eBooks and I

I love to read. I love books and the written word in general. One of the greatest pleasures of my life is to curl up on my couch or stretch out on my bed with a good book‒a real book, with a binding and pages made of paper‒no batteries required. I like having good books on my shelves, and when invited into someone else's home, the presence or absence of tangible, physical reading material, and when present, the subject(s) of the reading material can often, fairly or unfairly, inform my opinion of those whose home it is. I am not rich, or even well-off, by any measure, but I am proud of the depth and breadth of the works in my library of bound books.

As long as there are at least some people that like to collect things like stamps, baseball cards, music and motion pictures recorded on a physical medium (i.e. CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays), I suspect there will also be those that will enjoy, and continue to purchase physical, bound books. From a marketing standpoint, if book publishing went entirely digital, what would become of that staple of the publishing industry, the book tour? What gets readers to clear their calendars and brave the most inclement weather to attend a talk by a favorite author promoting their latest book? From the reader's standpoint, it is not so much the chance to hear the author speak, the biggest inducement is the chance for readers to interact with their favorite authors and ask them to sign their new book. In a world of Kindles, Nooks, etc., what would be the point? Will we hear readers say things like, “See this scuff mark on my Kindle^TM ? I got that when I downloaded James Patterson's latest ebook”? I think not.

Because I have such a deep appreciation for, and love of, the written word, it is not surprising that I consider the effort to express my own thoughts and ideas in the same way‒and do it well, hopefully improving with practice‒a very worthwhile endeavor. When I write about subjects that depend on getting one's facts right, I take great pains to research and document my sources (using Zotero‒a superb open-source bibliographic citation program). I readily admit it is sometimes a fair description of the diligence with which I dot my “i”'s and cross my “t”'s to say that it borders on the obsessive-compulsive. To the extent that I am a bit OCD about citing my sources, my defense is that I dread being caught with my pants down in an intellectual sense. Another defense is the daily frustration I feel when confronted by the fact that most people do not seem to give a hoot that they are talking out their asses about subjects of which they are utterly ignorant; I want to share as few traits with such people as humanly possible.

I have a tattered, well-used copy of the 27^th edition of the CRC Standard MathematicalTables that I acquired back in 1987 that was used at a Navy technical school I attended. The pages were falling out and were well-annotated by the students that came before me and it was being replaced with newer copies in better condition. That book went on to be further annotated by me and provide invaluable help not only to me as I studied calculus, physics, and electrical engineering on the way to earning my undergraduate degree, but to my daughters as they studied geometry, algebra, and trigonometry in high school.

Currently I have over 1.5 GB worth of scholarly peer-reviewed papers from on-line databases like EBSCO and ProQuest. I also make frequent use of Cornell University Library's outstanding arXiv repository of papers in the quantitative sciences. Additionally, being a dues-paying member of the AAAS, I also have online access to the journal Science and it's daughter publications. (My mother thinks it is a hoot that some of the mail I get from the AAAS is addressed to Dr. Northrup.) I also have a paid subscription to the online Questia library, a great source of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences. The vast majority of these papers are in the PDF format (with the exception of the material accessed through Questia) and are duly recorded in my Zotero library, both in the “cloud” and locally on my laptop. Using Zotero (I am not a paid spokes-person) I have the ability to copy/paste what I call “money quotes” from research papers of interest rather than going through the laborious process of re-typing them myself.

My current library of serious, non-fiction ebooks, in various formats, comes in at just under 20 GB. They include everything from things like the nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity (relevant to a writing/research project I am currently working on) and science textbooks and references like an Introduction to Astronomy and Cosmology by Ian Morison. I was delighted to come across the ebook version of the 32^nd edition of the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae, which I quickly snapped up for reasons of nostalgia. When researching whatever project I am working on, I have found being able to copy/paste passages from items in my ebook library into Zotero for later use as invaluable an aid as it is when quoting from a paper downloaded from the journal Science.

When I write, even for this blog, I always compose and polish my work using MS Word or LibreOffice and in the infrequent and brief snippets of down-time at my day job, I sometimes work on personal writing projects (don't tell my boss). I have a smaller, portable version of my library of downloaded research papers and ebooks, as well as various ebook reader software, on a flash drive for ready access, regardless of what computer I am at. Having read this far, it would probably be no surprise to learn that I have not paid for any of the ebooks in my library...until this weekend.

Earlier (on Saturday, July 14, 2012 to be precise), I came across a post by Jerry Coyne on his excellent blog, Why Evolution is True, the discussion of which I wished to contribute to. The post involved Sam Harris's latest book, Free Will, which I have not yet purchased or read, and because I like his writing, this seemed as good a time as any to plunge into the world of legitimate (i.e. DRM-restricted) ebooks. In the interest of full disclosure, the same day I also obtained a copy of Free Will (for free) via Bit Torrent, which is how I amassed the aforementioned 20 GB of ebooks. Many of the works of popular science, freethinking, atheism, and related topics in my ebook library I also have as printed and bound volumes. When a new book by authors whose work I follow (e.g. Dawkins, Harris, The Hitch (R.I.P.), Lawrence Krause, Dennett, Pinker, et al.) comes out I look forward to curling up with the physical book.

After checking out a number of ebook vendors online, I purchased the ebook Free Will through the online ebook store Kobo and found it a thoroughly disagreeable experience that I will not, as long as I have any choice in that matter, ever repeat. If I want to read a book for my own enlightenment and pleasure, I will continue to prefer old-fashioned bound books, and will gladly pay full price for them. Ebook readers like the Kindle, Nook, the iOS readers (don't even get me started on PC vs Mac‒at least for right now) are worthless to me, whether I am reading for pleasure or for research. When researching a topic for my writing, I often have my working draft and whatever ebooks are relevant to the subject at hand open at the same time, on the same computer. Further, ebooks that cannot be highlighted or otherwise annotated, and for which the copying of text (to insure I properly cite/quote particular passages) is disabled, are of no value to me whatsoever. To my mind, the various ebook reading platforms and file formats are simply a scheme to lock consumers into a particular type of hardware that are obsolete almost as soon as they hit the shelves and will need to replaced/upgraded in lockstep with Moore's Law. A nice racket...err...I mean "business model," I'm sure.

