Mood makes food taste different

From Nature:

Food_3 Feeling anxious? Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavours recede, according to new research. This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that a test based on flavour detection could help doctors to get more prescriptions right first time.

It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry. To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.

In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes.

More here.



Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Closing the Black/White IQ Gap?

Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine:

On November 28 the American Enterprise Institute held a symposium on the persistent gap between the average IQ test scores of black and non-Hispanic white Americans. The question: Is the gap closing? The presenters at AEI were James Flynn, a philosopher who taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Charles Murray, a scholar at AEI and the co-author of The Bell Curve.

Flynn is famous for having discovered in the 1980s that average IQs in many countries have been drifting upward at about 3 points per decade over the past couple of generations. In fact, the average has risen by an astonishing 15 points in the last 50 years in the United States. In other words, a person with an average IQ of 100 today would score 115 on a 1950s IQ test.

Flynn believes that the data show that the black/white gap is closing—that the average IQ scores of black Americans are rising faster than those of whites. And he began his talk at AEI by describing a study done by a German psychometrician who tested the IQs of 170 white and 69 half-black children left behind in Germany by American GIs. The average score for the white kids was 97 and 96.5 for the half-black kids. Flynn pointed out that the black German kids would probably have had a harder time in German society, yet they scored almost identically to their white counterparts. If the Eyferth study is right, the differences in IQ cannot be attributed to genetics.

More here.

Older than the sun, the meteorite scientists call ‘the real time machine’

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

TagishAs lumps of rock go it looks much like any other, unexceptional despite the deep red of its cool, smooth surface. The pieces range in size from pea-sized lumps to larger fist-sized chunks. But today, scientists will announce this is no ordinary stone. Prised from a frozen lake in northern Canada, it has become a prime candidate for the oldest known object on Earth.

The chunk came from a meteorite that scored an arc of fire across the skies before slamming into Lake Tagish in British Columbia in 2000. It has been pored over by scientists ever since, and is today revealed to contain particles that predate the birth of our nearest star, the sun.

The Tagish Lake meteorite was already regarded as exceptional because its mineral composition linked it to the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, more than 4.5bn years ago. The fragments of meteorite that still exist are among the most pristine in the world, as they were protected from contamination when they became wedged in blocks of lake ice.

More here.

Criminal psychopathy may be biological dysfunction

Tahani Karrar at Reuters:

Ist2_741612_classic_psychopathResearchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London monitored the emotional responses of six men who had committed repeat offences such as attempted murder, rape with strangulation and grievous bodily harm.

“We’ve never been able to look directly in the brain before and what we found is that when psychopaths were exposed to frightened faces the distress cue didn’t increase the psychopath’s blood flow. It decreased it,” Declan Murphy, a professor of psychiatry at the institute, told Reuters.

He added psychopaths might not stop their attacks because they may have learned to dampen their brain’s response to other peoples’ distress signals.

All six subjects scored highly on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a test which looks for the presence of cunning, manipulative or exploitative behaviors as well as lack of guilt or remorse.

More here.

Is James Bond Responsible for the Iraq War?

Richard Cohen in Slate:

061201_cb_bondtnI ask this question in (almost) all seriousness, not in any way to promote the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale, nor the new book on Bond by Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain, but merely to suggest that it was Bond—James Bond—who came to mind the night of Jan. 28, 2003, when George W. Bush, addressing the Congress, the American people, and the whole world, said those now infamous 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” By British government, he was speaking, of course, of Bond.

At the time, I did not give much thought to how Bond got this information, but I supposed it entailed a killing or two, a fast car, a gorgeous woman of situational morality, and a lethal gizmo provided by Q. Of course, I knew that it was not literally Bond who discovered that Saddam had gone shopping in Africa, but the fact that it was the British government that came up with the goods gave Bush’s assertion unimpeachable authority. You need only ask yourself what the effect would have been if Bush had cited the Italian government or the Russian government or even the Israeli government, which could be seen as an interested party. “The Italian government has learned …” We’d still be laughing.

More here.

Red Cardinal

Poem by Jim Culleny at NoUtopia.com:

Screenhunter_10_1Red Cardinal

Today I spied a red cardinal
perched on the branch of a birch
regal as any red cardinal
perched on the branch of a church.

Hey, I say, lovely red, redbird
where is it you come from?
He sang in his red red cardinal voice,
I was bred where this song is sung.

Where’d that be little bird? Tell me.
I have a need to know.
But how can I tell such an obvious thing
to a man who fabricates so?

And the cardinal dipped
as cardinals bow
before a cardinal rule,
and flew off then
to a sky or a church
leaving a cardinal fool.

Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate

From The Christian Science Monitor:Wood

Reading Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate reminded me a lot of attending my high school reunion. For those of us who lived through Watergate (and I certainly qualify — I was 14 the summer of the break-in and 17 the day that Nixon resigned — young and impressionable enough to immediately embrace these two Washington Post reporters as heroes), Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will never lose their fascination. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman didn’t have to play them in the movie for us to understand that these two young strivers (both still under 30) had altered the very culture of journalism in Washington, D.C., bringing to it a scrappy unwillingness to accept “no comment” as the end to a story.

But if Woodward and Bernstein were “the boys” that everyone loved on the crest of Watergate, the succeeding years have not always been as kind. Woodward — who has gone on to pen 11 more books after the two he and Bernstein wrote together on Watergate and Nixon — remains a huge name in journalism and yet weathers frequent criticism for what Shepard calls “a lack of analysis, a dearth of attribution, and a penchant for highly detailed, novelistic re-creations of scenes that were unrecorded, except in the memory of participants.”

Bernstein, who has written two books (one about his parents and another on a pope) and is now working on a third about Hillary Rodham Clinton, is in some ways better known for a messy personal life, including his infamous divorce from Nora Ephron, chronicled in her novel Heratburn. (Dustin Hoffman turned down that film role, uncomfortable at casting a real person in so negative a light.)

More here.

this living human shaft … this breathing pit

Elfriede_jelinek_2

If you have read Elfriede Jelinek’s most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, you’ll know what to expect from Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but – I know it’s hard to imagine – even more hateful. Second, something you don’t find even in them: a great deal of violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a horrifying vision of human nature (‘friends, that is, greedy beasts’) and nature itself (‘fundamentally evil’), in which human beings are objects, and objects are human – days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handkerchiefs ‘are quite stiff from everything they’ve had to swallow in their lives’.

Get the flavour? (Sorry, the rub-it-in style is catching.) Disgusting, despairing, but undeniably intriguing, and not just because of the porn. That last quote is a clue: Jelinek’s pages pullulate with weird but wonderful lines that only she could have written.

more from Literary Review here.

brice marden: physical presence

20061221marden

In Brice Marden’s fifteen-foot-long horizontal frieze The Muses a skein of muted green, gray, white, and blue paint loops across a field of light celadon green. Painted between 1991 and 1993, The Muses evokes a procession of the nine daughters of Zeus as it might have been carved on the pediment of a Greek temple—except that Marden doesn’t depict the divinities, he conjures up their aura. As the eye tries to follow the intersecting tendrils of alternately transparent and opaque paint, nine vertical columns somehow emerge from the ground while at the same time remaining embedded in it.

For an instant the goddesses are luminously present, but more as immanence than as solid forms, semitransparent shapes flickering against the light, perhaps (given the overall impression of green) in an olive grove, just as they might have materialized to the ancient Greeks. But the moment you sense their presence, the Muses disappear, receding back into the “landscape” to become swirls and eddies of paint on a flat plane, mere material. Then we remember that the mother of the Muses is Memory, and the gift they give to mankind is artistic inspiration, something that can arise and evaporate in the twinkling of an eye, and which is beyond human control.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

gardner’s opus

N56518

Written between 1966 and 1968, The Sunlight Dialogues contains more than 80 characters, eight parallel and intersecting story lines, 24 chapters (as an epic should), and weighs in at a hefty 690 pages. Set in 1966 in Batavia, New York, where the author was born and raised, it is the tale of a town’s disintegration from supposed perfection (the mythic American dream); a prominent family’s tragic descent into betrayal, death, and madness; and, holding its many narrative threads together, an aging policeman’s pursuit of a fire-scarred magician (the mark of Cain carried also by Grendel) who returns to Batavia—a place of real and false oracles and omens—bringing death as he preaches anarchy and radical freedom. Steeped in the fever-swamp conflicts of the late 1960s, when the civil-rights movement soured into violent black militancy, hippies transformed into yippies and Weathermen, and the federal government was preparing for the real possibility of civil war, Gardner’s fourth novel is for many critics, such as Gregory Morris, his “most expansive, most sophisticated, and most skilled intellectual declaration.”

more from Boston Review here.

Europe’s warmest autumn in 500 years

From Nature:

Tree_3 Do you still have roses in bloom in your English garden? Then you might not be surprised to hear that Europe is experiencing the warmest autumn since Columbus first sailed to America.

Preliminary analysis shows that continental mean temperatures in September and October were 11°C — that’s 1.8 °C higher than the long-term average for these months. November was 2.5 °C higher than the average. The results show that 2006 has beaten the ‘hottest’ autumns of 1772, 1938 and 2000 by about a degree. Some flowering trees, such as horse chestnuts, may spring into blossom before winter comes, causing problems later in the year. And butterflies and other animals may face trouble if they miss the signal to reduce their activity for the winter.

