OmegaMom

The scientific method, that is.  Theories?  We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man!  Hypotheses?  Pish-tush!  Soooo 20th century!  Experimentation?  Observation?  Oh, puh-leeze!  Who needs that stuff?  ‘Cause we’ve got data.

Gigabytes of data.  Terrabytes of data.  Petabytes.  Hexadeca-bytes.  Google-bytes, even!  (But not Google™ type bytes.)  Infini-bytes!  We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.

‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da!  New science!  All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all.  Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think.  Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"

I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more.  Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years?  Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year?  I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".

Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there.  And why.

As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here.  Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies.  Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.

Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too:  Theory is not dead.  The scientific method is not passe.  The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs.  But that’s not science.  It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that.  And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge.  But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…

All that kind of stuff.

Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity.  And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.

So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.

For a few years, my running gag with OmegaDad was that there were Martians, and they just didn’t want us bothering them.

Now that we’ve had a few years of Spirit and Opportunity exploring the red planet, for a much longer period than originally planned (yay!), and now that the Phoenix has landed, I guess I have to say a sad farewell to that little joke.

Aside from that, we had Ballet Recital Madness–The Preview (aka the production run-through of the recital).  Some lovely dancing, some extremely tired but very well-behaved three- to six-year-olds, a few glitches, and some laughs.  Next up is Thursday, dress rehearsal.

I may actually have real content here tomorrow, but can’t promise anything on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.

Blogging will lead you to an early death!

No!  Wait a minute!  Blogging is good for you!

Wait.  Really.  Here’s the scoop:  If you’re a popular blogger, you’ll get tabbed for a Big Internet Site Job, get hooked on exposing too much of yourself, ruin your personal relationships, have a nervous breakdown, think about leaving blogging entirely, and end up pretty much where you were to begin with, except (maybe) older and wiser.

Of course, we all know blogging isn’t real writing.

So much for blogging.

On a different subject entirely, can someone explain to me why everyone is (gasp!) shocked and horrified that Clinton, while discussing the ins and outs of primaries, mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s assassination?  I mean, she also mentioned a few other situations where the nomination wasn’t set until after the convention.  Dudes, she isn’t advocating assassinating Obama.  Really.  She may have been stupid to say such a thing, given how tender and delicate everyone’s sensitivities are these days about any perceived slight or threat or…whatever it was.  I swear, these days people just need to keep their yaps shut about everything, because someone is going to be (gasp!) shocked and horrified. 

The Chinese adoption community has been rocked by the news that Steven Curtis Chapman’s youngest daughter was accidentally run over by one of their sons.  I read the story and my heart froze; his daughter was five years old.  Once again, motherhood has changed my outlook–I would have read it and sympathized before, but now I read it and the hair on the back of my neck rises because OmegaDotter is six years old and scatterbrained and I could so easily see her paying attention to something else and running right behind the car as OmegaDad pulls out of the driveway.

The Chapman family is accepting donations to the Shaohannah’s Hope Foundation in Maria’s name.

Science-y stuff:

Jupiter has given birth to a brand new bouncing baby Red Spot.

I want to give one of these T-shirts to OmegaBro.  Or OmegaDad.  Or both.  Or maybe one for myself.  Go check ‘em out.

This is the night sky I miss from Small Mountain University Town.

Lisa got it first:  Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Karn Evil 9.

Whenever I listen to doomsagers and get nervous, things turn out all right.  K2 and Gh1f, those practitioners of the “Dismal Profession”, told me to calm down, and things did, after all, turn out all right.

(So far…)

So I’ve been struggling with TurboTax and my file of goodies from the year.  I really wanted to have a video of Robert Cray singing the 1040 Blues.  But, alas, I can’t find it.  Let me just say “job move”, “house sale”, “one spouse working for an employer in an income tax state” and a variety of other things.  It’s getting quite complex.  Oh, we don’t owe; in fact, we’ll get lots back.  Of course, we’ll have to refund a major portion of that “lots back” back to OmegaDad’s employer, because it gave us a “withholding allowance” to cover extra taxes.

