bearing blog

In which I am an amateur linguist, just for fun.

Today I feel like blathering about an academic subject in which I am completely untrained, and yet have Opinions.

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Friend of mine on Facebook yesterday shared this post from Letters of Note, the photograph grabbed apparently from a book called 'The Elements of Eloquence,' author Mark Forsyth, and posted originally on Twitter by Matt Anderson.

Said friend and I -- alright, it was Melanie -- had a blast discussing it.  The most fun I've had on a Sunday afternoon in a long while.  It must be the long weekend.

Before we start to criticize, let's discuss the overall pattern.  Have you noticed this feature of spoken English before?  That when you prepend -- without conjunctions -- more than one adjective to a noun, often there's a particular way to order the adjectives in series that sounds better than the other possible orders?  

Native English speakers would say, unless there was some special reason of emphasis,

 The little red wagon

not

The red little wagon

 

Or

The old brass key

not

The brass old key

Or

The enormous antique rocking chair

not

The antique enormous rocking chair

nor

The antique rocking enormous chair

nor

The rocking antique enormous chair

and so on.  

(Even though the author used an amusingly long string of adjectives as an example, I'm not going to go with more than three or four of them here, since our test of validity is simply to see what sounds okay.  Overlong strings of adjectives don't sound like natural English to begin with, so they don't make good test examples.)

How do we know which order is right?  And is there a permanent pattern?  Mark suggested to me that we simply know what is right because we are used to hearing it some ways and not others, but I don't think so because I can construct an entirely novel phrase and we still know that one is better than another:

The delicious square German vegan liverwurst

is obviously (to me) preferable to

The German square vegan delicious liverwurst

but it isn't obvious why.

Some kind of pattern production program exists in our language brain.  This isn't mere mimicking.  We have a pattern inside our heads, and we know when something doesn't fit the pattern, without ever having been explicitly taught it.  What is this pattern?

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The author of the photographed excerpt considers pre-nominal adjective sets as a string.  Like beads, they go onto the noun one after another, and since we apparently prefer some permutations to others, he looks for a pattern that tells us what order we automatically identifies an ordered list of attributes that, supposedly, describes the order in which English speakers string adjectives.  Here's the order again:

Opinion - size - age - shape - colo(u)r - origin - material - purpose - Noun.

This doesn't of course mean that we are likely, in ordinary speech, to craft sentences in which we describe a noun with a string of eight adjectives.  It just means that we supposedly put size-adjectives before material-adjectives, opinion-about-the-thing-adjectives before origin-adjectives, and so on.

Let's see the examples I wrote just now:

"little red" wagon is size-color .... Check!

"old brass" key is age-material.... Check!

"enormous antique rocking" chair is size-age-purpose I guess... Check!  

 

Or is it size-age-shape?  What if the chair is, er, shaped like a rocking chair but intended for an office?  Then it would be an enormous antique rocking office chair.  Still fits the pattern, I suppose.  Check!

"delicious square German vegan" liverwurst is opinion-shape-origin-(material or maybe purpose) ... Check!

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So far so good.  But!  If one sits and thinks for a while, one may come up with contrary examples.  So the "absolutely" in the author's paragraph must certainly be struck out.

The first one I thought of was

She has a new little baby.

This pattern puts shape before age, yet it is clearly better than 

She has a little new baby.

Later I thought of

The white crescent moon shone above

which, though it puts the white color before the crescent shape, sounds more correct than

The crescent white moon shone above.

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Okay, so the "absolutely" isn't warranted for our pattern.  Yet it seems almost right.  Is there a way we can generalize?  And what makes this pattern appear in the first place?

One of our interlocutors suggested that it had to do with "essence" -- that the more essential qualities are placed closer to the noun, and the more superficial ones are placed farther away.   So, for example, a little red wagon is more essentially red and only superficially little.  A German rocking chair's rocking-ness is more essential to its nature, and its German-ness less so.