More here.

Monday, December 4, 2006

A Case of the Mondays: Islam is Western

I really wish the people in the United States, Canada, and Europe who complain that Muslims are destroying Western culture looked at earlier groups of immigrants. The same things that people say about Muslims—that they’re an alien culture, that they don’t respect democratic values, that they treat women badly—were also said about Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants to the US a hundred years ago. The things people say about Islamic countries were true about a significant fraction of the West as late as the 1970s.

Islam and Christianity are so similar that they are almost, but not quite, the same religion. They’re both monotheistic, with all the cultural implications this carries. They both have a progressive view of the world, in which good works and proselytization will create an increasingly better world. Their eschatologies are remarkably similar. Overall, Islam is hardly different from Protestant Christianity. It’s entirely by accident that right now Muslim regions are more conservative and anti-democratic than Christian regions. Abstractly, there is nothing that prevents what is commonly called the West from eventually expanding as far south as the Sahara desert and as far east as Iran or even Pakistan and considering Islam as one of its two main religions. Just like there used to be a clearly defined Catholic West and a Protestant West, it makes sense to talk of a Christian West and a Muslim West.

More concretely, it’s instructive to compare Muslims to Jews. When Jews started immigrating to the US from Eastern Europe en masse, they were significantly more conservative than Christians on most issues, including all of those that anti-Islamic Westerners consider now in their assessment of Islam. They were almost invariably ultra-Orthodox; secular European Jews typically accepted Zionism and emigrated to Israel or tried to assimilate into the surrounding mainstream culture. If the practices of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel today are any indication, these immigrants were insular, stayed in enclaves like Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, had birth rates that would put today’s Arabs to shame, and treated women with about the same level of respect as Mormon polygamist sects. As late as 1963, Betty Friedan considered Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans as examples of groups that were more patriarchal than mainstream America in The Feminine Mystique.

That Jews are now the most reliably liberal ethnic and religious group in the United States should suggest that the people who rant about the Islamization of Europe have a disturbingly myopic view of history. Jews had few structural barriers to integration; American cultural policy has always been neutral, neither suppressing minority-religion civil society institutions the way France does or shoving them down people’s throats the way Israel does. Anti-Semitism ran rampant in the United States up until 1945, when people started feeling guilty about the Holocaust, but there were numerous institutions that Jews could turn to beside the synagogue. Still, the process took almost an entire century, and the integration of white Christian ethnic minorities, like Italians and Poles, took only slightly less. If a similar thing doesn’t happen to European Muslims, Europe only has its countries’ own cultural policies to blame.

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington defines Western civilization based on liberal democratic notions like democracy, human rights, and gender equality. Based on that, he proceeds to claim that the West consists only of the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Protestant and Catholic areas of Europe. Other people who focus on the cultural differences between Christians and Muslims are less explicit, but they still seem to believe similar things, perhaps with slightly tweaked civilizational boundaries.

The problem with Huntington’s assessment is that it ignores the fact that it’s just a coincidence of the last fifteen years that what he defines as the West is more or less contiguous with the part of the world that consists of democracies with at least moderate levels of gender equality. Thinkers in Protestant countries—including France, which has been at odds with the Papacy for centuries and fought on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years’ War—developed liberalism at a time when Catholic countries were authoritarian backwaters. Contrary to Huntington’s claim, the Enlightenment didn’t begin in Catholic and Protestant Europe while skipping Orthodox Europe, Latin America, and the non-Christian world; it began in England and France, and spread from there to countries that in some cases had been conservative in culture and government for hundreds of years.

All this means that critics of Islam, such as Mark Steyn and Daniel Pipes, are letting prejudice overwhelm their sense of reason. If you look at the situation between 1990 and 2006, you’ll indeed see that Muslims tend to be more religious, more misogynist, and more anti-democratic than American and European Christians. So what? If you looked at the situation between 1910 and 1925, you’d see that the same comparison applies to Jews and Catholics versus Protestants. It would even work better because you wouldn’t have to contort yourself to explain why what you say are Western values are not found in Russia and most of Latin America; you’d need to explain why France should be grouped with Britain rather than with Spain, but that’s far easier. That period of time saw emerging democracies in Germany and Czechoslovakia, both of which were dominated by Protestants (Prussians and Czechs respectively), compared with Italy’s slip into fascism. Applying the same methodology that Christian and Jewish critics of Islam use, you’d conclude that Catholicism was a backward religion that threatened to take over the United States via immigration and high birth rates.

