Another way that this fallacy presents itself is when someone from a wealthy nation travels to a poorer nation, which is the only way to virtually travel back in time. Some tourists think, “Oh, how quaint that the people here take their clothes down to the river by donkey and wash them in the fresh river water! How natural! This is how humans should live. I envy these people.” Shut the hell up. No you don’t. There is no rational person that washes clothes by hand that would not prefer to have a washing machine to do it for them in a tenth of the time with a hundredth of the effort. Anytime the adjective “quaint” comes to mind, ask yourself if you really mean it in a positive way. As an immigrant back to The Old World, I catch myself falling victim to this fallacy sometimes.

What set me off on this little rant was a TED Talk, by Sherry Turkle, that I saw this morning about how the internet and smartphones and texting and social networking is making us more lonely. What? Are you out of your mind? I disagree with just about every point made in this talk.

As with absolutely everything, you can do smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their smartphone. But I’ve also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?! Give me a break.

The world is getting better for humans by almost every metric, but something in our brains makes us long for days of yore when life was actually harder than it is now. You know that quote by Stephen Hawking?

Time travel might be possible, but if that’s the case, why haven’t we been overrun by tourists from the future?

Perhaps it’s just that no one wants to come back and live in the relative squalor.

The Moon and Venus

Touching the horizon over the motorway bridge I can see from my house.

My nine shots in a timelapse animation.

After realizing that M was a showstopper, imagine my surprise when I figured out that I could write my last name, too! Radium-Samarium-Uranium-Sulfur-Selenium-Nitrogen!

At this point, I had come too far not to make little periodic table boxes with the atomic number and weight of each element to line up like Scrabble pieces. But what format to use? Periodic table boxes vary wildly, with different fonts, text alignment, and which values are included. ptable.com has a very impressive dynamic HTML periodic table, with various facts as you hover. periodictable.com went with pictures of each element. Pure substances are shiny!

Eventually I found this list of periodic table PDFs available for downloading and printing. The first one on that page is the standard one for the California Standardized Test. As soon as I saw it, I was immediately thrust back to my lab bench in Chemistry class calculating moles and reaction yields. I had my format!

So here we go…

And finally, in her highly radioactive two element glory…

I might have to make some t-shirts of my own…

To the geometrymobile!

This is the composite photo, taken by Letian Wang in Beijing, China, on December 10, 2011, that originally sparked my interest. You can see that the radius of the Earth’s shadow is slightly greater than the Moon’s diameter.

First of all we need to define what we mean by “shadow”.

For the purposes of this post and subsequent calculations, we will only be dealing with the umbra, the dark bit where no direct sunlight hits the moon. We will be ignoring the indirect sunlight that is refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere during an eclipse, bathing the lunar surface in reddish hue.

Okay, let’s do some math!

Here we can see the relationship between the radius of the umbra to all the distances involved. Do I even have to mention that the diagram is not to scale?

If we draw two more lines, we get two congruent right triangles.

Since we know they are congruent, we know their sides are proportional and can write the following equation:

…which we can solve for the radius of the umbra:

When we plug in the values for the radii of the sun and Earth, we get:

Over time, with the two elliptical orbits involved, both the numerator and the denominator of our distance ratio vary. The ratio of the distance from the Earth to the Moon (d_moon) to the distance from the sun to the Earth (d_earth) is at its maximum when the Moon is at its apogee and the Earth is at its perigee (we are ignoring the likelihood of these two extremes coinciding, of course).

The ratio is at its minimum when the Moon is at its perigee and the Earth is at its apogee.

When we plug these back into our bigger equation, we discover that the radius of the Earth’s shadow at the distance of the moon varies from 4479 km to 4735 km, or from 2.578 to 2.725 moon radii.

To visualize this, let’s look at the minimum and maximum shadow sizes compared to the Moon.

Not a very big difference, I think you’ll agree. We did, however, answer our question.

At least now astrophotographer and artist Laurent Laveder will know the range of sizes for his hoops for his incredible lunar eclipse photography.

