kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, psychiatry
What is normal? It depends. My Funk and Wagnalls dictionary has several definitions, and even the first, purportedly primary, definition is not definitive: "Conforming to or consisting of a pattern, process or standard regarded as usual or typical; natural." Do you see that last word there, "natural"? It conflicts with the rest of the statement. Properly speaking, the first 15 words define "normative". ("Normative" has its own definition a ways down the page, one which is identical in meaning to those 15 words) "Natural" is a good first definition, particularly when we realize that nature embodies a range of "natural variation".
For about 200 years, psychologists and statisticians have developed an understanding of the "normal distribution", also called the Gaussian distribution. It crops up everywhere because of the way variation is so often dependent on many factors.
For example, the height of uninjured, healthy, adult male Norwegians has a certain range and an average value (about 1.8 m or 71" or 5 ft 11). The height of a particular Norwegian man is derived from many factors. There are many genes that influence how large the body grows; and also the kinds of food he ate growing up, the amount he exercised, and perhaps his favorite sport all contributed to his eventual height. Now suppose an otherwise ordinary Norwegian has a height of 1.5 m (59" or 4 ft 11), and another is 2.1 m (83" or 6 ft 11)? Men with either height are rare. However, among male gymnasts 1.5 m is a bit short but not that unusual, and among basketball players 2.1 m is also not unusual. Are both these men normal? Actually, yes. That doesn't mean they are problem-free.
"Normal" among people who vary in all their characteristics is properly understood as a range of variation. A mathematical concept called the Central Limit Theory shows that the normal distribution has no clear limit in either direction. The formula for the probability distribution has a very small but positive value for a height of zero, and also for a height of 4 m. However, for a homogeneous population such as native Norwegians, the standard deviation is about 7 cm, and the probability for someone to be outside the range of ±3 standard deviations (called "±3 sigma") is about 1 in 750. That means 1 in 1,500 for men shorter than 1.62 m (64") and 1 in 1,500 for men taller than 1.98 m (78"). A man who is 1.5 m tall is at -5 sigma, and the one 2.1 m tall is at +5 sigma. The probability for each is about one in 3 million. There are about 5 million Norwegians, so we might expect to find, on average, one perfectly healthy man who is shorter than about 1.5 m, and one perfectly healthy man who is taller than about 2.1 m, in each generation.
At what point would most people look at a man walking down the street, who is either quite short or quite tall, and say, "That isn't normal"? Now we are talking about what is normative. The fact is, society tends to cater to people who are within ±2 sigma of average, in height, intelligence, and BMI, which are the main three things you can measure. That range, from -2 sigma to +2 sigma, takes in 95% of us. The other 5% are just expected to cope with a world that isn't really made for them; for example in the U.S. doorways are 2 m tall and countertops are about 0.75 m high. Those who have trouble coping often wind up being classified as "handicapped" in some way. They may be "normal", but they are not usual, and that causes problems.
There are other characteristics that are harder to measure: a tendency be trusting or suspicious, one's ease or difficulty of forming loving attachments, the quickness or slowness of "temper", or the tendency to be altruistic or selfish. With several dozen psychological dimensions available, it is distressingly common to fall outside the ±2 sigma range on at least one of them. Some psychologists estimate that about half of us, at some time in our lives, will have a "condition" that can be diagnosed as "abnormal", or at least, treatable. I find that a bit disturbing, and I am not alone.
Professor of Psychiatry Jordan Smoller has written the first book (that I have seen) advocating the study of normal psychology: The Other Side of Normal: How Biology is Providing the Clues to Unlock the Secrets of Normal and Abnormal Behavior. I just checked Amazon.com; there are more than 4,000 books with "Abnormal Psychology" in the title, and 47 published in the past 90 days. There are only 35 titles containing "Normal Psychology", but most of these are editions of Mental Pathology in its Relation to Normal Psychology by Störring and Loveday. It is pretty safe to say that Dr. Smoller currently has the field of normal psychology to himself.
The thesis of his book is quite simple. William James a century ago wrote that "the best way to understand the normal is to study the abnormal." The result has been a steady process of studying various pathological conditions and staking out a supposed range of behavior (a syndrome) to define it. There is no doubt that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), now in version IV, has helped standardize communication among mental health professionals. However, the "edges" of the diagnoses are necessarily hard to specify, leading to continuing encroachment on "normal" territory. Only about half the people are still "normal", and that doesn't include me, because of my diagnosis as Bipolar II.
Is someone with a diagnosable condition, who can cope well with it, sick? Like many writers who are bipolar, I've learned the rubric, "When you are up, write, and when you are down, edit." For people in creative professions, a certain level of bipolarity is a benefit. It opens up a wider range of creativity, and also allows one those periods of narrowed focus necessary to prune the extra wildness off and complete work that might otherwise need the services of an expensive editor (painters and sculptors can't use editors, but writers and composers and lyricists can; and dancers' and actors' "editors" are called choreographers and directors).
I have two friends who are schizophrenic. One knows it and the other doesn't. The one who knows it used Thorazine for a time, but learned to cope with his inner demons so he could get off Thorazine, which has devastating side effects. He makes his living by tutoring in electronics and computer programming. The other fellow is institutionalized because it would take extreme force to put a pill down his throat. If left to his own devices, he hitchhikes around the country, which isn't bad in itself, but he can't earn money so he becomes a danger to himself. I guess I can't really call him a "friend" any more, since he can't reciprocate my friendly feelings. He is a likeable guy most of the time. I guess these men represent two ends (or near-endpoints) of a schizophrenia spectrum.
In seven chapters of the book, the author considers the intricate dance of genetics and environment (including family upbringing, if there was one) that influence a person's mental makeup—the genetics of behavior may take up 10% or more of our genome, so no one gene is the "gene for" any characteristic—; various ways researchers have used to tease out environmental influences; the surprising role of epigenetics, which is actually a non-Mendelian means of heritability; and the ways we can choose to change our behaviors (it ain't easy but it is possible!). He ends with a plea in favor of studying the normal ranges of behaviors, intending to turn William James's dictum on its head. It now seems better to study the normal so as to better understand abnormality.
In height, being tall is an advantage for getting a job and a mate, but being super-tall is not super-good. Men taller than about 2 m have paradoxically few jobs open to them. They duck through doorways; people stare at them (or try very hard not to stare). If they have exceptional athletic coordination, they might become professional basketball players, but for the rest, being unusually tall brings with it trust issues. It is also paradoxically difficult for those with extreme IQ's to get work. There are two issues here. Firstly, someone with an IQ greater than 160 probably grew up lonely. At +4 sigma, he or she was one in 32,000 and probably had no acquaintances of similar brilliance. This leads to significant social ineptness. Secondly, people with extreme IQ's have different interests, or you could say, they are seldom interested in things that interest those in the ±2 sigma range. This makes it harder to communicate with a boss or a customer. That is why Mensa was started.
In other areas, being "super" may not be possible. In the chapter on "Baby Einsteins", Dr. Smoller points out that an overloaded "learning" environment is probably akin to a hyper-oxygenated atmosphere. The body can only use so much oxygen. When we need extra, we breathe deeper, but going to the "oxygen bars" that cropped up some years ago didn't do the patrons any good, though it fattened the wallets of the proprietors. Alert: SCUBA divers know that pure oxygen at twice atmospheric pressure is toxic. If you fill your tanks with pure oxygen and dive deeper than 30-35 feet, you'll die; if you use regular air, you can dive to 150-170 feet, and then you'll die of oxygen poisoning. To go deeper you need special oxygen-poor gas mixtures. Fortunately, making your baby listen to Mozart music won't poison the little tyke, but it will not raise IQ.
So why is the "Mozart effect" popular? The studies upon which the craze is based are flawed. They didn't take into account the fact that parents who might play Mozart for their infants are also more likely to read to them, play with them, and take them places. That is what helps the kids' minds develop. Parents who plop a a little one in front of an "educational video" for a few hours a day will probably find the child is more passive in school and could have trouble learning.
So far, I have neglected the "biology" portion of the thesis. Our brain is biological. Most of modern pharmacology of behavior is based on a number of accidental discoveries that are some forty years old. Much more recent work with chemicals such as oxytocin is just beginning to hint that better chemical interventions are possible. Here is where Dr. Smoller's caution is advisable: we really, really need to know what is normal before we do any more manipulation of people's minds. Otherwise, how do you know when they are "better"?
How do you define success? This lack of a defined target leads to people who spend years and years in psychoanalysis, with little change. Aimless maundering to a clueless therapist is like circling under a lamppost, just because that is where the light is. A proper study of normality, and of the amazing adaptability of all of us, can shine more lights where today most are groping in darkness.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Painting the town, or lighting it
kw: community service
When you do something for others, you never know quite what will happen. I am visiting relatives in Decatur, Alabama, and had some free time this morning. I heard on a local station (800 AM, WHOS) about Jim Cotter of Glouster, Ohio (CBS report), a retired painter. After his wife died, he decided to spend his time by painting the houses of his neighbors. He got permission from one person to paint the house, and did so, then went on to another. After some time, word got around, and people began to come along to help. Then a youth group got involved, and even people from nearby towns volunteered. According to the commentator I heard, they are very close to finishing the painting of every house in this town of 2,000.
It reminded me of the stories I heard the last time my wife and I visited her mother in Japan. Her father Sanshiro had recently died at age 86. He never really retired, because the couple and their sons ran a family grocery store, but the older man was less involved in the store after about age 70. The area they lived in, called Fujimi-cho, a part of Yokosuka, is very hilly. There are small paved lanes winding from house to house up the hillsides. Though the streets had municipal lighting, the lanes were dark at night. One day about 25 years ago, Sanshiro bought a few fluorescent fixtures and some wire and borrowed a 10 meter ladder. He put the lights up on the poles that carried telephone wires and initially hooked them up to his own electricity. With the support of his neighbors he convinced the city to allow him to tap into the city power used for the street lighting. For many years thereafter, often with the help of a neighbor or two, he put lighting up above the hillside lanes throughout Fujimi.
Finding a need, and filling it. That sounds like just about the best retirement plan ever. And who says you need to wait until you retire?
When you do something for others, you never know quite what will happen. I am visiting relatives in Decatur, Alabama, and had some free time this morning. I heard on a local station (800 AM, WHOS) about Jim Cotter of Glouster, Ohio (CBS report), a retired painter. After his wife died, he decided to spend his time by painting the houses of his neighbors. He got permission from one person to paint the house, and did so, then went on to another. After some time, word got around, and people began to come along to help. Then a youth group got involved, and even people from nearby towns volunteered. According to the commentator I heard, they are very close to finishing the painting of every house in this town of 2,000.
It reminded me of the stories I heard the last time my wife and I visited her mother in Japan. Her father Sanshiro had recently died at age 86. He never really retired, because the couple and their sons ran a family grocery store, but the older man was less involved in the store after about age 70. The area they lived in, called Fujimi-cho, a part of Yokosuka, is very hilly. There are small paved lanes winding from house to house up the hillsides. Though the streets had municipal lighting, the lanes were dark at night. One day about 25 years ago, Sanshiro bought a few fluorescent fixtures and some wire and borrowed a 10 meter ladder. He put the lights up on the poles that carried telephone wires and initially hooked them up to his own electricity. With the support of his neighbors he convinced the city to allow him to tap into the city power used for the street lighting. For many years thereafter, often with the help of a neighbor or two, he put lighting up above the hillside lanes throughout Fujimi.
Finding a need, and filling it. That sounds like just about the best retirement plan ever. And who says you need to wait until you retire?
Friday, August 17, 2012
Strangeness for the sake of science
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, experimentation
It starts out simply enough, with a story of Benjamin Franklin attempting to electrocute a turkey. This was before he proposed it as the national bird, many years before his more famous experiments with electrified clouds and kites, and it came closer to killing him. He got across the circuit while trying to hook up the turkey, and the rest might have been history, forty years too soon. Upon his recovery, he re-charged the Leyden jars and managed to zap the bird instead of himself.
Electrical experiments in a mix of the sober, the strange and the wacky form the first section of Electrified Sheep: Glass-Eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and More Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese (I assume the name is pronounced the same as Bose). It is a follow-on to his book Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments. He also originated Museum of Hoaxes. Seems he likes that word "bizarre". He also likes mad scientists, and all the people profiled in the book were attempting to further the cause of science, whether they themselves were sane or not.
An electric generator in the 1740s was a globe or large tube of glass that rotated on an axis, driven by a handle. You rubbed your hand, or leather, or felt on the glass and picked up the resulting charge using a Leyden jar, the first capacitor. It is easy to make a Leyden jar using a glass mayonnaise jar with a plastic lid: wrap it in foil, to about half an inch below the lid, fill it with salt water (easier than trying to wrap the inside with foil) and stick a metal rod through a hole in the lid into the water. Be careful. It is easy to generate 20,000 volts or more with a glass-and-leather generator, and the amount of charge stored in the jar can hurt you rather badly. I used such a jar as the tuning capacitor for a Tesla coil I once built.
Ol' Ben was not the first nor the last to "measure" the power of an electric charge by determining how large a bird it might kill. Two charged jars would kill a chicken but it took five to kill a ten pound turkey. But now we have voltmeters, so the only folks still zapping birds are the "killers" at chicken processing plants. Electrocution results in more tender meat.
Years after Franklin, in 1903 in fact, during the battle between Edison and Westinghouse over DC or AC electrical supply, a large Westinghouse generator was used to electrocute an elephant (A short movie of the event, recorded by Edison, is found here.) But later in the Twentieth Century electricity became a much more manageable commodity, and the rage among scientists got an atomic edge. When the shine wore off atomic energy, and the cold war got under way in earnest, there were still those who hatched schemes such as one to bomb the moon, and one H-bomb was actually set off in space, something over 200 miles up (View video compiled of formerly classified films of the Starfish Prime explosion. This video runs for more than an hour).
I would have thought at that point, things could not get more strange. I was wrong. The third section of the book is on deception, primarily the kinds of deception used by researchers into psychology who employ actors to subject unwitting persons to various kinds of stress and see how they react. The experiments into conformity and obedience to authority are the most disturbing. Stanley Milgram's work is a case in point. Students who thought they were administering painful electric shocks to an actor, as a purported "memory aid", could usually be made to run the current all the way up, in spite of the actor's screams, with surprisingly little coercion. But there are lots of ways for a shrink to lie, because people in general are very inventive liars. Scientists have to deceive us or else we will deceive them.
Note to those who inflict telephone surveys on the public: I lie flagrantly to survey workers.
The book's fourth section describes numerous experiments with monkeys, including some that finally helped crack the old canard that female primates (including female humans) do not experience orgasm. A couple of chapters also discuss the century-long effort to humanize apes, now thankfully pretty much over. You can't raise a chimp like a human kid, past about two years.
The last section is the toughest to read through. Titled "Do-It-Yourselfers", it chronicles self-experiments such as ingesting parasitic worms, drinking the vomit of yellow fever victims, and even a number of cases of deliberate suicide, for various scientific purposes. When Barry Marshall drank a concoction of H. pylori in 1984, to prove that the bacterium causes ulcers, it was such a case. Self-inflicted pain is a further step. The fellow who developed the scale of venom pain, that tops out at 4 for the sting of the Bullet Ant, must have been nearly nerveless. A bee or scorpion sting rates a 2. Apparently the boundary between 3 and 4 is where you have to scream. The pain chapter is followed by one on self-surgery (a few committed without anesthesia!) and then one about near-suicide, and a few cases of suicide, done to make scientific observations while dying. I admit I skimmed that last chapter very quickly. Detailed explanations of a half dozen ways to commit painful suicide are just beyond my endurance. Call it a 4 on my mental pain scale.
Each portion has a dramatized section, then a series of essays on an experiment, or kind of experiment. Each chapter has a few such portions, and 4-6 chapters comprise a section. The first four sections were quite entertaining. I suppose there are a few folks who'll find even section five an enjoyable read. At the very least, all the sections are quite interesting reading. It is amazing, what has been done to gather scientific data.
It starts out simply enough, with a story of Benjamin Franklin attempting to electrocute a turkey. This was before he proposed it as the national bird, many years before his more famous experiments with electrified clouds and kites, and it came closer to killing him. He got across the circuit while trying to hook up the turkey, and the rest might have been history, forty years too soon. Upon his recovery, he re-charged the Leyden jars and managed to zap the bird instead of himself.
