Science Made Cool

Review: Mad Science

When it comes to science projects, I’m hardly a shrinking violet. Testing parabolic motion with ball bearings in high school was boring: why not roll a bowling ball out a second story window instead?  I was sequencing DNA in college before PCR and automation made it easy, and by grad school I’d graduated to designing and building my own experimental equipment. And since I’ve had kids, I’ve made maple syrup in my backyard (4 days to boil down; tasted like woodsmoke), soldered together robots and built a catapult (tho’ just a small one). But I’m not about to try most of the projects in Theodore Gray’s new book, Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Probably Shouldn’t (Black Dog and Leventhal).

Another Review of Parasites Unleashed

Pookie posted a review of Parasites Unleashed on the Game Cryer site earlier this month. He found it easy to learn, calling it "light and accessible." Which was exactly what we were aiming for when we designed it: we wanted 7 or 8 year old kids (and their parents) to be able to sit down and play without any difficulty. And his playtesters found the parasite theme appropriately (but not overly) icky. Glad to hear we hit that nail on the head. With this subject, it's so easy to go overboard.

Book Review: The Ghost Map

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, is a really excellent book. It chronicles the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, and the medical detective work by Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead which ultimately led to the discovery of the cause. (Here's a nifty TED talk by Johnson about the book.)

Johnson's book weaves several threads together. The most obvious is the story of the epidemic, which he details practically minute by minute. Johnson can do that because of the obsessive street-level research done by Snow and Whitehead during and after the outbreak. In a very real sense, they beat cholera by sheer dogged persistence and inquiry.

Moonshine

I just finished a highly entertaining book:  The Sun and the Moon:  The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books, 2008). After such a long subtitle, a summary of the book seems hardly necessary.

The Sun and the Moon covers a much wider swath of territory than its title would suggest. The ostensible focus of the book is the New York Sun, its editor Richard Adams Locke, and the remarkable "Moon Hoax" he pulled off in 1835. Locke wrote a series of articles purportedly based on a paper in a Scottish scientific journal, about the amazing discoveries made by Sir John Herschel using a radical new type of telescope at the new observatory in Cape Town. Locke's articles described all manner of marvels on the Moon, including forests, mountains of amethyst, unicorns, and bat-winged humanoids. The series was a sensation, and for a few weeks in the fall of 1835, the Sun had the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world at the time.

But there's more to Goodman's book than Locke's hoax. He braids into it the early career of P.T. Barnum, who was vying for the attention of New Yorkers at the time with his exhibition of Joice Heth, a woman said to be 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Another of Goodman's threads follows Edgar Allen Poe, who envied Locke's successful hoax and attempted one of his own a decade later with his "Balloon Hoax." He also describes the early days of mass-market journalism, in the days when editors occasionally settled disputed with fistfights, and when hoaxes and outright lies in the press were nearly as prevalent as they are today.

Finally, he paints a fascinating picture of New York itself in the Jacksonian era -- a city where pigs rooted in the streets, mobs occasionally burned the homes of abolitionists, and farm boys from Connecticut could become newspaper magnates. Boston and Philadelphia were the cultural capitals of the country in those days, and New York was its hard-charging, brawling boomtown.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments, particularly at the imaginative insults hurled between Locke and his arch-rival James Gordon Bennett, or at the sheer shamelessness of Barnum's humbugs. Recommended for anyone interested in history, science fiction, science, or good old-fashioned hoaxing.

Discarded Science

Discarded Science, by John Grant (Surrey, UK:  Facts, Figures & Fun, 2006) is an engaging but ultimately unsatisfying little book about the dead ends and false trails of scientific inquiry. Grant ranges widely over the history of science, covering topics like Ptolemaic cosmology, luminiferous aether, Velikovsky, Atlantis, Lamarckian evolution, Creationism, Ufology, Homeopathic, and scores of others. It is well-written and admirably complete. Unfortunately, Grant's desire for breadth and completeness has led him into a couple of dead ends or false trails himself.
   
First of all, his definition of "discarded science" wanders far astray. Things like Ptolemy's epicycles, the luminiferous aether, phlogiston, and Lamarck's theory of evolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics are all legitimately discarded -- they were once part of the mainstream of scientific thought, but were abandoned when contradictory data or better theories came along.

But the bulk of the book's length is not about interesting dead ends and how they came to be abandoned. Instead Grant spends a lot of time discussing theories which were pseudoscience from the start and never gained an iota of respectability -- the colliding planets of Velikovsky, Erich von Daniken's ancient astronauts, UFO cults like the "Aetherius Society," Chromotherapy, and similar nonsense.

