west of the moon

attention please!

Having decided to stop being ambivalent about the fact that I have a web presence, and instead to just have a damn web presence and learn to live with it, I've got a shiny new website over at susangroppi.com.  I also have a shiny new weblog, at susangroppi.com/blog.  The entire contents of this weblog, comments and all, have been exported over to there, and I'm even trying to add in all those past years of other, older, abandoned webjournals. 

I'll leave this site up for another couple of months, but I don't want to keep paying six dollars a month to SixApart forever, so update all your updatings and I'll see you in the new location.

africa reading challenge.

I've decided to join the Africa Reading Challenge, which I first learned about from Matt Cheney.   It's  pretty straightforward: read six books this year that are either about Africa or by African authors.  Ever since I first put together the unit on African science for my survey course on science in the ancient world, I've been deeply aware of how little I know about African history, so this is a great excuse for me to read up.  (On the long list of weblog posts I keep not getting around to writing: how trying to teach a unit on the history of science in Africa changed the way I think about teaching the history of science.)

The reading list may change as the year progresses, but this is my preliminary set of six books:

• Africa, A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Citizen and Subject, by Mamood Mamdani
• The Pygmies Were Our Compass: Bantu and Batwa in the history of West Central Africa, by Kairn Klieman.
• King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild
• Nervous Conditions, by  Tsitsi Dangarembga

This is list is haphazard at best.  The novels were selected based on recommendations, and mostly because I didn't want to limit myself to nonfiction, although I think nonfiction is where my interests are focused.  The point of the challenge is to read broadly, and reading broadly on a topic that's already as broad as "Africa" is obviously only going to be the first step towards understanding.  But it's a start.  (It's also cheating, a little--I bought the John Reader book last week, before I'd even heard of the reading challenge.  It was my vacation reading, and I'm still working my way through it.) 

What I'd love, though, are pointers to more readings on pre-colonial history.  Are there any good histories of the pre-colonial societies along the Niger, for instance?  My teaching on this has been cobbled together from articles and references in other texts, but I'd really love a good thorough history that covers the Kingdom of Ghana, and Gao, and Kanem.  Mali in the time of Mansa Musa, or even before.  I'm sure these books must be out there, I just haven't had a lot of luck locating them so far.  (I'm hoping that the Klieman book on my list might be a start in that direction, although not quite what I'm looking for.) 

So that's the Africa Reading Challenge.  I'll be posting about the books as I read them.  If anyone else wants to join in, just sign up at the original post.   (And if you don't have any idea where to start finding books for your list, there are suggestions both on that page and on Matt Cheney's post.) 

first the bees, now the bats?

This story from the New York Times is disturbing--apparently bats are dying, in large numbers, and no one knows why.  They're looking at a set of caves and mines in the northeast that are home to large bat colonies, and in all of these caves, something like ninety percent of the bats are dead or dying from a mysterious illness. (ScienceDaily also has an article, with mostly the same information.)

Symptoms of the bat disease include extreme weight loss (leaving them without sufficient fat reserves to make it through the cold weather), pneumonia, and a white fungus on their skin.  Based on the fungus, bat researchers are calling it white-nose syndrome, but according to the NYT article, the fungus is believed to just be a symptom, not the cause of the sickness.  From what I can tell from the reporting, it's the lack of fat reserves that's really killing them, although it sounds like they're disoriented too, flying during the day and during hibernation season. 

This is potentially a big deal.  The bat ecologists are saying that this will significantly impact the bat populations in the affected area, which stretches from New England to Indiana, and that it could easily spread to an even larger area.  Bats don't reproduce quickly, and their reproductive processes are likely going to be impacted by this illness, and some of the researchers are talking about extinction of whole bat species.  Even if it doesn't quite come to extinction, it's a dramatic reduction in species population, and the Science Daily article quotes someone saying that it could take hundreds of years for the population to regain full numbers. 