Of course, many people actually said that, not so much about Catholics as about Jews. For most of those, democratic values were just a front for anti-Semitism, because they were a good abbreviation for “Our culture.” American anti-Semites were likely to worship Hitler, even though his values were anything but what Americans consider American values. Western anti-Muslim writers seem to worship Putin’s strong-arm treatment of Muslims, even as he destroys the democratic institutions they all profess to want to protect.

What is more, if Western values are defined by democracy, women’s rights, and so on, then there is no such thing as the West, only more liberal people and less liberal people. Almost every country in the world has been democratic at one point; states usually abandon democracy only when it fails to work or when the military is strong enough to mount a coup, just like in inter-war Italy and Germany. People have been slower at adopting feminism, but given that Jews and Italians and Poles didn’t do anything to lessen women’s rights in the US, it’s safe to conclude that the people who promulgate fears that Muslims will pressure Europe to adopt Sharia laws are more interested in hating foreigners than in telling the truth.

One approach is to conclude that civilizations the way Huntington defines them don’t exist at all. Another is to say that they exist, but have nothing to do with liberal values. If the latter approach is correct, and Huntington’s basic framework of basing civilizational boundaries on religion has merit, then Islam is part of the West (indeed, the lack of a mosque hierarchy makes Islam more Western than countries where the Pope gets to dictate abortion law). That inclusion should help shatter myths of Western cultural supremacy, which are surprisingly prevalent among people who claim that what they like about the West is its pluralism. Unfortunately, like their anti-Semitic ideological ancestors, anti-Muslims did not come to be what they are now due to any examination of evidence, but due to some form of prejudice.

Teddy Roosevelt’s Ghost

Two years ago, I dressed up as Theodore Roosevelt for Halloween, and my friend Emily dressed as Cuba. Together, we were “the Spanish-American War”. We weren’t trying to honor the man, the country, or U.S. interventionism. Rather, we were trying to let a bruised and hard-to-defend moment of American history have a rare moment as a costume. Also, it let Emily buck the trend of “Sexy Pirate Halloween costumes.”

It was a terrific mistake. I thought my T.R. costume was clear enough: a fierce moustache, a “Big Stick” from the backyard, a pair of khakis, a second-hand hunting jacket, a cowboy hat. Voila! Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, ready for San Juan Hill. Emily’s costume was a little more of a problem — how does one dress as a country, let alone Cuba? — but we settled on a short black wig, a Spanish skirt, a fake parrot, and a bandolier. Just the sort of thing a hack costume company might actually sell as “Cuba”, if they were interested, which was exactly the point.

Incredibly, only one person on the streets of New York that night got it. What a surprise. But at the time, it was a disheartening lesson that our little obsession with the mash-up of American history was not only more than a little pretentious, it was also mostly unshared by anyone else. But a last minute chance encounter made the whole vnture somewhat worthwhile. We were shuffling home (my borrowed boots were far too small), when we passed a group of Latino guys hanging out outside an apartment building in the West Village. They took a look at us, and one said loudly, in Spanish and provoking great bellylaughs, “Look! Here comes a pirate and a [dergoatory Spanish word for a homosexual male]!” I should have winced, but instead I stifled a laugh. Was there any sharper irony than a costume of T.R., the self-(consciously-)made paragon of “manliness” and the chin-thrusting embodiment of American imperialism, being read as a [derogatory Spanish word for a homosexual male] instead?

That story came to mind when I read that on Friday a U.S. Postal Service mechanic pled guilty to haven stolen the revolver used by Roosevelt — then a colonel in the U.S. Cavalry — in Cuba during the Spanish-American war. In April of 1990, Anthony Joseph Tulino apparently visited Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s Long Island Home, and stole the .38-caliber Colt Roosevelt used during the battle of San Juan Hill. It was no ordinary revolver: it had been salvaged from the wreckage of the U.S.S. Maine after the battleship exploded in Havana in 1898 — providing the pretext for war — and with it Roosevelt apparently shot a Spanish solider during the Rough Riders’ most famous charge. Tulino kept it wrapped in a sweatshirt in his closet until a friend tipped off the police. He was prosecuted under the American Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by Roosevelt himself, and his guilty pleas ended what a U.S. attorney called a “16-year-old mystery,” returning a “treasured piece of American history…to the public.”

Yes, I wondered, but just how “treasured” a piece of U.S. history is it really? (Monetarily, the revolver’s valued at $500,000.) Just how “treasured” is any piece of historical memorabilia owned by a president, when compared to what a Marilyn Monroe jacket or DiMaggio jersey might fetch? I think pieces like pistol are important, but I also dressed up as its reckless owner for Halloween one year. How many Americans know–or would care– why T.R. and his ghost have been haunting recent American culture and policy? President Bush thinks he knows — he read Edmund Morris’s “Theodore Rex” over the first holidays after the September 11th attacks, and in 2003 I did a doubletake when i saw a NY Times picture of him advocating intervention in Iraq with a painting of Roosevelt in the background. Hardly a coincidence.

