Google in Our Hour of Need

By: | March 14, 2011

In late February, I had my first experience of worrying from afar about a good friend caught in a catastrophic earthquake. The anxiety started just before six in the evening of February 21st, after I’d knocked off work for the day and idly flipped on the radio to catch some news. I was only half paying attention, concentrating instead on how I was going to pull together a meal from the fridge’s sparse contents, when I suddenly heard a live interview with a very distraught woman in Christchurch.

The mere mention of Christchurch and the fear in her voice immediately caught my attention. For weeks, I had watched my tennis coach and good friend Glenn Richard train hard to represent Canada in the world seniors tennis tournament in Christchurch, New Zealand. Our conversation had been about little other than Christchurch–the draw, the players, the logistics of the tournament.  Then Glenn had flown off to compete. Where was he now? Was he safe?

I turned up the radio and began pacing. The initial news–a 6.3 earthquake close to the surface, buildings in jagged rubble, people entombed in the debris–sounded terrible. And the more I heard, the more worried I got. I had some dinner with my husband, then went online to see what if anything I could learn. By then, two and a half hours had elapsed since the first devastating tremor.

At that point, something almost miraculous happened, or so it seemed then. While googling, I landed on a screen called the Google Person Finder. Someone at Google had just posted it for the Christchurch earthquake. It looked almost homemade, nothing fancy, just two boxes–a green rectangle that said “I’m looking for someone” and a blue one that said “I have information about someone.” I clicked on the green box and entered Glenn’s name. I didn’t expect much. But to my astonishment, I got an immediate message. Glenn was alive. My sense of relief was enormous. How did Google do it, I wondered? Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Moment of Clarity 1

By: | March 11, 2011

You doubtless remember quantum mechanics: the deeply incomprehensible chain of reasoning about how particles are also waves; and the waves aren’t physical but waves of probability; and any given thing about which you’re certain means you’re uncertain about something else.  And so on, far into the night.  The worst thing about it is, apparently it’s true.  To a gazillion decimal places.

http://abstrusegoose.com/93

Christchurch, Hardtack and the Myth of Earthquake Preparedness

By: | March 10, 2011

I sleep with old sneakers and work gloves under my bed. My house and car are stocked with hand-crank radios, potable water and archaic, shelf-stable foodstuffs like hardtack and jerky. In my closet there is a crowbar and a very large axe, which I will use, should an earthquake tumble the walls, to excavate through the rubble to my son in the next room. And also because large axes are very cool.

I live in California, within a few miles of the San Andreas Fault. And I’m nowhere near ready for when the big one comes.

Sadly, the same thing seems to have been true for Christchurch, a gem of a city on New Zealand’s South Island. When a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit there at 12:51 pm on February 22, local time, buildings crumbled, communication broke down and at least 166 people died.

Perhaps more surprisingly, two weeks after the quake, many people in the area, especially in the eastern suburbs, are still struggling. Not Haiti 2010 struggling, thank goodness, nor even post-Katrina New Orleans struggling. But still, with water, food and information all in short supply, the question has to be asked: If even Christchurch, the very opposite of a basket case city, can’t handle a relatively small seismic event any better than this, is earthquake “preparedness” even possible? Continue reading →

An Argument About Crows

By: | March 9, 2011

“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.”  MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king.  Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.”  Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind.  The day/ After death I had gone for farewell, and the eyes/ Were already gone – that/ the beneficent work of crows.”  A year ago I watched a crow kill and eat a nestling robin.  Nobody likes crows.  I think it’s because they’re so black – black feathers, black legs, black bills, black eyes.  They look like flying shreds of a medieval hell. Continue reading →

Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Genes?

By: | March 8, 2011

The email was the opposite of scary. Subject: “Your Genetic Profile is Ready at 23andMe!” Six weeks earlier, I had mailed the genetic testing company a tube of my own spit. Now it was time for me to “start exploring” the results. I was terrified.

I read a lot about genetics, so I knew that this sort of test isn’t usually very useful, health-wise. 23andMe estimates your risk of getting common diseases — heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and many others — based on large studies of people who carry the same DNA-letter blips as you do. Think of a chromosome as a long string of DNA letters. According to one study, people who have a ‘T’ on one spot of chromosome 8 have a 4-fold higher risk of stomach cancer than do people who carry a ‘C’ on the very same spot. That may sound awful for T people, but in real numbers, it means C people have a really tiny risk, and T people have a slightly-less-tiny, but still tiny risk. In other words, the vast majority of people who carry the “high-risk” T will never get stomach cancer.

