Every Nuclear Detonation, from 1945-1998

This sobering video by Isao Hashimoto speaks for itself. You'll need about 15 minutes to watch the whole thing, but if you want a reminder of what the pace of testing in the nuclear age has been, this is well worth it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&hl=en_US&fs=1]

The reminder that more than 1,000 nuclear explosion took place in the American Southwest almost leaves you wondering how the entire region isn't an atomic wasteland, doesn't it?

The official page for this video on the site for the Preparatory Commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has more information about the artist.

(As the page notes, the video does not show two nuclear tests that occurred after 1998, both by North Korea, in October 2006 and May 2009.)

Once Again, False Balance on Climate at the N.Y. Times

By rights, I should have seen and commented on this article in the New York Times days ago, and perhaps a better blogger would now shrug it off as a lost opportunity. But even if it is only a fairly trivial example of the chronic problem with false balance that dogs reporting on the climate policy debates, this particular instance of it still annoys me so much that I need to vent it out of my system anyway. Tom Zeller, Jr., writes:

In any debate over climate change, conventional wisdom holds that there is no reflex more absurd than invoking the local weather.

And yet this year’s wild weather fluctuations seem to have motivated people on both sides of the issue to stick a finger in the air and declare the matter resolved — in their favor.

...

Last February, for example, as a freak winter storm paralyzed much of the East Coast, relatives of Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is a skeptic of climate change, came to Washington and erected an igloo.

They topped it with a cheeky sign asking passers-by to “Honk if you ♥ global warming.” Another sign, added later, christened the ice dome “Al Gore’s new home.”

...

Now, with record heat searing much of the planet from Minnesota to Moscow, people long concerned with global warming seem to be pointing out the window themselves.

“As Washington, D.C., wilts in the global heat wave gripping the planet, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has abandoned the effort to cap global warming pollution for the foreseeable future,” wrote Brad Johnson at the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.

Must it be necessary to point out that the climate deniers and the environmentalists are "invoking the local weather" in completely different, nonequivalent ways?

Inhofe and the sign makers were implying that the cold weather disproved claims of global warming and showed they were ridiculous. The scientific fraudulence of that argument is precisely why using isolated weather incidents to argue about climate is absurd.

In contrast, even though the Times titled this story, "Is It Hot in Here? Must Be Global Warming," no one in the story makes that argument. Johnson did not say the heat wave proved global warming was real. Instead, he highlighted the irony of lawmakers forsaking a sound response to the problem while the world was suffering from extreme heat—a kind of heat that will only become more commonplace and extreme as global warming continues.

One side illegitimately used weather as evidence. The other used weather as an example. Were Zeller and his editors too foolish to recognize the difference or was the thrill of getting to say both sides are doing it just too sweet to ignore?

Memoirs of an Entomophage

JR Minkel, who blogs as only he can over at A Fistful of Science, recently brought to my attention this Paul Adams article for Popular Science (and indirectly, this news story in the Guardian) about the underappreciated importance of insects as a food source for many people around the world. That prompted me to dig out this recollection of my own foray into eating insects, which I wrote up years ago.

Memoirs of an Entomophage

My reputation in some circles as a person who eats bugs has been blown out of proportion. Yes, I have knowingly and voluntarily eaten insects, but I wish people wouldn’t pluck out that historical detail to epitomize me (“You remember, I’ve told you about John—he’s the bug-eater!”). It was so out of character for me. As a boy, I was fastidious to the point of annoying priggishness; other children would probably have enjoyed making me eat insects had the idea occurred to them, but I wouldn’t have chosen to do so myself. Bug eating was something I matured into, and performed as a professional duty, even a public service.

Here’s how it happened. Back in 1992, the New York Entomological Society turned 100 years old, and decided to celebrate with a banquet at the map-and-hunting-trophy bedecked headquarters of the Explorers Club on East 70^th Street. Yearning for attention, the Society’s leaders had the inspiration to put insects not only on the agenda but also on the menu. For hors d’oeuvres, you could try the mini fontina bruschetta with mealworm ganoush, or perhaps the wax worm fritters with plum sauce. Would you care for beetle bread with your potatoes, or are you saving room for the chocolate cricket torte? Waiter, could I get more mango dip for my water bug?

