Helix Nebula

Hairy eyeballs from deep space: An infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a photo fave of amateur astronomers. The nebula, about 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius, surrounds a tiny white dwarf (dot in center). The red indicates the final layers of gas blown out when the star died.

I don't have all that much to say today, and here is this lovely picture, so I thought I would share it with you.

Photo NASA; text SFGate.com

Discovering Nature

I was thinking, after yesterday's post, about how we discover the nature of things. Particularly the nature of the young child. I used to wonder how it was possible for my great-grandfather, who was a math professor, to be so unobservant as to misunderstand infant dependence for selfishness. To think that the crying new born even knew that her mother was exhausted in the next room.

And I can now see, with knowing that the idea was not original with him*, but rather a part of the dogma of his ancestors' religion, how that came to pass. Because, when you start out, as anyone before the age of science pretty well did, with a belief that God has already given you the answer to this, you see the events in the world in that frame. The baby whose crying deprives his mother of sleep is seen to prove that babies are selfish and the idea that the baby only knows she is hungry and has no way to feed herself or ask politely will not occur.

But, when you have science, you observe the events without the frame, and you can see more clearly. Maria Montessori, who was the first woman physician in Italy, studied children as part of her internship**. She watched them with as little a priori theory as she could. As she developed materials, if the children did not learn from them as intended, she did not blame the children but changed the materials or the method. She gathered a great deal of new information about the way children learn.

Jean Piaget was a student in a Montessori school when he was young. Later he wrote a paper on marine biology that was so impressive the society to which he had submitted it invited him to present it. He wrote to decline, because the meeting was being held past his bedtime; he was only 8.

It is no wonder that Jean Piaget revolutionized the study of young children. Where Montessori had studied three year olds, Piaget studied his own children from birth. He watched them, he played games with them to see at what age they could perform certain mental tasks.*** Like Montessori, he looked at them with an eye as free from preconception as it was possible for him to have. He became, not only a developmental psychologist, but also a Montessori teacher. Any students who worked with him had to take Montessori training before they began. As a Montessori teacher, one of my major tasks was to sit and observe the classroom when the children were busy. It is that observing with as little prejudice as possible that leads to new knowledge.

* It wasn't just the idea -- when I read Fischer's book, the example he used and the words were exactly what had been quoted to me from Great-grandfather Upton.
**Because of her gender, she was assigned to work with feeble minded children. That work led her to further develop educational tools for them, some the creation of others, some her own. When her impaired students tested out at age level with normal Italian children, the authorities in both medicine and education were impressed with what a great job she had done. Montessori was appalled that normal children were being so poorly taught that her students could do as well as they did and went on to apply the materials and methods she had used with six year olds to normal three year olds. Montessori approached this work in a new way partially because, before she studied medicine, she studied engineering. How lucky for children that her father indulged her intellectual curiosity.
***It was Piaget's work that showed that one reason babies demand to be fed right now is that they have no sense of time. Now is all there is. When a baby is hungry, he is starving to death, he has always been starving to death, and he will always be starving to death. When the baby can wait the few moments his mother needs to pick him up and feed him, he has learned about time.

Portrait of Jean Piaget courtesy of Robert Kovsky; Maria Montessori courtesy of Edith Stein. This is my favorite picture of Montessori; it shows her as the young woman who was sent to speak to the issue of women's suffrage in Italy. She was chosen because feminists were, then as now, dismissed as ugly women who couldn't find husbands. Montessori so obviously was not.

The Perfect Spiral

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA)- ESA / Hubble Collaboration
Acknowledgment: R. Chandar (Univ. Toledo) and J. Miller (Univ. Michigan)

Explanation: If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as an Sc galaxy, the grand design of M74's graceful spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. Constructed from image data recorded in 2003 and 2005, this sharp composite is from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Spanning about 30,000 light-years across the face of M74, it includes exposures recording emission from hydrogen atoms, highlighting the reddish glow of the galaxy's large star-forming regions.

I am posting the pretty picture today because the world is too much with me, late and soon. The political landscape is so ugly, so rotted, so depraved that I can't write about it, and yet to write about anything else would be trivial. So, here is a picture of something that is both beautiful and non-trivial.

Photo and text from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Do click and enlarge.

The Story of Stuff

Julie and I often talk to each other about how you protect your child from becoming a member of the consumer society, how you help her to learn values that are more human. So, tonight I discovered this short film that I want to share with all of you. Go and visit The Story of Stuff. The video you will watch will take about 20 minutes, so you want to do this when you have some time.

