science

Current Issues  /  PotD  /  science
Water That Is Safe
April 21, 2016
charles i. letbetter - water that is safe

Rivers, ponds, lakes, and streams – they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do – they all contain truths. —Muhammad Ali

 

charles i. letbetter - water that is safe

Water is the very essence of life, but is it ever safe to drink?

I was standing outside with the Tipster this morning waiting on her bus in the rain. As we stood there, huddled under my umbrella, she noticed the water running off the side. Being the silly little six-year-old that she is, she tipped her head back so that the top of her head was exposed to the rain.

“What are you doing?” I asked in a rather incredulous tone. As with many six-year-olds, getting her ready for school this morning was a trying set of circumstances and I really wasn’t in the mood for nonsense.

“I’m drinking the rain off the umbrella,” she giggled.

I pulled her back up under the umbrella with a warning, “You don’t want to do that.”

She’s six. She’s not going to let a statement like that go unchallenged. So, naturally, her response was, “Why?”

What came out of my mouth was, “Because the cats have been all over it,” which is a cop-out because the cats have been all over everything in our house. What I really meant, though, was something more like, “I have no idea what the Ph balance of the rainwater here is and given all the manufacturing on this side of town I’m not sure any of the rainwater is safe without some form of filtering.” That version would have gone right over her little head, though. Cats are much more relatable.

If you’ve driven around Indianapolis lately, you’ve probably seen the billboards and/or heard the radio ads from Citizens Energy, the company that manages and oversees the Indianapolis water supply. The ad campaign has been an attempt to garner public support and understanding for a proposed rate increase to water bills in the areas that Citizens covers. The situation, as presented by Citizens, sounds dier. Some pipes are over 100 years old and much of the original infrastructure is crumbling. Replacing all those pipes is expensive. The plan worked. Yesterday, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) approved a rate hike that will increase the average residential water bill by $5 a month starting in May.

The rate hike doesn’t actually ensure that the water we receive through our taps is any cleaner when it leaves the treatment facility, but that it’s less likely to be contaminated between there and your home. In short, what the rate hike does is help prevent Indianapolis and the surrounding areas from experiencing a water disaster like what happened with Flint, Michigan. Clean water passing through aging pipes is about as dangerous as, well, drinking water falling off an umbrella. All manners of nasty chemicals leach into the water supply with no means of control.

As Americans, we take the quality and ubiquity of our water supply for granted. Almost everyone alive today has grown up with running water. We are accustomed to turning a knob and having the water flow at quantities and pressures we could take for granted. That’s why Flint’s water crisis was so alarming. We, as a general populace, weren’t even aware that such a disaster could happen.

Scientist and climatologists have been warning us for years, though, that our supply of drinking water is becoming increasingly unsafe. As with most matters of earth science, no one wants to listen. The stories are of gradual decline, of a slow erosion that isn’t necessarily evident every time one looks out the window.  In 1990, the Acid Rain Program was created as part of the Clean Air Act, but corporate and industrial opposition to the limits established by those laws has been severe and through continued lobbying the laws have been diminished to the point they’re hardly recognizable.

Keeping our drinking water clean is neither cheap nor easy. Earlier this month, Citizens was happy to announce that, “… drinking water produced at all of the utility’s treatment plants is safe …” but that announcement didn’t come until after the Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding an area downtown to its list of superfund sites. Being on this list allows federal funds to be used in cleaning up the area. Two of Citizens’ wellfield areas, along Riverside and 16th streets, would be included in that cleanup. Until then, anything from those wellfields has to go through extra treatment before it’s ready to be consumed.

Spring is deceptive in its ability to make everything look so clean and pure. We just assume that what we drink and sprinkle over our gardens is healthy and safe. A major effort is required to keep us as safe as we think we are, though, and your Indiana state legislature isn’t helping any. Bills attempting to eliminate or significantly limit the EPA’s rules, especially those regarding groundwater, are frequently introduced and there is a vocal lobbying effort to prohibit all EPA legislation completely.

As beautiful a state as Indiana could be, you’d think we’d value our natural resources more and want to keep them clean, but apparently that’s not necessarily the case across the board. Some would rather indulge the continued dumping of raw sewage and spew horrible chemicals into the air. What may seem harmless to some, eventually impacts us all. Rain eventually falls and little girls try to drink the rain from their umbrellas.

You would think such an act would be innocent and safe. It should be.

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Current Issues  /  PotD  /  science
Science, Psychology, and Bullies
March 14, 2016
charles i. letbetter - science, psychology and bullies

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ —Isaac Asimov

 

charles i. letbetter - science, psychology, and bullies

Science depends on replication. Psychology depends on publication. Bullies mar both.