Electrical experiments in a mix of the sober, the strange and the wacky form the first section of Electrified Sheep: Glass-Eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and More Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese (I assume the name is pronounced the same as Bose). It is a follow-on to his book Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments. He also originated Museum of Hoaxes. Seems he likes that word "bizarre". He also likes mad scientists, and all the people profiled in the book were attempting to further the cause of science, whether they themselves were sane or not.
An electric generator in the 1740s was a globe or large tube of glass that rotated on an axis, driven by a handle. You rubbed your hand, or leather, or felt on the glass and picked up the resulting charge using a Leyden jar, the first capacitor. It is easy to make a Leyden jar using a glass mayonnaise jar with a plastic lid: wrap it in foil, to about half an inch below the lid, fill it with salt water (easier than trying to wrap the inside with foil) and stick a metal rod through a hole in the lid into the water. Be careful. It is easy to generate 20,000 volts or more with a glass-and-leather generator, and the amount of charge stored in the jar can hurt you rather badly. I used such a jar as the tuning capacitor for a Tesla coil I once built.
Ol' Ben was not the first nor the last to "measure" the power of an electric charge by determining how large a bird it might kill. Two charged jars would kill a chicken but it took five to kill a ten pound turkey. But now we have voltmeters, so the only folks still zapping birds are the "killers" at chicken processing plants. Electrocution results in more tender meat.
Years after Franklin, in 1903 in fact, during the battle between Edison and Westinghouse over DC or AC electrical supply, a large Westinghouse generator was used to electrocute an elephant (A short movie of the event, recorded by Edison, is found here.) But later in the Twentieth Century electricity became a much more manageable commodity, and the rage among scientists got an atomic edge. When the shine wore off atomic energy, and the cold war got under way in earnest, there were still those who hatched schemes such as one to bomb the moon, and one H-bomb was actually set off in space, something over 200 miles up (View video compiled of formerly classified films of the Starfish Prime explosion. This video runs for more than an hour).
I would have thought at that point, things could not get more strange. I was wrong. The third section of the book is on deception, primarily the kinds of deception used by researchers into psychology who employ actors to subject unwitting persons to various kinds of stress and see how they react. The experiments into conformity and obedience to authority are the most disturbing. Stanley Milgram's work is a case in point. Students who thought they were administering painful electric shocks to an actor, as a purported "memory aid", could usually be made to run the current all the way up, in spite of the actor's screams, with surprisingly little coercion. But there are lots of ways for a shrink to lie, because people in general are very inventive liars. Scientists have to deceive us or else we will deceive them.
Note to those who inflict telephone surveys on the public: I lie flagrantly to survey workers.
The book's fourth section describes numerous experiments with monkeys, including some that finally helped crack the old canard that female primates (including female humans) do not experience orgasm. A couple of chapters also discuss the century-long effort to humanize apes, now thankfully pretty much over. You can't raise a chimp like a human kid, past about two years.
The last section is the toughest to read through. Titled "Do-It-Yourselfers", it chronicles self-experiments such as ingesting parasitic worms, drinking the vomit of yellow fever victims, and even a number of cases of deliberate suicide, for various scientific purposes. When Barry Marshall drank a concoction of H. pylori in 1984, to prove that the bacterium causes ulcers, it was such a case. Self-inflicted pain is a further step. The fellow who developed the scale of venom pain, that tops out at 4 for the sting of the Bullet Ant, must have been nearly nerveless. A bee or scorpion sting rates a 2. Apparently the boundary between 3 and 4 is where you have to scream. The pain chapter is followed by one on self-surgery (a few committed without anesthesia!) and then one about near-suicide, and a few cases of suicide, done to make scientific observations while dying. I admit I skimmed that last chapter very quickly. Detailed explanations of a half dozen ways to commit painful suicide are just beyond my endurance. Call it a 4 on my mental pain scale.
Each portion has a dramatized section, then a series of essays on an experiment, or kind of experiment. Each chapter has a few such portions, and 4-6 chapters comprise a section. The first four sections were quite entertaining. I suppose there are a few folks who'll find even section five an enjoyable read. At the very least, all the sections are quite interesting reading. It is amazing, what has been done to gather scientific data.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Keep that heart ticking
kw: heart disease, medicine, risk analysis
My doctor always has something to exhort me about: losing weight, reducing blood pressure, getting more exercise. Of course, he is right. Being an analytical sort, though, I decided to dig into his main worry, which is heart disease. I think it is mainly reflex on his part, because I have no risk factors. So I looked up the risk calculators for coronary heart/vascular disease (you can search for "(CHD OR CVD) AND risk"). The one I settled on is this one at Medical College of Wisconsin. I entered my information, and learned I have a 10% risk of developing cardiovascular disease in the coming ten years.
I dug a little further. The calculation is not a continuous formula in several variables, as I had thought. It is based on a block model. This table is the relevant set of blocks for my age (65), no smoking or diabetes, and systolic blood pressure of 140:
I also included an ancillary table for the block I am in (Total Cholesterol below 159 and HDL 35-44), for blood pressure. You can see that blood pressure is a significant factor, and that 10 points in systolic BP is about equivalent to 10 points in HDL, but negatively correlated. My doctor thinks I ought to take a medication to try to reduce my BP into the 120 range. It looks like he has a point; that would cut my risk in half. Were I a smoking diabetic, the risk would be doubled, to 20%.
I would like to see these calculators include a few more factors, assuming the relevant risk functions are known. Factors such as BMI (I am at 29, not so good) and HeartCam score (mine is zero, the same as a very healthy 30-year-old), for example.
Based on my family history, and my own history (!), what we really need is a cancer risk calculator. Hmmm (running a search…). Siteman Cancer Center has one. Pick one of 12 kinds of cancer, and have at it. I'll have to look into it.
My doctor always has something to exhort me about: losing weight, reducing blood pressure, getting more exercise. Of course, he is right. Being an analytical sort, though, I decided to dig into his main worry, which is heart disease. I think it is mainly reflex on his part, because I have no risk factors. So I looked up the risk calculators for coronary heart/vascular disease (you can search for "(CHD OR CVD) AND risk"). The one I settled on is this one at Medical College of Wisconsin. I entered my information, and learned I have a 10% risk of developing cardiovascular disease in the coming ten years.
I dug a little further. The calculation is not a continuous formula in several variables, as I had thought. It is based on a block model. This table is the relevant set of blocks for my age (65), no smoking or diabetes, and systolic blood pressure of 140:
I would like to see these calculators include a few more factors, assuming the relevant risk functions are known. Factors such as BMI (I am at 29, not so good) and HeartCam score (mine is zero, the same as a very healthy 30-year-old), for example.
Based on my family history, and my own history (!), what we really need is a cancer risk calculator. Hmmm (running a search…). Siteman Cancer Center has one. Pick one of 12 kinds of cancer, and have at it. I'll have to look into it.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Health care - too much and too little
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, public health, policy
When I finished six months of chemotherapy in mid-2001, I remember saying to my wife, "I am glad for modern medicine. Fifty years ago I simply would have died." As it happened, I lucked out; I hit a sweet spot in the history of colon cancer treatment. Someone today who discovers a large, Dukes' stage C tumor, will probably get care as good as I had, but they will not get identical care.
For one thing, the "gold standard" for chemo has changed. I received 5FU plus Leucovorin. At about the three month point I told the oncologist that it was getting painful to clap my hands (my son was playing basketball in a YMCA league every week). He became very grave, showed me an article about "hand-foot syndrome", and decided to adjust my dosage. He said if the syndrome was not checked, I could suffer from skin sloughing off the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet, and I might also have extensive nerve damage and numbness.
The modern regimen adds oxaliplatin (a platinum-containing cancer suppression substance) to the other two. The code word for this triple play is FOLFOX. It is much more likely to cause nerve damage, but I haven't read whether it makes the hand-foot symptoms worse or better or what. This means a larger number of people do not complete their regimen. Is it better overall? That is not yet known.
Other aspects of my good luck were a totally obsessive and incredibly skilled surgeon, at least one doctor who will talk sense without lying—I still see him every 3 years for a colonoscopy—and the oncologist all local doctors agreed was the one they would use or send family members to.
Many are less fortunate, and Otis Webb Brawley, executive VP of ACS, has encountered a great many of them. Once in a while, a book simply makes me furious. This was the case with Dr. Brawley's book How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America. I have reviewed at least a half dozen "anti-medical establishment" books in this blog. This one is the most revealing.
The opening scene is disturbing. A woman comes into an emergency room carrying her breast in a plastic bag. She wants it reattached. It turns out to be a large lump of tumor, so this is clearly not possible. Most doctors have never seen a breast self-amputation, and I had never heard of it before. It happens when breast cancer is untreated for a long enough time: The tumor takes over the blood supply to the point that the rest of the breast dies and just falls off, tumor and all. At the Atlanta hospital called Grady, they see about two such cases per year.
Early on, this woman had health insurance. When she first found a lump in her breast, several years previously, why didn't she see a doctor? Two kinds of fear. Firstly, like many women, she feared being disfigured. But even greater was her fear of losing her job if she took off too many sick days at work. She knew that surgical treatment might cause her to lose almost a week of work, maybe the whole week. She knew that if she had follow-up chemotherapy, she would miss one or two days a week for months. She would get fired. Once the self-amputation happened, keeping her job didn't matter, as she soon died.
Note to medical establishment: Require oncologists to work evenings and weekends. Not all of your patients are conveniently retired. Not all are allowed sufficient sick leave to take off fifty days in six months' time. When I was on chemo, I'd have been delighted to have my 5-hour session start at midnight. I could have slept through it instead of watching inane daytime TV. Ditto for dialysis centers.
This woman's story, and that of a few other patients Otis (he doesn't like to be called "Doc" or "Doctor") saw at Grady, introduce us to his first subject: Under-treatment. When I first got the book, and while I was reading the early chapters, I was expecting a polemic in favor of the PPACA, usually called Obamacare. Actually, this bill is mentioned only once, late in the book, and only in reference to the provision requiring insurers to accept people with "preexisting conditions". A deeper problem he sees is that, whether someone is insured or not, many poorer people are discouraged from getting routine medical care by job restrictions or a bullying culture at work. As a result, they only get "care" by visiting an emergency room, and frequently when it is too late.
The axis of the book is simple. Poor people are under-treated, and the rich and well-insured are over-treated. Both are evils. The middle of the book is about evidence-based medicine. There is precious little of it. Otis writes, "I don't know how you can practice medicine without measuring the effectiveness of the therapies you are administering." (p 166) Yet most doctors operate primarily by feel and supposition. They do what they might have seen in medical school or heard at a conference or read about in a journal, but very few take the time to dig in and find the facts behind it.
I know from my own study, and from a number of things I have read, that articles which report on clinical trials that actually tell us something useful are extremely rare. Many of those few have been gathered and summarized by the Cochrane Collaboration. It seems they have a substantial database, until you learn that there are thousands of clinical trials going on at any time, and tens of thousands that have been published, but a larger number that have not been published because they didn't prove what the company (usually a drug company) paying the bills wanted to prove, and finally that only a few percent are considered reliable enough for CC to recommend!
The over-treatment stories are, if anything, even more horrifying than those of under-treatment. One of the most disturbing is that of a 70-year-old man whom Otis calls Ralph, who was badgered by his wife into getting a PSA test. The ads for PSA testing for "prostate health" are targeted at women, pushing all their worry buttons; confirmed bachelors and unpartnered widowers almost never get screening of any kind, particularly for their prostate. Ralph's PSA measured 4.3, where "normal" is 4 or less. To many doctors, PSA in the range 4-8 means "watch and wait and check, using a finger, periodically." Ralph's doctor sent him for a biopsy, which was actually 12 painful needle sticks. Two showed low-grade cancer. Prostate cancer is typically slow and self-contained. One would think, "OK, let's check it yearly for a few years." Not Ralph's doctor. Ralph was "advised" to get the prostate removed, and eventually he did.
I won't go through the whole story of incontinence and impotence, radiation, eventually a bowel bag and a bladder bag, and death at age 77. Left alone, he had a good change of living into his 80s and dying of something else, never knowing he had cancer. I know only one man who died of prostate cancer, and he was 92. Ralph probably died early, and he sure suffered during those seven years. His death certificate doesn't mention prostate cancer, and because there is no category for iatrogenic over-zealousness, the recorded cause is septicemia.
Otis makes a good case in this chapter that the most likely reason prostate cancer "mortality" has been going down is that more prostate patients are dying of things like hormone treatments and other complications of over-treatment.
The USPSTF is one (so far) entirely honest reporter of well-analyzed clinical and epidemiological data. They do not recommend PSA testing for anyone, any time. The PSA level is very poorly correlated with cancer incidence or severity. It misses half the cancers. The more aggressive tumors get found by finger probing or by symptoms like having a hard time urinating anyway, so PSA is medically useless. It is, however, very useful fattening the wallets of quite a range of medical specialties, not to mention the makers of Depend® undergarments. A single PSA blood test costs between $70 and $240. The annual cost of roughly 20 million of these unnecessary tests is $3 billion, mostly from Medicare. The follow-up treatments, also mostly unneeded, cost billions more. No wonder there is a huge lobby working against setting standards for establishing risk before recommending PSA testing.
That is just one example. Not all screenings are bogus. Colonoscopy, for example, is the one way to prove whether or not you have a polyp or a tumor in the colon. When a polyp is found, a quick snip on the spot will prevent a possible cancer. When a tumor is found, a life may be saved, as mine was. Mammography is also worthwhile for older women. There is a recent flap over whether women 40-49 ought to have a mammograph. I think of it this way. The benefit is very small in this age range, and ten years less radiation exposure means fewer 70-year-old women would develop cancer from the radiation. Mammography is less definitive than colonoscopy, but it is a great deal more useful than a PSA blood test.
The closing chapter is a call to all of us to use our minds, to question our doctors. We all need to ask, "How can we know that (this dangerous condition) exists?"; KNOW, not just suppose. And to ask, "Supposing it exists, what are the effective treatment options?"; EFFECTIVE, not "sounds like a good idea" or "what my grandfather's doctor did". And to ask, "Are you afraid to say 'I don't know' when you don't know?" If the doctor hesitates, you probably have the wrong doctor.
On p 280: "The system is not failing. It's functioning exactly as designed. It's designed to run up health-care costs." In America in 2009, $2.53 trillion changed hands for medical "care". We only spend $1 trillion on food! It really ought to be the other way around: pay a bit more for better food, and a bit for a gym membership, and less for medical intervention. Otis's final call to us: Demand a health care system that can prove it, and when it can't, say "Enough!"
When I finished six months of chemotherapy in mid-2001, I remember saying to my wife, "I am glad for modern medicine. Fifty years ago I simply would have died." As it happened, I lucked out; I hit a sweet spot in the history of colon cancer treatment. Someone today who discovers a large, Dukes' stage C tumor, will probably get care as good as I had, but they will not get identical care.
For one thing, the "gold standard" for chemo has changed. I received 5FU plus Leucovorin. At about the three month point I told the oncologist that it was getting painful to clap my hands (my son was playing basketball in a YMCA league every week). He became very grave, showed me an article about "hand-foot syndrome", and decided to adjust my dosage. He said if the syndrome was not checked, I could suffer from skin sloughing off the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet, and I might also have extensive nerve damage and numbness.
The modern regimen adds oxaliplatin (a platinum-containing cancer suppression substance) to the other two. The code word for this triple play is FOLFOX. It is much more likely to cause nerve damage, but I haven't read whether it makes the hand-foot symptoms worse or better or what. This means a larger number of people do not complete their regimen. Is it better overall? That is not yet known.
Other aspects of my good luck were a totally obsessive and incredibly skilled surgeon, at least one doctor who will talk sense without lying—I still see him every 3 years for a colonoscopy—and the oncologist all local doctors agreed was the one they would use or send family members to.
Many are less fortunate, and Otis Webb Brawley, executive VP of ACS, has encountered a great many of them. Once in a while, a book simply makes me furious. This was the case with Dr. Brawley's book How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America. I have reviewed at least a half dozen "anti-medical establishment" books in this blog. This one is the most revealing.
The opening scene is disturbing. A woman comes into an emergency room carrying her breast in a plastic bag. She wants it reattached. It turns out to be a large lump of tumor, so this is clearly not possible. Most doctors have never seen a breast self-amputation, and I had never heard of it before. It happens when breast cancer is untreated for a long enough time: The tumor takes over the blood supply to the point that the rest of the breast dies and just falls off, tumor and all. At the Atlanta hospital called Grady, they see about two such cases per year.
