bearing blog

Later, gaiter. (That is: later, we'll know more.)

My favorite mask so far has been the polyester neck gaiter, not worn pulled up in a single layer bank-robber-style over the nose (it's not nearly tight enough for me to feel secure that way), but lapped into at least three layers and with the selvages over my head to create a tight seal everywhere around my nose and mouth.  I showed exactly how I did it, with photos, back in May, partly in hopes to encourage the "tight-gaiter-as-mask" method of wearing it instead of the looser "bandit style."

I listed numerous advantages, and then added:

Potential disadvantages:

• Polyester knit is fairly loose-weave and its specific filtration efficacy is not known.  This is the biggest caveat.  It's one reason why I try to get at least three layers over my mouth and nose.
• Some brands are pricey
• Maybe it will fog your glasses and you'll have to add some wire or something
• It's a little hard to get it just right without a mirror (at least at first)

Give it a try and see what you think.

Repeated Disclaimer:  I am not a professional dispenser of legal or medical advice, and I have not done an exhaustive literature search to determine if there is any other available data regarding polyester knit fabric as part of masks for source control in the community.    

So!  We now have a little bit---emphasis on the little---of data regarding polyester knit neck gaiters, and that little bit isn't good.  In my opinion, the scrap of data is enough to make me at least temporarily uneasy about relying on the gaiters without an added filter, so I've resumed experimenting with cotton fabric. 

In my opinion, it is not enough (yet) to rule out gaiters as an effective option. 

We really need to know more about this, because they are a very popular face-covering right now, and for good reason.  Some people believe it's the only type they can tolerate for long periods, so if it turns out that they are reasonably effective when worn in a well-fitting way, we don't want to lose them as an option.

Let's dig in to the source of this data, which is a very cool study that came out this week and which I have carefully read with some consultation assistance from my spouse, who has professional experience in particulate imaging.

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Here's a typical article's headline and excerpts, this from CBS News:

Neck gaiters may be worse than not wearing a mask at all, study shows

Using neck gaiters as a face covering might be ineffective at stopping the spread of the coronavirus, and could even spread the virus further than not wearing a covering at all, according to a new study. Researchers from Duke University found that the neck gaiter they tested was "worse than nothing." 

"The neck gaiter that we tested did essentially nothing, and worse than nothing, because it appeared to make large droplets into small droplets," Isaac Henrion, the study's co-author, told CBS News. Henrion is also the coordinator of  Cover Durham, a community project to distribute tens of thousands of masks to vulnerable people.

The neck gaiter is a circular piece of fabric that sits around a person's neck and can be pulled up to cover their mouth and nose. The issue with the convenient cover-up is likely not with its design, but with the fabric it is typically made from.

According to Henrion, the study tested a neck gaiter made of a thin, stretchy polyester, which they are commonly made from. Instead of stopping droplets that can contain the virus from escaping into the air, the fabric appeared to turn large droplets into smaller ones known as aerosols....

Duke's study focused on droplet production while talking, as opposed to coughing or sneezing...

While the study did not set out to create a definitive ranking of masks, Henrion said that N95 and standard surgical masks released the least amount of droplets. N95s yielded the best results, and surgical masks came in second, stopping 90-95% of droplets. Simple two-layer cotton masks were effective at stopping 80% of droplets from getting out when participants spoke. 

As for neck gaiters, Henrion stressed that the study was preliminary, and did not conclusively determine whether a gaiter's fabric or construction was responsible for producing smaller droplets. A neck gaiter with two layers of cotton could be more effective.

Without easy access to PPE, many people have turned to making their own masks. The study showed that homemade versions can be effective, but people should be mindful of their mask construction and fit. 

"Further research is needed to investigate the performance of bandanas and neck gaiters, since our study is only a proof of concept for the experimental method," Henrion said.

Martin Fischer, an associate research professor in Duke's chemistry department who took part in the study, told WRAL-TV it wasn't meant to rate different face coverings, adding that "Not all ... neck gaiters are bad. There are plenty good ones out there. It depends so much on the material, on how many layers you wear."

So, if you read all the way through the news article, you do see some caveats.  It's not an irresponsibly written news article; but I'd argue it's focused incorrectly.  This study --- Fischer et al., Sci. Adv. 10.1126/sciadv.abd3083 (2020) --- is not a study of mask effectiveness at all.  It appears to be a valuable and elegant study, but they did not write the paper so that they could report mask effectiveness.    It is a demonstration study of their novel apparatus.

In other words:  

Fischer et al. were not trying to use their apparatus to demonstrate the effectiveness of 14 masks.  They were using 14 masks to demonstrate the effectiveness of their apparatus.

Along the way, though, they did produce some data, which we shouldn't ignore; but we should be aware of its limitations.  

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A much better article about the study, the one that I wish had gone viral in the first place, was published in WIRED.   From the very headline and sub-head, they get the focus correctly where it belongs:  on the apparatus, not on the masks.

Scientists Put Masks to the Test---With A Cell Phone and a Laser

When it comes to blocking germs, not all cloth masks are created equal.  A new, low-cost testing device literally illuminates which ones won't get the job done.

Three cheers for journalist Megan Molteni, who wrote the article!  Three cheers for WIRED, who put all of the above in big type before the colorful illustration!  

I would love for you to read the whole WIRED article, but I'll pull out a section that's especially relevant to the neck gaiter question.  Emphases are mine.

 The neck gaiter, made out of a lightweight, breathable fabric favored by runners and cyclists, let through even more particles than the control group—110 percent relative to wearing no mask at all.

If you’re wondering how that is even possible, you’re not alone. Fischer was similarly stumped. Then he went back and looked at the footage again of himself wearing the neck gaiter. “You can see that it’s not just that there are more particles, but that on average, the particles are much smaller,” he says. His team believes the stretchy, porous material is actually fracturing bigger, heavier droplets, splintering them into tinier particles that can more easily remain suspended in the air.

If that’s true, it would blow up the maxim that any mask is better than no mask, says Kimberly Prather, an environmental aerosol researcher at UC San Diego who was not involved in the study.

But there’s another possible explanation: Maybe the extra particles aren’t all respiratory droplets. Instead, they could be fibers shedding off the material itself. This has been shown to happen before, and would be easy enough to test—but Fischer and his coauthors didn’t. “Splintering would be bad, but we don’t know for sure that’s what’s going on,” says Prather.

She also points out that the sample size for most of the mask testing is precisely one person. The study doesn’t capture all the variability in how people’s face shapes and speaking patterns might affect the effectiveness of different kinds of masks. So, while this project’s results are in line with other, larger, more rigorous studies, one shouldn’t read too much into the performance outcomes of individual masks based on this study alone, she says.

Still, Prather is impressed that the Duke team’s technique can detect particles down to half a micron. Most laser visualization methods are sensitive only to about 20 microns. “That’s a big deal, because this captures aerosols—the particles that come out during speech—not just bigger droplets emitted during coughing or sneezing,” she says. “Keeping it in perspective, I think it’ll be a great comparison tool to look at variability between people, more conditions. There’s a lot of different things you can do with the setup they’ve developed.”

