In Today's News

George Takei and husband will be the first gay couple on the Newlywed Game.

The "Art Instinct"

Whenever I encounter an evolutionary argument about why people do something, I w0nder about all the people who don't do it. Like, there is a book called "Why We Run" which, according to a brief review I read, presents a bunch of evolutionary arguments to explain why people enjoy running, and although I hate to judge books by reviews -- well, no, I don't hate it, I do it all the time, I just feel a certain scholarly guilt about it -- I think this argument has a problem explaining why 95% of us don't run.

Which brings me to the "Art Instinct." There is certainly something fundamentally human about art. Just about everyone has aesthetic feelings: we may disagree on what is beautiful, but we all know what it means to think that something is beautiful. We all share some form of the decorative impulse, the desire to make things pretty by putting pleasing designs on them. We adorn our bodies with jewelry, clothes, and tattoos, which seems so natural to us that we forget how weird it would be to see any other animal species doing the same thing.

And yet, the degree to which we care about art and the amount of effort we put into it varies greatly from person to person and culture to culture. Case in point: neolithic Britain. The picture shows what archaeologists are calling the oldest artistic depiction of a person in Britain, and my reaction is, why were neolithic Britons less artistically skilled than my six-year-old son? These were the descendants of people who filled Europe's caves with amazing paintings of animals. What happened? Obviously, the ancient Britons were putting their energies somewhere other than sculpture. They built stone circles on striking moorlands, and large chambered tombs, but they seem to have completely given up representational art. Maybe they had other arts we can't recover, like dance or music. But then again, maybe not.

Art is strange this way. For something so fundamental, it is oddly variable and transient. Some cultures are just vastly better at certain arts than others. Even in a culture that assigns a very high value to certain arts, these may be created by a tiny portion of the population. Other arts may arise in particular aristocratic cultures and become an obsession, for a while, to a tiny group, developing such dense networks of symbols and references that outsiders can only shrug at them. When those groups disappear, their art vanishes with them.

The Dog or the Family?

From the BBC:

An Australian man who freed his dog from an animal pound's "death row" and then went on the run has offered to surrender, police say.

Ron Gilbertson's dog, Max, was going to be put down for mauling sheep.

Mr Gilbertson went to say goodbye to Max last week, but instead cut the dog from his cage and fled, leaving his wife and two children.

Police in South Australia say the renegade pair were located after a search and were prepared to surrender.

"Unconditional Love"

I was going to let this nonsensical story at the NY Times pass without comment into the dustbin where it belongs, but I can't stop myself from ranting. The thesis is that children given "unconditional love" grow up happier than those whose parents only give them love with they are obedient:

This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, [psychologist Carl] Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.

. . . . In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

First, a bit of social science nerdiness: the data presented here to show that unconditionally loved children grow up happier is meaningless, because it could just as well be that happy people think better of their parents than the miserable. The effect is small enough that a few malingerers and a few of the rosy-cheeked could be responsible for all of it.

And, second, what on earth would "unconditional love" of your children mean? I think children hate to be criticized, in any way by anyone. I don't think correction ever makes them feel loved. So, to me, you can't offer "unconditional love" while ever criticizing or correcting your child, and since you can't keep a toddler alive without correcting him or her, this is baloney. What does "use conditional affection" mean, if it doesn't mean smiling at your child when he learns a new word and frowning when he hits his sister? Is it wrong to scold your child for hitting his sister? Is it wrong to smile at your child when she learns something new, or gives you a present?

And is it really so wrong to try to "control" your children? I hope not, because anyone who has been around toddlers knows that they need a lot of control. They need to learn not to bite and hit and call names, not to eat dirt, not to break Daddy's computer for fun. They need to learn to speak and put on their shoes and to say please and thank you. And a lot of other stuff.

As a theoretical proposition, is it possible to live with anyone without trying to shape that person? I doubt it, and I certainly don't think any adult can live with a child without trying to.

So enough with the extremist theorizing about parenting. Just do the best you can.

Martian Canals

Why do "scientists" insist on saying that this pattern represents cracks left by drying Martian lakes, when it is so clearly the remains of a canal system used by an ancient alien civilization?

