Science & Skepticism – Page 2

September 23, 2012

The Most Awesome Man in the World

Who is the most awesome man in the world?

The Most Interesting Man in the World — I said “Awesome,” not “Interesting.” (source)

No, no, this is a guy who has it ALL.

Carlos Slim — I don’t mean the “Richest Guy in the World,” either. (source)

The man I’m talking about is a kick-ass guy who’s really got it going on.

The Boogeyman checks under the bed for Chuck Norris. (source)

But, no, he’s not the toughest man in the world.

Let me give you some hints.

He’s got a day job. He’s enormously intelligent. He spent time at Columbia University in New York. He has a great sense of humor. He gets hate mail along with fan mail. He weighs in on matters pertaining to NASA missions. He’s participated in Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything). He’s on television a lot, even though he’s not an actor. He can hold his own with the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And, oh yeah, he’s black.

There’s a guy who’s more awesome than Barack Obama, something many people have no trouble agreeing with, although, of course, 47% of us are all about Obama. Really.

There’s just one problem: the Most Awesome Man in the World demoted Pluto, and he steadfastly refuses to apologize for it.

Pluto, a planet with five moons — Pluto has five – count ’em: FIVE – moons. Earth is so wimpy it only has one moon. Do non-planets have moons? I think NOT. (source)

But does that make him less than the Most Awesome Man in the World?

In spite of his slander against Pluto, I say no. Neil deGrasse Tyson IS the Most Awesome Man in the World.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, is an engaging, interesting speaker and science educator. He bases his views on evidence and proofs. He was already so cool by the age of 15 that he was presenting astronomy research to professionals. Carl Freaking Sagan himself tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit the college-bound Neil Tyson to his astronomy department at Cornell. (Tyson went to Harvard instead, then graduate school in Texas and at Columbia.) He has eloquently explained the God of the Gaps. He has schooled a prosecutor who wanted him, as a juror, to rely on eyewitness testimony, and inquired of a judge why the defendant was accused of possessing 1,700 milligrams of cocaine, rather than 1.7 grams – less than the weight of a dime. His stories of his experience with jury duty underscore something that I’ve often said is wrong with the legal system – it’s set up to discourage critical thinking.

He was asked what he believed to be the most astounding fact about the universe. He responded eloquently:

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high-mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy – guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small, because they’re small and the universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on and activities around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.

I follow Dr. Tyson on Twitter. Twitter is an insipid thing, parsing the world into 144 characters or less. I only use my account to promote this blog, but I have this Twitter feed on my browser’s homepage that shows me interesting things that other people have to say. It’s one way of keeping up with who just posted what where. I see in my Twitter feed when Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, posts news about religion in the public world, when Dante Shepherd posts new webcomics on his blackboard, when Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame finds a cool article. I follow political commentary on Twitter: The Tea Party Cat makes wonderfully pithy comments. Indecision is Comedy Central’s hub for all things political, and – oh! – Wonkette. The snarky Wonkette site may be my favorite political news anywhere.

I follow the thoughts of people, too. Among my favorites are Andy Borowitz and Ricky Gervais. Those guys are funny. Some people – and I am not among them – can really make those 144 characters work hard.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one such tweeter. His insights are worth repeating. And despite his obvious astrophysical prowess, his tweets don’t focus on the universe so much as they focus on, well, the world. For example:

and

Those Tweets were collected on a single site, which I was glad to see, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks just about everything Neil deGrasse Tyson says is worth hearing. I admire the heck out of the man. His values (“If aliens did visit us, I’d be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy”), his wisdom (“Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The Egg — laid by a bird that was not a Chicken”), his pride in his offspring (“More evidence my 14yr old daughter is a Geek: after prompting me to ask if she knew any jokes about sodium, she replied, ‘Na'”), his knowledge (“According to the song, Rudolph’s nose is shiny, which means it reflects rather than emits light. Useless for navigating fog”), and his insights (“I’ve come to conclude that Fettucini Alfredo is just Mac-and-Cheese for food snobs”) entertain, illuminate, and educate.

What’s not to like about him? Other than the Pluto thing, I mean. Let’s disregard that for the moment.

Set aside some time and listen to his “Brain Droppings” keynote speech from TAM 6. I’ve listened to it more than once, and I don’t get tired of it. He proves, yet again, that he is the sexiest astrophysicist alive.

August 31, 2012

The Mote in God’s Eye – 35 Years Later

I have always considered The Mote in God’s Eye a seminal book about initial contact between humans and another sentient, advanced species.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, both true masters of hard science fiction, collaborated on this book in 1974. I read it in high school – so sometime shortly after it was written. I remembered it clearly as cutting edge stuff. In one scene that has popped into my mind on multiple occasions throughout the years, the humans react with horror to the speeding vehicles used by the Moties for individual ground transportation. I was glad to know my ever-unreliable neurons hadn’t messed with my memory when I found it on pages 252-253 of the new copy I bought recently:

Tall, ugly buildings loomed above them to shoulder out the sky. The black streets were wide but very crowded, and the Moties drove like maniacs. Tiny vehicles passed each other in intricate curved paths with centimeters of clearance. The traffic was not quite silent. There was a steady low hum that might have been all the hundreds of motors sounding together, and sometimes a stream of high-pitched gibberish that might have been cursing.

Once the humans were able to stop wincing away from each potential collision…

Motie, found on Rocket Ship Pajamas — Motie

The first time I read that passage, many years ago, I imagined the reaction of an 18th century sophisticate to riding in a modern New York taxicab or merging onto an urban freeway at rush hour. I thought about how a Cro-Magnon might respond to riding in a car down a quiet street in a small town. What if the Cro-Magnon was on a motorcycle?

Thirty-something years later, as someone who writes speculative fiction – sure, merely as a hobby, but, hey, a girl’s going to dream – I noticed this classic story didn’t seem so cutting edge any more. I realized that a book written during my own lifetime, a book that blew me away when I first read it, has become dated.

I’ve noticed this a time or two before. Robert Heinlein’s books about Lazarus Long, for example, are very dated in some of their sexist, chauvinistic attitudes, even though the stories and the science are not. Heinlein makes multiple references to the pleasing shape of his female characters’ anatomy, but never to the sexual attributes of male characters. The worst offenders of these books were written near the end of Heinlein’s long, prolific career. Oddly, the character noticing the anatomy didn’t rub me wrong, perhaps because we all are capable of noticing pleasing physical characteristics of the opposite sex; the author himself struck me as a dirty old man. (I know, I know. I have no basis other than my gut for even saying that. And I revere Heinlein as one of the everlasting gods of the genre. Really, I do.)

