Memorial Day '08

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, when we remember and recognize all those men and women in uniform who went into harm's way for our country (whether the war was justified or not) and, in many cases, gave the ultimate sacrifice to protect our nation's interests.

Right now, the giant American flag that was presented in my grandfather's memorial service is hanging in my bay window, completely covering the glass there. Grandpa served aboard a supply ship in the Pacific during World War II, but came home safely. My great uncle fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II Europe. He came home, too. I also had a step father who served in the Korean war. A fall from an icy tank injured his back, but he came home. He never really recovered from his back injury, but he had a far harder time dealing with the mental wounds of war. And my lovely young niece is, right now, patrolling the edges of Sadr City in Baghdad. She is shot at often, and the risk of being killed by bullet, mortar, or roadside bomb is very real. I am lucky that none of my relatives has actually died while at war. Let's hope it stays that way. She comes home in August, just before her 23rd birthday.

But the danger doesn't end when they walk through that door to their good ole home. A recent study found that 1 in every 5 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD):

http://www.physorg.com/news127650186.html

That's 20% of returning veterans. Of those who seek treatment, only about half receive "minimally adequate" treatment.

The biggest effect of PTSD is depression, with suicide as the worst outcome. According to the Pentagon's own assessment, soldier suicides are five-fold higher than before the wars began, and currently that rate is at its highest ever since the start of the war (SOURCE). At least five soldiers commit suicide each day. That means that the number of suicides may soon outpace the number of combat deaths.

In a recent phone call, my niece commented on how surreal it is, fighting there in Baghdad, where you drive around in a big city, like any big city, where there are cars and people walking around, except there you can expect to be shot at at any moment, and everyone you are supposedly fighting for wants you gone and may be conspiring against you.

This isn't the war my grandfather and great uncle fought, or even my step father. Those we were liberating wanted us there.

So as you enjoy your day off, going boating, cooking hot dogs with the fam, reading blogs by liberal scientists, or simply gathering around the home entertainment system to watch this week's episode of American Gladiator, give a thought to those who have fought for your country, and another for those who are fighting for their lives right now.

Hang in there, my niece. I'll see you soon. Though this holiday is meant to remember our soldiers who have died, my flags fly for the living heroes, too, and one day soon this unjustified war will be over.

Addendum: On a closely related note, May 17 was Armed Forces Day, a day where we celebrate all that our combined armed services do for us (and, I might add, a holiday which is practically unknown or ignored outside of miltary circles, as far as I can tell).

Image taken from HERE.

Don't Touch My Cola No Matter How Thirsty You Are

Here's a question for you: If you were really thirsty, and there was an ice-cold six-pack of your favorite soda that was seemingly abandoned in your work lunchroom refrigerator, would you help yourself to a can? What if no one else was in the building? What if the six-pack had been left untouched in there for weeks? Is it really stealing if no one seems to care if you take them? I have to confess, I'd be tempted.

What if, instead of a six-pack of pop, it was a plate of $1 bills?

I probably wouldn't touch them.

I once did some backpacking in the wilderness of Idaho a couple of sweltering summers. Just before leaving for a one-week hitch into the woods, with a forty-pound pack on my back, I left a six-pack of ice-cold cokes in the fridge of the bunkhouse where I was staying. By the time I got back, lean and sweating and ready to collapse, all of the cokes were gone. I was pissed off! No one confessed to this dastardly crime.

Here's another one for you: If you had to choose between making someone suffer quickly or slowly, which would you choose? Let me put it another way: When you take the band-aids off your kids, do you do it slowly or do you rip it off? I'm more of a "rip it off" kinda guy.

An Israeli researcher at MIT named Dan Ariely is exploring these very sorts of scruples:

http://www.physorg.com/news127399170.html

He argues in his new book, "Predictably Irrational", that these seemingly irrational decisions people make about ethics is actually predictable, and he has tests to show it. The examples I gave above were two of the sorts of questions. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list since February 19.

His results, in a nutshell: People start out with good intentions, but life experiences lead them to cheat just enough to get away with it, or to make irrational decisions that seem to justify their mindsets, often in a predictable and economically-driven way.

I think we'd all like to think we are very ethical people. I do. But if it's a hot, hot day in the middle of summer, there's a wet six-pack of cola sitting in that fridge, and the owner of that coke has been gone for a week, wouldn't you reach out for a cold one? You can pay him back later, right?

Go on. Take a sip. I won't tell. They'll never know it was you ….


Image taken from HERE, stolen without conscience.

How Many Trees Die Because You're Divorced?

Ah, life is grand. I'm livin' the nuclear family dream. I've got my 2.1 children and 2.1 cars. I've got my average house with its average (slave debtor's) mortgage. I'm working a stable career with a heartless company. I've spent too much for Christmas. And, despite being short, round, forgetful, and hairy like a beast, I haven't been awful enough for my lovely wife to leave me yet. We've been married for over 12 years. Yeah, over 12 years! Can you believe it? And neither of us have been married (or divorced) before.

In this day and age when, in the United States, we have an average divorce rate of about 50%, most ending within the first 15 years, young folks tend to be a bit jaded on the whole marriage thing (statistics information). Many of their parents were Baby Boomers, the "Me Generation", who suffer the highest divorce rate of all demographics. Maybe it's a good thing Americans are marrying later, on average.

Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night, "Journeys end in lovers meeting," but as Pauline Thomason said, "Love is blind – marriage is the eye-opener."