In the meantime, while I’m still waiting for the bottom to drop out of the various markets (what can I say–a doomsaging addict I am), I wanted to pass on these three items:

Texas Instruments has demonstrated a way kewl proof-of-concept neckband that will transmit unspoken words over a phone line.  They are busy working on a commercial version for use by folks with MLS; having had a coworker whose husband has had a rapid decline over the past two years in his ability to speak due to MLS, I know this one would have proven a godsend to her family.  Right now the process is veeeeery slow, but give them a few more years.

Then we have the video of BigDog, a robot designed by Boston Dynamics on a DARPA grant.  This has to be seen to be believed–it can climb rock piles, regain its balance after being bashed by a person or after slipping on ice, and is generally rather uncanny.  Though at one point, it looks like something from Mummenschanz (that’s when it looks like two men carrying a mattress and walking downhill).

Another DARPA grant was to DEKA, the company run by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.  The grant was to develop a modern, superior prosthetic arm.  I’ve seen the clips from last year, when it was early days; the IEEE came out with a video about it from a month or two ago.  They hope to have this commercially available within the year.

I love living in a time when such amazing things are happening, and when it’s easy to find news about them.

Oh, yes, and if you see a “If you love this blogger, take this survey” popping up to your left, please do take the survey…

Gazing back into those misty, halcyon days of college, I dimly seem to remember something called "study groups".  At the beginning of the semester (or quarter), you’d collect names and phone numbers of other folks in your class who were interested in studying together, then you’d set a time, and someone would be tagged as the person to glom onto the first good study room or carrel at the university library.  You’d meet, everyone would have their textbooks and class notes, someone would bring noshes, and you’d spend a few hours going over the notes and exchanging answers and ideas about the homework.

"Y’know, I tried number 48, but I kept getting hung up!  Did anyone figure that problem out?!"

In my Numeric Analysis class (one of my favorites, really!), our prof gave us take-home tests for the mid-term and final.  He fully expected us to work in groups.  They were some of the hardest–and most fun–exams I had in my college experience.  Our study group met for hours in the library, in the break room in the basement of the math building, out on the lawns.  We worked hard.  We worked our butts off.  We thought deeply.  My mid-term response was 20 pages long; my final response was 30 pages.

We also had classes where it was probably assumed by the professor that we were working alone on homework and studying.  But even in those cases, hammering out the answers to more difficult problems with other students helped all of us understand the basic concepts better.  And those who got answers easily explained to those who didn’t, and gained from that aspect as well.

These days, it seems, such study groups often convene on the intertubes.  Specifically, at places such as Facebook.

One professor at Ryerson University, who apparently had a requirement that students were to work on assignments alone, discovered that a student had set up a Facebook study group for his class.  That student is facing expulsion and 147 counts of academic misconduct, one for each member of the study group.  His B grade was changed to an F by his professor after the Facebook group was discovered.

So many different ways of looking at this.

The professor didn’t want students working out answers to problems together. 

If that is the sole issue here, why weren’t all the other members of the study group equally penalized?  Why didn’t every student who was a member of the online group have his or her grades reduced/revoked?

As I understand it, each student was assigned different questions; since they were all different, was requesting help cheating?  Is the requirement to work on homework assignments alone a good requirement or a bad one?  Do students learn better by sweating through the problems on their own, or by helping each other find ways to reach the solution?

Different students respond in different ways to different approaches.  Some students do not like to work in groups at all.  Some students like to work in groups for some classes, but not others.  Some students work in groups all the time.  Some students work in groups to get off easily–but how does that help them when it’s time to take a test?  Some students who work in groups learn that they do all the work and others take the credit.  Some students learn better through reading, some through working through problems on their own, some through discussing, some through teaching others.

Questions of pedagogical approach aside, there are those who think that in this case it’s an open-and-shut case of cheating.  Others say that no-one posted specific answers to any problems and that mostly it was an ongoing session of tips and tricks on how to approach the problems. 

One blogger said that someone knowing they were getting the wrong answer indicates that they were cheating, because otherwise how would they know the answer was wrong?  Well, hell, I could always tell when I was getting the answer wrong–because nothing would check out when I worked the problem backwards.  Or else it just "felt" wrong.

