5 questions you had better know the answer to...

...if you want me to take you seriously as a scientist. This if from an article in the Guardian, about scientific illiteracy. Here are the questions:

Q: Why does salt dissolve in water?
Q: Roughly how old is the earth?
Q: What happens when you turn on a light?
Q: Is a clone the same as a twin?
Q: Why is the sky blue?
Q: What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Now, I say 5 questions because that last one is totally bogus. You could have been very good at science for years and completely understand the basics of thermodynamics yet not remember which law is which.

I have no problem answering all these questions (in fact, the very article described above does a piss-poor job of answering some of them [and they are wrong about the twin one!]), but anyone who works in science should really have some kind of understanding of what the right answer is to each of these.

At the very least your answer better be better than some of the people they interviewed for this article (on ions):

Kirsty Wark Because it's less dense.

Daisy Goodwin It forms
another compound. The only reason I know any of this
is because I've been
testing my daughter on her GCSEs.

Uh, your daughter is failing! But hey, Daisy Goodwin works on poetry anthologies and Kirsty Wark is a newscaster. Check out the reply of Robert Winston, who is a "Human fertility expert and science TV presenter" (a former medical researcher):

It's to do with ions isn't it? Let me just work it out. It's to do with the way
sodium and chloride ions, um. Do you know, I'm not sure I can really explain it.
I can't remember now from my physics years ago.

Yeah, you work on biology. Even more, you work on physiology (of a particular organism). You're telling me you don't understand how water dissolves things? You do realize that your organism of study is 80-odd percent water?

How about these replies:

(Age of the earth)

Susan Greenfield Oh blimey. Well, I know that human beings have been going for
about a million and a half years, so ... I'm just grasping here. Something like
60 billion years or something like that, but that's a grasp. I'm not a physical
scientist and it shows. I'm probably not scientifically literate.

(why is the sky blue)

John O'Farrell My daughter explained this to me the other day. She is in
Year Seven. It's to do with blue being the dominant colour in the colour
spectrum.

Kirsty Wark Because it's a reflection of the oceans on the planet. No idea
apart from that. I think the sky is blue because... the rain clouds obscure the blue, and the blue is a reflection... because of the sunshine. Fuck! I don't know! Why is the sky blue?

Seriously? People don't know this stuff? And John, your child is probably failing too.

Ok, first of all. My friend M and his wife L (and their baby C) got me what is, to this point, pretty much the most amazing baby gift we have recieved. Little Alton has a shirt that contains the answer to the question: "Why is the sky blue?" courtesy of M, L, and C (have I sent you guys a thank you yet? Gosh, I hope so! THANK YOU!!). I'll admit, as I have previously, that this is exactly the kind of question that I'm worried could throw me off my guard when my own child is asking me for the first time. However, these people are being asked by an adult, given some time to think, and that's the best they could come up with? Reflection off the ocean? I've lived in Kansas, and I can assure you the sky is blue there.

Secondly, I hate to hold people up to ridicule, but this is exactly what is wrong with western civilization and, indeed, the world. We are all idiots. 90% of people I've met in my life only know how to do a handful of things. Even 'jack-of-all-trades' people who do mechanical odd-jobs often don't seem to have the faintest clue why something works. Scientists seem to be among the majority here. Are we really being served well in society by producing engineers that can't understand any biology? Or biologists who literally can't do 1st year calculus?

Anyway, it is late and I'm tired and a little intoxicated so I should probably stop here. But seriously, from now on, if you can't answer basic questions about the world, then I'm not counting you as a real scientist.

Writing and blogging and something

So I'm trying to not write so much about depressing stuff. Someone recently referred to my blog as an "emotional roller coaster". Frankly, I don't know what to think about that, but I'd like to hear this blog described as "moderately informative" and "not suicide-inducing."

Which is why I now share with you the sum total of the positive, work-related feedback that I've received during the past few weeks (since, say, April). You know, to demonstrate that I'm not a complete failure.

Dear Dr. XXXXXX,

Thank you very much for your review of manuscript "XXXXX".

We greatly appreciate your assistance.

With kind regards,
Journals Editorial Office
Springer

Hmm. Roller coaster probably isn't the right word is it?

Other stuff:

- For some utterly incomprehensible reason, I've been playing this game about an hour a day. In fact, after finding that link I was 'forced' to play it for about twenty minutes just now.