The white-nose bat story has some resonance with the bee colony collapse story for a few reasons.  The first and most obvious reason is that it's a massive and completely unexplained die-off.  They're also both stories that potentially impact human lives, through agriculture.  Bats aren't a managed component of agricultural production like bees are, but they eat a whole lot of insects, enough that they can have a significant effect on reducing insect-based crop loss. 

First the bees, then the bats, and there's also word that frog populations worldwide are also being killed by a fungus.  This is a little spooky.

plant tending.

The weather's been beautiful here, and I've been penned up indoors most of the time.  Yesterday afternoon, I took a break from indoors and worked on my plants a little bit.

I have probably talked about the plants before.  I never kept houseplants of any kind before I moved to California, but when I first came out here, a friend who was moving away me a begonia.  Or, more accurately, he cut the leafy tops off the top of his own begonia plant, stuck them in a cup of water, and handed them to me.  He told me to leave them in the water until they grew roots, and then put them in some dirt.  I did, and they not only lived, but they flourished.  Those original begonia cuttings grew, and they sent up new canes, and after a while I took new cuttings and expanded the begonia collection.  (This picture is the closest to what my begonias look like, although mine are far less scenic.)  I also bought some new plants, and inherited even more plants from another friend who was moving out of town, and, well, I ended up with a lot of plants.  My apartment in Oakland was perfect for them, flooded with light.

Since I moved to Berkeley, the plants haven't been as happy.  It's mostly about the light--this apartment doesn't get nearly enough.  The begonias grow new leaves, but they don't flower, and all of the plants are growing all crooked and leggy as they desperately stretch toward whatever sad sunlight makes it into this place.  (I am not, if you haven't noticed, fond of my apartment.)  The begonia matriarch, the original cluster of canes I inherited back in my old apartment, has gotten so big and so lopsided that it fell over onto my desk a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, I cut back all the big lopsided top growths.

Here's the plant before the operation:

And here's after:

Okay, that may not look dramatic, but judging from how many clippings I have sitting in cups of water right now, I feel like I took off a third to a half of its overall mass.

... and, having written this much of what must surely be the world's most boring weblog post, I have realized why I feel the need to go through this step-by-step description of the plant care I handled yesterday afternoon.  (Cutting back the matriarch was a minor procedure; more major work involved repotting a root-bound tree thingy and splitting another rootbound begonia into two pots.)  Everything I know about houseplants is essentially self-taught; I've spent a lot of time googling around for information, but most of what I actually do is based on either modifying advice meant for outdoor plants or just making stuff up.  But I've learned a lot about cane plants, tuber plants, and root plants.  (The biggest thing I've learned there, unfortunately, is that every time I try separating out and replanting tuber plants, they die.)  I learned how to stake weak stems (like so: before and after) in a way that's stable but also gives the stem room to grow, I learned how to pack the soil in the pot so that the roots won't rot, and I learned that plants can live just fine even in environments (like this apartment) where they aren't going to thrive.

I like to think that someday I'll have a garden, even though I know that a garden is a lot more work than houseplants, even a small army of houseplants like mine.  Sitting out on the front steps yesterday, hands full of potting soil, surrounded by things that have grown in my care, that's not just a good feeling.  That's a little window of peace in the afternoon sun.

friday housecleaning.

Closing tabs, as they say.

• I've seen a lot of people linking to this article from National Defense Weekly, about SIGMA, a group of science fiction writers who are offering their services to the US government in an advisory capacity.  News of this group has been around for a while--the idea being, presumably, that people who spend their whole professional lives thinking about the future might actually have ideas about it--but this is the first report I've seen of the group in action.  Most of the discussion of this article has focused on Larry Niven's ideas about how hospitals can cut costs (spread rumors that will scare Latinos away from using them, on the theory that they're all illegal immigrants who don't pay their bills), but you've all missed the best part.  Namely:

"The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.   Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space."

No offense to either SIGMA or DHS, but seriously, this was the least surprising outcome EVER. 