Fischer and Westman also recognize the study’s shortcomings. “This was never going to be a definitive ranking of all masks under all types of conditions,” says Fischer. Doing that would require hundreds, or even thousands, more people testing lots more masks. “What we don’t want people taking away is: ‘This mask will work. This will not.’ It’s not a guide to masks. It is a demonstration of a new, simple methodology for quickly and somewhat crudely visualizing the effect of a mask,” he says.

If you would like an article that is a little more mainstream-web than the tech-web WIRED, you could try this article by Susan Matthews  in Slate.  It's more of a rebuttal to the "neck gaiters are definitely worse than nothing" narrative, and mentions other reasons why it is too soon to draw that conclusion definitively.  And it's written in a conversational style that might get the average person reading to the end. 

And, just in -- that is, a nurse friend shared this on Facebook while I am actually writing this blog right now -- here is an article from ScienceNews that has a bad headline (it isn't a "mask study!" argh) but summarizes everything I've been trying to say.  I'm being scooped in real time!

I do want to emphasize that the study is not a flawed study.  It's a good study!  And the paper is very responsibly written.  Fischer et al. themselves are very careful to explain what their work does and does not show.   It's just that media outlets don't always bother to read that far.

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I have many hot takes from all this, but as a number of them are duplicated in the news articles I've linked above, I'll restrict myself to a few in particular.

(1)  A new, cheap, effective testing method. 

The fundamental advance of Fischer et al.  is to design and describe a low-cost mask-effectiveness-testing apparatus and data analysis method that can be assembled by any research lab and even by your higher-level citizen scientist,  It is not beyond the ability of a bright high school student looking for a science fair project, or a garage tinkerer, if they can manage the data processing part or else figure out a proxy measurement.  

(2) This is the first mask-tester I have seen that actually tests the mask's performance while it is being worn by breathing humans.

Other studies of mask effectiveness have looked mainly at the filtration efficiency, by  (for example) stretching a sample of the fabric over an opening and pumping a mixture of air and saline droplets through the mask.  But the filtration efficiency of the fabric is definitely not the only significant question, and for all we know it might be one of the least important attributes.  We do not know how important the edge-seal around a mask is.  We do not know how tight a mask needs to be.  We do not know if the best mask-shape is different for different kinds of facial structures.  We do not know how well masks perform after they become wet with sweat or respiratory fluids.  We need to know these things, and the only way to find out is to test masks while they are being worn by real people.

(3) Now that an easy-to build apparatus exists, perhaps we'll soon start to see the mask studies that answer some of our questions.  

What we want to see are studies that evaluate a single type of mask in many iterations on many people, while they breathe, pant, talk, sing, cough, sneeze, and shout.   We want them to specifically identify the type of mask it applies to, and no, "fleece gaiter" is not good enough, nor is "two-ply cotton mask" or "poly-cotton blend."  What's the proportion of polyester and cotton?  What's the thread count?  Is it held on by ear loops or head ties?  In the case of a multipurpose face-covering such as a gaiter, is it worn tight to the face and jaw like I always have, or only pulled up over the nose?  I'll just point out that this study mentions three different two-layer cotton masks, and they do not measure the same.

(4)  Certain improvements that could be made will answer even more questions which are not possible with the current apparatus.  Among them:  how important are droplets that come away off to the side instead of dead-center in the front?

The authors of the paper explain that some very important questions literally cannot be answered with the apparatus as described in their paper, but in principle some design changes could close those gaps.  I'll just quote here.

A first limitation is that our experimental implementation samples only a small part of the enclosure and hence some droplets that are transmitted through the masks might not be registered in the laser beam.... The physiology of each speaker is different, resulting in variations of the position of the mouth relative to the light sheet.  Hence, the droplet count reflects only a portion of all droplets... A speaker hole that is sealed around the face would prevent the undetected escape of particles.

From looking at the diagram of the apparatus, I judge that droplets escaping around the edges of a poorly-fitted mask are the least likely to be caught at all.  So if edge-leakiness is to be evaluated, the apparatus will require development.

(5) One possibility:  This apparatus could be used to give a quick estimate of a particular person's particular mask on a particular day.  

My spouse, who unlike me does his engineering for a corporation for actual money, immediately thought of commercializing a similar design as a screening tool.  If it's vitally important that people have to have a mask that functions well on them to enter your building, you could set something like this up at the door and intercept people before they enter.  You could then, in principle, get a quick estimate of how well each person's mask is working for them, relative to a standard of your choosing.  If the mask they are wearing doesn't work well, you could advise the person to adjust the mask fit, or could offer the person a different type of mask.

(6)  It's definitely too soon to shame people who are wearing neck gaiters.

Don't do it.  I, personally, am concerned enough that I'm going to start looking for a comfortable cotton mask that fits me well (previously I had decided that the neck gaiter, twisted into a tight mask conformation, worked so well that I hadn't even bothered with cotton ones).  After all, we might find out that the gaiter really is a poor choice, and I want to be ready.  But we really do not know enough to abandon them, or the maxim that the best mask is the mask that you wear correctly and consistently.  Save your shame for the conspiracy theorists and the people who refuse to wear any mask at all.  We just don't know enough to be sure.

And I'll be frank:  One of the cotton adaptations I've tried so far, and the one that I like best, is to layer the neck gaiter on top of the cotton mask.  It's a little hot, but the tightness of the gaiter securely fastens the cotton mask to my face so it won't budge; destroys glasses-fogging; and spreads the pressure out all over my head.  But you know what?  You can't see that there's a cotton mask underneath.  So if you see me on the street with my gaiter wrapped around the lower half of my face, have pity:  I've got another layer under there.  

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My ultimate recommendation is to watch for citations of Fischer et al. in the literature.  Any paper that reproduces or improves upon their apparatus ought to be citing them, as should any paper that uses the apparatus to do a true mask study.  And if my observations about media coverage of scientific results are accurate, no matter what followup studies they perform, we'll likely never see them go viral again.

Science communication in the age of... oh gosh I'm so tired of "in the age of"

I've been thinking a lot about the power of science communication this week. 

Even though I've fallen off on blogging, I think a lot about sci-comm in general... or, now that I think about it, my thinking about sci-comm in general is part of why I've fallen off in blogging. 

When I first completed my PhD and transitioned to full-time attention to raising and educating my own family, I was highly confident that I would never be an academic or a researcher again (and not too sorry about it, although I would miss many corollary benefits).  I had an idea that sometime in the future (but with no urgency, and no plan) I might move into the broad field of sci-comm.  Journalism?   Textbook publishing?   Something to do with education?   It was then, and always has been, a vague idea.  I enjoy explaining technical things to non-technical people:  converting technical language into everyday language, and I think I have a bit of a natural talent for it; I'm untrained, if I ever decided to really make the career change I'd probably seek out some technical communications courses first to brush up on my skills, but it's always floated around in the back of my mind as "the thing I would do if I decided to re-enter the paid labor market."

(Understand, by the way, that I have zero formed plans or intentions to re-enter said market.  It's just a topic that's been on my mind a lot, especially since I decided to follow a bunch of sci-comm professionals on Twitter, who are always tweeting about how valuable it is and generally bumping it up in my consciousness a lot more.  So don't read any of this as hints that I am purposefully researching a career change.)