As a student, a frequent frustration was finding a research paper that, judging from the abstract, was exactly what I needed, but was only available behind a paywall set up by the likes of Elsevier, Springer, or Wiley. It seems I was not the only one that was outraged by this (see here, here, and here, just for starters). After my experience with DRM-protected ebooks this weekend, my opinion of the ebook publishing world is now almost as low as is my opinion of Elsevier and friends, nor are their motives for going about it as they are any less base, despicable, or contemptuous of those they hope to manipulate by such practices.

Citing Sources

In my most recent post introducing my on-going series on the 2012 elections, I went on at some length about “doing one's homework.” I hold myself to that same standard‒with at least some consistency, I hope. A reader might have noticed that I cite my sources in many, if not most, of my posts and thought I should give a brief account of my thinking regarding citation styles. As an undergraduate I took upper-level classes from many different disciplines: physics, engineering, geology, biology, and political science...to name a few. The default citation format I cut my teeth on was the venerable Modern Language Association (MLA) style. This makes sense when one considers that most undergrad's are introduced to writing “scholarly” papers not within their own major, but in courses taught by faculty from the English department.

One of the things I like about the MLA style is that it is set up to handle a very wide range of sources, from peer-reviewed journals to on-line videos of scientific symposia and just about everything in-between. Like many students, I used a bibliographic citation software package, specifically, EndNote. However, EndNote is very expensive and I was delighted when I learned of Zotero, a free, open-source alternative to EndNote and its pricey competitors.

For a professor grading a stack of papers written by undergrads, the MLA style is nearly ideal because the in-text citations are obvious (or very "in-your-face," depending on one's mood) and are easy to reconcile with the list of “works cited” at the end of the paper. I get that. Though I am no longer a student, I still want to show that I have done my homework in what I write, but the very thing that makes MLA great for professors grading papers, the obviousness of the in-text citations, makes a MLA formatted paper hard to read if the writer actually wants someone that is not an English professor to read it because the effect is visually quite jarring.

After some playing around with the Citation Style Language (CSL) used by Zotero, I have found that I really like the in-text citation format used by the British journal Nature. It consists of a simple, unobtrusive, superscript within the text which corresponds to the entry in the references at the end of the paper. However, the Nature style is not set up to handle nearly the same diversity of sources that MLA is, so I have had to tweak it a bit to make it work. It is still very much a work in progress and so if a reader cannot easily place the citation style I use, now they know why.

2012-The Very Long Year-Introduction

Election years in the United States typically feel long, and 2012 is shaping up to be a very long election year. Indeed, one could even say it began as soon as the last polls closed on November 4^th, 2008. This post was originally intended to be a one-off, however, like so many other posts, as I wrote it, I was constantly saying to myself "If I cover this fact or concept here, I also need to mention that supporting (or contrasting) bit from over there"‒and the whole thing snowballed from there. The original impetus for the stand-alone piece was the blow-up over Rush Limbaugh's juvenile, schoolyard bully-style attacks on the character of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke following her testimony before Democratic members of a House sub-committee. The subject of her testimony was contraception availability and the impact it has on women's reproductive health. Not surprisingly, as I noted above, instead of challenging the factual claims made in Ms. Fluke's testimony, something far beyond the pathetically limited scope of Limbaugh's intellect (not to mention that of his target demographic), the best he could do was resort to name-calling. The specifics of Ms. Fluke's testimony, Limbaugh's contemptible comments and those of his Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA)ⁱ sheep, will be covered in a later post.

In this post, I throw down the gauntlet and lay out my ground rules for any discussion or debate that purports to deal with the world around us. The gloves are off. I am through coddling social, religious, and political conservatives (and when I encounter people on the left that are equally ignorant, I will be just as intellectually brutal with them too). Let this be fair warning‒from now until I revert back to precisely the same the state of non-being I was in (suffering no discernible harm by the way) for the entire 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to just prior to my birth‒I will no longer remain silent when confronted by confident assertions made by people who have failed to do their homework. I always take considerable care in fact checking myself, in what I write and in my every day conversations with others. As a culture, we have little sympathy (for the most part) for a kid that blows off their homework in favor of playing video games and then embarrasses the hell out of themselves the next day in class when they try to bluff their way through a classroom discussion of the assigned material. Most grown-ups would consider such embarrassment their "just deserts" that would (hopefully) be a powerful motivator not to get caught with their intellectual pants around their ankles in the future, a valuable lesson in the journey toward maturity.

Paradoxically, upon reaching what can be loosely called "adulthood," the desire to avoid publicly embarrassing oneself or look like an ignoramus seems to undergo a curious inversion in some individuals. In the classrooms of our childhood and adolescence, those that pretended to know things they clearly did not were soon exposed, providing ample reasons to get our facts straight, have our ducks in a row, to dot our i's, cross our t's, and to do our homework. One would think that as adults, we would hold ourselves and others to a higher, not lower, standard of intellectual honesty than we hold children. As adults, we would certainly not want physicians that bluffed their way through medical school treating our loved ones or ourselves. Nor would we want auto mechanics working on our cars that were given passing marks for their ASE certifications and training merely because their instructors felt sorry for them. Lawyers that have not done their homework that dare appear in front of a judge are ruthlessly criticized and will have few clients and should we, as private citizens, ever find ourselves in a courtroom, whether civil or criminal, we have every right to demand that the attorney representing us has done their homework.