This seems like it is on the right track towards the pattern, but not so much on the how-we-apply-the-pattern.  Deciding about the essential nature of things is a philosophical exercise.  But we don't stop to practice philosophy every time we order our tall skinny decaf latte.  We just ask for it, and make the poor barista hunt for the keys in a different order.  (From the perspective of the cashier, the size of the latte is more essential, since it specifies the cost of the item; options like decaf and skinny are not.)

But there is something to this notion, and I think if we carry it farther we will find something better than the "string-of-attributes" theory.  

Let's start by asking the question:  Why is purpose placed in the closest spot to the noun?

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I don't think it's because the purpose of the object is the most essential quality of the object, but because of the natural way in which English speakers form compound nouns made up of multiple words.

A tennis racket is a thing.  We aren't speaking French:  We do not have to say "a racket of tennis."  For all practical purposes, in English tennis racket is a single noun.  We've never joined the words into tennisracket -- we aren't speaking German -- and that has created a bit of a red herring, in that, yes, "tennis" is a modifier, behaving like an adjective, describing the purpose of the racket -- but face it, a tennis racket is a thing.  It is not a racket that might or might not be for tennis, at least not in the same way that it might be green or lightweight or expensive or homemade.  It functions as a noun.  You don't drop the  "tennis" part of the noun unless it's obvious that you're in a tennis context.

Because a tennis racket is a thing, we don't divide the "tennis" from the "racket" by interspersing any other kind of adjective, any more than we divide the "dish" from the "washer" when I describe to you my new household appliance.  I don't have a dish shiny washer, and for the same reason, I don't have a tennis new racket.

Is this because tennis-ness is the most essential quality of the racket?  Indirectly, maybe; but the proximate reason is linguistic.  When we talk of a tennis racket, we join the two words into a compound.  

So the handheld implement for striking the ball in tennis, having a certain color and size is not described with a string of three adjectives:  large-blue-tennis RACKET.  Rather, tennis is joined to RACKET:  blue (tennis racket).

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But purpose isn't the only kind of modifier that we make functional compounds with.  I talked of liverwurst up there.  We stick that together because, I suppose, liverwurst is German in origin, but we're really discussing liver sausage here -- "liver" denoting the material of which the sausage is made.  And doesn't it often function as a compound too?  Liver sausage is a thing.  If you say "liver sausage" I get a mental image of a package of braunschweiger at the supermarket, followed by a strong association with rye bread and mustard -- I don't imagine a sausage (different mental picture) and then, thinking of liver, modify my mental picture.  

"Pork sausage," same thing, until you want to mention that it's pork breakfast sausage (material-purpose-noun).  But "pork breakfast sausage" is also a thing, although not as securely as is breakfast sausage and pork sausage.

I propose that in English, when we increase the number of modifiers on a noun, what we are really doing is creating nested compounds.  Not sausage that is made of pork, and intended for breakfast, and which I think is expensive, and which is of a brown color, all on a string; but

expensive ( brown ( pork ( breakfast sausage ) ) )

That is, it's breakfast sausage that happens to be pork.

And, it's pork breakfast sausage that is brown.

And, it's brown pork breakfast sausage that is expensive.

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Let's look at our counter examples:  the white crescent moon and the new little baby, both of which violate the prescribed order.

The white crescent moon is easy to explain.  "Crescent moon" is a common compound.  Yes, "crescent" literally describes the shape of the moon.  But in the English language, a "crescent moon" is a thing in and of itself, much more strongly than is a "white moon."  So while you might write about a crescent white moon, you are much more likely to write about a white (crescent moon).

Too, look at this:

white full moon  (color before, nominally, shape)

but

round white moon (shape before color)

And that's because a "full moon" is an established compound and a "round moon" is comparatively only an adjective plus a noun.

How about that new little baby?

"Little baby" definitely functions as a compound in many contexts.  Sweet little baby, good little baby, third little baby.  Little almost goes  before baby as a tic.

"New baby" is also a common utterance.  