So why am I not blogging, then.  I guess, the more that professional writing and communication is on my mind the more clogged up I become as an amateur writer.  Sometimes I think about banging out a quick critique of  a news article on a technical topic, or an opinion piece about something or other, or even a close reading of some research article that's making the rounds in the form of bad journalism.    For a long time I was perfectly happy to blather on at length, applying mathematics or chemistry that I learned in one context to situations that are entirely different, evaluating writers in fields far outside the areas where I legitimately have some expertise.  Because I like to have broad technical competence, not narrow and specialized knowledge (I learned that when I spent seven years specializing).  I like to drill down deep here and there, all over the place, according to my interests, and as I learn, bringing other people along with me.  It's simply... fun.

But I've always been aware of the dangers of thinking that because you're an expert in one field, you get to be treated as an expert in other fields.  Even if you count expertise that isn't credentialed -- I believe it is possible, even common, for motivated and intelligent people with a good sense of what they do and don't know to develop genuine expertise outside the gates -- you run the risk of overstepping your knowledge and not realizing it, and that's downright embarrassing when you get called out by the specialists.  The generally nerdy nerd has to be a humble listener, and listen to the specialists.  There is a general technical toolbox that we all share, but the specializers are the ones who generate the majority of the information that we generalists relish, chew on, and digest.

I feel like I can come up with new ways to say things, new ways to organize information.  Occasionally I have anecdotal experiences that are worth sharing, for the purpose of raising questions about how they connect to the wider world of investigation.  I'm not doing original research.  I know this.  But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to write about other people's expertise.

Still, I am a little bit choked these days by the fear that I will either overstep my bounds, or appear to be pulling rank inappropriately:   "I have a PhD in something so you should listen to me about this other thing."   The more I appreciate the importance of general science communication, the more I respect it as a profession, the meeker I feel about engaging in it as an amateur.   It isn't imposter syndrome, exactly; there's no particular place that I belong, but feel a secret un-belonging.  It's more the backside of the popular concept of Dunning-Kruger:  I've gone over the edge of Mount Stupid and the valley on the other side is long and flat.

The image comes from here: https://www.psychmechanics.com/the-dunning-kruger-effect-why/

The other reason I think I've been hesitating is because I feel more mixed these days about having a blog that is about a million different things.  There is no way I could separate them and have one blog for recipes and homeschooling and another blog for technical writing and a third blog for theology and canon law and a fourth blog for constitutional law and... The whole reason this won't work (unless I ever do make that career change) is my penchant for general nerdiness.  I am nerdy about recipes, and homeschooling, and numerous technical topics, and canon law, and constitutional law, and language learning, and basically everything I ever think about at any time.  It's unclear to me where the dividing line is between "Personal Musings" and "Technical Communication."  

....aaaaahhhh, there is no such line for me.  I just gotta start climbing the other side of that valley.

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I'll just close here by noting something that I hope the rest of you have noticed, too:  The people who made the various popular versions of the "Flatten the Curve" graph have, personally, probably saved an uncountable number of lives. 

I'll highlight Drew Harris's version below for its unfussy and concise elegance.  This is not the work of an amateur; it's the work of an expert.  But his version nailed the clear communication of the relevant information.

The concept predates Dr. Harris, and other artists made later versions which arguably were accessible to more laypeople and included information showing how ordinary people could "flatten the curve."  Personally, I think his version marks the turning point of the dissemination of this idea.  This article traces the evolution of the idea's presentation from a 2007 CDC publication, through Dr. Harris's chart, to the memes that people are sharing today.

Now go wash your hands.

Two museum days. (I)

On Monday, Labor Day, we headed for the Boston Museum of Science.  I had been there at the 9yo’s age and fondly remembered the giant van de Graaff generators and the lightning show, which to my delight is still running.

This is on the same peninsula with where we are staying in Charlestown, so we walked there.  There is a long viaduct to cross, which took us over a lot of railroad tracks and an exciting construction site.

The Boston Museum of Science is a good-sized museum with a lot of well-designed exhibits.  I think the  designers of the permanent exhibits here have done a better job, on the whole, than the ones at the Science Museum of Minnesota.  They seem to invite kids to sit down and interact for a longer time, rather than running around whamming buttons.

Among the many imaginary jobs I fantasize about having is “science museum exhibit designer.”  I would like to study what sorts of features encourage different sorts of people to spend more time with the material.  

As it is I am only left with a visitor’s impressions, not data, and of course the problem is that I am a particular sort of person, and probably an oddball of a visitor myself.

One example of the kind of thing I think about in science museums:   It seems to me that a linear design that nudges you to pass by things one at a time (deciding at each location on the path whether to stay longer or move on) is better for deep engagement than the sort of exhibit where a big open room has many freestanding stations scattered about.  But maybe the big open room works better when sixty field-trip children descend on it at once.  This museum had a mix of both, though, and they both worked pretty well.  I must say it is a lot easier to go with Mark than if it is just me.

One thing that surprised me:  a number of exhibits involved animated models that in my opinion worked extremely well.  There was a hands-on flow-of-a-river exhibit tucked away in a corner.  From a distance I saw the 9yo playing with it, moving blocks around in the river, and thought, “Oh, it’s like the river model in the Mill City Museum at home, where you build structures in a channel of moving water and see how the flow changes.”  But when I got closer I realized that the river was animated via projection from the ceiling, and switching out the blocks triggered a change in the story the animations were telling.  So—an interactive animation with a lot of physicality.  It didn’t teach the same thing as a flowing water channel wet lab, but it did what it did very well.

 

Another pleasant surprise was that my 5yo, unlike all his siblings at that age, was relatively uninterested in running around whamming buttons to see if anything would happen in less than two seconds.  He wanted to sit down and work his way through things, and spend lots of time on a single exhibit.   Such as working through a lovely little interactive where you get to touch and examine an animal skull, and then (by pressing buttons that let you make binary choices) decide which of three animals the skull came from.  Was it predator or prey?  Have a varied diet or a monotonous one?  Did it have a strong bite or a weak one?

He sat there, with me and later his sister, reading the questions to him, and went through all six skulls.

Another thing he got totally absorbed in was a game where you select from a bin three different malaria-mitigation measures for a population of at-risk individuals, constrained by a rudimentary budget, and find out how well the combination worked based on how many animated mosquitos disappear from the screen.  We had to entice him away.

As promised, we made it to the lightning show.  I was delighted, once inside the Theater of Electricity, to discover that the whole room was essentially unchanged from when I visited in the eighties.  The leaping aluminum disk, pinging into the air and clattering back down every few minutes as museum visitors charged the electromagnet and released it, I had forgotten but remembered as soon as I heard it again.  There is a decidedly old-school exhibit on the history of mathematics tucked into the back:  it has not changed either.  I remember the model of the Mobius strip, a little mechanized arrow clicking along on a track, traversing the whole thing to demonstrate its one-sidedness.   Lots of text and pictures.  Nobody would make this exhibit today.  But I remember it with fondness.

And of course there is the world’s largest van de Graaff generator.  I walked around it, running my hands over the smooth wooden railing, and felt the same as I did at age eight when it towered above me, because of course it still does.  