Mind you, eating insects is not so bizarre and alien a concept in most of the world. According to Gene DeFoliart, the editor of the Food Insects Newsletter (that’s right, they have a newsletter), societies outside of Europe and North America routinely eat at least some insects, sometimes because they are the closest things to livestock that’s available. Most of the world does not share our squeamishness about eating things with antennae. Moreover, the consequences of our cultural bigotry can be serious. The U.S. and Europe largely drive the budgets for food-related research around the world, which means that most spending on raising better food animals goes to studying cows, chickens and the like. Millions if not billions in Africa, Asia and Latin America however, would get much more direct benefit from knowing how to improve the fauna with six legs (or more) that provide much of their protein.

Then, too, it’s not as though most of us in America haven’t ever eaten insects. Eight million of us live in New York alone, after all, and the Board of Health can’t be everywhere. The key difference is how many insects we’ve eaten, and how aware we were of it at the time.

I had volunteered to cover this event for Scientific American, ostensibly because it would be a lighthearted addition to our pages. (“C’mon!” I had argued. “It’ll be fun! Lighten up! Don’t you get it, they’ll be eating bugs!”) For me, writing about entomology would be a pleasant change of pace because my beat at the magazine mostly ran toward molecular biology—the study of stuff that was once alive but has been dissected down into pieces so incredibly small no one can see or care about them.

Beyond that, I also had a secret motivation for wanting to go. The truth is that I have always been somewhat afraid of insects. I love to look at them; I love to learn about them; their multilegged, exoskeletal ways fascinate me. But the notion of insects crawling on me, biting me, stinging me gives me the creeps. My hope was that if I went to this Entomology Society banquet and turned the tables on our arthropod pals, I would be free of this phobia forever.

(I must admit that this idea occurred to me after discovering that in his autobiography, former Nixon henchman G. Gordon Liddy explained that as a child, he had been afraid of rats, until one day he caught one, cooked it and ate it. It’s not a good sign, I know, that I was taking self-improvement tips from a man who was a probable sociopath and confirmed radio talk-show host.)

It was in this spirit that I arrived at the Explorer’s Club on May 20 to find that the entomology banquet had exploded into a full-blown, out-of-control media event. Approximately 80 people were attending the dinner as guests. Roughly another 250 were there as representatives of the press, doing a very good impression of a swarm of locusts, bumping into one another’s cameras, jostling the Explorer’s Club decorations, and stealing one another’s interviewees.

They were doing everything, in fact, except eating. That behavior was unusual, because the standard arithmetic that applies to media events is Journalists + Free Food = No More Food. In this case, however, the members of the fourth estate were upholding the principle of being mere observers, not participants.

Yet when the number of people reporting on an event so exceeds the number of people actually participating in it, it suddenly becomes much harder to find anyone to interview. In desperation, reporters on that night had started interviewing other reporters. Of course, the great advantage of interviewing another reporter instead of a real source is that the reporter will immediately give you the quotes you need rather than cluttering their statements with facts or trustworthy information.

Since I was at the banquet as both a diner and a reporter, I was ideal. Thus, a reporter from the New York Daily News hit on me for colorful copy, and I was happy to oblige. “This is a night on which you do a lot of drinking,” I quipped, “and when you get home, you floss.” She happily wrote this down, and then spent much of the rest of the evening bringing other print and radio journalists to my side, to whom I said pretty much the same thing.

But forget all that and ask the question that really matters: How do insects taste? Depending on how they’re prepared, they may not taste like much of anything. If the insects are ground up and used as an ingredient—as they were in the aforementioned mealworm ganoush and the cricket torte—they can be completely unnoticeable. (That’s probably not the most reassuring thing you could hear if you ordinarily worry about insects in your food.) When the insects were served whole, they had a bit more distinctiveness to offer, although not necessarily something too strange.

The first offerings of the night, for example, were small wicker baskets filled with assorted fried crickets and grubs. These tasted primarily of salt and oil, with a slightly nutty aftertaste, not unlike most of the snacks you’d find sitting in a bar. (I’ll grant you this assessment may reflect less on the insects than on the quality of the bars I frequent.) The fried insects were all too recognizable for what they were, but taken individually, they were not too off-putting. Baskets full of them, however, were much more disturbing: every time anyone removed a handful, the rest would shift position in a way that created the illusion the buggy pile was still alive and squirming.

One type of insect being served was in fact still alive: honeypot ants from the Southwest. The pea-sized abdomens of these ants were engorged with peach nectar. In the wild, these swollen workers act as living canteens for their colonies. Pop one in your mouth and bite down fast, and you might not notice that this gumdrop is still wriggling, though you might notice the extra lemony zest of formic acid it spat at you in its last moment.