I don’t know.  I think requiring college/university students to work alone on homework assignments is not the best approach; I think that by that age the student knows whether s/he wants to collaborate or work alone.  I also feel that the students who are actually getting specific answers from others without doing any of the work are cheating mostly themselves.  They’re the ones who will end up doing poorly on quizzes and tests.  They’re the ones who won’t be able to do the basic work when they get into a more advanced course.  They’re the ones who will constantly be scrambling to keep up or cover up as they move into the workforce.

What say you?

For a very spirited discussion on this subject, from both sides, check out The So-Called Facebook Scandal at A Blog Around The Clock.

Remember that:  it’s just a model.

But this is way too cool to ignore:  Researchers performing planetary formation models on the Alpha Centauri system have found that every way they’ve run their models, they show Alpha Centauri B to have planets, and many times that happens, there’s a rocky planet within the distance to make water a liquid.

In other words, the model predicts that it’s highly likely that Alpha Centauri B has a rocky, watery planet at the right distance from one or the other of the suns to support life.

Whoa.

For those who don’t know, Alpha Centauri is the nearest star to our solar system, at 4.3 light years away.  Right now, of course, we haven’t got the technology to get there in any reasonable amount of time; a light year is a helluva long way away.  But still…

Whoa.

Time to aim Hubble or some other space telescope at Alpha Centauri, and start doing some real looking.

I am just about bouncing in my seat here!

(It’s just a model.  It’s just a model.  It’s just a model…)

When we moved, we lost our cordless phones.  (No, we’re not on wireless.  We couldn’t receive wireless at our old house, so it wasn’t worth the price.)  (Though I suppose we might be able to receive wireless where we are now.  Hmmm.)  Anyway, we purchased a (lousy, crappy, useless) dirt-cheap corded phone from the grocery store to tide us over for a while when we first moved in.

Then the tabby doohickey that sticks out to ensure that the phone actually, say, hangs up when you put the receiver down broke off.  When it broke off, I we had no earthly idea what it was for, so I we threw it in the garbage can.

Thereafter the (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone was iffy, at best, about when you had really, truly hung up.  And if you weren’t in the vicinity to hear the beep beep beep noise that the phone company so carefully provides you to alert you to the fact that your phone is off the hook, after a while the beep beep beep would turn off and the phone line would go dead.  Thus, when folks, say, called you up–what a concept!–all they got was a busy signal.  Or, after we got our new phone service, a voice mail box.  We on the other hand would go merrily on our day to day lives, not realizing that (a) our phone was actually off the hook, and (b) other people were actually trying to contact us and leaving phone messages…until one or the other of us picked the phone up to make a call.

Since we’re not wild and crazy social guys, that would happen every few days or so.

Then we bought a cordless phone set.

Woohoo!  Entering into the modern age, we thought!

Then a few weeks later, OmegaDad, while reaching for something in the old iteration of the office (read:  cramped, messy, filled with poorly balanced heaps) knocked the main base off the desk.

::  All your base are belong to us!  :: some kozmik kritter proclaimed.

Our base no longer worked.

Our two related cordless phones no longer worked.

One of our corded phones didn’t work.  This particular clue makes me think, in retrospect, that it was not OmegaDad knocking over the base unit that did it, but that some Evil Coincidental Voltage Spike did it instead.

Only our (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone that was schizophrenic about whether it was actually hung up or not (thus having a hang up on hang-ups, eh?) was "working", in the sense that we could place calls and receive calls–when it was hung up.

So OmegaDad finally purchased new cordless phones this weekend.

We plugged them in and started charging those puppies up.

Last night he did all the proper registering and what-not of the phones.

Everything seemed hunky dory.  Maybe–just maybe!–this time our phone situation would last longer than a week or two!

This afternoon, OmegaDad, being a loving and sentimental fella, gave me a call.  In a graceful, swan-like dip, I reached over, grabbed the cordless phone, pressed the "talk" button, and started talking.

As I was talking, I noticed that the network had gone out on my computer.

"Hunh!" thought I.  While talking to OmegaDad, I started fiddling with various network things on the computer.  Nothing worked.  I announced to him that the network was down.  I hung up the phone, fiddled with some more networking things, and the network got back up, dusted itself off, and started working again.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball.

That was mighty coincidental, I said to myself.