- I went fishing this weekend. I should set this up a little better:
When I was a kid (grade-school, middle school) I was, in all humbleness, the greatest fisherman I knew. I could damn near catch anything with any kind of bait. I mean it. I caught carp, catfish, crappie, bluegill, green sunfish, walleye, largemouth bass, white bass, whiper (striped bass, white bass hybrid), and smallmouth bass using a little yellow jig from a lake that no one knew even had walleye and smallmouth. All in one summer. From the shoreline.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten worse. In my freshman year of high-school Star Trek 'Next Generation' went off the air, so I began having a social life that didn't revolve around Tasha Yar and Wesley Crusher. That social life meant that I spent more time going to movies and chasing girls than fishing.
But all I had to do was pick up a pole and I'd still be able to at least catch some fish.
This weekend I went back to the very lake that was the site of so many of my fishing conquests. What happened?
I caught 1 fish.
1.
Uno.
Singular.
I'm going to have to figure out how to fish again, aren't I?

- Want to drive yourself insane? Try this 'impossible' quiz. I have to admit, I failed miserably.

- The NBA Finals: Really? The excellence that was the Western Conference playoffs has lead to this pathetic show? If I were, in any way, associated with the NBA, I'd be looking for a new job.

Our Lady Peace recently released a song entitled “Will the Future Blame us?” (you can listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3E6WvCMYY0)

I’m not sure what the artists are trying to say. The chorus of the song is “And I don’t ask why anymore”. Another commonly repeated refrain is “I don’t wanna know”. You can look at the complete lyrics here: http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858553074.

I hear these lyrics and I think of how people give up. I see it ever day. People deciding “I can’t do anything. I can’t solve this problem. I can’t achieve my dreams. I can’t save the world.” In a sense there is a John Nash game theory issue at play here, in that everyone’s more likely to be happy if there’s some careful consideration of what goals you choose and what goals you are likely to be capable of achieving. Yes, you’d probably like to run a Fortune 500 company, but the odds are low, so just focus on getting a good job with a nice benefits package.

This is a very mature outlook on life. At least, that’s what people would have you believe. ‘You’ve got to accept your limitations.’ ‘You’ve got to pick your battles.’ Blah blah blah.

I’m not even saying these ideas are universally bullshit.

They are universally bullshit when you’re deciding what you want to be. What you want to do. What you want to become. How you’re going to do your part to save the world.

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but most people get around 75 years on the planet Earth. Whatever you think happens after you die, you’ve only got a limited amount of time here. This is your only chance to make a difference.

Yet too many times I think people ‘grow up.’ People start taking the easy road, just because it is easy. They start worrying about how the clothes, the car they drive, the next raise, the basketball team, the haircut. Being a grown-up in America means caring more about your 401k than the plight of starving people in Africa (or even starving people downtown). For that matter, being a grown-up in America means getting worked up about issues like abortion, gay marriage, taxes, and whether or not reverse-racism is occurring.

Hello? We’re poisoning our own drinking water, the air we breath, the food we eat and nobody even mentions this? We’re in foreign countries kidnapping, torturing and killing innocent people, yet we’re having protests about whether or not gay people can have a legal marriage. And this is the grown up world? Really?

People who care are often tempted to just give up. While I was in graduate school I kinda gave up. I decided: I can’t care enough right now without destroying my ability to finish this degree.

Well, that was a bullshit decision. I can see now that short-term justifications like that are exactly what makes ‘adults’ quit caring altogether.

Will the future blame us?

Probably. I know I blame the past.

But I'm going to make damned sure I've done all I can.

Yeah, well...

All of you awaiting some cool pics and a brief recap of my weekend will just have to wait. Or no, you'll have to head over to a blog that actually has had time (apparently) to update since the weekend.

And in case you're wondering: Yes, of course I caused a minor disaster when I left town. That's only happened every single time I've ever left to go anywhere over the past 5 years. I seriously don't know why I ever go anywhere and I really just don't want to do science anymore. I wonder if Barnes and Nobel is hiring?

Oh what the hell, I'm going to vent a bit:

I can't believe nobody noticed this, but I'm not a plankton ecologist. Prior to moving to Oklahoma I've never, in my life, worked with phytoplankton. I had never done a secci depth or identified zooplankton under a scope. Hell, I'd never had to identify anything microscopic under a scope. I've never maintained algal batch cultures or chemostats. I don't know shit about fish.

So why is it that 2 weeks into my job here I 'sat in' on a 15-minute spiel about chemostats that I missed half of (doctor's appointment), and then a week later I got tagged with taking over all the chemostats.

I'm not an idiot, and this isn't rocket science, but there's a reason why people have written entire books about algal culturing: It isn't all chocolate cake and icing. There's some expertise involved and I haven't got it. So for the last 3-4 months I've been running these things thinking they were doing fine. Then I find out that most people start a chemostat and it runs for like 4 months. Mine were running between 4-6 weeks! I didn't even realize this was a problem.