• Another take on the singularity.
• Elle describes a few steps on the path that led her to become a historian.
• Incredible trainwreck of a First Person column.  I believe in being kind to First Person columnists, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that being on the job market will drive a lot of people crazy.  (For a less calm but highly realistic depiction of what happens inside the brains of some academics on the job market, there's also the Philosophy Job Market Blog.)  And in this case, it does look like the writer has at least some self-awareness about what a trainwreck she is.  But still.  This woman's story is right at the intersection where weak graduate advising meets unrealistic expectations meets a baffling lack of common sense.
• Hugo nominations have been announced!  It looks like a good list, in that it has a lot of fiction that I read and loved.  Hooray Ted!  Hooray David!  Hooray Mary (for the not-a-Hugo, sure, but hooray nonetheless)!

Rainy-morning flowers.

Rainy-morning flowers.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

Is history a science?

Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science.   I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through possible answers.  (For instance, when you start pushing people on this question, you find that many people think that if you say something isn't a science, you're saying that it isn't a valid field of inquiry, or that it isn't intellectually rigorous, or that it can't be right.)  I think that some of the students found the discussion frustrating, but I thought it was interesting, and a couple of people told me afterwards that they hope we come back to this topic again.

After class, someone asked me what my own definition is--what do I think makes something a science, or not a science.  I found it a really difficult question to answer, for a number of reasons.  First of all, I don't think there -is- a clear and easy definition.  There's not really a single bright line that can be drawn between "this type of work is science" and "this type of work is not science."  It's also difficult for me because so much of my interest in the question is how -other- people answer it: I know why Albion Small thought that sociology was a science, and why G. Stanley Hall thought that psychology was a science, and why the judges in the Kitzmiller decision thought that intelligent design was not science.  I know the arguments for (and against) including Renaissance European alchemy, dynastic Chinese medicine, Babylonian astrology, and Alexandrian engineering in the historical category of "scientific work".  I can argue both sides of the question about whether modern Western medicine is scientific.  And I've been known to think of the discussions about what constitutes "science" as a kind of inkblot test for what people think about different areas of research.  At the end of all of that, though, where do I personally draw the borders and boundaries?  I'm not sure I know.

I think that most of the time, when people try and drawn the boundary between science and not-science, they start from an instinctive or intuitive sense of which types of work are scientific, and then they back-form the criteria.   Pretty much everyone agrees that physics, chemistry, and biology go in the "science" box, along with their associated branches and sub-fields.  A lot of other disciplines are in a contested area, and a person's first intuitive or instinctive reaction as to whether these other disciplines (psychology, linguistics, engineering, computer science, sociology, economics, political science, medicine, archaeology, anthropology) go in the "science" box or not seems (based on my thoroughly unscientific sampling) to be based largely on her personal experiences.  The sorting into boxes comes first, and on an unconscious level; the outlining of criteria (experimentation, quantification, verification, general laws, predictive power, falsifiability, etc.) comes second, as a way of trying to make sense of the way you've sorted things. 

The way I sort things is based on my own history in this field.  Ten years ago, when I was finishing an undergraduate degree in psychology, I probably would have sorted things differently than I do now; four years before that, when I was a smart-ass high school senior with big plans to be a physics major and equal passions for Greg Egan and Ayn Rand, I -know- I would have sorted things differently than I do now.  Now, though, after six years in graduate school and two years teaching broad surveys on the history of science, I have very fuzzy boundaries for science.  I'm willing to toss most things into the "science" box, as long as I'm allowed to keep up a running commentary on the arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of the definition.  One snag in the sorting, though--the class reading that prompted all of this, the 1895 mission statement for sociology, makes reference to the "science of history", grouping history with economics and sociology, under the heading "social science." 