Early on, this woman had health insurance. When she first found a lump in her breast, several years previously, why didn't she see a doctor? Two kinds of fear. Firstly, like many women, she feared being disfigured. But even greater was her fear of losing her job if she took off too many sick days at work. She knew that surgical treatment might cause her to lose almost a week of work, maybe the whole week. She knew that if she had follow-up chemotherapy, she would miss one or two days a week for months. She would get fired. Once the self-amputation happened, keeping her job didn't matter, as she soon died.
Note to medical establishment: Require oncologists to work evenings and weekends. Not all of your patients are conveniently retired. Not all are allowed sufficient sick leave to take off fifty days in six months' time. When I was on chemo, I'd have been delighted to have my 5-hour session start at midnight. I could have slept through it instead of watching inane daytime TV. Ditto for dialysis centers.
This woman's story, and that of a few other patients Otis (he doesn't like to be called "Doc" or "Doctor") saw at Grady, introduce us to his first subject: Under-treatment. When I first got the book, and while I was reading the early chapters, I was expecting a polemic in favor of the PPACA, usually called Obamacare. Actually, this bill is mentioned only once, late in the book, and only in reference to the provision requiring insurers to accept people with "preexisting conditions". A deeper problem he sees is that, whether someone is insured or not, many poorer people are discouraged from getting routine medical care by job restrictions or a bullying culture at work. As a result, they only get "care" by visiting an emergency room, and frequently when it is too late.
The axis of the book is simple. Poor people are under-treated, and the rich and well-insured are over-treated. Both are evils. The middle of the book is about evidence-based medicine. There is precious little of it. Otis writes, "I don't know how you can practice medicine without measuring the effectiveness of the therapies you are administering." (p 166) Yet most doctors operate primarily by feel and supposition. They do what they might have seen in medical school or heard at a conference or read about in a journal, but very few take the time to dig in and find the facts behind it.
I know from my own study, and from a number of things I have read, that articles which report on clinical trials that actually tell us something useful are extremely rare. Many of those few have been gathered and summarized by the Cochrane Collaboration. It seems they have a substantial database, until you learn that there are thousands of clinical trials going on at any time, and tens of thousands that have been published, but a larger number that have not been published because they didn't prove what the company (usually a drug company) paying the bills wanted to prove, and finally that only a few percent are considered reliable enough for CC to recommend!
The over-treatment stories are, if anything, even more horrifying than those of under-treatment. One of the most disturbing is that of a 70-year-old man whom Otis calls Ralph, who was badgered by his wife into getting a PSA test. The ads for PSA testing for "prostate health" are targeted at women, pushing all their worry buttons; confirmed bachelors and unpartnered widowers almost never get screening of any kind, particularly for their prostate. Ralph's PSA measured 4.3, where "normal" is 4 or less. To many doctors, PSA in the range 4-8 means "watch and wait and check, using a finger, periodically." Ralph's doctor sent him for a biopsy, which was actually 12 painful needle sticks. Two showed low-grade cancer. Prostate cancer is typically slow and self-contained. One would think, "OK, let's check it yearly for a few years." Not Ralph's doctor. Ralph was "advised" to get the prostate removed, and eventually he did.
I won't go through the whole story of incontinence and impotence, radiation, eventually a bowel bag and a bladder bag, and death at age 77. Left alone, he had a good change of living into his 80s and dying of something else, never knowing he had cancer. I know only one man who died of prostate cancer, and he was 92. Ralph probably died early, and he sure suffered during those seven years. His death certificate doesn't mention prostate cancer, and because there is no category for iatrogenic over-zealousness, the recorded cause is septicemia.
Otis makes a good case in this chapter that the most likely reason prostate cancer "mortality" has been going down is that more prostate patients are dying of things like hormone treatments and other complications of over-treatment.
The USPSTF is one (so far) entirely honest reporter of well-analyzed clinical and epidemiological data. They do not recommend PSA testing for anyone, any time. The PSA level is very poorly correlated with cancer incidence or severity. It misses half the cancers. The more aggressive tumors get found by finger probing or by symptoms like having a hard time urinating anyway, so PSA is medically useless. It is, however, very useful fattening the wallets of quite a range of medical specialties, not to mention the makers of Depend® undergarments. A single PSA blood test costs between $70 and $240. The annual cost of roughly 20 million of these unnecessary tests is $3 billion, mostly from Medicare. The follow-up treatments, also mostly unneeded, cost billions more. No wonder there is a huge lobby working against setting standards for establishing risk before recommending PSA testing.
That is just one example. Not all screenings are bogus. Colonoscopy, for example, is the one way to prove whether or not you have a polyp or a tumor in the colon. When a polyp is found, a quick snip on the spot will prevent a possible cancer. When a tumor is found, a life may be saved, as mine was. Mammography is also worthwhile for older women. There is a recent flap over whether women 40-49 ought to have a mammograph. I think of it this way. The benefit is very small in this age range, and ten years less radiation exposure means fewer 70-year-old women would develop cancer from the radiation. Mammography is less definitive than colonoscopy, but it is a great deal more useful than a PSA blood test.
The closing chapter is a call to all of us to use our minds, to question our doctors. We all need to ask, "How can we know that (this dangerous condition) exists?"; KNOW, not just suppose. And to ask, "Supposing it exists, what are the effective treatment options?"; EFFECTIVE, not "sounds like a good idea" or "what my grandfather's doctor did". And to ask, "Are you afraid to say 'I don't know' when you don't know?" If the doctor hesitates, you probably have the wrong doctor.
On p 280: "The system is not failing. It's functioning exactly as designed. It's designed to run up health-care costs." In America in 2009, $2.53 trillion changed hands for medical "care". We only spend $1 trillion on food! It really ought to be the other way around: pay a bit more for better food, and a bit for a gym membership, and less for medical intervention. Otis's final call to us: Demand a health care system that can prove it, and when it can't, say "Enough!"
Cubized!
kw: musings, workplaces
A career has an arc, and mine has apparently peaked, some time in the recent past. I am now officially working my way down the ladder of success. After a decade or so in an office with a window, today I finished moving into a cubicle in a large room with nine co-workers, including our supervisor. The larger group to which we belong is bringing everyone from scattered locations into a single building. At least I won't be sharing an office.
After 45 years on the job, at a variety of companies and institutions, I've had nearly every work arrangement a desk worker can have. My first job was in a laboratory setting, and I had a desk in a corner. Later, working as a draftsman/design engineer, I was in a low-walled cubicle in a space almost too big to see across. Even sitting down, I could see and be seen across the cavernous room. Since then, I have usually had a private office.
The last thing I did after packing my stuff was measure the office, by the simple expedient of counting ceiling tiles. Twelve 2'x4' tiles, plus a row of partial tiles, comes to just over 100 square feet (9.3-9.4 sq m). The ceiling tiles above the new space number precisely 10, for 80 sq ft (7.4 sq m). However, there is a five-drawer horizontal file just outside the entryway, which would have been inside were this an office. It now contains my 40-year collection of algorithms and other analytical projects. I have as much shelf space as I had before. There is also a large common space with a table, where one or another of us can sometimes be found doing paperwork that takes more space than a desk affords. So in a sense, I have more space and flexibility than before.
I find I am not much bothered or distracted by hearing the others when they talk together or on the phone. The walls of this cubicle are pretty high (64" = 1.63m), and they absorb a lot of sound. So perhaps my colleagues won't be too bothered that I frequently talk as I work. I warned them that I talk and mutter almost constantly. That's not exactly true, it overstates my habit, but it is better to set expectations in a beneficial direction.
Now that the several days of move preparation and moving are done, I can turn my mind back to work and to productive pastimes like this blog.
A career has an arc, and mine has apparently peaked, some time in the recent past. I am now officially working my way down the ladder of success. After a decade or so in an office with a window, today I finished moving into a cubicle in a large room with nine co-workers, including our supervisor. The larger group to which we belong is bringing everyone from scattered locations into a single building. At least I won't be sharing an office.
After 45 years on the job, at a variety of companies and institutions, I've had nearly every work arrangement a desk worker can have. My first job was in a laboratory setting, and I had a desk in a corner. Later, working as a draftsman/design engineer, I was in a low-walled cubicle in a space almost too big to see across. Even sitting down, I could see and be seen across the cavernous room. Since then, I have usually had a private office.
The last thing I did after packing my stuff was measure the office, by the simple expedient of counting ceiling tiles. Twelve 2'x4' tiles, plus a row of partial tiles, comes to just over 100 square feet (9.3-9.4 sq m). The ceiling tiles above the new space number precisely 10, for 80 sq ft (7.4 sq m). However, there is a five-drawer horizontal file just outside the entryway, which would have been inside were this an office. It now contains my 40-year collection of algorithms and other analytical projects. I have as much shelf space as I had before. There is also a large common space with a table, where one or another of us can sometimes be found doing paperwork that takes more space than a desk affords. So in a sense, I have more space and flexibility than before.
I find I am not much bothered or distracted by hearing the others when they talk together or on the phone. The walls of this cubicle are pretty high (64" = 1.63m), and they absorb a lot of sound. So perhaps my colleagues won't be too bothered that I frequently talk as I work. I warned them that I talk and mutter almost constantly. That's not exactly true, it overstates my habit, but it is better to set expectations in a beneficial direction.
Now that the several days of move preparation and moving are done, I can turn my mind back to work and to productive pastimes like this blog.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Searching for fellow citizens of the Universe
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, exobiology, space aliens
Take a look at this artist's rendering of the Milky Way galaxy. The yellow and blue circle left of center represents the volume that can be reached with the SETI listening program, with a radius of about 200 light years (The new kilometer-scale array ought to increase that, at the cost of fewer simultaneous targets). Using an accepted scale height of the main disk (the spiral arms) of 1000 light years, or an effective thickness of 2000 ly, and a radius of about 50,000 light years, the (very rough) effective volume of our Galaxy is about 16 trillion cubic light years. The SETI listening volume is four million cubic light years.
To date, after listening very hard to one four-millionth of the Milky Way ("the Galaxy"), we have not recorded any radio signal from any other civilization. If, as Carl Sagan believed—and he has plenty of company—there are about a million alien civilizations in the Galaxy, there is about one chance in four that one of them is in range of the SETI program, to date. With one proviso: that "they" are broadcasting a signal quite a bit stronger than our own radio and TV "spill".
Further, megawatt TV broadcasting began in the 1950s, and will soon come to an end. Nearly everything is now on cable or glass fiber. I suspect any aliens out there also discovered ways to get their entertainment without using megawatt broadcasting, in less than 100 years, as we have. And by the way, now that TV and much radio is digital, and compressed, with suppressed carrier technology, if anyone "out there" detects our more recent signals they won't be able to decipher then, unless they have stumbled upon exactly the same MPEG and framing standards that we use. Our signals may as well be encrypted.
Carl Sagan didn't create the SETI program, Frank Drake did. Sagan had too much else to do, but he and Drake were friends, and Sagan was always a friend to Drakes' radio listening programs. In 1975 the two went to Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico and listened for any signal from the Andromeda galaxy. They were hoping, if there are a million civilizations in our Galaxy, there would also be a million in the even larger Andromeda galaxy, and perhaps at least a few of them employed multi-terawatt radio beacons. Maybe one would be pointed this way? They didn't detect any. Actually, even listening with the 300 meter dish at Arecibo, it would take an alien beacon with a trillion trillion watts to punch a signal this far.
Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe, by Joel Achenbach, was published in 1999, nearly three years after Carl Sagan died. It is in part a biography of Sagan, but even more, it is a chronicle of belief in extraterrestrial aliens throughout the United States. We find two attitudes toward the existence of alien civilizations, either "Of course!" or "Of course not!!". Very few people are indifferent or neutral.
Sagan was unusual. Though he passionately believed that there must be someone else in the Universe besides us, he was a scientist through and through (and often rather a jerk about it). This made him what Achenbach calls the Gatekeeper. As a very public, very popular astronomer and popularizer of science, he received tens of thousands of letters (and later, e-mails), frequently with someone's grand idea: how to go faster than light or travel in time (they come to the same thing), or for anti-gravity devices, or for ways to detect "the aliens among us", or about UFO's and government conspiracies to conceal their existence, or from people who believed that they themselves are aliens. As much as Sagan wanted to believe at least some of what he was told, he always checked an idea out scientifically. Thus, he had no truck with New Age and spiritualistic approaches.
His desire was his Achilles Heel. Achenbach notes that, time after time, often in a public forum, Sagan would bring himself to the edge of some looney position, only to swerve away at the last moment. He was an expert at having second thoughts, which usually kept him out of totally going bonkers.
Not so for many others. During the near-decade of research for this book, Achenbach attended a wider range of conferences and seminars on the general theme of "alien studies" than we might imagine could even exist. Of course, he was in Roswell, NM for the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged "flying saucer" crash in July 1947 that made Area 51 famous, and jump-started the fame of Major Jesse Marcel. Marcel's description of the materials as being unlike anything from Earth got into the news, and stuck in everyone's memory. Marcel's son is still a popular figure at "flying saucer" conventions. Twenty-odd years of study by the Air Force, culminating in Project Blue Book (terminated 1969; I remember that), just fed into the conspiracy theories of the suspicious.
But the real stars of the book are not the conventions so much as the conventioneers, the many people with a huge spectrum of beliefs. This says more about us than about aliens; in the absence of any clear evidence that any aliens exist, it is impossible to actually say anything about them! Humans want to believe. In spite of the rise of science, half or more of people in Western cultures still believe in a god or God of some sort (Elsewhere, it is much more than half). For many avowed Atheists, their aggressive non-belief is a religion in itself. And for many, science has become Science, a religion in its own right. Here again Sagan shines. He was never willing to call himself an atheist. I suppose we would call him an agnostic, one who "doesn't know", but he didn't use that word either. Stephen Jay Gould was the most adept at answering belief questions, whether about God or aliens: "No data."
There is an interesting journey among the ranks of "abductees". Achenbach is himself subject to sleep onset paralysis. All of us (except sleepwalkers) have our muscular system switched off just as we go to sleep. For some people, it sometimes happens a few minutes earlier. It can be terrifying. Fears are amplified, and hallucinations are frequent. I have a related "condition". When I am tired enough to be woozy, simply closing my eyes is enough to start a dream, even though I am mostly awake. I frequently hear voices in this state, but I can tell I am dreaming, and it stops immediately if I open my eyes. It is probably related to what schizophrenics suffer; they can't shut it off so easily. Sleep researchers consider that all "abduction" experiences have sleep onset paralysis as their source. Lots of people disagree.
During the final chapters, Achenbach takes a journey in a more spiritual direction. Not that he is a spiritual person, but he saw how many people, when faced with evidence that contradicted their belief, or especially when there were simply, "No data", would respond, "But I feel it is so." This is equally true of the "Of course not" folks, and some have gone to the extent of producing statistical analyses of how long our own civilization might last (one published paper states from 7,000 to 7,000,000 years, with "90% certainty"), or of the probability that "anyone" might be "out there". Strangely, even the most anti-scientific of the "I feel so" crowd want some sort of scientific patina upon their belief system. I say, if you aren't going to take science's answer, at least be honest that your position is based on something other than science.
In one section near the end, he recounts and updates the stories of some of the people he has written about. I just had to look up a few of them to see how they have fared in the thirteen years since:
Note, Pioneer Ten's transmitter used 8 watts until it was shut down in 2003. It was barely detectable from 67 AU (an AU is 149 million km; a light year is 63,500 AU). Pioneer used a directional antenna, but I don't know its gain. This implies it would take a signal of 7 million watts to be detected at a distance of one light year, and about 80 million watts from the distance of Alpha Centauri (or a lot larger antenna and "only" a few million watts—and it would have to be pointed right at us). Out at 200 light years, based on 7 million watts at one light year, an alien would have to really want to get through to us: it would take 280 billion watts with the Pioneer antenna, or at least 2-3 billion watts with one that had 100x the gain (about the size of Arecibo's dish). We are not going to hear anybody's accidental, unfocused signal at stellar distances. We just aren't.
I have to agree with Joel Achenbach's conclusion. We detect ourselves. We project our own hopes and dreams and fears and loves and hates upon imagined aliens. Yet we don't know whether dolphins or whales or apes or octopi have languages. How will we ever learn to understand a form of life that didn't originate here?