Pretty cool, huh? Did you figure it out?

Details that are crucial for the effect to work:

1. The frosted nature of the bottle, with just the window bit being clear. If the rest of the bottle were opaque, there would be very little light to see the image.
2. The lines between the window panes to give a parallax effect.
3. It has to be a clear liquid.
4. And the photo on the back of the label on the back of the bottle, of course.

Personally, I’m dying to know if the liquid is actually water, because water in a glass bottle refracts a lot. I also wonder if the actual image on the back label is distorted in anyway to counteract the refraction.

Pretty cool, huh?

Ms Nalder found that the best-educated (those with more than a master’s degree) were most likely to answer incorrectly that Proposition 13 applies only to residential property. Those with the least education (high-school dropouts) were most likely to get it right. Similarly, those who were already of voting age when Proposition 13 passed were most likely to answer incorrectly and the youngest correctly. The same pattern held for income, with wealthier respondents being more likely to be misinformed. Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest group among homeowners (who directly benefit from Proposition 13) were misinformed, whereas the largest group of renters (who do not benefit) answered correctly.

These results are puzzling and troubling. As Ms Nalder suggests, perception (as opposed to knowledge) of issues such as Proposition 13 appears to have more to do with “self-interest and a potential blindness to issues outside of one’s own experience” than with the content of the legislation. This would explain why those respondents who were “non-citizens” or “registered elsewhere” (probably recent arrivals) were more likely to give the correct answer than voters who are registered where they live.

How terribly, terribly depressing! The more you think you know, the less you actually know.

The reason for this, as Lehrer rightly points out, is our strong innate fact filter that simply ignores facts that don’t resonate with our core beliefs. It is really, really hard to listen attentively to an argument against your position. I tried once, as a mind broadening experiment, to get into a regular habit of reading some Conservative Christian, pro-life, anti-gay-marriage blogs, and I must say that I failed miserably. It was horribly annoying, sort of the intellectual equivalent of that kid behind you on the airplane kicking your seat repeatedly; I wanted to either shout at them or change seats to the section where people have moral values more like my own.

And so here we are, condemned to view the world like fans from either side at a sporting match, as unfair and biased against our side. I can’t really imagine that we’ll ever find a solution to this natural information bias, but learning more about it can’t hurt. In science, unlike politics, learning more about a topic is helpful.

This information, of course, is counter-intuitive and goes against your beliefs, and thus you will ignore it, because you really are an informed voter.

They can see inside my wife!

Although I have some vague understanding of the physics behind sonography, it is still completely amazing that we can “see” something in complete darkness without the use of electromagnetic waves (I mean, particles). The computational trickery to emit a certain frequency, hear the echo, “focus” the frequency to a certain depth, and construct an image from it is absolutely amazing.

It’s also interesting how the human brain can more or less understand the three dimensional shape it’s seeing, even though the ultrasound monitor is only giving you a slim two dimensional sliver of the image. It kind of reminded me of Flatland. The still images just don’t do justice to the motion-inducing 3D perception you get from looking at the monitor.

There’s a little human in there!

Academically, I have the whole mammalian reproduction thing pretty well grokked. I know where babies come from. On the other hand, HOLY CRAP THERE’S A LITTLE TINY HUMAN BEING LIVING INSIDE MY WIFE!! Until you’ve actually seen a modern day obstetric ultrasound performed, you can’t really understand how weird it is to have them stick a wand into one human and find another human inside. It’s very Matryoshka. I think I could attend a thousand ultrasounds and never get over how utterly (uterally?) amazing it is that human beings can grow and live inside one another. As a Y-chromosome carrier, I’m both relieved and disappointed that I will never experience sharing my body with anyone.

Without further ado, I present the internet debut of my second child, currently known as Offspring0002.

Ultrasound images are notoriously “Rorschachy”, but I think this is a profile shot with the head on the right looking up, and the body on the left. Except that the dotted line look like vertebrae, so perhaps I’m wrong.

This is a face-on shot, which looks eerily like the pop-culture alien face, especially when rotated.