But despite Roosevelt’s mark on anti-trust, health and environmental law, and the way he ushered in the “American Century” by asserting America’s exceptionalism and duty to intervene abroad, of the four presidents in the Mt. Rushmore club (all chosen, incidentally, for their role in protecting the republic and expanding its territories), he’s the least likely to be recognized by name. (This might be due to little more than T.R.’s lack of a dollar-bill home. Maybe Sean Comb’s great-grandson will one day say it’s all about the Roosevelts, instead, making this column even more irrelevant.)

American ignorance of its non-Washington-Jefferson-Lincoln presidential past seems to be a core joke in another interesting moemnt for T.R.’s ghost this month:

“Night at the Museum,” a Ben Stiller comedy to be released on December 22nd. In the most recent preview, we see Stiller — an applicant for a position as a security guard at New York’s Museum of Natural History — looking up at a posed manniken of Rough Rider-era T.R. on horseback.

“Ahh, Teddy Roosevelt,” he says to a museum employee. “He was our fourth president, right?”

“Twenty-sixth,” she says right back.

“Twenty-sixth,” Stiller notes.

It’s an easy joke, apt for almost any historical figure, but it’s brought to life by what seems to be the movie’s central conceit: that when the sun goes down, all the exhibits in the museum come to life. The Wild West dioramas, the T-Rex skeleton, and most importantly, the Roosevelt mannikan, played by none other than Robin Williams. The first time I saw the preview I flinched. Robin Willliams? But upon reflection you realize that casting one of America’s most manic comedians as one of America’s wildest presidents was a perfect choice, and said a lot about T.R.’s legacy. There’s no other American president whose character (what we know of it, at least) can hold its own, not as the straight-man (see Abe Lincoln in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” or Nixon in “Dick”), but as a source of laughs in its own right.

Monday Musing: Aptitude Schmaptitude!

Like most people, I have no special gift for math. This doesn’t mean, however, that I am mathematically illiterate, or innumerate, to use the term popularized by John Allen Paulos. On the contrary, I know high school level math very well, and am fairly competent at some types of more advanced math. I do have a college degree in engineering, after all. (There is no contradiction in this–pretty much anyone can be good at high school math.) While the state of mathematical incompetence in this country has been much lamented, most famously in Paulos’s brilliant 1988 book Innumeracy, it is still tacitly accepted. Around the time when Paulos was writing that book, I was an undergraduate in the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and I soon noticed that to get help with mathematics, one generally had to consult with Indian, or Korean, or Chinese graduate students. (The best looking women happened to be in Art History though, so I very quickly developed a deep fascination for Caravaggio!) Some of the engineering departments (like mechanical engineering) did not have a single American graduate student, and since that time things have only grown worse, with much of the most important technological and scientific work in this country being performed by immigrants. (About a quarter of the tech startups in Silicon Valley are owned by Indians and Pakistanis alone.)

Being incompetent in math has become not only acceptable in this widely innumerate culture, it has almost become a matter of pride. No one goes around showing off that he is illiterate, or has no athletic ability, but declarations of innumeracy are constantly made without any embarrassment or shame. For example, on a small essay that I wrote here at 3QD about Stevinus’s beautiful proof of the law of inclined planes, my extremely intelligent and accomplished friend, and frequent 3QD contributor, Josh (now teaching and studying writing at Stanford) left an appreciative comment, while adding, “I couldn’t math my way out of a paper bag.” (Sorry to pick on you, Josh, the example just came handily to mind!) Confessing confusion about numbers is taken to display not only an endearing honesty in self-regard on the part of the confessor, but is also frequently taken to hint at a fineness of sensibility and high development in other areas of mental life. Alas, (Josh notwithstanding) there is no evidence of any such compensatory accomplishment in those who are innumerate. Not knowing high school level math is not easily excusable. But reader, if you are innumerate, it may not be your fault and I will not scold you. In fact, I’m going to try and pin the blame on American culture.

The way I see it, there was a one-two cultural punch which has knocked out numeracy in this country: first, there was a devaluing of mathematical competence in and by pop-culture; second, justification was provided for not learning mathematics to those already disinclined to do so by the devaluation. That’s it. The rest of this column is an attempt to flesh this out a little bit.