Why, then, "new little baby" and not "little new baby?"  I think it's because new babies are by definition little, whereas little babies may or may not be new; so when we want to say, "She has recently given birth to a child!" we say "She has a new (baby)!" or "She has a new (little baby)!" almost interchangeably.  The newness is up front.  It's what we're emphasizing.

But if we want to say "She has a BIG new baby!" we are probably talking about a nine- or ten-pounder.  It's a big (new baby).

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And what of compound adjectives?

Check out this triplet of adjectives along with the noun "baby", two nominally denoting size and one nominally denoting age, and consider how it works:

tiny new baby (but not new tiny baby)

little tiny baby = tiny little baby (interchangeable)

new little baby (but not generally little new baby)

What's up with this?  Tiny must go pairwise before new.  New must go pairwise before little.  But tiny and little are pairwise interchangeable.  

I think this is because "tiny little" and "little tiny" function, and equally well, as compounds.  "Little baby" can be a compound, but we can force it apart with the right choice of modifiers and then you can get something like

(tiny little)(American baby).

 With new, tiny, and little, there's six possible orders:

 little tiny new baby

tiny little new baby

new tiny little baby

new little tiny baby

little new tiny baby

little tiny new baby

Some of these sound better to me than others.   How about to you?  

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Anyway, that's my untrained blathering about English syntax for the day.  I have a vague notion that the concept of a "parse tree" is the one that trained linguists would use to point out the flaws in my crackpot analysis is.  As they say, any fool can criticize, and I am always happy to play the fool for that purpose.  But, as I said to Melanie via FB, the fun thing about linguistics is that any nerd can do original amateur research on your own brain and your friends' brains, something that is hard to do in other sciences unless you have an MRI machine in your cheerful spacious well-equipped American kitchen laboratory.

 

 

 

Homeschool assignment: Reading Augustine on Genesis as a prelude to studying evolutionary biology.

I finished writing my assignment on Augustine for the beginning of the 9th-grade evolutionary biology course my son will be taking next year.  I thought I'd share it freely here, in case any other homeschoolers are interested in using classical authors to put modern science into long-term perspective.

Suggestions are welcome as I won't be assigning it till fall 2014.

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Augustine lived from 354 to 430 A. D. and was one of the most influential early theologians of the Church.

Page numbers refer to readings from The Literal Meaning of Genesis, appearing in the volume On Genesis, ed. by John E. Rotelle, trans. by Edmund Hill, New City Press, 2002.  

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 1. Read Book I, no. 1 (p. 168) for an introductory idea of the multiple meanings of Scripture.  List the different kinds of meaning that Augustine thinks Scripture can have.

 2. Skim over nos 2-28 (pp. 168-181) to get a flavor of the way Augustine lists questions to establish the difficulty of interpreting Genesis. Dip in here and there and read paragraphs in more detail.  Give three examples of problematic questions Augustine mentions.

 3. Read closely no. 29-30 (p. 181-182).   Why does Augustine believe that it is necessary to list the parts of creation in a certain order?   Why does Augustine believe that the scripture uses the words “earth” and “waters” to represent formlessness?

 4. Skip ahead to Book II, no. 25 (p. 205), about the creation of plants. Why does Augustine say plants are described as a separate creation from that of the land, but on the same “day” as the creation of land?

 5. Read the episode in Book III, par. 12 (pp. 222-223), in which Augustine refutes someone's scriptural interpretation (that a certain language is used of fishes because fishes lack any kind of memory) by pointing out that direct scientific observation of fish contradicts such an interpretation.

 What does this episode demonstrate that Augustine believes about the relationship between the interpretation of truth as revealed in Scripture and facts that are learned by observation of the natural world?

 6. Read nos. 18-19 (pp. 227-228). (It may help you understand if you begin at par. 16 on page 225.)

 Pay particular attention to this:

 The reader may also wonder...whether the phrase 'according to kind' comes up again and again just by chance... or whether there is some meaning in it, as though they were already in existence beforehand, though the account of their creation is only now being given... In fact this expression begins to be used about the grasses and the trees, and so on until we get to these terrestrial animals... Is it because these things sprang into being in such a way that others would be born of them and in succeeding to them would preserve the shape and form of their origin?... 

