A VENGEFUL FANTASY

MALEVOLENTWARE

In 2008, in Madrid,  an airplane took off with its flaps and its slats retracted.

It didn’t work out.

The flaps aren’t there to look pretty. When you stick ‘em out like that, you’re looking for some extra lift as the aircraft struggles up into the sky. Not that a mistake in setting the flaps is a big deal, really. Nice Mister Computer’ll remind you to make the necessary adjustments.

Unless, of course, Mister Computer’s got his own problems.

In the case of  Spanair Flight 5022, Mister Computer had a virus – a trojan, actually. An article by Leslie Meredith (we always like to give credit) on livescience.com, writes that the investigation of the NTSB discovered that there was no power to the take-off warning system. No slats. No flaps. No warning.

154 passengers died. 18 survived.

The central computer system got itself infected. Most probably from a USB “memory stick” or such.

The lesson? You knew it anyway. Computers can kill you lots of ways these days. You just can’t BE too vigilant.

The question?

Any PARTICULAR reason you can’t hang the writer of the malware that brought down an entire aircraft with 172 souls on board? MisterScienceAintSoBad hopes, with all his heart, there’s a way.

ANGELO'S TRAINER-BOX KEEPS SURGEONS SHARP AS A SCALPEL

A KIDNEY HAS TO GO

My brother-in-law’s still a handsome guy in his mid seventies. He’s fiercely loyal to my sister and his kids, a “drivin’ fool” who runs his magnificent RV across country at the drop of a beanie, and he’s the “go to guy” in the family when it comes to automotive questions.

But for several years, he’s been battling cancers acquired (probably) during his military service.

R’s been in remission for seven years thanks to the remarkable work of Dr. Shimon Slavin (International Center for Cell Therapy & Cancer),  a pioneer in immunological therapy. Recently, however,  a mass was discovered on one of R’s kidneys.

The kidney has to go.

A DECISION HAS TO BE MADE

R had to decide between an open incision or laparoscopy, the new “modern” approach, which involves manipulating tiny tools inside the abdominal cavity while observing with a tiny video camera. Laparoscopy is all done through small holes in the abdomen rather than through a large incision and can mean faster recovery and less scarring.

“You’re the science guy, R said.  What do you think? Should I take a chance on laparoscopy?”

“Well, the recovery’s easier with laparoscopy,” I said. “What’s not to like?”

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’m afraid they’ll have to chop up the kidney to remove it. I wouldn’t want all that cancer juice sloshing around in me.  Who knows what other organs could be affected.”

R’s fears certainly seemed reasonable. In fact, surgeons do worry about “spills”, cells that drip from an instrument during surgery.  So I called Angelo Tortola (Venture Technologies) who designs the tools used in these procedures. He also makes the training simulators that surgeons use to perfect their techniques.

After explaining a little about my brother-in-law’s background and describing the problem, I asked him if he could help.

“You called the right guy,” he said. “I had to give up one of my own kidneys about two years ago.”

Since Angelo had never mentioned this to me, I was very surprised.

“You’re OK now, right?”

“Completely. The cancer was fully contained. But I have a story.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“My doctor was ‘old school’. He was determined to go with an open incision.  Even after I asked about laparoscopy, he stuck to his position. Safer. Best result.

“But the more I read, the more I wondered.  Finally, I set up an appointment at Mass General Hospital in Boston with a leading surgeon – one who I happened to know did a lot of laparoscopic procedures.

“After reviewing my situation, he said I would be a good candidate for laparoscopy but I could choose an open procedure if I wished.

“I asked him about the relative advantages. He said that laparoscopic removal of a kidney was just as safe as an open procedure with lower risk of certain complications during recovery.

“So, I asked, how do I decide?

“Well, he said, with the open procedure it’ll take you longer to get back on your feet.

“How much longer? I asked.

“With the open procedure, it could be up to a year till you are fully normal, he said. With laproscopy, you should be functional within a few days.”

“Now THAT,” Angelo said, “is an amazing difference. And, you know what? He was right.  A couple of weeks later, I was on an airplane, on the way to a meeting.”

I asked Angelo about R’s concern. Does the kidney get chopped up before it is removed?