Just like learning to read (or for that matter, learning to play the piano) mathematics is something that it takes years to learn well and develop a good feel for. Reading, writing, playing the piano, and doing math are highly unnatural activities (unlike speaking, say) which we are not naturally evolved to do. Instead, we take abilities we have evolved for other purposes and subvert them because it is so useful to learn these things. And the price we must pay is that they are not always a great joy to do.Legaemc2l Just as one must learn one’s ABCs or practice one’s scales, one must also memorize one’s times tables, and I cannot think of a way to make that particularly interesting. It just has to be done. In fact, young students have to be disciplined into learning these things. But before anything else, it must be made clear that while learning math requires no special abilities, it is different than learning some other things in one crucial way: the study of math is (at least up to the high school level) very hierarchical and cumulative. While one may suddenly do very well in a European history course in high school while having paid no attention to any history in junior high, it is not possible to do well in Algebra in high school without having learned the math one was presented with in junior high. I sometimes tutor students for graduate admissions tests like the GRE or GMAT, and the first time I meet with them they often show me algebraic word problems they got wrong in a practice test. I ask how their junior high math is, and no one ever admits that they can’t do 7th or 8th grade math. Then I ask them to subtract one number from another for me, using a pen and a piece of paper I hand them: say -2and7/8ths minus 1and3/17ths. You’d be surprised how many of them are tripped up and make a mistake in a simple subtraction that any 8th grader should be able to do. The problem is they really cannot do ANY algebra until they are consistently and confidently competent in such simple tasks as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing numbers, and yes, this includes fractions, decimals, and negative numbers, but even these college graduates generally are not.

When I was a young child in Karachi, I liked reading Archie comic books, the hero of which is a bumbling, freckled, red-headed student at Riverdale high. He and his slightly evil schoolmate Reggie have a rivalry over class-fellows Betty and Veronica, who in turn are rivals for their attention. A slew of hackneyed characters rounds out the cast of this teenage-hormone-drenched-yet-wholesome comic book sit-com, including the glutton Jughead, the jock Moose, and others, but one of the least attractive characters serves as the pop-cultural stereotype of the math prodigy: Dilton Doily. Ridiculously and alliteratively named for a small ornamental mat, poor Dilton is smart but must pay the price. He is a small, unattractive, unathletic and insignificant nerd, complete with coke-bottle glasses and a pocket protector. No one in his right mind would or could look up to Dilton as a role model. Rather, he almost seems to be there as a warning of what might happen to one if one doesn’t watch out and avoid math. The rather stupid everyman Archie is, of course, glorified as an ideal and it is he who usually gets the girl. This is just one of a million such stereotypes in movies, TV shows, books, cartoons, and a zillion other things in which being mathematically literate is equated to basically being, at best, impotent and insignificant and, at worst, a sideshow freak. This is in part because geniuses in math, like in everything else, are sometimes eccentric, and in crudely contemptuous caricature, this eccentricity is easily exaggerated into freakishness. (In fact, I think that Stephen Hawking captures the popular imagination precisely because with his computer-generated voice and his sadly twisted pose in his wheelchair, he looks freakish to people and this so conveniently fits in with the popular prejudice about mathematical genius. It makes people feel good about being innumerate if being numerate is going to make one into a physical Stephen Hawking. The public even exaggerates his mathematical and scientific ability in a twisted sort of sympathy: in a poll of professional physicists, Hawking did not even make the twenty top living physicists, though popular polls would probably place him at number one; and probably number two, after Einstein, of all physicists, living or dead.) I could really go on forever providing examples of cultural hostility to mathematical literacy (and an argument could even be made that this is part of an overall anti-intellectual trend in America in the last few decades) but I am not interested in doing that here. My point is that it ain’t cool to be good at math.

But here’s the devastating second part of the one-two punch combination: if you haven’t learned your math, it’s because you don’t have an aptitude for it. (And for the reasons given in the previous paragraph, you might as well thank your lucky stars for that!) Through a complex series of events, I came to the United States as an 11 year-old boy to live with my brother in Buffalo for two years before returning to Pakistan for high school. I attended 7th and 8th grades at a suburban public school, and I loved it. To this day, I remember many of my teachers with immense gratitude and fondness: Mr. Shiloh, Social Science (“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams… ” Yes, I can still recite all the presidents, Mr. Shiloh); Mr. Schwartz, Science; Mr. Coin, Mathematics; Ms. Muller, on whom I had the biggest schoolboy crush, German; etc. But one bad thing did happen to me: I was given something called a differential aptitude test (DAT) soon after my arrival, and the results were explained to me by my homeroom teacher: apparently, while I was supposedly gifted in verbal skills and artistic abilities, I was not much good at math or music. I took this to heart, and stopped paying much attention to mathematics. What was the point, if I just didn’t have the requisite ability to get it? It took my father’s devoted and prolonged drilling in mathematics a few years later, back in Pakistan, to undo the damage of that test, and I eventually got 99 out of 100 marks on my boards exam there.