To date, after listening very hard to one four-millionth of the Milky Way ("the Galaxy"), we have not recorded any radio signal from any other civilization. If, as Carl Sagan believed—and he has plenty of company—there are about a million alien civilizations in the Galaxy, there is about one chance in four that one of them is in range of the SETI program, to date. With one proviso: that "they" are broadcasting a signal quite a bit stronger than our own radio and TV "spill".
Further, megawatt TV broadcasting began in the 1950s, and will soon come to an end. Nearly everything is now on cable or glass fiber. I suspect any aliens out there also discovered ways to get their entertainment without using megawatt broadcasting, in less than 100 years, as we have. And by the way, now that TV and much radio is digital, and compressed, with suppressed carrier technology, if anyone "out there" detects our more recent signals they won't be able to decipher then, unless they have stumbled upon exactly the same MPEG and framing standards that we use. Our signals may as well be encrypted.
Carl Sagan didn't create the SETI program, Frank Drake did. Sagan had too much else to do, but he and Drake were friends, and Sagan was always a friend to Drakes' radio listening programs. In 1975 the two went to Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico and listened for any signal from the Andromeda galaxy. They were hoping, if there are a million civilizations in our Galaxy, there would also be a million in the even larger Andromeda galaxy, and perhaps at least a few of them employed multi-terawatt radio beacons. Maybe one would be pointed this way? They didn't detect any. Actually, even listening with the 300 meter dish at Arecibo, it would take an alien beacon with a trillion trillion watts to punch a signal this far.
Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe, by Joel Achenbach, was published in 1999, nearly three years after Carl Sagan died. It is in part a biography of Sagan, but even more, it is a chronicle of belief in extraterrestrial aliens throughout the United States. We find two attitudes toward the existence of alien civilizations, either "Of course!" or "Of course not!!". Very few people are indifferent or neutral.
Sagan was unusual. Though he passionately believed that there must be someone else in the Universe besides us, he was a scientist through and through (and often rather a jerk about it). This made him what Achenbach calls the Gatekeeper. As a very public, very popular astronomer and popularizer of science, he received tens of thousands of letters (and later, e-mails), frequently with someone's grand idea: how to go faster than light or travel in time (they come to the same thing), or for anti-gravity devices, or for ways to detect "the aliens among us", or about UFO's and government conspiracies to conceal their existence, or from people who believed that they themselves are aliens. As much as Sagan wanted to believe at least some of what he was told, he always checked an idea out scientifically. Thus, he had no truck with New Age and spiritualistic approaches.
His desire was his Achilles Heel. Achenbach notes that, time after time, often in a public forum, Sagan would bring himself to the edge of some looney position, only to swerve away at the last moment. He was an expert at having second thoughts, which usually kept him out of totally going bonkers.
Not so for many others. During the near-decade of research for this book, Achenbach attended a wider range of conferences and seminars on the general theme of "alien studies" than we might imagine could even exist. Of course, he was in Roswell, NM for the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged "flying saucer" crash in July 1947 that made Area 51 famous, and jump-started the fame of Major Jesse Marcel. Marcel's description of the materials as being unlike anything from Earth got into the news, and stuck in everyone's memory. Marcel's son is still a popular figure at "flying saucer" conventions. Twenty-odd years of study by the Air Force, culminating in Project Blue Book (terminated 1969; I remember that), just fed into the conspiracy theories of the suspicious.
But the real stars of the book are not the conventions so much as the conventioneers, the many people with a huge spectrum of beliefs. This says more about us than about aliens; in the absence of any clear evidence that any aliens exist, it is impossible to actually say anything about them! Humans want to believe. In spite of the rise of science, half or more of people in Western cultures still believe in a god or God of some sort (Elsewhere, it is much more than half). For many avowed Atheists, their aggressive non-belief is a religion in itself. And for many, science has become Science, a religion in its own right. Here again Sagan shines. He was never willing to call himself an atheist. I suppose we would call him an agnostic, one who "doesn't know", but he didn't use that word either. Stephen Jay Gould was the most adept at answering belief questions, whether about God or aliens: "No data."
There is an interesting journey among the ranks of "abductees". Achenbach is himself subject to sleep onset paralysis. All of us (except sleepwalkers) have our muscular system switched off just as we go to sleep. For some people, it sometimes happens a few minutes earlier. It can be terrifying. Fears are amplified, and hallucinations are frequent. I have a related "condition". When I am tired enough to be woozy, simply closing my eyes is enough to start a dream, even though I am mostly awake. I frequently hear voices in this state, but I can tell I am dreaming, and it stops immediately if I open my eyes. It is probably related to what schizophrenics suffer; they can't shut it off so easily. Sleep researchers consider that all "abduction" experiences have sleep onset paralysis as their source. Lots of people disagree.
During the final chapters, Achenbach takes a journey in a more spiritual direction. Not that he is a spiritual person, but he saw how many people, when faced with evidence that contradicted their belief, or especially when there were simply, "No data", would respond, "But I feel it is so." This is equally true of the "Of course not" folks, and some have gone to the extent of producing statistical analyses of how long our own civilization might last (one published paper states from 7,000 to 7,000,000 years, with "90% certainty"), or of the probability that "anyone" might be "out there". Strangely, even the most anti-scientific of the "I feel so" crowd want some sort of scientific patina upon their belief system. I say, if you aren't going to take science's answer, at least be honest that your position is based on something other than science.
In one section near the end, he recounts and updates the stories of some of the people he has written about. I just had to look up a few of them to see how they have fared in the thirteen years since:
- Frank Drake, now 82 and Chairman Emeritus of the SETI Institute, continues active work with SETI. He has been at it for 52 years.
- Jill Tarter, who worked with SETI nearly as long, recently retired from active service to go into fund-raising for ongoing SETI programs.
- Dick Joslyn, who left the Heaven's Gate cult a few years before they suicided, died of Aids in January, 2000. Achenbach interviewed him for a chapter on the cult and "alien cults" in general.
- A facilitator of Starseed (a group who think they might be aliens), Miesha Johnston continues the weekly meetings, and also holds meetings for abductees, or those who think they might have been abducted. Her former friend Jan Bingham, who really thought she was a Pleiadian, seems to have dropped out of sight.
- Dan Goldin, who was NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001, a strong advocate for a human space program and for searching for extraterrestrial life (but mainly focused on bacteria), is presently involved in robotics research.
Note, Pioneer Ten's transmitter used 8 watts until it was shut down in 2003. It was barely detectable from 67 AU (an AU is 149 million km; a light year is 63,500 AU). Pioneer used a directional antenna, but I don't know its gain. This implies it would take a signal of 7 million watts to be detected at a distance of one light year, and about 80 million watts from the distance of Alpha Centauri (or a lot larger antenna and "only" a few million watts—and it would have to be pointed right at us). Out at 200 light years, based on 7 million watts at one light year, an alien would have to really want to get through to us: it would take 280 billion watts with the Pioneer antenna, or at least 2-3 billion watts with one that had 100x the gain (about the size of Arecibo's dish). We are not going to hear anybody's accidental, unfocused signal at stellar distances. We just aren't.
I have to agree with Joel Achenbach's conclusion. We detect ourselves. We project our own hopes and dreams and fears and loves and hates upon imagined aliens. Yet we don't know whether dolphins or whales or apes or octopi have languages. How will we ever learn to understand a form of life that didn't originate here?
Friday, August 10, 2012
Hydrogen restoration
kw: interstellar medium, analysis
Oh, wow, I just read an interesting speculation. It seems we could be in danger of losing our air. The Solar System (SS) is presently in a "local bubble" of extra-thin interstellar gas, but we are moving through it and some time in the future we'll exit into thicker gas. Most of the interstellar medium (ISM) is pretty thin, though it is as much as 100 times as dense as our current surroundings. But there are big clouds of hydrogen out there, "molecular clouds" (MC) that are as much as ten million times as dense as the gas through which the SS is moving. If we pass through a MC, it is thought that lots of hydrogen will be added to the Earth's atmosphere, combine with oxygen to make water, and it could get harder to breathe.
Really? This is worth a bit of examination. Some real numbers:
But, of course, were the SS to move through an MC, the Earth's average velocity relative to the MC would be at least 30 km/s, our orbital velocity. How much gas would we sweep up at that velocity? The Earth's cross section (intercept area) is about 1.3x1018 cm2. The velocity in cm/sec is 3 million, so the volume of MC swept up per second would be 3.8x1024 cc. The number of hydrogen molecules entering the atmosphere would range from 3.8x1027 to 3.8x1030. The mass of hydrogen gathered would then be between 13 and 13,000 kilograms per second.
That sound like a lot. What is its proportion to the whole? The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.3x1018 kg. Twenty percent is oxygen (just over 1018 kg). One kilogram of hydrogen combines with 8 kg of oxygen to form 9 kg of water, so the larger figure from the densest MC would remove 104,000 kg of oxygen from the atmosphere each second.There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, so the oxygen consumed per year would be 3.3 trillion kilograms. Again, it sounds like a lot, but it is 1/320,000th of the available oxygen. Thus we can conclude that, if the SS catches up to a thick MC (or the converse), one percent of our oxygen will be consumed in 3,200 years.
Let that settle in: 1% in 32 centuries. In terms of a human lifetime,it is nothing, but in more "geological" terms, it is significant. The earth loses 3 kg/sec of hydrogen to space, because water in the upper atmosphere is broken apart by UV light, and the hydrogen escapes. Over millions of years, this will cause the oceans to be lost. Even a thin MC would counteract this effect, and delay significantly the eventual loss of our oceans. That is not a bad thing!
When is this likely to happen? The closest MC, in the direction of the constellation Taurus, is 400 light years away. But we are moving "sideways", parallel to it. The nearest MC that we are getting closer to, as well as I have been able to determine, is a bit more than 1,000 light years away. Because the SS and the MC are in similar orbits around the center of the Milky Way, the approach speed is relatively low, at most 10 km/s. At that velocity, it takes 30,000 years to go a light year. It will take 30 million years or so to catch up to that MC. I guess we won't have to worry about the consequences of that for a while!
Oh, wow, I just read an interesting speculation. It seems we could be in danger of losing our air. The Solar System (SS) is presently in a "local bubble" of extra-thin interstellar gas, but we are moving through it and some time in the future we'll exit into thicker gas. Most of the interstellar medium (ISM) is pretty thin, though it is as much as 100 times as dense as our current surroundings. But there are big clouds of hydrogen out there, "molecular clouds" (MC) that are as much as ten million times as dense as the gas through which the SS is moving. If we pass through a MC, it is thought that lots of hydrogen will be added to the Earth's atmosphere, combine with oxygen to make water, and it could get harder to breathe.
Really? This is worth a bit of examination. Some real numbers:
- More than half of the ISM has a density of 0.2-0.5 atoms or molecules per cubic centimeter (cc). Another 10-20% is 10-20 times as dense as that. Most of those molecules are neutral hydrogen, H2. From this point we'll just call everything "particles".
- The gas in the local bubble has roughly 0.1 particle/cc (~100,000/cu m).
- The density within MC's ranges from 1,000 to 1 million particles/cc.
But, of course, were the SS to move through an MC, the Earth's average velocity relative to the MC would be at least 30 km/s, our orbital velocity. How much gas would we sweep up at that velocity? The Earth's cross section (intercept area) is about 1.3x1018 cm2. The velocity in cm/sec is 3 million, so the volume of MC swept up per second would be 3.8x1024 cc. The number of hydrogen molecules entering the atmosphere would range from 3.8x1027 to 3.8x1030. The mass of hydrogen gathered would then be between 13 and 13,000 kilograms per second.
That sound like a lot. What is its proportion to the whole? The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.3x1018 kg. Twenty percent is oxygen (just over 1018 kg). One kilogram of hydrogen combines with 8 kg of oxygen to form 9 kg of water, so the larger figure from the densest MC would remove 104,000 kg of oxygen from the atmosphere each second.There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, so the oxygen consumed per year would be 3.3 trillion kilograms. Again, it sounds like a lot, but it is 1/320,000th of the available oxygen. Thus we can conclude that, if the SS catches up to a thick MC (or the converse), one percent of our oxygen will be consumed in 3,200 years.
Let that settle in: 1% in 32 centuries. In terms of a human lifetime,it is nothing, but in more "geological" terms, it is significant. The earth loses 3 kg/sec of hydrogen to space, because water in the upper atmosphere is broken apart by UV light, and the hydrogen escapes. Over millions of years, this will cause the oceans to be lost. Even a thin MC would counteract this effect, and delay significantly the eventual loss of our oceans. That is not a bad thing!
When is this likely to happen? The closest MC, in the direction of the constellation Taurus, is 400 light years away. But we are moving "sideways", parallel to it. The nearest MC that we are getting closer to, as well as I have been able to determine, is a bit more than 1,000 light years away. Because the SS and the MC are in similar orbits around the center of the Milky Way, the approach speed is relatively low, at most 10 km/s. At that velocity, it takes 30,000 years to go a light year. It will take 30 million years or so to catch up to that MC. I guess we won't have to worry about the consequences of that for a while!
Thursday, August 09, 2012
Bouncing around at cosmic speeds
When I began reading a lot of science fiction in the 1960s, my local library had a great collection of the S.F. classics, including a set of E. E. "Doc" Smith's books Skylark of Space and the Lensman series. I remember being quite taken with the concept of the "inertialess drive" that allowed travel at speeds much greater than the speed of light. In one scene, a Lensman explains to a dance partner how traveling at 30-40 parsecs per hour can be compared to her experience of driving a motorcar at speeds of 30-40 miles per hour.
Doc Smith had given some thought to the implications of turning inertia on and off. In just a few scenes, two spaceships meet and must transfer personnel. They don't want to cancel initial velocities of the ships, so they just do it for the passengers. The notion is that when inertia is restored, the ship instantly takes on the velocity it had when its inertia was turned off. So do its passengers. Each one ship carries a compensator, a huge chamber with lots of bungees or some such inside. People go inside, the inertia is turned on, and they bounce around for a while. Then they can safely enter the other ship, the one the compensator came from.
I suffer from too much knowledge. I didn't think this through when I was fourteen years old. Now I know some physics. It turns out the compensator will have to be really, really big. The equations of motion we need are
v = a t (acceleration times time), so t = v/a
d = ½a t²
A well-conditioned person can tolerate 6 G's for a little while. Let's call that our maximum acceleration, which comes to 58.8 m/s².
Planetary speeds are great, and stellar speeds are greater. Start out with the speed of Earth in its orbit: just under 30 km/s, or 30,000 m/s. OK, you have traveled from Earth to near Pluto, which is moving much more slowly. You need to cancel out a 30 km/s velocity difference. First calculate the time: 30,000/58.8 = 510 seconds, or 8½ minutes. How far do you go while you are slowing down? The distance is ½(58.8)(510²) = 7,650,000 m or 7,650 km. That is quite a bit more than the radius of Earth.
Going to another star? Some of them are going at speeds comparable to Earth orbital velocity, or even slower, but not all. Arcturus, for example, has a speed relative to the Sun of 122 km/s. How to compensate for that kind of velocity? The time is 122,000/58.8 = 2,075 s, or more than 34½ minutes. I think 34½ minutes, and probably even 8½ minutes, at 6 G will do some damage, but let's find out the distance covered anyway: ½(58.8)(2075²) = 126,600,000 m, or 126,600 km. That's a third of the Earth-Moon distance!
Kind of a spoiler, isn't it? An interia compensator would have to be, not a big chamber with bungees, but a substantial rocket with fuel enough to blast at 6 G's for half an hour…or more! And then to bring you back to the ship you need to board, presumably at lower G so you can recover. That would take a few more hours. Ah, Doc, I love ya, and I sort of wish I didn't grow up.
Doc Smith had given some thought to the implications of turning inertia on and off. In just a few scenes, two spaceships meet and must transfer personnel. They don't want to cancel initial velocities of the ships, so they just do it for the passengers. The notion is that when inertia is restored, the ship instantly takes on the velocity it had when its inertia was turned off. So do its passengers. Each one ship carries a compensator, a huge chamber with lots of bungees or some such inside. People go inside, the inertia is turned on, and they bounce around for a while. Then they can safely enter the other ship, the one the compensator came from.