Is history a social science?  Maybe?  It is (or should be) rooted in factual evidence, and it can (sometimes) look for generalized laws, and certainly there are plenty of people who would categorize it that way.  There's a discussion down in the comments on this post about what it means to have a finding or a result in the humanities, and when I follow that reasoning through, I become more sympathetic to the idea that history (unlike, say, literature studies) can be thought of as a science.  When I first came to Berkeley as a graduate student and attended the day-long orientation for new grad students, I waffled over the afternoon breakout sessions, whether I was supposed to attend the discussions for humanities students or the ones for social science students.  When the idea of history as a social science came up in this reading, though, I found myself pulling away from it.  Is this a type of science, what we do?  My sorting instincts want to put it in the "not-science" box.  If the sorting question is, as I suggested above, an ink-blot test, what does it say about me that I'm resistant to calling this work scientific, even though it meets some of the criteria that logically fall out of my sorting process? 

I don't have an answer here, just a lot of questions, and the overall sense that the science/not-science question is one for which the best answers are more like a spectrum and less like a set of boxes. 

the robot future.

Just the other day, I was thinking that it must be some kind of indication about my personality that I got a warm fuzzy happy glow when I heard a newscaster on NPR use the phrase "giant robotic arms on the space station" and not be talking about fiction.  Giant robotic arms!  On the space station!  The story in question was about astronauts on the space station preparing to do a series of long spacewalks, to repair or assemble the giant robot, and there's not a concept in that sentence that doesn't fill me with glee.  We have a space station!  With robots!  Or at least robot arms. 

Except that I'm experiencing some ambivalence about robots at the moment, thanks to this video of a robot prototype named BigDog, developed by Boston Dynamics.  (If you're not the type who normally clicks through to YouTube videos, please do in this case--it's totally worth it.)  And I do mean ambivalence--I'm split between two strong reactions, both of which are occurring somewhere around the gut level, rather than the intellectual level.  On the one hand, oh good lord that's cool.  On the other hand, there's something really creepy and disturbing about it.  Watching the video, I kept thinking, this is for real?  That's actually a robot, and not two guys in a robot suit like a pantomime horse?  (If you have similar doubts, the part where it slips on the ice will cure you of them.)  There's something about the video that also made me feel a little queasy--it might be the shaky camera, or the buzzing-insect engine sound, or future shock.  They're all plausible.

The Boston Dynamics website describes BigDog as "the world's most advanced quadruped robot"; it also notes that the project is funded by DARPA, and that makes sense too.  A robot like this is far more useful in a combat situation than in commercial use.  I'm sure that functional concerns drove the physical form of BigDog--what little I know about anatomy suggests that quadruped motion is both easier to build and more stable than biped motion.  I have to wonder, though, if there isn't a little voice in the back of the designers' minds that suggests that a robot like this, one that looks like a metal coffee table and moves like a creepy cross between a horse and a spider, would have a psychological effect in combat situations as well.  If I'm this freaked out just watching it on YouTube, how would someone react seeing it out in the wild?

(Video found via Crooked Timber.)

playing the numbers.

Within the community of people who make their living paying attention to science--science writers, historians of science, science ethics and policy experts, among others--there are a few recurring concerns.  One is the lack of scientific literacy in the general public, which is usually seen as being related to a "soundbite culture".  Popular media sources need to distill everything down to small, simple, quotable summaries, but the work of science rarely produces small, simple results.

For most people, the most familiar examples of this come from health and medicine reporting, which often makes health science look contradictory and arbitrary: being overweight increases your chance of getting health problems, except when it makes you more likely to survive certain diseases, and losing weight is good for your health, unless you gain in back, because yo-yo-ing is bad for your health, and losing weight is futile because weight is genetically determined, except that people tend to lose weight when their friends do.  You should always wear sunscreen, because even small amounts of sun exposure increase your risk for cancer, but not getting enough sun exposure means you're short on Vitamin D, which boosts your immune system.  Red wine reduces your chance of heart disease, but drinking alcohol increases it.  In all of these cases, the apparent contradictions come from the fact that the basic statements are huge oversimplifications of the research in question, sometimes to the point where the statement no longer accurately reflects even a part of what the research was about.

