus mountains, making it the deepest. For both the starting point was well above sea level, so the caves do not descend below sea level. Team is a key word in the sentence above; professional caving expeditions involve dozens of participants and tons of gear. "Professional" caving is not lucrative in the sense of other, high-profile professions. It is a profession for these two spelunkers, though, because of the large sums of money involved, which these leaders spend much of their time raising. The leader must also secure permission from local authorities. Given the two expeditions from this book occur in Mexico and the former Soviet state of Georgia, political entities without a long history of respect for law, obtaining and keeping permission is not trivial. Stone faced the extra hurdle of local residents who viewed the cave as a religious emblem and disliked his operations there.
Tabor's description of caving was much different than my lay understanding. When I thought of caves I thought of stalagmites rising from the ground and stalactites descending from the ceiling. Those are present in limestone caves, which these are not. The key description is dark, pitch black. Darkness, experienced for up to two weeks at a time for some members, causes depression and suppresses the immune system. Carbide lamps were typical light sources, being replaced (but not exclusively) by LEDs. Next is wet. Caves are formed by the flow of water and the spelunkers are always wet because they are operating in flowing water that ranges from a trickle to a waterfall. At other times they are pushing through sumps: pockets of water that separate two airspaces in a cave. The only way to get from the air space you are in to the air space you want to be is to pass through this water.
Next is grueling and dangerous: think mountaineering in reverse. Cheve descended nearly 5,000 vertical feet, Krubera more than that. Rock climbing with ropes is the essential mode of transportation. The reverse-climbers plan stages and cache them with food. Falls and death are, if not common, part of the job. And, while mountaineers face thin air and cavers generally have plenty of oxygen, cavers face at least three additional difficulties. First, mountaineers do not have to dig. Cavers often dig in tight spaces (hence the need to dig at all). And, the material dug out needs to be carried up to be removed. Using an average density of rock at ten times that of water, a one-gallon container weighs 85 pounds. Second, rescue is especially tricky in a cave. Whereas the climber may have contorted his (usually his, though the book did mention a few women cavers) body to slip through a narrow passage, a metal litter used to recover an injured caver cannot so bend. Now, combine that complication with the fact that the rescue involves the hard work of lifting a heavy body and rescue litter thousands of feet. And, helicopters can be used to evacuate an injured mountaineer but not an injured caver (at least until the caver reaches ground level). Third, mountaineers rarely run the risk of drowning. Recall the water and imagine a caver crawling through a space that is only a few feet high. A strong rain from above can quickly raise the water level below by several feet. A caver caught in a narrow passage can find his air replaced by water and drown.
Like mountaineers, spelunkers must also deal with wind. This surprised me. The deepest caves have an outlet at the bottom as well as an opening at the top. Tabor describes Stone as pouring dye into the water at the top of Cheve and having a team member observe the dye in a nearby river, 8,000 feet below. The outlet allows more water to flow through and widens the cave, deeper, making the cave easier to descend. This wind produces much noise and, combined with the wetness, interferes with sleeping. Also interfering with sleeping is the lack of flat surfaces. Caves have less space than mountains and finding that cozy-little-spot is near impossible. Beds are sometimes narrow trays bolted to the rock above a rushing waterfall.
Krubera cave was more cramped that Cheve, but Cheve had far more water. Its spelunkers needed to traverse long sumps, longer than one could hold his breath. Stone was an engineer by training and he spent years developing an advanced scuba tank called a rebreather. Tabor, at least, describes it as a Stone invention. The wikipedia article does not mention Stone. The idea is clever: we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, except that is not quite true. We exhale carbon dioxide and oxygen; our bodies do not make use of all the oxygen we inhale. Rebreathers capture this oxygen and last approximately ten times longer than a standard tank, depending on the depth of the water. The rebreather does not expel gas, a further advantage in military applications where the user does not want to be detected.
The author relates the multiple expeditions of two leaders in the field: Bill Stone, Ph.D. and Alexander Klimchouk, Ph.D.
Dr. Stone focused his efforts on the Cheve cave in Mexico, where he and his team pushed down to -4,869 feet, making it the 9th-deepest in the world. Klimchouk's team descending to -6,825 feet in Krubera cave in the Caucasus mountains, making it the deepest. For both the starting point was well above sea level, so the caves do not descend below sea level. Team is a key word in the sentence above; professional caving expeditions involve dozens of participants and tons of gear. "Professional" caving is not lucrative in the sense of other, high-profile professions. It is a profession for these two spelunkers, though, because of the large sums of money involved, which these leaders spend much of their time raising. The leader must also secure permission from local authorities. Given the two expeditions from this book occur in Mexico and the former Soviet state of Georgia, political entities without a long history of respect for law, obtaining and keeping permission is not trivial. Stone faced the extra hurdle of local residents who viewed the cave as a religious emblem and disliked his operations there.
Tabor's description of caving was much different than my lay understanding. When I thought of caves I thought of stalagmites rising from the ground and stalactites descending from the ceiling. Those are present in limestone caves, which these are not. The key description is dark, pitch black. Darkness, experienced for up to two weeks at a time for some members, causes depression and suppresses the immune system. Carbide lamps were typical light sources, being replaced (but not exclusively) by LEDs. Next is wet. Caves are formed by the flow of water and the spelunkers are always wet because they are operating in flowing water that ranges from a trickle to a waterfall. At other times they are pushing through sumps: pockets of water that separate two airspaces in a cave. The only way to get from the air space you are in to the air space you want to be is to pass through this water.
Next is grueling and dangerous: think mountaineering in reverse. Cheve descended nearly 5,000 vertical feet, Krubera more than that. Rock climbing with ropes is the essential mode of transportation. The reverse-climbers plan stages and cache them with food. Falls and death are, if not common, part of the job. And, while mountaineers face thin air and cavers generally have plenty of oxygen, cavers face at least three additional difficulties. First, mountaineers do not have to dig. Cavers often dig in tight spaces (hence the need to dig at all). And, the material dug out needs to be carried up to be removed. Using an average density of rock at ten times that of water, a one-gallon container weighs 85 pounds. Second, rescue is especially tricky in a cave. Whereas the climber may have contorted his (usually his, though the book did mention a few women cavers) body to slip through a narrow passage, a metal litter used to recover an injured caver cannot so bend. Now, combine that complication with the fact that the rescue involves the hard work of lifting a heavy body and rescue litter thousands of feet. And, helicopters can be used to evacuate an injured mountaineer but not an injured caver (at least until the caver reaches ground level). Third, mountaineers rarely run the risk of drowning. Recall the water and imagine a caver crawling through a space that is only a few feet high. A strong rain from above can quickly raise the water level below by several feet. A caver caught in a narrow passage can find his air replaced by water and drown.