This is a very intelligent and witty discussion of how we go from resource extraction, through manufacturing, to big box stores, to the consumer's home, and finally to the landfill. Annie Leonard tells this very serious story in a light hearted way that anyone can understand.

Without becoming preachy, she gives us this vitally important information. It will make you look at the stuff in your life in a different way. And, right before Christmas, the time of institutionalized consumption of unnecessary stuff, is a good time to review just how the throw-away economy hurts us and the earth. Show it to the young people in your life and e-mail it to everyone you know. There is no need to live a life circumscribed by planned obsolescence, where we can be attacked by terrorists and our president tells us that the way to combat that is to go out shopping.

A Thing of Beauty

The Fairy of Eagle Nebula
Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI/AURA), ESA, NASA

Explanation: The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Do click to enlarge.
Photo and text courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day

New Math

My sister Colleen had New Math and she was confused her entire life. I took a class in grad school on how to teach it, and there were students in the class who had been teaching it for five years and from their questions it was obvious why the kids were so confused. Teachers who don't understand something have no ability to teach it.

The Milky Road*

The Milky Road
Credit & Copyright: Larry Landolfi

Explanation: Inspired during a visit to Fort Davis, Texas, home of McDonald Observatory and dark night skies, photographer Larry Landolfi created this tantalizing fantasy view. The composited image suggests the Milky Way is a heavenly extension of a deserted country road. Of course, the name for our galaxy, the Milky Way (in Latin, Via Lactea), does refer to its appearance as a milky band or path in the sky. In fact, the word galaxy itself derives from the Greek for milk. Visible on moonless nights from dark sky areas, though not so colorful as in this image, the glowing celestial band is due to the collective light of myriad stars along the plane of our galaxy, too faint to be distinguished individually. The diffuse starlight is cut by dark swaths of obscuring galactic dust clouds. At the beginning of the 17th century, Galileo turned his telescope on the Milky Way and announced it to be composed of innumerable stars.

* Picture and text from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Saguaro Moon

Credit & Copyright
Stefan Seip

From Astronomy Picture of The Day

Tonight's Full Moon, the one nearest the autumnal equinox in the northern hemisphere, is popularly called the Harvest Moon. According to lore the name is a fitting one because farmers could work late into the night at the end of the growing season harvesting crops by moonlight. In the same traditions, the Full Moon following the Harvest Moon is the Hunter's Moon. But, recorded on a trip to the American southwest, this contribution to compelling images of moonrise is appropriately titled Saguaro Moon.

Even though Juneau is under cloud cover, as we are so much of the time, and I can't see the moon from my window, luckily this site exists and I can see it, along with the saguaro cactus, which I also love. Clear nights on the desert are wonderful.

Do click and enlarge

Using The Scientific MethodIn Daily Life

Once upon a time, I slept like a baby. Would wake up to go to the bathroom, and fall back asleep so fast that I never remembered my head hitting the pillow. And then, well then -- I didn't. One thing and another: apnea, stuffed sinuses that made it impossible to sleep and wear my CPAP machine, restless legs, the odd cramp or two or seventy, and insomnia. One by one, I dealt with each of these things. Sinus surgery, using sleeping pills for a short time to train myself to sleep again, taking the medicine they give to children who wet the bed so I don't have to get up as often, taking coral calcium and 1/4 of a percocet at bedtime for my legs, -- one by one, I picked these problems off. (Even tried doing either coral calcium or percocet and discovered the calcium wasn't what was doing it.) And yet, and yet.

Every week there would be nights when I had trouble getting to sleep. Not insomnia. Eventually I would sleep, and soundly, but just not early enough and therefore not long enough. So, having been raised on the idea that experiment and observation were the solutions to everything, and since I couldn't figure out what to experiment with now, I started keeping a new chart. (The first had followed my various attempts at symptom control.) Discovered I had trouble getting to sleep on time on Saturday, Sunday, and some Tuesday nights.

What could cause that pattern? At first I thought it might be because I have half a 20 ounce Pepsi on Saturday and half on Sunday, in the afternoon, but that didn't explain it because I don't on Tuesday. So, puzzled, I continued with my little chart, figuring eventually I'd see the pattern. And then, last week, on Tuesday it happened again and the light went on. I checked my calendar, and what do you know. On some Tuesdays (supposedly alternating, but sometimes they get canceled) we have a staff meeting at 10:30. Every other work day, I have a large mug of coffee first thing in the morning and drink ice water the rest of the day. On staff-meeting Tuesday, I have a mug when I get in, and another at the meeting. Just enough to wire me.