I had less than favorable reviews for only two dishes from that evening, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were the ones involving the largest insects. The first was listed as a roasted Australian kurrajong grub. Kurrajong is actually another name for the Brachychiton genus of trees and shrubs that can play host to many types of wood-borers; I think the insect in question is what is more commonly called a witchetty (or witjuti) grub, an old staple of the Aboriginal people. Here we have something that looks not unlike a pale link sausage, but with a head like a chive. In flavor, too, the witchetty grub is reminiscent of sausage, though one in which the meat has been stretched with too much mealy filler and the casing has perhaps a bit too much snap. Not to my personal taste, but not inherently awful.

However. That brings us to my Waterloo, the sautéed Thai water bug. This dish was every nightmare I might ever have had about an insect banquet rolled into one. For openers, it is a water bug, which is to say, it looks like a gigantic cockroach. Whatever it was sautéed in did nothing to disguise its fundamentally roachy nature. It was an insect, whole and uninviting, sitting on a plate, looking like it wanted to run away as much as I did.

Furthermore, because this water bug was about three inches long, it posed a problem that none of the other edible insects that night did: I would have to eat it in at least two bites. Which end to eat first? The front half looked spiky and crusty; the back half looked like it held reservoirs of goo.

I stared at the water bug, hoping it was not staring back at me, trying to decide whether I could bring myself to eat it at all. Hadn’t I dined on enough insects already? And wasn’t I already feeling a little less phobic about insects? How much personal growth did I need in one evening, after all? I had very nearly talked myself out of it—

—when I suddenly became aware of a halo of bright lights surrounding me. It was my fellow jackals of the press, circling, smelling my vulnerability. The camera crews had been hoping to catch somebody eating one of these six-legged abominations for the first time, and there sat I: so obliging, so quotable. Feeling unable to back out of the situation, I raised the beetle to my lips (noticing that, dear god, it had a noticeable heft), oriented its head and thorax down my throat and bit down.

It managed to be even less appealing than I’d expected. As my teeth crunched through the brittle exoskeleton, the rapidly disarticulating body parts poked my tongue and palate. Oh my god, I thought, I’ve got a leg stuck between my teeth. Worse, the flavor was grotesque: acrid and somehow reminiscent of lighter fluid. The bug’s feel in my mouth made me think of globs of barbecue sauce that had fallen onto a grill and burned.

(What I’ve subsequently learned by reading an account of the evening in the Food Insects Newsletter is that the water bugs may have been cooked wrong. Everyone I spoke to that night—even those few entomophages there that night who normally relished the creatures—hated what had been done with them. You know the expression, “Misery loves company”? In this case, company doesn’t help.)

“How do you like it?” asked one of the reporters from the enviably insect-free crowd.

Resisting the temptation to spit the mouthful back onto the plate, I managed to mumble, “Mmm, that’s some bug”—not a memorable bon mot, but if Oscar Wilde ever ate insects while in prison, no epigrams marked that occasion either. At that moment I knew with crystalline certainty that my phobia about insects was not going away after that evening, that it might never be going away—and that if anything, my neurosis had picked up extra material to work with.

And no, the second bite was not any better.

Postscript: It really is worth reading that edition of the Food Insects Newsletter from 1992, if only to read this anecdote from "The Chef's View of the New York Banquet," which is a kicker I cannot top:

The kitchen staff swirled around her, carrying containers with masking-tape labels such as "cream cheese mealworm dip" and "bug grub." Behind the stove, a cockroach scurried up the wall.  " Yike's," said Elliot, taking a swat at it with a rag.  "That's not one of ours."

The Road to Scientopia

The constructive chaos triggered by the PepsiCo fiasco at Scienceblogs.com continues to evolve, in ways that I have to hope will ultimately be to the advantage of bloggers, scientists and the science-reading public alike. The latest evidence is that as of 10:00 a.m. EDT today, there’s a new game in town: Scientopia.org, “a new blogging collective to educate and entertain anyone interested in eclectic voices of science,” according to the press release announcing its launch (emphasis added).