Something similar struck me on a number of occasions while rereading The Mote in God’s Eye. For instance, when Sally explains human birth control methods to a Motie, she says that “nice girls” don’t use birth control. She explains that they simply abstain from sexual relations if they don’t want to become pregnant. Her words shock the Motie, but not for the same reason they shocked me.

Even of those I know who are relatively prudish, I doubt very many, at least the people I know, would actually think that “nice girls don’t take birth control.” Nope, not even my devoutly Catholic best friend. (Of course, to hear the abstinence-only sex education crowd talk, that’s all it takes for birth control. I submit that those folks are completely unrealistic, and statistics belie their position. But that is a topic for another day.)

I guess I’ve become accustomed to the progressive social portrayal of the future that modern speculative fiction tends toward. Except for futuristic dystopias such as The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, which feature government-imposed sexual repression, sexuality’s treatment in speculative fiction over the last half century seems fairly universal – all sex, all the time, anything goes. Certainly that was the case by the mid-70’s.

The sexual revolution was in full swing in 1974. Attitudes and social mores toward sex heaved and groaned in those years. Roe v. Wade had been decided the year before. The Equal Rights Amendment had passed both houses of Congress two years before, the same year that the Joy of Sex, which was still in the top five bestsellers in 1974, became a sensation. Birth control was in wide use, and the Summer of Love was almost a decade in the past. In 1961 – thirteen years before the Mote sun gleamed in the middle of the Coalsack, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land paved the way for these attitudes when Valentine Michael Smith created a new religion incorporating free love. By 1974, co-ed college dorms commonly dotted campuses across the nation. Penicillin cured everything but herpes and hepatitis; no one had heard of AIDS or HIV. Hair was six years into its run on Broadway, complete with full nudity.

The attitudes that dated The Mote in God’s Eye extended to the personnel on the two ships that visit the Mote world. With the exception of Sally and the perpetually pregnant Moties, every single character in the book is male. But, there’s more. I remember this book as one of the truly inspirational ones in my adolescent library, packed with action and tension. Reading it this week, it hasn’t felt the same. At first, I couldn’t figure out why the book just didn’t hold my attention the way I remembered it doing 30-something years ago. Now, less than a hundred pages from the end, I think I may have figured it out.

The book needs red ink. Had Niven and Pournelle not banged out this novel on an Olivetti typewriter, if they had used a word processor, they probably would have tightened their prose and eliminated things like lists, awkward scene transitions, jerky dialogue, and other things we can now avoid by revising a million times without rewriting the whole darn thing page by tortured page. Editing just isn’t what it used to be, for which we probably should be grateful. Otherwise our eyes might still cross, reading post-Victorian verbosity.

And then there’s the passive voice. The book doesn’t read like a scientific treatise, but still, a lot of the descriptions employ the verb “to be.” Characters interact actively, but they tend to observe their surroundings in a list. I wonder if I noticed this only because I’ve been writing more myself, and try to use E-Prime unless it just sounds silly. I wonder if I notice it because I have critiqued the work of other writers in recent months.

I hope critiquing hasn’t led to this. I like reading what other people write, making suggestions for improvement, and getting good feedback from them on my own work. If critiquing means the joy of reading suffers, then I’ll have a big hole in my life.

But now, now I have a book to finish. And even if it isn’t as good as I remember, it’s still good.

August 28, 2012

Twinkies

Because someone mentioned it in comments on my Facebook link to a recent blog post, I am now compelled to discuss the pros and cons of Twinkies, that sweet treat adored by stoners and other kids everywhere.

The Twinkies Legend ramped up a few years ago when the fried Twinkie was introduced to thronging sophisticates of fair fare. People drove for hours just to taste it, and the initial purveyors of this particular fine food sold 26,000 fried Twinkies in just 18 days. The magic was not obvious to those watching from the sidelines, but no one can deny the faithful. We, personally, have never tried this delicacy. According to reports, the famous creamy filling melts and soaks into the cake, giving it a souffle or pudding-like texture. It was an instant hit.

Deep-frying isn’t the only way to get Twinkies into your family’s diet. There’s an entire cookbook, 112 pages long, containing more than 50 recipes with Twinkies as an ingredient.

Never get between Americans and their Twinkies. In 1987, teamsters who delivered Twinkies to New York City and its New Jersey suburbs went on strike. Area Twinkies lovers panicked. The reaction was “not unlike smokers who start to tense up when they run out of cigarettes and all the stores are closed.” Twinkies addicts called distant friends and relatives to send in emergency supplies. We imagine the airlifts resembled Berlin in 1949.

Disaster struck again in March of 2000, when the teamsters’ strike closed bakeries all over the Northeast. The Internet came to the rescue during this “Great Twinkie Famine of 2000.” eBay made out like a bandit, selling 20 batches of Twinkies for over $5,000.

Twinkies are popular, no doubt about it. According to Hostess Foods, 500,000,000 Twinkies are produced annually. In case you got cross-eyed counting zeroes, that’s half a billion, with a B. America’s population today is a little over 3.14 hundred million; America is pi, and Twinkie is the ubiquitous cake that radiates among us.

pi, twinkies, and fat captain america — Source, Source, and Source

You might think that with popularity like this, the company that concocts Twinkies would be sitting on a big pile of money. Not so. Just this January, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection – the second time it has done so in the last ten years. Yesterday we learned that negotiations with its unionized employees might result in the employees owning a piece of the action. Twinkies lovers everywhere hope that out of these bankruptcy negotiations will come the ingredients for Twinkies’ success.

Like so many of our favorite mass-produced foods, the ingredients of Twinkies cannot be identified by the common consumer. In fact, they are so mysterious that a guy named Steve Ettlinger wrote an entire book about these ingredients. It turns out that Twinkies come from mines. That’s right. Twinkies ingredients are mined (limestone, gypsum), drilled (petroleum), refined, and synthesized into those tongue-twisting polysyllabic compounds that are printed on the package.

Upon learning about these ingredients, we were bemused to realize that it is necessary to chill Twinkies before frying because plastic melts at high temperatures. And that creamy filling? There’s no cream in it. It’s sugar and shortening. Maybe even made from beef – so vegan Twinkies lovers, beware. When confronted with the truth about the sources of ingredients, David Leavitt, Vice President Snack Marketing at Hostess said, Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people … would agree that Twinkies just taste great.”

That’s right. He said it. Food doesn’t actually have to be made of food to taste good.

