On Glasses

I just got glasses. I love my glasses. In fact, I might be just a little annoyed that after all these years in engineering, I have only just now needed glasses. Yes, they are tedious to clean, they leave little dots on my nose after a long day, my kids are always trying to pull them off. But aside from being able to see every leaf on every tree and every hair on my kids' heads, and being able to read road signs in time to react to them, they have been fabulous for me at work. And in the supermarket. And everywhere, wherever I go, I look out through these clear-making glasses and people treat me differently.

I love my glasses for two reasons.
1) Women with glasses are assumed to be smarter, and worth listening to. People are listening to me a lot more these days. Women with perfect eyesight evidently ought not be engineers, indeed they ought not speak with authority on anything. Smart women always have glasses. Hollywood tells us so.

In Top Gun, Kelly McGilles's Charlie wore glasses every time the plot required her character to use her PhD. In the Iron Man series, Gwyneth Paltrow was only allowed to take over Stark Enterprises after her glasses proved her to be CEO material. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was clearly much smarter and more dangerous because she wore glasses. In sitcoms everywhere, glasses give a hot supporting female character the ability to use a computer, crack a cipher, speak a second language, know a plot-critical fragment of information at a particular time, run a covert investigation (usually using a computer), defend the accused in court, or hold their professional or intellectual ground.

2) Glasses are a great prop. Peering over the top of them and saying "Really?" can get a very satisfying squirm from a less-than-honest individual, whether my own child, a colleague, or a door-to-door telephone salesman. I really quite like taking them off to clean them whenever someone tells me about the latest project disaster. There is also apparently something where men apparently have a 'thing' about a plain woman taking off her glasses and suddenly being gorgeous (*shrug*).

This extract of an old Humprey Bogart movie "The Big Sleep" makes both points admirably. I love it.

Hooray for my glasses!

Essays I would have liked to have written in high school

 I was cleaning up the laundry generated by 3 sick children and started thinking. Bad habit, thinking. It leads to questions and ideas and more questions and more ideas. I would have to lit search to see if anyone has answered these. I am sure somebody will have, somewhere. On a planet of 7bil, ideas must frequently strike in many different places.

Any IB student want an Extended Essay Topic? Any of these take your fancy? You can do the lit search & see if the topic is still open.

• Paying for Water - Soft-drink Companies and the Biggest Public Heist of All Time
• Hygiene and Democracy - How people who began to feel entitled to not die from infectious disease also started feeling entitled to choose their leader
• The Luck of the Gulag - What modern-day employees can learn from the stories of Polish prisoners in Sibera during WWII
  Change from unexpected places 1: How Superman comics undermined the power of the Klu Klux Klan
• Change from unexpected places 2: The impact of music recording and distribution technology on Cold War policies, specifically the period 1962 - 1989 (compact cassette tapes were first sold in 1962, and CDs started being distributed in 1983; Reagan & Gorbachev were both in power from 1985 and by then many historians argue it was all over bar the shouting from the trigger-happy military brass, I have a proposed mechanism too but not enough time or space to write here.)
• Change from unexpected places 3: the role of street lighting in the progress of the feminist movement
• Change from unexpected places 4: the internet and the dropping average age of political activists: is this ever going to drop the voting age in first-world nations?
• Micro-credit and its interaction with institutionalised corruption in developing nations - such as Bangladesh - or the USA?
• The effect of fixed-price trading (as opposed to an expectation of bargaining) on peoples' ability to evaluate object (or service) value and quality (I would love to come up with a quantitative study but am not in a position to.)
• Surviving London before the Fire and the Sewer Cleaned it Up - What did a life expectancy of 40 really mean, in the absence of child-soldier-recruiting African warlords?
• Examples of Genetic Adaptation of Humans to Specific Regional Diets, and the migrant (/invaded) population's health cost of deviating too far from those diets
• A proposal for educating members of the newspaper-writing and -reading public about the difference between correlation and causation
• A proposal for educating members of the scientific and legal communities on the importance of a timely, even if not-quite-right, statement from an educated authority

 Okay. Back to the spewy laundry. *sigh*.

Astronomy, mythology, and the art of teaching by telling progressively smaller lies.

I tell my kids stories at night. Sometimes they are good enough stories to re-tell here.
They can see the Milky Way at its most magnificent from their large, south-pointing, low-light-pollution 2nd-story windows. They ask about the stars.
"What's a star, Mum?"
"A star is just like a sun but a lot further away so it looks much smaller. And some stars aren't single suns, but a whole mass of suns a very very very long way away called a galaxy. And some are planets of our own solar system, reflecting the light of our own sun."
"How do you tell which one is which?"
"Well you have to learn about the skies. But if the star is in this section here (point to the bright spray of the Milky Way) it's probably a star. And if it's over there (south-west) it's probably a galaxy. And if it's really bright it might be a planet."
"Did people always know what stars were? When in history did they work it out?"
(precocious flippin' 5 yr old! *sigh*,)


Here starts the story, in grownup words this time.