And my 9yo loved the show, so there’s that.

Later, after a long rest in the apartment, we ventured out in the pouring rain to a pizza restaurant at the other end of Charlestown.  It had a stellar beer and wine list and great food.   We split a few pizzas and salads, and I drank a sour named after a banh mi sandwich and then discovered a Ligurian rosé on the menu, which I never ever ever see, so I had to have that, and it was awesome.

The little guy was still tired, and didn’t have much appetite.  He needed his sister’s hat and a napkin cape to stay warm, and later ate cereal in the apartment.   Hurray for a kitchen.

 

Meta-popular science.

One of my parallel non-fiction reads right now is The Tangled Tree by David Quammen.  It's a history of the understanding of horizontal gene transfer, so it's sort of a meta-story:  how the narrative of the origin of species has changed, especially how the shape and form of the representation of evolution's history as a tree has changed.  It's also a collection of stories about the scientists who worked on, are working on, the rather non-linear development of that knowledge.  It's well written and though I haven't finished it yet, I'm enjoying it and would recommend it.

I'm reading it now because my second son is going to study biology this year with an emphasis on evolutionary biology.  My oldest chose that topic when it was his turn, and it's easy enough for me to repeat it (since I already designed the curriculum), and it's a convenient type of homeschooler biology because it doesn't require a lab. 

(What's less convenient is finding a high-school level textbook.  I am here to tell you not to even try to find a commercial evolutionary biology textbook that is aimed at the homeschool market.  I use an introductory college text that is supposed to be accessible to non-STEM majors.)

The college text is a few years old.  Most of the principles in it are still intact (especially since it is mostly about what happens in the world of multicellular animals).   But I'm aware that the evolutionary tree re: unicellular life has changed a great deal since genome-sequencing got easier and cheaper, and I needed a quick refresher that would bring me closer to up-to-date so I could add some corrections.   

Of the major branches of scientific knowledge, biology is my weakest (I never took a class in it after ninth grade, and my ninth-grade teacher was crappy, those two things probably having something to do with one another).   So I picked up a book written for a popular audience, and I'm enjoying it, and learning enough that I can know when to say "oh, hey, the information going into the diagram on page eighty-whatever has probably been superseded---let's Google that to double check it."  So far so good.

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I pick up popular books about other fields of science from time to time as well, including ones that I'm much more familiar with.  You all know that I have a great side interest in linguistics, for instance, and I periodically read popular stuff about that, especially applied fields like translation.  I have a couple of others going at the same time as The Tangled Tree.  One of them is a biography of Claude Shannon, who (to put it succinctly) invented all the mathematical theory behind data compression.  I got interested in this because Mark was telling me about the math and we became curious about the person who came up with it, and now we're working through it as a read-aloud together.   Another one is a bit of applied educational psychology which I'm reading to see if I can understand one of my offspring just a little bit better in order to help said offspring focus on learning.  I also have a history of the synthesis of the transuranium elements lined up, for after Mark and I finish the Shannon book, maybe for me to read aloud while he drives during our next road trip.

I usually enjoy what I learn from such books.  But I have to tell you, I sometimes put them down with a feeling of unease and disappointment in myself.  It's difficult to put my finger on, but I think it's because I wonder if I have lost my ability (or the required patience) to dig through the literature itself, in a kind of atrophy of mental muscle.

If that's happened, I don't regard it as an interior fault.  There are structural factors that come into play, such as the fact that for the first decade after my transmogrification it was a severe hassle to get hold of academic publications without an academic or industry affiliation.  (And it's not a lot better now, a subject about which I can rant at length, although it's moving in the correct direction.)  And also the nontrivial problem, left to the reader, of arranging the physical space and the boundaries on the scholar's, or the creative's time.   

There's also the sheer volume of the literature---one always relies on word of mouth, social media now too of course, literature reviews that come out in this or that field and that summarize the changing shape of consensus or present multiple sides of an active debate.  The cream (or the flotsam, or even the scum!) rising to the top:  "Have you seen so-and-so's paper?"  Where do you start if you want to go straight to the primary source?  The only thing that makes sense if you value your time, and don't have students to track it down for you, is to begin with the tertiary or higher-order publications that catch your interest, and trace the citations backward.  We've done this with the Shannon book (to some extent), finding Shannon's master's thesis and reading enough of it to be certain that understanding the math behind it very well would require us to brush up with our old textbooks.  It is fun to do, this backwards-tracing, but it requires you to have a certain level of trust in the authors of the tertiaries-and-higher.  And that requires those authors not so much to be honest and smart scientists, but more honest and smart journalists.

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Behold the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect," which I unironically lift from Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect describes the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. The term was coined by author, film producer, and medical doctor Michael Crichton. He explains the irony of the term, saying it came about "because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have", and describes the term in his talk "Why Speculate?" in which he says:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them.

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

The Gell-Mann effect is not a universal phenomenon, and some believe that there is increased distrust in news media when one notices errors in reporting.

 

I'm aware of the Gell-Mann effect, and in the back of my mind as I read popular histories of science, or explanation of this or that phenomena, I've always got this tickle in the back of my mind of:  did this particular long-form journalist get it right?  Am I accepting this narrative because the writing is clear and the presentation is convincing?  Am I actually being misled here?  Would I think this matched up if I went back to the primary sources, the peer-reviewed articles, and formed my own judgment?

And then I don't go back, most of the time, because I have to prioritize other activities in my rather full life.

And I think that is why I feel a little sad when I read these books.  Trained as an academic, I learned how much I don't know.  Being a bit of an iconoclast, and not being hampered by any desire to be a team player, I walk around with a metaphorical mental stamp in my pocket that says "[citation needed.]"    I learned to say:  I do not know enough about this subject to have an informed opinion.  

Years out of the academy, I also have ceased needing to have an opinion on everything.   But I haven't ceased wanting to know enough to have an opinion, and so I feel a little sad that I can't track everything down enough to do so.

+ + +

One way for me to mentally make peace with that slight discontent:  I have developed an even stronger interest in sci-comm as sci-comm, in the way that technical information is adapted to suit the needs and background levels of the various audiences.   I'm endlessly fascinated with the way complex information changes, or remains constant, as it is transmitted to different ears or eyes and minds through different media. 

Taking a step back and evaluating:  is this clear? is this correct? is this maintaining my attention? what is working and what is not?  This is a tool of detachment (I don't have to feel part of the intended audience) and also a way for me to think about what I am thinking.  I'm not sure whether it makes me a good scholar or a bad one, or really if it's just proof of being an ex-scholar; but it makes me feel more comfortable because I feel I've preserved my integrity.  These questions are something I can get at directly and immediately, unlike the content itself.  Of that, I must be satisfied (much more often than I'd like) to take someone else's word for it.

Other nerdy/sci-comm people's takes on the eclipse.

Just in case my own nerdy take wasn't enough for you:  I'm going to gather here just a few links to eclipse reactions from minor celebrities in the world of science communications (that's what I mean by sci-comm, of course).  

If I come across more, I might add more.

+ + +

Derek Mueller runs Veritasium, "a channel of science and engineering videos featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science."