Science has weighed in on the Twinkies question. The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project at Rice University subjected Twinkies to a series of strenuous tests to determine their properties. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is an acronym for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. Dedicated researchers jolted Twinkies with electricity, dropped Twinkies from staggering heights to replicate Galileo’s experiment, exposed Twinkies to radiation, plumbed the depths of Twinkies intelligence, subjected Twinkies to rapid oxidation, tested the density of Twinkies, and more.

At this point, we are hard-pressed to find anything positive about Twinkies except their taste. We thought that perhaps the nutritional value would be positive, since we heard rumors a couple of years ago that someone once went on a Twinkie Diet and actually lost weight. It turns out that what the guy essentially did was starve, so don’t replace your amphetamines with Hostess products just yet. If you want a hypoglycemic rush, Twinkies are your tool.

So what about the rumors of the eternal shelf-life of Twinkies? Turns out this is in error, too. We can attest to the lie. When we helped our teenage son empty the trunk of his car once, we found a box of Twinkies that had been bouncing around back there for quite some time. “In case I need a snack,” he explained. Sure. Boys get hungry. We understand. So we removed one of those delicious golden snack cakes from the box. It felt funny. It was hard. Like, brick-hard.

“How long have these been back here?” we asked.

Our progeny shrugged. “A few months, maybe.”

We were glad he hadn’t been on a crime spree. Had he needed to use the Twinkie Defense, he’d’ve broken a tooth.

August 21, 2012

Because Raped Women are a Series of Tubes

One of the pleasures of living in a world where anti-intellectualism rules a major political party is that it’s fairly easy to spot the political leanings of the shockingly ignorant.

Ignorance is strength — Image courtesy of Matt Katzenberger (source)

These are the people who consistently vote against their best interest, and are completely immune to the cognitive dissonance that rational people encounter when they attempt to hold diametrically opposed opinions in the same brain. They want to repeal Obamacare because socialized medicine is bad, while protecting Medicare because socialized medicine is good. They want the incredibly rich to get ever larger tax breaks, even though the very rich pay proportionately less than they – the working and middle class – do. They actually believe the obvious bullshit of the ultra-rich Romneys and Koch brothers of the world, who promise they would be creating oodles of jobs (Really!) if not for the unduly burdensome 13% or less that they now pay in taxes. They are the same people who are completely in favor of the death penalty, but anti-abortion no matter what the reason.

They support defunding government grants for poor students since only snobs want their kids to be educated. The budget proposal put forth by Paul Ryan, the new star of Mitt Romney’s presidential ticket, would not only reduce the size of Pell grants and even eliminate access to them for tens of thousands of students but would have cut the Head Start program to ribbons, too. Education? Our kids don’t need no stinkin’ education! We can compete with the educated workforce of countries like Sweden, Japan, and Germany without all that schooling. It doesn’t take education to know stuff.

It isn't legitimate rape if she gets pregnant. — (source)

Just ask U.S. Senate candidate, and current U.S. Congressman, Todd Akin (R-Mo). He knows stuff. Akin is the guy who has been all over the news in the last couple of days because of his cocksure knowledge that “legitimate rape” doesn’t result in pregnancy. He knows this because “doctors” told him. In his interview with Charles Jaco on a St. Louis television broadcast, Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole [conception] thing down.” (If you want the full context, watch the full interview. The abortion comments are in the second video, and start at 1:54.)

There are about 32,000 women in America who are now relieved to know that the rape by which they were impregnated last year wasn’t “legitimate” rape. They can now conclude that despite the non-consensual nature of that sexual congress, they actually enjoyed it. And that’s good news for this year’s approximately 32,000 impregnated victims of non-consensual sex, too. Thank you, Congressman Akin, for your words of comfort. All those women can stop going to therapy now that they realize that they weren’t really traumatized at all. That’ll save a bundle on their health care costs, seeing as how your party would prefer not to insure these women’s health, either.

To be fair, Akin did say that he misspoke. He meant to say “forcible” rape, not “legitimate” rape. Because non-consensual sex with a drunk college student isn’t really rape, whether or not she’s cognizant of what’s happening. And it’s totally not rape if the parties are married, even if they happen to be going through a divorce. It’s not rape if one partner is under the age of consent, because children who have sex know what they are getting into and are making intelligent, informed decisions about it. Especially children who have had abstinence-only sex education.

A woman's body can totally tell if this is rape or not. — Roulette determines the lucky winner. (Source)

Life starts at conception, according to Akin. (It’s right there on his website, so it must be true.) Or maybe it starts two weeks before conception, like Arizona recently legislated, which means that women are in a perpetual state of “pregnancy” because conception could happen two weeks in the future at any time. Akin must be right, because he knows this stuff. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and pregnancy is sciencey, right?

Oops. No. I’m wrong. It’s God stuff, not science stuff. Totally my bad. Sorry.

Where better to look than to God for guidance on, well, everything? Now, God doesn’t speak out loud, or even very clearly, but fortunately he wrote his completely unclear directions down for us. Reading the Bible for instruction on life is tantamount to reading the instructions from Ikea, except that once you’re done with the Ikea instructions you have a piece of furniture that either wobbles, or doesn’t. Reading the Bible is tougher, so fortunately we have crowds of really, really smart preachers to tell us exactly what God actually meant when he dictated those mystifying instructions. Now, a disturbing number of those really, really smart preachers, especially the fundamentalist ones, haven’t been to college, much less seminary, but they can read Elizabethan English and understand it just fine because they’re touched by God. Yes, we’re back to the refrain of “We don’t need no education.” Thank you, Pink Floyd.

NO THANKS! — Yes, I said they are touched. Touched in their various God Spots. (image source)

The Bible is crystal clear about when life begins, if by “crystal” you mean “obsidian.” If you don’t believe me, check out the Open Bible site, which has all the references its author deems relevant gathered carefully in one place. You can even vote for which verses make things clearest for you. Of the 40 or so verses excerpted from various English translations of the Bible (we know God meant the Bible to be in English), I found two that were absolutely on point and helpful. Oddly, they were the same verse, just in slightly different translation: Exodus 21:22-24, which says that if a bunch of men get together and hit a pregnant woman so that she has a miscarriage, then they either get fined as the husband sees fit, or they get punished to the same extent that the woman was injured. Go ahead and click the link on that verse. Read it in multiple English translations. If you know other languages, read the translation in other languages, too. Now you tell me which one is the best translation, given your expertise in ancient Hebrew.

Now, just for funsies, look at the rest of Chapter 21 of Exodus. It’s all relevant and pertinent to life today, isn’t it? So it makes perfect sense to use it as our go-by.