We invite the world to ponder, argue, converse, and laugh along with us. Each blog is produced by an individual or group that retains complete editorial control of its own content. Some bloggers are moving from other networks; others are creating new blogs. At launch Scientopia will consist of 24 blogs, including the following:

The Urban Ethnographer (scientopia.org/blogs/urbanethno) Krystal D’Costa

This Scientific Life (scientopia.org/blogs/thisscientificlife) GrrlScientist, formerly of Living the Scientific Life, and Bob O'Hara

Skulls in the Stars (scientopia.org/blogs/skullsinthestars) Greg Gbur

Adventures in Ethics & Science (scientopia.org/blogs/ethicsandscience) Janet Stemwedel

Good Math, Bad Math (scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath) Mark Chu-Carroll

WhizBANG! (scientopia.org/blogs/whizbang) Pascale Lane

The complete listings can be found on the Scientopia.org home page. More blogs will be added in the months to follow.

The Scientopia network is more than a collection of individuals: it's a scientific community. It serves the common goals of sharing our love of science, while respecting the diverse interests of its members. At Scientopia, the community -- of bloggers and readers, engaging with science and each other -- is not a side effect. It's the whole point.

To my mind, that last part about community is the most important, and the one that bears most strongly on the raison d’etre for blogging networks. Individual blogs with their individual authors’ voices can link to one another informally as easily as networked ones can; they can encourage cross-talk and mutual traffic, too, in loose alliances. So why have the formal structure of a network at all?

Part of the answer is of course practical: having an organized network can spare some of the authors the technical headaches and redundant costs of being on their own, and some uniformity of presentation and layout (if it’s good) can be beneficial. But the real advantages, which are less easily defined ahead of time, have to come out of the ongoing association and conversation among the bloggers. They have to figure out collectively what makes them a true community where synergies are even possible. Do they all share a similar set of values or interests? Can they find practical ways to advance the cause of the network beyond pushing their own blogs? Is there a shared identity of some sort for the network that gives the individual bloggers room to breathe?

This is the gauntlet thrown down for all blogging networks, not just scientific ones. If Virginia Heffernan’s recent column in the New York Times reacting to Scienceblogs and the PepsiCo mess (in which she made several ill-informed assertions) contained any point worth considering, it was that Scienceblogs had become so motley in its offerings that visitors to the site—and maybe even some of the bloggers there—might not know what to expect. Nothing is wrong with variety and diversity, of course, but it’s easy to believe that bloggers might not always be comfortable with the direction that some of their neighbors or the network as a whole might seem to be taking.

Maybe such tensions are inevitable in any mixed network beyond a given size; maybe they are even good in the long run. What the fracturing of Scienceblogs and the formation of new networks promises, though, is the possibility of new experiments in community within the theme of science blogging. I’ll be very curious to see how Scientopia’s efforts pay off, and certainly wish them all success.

Lest anyone doubt that Scientopia’s formation was directly shaped by the unmarked advertorial misadventure at Scienceblogs, the release also notes that, “When the networks run with commercial interests in mind, the priorities of the bloggers and readers can get lost. Some bloggers began to wonder: what would happen if the bloggers and their readers came first? From this discussion sprung Scientopia.org.”

Just so. Of course, the long-term commercial viability of science blogging (or of networked blogging in general, or of individual blogging in general, for that matter) is all still up in the air, as so much of commercial media is these days. But it sounds like making money at science blogging isn’t the primary objective of the Scientopia folks: they just want to converse well about exciting topics in science. And if that’s utopian thinking, then that’s a dream I’m happy to share.

Update: Bora Z. has added his own welcome for Scientopia at the new digs of A Blog Around the Block, which includes a nice summary of the latest whereabouts of many former Sciblings.

Busted Explanations for Karate Breaking

Martial arts are my hobby and explaining science is my job, so the recent appearance of “How karate chops break concrete blocks” on io9.com naturally caught my eye. Unfortunately, not only did it fall far short of my hopes of offering a lucid explanation, it parroted misleading statements from an article on exactly this same subject that has been annoying me every time I remembered it for 10 years. (Oh wonderful Web, is there no old error you can’t make new again?) Indulge me while I try belatedly to set the record straight. The io9 article starts by asking how the squishy human hands of martial artists can break concrete slabs, wooden boards and other considerably harder objects. Reassuringly, it wastes no time on talk of chi and similar Eastern mysticism but instead goes right to a very loose discussion of the biomechanics of hitting efficiently and striking to vulnerable positions in the target. So far, so good, although the descriptions of what to do are probably too vague to be helpful to readers who don’t already know what they’re doing.