 Some months ago he had an exchange with Dianna Cowern of PhysicsGirl, which he made public recently via Twitter as "evidence of before and after."  Cowern is in gray and Mueller is in blue:

 

"Particles line up. Big deal."

Here's the Veritasium episode that he filmed during the eclipse.  Still no big deal?

Mueller writes:

As the moon passed in front of the sun turning day to night and revealing the sun’s corona, apparently all I could think to say was ‘Oh my goodness!’

 + + +

 My kids (and I) are big fans of Smarter Every Day, which is produced by Destin Sandlin.   Sandlin's best work involves high-speed videography, of things like jellyfish stings and exploding glass drops.  

Before the eclipse he issued a couple of videos with tips about what to look for and photograph during the eclipse:

 

 

Clearly, Sandlin didn't have the "no big deal" attitude, but he still wound up more excited than he expected.  Along with photographer Trevor Mahlmann, he traveled to the only location in the U. S. where it was possible to watch the transit of the International Space Station across the sun at the same time as the eclipse.  Here's his video -- in which it is revealed that this extraordinarily precise camaraman was so blown away, he forgot to remove some of his lens caps.

 

+ + +

Finally, here's the incomparable xkcd, drawn by Randall Munroe:

Munroe's mouseover caption:  

I watched from a beautiful nature reserve in central Missouri, and it was--without exaggeration--the coolest thing I've ever seen.

I wasn't far away, and I agree. 

 

Totality: August 21, 2017.

In March I suggested to Mark that we get a hotel reservation for August 20, 2017, in the path of totality somewhere, because I had heard that hotels were filling up.  Within a couple of days he had gone online, searched, easily found a couple of rooms in a motel northeast of Kansas City for $80 each, and reserved them without fanfare.   I think he may even have laughed at me a little for worrying that there would be nearly no rooms left, although he did warn me that they were not nonsmoking rooms. When we checked into that motel Sunday night, the clerk informed Mark that those rooms had only come available as a result of a computer glitch that incidentally left them underpriced for a two-day window, during which Mark had happened to log on.    That had been the start of our luck.

+ + +

I was worried about disappointing everyone, about dragging the family down to Missouri only to see a cloudy sky; about thirteen hours of driving round-trip for a two-minute experience.   I was also worried about being trapped in a gigantic national traffic jam. I was following people on Twitter who had made three, four, six lodging reservations spaced along hundreds of miles of the eclipse path.  I knew people who would be in Tennessee, South Carolina, Wyoming.  Two weeks out I started watching the projected "sky cover" forecasts.  The center of the country did not look good.  But that was where our reservation was, so we would go there anyway and hope for the best.  

"Maybe," Mark suggested, "we can get up in the morning, check the forecast, and drive to get away from the clouds."  I fretted, and I packed the car with 36 hours' worth of food and water.  

+ + +

When I was a very small child I owned a paperback picture book called "Something is Eating the Sun."  I think I remember choosing it at Books & Co. in my hometown.  It was a riff on Chicken Little, a series of barnyard animals becoming increasingly worried about the bites being taken out of the sun's disk, page by page.  The last page warned readers against following the animals' example and looking directly at the sun during an eclipse.  

When I was a bigger child (almost certainly on July 6, 1982, when I was seven) there was a total lunar eclipse visible from my street.  I remember being allowed to stand outside barefoot in the street after my bedtime.  I don't remember what it looked like, but I vaguely remember being disappointed that it did not look like something was eating it.

I got older, and I learned about the solar system and the law of gravitation, Kepler's laws, the mathematics of ellipses, a bit of astronomy.  I learned about how the Royal Society made observations during the eclipse of May 29, 1919 that tested the theory of general relativity.  Total solar eclipses were a thing in the planetary domain that I had never seen but that I understood, the way I understood that the moon made the tides.  I had studied ebb and flow, neap tide and spring tide, the lag behind the moon and the slowing of the earth's rotation.  I had eventually been to the seashore and seen the water rise and fall, the moon's work between my feet and flowing cold around my ankles.  Someday, I might see a total eclipse too.

I was a sophomore at Ohio State when I saw a partial phase of the annular eclipse of May 10, 1994.  The square courtyard between McPherson Lab and Smith Lab was full of people trying to look at the sun through Pop-tart wrappers and CDs.  I had no light filter and knew better than to look at the sun, but I could feel the temperature drop and see the strangeness of the light.  I stopped to sit down next to some shrubbery;  its shadow was spangled with perfectly identical crescents of light, an unexpected phenomenon that delighted me, none the less because I recognized the pinhole effect immediately even though I did not know to look for it until that moment.  No one around me had noticed the shrubbery shadow yet, and it felt for a moment like a private secret between me and the universe.

That got me a little more interested.  And when I encountered Annie Dillard's essay "Total Eclipse," much later, I began to think seriously:  If I get a chance to experience an eclipse, I shouldn't miss it.

+ + +

All this is to say that I knew what would happen.   I knew, too, that other people knew even better than me.  I know in the bottom of my being that the planets and the moons move in their elliptical orbits so simply and in accord with laws that are themselves so simple, that the locations and times of all the eclipses for hundreds of years in the future have already been mapped; so simple that indeed people have been predicting them for hundreds of years, before computers, before calculators, before pencils.  Eclipses are a tame thing, a trivia question, a child's picture book, a just-so story.   They may be rare, but they are a caged specimen.  A famous gem of the natural world. I knew everything about them.  I was even well informed, thanks to Annie Dillard, that they were an emotionally moving experience that was worth driving a few hours to see.  I get it, I get it; we'll go.  I knew it would be cool.

Or so I thought.

+ + +

Rain poured and lightning flashed in the morning in Kansas City.  We checked out of our hotel at 11 am and ran through the rain into a McDonald's, where patrons were watching the crescent sun on big screen teevees, a feed from the west coast where the eclipse had already started.

  

One hour and forty-five minutes to totality.

 The parking lot was flooding and the sky was leaden.  "At least we got to eat Kansas City barbecue last night," I was saying.  I was tense.  I had dragged the whole family down here for nothing.  

Mark said:  "We'll check the weather radar and drive towards clear skies."

I said:  "There will be traffic jams.  Maybe we had better stay put and hope that the rain passes."

Mark grinned at me and said:  "You know what this is?  This is an adventure.  This is a weather-dependent activity.  I do these all the time."  And in that moment, I realized that whether we saw the sun or not, it was going to be okay.

 + + +

Fifteen minutes later we were in the car.  Mark was driving fifty miles an hour in the pouring rain, twisting left and right between fields of tall corn, and I had a phone in each hand: one displaying the static, zoomable map of the totality path, and one tracking our little pulsing blue circle along the back roads northeast of Kansas City.  "Does this road go east?" Mark was saying.  "The skies are clearer to the south, but the car says it's going east."

One hour and twelve minutes to totality.

"It goes southeast," I repeated through the thunder of the rain on the roof of the car.

 "The car is going east--"

"It zigzags.  On average, it's southeast.  We have to stay on this road to cross the river."

Our oldest, from the back seat, with a third phone open to live weather radar:  "After we cross the river we need to cut west."