If our child were suffering from an unknown illness, we would demand that the treating physician leave no stone unturned or allow no assumption to go unquestioned in identifying the malady and how to treat it. In our daily lives however, when it comes to politics, social policy, etc., whether in conversations with family, friends, co-workers, or in the mass media, it is not the person that is, not to put a too fine a point on it, “talking out their ass” that is shamed and embarrassed, but rather it is the one that dares to call them on it that is vilified. By way of comparison, if you enter into a conversation with someone that has a mania for the minutiae of some subject or activity, whether it be Star Trek or NASCAR, they will soon know whether you are merely a dabbling dilettante or if you "know your stuff." If they determine that you are a mere pretender, few will hesitate to dismiss you as a "wannabe" or its equivalent.

As citizens in a democracy, one of our most consequential acts is going to the polls. The intellectual effort, the due diligence, the conscientiousness with which we educate ourselves concerning the facts of the issues before deciding who or what to vote for, are every bit as essential to the continued health of our representative democratic republic as the rigorous studies of a physician or surgeon are to the health of their patients. Paradoxically, our political discourse, at the level of individuals and in society as a whole, is rife with examples of people holding opinions that have no basis in actual facts. In the words of a 19^th century humoristⁱⁱ, "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so." In my office, there is an older co-worker that has one of those 8 ½ by 11 inch line drawings, like countless others in circulation in offices throughout the country when photocopying and fax machines were still a novelty. The picture depicts the face of an "old lady" holding a coffee mug, telling folks "Don't believe everything you think." I think that little "poster" should be placed outside every voting booth in the country. As Altemeyer observed in The Authoritarians², based on subject responses to other survey instruments, he was able to predict that certain people will reliably fail a simple test of inductive reasoning. What the results showed is that as long as those that actually failed the test thought the conclusion was true, they were utterly oblivious to the faulty reasoning used to arrive at the conclusion (or they thought it did not matter). This is why many mathematics teachers require their students to show their work and why some give partial credit‒because the point is to learn the complex steps involved in solving certain kinds of math problems. Once a student has the steps down, then they can concentrate on the silly mistakes we all make, like forgetting a negative sign or some such. The importance of being able make a logically consistent argument, and, not co-incidentally, know what a poorly constructed argument looks like, are a primary reason that Euclidean geometry is still taught in high schools. It may sound a bit lame or lacking in a certain "rigor," but a university I once attended even allowed students to take a course in formal logic to satisfy a core math requirement–because the goal was to teach logical thinking.

As a relatively uncontroversial (hopefully) example that illustrates the interplay between opinions and facts, and which I will later apply to more controversial ideas, is from the history of the Second World War. There have been those that maintain that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was in possession of what we would today call "actionable intelligence" of an impending attack on U.S. forces in the Pacific. In one sense, it did not require a genius to predict that the United States cutting off exports to a resource-poor and ruthlessly expansionist Japan would not go over well and that open conflict would be the likely result. Given that the principals involved are now dead, as a practical exercise it would hard to interrogate those that were in a position to know. Regardless of how "impractical" it may be to ascertain, 70 years after the fact, who in FDR's administration knew what, if anything, and when, or if, they knew it. The only thing that, even in principle, could ever possibly decide the matter would be evidence. How one feels about the New Deal, the Lend Lease program, FDR, any other aspect of the politics of the time, is irrelevant.

The most contentious and divisive topics in the areas of public policy arise largely because of differing ideas of the real purpose of laws and government institutions in a society. Right-Wing Authoritarians (RWAs) are able to get away with many of the things they do in setting public policy because, as individuals and as a group, their feet are seldom held to the fire and pressed for their true motivations for supporting the policies they do. When I say "holding their feet to the fire" I mean something like the climatic scene in A Few Good Men³, where Lt. Kaffee relentlessly presses the self-righteous Col. Jessup until he tells the truth‒that he ordered the "Code Red," convinced the whole while that he had done nothing wrong.

The idea of "doing one's homework" when forming our beliefs and opinions is part of the more general (and very rare) virtue of intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty not only requires that we be willing to defend our opinions and beliefs, but that we are also obliged to honestly acknowledge the motivations and assumptions underlying them. It seems that on some level, RWAs seem to instinctively know that to come right out and say the actual reasons why they take the positions they do regarding certain subjects will expose them to public ridicule. Aside from the ravings of anti-vaccination nut-jobs, most folks, RWA's included, recognize that promoting public health through vaccination programs, fluoridation of water, etc., is a legitimate area of concern for governments‒until the public health concern in question has any connection, however tenuous or remote, to sex. In developed, liberal democracies throughout the world, it is generally acknowledged that unwanted teenage pregnancies and the unchecked spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have significant economic, social, and public health costs and are no less a legitimate public health concern than preventing flu pandemics. There would be near-universal outrage if a government were to mandate the use of a particular treatment for a specific disease for any other reason than that it actually works.

