Yesterday I had an interesting discussion with a former student about math. That’s right: math.
The Women’s Studies department I teach in has a sort of open adjunct/student lounge with computers and a small library and a table and such — a place to hang out and get a little work done or chat online or whatever. This student was working on some algebra, and was clearly frustrated. She turns to me and says, “Why do we have to learn this stuff?! When am I ever going to need to know about imaginary numbers?”
Two things you should know about me. First, I started my academic career as an engineering major — aerospace, to be precise. While I quickly bailed out of engineering, I have a great respect for the applied sciences, and the sciences in general.
Second, I’m a strong believer in the “Renaissance man” idea (though I’d like to give a hat tip to all the Renaissance women out there, too), and in the principles of the Enlightenment, and in the idea of a well-rounded liberal education. That is, I think that it’s important to know a lot of stuff about a lot of topics, just to get by in the world.
“You need to know it,” I said, “because it’s the core of the physical sciences. Because it’s the closest we are able to come to understanding how the world works.” I spent some time talking about e and natural logs and Golden Rectangles and nautilus shells and such.
I was clearly losing her. Blah blah blah. I re-grouped.
“You need to know this because science education in our society is dismal. Because there are people out there who want to control you, and who will use the fact that Americans know virtually nothing about science to exercise that control. So when you go in to get birth control, someone will deny it because they think it’s the same thing as abortion, which it clearly isn’t.”
The biggest debates in our society right now are science debates: stem-cell research, abortion, cloning, genetically-modified foods, the energy crisis, global warming, the status of gay, lesbian, bi, and trans persons, and more. And most Americans are “funnels” on all these matters — they take in huge amounts of blather from the media and other sources, and uncritically spit it out the other side.
Science isn’t going to resolve all these debates. Science is not and never has been or will be the end-all-be-all of knowledge. As a card-carrying postmodernist, I’m dutifully aware of the cultural-constructedness of scientific knowledge. BUT science is certainly part of the way we as a society have to deal with these issues — not just the facts and figures that science produces, but the mindset that science inculcates, the critical and evidence-based consideration of those facts and figures.
An effort called ScienceDebate2008 has emerged to get this year’s presidential candidates to devote an entire debate to issues of science policy. There really are no excuses for our candidates to decline a science-based debate — but I’m sure that’s what they’ll do. Neither Obama nor McCain (nor Clinton, if she wins the nomination, which I kind of doubt) is going to risk looking absolutely idiotic on national television while the “geeks” and “nerds” grill them. But I still think we have to make them say “No”, to get into the public consciousness just how crucial this stuff is and to force the candidates to acknowledge that — and risk everything by becoming the anti-science candidate. So sign the petition.
More importantly, start talking about science. Start learning about science — I promise, there’s very little that’s painfully dull. Grab a copy of Galileo’s Commandment, which highlights the best science writing in Western history, or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and go from there. Make an effort, a real, concerted effort, to explain to your kids why math matters, why this goofy crap they have to learn in Algebra or Pre-Calc or Geometry matter, how it relates to the “real” world. And, of course, resist with all your might the wrong-headed, wrongly-implemented, and entirely bad-faith-based No Child Left Behind, especially it’s implicit rejection of science along with the arts, world culture, social science, and indeed, reason itself.
During the several years I spent researching and editing Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War, I wrote several pieces on the themes covered in the book (or closely related issues) at Savage Minds. For your convenience, here is a quick guide to related information at Savage Minds.
- Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents: My first look at the work of Montgomery McFate (a lead author of the Army’s counter-insurgency handbook and a strong advocate of anthropology as a military tool).
- Working for PRISP: A discussion of the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholarship Program, which offers students scholarships in selected disciplines (including anthropology) in exchange for internships and other service in US national security agencies.
- Anthropology Against Its Subjects: A report on David Price’s research into WWII efforts by anthropologists to create a race-specific weapon to use against the Japanese.
- And in case you’re wondering how an academic book gets produced, I wrote “The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume” about the conception, collaboration, and publication of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Three parts: Part 1, Part 1a, Part 2
I don’t know the story behind these images at all, but they certainly say more than their allotted 1,000 words! The creators of these pictures of free range workers say only that they wanted to illustrate the commonality between office working conditions and the way chickens are raised (i.e. in cage batteries vs. free-range). Of course, no matter how chickens are raised, no matter how happy or unhappy they are on their farms, their ultimate end isn’t all that pleasing for the chicken (I imagine — I’ve never asked a dead chicken how they felt about it all).
Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died.