When the honeymoon is over, the love handles start coming on, and the enthusiastic and oh-so-Leave-It-To-Beaver "Honey, I'm home!" hug is replaced with a quiet shutting of the door, a couple aspirins, and a "Hey, what are you getting out of the freezer for supper?" Sadly, some folks open their eyes and discover that the snoring lump sleeping next to them on the Posturepedic isn't quite what they bargained for, or worse. All too often they give them the boot, the Big D, the marital sayonara. DIVORCE.

But wait! If this is you, my fellow blog reader, you may want to add one more thing to the social, emotional, economic, religious, parental, and physical strains that await (or afflict) you, your spouse, and your children around the dark corner along the divorce path. A recent study found that divorce actually hurts our environment:

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news115925227.html

Research abstract: HERE

That's right. If you are divorced, you are likely contributing to the misuse of our planet's precious few resources, thus forever increasing your already sky-high guilt factor. According to the two authors of the paper, which studied individuals from a number of countries, households of divorced individuals have more rooms per home per individual, thus requiring more heat and light, and thus more resources to power them.

To quote the paper: "In the United States in 2005, divorced households spent 46% and 56% more on electricity and water per person than married households. Divorced households in the U.S. could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households. Furthermore, U.S. households that experienced divorce used 42–61% more resources per person than before their dissolution."

Yikes. So, what does that equal in terms of pollution? How much greenhouse gases were made by all the coal that was burned? How much acid rain? How many dead trees and tumerous fish? Come on, I've got to have a figure for our angst to feed upon!

And that doesn't even take into account the growing numbers of single adults who have yet to marry, or widowed individuals who live longer and don't remarry. Just think what the neoconservatives will say about this one! All those ultrareligious Focus On The Family nutjobs and preaching presidential candidates. The authors also found that when divorced individuals remarry or return to their previous cohabitating married lifestyles, their energy consumption returns to average.

But, unfortunately, we don't all marry wisely, and people change. And there are a lot of really, really bad people out there who hide their true natures. Sometimes divorce is simply unavoidable. So what are all you divorced people to do to reduce your impact on the Earth and save your environment? Wear tie-dye and join a commune? Move back in with Mom? Go crawling back to their deadbeat or philandering spouse? Jump back into the hot, smarmy date circuit in search of a ring again?

No, of course not, dummy. Just live wiser. Living alone without the benefit of someone nagging at you doesn't mean you have to forget to turn off the lights or use less water, and now that you no longer have an extra person to throw away your money for you, do you really need that third bedroom for all those craft projects you never had time for while you were slaving away for that slug you used to be married to, a formal dining room to collect dust bunnies, or a second bathroom frequented only by your cats and the occasional tub spider? No. Live simply. Live in a smaller space. Let your hair hang down and live a little more like a hippie. Dig it?

As for me, I'm going to sit with my 2.1 children and my lovely, long-term wife tomorrow night, drink hot chocolate, and turn off all the houselights except for the Christmas tree. And as I enjoy my Leave It To Beaver life in the flickering woodstove flames of my energy-conscious lifestyle, safe in the self-riteous assumption that my marital bliss will last forever, I'll drink a toast to all you divorced-types and hope you'll be reducing your energy consumption this fine holiday season as you write out your alimony checks by holly-scented candlelight. Cheers.


Image taken from HERE.

An Experiment On Memory Retention

I'm busy preparing for my new job these days, a job I'll start in less than a week. Other than organizing and packing eight and a half year's worth of office crap and moving it from one building to another in some semblance of planned chaos, preparation requires only one thing: STUDY.

My company sells nearly 3000 products, not counting the ones sold at other sites globally, and I will have to know or be able to retrieve obscure facts about nearly every one of them at a moment's notice to help the customers. The one best way to do this is to read and be able to regurgitate the product literature, especially the tome-like company handbook that we distribute to customers.

It's over a thousand pages long.

I have one of the worst memories of anyone I know, at least for common day-to-day stuff. If I have to shop for more than three things in one trip, I'd better write a list or I'll have hell to pay from my lovely wife, who never ceases to remind me of my particular handicap, especially if I go to the store for cheese and come back with four bags of not-cheese groceries. My memory is better for work-related topics, but not exactly stellar, and though my long years of developing products has given me a strong basis of wisdom to grow from, it is still a daunting task to absorb so much product data.

I was thinking about this tonight as I pulled out my company handbook, when my wife proudly exclaimed that she had just finished the 759th (and last) page of the final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Then it occurred to me how one might better be able to retain large amounts of data: Fiction.

Children's books do it all the time – teach lessons by incorporating them into the text and pictures of a fiction book.

I told my fantastic idea to my wife, and she immediately scoffed at the idea. "An adult ought to be able to study information without having to have it in story form." But I wonder. I can recall exquisite details about nearly every book of fiction I have ever read. It seems most any Harry Potter fan out there can do the same. Just ask one what Lord Voldemort's real name is, the name of the spell that scares away the Dementors, or who Mrs. Norris is.

So I am devising a test, and I'm wondering what you think of it. As a writer of fiction, I imagine I could convert your average textbook chapter into a reasonable story that contains the same facts. Of course it would be much longer in order to accommodate all the data plus a tolerable plot and dialogue, but I'd be willing to read extra if I was sure it would help me retain the info. My test would have one group of volunteers read a couple textbook pages, and I would have another test group read a work of fiction which contains the same information plus some sort of reasonable plotline. Sure, it wouldn't be able to compete with J.K. Rowling, but I'd bet that incorporating the data this way would allow it to be better processed in our brains. I'd then test the volunteers on what they read just after the reading, a day after, and a week after, to determine the retention rate. I'd put my money on the fiction-readers.