Creative people walk a fine line between brilliance and insanity. We know this, or at least, we think we do. Anecdotal observation tells us the premise is true even if there is no research to support the observation. Science, however, actually does confirm a link between creativity and mental illness. Maybe. That report was published in 2010, but the whole premise was later brought into question when additional studies failed to replicate the results. Arguments between researchers are ongoing, but trust me, we’re all nuts.

Science relies on research that can be duplicated. A scientific theory is just a nice idea until someone can not only prove their concept to a reasonable degree (100% certainty is often impossible), but someone else has to be able to copy that research and achieve the same results. Studies cannot be considered accurate if there is no corroboration. That’s just the way science works.

Well, that’s the way science is supposed to work.

The field of psychology has long had a PR problem and much of that problem revolves around the difficulty that exists in duplicating their research. It’s one thing when scientists are doing research on inert materials or with factors that are relatively absolute. Psychologists, however, have to do their research with humans, which means they’re working with a base set that, at its very core, cannot be duplicated exactly. Sometimes, they can’t even get close. Two different study groups in two different parts of the world may duplicate research methods exactly and still come up with wildly different results, not because the methodology was flawed, but because of basic differences in the humans studied. This makes finding necessary corroboration difficult, and significant when it happens.

So, let’s take a study done some 20 years ago. This study, which involves chocolate chip cookies and self-control, has been the basis for 83 similar studies and almost 200 additional experiments, all coming to the same general conclusion. So, one would think that this passes the scientific requirements for proven theory. Pretty much everyone in the field of psychology accepted this research as fact.

Then, last week an announcement was made that brings all that research into question. There is a paper set to publish next month that directly challenges all the findings from the past 20 years on this particular subject. Most importantly, for this conversation, it challenges how psychological research is performed and the common use of macro-analysis in assessing that research. What the paper seems to infer is that huge bodies of established psychological research are wrong because of errors in macro-analysis.

How does this affect you and me? Everything your therapist told you may be pure bunk. That doesn’t mean psychotherapy isn’t helpful; don’t go cancelling that appointment just yet. But people who rely on the accuracy of that information, which not only includes psychotherapists but aspects of law enforcement, retail planning, marketing, transportation, and everything else that relies on studies of human behaviour, now have more reason than ever to question the veracity of information being presented as fact.

While psychology is the field currently in the hot seat, you should know that questions concerning the accuracy of published research have been around for a while. A study from 2005 claims that most research findings are false. But then, an article for the American Psychological Association questioned whether there is a reproducibility crisis.

There are a crap ton of reasons these fallacies exists, but what they all ultimately come down to are money (no big surprise) and what Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert calls shameless bullies. There are millions of dollars in funding on the line, not to mention tenure, based on a researcher’s ability to publish their findings, and the greater number of scientific publications have shown a distinct bias for publishing papers that are positive and declare new findings that, at least on the surface, seem to move science forward. And while the scientific method requires that research be duplicated, there is considerable animosity between original researchers and those who would reproduce their work. Katie Palmer’s article in Wired last week, “Psychology Is In Crisis Over Whether It’s In Crisis,” had so much back and forth on the issue that my  head was nearly spinning by the time I waded through everything. Folks with Ph. D.’s can be just as mean as street hoods, they merely use words that cut sharper than a switchblade.

How does one resolve an issue like this when the very methods that might solve the problems are part of the problem?

Dear science: we need you to get your act together and quickly. We’ve trusted you, put faith in your findings, confident that research that was duplicated was accurate. Now, we are beginning to question whether we know anything at all. Finding out our science is skewed is rather on par with finding out those deities we believed in probably don’t exist. Who and what are we supposed to believe? Who and what are we supposed to trust? Is anything real?

I can handle psychology being in flux for a while. After all, scientists are just as crazy as creatives. Just don’t tell me what we know about gravity is wrong; it’s Monday and I might come unglued.

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Music  /  science
Don’t Diss The Astrophysicist
January 27, 2016
charles i. letbetter- don't diss the astrophysicist

Without physics there’d be no Fashion Channel — there’d be no TV. But w/o fashion, physicists might just be naked. Not good.— Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

charles i. letbetter - Don't Piss Off The Astrophysicist

All music is appreciated equally in space because there is no sound in a vacuum

“Stupid is as stupid does.” My mother said that long before the movie Forrest Gump made it popular. Typically, she would say that when a particularly troublesome child was behaving exactly like its particularly troubled parents. Mother also said that it is, “difficult to teach children who are willing to believe everything without a second thought.” She encountered plenty of both over the years, like the little girl who was afraid to sit in her chair in the classroom because someone told here there were bugs in the wood waiting to eat her butt. Had the child been three or four, she would have been excused of her naiveté, but by fifth grade such nonsense, on both sides of that situation—the girl and the brat who was being mean—could hardly be tolerated.