Part of basic scientific literacy is learning to unpack these statements, learning which questions to ask in order to put everything in the right context.  When you're looking at a medical diagnosis, for instance, and someone says, "patients with this condition have a forty percent survival rate."  What does that mean?  What's the timeline?  "Forty percent survival rate" means that forty percent of patients are still alive at some set time after diagnosis--three years, or five years, or ten years.  If the timeframe is large enough, then the percentage may not take into account recent changes in treatment options.  It can also be hard to tease out information about how early (or late) patients were diagnosed.  Generally speaking, medical treatments are more effective in the early stages of an illness, but do the survival rate numbers take that into account? 

If you spend a lot of your time dealing with science and medicine, either from the inside or the outside, this kind of thinking becomes second nature.  But it can fly away just when you need it most.  A few years ago, someone very close to me was diagnosed with cancer.  When I first found out, I spent hours researching online, trying to get a handle on the situation.  I found websites that explained treatments and prognosis in detail, that avoided all of the sound-bite pitfalls I described above, and I didn't want them.  I was reading things like "patients diagnosed while in Stage 2, who enter treatment X immediately, have an eighty-five percent likelihood of still being alive seven years later, and the advent of medication Y has decreased the chance of remission after two years," and I didn't care--the voice in my head was saying, just tell me if it's going to be okay.  I kept thinking, I don't want all of this information, I just want the answer.  Within a day or two, I was able to appreciate and process all of the detailed information, but right in that moment I finally understood the appeal of the scientific soundbite.

All of this has been on my mind again this week, watching some of my closest friends manage a medical crisis with their infant son.  They're lucky enough to have doctors who will explain everything to them, patiently and thoroughly and in detail, and they're being flooded with information, and they're doing a great job of processing all of it.  From where I'm standing, half a step back, I'm comforted by having access to so much information, most of the time.  Every once in a while, though, all the statistics and probabilities fade into white noise, and the sound of all those numbers turns into that same small voice: just tell me if he's going to be okay.   

a personal history of the magnetic fields.

I saw the Magnetic Fields last night, at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.  It was a great show, a good mix of old and new material, and I always love the differences between the live and recorded versions.  Every time I see them live, the older material gets slower and sadder, I think--it's not as though "Lovers From the Moon" was ever a peppy song, but it was outright mournful last night.  (And, as so often happens to me, watching Sam Davol made me wish I knew how to play the cello, but that's neither here nor there.)  Throughout the show, though, I kept thinking about my own history with this music.   It's not that I think I have any kind of indie-pop cool-kid cred here--kind of the opposite, actually.  But I ran into one of my students in the lobby, before the show, and that somehow got me thinking about how long I've been listening to this band, how many other memories and stories are all tied up in that history. 

My first exposure to the Magnetic Fields didn't take, actually.  It was freshman year in college, when I made an unsuccessful attempt at being a college radio DJ.  "All the Umbrellas in London" was in the "heavy rotation / new singles" bin at the station, but I only listened to it once or twice, and never played it on air.  Our college radio station, WHRB, had (probably still has?) a very competitive selection and training process (called "comp"), and the year I went through it, our comp directors were two guys with, er, prickly personalities.  They were very self-assured, very aggressive about their opinions, and absolutely scornful of any music that wasn't sufficiently hardcore.  I learned a lot during that comp--I learned about the history of punk and hardcore, I learned a lot of gossip about the Lemonheads, I learned how to operate studio equipment, I learned that you couldn't count on the jazz DJs to show up for their 5am shifts, and I learned that the comp directors would shout you into the ground if you expressed a serious interest in indie pop. 

I'm pretty sure that it was "100,000 Fireflies," on a mix-tape from a friend, that made me a fan.  Everything accelerated from there.  Music is such a social experience, and most of my college friends liked the Magnetic Fields; I owned a few CDs, but even if I hadn't, the music was somehow just always there. 