I picked up the cordless phone.

I dialed OmegaDad’s office number, watching the networking indicator on the computer.  Ring, ring.  Nothing happened.

Then OmegaDad picked up the phone.  A second later, the network went down.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball once again.

"Dude.  When I talk to you on the new phones, it kills the wireless network."

OmegaDad thought it was the cabling (our phone lines are carried over the cable network).  I was sure it was telecommunications interference of one sort or another.  I hung up.  The network came back up.  I read the phone manual.  They made sure to tell you about other things interfering with the phone, but not a word about the phone interfering with other things.  Grrr.

I flexed my Googlemeistra fingers and typed in "wireless phone computer interference".  After reading a variety of things, it turns out that our (cheap!) cordless phones, which transmit on 2.4GHz, interfere mightily with various 802.11 wireless networking protocols, because they, too, are on that frequency. 

The OmegaFamily was very, very close to dumping the new phones.

Then I found something that talked about being able to assign a frequency to the wireless router.  Specifically, that while the majority of the bands used by the wireless router are overlapping channels, 1, 6, and 11 are unique and don’t overlap.  I logged into the router.  I fiddled with settings.  I found a way to select channel 11 (the one I remembered off the top of my head as being unique).  I saved.  I picked up the phone.  I dialed OmegaDad.  He picked up. 

And lo and behold, the network didn’t go down.

Let that be a lesson to you.  Googling rulz!

(I thought about titling this post "What’s the frequency, Kenneth?!"  Does this date me?)

(Alert readers may note that there’s a comment down on Part I from "LASIK complications".  After some thought, I let that one in because–even though I feel that the folks behind the LASIK complications site have an agenda–anyone who is considering LASIK needs to understand that there are risks and those are your only pair of eyes.  But also take a look at PubMed listed studies about LASIK and come to your own conclusions.  Since I generally think that people who read me are Thoughtful, Intelligent, Respectful People [aren't you??], that probably goes without saying after all…)

There was no question as to who I’d use for the surgery–all my elderly relatives in Arizona who had had cataract or other eye surgeries had used one or another affiliate of the Barnet-Dulaney group, generally well-respected folk who were on the cutting-edge of eye surgery research.  Word had it that every one of the docs there had gotten PK or LASIK done to their eyes as well–sort of putting their money where their eyes were, as it were.  They were pricey–$2000 per eye–but every time I saw "bargain rate" LASIK ads, a shiver of fear would go through my body.  And Grandma was paying for it.  And she said "Get the best!"

First, you go get your eyeballs measured.  They have to be able to tell if your cornea is thick enough to be blasted by a laser.  Ahem.  Just wrap your brains around that phrase for a moment or two:  Is your cornea thick enough to be blasted by a laser?!?!  They also have to figure out if the pressure in your eyeballs is too high, whether you’ve got an astigmatism which would complicate the contouring, etc.

Then the day of the big event came along.  I was alternately thrilled and terrified.  At the time, BD did two days of LASIK surgery per week, Thursday and Friday, giving the patient time to recuperate over the weekend.  So I had a coworker drive me over on Thursday morning, and got into the cattle line.

Oh, yes, make no mistake:  it’s a truly Ford-like assembly line approach they’ve got going.  At the very start, you get one-on-one, where the doctor and nurse make sure you’re absolutely positively thoroughly sure you want to do this, they give you a goodly dose of valium, and then you get into the feedlot.

The feedlot being a huge waiting and recovery room filled with comfy recliners, dim light, music, and a herd of pre- and post-LASIK folks zoned out on valium, waiting for their turn or recuperating.

It’s somewhat surreal to be zoned on valium at the same time you are maximally uptight about being blasted by a laser!!! while listening to Muzak and swapping poor-eyesight-war stories with the guys in the recliner on either side of you.

Then it’s your turn.  You get loaded onto a gurney and pass under the industrial-size clock that looks like a brown circle with a white center with fuzzy brown blobs at roughly the quarters of the clock, and through the swinging double-doors into the operating theatre.  Where they have four LASIK operations going on at once.  I tell ya, these folks were making real money off this procedure–and this was back in 1998!

