Blogs / Cosmic Variance

In Sunday’s New York Times, Julie Bosman has an interesting article about a mini-crusade to keep an award-winning children’s book off library shelves. The book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, won this year’s Newbery Medal, and is taking flak because of a single word, which appears on the very first page. That word is (and I hope any children reading will cover their eyes) scrotum.

So what is this filth that threatens to infiltrate children’s libraries? Well, the word apparently arises is the following context

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

The Times article contains a number of quotes from librarians that I found pretty silly

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote…

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J.

Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

What exactly is going on here? Around fifty percent of the people who might read this book will have already found, after a casual inspection, that they possess a scrotum. If one wanted a natural way to talk to one’s children about what their body parts are and what they are called, surely having one crop up in a kids book would provide that. There is certainly nothing sexual about a dog being bitten on his scrotum (unless he specifically asked the rattlesnake to do it, and was found tied to his kennel with silk scarves. But I digress.). And telling a child that a scrotum is a particular body part that either they or their classmates possess does not seem to be necessarily sexual either.

Is it thought that keeping the name of the body part secret will make them less likely to realize that it can be used for Satan’s work?

The author is understandably, to my mind, confused by the kerfuffle.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

This is what really gets me about censorship. Nobody would argue that the children’s section of the library should contain hard-core pornography, but I wish people weren’t so touchy as to squash things that might trigger, and help nurture curiosity. I would have thought that any teacher worth their salt would welcome a child initiating “that vocabulary lesson”. Micromanaging a child’s environment to this level, where one tries to avoid their knowing what perfectly natural body parts are called, strikes me as, well, you know, what a scrotum contains - bollocks!.

A recent Gallup poll, via Daily Kos:

If your party nominated a well-qualified Candidate For WH ‘08 who was _, would you vote for that person?

                         Yes   No                  

Catholic                  95%  4%                          

Black                     94   5  

Jewish                    92   7    

A woman                   88  11        

Hispanic                  87  12    

Mormon                    72  24  

Married for third time    67  30  

72 years old              57  42

A homosexual              55  43    

An atheist                45  53

Nothing new, of course.

But what if the race were between an atheist and a black Mormon lesbian, huh? What then?

In a follow-up to Julianne’s previous post on scientific communication, I thought I’d describe a lecture I attended last week. I’ll try not to say anything overly controversial (though CV readers can be a tough crowd). The talk was by Felice Frankel, as part of the Santa Fe Institute public lecture series. The title was “More than Pretty Pictures: The Power of Images in Science”. Frankel is known for her scientific photographs. She creates beautiful images of a large range of physical systems (from water droplets to nanocrystals). She’s been responsible for quite a number of cover images for journals such as Science and Nature.

Frankel spent much of her lecture discussing her philosophy in taking scientific images. This consisted mostly of comments about the power of visualization, and ideas for how to make scientific visualization more effective. She emphasized that it’s highly nontrivial to produce an image which grabs you, while simultaneously informing you about the science it’s meant to represent. Many scientific images are uninspired. Or confusing. Often both. The lecture was sprinkled liberally with her work, much of which is quite arresting. For example:

This is an image of a ferrofluid. Frankel took seven small magnets, and placed them below a glass plate with the fluid above. She then added a bright yellow Post-It note below, yielding the vivid colors. It is this last step which completely transforms the photograph, and which your average scientist would have neglected. We have much to learn in how to present our results, both within the community, and to the world at large.

Images are indeed an essential component of science. They are visceral and physical, in a way that a table of numbers cannot hope to reproduce. They allow for what Frankel terms “visual thinking”: a direct and unmediated engagement with the world. This is particularly evident in astronomy. I would argue that the Hubble Space Telescope has generated many of the most beautiful images ever produced. And an appreciation of the science underlying the images only strengthens one’s admiration. Astronomy is peculiar in that a large portion of the field is fundamentally based on pretty pictures. (Okay, some of these pictures are run through variants of prisms to produce spectra, which aren’t quite as beautiful (at least to my, untrained, eye).) Julianne is our resident expert on taking and interpreting astronomical images; I’m told it’s a little more involved than pointing a digital camera and pushing the button.