Then the article seems to go off the rails (emphasis added):

It's also important to strike quickly at the surface of the block. Most blows are part connective smack and part push. This delivers the most damage when fighting flesh, but helps protect concrete or wood. Concrete and wood have a good mix of rigidity and elasticity. The materials will bend, and even flex back like a rubber band would, but the limits of their malleability are much lower. Bending and snapping back can do more damage to them than it can to things that flex easier. By making the blow fast and pulling back, the striker hits the block hardest and allows the material to do the maximum amount of bending. A follow-through push will keep the material from snapping back, and snapping itself.

In my experience, and that of every other martial arts practitioner to whom I’ve ever spoken about this subject, that’s just not right.

When you break a board, or concrete, or a Louisville slugger or anything else routinely used these days in demonstrations of tameshiwari (breaking), you have to follow through on the strike. Indeed, advice commonly given to students learning to break is that they should aim at an imaginary target several inches beyond the actual object, for two reasons. First, doing so helps to make sure that the actual strike occurs closer to the movement’s point of peak biomechanical efficiency. Second, it helps to override our natural tendency (partly psychological, partly reflexive) to slow down ballistic movements such as punches and kicks before they reach full extension, which helps to protect the connective tissues around our joints.

This argument is not theoretical for me. I’m not in the same martial arts galaxy as Mas Oyama, and I am anything but a breaking ace. But I have studied karate for 17 years, and during that time I’ve broken my share of boards, concrete and rocks, and helped out with demonstrations by other karateka executing far more powerful breaks. They all followed through.

The reason this faulty description of breaking jumped out at me is because I had read it 10 years ago in Discover magazine’s “The Physics of … Karate,” which is one of the two articles that the io9 piece listed as a source. (The other was an entertaining and apparently blameless piece by The Straight Dope.) The Discover piece was if anything even more confused because it implied that boxers’ punches could not break boards (believe me, they can) and implied that biomechanical efficiency somehow justified its statement that a karate chop “lashes out like a cobra and then withdraws instantly.”

If you’d like more thorough and quantitative explorations of the physics of breaking, you can get them here and here [pdf]. You can also read what are regarded as a couple of classic papers on the subject:

Walker, J. D. “Karate Strikes,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 43, 10, Oct. 1975

Feld, M. S. et. al. “The Physics of Karate,” Scientific American, pp. 150-158, April 1979

A surprisingly accurate and informative description of the science behind breaking is also available on this page (with video) for the old Newton’s Apple children’s science TV show, which states:

One key to understanding brick breaking is a basic principle of motion: The more momentum an object has, the more force it can generate. When it hit the brick, [karateka Ron] McNair's hand had reached a speed of 11 meters per second (24 miles per hour). At this speed, his hand exerted a whopping force of 3,000 Newton’s --or 675 pounds--on the concrete. A slab of concrete could likely support the weight of a few people weighing a total of 675 pounds (306 kilograms). But apply that amount of force concentrated into an area as small as a fist and the concrete slab will break.

The io9 article correctly points out that when breaking multiple boards or slabs at once for demonstrations, breakers often put small spacers (wooden pegs, pencils, stacks of coins, etc.) between them at the edges so that they do not sit solidly atop one another. Use of spacers does make breaking a given number of boards much easier (see that Straight Dope article to see how much easier). But then it continues:

Hold a piece of paper by both sides in the air and a knife, applied to the middle, will cut right through it. Put it on a smooth concrete floor, and it will be much, much harder to cut the piece of paper using the same knife.

Like everything else in life, breaking is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending. The paper can't bend, and so it doesn't give. A concrete block works the same way.

Trying to explain breaking by drawing analogies with cutting only confuses matters. And what in the world does "Like everything else in life, breaking is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending" even mean? [Update: Good news, everyone! Allan West in comments points out to me what I should have recognized in the first place: the author is quoting Bender of Futurama. Thanks, Allan; your Planet Express gift certificates are on the way.]

Breaking is filled with practices that, depending on your point of view, are either tricks for fooling observers or techniques for maximizing a strike’s visible effect. You don’t just strike with the power in your arm or leg: you organize the movement of your strike to bring in as much power from your legs, hips and upper body as possible, too. When breaking wooden boards, you use pine (not oak, not mahogany) that isn’t marred by dense knots, cut ¾ inch thick and about 12 inches on the diagonal; you hit them to break along the wood’s natural grain. (For some demonstrations, breakers have been known to bake their boards ahead of time to make them more brittle.) One good board, if held securely so that it won’t move on impact, is so easy to break that even those with no training at all can be taught to do it in under five minutes.