“Not to worry,” Angelo said. “That’s not how they do it. The organ is removed in one piece. And everything’s placed in a plastic bag before removal.

“You tell your brother-in-law that either choice is safe. It’s up to him.”

OMG!

YOUNG RESEARCHER WITH ACNE CURE

We were once beautiful. Even Fink. Once, we were healthy. supple and unblemished.

Except for the nasty zits which would lie dormant until a few days before something important like a first date, a prom, or a bar mitzvah when they would BURST into glorious Technicolor blotches, humiliating and depressing us.

And obliterating our dreams of becoming ex-virgins.

Ever.

Well thank YOU, Dissaya “Nu” Pornpattananangkul, for coming up with a zit-killer DECADES too late.  I don’t believe ther’re any virgins left  in high school to benefit from this work  but Pornpattananangkul  (am I pronouncing that right?) has developed a drug delivery system based on gold nanoparticles which deliver  lauric acid directly to the (very) offending lesions.

ENGINEERING IS NOT (no offense) SCIENCE

Pornpa.. Pornpatt.. WHATEVER! .. is gonna be a terrific engineer. But there’s some science yet to be done. Will it REALLY work? Side effects? Cost?

A great first step and the article says human testing may follow soon.

ScienceAintSoBadEngineeringRating = 10

ScienceAintSoBadScienceRating? Let’s hope we hear more.

A CURE FOR BACKPACKS?

I can ONLY ride the Nostalgia Dunebuggy so far. MISERABLE and PATHETIC  as our young lives were, we didn’t walk to school leaning forward.

School books have gotten so heavy in the last five years, that obesity’s become the only REMEDY for the struggling future generations that we call kids or (sometimes) just annoying. In fact, their parents are EGGING THEM ON to gain a few pounds. ”Hey. EAT that! You wanna get pulled over backwards by your books and lie there like a DOPE with yer arms and legs wavin’ around?”

Sad.

Eric v.d. Luft, PhD (Syracuse) did a little research on WHY the books are so engorged.

Oomph!

Fat margins, fat paper, and lots of jazzy color illustrations.

You know fer SURE some kid’s gonna be too loaded up to dodge a runaway foreign car.

Too much backpack mass. This is all just a GIFT to pediatric orthopedic surgeons.

‘course the ultimate solution is a digital child. Did I say “child?”. I MEANT, of course, BOOK.  An eBook.

Not a specially  original thought.  Electronic book readers are catching on among adults.  There’re a LOT of choices. Kindle, Sony’s E-reader, The Nook (Barnes and Noble), ALL kinda smart phones, netbooks,  the Ipad (and it’s soon-to-be competitors), and so on. There’re way more “initiatives” then MisterScienceAintSoBad is in the mood to discuss. (Example).

The technology’s there. It’s even affordable. Text book publishing, parents, and teaching institutions are trying to catch up with  it.

ROBOTS COUNT FOR SOMETHING

According to the IEEE Spectrum, the world’s robot population’s about 8.6 million souls.

Well. Not souls, exactly.

You know what I mean.

EVIL METER

GOOGLE’S NEW INDICATOR

Have you been watching the ins and outs, ups and downs, backs and forths of Google/China?

If you have, you know that Google’s modest experiment in self-censorship’s resulted in a sour magnesium taste for the “Do no harm” guys who don’t like all the ropes ‘n chains ‘n blindfolds that seem to be the cost of doing business in China. So they said – I think the word was..  tryin’ to think here.. I think it was “NO“.

Unless China took the gag off.

And China, always, nimble in these kinds of negotations said “Uh.. Jeez. But we ALWAYS censor.” And stuck to its idiotic guns.

Without an acceptable response from China, Google’s decided to move its operations to Hong Kong where it’ll get itself out of the censoring business and back to the search business. And the map business. And the phone business. And.. well.. like that.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad has no standing here since this is politics. But just in case you want my opinion? I think the huge, powerful, fast growing nation of China will lose and the funny li’l guys with the search engine’ll win.

But it’ll take awhile.