If a society, or a government that claims to act in the name of its citizens, is serious about reducing the human suffering, misery, and deaths caused by smallpox, the only legitimate criteria is: do the vaccines in question actually work as advertised? If anyone were to propose an alternative, we would require that the alternative is more effective, period. Before spending tax dollars on an ad campaign to educate consumers to properly handle and cook meat in an effort to reduce food-borne illnesses, we would demand that the precautions advocated are actually effective. Proposed solutions to societal ills that seem to have little to do with whether or not the solutions in question are actually effective in fixing or mitigating the problem, should set off all sorts of alarms in the minds of all intelligent, thoughtful, and honest human beings. In my next essay, I will expose the moral pretensions of RWAs by looking at one of the hot button issues of the upcoming election

ⁱDr. Robert Altemeyer has been researching the authoritarian personality since the mid-1960's. When the horrors of Hitler's "Final Solution" started to dawn on the rest of humanity, many sought to understand how people‒otherwise decent, normal, educated folks‒can so totally surrender themselves to a charismatic leader with a brutal ideology. Novelists like George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut explored these questions through their fiction. While some “social scientists” indulged in various forms of moral relativism (I will spare the reader a rant against “post modernism”) other social scientists felt it essential to understand what combination of individual and societal factors make it possible for the citizens in a modern nation, solidly a part of the "Western Tradition," to go along with the Holocaust, indifferent to the enormity of what was done.

Serious social scientists like Phillip Zimbardo (The Stanford Prison Experiment) and Stanley Milgram (The Milgram Experiment) explored situations and contexts in which people surrender to “authorities” and can be goaded to commit moral atrocities they would not if left to their own volition. Altemeyer 's contribution was in identifying two distinctive types of “authoritarian” personalities. Obviously there were “Authoritarian leaders,” e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco (Spain)‒they are easy to spot. All by themselves they are merely a frustrated demagogue, to be dangerous, they need followers‒lots of them. This was why much of the research into the "authoritarian personality" following the Second World War focused on authoritarian followers.

In Altemeyer's research, he defines "Right-Wing Authoritarians" to be (in part) those that submit to established authorities and rigidly adhere to conventional ways. "Left-Wing Authoritarians" would be those that submit to those that would overthrow the established, traditional authorities‒think 1960's hippie radicals‒a rare breed in the United States today. Keep in mind that while on the conventional "left-right" political spectrum, Soviet or Chinese-style Communism (note the capitalization‒when you see it I wish to make a distinction between socialism/communism and a specific instantiation of it the same way that we would describe the United States as being a democratic republic) is deemed to be the far left end of the spectrum, but for someone living under such a system, that Communism is the established authority. A zealous supporter of conventional ways and the "party line," whether in the United States or in Soviet Russia, would be a Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) follower.

ⁱⁱAmong late 19th century American humorists, Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the most famous. However, on the quotation sites I consulted, no instances attributing the quote to Twain provided a title of the containing work. Geoff Colvin in this book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, quotes a contemporary of Twain's, Josh Billings (his real name was Henry W. Shaw, 1818-1885) as: "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so." Elsewhere, Billings is quoted as (at: http://www.qotd.org/search/search.html?aid=3945&page=4): "It ain't what folks know that's the problem, it's what they know that ain't so."

The 1876 book, The Complete Works of Josh Billings, p. 286 contains the following quote: "I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain't so."[sic] The careful citing of sources seen today was not all that common in the 19^th century‒except perhaps in scientific circles. Attempts to correct the "loose" spelling (by modern standards, not for the times it was composed) of Billings' phrasing neatly accounts for the many variations in phrasing of the sentiment expressed as later writers “cleaned up” Billings' very astute observation to make it less jarring to more modern readers.

References

1. Colvin, G. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. (Penguin: 2010).

2. Altemeyer, B. The Authoritarians. (2006). at <http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/>

3. Reiner, R. A Few Good Men. Film. (1992).

An Epiphany or Just Kidding Myself?

I just got home (late on Dec. 2) from a five-day conference of Veteran's Employment Representatives on the new materials for the Transition Assistance Program (TAP) for service members about to leave the military and I wanted to get my thoughts out there with little polishing. The conference, my "classmates," and especially the "trainer," Dr. Beverly Hyman were the best part of the experience. Dr. Hyman and her husband are the co-authors of the book, How to Know If It's Time to Go: A 10-Step Reality Test for Your Marriage–which I will be buying and reading–and I have been divorced almost ten years now.

I have written before of my ADD/ADHD and anyone that knows me would not be surprised that I was that annoying student that was always raising their hand to contribute something to the discussion. There were times I had to force myself to remain still and let others have a chance. It is not (I hope) that I am really that self-absorbed, it is just that, despite my ADD/ADHD, or (here comes the possible epiphany part) because of it, I seem to have a knack for finding connections, metaphors, or analogies between seemingly dissimilar ideas or concepts. One of the diagnostic features of ADD/ADHD is a deficit in "working memory" and that is me to a "T." Might it be that my deficit in working memory forces me, and perhaps others with ADD/ADHD, to draw on their long term memories, or to use a computer metaphor, to compensate for not having enough RAM (where programs and data are stored while they are being used, and which is cleared when the computer is powered down) by having a fast and very well indexed "hard drive" (long term memory) that is able to make rapid connections to things it already knows?

Jet fighters are designed in such a way that, aerodynamically, they are just on the verge of being uncontrollable. Key to the survival of military jets in air-to-air combat is their maneuverability, whereas predictability and stability are what you want in a commercial or military that carries people or other cargo. Perhaps those with a good working memory are able to stay focused and "on task," like a well-designed passenger aircraft. Combat aircraft on the other hand are too difficult for a human to control and it is only the ability of computers to make tiny millisecond by millisecond adjustments to the flight controls that they are stable at all, but when they do need to maneuver, they can do so incredibly quickly-in much the same way that someone with ADD/ADHD can quickly see how a new piece of information might relate to something they already know.

I have some thinking and reading to do. I will certainly have more to say later.