I am by no means alone in this experience, and I believe that these tests and the whole idea that some children are better at some things and others at other things, and that they should be told this very early, is a stupendously dangerous one. What purpose can it serve, other than to encourage kids to give up on subjects that they may not have previously done well in for a thousand different completely contingent reasons? They will naturally already be trying harder at things they are good at, so they don’t need more encouragement there. This idea, that some people are good at some things, and others at other things, is fine if it is a matter of catering to children’s self-esteem when they are selecting a sport to play, for example. One person can be happy playing football, while another smaller person might become good at Badminton, or whatever, letting everyone believe that they have some special ability. After all, most of them will not grow up to be professional sportsmen or women. But when it is about something as fundamental and basic to future understanding of the world that they live in as mathematics is, it is hugely destructive. I firmly believe that anyone normal can be taught to master the mathematics of high school, and that it is all that is needed to produce a profoundly more numerate society, but it is near-impossible to overcome the “I’m just no good at math” barrier. Why are people even allowed, much less encouraged, to believe this about themselves? For those students who are geniuses, as well as those that are truly handicapped in some particular mental skill, these tests are not needed. That can be tested for in other ways. It is the huge majority of kids falling under the middle of the bell curve that tests like the DATs are so damaging to, and this, I think, is the real root of innumeracy in this country.

And then there are those who feel that it is no great loss to be innumerate. In that case, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you are missing. Some of the most profoundly beautiful ideas produced in the last few thousand years are beyond you, as is the serious study of about 80% of what is taught in modern universities. Even the social sciences cannot exist without math anymore, and you cannot have any deep sense of political and economic issues if you are completely innumerate.

Let me summarize: math emphatically does not require any special ability, but it does require a lot of discipline, and if you fall behind, because of its cumulative nature, you will find yourself in a cycle of failure to master whatever you are presented with next. If you try to make the argument that math is something that only a portion of the population have the congenital ability to master, even at the high school level, then you must also make the argument that this mysterious ability, unlike any other mental ability that we know of, is also sharply unevenly spread across various countries. Japanese children have much more of it than American ones, for example, because Japanese high school students regularly trounce American students at the same level in math tests. You will also have to explain how Japanese children who have been living in America for a couple of generations lose that congenital ability. No, I’m afraid that will not do.

This essay is dedicated to my friend and greatest anti-innumeracy warrior, John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy I mentioned above and recommend highly. Click it to buy it, or click here to buy his other books.

My previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

POST SCRIPT: John Allen Paulos has sent the following comment by email:

Paulos_5A nice story and some good insights, Abbas, and thanks for the kind words.

I agree that to an extent mathematics is a hierarchical subject and that a certain amount of drill is absolutely necessary to do well in the elementary portions of it. Nevertheless, it’s important to realize that considerable understanding and appreciation of many important ideas can be obtained via puzzles, everyday vignettes, expository articles, and sketches of applications.

A loose analogy comes to mind: If all one ever did in English class during elementary, middle, and high school was diagram sentences, or all one ever did in music class during those same years was practice scales, it wouldn’t be very surprising if one lacked interest in or appreciation for literature or song. Given suitable allowance for hyperbole, however, this is what often passes for early math preparation. The analogue of literature and song is not provided to mathematics students in their early studies, so there seems little rationale for developing the necessary mechanical skills needed.

A marginally relevant anecdote: I gave a lecture once to a very large group of students at West Point. Whether because of their military interests or their personal psychology, some were quite interested in the sequence or hierarchy of mathematical subjects. During the question and answer session after my lecture, I was told that the proper order of these subjects was arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, and advanced calculus and then was asked what comes after advanced calculus. The students were nonplussed at my answer of “serious gum disease.”

Sunday, December 3, 2006

30 Best Blogs of 2006

We are simultaneously happy and insulted to show up at number 12, as chosen by Rex Sorgatz:

Caveat: no human on the planet is qualified to do this, and the 500 blogs that I follow probably represents how many blogs are created in a second.1 On the other hand, this is not a list of esoteric blogs that you’ll smirk at and never read again. I actually read all of these, because I think they’re great…

13. Make Magazine
Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I’m including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make’s philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)

12. 3 Quarks Daily
3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)

11. Screens
I’ve had a boyish crush on Virginia Heffernan‘s writing since her days as Slate’s tv columnist. This year, she started this peculiar little blog for the New York Times, covering the cultural side of the internet video industry before anyone realized there was such a thing. She was the first mainstream media writer to snag lonelygirl15 as a storyline (which I — still boyishly — think she first saw here), writing in a cozy vernacular that you were surprised in the old gray lady. (See also: Lost Remote & Carpetbagger.)

More here.