Do you agree? Would you volunteer for this test?


Image taken from HERE.

Public Speaking For Scientists

In my profession as a biotech scientist, good public speaking skills are essential. In fact, having bad public speaking skills, particularly due to shyness, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for Lab Rats. The last thing you want to do is get up in front of a bunch of scientists and look like a moron, especially if they know as much as you do about areas of your own study, and possibly more. In any given crowd there will be novices and experts. Somehow you have to appeal to them all while giving them at least one good nugget of information they could fine intellectually stimulating. The big thing is for people to overcome their fear and make themselves comfortable standing up in front of (sometimes) dozens or even hundreds of perfect strangers and sounding both knowledgeable and relaxed. Today’s blog from Scott Adams was about that. HERE is a good article on overcoming that fear.

Scientists aren’t shy when it comes to pointing out flaws in your protocols or logic. In fact, it’s what we are trained to do. So much so that when the question and answer period comes at the end (as most are prone to do), you expect critical questions to be asked about why certain choices were made in the experiments and how we made certain assumptions about the data and results, and you have to explain. Sometimes you will gather new insights about your process and can go back to the lab to test them out. That’s the real value of these presentations. If, being a scientist, you give a presentation and there are no questions or comments at the end, then either you’ve blown them away with your incredible genius, or you’ve failed in your mission entirely and wasted a great deal of your time and that of the audience. As much as I would love to think I fall into the genius category, I would have to admit my failure. Luckily, I can’t think of any talks I’ve given lately that were complete failures that way.

Inevitably there will be one older professor in the audience who will glibly point out some crucial mistake you had made that surely could have avoided if you had only read their seminal paper on whatever obscure protein or cellular process they’ve studied for decades. If it’s a good idea, you say so, and get the reference from him later. Probably 90% of the comments are that way. If not, you say “Thanks, I’ll look into that.” That’s usually code for “Thanks for pushing your own interests, dumbass, and abusing your authority to make me look bad in front of my peers. I’ll ignore your comment.”

I’ve taken a couple public speaking courses, but only because I went to a liberal arts college. They were taught by the sociology department. Oddly, science departments don’t seem to include speaking classes. This always perplexed me, given the importance of it. It seems they assume you’ll somehow pick up the skills by watching other (sometimes very bad) speakers during the seminar series. So the classes you learn from are geared more toward speaking from a marketing perspective (“Here’s why my product is a good one”), or a dry information perspective (“Here are the latest sales figures”). Science is at its core an interactive discipline based partly on rational thinking and partly on peer review. The talks have to keep that in mind (“Here’s my data, now tell me where it’s lacking”). Oh, sure, you have to enunciate, make eye contact, not rely on notecards, not stutter and all that sort of thing, too (HERE is a starting place for learning). That much is in common, and scientists by and large are really good about those basics. But here are some additional recommendations that I am vainly going to make to my fellow scientists, even if I am sometimes guilty of not following all of them:


DON’T BE BORING. For crying out loud, reams of data and slide after slide of chemical structures will put your audience to sleep in minutes. Only the worst geeks will stay awake. In every experiment is a story crying to get out. Pretend you’re trying to tell your grandma about the purpose of your experiment. The story you tell will inevitably be reductionist to the point of being interesting. Refer to that story off and on through the talk. Talking about your studies of filamentous actin and its role in G2 states of cellular division is dry. Adding that the protein conjugate you used is highly poisonous and was purified from the Death Cap Mushroom is much more interesting.

HUMOR IS GOLDEN. Scientists love stories of how experiments went wrong but resulted in unforeseen eureka moments, or how they got fed up with someone and wanted to prove them wrong, only to prove them right but then one-up them. Some scientists are so dry in their presentations that you wonder if they’re drugged.

DON’T BE FLASHY. Leave the animated graphics and marketing logos for the sales folks. Scientists just want the facts. Nifty text fly-ins and superfluous decorations from clip art are simply annoying. One example of doing it right was when a guy I work with recently showed a slide of a simple Excel chart on a white background. He said it was the only flashy slide he had with animation then proceeded to grab the cloth screen with his hand and shake it, making the text scintillate.

GET TO THE FRICKIN’ POINT, ALREADY. Scientists love to go on and on about their specialty. Who can blame them? Many have spent half a decade focusing on one obscure metabolic pathway or gene studied by only a handful of other scientists around the world. Chances are, though, most of their audience could care less about most of that work. They really just want the highlights. Know who your audience is and gear it to them.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO TURN OFF THE PROJECTOR. Here's a big one. Nearly every presentation I’ve seen in the last 10 years has been solely a PowerPoint presentation. That’s okay. That’s the best way to get across most of the points. But somewhere along the way it seems most of us scientists have forgotten the fine art of turning up the room lights, raising the screen, and putting away the laser pointers. Draw on a chalkboard. Gesture with your hands. Get out from behind the frickin’ podium and use the space up front. Maybe, in your wildest moments, even produce props to pass around the room, such as chemical models or actual (non-toxic) samples from the lab. It’s so rarely done, I would consider the presentation a novelty worthy of attending even if I otherwise would have no interest in the topic.


So, to my tens of readers, what have you done to make your presentations more interesting?


Image taken from HERE.