This then is the significance of 'according to kind,' where we are to understand both the efficacious force in the seed and the likeness of succeeding generations to their predecessors, because none of them was created just to exist once and for all by itself, whether to continue for ever, or to pass away without none to succeed it.

 Does the above passage refer to the possibility of God creating animals that would then produce new ones of the same kind, or does it refer to the possibility of God creating animals that would eventually give rise to animals of different kinds?

 7. Read no.s 22-23 (pp. 229-230).   Augustine subscribes to the then-current scientific theory of “spontaneous generation,” i.e., that maggots and flies spontaneously come to life in rotting meat. (Never mind for the moment that moderns know the maggots are not spontaneously generated, but come from eggs which are laid in the meat by insects.) What philosophical problem does Augustine say the theory of spontaneous generation creates for those who study creation?

 Augustine's answer is phrased as follows: “...possibly there was some natural tendency in all animated bodies, so that they already had seeded and threaded into them beforehand, as it were, the first beginnings of the future animalcules, which were going to arise.”  How might we apply this same principle, based on a now-outdated scientific theory, to the more current idea of biological evolution?

 8. Read par. 30 (p. 234). What does Augustine say is the defining aspect of humankind, the aspect in which man is made “in the image of God?”

 Do you think that the distinctive characteristic of humanness is something we can measure with current technology? Why or why not?

 9. Read Book V, no. 12 (p. 282).  Does Augustine argue that the act of creation is a single act, or a series of acts?  Was there a time before the beginning of the universe, according to Augustine?  Tell what you know about what cosmology, a modern branch of physics, says about this question.

 10. Read Book V, no. 41 (p. 297; note that it is two paragraphs long).  Can this philosophy be said to admit the possibility of biological evolution?

 11. Optional: If you are interested in Augustine's mathematical interpretation of why there are six days of creation and not some other number, see Book IV, beginning on page 241.  

Darwin's liberal arts program.

Darwin is writing about his own ideas for a redesigned "modern liberal arts curriculum:"

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as "the skills of a free man". I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it's worth thinking a little on how one might update this list.

Darwin goes on to list thoughts on a slightly different set of arts: history and literature; writing and rhetoric; philosophy; language, grammar and linguistics; mathematics; natural science; computer science; and social sciences. Please go and read his thoughts; this post is my response.

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Even though I took a concentration in the sciences in high school, and went on to major in engineering, I appreciate and share the goal of producing broadly educated individuals who have a sense of the way different disciplines interrelate and who have had practice in writing, in forming arguments, and in taking account of the whole human person in their work in the world.

But I don't think liberal arts colleges always succeed in this goal, particularly today. I think there are three major problems here:

• Number one: the leftist political slant of nearly every liberal arts department in the country. Slant is inevitable, but it shouldn't always be in one direction, and departments ought to conscientiously try to correct it. They don't.
  
• Number two: Education isn't broad, general, and adaptable, and it limits the ability of the educated person to think and reason about the world, when mathematics and physical science are absent or only afterthoughts. It's utterly ridiculous to call an education "broad" and "adaptable" when the graduates have only a vague understanding of the physical laws that govern the world they live in; a poverty of knowledge about the human body, the organisms that inhabit its surroundings, and the materials that make those surroundings; and ineptitude with the mathematical language in which we express relationships among all these things.
• Number three: the declining academic standards of those colleges. Some of this is associated with the leftist slant, in my opinion -- not that leftist slants are necessarily less academically rigorous than rightist slants, but "slant" is generally expressed by ignoring whole points of view and areas of study. Theology, Western civ, and military history, once important aspects of their fields, are gathering dust. If it was a rightward slant, we'd see different things ignored. That's part of it. Another part of it is simple grade inflation and reduced reading loads. The physical sciences and engineering just have not suffered from this as much.

To sum up: I don't think a lot of liberal arts colleges really are delivering what Darwin describes as the mission of the liberal arts.