I suffer from too much knowledge. I didn't think this through when I was fourteen years old. Now I know some physics. It turns out the compensator will have to be really, really big. The equations of motion we need are
v = a t (acceleration times time), so t = v/a
d = ½a t²
A well-conditioned person can tolerate 6 G's for a little while. Let's call that our maximum acceleration, which comes to 58.8 m/s².
Planetary speeds are great, and stellar speeds are greater. Start out with the speed of Earth in its orbit: just under 30 km/s, or 30,000 m/s. OK, you have traveled from Earth to near Pluto, which is moving much more slowly. You need to cancel out a 30 km/s velocity difference. First calculate the time: 30,000/58.8 = 510 seconds, or 8½ minutes. How far do you go while you are slowing down? The distance is ½(58.8)(510²) = 7,650,000 m or 7,650 km. That is quite a bit more than the radius of Earth.
Going to another star? Some of them are going at speeds comparable to Earth orbital velocity, or even slower, but not all. Arcturus, for example, has a speed relative to the Sun of 122 km/s. How to compensate for that kind of velocity? The time is 122,000/58.8 = 2,075 s, or more than 34½ minutes. I think 34½ minutes, and probably even 8½ minutes, at 6 G will do some damage, but let's find out the distance covered anyway: ½(58.8)(2075²) = 126,600,000 m, or 126,600 km. That's a third of the Earth-Moon distance!
Kind of a spoiler, isn't it? An interia compensator would have to be, not a big chamber with bungees, but a substantial rocket with fuel enough to blast at 6 G's for half an hour…or more! And then to bring you back to the ship you need to board, presumably at lower G so you can recover. That would take a few more hours. Ah, Doc, I love ya, and I sort of wish I didn't grow up.
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Siberia in the crosshairs
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, meteorites, craters
Take a look at Manicougan Crater in Quebec, 100 km (60 miles) in diameter and 214 million years old. It is one of hundreds of impact craters known; see the Impact Database.
I was hoping to find a nice image of a crater in Siberia, but none are this photogenic. The Popigai crater in north-central Siberia is the same size as Manicougan, but is only 35 million years old. Popigai is one of the places visited by Dr. Roy A. Gallant, and reported about in his book Meteorite Hunter: The Search for Siberian Meteorite Craters. Northern Siberia is a lot harder to reach than central Quebec.
Meteorite Hunter chronicles seven of Dr. Gallant's expeditions ("trips" is too tame a word), facilitated by his friend and colleague Katya, Ekaterina Rossovskaya, from 1992 to 2000. For the Popigai expedition, the number of researchers, family members, guides and staff numbered more than 25. The impact sites visited were Tunguska (of course!), Sikhote-Alin, Chinge, Pallas, Tsarev, Popigai and Teleutskoye. Four of these were meteorite falls in the Twentieth Century. Contrary to some reports, the Tunguska impact of 1908, really an aerial explosion, killed at least two people.
Any visit to Siberia is an ordeal. Crossing the continent via the Trans-Siberian Railroad is difficult enough, but getting to the geologically interesting locales requires vehicles that can manage deep bogs, cross rivers and climb boulder-strewn hills. A driver told the author that the best vehicle to use on Siberian roads is a helicopter. Indeed, three of the seven locations did require helicopter transport. Then I read that in 1992 the author was 68. Clearly, he has the endurance of a man half his age.
Dr. Gallant's interest is not simply geological. As he explains in his last chapter, Earth is still being pummeled by a rain of cosmic dust, pebbles and larger objects that amounts to between 40 and 60 tonnes daily, or 14,000-22,000 T/y. According to NASA's Near Earth Object program, an object 10 meters across or larger hits Earth about every ten years. Calculated another way, such an object passes inside the Moon's orbit every day. The Barringer Crater in Arizona, 1.2 km across, was excavated by a 50m metallic object. The most reliable estimate by Russian researchers is that the Tunguska object was about 156 meters in diameter, but it must have been stony or even a stone/ice combination.
The Google Maps Meteor Crater Viewer shows these known craters for North America:
A similar view for northern Asia and part of Europe:
The Mercator projection used exaggerates the size of Siberia, because it is so far north. Its area is about 15 million square km, while that of North America is 25 million. But the seeming sparseness of craters in Siberia just indicates how little explored it is, compared to North America and Europe. There are hundreds of craters yet to be found.
Among known craters, this list from Wikipedia is instructive:
This shows the eleven known craters, 20 km or greater in size, that are 65.17 million years of age or younger. It may be that the two oldest, Chicxulub and Boltysh, were simultaneous, though the Ukranian crater's size indicates it had less than 1% of the energy of the other. Then there is a cluster of three craters aged 35 million years, including Popigai. There was an extinction event at that time, though it wasn't quite as bad as the one 65 million years ago, the younger impacts having perhaps one-fourth the energy of the older ones. The youngest crater on the list, Karakul, is but 5 million years old. It is likely that continued study will turn up dozens to hundreds more craters in coming years, to help us better estimate our chances of getting wiped out. Doing something about it is another thing entirely.
Reading this book reminded me of reading the "dinosaur hunter" books by Roy Chapman Andrews, many years ago. The thrill of adventure is the same, as is the frank assessment of the difficulties encountered. Of course, getting around Siberia still requires the good will of Russian bureaucrats, and some of that was hard for Katya to earn. Fortunately, the people who aren't bureaucrats were very welcoming. But getting from somewhere like Moscow to a remote Siberian village mainly required braving abominable travel conditions, and biting insects that are unrivaled (I've encountered mosquitoes the size of horse flies in southern Kansas, but the Siberian ones must be even worse). And, you'd better love beet soup. Borscht is the common fare in most places. The author reports it is all well worth it. Lovely scenery, welcoming people, and amazing science to be done. There is much more yet to do.
I was hoping to find a nice image of a crater in Siberia, but none are this photogenic. The Popigai crater in north-central Siberia is the same size as Manicougan, but is only 35 million years old. Popigai is one of the places visited by Dr. Roy A. Gallant, and reported about in his book Meteorite Hunter: The Search for Siberian Meteorite Craters. Northern Siberia is a lot harder to reach than central Quebec.
Meteorite Hunter chronicles seven of Dr. Gallant's expeditions ("trips" is too tame a word), facilitated by his friend and colleague Katya, Ekaterina Rossovskaya, from 1992 to 2000. For the Popigai expedition, the number of researchers, family members, guides and staff numbered more than 25. The impact sites visited were Tunguska (of course!), Sikhote-Alin, Chinge, Pallas, Tsarev, Popigai and Teleutskoye. Four of these were meteorite falls in the Twentieth Century. Contrary to some reports, the Tunguska impact of 1908, really an aerial explosion, killed at least two people.
Any visit to Siberia is an ordeal. Crossing the continent via the Trans-Siberian Railroad is difficult enough, but getting to the geologically interesting locales requires vehicles that can manage deep bogs, cross rivers and climb boulder-strewn hills. A driver told the author that the best vehicle to use on Siberian roads is a helicopter. Indeed, three of the seven locations did require helicopter transport. Then I read that in 1992 the author was 68. Clearly, he has the endurance of a man half his age.
Dr. Gallant's interest is not simply geological. As he explains in his last chapter, Earth is still being pummeled by a rain of cosmic dust, pebbles and larger objects that amounts to between 40 and 60 tonnes daily, or 14,000-22,000 T/y. According to NASA's Near Earth Object program, an object 10 meters across or larger hits Earth about every ten years. Calculated another way, such an object passes inside the Moon's orbit every day. The Barringer Crater in Arizona, 1.2 km across, was excavated by a 50m metallic object. The most reliable estimate by Russian researchers is that the Tunguska object was about 156 meters in diameter, but it must have been stony or even a stone/ice combination.
The Google Maps Meteor Crater Viewer shows these known craters for North America:
A similar view for northern Asia and part of Europe:
The Mercator projection used exaggerates the size of Siberia, because it is so far north. Its area is about 15 million square km, while that of North America is 25 million. But the seeming sparseness of craters in Siberia just indicates how little explored it is, compared to North America and Europe. There are hundreds of craters yet to be found.
Among known craters, this list from Wikipedia is instructive:
This shows the eleven known craters, 20 km or greater in size, that are 65.17 million years of age or younger. It may be that the two oldest, Chicxulub and Boltysh, were simultaneous, though the Ukranian crater's size indicates it had less than 1% of the energy of the other. Then there is a cluster of three craters aged 35 million years, including Popigai. There was an extinction event at that time, though it wasn't quite as bad as the one 65 million years ago, the younger impacts having perhaps one-fourth the energy of the older ones. The youngest crater on the list, Karakul, is but 5 million years old. It is likely that continued study will turn up dozens to hundreds more craters in coming years, to help us better estimate our chances of getting wiped out. Doing something about it is another thing entirely.
Reading this book reminded me of reading the "dinosaur hunter" books by Roy Chapman Andrews, many years ago. The thrill of adventure is the same, as is the frank assessment of the difficulties encountered. Of course, getting around Siberia still requires the good will of Russian bureaucrats, and some of that was hard for Katya to earn. Fortunately, the people who aren't bureaucrats were very welcoming. But getting from somewhere like Moscow to a remote Siberian village mainly required braving abominable travel conditions, and biting insects that are unrivaled (I've encountered mosquitoes the size of horse flies in southern Kansas, but the Siberian ones must be even worse). And, you'd better love beet soup. Borscht is the common fare in most places. The author reports it is all well worth it. Lovely scenery, welcoming people, and amazing science to be done. There is much more yet to do.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Encouraging science
kw: science, scientists, rewards, athletes
In an old "Wizard of ID" strip, the knight asks the king why athletes are paid millions while scientists are poorly paid. The king answers, "Would you pay to watch a scientist?" In a more recent strip, the king asks a youngster what he wants to be. The child answers "A college professor." The king asks, "What are you doing to prepare yourself?", and the kid says, "Working two days a week."
Scientific and technical productivity in the U.S. continue to fall. Every week I see more articles listing the ratio of new PhD's of American birth compared to foreign, and that those born elsewhere are increasingly choosing to return home to work. As attested by the ongoing Olympics (which I am enjoying immensely), we are getting what we pay for: more and better athletes. We are running neck and neck with China in the medal count, in spite of having one-fifth the population, and, now a slightly smaller gross economy. And China has been investing heavily in its athletes for propaganda purposes. They are taking the place of the USSR in a new Cold War (another subject I'll have to defer until I've thought about it some more).
But the fastest-growing group of new millionaires in the U.S. has been, for more than a century, professional athletes. John L. Sullivan was the first sports figure to earn a million dollars, in the 1880s. A recent contract for Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels totalled $144 million for six years.
Prior to the days of John L. Sullivan, some scientists were real celebrities. Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were very popular scientific lecturers, and there were many more. In 1890 C. V. Boys published Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them, a compendium of his lectures using a "magic lantern", a type of projector. The book is still in print. A few more recent scientists have achieved celebrity status, most notably Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan. More recently, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a rising star.
Quick, how many famous, living scientists can you name? Was there anybody not on the list above? Now, how many famous, living athletes can you name? Was it more than ten, twenty, or even more? The number of players in big-league baseball, the NFL, NHL and NBA totals about 3,500. Baseball's minor leagues add another 4000, which are at least locally famous, though they don't earn millions. Those 3,500 nearly all do earn millions yearly. What do we spend on professional sports? Ten or twenty billions? If you add in their endorsement contracts, it is almost incalculable.
What would be the result if a top scientist could earn a million dollars yearly? Sure, some top schools pay "full professors" up to a quarter million yearly, though the average is far lower. There are 1.6-1.7 million post-secondary teachers in the U.S. Those on the Tenure track (about a third) are doing most of the research. A smaller number of those who have Tenure still do research; they don't have to. And they are the reason for the kid's retort to the king above.
There is a way that some scientists earn more than academia pays. They form companies. Sometimes it works, but administering the business detracts from their own research. For many, it is a way to give up your research and go broke. Is it worthwhile allowing the scientist whose work leads to a commercial product to participate in the profits, without leaving academia?
Scientists working for larger corporations with research departments might get a bonus for obtaining a patent, but I think they ought to get a percent of the profits for a product based on that patent. What would that do for our national scientific productivity?
And what of those who do the "blue sky" research that doesn't lead to "products"? Astronomers and particle physicists come to mind. The salary budget for the use of big-ticket instruments such as the Keck telescopes or the LHC needs to be commensurate with what it cost to build it.
You get what you reward. When our researchers are again our heroes, and appropriately compensated, we will get more of them, and the best work will get better.
In an old "Wizard of ID" strip, the knight asks the king why athletes are paid millions while scientists are poorly paid. The king answers, "Would you pay to watch a scientist?" In a more recent strip, the king asks a youngster what he wants to be. The child answers "A college professor." The king asks, "What are you doing to prepare yourself?", and the kid says, "Working two days a week."
Scientific and technical productivity in the U.S. continue to fall. Every week I see more articles listing the ratio of new PhD's of American birth compared to foreign, and that those born elsewhere are increasingly choosing to return home to work. As attested by the ongoing Olympics (which I am enjoying immensely), we are getting what we pay for: more and better athletes. We are running neck and neck with China in the medal count, in spite of having one-fifth the population, and, now a slightly smaller gross economy. And China has been investing heavily in its athletes for propaganda purposes. They are taking the place of the USSR in a new Cold War (another subject I'll have to defer until I've thought about it some more).
But the fastest-growing group of new millionaires in the U.S. has been, for more than a century, professional athletes. John L. Sullivan was the first sports figure to earn a million dollars, in the 1880s. A recent contract for Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels totalled $144 million for six years.
Prior to the days of John L. Sullivan, some scientists were real celebrities. Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were very popular scientific lecturers, and there were many more. In 1890 C. V. Boys published Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them, a compendium of his lectures using a "magic lantern", a type of projector. The book is still in print. A few more recent scientists have achieved celebrity status, most notably Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan. More recently, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a rising star.
Quick, how many famous, living scientists can you name? Was there anybody not on the list above? Now, how many famous, living athletes can you name? Was it more than ten, twenty, or even more? The number of players in big-league baseball, the NFL, NHL and NBA totals about 3,500. Baseball's minor leagues add another 4000, which are at least locally famous, though they don't earn millions. Those 3,500 nearly all do earn millions yearly. What do we spend on professional sports? Ten or twenty billions? If you add in their endorsement contracts, it is almost incalculable.
What would be the result if a top scientist could earn a million dollars yearly? Sure, some top schools pay "full professors" up to a quarter million yearly, though the average is far lower. There are 1.6-1.7 million post-secondary teachers in the U.S. Those on the Tenure track (about a third) are doing most of the research. A smaller number of those who have Tenure still do research; they don't have to. And they are the reason for the kid's retort to the king above.
There is a way that some scientists earn more than academia pays. They form companies. Sometimes it works, but administering the business detracts from their own research. For many, it is a way to give up your research and go broke. Is it worthwhile allowing the scientist whose work leads to a commercial product to participate in the profits, without leaving academia?
Scientists working for larger corporations with research departments might get a bonus for obtaining a patent, but I think they ought to get a percent of the profits for a product based on that patent. What would that do for our national scientific productivity?
And what of those who do the "blue sky" research that doesn't lead to "products"? Astronomers and particle physicists come to mind. The salary budget for the use of big-ticket instruments such as the Keck telescopes or the LHC needs to be commensurate with what it cost to build it.
You get what you reward. When our researchers are again our heroes, and appropriately compensated, we will get more of them, and the best work will get better.
Monday, August 06, 2012
In the image of the Creator
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, creativity
You know a book is good when it seems much too short. At just over 250 pages, Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer is probably as long as it needs to be, but it seemed the reading was over all too soon. In this volume the author has done his best to gather all the best research and understanding about human creativity. The key finding: humans are creative. It is what we do.
Some people are much more productively creative than others. It may be that we are learning why. There are aspects of both individual and collective activity that foster creativity, and some that don't. But we need to realize that "creativity" does not refer just to "the arts". The handyman who fits a shoe-changing bench into a corner of the entry, or the cook who adds "a little bit of this and a little of that" to a recipe, or the sales clerk who says, "We can make that work," when confronted with a non-standard request, all are creative. So is a room full of kids learning backflips, or a company's employees putting up a makeshift movie screen where they can all watch the Olympics (this last is the subject of an ad for Chobani yoghurt).