So now I'm trying to figure out what has been going wrong, and conversations with 'experts' have left me thinking this is all just a bunch of voodoo magic. I've never heard such great advice in my life:

"Sterilize the surface you're working on with ethanol."
"Why? I don't put anything on that surface do I?"
"No, but every little bit helps."
"Well, do I need to build a box to keep the reservoirs in?"
"You could."
"Would it help?"
"Maybe."
"Ok, what do I need to do to keep the bubblers from exploding in the autoclave."
"Uh, that's never happened to me."
"Ok. Great. What about the tubing, it keeps melting together."
"Really? Wow, that sucks. That's never happened to me."
"Should I autoclave for less time?"
"No, you can't."
"Uh...ok. Well, how should I replace the reservoirs up top? With new flasks or just by refilling them?"
Expert 1: "Definitely replace those flasks. They get dirt and stuff in them otherwise.
Expert 2: "Don't ever remove the tube from a flask, just refill it or else you'll get dirt and stuff in there."

You guys are really helpful.

I can personally guarantee anyone who asks that I could get better results using batch cultures, but of course, nobody asks me.

There are going to be days like this I suppose.

There are two truths in the world: 1) everyone wants to be happy and 2) everyone sees themselves as pretty amazing.

Oddly enough, this inevitably leads to religious wars, racism, bigotry, class warfare, poverty, and every kind of despicable behavior known to man.

Why? Because we aren’t actually as amazing as we think ourselves to be. Everyone believes, deep down, that he/she is a special person. This isn’t strictly true. Each of us is special, but we are special to those who know and appreciate us, not the greater population of mankind. Further, we all have different expectations for happiness. One person seeks money, another to go fishing, another to change the world, another to travel. When we are unable to achieve these goals, or when these goals are difficult to attain, we begin to perceive the world is against us. That someone or something is trying to prevent us from achieving the happiness that our special status deserves.

And so humans suffer from a kind of mass hysteria. Numerous political and social movements have used the perception that other people are to blame for your problems as a way of rallying broad support. This battlecry unites the strategies of George W. Bush, McCarthy, and Adolf Hitler.

It is the terrorists, the Chinese, the immigrants, the Communists, the Jews, the blacks, the Arabs. These are the source of your problems. Elect me and I will eliminate your problems by somehow eliminating these other people.

Today in America I see this. A perception by the middle class that their problems are caused by other people, by black people, by Mexican people, and by people who don’t share the same viewpoint as middle America.

This is, in a larger sense, the most ridiculous notion in the history of civilization. Middle-class America today exists because previous generations killed all the Native Americans, used slaves to build the early economy, instigated wars with neighboring states, forced their way into markets that had no interest in their services, and invented the most appalling ways of killing people known to man. And yet still the most powerful force ever in the history of the earth finds itself constantly afraid of wasting money on welfare or subsidizing research.

I see this perception that America is under constant cultural assault by other people all the time. For example, the Fox News Channel has made careers for guys like Bill O’Reilly because of paranoid non-threats such as the War on Christmas. 80% of Americans refer to themselves as Christian. Does this seem like a country in which a ‘War on Christmas’ should be taken seriously? Our entire economy gears itself around the holiday, every charity, every church, every academic activity takes Christmas as its fundamental dividing point. Yet some people seem to feel that using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” signals some kind of immoral assault on the very basis of Christianity. This perception can only be considered irrational. Yet it persists.

Some groups might be forgiven if this blaming other people for their own problems seems rational (even thought it might not be): African Americans have been the subject of intense, state sponsored racism in this country as recently as 35 years ago, and an entire social movement has emerged advocating a return to values as they were when African Americans were enslaved. Understanding why blacks might think they are being persecuted isn’t hard: There is a lot of evidence that it is still occurring and there are a lot of people alive today who grew up in a culture where racial hatred was an institutionalized reality.

I don’t really recommend you spend much time thinking about this. There isn’t much anyone can do to prevent people from being ignorantly afraid. You can’t explain to someone that their pitifully narrow viewpoint is just that, when they don’t want to believe anything else. You can’t even explain that happiness isn’t the same for everyone.

I just spent all weekend and today thinking about this. I’m depressed, exhausted and increasingly angry. I don’t want my child coming into the world as it is. This is a world filled with hatred, racism and ignorance, and too many people are doing their best to keep it that way.

Some days I just don’t want to make the world a better place. Some days, the world doesn’t deserve it.