The Last Word On Nothing

Correction

By: Richard Panek | April 9, 2013

Correction: An article yesterday about a tiny force in quantum mechanics that could be used in future microscopic devices referred incorrectly in some copies to the size of the force measured when two metal plates were placed within one 40-thousandth of an inch of each other. It was one 300-millionth of an ounce, not one 300-thousandth. —New York Times, February 10, 2001

Screen shot 2013-02-08 at 10.33.54 AM I clipped this correction the day it appeared in the Times and pinned it to my cork bulletin board. This was a long time ago, so I can’t be sure what I was thinking. Most likely I found this assemblage of absurdly small numbers to be comical: the fastidious precision of science meeting its match in the finicky precision of the Paper of Record. What I do know for sure is that at the time I didn’t fully appreciate just how fastidious quantum mechanics is. Continue reading →

Birds in a Blender

By: Erik Vance | April 8, 2013

Imagine for a second that the country of Mexico was a long funnel, with the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts as the sides of the funnel. And imagine you were to roll a marble down the Pacific side, all the way from San Diego, down Sonora, passed Mazatlan, Jalisco (though it takes a little hop over Puerta Vallarta), and down past Acapulco. The place where the marble would stop – that little indent at the very bottom – that is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Once upon a time, this was the most important region in Mexico for Americans. Before the Panama Canal was built, the Tehuantepec Route was the primary way to get stuff from one coast to the other. In fact, the Ithsmo, as it is known, was an earlier candidate for the canal. The New York Times even had a regular column updating people about its comings and goings (for hilarious examples of this, click here and here). The region has a rich culture and cuisine – like traditional transvestites (accepted as the “third gender“) and the wearing of iguanas on one’s head before one eats them. Seriously. Click the stupid link if you don’t believe me.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | April 6, 2013

April 1 – 5

On April Fools day, Jennie Dushek teased the internet with the obituary of a great dad.

I wondered whether science has anything interesting to say about stupidity.

Cassie examined the evidence from the anti-vax side of the aisle and found it wanting.

Guest poster Michael Balter told us about the dinosaurs at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.

And Christie finally got the goods on a story you might remember about the woman who died after being refused CPR. Proving that maybe the Aschwanden rule should be that the real story is always far more complicated — and interesting — than you think it is.

Vaccines, Viruses, and the Anti-Vax Movement

By: Cassandra Willyard | April 5, 2013

On a chilly February evening, I found myself stepping across the threshold of one of Midtown Manhattan’s many brick high rises. I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, home of the Meta Center, which describes itself as Manhattan’s “number one destination for Consciousness Raising, Cutting Edge Spiritual & Metaphysical Education, Healing and the Creative Arts.” A sign at the entrance to the conference room asked me to remove my shoes before entering sacred space. So I shucked my boots, tried to hide the hole in my left sock, and picked my way to the back of the room in search of an empty folding chair.

I had come to hear a lecture on vaccines. As a science writer and public health advocate, I’m a big proponent of vaccination. Study after study has shown that the benefits far outweigh the risks. The proof is incontrovertible. But I wanted to hear the alternative argument. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Sun, Sea, & Sauropods

By: Michael Balter | April 4, 2013

I grew up in L.A., but 25 years ago I sold my car and moved to Paris. I’ve had few regrets since, although I do return every year to see my old friends. Each visit reminds me that Angelenos don’t have much to be proud of, especially when they have to sit in traffic for hours to get to those places that still are worthwhile (like the excellent restaurants.) True, transportation officials are currently widening the San Diego Freeway at a cost of 1 billion dollars, but the project seems to promise little more than an increase in drivers’ choices of what lanes they want to be stuck in.

So it was a great pleasure to find something an old Angeleno really can get chuffed up about: The new 14,000 square foot Dinosaur Hall at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. As a paleo writer for Science, I was treated to a tour of this terrific new exhibition by the museum’s head dino guy and director of its Dinosaur Institute, Luis Chiappe, who is also one of the world’s leading experts in the evolution of the first birds. (I think every town should have a Dinosaur Institute, don’t you?) Continue reading →

Is CPR for the victim or the bystanders?