What I found most surprising about Frankel’s lecture was her repeated insistence that she is not an artist, and that her photos are not to be considered art. As she put it: “This is why I am not an artist: I am deeply committed to maintaining the integrity of the science.” In her view, because she is constrained to reproduce the world as it is, she is not allowed the free rein of an artist. Her focus is on communicating science as effectively as possible: education rather than aesthetics, meaning rather than art. I find this argument somewhat disappointing. Her most effective images are certainly art; in fact, a number of museums have added her photographs to their collections. And her ability to produce these images, without the liberty of composing unphysical scenarios, or the liberal application of photoshop, does not detract from her talents. If anything, the restricted domain in which she works emphasizes her abilities. Although the sonnet is a severely constrained form of expression, I don’t see anyone arguing that Shakespeare’s contributions don’t qualify as art.

One side-note which Frankel briefly touched upon was the issue of “true” or “accurate” representation in science. While Frankel makes an effort to maintain the essential integrity of her images, most Hubble images are somewhat enhanced (false-color). This means that, were you to manage to stick your head into the focal plane of the Hubble telescope (the fact that it’s hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth notwithstanding), the image you would see with your eyes would look completely different from the postcards we’re all familiar with. Scientists have taken liberties with the color palette and contrast in producing the images. Often the frequencies of the light in astronomical images are well outside human experience. The human eye is a particular sensor, and there’s no reason that it “sees” the universe in a way that’s in any sense profound. For example, we don’t see infrared. If we did, a hot pan on the stove would glow as a warning, and all those times I have dropped spaghetti sauce all over the floor would have been avoided. We don’t see x-rays either (superman presumably does; but in his case his eyes must not only be sensitive to x-rays, but also emit them in the first place, since the Sun isn’t bright enough in x-rays to give him good images on Earth). There are interesting astronomical sources of light at essentially all frequencies we’ve cared to observe, and so we generate images in a tremendous range of wavelength bands. Furthermore, by playing with the contrast and color scale, we can highlight various features and structures in the images; perhaps we’d like to “see” star forming regions, or shocked gas, or interstellar dust. As a happy byproduct, we also make the images visually stunning. It’s probably not entirely happenstance that images which emphasize interesting science also happen to be more beautiful. Although you would never see the identical scene with your naked eye at a telescope, the images are no less physical or instructive. They represent good science and good aesthetics. What’s not to love?

I am all in favor of increasing scientific communication, both within the field and to the general public. So, let me first go on record as saying I think it’s a great thing that the American Astronomical Society decided to podcast some of the large plenary talks from their latest meeting in Seattle. Podcasting is a terrific way of giving more people access to something that you’d have to be priviliged with time, money, and credentials to attend. Apple had a big presence in the plenary sessions, and have even loaded the talks into iTunes! (Search on “AAS/AAPT”). A big “huzzah!” to all involved.

However.

For scientific talks, the visuals are key. Plots, diagrams, equations — key content is lost when all you have is sound. If you listen to any of the talks, you’ll hear people saying “If you look here…”, “As you see…”, etc. Now, if you already have a good sense of what the speaker is talking about, it may be fine to just have the words, but I’m very curious what it’s like to listen to these without the images that go along with them. Hopefully next time they’ll at least have a link to the PDF of the slides.

Now the kicker is that the website did indeed include some visuals, and man did they go out of their way to make them weird. They video-taped all the speakers, and painstakingly combed through every millisecond of footage to pick the oddest damn still-frames they could find. For example, nothing captures the excitement of the press conference on “NEWS FLASH FROM THE GALACTIC CENTER!!!” like the following:

Nor, could they have identified more amusingly unflattering moments in 50 minutes of video than the still frames they chose for me and my collaborator Rachel Somerville, who gave back-to-back talks.

Update: Removed on the count of insensitivity on my part. Sincere apologies to all.

None of the other speakers fared much better. On the whole, however, I think this is terrific progress. Next time they may even spell my name right.

Just over a year ago, Clifford reported the shocking news that Andrew Chamblin, a wonderful young physicist, great guy, and a friend of a number of us at Cosmic Variance, had died. Many people used the comments section of that post to recount fond memories of Andrew. We then announced The Andrew Chamblin Memorial Conference here, and Clifford later discussed it over at Asymptotia.

I’d now like to bring to your attention the first Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Stephen Hawking on Wednesday May 9th. The invitation is below, and I’ve been told that it’s important that people read the bit at the bottom, and understand that anyone wishing to attend must email the secretary to let her know, since entry is by (free) ticket only.