The homepage of Akin’s campaign website opens with a religious statement that puts the cart before the horse:

First, I want to give thanks to God our Creator who has blessed this campaign, heard your prayers, and answered them with victory. Through the months we have seen frequent instances of His blessing and are reminded that with Him all things are possible!

Evidently he credits prayer and divine intervention with his success in the Republican primary rather than the hard work of his supporters. I suppose that makes sense, seeing as how his list of endorsers lean heavily toward leaders of conservative Christian religious institutions. (Surely there’s no impermissible politicking going on in the churches those endorsers represent. Surely. Because that would jeopardize the tax-exempt status of those churches.)

This situation with Rep. Akin demonstrates exactly why I have a huge problem with politicians using an inconsistently translated collection of Bronze Age “wisdom” to guide modern government policy. This situation, among others, is why I advocate, agitate, and get politically active – not to mention write passionate blog posts – when elected officials decide it’s okay to blur the lines between church and state. It’s also why I get cheesed off when people want to base their lives on a book of superstitious tales and ancient customs we no longer observe.

When we allow our leaders to cherry-pick verses of this collection of ancient manuscripts, we set ourselves up to go back to that time. Me, I’d rather live in a world of universal health care than a world of leper colonies and plagues. And if that makes me a socialist, then I am a proud socialist.

Furthermore, when a page of platitudes masquerades as “clearly the Bible says life starts at conception,” then I think it’s way beyond time our elementary schools taught critical thinking and logic to children – because if their parents buy the crap on that page as “proof” of anything, they won’t teach their kids to think at home or anywhere else.

Apparently what makes a human different from other living creatures is that we have a soul. How religious people can tell whether we have a soul, and how they know animals do not, remains an insurmountable mystery. Science cannot say when the soul comes into existence, since there is no evidence that such a thing as a “soul” even exists. But ignoramuses like Todd Akin want to legislate matters pertaining to women’s health based on their Bronze Age “wisdom” without any proof whatsoever. If we permit this to happen, we will get the same draconian laws as places like the Dominican Republic, where pregnant teenagers are denied chemotherapy because the life-saving treatment might harm a 13-week old fetus. Yeah, that happened.

The problem is ignorance, lack of education, and reliance on “facts” gleaned from questionable translations of Bronze Age texts.

The problem is that people with no more background in science that this Akin clown sit on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Presumably he would know something about science if he’s sitting on a major legislative committee devoted to it. Of course, his Bible-based philosophies are contravened by science, so he cannot possibly wrap his head around them. Like that other ignorant politician who attempted to speak about a subject he knew nothing about, Akin apparently believes that women are a series of tubes, tubes that can easily be rerouted just by the nature of forced intercourse, to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

What complete jackassery.

July 10, 2012

What Good is a Higgs Boson?

The confirmation of the Higgs Boson brings this question: how can we use it?

220px-Higgs,_Peter_(1929)3 — Peter Higgs (source)

Even Professor Peter Higgs has no idea, despite the fact that he is likely to win a Nobel Prize for the discovery that bears his name.

There’s no telling when we might come to realize the practical applications for this particle. If we look at the history of particle physics, our ability to understand, use, and control the elements of each discovery took more than just decades. They took well over a century.

volta_300px — Alessandro Volta with the voltaic pile (left) and the electrophorus (right). (Source)

In 1733 French chemist Charles-François de Cisternay du Fay discovered that electricity had both negative and positive charges. A decade later, Benjamin Franklin would claim that the tiny particles of matter contained co-existing positive and negative “fluid” electricity. Utilizing the discoveries of the positive and negative charges, Alessandro Volto invented the first known battery in 1800, and proved that electricity could travel through metal wires. (When I say “first battery,” I am discounting the so-called Baghdad battery, since its function is unknown.)

But the existence of electrons and protons were first theorized in the 1840’s – over a century after DuFay – by natural philosopher Richard Laming, who conceived the atom to have a central core surrounded by layers of both negative and positive charges. Working with these theories, Farraday made his cage and discovered electromagnetism.

Tesla18Dalek10003Ft faraday cage — (source)

Discoveries in the 19th century proceeded at what seemed like a breakneck pace. Then, in 1897, J.J. Tomson developed his notion that the positive and negative charges were actually particles in each atom. In the meantime, and Tesla and Edison were using the positive and negative currents of charged particles to invent ever more amazing electrical devices. Simultaneously, Pierre and Marie Curie would isolate radioactive isotopes of polonium and radium. The lightning speed of 19th-century discoveries was supplanted by the 20th century’s explosion of knowledge. Within 40 years, we had not only discerned the nature of isotopes, we had split the atom and devastated a country with the raw power of fission. Only a generation after that, we walked on the moon. Each new discovery led to many, many more. Magnetic tape, the computer, interplanetary travel, the microchip. By the end of the century, we had such a dizzying array of devices that even science fiction couldn’t keep up.

Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, we continue to develop technology at such a speed that it is obsolete almost the moment it gets into the hands of consumers.

So when we ask ourselves whether we should pour resources into researching theoretical physics, history tells us that we not only should but must. Had researchers not pursued the weirdly conflicting positive and negative charges present in electricity, you couldn’t read this blog post and I couldn’t write it. We cannot imagine the advances of the next 300 years any more than duFay could have conceived of smartphones.

What technology are we missing?

What about something cool and heretofore science-fictiony, like, say, Faster Than Light (FTL) travel? Well, no. The Higgs boson doesn’t change the laws of physics. It confirms what physicists already thought. So, if the smart guys already have ideas about what it is, why don’t they know what it can do for us?

Wireless power delivery would be nice. So would cheap, renewable energy. How about a substitute for plastic that does not rely on petroleum? Even if we can’t go faster than light, speeding up and cleaning up the environmental cost of travel would be a most excellent way to use new technology. Matter transference. Beam me up, Scotty.

Advances in optics go hand in hand with advances in particle physics. Because of both, we know that the universe is expanding, how stars are formed, and where we might find sibling planets. We are learning the stuff of the creation of life itself, which leads us back to the medicinal uses of technology. Hypocrites could never have imagined the x-ray, that allows doctors to see hairline fractures and dental caries. He certainly could never have imagined the MRI. And what about shrinking deadly tumors with radioactive elements? Even the most learned Arab doctors of the Middle Ages weren’t thinking of such a thing.

So, medical applications. We’re missing medical applications.

And there have to be more out applications out there.