It’s been practically 15 years since I’ve played D&D, but in my high school years, and again for a couple years when I moved back to San Diego to go to community college after dropping out of school for a couple of years, D&D was an important part of my life. I don’t buy the common stereotype that role playing games, and particularly D&D, are the refuge of the anti-social. They are, if anything, profoundly social, ways of connecting for people, especially young people, who yearn for the sociality gaming provides. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that so many of the folks who developed the backbone of the social Internet were gamers, nor that so many of the Free Software leaders were also.
At some point, the “start-up” costs of gaming became too much to bear — as did the challenge of finding similar-aged gamers to play with. New editions were issued, meaning new books had to be bought (the last books I bought were 2nd edition, and I only bought a couple; they’re on the 3rd edition going on the 4th now). And the thought of sitting down to role play with teenager when I was pushing into my late 20s (let along through my 30s) gives me no pleasure, none at all.
There’s a world of difference between gaming at 15 and gaming at 25; when I was 15, it was the “awesomeness” of it all, the ability to pretend to be a warrior wizard, to “level up” (as the WoW kids say), that made gaming fun. In my 20s, it was the act of collaborative world-building, of creating and exploring an improvisational storyline that became more important. And all the harder to find like-minded players.
I could play again today, but to what end? Nostalgia? Irony? No, I suppose I’ve gone in a different direction, and gaming isn’t really on the table any more. Still, it’s saddening to see Gygax pass away. I understand he wasn’t the easiest fellow to get along with; at the same time, it always seemed to me he was hard done by the company, and the industry, he helped create. In any case, he created the forum in which I, and thousands of others, found the social outlet we so craved as smart teens with over-active imaginations.
Here’s to him!
The old design of this site was getting a little too crowded for my taste, so I’ve updated the whole site to a drupal theme called Ad Agency, based on an Open Designs template by Collin Grassley.
I may futz around with the header image — I’m not sure a hummingbird says all that much about me — and I’ve done some minor changes to the stylesheet and some of the template PHP files, but overall I think it’s a gorgeous design. There’s certainly more room for everything to “breathe”.
Hopefully you agree.
The city of Las Vegas withdrew the business license of the endoscopy clinic at the center of the hep-c outbreak yesterday. I don’t see they had any choice — you know that every political office in the state is getting calls, emails, and soon letters from angry former patients and their families.
Here’s the thing: think about your typical colonoscopy patient. Middle-aged or elderly, likely married, probably not an intravenous drug user — probably not in any way at risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). So it’s highly unlikely that, if this outbreak hadn’t been caught and investigated, any of these people would have been tested for blood-borne illnesses like hepatitis or HIV. And they can be symptom-free for years and years, symptom-free and carrying the infection.
Potentially 50,000 unknowing carriers.
See where this is heading?
And here’s something else: we think of hepatitis and HIV as STI’s, but every outbreak of hep-c in the last 10 years has originated in a medical clinic! The practices engaged in at this clinic — reusing vials of medication and reusing syringes — are apparently widespread, even though thwey’re known to spread disease.
And we keep telling kids not to have sex. At least for hep-c, it seems we should be telling middle-aged people…. Well, the abstinence-only idea, that “Just Say No” BS, seems even more wrong applied to medical care. “The only 100% effective protection against STI’s is to avoid medical care”? That’s clearly insane (which might say something about the sanity of abstinence education); but it might make sense to start warning people about the threats that their doctor’s offices and, very likely, their insurance companies pose to their health.
If this story stays in Las Vegas, it will be a travesty. It’s not about a clinic in wacky Sin City that slipped up, it’s about dangerous cost-cutting practices across the medical community that are putting us all at risk.
 Scott Young, who I interviewed on Lifehack Live back in January, sent me a copy of his new e-book called Learn More, Study Less. In our interview, he describes his notion of “lifelong learning” (which he says is a misnomer — “if learning isn’t life long, what is it?”) which makes up the subject of his new book.
I haven’t read it yet — and don’t know when I’ll get a chance to, with everything else going on right now — but knowing Scott and knowing his work, I feel pretty comfortable suggesting you go check it out. You can get a taste of it by downloading the Learn More , Study Less preview (pdf link), or by checking out the post Scott guest-posted at Zen Habits, How to Learn More and Study Less.
And if you’re going to be at Zen Habits anyway, it would probably be a good thing to pick up Leo Babauta’s excellent Zen to Done (which I’ve read — you can read my review at lifehack.org) and his new ebook, Zen Habits Handbook for Life, which I haven’t read. But this is Leo Babauta we’re talking about here, which means it’s virtually guaranteed to be better than anything else you’ve read this year.