The name Milky Way comes from Greek mythology, same as Galaxy comes from the same root as lactation.
Here is my favourite pre-Christian, (pre-Greek) creation story amalgum, from fragments of memory of mythology, which wouldn't hold up to any decent research but makes me smile anyway. (Come to think of it, maybe it's Hopi Indian. I'll look it up and edit this post.)

The Sky, the mother of everything, fell in love with the father Sun and they had children, the Earth, the Moon, (and the other inner planets, if you accept the assumption that this amalgum pre-Christian society had half-decent proto-astronomy)
She had so much milk for her child(ren) that it sprayed all over her dress, creating the Milky Way.
But the Sun and the Sky could not get along. The Sun was too bright, the Sky took up too much space.
Ultimately, they decided to split the care of their child Earth into Day and Night.
The Sky also helped her daughter the Earth deliver life, flowing out of the ground in a vast river and filling the land and the sea with all living things. (Can't remember which was the Earth's partner. It's not the Moon, he was her brother.)


So then a couple of weeks ago, we borrowed Carl Sagan's Cosmos ep 1&2.
There is a rather good section on the origins of life, at roughly 48 minutes.
Sagan stands next to a large glass bulb full of gases supposedly in abundance before plants evolved, took over and started messing with things.
Electrical arcs (simulating lightning) were generated through the chamber.
After an unspecified length of film on the cutting room floor, a fabulous brown sludge of proto-amino-acids started running down the walls of the chamber.
He put this forward as evidence that self-replicating organic molecules can appear on any planet with something close to the right atmosphere & a bit of atmospheric turbulence. I was convinced (enough to do a bit more reading & get more convinced, anyway).

Check out this very readable article on Google Scholar. It puts forward four theories from the body of literature for the origin of life and talks about their plausibility and likelihood. It's short but my version is shorter.

1. Exogenous, ie a "banana skin thrown from a passing spacecraft". Totally untestable, at least until we invent interstellar transport and go ask them if they dropped a banana skin on our planet about 4 Bn yrs ago.
2. Endogenous and atmospheric, from gases + electricity. like Urey & Miller demonstrated in 1953 and Sagan filmed in 1980, except that they might have gotten the primitive earth's atmosphere wrong, so on to the next theory
3. Endogenous, aquatic. Some magic around some funky hydrothermal vents, where clay or something protected the tiny volatile proto-proteins (lol) from boiling alive, or 
4. RNA from we don't know where. Possibly atmospheric. Proposed mechanism requires UV light.
   There is another one in the literature,
5. Meteorite bombardment literally vibrating some replicating organic molecules of life into existence. Also hard to test & probably not necessary since 2, 3, and 4 are quite plausible enough for me. Anyone got a spare planet to propel some meteors at, and we can see if you get a nice brown amino sludge?

It all sounds complicated, but truly, consider the endogenous theories alongside the miscellaneous mythology story above. I propose that the longer scientific language tells largely the same story, just a little differently.

• The Sky (atmosphere) interacted with the Sun (whose heat & light generated the required atmospheric turbulence, and also sent UV radiation if that turns out to be necessary) 
• and this interaction seeded RNA on earth (atmosphere, hydrothermal vent, who's pickin?)
• which then flooded simple replicating RNA from a few discrete places to fill the entire Earth, evolving into the life we know.
• The Sky had enough milk for all of her children, in fact her breasts were so full that they sprayed it right through the galaxy. (Sagan's film proposes highly probable extrasolar life, arising from similar mechanisms on other planets). 
• The stars in the sky are there to remind us that the Sky (both in terms of our Earth's atmosphere, and the whole galaxy & visible universe) is probably a very fecund place.

My two older kids loved that story. They told me I should write it down.
I hope you liked it too.

Sleep well, my invisible readers.
Lexskigator

Global warming freak out

Last week, I had a global warming freak-out.

So being trained in statistics, I went to find a bigger sample of people. First I tried a straw poll of other parents at the school pickup waiting area revealed that most of them have had one too in the last 12 months too. Emily’s mum confessed to a nightmare about post-apocalyptic life in a bunker in a verdant Antarctica. James’s dad freaked out after reading an article about brown coal, and promptly called a solar company to get a quote on a rooftop PV array. On the spot, Emily’s mum asked James’s dad for the solar company’s number. Perhaps having young kids makes parents feel like we are not individuals, instead our kids are the tip of a genetic tendril stretching into the future. And in a +5°C world, we fear there’s not much of a future for them.