The important news from the doctor is that A) there’s only one of them (WHEW!!), and B) it looks perfectly healthy. It’ll still be another two months until we know Offspring0002′s sex. Until then, we’ll just have to wait.

1) Dendochronology

Every school kid knows that you can count the rings on a tree trunk to know how old the tree is (or was when it was cut down), but what is left out of the school lesson is that every growth ring is unique, and that they are proportionally identical for all the trees in a certain geographical region. When one tree has a really strong growth year, they all do, and when the resources are tight another year, all the trees grow a little bit less. This is pretty obvious, but then comes the genius bit… To use Dawkins’ example, what if you want to know the exact year the timbers in your Tudor House (built in the Tudor Period from 1485 to 1603) were cut down? Impossible, right? Wrong.

Because we have pieces of wood cut down throughout the centuries that overlap with the present day tree ring record, we can simply line them up with the tree rings we know the dates of for sure, and then we can go back further. We do that again, and again, and again, and we end up with a database of tree rings going back… wait for it … 11,500 years!!!

Of course dendrochronology is mostly used for archaeology rather than paleontology, but it helps demonstrate just how clever scientists can be when it comes to properly dating objects from the distant past. Dawkins mainly included it in his book to show how using only trees and methods a six-year-old could understand, scientists can blow Young Earth Creationism out of the water.

2) Homology

To quote Dawkins:

What a piece of work is the mammalian skeleton. I don’t mean it is beautiful in itself, although I think it is. I mean the fact that we can talk about “the” mammalian skeleton at all: the fact that such a complicatedly interlocking thing is so gloriously different across the mammals, in all its parts, while simultaneously being so obviously the same thing throughout the mammals.

What he’s talking about his homology, how skeletal structures can be identical across related species, despite the size of each bone being different. I was unaware that every bone in the human skeleton has an exactly correlating bone in the skeletons of mice, elephants, whales and bats. The image I’ve included here is a wonderful example showing how the wings of pterosaurs, bats and birds differ. When flying, the pterosaurs supported their entire weight on the equivalent of their pinky finger, the bat supports its weight on its four fingers, and the bird uses its entire arm. The important point being that they are all the same bones, just sized differently due to their repurposing.

3) The Laryngeal Nerve

Okay, I confess to having heard of this before, but I’m including it because it’s so ridiculously interesting. There’s this nerve, you see, that goes from the brain to the larynx, the “voice box” organ used by mammals to make noise and swallow. Rather than travel directly from the brain to the throat, as any engineer designer with any intelligence would have it do, it meanders all the way down into the chest, loops around an artery leaving the heart, and heads back up to the throat. Of course there are hundreds of “no competent engineer would design it this way!” bits across the spectrum of anatomy (of particular note, because if its fame as a Creationist talking point, is the optical botchery that is human eye), but the laryngeal nerve is probably the most glaringly obvious, especially in the animals with the longest necks: giraffes.

Dawkins was lucky enough to attend a dissection of a giraffe neck to study this nerve.

He also ventures humorously into chin-stroking armchair conjecture land with:

Quite apart from the waste of resources involved in making such a long nerve, I can’t help wondering whether giraffe vocalizations are subject to a delay, like a foreign correspondent talking over a satellite link. One authority has said, “Despite possession of a well developed larynx and gregarious nature, the giraffe is able to utter only low moans or bleats.” A giraffe with a stutter is an endearing thought, but I won’t pursue it.

4) Arms Races

Another concept that was only vaguely familiar to me is that of evolutionary arms races, which refers to two species, typically predator and prey, evolving strategies and abilities in unison. I love the aptness of the term “arms race” in this sense. The example used in the book is that of cheetahs and gazelles. Both are fast, but what the cheetah has in raw acceleration (0 – 60 mph in three seconds!), the gazelles make up for in endurance. As subsequent generations of cats got faster, the ungulates did too. But, as Dawkins points out, each gain in speed and agility is met with costs, like real arms races, because energy spent on making legs longer and muscles stronger are not spent on the genes’ primary goal of reproduction. His point is just how futile it all is (the section of the book is titled “Running to stay in the same place”) and how ridiculous it would be for an omnipotent designer to make Nature like this.

