Category Archives: Science

On TED talk and Book about The Blank Slate

As soon as I get to read Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, I’ll give a more complete review. But I wholeheartedly agree with at least two of his points. First is the basic premise that people are born with a ‘first draft’ of their attitude toward life already built in. Secondly, and related to this, is his assessment of the ‘decline of the arts’. It’s bullshit. The arts are alive and well. What is declining is an interest in pedantic pseudo-intellectualism in the arts. We’re getting back to a more grounded artistic sensibility that actually takes into account what people actually like. That seems unsophisticated. Sophistication for its own sake had its heyday. It’s over.

But sophistication can come back. Sophistication now should be about bridging discipline gaps. Instead of intellectual masturbation, (forming connections to yourself) artists need to go study neuroscience and learn how to make people tick. Or make connections to other sciences or history and try to teach people something beautiful in a way that is beautiful. Forge new connections. We all need to bridge Snow’s Two Cultures. This is meaningful. It will give birth to new ideas. It’s intellectual procreation.

Cheers,
Peter

 

Dark Science: on freeing the negative results

Hi all. Sorry for the long silence. My dissertation is defended – I passed. I’m qualified as a PhD!

So this whole presentation and dissertation thing reminded me of some work I did a few years ago. I got it published after a struggle, but one reviewer specifically recommended against publication because it was a ‘negative result’. I showed that a peptide implicated in Alzheimer’s disease does not affect synaptic vesicles. It seemed like al ikely hypothesis at the time.

I think a “Journal of Negative Results” would be a good idea. There’s been some rumbling about this on the net. Wired magazine did a great piece on it called “Freeing the Dark Data”.

Well, in any case, there is one, now, it turns out. The Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine publishes studies that show that show things that are useful in the sense that they say “don’t bother trying this hypothesis. We already tested it.”

That’s a simplification, of course, but from a researcher’s standpoint, things in that spirit have tended to go unpublished. Articles like this make it sound like scientists are hiding data that doesn’t suit their fancy. Really, if they have some hypothesis (“I’ll bet drug A will work a lot better if we include drug B”) and then they test it and find out it’s totally false, it feels like failure. And it’s hard to publish. Journals don’t want low-impact articles like “Drug B does not change the activity of Drug A.” They want titles like “Drug B enhances effects of Drug A by 1000%”

Plus, it seems like scientists should know what they are doing. Why were we wrong when we predicted that Drug B would enhance Drug A? Were we being foolish? Nobody wants to look foolish.

So maybe with this kind of journal, this will start to change. This is good for science in the long run. If somebody, later, reads that the fact that Drug A and B don’t affect each other, it might have huge implications that are not obvious now. Why repeat the experiment? If the data is out there, that’s to everyone’s benefit. It even seems like Google (“don’t be evil”) is getting on board.

Cheers,
Peter

Extremely cynical: the Politics of Fear

I have tried to avoid making the topic of the Big Upshot political. I’ve skirted the line with that recent post about Ukraine and Russia. I admit that. For the most part, I just don’t think that I can do a lot of good in the political sphere. I could write inflammatory, poorly-researched posts about surface issues, but there are lots of those already. I could write well-researched, well thought-out, powerful analyses, but I suspect nobody would read them. So, instead, I try to focus on the humor of science and the humor of living around science.

 

But this was just too much. ScienceNow at Science Magzine (Arguably the most prestigious publication on the map) posted a piece called “The Politics of Fear.” Not too long ago, The Jester talked about our culture of Fear and Consumption.His opinion is that the fear-memes of that kind prey on our natural responses to scary, threatening things. Evidently, it is more than just speculation. The article over at ScienceNow sums up an article by Okley et. al. called “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits.” The article correlates genetics, fear responses and political decisions.

The implication is that some people have a more pronounced fear response – they are easier to scare and upset. And this correlates with the person for whom they vote. People who are threatened easily (“Are you threatening me?!”) probably are easier to influence with lies and scary pronouncements in paid TV commercials. Evidently, this is so much the case that they will vote against their own selfish interest.

I’m afraid that I have a hard time not reading this with a very cynical eye. The implication is that it is hopeless to try to have a good political debate (in my naivete, I thought I would see one this election). This scientific result implies that inflammatory, poorly-researched diatribes will win consistently over well-researched, well thought-out, powerful analyses. They will excite different kinds of brains, and I’ll let you guess which are more strongly represented in the general population.

Sorry for the cynicism today. I miss my girl.

-Peter

New documentary, F.L.O.W, and why bottled water is absurd

F.L.O.W. is a new documentary on water. On Democracy Now Sept. 12 2008, they discussed it and, in particular, the topic of bottled water. When I was in Ukraine, I was told both by locals and by the tour guide that it was not smart to drink the local tap water (unless it was boiled). Ukraine is a whole different situation than in the U.S. We have clean tap water here. The water out of your tap is more tightly regulated and is almost certainly more safe than bottled water. And it is orders of magnitude cheaper.

 

The oft-quited statistic is that the U.S. alone spent $15 billion on bottled water in 2007. Well, check this out:

“The United Nations Millennium Development Goal for environmental sustainability calls for halving the proportion of people lacking sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. Meeting this goal would require doubling the $15 billion a year that the world currently spends on water supply and sanitation”

With what the U.S. alone spends on bottled water that we don’t need we could alleviate the very real need for half of the world’s population. That, ladies and gentlemen, is shameful.

-Peter

Ukraine and more biofuels – politics and energy research and development

My mind is on the Ukraine a lot these days. My dear betrothed lives there. For those of you living in a cave, Russia and NATO were having a little tiff over Georgia. Last month, a US official, Richard Holbrooke, predicted that Ukraine would be next. I think the situations are pretty different, and the Guardian agrees. From some reports I heard through the underground grapevine (who can you trust these days?) Georgia tried to expel some ethnic Russians. That’s why Russia stepped in. Or Russia cooked up the story as an excuse after they moved in. Who knows? But Georgia has allies and European ambitions… so we got escalations.

Will Ukraine try to expel its ethnic Russians? Doubtful. It’s a much bigger country with a lot more Russians. Could Russia claim this was happening as an excuse to annex Crimea (where they have navy bases)? Maybe. If Russia tries to annex Crimea for whatever reason, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I’m a scientist, not a soldier. And what side do you fight for? Besides, I don’t speak Russian well at all.

 

I had a faint notion in the back of my mind of going to Ukraine some day to see if I could start a biofuels R&D business. It’s a fertile country with a huge energy deficit and an underused intelligentsia. It seems like a prime location. But the political situation, clearly, leaves much to be desired.

A company spin out just started up here at the U. of Washington with what seems to be the basic business model that I think could succeed in that kind of environment. Rapid development of new algae strains for fuel production on land or sea. It sounds perfect. The don’t do recombinant genetics, it looks like just forward screening, but I think I would add some splicing if budgets allowed. But I would definitely consider rapid screening using micro-scale systems. How fast can a new algae strain go into production?

I would bet that the main practical problems will be political. A dollar can go a lot farther in Ukraine, but not if it gets taxed at the 40% tariff rate. And if government dissolves, then where is a company that depends on a laissez-faire tax system and a free energy market? Because those would be pretty important to this company.

You know… that could be an issue here.

-Peter