I understood all of this and was quite familiar with the oodles of scientific commentaries and popular press articles and books about why these risk tests probably aren’t worth fussing over. Their interpretation is so fuzzy that some doctors think they shouldn’t be sold to consumers without expert supervision. Like a rebellious teenager, I loathe this kind of paternalism, and bought the test partly in defiance. If I waited too long, regulators might deny me the opportunity. I’ll show them!

So after all of that huffing and puffing and spitting and waiting, I finally had access to my precious genetic profile. And I was scared of the damn website.
Continue reading →

Ancient Forms of Biological Warfare

By: | March 7, 2011

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” – George S. Patton

Early American warfare has always seemed — to me, at least — rather quaint. Men in uniforms line up in a grassy meadow. They march toward one another. They fire, reload, and fire again. Whichever army shoots the most people wins. I never assumed the battles ended with handshakes and backslaps, but they still seemed rather sportsmanlike.

So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a 2004 paper in the Colonial Williamsburg journal titled “Colonial Germ Warfare.” Germ warfare? In the 1700s?

As a matter of fact, yes. It turns out biological weapons have a long and sordid history dating back to way before colonists were killing redcoats (or vice versa). I learned that Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander best known for leading an army over the Alps atop an elephant in 218 B.C., used to catapult pots filled with snakes toward enemy ships. A little more digging led me to a paper enticingly titled, “The History of Biological Warfare,” which contains gems like this:

In 1495, Spanish forces supplied their French adversaries with wine contaminated with the blood of leprosy patients during battles in Southern Italy. In the seventeenth century, Polish troops tried to fire saliva from rabid dogs towards their enemies. Continue reading →

Talking Universe Blues, Part 3

By: | March 4, 2011

(This post is the third in a three-part series. The first and second appeared the past two Fridays.)

“What can we as scientists do to better communicate science to the general public?”

This question didn’t stump me, but, I admit, the answer did elude me at first. I started talking about how writers are dependent on the good will of scientists in communicating what they do to the general public. I said that scientists should be eager to talk with us—which, in my experience, they already are. I said they should see it as almost a civic responsibility—which, in my experience, they already do. And I said that writers should be careful about how accurately they portray the nuances of science—which, in my experience, they sometimes aren’t. But from the looks on some of the faces in the auditorium, I didn’t seem to be adding much to the conversation, if only because I was talking about the writer’s role in better communicating science to the general public. The question, however, was what can scientists do. The scientists in this room wanted to know—really, really wanted to know.

Continue reading →

The Emperor and the Parasite

By: | March 3, 2011

In the year 111 BCE,  the emperor of China sent his emissaries westward to the land of the Wusun. The emperor had grown tired of the Central Asian nomads who routinely swept into his villages, stealing the grain, making off with the women and burning the houses. Wudi realized he needed better, faster horses to drive them out, so he sent his envoys far west to the Wusun. A people of the steppe, the Wusun reportedly possessed a horse of exceptional beauty, speed and endurance. Indeed, this horse was said to have descended from the heavens. When it galloped, it sweat blood.

Wudi traded an imperial princess for several of these horses, only to discover that he had been swindled. The animals belonged to inferior breeds. But the emperor refused to give up. He sent an entire army in 103 BCE to what is now eastern Uzbekistan to find and capture some of the horses. His imperial forces suffered terrible losses and deprivation, but they succeeded in finding nearly two dozen superior horses, which they transported back to the imperial stables. There the Chinese court called them tianma, “heavenly horse.” The breed became the favorite mount of Chinese emperors and nobles.

I was reminded of this imperial obsession last week by news out of Xi’an, one of China’s ancient capitals. While excavating the massive mausoleum of Emperor Wudi, Chinese archaeologists found skeletal remains of 80 horses that had been sacrificed and buried in two cavernlike pits. At the entrance to each cavern lay the skeleton of a stallion as well as a small terracotta warrior. Continue reading →