Help Wanted: Human Sardines

Imagine yourself surrounded by five of your coworkers in a small house in the mountains. Go on, pick out five of your coworkers, I’ll wait. For the sake of ease, pick the five you like the most. If you aren’t the sort of person who works at a job with lots of people, you can pick out five good acquaintances.

Here’s a hypothetical situation: You meet these people for a dinner party at a mountain chalet. You are socializing, but all of you have also brought your work with you to do later.

Now imagine that an avalanche buries you all in the house such that there is no way out. You are in no mortal danger, and you have all the food, drink, recreation material, and facilities that you need to live for years. Your boss calls and says you all have to keep working normal hours, but it would be more than a year before they can dig you out. Good luck.

Do you think you could do it? Could you get along with all of them in such close, cramped quarters, and get your work done – for more than a year?? Do you really feel so close to your fellow workers that you’d all get along peachy? Or do you think cabin fever would start creeping in?

I don’t know if I could do it. Maybe I wouldn’t mind being around a couple of my coworkers that long, but I’d be more worried about them tolerating me! There’s a very good reason why I’m not writing this blog from a Navy submarine right now.

Now imagine that you aren’t in a closed-in mountain chalet, but in a spaceship headed for Mars, or on Mars itself. Are you shrugging it off right now, or are you thinking like I am that by the fifth month you’d be prying open the airlock and seeing for yourself how many milliseconds it would take for your eyeballs to freeze in the vacuum of space?

The European Space Agency (ESA) is about to test this scenario (no, not the eyeball-freezing part – the long-term habitation part):

http://www.physorg.com/news101457611.html

They put out a call for paid European volunteers in excellent mental and physical health to serve as guinea pigs. These intrepid volunteers will be paid 120 euros a day (= $158US) to live for up to 17 months in a closed habitat the size of about “nine truck containers.” Others will live 105 days in preliminary trials under similar situations. They’ll be doing work-like activities and testing, and will have to face simulated emergency situations, but mainly they’ll have to face long periods of inactivity and potential boredom. There will be six people in each habitat. Their only contact with the outside world will be by radio, with a simulated 40-minute delay, and whatever they are allowed to bring in with them. What will happen, researchers wonder?

According to the article:
“Assuming that Mars and Earth are favourably aligned, with their closest distance of 56 million kilometres (35 million miles), it would take 250 days to get there, 30 days spent on site to conduct experiments and 240 days for the return”

Yay! Astronauts have done this on space stations. You can too, right? You get used to the locker room smell pretty quickly, and packaged rations can seem pretty yummy if you brainwash yourself enough, I imagine. Why, it would be a blast. Just bring along your Pictionary set and you’ve got it made!

If this sounds appealing to you, here’s the link to the application webpage:
http://spaceflight.esa.int/users/index.cfm?act=default.page&level=16&page=2203

Personally, I think I’d rather swallow live leeches. But that’s just me. You go ahead.


Image taken from HERE.

Father's Day, And Carrying My Children Through The Forest

Happy Father's Day to all you papas, grandpapas, and papas frites out there. We spent Father's Day picnicking at a nearby state park, then hiking a new trail (for us) up in the mountains with the family, enjoying the spirit of discovery I saw in the eyes of my kids as they explored the subtle joys of throwing rocks into a lake, splashing in the mud, and hugging trees along the trail. Though they are only toddlers, my son and daughter are real troopers. Still, by the end of it, I was carrying both of them when they ran out of steam. I didn't mind, though. That's what dads are for, after all.

Of course, I had started down the trail with the intention of making them walk all the way. Inevitably, it was my daughter who first broke me of that idea. How did she do it? Yep, you guessed it. She stood in front of me, arms wide, and looking at me with those adorable please-please-please eyes. How could I possibly say no to someone so cute? Oh, man, the things she's likely to get away with over the years!

I'm not alone in being influenced by my daughter. A study was recently released by researchers in economics and psychiatry from Yale that showed male congressmen who have daughters are more likely to support women's rights and health issues:

http://www.physorg.com/news101125978.html

But is it really surprising? Don't we naturally relate most to issues we have the closest connections to? According to the article: "Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University's Child Study Center, said daughters make fathers 'think differently about how they're going to make the world a better place.'"

Yep. I consider myself an advocate for women's rights, anyhow, but I have no doubt she, and my son, will change the way I see the world, and in a big way. I think it's a reasonable argument that, though we play a pivotal role in molding the way our children see the world as they grow up, in the end it is our children who change us more.

You Brought Your Laptop With You On Your Last Vacation, Didn't You?

I just came back from a three-day vacation. I had a great time relaxing with the kids, playing Scrabble with my mother-in-law, and staying at a snazzy timeshare condo that the in-laws had arranged for us. It was great getting away from the lab for a while. And yes, I have a great affection for my in-laws and out-laws.

Of course, "getting away from it all" is a misnomer. Vacations in my line of work, and possibly yours, too, don't mean that there is no work to do. It just piles up while you're away. My list of things to do didn't get any shorter while I was away, but now I have less time to do it in. And most likely more tasks have been put on my plate while I was away. I know from previous experience that at least half of Monday will be spent simply reading and responding to emails. I also had materials to read, a lab book to update, and a report to write, but I was a rebel and didn't do any of it. Still, all of this "vacation work" sorta puts a damper on the whole "relaxation" thing.

"But wait," you say, "just bring along your laptop and work when no one else needs you."