We spent tons of money to go to the moon, and many say that we did it for political reasons, not scientific ones. It’s been said that the missions to Mars are just a way to keep ahead of the Chinese, the way Apollo 11 was our competitive “gotcha” against the Soviets. We have to allocate the limited resources we have.

How do we prioritize spending on research and development?

Without a bottomless well of money to tap, how do we prioritize where to spend? Shouldn’t we look at what we hope to get out of it?

Absolutely. For instance, there are some who believe that everything we classify as “life” violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because as evolution goes on entropy should increase; life should not get more complex. This argument has holes in its logic that won’t be addressed here, but even assuming that it is true, we definitely stand to benefit from the research. If we don’t understand what happens on the quantum level, we may never understand how life arose. We need to understand how and why life has evolved to better understand our own bodies, the living plants and animals we share the Earth with, and the earth itself.

But that answer begs the question, in a way. If all research is important, where do we start? And if some R&D projects are funded at the expense of other projects, how are we supposed to choose?

We cannot spend all our money only on things that seem to promise immediate benefits. We have to spend on things that do not yield instant applications so that someday we can hope to realize those applications. Faraday’s cage was a nifty creation in 1836, but its use was not readily apparent. Further study in the behavior of electricity showed that its structure protected its contents from high electrical charges. Now, Faraday’s invention is put to a mind-boggling array of uses. Without the Faraday cage, we wouldn’t have microwave ovens, coaxial cable, or MRIs.

And no one starved because we went to the moon.

So should R&D be completely unrestrained?

Physics students don’t have to take ethics courses. In fact, most students of science don’t take ethics courses. This seems somewhat at odds with the ethical outcry that is raised about certain kinds of research. Stem cells come to mind immediately, as does the atom bomb.

Technology scares some people. We should not assume that technology will always be put to positive use. We want to improve standards of living, but negative uses of new technology – and old technology – are still a danger.

Should ethics training be required?

Of course, the more technology we have, the more practical applications we’ll find. But should physicists be required to take classes in ethics? Should ethics be part of the continuing science education curriculum?

We cut corners on technology. For instance, buildings wired with aluminum are more likely to catch fire. Yet we continue to use aluminum wire, even though resources aren’t an issue, because of comparative budgets. this seems to be as much an ethical issue as anything.

And so, at Socrates Cafe, we had this discussion:

Chris: Assume the existence of a supervirus. If it is at only one lab, should it be given to other labs to study? Is the added danger of a weaponized virus worth the risk of spreading it around to study it?

Rudy: 100 years from now, or 1000? What will life be like?

Wilson: Humanity won’t kill itself off within the next millennium. We’ll keep improving our lot.

Lisa: If science is tied to economic gain, how can the fields that are only theoretical really expand?

Chris: Relations between those on the ground and those developing theory. How will we pay for R&D if there are no practical applications?

Paul: Inspiration for future generations is worth the cost of doing theoretical research today.

Wilson: Part of being alive is seeking out an understanding of how we connect to other people and things.

Elaine: Some stuff is just plain fun to think about, like string theory.

Paul: And multiverses.

Wilson: String theory is a cult. The string theorists adjust their theory to fit the world; it’s not provable or stable.

Paul: So, you’re saying that string theory is no more than a religion.

Chris: If we can apply theory to reality and get a predictable result, the theory is proven.

Wilson: String theory is neither provable nor observable; therefore, it is a cult.

Elaine: Scientists hold on to theories, and despite their best efforts tend to be stubbornly biased in favor of their own interpretations. They are just as guilty as the religious in that regard.

Stellus: But observational science bows to peer review.

Wilson: Religions evolve, too, according to the popular will. They aren’t provable like science is, but something makes adherents.

Chris: Let me recommend a book: Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michel Hecht.

Rudy: Who decides what is worthwhile? In fact, we should define “worthwhile.”

Roxana: If it gives me pleasure, if it has some benefit in the world, then it’s worthwhile.

Lisa: To have science considered worthwhile, people have to believe in it, despite its lack of immediate practical application.

Stellus: Highly educated people work as menials because there are not enough positions available in their fields. IS what they do worthwhile? Are their lives and talents and purpose worthwhile?

Rudy: So, what are worthwhile endeavors?

Anne: Something worthwhile will improve the world. It might eliminate reliance on non-renewable resources, for example.

Elaine: Or ensure adequate clean water.

Paul: Or eliminate over-reliance on electronics.

Lisa: “Worthwhile” is always someone else’s judgment.

Rudy: What good was Hubble? Was the flawed telescope worthwhile?

Wilson: We learned that the universe is expanding, and we got amazing pictures of nebulae.

Elaine: And the optics were repaired in a feat never before attempted. The flaw itself was worthwhile because we had to figure out how to fix it.

Paul: We also learned more about the size of the universe.

Wilson: The knowledge Hubble gave us changed how we relate to the world. Check out the YouTube documentary “Mindwalk.”

Elaine: If we had to choose between science and poetry, which would we deem more worthwhile?

Anne: We can’t eat poetry. Science is how we survive.

January 15, 2011January 25, 2024

New Zodiac

So, because the earth is constantly in motion, and so are the stars, we’ve ended up with a 13th sign of the Zodiac. This sets everything askew.

Just like that, I’m a Gemini. Now I have to completely re-identify with twins. It was hard enough when just one of me was in my head.

Whatever will we do about that culturally important song?

When the moon is in the second and third house
And Jupiter aligns with Mars and almost with Venus
Then peace will guide the planets
And the Mayan calendar will put an end to the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,
No, I mean the age of Pisces! Pisces! Pisces!

July 2, 2009

I Just Solved All Our Problems

In response to the blog post of a friend who is understandably bemoaning the state of the nation, I got a wee bit windy.

I know, I know – it’s hard for anyone to believe that I – moi – would spew opinions unrestrained against the drums of ears attached to mouths that were asking rhetoricals, not practicals. Nevertheless, I have the answer, and if the president would only sit down and pay attention to me, all the country’s problems – yea, even all the world’s! – would be solved.

The economy is not going to be fixed overnight, and right now Obama is listening to the experts who advise throwing more money at the economy in all the wrong places – at least IMHO. But, in response to those who are nodding sagely, saying “We told you that Obama would bring socialism and liberalism to the country, but did you listen? Nooooo,” I say that (ahem) this started on the Republican watch. Obama inherited this disaster; he did not create it. And since no one has ever dealt with such a staggering world-wide economic crisis before, that means he is inventing this wheel as he goes along. Will he get it all right? Of course not. But he won’t be likely to get it all wrong, either.