So there you are, lying on your back, about to subject your one and only pair of eyes to the awesome power of being blasted by a laser!!!, and the doc and nurse come to you and explain they’re going to just pop an eyelid stretcher into your eye.  My immediate thought was, "They’re what?!  I’m not going to be able to handle this!"  At which point, the nurse stretches your eyes open, the doc’s hand swoops down until your eyes go cross-eyed trying to focus on the black ring he’s holding, and poof! your eyes are forcefully held open and it doesn’t hurt or scare you after all.

That valium is good stuff, I tell ya!

And then the doc positions this huge piece of machinery over your head and slices an ultrathin slice of corneal flap so quickly you hardly remember it.  Then he asks you to focus on the pinpoint red light above you.

If you’ve got 20/600 vision, "focusing on the red light" is sort of an oxymoron.  The best you can do is try.  And the "pinpoint" red light is actually a great big fuzzy sparkling red blob.  But, hey, okay–the man wants you to focus on it, so you do your best.

Then the doc says, "Here we go.  Keep focusing on the red light."

At which point, he flips a switch.

And the road construction workers who were cleverly hidden in the operating theater go to work, full blast.

KRRRR-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA-KRRRR-THUNKA-THUNKA-THUNKA

It sounds like a jackhammer.  It’s not like lasers in the movies, that make a nice, discreet "Brrrp!"  And as the jackhammer is hammering away in the background, the great big fuzzy sparkling red blob you are focusing gets clearer…and sharper…and clearer…and sharper…until it’s a tiny, brilliant red speck in the darkness above you.

The whole thing takes 30 seconds.

Then they switch eyes and do the same thing for the second eye.

Then they wheel you out.

Just like that.  Wham, bam, thank you Ma’am.

They wheeled poor ol’ valium-doped me back into the recovery room, in a different recliner, taped great big bug-like metal sieve things over each eye, and let me recuperate.  I glanced back at the operating room doors, and realized that the industrial clock, previously a brown and white circular blob, was now in clear and utter focus.  I was halfway across a room that measured at least 50′ long, and the clock was in focus.  I could read the minute marks!!!  I looked around, through my bug-like eye coverings, and saw everything in the room as if it were etched in glass.

(Cue angelic chorus singing "Ahhhhhh!")

I had to wear the buggy eye-coverings for two days.  I had to use special eyedrops for a month.  My eyes felt gravelly for a week.  And that was it.

Folks, I tell ya:  It’s a bloody miracle.

Now for the less miraculous news:  They undercorrected my left eye.  The whole deal included an option to go back for a recorrection within a year, and, looking back, I should have done it.  But it took so very much gumption to risk my eyeballs the one time that I couldn’t bring myself to do it a second time, and then time passed, and then, by the time I was ready to do it again, the year had already passed.  Bummer!  So I had 20/20 vision in one eye and 20/50 in the other.  And, alas, my eyeballs continued their ever-increasing nearsightedness, so at this point, I think I have 20/30 in one eye and 20/60 in the other.  I do need a very light prescription to drive as a result of my wimpiness.  But y’know what?  Even with that, I think LASIK is the miracle surgery.  I highly recommend it. 

Just don’t go to one of the fly-by-night operators that advertise "LASIK for $500!"

Lots of sky news lately.

First off, there was tonight’s total lunar eclipse.  Alas, we couldn’t see it, due to cloud cover.  I hope some of you did!  I was truly hoping to be able to see this one, because it was due to be total just as it rose here in Alaska.  The last time I saw a rising moon that was totally eclipsed was many years ago in Chicago, over Lake Michigan.  It was the most awe-inspiring sight:  a huge glowing red orb in the sky, quite Tolkein-esque, grim and foreboding.  It was huge, of course, because it was down on the horizon, and our perceptions of size are aided by local landmarks (trees, buildings, etc.); items not on the horizon don’t seem as big because there’s nothing to compare them to.

Then, there’s the U.S. planning to shoot down a defunct satellite (oops–it seems that they’ve done it tonight).  I’m not quite sure why our gummint has decided to do this, when we’ve had satellites merrily downing themselves for years now, though they played up the "1,000 gallons of hydrazine (EEEK!  Deadly chemical!)" aspect quite a bit.  OmegaDad’s theory is that the U.S. is doing it because China shot one of their own down a year or two ago, and we have to show them that we, too, can do fancy space shooting.  Sort of a cold, cold, cold war, being done in secret out in the open.