Anyway, now that Google, itself, isn’t censoring (with some temporary exceptions till contracts expire), Google felt it would be useful for its readers to have a visual indicator of how much censoring is being done by the Chinese authorities. So they developed a nice “status page”, called by some, its “Evil Meter”

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10 (for Google)

ScienceAintSoBadRating = -1 for China

Science Ain’t So Bad t-shirts and mugs and stuff

DEFINING THE ELECTRON

MY PUBLIC

A long, long time ago, Joel, Doug, and MISTER ScienceAintSoBad were in line for an ice cream cone in Harvard Square.

I can’t remember, exactly, why, but Joel said (not for the first time) that “People are morons.”

Mister (not at that time) ScienceAintSoBad sturdily defended you.

“Not all of them.”

“That’s what YOU think. They don’t know crap!”

“You do?”

Three guys in line for ice cream.. You don’t want the whole transcript. However, it led to a “test” (we were young, remember). We decided to ask people in the line about electrons.

We would be easy graders. The interviewee didn’t have to know a lot. The answer could be “part of an atom”, “a tiny something that’s part of stuff”, “a particle”, “some small shmatta from physics” – just some indication that he.she knew what we were talking about.

So we did the survey. We asked ten customers, one by one. And this is what happened.

Nobody knew the answer.

One person – a high school girl, I think – knew it was “something in science” so she got a passing grade.

Everybody else was stumped. Most of them shrugged their shoulders or looked confused or were afraid that they were on Candid Camera.

Why bring this up?

Not because Joel was right about people being stupid. THEY weren’t making idiots out of themselves in an ice cream shop. But if this shop, which was a few hundred yards from Harvard (gasp!) University was even a little representative of the intelligent beings that inhabit our planet, then they (those intelligent beings) certainly didn’t give a lime sherbert’s damn about physics. Or abstract theories. Or natural philosophy. Or what-have-you.

You’re gonna say you have some issues with my methodology. That is wasn’t scientific.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that the “deeper” more abstract things are a hard sell with the average person. It’s just not what people think about.

WHAT I WRITE. WHAT YOU TOLERATE.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad can tell when you’re interested.

You know that little shmagegge on the upper right of the screen? It counts the visitors.

When we do an article about PRACTICAL things like the effects of salt on your health or a new cancer drug or a new breakthrough in hypnotic suggestion that turns teenagers into sweet, docile, uncomplaining saints, that thing GOES! The individual numbers get blurry and it goes whirr, whirr, whirr.

BUT when we do something really INTERESTING, something of PROFOUND SCIENTIFIC IMPORT such as the continuing effort to understand dark matter or dark energy or research into the true nature of the universe (quantum mechanics or string theory, for example), it stutters, hesitates, shivers, and staggers like it’s developed a case of frozen neuron disease.

This tells me that if I want lots of customers (and, by the way, the readership of Science Ain’t So Bad has been growing and thank you) I should stay away from deep science.

Unfortunately, because of a contract I have with myself, that’s not gonna happen so you can either go away with something new or (more likely) just skip the good stuff.

I hope you’ll, at least, give me a chance on the esoterica. It’ll make you a better person.

And, how can you be sure it won’t come up in a job interview?

You’ll be SO happy to learn that I’m adding book reviews to Science Ain’t So Bad and the first review – not finished yet – is going to be Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

Which doesn’t have a THING in it that’ll relieve the symptoms of a cold.

REDLANDS' RASCALLY RESOURCE

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad brings up the same tired old names in science and engineering a lot – Newton, Einstein, Kepler, Planck, Jobs (That’s Steve, not “jobs, jobs, jobs”) and so on.

Today, however, I would like to introduce a fresh face – a rising star in engineering, known as the Redlands Rascal, who, only yesterday sent me.. well, let him speak for himself.

For his highly innovative and truly ingenious solutions to some of society’s most nagging problems:
ScienceAintSoBadRating = BOING! (That’s the weight hitting the bell at the top)

The image is mine
(not a self portrait) .


By the way,
I don’t steal images
from others.
I wouldn’t be able to handle the guilt.

Psychology: Guilt.

Hold onto your wig because this is a real toupee blaster. According to an article in the Spanish Journal of Psychology, men feel less guilt than women.

An article like this illustrates beautifully the power of the scientific approach.

