It’s the minorities, Isn’t It?

Here’s your Intermittent Science and Technology News You Can Use Catch-Up Roundup.

Our first item is news that the “Radar Scope” you ordered when you were a pubescent middle school boy will soon be available at the low low price of $1000 per unit. To be initially distributed in the spring only to our troops in Iraq, it will detect signs of unwanted enemy breathing on the other side of thick concrete walls. The hand-held devices should be ready for peeking into girls’ locker rooms as early as 2008. In the meantime expect it to be on your local police department’s Home Security 2006 Christmas Wish List. That’s News You Can Use!

Our remaining items belong to the “Social Science Marches On” category. A study of the Canadian Medical Association has concluded that giving homeless alcoholics up to 16 glasses of wine a day on an hourly basis can improve their health and behavior. In related news, alcoholics everywhere are saying, “we told you so,” and “what part of ‘self-medication’ hadn’t you understood?” Here’s a general rule to live by: when desperate people living desperate lives say they need something, they may know more about it than the comfortably ignorant.

Of course the free wine helps in part by relieving the need to waste valuable energy scrounging for wine in other ways. It also helps create a bond between the wine providers and the wine receivers, which makes the wine receivers more accepting of other services.

Not all social bonds are good, however. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has determined that the cell phone has brought too much social connection to modern life and is now increasingly a factor in domestic strife. Family life is being interrupted by work life; work life is being interrupted by family life. So the social bonding that helps an alcoholic accept help to get off the streets can also break up families, when there’s too much of it, and put moms and dads on the streets. We are complicated animals, aren’t we?

How complicated are we? Scientists are looking into it! Socio-evolutionary-anthropological scientists have been theorizing about the very evolution of the mechanism of social bonding that we all take for granted. How have we humans successfully evolved the means to bond outside of families, to create the friendships and comraderies that tie us one-to-another and keep us from killing each other all the time, instead of only just some of the time?

The answer is truly complicated. Nature, these researchers say, has endowed some of us with “imagination” that we use to modify our own behavior for the purpose of creating bonds. Examples of this can especially be seen at Star Trek Conventions, and among Goths, Raging Grannies, Filkers, and Canasta players. The imaginative people bond by sharing the products of their imaginations and through their enhanced facilities of suggestibility and geeking.

But the genius of social evolution is that every one of its successes creates more opportunity. As imagination evolved to bring some people together, those who lacked that advantage evolved mechanisms to compensate. Hence, the unimaginative have learned to bond together in what researchers refer to as “clumps” defined by shared boredom and the shared paraphernalia of stupidity, such as alcohol, reality TV, and designer jeans.

Further Questions and Activities.

1. List ten ways a device to see through walls could improve lives. Next, list ten ways the invention of walls has already improved lives. Combine your lists. See them negate each other.

2. Get a kitchen timer. Set it for one hour. Before it goes off make up six conclusions for future scientific sociological studies to have.

3. Here’s an experiment to try with the whole class. Use your imagination to try to bond with the student on your right. When the student on your left tries to bond with you, report him. When it’s over, who’s in detention? It’s the minorities, isn’t it?

When Foresight Was 20/20

George Bush on CNN about New Orleans: "They're facing problems that nobody could foresee: breaking of the levees and the whole dome thing over in New Orleans coming apart. People couldn't foresee that."

I’ve been trying to figure out that whole not-foreseeing thing. Please follow me as I attempt to unravel this one.

Naturally, when the Philadelphia Inquirer had an article last year about the danger to New Orleans of taking a hurricane hit head-on, George Bush ignored it. You can’t read newspapers that put the word “Inquirer” in their name. You do that with one, pretty soon you’re sliding down that slippery slope and the next thing you know you’re reading on a regular basis.

Could George have watched the in-depth report on the problem presented by the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers in 2002? Daniel Zwerdling talked to scientists and community leaders about how New Orleans could be devastated in any year by a hurricane. Surely our President can have his people watch TV when something comes on that might be important?

No! He could not, not if Bill Moyers is involved. Besides, Zwerdling sounds like Nerdling. You know how sensitive our President is to being perceived as an intellectual. George “best tee-totaler to have a beer with” Bush can’t be seen as having even heard of PBS.

The same argument applies to the long 2001 article that appeared on the subject in Scientific American. Scientific American? What’s that? Some magazine for global-warming evolutionist stem-cell murdering crazies? Probable reaction: “Not my constituency.”

But then I found out that USA Today had warned of the danger even before that, in 2000! Help me! I cannot imagine how President Bush can say that something is unforeseeable when even USA Today could and did foresee it, five years ago!