Creation typically begins with frustration. The book's first chapter recounts Bob Dylan's disgust with his early career, when he literally headed for the hills. Before long, he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone", the first of an immense outpouring of songs that literally changed modern pop music. His lyrics are so memorable that when I first heard "The Times, They are a-Changin'" on my Dad's car radio, as soon as we got home I sat right down and wrote it out.
Dylan's experience brings out a second key to creativity: change your surroundings. In fact, you could summarize the first five chapters of the book this way: when you have a difficult problem to solve,
I would add a word about group problem solving. In the chapter on Q, Lehrer rightly blasts brainstorming. It truly is the worst possible kind of teamwork. The biggest problem with it is the "no criticism" rule. To use the terminology of Edward de Bono in Six Thinking Hats, you don't want to Black Hat an idea too early, but if everything is "blue sky" without discernment, you don't produce anything useful. A certain level of criticism needs to be fostered. The best ideas are those that can survive the fire. But ad hominem criticism needs to be nipped in the bud. If a team member resorts to personal attacks, get him or her off the team.
I have found that the best teams have a mix of openers and closers. Openers are divergent thinkers. They come up with lots of ideas. Closers are convergent thinkers. They know how to make an idea work practically. And both kinds of thinkers need to enjoy the process.
I have a couple of books that I keep handy: Jump Start Your Brain by Doug Hall and David Wecker, and A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oeck. Imagine is a good companion volume alongside them.
You know a book is good when it seems much too short. At just over 250 pages, Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer is probably as long as it needs to be, but it seemed the reading was over all too soon. In this volume the author has done his best to gather all the best research and understanding about human creativity. The key finding: humans are creative. It is what we do.
Some people are much more productively creative than others. It may be that we are learning why. There are aspects of both individual and collective activity that foster creativity, and some that don't. But we need to realize that "creativity" does not refer just to "the arts". The handyman who fits a shoe-changing bench into a corner of the entry, or the cook who adds "a little bit of this and a little of that" to a recipe, or the sales clerk who says, "We can make that work," when confronted with a non-standard request, all are creative. So is a room full of kids learning backflips, or a company's employees putting up a makeshift movie screen where they can all watch the Olympics (this last is the subject of an ad for Chobani yoghurt).
Creation typically begins with frustration. The book's first chapter recounts Bob Dylan's disgust with his early career, when he literally headed for the hills. Before long, he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone", the first of an immense outpouring of songs that literally changed modern pop music. His lyrics are so memorable that when I first heard "The Times, They are a-Changin'" on my Dad's car radio, as soon as we got home I sat right down and wrote it out.
Dylan's experience brings out a second key to creativity: change your surroundings. In fact, you could summarize the first five chapters of the book this way: when you have a difficult problem to solve,
- Go somewhere else, from around the house to around the block to around the world. New viewpoints bring new ideas.
- Relax and think about something else. Unhappy people seldom solve anything.
- Recast the problem. Benjamin Franklin records in his Memoirs (published as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin) that, to learn a difficult concept, he would write it out in poetry, set it aside a few days, then translate the poetry back into prose.
- Sleep on it. I built my career as a scientific programmer upon insights that tend to arrive at 3 or 4 AM out of a sound sleep.
- Try to explain to someone who knows nothing about what you are working on (but do spare your beleaguered spouse). That person is likely to ask a question that makes the solution you need pop into your consciousness.
- Involve others. There is a not-too-much-not-too-little aspect at work here. Lehrer calls this factor Q. There is a "sweet spot", sort of like the Goldilocks "just right" amount of Q, that leads to the greatest group productivity.
- Live in a cosmopolitan city, though Lehrer has a few comments about cities to avoid and cities to seek out. Generally, the creative productivity per person increases by 20% every time you double the population. Much of this has to do with having a larger network of loose associations and chance contacts; the "I know a guy who knows a guy" effect. You are also more likely to find a milieu with just the right level of Q.
- Seek an environment in which collaboration is rewarded rather than restricted. Small companies are more productive than large ones, just the inverse of the city effect. That is because cities don't make their residents sign noncompetitive and nondisclosure agreements. Eras such as Fourth Century Athens and Elizabethan England were mightily creative, but as T.S. Eliot wrote, "The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours, but less talent was wasted."
I would add a word about group problem solving. In the chapter on Q, Lehrer rightly blasts brainstorming. It truly is the worst possible kind of teamwork. The biggest problem with it is the "no criticism" rule. To use the terminology of Edward de Bono in Six Thinking Hats, you don't want to Black Hat an idea too early, but if everything is "blue sky" without discernment, you don't produce anything useful. A certain level of criticism needs to be fostered. The best ideas are those that can survive the fire. But ad hominem criticism needs to be nipped in the bud. If a team member resorts to personal attacks, get him or her off the team.
I have found that the best teams have a mix of openers and closers. Openers are divergent thinkers. They come up with lots of ideas. Closers are convergent thinkers. They know how to make an idea work practically. And both kinds of thinkers need to enjoy the process.
I have a couple of books that I keep handy: Jump Start Your Brain by Doug Hall and David Wecker, and A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oeck. Imagine is a good companion volume alongside them.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Do high or low taxes work better?
kw: policy, income taxes, analysis
In a recent campaign advertisement, President Obama states that Mitt Romney wants to lower taxes on the rich, expecting this to stimulate the economy and improve employment figures. He says, "That was tried. It didn't work then, and it won't work now."
I beg to differ, Mr. President. First of all, you are lying. Mitt Romney's proposal would indeed keep taxes for the rich from rising, while reducing taxes the most for working Americans with lower incomes. This latter fact is conveniently ignored in the campaign ad.
Look at this chart:
The dollar figures are all adjusted to 1983-4, when the Consumer Price Index was 100; it is 224 today and was about 30 in 1960. Also, these are marginal rates. In 1960 a family earning $50,000 (taxable income; actual gross may have been $60K-$75K) paid 20% on the first $30,000 ($6,000) and 22% on the rest (another $4,400) for a total of $10,400. Average tax rate was actually under 21% on taxable income, and was closer to 15% of the gross. (Actual 1960 dollars: taxable income about $6,600, income tax total $1,380)
I lived through all these years and remember them; I was thirteen in 1960. To pay down the national debt after World War II, Truman and Eisenhower really "soaked the rich". It was during the early 1960s that L. Ron Hubbard, objecting to being taxed nearly 90% (his books were making him rich), started the "church of Scientology" as a tax shield. The so-called "good life" was based on most Americans in the middle class, families earning the modern equivalent of $25K-$50K or so paid less than 20% of their gross income in taxes; also state income taxes were a lot smaller than they are today, and sales taxes seldom exceeded 3%; and corporate tax rates were lower for small business (but that's a subject for some other time).
Jack Kennedy was a conservative by today's standards. He lowered tax rates by about a tenth for most Americans, and by about one-sixth for the richest! Would any modern Democrat dare to reduce Warren Buffet's taxes by one-sixth? America prospered as a result, but not for long, because Lyndon Johnson came in with the "war on poverty", which has clearly made poverty worse instead of better. I don't have much else to say for the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. The Vietnam war drove fiscal policy, which was in a shambles throughout.
Then came Jimmy Carter. He raised taxes on most of the middle class and the near-rich, but lowered them on the richest among us (I never could figure that out). That and his other ham-handed policies led to inflation that approached 20% and the invention of the "misery index".
In two steps, Ronald Reagan, with Tip O'Neill's help, lowered taxes for nearly everybody, but raised the minimum tax from zero to 15% for the lowest tax bracket, claiming this was "fair." America evidently thought so. This led to a huge boom in the American economy, and although those years began with a rise in the national deficit, this was shrinking rapidly by 1992, and continued right through the early Clinton years. The "Clinton surplus" was largely Reagan's doing.
When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, it took a few years to stop the "Reagan revolution", but by 1998 the economy was on another downturn. His legacy to "W" was the 2000 recession.
George W. Bush, in spite of two wars, was able to get taxes reduced a little in 2003. At the same time, banking regulations were loosened up, which added to the prosperity, but eventually were seen to be a mistake, because it became too easy for the greedy to manipulate, and the crash of 2008 was the result. However, 1990's-era regulations have not been reinstated, so it could happen again.
The 2003 tax bill was temporary, and will sunset at the end of this year. Members of congress are bickering over which provisions of the law to convert to permanent law. Of course, modern Democrats want to "soak the rich", but the history I have lived through shows that such policies damage the economy.
In 2011, one-tenth of American taxpayers paid 72% of the income taxes. They are already being soaked. At the same time, between 47% and 49.5% (depends whom you consult) paid no taxes, but not because there is a zero rate at the lowest marginal bracket. Rather, more subtle factors are involved:
Who will pay the most if the "Bush bonus" expires in January 2013? Everybody except the middle class! The lowermost tax rate, currently 10%, will go up to 15%. Your payroll deduction will jump by half, if you are making less than about $20,000. Then those with taxable income between $69,000 and nearly $140,000 will see a rise from 25% to 28% (about one-eighth), those from $140,000 to $212,000 will see a rise from 28% to 31% (about one-ninth), and the richest will see a rise to as high as 39.6% (about one-seventh).
Many say of those in the top brackets, "So what? They can afford it." The people in the top brackets, those paying 25% and up, are already paying three-fourths of all income taxes. Do you want them to pay 100%? Where is your self respect? Can your conscience allow you to accept services for which you have paid nothing? If so, you must be a true liberal.
Think over the points in this post. The President has lied and misled the public with these campaign ads. "Trickle down economics" has worked several times in the past. Mitt Romney is proposing that we let it work again. President Obama has increased the national debt by $4 trillion in three years. The recession is not over, and unemployment remains over 8% officially, but is actually 15% when you count those who no longer qualify for unemployment insurance payments, but still aren't working. Can we afford five more such years?
In a recent campaign advertisement, President Obama states that Mitt Romney wants to lower taxes on the rich, expecting this to stimulate the economy and improve employment figures. He says, "That was tried. It didn't work then, and it won't work now."
I beg to differ, Mr. President. First of all, you are lying. Mitt Romney's proposal would indeed keep taxes for the rich from rising, while reducing taxes the most for working Americans with lower incomes. This latter fact is conveniently ignored in the campaign ad.
Look at this chart:
The dollar figures are all adjusted to 1983-4, when the Consumer Price Index was 100; it is 224 today and was about 30 in 1960. Also, these are marginal rates. In 1960 a family earning $50,000 (taxable income; actual gross may have been $60K-$75K) paid 20% on the first $30,000 ($6,000) and 22% on the rest (another $4,400) for a total of $10,400. Average tax rate was actually under 21% on taxable income, and was closer to 15% of the gross. (Actual 1960 dollars: taxable income about $6,600, income tax total $1,380)
I lived through all these years and remember them; I was thirteen in 1960. To pay down the national debt after World War II, Truman and Eisenhower really "soaked the rich". It was during the early 1960s that L. Ron Hubbard, objecting to being taxed nearly 90% (his books were making him rich), started the "church of Scientology" as a tax shield. The so-called "good life" was based on most Americans in the middle class, families earning the modern equivalent of $25K-$50K or so paid less than 20% of their gross income in taxes; also state income taxes were a lot smaller than they are today, and sales taxes seldom exceeded 3%; and corporate tax rates were lower for small business (but that's a subject for some other time).
Jack Kennedy was a conservative by today's standards. He lowered tax rates by about a tenth for most Americans, and by about one-sixth for the richest! Would any modern Democrat dare to reduce Warren Buffet's taxes by one-sixth? America prospered as a result, but not for long, because Lyndon Johnson came in with the "war on poverty", which has clearly made poverty worse instead of better. I don't have much else to say for the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. The Vietnam war drove fiscal policy, which was in a shambles throughout.
Then came Jimmy Carter. He raised taxes on most of the middle class and the near-rich, but lowered them on the richest among us (I never could figure that out). That and his other ham-handed policies led to inflation that approached 20% and the invention of the "misery index".
In two steps, Ronald Reagan, with Tip O'Neill's help, lowered taxes for nearly everybody, but raised the minimum tax from zero to 15% for the lowest tax bracket, claiming this was "fair." America evidently thought so. This led to a huge boom in the American economy, and although those years began with a rise in the national deficit, this was shrinking rapidly by 1992, and continued right through the early Clinton years. The "Clinton surplus" was largely Reagan's doing.
When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, it took a few years to stop the "Reagan revolution", but by 1998 the economy was on another downturn. His legacy to "W" was the 2000 recession.
George W. Bush, in spite of two wars, was able to get taxes reduced a little in 2003. At the same time, banking regulations were loosened up, which added to the prosperity, but eventually were seen to be a mistake, because it became too easy for the greedy to manipulate, and the crash of 2008 was the result. However, 1990's-era regulations have not been reinstated, so it could happen again.
The 2003 tax bill was temporary, and will sunset at the end of this year. Members of congress are bickering over which provisions of the law to convert to permanent law. Of course, modern Democrats want to "soak the rich", but the history I have lived through shows that such policies damage the economy.
In 2011, one-tenth of American taxpayers paid 72% of the income taxes. They are already being soaked. At the same time, between 47% and 49.5% (depends whom you consult) paid no taxes, but not because there is a zero rate at the lowest marginal bracket. Rather, more subtle factors are involved:
- The EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), which began in 1975 under Johnson; part of the War on Poverty. For a family of 4 with taxable income of $17,000, this amounts to nearly $5,900, "credited" against a much smaller tax bill (a few hundred), so such families are actually paying a negative tax. The EITC phases out at $45,000, for a 4-person household.
- The Standard Deduction, begun in 1944. It is presently $11,900 for a married couple.
- Personal and Dependent Exemptions. It was $3,800 in 2011, so $15,200 for a family of four. Exemptions are deducted after AGI is calculated.
Who will pay the most if the "Bush bonus" expires in January 2013? Everybody except the middle class! The lowermost tax rate, currently 10%, will go up to 15%. Your payroll deduction will jump by half, if you are making less than about $20,000. Then those with taxable income between $69,000 and nearly $140,000 will see a rise from 25% to 28% (about one-eighth), those from $140,000 to $212,000 will see a rise from 28% to 31% (about one-ninth), and the richest will see a rise to as high as 39.6% (about one-seventh).
Many say of those in the top brackets, "So what? They can afford it." The people in the top brackets, those paying 25% and up, are already paying three-fourths of all income taxes. Do you want them to pay 100%? Where is your self respect? Can your conscience allow you to accept services for which you have paid nothing? If so, you must be a true liberal.
Think over the points in this post. The President has lied and misled the public with these campaign ads. "Trickle down economics" has worked several times in the past. Mitt Romney is proposing that we let it work again. President Obama has increased the national debt by $4 trillion in three years. The recession is not over, and unemployment remains over 8% officially, but is actually 15% when you count those who no longer qualify for unemployment insurance payments, but still aren't working. Can we afford five more such years?
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Temporal recipes
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physics, time travel, time machines
Brian Clegg is becoming one of my favorite explainers. I reviewed two of his books already (last week and late last year). This one is in the middle, published December 2011: How to Build a Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel. In his fluid and entertaining way, Clegg starts with the philosophy of time (there's barely any), segues to the physics of time (primarily the general theory of relativity), and discusses all the approaches to controlling one's progress along the time axis that have a scientific basis, and a few that don't.
H.G. Wells was the first to write of time as a fourth dimension, and his Time Traveler constructed a mechanism to move along that dimension. For Wells, time travel doesn't remove one from one's physical location on Earth's surface. But I wonder what Wells was thinking when he wrote that after the Time Traveler dragged his machine outside the Morlock cave and returned "home", there were skid marks on the floor. Is it just a hint that the whole adventure was the TT's dream?
Let's cut to the chase. Do we learn how to build a time machine? If the theories of physics about how gravity and mass/energy in motion affect time are true, then yes, indeed, a time machine is possible. Possible, but difficult in an engineering sense. Here is one recipe:
By the way, if your spaceship can exceed the speed of light, it is already a time machine; you don't need the black hole. But we don't know how to make such a space drive, while we do know what it would take to utilize a black hole's frame dragging.
Two points were new to me. I don't know why I haven't read or heard of either one before, given all the reading I do. Firstly, that the inside of a black hole is bigger than the outside. Because of the way that mass warps spacetime, the "distance" from the event horizon to the singularity at the center is infinite, if it is a true singularity. If instead, space is granular and the "singularity" gets no smaller than the Planck length, the distance is still huge. It is like the difference between the diameter of the bell of a trombone, and the length of the entire horn, were it straightened out. Indeed, Clegg discusses the shape known as Gabriel's Trumpet, formed by the function y = k/x, cut off where x=1, and rotated about the x axis; it has a maximum radius k but goes infinitely along the x axis, getting narrower as it goes.
