At Facebook they analyzed everyone’s status updates and arrived at the conclusion that there is one day all year when Facebookers are happiest. Christmas.
Data crunchers in other labs have revealed that if you live in Vermont you will live longer than if you live in New York.
Science interprets stuff like that and makes it really useful. (“Honey, call the movers – we’re going to Burlington on Christmas.”)
Okay, so what if a doctor told you that getting a vaccination against swine flu would be good? Would you get the shot?
Guess what — according to a University of Michigan poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they do not plan to vaccinate their children against H1N1. Many were worried about the vaccine’s side effects. People believe that getting the shot might make you more likely to get sick. Bill Maher told his 60,000 Twitter followers, “If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.” Even the popular Dr. Mercola is against the shots.
The news is bad for flu vaccinations and it’s even worse for others. Some parents, including Jenny McCarthy, believe that having your children vaccinated against measles might make it more likely that they’ll be diagnosed with autism. Fewer people, therefore, will take the good advice of their doctors and get a vaccination that might help their children and society at large.
People don’t trust science like they used to. A Pew Research Center poll says that only 27 percent of Americans think our greatest achievements are in science – down from 47 percent a decade ago. One explanation is that the days of Big Science – landing on the Moon, inventing the transistor – seem far away. Science is routine now. We expect our smart phones to do the laundry and make photocopies.
Even the innocuous Bill Nye the Science Guy is making people mad. A story appeared on Rainn Wilson’s website about the time Nye was giving a science talk in Waco, Texas:
He cited Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Nye stated that the lesser light in the aforementioned quote was not technically a light, but a reflector, as in it reflects the sun’s light. The God-fearing folks of Waco were furious. One woman shouted, “We believe in God,” and proceeded to usher out her three children.
Just because your doctor says get a flu shot doesn’t mean you have to get one. (I’m not getting one.) Just because NASA says we should go to Mars doesn’t make it a good idea. (There are a few old bosses I’d like to send to Mars, believe me, but I’d rather we spend the money on solar power and electric cars.) It’s good to question science and medicine.
In the void brought about by all that questioning, however, sometimes you get ignorance. Not good. My fear of getting a flu shot comes mostly from ignorance – I admit it, and by not trusting science we could be creating an epidemic of ignorance worse than the flu.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
I was watching the waters of the Ganges flowing through the town of Rishikesh, India. I’d heard that the Sadhus, or holy men, said those words about the river to explain why the holy Ganges looked like a garbage dump. I must have been really enlightened that day, because with vision better than Superman’s I could see the E. coli, the hepatitis A, B and C, the typhoid and cholera and dysentery swirling downstream.
I was trekking a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. The only sign of life was an ink black beetle walking carefully on blue ice. My Super Vision was also working that day. 
I scanned the vastness all around, intoxicated with the way the ice ripped into the sky. I saw no disease of any kind, not a single speck of trash anywhere. That’s because if you bring trash there you also have to take it out. If the Argentine park rangers find that you’ve left any, they will unsheathe their ice axes, dig a grave for you and dump you in; I think that’s the rule, anyway. The ice is so clean that you can mix it with whiskey and drink it down, using it to jump start your heart so you are able to walk the trail back to the boat that circles icebergs, to the little bus bouncing on a gravel road, to your room where you will finally be warm again.
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
Was the voice of that holy man trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as “pure” perception? Sometimes your eyes don’t see what they’re seeing? Could I have been distracted by all the noise and chaos that is India?
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This is where science comes in handy. It can measure stuff, and researchers at Montana State University have concluded that the Ganges contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes.
“The Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.”
– Dr. Tim Ford, Montana State University
Scientists can also measure how fast glaciers are melting in Patagonia and elsewhere, documenting climate change. So you might conclude that human perception, filtered by memory and experience, won’t get you far when trying to prove anything. For example, if you come from a dirty place, India may look clean to you. If you come from a noisy place, Patagonia may seem unbearably still. Without objective measurement, you get into “everything is relative.” Messy business.
Spiritual folks will tell you that faith helps you experience the unseen. (“Is that the face of Jesus on my bathroom wall?”) For the science-minded, this notion is easy to dismiss. But this is tricky territory. Some scientists are doubting whether we can really measure anything objectively – that the consciousness of the investigator changes the outcome, for one thing.
When science meets spirit, when objective measurement meets faith, could it be that boundaries of both science and spirit are going to be changed?
That makes my mind spin, and thankfully I notice I’m over 500 words – but I will continue this thought in another blog. No matter what the Sadhu says, I’m not going in the Ganges.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?
Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”
Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.
To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.
It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.
Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.
Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.
Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.
All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.
Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?
“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the 
future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I have been staring at a $20 bill on my desk for an hour now but it has yet to turn into $40. If I think about this blog really hard, will it write itself? There are those who believe beliefs can manifest into things, that action and thought are entangled.
There’s a kind of chocolate on the market called Intentional Chocolate. Dr. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, co-authored a study on it, a randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind study, to see whether chocolate exposed to the positive intentions of people meditating would make a difference in the mood of people who ate the chocolate. Turns out, according to the paper, that people who ate the “positive thought” chocolate reported feeling better than those who ate regular chocolate. Huh. Would that work with pizza?
Dr. Radin admits to being surprised at the outcome of the test, but he says he’s interested in asking questions about how the world works, regardless of prejudices.
Well, scientists do tend to freak out when you suggest that the consciousness of somebody can change the outcome of an experiment. Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times about the chocolate experiment: “There’s nothing in the way that we understand the universe that would explain how a group of people could influence the well-being of others by blessing their chocolate,” he was quoted in the article. “Besides, if chocolate could be blessed, it could also be cursed.”
Cursed chocolate bunnies aside, Dr. Sloan is an important crusader against quack science and I admire his stand. But there are other beliefs about belief.
One of the premises of quantum physics is that the observer, by the act of watching, affects observed reality. Trying to get my mind around this makes me want to lie down in a darkened room and eat chocolate. But according to a study published in Nature, scientists have demonstrated how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed.
Dr. William Tiller, a Professor Emeritus of materials science at Stanford University, believes that human consciousness can change what we call physical reality. His view is that physics has been examining the interaction of mass and energy and he now wants to bring consciousness to the party. He thinks mass can be converted into energy which in turn can be converted into consciousness. This makes my head hurt, supporting the formula t/C*10=a2. That is, thinking (t) about consciousness ( C ) for ten minutes equals taking two Advil (a2) and lying down in a darkened room.
We all know the saying “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It’s at the heart of “show me” scientific thinking. Dr. Radin argues we have this backwards. It should be, he says, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”
Consider that over the weekend, and if you catch a chocolate bunny smirking at you, do not eat it.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Do blogs have too many links? Links are someone interrupting when you’re trying to talk or worse, your own thoughts interrupting you when you think. Something like this happens when you sit cross-legged in yoga and the aching knees start talking to the mind. Your consciousness loops back upon itself and you work to quiet what is known as the “monkey mind.”
But I digress.
In 1960 Ted Nelson, a graduate student at Harvard, created Project Xanadu. The project was going to be a word processor capable of creating nonlinear documents. Every quotation would be linked to its original source and every thought annotated. Funny thing, Ted Nelson never finished the project. That tells you something right there about nonlinear thinking. Ted Nelson would have liked Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Links dare me to click to see where they’ll go. If I don’t have time to write about the British post office employee who developed the technology of the link you’re using now, I just link to him. Links are an intellectual weapon. If I write about differential calculus and you have to click, you prove you don’t know what kind of calculus that is. By linking to special relativity I can seem really smart. But I’m not so smart if I link to Wikipedia. Here’s why.
I was interviewing a pharmacology expert about the stuff voodoo priests use to turn people into zombies. Armed with my Wikipedia fact sheet, I began talking about witch doctors gathering neurotoxins from puffer fish and toads and feeding those chemicals to their victims. But as the professor kindly explained and the camera rolled on my discomfort, no puffer fish are required. He told me, correctly, that you turn somebody into a zombie by feeding them jimson weed, a plant that grows wild in California and has a lot of scopolamine. Huh. If you click on Wikipedia and How Stuff Works the wrong answers are still up there.
Elements of the original Xanadu Project thrive today and its acolytes propose that your documents come alive with an electronic storm of Post-Its.
http://transliterature.org
Some contend that such multi-tasking is great for parallel processing computers, but not so efficient for people. I’m not sure: I haven’t actually read those books. I’m just linking to one of them so it seems like I’ve done the research.
Good writing has its own hypertext. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about “the tintinnabulation that so musically wells … from the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.” With tintinnabulation in the poem, derived from a Latin word for bell-ringer, you get to hear the bells without clicking on anything. James Joyce wrote about “the light music of whiskey falling into a glass,” which makes me want to get a cocktail.
Before I go into the kitchen, let’s stay on track. I believe I am passively using technology but in fact technology is using me. Using a computer to help me think changes the way I think. Clicking on links as I read changes the way I read. I started this with Yogi, yoga and the monkey mind and hyperlinked near and far. I’ve realized that if I want to read a sentence to the end, I might need to do it with a book.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