5) Four Memories

The concept of four memories that help us survive is very elegant. It goes like this:

1. Genetic Memory – Our DNA, in its direction of our embryonic development, contains helpful information about the distances our eyes need to focus, our instinctual responses to possible predators, our distaste for poisonous substances and like of calorie-rich substances.
2. Immune Memory – Within our own lifetime, our immune system remembers specific diseases it has fought off and stores the recipe for antibodies to defend us against those diseases in the future. Through science, we have been able to develop vaccines (like immune memory school) to trick our immune systems into thinking that we’ve already had polio or the measles and thus defend ourselves against future encounters.
3. Regular Memory – What we normally refer to with the word memory, stored in our nervous system. We can recall events that have happened to us and how we survived them.
4. Collective Memory – This is the memory of our ancestors, passed down through language. The capacity of this memory exploded with the invention of writing, and then exploded again with the printing press and the Internet. Imagine if all we knew were our own experiences! Instead we go to school for decades to learn all the information of those that came before us.

Okay, so that may not have been about specifically about evolution, but it was an idea new to me that was presented in the book.

Agentive

She does go into detail about Spanish vs. English and culpability. She uses the academic terms agentive or non-agentive. In fact, English is fairly rare in its insistence of attributing actions to an agent. In an experiment, native English and Spanish speakers were shown a video of a man intentionally performing an action (e.g. popping a balloon) and then another one of a man unintentionally causing an action. Then, they were asked to pick the man out of a lineup. The anglophones did well identifying the man in both scenarios, but the hispanophones had much more trouble identifying the man when the action happened unintentionally, since they hadn’t needed to focus on him as the subject of the sentence when they thought about the video. Not only that, but the researchers were able to induce this effect in native English speakers by making them read lots of passive voice, non-agentive sentences before watching the videos. Fascinating!

Gender

How odd is it that so many human languages would evolve to consider various inanimate objects as inherently masculine or feminine? Not that odd, apparently, as some languages have up to 30 genders, at which point it becomes clear that genders are really just classifications of concepts. Some languages have a gender just for hunting weapons or things that are shiny. And then there’s the famously humorous Australian Aboriginal gender for “women, fire, and dangerous things”.

The gender of objects in the languages we speak directly influences how we think about an object. In Russian, a chair is masculine, so Russians – even if they are tested in English! – will describe a chair as sturdy and strong, whereas a Spaniard, who has a feminine concept of a chair, will describe it as elegant and slender and beautiful.

What surprised me most about the gender section of her talk was my emotive reaction to learning how, for many words, Russian has some opposite genders to Spanish. It really feels inherently wrong to me that, in Russian, chairs, flowers, and the moon are all masculine, and the sun is feminine. How revolting! My emotions on this subject are direct evidence of just how much learning a second language directly influences how you think about the world.

Monolingual Questioner

During the Q&A session after the talk, one of the people facilitating the questions is Stewart Brand, who is clearly a very intelligent man, but who came across to me as a glaringly ignorant monolingual. He says – and I’m paraphrasing – “Here in California, we hear a lot of Spanish, and it seems to me that Spanish is a very simple language, with each thing having one word associated with it, whereas English has a rich tapestry of words for each concept. If I ever got Alzheimer’s,” he quips, “I’d rather have it in English than in Spanish, because there would be more words to convey what he meant even if he couldn’t think of the word I wanted.”

I’ve heard this same opinion, but reversed, from monolingual Spaniards. You have to get quite deep into learning a language before you learn all the synonyms. In Spain, for example, they have a very rich bacon-flavored tapestry of words for the animal from which they derive their favorite meat: cochino, puerco, guarro, marrano, chon, etc. But you could probably get to fourth-year Spanish in college and never learn more than cerdo for the word pig, because you really don’t need the rest until you’re writing poetry or insulting someone in a Spanish bar.