From what I hear and read, the economy isn’t going to start upward on any consistent basis until at least next year, and maybe not until 2011. Whenever in history the economy has tanked as suddenly and as severely as it did last summer and fall, the recovery has always been slow. That’s why they call them “depressions.”

Consumer confidence is badly shaken, and as more and more jobs are lost and more and more foreclosure notices are mailed, it’s not as if Dick and Jane are suddenly going to decide to splurge on that vacation home, lavish gifts for their status-conscious kids, or a pricey new automobile. Their businesses aren’t going to be hell-bent to hire new employees, either, because if sales are down, and no one is getting the services they offer, the employers simply can’t justify it.

The economy is, believe it or not, depressed. And Economic Abilify has not yet been invented.

My opinion (and one or two of you might possibly be aware that I have one or two opinions, even though I rarely mention them in polite company) is that Obama would be better off to give stimulus money to the people and entities that are best in a position to turn this thing around, i.e., all of us, but in different ways.

Money should go to the homeowners trying to stave off foreclosure as a condition of and part of the debt renegotiation with the lenders – that way the lenders get paid directly by the government on behalf of the homeowners, the homeowners and their children aren’t sleeping on the streets, and the banks don’t own homes they can’t sell.

If a home is undervalued for the debt the homeowner has against it, the government should pay the difference as soon as new terms for the remainder are worked out between the borrower and the lender. If the borrower can’t afford to continue making the original payments – not the juiced-up interest payments – then there can be a second tier of incentives for the lenders to extend the debts to a 40 year amortization as opposed to the customary 30 year schedule.

And NO MORE INTEREST-ONLY long term debt! Whose idiotic notion was that, anyway? “Here, Joe Bob and Sally Sue, take this money that you never have to pay back. Just pay us interest and we’ll all be happy.” The hell, they say! Morons.

Next, apply stimulus funds to the remaking of the American infrastructure, especially rural and smaller urban areas without reasonable public transit. Make light rail, high speed rail, and buses reach more places and serve more people on better schedules. One of the worst things we ever did was allow our railroads to be dismantled in favor of three cars in every driveway and five lanes on every freeway. Refurbishing and improving our infrastructure will employ hundreds of thousands of people in various positions throughout the country. From engineers to draftsmen to laborers to porters, we can get this country moving at a much more economical rate, and faster, if we’ll commit the funds to do it. And those jobs won’t go away when the projects are complete – they will need to be maintained, too.

Simultaneously, pour money into scientific research and development of alternative energy as well as into to cleaning up and maintain the environment. I’m not talking about just reducing greenhouse gases, although that is certainly a big concern, but (for example) about making reasonable accommodations for heavy metals that are the by-product of mining and drilling. A rocket laden with nuclear waste, arsenic, mercury and lead headed for the dark side of the moon might not be a bad use of NASA’s funding.

Put people to work cleaning up the environmental damage we’ve done to the planet, and making sure we’ve still got a planet to leave to our great-grandchildren. Clean water, clean air, and fewer chemicals artificially enhancing the soil and crops will go a long way toward making us all healthier – not to mention the possibility that our grandchildren might be able to play with frogs in their back yards some day.

And while we’re at it, quit giving chickens and cows all those damn hormones! I have yet to meet a teenage girl whose double-D’s don’t put my paltry gifts to shame. Why are their adolescent mammaries the size of a Holstein’s udders? Hormones!

Reduce the employer’s share of employment taxes. With the matching amounts that employers pay for health insurance, medicaid, unemployment, and social security, the cost of hiring an employee is a lot more than just what the employee sees in his check. This would be a real, dollar amount of savings for employers and would probably allow businesses to hire more workers across the board and at all levels.

Nationalized health care? Bring it on. Insurance companies will always provide coverage to people who choose to pay more for less care. Those of us who have survived cancer (twice, thankyouverymuch) or who are on certain costly medications can’t get health insurance without staggering pre-existing conditions clauses that make our health insurance worthless and excruciatingly expensive – if we can get it at all.

When health insurance benefits dictate whether a parent can open a business of his or her own or must stay with an employer who provides health coverage the family can’t get elsewhere, entrepreneurialism is stifled. This country is dependent on small business and entrepreneurs. We absolutely must break down the barriers that prevent people from making an attempt to achieve their dreams. I don’t know about you, but I work a lot harder for myself than I do for someone else. I don’t think failed businesses should be propped up by the government (Detroit, are you listening?), but when something like paying for childbirth determines whether a family can start a small business, there’s something desperately wrong.

Where, O Where will the money come from to do all this?

(clearing my throat)

The same place the last two trillion dollars came from. And the next trillion will actually make a difference. It will put people to work, shore up the foundation of the country, and stabilize the economy. It will also have the added benefit of making the world a better place. And if any of you out there are thinking there won’t be more stimulus money forthcoming, you just hide and watch. It’ll come, I promise, whether the president takes my incontrovertible advice or not.

Now that I have solved the problems of the environment, the economy, health care, and reliance on fossil fuels, are there any other problems you’d like me to take a look at? My rates are reasonable, and I’m in a spewing mood.

May 21, 2008

Breast Cancer Awareness

Breast cancer has taken the lives of women we knew and loved, and has made the lived of other women we know and love very difficult. Has anyone’s life been unaffected by it? Don’t we all know someone who has had breast cancer?

The Susan G. Komen Foundation is the beneficiary of a Three-Day Walk for a cure for breast cancer. The walk is a National Philanthropic Trust project, aimed at nationwide and even worldwide participation.

With money for cancer research, more women diagnosed with breast cancer can be like my friend Ellen, who miraculously survived with a spontaneous remission despite being given a death sentence by her doctor, and my aunt Jackie, who survived with successful treatment. I can name others who have recovered and others who, sadly, have not. My cousin Margaret, my neighbor Sassy, my old friend Faye…. all have been the unlucky victims of this insidious disease.

As many of you reading this blog know, I’ve had cancer twice. I’ve not had breast cancer, but my nightmares tell me to I expect to. None of us are safe.

Please donate to this worthy cause.

My friend Kathi, who happens to be my former husband’s girlfriend, is participating in the three-day walk in October. If you don’t participate yourself, please donate to her effort to raise money for a cure.

Is it weird that I ask you to support Kathi? She’s dating my ex-husband, after all. If you don’t already know, Skip and I have a wonderful relationship – much better than when we were married – and it all revolves around a certain boy who is closing in on adulthood. Our son Jack is sixteen, personable, creative, and reasonably well-adjusted despite his parents’ divorce. Skip and I have worked hard to make sure we work together for Jack’s sake. He is the single most important thing in our lives. Skip and I encourage each other constantly, talk almost daily, and support each other’s goals, hopes and dreams. We call each other for support and to vent. We still like each other. Thank the gods we divorced before we could develop hatred for one another!