And then Sam’s Mum told us about her freak-out: that the smart meter recently installed on the outside of her bedroom wall was giving her brain cancer.

Then Lachie’s mum started talking about her sister’s anxiety about being tailgated by taxis.

All of a sudden, the conversation shifted into a very typical school pickup set of topics: rotating and apparently disconnected anecdotes about other peoples’ wacky anxieties and the equally wacky measures they employ to cope with them.

So the next day, I tried another experiment: I asked about global warming fears at the lunch table at work. I sat with about 10 men, all employed as infrastructure engineers, ranging in age from 22 to 60+ (I’m too polite to ask).

Once again, two people started to talk about their genuine freak-outs and subsequent sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle measures, and then somebody shifted the pattern. This time, two programmers in their mid-30’s started joking about the potential threat to hops production and thus to the supply of BEER! Oh no save the BEER! they said, and led us onwards into stereotypical blokey alcohol and sport driven conversation.

On a data set of two, my working theory was this. Discussing global warming is like holding onto a wet eel - we can’t get a grip. Many people have a sense of unease, and will discuss fears and findings and scenarios one-to-one, but in a group there is always someone who will divert and unravel the conversation, and maybe the rest of us are all too happy to be released from thinking about it.

So I went looking for data point number three: A group of my old uni friends: several environmental science graduates now consulting to industries like mining or contaminated land, several doctors, a few engineers, a few biomedical scientists, a few others. All but two are parents of young kids. Once I told my freak-out story and opened the conversation, it was not derailed. They were all very sure that climate change is real, here now, and a big problem.  The enviro scientists kept producing stories about recent climate data, and how the models are surprisingly accurate. One of the doctors held our complete attention for 25 minutes talking on link between economic development, population health, and carbon output. We discussed drought and storms and the models for shifting weather patterns, food shortage, transport challenges, and the disproportionate political power of vested interests industries like mining and petrochemical energy. We shared what we knew about carbon capture and storage, energy generation and demand side management of fixed electricity loads, how cholera spreads after a natural disaster, and where our infrastructure and lifestyles are most vulnerable to gradual climate change, or larger more frequent catastropic weather events. Every one of us, in our professional life, had come across a reason to think very seriously about man-made climate change and what might be done, is being done, isn’t being done.

But in several hours of discussion we never touched on what all this might mean for our kids. It was just too scary, and too easy to give up hope.

In my view, the problem at the heart of the “climate debate” is this.

1. Climate scientists know that climate change is happening, due to human emissions of CO2. We know that the global climate system is a bit like a freight train: heavy and slow to start, but we’ve got the accelerator up full-bore, and just because we don’t know what the top line speed is or when it’s going to get there, we know that top line speed is
   a)    very bad for most life on this planet, and 
   b)   really very hard to slow down.
2. A small but increasing number of professionals are finding that their work touches on how climate change impacts on people. Actuaries calculating insurance risks need to take increased frequencies of ‘freak’ events. Botanists and zoologists are consistently discovering species shifting into new territories following climate change: Victorian alpine species are at risk from snow-less winters, and the ‘Cockroach Line’ has almost shifted from Canberra to as far south as Melbourne. A civil engineer spoke about how they’ve been redesigning our stormwater and sewerage systems for higher tides. and bigger floods from storms.
    
3. Psychologists have identified, and are starting to discuss, a new type of illness:
   Climate Anxiety.
   It’s particularly prevalent in certain demographics: late adolescents and young adults (whose brains, it turns out, are supremely adapted to thinking about ‘big picture’ issues like God and death and climate change); mothers of children under 5 (whose brains, it turns out, are triggered by pregnancy hormones to adapt to protecting their children and learning to manage daily life with the huge adjustment that the little one’s arrival entails); those with a history of anxiety issues (whose brains are flooded with anxiety neurotransmitters anyway!) and the very old (whose brains haven’t particularly been identified as changing, but whose thoughts are suddenly turning to God and death and the past that they’ve witnessed and the future of their bloodline and their loved ones).
4. Many of the rest of us don’t want to think about it. We just want to work, and get paid, and buy stuff hoping it will make us happy, and watch TV in the evenings so we don’t have to think. And we are the ones with jokes about beer, stories about taxis, thousands of ways of shutting down the conversation before that third tentative person can put their thoughts into words for the first time.

Here’s the thing. The freight train is getting faster. It’s about bloody time we start, and persist with, conversations about what to do next. Don't let others shut you down.