Phatic Hiatus

Important But Odd Science Of 2008

It's traditional on the internet to do a year-end list of something quirky, so I thought I'd look for unusual scientific studies. Getting the canonical "ten" might not be possible, so I'm going to settle for five:

1. Yawning serves as a thermoregulatory mechanism in parakeets. Unlike higher mammals, parakeets don't yawn as a social function (i.e., you can't make them yawn by power of suggestion, which I'm sure took a good deal of laboratory work to establish with certitude) which makes them an ideal candidate for studying the biological purpose of yawning. Apparently it's to "cool the brain". I think it would be great to have a doctoral dissertation all about yawning parakeets!

2. Dogs have wet noses to enhance selective olefactory sensitivity. Certain types of molecules (water soluble ones, I assume) are preferentially attracted to wet surfaces, and this functions as a filter for the sort of things that dogs want to smell. I'd guess that oily substances just float above the surface of the water, so that poor Fido doesn't get overwhelmed by a spray of perfume. Think of it as the aromatic equivalent of a pair of polarized sunglasses.

3. Rats love to be tickled, and you can hear them laughing if you use an utrasonic transducer. Technically this is science from 2007, but the video was new to me so I'm going to include it. If I ever get a rat, I definitely want one of these gizmos so I can listen to him laughing. It makes them seem so much more human.

4. Electrons can be caught on video. An electron, of course isn't a tiny blue ball, like you see in your textbooks. It's a wave, with alternating nodes (regions of high density) and antinodes (regions of low density). The "density" is the probability that the electron is there. (Don't try to understand it, if you're new to quantum mechanics. Just accept that electrons are weird and can't decide where they are.) I did my own thesis on a theoretic prediction of how you could "see" electrons by the effect they have on a nearby atom, with images very much like this one, but this is a more direct and time-dependent mechanism that allows you to watch the same electron as it moves.

5. The Large Hadron Collider actually worked. The world did not implode in the process, so far as anyone can tell. Maybe not the most remarkable new discovery, but I enjoyed the title of the article all the same!

My Parallel Universe

Something I realized in the course of the last year is that I no longer exist in the same country as most of my friends and family. The reason is that geography no longer matters. Our identity is shaped by our relationship not to the world itself, but by the way we view the world. Most of us have strong opinions about people we've never met, and feel entirely rational in holding these opinions. They are created for us by the media. This has resulted in a fundamental shift in the epistemology of our communal identity. To quote a famous bit from Learned Hand:

The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

This annual rundown of notable quotes isn't remarkable in having a liberal bias (the author pretty much admits that up front), but rather in the frank admission that some of the quotes are possibly unfair and taken out of context. This simply doesn't seem to bother anyone all that much, being such a standard expectation that it's been absorbed into the rules of play, like running the football emerged spontaneously out of proto-soccer ballgames. The idea of "fact-checking" is secondary because it isn't actually an election that pits McCain against Obama, it's an election that pits the public perception of McCain against the public perception of Obama.

The interpretative schema matters just as much as the content, if not more. We collectively construct who these figures are, something most bizarrely reflected in the amalgamation of Sarah Palin and Tina Fey into a sort of collective entity. I pointed out a couple weeks back that not only did the majority of Americans ascribe quotes by Fey to Palin, but that the survey organization accepted this association as correct because they were popularly associated with her image. Think about that for a moment.

None of this affects me, since I don't participate in the "television world" that creates and nurtures public opinion. I'm not sure there's anyone else in the whole country who follows politics as avidly as I do, but with such total disregard for television. As a result, McCain and Obama are literally different people for me. Their names don't refer to the same referents. (Or to be more precise, for the reader of Frege, they have the same Bedeutung but not the same Sinn.)

This makes it actively difficult for me to have conversations with other people about politics, and I am finding myself less inclined to want to risk the confusion it entails. A more fundamental problem for me is wondering to what extent my own universe is being constructed incorrectly by my consumption of alternative media.

Full Court Press

The history of the civil rights movement is that of turning controversy into consensus, and then building a mythology around the consensus. As the gay right movement has tried to emulate the success of the racial justice campaigns of the 60s (so far without a galvanizing MLK figure) it's become increasingly anxious about turning the corner on the the "controversy" stage and jumping directly to the "consensus" stage, so it can start acting like it's already won the war. That's a process greatly simplified by the fact that the media has disconnected itself from popular opinion. Even as popular opinion seems disinterested in the issue (if not actively opposed), the tenor of most new articles is just barely clinging to the idea of "equal time", usually with a dozen "pro quote" balanced off by a single obligatory "anti quote".

Newsweek tries to turn the corner by writing a cover story that finally refuses to report the controversy, and instead just reports the side it wants to win. There's no attempt at providing balancing sources on each side. It's a little like trying to hold a victory parade in the middle of a battlefield, and unsprisingly, Newsweek had to close down the comments box so that the majorettes wouldn't step in landmines.