The Hobo Code

There's nothing cooler than a secret alphabet. From Wikipedia:

To cope with the difficulty of hobo life, hobos developed a system of symbols, or a code. Hobos would write this code with chalk or coal to provide directions, information, and warnings to other hobos. Some signs included "turn right here", "beware of hostile railroad police", "dangerous dog", "food available here", and so on. For instance:

• A cross signifies "angel food," that is, food served to the hobos after a party.
• A triangle with hands signifies that the homeowner has a gun.
• Sharp teeth signify a mean dog.
• A square missing its top line signifies it is safe to camp in that location.
• A top hat and a triangle signify wealth.
• A spearhead signifies a warning to defend oneself.
• A circle with two parallel arrows means to get out fast, as hobos are not welcome in the area.
• Two interlocked humans signify handcuffs. (i.e. hobos are hauled off to jail).
• A Caduceus symbol signifies the house has a medical doctor living in it.
• A cross with a smiley face in one of the corners means the doctor at this office will treat hoboes for free.
• A cat signifies that a kind lady lives here.
• A wavy line (signifying water) above an X means fresh water and a campsite.
• Three diagonal lines mean it's not a safe place.
• A square with a slanted roof (signifying a house) with an X through it means that the house has already been "burned" or "tricked" by another hobo and is not a trusting house.
• Two shovels, signifying work was available (Shovels, because most hobos did manual labor).

The image of wandering people finding their way by reading the mysterious symbols scratched by those who came before makes me want to tell a story. Maybe a ghost story, about an abandoned station at a western ghost town, where strange markings left by earlier victims warn others away lest they become prey for the spectral beast. Or a more ambitious story with a secret community hidden in the mountains, welcoming to all who can unravel the clues and reach it, with unknown enemies known only by frightened symbols scratched by those who disappeared, with some sort of treasure or revelation hinted at by symbols none of the living can understand.

Making the World a Little Better

Just suppose there were a government program that actually seems to make poor children so much healthier that it more than pays for itself through reduced emergency room visits and the like. And what if this program had the side effect that children who went through it were much less likely to become teenage criminals. What would America's charming conservative media stars say about it? The program is home nursing for poor families:

Thirty years ago, a professor of pediatrics named David Olds (then at Cornell, now at the University of Colorado, Denver) came up with a straightforward idea: send nurses into the homes of poor and undereducated first-time teenage mothers to coach them through their children's difficult first two years. There are now 18,000 families receiving that service in 29 states, from a variety of local government agencies and nonprofit groups, supported by some $80 million per year of federal, state, and foundation funds, under the watchful eye of the Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office, a spinoff of the University of Colorado.

The program was designed to improve health, not to control crime, and the health-care savings from lower rates of sickness, substance abuse and welfare dependency among the mothers and children more than cover its costs. But it turned out that by the time the kids were 15 years old, those served by the program had been arrested less than half as often, and convicted only one fifth as often, as similar children who weren't given the assistance.

And what do Republicans think of this idea?

When a provision for nurse home visit grants was added to the House version of the health-care bill, the House Republican Conference promptly issued a statement mocking the program as a "nanny-state boondoggle." They called it "billions for babysitters" and suggested buying copies of Dr. Spock's child-care book instead. Lindsey Burke of the conservative Heritage Foundation warned of a "stealth agenda" to "impose a federally directed, top-down approach to parenting" and an increase in the federal role in preschool education.

Fox News anchor Glenn Beck says the program reminds him of 1984, suggesting it will be forced on families with overweight children by the fat police. Chuck Norris, TV's Walker, Texas Ranger and an early supporter of Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, calls the program "Obamacare's home intrusion and indoctrination family services."

Now I wouldn't stake too much on this particular program; these things sometimes turn out to depend on the efforts of a single dedicated director and the staff that he or she personally instills with commitment, and when made into bigger, more bureaucratic programs they often falter. But wouldn't it be worth a try? After all, it doesn't cost much. Right now America seems to be full of motivated young people who want to "make a difference." Couldn't we direct a few thousand of them into programs like this? Everybody knows that America suffers terribly from the existence of an underclass that is barely part of our society, but nobody seems to know how to bring them in. When an inexpensive program shows as much promise as this one, shouldn't it be tried? And when you oppose a new idea that really might help miserably poor people in your own country, besides reducing crime, without spending a lot of money, are you a conservative or just a jerk?

Today's Kinda Sorta Good News

The world recovers much more quickly from mass extinctions that we thought. It seems that although 90 percent of ammonite species (squiddy things with shells) were wiped out during the Permian mass extinction, they recovered their pre-mass-extinction diversity within a million years, instead of the 5 to 15 million years previously estimated.