Now good crackpottery is always entertaining, and Grant's book would be a lot less fun to read without these interludes, but they do rather wander from his topic. They also wander rather heavily over the pages of Martin Gardner's landmark study of crank science, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. And since Grant never goes into much detail about the crackpot theories he covers, I found myself thinking again and again "Martin Gardner did it better."

Grant's second wrong turning is that he throws in opposition to science and ideological suppression along with discarded science and quackery. For instance, he spends several pages quoting religious leaders opposed to abortion and contraception, including Jerry Falwell, Pope John Paul II, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Fine -- but none of those gentleman base their arguments on science. They say that abortion (or contraception, or even complete nudity) is wrong on moral or scriptural grounds. So what are they doing here at all? "Because John Grant doesn't agree with them," is apparently the answer.

This desire to throw in everything including the kitchen sink means that Grant's book is maddeningly superficial. Nothing gets more than a couple of pages, and many topics are covered in just a paragraph or two. In the end, that is the book's greatest flaw: it dilutes its subject matter like a dose of homeopathic medicine. One learns little about the process or history of scientific thought, just a collection of factoids. It's entertaining but nothing more. A deeper and more narrowly-focused approach would have been much more rewarding to the reader.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

We're back from a long Christmas road trip which included a number of stops at places of scientific and historical interest. In Durham, NC, our Crack Team visited the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, and had a grand time.

The Museum isn't huge -- the main building is about the size of an auto dealership -- but the exhibit designers have done an excellent job of leveraging the region's very strong science and technology resources to create a museum full of genuinely instructive interactive exhibits.

There's a small zoo featuring local species, an impressive gallery of space hardware and space exploration exhibits (including photos of North Carolina astronauts). Both the 6-year-old and the 12-year-old members of our Crack Team tried to master the rather difficult Mars mission launch window exhibit. The two of them also had a ball with the whispering gallery and a Mars rover simulator. The younger team member played for a time in the children's museum area.

Because it was a drizzly day we passed up the chance to walk on the Museum's extensive outdoor trails or ride the train. We also skipped the new "Magic Wings" butterfly conservatory because our Science Made Cool World Headquarters is located near another "Magic Wings" operation.

Overall, the Museum of Life and Science kept two kids and one adult genuinely interested and entertained for four hours on a rainy Saturday. You can't beat that for a recommendation. Check it out if you're in the Triangle area.

The Importance of Being Visual

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only because humans are acutely visual animals. Large portions of our brains are devoted to making sense of the information we pick up with our eyes, processing changes in light and shadow, movement, and finding faces in everything we look at. (For more on that, here’s an interesting video from the MIT Museum -- Nancy Kanwisher talking about her research on human visual processing.) Visuals become particularly important in the sciences, where a well-drawn figure can be the difference between clarity and a confusing morass of conflicting data.

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery and Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless! are two books that are all about the figures.

Which Ones Were the Animals, Again?

When I picked up Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, I expected a book full of stories about African wildlife, kind of like Wild Kingdom or the National Geographic Channel in print. What I got was better: a light memoir by Peter Allison about the experience of being an African safari guide, warts and all. Although Allison shares plenty of stories about animals, the real f ocus is on the people he met while guiding, from the “bird nerds” who wanted to stop to look at every bird on the drive into camp, to the camera-toting Japanese guests annoyed by the animals’ inability to follow instructions. Sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageously funny, but always entertaining, this book is a quick and rewarding read.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
Peter Allison
2007
Lyons Press

So Simple, and Yet So Addictive

I’ve been fooling with a nifty new toy all weekend -- the Flip-‘n-Stack Acrobatz from Zing Toys. It’s really incredibly simple: a $14.95 kit gets you a metal square with a target printed on it, a small plastic launcher, and four chunky magnetic acrobat figures in blue and red. You put the magnetic figures on the launcher and flip them onto the target. It’s amazingly addictive. The blue and red figures stick together: one has north magnetic poles exposed on the ends of its little hands and feet; the other has south poles exposed. You can flip the figures onto one another and make them stick in stacks. There’s a simple scoring system so you can play competiively with another person, but everyone in my family seems to be just as happy to keep trying to build little towers of men. We may have to break down and buy a booster pack to get some extra magnetic figures soon. Our towers are starting to look a little puny.

Another Bone Wars Review

Brian Andres wrote a long review of Bone Wars: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology for the new issue of Palaeontologia Electronica. Have a look!