A Memo to J.J. Abrams

Picking science fiction movies apart for their scientific gaffes–both major and minor–has a long and venerable tradition. When I first saw J.J. Abrams' Star Trek "reboot" in the theater (twice) I enjoyed it immensely. However, the weaknesses of the whole idea of a "supernova" taking out a single habitable planet, the home-world of the movie's villain, was not lost on me at the time (I will not address the "red matter" MacGuffin in detail here). While watching it again the other day on DVD, I thought of a minor tweak that would make the plot element of the destruction of a planet more scientifically plausible and still retain the following storyline benefits:

1. the plot would still involve a black hole (cue ominous music)

2. the word “supernova” (hereafter: “SN”) would still be used on-screen

3. the word “hypernova” (i.e. a really bad-ass big brother to a mere supernova) could be used as well

4. an opportunity would be created for some really awesome, not yet depicted on the big screen, FX "disaster porn"

So, beginning at the beginning...

Throughout their lives, all the stars we can see on a clear night (and even those we cannot) exist in a state of equilibrium between the outward force of the energy released by the fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones in the star's core, and gravity, which acts to collapse the matter of the star to a central point. When a star is being born from a molecular cloud, as it condenses, the pressure and temperature at its core increases steadily until at about 15 million K,ⁱ thermonuclear fusion begins. Once the fusion process has begun, the the outward radiation pressure of the energy thus released begins pushing back against gravity, settling into a state of what is called hydrostatic equilibrium and there matters stay, at least as long as there is enough of the "fuel" needed to keep fusion going and pushing back against gravity. In the case of our own Sun, it is just barely middle-aged for a star of its size and luminosity and will go on largely as it is today for another 5 billion years.

All good things must come to an end and so it is too with the fusion gravy train. The problem is that a star's supply of elements that can be fused is not infinite. As lighter elements are fused into heavier elements, those heavier products make their way to the star's core, but that is where the highest temperatures and pressures, necessary for fusion, are also. The kind of fireworks called for by the movie going public in their lust for great science fiction disaster porn needs a star (or stars) many tens of tens of times the mass of our sun.

The scale of the disaster porn I'm referring to can only come from the most energetic cosmic phenomena observed by humans, the only thing more powerful yet conceived by science is the Big Bang. These cosmic phenomena are called gamma-ray bursts (GRB's). Gamma-rays are the most energetic, highest frequency form of electromagnetic radiation. To provide a tangible sense of the energy of gamma-rays, anyone who has ever had x-rays taken has likely worn one of those heavy, lead-lined "bibs" to shield the more delicate parts of our bodies (e.g. the reproductive organs). Gamma-rays can penetrate up to several centimeters of lead, over ten times the thickness of lead used to shield patients getting x-rays.

Some (though not all) observations of GRBs are associated with supernovae (the plural form of the singular “supernova”). All by themselves, supernovae are powerful enough (in the visible light part of the spectrum) that for decades, astronomers have used a particular species of supernovae, designated by astronomers as a "Type Ia" supernovae, as part of the "cosmic distance ladder." The circumstances under which they form make them a "standard candle"ⁱⁱ that can briefly outshine the galaxy of which they are a part. Conventional supernovae release these incredible amounts energy in a blast that is a more-or-less spherical wave front of high-speed particles, visible light, and hard radiation, fading over a period of days or even weeks. What makes GRBs different is that they release at least as much energy as supernovae, but do so in seconds, and in two focused directional "beams" thought to be aligned along the magnetic poles of a freshly-minted black hole.

(Any real astrophysicists reading this, please be kind in the hate mail I'm sure you will want to send after what I say next.) As a strictly visual metaphor (the physics behind it, other than the magnetic field connection, is quite distinct) think about the auroras visible from Earth's extreme north and south latitudes, the point being that "stuff" can interact with magnetic fields. Another similar cosmic phenomenon are "pulsars," thought to be (on very solid observational grounds, mind you) rapidly rotating neutron stars (i.e. failed black holes) whose magnetic poles are offset from their rotational poles, creating a "lighthouse" effect, both in the radio and the visible light spectrum, and are detectable for many light-years. In fact, their signals are so precisely timed, when first detected by radio telescopes in the 1960's they were referred to as, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, LGM's for "little green men" as there as there was no known natural phenomena that were that regular.ⁱⁱⁱ

There are several, and not necessarily mutually-exclusive, posited "progenitors" for GRBs,¹ but there is much that is still unknown–leaving a lot of room for science-fictional speculations. Without going into too much detail (a temptation I frequently face) there are short and long-lived (remember, time is relative) GRBs. The so-called "long" GRBs (those lasting more than 2 seconds), have always been observed in connection with supernovae, specifically, a kind of supernovae called collapsars. Collapsars are supernovae whose progenitors are stars of 40+ solar masses, massive enough to have developed a solid iron core, ^iv that collapses straight (well, almost) into a rapidly-rotating black hole without pausing at the neutron-star phase. Short GRB's–those lasting less than 2 seconds, and commonly only fractions of a second-making them hard to detect as one has to be looking at it as it happens to catch it–are thought to result from the merger of a black hole with a neutron star, or of two neutron stars.

If I were writing a script, I would use the black hole + neutron star plot device (you could still have the "red matter") as some sort of "ultimate weapon" gone cosmically awry. You could even use the old science-fiction trope of the "Frankenstein complex"–either the hubris of the scientists involved thinking they can accurately predict and control where the beams will end up pointing, or the militaristic leaders who ignore the warnings of their scientists. The creators could also be some unknown threat from elsewhere (can you say "sequel"?). In the altered time-line of the reboot, presumably, the Borg (unarguably the baddest adversaries the Federation has ever faced) are still out there and the events of the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Regeneration" still happened. I'm seeing possibilities J.J.! Just think about the disaster porn FX you could get out of the massive jets from the GRB pulverizing star systems as it bores a path of interstellar destruction through the galaxy!