You observe the male species, burdened as it is with feelings of over sensitivity, huddled in corners with arms tightly clasped and murmuring about the possible emotional injuries we may have caused, through a passing slight, to another, and you would, necessarily, conclude that it is the oppositely endowed gender – the x chromosomal female version of us – that is a stranger to feelings of guilt.

But it is the work of scientists to tease out the facts from the seemingly obvious. MISTER ScienceAintSoBad can’t BEGIN to express his awe at this work.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = YGBKM (You Gotta Be Kiddin’ Me!)

A follow up to my recent article on comic books as literature:

Randall Munroe studied physics at Christopher Newport University and has worked for NASA. He also writes a sparse but very funny “webcomic” with sardonic observations on life as lived in the technobulb.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

Literature?

By the time I hit kindergarten, I was a reader.

I wanna think it’s cause I had a brain but, thinking back on it, my primer consisted of a small collection of comic books which my Mom (and other adults in my life) helped me to figure out.

The process was kinda informal.

I would point and ask my Mom what was happening and she would say “Captain Marvel’s about to get hit by a brick. He’s saying ‘Shazam!,”

“Shazam?”

“It’s the word he uses to turn into a tough guy” she would say. And she would help me to see the pieces of the sound – the “sh” and the “a” sound and so on.

I’m off comics now (because you can’t buy ‘em for a dime anymore) but they did give me an edge in kindergarten (where you want every advantage you can get).

Carol Tilley, who teaches Library and Information Science at the University Of Illinois has done some research in this area; the research was picked up in Science Daily .

I wasn’t able to find the original study and Ms Tilley wasn’t particularly responsive to ScienceAintSoBad (which I don’t hold against her) but the gist seems to be that comics deserve to be taken more seriously as adult literature.

She reminds us that some advocates of comic books use the term “Graphic Novel”. And she says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature.

You’re gonna ask me where’s the science in all this, aren’t you? You’re gonna ask me why I’m even writing about it, right?

Cause I LIKE comic books.

ScienceAintSoBadRating (for MISTER ScienceAintSoBad’s article here) = 1

STRESS VS CANCER?

Oncology: The Role Of Stress

Robert’s amazing.

He’s a good guy. Well informed and smart, good looking, full of energy, kind hearted, and ambitious.

And, believe it or not, he’s the guy who picks up our refuse every week in his antiseptically clean truck.

And he’s bonded with our pink nosed cockapoo, Luna.

Some day, Robert will own a fleet of trucks. Or a fleet of companies.

A couple of weeks ago, he asked MISTER ScienceAintSoBad if stress might be one of the causes of cancer.

“Robert! You can’t just make this stuff UP! Where’s that COME from?”

He looked abashed.

I felt bad.

“I don’t have a source for it,” he said “but it seems possible to me.”

Patronizingly, I explained to him that cancer’s causes are known. Genetics and the environment. EVERYBODY knows this.

But Robert isn’t the type to say things without thinking them through. So I thought about it (after I had made an ass of myself).

Robert giving Luna a biscuit

Isn’t the immune system the front line of defense against cancers, keeping spontaneous cellular mutations at bay? And it IS known that stress effects the immune system.

Damn! Where did I leave my computer?

After grinding Google down to a nub, I could see the basis for Robert’s conclusions and they seemed quite sound. Or, at least, they would have been until recently. However, D DeNardo (University Of California) dug down another layer showing how complicated things really are.

According to our latest understanding, the immune system does try to chomp cancers. But, unfortunately, its clumsy response can be exploited by some cancers for their own purposes.

Best thing I’ve found on the stress/cancer thing’s an article from the New York Times, November, 2005 (so a little dated). It’s by Gina Kolata.

Kolata points out that LOTS of people have come to believe there’s a cancer – stress link. But, after tons of studies, it’s been impossible to prove. So no link. Or, at least, in scientific-ese, “no evidence”.

Which, in science, is the sweet kiss of death.

Science, however, is the ultimate exercise in open mindedness.

Just ask us. We’ll tell you.

So maybe the very next study WILL show a link. Could happen.

For the excellent question, ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

For my incomplete answer, ScienceAintSoBadRating = Well, I Tried.