"West?  Really?"

"West!  After we cross the river."

Sixty minutes to totality.

 

There was a patch of blue sky, and Mark made for it.  Amazingly, there were not a large number of cars on the road with us.

We came out of the rain.

Fifty-three minutes to totality.

"GO GO GO" I typed into Facebook.  A friend under blue skies in Tennessee replied:  "It's like Twister in reverse."  It was.  We were chasing the edge of the storm from the inside.  I documented our location (Lexington, MO):

Forty-three minutes to totality.

Blue skies were ahead.

+ + +

"Let's stop here."

"We've got time."

"Look, there's space at this crossroads." 

"We can get farther."

And then we passed a little driveway into a pasture, with a little chained gate a few yards from the road, and a pond on the other side of the gate, and Mark said:  "That's where I'm going to stop.  He pulled into the driveway of a bed and breakfast that was the next mailbox down, turned around, and went back to the little driveway and pulled in.

I got out of the car and I saw my shadow:

 

Twenty-five minutes to totality.

  

The sky.

 

+ + +

We set up telescopes, and pulled out our eclipse glasses embedded in paper plates for safety, and I looked up at the crescent sun and I realized that it was really going to happen.  The children were positively leaping.  

    

We put the three-year-old in the van for safety's sake, partly so he would not look at the sun, but mostly so he would not wander into the road.  And we looked up, and stopped taking photos, and waited.  

We felt it get cooler.  We saw the light going all wrong, and I saw Mark laughing:  "This light is crazy!"

"It's like a tornado sky," said my daughter.  I agreed, it was like that.

The crickets began to sing.  The children exclaimed over the shadow bands rippling in the road.  I stood next to the van door so that I could keep some attention on the three-year-old.  I watched the crescent get smaller through the eclipse glasses.  This was so interesting that I forgot to look around at the deepening sky, or look to see the great shadow coming.  I watched through the eclipse glasses until the light was completely gone and the children started shrieking.  Then I looked.

+ + +

I had known what was going to happen.   And... I had not known.   What happened to me was this:  

I staggered backward, two, three, steps, staring at the sky.  I'm not sure if I was recoiling, or backing up to try to take it all in -- either way, something crazy that couldn't make sense, because there is no way to get farther from the sky.  "Oh, my God," I was saying, over and over again.  

Yes, I could see the corona, ghostly in the blackness, and Venus down and to the right.  Yes, I could see the ruby-colored sparkles around the black disk of the moon.  Yes, it was beautiful.  

It was not like seeing the tide rise and fall according to the tables.  It was not like knowing that general relativity had been proven correct.  It was just like the photographs, and yet it was nothing like the photographs.  It looked just like the photographs, but standing there between a pasture and a cornfield, in the chilly midday of August, was not 

I know some people say that it was like a religious experience.  It was not like that for me.  A religious experience is a sense of communing with the supernatural.  I am kind of familiar with those, oddly enough.  This was new.  It was a natural experience.   And it was making tears well out of my eyes.  

"Oh, my God," I kept saying.  My 13-year-old son kissed me on the cheek.  I became aware of someone standing close behind me, grasping my bare upper arms in his warm hands.  I remember deciding that it was probably Mark, but I could not tear my eyes away from the moon and the sun.  

+ + +

The first thing I came up with to try to explain the experience was:  Have you ever seen videos of audiences from the Beatles' tour of the U. S. in 1964?  The young women weeping and dropping to their knees upon catching sight of the stars?  I always wondered what on earth would make people act like this.  But having seen the eclipse, I think it was a little bit like that, an extremely nerdy celebrity sighting.  I am a science nerd.  It is essential to my being.  Total solar eclipses are celebrities, rare celebrities, a thing that I thought was tame but that has tamed me, apprivoisé, a thing I know like an old friend, like Fibonacci's sequence, like the digits of pi, like the hydrogen atom.  

And there it was right in front of me!  A thing I'd hoped to see for my whole life, but not ever allowed myself to long for, because maybe I would never attain it.  And now I was face to face with it, and I knew -- knew -- it was something worth longing for.  Had always been.  And I was, in fact, weeping at the sight, and my knees really were weak.

+ + +

You can study the biology of human gestation for your whole life, become an expert, do original research, earn a medical degree, a Ph. D., see patients, weigh evidence, make predictions, feel the satisfaction of measuring the outcomes and watching them come true.  Knowledge is valuable.  And yet:  it is not a substitute, never can be a substitute, for bringing your own child to birth.  It's not the same.  

You can know everything that's going to happen, and everything can progress exactly as you expect, and then experience knocks you back, with something you didn't even know was there, something beyond knowledge, something that ties you to every other human on the planet who has ever experienced the thing, and forever separates you from those who haven't.

And they don't know either, any more than you did, in the time before.

+ + +

The second thing I came up with to describe the experience was:  It was less like an event than it was like a feature, like the mountains and the sea are features of our planet, but this is a feature of the solar system instead, the first feature I ever really got to see.   Oddly enough, the starry night sky seems also to be a feature of our planet; even though it is located outside the planet, it looks the same all the time; we can look in different directions from here, but the view is essentially the same.  The planets moving against the sky is a little like this, but you cannot really watch it happen because it is too slow.   

Our planet has some very beautiful features.  Before Monday I often said that the most beautiful place I have ever been is the Alps above the Chamonix Valley; I said that the first time I went there when I was in college, and I said it again when I returned with my husband and five children twenty years later.  I have seen and heard other beautiful features:  certain birds and jellyfish, certain beaches at sunrise, certain echoes of laughter ringing in columned arcades, certain cleverly shaped and polished stones.   The total solar eclipse is like that:  a thing worth traveling to see, all by itself, but it's not of this earth, it's of something larger, it's of the sun and all its orbiters, including me.  The limited slips of time in which it happens, well, that's just part of the directions to get there, they're simply directions that include both time and space.

I will be back in the Alps very soon, and I somehow think it will no longer be the most beautiful place I have ever been. 

+ + +

If there's one thing I perceive intellectually more than I did before, it's the tremendous gift given to us at the formation of the solar system, the gift of a moon that is, sometimes, the same size in the sky as our sun.   Much larger or closer and it would cover up the corona; much smaller or farther, and we would never have totality.   It did not have to be that way, and it is, for no particular reason; it just is.  A gift.  Everything that is beautiful is a gift, but knowing it increases its beauty.

I knew that, but I know it more now, and I am truly grateful.

+ + +

It was over fast, and the light came back, and the shadow bands were streaming over the road, like the shadows of clouds, but impossibly fast.  And we threw everything in the car and raced to beat the traffic going home on I-35.

The memory of those two minutes and nine seconds is truly dreamlike; I remember the feeling, the shock, the staggering backwards, the tears, reaching my hand out to the van to steady myself.  One of the strangest parts of the memory is the way I realized that Mark was standing behind me and holding me:  that I hadn't even noticed him coming up to me and putting his hands on my arms, the way he seemed to came out of nowhere, the way I had become aware of that sensation without really being aware of what it meant, or who he was, or thinking, really, about anything at all.