When breaking concrete, you use slabs that are relatively narrow and long, so that the strike can hit at a distance from the supports at their edges for best leverage. With some multiple breaks—involving, say, big slabs of stacked, spaced ice—you can count on the weight of the falling, broken pieces on top to help break slabs lower in the stack. And so on.

All these practices are ultimately demonstrations of simple physics, not magical chi, but doing them well—particularly the more demanding ones—also takes strength, training and concentration. The value of tameshiwari to martial arts training is much debated; it has little or no practical relevance to fighting or whatever else people study martial arts for. Done wrong, breaking is an amazingly efficient way of messing up your limbs, potentially permanently. I don’t do it often and I don’t much miss it. But I have seen (and felt firsthand) how much successfully breaking boards can boost a student’s confidence, so who knows.

In closing, Matt, the Skeptical Teacher, demonstrated karate breaking at The Amaz!ing Meeting a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, and even showed that he could teach veteran skeptic Joe Nickell to break in under five minutes to prove the lack of mystical woo involved. Here's a clip of a break he did on the main stage.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On-CiwL5x80&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

A Little Gene Music (Eine Kleine Nukleotid Musik)

It won't be Lady GaGa. But maybe a little Lady GAGATCAGCTCATTCGAC...?

On Tuesday at the British Royal Society of Music, the New London Chamber Choir will publicly perform a new choral piece with the lilting but jargony name "Allele." The genetic allusion isn't a superficial conceit: it is genuinely genomic music. Each of the 40 members of the chorus will be singing a score based on part of his or her own DNA.

The project began with geneticist Andrew Morley and the Wellcome Trust's "Music from the Genome" project, which had sequenced the DNA of 40 gifted singers to learn whether they had any distinctive genetic commonalities that might be indicative of musical ability. The findings of that genomic study have not yet been published. In the interim, however, Morley—who had sung with choirs in his youth, according to the BBC—decided to use the genomic sequences as the raw material for an artistic work.

He turned the data over to composer Michael Zev Gordon, who first translated the strings of nucleotides into notes, then rendered them musical through his selection and rhythmic arrangement of them. The poet Ruth Padel provided the lyrics for the singers. As Pallab Ghosh of the BBC writes:

To begin with, there is a single voice singing a simple rhythmic phrase; but as the piece develops, more voices join in - conveying the biological idea of replication and reproduction. At its climax, each member of the choir is singing their own unique genetic code - resulting in everyone singing a subtly different song.

Morley and Gordon seem not to be the first to think of translating genome sequences into music. Indeed, some artist-scientists have attempted the maybe even more intriguing trick of turning music into DNA and inserting it into living cells.

Research fellow Gil Alterovitz at M.I.T. and Harvard Medical School has developed a computer program that translates information about cells' gene and protein expression into musical sequences. His purpose is scientific rather than aesthetic, however. Because our brains are particularly adept at picking up patterns in the sounds we hear, Alterovitz hopes that his system could help researchers identify subtle derangements in the synchrony of gene expression that might underlie disease states.

For example, since the 1990s, musician Peter Gena seems to have been developing compositions based on DNA, with the assistance of geneticist Charles Strom. For the multimedia installation Genesis, they worked with Eduardo Kac, who created a synthetic gene sequence based on a Morse code translation of a line from the eponymous chapter in the Bible: "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." The DNA representing that sentence was inserted into bacteria and grown in a petri dish; fluorescent proteins helped to show how the plasmids holding the synthetic DNA spread throughout the cell population, moved horizontally into other cell lines and mutated over time.

In the past decade, fungal microbiologist Aurora Sánchez Sousa of Madrid’s Ramón y Cajal Hospital and Richard Krull have similarly used genetic sequences as the baselines for musical compositions, which were then elaborated upon further in accordance with Krull's inspirations. The results of their labors are available on the Genoma Music site.

Back in 1998, musician Susan Alexander of Sacramento worked with biologist David Dreamer to make music out of the molecular vibrations of DNA in response to illumination by various wavelengths of light.

And currently, poet Christian Bök is working on writing poetry that can be translated into DNA and then inserted into bacteria as a working gene (not just junk DNA filler). Just to add an additional level of difficulty to the project, though, he also wants the amino acid sequence in the protein made by this gene to itself be comprehensible as a poem different from the one in the DNA. Yikes.