At some point, and I'm trying to pin down when, a group of us went to see them play at Smith.  Eight or nine people in two cars, driving out from Cambridge to Northampton.  This was close to ten years ago, and I remember it in a series of vivid fragments.  The show itself was in a ballroom or gym space, upstairs at the student center, I think?  We all sat on the floor, and the stage was only a foot or two raised off the ground.  The opening acts were all student bands, and one of them kept shorting out their lighting setup, all bright flashes and popping noises before everything went dark.  There was a band whose entire set consisted of electric guitar feedback and a woman screaming near a microphone.  The show itself felt perfect, not because it was smooth and polished but because it was immediate and idiosyncratic.  Stephin agreed to a request from the audience for a song that Claudia had forgotten how to play.  Claudia made a few hesitant jokes about Smith College, something about whether they were more likely to find copies of On Our Backs or Off Our Backs in the green room.  Stephin went out into the audience and sang "Josephine" as a serenade to someone.  This was a few months before 69 Love Songs came out, so when they played "Come Back from San Francisco", I'd never heard it before, but it stayed with me for days.  (It wouldn't be until months later, listening to the new album over and over again at work, that I caught the double edge to the lyrics--"you need me like the wind needs the trees ... like the moon needs poetry, you need me.")  I remember the drive home, too, watching the Massachusetts Turnpike speed past the window in the darkness, before drifting off to sleep in the backseat. 

69 Love Songs was an -event-.  No matter how many times I listened to it, I found something new, something particularly lovely or clever or funny or sad.  We all sent email back and forth for days, making lists of our favorites.  (I mentioned this in my online journal at the time, which led to my being interviewed by a reporter for the London Sunday Times Magazine.  I've still got a copy of the article, I was so excited.)  A while later--a few months? a year? the chronology is fuzzy--the whole group of us saw them at the Middle East in Cambridge, maybe a Valentine's Day show?  All the singers from 69 Love Songs were there, too, and the stage was so crowded, all the people and the instruments and equipment all jammed up together, the singers perched on little stools.  We were all up in front, right near the stage.  During the encore, Stephin brought his dog out on stage with him, a little chihuahua named Irving.  He asked us all to be very quiet, because Irving was afraid of crowds.  I don't remember the song, but it was something Stephin sang all by himself, just him and Irving at a microphone in the middle of the stage.  No matter how quiet we were, Irving still got scared, and he started shaking and whimpering.  Stephin, without even a tiny hitch in the song, turned the dog around so that he couldn't see us, and then slowly tucked the dog under his shirt until the song was over.

Last night, Stephin Merritt explained his current theory on audience interaction.  "The audience doesn't... speak... [long pause] ... English.  There are some cognates, it might sound like they understand you, but they don't.  That's why you don't answer them when they talk to you."  Daniel Handler, filling in on accordion for a few songs, engaged us all in some audience participation during one of the songs from the Series of Unfortunate Events soundtrack. He asked us all to make pounding noises with our feet when the song tells us to run away, and to slump over in our seats when the song warns us we might die.  The people sitting in front of me, a group of highly stylized twentysomething hipsters, were the most enthusiastic pounders and slumpers in our section.  Before the show, watching this group file into their seats, I couldn't help smiling.  They looked so familiar, cats-eye glasses, an army jacket with a patch of the East German flag, aggressively cultivated sideburns, corduroy skirts and retro blouses.  They looked like people I used to know.  "I feel old," was what I said to the friend I was there with, but I'm not sure it's what I meant.  The sound on the new album is full of production and echo (there's a reason it's called Distortion), but when they played those songs onstage, just piano, cello, ukelele, and guitar, they didn't sound that different from the older songs.  Years go by, and everything changes, but it's all just pieces of the same whole.  That's what it felt like, pieces of the same whole.