I support Kathi not only because she is my friend and Jack’s possible future stepmom, but because she is actually doing something for a cause I believe in strongly. If you don’t participate in the walk yourself, support someone who is.

March 13, 2008

Dolphin Saves the Whales

Despite Geraldine’s Ferraro’s possible claims to the contrary, there is no racism among cetaceans.

There’s a bottlenose dolphin called Moko who frequently splashes and plays with swimmers at Mahia Beach on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island, in a region known as Hawke’s Bay.

Hawke’s Bay is sort of the Napa Valley of New Zealand. The region is famous for its wines and fine accommodations. The peninsula is a scenic reserve, complete with hiking trails and camping.

Moko the dolphin is a real-life “Flipper.” She plays with swimmers, pushes kayaks through the water, and comes close to boats so the people in them can pet her. Although dolphins don’t normally seem to be afraid of humans, interactions between humans and dolphins in the wild are fairly rare. Conservation Department workers speculate that Moko is isolated from her pod and gets her social contact through her interactions with the bathers and boaters off Mahia Beach.

Moko the dolphin does more than just play with the bipeds in Hawke’s Bay, though. She’s a true hero, and Monday she proved it.

On Monday, a 12-foot mother pygmy sperm whale and her 4-foot calf became stranded in a shallow area frequented by swimmers at Mahia Beach. Conservation Department workers did their best, but could not get the whales pointed in the right direction. They got a sling under the mother and the baby, pulled them off the sand bar, and pointed them to deeper water. The whales were frightened, though, and kept getting beached. They were apparently afraid of the shallow waters near the beach and could not find their way amid the many sand bars back to open water.

The animals kept getting beached on the shallow sand bars that surround the swimming area. The Conservation Department workers freed them four times, but each time the whales become grounded again, unable to swim to deep water and safety.

Malcolm Smith, who had been in the chilly water trying to free the whales for well over an hour, described the rescue by Moko as “amazing.” “I was starting to get cold and wet and they were becoming tired. I was at the stage where I was thinking it was about time to give up – I’d done as much as I could.”

Giving up means euthanasia. If stranded whales cannot be freed and sent back into open water, the Conservation Department spares them the long, agonizing death that results from the whales being impossibly stuck on a beach or on a sand bar.

Suddenly, though, apparently in answer to the whales’ distress calls, Moko the friendly dolphin showed up. Juanita Symes, a Conservation Department worker and rescuer, told The Associated Press that “Moko just came flying through the water and pushed in between us and the whales.”

The dolphin and the whales communicated. The rescue workers saw Moko’s actions and heard her whistles, and heard the audible response of the pygmy sperm whales. Moko then led them about 200 yards along the beach, through a narrow channel, and out to the open sea.

London’s Daily Mail quoted Smith as saying, “Moko is a real heroine because there is absolutely no doubt she learned of the whales’ plight through some kind of telepathy and then got them out of trouble.” Moko led the whales about 200 yards parallel to the beach, then turned into a narrow channel the whales had not been able to find on their own. The whales followed Moko to the open sea and have not been seen since in the Mahia Beach area.

The mother and calf were extremely lucky. Most of the whale strandings at Mahia Beach end up with the whales having to be euthanized. Perhaps when other whales become disoriented and stranded in the shallow waters, Moko will again come to the rescue.

February 29, 2008

Eye Cancer

One morning in 1999 I went to my optometrist for a routine eye exam. It was time to check the strength of my glasses and contacts. With my pupils uncomfortably dilated, Dr. Randall Teague peered into the depths of my right eye. He looked into my left eye for a quick moment, then looked into the right again. He looked for what seemed like a very long time, since he was shining a light directly through the pupil onto the retina.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a freckle in your eye?” he asked.

I was a little startled. In fact, my neurologist had asked the same question when I was last in his office for a visit for my migraines. I told Dr. Teague this.

“You need to see a good ophthalmologist,” Dr. Teague said. He turned and reached for a phone book. “I’m going to call to make you an appointment.”

This was certainly an unusual thing to happen during an eye exam, I thought. As I sat in the darkened room, in the exam chair, I watched as Dr. Teague called the office of Bill Mabrey, a very respected Little Rock ophthalmologist, and asked to set an appointment. “She needs to be seen this afternoon,” he told the person on the other end of the conversation. I began to worry.

“Why this afternoon?” I asked. I had other plans for the day, but Dr. Teague exuded a sense of urgency.

That afternoon I went to see Dr. Mabrey, who, coincidentally, was the son of my in-laws’ neighbor and close friend. Over the past ten years, I had heard of Bill Mabrey’s professional progress from his mother, who loved to talk about how well he was doing and the awards and recognition he received as an extraordinarily accomplished ophthalmologist. I knew that he was one of the best in Little Rock.

“You have a choroidal melanoma,” he told me that afternoon. He explained that the “freckle” in my eye was similar to a mole on the skin. It was essentially a growth of pigmented cells in the part of my eye just behind the retina. Some people have small “freckles” in their eyes, just like they have freckles on their skin, and there is no problem. When the freckle grows, though, it is considered to be a malignant tumor that has to be removed surgically.

Only 5 in a million people have choroidal melanoma. That means about 1200 people in the United States have this condition. It is rare. And when “surgical removal” of that melanoma means removing the eye entirely, well, it is scary as hell.

A choroidal melanoma can metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body, usually to the liver or the lungs. Aggressive action to eradicate the tumor is necessary to prevent the spread. The eye is removed to prevent the melanoma from spreading. “You will most likely have to have your eye removed,” Bill Mabrey told me. My world rocked.

I have always had a fear of blindness. When I was first given glasses at the age of 9 I was told that my eyesight would continue to decline. “How bad will it get?” I had asked the eye doctor. He replied, “Oh, eventually you’ll go blind.” He thought I understood he was kidding. I didn’t, and it wasn’t until several years later that I came to understand his remark to be flippant. But in the meantime, I was sure my eyes would soon fail me completely and I would be in a world without books, without sewing, without the fine details that I loved to give to things.

More than anything else, I use my eyes. I read. I write. I sew. I make miniatures. I cannot possibly imagine life without eyes. I can lose my hearing and be okay. Yes, I love music and movies, but losing hearing would only handicap me. Losing my sight would make life much less worth living.