Sure, no problem, I'll just log on in-between swimming with my toddlers and grilling steaks with Dad. I'll call in to the office on my cell phone to "check in" while I drive back to the condo. Maybe I can squeeze in a few emails between watching "Flushed Away" with the kids and playing a game of Scrabble. You laugh. But I know you're out there, with your laptops, cell phones, blackberries, and PDAs. You're laughing because you do it, too. One coworker of mine is even dorky enough to bring his laptop and cell phone with him on camping trips.

According to a recent poll, one in five people who go on vacation bring their laptop along, mainly for keeping up with work:
http://www.physorg.com/news99917478.html

Two in five downloaded their email while on vacation. 80% brought their cell phones. 50% checked work voicemail messages. According to the poll, these "techno-geeks" are typically highly-educated, under 40, and white – like me. Coincidently this is also the demographic I suspect is most likely to show off their Star Trek uniforms on first dates, but I digress.

What's wrong with this picture? Hello?!? Vacations are supposed to be about getting away from work, not taking it with you. I'm very, very good about not doing these things. I actually believe my workplace won't miss me for a few days, and any work I miss will eventually be caught up with.

But wait, just bring along your laptop and work when no one else needs you. Yes, I said it, and I did it. I brought along my laptop, and worked on it after everyone else went to sleep at night, but I swear it wasn't for work. Um, well, not for my day job, at least. I was busy working on some fiction writing (a side hobby of mine) and playing computer chess. So there. Besides, my room wasn't internet-ready.

Gasp. Yes, it's true. My room didn't have an internet connection. In this day and age when everything that includes a battery seems to be internet capable, and a significant portion of the population are beginning to resemble the Borg, my room was still operating without the world wide web. Geez, roll your eyes! How very pre-90's!

I should also mention that I had my wife's cell phone with us, but it, too, is not subscribed to any internet service.

Ah, but never fear! The condo lobby offered a single internet-ready computer that could be logged into – for the low, low price of $4.00 per half hour. Who the hell would pay four bucks to check their friggin' email, I ask? You'd have to be pretty hard up to shell it out. Being a cheap bastard, I chose to stay away, and thus you weren't graced with any blog entries for days. How did you ever make it without my illustrious wisdom catapulted to you via the binary mysteries of the www?

The last place I stayed, on a business trip to Berkeley, was an old "grand dame" hotel which turned out to be a dump. [I've stayed at enough of those "grand hotel" places to know they aren't nearly as wondrous as you would hope. Without free breakfast, and often without even swimming pools or hot tubs, you're basically paying for a nicer lobby, and the rooms are usually smaller and badly furnished. You're better off staying at Best Western, IMHO]. The lobby at that Berkeley hotel had four computers you could use, free of charge, up to 15 minutes a day. To do so, you had to get a code from the front desk. The problem was that 15 minutes is NOTHING. First of all, the connection was slow, so by the time I was able to log into my email server and actually start reading emails, nearly a third of my time was gone. Actually putting thought into my replies meant I was only able to read and reply to a fraction of my inbox. Begging for a second code was successful in doubling my time, but it was still a stretch. That same hotel offered free wifi in the lobby, but my ancient laptop was not wifi compatible. Luckily a coworker had a wifi-capable computer I could use to get some extra work done.

Anyhow, I have now returned to the modern world, and thus you get this blog post to complete your day. Enjoy.

Oh, and I rock at Scrabble. In one game, I had two 7-letter words. Beat that, you techno-geeks!


Image taken from HERE.

Worked To Death - Literally

An article was released today stating that “a record number of Japanese people literally worked themselves to death last year, despite campaigns to ease the country's notoriously long office hours. Some 355 workers fell severely ill or died from overwork in the year to March, the highest figure on record and 7.6 percent up from the previous year, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour said.”

http://www.physorg.com/news98605002.html

You have to hand it to those Japanese business types; they really dedicate themselves to their jobs. Gotta drive that capitalist bullet train, ya know. Capitalism was our main contribution to the Japanese after we blasted the hell out of them in WWII. Call it a sympathy gift from one evil empire to another. We should have seen it coming, what with the extreme dedication the people of Japan have to their work ethic and sense of social unity.

According to the article, there has been an increase in part-time positions manned by people in their 20’s and 30’s. With youth comes greater energy, and the young are less likely to feel pressure and energy-drain from having kids and mortgages and such, factors that, I assure you from personal experience, slowly drain the energy from you like a Sith lord. There have been plenty of days I thought my kids and my job were killing me. Any day now I expect my coworkers to come in and find me collapsed onto my lab bench, the victim of work-induced heart attack, my dead-lab-rat drool mingling with spilled reagents. All those young people and their wicked energy means the older, more closer-to-death workers have to pump up their effort to compensate. Many of those who died were killed by stroke or heart attack, and I already have a heart condition.

But it’s not just the older Japanese who are suffering. Even the 20- and 30-somethings are seeing an increase in mental health problems. In short, they're being driven crazy by their work load.

A potential antidote for overworked Japanese? HERE

Let’s hope the Japanese work ethic doesn’t come here. I remember a few years ago, one particularly horrible slavemaster – I mean boss – that I had at the time actually suggested that we STACK lab benches, with one person working at the bench on the floor and another person on an elevated platform at a higher bench “like they do in Japan.” I’m not sure if he was telling the truth, but I shiver at the idea, even if it was do-able. Around that time an HR person, who was equally evil, proposed that the R&D teams go to nights shifts, too. Luckily they are both gone, now.