Like mountaineers, spelunkers must also deal with wind. This surprised me. The deepest caves have an outlet at the bottom as well as an opening at the top. Tabor describes Stone as pouring dye into the water at the top of Cheve and having a team member observe the dye in a nearby river, 8,000 feet below. The outlet allows more water to flow through and widens the cave, deeper, making the cave easier to descend. This wind produces much noise and, combined with the wetness, interferes with sleeping. Also interfering with sleeping is the lack of flat surfaces. Caves have less space than mountains and finding that cozy-little-spot is near impossible. Beds are sometimes narrow trays bolted to the rock above a rushing waterfall.
Krubera cave was more cramped that Cheve, but Cheve had far more water. Its spelunkers needed to traverse long sumps, longer than one could hold his breath. Stone was an engineer by training and he spent years developing an advanced scuba tank called a rebreather. Tabor, at least, describes it as a Stone invention. The wikipedia article does not mention Stone. The idea is clever: we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, except that is not quite true. We exhale carbon dioxide and oxygen; our bodies do not make use of all the oxygen we inhale. Rebreathers capture this oxygen and last approximately ten times longer than a standard tank, depending on the depth of the water. The rebreather does not expel gas, a further advantage in military applications where the user does not want to be detected.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Book review: Cognitive Surplus
Authored by Clay Shirky in 2010 (ISBN 978-1-59420-253-7).
I noticed this book on the "new releases" shelf at my library. I read a few pages: he was observing the waste of time that is TV viewing. I have been urging my family to give it up and thought this would be good ammunition.
It turns out the book is about something else: our recent surplus of free time. Only in the last fifty years, one hundred at most, has a large portion of society had a surplus of free time. This time is courtesy of the many labor-saving technologies from the industrial and post-industrial revolutions. What are we doing with it?
Watching TV, mostly, in the United States and elsewhere. Shirky says that Americans alone watch 2 hundred billion hours of TV per year. Millions of hours of TV commercials on any given weekend. He cites an IBM researcher who says that Wikipedia, all the infrastructure and articles and edits and such, amounts to one hundred million hours over the ten years of its existence, or a mere ten million hours per year, or 0.005% of the time spent watching TV. So, when someone says, "I created or edited a Wikipedia page," and someone else responds, in a desultory fashion, "where do you find the time," the answer is: how could you not? We have so much free time.
We watch TV over reading or walking or bowling because the barrier to entry is so low. It is always available and there is usually something interesting to view. But today's youngest generations are watching less TV than the earlier generations; their preferred activity is still not reading nor walking nor bowling, but interacting: Facebook, Twitter, texting, web-surfing, even old-fashioned email.
And, whereas TV is a one-way medium, today's web technologies are two-way. We are using our free time to consume and produce. Given the amount of time and technology available, what has been produced could not have been predicted fifteen years ago. Encarta started in 1993 as a Microsoft purchase of an existing encyclopedia with 40-thousand-plus articles and the full backing of one of the world's largest corporations. Wikipedia started in 1999 with a volunteer staff, zero articles, and a few computers. Who would have predicted Wikipedia's triumph? Who would have expected thousands of people to contribute 3.4 million articles without being paid?
Shirky explains that by focusing on a monetary reward we are ignoring key human motivations: autonomy, competence, membership, sharing. Think about your hobbies and whether you would enjoy them more as a paid position with a boss. Probably not. I have written about this before. Wikipedia and Linux were and are successful because they provide all four motivations. Before the Internet, no one volunteered to write an encyclopedia because there was no way to do it, not because there was no interest.
Shirky says it is a mistake to treat current behaviors as natural when they could be accidental. We watch hours of TV not because it is natural, but because we have no means of producing, only consuming. With the arrival of the printing press and its (then) enormous cost, the publisher had to undertake editorial review. Printing items that would not be consumed would put the printer out of business. Thus, the editorial function of the press is something of a historical accident. With publishing costs now zero the editorial function is no longer needed, or at least it will not be compensated as highly.
He cites research that McDonald's pursued regarding its milkshakes: it wanted to know how to improve sales. Instead of focusing on taste and price, one of its researchers asked: what job is this milkshake performing? This researcher observed that most were purchased by lone travelers, in the morning, and were not consumed in the store. Sustenance? Perhaps, or more possibly, something to occupy the time of a lonely commuter. When something better comes along we should expect a decline in milkshake purchases.
The decrease in the cost of communication will cause us to re-evaluate all sorts of decisions we have made and practices we employ. For example, on college campuses study groups are encouraged while naked sharing of homework is subject to disciplinary action. With free communication it is now possible to set up a study group that includes hundreds of students, not just a small group. With membership so large, and access free and anonymous, some students will take but not give. Like Wikipedia, that may not bother the contributing students but may bother the professors.
One of my favorite examples from the book illustrates how people from my generation, and generations older than me, may not fully appreciate how different our world will become. Shirky was visiting the home of a friend with a four-year-old daughter. The daughter was watching a TV program and was really enjoying a particular character. She suddenly lifted from her seat and started rummaging behind the screen. "What are you looking for, honey?" "The mouse." She just assumed that everything electronic she observes will come with the interactivity provided by, in this case, a computer mouse.
I noticed this book on the "new releases" shelf at my library. I read a few pages: he was observing the waste of time that is TV viewing. I have been urging my family to give it up and thought this would be good ammunition.
It turns out the book is about something else: our recent surplus of free time. Only in the last fifty years, one hundred at most, has a large portion of society had a surplus of free time. This time is courtesy of the many labor-saving technologies from the industrial and post-industrial revolutions. What are we doing with it?