I haven't much advice about how to fix political slant or grade inflation, but I do know something about the sciences and mathematics. And here I will try to strengthen my liberal-education cred a little bit more: Even though in college I specialized in chemical engineering, and even though in graduate school I had to get even more narrowly specialized, at heart I am a science generalist: I enjoy being at least a little bit conversant in everything much more than I enjoyed becoming an expert in a tiny little area of materials science. This is one of the reasons why staying home to educate my children attracted me more strongly than going on to look for work in research, when it was time to make a decision. I could maybe make an argument for a liberal sciences major to complement the liberal arts major: why not develop a generally adaptable set of skills that would allow the person so educated to understand and reason about the physical world and its laws? (Bonus: the objective nature of physical laws insulates such a program, just a bit more, against political slant and grade inflation.) I could even point to my chemical engineering major and suggest that it comes pretty close to actually embodying a liberal science/engineering major, since the curriculum is a fairly broad combination of science and technology areas (particularly if you take biology electives). It's really why I felt so comfortable there as an undergraduate.

Here are some thoughts. I am cribbing a little bit from what I wrote in Darwin's comboxes.

Mathematics. The key to making math work as a liberal art is to think of it as a means of expanding cognitive abilities. It isn't all calculation - it is a means of understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases. Many people don't get to see the beauty of mathematics, even if someone has been wise enough to show them its utility.

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

One of the ways I've tried to make our homeschooling different from my own experience is that I'm trying to present math as a mode of thinking, not just as an exercise in memorization....

I, like Darwin, worked my own way through Saxon Math, but although I learned much about following formulas exactly as they were presented to me, I learned little to nothing about mathematics as "understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases"....But that could also be because math and science had never, not even in my early years at school, been presented as anything other than formulas or drudge. I do think that if I had been inculcated with an interest in, if not a love for, math from an early age, my later studies would have borne more fruit. But I also think that having a good instructor would have been key.

Mind you, not every scientist or engineer winds up with the attitude toward math that I have. But my experience was that (except for proof-based geometry and much later, in graduate-level continuum mechanics, which sounds like science and was taught by an aerospace engineering professor but is really math) it wasn't in my mathematics classes that the "beauty" of math happened. It was in science and engineering classes. It is in the study of "stuff" that it becomes clear how math works its magic on it: setting limits on the world, describing how that stuff moves around, increases and decreases. Writing a mass balance on a differential element of a spherical shell -- a basic problem in introductory chemical engineering -- always felt beautiful to me.

Yeah, I am kind of a weirdo. Please don't roll your eyes at me.

That being said, I would think that proof-based geometry would tie in neatly to the liberal arts curriculum. You could easily put a historical emphasis or logic emphasis on it, or even use it to substitute for a different type of logic course. I plan to use proof-based geometry as the main way of including logic in my homeschool curriculum.

But geometry is so useful with such wide application that it goes beyond logic. Geometry, the calculus specific to understanding related rates, and maybe a study of functions -- any of these could be applied to a wide range of intellectual activities.

 

Sciences. If you have to only have one science, I nominate physics. For one thing, it gives you a shot of putting all that mathematics in context -- of working together with mathematics to demonstrate how we use it to grasp the world. For another thing, even elementary Newtonian physics does a good job of demonstrating how things are not always as they seem -- how we become fooled by the specifics around us into misunderstanding general laws. Air resistance and friction and frames of reference create so many red herrings! For a third thing, it's the most "generally applicable" of all sciences. Biology is just chemistry at bottom, and chemistry is just physics at bottom. For yet another thing, it encourages the contemplation of the fundamental nature of the material world. It is the interface of creation.

But since "general" is the aim, it might be better to have a little physics, a little chemistry, a little bio, and then maybe an elective in some other area of science.