So, this weekend I drank 7-Up instead of Pepsi, and what do you know. Problem solved. And for staff meetings, I can wait for my morning coffee or I can drink water at the staff meeting or I can have a small cup at 9 and another at 10:30. Maybe I'll be really scientific and try all three and compare the results.

This also allowed me to make an observation on another matter that had peeked my curiosity. If you notice the picture of the plastic bottle of Pepsi, you can see it has a blue cap. Pippin loves these. Almost as soon as I've got the bottle open, he steals the cap and chases it all over the house. The other night he dragged out about eight of them from where ever it is he stashes them. However, when I offer him the caps from V-8 Juice bottles, he ignores them. Is this a matter of color (one is blue, the other orange) or size (the V-8 cap is larger) or something to do with the bottles? Well, the 7-Up bottle didn't have a blue lid, and he snatched that as soon as he could. So, it isn't color. It could still be size or the size and shape of the bottle. I will have to figure out how to test that.

And people wonder when they are going to use the things they learn in school!

In A Nutshell follows.

Loving Science

Among the things I love, and the list is long so it may be a while before you know all of them, is science. Told you I thought about becoming an astronomer. Majored in anthropology, intending to be an archeologist, my first swipe at college. After I dropped out and then returned as the single mother of two very young children, switched to psychology. Now, I know that the social sciences are not as developed as the hard sciences, but they are science. And, when I took psychology you had to have a semester of human anatomy. Among my anthro classes was one on comparative anatomy where we studied the teeth of various primates.

I got to thinking about this when I was over at A Natural Scientist and found this wonderful article Curiosity, Wires, Destruction

My other theory is that everyone would love science if they were only shown it the right way. I've sat through a lot of lectures where the teacher clearly didn't know the answer to "Why should my students care?" And you know what? Those lectures were boring. But there should always be a convincing answer. Sometimes the answer is, so you can understand something else. Sometimes it's, because it's cool. Occasionally, it's directly relevant to everyday life:
***We had a microscope growing up. Pond scum, dog hairs, onion skins, dirt, leaves: you name it, we looked at it.
***We took apart a washers, computers, blenders, and cars. "Why?" was always answered by "What do you think?"

All three of us are scientists.

I have taught people science all of my life, just about. I was a camp counselor the summer after my freshman year of college, and we studied the outdoors. The kids were out in it and they loved it. When I taught Montessori, we had a wonderful science section, where very sophisticated concepts were presented at the level a three or four year old could understand. It was a very popular section of the classroom.

I gave my own children a telescope, a microscope, a stethoscope, prisms, magnets, and gyroscopes and they played with them and learned.

Because I love science, I am always reading about it and adding new knowledge to my life. When I was teaching parenting classes, I added research about various things to help my students see the what and why of their children. I used research about wild ravens learning faster than tame ones to throw light on how their children needed to play outdoors and run and climb to learn easily. I brought in history to help them see that mistakes are to learn from rather than to be punished.

And the thing is, the thing that agrees with A Natural Scientist -- many of the parents in my class had dropped out of school. Some were illiterate. And yet, like all of the children that I taught, they loved the science that I taught them. Because I love it. Because I knew how it related to what they needed. And, because I taught it with respect for both my subject and my class. There is something that is amazing when you first see someone who the schools have always treated as stupid grasping science. Understanding that what she is learning is science. Knowing that she can understand it and that you know she can understand it.

Children are naturally curious about the world. They have to be slapped down, told that they are wrong for wanting to know the answers, to give up that curiosity. Children want to learn the way colts want to run and kittens want to pounce. What would you have to do to a colt to make it hate running? What would you have to do to a kitten to make it fear pouncing? We have to stop doing that to our children, whether it is happening at home or in school. Because it is their birthright to love learning, to love science, to be excited about new things. And too many of them are being robbed. Every adult you encounter who doesn't like science and learning has been robbed. It is unconscionable.

Limburger Cheese

My father loved limburger cheese. My mother hates the way it smells like dirty socks. As a child, it was always my goal to prove to my father that I loved him more than my mother did. (Yes, Sigmund, there is an Electra.)