I am too young (at 47, I seldom get to say that much anymore) to remember the original Star Trek (ST:TOS) during its first-run on NBC. Somewhat against type, I was drawn to science fiction by my interest in, and love of, science–and especially astronomy–while it seems that many scientists of my generation were first turned on to science by a love of science fiction. A local TV station started showing reruns of ST:TOS in my first year in junior high, and perhaps not coincidentally, the same year Star Wars: A New Hope was in theaters. Add to this the presence in my school library of the James Blish short-story adaptations of all 79 episodes of ST:TOS and the Alan Dean Foster novella-length adaptations of the animated series (ST:TAS) and you have a perfect trifecta. I was such a voracious reader (I still am) that I had read all of Blish's adaptations long before I saw all the ST:TOS episodes.

As an adult science-geek, one of the things I enjoyed about Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) was that the writers included bits of "sciencey" stuff that one could read about in recent issues of Scientific American, like "cosmic strings" or "dark matter," cutting-edge science stuff. What astronomy undergrad would turn down a chance to review the sciencey bits of a script (if done right, keeping the whole of the script a secret would not be that hard).

Heck, I'm available-and rather cheap, too!

¹ G. Vedrenne, Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Brightest Explosions in the Universe, Chapter 8, (Springer; In Association with Praxis, Berlin; New York; Chichester, UK, 2009).

iIn the Kelvin, or absolute temperature scale, water freezes at 273.15 , boils at 373.15, and all molecular/atomic motion ceases (that is one definition of "temperature") at 0 (zero) Kelvin (note the absence of the "⁰" degree sign). For a star the size and composition of our Sun, the core temperature (partly a function of its mass) is 15 million K.

iiIf a light source lies an unknown distance away, but you know that the source is a 100 watt light bulb, and you have a light meter, the kind used in old cameras, all you have to do measure the power of the light that reaches your meter, do a little math, and viola, you know how far away the light bulb is.

iiiSome pulsar signals are so stable (remember the accuracy claim of the first quartz watches?) make them suitable for use as cosmic “radio beacons” for interstellar navigation. The plaques carried by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes as “greeting cards” to any advanced extraterrestrials that might come across it millions of years in the future illustrated the position of Earth with respect to 14 pulsars using a binary-type code.

ivThe creation of elements, via fusion, higher than iron on the periodic table require an input of energy rather than having energy left over to power the star and push back against gravity-which makes iron, as Isaac Asimov titled an essay on supernovae, the "dead-end middle."

The 48 Percent Part 3 - Slipping Into the Future

Right now, the United States economy, and that of the world in general, is in turmoil–arguably the worst economic disaster since 1929. In my day job, working on the public side the workforce development arena (i.e. Job Service), I see many people that feel strangely out-of-place seeking new employment in the 21^st century world, many of whom were with their former employer for decades.

Even my co-workers are not immune to this sense of bewilderment. The particular branch of my state government for whom I work is in the midst of transitioning, after nearly a decade using Windows XP^® and MS Office XP/2003, to Windows 7/Office 2010. In speaking with my managers and co-workers, I have likened the experience of my co-workers starting up their computers one morning, only to be faced with a completely unfamiliar operating system, to what a blind person would likely experience if they awoke one morning to find their furniture has been rearranged while they slept.

One of my younger co-workers observed, as have I, that many job-seekers that claim to know nothing about computers act as though their ignorance is something of which they can be proud. I am quite willing to grant a pass to those of my parent’s generation (born 1939), those that are at or near retirement age. However, for those young enough to have not yet started elementary school when Sputnik 1 launched in 1957 (i.e. those born after, say 1952/3), there is, barring some notable exceptions that I will address shortly, no excuse.

My day-to-day supervisor thinks that with the rate computer technology is advancing, it will not be long before computers will be completely voice-activated, without the need for keyboards or pointing devices (mice, trackballs, etc.), with perhaps the exception of a finger. The sort of computer-human interaction depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film The Minority Report may not be far off the mark in this regard. History has shown however, that while the pace of technological change is in some regards even quicker than some “futurists” predicted, reliably predicting the direction of the changes is more of an art than a science. Case in point: from the vantage point of the 1950’s through the mid 1970’s, the real 21^st century does not look much like the 21^st most thought it would just several decades ago.

While the changes that have occurred have not been in the anticipated directions, they are every bit as momentous, if not more so, than the long-delayed flying cars in everyone’s garage, orbiting space colonies, and manned Mars bases. Just because we do not yet have flying cars for all, and are still waiting on the lunar vacation resorts, does not mean that the computer revolution of the last 15-20 years was a mere passing fad, as some plainly thought it was. Apparently, a significant number of our fellow citizens (I am almost exclusively concerned with Americans in this piece) were not paying attention.

Another thing that leaves me stupefied is when people act outraged or offended when pointing out that their lack of computer skills will preclude their opening certain occupational doors, as though it is completely unreasonable to expect them to put forth the required effort to acquire new skills in order to make themselves marketable to employers. I am not talking about “average” people knowing how to create their own webpage using html code, or build a relational database from scratch. What I am talking about is “average” folks being able to follow the instructions for filling out an online employment application or finding information about a potential employer by visiting their website.

It is now time for a few caveats and to crank down the “arrogant bastard” tone. Many people (I am referring to adults throughout) find computers intimidating. One oft-repeated frustration I have heard is that some find computer screens too busy; with just too many things to visually track. This produces stress and anxiety, which in turn makes it that much harder to focus and just becomes a debilitating positive feedback loop. Our technological society has created a stimulation-rich environment that did not exist 50+ years ago.

One result of our stimulation and information-rich society has been a marked increase in the identification of, and diagnoses for, cognitive impairments like ADD/ADHD and autism. One mundane reason for this increase is that the diagnostic tools used to detect such impairments have become much more refined as our understanding of how the brain works has grown. The other reasons are best explicated by way of analogy. Brain circuits involved in spoken language were certainly shaped by our evolution, but written language (and formalized mathematics as well) are technological innovations, not things for which the human brain was equipped by natural selection.