By the way, the bacterium into which Bök wants to insert his multilayered genetic composition? It's the extremophile Deinococcus radiodurans, well known for its near invulnerability to radiation damage. D. radiodurans is a good choice because the DNA-repair properties that give it high radioresistance also make it extremely resistant to mutation—which means that if Bök succeeds, he won't have to worry as much about mutation reducing his genomic art to gibberish.

Of course, that will also mean that Bök's creation should be able to survive for a long, long time. That's one way to achieve artistic immortality.

A personal request: Perhaps one of you readers can help me with a request that no amount of racking my memory or searching online has yet solved. While writing this article, I was reminded of an anthologized science fiction story that I read, oh, probably 35 years ago. It concerned an inventive genius and music lover who feared that when civilization collapsed (as it surely would), all the beautiful musical works of genius would be lost forever, because recordings would perish and musical notation would be inscrutable. He therefore invented a machine that, when it received musical input, produced living creatures; his idea was that these creatures would survive in the wild and somehow preserve the music until such time as someone invented a similar machine that could change the beasties back into music again. The creatures in question all had traits that somewhat reflected the qualities of the music or its composers: I remember that the "wagner beasts" were threatening and wolflike. As you might imagine, this scheme did not work out well.

Can anyone identify the name and writer of this story? Not remembering it has bothered me for eons. Thanks.

Off the Clock

Unemployed people have time on their hands, you say? Sure, if by "time" you mean the ability to travel backward through time. I would have thought it was impossible, too, until esteemed economist Arthur Laffer set me straight with his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Laffer was arguing that it is economically counterproductive to raise unemployment benefits during economic hard times—say, now, for example—because it only creates disincentives for people to work:

Imagine what the unemployment rate would look like if unemployment benefits were universally $150,000 per year. My guess is we'd have a heck of a lot more unemployment. Common sense and personal experience indicate higher unemployment benefits will make unemployment less unattractive and thereby increase unemployment even in the Great Recession.

Can't argue with that. True, unemployment benefits aren't actually $150,000 a year—about three times the median household income in 2008. They're closer to just $300 a week, or $15,600 a year. This hypothetical argument that supposes the exact opposite of reality, that one could on average make much more money by being unemployed, is nevertheless irrefutably compelling.

What really persuaded me, though, was this graph that Laffer and the WSJ supplied to bolster the argument that "since the 1970s there's been a close correlation between increased unemployment benefits and an increase in the unemployment rate."

The correlation is indeed close—with increases in unemployment benefits lagging spikes in unemployment by a year or so. This can only mean one thing. Those unemployed layabouts are using some of their $150,000 a year incomes to lounge around in Hot Tub Time Machines, jump back in time and get themselves laid off and so that they can soak up all that sweet, sweet government gravy.

Laffer is apparently not alone in his profession in believing that time travel is a major influence on the U.S. economy. Nobel laureate economist Edward C. Prescott recently stated at the Society for Economic Dynamics meeting in Montreal that Obama caused the current recession, which is a neat trick because the recession started in December 2007.

In summary, then, the keys to time travel are: (1) Lose your job. (2) Study economics.

PepsiCo Scienceblog Goes Flat

That didn't take long. The PepsiCo-sponsored blog on Scienceblogs that caused such an uproar this week, and which I discussed here, has now been removed completely from the network site. Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Journalism Tracker had published a further follow-up this morning that included some additional steps announced by publisher Adam Bly to improved the presentation of advertorial blogs on the site. In the end, though, PepsiCo's Food Frontiers blog proved too much of a sore point to retain. (Surely, even PepsiCo must have started to see the initiative as liability.) Still, damage has been done to the Sb's relationships with its bloggers, some of whom have decamped permanently. What any of this will mean to Sb's audience, or for the future of blog networks more generally, remains to be seen.

This episode illustrates one potential obstacle that all would-be blog networkers should consider. Are the management, the bloggers and any sponsors all of a like mind about what the network's mission is? Is everyone clear on what the supposed advantages and ground rules for the existence of the network should be? Do all the parties understand what the stakes are for the others? If not, severe conflicts like this one seem more than likely to occur.