Dr. Boroditsky does an excellent job of not calling Brand an idiot, even if the look on her face does.

The Video

Her talk doesn’t actually start until about the four minute mark because first they preview a wonderful short video from my beloved RadioLab, aptly titled Words. It’s a sequence of very video clips cleverly edited that requires a good knowledge of English to follow. The full length video is available on FORA.tv, where they provide a nice table of contents for navigating to just the bits you’re interested in if you so choose.

I’m really starting to love FORA.tv as a site for what are more or less unabridged TED talks.

The stalactites form at a rate of about one centimeter every 150 years. Some of them are two or three meters long. That’s 45,000 years old. It’s rather mind boggling to look at a stalagmite standing as tall as I am and think that, in the time that it takes to have all the happiness, sadness, pain, pleasure, and joy of one entire human life, this structure gains a couple millimeters. And then, once you’ve contemplated the single tree, you take a step back and see the whole forest of thousands upon thousands of stalactites and stalagmites… You can’t help but have a transcendent moment and appreciate the transience of your own existence.

Some of them take on a curtain-like look to them, causing some of the stalagmites to look like sheet-wearing ghosts.

Formation

Because of the geological timescales involved, stalactite growth is a little hard to study scientifically. However the basic process by which stalactites and stalagmites grow is fairly well understood and makes complete sense:

1. Water flows through the rock from the surface picking up calcium carbonate.
2. Water drips from the cave ceiling, evaporating a little as it drips, depositing a minuscule amount of calcium carbonate on the ceiling.
3. The drop hits the floor and deposits another minuscule amount of calcium carbonate there.
4. Repeat until the stalactite and stalagmite meet.

Easy, obvious and boring.

But wait! This is where things get wacky…some of them, called helictites, grow sideways! Some of them grow up from where there is no stalactite coming down. Some of them grow in spiky balls with radial symmetry and others like winding tree roots or vines. And no one knows why.

The best theories of helictite formation involve some combination of wind and capillary forces. Others, which seek to explain the radial symmetry, involve crystalline structures and magnetism. It’s just difficult for a scientist to study something that will only grow five millimeters in her entire career.

One thing that constantly kept popping into my mind when I was looking at these helictites was just how organic they looked. That was almost the most impressive thing about the whole cave experience. How could water and rock that would be like this even if life had never appeared on the planet look so much like tree roots or corral or sprigs of grass? Absolutely amazing.

I followed the rules and took no photos and touched nothing in the cave. All of the photos I’ve provided here were found on the internet. Here are some other good ones. The desire to reach out and feel one of the white wet glistening limestone pillars is quite overwhelming. When I was in the cave, I commented to my wife that they should have one stalagmite where they just say, “Screw it, we’re gonna let people touch this one.” I would have even paid extra.

Return to the Planet’s Surface

After we rode the old miners train back up to the tourism office and gift shop, blinking furiously as our irises contracted, we were disappointed to see that a cloud bank had rolled in and the gorgeous views we’d missed in our rush to our pre-purchased 13:30 tour were no longer visible.

Despite only feeling like about 15 minutes, the cave tour took a full hour, so by the time we got into the car and were leaving, we were starving for some lunch. We stopped at the first little one-church-two-bars-ten-houses town we found and stumbled into glory. Well, actually the restaurant, which was in someone’s basement, was called Casa Gloria. It was one of these places like we experienced in Rioja that only made one thing, but they made it really well. In this case it was lechazo, which means “lamb that was only ever fed milk”. Actually they had cabrito, baby goat (kid?), too. The house wine was a 2001 Rioja Crianza, and the leg and ribs of the lamb we were served were perfect. It was one of the best meals we’ve had in a long time. Did I mention we were starving?

Unassuming house in the middle of nowhere with a killer one-dish restaurant in the basement.

Their menu board out on the highway, with some horses across the street. Al horno means “in the oven”, in this case, “roasted”.

With tummies full and the geological insignificance of our lives understood, we headed home for a late hour-long Spanish siesta, during which the stalactites and stalagmites in the Soplao Cave grew 7.6 nanometers.