Then there’s the fireball seen over much of the northwestern U.S. Tuesday morning, estimated to be centered over Adams County, Washington, with various videos that captured it (wow!).  Reports on this meteor came from Idaho and Nevada, too, so it was quite a spectacular one.  You must watch those videos; in the second link, go halfway through and that’s when they show some more videos of the fireball.

Last of all, there’s news of a star that has a planetary system that’s practically a clone of ours, at least in galactic terms.

All very cool, to a geeky gal like me!

A few years ago, OmegaDad purchased a book called (I think) "Dinosaur Hunters", an in-depth retelling of the story of the feud between Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh, two paleontologists who set the standard for dinosaur fossil hunters in the 1800s.

For those who think that scientists are cold, aloof, logical, precise, and passionless, the story of these two would be an eye-opener.  We’re talking claim-jumping.  Races to publish data.  Vituperation and personal attacks galore.  Weapons drawn.  Dashes to be the first to dig in a promising new place.  Fights over who got to name what, whose reputation would be solidified down the centuries as The Premier Dinosaur Discoverer.  Nasty letters to the editor back and forth.  A feud played out in the public eye.

(Of course, as a person who grew up with scientists and scientifically-minded folk, I’m quite aware that the stereotype in the paragraph above just doesn’t cut it.)

One of my current regular blog-stops is ScienceBlogs.  You get it all there–climatology, biology, physics, computer science, zoology, oceanography, medicine, pharmacology–you name it, it’s there.  Along with lots of lively writers who are passionate about their fields.

This week, in the rotating blog headline spots, there was something about "armadillodiles".  I wasn’t interested, so skipped over it.

Then there was a rotating headline about Aetosaurs and Whistle-Blowing–The Saga Continues.  Well!  "Whistle blowing"?!  I had to dip in.

Dipping in led to this further article from a year ago. 

It turns out that there has been a controversy brewing in the U.S. paleontological world, starting small a few years ago, and growing.  The story, in a nutshell, is that the paleontologist who is in charge of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and is one of the editors of its journal, seems to have "jumped the gun" a number of times, citing other people’s work, work that was "in progress", taking the credit himself for the conclusions, and grabbing at chances to name specific fossil branches himself.  This includes claims that he cribbed info from unpublished masters’ theses, used information garnered from visits to other museums that were working on soon-to-be-published research, skipping over the peer-review process, and pretty much ran rampant over lots of younger paleontologists’ research.

This had been bubbling up in the professional email list for paleontologists.  It led to a variety of posts similar to the second one I linked (you need to read the comments, too!).  And then, the reason for the first post cited:  Nature Magazine, the stuffy crown prince of the natural sciences, has just published an article about the controversy.

A certain amount of stuff got posted afterwards, with titles such as Paleontologists Behaving Badly, Something’s Fishy About These Armadillodiles, Who’s Scooping Whom and Why This Matters, and Way to Represent Your Professional Community, Dude!

The entire affair seems redolent of the Cope/Marsh wars, an interesting perspective on scientific clashes, and also an interesting perspective in how Things Have Changed.  Once upon a time, the natural history world was filled with adventurers pushing each other out of the way, racing to be The First…enough so that "Around The World In 80 Days" is couched in those terms, a daring duel between scientific adventurers and scoundrels.

There you have it:  Dinosaur Wars, which I thought were a thing of the past, still exist.  The ethical scientists get creamed by a modern-day throwback.  Passions flare.  And it’s all about science!!!

One of the staples of a certain subset of science fiction stories is the Singularity (sometimes called the “TechnoRaputure”)–the point at which technological change, married to computers, starts coming so quickly and heavily and becomes so very intertwined with our lives and consciousness that it’s almost impossible for people before the Singularity to comprehend what it’s like living after the Singularity.

One aspect is to be so interconnected with computers–using, say, brain-computer interfaces–that humanity is enhanced by the computer use to being almost super-human.

Be that as it may…it’s an interesting concept. 

