Science – Page 35 – a sibilant intake of breath

Common misconceptions

XKCD has some good advice. Everyone should read the article ‘List of common misconceptions‘ on Wikipedia, if only so that they personally can stop spreading them.

There are a few on the list I have been guilty of believing myself at various points. The truth is:

There is no evidence that Iron maidens were invented in the Middle Ages or even used for torture.
Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short.
A belief that decades/centuries/millennia begin not on the year ending in 0, but rather on the subsequent year ending in 1 (e.g., “The current millennium didn’t really begin on January 1, 2000, but rather on January 1, 2001”) — based on an assumption that there was no year 0 — are founded in an incomplete understanding of historical calculation.
Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” Palin actually said “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Some cooks believe that food items cooked with wine or liquor will be non-alcoholic, because alcohol’s low boiling point causes it to evaporate quickly when heated. However, a study found that much of the alcohol remains – 25% after 1 hour of baking or simmering, and 10% after 2 hours.
When a meteor lands on Earth (after which it is termed a meteorite), it is not usually hot.
Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds.
Although there are hair care products which are marketed as being able to repair split ends and damaged hair, there is no such cure.
Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.
A person who is drowning does not wave and call for help, as in fictional depictions of drowning.
It is not nutritionally necessary to combine multiple sources of vegetable protein in a single meal in order to metabolize a “complete” protein in a vegetarian diet. Unless a person’s diet was heavily dependent on only fruit, only tubers, or only junk food, he or she would be virtually certain of getting enough protein if he or she were eating enough calories.
It’s a common myth that an earthworm becomes two worms when cut in half. This is not correct. When an earthworm is bisected, only the front half of the worm (where the mouth is located) can survive, while the other half dies.
The flight mechanism and aerodynamics of the bumblebee (as well as other insects) are actually quite well understood, in spite of the urban legend that calculations show that they should not be able to fly.
Contrary to the common myth, the Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet.
It is not true that air takes the same time to travel above and below an aircraft’s wing.
Glass is not a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid, although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids.
No scientist ever lost his life because of his scientific views, at least to the knowledge of historians of science.

I have seen many of these repeated in rather reputable sources.

For Christmas, I received The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens. So far, the most interesting among them has been “The Elegant Eyeball” by John Gamel, originally published in The Alaska Quarterly Review.

Despite being slightly astigmatic, I had never given much thought to eye health or ocular diseases. What was most startling and unsettling about Gamel’s account was the description of the pain associated with maladies like dry corneas or glaucoma. For some reason, I had assumed that eye illnesses simply involved the painless loss of sight, not the sort of agony he describes.

Ultimately, the essay is a reflection on the inevitability of deterioration and death in human bodies – the way time invariably takes away the most precious, necessary, and appreciated of human faculties. Gamel describes one patient – a professor of anthropology at Stanford – who responded to Gamel’s ultimate inability to stave off his macular degeneration with a mixture of realism and humility: “Why so sad, doctor? You look like you just lost your best friend. Who do you think you are – a magician, a god who turns old men into young men?”

Gamel does describe one area where there has been significant progress: in the use of intentional retinal scarification using lasers, to reduce the rate and seriousness of sight loss associated with diabetes. He describes how the treatment has helped hundreds of thousands of people to read and drive for years after diabetic retionopathy would otherwise have blinded them.

Such successful extensions aside, the resounding message of Gamel’s piece is that our own sense of the inevitability of our extending lives and vitality is an illusion. As such, we had best make full enjoyment of our vision while it remains acute.

How to start a cult

While I am having difficulty finding a reputable source to confirm it, I have been told the following odd thing about human psychology: if a person wears glasses that flip their vision upside down, about three days later their brain will adjust and invert their sight. If they then remove the glasses, their vision will seem to be upside down before it flips again, more quickly.

I don’t think all that many people are aware of this quirk of human psychology. As such, it seems like something you could build a cult around.

You would come up with a long and convincing build-up to a supposedly sacred ritual in which people wear the glasses. You tell them that if their vision eventually flips, it is because your deity has deemed them worthy of being tested. Then, you tell them that when they remove the glasses, one of two things will happen. Either their vision will be inverted forever, or it will flip back. Tell them that if it flips back, it means your deity has found them worthy, and they are on track for some sort of magnificent afterlife.