Secondly, the conundrum of mass balance. If you could jump to a chosen date, say, 100 years either past or future, and you were to stay there for a few days before returning, your mass, and the mass of whatever part of the time machine accompanied you, would be added to the universe in that other time, and subtracted from whatever period in your "home" time you were gone. Is the conservation of mass/energy a requirement for every moment in time, or only for all spacetime? This is not known, but it may be a reason for time travel to be impossible. This could mightily complicate general relativity.
One point I didn't find discussed. If someday a machine could take someone to any point in time, would they return to the time that they left, or to that time plus the duration of their visit elsewhen? Could you "return" to a time earlier than home time plus trip duration?
Some of the points discussed by the scientists Clegg consulted are more metaphysical, such as the notion that nature somehow conspires to keep a time traveler from making any paradoxes (like killing your own grandfather, the classic paradox); or the idea that making a wormhole that incorporates a time shift would result in catastrophic feedback as radiation from the futureward end exits the pastward end and re-enters the futureward end and so forth, causing an energy pileup that effectively explodes the wormhole and everything in its vicinity. Depending on how long this takes, it could result in a detonation similar to a supernova. Remember the tongue-in-cheek proverb: Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. It may be more true than we'd like to think.
So, now I know a few ways a time machine could be made. Most of them do not permit travel into a past that is before the machine was made. So if time travel is possible, and it is of that sort, it explains why nobody has dropped by from the future to visit. No such machine exists, just yet. The day one is invented, perhaps we'll find many events thereafter clogged with time tourists. Could true time travel be discovered during my lifetime? I hope not. I am not sure I am ready to be interviewed by a genealogy-seeking great-great grandchild!
Brian Clegg is becoming one of my favorite explainers. I reviewed two of his books already (last week and late last year). This one is in the middle, published December 2011: How to Build a Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel. In his fluid and entertaining way, Clegg starts with the philosophy of time (there's barely any), segues to the physics of time (primarily the general theory of relativity), and discusses all the approaches to controlling one's progress along the time axis that have a scientific basis, and a few that don't.
H.G. Wells was the first to write of time as a fourth dimension, and his Time Traveler constructed a mechanism to move along that dimension. For Wells, time travel doesn't remove one from one's physical location on Earth's surface. But I wonder what Wells was thinking when he wrote that after the Time Traveler dragged his machine outside the Morlock cave and returned "home", there were skid marks on the floor. Is it just a hint that the whole adventure was the TT's dream?
Let's cut to the chase. Do we learn how to build a time machine? If the theories of physics about how gravity and mass/energy in motion affect time are true, then yes, indeed, a time machine is possible. Possible, but difficult in an engineering sense. Here is one recipe:
- Procure a spinning black hole. The bigger the better, because tidal effects are less dangerous near the event horizons of the largest black holes. However, though the "escape velocity" from just outside the event horizon of any black hole is c, the energy needed to make a powered ascent against the gravity is much greater the more massive the hole is. Also, the faster the spin rate, the better. Faster rotation means you don't have to get as close to the event horizon. A few million revolutions per second ought to do it.
- Procure a spaceship with sufficient fuel to allow you to dive into the gravity well of the black hole, swoop above the event horizon, and return.
- Rig some kind of shielding sufficient to protect you and the ship from radiation and impacts from light and matter particles that have dropped down the gravity well and are approaching infinite intensity.
- When you perform your swoop, you'll take advantage of the frame-dragging effect of the rotating gravity field. Supposedly, swinging by in the direction of rotation takes you forward in time, and swinging by the other way takes you backwards. The limit into the past you can go is the date of formation of the black hole.
By the way, if your spaceship can exceed the speed of light, it is already a time machine; you don't need the black hole. But we don't know how to make such a space drive, while we do know what it would take to utilize a black hole's frame dragging.
Two points were new to me. I don't know why I haven't read or heard of either one before, given all the reading I do. Firstly, that the inside of a black hole is bigger than the outside. Because of the way that mass warps spacetime, the "distance" from the event horizon to the singularity at the center is infinite, if it is a true singularity. If instead, space is granular and the "singularity" gets no smaller than the Planck length, the distance is still huge. It is like the difference between the diameter of the bell of a trombone, and the length of the entire horn, were it straightened out. Indeed, Clegg discusses the shape known as Gabriel's Trumpet, formed by the function y = k/x, cut off where x=1, and rotated about the x axis; it has a maximum radius k but goes infinitely along the x axis, getting narrower as it goes.
Secondly, the conundrum of mass balance. If you could jump to a chosen date, say, 100 years either past or future, and you were to stay there for a few days before returning, your mass, and the mass of whatever part of the time machine accompanied you, would be added to the universe in that other time, and subtracted from whatever period in your "home" time you were gone. Is the conservation of mass/energy a requirement for every moment in time, or only for all spacetime? This is not known, but it may be a reason for time travel to be impossible. This could mightily complicate general relativity.
One point I didn't find discussed. If someday a machine could take someone to any point in time, would they return to the time that they left, or to that time plus the duration of their visit elsewhen? Could you "return" to a time earlier than home time plus trip duration?
Some of the points discussed by the scientists Clegg consulted are more metaphysical, such as the notion that nature somehow conspires to keep a time traveler from making any paradoxes (like killing your own grandfather, the classic paradox); or the idea that making a wormhole that incorporates a time shift would result in catastrophic feedback as radiation from the futureward end exits the pastward end and re-enters the futureward end and so forth, causing an energy pileup that effectively explodes the wormhole and everything in its vicinity. Depending on how long this takes, it could result in a detonation similar to a supernova. Remember the tongue-in-cheek proverb: Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. It may be more true than we'd like to think.
So, now I know a few ways a time machine could be made. Most of them do not permit travel into a past that is before the machine was made. So if time travel is possible, and it is of that sort, it explains why nobody has dropped by from the future to visit. No such machine exists, just yet. The day one is invented, perhaps we'll find many events thereafter clogged with time tourists. Could true time travel be discovered during my lifetime? I hope not. I am not sure I am ready to be interviewed by a genealogy-seeking great-great grandchild!
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
So when is everybody?
kw: time travel
In 1950, hearing his colleagues discussing if "Martians" or other aliens were "out there", Enrico Fermi abruptly spoke up, "Where is everybody?" (a paraphrase, no doubt). Concerning the possibility of travel through time, you could ask the same thing. If in the future actual time travel becomes possible, one would think that time travelers interested in their own history would be overrunning significant events such as 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.
Time travel into the future is, effectively, what we do by doing nothing. Time passes at the rate of one second per second. However, a "second" is a bit variable, depending on certain effects of general relativity (acceleration and gravity). Speeding up futureward progress can be done by traveling somewhere very fast, then turning around and returning equally fast. But "very fast" means something over a billion km per hour, or some 10,000 times as fast as the fastest spacecraft that has been sent out, to date, or about 40,000 times as fast as the orbital speed of the International Space Station. The energy required is unfeasible until we learn how to harness a few percent of the Sun's output into propulsion (or that of any convenient nearby star).
Going backward in time is another proposition entirely! Even though quantum tunneling provides a way for photons or perhaps even subatomic particles to briefly exceed c, which sends them back in time a few nanoseconds, no means is known for complex items such as molecules or humans to do so.
But let us suppose a device is invented that can move freely along the time axis, taking someone along with it. Just as relativity tells us that motion in space affects time, deliberate motion in time is likely to affect space. For example, suppose you go ten minutes in either the future or the past "direction", more or less instantly. Will you remain stationary in space? Does that question even have meaning? Stationary with respect to what?
Let's consider that we all are moving, even when sitting still. With respect to the center of the Earth, I am moving about 1,280 kph, or 0.356 km/s. Anyone right at the equator is moving even faster: 1,670 kph, or 0.464 km/s. But Earth is moving, at 29.8 km/s relative to the Sun, the Sun is moving at about 200 km/s as it orbits the center of the Galaxy, and the Galaxy is moving at just over 625 km/s with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation that is thought to represent a stationary reference frame for the Universe, at least that part of it we can see. But even that idea is questionable according to special relativity.
Is it possible that time travel allows your personal coordinate system to be pinned to the surface of the Earth? If not, during that instant jaunt through ten minutes of time, you might find you have moved 200-300 km and probably several km upward, or perhaps almost 18,000 km relative to Sol, or 120,000 km relative to the Galaxy, or as much as 375,000 km in the Universal reference frame. That'll get you into the vicinity of the Moon.
I suspect the last figure is most correct. Whoever invents a time machine has to start out with time jumps in the range of a microsecond. Then if the CMB is the actual reference frame, the distance jumped will be only 62.5 cm. You'll need to put your time machine into a vacuum with at least that much elbow room in all directions, so the jump will not be into solid matter!
If this is the consequence of mastering time, it will simply not be practical unless we also learn to make corresponding jumps in space, either to compensate, or perhaps to go to a where/when of our choosing. I wonder if we could ever find out how to locate Dallas, TX, Nov 3, 1963, a certain grassy knoll…
And that is why I think we won't ever have time travelers showing up. Even if one's location in time and space could be chosen at will, knowing where/when a target event is "located" in the spacetime continuum may be impossible to determine, except for very short jumps.
In 1950, hearing his colleagues discussing if "Martians" or other aliens were "out there", Enrico Fermi abruptly spoke up, "Where is everybody?" (a paraphrase, no doubt). Concerning the possibility of travel through time, you could ask the same thing. If in the future actual time travel becomes possible, one would think that time travelers interested in their own history would be overrunning significant events such as 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination.
Time travel into the future is, effectively, what we do by doing nothing. Time passes at the rate of one second per second. However, a "second" is a bit variable, depending on certain effects of general relativity (acceleration and gravity). Speeding up futureward progress can be done by traveling somewhere very fast, then turning around and returning equally fast. But "very fast" means something over a billion km per hour, or some 10,000 times as fast as the fastest spacecraft that has been sent out, to date, or about 40,000 times as fast as the orbital speed of the International Space Station. The energy required is unfeasible until we learn how to harness a few percent of the Sun's output into propulsion (or that of any convenient nearby star).
Going backward in time is another proposition entirely! Even though quantum tunneling provides a way for photons or perhaps even subatomic particles to briefly exceed c, which sends them back in time a few nanoseconds, no means is known for complex items such as molecules or humans to do so.
But let us suppose a device is invented that can move freely along the time axis, taking someone along with it. Just as relativity tells us that motion in space affects time, deliberate motion in time is likely to affect space. For example, suppose you go ten minutes in either the future or the past "direction", more or less instantly. Will you remain stationary in space? Does that question even have meaning? Stationary with respect to what?
Let's consider that we all are moving, even when sitting still. With respect to the center of the Earth, I am moving about 1,280 kph, or 0.356 km/s. Anyone right at the equator is moving even faster: 1,670 kph, or 0.464 km/s. But Earth is moving, at 29.8 km/s relative to the Sun, the Sun is moving at about 200 km/s as it orbits the center of the Galaxy, and the Galaxy is moving at just over 625 km/s with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation that is thought to represent a stationary reference frame for the Universe, at least that part of it we can see. But even that idea is questionable according to special relativity.
Is it possible that time travel allows your personal coordinate system to be pinned to the surface of the Earth? If not, during that instant jaunt through ten minutes of time, you might find you have moved 200-300 km and probably several km upward, or perhaps almost 18,000 km relative to Sol, or 120,000 km relative to the Galaxy, or as much as 375,000 km in the Universal reference frame. That'll get you into the vicinity of the Moon.
I suspect the last figure is most correct. Whoever invents a time machine has to start out with time jumps in the range of a microsecond. Then if the CMB is the actual reference frame, the distance jumped will be only 62.5 cm. You'll need to put your time machine into a vacuum with at least that much elbow room in all directions, so the jump will not be into solid matter!
If this is the consequence of mastering time, it will simply not be practical unless we also learn to make corresponding jumps in space, either to compensate, or perhaps to go to a where/when of our choosing. I wonder if we could ever find out how to locate Dallas, TX, Nov 3, 1963, a certain grassy knoll…
And that is why I think we won't ever have time travelers showing up. Even if one's location in time and space could be chosen at will, knowing where/when a target event is "located" in the spacetime continuum may be impossible to determine, except for very short jumps.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
A flock of one-minute reads
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collections, short essays
There are a number of ways to have a chance at getting some of your writing into print. Most cost a few bucks, such as various "poetry projects". I've just run across one that specializes in short essays and in what the editors call "Six-Word Memoirs": Smith Magazine. With free registration, you can enter your own brief memoir, or a 2-word one-liner, where it is made available online, and may just be published in one of their books.
I haven't seen the earlier book on the 6-word pieces (it must contain hundreds), but just finished reading The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories From 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure, edited by Larry Smith.
The book is composed of 125 short essays in which the writers describe a moment that changed their lives, in 100-500 words, sometimes a bit more. A few of the writers are artists who submitted drawn pieces or cartoon panels. When you are going to capture a meaningful event in a page or two, brevity is pure gold. The best pieces have an arresting first line, as this page shows.
Here we read of the tension between being a journalist and being a feeling human ("Checkpoints" by Alaa Majeed); of turning points such as a murder conviction ("The Verdict" by Byron Case) or seeing in your infant's eyes a choice to turn away from your own failures so she'll have a chance at her own successes ("Trusting Eyes" by Jami Kempen); of a career changed by hearing a new kind of music ("Maiden Days" by Judy Collins); and the devastating effects of being raped (the first half of "Forgiven" by Jennifer Thompson).
Right in the middle, we learn where the "war on drugs" really came from. Quoting John Ehrlichman in 1992: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. … We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. … Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." ("Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum). This is the single biggest reason for more than half of the 2 million or more people who now inhabit American prisons. It is time this fact was more widely known. Call this my moment, from reading the book. I have been against the "war on drugs" from the beginning, but now I have a more concrete reason (and I am quite aware that there was an earlier drug war, with its signature piece the wildly overdone film Reefer Madness).
Just to whet our appetite for the earlier book, a few pages such as this one contain some of the 6-word items. The web site must have thousands of these. They are the original concept upon which the e-mag was based. Larry Smith calls them "American Haiku". They are even briefer than haiku, which contain 17 syllables; these have from 6 to 12, typically.
Two of my own, topical of course:
I write so I can read.
I read so I can write.
They go together, and readers of my blog will know why. Y'wanna write your own story? Go to Smith.
There are a number of ways to have a chance at getting some of your writing into print. Most cost a few bucks, such as various "poetry projects". I've just run across one that specializes in short essays and in what the editors call "Six-Word Memoirs": Smith Magazine. With free registration, you can enter your own brief memoir, or a 2-word one-liner, where it is made available online, and may just be published in one of their books.
I haven't seen the earlier book on the 6-word pieces (it must contain hundreds), but just finished reading The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories From 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure, edited by Larry Smith.
Here we read of the tension between being a journalist and being a feeling human ("Checkpoints" by Alaa Majeed); of turning points such as a murder conviction ("The Verdict" by Byron Case) or seeing in your infant's eyes a choice to turn away from your own failures so she'll have a chance at her own successes ("Trusting Eyes" by Jami Kempen); of a career changed by hearing a new kind of music ("Maiden Days" by Judy Collins); and the devastating effects of being raped (the first half of "Forgiven" by Jennifer Thompson).
Right in the middle, we learn where the "war on drugs" really came from. Quoting John Ehrlichman in 1992: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. … We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. … Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." ("Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum). This is the single biggest reason for more than half of the 2 million or more people who now inhabit American prisons. It is time this fact was more widely known. Call this my moment, from reading the book. I have been against the "war on drugs" from the beginning, but now I have a more concrete reason (and I am quite aware that there was an earlier drug war, with its signature piece the wildly overdone film Reefer Madness).
Two of my own, topical of course:
I write so I can read.
I read so I can write.
They go together, and readers of my blog will know why. Y'wanna write your own story? Go to Smith.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Going the way of all flesh
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging
I phoned my father on his sixtieth birthday and asked, "What is it like?" He said, "I feel a lot like I did when I was twenty, but everything takes longer." Five years ago, I passed that milestone myself, and I have to agree. Not much has changed, yet everything has changed. And, nearly everything does indeed take longer. I expect to have some time yet for things to take even longer. Dad is still ticking along at age 90.