See, on the geological time scale, nothing you do matters at all, not even causing mass extinctions.

Ali Soufan on the Torture Reports

Former FBI agent and torture opponent Ali Soufan fires another salvo against Cheney and company. To him, the CIA Inspector General's report provides clear evidence of torture's ineffectiveness. He points out that most if not all of the evidence said to have been provided by tortured men had already been acquired by other methods:

Some of the information that is cited in the memos — the revelation that Mr. Mohammed had been the mastermind of 9/11, for example, and the uncovering of Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber — was gained from another terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, by “informed interrogation,” conducted by an F.B.I. colleague and me. The arrest of Walid bin Attash, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messengers, which was also cited in the 2005 C.I.A. memo, was thanks to a quick-witted foreign law enforcement officer, and had nothing to do with harsh interrogation of anyone. The examples go on and on.

A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.

Soufan also laments what might have been learned from Khalid Sheik Mohammed if had been questioned by knowledgable agents instead of CIA psychologists:

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

Chicken Parents, or, Irrational Fear is not Love

From the NY Times, a piece on parents who are afraid to let their children walk to school:

It has been 30 years since the May morning when Julie Patz, a Manhattan mother, finally allowed her 6-year-old son, Etan, to walk by himself to the school-bus stop, two blocks away. She watched till he crossed the street — and never saw him again. Since that haunting case, a generation of parents and administrators have created dense rituals of supervision around what used to be a mere afterthought of childhood: taking yourself to and from school. . . .

Parents’ worst nightmares were inflamed recently by the re-emergence of Jaycee Dugard, the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way to the school bus 18 years ago in northern California.

Some people are nuts. Because of two (TWO!) cases over the past 30 years -- ok, so maybe they left out a couple and the real number is, say, ten -- some parents are afraid to let their kids out of their sight? This isn't parenting, it's insanity. Everyone who has ever taken a serious look at the problems says stranger abductions are vanishingly rare. But do facts have any impact on this fear? No:

In a study of San Francisco Bay Area parents who drove children ages 10 to 14 to school, published this summer in the Journal of the American Planning Association, half would not allow them to walk without supervision, and 30 percent said fear of strangers governed their decision.

And while there are certainly many parents who scoff at this crap, there are enough scaredy cats to have a real impact on how kids live:

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. . . During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent.

And it isn't just parents:

And Mrs. Pierce faces another obstacle to becoming a free-range mother: public opinion.

Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk.

I think real harm is being done to kids by all this fear. First, they grow up thinking of the world as a dangerous place full of bad people, which it really is not. Psychopaths who kidnap and kill children exist, but there just aren't enough of them to comprise a real threat. This fear distorts how and where we live, how we think about crime and punishment, how we vote. Second, kids are being deprived of the chance to build their own lives outside their homes, roaming their neighborhoods with their friends. When I was 9 to 13 I lived on my bike, traveling miles, visiting friends' houses, playing pick-up soccer games, exploring the woods. Looking around my exceptionally safe neighborhood now I see none of that. Part of the difference is surely the spread of cable tv and video games, which give kids more reasons to stay inside, but part of it it wholly unreasonable parental fears.

My middle school kids walk to school.

Another Socialist for National Health Insurance

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong... Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.

-- Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

Hayek, for those who don't know his work, was every libertarian's favorite economist, a nearly fanatical advocate of free markets. This passage, which I got from Andrew Sullivan, points out better than anything else I have seen how bizarre and senseless American opposition to health reform really is. National health insurance isn't a left wing thing, it is a moral and sensible thing.

Finally, the Reason We Invaded Iraq

Fouad Ajami, in the course of explaining why the war in Afghanistan is not "better" than the Iraq war, offers what I always thought was the real reason Bush, Cheney and company chose to invade Iraq:

To begin with, a policy that falls back on 9/11 must proceed from a correct reading of the wellsprings of Islamist radicalism. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him. No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren.

I personally think this is a totally lame reason to invade a country and kill 100,000 people, which is why Bush & Co. dreamed up so many other justifications. But I think this was always the real reason: to send a message to Arabs that we won't be attacked and pushed around.

A Warning to Non-Sewing Wives

Curiously, vague feelings against Lady Davy have remained in the collective folk memory of Penzance. . . . I was told on several occasions that the large stone statue erected to (chemist Sir Humphrey) Davy, dominating Market Street, showed his frock coat with a missing button "because Lady Davy was a bad wife and would never sew it back on."

--Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder.

No, it isn't News

Various people are going ga-ga over a story in the London Times about Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the possibility of German re-unification in 1989:

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. . . .

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

Details about what was said have just been released from the Russian archives. But Thatcher's uneasiness about German unification, which she shared with the British foreign policy establishment and most of the British press, was no secret at the time, and I read in detail about it years ago, in George H.W. Bush's joint memoir with Brent Scowcroft. Of all the major non-German figures involved, only Bush was a strong supporter of unification from beginning to end. It was his finest hour. Scowcroft admitted in the memoir to his own grave doubts. The whole thing was an exercise in how a big change of any kind, even a really good change, makes people very, very nervous. Although I suppose you have to factor in the historical reasons Europeans had to distrust a powerful German state.

Today's reaction to the Times story is a lesson in how quickly people forget. Now that eastern Europe has been peacefully re-integrated with the west, nobody remembers how scary it seemed at the time, and how many thoughtful people opposed it. "But Thatcher is our hero!" you can hear the young Tories saying. "How could she ever have been against such a good thing?" Because she, unlike them, did not know the future.

The Romance of Chemistry, ca. 1817

I'm reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, about science in the Romantic period, 1780 to 1820 or so. It's quite interesting, if slow in parts. From it I extract this, which is from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, an account of a chemistry lecture that inspired the hero:

"The ancient teachers of this science," said he, "promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of Nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: then can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow."

Just Toys

More evidence that the little womanish figurines found at Çatalhöyük and other neolithic sites in the Near East are just toys, not "goddess statuettes." They are found in regular trash dumps, not graves or niches, and they seem to be made in the same way and of the same stuff as the more common figurines of goats. Interestingly, as many seem to be male as female.

College Graduation Rates and One Other Thing

Two former college Presidents have a new book out on the state of our universities. They are particularly worried about low graduation rates. From a summary in the NY Times:

At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.

Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as "failure factories," and they are the norm.

Overall, only around 60% of the students who enter public universities graduate in six years. This observation is usually followed by lots of numbers on the effects of race and class and whether students live on or off campus and the like. But neither they NY Times piece nor, so far as any review I can find tells me, the university presidents' new book says anything about why we want students to go to college and what they are supposed to be learning there. What good does it do to have a debate about how to get kids to go to college when we have no idea what college is for? When I was at the University of Minnesota in the late 1980s they commissioned their own study of why students dropped out, and the overwhelming explanation given by the students they interviewed was that the education they were being offered seemed boring and pointless to them. They just didn't see the value of what they were learning.

Maybe instead of tweaking the financial aid system we should take a serious look at how we structure higher education and what we teach students in four-year colleges.

If it were up to me, I would turn half the four-year colleges in the country into community colleges focused on technical and business training. Then I would make the remaining four-year colleges much tougher and more intellectual, forcing the students through rigorous programs in math, science, literature and thinking.

But that's just my suggestion, and I would be willing to entertain others. What makes me crazy is the continued insistence that there is nothing wrong with higher education that can't be fixed by more financial aid and a little counseling of freshman. The problem is that universities don't know what it is they want to teach or how to go about teaching it. The problem is that we don't know what it means to be educated. As things stand now, students finish college mostly because it is a sort of habit of the middle class, so sticking it out shows your commitment to middle class life and its values. No wonder poor and minority students can't be bothered.

Child Soldiers, or, Everything is Complicated

One of the most worried over groups in the world today is "child soldiers." The words summon up an awful image of boys impressed at gunpoint into pointless wars, learning brutality as they live in greater fear of their own tyrannical commanders than of their enemies, and in the end being cast aside, too psychologically damaged by a youth spent at war for any sort of productive civilian life. This narrative even appeared in the TV series "Lost."

And no doubt it is that way for many. But no category so vague as "child soldiers" really describes the lives of everyone who can be said to belong. And here we come to the experience of child soldiers in the Maoist rebel army of Nepal, which is the subject of a documentary getting attention on anthropological blogs. The filmmakers seem to be sympathetic to the rebels, but then I suppose if they weren't they would never have gotten to interview so many child rebels. And they came back with stories like this:

Asha, a girl from a Dalit Hindu caste in southern Nepal, described how she became associated with the Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) -- “I was born into a poor family.” She pointed to a few pounds of cornmeal and then the one goat outside her thatched hut, “We just have this much, nothing more. I was a very good student [but] my parents told me: ‘We have no money so you have to leave school and take care of your brothers and sister.’” With few economic resources, Asha’s mother decided to pay for her brothers’ schooling rather than “waste money on a girl’s education.”