Watching TV, mostly, in the United States and elsewhere. Shirky says that Americans alone watch 2 hundred billion hours of TV per year. Millions of hours of TV commercials on any given weekend. He cites an IBM researcher who says that Wikipedia, all the infrastructure and articles and edits and such, amounts to one hundred million hours over the ten years of its existence, or a mere ten million hours per year, or 0.005% of the time spent watching TV. So, when someone says, "I created or edited a Wikipedia page," and someone else responds, in a desultory fashion, "where do you find the time," the answer is: how could you not? We have so much free time.
We watch TV over reading or walking or bowling because the barrier to entry is so low. It is always available and there is usually something interesting to view. But today's youngest generations are watching less TV than the earlier generations; their preferred activity is still not reading nor walking nor bowling, but interacting: Facebook, Twitter, texting, web-surfing, even old-fashioned email.
And, whereas TV is a one-way medium, today's web technologies are two-way. We are using our free time to consume and produce. Given the amount of time and technology available, what has been produced could not have been predicted fifteen years ago. Encarta started in 1993 as a Microsoft purchase of an existing encyclopedia with 40-thousand-plus articles and the full backing of one of the world's largest corporations. Wikipedia started in 1999 with a volunteer staff, zero articles, and a few computers. Who would have predicted Wikipedia's triumph? Who would have expected thousands of people to contribute 3.4 million articles without being paid?
Shirky explains that by focusing on a monetary reward we are ignoring key human motivations: autonomy, competence, membership, sharing. Think about your hobbies and whether you would enjoy them more as a paid position with a boss. Probably not. I have written about this before. Wikipedia and Linux were and are successful because they provide all four motivations. Before the Internet, no one volunteered to write an encyclopedia because there was no way to do it, not because there was no interest.
Shirky says it is a mistake to treat current behaviors as natural when they could be accidental. We watch hours of TV not because it is natural, but because we have no means of producing, only consuming. With the arrival of the printing press and its (then) enormous cost, the publisher had to undertake editorial review. Printing items that would not be consumed would put the printer out of business. Thus, the editorial function of the press is something of a historical accident. With publishing costs now zero the editorial function is no longer needed, or at least it will not be compensated as highly.
He cites research that McDonald's pursued regarding its milkshakes: it wanted to know how to improve sales. Instead of focusing on taste and price, one of its researchers asked: what job is this milkshake performing? This researcher observed that most were purchased by lone travelers, in the morning, and were not consumed in the store. Sustenance? Perhaps, or more possibly, something to occupy the time of a lonely commuter. When something better comes along we should expect a decline in milkshake purchases.
The decrease in the cost of communication will cause us to re-evaluate all sorts of decisions we have made and practices we employ. For example, on college campuses study groups are encouraged while naked sharing of homework is subject to disciplinary action. With free communication it is now possible to set up a study group that includes hundreds of students, not just a small group. With membership so large, and access free and anonymous, some students will take but not give. Like Wikipedia, that may not bother the contributing students but may bother the professors.
One of my favorite examples from the book illustrates how people from my generation, and generations older than me, may not fully appreciate how different our world will become. Shirky was visiting the home of a friend with a four-year-old daughter. The daughter was watching a TV program and was really enjoying a particular character. She suddenly lifted from her seat and started rummaging behind the screen. "What are you looking for, honey?" "The mouse." She just assumed that everything electronic she observes will come with the interactivity provided by, in this case, a computer mouse.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Book review: the invisible gorilla
Authored by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-307-45965-7).
SPOILER ALERT: before reading reading further, please count basketball passes.
According to these authors, approximately 50% of the people who view the video do not observe the gorilla. I read about the video before viewing it, so I have no first-hand knowledge. Both of my children did not not observe it. Of three adults I know who viewed the video, two observed the gorilla and one did not. How could it be that so many of us fail to observe what is right before our eyes? Natural selection, perhaps. There is great benefit to being able to focus on prey in the bush in front of you, or predators behind you, without considering an ongoing argument with a cave-mate.
You might say, after watching the video and reading my explanation, that the gorilla was black and half the players were black; there is no mystery in 50% of the subjects not observing it. Fair enough; the authors repeated the experiment with a red cross sign in place of the gorilla. This time the subjects did a little better, observing the cross 70% of the time. And, according to their studies, there is no such thing as an observant person, a person who consistently notices unexpected objects.
With this knowledge in hand, other strange conclusions emerge. Motorcyclists are at higher risk for accidents: they are less noticed and more vulnerable to injury. Should cyclists wear reflective clothing? The authors say it won't make much difference. The problem arises because motorists are not expecting motorcycles and thus do not observe them, even when seeing them, much like subjects plainly "see" the gorilla in the midst of the basketball players but do not observe it. Perhaps motorcycles should be outfitted with widely-spaced headlamps to mimic the front-ends of most automobiles. What about airplane pilots who collide with objects on the taxiway? Surely, a heads-up display would improve matters by allowing the pilots to look through their windshield all the time instead of shifting their gaze between the windshield and their instruments. Tests did not show any improvement, however. The authors interpret that result to mean that the problem was not that the pilots' eyes did not catch the light from the taxiway objects; rather, the pilots did not expect those objects to be there and so did not observe them. The problem is attention, not eyesight.
Given the foregoing I have decided to stop talking on a mobile phone while driving. Hands-free devices are not the answer either. The problem is attention, not finger coordination.
Related to the ability to observe the unexpected is the ability to observe unexpected changes. For instance, movies are not recorded end-to-end. Various scenes are recorded, out-of-order, and then re-ordered in the editing room. Thus, a sequence that takes place over one minute in the movie may have been recorded days apart. Staff on the set are responsible for ensuring that, for example, if the actor was wearing glasses on the first day of filming a scene then the actor must continue to wear glasses on the second day. Yet, mistakes are made, and a cottage industry has arisen, devoted to chronicling the mistakes movie directors and editors make when filming a movie.
This book is all about illusions. The first illusion, described above, is that we observe all there is to observe and that we can competently attend to more than one thing at a time.