Though Mom passed away at 81, she had the potential for a longer life, had she not fallen afoul of a deadly cancer. As it happened, she also fell afoul of creeping dementia, starting before age 60, so when it came, her death from cancer was counted a blessing. Which side of the family will I be more like? I've already had cancer, and I show no signs of dementia (you reading this can judge for yourselves – be kind!), so perhaps I have 20-30 years to go. I hope they are fruitful years.
I live by my wits, and in particular I need a robust memory to thrive in the knowledge management business. If I start "losing it", I won't last long. But I have had colleagues who retired at 58 and 60, while others retired at 75 or even older, and I have a valued colleague who is 78 (I think; he is a bit cagey about it). This last fellow retired, then came back as a consultant. I figure, as long as the work is fun and interesting, having that paycheck is also lots of fun, so why not keep going? My father retired at 75.
Professor William Ian Miller may be one of those who is ready for retirement closer to his sixties than his seventies or later. The title of his book says it all: Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain, Which He Flatters Himself Formerly Did Him Noble Service – A Plaint, Tragi-comical, Historical, Vengeful, Sometimes Satirical and Thankful in Six Parts, if His Memory Does Yet Serve. Ka-boing! He gets the award for longest title!! Dr. Miller is 65, probably no more than a month or two older than I am, and his writing indicates he is still in possession of most of his wits. However, upon introspection, he feels he has lost a lot. One of the six parts of the book is titled "Complaining", but he doesn't confine his own complaining to that section. By the finish, I had to say, with Shakespeare, "Methinks thou protesteth too much", to slightly misquote Gertrude in Hamlet, Act III.
However, the book is not entirely a complaint. I would not have read through 265 pages of pure kvetching. It is, rather, a very entertaining survey of old age, its ills, and the ways a range of societies (mostly Norse) have treated the old through history. The good professor studies a cluster of ancient literature genres centered on the Icelandic Eddas and Norse epic poetry in general. Many of his illustrations derive from these. Thus, he dwells for quite a spell upon the characters in Egil's Saga: Egil, his son Skallagrim and grandson Kveld-Ulf. Each grew old in turn during the time covered by the saga, and they had quite similar personalities. In particular, in their old age, they each responded to grief by taking to bed and staying there for long periods. This is a common ploy of those who think they are old enough to get away with it. However, in one instance, the old codger's son shames him into arising and taking the field in vengeance, where he dies, though only after killing a dozen or so enemies. Perhaps old Icelanders are made of sterner stuff.
Isn't that how we all hope we can go out, in a blaze of glory? Well, maybe some of us. I confess to being more cowardly than that, and hoping my heart just quietly stops beating some night while I lie sleeping. In particular, with my family history, I have zero risk of death by heart attack or stroke, and a recent Heart Cam scan (my doctor insisted) shows my heart is as clean as a healthy teenager's. So I expect, sooner or later, another bout with cancer, and that's typically a rather painful way to go. Maybe if I am lucky, something critical will just wear out first. I'd rather wink out than blaze out.
Before getting to complaining, the author discusses the horror of finding yourself old, to the point of not easily recognizing your face in a mirror. I still have my high school picture. I showed it to some college students recently, because one asked about it. A girl blurted out, "Oh, you used to be so handsome!" Clearly, things have changed. I really don't look like I did then, though I really can recognize myself in recent pictures or mirror views. Looking at my father, I can see about how I'll look in 25 years, God willing. And by the way, Dr. Miller writes about recently visiting his mother, aged 89, so he probably has 20-25 years to go himself. Get used to it, Bill!
The shortest section of the book is about "Wisdom", and the various rather unfounded myths about getting older and wiser. Older and more stubborn is more like it. I rather like what Elihu said to Job and his "friends" (as if you could have such good enemies): "I said, 'Let age speak, and let the multitude of years make wisdom known.' But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding. It is not the great who are wise, nor the old who understand justice." (Job 32:7-9) A succinct proverb says it all, "There is no fool like an old fool".
So the fourth section is about how we might wrap things up, and is titled "Retirement, Revenge, and Taking it With You". The retirement picture, at least in the West, is where the rubber really meets the road. Having lots of kids was the traditional retirement plan; you just hoped at least one would have sufficient gratitude to take care of you when you got feeble. The condition of one Neandertal skeleton, of a man who was aged at the time of death, but was apparently being fed and cared for by someone, shows that the plan can work, though cases abound of the young giving the very old a bit of help to embark on "the next journey". Now we have pensions and IRA's and so forth.
We need them! In 1900, 4% of Americans were 65 or older, and the average retiree lived on about five more years. By 1936, when Social Security was enacted, those 65+ amounted to 5%. By 2000, it became 12.5%, and is expected to hit about 16% in eight more years (2020, when I'll be 73). Living on a fixed income these days is just a death sentence by inflation. Costs go up, and old folks begin to starve. Some people put their aged relatives in a nursing home. Nursing home neglect is becoming an epidemic, and is part of a larger picture of "the home" just being another means of "helping" someone reach the final exit sooner. Particularly if the aged person in question has a substantial IRA or other wealth. Is it any wonder some oldsters get vengeful, and even plan how to "take it with them", if only by spending down their assets. Can you say "Senior Citizen Cruise"? In Egil's Saga, old Egil gets out of bed long enough to take a couple of chests of silver to a bog, where he throws them in, with the help of two slaves. He is still strong enough to kill the slaves so they can't be asked which bog.
The section titled "Sentiments" made more sense to me. My wife finds it a bit amusing how easily I shed a tear. It gets easier as the years go by. It is getting risky to invite me to a wedding or funeral. I'll be the one trying to weep silently, and failing. Was Dylan Thomas's father a sentimental type, that the son wrote "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"? What is the use of all that rage? The stress will just kick off your ticker that much sooner. The sixth section explores this a little more. But I have to remark on another item that I found quite bracing.
Throughout the book, the author disparages "Positive Psychology" and its Pollyanna-ish tendencies. I agree with him. Life can be tough, and it does no good to over-optimize, or to over-pessimize about it. If some think the very old are happier than others, there are several explanations. One is that happier folks might live longer. Another is that "ignorance is bliss" and that an increasing number of the very old are too demented to know if they are sad or not. I suspect some of it is just the error of averaging apples with oranges with bananas with orangutans. Anyway, I wonder how many old folks simply lied about how happy they were. I just got interrupted by a phone call, one of those automated political surveys. I hung up on it. If I had taken it, I would probably have lied, because I usually do, on purpose. Think about that, pundits out there with your surveys and smoke-and-mirrors predictions!
I was able once to recalculate the statistics from an article that reported on a study of IQ and aging. The authors claimed that IQ dropped with age after 40 or so. But if you recast the numbers so that you count back from the age at death, IQ actually rose until a final decline that typically began about five years before death. So if your "natural death" is going to come at age 80, you can expect to get smarter until age 75. Maybe there is something to this wisdom of age bit!
How does that square with the fact that brain scans show brains shrinking with age? Size isn't everything. Einstein's brain has been preserved, and its volume is 1,230 cc. The average 76-year-old man's brain is about 1,250 cc. The "normal" range for middle aged men is 1,050-1,450 cc. Einstein worked on the "grand unified theory" right up to the end.
So, like many, I may occasionally find a word that I ought to know, on the tip of my tongue, but glued there so I can't get it out; I may mislay my keys (though I have strict habits to forestall this); I never could put a name to a face until I'd been with someone three or four times, so that's not a consideration; I have different eating habits than I used to; the way my wife and I relate to one another has changed; the way my brothers and father and I relate to one another has also changed; and I think I am less likely to try to intimidate my younger colleagues with superior knowledge – I'd rather collaborate on a more equal basis than I used to.
I don't know if Dr. Miller is really "losing it", any more than I am. If we are, I think there is still a very great much left to lose. There are also a few things to gain. For example, I can play a greater variety of parts now: curmudgeon when it suits me, or kindly grandfatherly ball of fluff when that is better. And so forth. Back to lying on surveys: the old become better actors. Another reason to watch out!
I phoned my father on his sixtieth birthday and asked, "What is it like?" He said, "I feel a lot like I did when I was twenty, but everything takes longer." Five years ago, I passed that milestone myself, and I have to agree. Not much has changed, yet everything has changed. And, nearly everything does indeed take longer. I expect to have some time yet for things to take even longer. Dad is still ticking along at age 90.
Though Mom passed away at 81, she had the potential for a longer life, had she not fallen afoul of a deadly cancer. As it happened, she also fell afoul of creeping dementia, starting before age 60, so when it came, her death from cancer was counted a blessing. Which side of the family will I be more like? I've already had cancer, and I show no signs of dementia (you reading this can judge for yourselves – be kind!), so perhaps I have 20-30 years to go. I hope they are fruitful years.
I live by my wits, and in particular I need a robust memory to thrive in the knowledge management business. If I start "losing it", I won't last long. But I have had colleagues who retired at 58 and 60, while others retired at 75 or even older, and I have a valued colleague who is 78 (I think; he is a bit cagey about it). This last fellow retired, then came back as a consultant. I figure, as long as the work is fun and interesting, having that paycheck is also lots of fun, so why not keep going? My father retired at 75.
Professor William Ian Miller may be one of those who is ready for retirement closer to his sixties than his seventies or later. The title of his book says it all: Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain, Which He Flatters Himself Formerly Did Him Noble Service – A Plaint, Tragi-comical, Historical, Vengeful, Sometimes Satirical and Thankful in Six Parts, if His Memory Does Yet Serve. Ka-boing! He gets the award for longest title!! Dr. Miller is 65, probably no more than a month or two older than I am, and his writing indicates he is still in possession of most of his wits. However, upon introspection, he feels he has lost a lot. One of the six parts of the book is titled "Complaining", but he doesn't confine his own complaining to that section. By the finish, I had to say, with Shakespeare, "Methinks thou protesteth too much", to slightly misquote Gertrude in Hamlet, Act III.
However, the book is not entirely a complaint. I would not have read through 265 pages of pure kvetching. It is, rather, a very entertaining survey of old age, its ills, and the ways a range of societies (mostly Norse) have treated the old through history. The good professor studies a cluster of ancient literature genres centered on the Icelandic Eddas and Norse epic poetry in general. Many of his illustrations derive from these. Thus, he dwells for quite a spell upon the characters in Egil's Saga: Egil, his son Skallagrim and grandson Kveld-Ulf. Each grew old in turn during the time covered by the saga, and they had quite similar personalities. In particular, in their old age, they each responded to grief by taking to bed and staying there for long periods. This is a common ploy of those who think they are old enough to get away with it. However, in one instance, the old codger's son shames him into arising and taking the field in vengeance, where he dies, though only after killing a dozen or so enemies. Perhaps old Icelanders are made of sterner stuff.
Isn't that how we all hope we can go out, in a blaze of glory? Well, maybe some of us. I confess to being more cowardly than that, and hoping my heart just quietly stops beating some night while I lie sleeping. In particular, with my family history, I have zero risk of death by heart attack or stroke, and a recent Heart Cam scan (my doctor insisted) shows my heart is as clean as a healthy teenager's. So I expect, sooner or later, another bout with cancer, and that's typically a rather painful way to go. Maybe if I am lucky, something critical will just wear out first. I'd rather wink out than blaze out.
Before getting to complaining, the author discusses the horror of finding yourself old, to the point of not easily recognizing your face in a mirror. I still have my high school picture. I showed it to some college students recently, because one asked about it. A girl blurted out, "Oh, you used to be so handsome!" Clearly, things have changed. I really don't look like I did then, though I really can recognize myself in recent pictures or mirror views. Looking at my father, I can see about how I'll look in 25 years, God willing. And by the way, Dr. Miller writes about recently visiting his mother, aged 89, so he probably has 20-25 years to go himself. Get used to it, Bill!
The shortest section of the book is about "Wisdom", and the various rather unfounded myths about getting older and wiser. Older and more stubborn is more like it. I rather like what Elihu said to Job and his "friends" (as if you could have such good enemies): "I said, 'Let age speak, and let the multitude of years make wisdom known.' But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding. It is not the great who are wise, nor the old who understand justice." (Job 32:7-9) A succinct proverb says it all, "There is no fool like an old fool".
So the fourth section is about how we might wrap things up, and is titled "Retirement, Revenge, and Taking it With You". The retirement picture, at least in the West, is where the rubber really meets the road. Having lots of kids was the traditional retirement plan; you just hoped at least one would have sufficient gratitude to take care of you when you got feeble. The condition of one Neandertal skeleton, of a man who was aged at the time of death, but was apparently being fed and cared for by someone, shows that the plan can work, though cases abound of the young giving the very old a bit of help to embark on "the next journey". Now we have pensions and IRA's and so forth.
We need them! In 1900, 4% of Americans were 65 or older, and the average retiree lived on about five more years. By 1936, when Social Security was enacted, those 65+ amounted to 5%. By 2000, it became 12.5%, and is expected to hit about 16% in eight more years (2020, when I'll be 73). Living on a fixed income these days is just a death sentence by inflation. Costs go up, and old folks begin to starve. Some people put their aged relatives in a nursing home. Nursing home neglect is becoming an epidemic, and is part of a larger picture of "the home" just being another means of "helping" someone reach the final exit sooner. Particularly if the aged person in question has a substantial IRA or other wealth. Is it any wonder some oldsters get vengeful, and even plan how to "take it with them", if only by spending down their assets. Can you say "Senior Citizen Cruise"? In Egil's Saga, old Egil gets out of bed long enough to take a couple of chests of silver to a bog, where he throws them in, with the help of two slaves. He is still strong enough to kill the slaves so they can't be asked which bog.
The section titled "Sentiments" made more sense to me. My wife finds it a bit amusing how easily I shed a tear. It gets easier as the years go by. It is getting risky to invite me to a wedding or funeral. I'll be the one trying to weep silently, and failing. Was Dylan Thomas's father a sentimental type, that the son wrote "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"? What is the use of all that rage? The stress will just kick off your ticker that much sooner. The sixth section explores this a little more. But I have to remark on another item that I found quite bracing.
Throughout the book, the author disparages "Positive Psychology" and its Pollyanna-ish tendencies. I agree with him. Life can be tough, and it does no good to over-optimize, or to over-pessimize about it. If some think the very old are happier than others, there are several explanations. One is that happier folks might live longer. Another is that "ignorance is bliss" and that an increasing number of the very old are too demented to know if they are sad or not. I suspect some of it is just the error of averaging apples with oranges with bananas with orangutans. Anyway, I wonder how many old folks simply lied about how happy they were. I just got interrupted by a phone call, one of those automated political surveys. I hung up on it. If I had taken it, I would probably have lied, because I usually do, on purpose. Think about that, pundits out there with your surveys and smoke-and-mirrors predictions!
I was able once to recalculate the statistics from an article that reported on a study of IQ and aging. The authors claimed that IQ dropped with age after 40 or so. But if you recast the numbers so that you count back from the age at death, IQ actually rose until a final decline that typically began about five years before death. So if your "natural death" is going to come at age 80, you can expect to get smarter until age 75. Maybe there is something to this wisdom of age bit!
How does that square with the fact that brain scans show brains shrinking with age? Size isn't everything. Einstein's brain has been preserved, and its volume is 1,230 cc. The average 76-year-old man's brain is about 1,250 cc. The "normal" range for middle aged men is 1,050-1,450 cc. Einstein worked on the "grand unified theory" right up to the end.
So, like many, I may occasionally find a word that I ought to know, on the tip of my tongue, but glued there so I can't get it out; I may mislay my keys (though I have strict habits to forestall this); I never could put a name to a face until I'd been with someone three or four times, so that's not a consideration; I have different eating habits than I used to; the way my wife and I relate to one another has changed; the way my brothers and father and I relate to one another has also changed; and I think I am less likely to try to intimidate my younger colleagues with superior knowledge – I'd rather collaborate on a more equal basis than I used to.
I don't know if Dr. Miller is really "losing it", any more than I am. If we are, I think there is still a very great much left to lose. There are also a few things to gain. For example, I can play a greater variety of parts now: curmudgeon when it suits me, or kindly grandfatherly ball of fluff when that is better. And so forth. Back to lying on surveys: the old become better actors. Another reason to watch out!
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