Unfortunately I can’t make it, but be sure I’ll be thinking of Andrew on that day.

Jennifer tries to take the high road with her Valentine’s Day post. A little science, a dash of poetry, a bit of cute archeology.

But it’s all just a distraction to prevent people from noticing this picture in Nature. That’s one she’ll never live down!

Nor will I.

A few years ago, as a newbie assistant professor, I was visited in my office by an editor at The Free Press. He was basically trolling the corridors, looking for people who had interesting ideas for popular-science books. I said that I liked the idea of writing a book, but I didn’t really want to do a straight-up cosmology tome. I had a better idea: I could write a book explaining how, when you really think about things scientifically, you come to realize that God doesn’t exist. I even had a spiffy title picked out — God Remains Dead: Reason, Religion, and the Pointless Universe. It’s not any old book that manages to reference both Steven Weinberg and Friedrich Nietzsche right there on the cover. Box office, baby.

The editor was actually intrigued by the idea, and he took it back to his bosses. Ultimately, however, they decided not to offer me a contract, and I went on to write another book with more equations. (Now on sale at Amazon!)

All of which is to say: I totally could have been in on the ground floor of all this atheism chic. These days, between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a prominent publicly-outspoken atheist of one form or another. That could have been me, I tell you.

These guys have gotten a lot of attention — especially Dawkins, who was recently voted Person of the Year by at least one reputable organization. Of course, some of the attention has been negative, especially from folks who are unsympathetic to the notion of a harsh, materialistic, godless universe. But even among self-professed atheists and agnostics (not to mention your wishy-washy liberal religionists), some discomfort has been expressed over the tone of Dawkins’s approach. People have been known to call him arrogant. Even if you don’t believe in God, so the argument goes, it can be a bad strategy to be upfront and in-your-face in public about one’s atheism. People are very committed to their religious beliefs, and telling them that science proves them wrong will lead them away from science, not way from God. And if you must be a die-hard materialist, at least be polite about it and respect others’ beliefs — to be obnoxious and insulting is simply counterproductive. Apart from any deep issues of what we actually should believe, this is a separate matter of how we could best persuade others to agree with us.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that atheists shouldn’t be obnoxious and insulting; in fact, I think it’s a good strategy in all sorts of situations. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, etc. But it does not follow that we should keep quiet about comforting illusions because those are the only things standing between the poor dears and overwhelming existential anxiety. If people ask whether, as scientists, we believe in God, we should respect them enough to tell the truth — whatever we think that is. That doesn’t mean we have to go door-to-door spreading the good word of the laws of nature. It just means that we should be honest about what we actually think, giving the best arguments we have for whatever that may be, and let people decide for themselves what to believe.

Arrogant or not, as a matter of fact Dawkins and company have done a great service to the cause of atheism: they have significantly shifted the Overton Window. That’s the notion, borrowed from public-policy debates, of the spectrum of “acceptable opinion” on an issue. At any given time, on any particular question, the public discourse will implicitly deem certain positions to be respectable and worthy of civilized debate, and other positions to be crazy and laughable. The crucial part of this idea is that the window can be shifted by vigorous advocacy of positions on one extreme. And that’s just what Dawkins has done.

In other words, by being arrogant and uncompromising in his atheism, Dawkins has done a tremendous amount to make the very concept of atheism a respectable part of the public debate, even if you find him personally obnoxious. Evidence: a few years ago, major newsmagazines (prompted in part by the efforts of the Templeton Foundation) were running cover stories with titles like Science Finds God (Newsweek, July 20, 1998). Pure moonshine, of course — come down where you will on the whole God debate, it remains pretty clear that science hasn’t found Him. But, within the range of acceptable public discourse, both science and God were considered to be undeniably good things — it wasn’t a stretch to put them together. Nowadays, in contrast, we find cover stories with titles like God vs. Science (Time, Nov 13, 2006). You never would have seen such a story just a few years ago.

This is a huge step forward. Keep in mind, the typical American thinks of atheists as fundamentally untrustworthy people. A major network like CNN will think nothing of hosting a roundtable discussion on atheism and not asking any atheists to participate. But, unlike a short while ago, they will eventually be shamed into admitting that was a mistake, and make up for it by inviting some atheists to defend their ideas. Baby steps. Professional news anchors may still seem a little befuddled at the notion that a clean, articulate person may not believe in God. But at least that notion is getting a decent public hearing. Once people actually hear what atheists have to say, perhaps they will get the idea that one need not be an amoral baby-killer just because one doesn’t believe in God.

