Science Ain't So Bad

Facebook? What you need is a dog.

Dear Mr SASB: My so-called friends think I’m a loser. Maybe they have a point. I’m  an uncoordinated klutz. I have braces and zits. Still. I’m like “screw them. I’ll just hang out on Facebook where it’s cool”. My old friends? They totally sucked anyway. My dad says this is unhealthy. He says I should check with Mister SASB who considers himself a frugging expert in almost everything. So? Are you cool with this or what? – EmilyKickMe4

Listen,you little pipsqueak, I AM an expert on everything. Everything that matters.

Teenagers aren’t on the list.

So your real friends think you’re a ditz and treat you like a putz. But on Facebook you ARE someone. A new person with a wall of your own. It’s not real life, but who cares? Whatever works.

Let’s look at the science.

Amanda Forest and Joanne Wood wondered about this exact thing. Can you really slip out of your old skin, slip a social network over your bones, and be better off?

The article in Psychological Sciences says no.

If you have an ” I am pathetic” sticker on your personality it will follow you to Facebook and Google+. Low self esteemers can’t stop putting themselves down. Not even in the digital world . Pretty soon their new online pals start to think of them as dweebs just like the flesh-and-blooders did that they thought they had left behind. Bad as real life is, at least, when people find you annoying you can see it on their faces. Not on Facebook. I know what the name says but those “faces” aren’t real. Just pixelated images which don’t give the kind of feedback that is needed.

The article by Forest and Wood implies you shouldn’t run away from your troubles. You should face them. If you are your own worst enemy, don’t try to make it better on Facebook. Get a dog.

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Image credits go to MISTER SASB (our Luna on the left,  her boyfriend, Bailey, on the right).

FINEDELLAGIORNATIUM

Mister ScienceAintSoBad. What’s happening? My brothers and my sisters, my parents, the people on television? They keep repeating this THING. Over and over and over again. It’s annoying. They keep saying “At The End Of The Day”. I don’t know WHY they’re doing that or what it means. Can you help me out here? You’re a pretty smart guy (when you aren’t r-e-a-l-l-y clueless). RachelFromIdaho

Dear Rachel,

Thanks. Nice compliment.

The End-of-the-day thing? I hadn’t noticed. But I watched some TV and, like you say, they’re all doing it. Here’s an example of what I found: Mr Obama’s been able to combat some of the charges of his worst critics, but at the end of the day…

End of WHAT day? What are they talking about?

When I did my little TV experiment, I tuned to CNBC. The CEO of a company you probably know was on Closing Bell.  He was explaining why his company had such a bad quarter. Suddenly, he stopped and stared at Maria Batiromo and said “at the end of the day”. Then he ripped off the lapel mike, and left. Just like that!

An article in Neurobiological Sciences (Dr. Jaimes Dinwitter, Harvard Medical school) explains that this is a bug. It likes light and warm temps. TV studios are perfect (the lights). Broadcasters, in particular, seem to be infected. Public personalities, too.

It goes right to the brain.  Broca’s Area which has a lot of the functions of speech. And, here’s the thing. It plays you like a piano. At-the end-of-the-day, At-the end-of-the-day, At-the end-of-the-day . Nobody understands why that phrase. Nobody understands the mechanism behind the repeated vocalizations. Worse, nobody understands how this new bacterial strain can be defeated. Right now, according to the National Centers for Disease Control And Prevention, 24% of the adult population and almost all public figures have this supposedly harmless mental hiccup.

Mister SASB congratulates Dr. Dinwitter on figuring out what this is. At the end of the day, this may be an important first step to dealing effectively with an annoying and potentially serious pathogen.

LOTTA SHIP!

TOO TALL?

You know the Costa Concordia? The gorgeous cruise ship that sunk off the coast of Giglio?

Normally (when it’s not turned over on its side) 26 feet of the ship is underwater. The rest sticks straight up for thirteen stories.

Top heavy, right?  No WONDER it flopped over!

Modern cruise ships are very high tech. The architecture says “Physics be damned! I look impossible because I AM impossible!” So is this a bad way to design a ship? Did top marine architects not notice that their leviathans aren’t stable in the water? Did the insurance companies insure half billion dollar sinkers because they were foolish? Were the insurance agents too busy to drive out to the dock and actually take a look at the the mess they were insuring?

