Blue Collar Scientist

I have to admit that I don’t understand Chris Mooney or the Framists at all anymore.

Michael Gerson has written an op-ed in the Washington Post, denying that there has been a Republican war on science. This, obviously, is partially a response to Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science. So you’d expect Mooney to have something to say.

That expectation has been fulfilled. Mooney’s reaction? Have a look - first he briefly enumerates the ways in which the op-ed is a straw man and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the subject of his book, and then he concludes with:

In short, Gerson’s oped is a joke. No need for debunking, just laughing.

Ok, Chris. I’m totally behind you in this. Laugh at the guy - that’s the kind of response he deserves.

What I don’t get is why we can’t laugh at antiscience extremists who deny evolution (but still take medicine when they get sick), when their arguments have nothing to do with evolutionary theory, when they brazenly lie to make their points, when what they say attacks a straw man. I don’t get why those silly people need to be treated with special condescension, gentle kindness, and a widespread pulling of the punches, while Gerson, who is just like them, should be laughed at.

I guess when you are a big-time communications expert, when you tour the country giving allegedly highly successful lectures to packed audiences, when you have such stature that you get to tell people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers to go shut the **** up, you get to decide for yourself how the rules of the game are applied.

Or could it be that when an antiscience boob like Gerson attacks something that Mooney actually cares about, even Mooney sees the value and effectiveness of ridicule?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere published a study yesterday in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology¹ which establishes that asthma is associated with higher levels of suicidal thoughts with attempted suicides.

Doesn’t surprise me one bit.

The Flying Trilobite recently had a posting about asthma, a response to some google traffic that was coming his way, and over there I outed myself as an asthmatic from a very young age. When I was a kid, I had asthma severe enough to result in airway remodeling - in my case decidedly not good remodeling, though there is legitimate scientific debate whether remodeling in general is beneficial or deleterious - and today I walk around with significantly reduced lung capacity, compared to what I should have for my height and body weight, or whatever the norms are based on.

The reason that I’m not surprised to see asthma associated with suicidal thought and attempts is manyfold.

First, not being able to breathe properly is frightening and extremely painful, especially to the muscles that are used to breath - the shoulders, chest, and back in particular. Educated patients understand that few people die of asthma - but we are also taught that those that do often die of suffocation over a period of days or weeks of continuous and gradually worsening asphyxiation. We also understand that normal use of our life-saving medications can lead to refractory asthma - which is usually especially severe and frequently results in death; if you can walk out of the ICU, you consider yourself lucky.

Faced with an uncertain future, I know that I would feel a lot more comfortable about my existence if I knew that palliative care was available in the event that I faced a severe, probably terminal bout of asthma. But such palliative care is denied to asthma patients. We must tough it out, and that’s that. I can easily imagine that after a week or two of continuous symptoms, a perfectly rational asthmatic who cannot get any pain relief might be in the mood to take what the medical establishment would consider to be a few too many sleeping pills. I’ve never been down that road myself, but I’ve thought quite a bit about end of life care, knowing that if I don’t die of an accident or other sudden cause, I’m likely to die of asthma and its complications, and I’m unhappy in every way with what I know of how medicine treats the dying asthmatic.

The researchers sum up what I’ve just said in this way:

“Researchers have speculated that the relationship between asthma and suicidal behaviors is possibly because of ensuing mood and anxiety that results from disability and discomfort associated with asthma, which can be a lifelong disease,” they note. “Individuals might have frequent thoughts of death with increasing severity solely because they have a potentially life-threatening illness.”

To which my response is, no shit.

Technically, my evidence is anecdotal and personal; this hypothesis should be tested properly. But it rings true and I don’t consider it a high-risk experiment.