Unsolicited Advice for Patrick J. Michaels

As an editor, I have this suggestion for Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute. It might help his public communication skills. Patrick, in the future if a reporter asks you, "Did you mean to imply that undercutting the credibility of the field [of climate research] in toto is a good thing?" and your answer is, "No," followed by this:

I think that most environmental policies (or non-policies) require some type of “event”. Consider “Waldenstrube” (acid rain), the mis-named “Ozone Hole” (more accurately known as the early-spring Antarctic depletion) and the Montreal Protocol, or Bob Watson’s completely fabricated Northern Hemisphere ozone hole (did you ever write about that?) prompting a complete phaseout by the senate, 99-0. I think our science has always been fraught with uncertainty. Look at the history of Methane concentrations in the last two decades. “Consensus” science (including myself in this one) was dead wrong about the second most-important human-related greenhouse-gas emission! That’s a pretty big flop that the public is completely unaware of. So if they don’t trust us as they used to, that’s a good thing…at least it is the right thing!

I don’t have a problem with the public not trusting scientists. The way we do science today ( Kuhn + large programmatic funding = stasis + shenanigans) certainly doesn’t inspire my trust.

Then it would be faster and clearer if you just said, "Yes."

So... Benjamin Santer was asking for it?

Pity, if you will, Andy Revkin. As a reporter who worked the environment beat for The New York Times for many years, and who now continues as the author of the Dot Earth blog for that paper, Andy has the mixed blessing of being one of the most prominent journalists covering climate change, which means that he is a prominent target for arrows from all sides. Those who doubt, deny or otherwise resist efforts to stop anthropogenic global warming—whom Andy calls stasists and whom I'm usually comfortable calling deniers or denialists—attack him for pushing "climate alarmism." Meanwhile, proponents of climate policy reform paint Andy as frustratingly, deliberately centrist: too willing to echo the talking points of seemingly respectable opponents; too willing to discount the efforts of the disinformation campaign that maintains the energy/climate status quo. Of course, anyone who knows Andy and is familiar with his body of work can have no doubt that he recognizes the reality of climate change and the importance of trying to prevent it. I know his heart is in the right place. I know he isn't namby-pamby on the subject.

But it's easy to see why so many climate scientists throw up their hands at Andy's work when, in a post about the wild goose chase that was Climategate, he writes things like this (emphasis added):

The press, including me, was excoriated for devoting too much ink (and electrons) to the disclosed files in the first place. Some coverage was indeed far too focused on the sense of conflict, which is not surprising given that — as my screenwriter friends always say — conflict is story.

But what such critics forget is that many of the e-mail messages enabled the allegations that were then propounded by folks like Anthony Watts and amplified by professional anti-climate-policy campaigners like Marc Morano.

I would have had no need, in my initial print story on the affair last December, to seek a comment from Patrick J. Michaels — a climatologist who speaks and writes on energy and climate policy for the Cato Institute, which fights most regulatory solutions to environmental problems — if Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, using his government e-mail account, had not vented to colleagues on October 9, 2009, in this way:

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next 
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat 
the [expletive]  out of him. Very tempted.

I want to give Andy the benefit of the doubt on this, but how is writing that the stolen (or whatever) personal messages "enabled the allegations" not tantamount to blaming the victims of the theft? What exactly is the implicit standard here? That no one should say anything intemperate even in a presumably private conversation because, if it somehow becomes public knowledge, reporters will have no choice but to investigate every rhetorical flourish?

If that is the idea, then Andy really fell down on the job. Because although he sought out Patrick J. Michaels for comment, I don't see any evidence that he tried to contact the organizers of the scientific meeting to find out whether they would have beefed up security to head off Santer's berserker assault.

Please, Andy. We get it. The e-mails contained some juicy, gossipy slurs, and asking the subject of them what he thought was irresistible. Anybody in journalism might have done as much—TMZ and Perez Hilton surely would. It was certainly helpful to your efforts that Santer said something so colorful, because let's face it, for your purposes it would have been enough for him to say, "Patrick Michaels sure makes me mad! I sure wish someone would make him shut up!" Even that would have shown evidence of some emotional bias against the man and you would then have had to seek comment about it, no? Michaels would certainly have thought so, true? And you wouldn't want to make him unhappy.

It was a completely justified way to go with the story. Noted. I can swallow that. But please, don't be low enough to imply that the climate researchers brought it on themselves by failing to anticipate someone would make them publicly answerable for expressing personal opinions that fall short of an unstated, never-to-be-reached standard of decorum.

My apologies if anyone thinks I'm out of line for upbraiding Andy like this. But what such critics forget is that Andy's ill-considered comments enabled my allegations, much as Santer's did. The difference is that Andy intentionally put his words on a blog of The New York Times, whereas Santer just found his there.