The next illusion the authors consider is memory accuracy. The classic view is that memory is like a disk drive: observations come in, are written to disk, and are later retrieved. Sure, there are cases where our memory fails, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. It turns out that the disk drive metaphor is terribly wrong. Memories are profoundly influenced by emotions. Worse, our strength of recall is unrelated to accuracy. I remember this concept from my law school days: subjects were shown a video of a traffic accident and were later separated into two groups. The groups were asked similar, but different questions. For example, group one would be asked "did you observe a broken headlight" while group two would be asked "did you observe the broken headlight". The positive responses were higher for the first group. This result has been repeated countless times in sociology and psychology departments. And, these results are plainly visible in everyday life. The authors cite a study where subjects observed a staged crime and were later asked to identify the perpetrator. Some subjects were given longer, or less obscured views, than the other subjects; these subjects were better at identifying the staged criminal. Yet all subjects expressed the same confidence in their identification.
Shortly after 9/11 the younger President Bush was asked about his recollections of the attacks and his recollections did not match the agreed, actual sequence of events. Some viewed his statements as evidence of his prior knowledge. I was no fan of Bush but I do not think he would do such a thing, especially when faulty memory at a time of high emotionality explains the facts so well. As another example, Hillary Clinton the campaign trail proudly claimed to have touched down in Bosnia in the middle of a fire-fight; none of the press present that day recall such a thing. What would cause her to issue such a statement when it could so easily be proven wrong? Perhaps because she simply mis-remembered it.
Most of us also suffer from the illusion of knowledge. We think we know more than we do about just about everything we encounter. Consider the toilet: we all know how to operate one, but do we know how it works? Could we explain it to a five-year-old, to the repeated "why" questions he or she might ask? Could we draw a picture of a bicycle from memory? The authors cite examples from the investing world: hot-shots like Brian Hunter and hot-shot companies like Lehman Brothers. They certainly felt like they knew how the markets worked.
Another common illusion is using the particular to prove (or disprove) the general; related is the illusion of cause. Many among us believe that autism can be caused by vaccinations. These authors claim that is no proven correlation, let alone proven causation. Rather, the signs of autism manifest themselves around age 2, and most children receive a battery of immunizations at around the same time. This is unfortunate, because the diseases these vaccinations protect against, such as measles, are terrible diseases in their own right. One can only catch measles from someone else who has measles. Some children, such as those receiving certain organ transplants or cancer chemotherapy, should not receive the measles vaccination, and such children are at risk from those children who are not immunized but could be.
Again, the human tendency to conflate sequencing or correlation with cause is probably genetic. Survival is enhanced by the ability to form patterns from observations about the behaviors of predators and prey. I remember reading From Good to Great, where author Jim Collins cites the non-obvious behaviors of successful companies, and thinking that these behaviors were probably practiced by hundreds of failed companies, and further than many successful companies did not follow these practices. I think many recent business books are similar.
Did you know that playing Mozart for young children makes them smarter? It does not, or at least it has not been proven to do so by more than one research team. Media sources cited the original study, showing a relationship and helped generate millions of dollars of sales for Baby Einstein and similar products. Few people, and no one in mainstream media, paid any attention to subsequent studies that showed no relationship. The authors call this the illusion of potential: we can achieve more, if only we knew how. Did you know that we only use 10% of our brain power? I did not. I am not even sure what this means. What is your brain capacity? How is it measured? Why would we have all this unused capacity after millions of years of natural selection? Our big heads make childbirth more risky; wouldn't smaller, more efficient brains, provide a competitive advantage?
As other examples the authors cite studies regarding training your brain. It makes sense that exercising your brain will make it stronger, must like exercising your body. There is little evidence that this is true for adults (children being another matter entirely). Subjects who memorized long strings of numbers, for example, became good a memorizing long strings of numbers but no better at other cognitive tasks. In one study, though, aerobic exercise increased cognitive abilities (more so than stretching exercises). So, put away your Mozart CDs and your Sudoku puzzles and put on your sneakers.
SPOILER ALERT: before reading reading further, please count basketball passes.
According to these authors, approximately 50% of the people who view the video do not observe the gorilla. I read about the video before viewing it, so I have no first-hand knowledge. Both of my children did not not observe it. Of three adults I know who viewed the video, two observed the gorilla and one did not. How could it be that so many of us fail to observe what is right before our eyes? Natural selection, perhaps. There is great benefit to being able to focus on prey in the bush in front of you, or predators behind you, without considering an ongoing argument with a cave-mate.
You might say, after watching the video and reading my explanation, that the gorilla was black and half the players were black; there is no mystery in 50% of the subjects not observing it. Fair enough; the authors repeated the experiment with a red cross sign in place of the gorilla. This time the subjects did a little better, observing the cross 70% of the time. And, according to their studies, there is no such thing as an observant person, a person who consistently notices unexpected objects.
With this knowledge in hand, other strange conclusions emerge. Motorcyclists are at higher risk for accidents: they are less noticed and more vulnerable to injury. Should cyclists wear reflective clothing? The authors say it won't make much difference. The problem arises because motorists are not expecting motorcycles and thus do not observe them, even when seeing them, much like subjects plainly "see" the gorilla in the midst of the basketball players but do not observe it. Perhaps motorcycles should be outfitted with widely-spaced headlamps to mimic the front-ends of most automobiles. What about airplane pilots who collide with objects on the taxiway? Surely, a heads-up display would improve matters by allowing the pilots to look through their windshield all the time instead of shifting their gaze between the windshield and their instruments. Tests did not show any improvement, however. The authors interpret that result to mean that the problem was not that the pilots' eyes did not catch the light from the taxiway objects; rather, the pilots did not expect those objects to be there and so did not observe them. The problem is attention, not eyesight.
Given the foregoing I have decided to stop talking on a mobile phone while driving. Hands-free devices are not the answer either. The problem is attention, not finger coordination.
Related to the ability to observe the unexpected is the ability to observe unexpected changes. For instance, movies are not recorded end-to-end. Various scenes are recorded, out-of-order, and then re-ordered in the editing room. Thus, a sequence that takes place over one minute in the movie may have been recorded days apart. Staff on the set are responsible for ensuring that, for example, if the actor was wearing glasses on the first day of filming a scene then the actor must continue to wear glasses on the second day. Yet, mistakes are made, and a cottage industry has arisen, devoted to chronicling the mistakes movie directors and editors make when filming a movie.