A Big Band for Today, With Hints of the Past

The band Secret Society, which gave a brilliant performance at the Second Annual 3 Quarks Ball earlier this year, is reviewed by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times:

02darc1_1Halfway through an alto saxophone solo, in a piece of large-ensemble jazz by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a funny thing happened. The solo, by Rob Wilkerson, was thoughtful and idiomatically current. It took a few minutes to crest and subside, and Mr. Wilkerson passed through provocative intervals, swift chromatic passages and long tones, played with feeling. It wasn’t cold, or overdetermined by patterns. Why didn’t it seem right?

It was that Mr. Argue’s ensemble writing, before the solo, had been so rich and strong that the solo felt distracting, almost unnecessary. The tune was called “Flux in a Box,” and there were 18 good musicians onstage on Thursday at the Bowery Poetry Club, most of them having emptied out of music school in the last five years or so. (The Secret Society formed last year and hasn’t played many gigs yet; the musicians are all moving parts of the New York jazz scene, most with some working experience in the city’s best big bands, including Maria Schneider’s ensemble and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.) Mr. Argue, young, tense, sallow and leather-jacketed, conducted in front…

But a few other of Mr. Argue’s pieces, including “Induction Effect” and “Habeas Corpus,” established something else about him: he wants his music to make contemporary sense. Thursday’s set established a through line among Mr. Brookmeyer’s adventurous big-band compositions of the ’60s, Steve Reich’s pulse patterns and Tortoise’s new instrumental rock with jazz harmony. There were drones, backbeats, short cyclical figures, clouds of guitar distortion, all of it written into the music and elegantly claiming its place. And so a big, broad musical vocabulary came together easily, without jump-cutting or wrenching shifts of style. Mr. Argue made all these elements belong together naturally.

More here.  Congratulations to Darcy and all of Secret Society!

Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America

From Bookreview.com:Fat_5

From the person behind the documentary Supersize Me, this book looks at the fast food industry in America. In 2005, obesity related diseases will come close to smoking as the biggest killer of Americans; the estimate is that 400,000 people will die from such diseases. As an experiment, put a plate of McDonald’s fries under glass, for several months. What will happen to the fries? The answer is: basically nothing. They might start to smell, but there will be little or no decomposition to the fries. One can only wonder what is in the fries or the vegetable oil to cause this to happen.

Part of this book is also a chronicle of his 30 days on the “McDonald’s Diet” for the film. He got three different doctors to independently keep an eye on his health, which basically fell apart. He suffered bad headaches and chest pains, he couldn’t focus mentally and his cholesterol and blood pressure rose dramatically. Oh, and he also gained more than 24 pounds.

A measure of liver function is the presence of an enzyme in the blood called serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase (SGPT). During his month of McDonald’s food, his number rose from 20 to 290; under 40 is normal. Another enzyme to measure liver function is alanine transaminase (ALT); his number skyrocketed from 17 to 471, before settling at 240. Again, under 40 is normal. Is it any wonder that a child bron in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes from poor dietary habits?

More here.

Do you need to be an intelligence agent to get hold of polonium-210?

From Nature:

Rt No. Contrary to initial reports, the radioactive substance that last month killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had been living in London, could probably be obtained by someone without contacts at nuclear reactors, the sites at which polonium-210 is manufactured. In the United States, tiny amounts can be bought from various supply companies — but one would need to buy thousands in order to amass a dangerous dose. Larger amounts of the substance are found in some commercial products, such as anti-static devices used by the plastics industry. These devices are strictly regulated and are usually only available for lease rather than purchase. Specifications available on manufacturers’ websites suggest that they contain enough polonium-210 to kill someone, says Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

How much was used to kill Litvinenko?

No one knows for sure, but the time he took to die — around three weeks after being admitted to hospital — gives a rough clue.

More here.

Saturday, December 2, 2006

The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of the universe

Nicholas Fearn review Michael Frayn’s book, in The Independent:

FraynstorIt is unfair of sceptics to dismiss psychology as mere alchemy. Whatever the deficiencies of Freud and his successors, the alchemical stage in our understanding of human beings was always that catalogue of speculation and dogma known as literature. Even today, a novelist can still round off a chapter with a grand pronouncement about life or men and women without fear that the reader might demand evidence or argument to support his claim. Such authorly “insights” are the currants that make the cake, for we like to think that a great work of literature is not just inspiring, but also contains eternal truths. We do not wonder about the writer’s sample size or his controlled conditions, for to doubt his intuitive grasp of the world and his authentic vision would be philistine. However, this has not prevented scientists from trespassing on the novelist’s territory at will; seeking to expose the conditions for happiness and the recipe for love itself. Were proper account to be taken of such research, then poets and novelists would be reduced to the status of upmarket entertainers. Their vaunted insights would at best provide illustrations with which to jazz up the papers in a scientific journal.

More here.