Second, much of my society does not accept asthma as a legitimate condition. Through the 1950’s, asthma was considered a psychosomatic condition - a disease that was entirely in the sufferer’s head. Until the mid 1960’s, treatment for asthma was dispensed by psychiatrists and psychologists in this manner²:

At that time, psychoanalytic theories described the aetiology of asthma as psychological, with treatment often primarily involving psychoanalysis and other ‘talking cures’. As the asthmatic wheeze was interpreted as the child’s suppressed cry for his or her mother, psychoanalysts viewed the treatment of depression as especially important for individuals with asthma.

Cry for my mother, my ass.

Asthma is now proven to be a real disease. In fact, it is an immune disease, a consequence of a too-active immune system. Remember this the next time a quack medical cure purveyor tries to sell you something that “boosts the immune system” - I have a boosted immune system, and trust me, you don’t want one. Asthma is an immune response in the bronchial airways, leading to constriction of those airways, excess mucous production, and is topped off with inflammation. All three of these leave less room for air to enter and exit the lungs.

Despite the objectively measurable physiologic symptoms, and despite the ability to induce asthma in anyone using a Methacholine challenge or similar test, the condition was considered until recently³ to be all in the patient’s head. Although the medical establishment changed its mind and recognized the condition as a real disease - and kudos to the medical establishment for responding to evidence, I’m not trying to say they were negligent in any way - the rest of our society has been slow to follow in the time since.

Despite medical evidence that prompt use of a rescue inhaler is necessary to save the lives of asthmatics, despite federal laws that protect the rights of asthmatics, and despite state laws mandating that schools allow asthmatic children to carry inhalers, there are still people who are too short-sighted to notice, or care, about asthmatics.

This school used to have an outright ban on medication, until I and others pointed out the illegality of the situation to an asthma activist organization. In response to massive pressure, the school changed the policy, and now if you fill out a form, the school says you can, they guess, have your medicine, if it is absolutely necessary that, you know, the student continue to live, or something. See also here,

Here is a school (pdf) that illegally requires the inhaler to be kept in the nurses office, and explicitly calls the use of the inhaler a “privilege” - at this school, the right to continue living is suddenly no longer a right. They also give broad, draconian powers to teachers who think the inhaler isn’t needed to deny its use to students. Here’s a hint for you - school teachers are not qualified to make medical assessments of respiratory function. This kind of thing is pretty widespread - one survey found that about a third of asthmatic kids had their inhalers taken away from them by school officials.

What happens when such practices are put into place? Students die. It has happened a number of times, but I’ll only link to the story of Catrina Lewis Michele Gaudin. Catrina died while school officials prevented her accessing her inhaler and spent a half hour trying to telephone her mother, before finally calling 911 to pick up the body. The life-saving murderous advice they gave to Catrina before she died was to go outside and get some fresh air. Her inhaler was locked in the school nurse’s office the whole time - they just wouldn’t let her use it.

Leaving the schools behind, there are still numerous examples of the asthmatic prejudice in the wider society that I’m sure any asthmatic could invoke. One of my favorites involves any time I was having an attack as a kid, and was told - and this happened often - to “just breathe” by some knowedgeable dumb-ass adult. I think I heard this from my gym teachers, parents of my childhood friends, extended relatives, and other well meaning, but very ignorant, people in my community.

Today, I’m active in athletics, despite having a significantly reduced lung capacity. Specifically, I like to ride bikes, and I have a high performance, tricked-out, all-carbon road bike with some nice components that weighs approximate 6/10^ths of an ounce that I like to ride as fast as I can. I ride in groups with some pretty fit riders, most of them about half my age. I can keep up, except when we hit the longer hills. Then my lungs just don’t allow it. I arrange ahead of time with my riding companions, telling them they can wait for me at the top, or they can just keep going and we need not finish together - it doesn’t matter to me. The few that wait? Well, when I get there, I’ve heard “just breath” a few too many times.

If we could breath, folks, we would.

