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Go Buy Microcosm Right Now!

Carl Zimmer may be my favorite science writer around today (others seem to agree), so I'm excited to report that his new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life hit the shelves yesterday. I had the opportunity to read it in manuscript form, and it's really an exceptional book -- what Carl calls an "(un)natural history of E. coli" -- the world's most famous microbe. Having just published a book that partially starred a bacterium myself, I know how hard it is to make a book about microbial life engaging to human readers, but Carl pulls it off brilliantly here -- it's creepy, mind-twisting, and delightful all at the same time. It's the kind of book that literally expands your perspective on the world -- it helps you see how this alternative universe of tiny life forms is bound up crucially in our own day-to-day experience. So go check it out now....

I Contain Multitudes (Of Banana Republics)

We're spending a week of part-work, part-vacation out on the eastern end of Long Island this week, and on the way we stopped by the Apple Store in Huntington to buy an iPhone for a friend. Turns out the Apple Store resides in the Walt Whitman Mall, which is rivaled only by the Walt Whitman rest area on the Jersey Turnpike in its rolling-over-in-his-grave quotient. The thing I love is that they've reprinted Leaves of Grass -- in the shape of leaves, mind you -- on the typically barren exterior of the mall. But every now and then one of the tenants has punched a window through the wall, interrupting the verse. I took this snapshot of Whitman's words dueling it out with a Sbarro chain.

The edited line now reads:

Sing on,
Sing on, you grey-brown
bird. Sing from the swamps,
the recesses, pour your chant
from the bushes. Limitless out of the
pizza, pasta
take out
804-0900

Little Miss Sunshine

Got to this odd Slate article via kottke:

But since it's comedy we're talking about, the overriding critical question would seem to be: Is Little Miss Sunshine funny? I found it pretty funny, funnier by a long shot by than the vast majority of mainstream comedies, and, at the indie-plex screening I attended, a lot of people laughed. Little Miss Sunshine may not be a great film. The dad character is saved from being a malicious caricature only by Kinnear's marvelous performance, and the dance-party climax is pat and saccharine. But why should anyone be so annoyed by a genial comedy that clearly satisfies the genre-requirement that it be funny?

This whole argument is the polar opposite of my reaction to Little Miss Sunshine. I have a huge weakness for the genre -- Flirting With Disaster is one of my all-time favorite comedies, and I thought Garden State was genuinely funny and sweet as well. Yes, LSM was formulaic in its quirkiness (as all genre comedies are.) My problem with it was that it wasn't actually funny. There were a few little chuckles, but barely anything approaching a genuine laugh. There's a point about thirty minutes into it -- once the whole lineup of crazies has been established -- where you think: ah, now it's going to get hilarious. And then it just fizzles.

Gmail Weirdness

I'm getting mail bounced back that I sent from my Gmail account, with this error message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553-mail rejected because your IP is in DUL. See 553 http://www.mail-abuse.com/enduserinfo.html

Forgive my ignorance, but which IP is in trouble here -- my ISP's or Gmail's? And what can I do? Help?

The media should be forced to run this story every few weeks, just to remind everyone that it's a great time to be alive. But the problem with this sort of good news is that it evolves so slowly -- unlike disasters and wars and bird flu. Even with all the ailments and stresses of modern life, we're still living twice as long as our ancestors a century ago.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Great to see some serious research returning to the world of psychedelics. But if I might just draw your attention to the fine print here:

The study volunteers had an average age of 46, had never used hallucinogens, and participated to some degree in religious or spiritual activities like prayer, meditation, discussion groups or religious services. Each tried psilocybin during one visit to the lab and the stimulant methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) on one or two other visits. Each visit lasted eight hours. The volunteers lay on a couch in a living-room-like setting, wearing an eye mask and listening to classical music. They were encouraged to focus their attention inward. Psilocybin's effects lasted for up to six hours, Griffiths said. Twenty-two of the 36 volunteers reported having a "complete" mystical experience, compared to four of those getting methylphenidate.

I would really like to meet the four people who had a "complete mystical experience" on Ritalin.