With no hope to pursue an education in her village, Asha was drawn to the Maoists women’s brigades traveling through her village. They promised girls an education and the opportunity to live in a Maoist society where men and women are treated equally. “I was 13 years old when I joined the Maoists,” Asha told me. The Maoist Army was comprised of many young women like Asha, the majority of whom joined voluntarily. For Asha and other girl soldiers, the most difficult part of being a soldier came after the war was over when they returned home. Former child soldiers, especially girl soldiers, returned to communities where they were feared, stigmatized, and vulnerable to myriad abuses.

So here we have "child soldiers" who signed up voluntarily to get away from boring, oppressive homes and felt no special anguish about their wartime experiences, and whose problem with reintegrating into civilian life is not their own psychic trauma, but how other people feel about them.

The Overblown Giant Pacific Garbage Patch

As I said recently, attempted expeditions to the supposed "Giant Pacific Garbage Patch" or "Plastic Vortex" have been disappointing to environmental alarmists. National Geographic is promoting the latest such voyage with a hype that strikes me as downright nutty. Take this photo:

Yes, there are plastic bottles in the ocean. But look at the water in the background!

Or this, which they use as their lead:

Is that a giant Pacific garbage patch, or just a lost fishing net with some other stuff caught up in it?

Pollution of the oceans is a major problem, but creating this image of a giant garbage vortex that looks to the rest of us like, well, an ocean, is going to backfire and make environmentalists look like liars.

More Messel Fossils

A collection of new and old finds.

Two Interesting Statistics on Driving Safety

These are from a NY Times piece on texting while driving. First, "The federal government estimates that at any given time about 11 percent of drivers, or about two million people, are talking on a cellphone." Their risk of crashing is about 4 times as high as non-talkers, says the National Transportation Safety Board. We don't have an official estimate of the risk being run by people who text while driving, but the NTSB thinks the risk is "much higher" than just talking on the phone.

Of course, your chance of crashing on any given day is so low that even ten times that risk is very low, so very few people will have their attitudes toward texting changed by being in an accident while texting themselves.

The other bit of government data, which I found even more interesting, is that having an adult passenger with you in the car makes your trip much safer. About 85% of drivers are alone, but when they have another adult passenger with them, their chance of crashing falls by 50%.

So let's hear it for backseat drivers....

Nobody Found the North Pole

I have finally delved sufficiently into the matter to decide that the cynics are right, and neither Frederick Cook nor Robert Peary reached the north pole in 1909. Both were frauds. You can read John Tierney's summary of the evidence here. Tierney reports that the first human to cross the pole may have been Roald Amundsen, who floated over it in a dirigible in 1926. But the first undisputed claim to have reached the pole on land belongs to Minnesotan Ralph Plaisted, who traveled by snowmobile in 1968.

That Peary's claim stood up for so long is rather remarkable, given how flimsy it seems to me after reading something about the evidence. All of which goes to show that hype can be a very bad thing for science, as likely to lead to sloppiness and fraud as to real discovery.

Explain these Away

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending back thousands of high-resolution photographs of the moon, including many that show the Apollo landing sites. The one above shows the Apollo 11 site; the descent stage of the lander is casting the long shadow in the center. Click on the picture for a larger image. In the one below you can see the tracks left by the Apollo 12 astronauts as they traveled around their landing site, including a visit to the remains of the Surveyor 3 space probe. Surveyor, Head, and Bench are the names of craters.

These ought to be hard for conspiracy buffs to explain away, but then I suppose any agency capable of faking the moon landings could fake a few dozen photographs.

A Tsunami of Stuff

Interesting piece by Jon Mooallem in the NY Times, on the self-storage industry. When these facilities first opened, they were marketed toward people who were moving or between homes or whatever, as temporary places to stash their stuff. But now most people rent their storage space on a permanent basis, to store stuff they just can't fit in their houses. There are now 51,000 storage centers in America, with 7 square feet of space for every American:

“A lot of it just comes down to the great American propensity toward accumulating stuff,” Litton explained. Between 1970 and 2008, real disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spending nearly all of it — all but 2.7 percent — each year. Meanwhile, the price of much of what we were buying plunged. Even by the early ’90s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. By 2005, according to sociologist Juliet B. Schor, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.