So my partner, she works at the state health lab. Her team does the outbreak investigation and labwork, and all the bioterrorism stuff. So you can imagine how soundly I sleep at night!
This week saw the release of information on a case they’ve been following for a while, which has turned into the largest notification in US history: 50,000 people are being notified that they might have been exposed to hepatitis C, hepatitis B, or HIV when they went into a popular clinic for colonoscopies. You can imagine all the bloodwork!
Here’s what happened, as far as I can make out (I don’t have much privy information, since a lot of that stuff is top-secret): this clinic is the place in town for colonoscopies. People come in from out of state to get their colons scoped — it’s a major clinic. Apparently, all that HMO dough from doing thousands of procedures a year just isn’t cutting it, though, because they decided they could save hundreds of dollars a year by squeezing every last drop of medication from those little rubber-capped tubes they fill syringes from. Here’s what you’re supposed to do:
- Figure out how much medication the patient needs.
- Draw that amount from the bottle.
- Throw the bottle away.
That means, of course, that sometimes you throw, say, 30ml of a 50ml bottle away.
But that’s wasteful, right? So here’s what the clinic did:
- Fill a syringe, administer the medication.
- Throw out the needle (but not the syringe)
- Put on a new needle, stick it back into the medication bottle, draw a new dose (which of course contaminates the whole bottle), and administer it.
They were apparently drawing several doses from the same potentially-contaminated bottle. 6 people have hepatitis C from this, that we already know of. There may be dozens, or hundreds, more, because apparently this was standard practice here for years.
In case that’s not enough, last night the police found ricin in a residence hotel room. Of course, that’s terrorist stuff, so the whole team is called in. All I can know at the time is “Dustin, I have to stay at work, there’s been an incident” because as you can imagine, terrorist stuff is super-duper-extra-special-double-secret classified.
But I did get to watch it on the news. In fact, the two stories which have been our life this week were the two lead stories on the local news this morning. Back-to-back.
There shall be no sleep around here for a while, as there hasn’t been all week. 50,000 blood tests is a lot to do. Naturally the health department isn’t handling all of them — still, records must be kept and processed, and samples must be analyzed, and there’s a lot of weekend and after-work hours involved in all that.
Imagine how boring my days seem in comparison. “I had a podcasting problem today.”
“Really? I saved lives.”
“Oh, well, ok.”
So it goes…
 A few weeks ago, Alex Shalman, one of the guest contributors at lifehack.org, asked me to contribute to his “Happiness Project”, a set of interviews with prominent bloggers about their definitions of happiness and what they’re doing to increase happiness in their lives.
My responses were posted today (along with fellow lifehackista Leon Ho’s), putting me in some pretty good company: Liz Strauss, Darren Rowse, John Chow, Leo Babauta, and Steve Pavlina, among others, have all participated. (You can read the full list of participants so far at the Happiness Project main page.)
Alex is also running a contest, offering among other things a $200 donation to the charity of their choice for the interviewee whose interview has the most original comments at the end of the project. There are also prizes for other participants, like the top commenters, so go check it out and start commenting! (The first week’s bloggers have a 2-week headstart on me, so it’s unlikely I’ll win without a lot of help! Unlikely as it is, I’ll pledge the prize, if I win, to Doctors Without Borders. As Alex says, he didn’t tell us there was any sort of contest involved when we participated, so it’s just icing on the cake.)
If you don’t already know Alex Shalman’s work, take some time to check out the rest of his blog, too. Alex is pretty driven, and his drive is contagious. I talked with him a few weeks ago (before he sent me the interview), and he has a way of taking for granted as “done” things that the rest of us see as challenges. Which is to say, he spotlights the excuses we use to put things off and just assumes we’ll get past them. I don’t think he does it consciously, it’s just part of the conversation for him. At his site, where he really is trying to push his readers past their own excuses, he can be very powerful, indeed.
Check it out, and give a little thought to your own answers. What makes you happy? What have you done lately to make yourself happier?
A while back, I mentioned that I was putting together some material on writing and technology and thinking about launching a new site around it.
I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer’s Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There’s a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you’ll be informed when the site officially goes live.
The Writer’s Technology Companion is going to cover the tools of the writing trade, including computer hardware and software, blogging tools, ways to promote and sell material on the Web, self-publishing tools, and more. The focus is on writing in general — everyone from romance novelists to screenwriters to freelance technical writers should find something useful.
I look forward to seeing you there!
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