Another is the admonishment that I’ve heard numerous times to just relax, and not sit up so straight during an attack. Got news for you - if I lay down during an attack, it gets way worse. If I recline on my couch, perhaps with some grapes and a couple of Roman slaves waving some white feather fans over me, the best that can be said is that I will have died in style. A kind of anachronistic, perverse style, but you see the point. Ignorant advice that I should just relax isn’t really needed here: Asthma isn’t a result of being high-strung. Being high-strung is a result of having to deal with idiots while I’m having an asthma attack.

The bottom line is that our culture views asthma in different ways; some see it as a medical condition and nothing more, and that’s fine. Others see it as a sign of personal weakness and a character flaw, and that’s not fine. That’s the heritage of the old establishment view of asthma as psychosomatic, requiring treatment with Freudian psychotherapy in order to make a better-adjusted person with fewer mental hang-ups.

Now, if you spent your life explaining to close friends and activity companions about certain of your limitations, in a responsible way so that they could make informed choices and not panic when confronted by these limitations - OR if you spent your life not disclosing these things and forcing others to deal in ignorance with what they considered to be unexpected and unexplained behavior on your part - and you had about half the people respond from the perspective of the “personal weakness” meme, would you consider suicide? How about some of your friends? I have no problem believing that this kind of social challenge would lead at least some people to suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not piling on the researchers here. It is about time that someone took a look at the mental health attributes of asthma, now that 1 in 4 kids are getting it, and these researchers are doing a good thing. I reserve my ire solely for the irresponsible behavior and prejudices of people confronted by asthma. Fortunately, it is getting rarer as I age. Unfortunately, not as fast as I’d like, and until things get straightened out in the culture, an asthma-suicide link is going to have the ring of the obvious to me.

1. Clarke DE, Goodwin RD, Messias E, Eaton WW. Asthma and suicidal ideation with and without suicide attempts among adults in the United States: What is the role of cigarette smoking and mental disorders? Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol 2008;100:439-446. [↩]
2. Asthma and depression: a pragmatic review of the literature and recommendations for future research Clin Pract Epidemol Ment Health. 2005; 1: 18. Published online 2005 September 27. doi: 10.1186/1745-0179-1-18. PMCID: PMC1253523 Copyright © 2005 Opolski and Wilson; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1253523 [↩]
3. Within my lifetime. [↩]

My previous two videos about Junk Bond Observatory have inspired some Q&A, so I’ve posted part one (of two) of some answers to the questions that have been posted to the blog as comments, and/or e-mailed to me. This is a bit dry, I know, but it is what I do for a living, and I don’t know how to make it interesting unless you are really obsessed with high performance telescopes that aren’t being controlled by grad-student-ware¹. Anyway, here it is:

If you want to keep up with my future videos, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

The next two videos coming up will be part two of the Q&A, and a video of a short presentation I gave at a religious school.

1. This is a slightly derogatory term referring to kludged-together software, generally written in some deplorably out of date language or development environment, with many bad architectural choices made, by the graduate students tasked with writing it in return for peanuts and water from the drinking fountain down the hall. In astronomy, grad-student-ware (cf. shareware, freeware) seems to be responsible for more observatory downtime and observational overhead than any other source. [↩]

I’ve previously posted about John Freshwater, the teacher at a Mt. Vernon, Ohio school who is accused of mutilating students by burning religious imagery into their flesh. Yesterday, Blake Stacey left a comment to that post pointing out a new story in the Columbus Dispatch, which has more details about the allegations.

The tool a student says his science teacher used to burn a cross on his arm comes with a warning: Never touch or come in contact with the high voltage output of this device.

When the boy’s parents complained, administrators at Mount Vernon Middle School told John Freshwater, the school’s eighth-grade science teacher, to lock up or remove the BD-10A High Frequency Generator from the classroom. About the same size and shape as a power screwdriver, its tip puts out up to 50,000 volts of electricity.

Science teachers use the generator to ionize gases in a test tube so that students can identify them by their glowing colors.

When I made my original posting, I was struggling to think of what kind of “electric shock machine” (that’s the phrase used in the story I quoted at the time) could have been at issue here. I must have gotten hung up on the idea that the machine was made for the purpose of administering electrical shocks - I had electroshock therapy devices and all kinds of other, stranger things going through my head. But the Dispatch story identifies exactly what was used - and it is something I’ve used myself.