There remain a few isolated hunter-gatherer societies in the world today, living much the same way that all of humanity lived prior to the invention of settled agriculture and the first cities. Even after the invention of farming and cities, several more thousand years elapsed before writing was invented. In such pre-literate societies, whether today or in depths of human pre-history, the condition known today as dyslexia was irrelevant in the environment in which such people lived. Additionally, to the extent that “dyslexia” was irrelevant, it would be reasonable to say that, in some sense, “dyslexia” did not exist.

A quote, most often attributed to William James, but first made known to this author via Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame, summarizes the situation nicely, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.” If a difference in brain wiring, known to lead to dyslexia in an environment in which mass literacy was the norm, were to occur in the brain of a person belonging to a pre-literate society, that difference in brain wiring would, in fact, “make no difference” in the life of the individual in their native culture. It is only in an environment where mass literacy is the norm does such a distinction in brain wiring make an important difference.

People today find themselves bombarded by external stimuli (mostly visual and auditory) that were not part of the environment in which Homo sapiens evolved. Navigating the modern world calls upon cognitive abilities that were seldom, if ever, called on just a generation or two ago. Is it any surprise to anyone, especially experts in the cognitive sciences, that the totally novel sensory and cognitive environment of the early 21^st century is revealing heretofore unrecognized, and previously unneeded, strengths and weaknesses in the cognitive endowments of individuals.

One of the names this sort of “sensory overload” goes by is Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), but there are other conditions that exhibit similar symptoms. Much of the relevant peer-reviewed literature available to this author have titles such as:

• Sensory processing disorder: Any of a nurse practitioner's business?[i]
• The Concept of Information Overload: A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines[ii]
• "Is this Site Confusing or Interesting?" A Perceived Web site Complexity (PWC) Scale for Assessing Consumer Internet Interactivity[iii]
• Employment and Adults with Asperger Syndrome[iv]
• Information-processing deficits and cognitive dysfunction in panic disorder[v]
• Perspectives on sensory processing disorder: a call for translational research[vi]
• The Impact of Induced Stress Upon Selective Attention in Multiple Object Tracking[vii]

ADD/ADHD provides a useful analog for this in that it was first identified in children and only later was it realized that the condition persists into adulthood. Many adults, myself included, developed coping strategies and were completely unaware the ADD/ADHD they had as a child was still with them until they were properly tested. It may be that because children are often placed into environments and situations they would rather not be in, that it is in these situations that their struggles stick out like the proverbial sore thumb and provide a “handle” on which to begin a scientific enquiry. Adults, on the other hand, have traditionally had far more control over what situations and environments they choose to be in and after many years of doing so, the avoidance often becomes unconscious. With the majority of research in this area focused on children, I fear that many adults are slipping through the cracks. Adults who, for whatever reason, avoid anything that is too intellectually or cognitively challenging will be at a disadvantage, both in terms of self-sufficiency and providing good role models for their children.

I suspect that the apparent difficulties many adults have in functioning in our current stimulation and information-rich environments are an admixture of genetic/physiological[viii] factors, socioeconomic/cultural factors, and personal choices. Groping for remedies to this situation, without having the vaguest notion of how much of a particular population’s variation in demonstrated cognitive capacity is attributable to which causal factors, is a recipe for failure. Such a “wait it out” attitude essentially admits that some sizable faction of human beings is somehow incapable of being educated or elevated in their competency and understanding. So why not give up right now?

I do not wish to live in a world where a certain percentage of humanity is relegated to a permanent intellectual underclass–not if it can be helped. Putting my “arrogant bastard” hat on again, I also know that many people are, in fact, ignorant, incurious, and complacent. A frequent frustration in my day job is that I am in a bit of a catch 22 in distinguishing those that have a legitimate learning/cognitive disability from those that are merely lazy and/or complacent. Either way, I risk doing a grave disservice to those I work with daily. I do not tolerate fools gladly, and far too often, I must bite my tongue and refrain from telling someone who just could not be bothered to keep up with our changing world, that unless they have a note from their doctor, I am not going to carry their lazy ass.

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[i] Byrne, Mary W. "Sensory processing disorder: Any of a nurse practitioner's business?" Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners 21. 6 (2009): 314-21.

[ii] Eppler, Martin, and Jeanne Mengis. "The Concept of Information Overload: A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines." Information Society 20. 5 (2004): 325-44.

[iii] Gupta, Reetika, Sucheta Nadkarni, and Stephen J. Gould. ""Is this Site Confusing or Interesting?" A Perceived Web site Complexity (PWC) Scale for Assessing Consumer Internet Interactivity." Advances in Consumer Research 32. 1 (2005): 42-50.

[iv] Hurlbutt, Karen, and Lynne Chalmers. "Employment and Adults with Asperger Syndrome." Focus on Autism & Other Developmental Disabilities 19. 4 (2004): 215-22.

[v] Ludewig, Stephan, et al. "Information-processing deficits and cognitive dysfunction in panic disorder." Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 30. 1 (2005): 37-43.

[vi] Miller Lj Fau - Nielsen, Darci M., et al. "Perspectives on sensory processing disorder: a call for translational research." Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 3. 1662-5145 (Electronic) (2009).

[vii] Morelli, Frank, and Pamela A. Burton. "The Impact of Induced Stress Upon Selective Attention in Multiple Object Tracking." Military Psychology 21. 1 (2009): 81-97.

[viii] When I say “physiological,” I have in mind such things as the environment within the womb, nutrition, or any other biological effect that is not directly attributable to an individual’s genotype.