The Numbers Game

I meant to point to John Heilemann's excellent piece on the steroids controversy, "Let Juice Loose," when it ran two weeks ago, and not just because it had a nice shout-out to my elective surgery piece from Wired last year. John makes some great points about the records mythology of baseball:

Elective surgery will also pose knotty problems for another of the arguments deployed in defense of bans on doping: that in a sport such as baseball, where history matters—where, indeed, records are revered as sacred—letting players juice would make it impossible to compare performances over time. This is why Bonds, as he approaches Hank Aaron’s home-run record, has ginned up so much consternation. But is it really possible that if a player known to have had laser eye surgery were to surpass, say, Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, that baseball would contemplate placing an asterisk next to his name in the record books (as some are suggesting should be Bonds’s fate if he surpasses Aaron)? If not, why not? The truth is that all the talk in baseball about the sacredness of its records is little more than another tactic in the long-running campaign waged by its overseers to mystify the game.

I'd add one other point to the debate, which has no doubt been said a million times in discussing this issue: the primary reason why records shouldn't be considered so sacred is that they don't factor in the obvious increase in overall competitiveness in the sport. Barry Bonds might have used steroids to help him hit 13 more home runs than Babe Ruth ever managed in a single season, but Ruth had a huge advantage over Bonds in that the pool of pitching talent he was facing was drawn entirely from white Americans. No doubt there was a Pedro Martinez or a Mariano Rivera throwing rocks at 95 MPH in the Dominican Republic or Panama back in the 1920s, but Ruth didn't have to face them because they had no way to make it into the major leagues back then. When Ruth played, there was a potential talent pool of about 10 million people; now, the number is in the hundreds of millions, and the system for discovering and nurturing new talent is vastly more efficient than it was then.

When you factor in the increased training regimes, non-elective surgical techniques, computerized analysis of batter/pitcher history, and the accumulated strategic wisdom of playing a sport for seventy-five years -- it should be clear that the bar of competitiveness has been raised significantly since Ruth hit his 714 homers. We don't see clear evidence of this trend because the batters have been improving alongside the pitchers, so it tends to even out. (Though we do see it in the decline of .400 hitting, as Stephen Jay Gould explained in Full House.) But if the problem with steroids is -- at least in part -- that it makes it unfair to compare one era's hitters with another era's, why isn't the increase in the overall quality of play equally problematic? Even without steroids, I wager Bonds would have hit 73 home runs -- if not more -- off the pitching of the 1920s. Maybe Ruth should have the asterisk.

I knew it! Reading is bad for you.

The two research groups monitored the behavior of 241 drivers in 100 vehicles for more than a year. During the 2 million miles of the study, the drivers were involved in 82 crashes and 761 near-crashes. Reaching for a moving object multiplied the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times, according to the study. Reading, applying makeup, or dialing a handheld device tripled the risk.

Now, I realize that I live in a pedestrian-centric city, and perhaps I'm a little out of touch with what's going on in the rest of the country. But are people actually reading while driving now? How do you even do that?

I've always been weirdly obsessed with the question of how life on earth would have evolved differently if there had been no moon. So I was delighted to stumble across this fragment of an essay by Isamov from the early seventies called The Triple Triumph of the Moon. His most provocative conclusion: land-based life might have never have evolved without the moon:

Life spread outward into the rims of the ocean, where the sea water rose up against the continental slopes and then fell back twice each day. And thousands of species of seaweed and worms and crustaceans and molluscs and fish rose and fell with those tides. Some were exposed on shore as the sea retreated, and of those a very few survived, because they happened, for some reason, to be the best able to withstand the nightmare of land existence until the healing, life-giving water returned.

Species adapted to the temporary endurance of dry land
developed, and the continuing pressure of competitor saw
to it that there was survival value to be gained in developing
the capacity to withstand dry-land conditions for longer and
ever-longer periods.

Eventually species developed that could remain on land
indefinitely...

And of course the tides are the product of the Moon. The
Sun, to be sure, also produces tides, nearly half the size of
those produced by the Moon today, but that smaller to-and-fro
wash of salt water would represent a smaller drive towards
land and might have led to the colonisation of the
continents much later in time, if at all.

Since the steroids controversy has flared up again thanks to Barry Bonds, I thought I'd raise again the question that I posed in a Wired essay last year: why are steroids against the rules while enhancement surgeries -- like laser eye surgery -- are completely legit? Shouldn't it be more of an offense to permanently alter your body in order to improve performance?

Finally, new surgical procedures will be so effective and feature such rapid recovery time that Tommy John surgery will look like bloodletting by comparison. In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."