Lately I’ve been rebelling a bit and haven’t come in much at night or on the weekends. I just haven’t had the energy. I thought I was slacking, but now I have a legitimate excuse. “Sorry, boss, but I can’t come in this weekend. It may kill me!”

Did my heart flutter? Ooh, my arm just went numb. I'm . . . I'm . . . Gaackk! . . . .

No Videos For The Troops

It just became tougher to share videos and pictures with American soldiers in Iraq:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/05/14/military.sites.blocked.ap/index.html

Today my precious little niece, age 20, ships out to Iraq. She finished army boot camp and MP training a mere 2 weeks ago. She gets a little more training in Kuwait, then it’s off to the horrors of war for her, and she’ll be right in the thick of it. I still see her as a little girl in my mind, so the thought of her going off to kill people in an unjustified quagmire of a war that serves no apparent American interests doesn’t sit well with me, especially since I was one of those folks standing at my courthouse with anti-war signs back when it all started. But it’s the choice she made for herself. All I can do is hope she comes back in one piece, physically and mentally. I don’t want her to join the over 3100 Americans who have been killed, or the tens of thousands who have been seriously wounded.

Of course I hope to keep in touch with her while she’s “over there.” She brought her new laptop computer with her, and has a couple of email addresses and the internet, but she’ll be relying on the army electronic networks to keep in digital contact with us.

Many servicemen and servicewomen and their families use photosharing and video websites, like YouTube, MySpace, and Photobucket, to keep in touch with each other. Consider THIS video from someone to their Uncle Keith in Iraq.

Troops are also able to share their experience with the world at large, such as in THIS footage (“Looks like they blew up the showers again.”), or THIS patriotic footage of actual fighting.

But the military has decided to make these and many other photo- and video-sharing sites off-limits to their troops using military networks, starting today. Here is the DoD notice to soldiers: http://www.usfk.mil/usfk/bell-sends/5_11_07_27%20-%2007%20Restricted%20Access%20to%20Internet%20Entertainment%20Sites%20Across%20DoD%20Networks.pdf.

They say it’s because it slows the system down too much, but you would think the world’s most funded army would be able to have a decent networking system that could handle the bandwidth. They also say they worry about sensitive information being leaked. Maybe they have a point there, but don’t they already censor such things? No, I think they are afraid more about morale, since a great many videos and photos out there are being put out about the horrors the civilian population are facing (over 600,000 civilians have died, according to one estimate, and over 2.6 million have refugee status according to the U.N.), and increasing numbers of anti-war videos are being published. Here is a good example, but WARNING, it contains very graphic images: HERE. My niece has told me how nearly everyone she has met so far in the military is strongly against the war. And we’re talking about the new recruits, who are supposed to be “gung-ho” fresh from boot camp!

The military’s reaction is strangely hypocritical, since they are posting their own videos on the web, for the sake of recruitment and banging the patriotic drums, even have their own channel on YouTube (EXAMPLE). It’s a two-way street. As the CNN article says, this war is as much about minds and action as it is about bombs and guns. When the troops aren’t able to broadcast their side of things, all you are left with is official propaganda and the many, many videos put out by the other side.

Oh, well. For now I can still send emails to my niece, at least, as well as standard mail. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail and bring home the troops soon, anyhow.

Bring ‘em home, Bush.

Addendum: On a related note, the U.S. military set up its own YouTube channel just last week, and about a week before that they banned all blog posting by soldiers without express supervisory approval for each post (see blog links at this post: http://tailrank.com/1851635/The-end-of-military-blogs). Of course, how many supervisors would allow it, thinking that any perceived slip would fall on their heads? It all adds up to a serious clamp-down on soldier communications while at the same time increasing the military's propaganda machine. What's next? Will the military forbid email? Are the soldiers to be reduced to WWII-era censored snail mail, too? In a weird and scary way, it seems to me that the very people who are supposed to lay their lives on the line for our rights are denied most of those same rights, almost to the level of inmates in our prison system.

Update (5/18/07): Today PhysOrg.com released an interview with the YouTube co-founders: http://www.physorg.com/news98692938.html. They said they could not understand why the military, with its massive network and its own YouTube channel, would use the excuse of not having enough bandwidth for its soldiers to use the system. They went on to explain how they were willing to work with the military to solve the problems, and that they censor particularly violent videos.

Marital Bliss And Toddler Upchuck

As I said in my last post, my family and I have been battling a flu. First it was me, in all my belly-clutching, sleep-demanding grumpiness. Then my lovely wife got it (Tag, you’re it, Honey!), with requisite barfing and long sleep hours. Now my toddler daughter has it, but in her sweet, straightforward manner that only a young child could have she just cried a little and then upchucked onto the linoleum (thank goodness it wasn’t the carpet!), followed by lots of sleep. We could have done without the rotten-egg farts and diarrhea, though. Have I grossed you out yet? Doubtless my 2 ½ year old son will get it next, as he shares cups and such with my daughter despite our best efforts. All the while we’ve had to stir into the stew a heaping portion of long work hours for both of us, including night work, with a soup base of fatigue, and a dash of irritability, just for flavor. And daycare won’t take a sick child.

It’s times like this that make me happy I’m in a strong marriage. Yes, my fellow parenting types, I think back to all those countless bottles, diapers, tantrums, thrown food, hyperactivity, and just plain neediness that have filled two and a half years between the smiles and laughs and sweetness, and I realize how much it has bonded me and my wife. I think even if we had had to deal with babies who had colic or some major medical need, we still could have weathered it. I feel sorry for those “kids” out there who get married right out of school and have babies before they’ve even had a chance to bond with each other, much less mentally mature on their own, or for single moms with few folks to turn to (like my mom was). Just last Sunday marked the 13th anniversary of when my wife and I met each other, as well as the 12th anniversary of my proposal to her. By the time kids came around, we had worked out enough of the relationship glitches to weather the rough spots of parenting.