The 48 Percent Part 2

At Beyond Belief 2006, when speaking about his work on phantom/paralyzed limbs and the denials that can accompany such phenomena, V.S. Ramachandran related a humorous anecdote about a study that asked people if they were above or below average in intelligence. Ramachandran pointed out the fact that like height, the distribution of IQ scores in a population take on the shape of the iconic “bell” curve (called by mathematicians a “normal” or “Gaussian” distribution). The salient property of Gaussian distributions of variations in a population is that 50% of the population will be below the average value (or arithmetic mean) for the trait in question and the other 50% of individuals in the population in question will be above the average value. [1] The punch line comes when Ramachandran reveals that 98% of the survey respondents indicated that they considered themselves to be of above average intelligence, a statistically impossible result which indicates that 48% of humanity are “in denial of their own stupidity.” His point was that even people without brain injury engage in classic Freudian, defensive denials every day.[2] Though the study may have been fictional, it is plain that only 50% of humanity can be of above average intelligence and therefore, the other 50% must fall below that average.

A consequence of the above dilemma showed up in an interview with Lord Martin Rees, Patricia Smith Churchland, A.C. Grayling conducted by Roger Bingham of The Science Network. At about 00:32:00 into the dialog, Dr. Churchland notes that there is (primarily in the United States), and coming from both the far left and the extreme right ends of the cultural/political spectrum, a disturbing undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in general, and of anti-science in particular. She confessed that she does not know how to reach the sort of people who get their news from Rush Limbaugh and/or a certain American news channel that she left unnamed.

The brute fact that half of humanity will always fall above the normalized “average” intelligence (measured by whatever criteria one chooses) and the other half will fall below that “average,” poses a profound problem for skeptics, atheists, scientific rationalists, humanists, and anyone hoping to increase the role of evidence-based critical thinking in the discourse of our democratic republic. Proposed solutions usually involve some combination of better schools and/or teachers, more educational television programs, more popularizations by capable scientists or other public intellectuals, more scientifically accurate Hollywood pictures, or better-trained science journalists. However, what if those things are only partial solutions? What if there is an asymptotic limit to the percentage of people that can be reached by reason and evidence? Amidst all the talk of science and math education in schools and efforts to engage the voting public, there is one question that has not been raised, let alone substantively addressed. What if some significant fraction of humanity is simply not cognitively equipped to think critically or rationally to the degree required to become a scientifically literate citizen in the 21st century?

No matter how “politically incorrect” the above question may seem, the question posed is very worth answering. Asking the question or attempts to answer it is not part of some sinister eugenics program or elitist, racist agenda. In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett advocated that all the tools in the arsenal of modern science be applied to understanding religious faith and practice. Dennett also maintained that religious faith is unique in that it is currently off limits to the kind of inquiry he was proposing, hence his choice of title. While it is certainly true that the “taboo” against looking too closely at religious beliefs for fear of dulling their sheen is probably the strongest such taboo, inquiries into other areas of human existence can also set off alarms in some people. It is quite likely that what follows, if taken up by experts in the relevant disciplines (I make no claim to be one), may be an important adjunct to the investigation Dennett proposed. If the question under consideration were “what percentage of human beings can reasonably be expected, based on the heritability of the required traits and assuming an environment that provides the opportunity to excel, would be able perform at the level of an Olympic athlete?”, the question would be entirely uncontroversial. That is precisely the kind of question posed (but not answered) in this series of essays.

As Steven Pinker argued so effectively in The Blank Slate, human beings are not infinitely malleable. Relevant to the topic of these essays is the question of what exactly goes into making someone a skeptical, critical thinker (though not necessarily a scientist)? Obviously, “intelligence” or as it is colloquially called, IQ (after Intelligence Quotient)–an admittedly slippery term–is part of the picture, regardless of how “intelligence” is defined and/or measured. The openness and intellectual honesty demanded by rational inquiry, is essential to not only science, but to history, law, medicine, ethics, or any other field of human intellectual endeavor (not to mention the functioning of a healthy democracy), and is antithetical to any form of authoritarianism. The degree to which someone fits the authoritarian personality type certainly matters too. What is the nature/nurture split for authoritarianism? Likewise, curiosity and inquisitiveness are also essential to being an informed, rational citizen in the 21^st century. However, there are hundreds millions of human beings in the United States alone, never mind the rest of the planet, who seem incurious and uninquisitive. To what degree are curiosity and inquisitiveness malleable or heritable? What areas of the brain light up in when someone that is asked to justify their rationale for thinking that evolution or anthropogenic climate change are preposterous ideas, and yet at the same time finds millennia-old miracle stories of virgin births, people rising from the dead, or nocturnal rides on flying horses, etc. to be completely credible and utterly reliable?

Some of the relevant research in all these areas has been conducted already, with the greatest amount devoted to the heritability of IQ. A limited amount of research has been performed on the heritability of authoritarian attitudes and very little research has apparently been done on the nature/nurture mix for things like critical thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, or curiosity and inquisitiveness. Nearly all attempts to engage the public to further science and reason seem to assume that a majority of those not already so inclined or engaged, can indeed be reached. Those convinced that the future of humanity critically depends on the application of science and reason to the problems that vex this planet would do well to test the assumptions underlying efforts to communicate science and reason in order to better direct their efforts. None of this should suggest in the slightest that if the number of people that can, in principle, be reached is below a certain minimal threshold, the effort is not worth it. Nonetheless, we need to have some idea of how successful we can reasonably expect to be, all other things being equal.

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[1] Barring any “self-selection” biases of course.

[2] Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. Roger Bingham ed. Session 4. Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival. Salk Institute. La Jolla, CA. November 5 2006. The Science Network. 23 August, 2009. (at 44:12).