This book is all about illusions. The first illusion, described above, is that we observe all there is to observe and that we can competently attend to more than one thing at a time.
The next illusion the authors consider is memory accuracy. The classic view is that memory is like a disk drive: observations come in, are written to disk, and are later retrieved. Sure, there are cases where our memory fails, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. It turns out that the disk drive metaphor is terribly wrong. Memories are profoundly influenced by emotions. Worse, our strength of recall is unrelated to accuracy. I remember this concept from my law school days: subjects were shown a video of a traffic accident and were later separated into two groups. The groups were asked similar, but different questions. For example, group one would be asked "did you observe a broken headlight" while group two would be asked "did you observe the broken headlight". The positive responses were higher for the first group. This result has been repeated countless times in sociology and psychology departments. And, these results are plainly visible in everyday life. The authors cite a study where subjects observed a staged crime and were later asked to identify the perpetrator. Some subjects were given longer, or less obscured views, than the other subjects; these subjects were better at identifying the staged criminal. Yet all subjects expressed the same confidence in their identification.
Shortly after 9/11 the younger President Bush was asked about his recollections of the attacks and his recollections did not match the agreed, actual sequence of events. Some viewed his statements as evidence of his prior knowledge. I was no fan of Bush but I do not think he would do such a thing, especially when faulty memory at a time of high emotionality explains the facts so well. As another example, Hillary Clinton the campaign trail proudly claimed to have touched down in Bosnia in the middle of a fire-fight; none of the press present that day recall such a thing. What would cause her to issue such a statement when it could so easily be proven wrong? Perhaps because she simply mis-remembered it.
Most of us also suffer from the illusion of knowledge. We think we know more than we do about just about everything we encounter. Consider the toilet: we all know how to operate one, but do we know how it works? Could we explain it to a five-year-old, to the repeated "why" questions he or she might ask? Could we draw a picture of a bicycle from memory? The authors cite examples from the investing world: hot-shots like Brian Hunter and hot-shot companies like Lehman Brothers. They certainly felt like they knew how the markets worked.
Another common illusion is using the particular to prove (or disprove) the general; related is the illusion of cause. Many among us believe that autism can be caused by vaccinations. These authors claim that is no proven correlation, let alone proven causation. Rather, the signs of autism manifest themselves around age 2, and most children receive a battery of immunizations at around the same time. This is unfortunate, because the diseases these vaccinations protect against, such as measles, are terrible diseases in their own right. One can only catch measles from someone else who has measles. Some children, such as those receiving certain organ transplants or cancer chemotherapy, should not receive the measles vaccination, and such children are at risk from those children who are not immunized but could be.
Again, the human tendency to conflate sequencing or correlation with cause is probably genetic. Survival is enhanced by the ability to form patterns from observations about the behaviors of predators and prey. I remember reading From Good to Great, where author Jim Collins cites the non-obvious behaviors of successful companies, and thinking that these behaviors were probably practiced by hundreds of failed companies, and further than many successful companies did not follow these practices. I think many recent business books are similar.
Did you know that playing Mozart for young children makes them smarter? It does not, or at least it has not been proven to do so by more than one research team. Media sources cited the original study, showing a relationship and helped generate millions of dollars of sales for Baby Einstein and similar products. Few people, and no one in mainstream media, paid any attention to subsequent studies that showed no relationship. The authors call this the illusion of potential: we can achieve more, if only we knew how. Did you know that we only use 10% of our brain power? I did not. I am not even sure what this means. What is your brain capacity? How is it measured? Why would we have all this unused capacity after millions of years of natural selection? Our big heads make childbirth more risky; wouldn't smaller, more efficient brains, provide a competitive advantage?
As other examples the authors cite studies regarding training your brain. It makes sense that exercising your brain will make it stronger, must like exercising your body. There is little evidence that this is true for adults (children being another matter entirely). Subjects who memorized long strings of numbers, for example, became good a memorizing long strings of numbers but no better at other cognitive tasks. In one study, though, aerobic exercise increased cognitive abilities (more so than stretching exercises). So, put away your Mozart CDs and your Sudoku puzzles and put on your sneakers.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Dogs Decoded
My family and I watched a Nova show: Dogs Decoded.
According to the show, dog owners live longer than non-owners. Of course, this is correlation, not causation, but causation is possible, and owing a dog is fun.
Some researchers have examined animals' ability to track human eye and finger gestures. The first animals mentioned were chimpanzees, the animal most similar to humans in terms of DNA sequences. A treat was placed under one of two opaque cups and presented to a chimp. A human would point, or look at, or both, the cup with the treat. The chimps paid no attention to these signals. Dogs, however, did.
The show described attempts to domesticate wolves, the animal believed to have DNA most similar to dogs. The wolves were removed from the mother at birth and fed and raised in a human home. After about eight months the wolves became too aggressive to live with. Or, rather, their aggressiveness did not diminish and they became too large to live with safely.
The show then described attempts to domesticate foxes. Adult foxes were selected based on their initial contacts with humans. Some react fearfully, some aggressively, some with curiosity. The curious foxes were bred with each other and, after eight generations (eight years) the researchers had foxes that were perfectly suited to live in a human home. These foxes also developed some of the physical traits of dogs: their legs were shorter and their tails curlier than standard foxes.
Dogs were described as having intelligence beyond our common assumptions but did not list any research to back this claim. It did, however, recount the activities of a particular dog. The dog was placed in one room and several dozen stuffed toys in another. The subject dog was verbally instructed to retrieve a particular toy, and did so. Fair enough, not so impressive. Then the dog was shown a smaller version of a particular toy; this dog went to the other room and retrieved the full-size version. Pretty neat. Then this dog was shown a picture of a particular toy; that toy was retrieved. That, I thought, was pretty impressive.
According to the show, dog owners live longer than non-owners. Of course, this is correlation, not causation, but causation is possible, and owing a dog is fun.
Some researchers have examined animals' ability to track human eye and finger gestures. The first animals mentioned were chimpanzees, the animal most similar to humans in terms of DNA sequences. A treat was placed under one of two opaque cups and presented to a chimp. A human would point, or look at, or both, the cup with the treat. The chimps paid no attention to these signals. Dogs, however, did.