The fear of blindness that had permeated my childhood and adolescence came roaring back into my life. It arrived with a powerful blow and knocked me senseless. I didn’t hear the rest of what Dr. Mabrey said, but as I left I was told to make an appointment to have an MRI done on my eye.

The only place in the state that had the equipment to do an MRI on my eye to determine the size of the tumor was the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), which is located in Little Rock. Pursuant to instructions from Dr. Mabrey’s office, I called for an appointment. It would be six weeks before they could fit me in. I made the appointment.

The next few weeks were hell. This was the second time I had been diagnosed with a cancerous condition. Jack was three years old the first time. Now he was eight. The notion of this cancer metastasizing terrified me, not so much for me but for my son. My dad had lost his mother to leukemia when he was a teenager and never recovered from the blow. I didn’t want this to happen to Jack. I was 36 years old. My grandmother died at the age of 39.

I walked around in a daze. Depression froze me. I spent a lot of time just going through the motions of life. Going to my law office, going home, making dinner, sitting in a daze waiting for the next blow to fall. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I spent a lot of time just staring into space. Blindness, a cancer metastasizing, the possibility of my child growing up without his mother. I couldn’t even cry. I was numb.

It’s hard for me to write about those months of my life. Even now, nearly a decade later, I can’t think of them without tears. That time was easily the lowest I have ever been, and I’ve had plenty of lows.

My sister, Susan, recognized the fact that I couldn’t function. My husband didn’t. My sister, though, didn’t hesitate.

Susan researched the diagnosis. She started making phone calls. She found that there were five clinics in the US that treated choroidal melanoma. One of them was at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, just a two-hour drive away. When she told me she had found the clinic, she joked that she had hoped we’d have to go to New York, where the shopping was better. I managed a smile. I was so numb I really didn’t care.

Susan got me an appointment at the clinic in Memphis two weeks later. She canceled the appointment at UAMS and got the records from Dr. Mabrey’s office. She was ready to drive me to Memphis when a few days before the appointment my husband said he would take me. He had said before that he really couldn’t take a day off, even for his wife’s cancer.

Ophthalmic oncology is a tiny subspecialty within ophthalmology. There are approximately 147 ophthalmic oncologists in the world. Getting a second opinion would be virtually impossible, and would most likely be done at my own expense. It wasn’t practical. If the ophthalmic oncologists at the University of Tennessee, which was also associated with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis couldn’t save my eye, it wouldn’t be saved.(Remember the plugs actor Danny Thomas used to make for St. Jude’s on television? He founded the hospital.)

That day I waited in the crowded reception room with about 40 other patients. Not everyone had the same problem I did. There were some who were blind, some who were obviously frail and feeble, and others who appeared just as healthy as I did. After what felt like a lifetime my name was called and I began a series of tests.

After an ultrasound of my eye, photographs of my retina, and two doctors peering through the enlarged pupil of my right eye, Dr. Barrett Haik told me that the spot was most likely malignant and that there were just a couple of options for treatment. One was that my eye would be removed and I would get a glass replacement. If the second option didn’t work, that’s what would ultimately happen anyway.

The second option was a radical new procedure. A tiny laser beam would be aimed through the clear pupil of my paralyzed eye and the melanoma would be burned to a pile of ash. The blood vessels feeding it and helping it to grow would be cauterized by the laser, too. The procedure had rarely been done before, and never by Dr. Haik. However, Dr. Matthew Wilson, his associate, had seen it done. It was experimental. If I did it, I might still need to have radiation treatments on the eye. Despite the laser and radiation, I might still lose my eye. Was I willing to try it? I shrugged. Sure. Anything was better than sacrificing my eye.

It could not be done that day. The doctors would have to get the necessary equipment from St. Jude’s campus. I should come back in a month. New measurements could be taken by ultrasound and by photograph at that time to confirm that the spot was malignantly growing inside my eye.

I was still numb. When Skip and I explained the options to our families, the consensus was to go for the laser surgery. I was still in such a state of shock and denial that I couldn’t pick up the phone to call for the appointment. My sister came to my rescue again. She called the office in Memphis. I had an appointment to have the surgery.

This time the reception area at Dr. Haik’s office wasn’t as crowded and I was ushered in almost immediately. The pupil of my right eye was dilated with drops. Measurements were again taken with the ultrasound and the photographs. I was seated in an examination chair and given a painkiller.

The team knew what they were about to do to me would hurt and they warned me it would be uncomfortable. Still, I was unprepared for the excruciating agony of a paralytic agent being administered to the muscles around my eye by a hypodermic needle. The shot and the searing agony seemed to go on forever. When it was finally over I asked if it was a boy or a girl. I hoped, for that much pain, I had a baby girl to show for it. Jack was, alas, sibling-less.

While they waited for the paralytic drug to take effect, Doctors Wilson and Haik talked and joked with me. I have never met a doctor whose bedside manner was better than Dr. Haik’s. He was constantly patting my hand and arm in a fatherly manner, soothing me with his soft voice, and putting me at ease with every word. He explained each step thoroughly.

He was also honest about the fact that he had never attempted the procedure he was about to perform on me. Dr. Wilson had done it, and would be supervising him. The two medical men readied the laser and talked with me and each other about what was happening. Dr. Haik bent over me and aimed the light through my pupil onto the part of the retina where the melanoma was bulging through the choroidal layer of my eye. As soon as he was confident of his aim, he activated the laser. I felt nothing.

For several minutes he directed the laser into my eye. He explained that he was burning not only the melanoma but the blood vessels that were feeding it. Cauterizing those vessels was paramount: if they could still deliver nourishment to that tumor, the spot would continue to grow. All the cancerous cells had to be eradicated.

At last, he finished. He moved aside and Dr. Wilson took a look. He readied the laser and burned a little more of the area. Still, I felt nothing. Dr. Wilson backed away and removed his mask. “I think we got it all,” he grinned. I smiled with relief. It was probably the first time I had smiled in over two months.

Four weeks later I returned to the clinic for a checkup. The tumor wasn’t growing. There was just a mountain of ash where it used to be. I had a blind spot in my vision where the laser had seared the retina and damaged it permanently. A small black spot in one corner of my vision is such a small price to pay to keep my eye. Nine years later, I don’t even see it. In fact, even when I look for the blind spot I can’t find it. (I guess I’m blind to it – right?) My brain has compensated for the small gap in my vision.

I now go to Memphis once a year for a follow-up exam. Last year Dr. Haik was on sabbatical and I really missed seeing him. Dr. Wilson was there, though. I adore these two men who saved my eye.

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