Well, a study has just been released about “coparenting relationships” with small children (a.k.a. the ability for you and your spouse not to strangle each other when the kids are screaming, poopy, breaking fragile keepsakes, falling off tabletops, and wiping runny noses on their arms all at the same time):

http://www.physorg.com/news96002754.html

Researchers through Ohio State University studied 97 Illinois couples who were expecting a child (2/3 of them would have their first child), giving them a questionnaire and videotaping their interaction. When their child was 3.5 years old, the researchers came back and videotaped the couple playing together with their child and cooperating to change their child’s clothes. Their goal was to study how well the couples interacted with each other as well as the child, how “close” their marriage relationship was, and how well they cooperated with each other. Not surprisingly, those couples found to be less “close” had more difficulty cooperating with tasks and were more critical with each other. Previous studies by the authors had shown how negative coparenting relationships affected the children in negative ways down the line, such as in aggressiveness and inappropriate behavior at home and school.

Duh. But I guess it’s good to show it in an irrefutable way.

What I’d be more interested in studying is the effects on marriage of having children who were behaviorally difficult, especially spirited, or had special needs. Do couples tend to grow closer from the strain, on average, or is the divorce rate much higher? I wonder. Personally, I’d like to think they tend to grow closer. Getting toddler puke on me and working with my wife despite our own sickness has made me think so.

Sleep Problems, Part II

I'm not a "morning person." Even on the best of work days, getting me out of bed takes a force of willpower comparable to running into a burning building. I've always been that way, even as a boy. I would stumble out of my bedroom in the mornings, skipping breakfast so I could get an extra ten minutes on the pillow, running late to catch the school bus at the last possible minute. I doubt I got many A's in the first-period classes. Still, no matter how much caffeine I pump into myself, I don't *really* wake up until about 10:30. I've also always been a "night owl," staying up 'til midnight or later. Unless I'm sick or totally exhausted (which happens more often now that I have kids), I simply can't fall asleep before 11PM, no matter how hard I try. It's my natural rhythm. Being sleep-deprived with kids has only heightened my morning pain. I'm certain when I finally croak it's going to be after trying to get up one early morning.

There have been times in my life when I've tried to change. Our society isn't very tolerant of night-owls / late-sleepers like me, viewing us as lazy for sleeping in, and as disorganized or party-crazy for staying up at night, no matter how much we do during the day. I had an agricultural science job for a little over a month, many years ago, where I had to get up while it was still dark, commute about 45 minutes, and report for work at the break of dawn. I tried very, very hard to change, going to bed by around 9:30PM whether I was tired or not, taking cold showers in the morning to wake up, and quaffing a higher-than-usual volume of caffeine. Have you ever seen "The Return of the Living Dead", where rag-dressed zombies shamble after hapless yet incredibly slow victims, arms outstretched and muttering, "Brains…."? Now take one of those zombies and put them in a field full of strawberries and fruit trees. That was me.

Can you tell I'm having trouble adjusting to the new time change?

In an interesting coincidence, many years back I landed in a doctoral program studying circadian rhythms of insects (a "circadian rhythm" is the scientific term for natural day-night cycles for animal behavior and physiology). To do this, I dissected about a zillion fruit flies under a dissecting microscope, pulling them apart with very fine forceps and teasing out their organs (Yes, the flies were usually alive when I did this. There is sure to be some sort of karmic retribution waiting for me. Any day now a thick swarm of fruit flies will descend on me and eat me like a gigantic banana, their natural prey). Anyhow, part of my studies was to examine the role of a gene called period (named for its periodic cycle of expression through the course of a day). This was also the only job I've ever had where I could choose my own hours – not unusual for academics. I usually wandered in around 10AM, worked until around 5PM, then came back in the late evenings for two or three more hours of work. I loved it (the work, that is. I can't say the same about the manic scientist who ran the lab and was my doctoral advisor), but I couldn't make a living on the meager earnings of a grad student and had to get a "real job."

Now it all comes full circle. Like so many other conditions related to our health and behavior, science has now linked my "night owl" circadian rhythm to my genes, even when it comes to effects of sleep deprivation (such as children crying in the middle of the night for, oh, two and half years). Molecular biologists and psychologists have been able to link human circadian rhythm to genes in humans which are analogues of the genes I studied in fruit flies, including period. One, in humans, is called period3, which comes in a "long" form and a "short" form, and has been shown to play a role in determining if humans are "larks" or "owls". The study to be published in the next issue of Current Biology demonstrates the role of this gene in the effects of sleep deprivation:

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news92670935.html

The journal abstract, for you science-types: HERE

Apparently, my period3 is "long" (No, I'm not menstruating). According to the article, "individuals with the longer variant of the gene performed very poorly on tests for attention and working memory [in the early morning hours]. Cognitive Psychologist Professor John Groeger, says: 'the early morning performance problems of those with the long variant have important implications for safety and efficiency at work.'" Those with the short form of the gene performed well.

So there ya go. I haven't been tested, but I'll bet I'm "genetically challenged," at least in the early morning. So if I come to work looking dreary-eyed and you try to bug me, I'm going to hold up may hand and snarl, "Talk to the genes!" then continue on my way to my morning dose of caffeine.