Because people would think the flipping was supernatural, it would make a gullible subset believe anything else you cared to tell them (like about how they need to sell their home to help fund the crystal statue that will bring about the end of the world). Eventually, people will leave the cult and tell their story, and neurologists will appear on the news to explain that the vision-flipping is normal and being used to scam people. By then, however, you will be long gone with a lot of money.

I think this could work partly because vision is such a key part of a person’s life. Seeing it flip would be a powerful emotional experience, especially if you were prepared in advance to interpret it in a specific metaphysical way. The period between the first and second flip would be full of anxiety – since you already know the flipping is possible, but fear it could be permanent for you. Then, the second flip would really lock at least a few people in. It would feed their narcissism by telling them they are special, and it would seem to be something beyond the power of ordinary science or reasoning to explain.

I think people have probably bought into cults on the basis of less convincing evidence than this. Get a couple of celebrity adherents and the road to wealth and influence would be short and smooth.

Disclaimer: While you might actually be able to start a cult in this way, it wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do.

The peak-end rule

Some psychological insights have a great deal of practical importance. It seems to me that the ‘peak-end rule’ is among these. Essentially, the idea is that when remembering an experience like a medical procedure or a vacation, our recollection is strongly coloured by the most intense portion of the experience and by the ending. Sam Harris mentions this on p.77 of the hardcover version of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. It is also mentioned in Paul Bloom’s free series of psychology lectures.

The insight has practical value when it comes to unpleasant experiences. Harris describes how prolonguing the least painful portion of a colonoscopy (at the end) reduces how much pain patients later recall having experienced. It seems to me that the insight could also be exploited when planning pleasant activities. If you are setting up a concert, art show, or vacation, it seems like a good idea to include something that will serve as a positive and engaging emotional peak and to put some effort into ending things well.

Setting up a strong emotional peak could also benefit those hoping to cultivate romance. As mentioned before, people misattribute excitement unrelated to a person who they are getting to know. While it might be the scary movie or the rollercoaster that is causing your heart to pound, some part of your brain may wrongly attribute the feeling to the person who you are sitting beside.

The identifiable victim effect

In the second chapter of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , Sam Harris describes the strange phenomenon in human psychology where we care less about a problem as the number of victims rises. When we see one little girl who is starving, we generally feel more concern and willingness to help than we do when it is her and her brother, or her and her entire village.

This seems deeply irrational. Bigger problems should motivate a larger desire to help. Perhaps it reflects our implicit awareness of our own limitations. Helping one little girl may be within our power in a way that helping a large group is not. Still, this quirk seems likely to be very damaging. If we don’t feel a strong moral impulse in the face of a big problem, we are unlikely to band together and provide a big solution.

That applies directly to climate change. It may also have something to do with our sometimes strange notions about the value of avoiding extinction and our thinking about apocalypse.

Science and morality

I encourage readers to pick up a copy of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. A friend and I are already reading it, with the intention of discussing it, and my preliminary experience suggests that it will provide good fodder for discussion.

Harris argues that what is good and what is bad ultimately depends on the experiences of conscious beings. Since science can illuminate what those experiences are like and what triggers them, science can speak on moral questions.

Harris also questions the moral authority accorded to religions. Just as religions teach deeply misleading things about the physical nature of the universe (such as that it is 6,000 years old, was created in six days, and contains unchanging species), they arguably teach deeply misleading things about morality, since their prescriptions fail to encourage the well being of conscious beings.

Rather than leap into discussion of these ideas now, I encourage readers to buy or borrow the book. It will be more interesting to discuss on the basis of all of its contents, rather than on the basis of my brief comments on some of the early pages combined with the pre-existing beliefs of myself and readers.

A pan-European electricity grid

Last month, The Economist made a convincing case that a pan-European electricity grid could help Europe move to a future more compatible with a stable climate:

This offshore grid is the germ of a big dream: a Europe-wide system of electricity highways. If it makes sense in the North Sea, it makes even more for wind and solar power from Spain and, one day, solar energy from the Sahara desert. And as well as Norwegian reservoirs, why not store power in existing Alpine valleys? This would reduce the need for more power stations to balance the spikes and troughs of renewables. Moreover if producers could trade energy over the grid in a single market, the benefits could be bigger still. European officials reckon energy savings of some 20-25% would be possible.