By: Christie Aschwanden | April 3, 2013

Yesterday at The Washington Post, I wrote about a controversy in which a 911 caller who identified herself as a nurse refused to give CPR to an 87-year-old woman who’d collapsed at a Bakersfield, California independent living facility. (Unlike a nursing home, the facility did not employ medical staff, and, according to the Associated Press, the caller worked there as an administrator, not a medical provider.)

In the tape, which you can listen to below, the 911 dispatcher urges the caller to begin CPR. When the caller explains that the facility’s policy is to leave medical care to the emergency responders, the dispatcher grows increasingly frustrated.

Dispatcher: she’s going to die if we don’t get this started. do you understand?

Caller: I understand.

Later….

Dispatcher: I understand if your boss is telling you you can’t do it…But … as a human being … you know … is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?

Caller: Not at this time. Continue reading →

I’m with stupid

By: Sally Adee | April 2, 2013

What is stupidity?

That’s the question I set out to answer this week for New Scientist. The idea was to look at the science of stupidity, but it took me a good couple of weeks to stop hitting brick walls in my research. Respectable scientists don’t like to talk about stupidity. “Stupidity is an evaluative term,” Alan Baddeley told me, “not a scientific one.” Baddeley is a psychologist at the University of York who studies working memory. “[Stupidity] has not been studied because it is neither sensible nor useful to do so,” he says. So instead, psychologists study intelligence.

I sympathize with Baddeley’s aversion. Attempts to locate stupidity somewhere specific — whether that’s people, cultures or other groups — often seem to leave us in problematic territory.

My next stop was Professor Google. Another bad idea. Depending on your search terms, the first results lead you to the Darwin awards. A funny idea at first blush, but there’s something soul-crushing about the idea that someone has gleefully assembled a compendium of these terrible tragedies. And apart from lending support to some ugly stereotypes, the Darwin awards provide no great insight into the nature of stupidity, merely confirmation of its existence.

This was frustrating. How could something so ubiquitous be so elusive? I mean, there’s no shortage of examples in my own life — both committed against me and by me. Stupidity seems like it should be added to the list that includes death and taxes. Why isn’t anyone studying it? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Family Man Who Invented Relativity and Made Great Chili Dies

By: Jennie Dusheck | April 1, 2013

In an obituary for veteran rocket scientist Yvonne Brill this weekend, the New York Times disastrously failed science writer Christie Aschwanden’s Finkbeiner test for profiling scientists.

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. —New York Times

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Family Man Who Invented Relativity Dies

He made sure he shopped for groceries every night on the way home from work, took the garbage out, and hand washed the antimacassars. But to his step daughters he was just Dad. “He was always there for us,” said his step daughter and first cousin once removed Margo.

Albert Einstein, who died on Tuesday, had another life at work, where he sometimes slipped away to peck at projects like showing that atoms really exist. His discovery of something called the photoelectric effect won him a coveted Nobel Prize.

But his ~~devotion to family~~ personal and professional balancing act also won him notice. In 1950, Boys’ Life and Sears Roebuck awarded the former patent office employee their Leafblower SuperDad Award for his steady financial support of his ex-wife and schizophrenic son all through the long years of his happier second marriage to his cousin Elsa Einstein. Also noted by the prize committee was his success in finding a new job after losing his job in Germany in 1933.

Mr. Einstein—or Dad, as his step daughters and long-estranged sons called him—is believed to be the only person of Jewish descent to have developed the theory of special relativity. When Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels targeted Einstein’s work for book burnings, Mr. Einstein shrugged it off, writing, “… I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise. But you can’t take these things too seriously, can you? You just have to be cheerful and not get upset when you get insulted.”

Mr. Einstein never got the medical degree his parents had hoped he’d get, but he picked up a teaching diploma in math and physics that allowed for some surprisingly competent work. “Nobody had the right degrees back then, so it didn’t matter,” he told the Times.

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Photo, Einstein’s apartment in Bern: Jacek.NL