In order to prove that I loved him more, since Mama wouldn't even allow him to bring limburger into the trailer, I learned to eat it and like it. Of course, part of the reason that I could even attempt this is that I don't have a very good sense of smell. Nor, apparently, taste.

Just last week there was a story in the local paper about how the more taste buds you have, the stronger/hotter/more bitter foods taste to you. People like this are called picky eaters and are generally skinny. It isn't very healthy because it leads to deficiencies, since these super tasters find most vegetables bitter tasting. On the other hand, are people like me. Not so many taste buds, not such a sharp sense of taste. Love hot. Love bitter. Love sour. Lover pungent. Because these foods give us some sensation of taste. We aren't skinny. We don't lack vital nutrients.

So, I wasn't really proving that I loved my father more than my mother did. Just that I had fewer taste buds. But, science aside, it served me well. I felt quite puffed up in my own esteem about it, and for a four year-old, that is what really counts.

Neither Julie nor Richard can stand the way limburger smells, so I learned to enclose it in a glass jar when I put it in the refrigerator and to eat it when they weren't home. Years later I discovered that Missy (my small, gray cat for 18 1/2 years) loved it. Missy wouldn't eat any other people food. You could eat salmon or crab or prawns or chicken in front of her and she wouldn't seem to notice. So, imagine my surprise the day I spread some limburger on a cracker and she came running downstairs and nabbed it out of my fingers as I was putting it into my mouth! I soon learned that if I wanted to eat limburger with Missy in the house, I needed to give her some on a saucer. She was much faster than I was, and that first time was the only time I managed to get it anywhere near my mouth before she nabbed it.

Junkfood Science

You may notice a new blog on my blogroll -- Junkfood Science. I only discovered on Tuesday that one of my favorite sane people has her own blog. I have read Sandy Szwarc, RN, BSN, CCP, for a couple of years now at Techcentral Station. (I was unable to give you a direct link to her series. If you are interested, use the link above, then under authors, look her up and it will take you to her archives.) She wrote a crackerjack series there on the moral panic (although, I'm not certain that she calls it that) about obesity and food that we are experiencing these days. Her writing is firmly rooted in science and she recognizes the misuse of research and pseudoscience in creating a false epidemic of obesity in order to sell products and services which, at best are useless, at worst are harmful and sometimes deadly. Hers is a voice of reason in the wilderness, and I can not recommend her too highly.

This quote from a recent post, Have your steak and enjoy it too! gives you an idea of the flavor of her writing and the solid, good sense of her information:

When it comes to food and health news, the saturation of media coverage is usually inversely proportional to the soundness of the research. Sensational claims sell a lot of newspapers, lure viewers and listeners, and create good buzz. The trouble is, most of us don't realize we're getting Hitchcock-like fiction when we turn on the news. With last week's scare du juor "red meat increases risk for breast cancer" no mainstream news reporter took a critical look at the study they were reporting, preferring to simply pass along the press release. No one except Steve Milloy, of course, who wrote an excellent review here.
Our first clue that there was something more afoot in this media blitz than brilliant science, is that this one study, out of the thousands of new studies released every single day, was reported in every media outlet, on the exact same day, all saying the exact same thing. This is evidence of brilliant marketing, but not much more. Like everything in media today, it deserves viewing with the same skepticism as you would any other commercial. The study wasn't nearly as well done as its marketing...

What more could I possibly say? Visit her. Visit her series on Techcentral Station.

They'll Believe a Man

So here we have this article, talking about Ben Barres, a male scientist who used to be a female scientist. A man with a unique perspective on the whole argument as to whether women are under represented in science because of how they think or because of how they are treated.

Where Summers sees innate differences, Barres sees discrimination. As a young woman—Barbara—he said he was discouraged from setting his sights on MIT, where he ended up receiving his bachelor’s degree. Once there, he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”

Remember here that his sister is his past self. Do you suppose that when Professor Barres speaks about this subject he is listened to because he's seen it from both sides? Or because the person speaking at this moment, to paraphrase Captain Samantha Carter on Stargate SG-1, "wears his reproductive organs on the outside instead of the inside"?

Legislating for Ignorance

To see just how quickly and how far we are sinking into the abyss, go to Common Dreams and read Florida’s Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking by Robert Jensen

One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.
By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.***One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.
Except in Florida.