How to design such a course in order to create scientifically literate citizens would be instructive. And difficult: to take two whole semesters of the chemistry program, for instance, barely scratches the surface of chemistry. You would want to design it from scratch, not just rely on the introductory material that science majors have to take. You want a "chemistry for liberal arts majors" that isn't just code for "chemistry for people who hate math and need an easy way to get the science credit the stupid college says they have to have." And in many universities that would be hard: the chemistry department will want to save its best teachers for its own students (the chemistry majors). So unless you have buy-in from the department chair, and professors who have a passion for sharing their subject with students in other majors, it'll be so hard to put together a quality science series.

 

Languages. In countries where English is not the spoken language, I would require the study of English for the same reasons that the medievals studied Latin and Greek: it is a modern-day lingua Franca. But here in English-speaking North America, I would advise learning a second language: not so much for the ability to converse in the language or to read its literature, but for the cognitive development and deep knowledge of "how language works" that comes from translating one's thoughts into another idiom. I don't think you can really understand your own language until you have studied a different one for long enough to get its grammar and it's mode of thought. Sure, you could learn about language by studying linguistics instead. I have never taken linguistics, so I can't really judge. But my instinct is to say that you can learn enough of what is generally applicable about language by delving into the process of learning one language well.

Computer science. Darwin had some thoughts about this in his post. I agree with them. If you are going to have a basic understanding of the social forces that shape the modern world, then at this point in history you need to have an understanding of computing. I suggested "a notion of the algorithm" as the fundamental concept around which to build a liberal computing art. Darwin has some more ideas. Whatever you include, I think it would be instructive to include a little bit of computer programming: just enough to demonstrate the thought process that goes into instructing a computer to execute step-by-step instructions. See how a loop works, and an if-then command. Experience the frustration of accidentally dividing by zero. Debug something: discover how important accuracy really is when you are dealing with a machine that cannot guess what you really meant. Understand a tiny bit of what makes human intelligence so unlike machine language, and appreciate the human accomplishment that is inventing computer languages.

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I think what I have written here demonstrates a piece of my educational philosophy, or maybe you could call it a bias, or a theme that pervades my understanding of learning. It is this: To acquire mastery of a skill is a way to acquire generally applicable knowledge.

This has certainly played out in my own life. I could not appreciate the general beauty and utility of mathematics until I exercised my mathematical knowledge in wrestling with physics and engineering problems. I could not have taught myself Latin and Spanish (enough to teach them to children) without the experience I had being taught French -- a specialization! -- to fluency. To the extent that I understand the notion of an algorithm, the process of formulating a problem in the way a machine can understand, and other abstract aspects of computer science, I understand them because I have written computer programs, and struggled to debug and improve them.

I think you can't really learn linguistics until you've learned to speak a language. I think you can't really say you appreciate music until you've attempted to play an instrument well.

You might argue, well, linguistics is more than learning the grammar and vocabulary of one single language. Music is far more than convincing a French horn to emit the notes written on the page. Mathematics is more than a mass balance. And so forth and so on. You need context.

Yes. You need context. But I think it isn't so terribly hard to start with a practical skill and work outward to generalize it. One could argue that the necessary context is provided by acquiring practical skills in a variety of fields -- as mathematics, physics, and philosophy work together to create context for the understanding of creation.

Or we could put it this way. The liberal arts are supposed to educe an individual who has a general and adaptable set of skills. I argue that to be able to specialize -- to be able to dig deeper -- to be able to apply knowledge -- to make the abstract practical and concrete -- to check one's theories against the problem of the physical universe is itself a "generally applicable skill" that is utterly necessary in order to reason about the world.

And you can't acquire that generally applicable skill without practice specializing, without practice developing expertise in something, without practice in "practical skills" here and there, without asking yourself if reality confirms that your thoughts are correct.

Sugary.

The article content is, actually, interesting, but what grabbed my attention was the stupid posed lab photo.

"Hey, Mr. P.I.  -- sorry, that's doctor P.I. -- you, hold this blue folder and make a serious face while you read aloud to the visiting research associate.  

Okay, now, we need this photo to look all sciencey and stuff, so why don't you put some lab equipment on the desk.  No, not that lab equipment, the new sparkly lab equipment.  