Such ideas have nostalgic appeal because the European Union was born from a move to pool energy sources in 1951 in the European Coal and Steel Community. These days the EU can be the community of wind and sun, not to mention gas and nuclear power. The trouble is that such dreams are not cheap. The European Commission this week said that €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) of investment would be needed in the next decade. Most should come from the industry, but a chunk must also come from already tight public budgets.

They are wrong, however, to claim that rising natural gas consumption is not a major problem. Burning gas may be a better way to get a kilowatt-hour of electricity than burning coal, but both are unacceptable in a world where carbon dioxide concentrations are already dangerously high.

Europe’s improved grid should be connecting energy demand centres to diverse and disparate sources of renewable wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy – not perpetuating dependence on fossil fuels.

Mythbusters

For the unfamiliar, Mythbusters is a television show in which a group of geeks test the validity of ‘myths’ about how the world works. Examples include whether poppy seeds can make a person fail a drug test, whether cell phones interfere with aircraft instruments, whether falling bullets can be lethal, etc.

While many of these questions can probably be answered with a reference text and as calculator, what distinguishes the show is how they set out to physically test the myths in question. Rather than just calculating how much helium it would take to lift one of them, they build a gigantic rig of 50 huge helium-filled tubes in a gigantic hanger.

In the past, I have been a bit bothered when they have done something physically that could have been very easily disproven with a bit of math. A little moment in an episode I saw yesterday changed my thinking a bit though. It was the demeanour of Adam Savage – one of the show’s two main hosts – when they were trying to make him buoyant in air by filling a small inflatable boat with helium. In the little clip, it is obvious that both he and Jamie Hyneman know perfectly well that the boat won’t have sufficient buoyancy. They do the physical test not because it is necessary, but because it illustrates their methodology.

As an XKCD comic points out, the lack of scientific rigour in some Mythbusters experiments is only a very minor basis for criticizing the show. It’s obvious that they put more thought into their trials than they have time to discuss on the show. For instance, testing the myth that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key on the string, they mention in passing the use of an ‘authentic’ key. Furthermore, it seems clear that their major message is about the importance of empirical testing and verification, which is ultimately the best mechanism we have for making sure what we believe about the world is remotely accurate.

The show is a lot of fun, and I think it transmits some really important ideas about science. Their fondness for explosives certainly makes for enjoyable television. Furthermore, Kari Byron’s participation certainly doesn’t hurt the show’s entertainment value; she has to be one of the most attractive women in the entertainment industry, particularly when welding.

Energy flow from a gas pump

Here’s a statistic that does a good job of demonstrating just how energy-rich fossil fuels are:

An ordinary gas station gasoline pump transfers about 16 megawatts (MW) of chemical energy while operating. That’s about ten times the power output of the Grouse Mountain wind turbine. For any particular span of time, a nuclear reactor puts out about as much energy as 63 gas pumps.

Also, as mentioned before, a barrel of oil contains energy equivalent to the energy output of an adult human working 12.5 years worth of 40 hour weeks.

Air pollution from shipping

This article from The Guardian makes an astonishing claim: Health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated’.

The article says that a single one of the giant container ships that transport much of the world’s freight emits as much air pollution at 50 million cars:

Cars driving 15,000km a year emit approximately 101 grammes of sulphur oxide gases (or SOx) in that time. The world’s largest ships’ diesel engines which typically operate for about 280 days a year generate roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx.

The article refers to an American study that found that the world’s 90,000 cargo ships collectively cause 60,000 deaths per year in the United States, through air pollution. It also estimated the associated health care costs at $330 billion per year.

Reducing air pollution is one of the significant co-benefits that can accompany the replacement of fossil fuels with sustainable, zero-carbon sources of energy. At the same time, ships powered using fossil fuels could be made to emit fewer toxic chemicals by toughening the emission and fuel quality standards imposed on them.

Category: Science