Astonishment.  Pure astonishment, and a sight, and even now I can barely remember the sight, but in a breath I can remember the way the astonishment took hold of me.  I can relive it, sometimes, not by watching videos of the sun disappearing, but by hearing audio of the crowds gasping and stammering, the way I gasped and stammered.

Will it happen again, if I travel to see another one?

I don't know.  I will find out, I hope, in 2024.

Presenting as imperfect.

I'm so glad that Anne at Preventing Grace gave me this kind shout out in her piece If I Work Hard Enough I Win the other day:

... I am about to turn in all my school reports. And I have made a detailed book list for the fall. And two friends were chatting away about bullet journaling (which turns out not to be at all what I imagined). And then Bearing Blog wrote about how she divvies up her time and keeps her mental health always in view. (Oh how I love Bearing Blog and her calm, rational way of thinking.) And it reminded me that, when I’m in the thick of a school year, I do get into an ugly, constraining loop of not being able to stop working.

In fact, sometimes when I am on holiday I am not able to stop working. And sometimes, when it’s a nice, pretty day outside, I am not able to stop working. Last year I spent most of our sunny weeks away cleaning, picking up, and neglecting the stack of books I had brought to read....

So, obviously, as per usual, of course, necessarily, as I vow every year, I don’t want to do this again. I want to find The Perfect Organizational System that will remove entirely the existential gaping maw of failure. Because, of course, if I just do all the work, I won’t fail. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s me just working hard enough and not forgetting anything that is the difference between life and death.

I was going to leave a comment at Anne's blog along the lines of "You really should say, 'Bearing Blog wrote about how she TRIES to keep her mental health always in view,'" but then I remembered my own advice to myself in the linked blog post, the one where I resolved to blog before I get any work done or do anything else.  Well, there was more to it than that, but  anyway, I should blog before I write the key to the chemistry test, and if I leave the comment at her blog first, my thought will be spent.

(One of my problems is that my mental health is always in view.  I am forever craning my neck to see over and around it.)

+ + +

At any rate, today I want to share a post from the excellent physics blog, Gravity and Levity.

Momentary digression.   I first started blogging in 2005, not quite a year after I finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering.  It was probably right about the time that I was deciding to hang up the idea of switching to technical editing and developing a free-lance network.  And I hadn't yet gotten to  the place where I would accept that I wasn't ever going to get around to cutting and polishing the three publishable pieces of my thesis and shopping them to the appropriate journals, a place of acceptance that I wouldn't finally reach until my academic adviser passed away about two years later.

At the time, I thought that I might do quite a lot of science blogging, in between the recipes and the self-help, commentary on news articles and the like, and so I read some science blogs.  But as time went on, I got bored with all but a few.  It turns out that I don't have time to write commentary on all the Science News that passes by the world's eyes day after day, shining for a moment, inspiring a burst of chatter, then passing back into oblivion.  

It also turns out that a steady diet of Science News is extremely irritating -- maybe not to everybody with research training and a grasp of mathematics and statistics, but at least to me.  Oh my.  I don't even want to go there right now, lest I lose the whole point of my post, but Science Journalism is bad.  It's not all bad, but so much of it is very bad.  And Science Facebook is also very bad.  Painful, even.   Ok, I don't want to get into this, but just so I can be a little less vague, the features that bug me the most are 

• Identifying non-science (e.g., engineering, technology, and nature-education) as "science"
• The disturbing lack of a word other than "science" for fields in which reproducible experimentation is impossible, meaning that those fields' findings acquire an undeserved aura of certainty and universality that should be reserved for physical law
• Identifying the policy opinions of a person who is employed as a scientist as "science"
• Appeals to authority -- the logical-fallacy form, that is
• Ascribing magical certainty to anything called "science"
• Statistics deployed for any reason by people who do not understand them
• The entire system of publish-or-perish and peer review, which discourages negative results and which relentlessly pressures working scientists to get "good" results, thereby undermining the scientific method

There's also the problem of specialization.  I only studied in depth one little tiny area in materials science and engineering.  I can't comment with a post-graduate level of expertise on anything else, except for the general skills that one develops along the way (mostly math and procedure).  

Anyway, the gist of that is that I don't read many science blogs anymore.  I do read some scientists' blogs, though, because people who write generally and well and bring their perspective as a complete nerd to whatever interests them are the people I like to hang out with, virtually speaking.

Ahem.

+ + +

So, back to Brian's recent post at Gravity and Levity, Toward a Culture of Tolerating Ignorance.   He begins with some words about impostor syndrome, and then dives into the practical advice, which I'll quote at length.

There is one practice that I have found very helpful in my pursuit of a scientific career, and which I think is worth mentioning.  It’s what I call fostering a “culture of tolerating ignorance.”

Let me explain.

As a young (or even old) scientist, you continually feel embarrassed by the huge weight of things you don’t know or don’t understand.  Taking place all around you, among your colleagues, superiors, and even your students, are conversations about technical topics and ideas that you don’t understand or never learned.  And you will likely feel ashamed of your lack of knowledge.  You will experience some element of feeling like a fraud, like someone who hasn’t studied hard enough or learned quickly enough.  You will compare yourself, internally, to the sharpest minds around you, and you will wonder how you were allowed to have the same profession as them.

These kinds of feelings can kill you, and you need to find a way of dealing with them.

I have found that the best strategy is to free yourself to openly admit your ignorance.  Embrace the idea that all of us are awash in embarrassing levels of ignorance, and the quickest way to improve the situation is to admit your ignorance and find someone to teach you.

In particular, when some discussion is going on about a topic that you don’t understand, you should feel free to just admit that you don’t understand and ask someone to explain it to you.

If you find yourself on the other side of the conversation, and someone makes such an admission and request, there are only two acceptable responses:

1. Admit that you, also, don’t understand it very well.
2. Explain the topic as best as you can.

Most commonly, your response will be some combination of 1 and 2.  You will be able to explain some parts of the idea, and you will have to admit that there are other parts that you don’t understand well enough to explain.  But between the two of you (or, even better, a larger group) you will quickly start filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge.

A culture where these kinds of discussions can take place is a truly wonderful thing to be a part of.  In such an environment you feel accepted and enthusiastic, and you feel yourself learning and improving very quickly.  It is also common for creative or insightful ideas to be generated in these kinds of discussions.  To me, a culture of tolerating ignorance is almost essential for enjoying my job as a scientist.

The enemies of this kind of ideal culture are shame and scorn.  The absolute worst way to respond to someone’s profession (or demonstration) of ignorance is to act incredulous that the person doesn’t know the idea already, and to assert that the question is obvious, trivial, and should have been learned a long time ago.  (And, of course, someone who responds this way almost never goes on to give a useful explanation.)  An environment where people respond this way is completely toxic to scientific work, and it is, sadly, very common.  My suggestion if you find yourself in such an environment to avoid the people who produce it, and to instead seek out the company of people with whom you can maintain enthusiastic and non-scornful conversations.

+ + +

Of course, I have two general responses to Brian's post, which you should really go read in its entirety (if only so you can follow the embedded links -- they are also very good -- and read some of the comments).

The first response is the almost obligatory, "I wish I had read and assimilated this before I started graduate school."