The current administration doesn't just try to control what we remember about our past. They also remove information that is critical of their decisions from government studies and facts that don't agree with their ideology from government websites. They teach sex education and lie about condoms. They sell books at the Grand Canyon stating that it was formed by Noah's flood. They simply repeat lies until we are supposed to accept them as truth. They choose not to believe in global warming. They attack Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction, and then wonder why the other two countries they have designated as part of "the axis of evil" speed up their nuclear weapons research. They decide that the public doesn't need to know about pollutants that can effect the health of their children.

The best way for authoritarians to stay in power is to frighten the public and keep it stupid. Remove evolution from science. Remove information on human sexuality and birth control from sex education. Remove interpretation from history. Subvert the ability to think critically, and no one can be critical of you.

So, Why Should I Take Geometry?

As was mentioned in Susan Stanley's story on Julie's blog, I met Julie's father in geometry class.

The reason I (the mighty junior) was in the same geometry class as Michael (the lowly sophomore) was that I missed a good deal of the first semester of my sophomore year. I had that tonsillectomy where Kate savaged her father's only pair of dress socks to stuff me a rabbit. I missed school for a couple of colds. And then I got impetigo. Without antibiotic ointment, impetigo takes as much as three weeks to clear up and meanwhile it is so highly contagious that the school would not allow me to attend. I no longer remember how much school I missed altogether, but it was concentrated in the first six or seven weeks of the semester. It didn't make a difference in most classes, because teachers sent my books home and I could keep up. But in geometry, it mattered. I had to drop out of the class and take it my junior year.

I would have never been Maya's Granny, because neither she nor Julie would have existed, if I hadn't come down with impetigo. Not only that, I had a friend from my class, Robert, and Michael had a friend from his class, Jane. Because Michael and I were friends, Robert and I met my dear friend Jane. Jane and Robert got married and had David. So, there are three people who wouldn't have been born if I hadn't had impetigo. You just never know what small thing is going to have what big effect.

My first geometry teacher, who's name I no longer remember (perhaps because I wasn't in his class that long) is memorable to me for two events. One of the memorable events that happened in that class was the day we were learning inverses and obverses for theorems. The teacher, who was sitting on the edge of his desk, asked me for the inverse of a right angle, and out of my mouth popped "a left angle". He laughed so hard that he made a five point landing on the floor, from where he announced, "and now we know why the pun is the lowest form of humor." Ah, so. I can make people laugh by saying smart things!

The other had to do with the fact that I moved around a lot as a kid, and two of the places I had lived before high school were El Paso, Texas and Roswell, New Mexico. Both have a touch of Southern dialect. I had picked it up. The first day of class, the teacher passed out problem sheets and told us to figure them. Now, to me, newly returned to California from the Southwest, figure was a synonym for guess. As in "What are you bringing to the church social, Ida Mae?" "I don't know. I figure maybe potato salad." Not believing that a math teacher could want me to guess the answers to arithmetic, I asked what he meant by figure. And he said, "Reckon." Well, reckon is also a synonym for figure in the South. As in, "Although, I reckon I might bring deviled eggs." More confused than ever, I valiantly tried again, "what do you mean by reckon?" and he answered, "You know, calculate." My gawd! Can you just see it coming? To me, calculate was yet another synonym for figure and reckon and guess. I have to admit, I cheated. I couldn't bring myself to guess at those problems and so I did arithmetic on them. I'll be damned! People can use the same words to mean different things!

And now that I think about it, if science is defining calculate, figure, and reckon as perform precise mathematical operations and Southerners are defining them as "take a wild, improbable guess" it is no wonder that when biologists call it the theory of evolution, Southern Baptists hear, "Your guess is as good as mine."

Jonas Salk is My Hero

J read my Friendship post and wanted to know what polio season was. Oh, the things we neglect to tell our children! It used to be dangerous to do certain things during certain time(s) of the year, because you were more likely to get polio. It was probably summer, because I remember pools being closed when there was an outbreak. And, of course, you didn't have surgery during polio season unless you had no choice. Probably Colleen got tonsillitis in the summer most of the time, which makes sense because when we had ours out, I missed school.

I remember watching Johnny Carson one night when J was a baby and his guest was Jonas Salk. Johnny told Salk how that morning at breakfast his son had asked who his guest was and then wanted to know who Jonas Salk was and then what polio was. Johnny and Salk and I all sat there and cried! And, I'm crying now. Because of what Salk did, there are children who don't know what polio is!

I decided to google polio season and this is what I found.