Right now, we already have plenty of people whose short-term memory is fading because it’s not in use anymore–they use the computer to store that information, and leave their brains free from that clutter.  (Think speed-dialing, email programs that store people’s email addresses so you don’t have to remember them, calendaring programs to keep important dates handy.)  This is all done with computers being “outside” us.

What will it be like when the computer is more of an extension of ourselves than an outside appliance?

So I keep looking at news stories about human-computer interfaces with a certain amount of interest.  OmegaDad and I, for instance, really, really want the RetinaCam, an always online camera embedded in your eye that you can turn on in the blink of an instant, so that all those wonderful pictures that you never get, you can now get.  (Get it?)

They don’t have the RetinaCam yet.  But a company called “Eye-Fi” recently came out with a wi-fi-enabled digital camera chip.  This is way kewl.

Then there’s the recent news of the guy who has been paralyzed for years, unable to speak.  Boston University researchers, working with guys from a company called Neural Signals, Inc., have been working with Eric Ramsay on translating the signals in his brain into real speech.  Right now, they think they have gotten to the point where they recognize 80% of the signals in his speech centers, and they hope to hook this information into a computer speech synthesis program soon.  This is amazing.

More on the brain-computer interface front:  a research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has come up with a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI)–a helmet type doodad that records brain signals–that allows someone to control a Second Life avatar.  Just by thinking about moving forward, you get your SL avatar to move forward.  Think about turning it one way or the other, and it moves that way.  Whoa.

Much to my dismay, I’m unable to find any references to the next item, which makes me think I’m searching on the wrong terms.  I know it was on ScienceBlogs recently, but not within the past week or two.  This makes it hard to locate, sigh.  Anyway, there was a music concert where the instruments or the music (can’t remember which) was controlled by the audience’s brainwaves.  I think.  Agh!  I should have bookmarked it when I first saw it!  Anyway, that was another way kewl approach to computer-human interfaces.

Tomorrow:  Linky Love; Monday:  Prostheses galore!

Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

Right around the same time that my female hormones really went around the bend (aka “perimenopause”), I began to have a whole slew of side effects.  Hot flashes, a hell-on-wheels hair-trigger temper, a sex drive that tanked, and memory issues.

Each of these taken separately was a total pain in the ass.  Taken as a whole, it’s a personality disaster.  But, even so, most of it is stuff you can grit your teeth and grin and bear, or take various nostrums to deal with.

One aspect, however, really, really bothers me, and that’s the memory problems.

The thing that bothers me is not the fact that I have them–everyone has memory lapses, and walking into a room and suddenly realizing you can’t remember what you went in there for was nothing new and exciting to me, just something to take in stride.

What was disturbing, however, was the form the memory problems took.

I pride myself on my vocabulary.  My ability to flit from word to word.  My personal OED sitting at my neuron-tips, just waiting for the right shading of meaning to pull the proper word out of the mental dictionary.

The form my perimenopausal memory problems took–and still take–is one where very simple words elude me.  I’ll be talking, and suddenly, instead of, say, “oven”, my mind and mouth will say, “refrigerator”.  It’s always a somewhat related word, just slightly skewed.  And worse than that are the times where I simply cannot recall the word I want to use.  At all.  I find myself saying, “the place where all the food is kept cold” and waving my hand about as if to pull the proper word out of the ether.

The thing that scares me most in terms of getting old is Alzheimer’s disease. 

No-one in my family has had it, that I know of; we’ve been remarkably lucky in that as we age, we suffer from all sorts of icky age-related diseases but still retain full mental faculties.  Diabetes?  Yup.  Cancer?  Yup.  Heart disease?  Yup.  Alzheimer’s?  Nope.

Coming from a family that is so rich in folks with excellent mental abilities and a lively love of mental games and learning and puzzles…all of those things are prized possessions to me.  The thought of losing those abilities…the thought of having to depend on someone else because I was losing my own ability to think…these thoughts scare the snot out of me.  It’s my very deepest fear.

Researchers have recently come up with 16 protein markers in the bloodstream that serve as markers for Alzheimer’s, with a 90% success rate.

Would you want to know?

I read that story and my first thought was, “Hah!  Now I can get a test and find out if my specific type of memory lapse is a symptom of Something Worse!”