Why science denial has been so strongly embraced the past eight years, after decades of great American achievement across all the science fields, has been disconcerting. I fail to understand why people who seem otherwise intelligent can just randomly choose to replace that which is reasonably proven through scientific process with some myth that doesn’t even hold together as it passes from one person to the next. Such willful and blind ignorance leaves me quite concerned not only for the future of our country but for the survival of our species.

I had seen noted in some obscure reference that anti-science groups such as the Flat Earth Society were enjoying a resurgence of interest along with those denying climate change, but I had always assumed that their members were limited to those who ingested a severe amount of paint chips as children. Then, over the weekend, this guy, who allegedly is a rapper and calls himself B.o.B. makes an incredible post about the earth being flat. The Internet proceeded to perform its version of a brain explosion.

Not being the world’s greatest rap fan, I had to Google B.o.B. and see who he really is. Bobby Ray Simmons, Jr. from Decatur, GA, a suburban town a few miles South of Atlanta. My first thought was, “Aww shit, I bet this is one of the dudes who tried pushing his CD on me in the parking lot outside Whiskey Peach,” but it couldn’t have been. I was here in Indy by the time someone decided ol’ Bobby knew how to rhyme. Still, I had to roll my eyes. Rappers coming out of Decatur or anywhere on the South side of ATL has become about as cliché as peaches and sweet tea, and not nearly as good. I was all set to just ignore the whole situation, assuming it would go away the next time I refreshed my browser. Such stupidity tends to have an especially short shelf life on the Internet.

But then, something rather wonderful happened. For reasons that are his own, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson decided to reply to B.o.B.’s tweet about the NYC skyline’s visibility over the horizon:

The astrophysicist also attempts to educate the rapper on the way stars move. Bobby got offended, apparently, and one of the things I appreciate about Dr. Tyson is that he goes out of his way to make sure people understand that being bad at science doesn’t make someone a bad person. He posted to Twitter:

The astrophysicist is much more magnanimous than I fear I would be in such a situation. In fact, more than a few people were ready to go to the mat for Dr. Tyson, one of those being his nephew, Steve, who is a “hip-hop MC” and DJ in Philadelphia. Steve didn’t take to kindly to Bobby dissing his uncle, so he put together some music of his own with a track called Flat to Fact. Here, go ahead and take a listen (warning, if your ears are not accustomed to the speed of contemporary rap, you may need to listen multiple times before you actually catch what ol’ Steve is layin’ down):

At least Bobby seems to have the good sense to know when to quit, as he’s gone on to other somewhat less offensive methods of hyping his new album. He seems to have dropped the subject of the earth’s shape for now.

What I think this shows, however, is that the Internet doesn’t take kindly to those who display their science ignorance in ridiculous ways and, even more important, one should never, ever diss the astrophysicist. Ever.

 

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Editorial
Genetically Modified People
June 10, 2015

charles i. letbetterMost of the intelligent world, and by that I mean the portion whose reasoning is not polluted by mythologies, understands the necessity and general concepts of evolution, especially in regard to human development. While true evolution takes place slowly at the DNA level over hundreds of generations, one need not look back much more than a couple of generations to see the more immediate environmental impact of changing conditions. As a species, we are generally taller, more sedentary and therefore, more obese, and living longer. We have largely eradicated the diseases that killed our great-grandparents but succumb to autoimmune diseases that were once quite rare. How this might all balance out on the evolutionary scale remains to be seen, but without question the actions we take today affect what our species is tomorrow.

charles i. letbetter

How much control do we have over our own evolution? Some would claim that we are in total control of our evolution with technological and metaphysical advances that allow one to choose not only physical traits of our children but also their temperament and even the basic structures of their belief system. If we develop the means by which to conceive, gestate, and give birth to live humans totally outside the physical body, is there any real limit to the changes we might make in human physiology? Eradicating disease is one thing, but might our attempts to make ourselves smarter change the evolutionary construct of the brain in ways we cannot anticipate? Does giving one the ability to run faster change the skeletal and muscular evolution of our legs?

Some suggest that genetic modification interrupts and eventually might bring an end to evolution; that by preventing latent genes from dying or promoting certain DNA strands out of order, we deter the species from its natural course of adaptation. Yet, are we not, through natural biological processes, doing the same thing when we choose with whom we mate? Two red haired parents are more likely to produce a house full of red haired offspring. The combined DNA of two track champions yields children with a higher potential for physical development.

charles i. letbetter

Genetic modification might change the appearance of one person for one generation, but in order for that modification to become part of the greater human genome, it must be duplicated identically across the whole of the population for multiple generations until that modification itself becomes a part of our very nature. For such modification to overtake the natural course of evolution, the population must first surrender all personal choice.

One must then ask, at the point humans surrender their personal choice, are they really still human?