 High school, even.   I emerged into adulthood with a defensive habit of pretending I knew things instead of asking dumb questions or even shutting up and listening, because I feared scorn.  Even though I only had this habit in some contexts, not others, it didn't serve me well in the long term.  (Being able to bullshit very well can be a lucrative skill, but I don't possess that kind, at least not in person.  Maybe Anne's praise is evidence that I can do it in writing a little bit.) 

The second response is that one does not have to be working in academia to put this advice into practice.  Almost any collaborative community in which you find yourself is one in which people have varying levels of knowledge of the subjects at hand.  You can use it at work, in your volunteer groups, in your teams, and in your family.   

Ask questions.  Honor questioning.  The higher your position, the greater your responsibility.  Answer questions.   Eliminate scorn.   

(The hardest part?  Resisting the temptation to conversationally scorn for their ignorance people who are not present, including public figures in the news.  And yet, if you wish to send the message "You are valued, unconditionally, and it is no crime to be ignorant," to impressionable and vunerable people around you, you must demonstrate to them that your tone will be the same even when the vulnerable people are out of the room.)

+ + +

There are so many things I didn't have figured out when I was starting out, things I realize now that I wish I could have known then.   It was true about my brief time in academia, and it's true about my longer life making a home and raising children.   But that's the nature of living in time:  you get wiser as you go, and logically that means you must have started out pretty green.  Embracing that logic really does relieve a lot of stress.  

But that, too, is the sort of thing you get better at with practice.

Why it's important for science teachers to teach theories that aren't "true."

At Gravity and Levity, a defense of teaching the Bohr model of the atom (at least as a prerequisite to teaching more modern models).  

The Bohr model has been discredited, but it's still very useful.

A few years ago, at a big physics conference, I was party to an argument about whether we should be teaching the Bohr model of the atom in lower-level physics classes.  The argument in favor was that the Bohr model is easy to teach and gives a simple way to think about the structure of atoms.  The argument against was that the Bohr model is completely outdated, conceptually inaccurate, and has long been superseded by a more correct theory.  The major statement of the opposition argument was that it doesn’t do anyone much good to learn an idea that’s wrong.

How strongly I disagree with that statement!

What follows is an explanation of the Bohr model and also an explanation of a similar problem in physics (Landau levels) that, in the blogger's opinion, itself justifies the teaching of the Bohr model.  But he says -- and I agree -- that there are deeper reasons:

I can’t resist making a larger comment here about the idea that certain scientific ideas shouldn’t be taught because they are “not true.”

Science, as I see it, is not really a business of figuring out what’s true.  As a scientist, it is best to take the perspective that no scientific theory, model, or idea is really “true.”  A theory is just a collection of ideas that can stick in the human mind as a useful way of imagining the natural world.

Given enough time, every scientific theory will ultimately be replaced by a more correct one.  And often, the more correct theory feels entirely different philosophically from the one it replaces.  But the ultimate arbiter of what makes good science is not whether the idea an true, but only whether it is useful for predicting the outcome of some future event.  (It is, of course, that predictive power that allows us to build things, fix things, discover things, and generally improve the quality of human life.)

It is undeniable at this point that the Bohr model is decidedly not true.  But, as I hope I have shown, it is undoubtedly very useful for scientific thinking.  And that alone justifies its presence in scientific curricula.

I would like to add that it's pretty impossible to understand what makes a revolutionary idea (like quantum physics) revolutionary, unless one has some concept of what came before.

 

You don't have to overdo it.

Article in the NYT Well Blog: Why 4 Workouts a Week May Be Better Than Six.

And how about just two workouts a week? Really -- almost as good.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily...

[R]esearchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women, ages 60 to 74, and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group... completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week...

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups....

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued....Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

I have long advised people who want to become "one of those people who works out" to start with twice a week, and try to keep that up for a good long while. I only manage three times a week myself, and that is if I am lucky and nothing derails me. Twice a week can be life-changing -- it is frequent enough to see and enjoy progress, but not enough to cause burnout. Whether it requires stressful schedule juggling depends on how full your schedule already is, and on what you are currently filling your time with.

 

Posted with Blogsy

A little middle-aged motivation for you.

The NYT "Well Blog" describes a study that's good news for those of us who are committed to staying fit in middle age -- or who have time to practice better habits between now and then.

[W]e are spending more years living with chronic disease and ill health — not the outcome that most of us would hope for from a prolonged life span.

But a notable new study published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that a little advance planning could change that prospect. Being or becoming fit in middle age, the study found, even if you haven’t previously bothered with exercise, appears to reshape the landscape of aging.

Here's the deal, as best as I can figure it out:  Waaaay back in 1970, a group of more than 18,000 healthy, chronic-disease-free middle-aged men and women (average age:  49) had visited  a clinic for a treadmill test to determine their aerobic fitness.  

According to the blog, the data was still around in recent years, when researchers used it to divide the group into five "fitness categories" based on the results of that long-ago treadmill test.  (Most of them fell in the "least-fit" category.)  

Then, in a first-of-its-kind data comparison, the researchers checked the same individuals’ Medicare claim records (with permission) from 1999 through 2009, by which time most of the participants were in their 70s or 80s.

What they found was that those adults who had been the least fit at the time of their middle-age checkup also were the most likely to have developed any of eight serious or chronic conditions early in the aging process. These include heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and colon or lung cancer.

The adults who’d been the most fit in their 40s and 50s often developed many of the same conditions, but notably their maladies appeared significantly later in life than for the less fit. Typically, the most aerobically fit people lived with chronic illnesses in the final five years of their lives, instead of the final 10, 15 or even 20 years.

This is pretty good news, especially if you're

• (a) already a fit middle-aged person, 
• (b) not yet middle-aged, or
• (c) just beginning middle age and thinking about developing good habits.

Moving from the least-fit to the second-least-fit category appears to have the strongest effect.  If that's so, then going from total couch potato to not-quite-completely-a-couch-potato might make a big difference in how many years you spend as an infirm adult.

The aerobic fitness level at that middle-aged checkup did not affect lifespan nearly as strongly as it affected quality of life.   It "compressed" the years of infirmity.  To put it bluntly, this suggests that a public health effort which managed to encourage activity in the middle age years could well pay off in long-term health care costs.

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Of course, this might not demonstrate a causal relationship.  Even though all these adults were healthy and free of chronic disease in 1970, maybe the least-fit ones were unfit because of some underlying, deep condition that also caused them to develop chronic disease sooner than the fitter ones.  Maybe a choice to become fitter wouldn't have changed that.

But then again, maybe it would have.  Maybe individuals who decided to become fitter would have paid more attention to the signals their body sent them, and would have detected problems earlier.  Maybe a habit of exercise would have given them confidence to change other habits.  Maybe getting out of the house more would have improved their mental health.  We really don't know.  

I think this is really good news for my readers out there, most of whom are women in their childbearing years, and who don't see much concrete motivation to work on fitness habits.  You've got time, folks. 

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I would be interested in knowing more details about the age range and about how the individuals were divided into fitness quintiles, but don't have quick and easy access to the journal.  

(HINT HINT HINT, those of you with access to Arch. Intern. Med.   I believe this is the link.)