It is basically a Tesla coil, packaged up in a nice, convenient flashlight-like enclosure. They are used industrially to test for pinhole leaks and to test welds, but if you have a very rarified gas inside a glass container, you can use it to ionize the gas and cause it to give off pretty colors. The principle is exactly the same as the neon sign advertising Alaskan Amber at your local pub¹, and this application of the device is often used to demonstrate ionization states and excitation emission in a physics class. If you’ve used this kind of device for instructional purposes, you will certainly have noticed the smell of ozone surrounding its use.

I have used this device instructionally, and in a moment of carelessness, I once burned myself with one. My forearm made contact with the electrode of the device for about half or three-quarters of a second - this necessarily being an estimate. This experience wasn’t too painful at the time, on the order of getting a good strong static shock after shuffling your feet on the carpets. But it did leave one hell of a welt that got more and more painful over the course of the next three or four days. My recollection is that the small wound stayed painful for a week or so. Eventually the welt that was raised went down, scabbed over, and after about two weeks, the scab fell off. I had a red mark that persisted for about two or three months. It was by no means a pleasant experience. But it wasn’t all that severe; I’m a grown-up and I can take the consequences of my own brief clumsiness.

The issue here is whether middle school children should be forced to endure the same experience by an adult who has been given power over them. And the answer is obviously no.

The maker of the device is quoted in the article as saying:

“We have instructions to warn people that it’s not a toy,” said Cuzelis, who owns Electro-Technic Products in Chicago. “If this device is directed for seconds (on the skin), that’s a clear misuse of the product.”

He also points out that he’s not heard of severe injuries caused by the device, which I can readily understand, because when I got in touch with the business end of this thing, I dang near threw it across the classroom from my reflexive reaction to the pain. They’ve never been sued over its use, and I’d say that’s a result of the device being straightforward to use, sensibly designed, and clearly labeled with a warning not to use it on skin or flesh.

The Dispatch article says that the investigation the school is undertaking will be finished by the end of this month. The school has apparently already acknowledged that Freshwater was in possession of the device he is accused of using to burn students; the principal wrote a letter warning Freshwater not to shock students with the device in January, following a December 10, 2007 complaint from a parent. Freshwater has hired a lawyer and refuses to talk about the allegations.

I’m looking forward to learning the results of this investigation at the close of May.

1. If you can’t get Alaskan Amber at your local pub, don’t despair. Really. [↩]

The Institute for Creation Research has released an enemies list, apparently as a tribute to the deep paranoia of Nixonian politics they engage in. It contains some interesting tidbits. It is mostly the usual collection of misleading quote-mining lying by misquoting others, but a few points had me laughing.

For example, about Dawkins - their Enemy Number One - they say:

It is no wonder that Dawkins has elsewhere concluded that “life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” If this is what evolution offers, can there be any other result but despair?

Any other result but despair? Let us read from the Bible. Please open the good book to Ecclesiastes 11:8, and read along with me:

Indeed, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but it seems pretty clear to me who is purveying despair, and it isn’t Richard Dawkins.

Under Eugenie Scott’s entry, they trot out the tired old lie that creationists have been retreading since the 1860’s:

[T]here has been no observable scientific evidence for macroevolution.

Of course there have been; at one web page alone, you can learn about no less than 29 observed instances of evolutionary speciation, complete with citations to the scientific literature. One wonders, if they are right in their claim that evolution is false, why they have to lie about the scientific findings on evolution all the time….

But that’s not really my point here. I want to return to the bible again. Please attend to Genesis 1:11:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit….

Sadly, the ICR doesn’t respect its own sources. If you read that, you surely noted that the bible does not say that god created plants. The text clearly states that plants were to be brought forth by the Earth. This is a clear example of biogenesis, the transition of inorganic material to advanced organic life.