To answer these oh-so-great questions, MISTER ScienceAintSoBad, did a little research. An article  in the New Scientist by Paul Marks helped. These “ships of the future” are “engineering intense”. In spite of their Towering Inferno look, they’ve got plenty of “ballast” down below – enough to pass tough, tough stability tests where the ship is pulled from vertical with weights and released. It’s part of routine shipyard testing and it’s a tough exam. The ship has to recover from a vicious lean and right itself  fast enough or nobody’s going anywhere.  There are watertight compartments too which are designed for water ballast to be pumped around. This is to provide stability and compensate for forces that might tip the ship. And the lifeboats aren’t old days, either. They’re self-righting covered pods. If you can get yours down to the heaving seas, you can sail twice around the world. Guaranteed.

Engineering marvels.

But here’s the thing. With science we like to test our theories. We like evidence.

What’s the evidence that the Costa Concordia was a safe ship? Did it fail safe? You’re thinking “no”, aren’t you? And you’re saying this because it was over on its side and would have sunk if it hadn’t had the good luck/bad luck to have found itself a rock!

Okay. Maybe NOT so accident resistant. I’ll give you that one.

These ships aren’t perfect. Their huge profiles can make them hard to handle in strong winds. And they’re “tender”. If they turn  too fast, bad things happen. They roll like crazy. The steering limit system is supposed to prevent this. You can’t turn too sharply if your life depends on it. (I realize that it does. Thank you for that comment.)

For the moment, most of the attention seems to be on the way the crew handled things and that makes sense. But that ship’s going to get a good look over too. Maybe 13 stories is one too many.

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Thanks to Robert Lender for the photo:
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THE NOTORIOUS BULLS EYE

TICKS

Dear Mister SASB, I live out in the woods with three dogs. I get a lot of ticks on me. No Lyme disease yet but it’s just a matter of time!!! Is there anything I should do? – WoodyLane5

Image credits” Yersinia Pestis. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A WORLD OF THEIR OWN

Some people’s senses are “crossed”. One sets off another. The F key on the piano is baby blue in color. Chanel Number Five perfume sounds like a waterfall. Your smelly pooch?

Not going there.

It’s called synesthesia. People with this “problem” live in a special, often delightful, world  where a person’s senses  interact with each other in strange ways, turning life into a symphony/smorgasbord that others can only try to imagine. Intriguing scents  mix with visual cues, sounds with the sensation of touch. Sometimes just two senses combine, sometimes more. Taste and sight. Sound and sight and smell and touch. And, since adding colors or sounds or tastes or smells to a word does make the word (or number) more memorable, synesthetes have amazing memories. Very creative, too.

Degas, Mozart, Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington, Tessler, Sibelius. Even Richard Feynman and Marilyn Monroe were synesth…

synesth..

whatever!

In case you’re wondering, most synesthetes don’t think it’s so bad. Many don’t realize they’re different  unless someone points it out. And the memory/creativity thing is a nice plus.  A gift, some of them say.

So.

So Dr Devin Terhune and Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh(Current Biology) were curious. They wondered why some people have this “gift” and others have to read about it.  They studied one of the most common forms – the one where words or numbers combine with colors.

Working with volunteers, the two scientists used magnetic or electrical stimulation to control the excitability of the visual cortex  - the part of the brain most associated with vision. They adjusted things just to the point where their subjects started to see light flashes. What the study showed, is that the visual cortex of a synesthete is more easily excited.

Much more easily.

Apparently, this shows that synesthete brains are in a sort of hyper excited state. A clue, perhaps.

This is boutique science. Five subjects. All synesthetes. Maybe that’s not enough to justify sweeping conclusions.  Since there’s no clamor for a pill to cure synesthesia there isn’t much money but, Terhune and Kadosh did good. This is interesting stuff and it does teach something about the brain. Change the excitability and  the colors disappear.

Could this technique be used in reverse ? Could it turn Mister ScienceAintSoBad into a synesthete ? Wouldn’t that be fun? For a little while?

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 7.

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Image credits:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.