The show described attempts to domesticate wolves, the animal believed to have DNA most similar to dogs. The wolves were removed from the mother at birth and fed and raised in a human home. After about eight months the wolves became too aggressive to live with. Or, rather, their aggressiveness did not diminish and they became too large to live with safely.
The show then described attempts to domesticate foxes. Adult foxes were selected based on their initial contacts with humans. Some react fearfully, some aggressively, some with curiosity. The curious foxes were bred with each other and, after eight generations (eight years) the researchers had foxes that were perfectly suited to live in a human home. These foxes also developed some of the physical traits of dogs: their legs were shorter and their tails curlier than standard foxes.
Dogs were described as having intelligence beyond our common assumptions but did not list any research to back this claim. It did, however, recount the activities of a particular dog. The dog was placed in one room and several dozen stuffed toys in another. The subject dog was verbally instructed to retrieve a particular toy, and did so. Fair enough, not so impressive. Then the dog was shown a smaller version of a particular toy; this dog went to the other room and retrieved the full-size version. Pretty neat. Then this dog was shown a picture of a particular toy; that toy was retrieved. That, I thought, was pretty impressive.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Book review: The Poisoner's Handbook
Authored by Deborah Blum in 2010 (ISBN 9-781-59240-243-8).
When I first spotted this volume on the shelf at the library I thought the title might be "The Young Poisoner's Handbook"; I once watched an enjoyable movie by the same name.
Even though the book explains thoroughly the chemistry behind poison, the central stories of Charlie Norris, New York City's long-serving chief medical examiner, and his assistant Alexander Gettler. Before Norris' arrival in 1918, New York, like many cities, allowed the Mayor to appoint the coroner. By law, no medical degree or experience was required, and the appointments generally followed exigencies political rather than scientific. The appointees could be inept or corrupt or both. Pay was sometimes based in part on commission; the coroner might perform multiple autopsies on the same body to collect multiple payments. One coroner received kickbacks from funeral homes for directing bodies there. Coroners would accept payment from relatives or interested parties in exchange for a particular finding regarding cause of death. As an example of ineptness, Blum cites a death certificate identifying "assault or diabetes" as the cause of death.
Norris was a skilled scientist, but his main contribution to the professional medical examiner we take as a given in today's cities was political and monetary. Norris forcefully demanded the independence of his office, bullying or embarrassing the mayor where necessary. He could do so because of his independent means: he was of the Pennsylvania Norrises, leading bankers and founders of Norristown. When he first took office the coroner's laboratory had no equipment (itself testimony to merits of the former office-holders). He used his own funds to purchase the equipment, and throughout the years when a poor economy or an emboldened mayor caused his funding to be cut, he would again dip into his own pocket to pay the salaries of his staff. Norris also used his political skills and charm to organize conferences of medical examiners from other cities, further strengthening the notion that the coroner's office should be a professional, rather than political, post.
The science Alexander Gettler inherited was primitive. Poisoning was a preferred method of murder because it was so easy to "get away with". Few methods existed for reliably detecting the presence of a poison in a cadaver. Even if its presence could be proven, no one knew what a lethal dose was. These uncertainties meant in many cases no arrest, or if an arrest then no conviction. Gettler was an exceptionally skilled chemist and toxicologist. He, together with Norris, invented the tests necessary to isolate poisons and determine what levels caused which symptoms.
Blum divides her book by poison. These divisions fall to some extent into time periods, although many poisons spanned (and continue now) across multiple periods:
Chloroform (CHCl3). Chloroform was one of the first widely-used anesthetics. Cheap and effective, surgeons preferred it, pharmacists stocked it, and it was widely available. It was, however, capricious. No one knew for sure what a safe dose was, and the burning and scarring of throat and lung tissue made overuse painful. Doctors preferred its use in part because suits for malpractice often failed because no one could say what was safe. Robbers and murderers appreciated its effectiveness.
Methyl (wood) alcohol (CH3OH). Like its cousin ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol gives its user a buzz, though more intensely. After the buzz, blindness and death often followed. As opposed to ethyl alcohol, when the body breaks down methyl alcohol the by-products are formaldehyde and formic acid. Ordinarily, no one would willingly imbibe methyl alcohol in place of ethyl. But, the Prohibition laws were not ordinary. Ethyl alcohol was harder to come by; bars and saloons sold liquor from unmarked, or mislabeled, containers. It was drinker-beware, and the poor populations, those without access to previously acquired stashes of alcohol, were most at risk.
Cyanide (HCN, KCN or NaCN). Cyanide is present in yew tree leaves, cherry laurel flowers, peach and apricot pits, and in bitter almonds. It was a popular choice for suicide because it acted quickly; it was not so popular for murder because of the tell-tale signs of death: bruising discoloration and convulsions. Accidental deaths were commonplace: before Norris was able to successfully lobby for their outlaw, insect fumigation commonly included cyanide in a gaseous form (hydrogen cyanide is used in the gas chamber).
Arsenic (Ag). While pure arsenic is poisonous, it mixes easily with oxygen to form white arsenic (As2O3), a nearly tasteless and odorless substance that can be added to food and causes death. As a murder weapon, its benefits include easy accessibility and handling (it was a key ingredient in weed and rat poisons) and, if administered in small doses, a slow death that mimics natural causes. However, because it is a metal and is not digested, it remains detectable in a body long after death. Alexander Gettler's contribution was to develop tests that detected ever smaller amounts.
Mercury (Hg). Pure mercury is not particularly poisonous, mostly because as a liquid its surface tension is so high that it tends to slip right through the digestive system, although its drinkers did tend to develop cancer. When mixed with chlorine in HgCl2, however, it becomes a salt, and like most salts is easily absorbed into the body. Like white arsenic, mercury bichloride was readily available in rat poisons and other household products (including treatments for constipation and syphilis). As with white arsenic, Dr. Gettler improved the sensitivity of the existing tests.
Carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon monoxide was a key ingredient in "illuminating gas" (along with hydrogen); the gas was also used to power stoves and heaters. Carbon monoxide is particularly toxic; at the time government scientists reckoned that the 22 horsepower Model-T, running in a closed, single-car garage would produce a lethal dose in ten minutes. Its lethality stems from its attractiveness to hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen in our blood. It turns out that hemoglobin prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen 200-to-1; thus, even with plenty of oxygen available, the body suffocates. The challenge for New York City toxicologists was to differentiate the carbon monoxide level in the cadaver from the level which existed in all urban dwellers. Gettler and others performed autopsies on dozens of decedents, from rural and urban settings, to discover the expected amount of "background" carbon monoxide. These discoveries were critical to securing convictions.
Radium (Ra). Radium is a poor choice as a murder weapon or suicide modality. It kills over a period of years. Its discovery in France by Madam Curie in 1898 came at the same time as her discovery of polonium, named after her native Poland. Both were radioactive, like uranium. Radium was considered especially useful, as it "burned" (emitted alpha and gamma radiation) much faster than uranium but more slowly that polonium (polonium's half-life is only one year). The military appreciated its use in watches whose numbers and indicators glowed in the dark, providing the time to soldiers without revealing their location to the enemy the way lights would have. Today, the same effect is achieved in watches and street signs with phosphorescent materials. The sparkle of radium was considered healthy in the early 1900s; the substance was added to soda, candy and facial creams. A hot spring that emitted radon gas was more popular than those that did not.
How was the radium made part of a watch? By hand-painting. The young gals who worked in the manufacturing plants were instructed, or learned on their own, that the paint brush could be brought to a finer point by smoothing it with their mouths. Unfortunately, from a chemical perspective (the number of electrons circling the nucleus) radium looks like calcium, which the body readily absorbs. Over time the radium entered their bones, causing their legs to break and their teeth to fall out.
Ethyl (grain) alcohol (C2H5OH). Beer, wine and liquor have caused countless deaths, either directly by incapacitating the brain, or indirectly, by causing poor judgment or coordination that precipitates an accident. But the science necessary to determine the level of intoxication of a decedent did not exist in Norris's time. It had to be invented.
One thing Alexander Gettler established was that the amount of alcohol consumed, the amount in the stomach, even the amount in the blood, was of no importance. It was the amount in the brain that mattered. And, by testing dogs, he established that the amount in the brain had the same effect on anyone, regardless of their drinking experience. What differentiated the habitual drinker, who could seemingly imbibe without effect, from the novice was the amount of ingested alcohol that made its way to the brain and the speed at which it did so. The chronic drinker's liver generates more enzymes to break down alcohol; thus, the chronic drinker seems to have a higher immunity to alcohol's effects.
Thallium (Tl). This was the preferred mode of the young poisoner in the movie mentioned above. It was first isolated in 1861, and its poisonous nature was soon recognized, but many in industry believed, or at least said, it was harmless in small amounts. It appeared in depilatory creams that very effectively removed hair from wherever on the body it was applied. Manufacturers derived pest control substances from it, mixed it with tungsten in lamp filaments, added it to eyeglasses to increase refraction, and combined it with mercury to achieve thermometer readings below -50 Celsius.
Its effectiveness as a poison derives from its chemical resemblance to potassium, which the human body is happy to incorporate into all of its tissues. The indications of poisoning included delirium and coma, tremors, nausea and diarrhea, and varied from person to person. Death from 10 grams followed in a few days or weeks. To the poisoner, these varied symptoms and extended period between application and death were very attractive, especially if the poisoner disliked the victim. As an added bonus, thallium has no taste or texture and is easily combined with foods and liquids. The poisoner only needed to hope that no autopsy was performed. Because thallium is a metal is remains in the body well after death and is easily detected.
Ms. Blum uses a light, story-telling style. I could have finished the 280-page book in a day had I not been distracted. I found her closing note amusing: when her husband discovered the topic of the book she was writing he made sure to place his cup of coffee beyond her reach.
When I first spotted this volume on the shelf at the library I thought the title might be "The Young Poisoner's Handbook"; I once watched an enjoyable movie by the same name.
Even though the book explains thoroughly the chemistry behind poison, the central stories of Charlie Norris, New York City's long-serving chief medical examiner, and his assistant Alexander Gettler. Before Norris' arrival in 1918, New York, like many cities, allowed the Mayor to appoint the coroner. By law, no medical degree or experience was required, and the appointments generally followed exigencies political rather than scientific. The appointees could be inept or corrupt or both. Pay was sometimes based in part on commission; the coroner might perform multiple autopsies on the same body to collect multiple payments. One coroner received kickbacks from funeral homes for directing bodies there. Coroners would accept payment from relatives or interested parties in exchange for a particular finding regarding cause of death. As an example of ineptness, Blum cites a death certificate identifying "assault or diabetes" as the cause of death.
Norris was a skilled scientist, but his main contribution to the professional medical examiner we take as a given in today's cities was political and monetary. Norris forcefully demanded the independence of his office, bullying or embarrassing the mayor where necessary. He could do so because of his independent means: he was of the Pennsylvania Norrises, leading bankers and founders of Norristown. When he first took office the coroner's laboratory had no equipment (itself testimony to merits of the former office-holders). He used his own funds to purchase the equipment, and throughout the years when a poor economy or an emboldened mayor caused his funding to be cut, he would again dip into his own pocket to pay the salaries of his staff. Norris also used his political skills and charm to organize conferences of medical examiners from other cities, further strengthening the notion that the coroner's office should be a professional, rather than political, post.
The science Alexander Gettler inherited was primitive. Poisoning was a preferred method of murder because it was so easy to "get away with". Few methods existed for reliably detecting the presence of a poison in a cadaver. Even if its presence could be proven, no one knew what a lethal dose was. These uncertainties meant in many cases no arrest, or if an arrest then no conviction. Gettler was an exceptionally skilled chemist and toxicologist. He, together with Norris, invented the tests necessary to isolate poisons and determine what levels caused which symptoms.
Blum divides her book by poison. These divisions fall to some extent into time periods, although many poisons spanned (and continue now) across multiple periods:
Chloroform (CHCl3). Chloroform was one of the first widely-used anesthetics. Cheap and effective, surgeons preferred it, pharmacists stocked it, and it was widely available. It was, however, capricious. No one knew for sure what a safe dose was, and the burning and scarring of throat and lung tissue made overuse painful. Doctors preferred its use in part because suits for malpractice often failed because no one could say what was safe. Robbers and murderers appreciated its effectiveness.