Sure, Bush doesn’t read. He prefers to listen only to the single lone voice of God in his head, never to the billions of voices of God outside his head, the voices that his head and ears were presumably designed to listen to. But of all the thousands of people working in the executive branch directly under Bush, there isn’t one person he listens to that reads USA Today? What do they all read, cereal boxes?

Here are some more confusing comments about the New Orleans disaster. When it was suggested, as I have just done, that the administration had not done all it could do to prepare for this disaster, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said, “This is not a time for finger-pointing or playing politics.” But, after changing channels, the very next thing I hear is Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a part of the executive branch of government (Bush’s branch), saying victims of Katrina were to blame for their own problems, for not heeding mandatory evacuation notices.

Excuse me, are we finger-pointing or aren’t we? We can point at victims but we can’t point at Bush? How about I point at this: the people who stayed behind were all the poorest people in the area and they received little to no assistance from FEMA to comply with those evacuation notices. Were they all supposed to have taken their private doctors along with them in Lear jets to Lanai to stay there until New Orleans is reassembled?

Well before Katrina hit, interstate buses leaving New Orleans were locked down.

Now I want to talk about the fact that Senator Trent Lott is homeless, too. As reported in the Seattle Times, Katrina leveled Lott’s 154 year-old Pascagoula home. The fact was mentioned by Bill Frist the next day as the Senate approved $10.5 billion in aid for areas affected by the hurricane.

Such aid may help rebuild Trent Lott’s house. I hope so, because, as I have always said, “If there’s just one homeless person in America, that’s one too many.”

Provided he takes responsibility for himself and goes out and gets a real job.

The Physics of Wage-Slavery

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about time. But you know what's really important? Timing, that's what. And I'm not just being paranoid when I say that! I have facts to prove it, too!

Timing is what "the check's in the mail" is all about. When you "take five," you take time, but timing is what makes taking it possible.

Ask most any evolutionist what his beef with creationism is and he'll tell you it has nothing to do with the theology of the matter. It's only about the timing involved.

Timing is what homo sapiens has more than the Wooly Mammoth, probably enough more to account for the recent shortage of the latter. Timing, suitable rocks, a good throwing arm. Likewise, a poorly timed precipitous climate change is poised to do homo sapiens in, with the rest of the planet probably feeling it's not one eon too soon.

Q. What's so hard about relativistic quantum physics? A. Taking into account the timing. The same thing can be said about tuning Lamborghinis or trying to tickle tigers.

Bad timing is almost synonymous with disorder. It's dis-order in the course of events. Mathematical chaos has gobs to do with timing and convolutions of timing, and the inevitable losing track of timing. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle can be laid to timing. "Hey Werner, what should we measure first? Are you sure? It seems to make a difference."

What's the real answer to the question about life, the universe, and everything? Timing: it's critical to life, while the rest of everything that isn't alive doesn't care.

In good timing, Science cures your terminal disease before you have debilitating symptoms. In bad timing, Science is not at all convinced that your disease is terminal until the day you die from it. Science is then so impressed by the sheer horror of your manner of death that she names the disease after you and proceeds to cure it, so that no one else will ever have to suffer so much again.

Good timing leads to Bliss; bad timing leads to Tragedy. When gene sequences fire in their correct order you get a gorgeous baby with ten little toes. Let the genes fire in the wrong order and your baby might still have ten toes, but they could be growing out of her eyebrows, causing a premature end to her modeling career, and forever dashing her dream of becoming the first non-Sherpa to break-dance atop K2 without an oxygen mask.

If you don't think good timing is important, try this experiment. Get a ride on a lunar landing module to the moon and beg your crewmates to be the one who decides when to fire reverse thrusters during the landing, but don't you or any of them look out the window or use the radar or anything that would tell you where the ground is in relation to the module. If you live maybe I'm wrong, maybe timing isn't important. If you die, my point.

Let's consider one specific variety of bad timing that concerns poor people. Let's talk about the sort of bad timing that can be summed up in the words: "You'll receive your first paycheck a week after your first fully completed pay cycle."

Since a typical pay cycle is two weeks that means the average would-be wage-slave can't get paid until after putting in three weeks of work. But doctors doubt someone in your condition could live two weeks without food of any kind, and think you'll last much less than that if you engage in major activity as required by a full time job. So if you're starting your job with no money in reserve, and if the job keeps you from taking advantage of meal programs, and if you're homeless with no place to cook food bank stuff -- well, screwed again.

But at least you know what did it. It was the timing!

Of Pennies and Prejudice

Today I want to talk about panhandling, panhandling related incidents, and panhandler focused factoids.