And let us also look at 1 Corinthians 15:45:

So also it is written, “The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.

A strong endorsement of the naturalistic world view that science, and evolutionary theory, represents. Naturalism comes first; without it, the bible says you can’t have spiritualism.

They move on to PZ Myers, and lead with their chin ignorance:

Although many other evolutionists are active “evangelists” in the world today, P. Z. Myers deserves a mention because of his prolific presence in cyberspace, mainly through blogs on his website Pharyngula.

I was under the impression that Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, is at Scienceblogs. Shows you what I know.

They don’t really say anything in the Myers section about their beliefs, so there’s no way to consult the final authority (the Bible) on the truth of their claims. So, disappointed, I will simply have to bring this posting to a close.

When the intense heat of a forest fire or volcano warms the humid air above, the air rises to a point of stability, generally within a humid layer of atmosphere. The phenomenon creates what is known as a pyrocumulus cloud¹.

When the cloud gets so big, and so turbulent, that it exhibits electrical activity, it graduates to pyrocumulonimbus status.

That’s what’s happening at Chaitén, the volcano in Chile that has been erupting recently. And some photographers are taking some spectacular photos of the phenomenon, like this one picked up by National Geographic, and this one by an uncredited photographer.

The last decent-sized pyrocumulus that I saw was while I was hiking on the Iceberg Notch trail in Glacier National Park in northern Montana. A small forest fire on the nearby Blackfeet Indian Reservation created a pyrocumulus, the turbulence and winds of which quickly whipped the fire into a huge conflagration. After my hike was over, it graduated to pyrocumulonimbus status, giving us a nice electrical display as we tried to get back to our rental cabin on a road that went right through the firefighters’ central command and even a small corner of the fire itself. Quite exciting.

1. Nuclear detonations, and sometimes industrial activities, can also create these clouds. [↩]

It takes three minutes to explain the evolution of the eye.

It only takes an intelligent design creationist three seconds to say “it is still too complex to have evolved.”

Ken Miller has written an op-ed for the Boston Globe that all should read.

There have been two pretty high profile cases of teachers being fired recently, and I thought it was time to comment on both.

The first one involves the firing of substitute teacher Jim Piculas in Florida for engaging in a bit of performance art. Piculas performed a pretty standard magic trick in his classroom, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear. Years ago when I was a kid I did a trick like this; that means, by definition, that it is a beginner’s trick and one that just about anyone can learn.

Piculas probably did the trick because such things are encouraged by education experts as ways of gaining the attention of the class, regulating the classroom, and winning the respect of the kids. I’ve seen such advice dispensed at several educational conferences. If you do a google search, you will find 420,000 references to classroom management and magic tricks. Many of the pages advocate using magic in the classroom, especially for substitute teachers like Piculas; for example one suggests performing tricks as rewards:

If you have special kid friendly talents, sometimes these can be used as great classroom management techniques! If you can play the guitar, bring that in with you and play for them when they are working quietly…. If you know some magic tricks, that works well in the same way. Show them one at the beginning of class, and then offer to show them more as rewards. Juggling can be used in the same way, if this is something you are capable of doing.

Even religious school authorities advocate magic tricks in the classroom, although in this case the trick is being performed by the kids:

Pastoral Care Day at our school takes place at the end of every term. Children may choose to sing a song, recite a poem, read a short story, crack a joke or say a riddle, share an invention, show their art work, put on a one-minute skit, dance or sing to music, play on an instrument, do a magic trick, etc.

Suffice it to say, performing magic tricks in the classroom is a widely sanctioned professional activity amongst teachers, and it has a very important role in classroom management. You don’t have to go far at all to find experienced educators advocating such performances.

And the key here is performance. Magic performers¹ know that what they do is performance art, and they don’t claim - in fact they specifically deny - that they are using supernatural forces to accomplish the illusion. However, that is not the stance that the Pasco County School District has taken - they’ve specifically accused Piculas of