We don’t just make this up. Here are our sources:
http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/situation_trends/en/
http://www.livescience.com/13081-8-reasons-obesitiy-americans-fat.html
http://www.livescience.com/45376-why-did-humans-grow-four-inches-in-100-years-it-wasnt-just-diet.html
http://www.livescience.com/36217-early-bacterial-exposure-immunity.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20131210130858-75054000-big-idea-2014-you-will-transform-your-own-biology
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/artificial-wombs-are-coming-and-the-controversys-already-here#
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1911
Miller, Geoffry F. The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. April 1, 2001. Anchor Books, Random House, New York.

This article was originally published in EspritNu, Vol. 1., November 2014.

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PotD  /  Social Commentary
8 Things REALLY Smart People Know
May 28, 2015

charles i. letbetter

The Boss (2010)

“This photographic thing has changed the entire vision of the world. It will go through every activity of humanity — science, medicine, space, ESP, for peace, against peace, entertainment, television, movies, all of them — you will not find one without photography.” -Lisette Model

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Clickbait lists are especially good at spreading pseudo-science and fear mongering. Lists such as “10 Foods You Shouldn’t Eat” and “5 Big Companies You Can’t Trust” do more harm than good, destroying any trust we have in our fellow man. Personally, I tend to defer a number of issues to those smarter than me; a lot smarter than me. I’m not talking about the “four out of five” ratio, but more like 99 of 100, and only the really intelligent thinkers among those. They tend to be unanimous on a number of issues the rest of us still waste time arguing about. Here are a few such examples.

No8Humans Cause Climate Change

For the smartest people in the world, this is a no-brainer. They stopped arguing about it 40 years ago and have been focusing their attention where it belongs: finding a solution. Is this a convenient fact? No. Does a solution likely involve a dramatic shift in the way some industries do business? Yes. Is there any reason is should be limited by political belly-aching? No. The argument has been over a long time. Move forward.

No7You’re Only As Good As The People Around You

Smart people surround themselves with smart people and make every effort to bring those people up to their level. Very little is achieved working alone and doing great things that change the world requires everyone on the team be at the top of their game. Really smart people know that and manage their teams by teaching them and encouraging to learn more and develop their skills. Is there any reason we all shouldn’t take that approach? No, there isn’t.

No6Don’t Just Focus On One Thing

Just as you were likely taught to not put all your eggs in one basket, focusing on only one thing at a time is rarely a good idea, either. Really smart people know that our brains are designed to multi-task and need stimulus from a number of different directions in order to operate most efficiently. Science and music work remarkably well, for example, as do business and sports. Even within a general industry, focusing on multiple projects, having more than one ball in the air, keeps our minds more alert and creative.

No5Evolution Happens

The smartest people in the world just assume the rest of us know this and laugh and scoff when encountering someone who’s not on board. They understand the amount of evidence accumulated at this point is too high for there to be any alternative. They’ve known this for well over a hundred years now. That anyone is still arguing the point is rather like saying one would rather believe in magic than science. Governments that promote magic rather than real education are ultimately enslaving their people.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]
No4Artificial Intelligence Is Scary

Really smart people do have fears and the one that bothers the smartest, from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, is Artificial Intelligence (AI). We’re talking about something much more advanced than your smart phone, though.  What bothers them is giving a device the ability to make changes and adjustments based upon its input without direct human interference. While it’s nice to have devices doing the thinking for us, eventually they figure out they don’t need us. We need to proceed carefully.

No3Vaccinations Are Important

Want to entice a really smart person to smack you? Tell them you don’t believe in vaccinations. Really smart people know that vaccinations save lives. How many lives we can’t know because the people who were vaccinated never became ill in the first place! What we do know is that in parts of the world where vaccinations don’t happen disease is far more rampant and much more difficult to control. The whole anti-vaccination movement is based on something proven to be a lie. Get your immunizations now.

No2Most GMOs Are Safe … And Necessary

Again, pseudo-science and outright lies spread across the Internet have done a great disservice is causing us to distrust our food sources. Don’t like Genetically Modified Organisms? Put down that strawberry; they wouldn’t exist without genetic modification. Stop eating asparagus; its current form is almost unrecognizable from the little annoying weed it once was. Same is true for a number of foods one now laughably sees marketed as organic. Really smart people know that to feed the seven billion plus people in the world, we need food that can adapt to being grown in a variety of climates and soils. Without GMOs, we’re all going to starve.

No1Just Because It Hasn’t Been Proven Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t True

Really smart people understand there are some things we will never know (because we can’t go back in time) and some things we don’t yet have the ability to know. They’re okay with that because the preponderance of evidence points to a single solution. Really smart people are also okay with Truth not being an absolute. Truth once said that the universe revolved around the Earth. As our ability to understand and observe the universe changed, so did Truth. This is why they use the word theory; it is the Truth as we are able to understand it at this moment.

Really smart people agree on a lot of things. Maybe we should listen.[/one_half_last]

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