It really annoys me that I can't actually present reliably true panhandler focused factoids, on account of there being none. So far, the only way genius social scientists have been able to figure out who panhandles and who doesn't is to go around to places where they think potential panhandlers are to be found, like shelters and meal programs, and beg them to tell the truth about whether they panhandle or not. This approach results in statistics that are a little like the ones you get when you ask the neighbor teenagers how often they've done each other.

To make matters worse: I am not a statistics wonk, so I forget even where I've seen statistics based on the truth-begging approach. So, for example, I am certain that at one time a few years ago I saw a report about such surveys being done in Seattle, Denver and Washington, D.C., independently, among other places. I am almost certain what the results were. And I am absolutely without any shred of doubt certain I don't remember where I saw that report, so I'm just wasting space telling you about it.

Still I can't resist telling you that, in spite of the inadequacies of the research methods, there is one pair of conclusions that genius social scientists always come up with when they study the question. Those conclusions are that (2) most panhandlers aren't homeless (so looking for them in shelters might be a mistake, see above), and (1) most homeless people aren't panhandlers.

The reason they come to the first conclusion is that the reported frequency of panhandling among admittedly homeless people is incredibly low even assuming, as social scientists do, that roughly a quarter of all human beings will lie to social scientists whenever they get the chance. The reason they come to the second conclusion is the same way I have, namely by getting to know various panhandlers and following them home at the end of the day.

The kind of results we're talking about varies considerably from city to city, but, except for Washington, D.C., in every place you go the percentage of homeless people who report even intermittent panhandling is down below 15%. In some areas the figure is much lower. I just saw a recent report out of Charlottesville, Virginia, about a hundred miles from D.C., where they could only get 4 homeless adults in a hundred admit to having panhandled at all in 6 months. Or maybe it was 3 in a hundred. They weren't too clear about their denominator. I don't blame them --denominators are hard.

The result I remember for Seattle was closer to 6%. I'd really appreciate someone tracking that down for me.

Meanwhile, a survey done by the Gallup people found that over 30% of all Americans thought the average homeless person was a panhandler. So a sizable minority of Americans figures that you can't solve homelessness without first dissuading homeless people from relying on panhandling, something hardly any of them do. It's like thinking that in order to solve the continuing problem of poverty in rural West Virginia, we have to get the West Virginians to not speak Etruscan when applying for jobs.

Here's one of those panhandling related incidents I was talking about. One day I was homeless and had 3 pennies. Two days later I still had the same 3 pennies. It occurred to me then that if I asked somebody for a quarter and they gave me one, I would experience an 833% increase in liquid assets, and after buying a roll at Safeway I would still have 3 pennies. Instead, I starved. Ha, ha, pride is funny.

Let that be a lesson to you all. If you are ever homeless, and you only have 3 pennies, and you don't ask anybody for a quarter, well, join the club.

If You're Screwed, You're Screwed

For today's column I want to talk about how "Science Marches On!" I am very excited about a new discovery that finally gets at the underlying truth about life neither being a rose garden nor a bowlful of cherries. It also deepens the theory that the Rich Get Richer While the Poor Get Poorer, by sinking it to the level of biology and the reproduction of cells. It’s a very factual new discovery that is so scientific and at the same time so scary that it could make the basis for a great new film to bum out kids in high school.

The discovery is a long time coming. I remember reading in history books that way back in the Dark Ages the silly Dark-Ages-people all thought that life was "essentially" a waiting room experience with one good magazine that everyone fought over until they remembered that none of them could read, and then you died and went to heaven.

Then, in the Renaissance, science started, and all the beginner scientists started to believe that life blew. It wasn't until the 1800's before science-greats like Darwin and other guys who actually knew things figured out that life really sucks, as we now know today.

But it is one thing to know that life sucks. It is quite another to know HOW life sucks, or to possess the video. This is where 21^st century scientists have it all over 19^th century scientists: even though they aren't as smart, there's lots more of them, so when you put them all together they end up knowing more. Besides, they have cell-phones and digital cameras and laptops.

Anyway, here it is. Scientists just learned last month that if you experience long-term hardship, and if you experience it as chronic stress, then your telomeres will shrivel up. This is bad, the scientists say, because telomeres are the tips-of-the-shoelace thingies at the end of your chromosomes that need to be big and long so that your cells can divide and multiply. So it's like, you know, with shriveled telomeres your cells might as well be neutered, and pretty soon the cells you have die without replacements, and so do you.

There's more: they've actually figured out how much shriveling happens. As much shriveling happens in a typical case that we are talking about losing roughly a year of lifespan for each year of stress experienced. Give or take a month or two.