It remains to be seen whether this kind of propaganda can actually succeed, in a world where "the media" is increasingly a decentralized network instead of a hierarchical hub. I think there's a chance it will succeed just due to the ubiquity of entertainment options that are funded by Hollywood liberals. Even as blogs eclipse the NYT and the network nightly news triumvirate, a proliferation of rough-edged cable dramas and comedies are capturing ten times as many eyes as anything more intentionally didactic. Reading arguments is tiresome. Actors and celebrities are fun, and so American values are being remade in the image of what actors and screenwriters believe.

The article itself, by the way, isn't worth your time. Take this, for example: "First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman." This would be what most people refer to as a "falsehood", and usually falsehoods are a problematic premise for a cover story.

“Jesus answered, “have you not read that the One who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh”? Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.’” - Matthew 19:4-5

What the article might mean to say is that Jesus never makes negative or exclusive statements about homosexuality, having been asked only about divorce, but that's a different argument entirely. The positive statement here clearly indicates that the creational order, with gendered humans, is the foundational reason for marriage existing. If we had not been made "male and female", then the argument for marriage wouldn't successfully relate marriage to the creation account, and the statement made by Jesus would become senseless.

Marriage As An Economic Indicator

During the 60s, the way in which households accumulate wealth underwent a fundamental shift. Median personal income began to level off, and has now effectively decoupled from GDP data to the point where no one is terrible surprised to see poor gains in median wages during a period of prosperity. (Instead, the growth tends to occur in capital gains, which are accrued by the investor class.) At the same time, median household income continued to rise as women entered the workforce and took higher paying jobs. In effect, this took a lot of economic activity that had been occurring off-record (women cooking food and brewing coffee for their families, say) and turned it into measured economic activity that generated income.

This only worked for families with dual wage-earners, of course. At exactly the same time, marriage rates started to decline-- but disproportionately in minority households. Kay Hymowitz, in a WaPo editorial today, talks about the cruel irony of this trend coinciding with the American civil rights movement. Just as opportunity began to open up, the ability of black families to take advantage of the wealth-building potential of dual-income marriages was evaporating.

This has created a horrible pattern of government dependency that's turned racial reconciliation into a massive shakedown by shrewd political operators. The decline in structural racism (Jim Crow laws) coincided so neatly with the rise in broken families that the political wins of the 60s were exactly canceled out by the cultural losses, and no one was any better off. The organizational network of advocacy groups, having been locked into an anti-racism message, couldn't reconfigure to attack the new problem of familial decohesion. And so the failure of legislative wins to improve the economic position of black Americans became a proof that racism had just gone underground, and needed ever more aggressive posturing to be ferreted out. It didn't help, of course, that the allies of the civil rights movement were cultural radicals not otherwise predisposed to favor community building or family strengthening policies, particularly when the "community" being lost was often a religious (even a fundamentalist) one. (Go to any urban block congregation on Sunday morning, and count the number of single adult men in the pews.)

The result is the modern tragicomedy of race relations. The more intractable the lack of economic progress, the more evidence provided for the existence of covert racism, which reinforces the incorrect narrative that the origination of the crisis is external rather than internal. Instead of tackling the problem of extra-marital pregnancies, the average urban "anti-poverty advocate" tosses some condoms to the men and puts the women on the public dole. As long as the problem exists, the government keeps the flow of money coming, and blacks reliably vote for the "right" kind of politicians-- the ones who perpetuate the narrative that keeps them in a state of economic bondage. Meanwhile, white Americans build up real wealth in their 401k's, and transfer it neatly to the next generation as the Social Security system totters off toward insolvency.

And of course, anyone who tries to point this scandal out is accused of being "patronising" toward the black community, who must be assumed to know what's in their best interest for reasons of political correctness. This creates an agonizing dilemma for conservatives, who know what the disease is but can't speak the name to the patient without being the object of anger and dismay for an act of "victim blaming". The result is a state of silence and disengagement that is equally uncaring, accompanied by occasional cheerleading when someone like Bill Cosby makes the same case from within the community.

If Barack Obama can accomplish anything constructive in the next four years, hopefully this will be it. Here's an encouraging start: A leftist blogger getting all grumpy about Obama's rather obvious suggestion that black men stop dressing like hoodlums.

Wanna Buy A Big Boat?

The always alert Rod Dreher is noting further deterioration in the Baltic Dry shipping index, which seems to indicate a near complete cessation of all global commerce. I'm not aware of a comparable set of indices for air, rail, or truck transport, so this is obviously only a sampling of all trade activity. But it's still distressing, in that it heralds a recapitulation of one of the exacerbating features of the credit crisis in the 1930s: the shutdown of international trade. In that era much of the blame could be assigned to protectionist policies. But the credit system is every bit as capable of hexing the trade routes.

Accompanying this is a collapse of the prices of raw materials. This is a welcome development in the sense that a price correction was necessary at some point, but the circumstances suggest that the price declines are being driven by low volume rather than high volume. In other words, it's not because the supply is growing, but because both supply and demand at the new lower prices are shrinking in concert. The "real economy" of substantive goods is vanishing, while the skeletal structure of the "shadow economies" in services and financial products are being left to float in mid-air.