No, don't fill it with that transparent solution you were studying.  Too boring.  Hey, kid, run down the hall and get me an orange Fanta out of the vending machine.  Okay, now  SMILE BIG.  Not you, professor, just the girls.  Say cheese!"

"Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent."

Wow. If the allegations referred to in this British Medical Journal editorial are true -- that scientist Andrew Wakefield, who was being paid by law firms who wanted to sue vaccine companies, deliberately manufactured data linking vaccines to autism  -- then Wakefield has blood on his hands.

Count me in among the mothers who (back in 2000 when my first child was born) chose to vaccinate on a delayed and modified schedule in part because of the doubts engendered by reports like Wakefield's 1998 paper in the respected British journal Lancet. 

It has been suggested for a long time that the preponderance of the evidence since Wakefield's report tended to refute the alleged vaccine-autism connection, and I had come  to believe that it was in error -- one of those common dead-end pathways in scientific research.  Eventually, the paper was even retracted, as does happen sometimes when there prove to be mistakes.   I no longer had a concern about vaccines and autism specifically.  I hadn't been following the story closely since then, and so I wasn't expecting a finding of fraud.

Full disclosure:  I'm still unhappy with vaccines that have a fetal-tissue connection.  I still prefer to give kids one vaccine at a time the first time they get one, so that the cause of any reaction can be known.   I'm supportive of religious- and philosophical-exemption laws.  And I am aware of the concerns about vaccine reactions of other kinds, and am understanding of the nervousness with which many parents approach them, as well as being generally sympathetic with a low-medical-intervention and individual- rather than population-focused medicine.  

But this?  Outright falsification of medical data that affected vaccination decisions (and possibly disease outbreaks) in several countries, as well as influencing the direction of autism research?  

I can't figure out whether I'm outraged more as a mother or as a scientist.

(Knowing me, probably as a scientist.)

Mainstream-type folks often like to characterize alternative-type folks as crackpots.  Homeschoolers know this.  Home-birth mamas know this.  Mothers who practice extended breastfeeding know this.  Consumers of alternative medicine of all kinds know this.  People who source some of their food outside the mainstream production/processing industry know this.  Hey, religious people know this.  It's annoying to see experts whose knowledgeable advice you rely on, referred to as crackpots, or evil.

It's even more annoying when some of the  "experts" DO turn out to be  crackpots, or evil, or both.

Chemistry blogger Derek Lowe weighs in:

The 1998 paper that linked MMR vaccination with autism has had a long way to fall. It made, of course, a huge media sensation, and energized the whole vaccination/autism controversy that still (in spite of evidence) goes on. But it didn't look very robust from the start, scientifically. And over the years it's gone from "Really needs shoring up" to "hasn't been reproduced" to "looks like there's something wrong with it" to "main conclusions retracted" to the final, lowest level: outright fraud.

Here's a good history of the whole affair in the BMJ. And here's the first part of a series of articles by Brian Deer, the journalist who dug into the study and found how fraudulent it really was. Not one of the 12 cases in Wakefield's original study hold up; the data were manipulated in every single one to make it fit his hypothesis. His hypothesis that he was getting grant money for. His hypothesis that he was already planning lawsuits around, before the study even started.

His hypothesis, I might add, that has led to completely unnecessary suffering among the unvaccinated children this scare has produced over the years, and has diverted enormous amounts of time, energy, and money away from useful study of autism. This sort of deliberate action is really hard to contemplate, as a reasonable human being - it's like some sort of massive campaign to persuade people to throw bricks through the windows of ambulances.

In a better world, we'd be getting expressions of sorrow and contrition from all the celebrities and others who've profited from this business. But that's not going to happen, is it?

Don't hold your breath.

End of an era.

Derek Lowe, defending chemistry blogging against the usual charges (no fact-checking, no editorial oversight, yadda yadda yadda) is absolutely right:

There is indeed a lot of inaccurate nonsense on the internet. And everyone should read what they find online with a thought to who's written it, and why. But everyone should do the same with stuff that's printed on flattened sheets of dead trees, too, even if there are flattened-dead-tree-sheet editors and fact checkers. This is no place to list the stories that have been horribly messed up by even the most respectable of the old media. I'm thinking of a good list right now; any well-informed person should be able to. (If you can't, you're not as well-informed as you think you are). And there is indeed a lot of good science reporting in newspapers and magazines, although we can't ignore the fact that there's an awful lot of lazy and sloppy science reporting, too.