So let's say someone, we'll call him Herbert, was genetically predisposed to live 70 years if his life went as well as it does for normal people. But suppose instead the beginning of his life, for the first 35 years, is a genuine living hell, comparatively speaking. According to our old understanding we would have thought that at least Herbert would have had a second 35 years left to him during which things might start looking up. But now we know that Herbert's telomeres will be entirely useless as of his 35^th birthday and Herbert will die of premature old age within days. Or a couple of years. Or he's already dead. Approximately.

Now, some see a silver lining to this discovery. They point out that the telomeres only shrink if you experience the stress. In other words if you don't know you're miserable you won't suffer the ill effects of it. Right, that's it, I could just whack myself up-side my head so hard I don't notice anything at all ever again.

No, there are only two alternatives. Either you're so stupid you not only don't know when you're suffering you also can't fully know when you're having a good time, i.e., you're a fish, metaphorically speaking. Or else you're a sentient being and every year that you suffer you lose that much opportunity to make up for it.

So we may sum up this new discovery as follows. If you're screwed, you're screwed. Unless you're stupid, in which case you're screwed.

Has there ever been a time when we could so clearly see the need for justice as this? Let's stop putting people through genuine living hells, at least until we can find a way to enlarge telomeres.

Bitter Sleeping Pill

Well, here we are. It's the Dawn of a New Day, America Has Spoken, the fat lady has sung, and birds everywhere have flown south for four years.

The good news: expect a resurgence of Fifties-ish-style paranoia to feed a renaissance of the paranoia-genre of horror-scifi movies. With modern cgi technology and the experience of this year's election under our collective-consciousness belt, we can look forward to some terrific movies. Titles like the Attack of the Evangelical Masters, or Night of the Living Neocons, or Invasion of the Constitution Snatchers spring to mind, but I'm sure talented writers could sublimate them way up better than I could. Sublimation was never my forte. Vomit is my forte.

So tell me, do I sound bitter? Good, because I'd hate to sound like I was living a lie or in denial or anything like that. No, unlike 51% of whatever percent of America bothered to vote, I live in the world of Reality, not the world of Bush-Think. So if I'm bitter I'm going to know it, and I'm not going to care if I show it.

I don't mind the country's election choice nearly so much as the transparent mind meltingly bombastic canard of Cheney et al to the effect that George W. Bush now has a significant mandate. He does not. That the numbers of voters that put Bush over the top was a record does not erase the fact that the numbers that voted for Kerry was a record also. For an incumbent running for a second term, 3% is a slim margin. That was no landslide and I would put far more faith in the Bush Administration if it didn't consist of such cowards in the face of the truth that they couldn't even admit it and proceed from there.

If the administration can't rule without propagating fantasy after fantasy, then all of America will get into the act.

Do I sound bitter? Let's see, in news from Texas we've already returned to the days of after-school specials. The decision by voters all across America to affirm the lie that denying marriage to gays is justified has already begun to be followed by orders to require textbooks rewritten to reflect the majority opinion. As if elections determined matters of fact.

The precedent could lead to interesting new forms of oppression. For instance we can expect Texas to hold a state-wide initiative soon to decide Yes On Creationism, bypassing that whole free scientific discussion crap. Then when it passes, they'll announce that the majority has called it true so it's true. Schoolbooks will be rewritten, fools will gloat over the fall of the wise, and it won't be overturned because Bush will have, by then, installed additional fools in the Supreme Court.

In October 2001 I expressed the fear that the terrorists may win, because they might have succeeded in bombing us back to the Fifties. Well, it's happened. "What, Me Bitter?"

Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Sure, a man who's already prosecuted the first totally unprovoked war in American history based on fabrications has his finger on the red button. Sure, an arrogant blasphemer who thinks he's God's all-time favorite president has the power to destroy our environment for the sake of his corporate buddies, and he has the character and temperament to tell us it's for our own good and the Greater Glory of God. Sure, a "servant of the people" that thinks Habeas Corpus, the right to a swift and speedy trial, and the right to be free of unwarranted searches are all obsolete concepts has now got almost complete control of government. But you have to get over it, right?

So in the interest of getting over it, I propose a further slide into irrationality and denial and fantasy. Lets all say black is white and white is black and have us a four-year carnival of lunacy.

The terrorists are on the run. Osama is scared of the terrible visage of George W. Bush, Man of God and Macho Ace National Guard Pilot. If the terrorists do by chance succeed in striking America again, it will have been Bill Clinton's fault. Gays will never endanger our marriages again. Speaking out against a government of liars is an attack on America.

Sweet dreams, one and all.