For that, Richard Dawkins, thank you.

Archaeologists from Valdaro, Italy, have unearthed a pair of skeletons — a couple who died young, and have been hugging for the last five thousand years. Take that, Andrew Marvell!

Commentators were unsure of many of the basic facts about the Neolithic couple — whether they died simultaneously or one followed the other, whether it was a sudden accident or a ritual sacrifice, or even whether they are man and woman or a same-sex couple.

Opinion is unanimous, however, that they are awfully cute.

While I enjoy blogging, and am perfectly prepared to discuss it with colleagues and students, I have generally kept it separate from my actual job. I don’t include it in my yearly account of my intellectual activities, I haven’t included it in promotion documents, and I certainly don’t blog about sensitive departmental or university matters.

Nevertheless, I think that universities and academics are becoming increasingly interested in the potential of blogs as educational and research tools (This topic has been discussed before here at Cosmic Variance, where an interesting discussion developed.) As a sign of this, I was recently asked to participate in the Syracuse University Faculty Development Focus Series. The organizers had come across our blog, and asked me to speak in a session with the following blurb

The community of weblogs is growing at an astounding rate. On July 31, 2006. Technorati, a popular search engine for blogs, tracked its 50th million blog*. How then can the educational community harness the power of blogs to get their ideas published and propagated? This workshop introduces participants to the different types of blogs and the ways they are being used for individual and collaborative research and learning.

Now, I have made it clear that I can only really speak with confidence about my own experience blogging, the issues that have arisen here and when I blogged at Orange Quark. I might have a few more widely applicable comments to make, but mostly it will be safer to speak about what I know best.

However, it occurred to me that we might use this opportunity to demonstrate how research might be facilitated by blogs, by asking you all to use this post’s comment section to throw in your ideas about the topic of the workshop. The question is

How can the educational community harness the power of blogs to get their ideas published and propagated?

I’d really appreciate any help you can give, and I’ll use this post and its comment thread as one of my examples in the workshop.

Another interesting abstract from the arxiv: astro-ph/0702173, “Dark Matter and Sterile Neutrinos,” by Biermann and Munyaneza.

Dark matter has been recognized as an essential part of matter for over 70 years now, and many suggestions have been made, what it could be. Most of these ideas have centered on Cold Dark Matter, particles that are predicted in extensions of standard particle physics, such as supersymmetry. Here we explore the concept that dark matter is sterile neutrinos, particles that are commonly referred to as Warm Dark Matter. Such particles have keV masses, and decay over a very long time, much longer than the Hubble time. In their decay they produce X-ray photons which modify the ionization balance in the very early universe, increasing the fraction of molecular Hydrogen, and thus help early star formation. Sterile neutrinos may also help to understand the baryon-asymmetry, the pulsar kicks, the early growth of black holes, the minimum mass of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, as well as the shape and smoothness of dark matter halos. As soon as all these tests have been made quantitative in their various parameters, we may focus on the creation mechanism of these particles, and could predict the strength of the sharp X-ray emission line, expected from any large dark matter assembly. A measurement of this X-ray emission line would be definitive proof for the existence of may be called weakly interacting neutrinos, or WINs.

The three flavors of neutrinos we know and love (the electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino, or equivalently [but differently] their mass eigenstates) interact through the weak nuclear force and gravity, but not through electromagnetism or the strong force. A sterile neutrino is one that doesn’t even interact through the weak force! As of yet completely hypothetical, such sterile neutrinos can play an interesting astrophysical role, depending on their masses; Alex Kusenko, as well as the above authors, has been investigating their properties for some time. This is a review paper that touches on a number of the novel possibilities.

Some other interesting abstracts:

• Davoudiasl and Rizzo, “Signatures of Spherical Compactification at the LHC,” hep-ph/0702078.
• Hayes, “Is the outer Solar System chaotic?”, astro-ph/0702179.
• Romano, “Testing cosmic homogeneity,” astro-ph/0702229.

Note that co-bloggers are welcome to post their own favorites, and commenters are welcome to suggest theirs! (At least one frequent commenter is a co-author of one of the papers above.)