But there's a lot of inaccurate nonsense in the peer-reviewed literature, too. Without editors and reviewers there would surely be more, but too much junk gets through as it is. And if you want to see that stuff flagged, you'll do well to read the chemistry blogs.

Professional journalists -- even (especially?) sci-tech journalists -- don't have a monopoly on the wide dissemination of sci-tech information anymore.  And we're all better off for it.

A silly physics joke I hadn't heard.

From Jamie at Light and Momentary.  To my delight, much like another silly physics joke I have long appreciated, it also involves cows.

Of course, I might change it to "interrupting viscosity" or possibly to "interrupting chemical potential."  We are, after all, engineers here.

A silly physics joke I hadn't heard.

From Jamie at Light and Momentary.  To my delight, much like another silly physics joke I have long appreciated, it also involves cows.

Of course, I might change it to "interrupting viscosity" or possibly to "interrupting chemical potential."  We are, after all, engineers here.

The final form of the basic recipe: Whole wheat bread from a machine, with soaked flour.

(Other posts on soaked-flour recipes in the bread machine: 

•  an introduction and experiment #1 on keeping the yeast dry, 
•  experiment #2 (keeping the yeast dry with some of the dry ingredients), 
•   results of #2, 
•  experiment #3 (mix in the pan with only 1/2 tsp of yeast) and experiment #4 (soak the flour and liquid and add the rest later), 
•   the successful results of #3 and a consideration of how baking like this would fit into my schedule, 
•   results of #4, 
•   leaving out the sugar, 
•   the results of leaving out the sugar, 
•   the same bread with sugar but without gluten)

Results of the no-added-gluten bread with 3/4 tsp, rather than 1/2 tsp, of yeast:

Not quite perfection (the top is kind of gnarly), but the right amount of rise and a good texture.

Here it is soaking and rising in the pan before the machine came on:

So, to sum up, I started with a recipe for "buttermilk whole wheat bread" in the bread machine.  Here's how I adapted the recipe for soaking:

• Left out the added wheat gluten 
• Halved the yeast 
• Reserved the salt and added it to the top of the dough after mixing  

And here's the procedure I used with my bread machine:

• Added to the bread pan 1 and 1/2 cups whole milk soured with 1 and 1/2 Tbsp white vinegar; 2 Tbsp coconut oil; 3 cups whole wheat flour; 1 and 1/2 Tbsp sugar; 3/4 tsp bread machine yeast
• Locked the pan on the machine, set it on "quick bread," and allowed it to mix the dough.  Stopped the machine after the bread was mixed, when the machine entered the BAKE cycle. 
• Sprinkled 1 tsp salt on top of the dough. 
• Set the machine to "whole wheat" and set the timer such that the machine would not come on until the dough had rested and risen at least 8 hours in the pan. 

 The next thing I'll try to do is adapt my family's favorite recipes to this method. 

Same bread with sugar, but without gluten.

Last time I left the sugar out of my low-yeast, long-soak-and-rise bread machine bread.  The results were pretty good.  This time I kept the sugar and left out the added gluten.

Both loaves --- the one without sugar and the one without gluten --- baked up to a similar texture, with a similar flavor.  They're both a little short, but they still have a wonderfully soft texture --- I guess that's the soaking.  

I think I will continue to put sugar in my bread, because we are all very fond of honey-oatmeal bread and molasses-rye bread.  If I always put some kind of sugar in the bread, then I'll get more-or-less consistent results, I guess.  But I think I will perhaps stop putting gluten in soaked bread recipes.

I wonder, now, if I can get the loaf to rise a little higher (even without added gluten) if I add just a bit more yeast.  I think that will be the next experimental bread.