Now get some sleep!

Sleep Problems, Part I

Come, Sleep; O Sleep! the certain knot of peace.
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release…

-- excerpt from "Sleep", by Sir Philip Sidney

Ah, Sleep! Without it the "knot of peace" becomes a knot in my back. Trust me. It hurts.

I get too little of the "balm of woe" these days. We really can't get much done while the kids are awake, so I spend late hours most nights catching up with things. Sometimes I even go in to work. If we want to relax and decompress, it happens in that time, too, typically with a movie or TV show. Usually I'm up until midnight or 1 AM. The kids still wake up most nights, too. Since I'm the one most likely to hear them, I'm the one most likely to get up and soothe them back to sleep. I'm f*ckin' tired. Maybe I should just sleep at work.

A couple of studies were released last week regarding sleep. The first one, from the Journal of Family Psychology and a researcher named Boergers, shows that children with sleep problems negatively affect the sleep patterns of their parents:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070308/hl_nm/sleep_disorder_dc

Boergers found that parents with sleepless children are more likely to have daytime drowsiness, more likely to be impatient with their children or spouse, and be less productive at work and home.

Really?? Let us please pause a moment to tilt our heads, take a deep breath, then utter a deep and sarcastic DUHHH! I rate this study right up there with the one that found people who go to bars with country music are more likely to be depressed. Come on! Is this what our government money is funding these days, stupid ass studies to confirm that parents with sleepless kids are friggin' zombies? Hey, Boergers, here's a sleep study for ya: Does standing over you while banging cymbals and screaming the Star Spangled Banner keep you awake at night? How can you be sure? I think you should commission a study and let me help!

Reading My Intentions

Quick! What am I thinking?

You can't read my mind? So far no one can truly do that, but science is getting closer all the time.

Think back to the last action movie you watched. There's a pretty good chance that the climactic scene involved the bad guy putting a gun to some helpless blonde female's head or a finger on a red-pulsing doomsday button. You and the hero of the movie are left wondering, "Is he really going to do it?"

A researcher named John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences now has a way to find out, with a success rate of 70%. This was made possible by a new combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and sophisticated computer algorithms (Current Biology, 20th February 2007, online: 8th February). Of course, you'd have to put the bad guy's head in an MRI machine….

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news90164161.html

In short, while being imaged using the MRI technique, test subjects were told they would be shown two numbers and had to decide beforehand if they would add them together or subtract one from the other, then the numbers were shown to them. In that moment of decision before the numbers were shown, results showed that certain areas of the brain were being utilized in different ways, making it possible to predict what the test subjects' intentions were. The authors point out the potential uses of this technology, such as helping guide artificial limbs or computer cursors for the handicapped.

Now if only this could be used in more mundane situations. For instance, tonight I was eating Haagen-Dazs ice cream while watching a movie ("Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers"), and my wife might have been wondering, "Is he going to hog the entire container again?" Important decisions were on the line, such as leaving me in chocolaty ice cream bliss to enjoy seeing orcs hacked to pieces, or to yell, "Hey, lard-butt, stop bogarting the ice cream!" As it was, being the wonderful caring person she is, she left me in bliss, no doubt trusting me to leave some for her.

I ate it all. Call me a glutton. Mmmm. Mayan chocolate flavor!

What? I had every _intention_ of sharing….

Happiness Is A Shiver Away

Yesterday I heard that a fellow lab rat at my evil global biotech company is leaving for another job. I'll call her "Lisa." She's been here as long as I have, and is extremely valuable to the company, but I hear she feels fed up with the lack of promotion. I can't imagine it (and by "can't" I mean "absolutely can"). She's moving to Boston. I may be going out on a limb, but I'm going to make the call that she is unhappy.

Well, "Lisa", cheer up! Didn't you know you live in one of the happiest nations in the world?

According to a study of "happiness levels" in almost 180 nations around the world, using a variety of databases (including, oddly, the CIA!), the United States comes in at a relatively happy 23:

For write-up and some rankings:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm

This link has a map:
http://www.physorg.com/news73321785.html

According to the authors of the study, the best indicators of happiness for a nation are good health, wealth, and education. War and famine, for instance, bring the ratings down, of course. But I'm seeing another trend entirely. Consider the top ten most happy countries:

1. Denmark 2. Switzerland 3. Austria 4. Iceland 5. The Bahamas 6. Finland 7. Sweden 8. Bhutan 9. Brunei 10. Canada

Of the top ten, EIGHT of them are cold countries! (I'm counting Austria because of its mountains and frigid winters, and Bhutan is mostly in the Himalayas. Bhutan, oddly, is also the only country that officially measures its Gross National Happiness). This can't be coincidence. If you think about it, what do you do when it's cold outside? You stay in by a cozy fire, eat good food, curl up with your significant other – then curl up a little closer. Next thing you know…. You get the picture. That'll warm your Surbrød!

Now, there are plenty of cold countries that didn't score highly, but I still think it's a factor. The notable warm exceptions in that list are The Bahamas and Brunei, both of which are tropical paradises, but who couldn't be happy in a tropical paradise, I ask?

I would also like to add that my evil global biotech company doesn't have a site in any of those countries. Also not a coincidence, I imagine.

So, "Lisa", maybe moving to Boston isn't the answer. Maybe Denmark would be a better choice. Break out that Viking helmet and learn to eat pickled herring, baby!