Schor has been hacking intrepidly through the jumble of available data quantifying the last decade’s consumption spree. Between 1998 and 2005, she found, the number of vacuum cleaners coming into the country every year more than doubled. The number of toasters, ovens and coffeemakers tripled. A 2006 study found middle-class families in Los Angeles “battling a nearly universal overaccumulation of goods.” Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected in the corners of backyards. “The home-goods storage crisis has reached almost epic proportions,” the authors of the study wrote. . . .

Consider our national furniture habit. . . . We’ve spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it. The amount entering the United States from overseas doubled between 1998 and 2005, reaching some 650 million pieces a year. Comparing Schor’s data with E.P.A. data on municipal solid waste shows that the rate at which we threw out old furniture rose about one-thirteenth as fast during roughly the same period. In other words, most of that new stuff — and any older furniture it displaced — is presumably still knocking around somewhere. In fact, some seven million American households now have at least one piece of furniture in their storage units. Furniture is the most commonly stored thing in America.

Why am I not Surprised?

In the category of scientifically dubious but still interesting research:

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Women, on the other hand, are not affected at all by chatting with a handsome man.

Whatever Those Are

According to the caption of this Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photo, this is a "spider trough network." But the only thing that came up on Google for "spider trough" was this picture, so I have no idea if it is some very obscure geological term or a new one coined at JPL to describe this picture.

The Perfect Size?

From Chris Bodenner:

A UK study found that the ideal female body size according to men is 12 and women 8. (The actual UK average is 16.)

I think those UK sizes translate into 6, 10, and 14 American. Size 10 seems kind of skinny to me, but I still think it's worth pointing out that this confirms what I have always said, that women are more obsessed than men with female skinniness.

Bees!

Look closely at those creatures crawling over this blooming sedum, and you will see that most of them are honeybees. It has been five years since I saw so many in my yard at once. The first year we lived here there were so many they made my children nervous. Then they disappeared, victims of "colony collapse disorder" or some such affliction. I saw none at all for years, just bumblebees. Then last year I saw an occasional honeybee, and the same this spring. Now, finally, I see them in numbers again. I wonder if this means wild bees are evolving some resistance to this plague, or if one of my neighbors has installed a hive and sprayed liberally with miticide.

State Fair

I took today off, and Lisa and I took Clara to the state fair. The fair with only one child! And it was so uncrowded on a weekday. We toured the animal barns, rode a few rides, wandered through the craft hall, and generally got out on another perfect late summer day.

Plastic Surgery for Migraines

There have long been rumors that facial plastic surgery can ease chronic migraines; this idea is at least 20 years old, and I suppose it got started when some facelift patient told her doctor, "oh, my migraines are gone." The idea is that the surgery reduces the irritation of facial nerves that trigger the headaches. Botox has lately been used the same way, and it has become such a common off-the-books procedure that the maker of Botox is pursuing approval of this treatment from the FDA. Now a major double-blind study has been done of facial plastic surgery as a migraine treatment, and the results are promising:

No wonder that earlier last month, news of a surgical “cure” that touts a high success rate ricocheted worldwide. The double-blind study, published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, found that more than 80 percent of patients who underwent surgery in one of three “trigger sites” significantly reduced their number of headaches compared with more than 55 percent of the group who had sham surgery. More than half of the patients with the real surgery reported a “complete elimination” of headaches compared with about 4 percent of the placebo group.

But look at that placebo group number: 55 percent who had sham surgery reported significantly fewer headaches. That is the whole problem with trying to make treatment for head or back pain scientific. Pain happens in our heads, and everything from our mood to the color of the room we are in can affect how much pain we say we feel. There have been numerous reports of miracle drugs for migraines over the years, but in every case it turns out that the very high success rate of initial studies is largely the placebo effect of something touted as a new miracle drug, and that as the drug becomes routine, its effectiveness declines.

The doctors cited in the NY Times are concerned that there will be a rush of people trying to get the procedure, because some of them think it will only work for people whose headaches start with facial pain. My own headaches, which gave me a great deal of trouble in my late teens and early twenties, turned out to be related to my allergies, and now that I have my allergies under control I have a bad migraine only two or three times a year. But if that result of 50 percent reporting complete elimination of their headaches holds up, this will be a miracle cure for many, many people.