Methyl (wood) alcohol (CH3OH). Like its cousin ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol gives its user a buzz, though more intensely. After the buzz, blindness and death often followed. As opposed to ethyl alcohol, when the body breaks down methyl alcohol the by-products are formaldehyde and formic acid. Ordinarily, no one would willingly imbibe methyl alcohol in place of ethyl. But, the Prohibition laws were not ordinary. Ethyl alcohol was harder to come by; bars and saloons sold liquor from unmarked, or mislabeled, containers. It was drinker-beware, and the poor populations, those without access to previously acquired stashes of alcohol, were most at risk.
Cyanide (HCN, KCN or NaCN). Cyanide is present in yew tree leaves, cherry laurel flowers, peach and apricot pits, and in bitter almonds. It was a popular choice for suicide because it acted quickly; it was not so popular for murder because of the tell-tale signs of death: bruising discoloration and convulsions. Accidental deaths were commonplace: before Norris was able to successfully lobby for their outlaw, insect fumigation commonly included cyanide in a gaseous form (hydrogen cyanide is used in the gas chamber).
Arsenic (Ag). While pure arsenic is poisonous, it mixes easily with oxygen to form white arsenic (As2O3), a nearly tasteless and odorless substance that can be added to food and causes death. As a murder weapon, its benefits include easy accessibility and handling (it was a key ingredient in weed and rat poisons) and, if administered in small doses, a slow death that mimics natural causes. However, because it is a metal and is not digested, it remains detectable in a body long after death. Alexander Gettler's contribution was to develop tests that detected ever smaller amounts.
Mercury (Hg). Pure mercury is not particularly poisonous, mostly because as a liquid its surface tension is so high that it tends to slip right through the digestive system, although its drinkers did tend to develop cancer. When mixed with chlorine in HgCl2, however, it becomes a salt, and like most salts is easily absorbed into the body. Like white arsenic, mercury bichloride was readily available in rat poisons and other household products (including treatments for constipation and syphilis). As with white arsenic, Dr. Gettler improved the sensitivity of the existing tests.
Carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon monoxide was a key ingredient in "illuminating gas" (along with hydrogen); the gas was also used to power stoves and heaters. Carbon monoxide is particularly toxic; at the time government scientists reckoned that the 22 horsepower Model-T, running in a closed, single-car garage would produce a lethal dose in ten minutes. Its lethality stems from its attractiveness to hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen in our blood. It turns out that hemoglobin prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen 200-to-1; thus, even with plenty of oxygen available, the body suffocates. The challenge for New York City toxicologists was to differentiate the carbon monoxide level in the cadaver from the level which existed in all urban dwellers. Gettler and others performed autopsies on dozens of decedents, from rural and urban settings, to discover the expected amount of "background" carbon monoxide. These discoveries were critical to securing convictions.
Radium (Ra). Radium is a poor choice as a murder weapon or suicide modality. It kills over a period of years. Its discovery in France by Madam Curie in 1898 came at the same time as her discovery of polonium, named after her native Poland. Both were radioactive, like uranium. Radium was considered especially useful, as it "burned" (emitted alpha and gamma radiation) much faster than uranium but more slowly that polonium (polonium's half-life is only one year). The military appreciated its use in watches whose numbers and indicators glowed in the dark, providing the time to soldiers without revealing their location to the enemy the way lights would have. Today, the same effect is achieved in watches and street signs with phosphorescent materials. The sparkle of radium was considered healthy in the early 1900s; the substance was added to soda, candy and facial creams. A hot spring that emitted radon gas was more popular than those that did not.
How was the radium made part of a watch? By hand-painting. The young gals who worked in the manufacturing plants were instructed, or learned on their own, that the paint brush could be brought to a finer point by smoothing it with their mouths. Unfortunately, from a chemical perspective (the number of electrons circling the nucleus) radium looks like calcium, which the body readily absorbs. Over time the radium entered their bones, causing their legs to break and their teeth to fall out.
Ethyl (grain) alcohol (C2H5OH). Beer, wine and liquor have caused countless deaths, either directly by incapacitating the brain, or indirectly, by causing poor judgment or coordination that precipitates an accident. But the science necessary to determine the level of intoxication of a decedent did not exist in Norris's time. It had to be invented.
One thing Alexander Gettler established was that the amount of alcohol consumed, the amount in the stomach, even the amount in the blood, was of no importance. It was the amount in the brain that mattered. And, by testing dogs, he established that the amount in the brain had the same effect on anyone, regardless of their drinking experience. What differentiated the habitual drinker, who could seemingly imbibe without effect, from the novice was the amount of ingested alcohol that made its way to the brain and the speed at which it did so. The chronic drinker's liver generates more enzymes to break down alcohol; thus, the chronic drinker seems to have a higher immunity to alcohol's effects.
Thallium (Tl). This was the preferred mode of the young poisoner in the movie mentioned above. It was first isolated in 1861, and its poisonous nature was soon recognized, but many in industry believed, or at least said, it was harmless in small amounts. It appeared in depilatory creams that very effectively removed hair from wherever on the body it was applied. Manufacturers derived pest control substances from it, mixed it with tungsten in lamp filaments, added it to eyeglasses to increase refraction, and combined it with mercury to achieve thermometer readings below -50 Celsius.
Its effectiveness as a poison derives from its chemical resemblance to potassium, which the human body is happy to incorporate into all of its tissues. The indications of poisoning included delirium and coma, tremors, nausea and diarrhea, and varied from person to person. Death from 10 grams followed in a few days or weeks. To the poisoner, these varied symptoms and extended period between application and death were very attractive, especially if the poisoner disliked the victim. As an added bonus, thallium has no taste or texture and is easily combined with foods and liquids. The poisoner only needed to hope that no autopsy was performed. Because thallium is a metal is remains in the body well after death and is easily detected.
Ms. Blum uses a light, story-telling style. I could have finished the 280-page book in a day had I not been distracted. I found her closing note amusing: when her husband discovered the topic of the book she was writing he made sure to place his cup of coffee beyond her reach.
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