Then I thought again.  Firstly, of course, is the 90% success rate, which implies a 10% failure rate.  The articles I’ve read didn’t say whether that 10% was 10% false positives (”Why, Jane!  I am so sorry that seven years ago we diagnosed you with Alzheimer’s; it turns out you’re one of the lucky folk who actually won’t get it!”) or false negatives (”George, we’re sorry, but it turns out that we were wrong; you are developing Alzheimer’s very quickly.”). 

Secondly…well, secondly.  What would you live like if you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were developing Alzheimer’s.  That even though nothing showed up currently in your personality, all the signposts were there indicating that every day, bit by bit, your brain was decaying, and after a certain point you would no longer exist as a person.  That in a few years, your loved ones would be dealing with you-as-a-burden, someone who no longer recognizes them and no longer loves them.

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I’d like to think that I’m the type to find out and face reality.  But at the same time, it’s so much easier to live with a “maybe” than with a “for sure”.

What would you do?  Would you want to know?

Hey, sounds like a fun topic on a grey, rainy, chilly morning, eh?

Okay, okay, it’s better than, say, “global thermonuclear warfare” (about which I have nightmares on a twice-a-year-basis, just like tornadoes) (the Wizard of Oz turned tornadoes into nightmare material for more kids than me, I am sure).

Way back when, in the mists of time, I took a Geology 101 class in college.  It was great.  I loved it.  There is an alternate universe where OmegaMom decided to pursue geology as a career instead of sort of floating about for years before deciding on computers.

One of the really neat things about this Geo101 class was that the professor discussed, in great depth and detail, the controversy about the Great Extinction Event of the dinosaurs.  It was interesting because the professor had been there while the controversy started, played out, and the paradigm shifted to the new, improved version of what happened.  Previously, it had been thought that a period of extremely active volcanism was what did the dinos in (remember that scene of the animated dinosaurs taking the big trek in Fantasia to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?).  But right around the time OmegaMom was born, a geologist named Luis Alvarez and his son Walter proposed a new theory:  that a meteor or comet impact was what had caused the extinction.  They cited, as evidence, the KT boundary layer, a layer of soil found worldwide, which was chock-full of interesting elements such as iridium and (I believe) osmium and particular particle shapes that are only produced under huge heat and impact stresses (tektites).

OmegaMom was taking this intro class at the end of the paradigm shift period (it took quite a while for the geology types to actually accept such a radically different view of looking at things).  It was fascinating, especially realizing that scientists could just toss every bit of “accepted” knowledge away, when presented with enough evidence, and move in a totally different direction.

The geology folk have been looking for evidence of other such things all over the place since then, and have found quite a few that seemed tied into other extinction events.  This has also led to a certain amount of interest in space agencies tracking near-earth objects (and to a few grand disaster movies), Just In Case.  After all, if it’s happened once, it can happen again.  And what will We do (we being the human race) if it does?

Then, this week, Small Mountain University issued a press release in conjunction with a bunch of other universities.

For years, the “accepted” knowledge about the extinction of the mammoths and other large mammals that roamed the Americas and northern Europe and Asia has been that they were hunted to extinction by human beings.

But lo & behold–according to this group of geologists, there is evidence that a large something–a comet or low density meteor–whapped the Earth about 12,900 years ago, causing firestorms, devastation, and a 1,000-year mini ice age.

First off, it’s a radically different approach to the idea of the mammoth etc. die-off–so that’s interesting.  Then there’s the question of how it will play out in the scientific community.

Then there’s li’l ole OmegaMom sitting here and reading that press release and accompanying news articles and realizing–with a weird gut-level oomph–that, hey, yeah, these things can happen, and it isn’t necessarily millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future.  Dudes, this event, if the evidence pans out, was a mere 13,000 years ago.  That’s a blink in the geologic record.  It’s like yesterday!

So every once in a while, OmegaMom catches herself casting the hairy eyeball up to the sky, wondering…when?  What if…?

(Like, “what if the Tunguska object had been bigger??”)

Hey, as disaster theories go, it’s got more sweep and grandeur than, say, Y2K or Peak Oil or even gl0bal warm1ng.