Forgiveness

Being able to apologize when I’m at fault tends to make people like me more.

Being able to rationalize away my need to apologize tends to make me like myself more.

Citation(s) Needed: Receding Gums, Bright Colors, and Bloody Urine

Pretend you’re a primitive monkey. You’re jumping through the trees one fine afternoon, just generally doing that living that primate life. You come across a fruit tree! Oh joy of joys! Sugar, hoorah! Cheap, easy calories, and all for your-simian-self. However, you pause for a second. Weren’t your ancestors mostly nocturnal, ground dwelling scavengers? That is, they spent most of their lives in the dark, in environs where one doesn’t need such bourgeois luxuries like “color vision”. While this was a practical biological budgeting decision for your ancestors, it presents a problem for you. You don’t want to eat fruit that hasn’t fully ripened, but you can’t tell ripe fruit from unripe fruit without going by its color.

Fortunately, evolution has got your back. A couple gene duplication events at some point very early in primate evolution when combined with some time, and a whole lot of luck was all it took to give you color vision that’s the envy of the animal kingdom. You’ve got cone cells that’ll let you see in RED, BLUE, GREEN, and well, actually, that’s about it. Varying levels of those 3 colors form everything else. That’s not to say there isn’t some degree of variation among humans. Human females, for example, tend to be much better at discerning colors than human males. There is some evidence to suggest that 2-3% of women can actually see in 4 different colors ( tetrachromacy, as it’s called).

The development of color vision ends up having some bizarre effects on primate biochemistry. The one I want to focus on starts with the reduction in the need for endogenous antioxidants (compounds produced by the body to deal with oxidative damage). Let’s look at Vitamin C (ascorbic acid). Most mammals can produce ascorbic acid on their own (at a slight metabolic cost), but primates just can’t. Fruits are generally very high in Vitamin C, and because of our excellent color vision, it was wasteful to continue producing ascorbate. This does have a drawback. Take primates away from plants, and you get scurvy (ascorbate actually means “without scurvy”).

This wouldn’t be so bad, except it seems like there was another side effect. Uric acid, a minor component of urine used by the body to dispose of excess nitrogen, also acts as a potent antioxidant, and is naturally produced by the body. In other mammals, the enzyme uricase exists to oxidize it to allantoin, but higher primates can’t do that. Why? Well, some of the things done by endogenous ascorbate just can’t be replaced by dietary ascorbate. So, the body comes up with a way to boost levels of urates to compensate. As a result, primates tend to have higher levels of uric acid. Urates tend to be pretty insoluble in water, so they form crystals. When this happens in our joints, we get gout (effectively unique to primates). When this happens in our bladders, we get kidney stones. So if you ever start urinating blood, just blame it on your fruit crazy monkey ancestors.

 

Citation(s) Needed: Expiration Dates

The world is ending! Y’know, eventually. I mean, it’s probably ending, right?  The matter of the ultimate fate of the universe is the domain of cosmology. As a field dominated by confusing jargon, untestable predictions, and hand-wavey black boxes, cosmology hasn’t come to a consensus about just what’s going to happen, but here are a few possible outcomes.

The first idea has its roots in 19th century thermodynamics. According to the second law, entropy in the universe is bound to increase. On net, the universe will become less capable of doing useful work as it approaches complete thermodynamic equilibrium. Star formation will cease, and life will become impossible. Supposedly stable atoms like protium decay over such  long periods. Atoms just don’t last forever. Even black holes will evaporate over time due to Hawking radiation. This has been called the heat death of the universe, and is likely an unavoidable consequence if the universe functions as a closed thermodynamic system (this is another one of those definite maybes). Of course, this will take a VERY long time. Estimates say we have between 10^12 and 10^14 years (between 100 and 10,000 times the current age of the universe).

The second idea is similar to the first, but accounts for the fact that the universe is expanding, and at an ever accelerating rate due to a mysterious force called “dark energy”. What is dark energy? Why, it’s the thing that makes the universe expand (good job, cosmologists)! Given that the universe is constantly expanding in this case, it may never reach total equilibrium. It will, however, become extremely cold. Asymptotically close to absolute zero cold (-273°C/0 Kelvin). As matter and energy become more spread out, the average temperature of space will inevitably fall. You can call this the “big freeze”.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The Poincare Recurrence Theorem tells us that the universe will return to its initial state after mind-bendingly long periods of time. I’d quote you a figure, but it is literally the largest period of time ever discussed in a published physics article, and would require bizarre notation to even display. If you want a more unconventional take on the end of the universe I’d recommend Asimov’s short story “The Last Question”.

 

Citation(s) Needed: Multivitamins

This was originally written for the science column of my school’s newspaper. It was my first shot and I hadn’t quite figured out how to present it (I feel the subsequent articles are better). The title comes from me not being given enough space to include a bibliography, but it also justifies me not actually fact-checking anything I said. I’m pretty sure nothing I said is blatantly wrong, but take it with a couple shakers of salt. 

You may have heard that current multivitamins don’t do much to help healthy non-deficient people. This is technically true, but not the most complete account of it. The evidence tells us that health outcomes are not improved, and are possibly even slightly worsened by taking multivitamins. The research available has some methodological problems, but it’s indicative of something.

 

Is that it then? Are multivitamins just useless? I don’t think so. Not necessarily at least. Referring back to the original sentences, let’s take a look at the two qualifiers I used. The first one, “current”, is quite important. Most of the multivitamins studied contain excessive quantities of some nutrients, even approaching toxic levels. Vitamin E, for example, is known to be toxic at daily dosages of 400 mg, yet it’s not uncommon for multivitamins to contain that much. It’s not as if it’s impossible for a supplement to improve health outcomes. The anticarcinogenic effects of selenium supplementation are well documented. It could very well be the case that modern formulations are just so awful as to cover-up the good with the bad.

 

The other point that deserves mention is the idea that your typical westerner isn’t deficient. Now, as a rule of thumb, the official requirement of a nutrient is a low-end estimate (Vitamin D being a good example, but that’s a story for another time). With this is mind, the official daily allowance of potassium is 4700 mg. To get that from diet, one would need to eat a dozen bananas a day. Practically everyone is deficient, and that’s just one nutrient. Proper supplementation could help to alleviate this.

 

This issue deserves a more nuanced discussion, but our time is short. The simple fact of the matter is that, with the situation today, it probably isn’t worth it to take a normal store bought multivitamin. As we learn more about nutrition, this could change, but I’d recommend sticking to specific supplements for now.

Conceptual Physics

You want to know what it’s like to climb a mountain, but for whatever reason you can’t. You decide to try to emulate this experience by walking down the street. In a lot of ways it’s  similar. You’re moving your legs, looking at stuff, etc. After a while, you may start to feel pretty good. “I’m a mountaineer! This is so cool!”. Maybe you even get convinced that because you’ve walked down the street, you actually understand what it’s like to climb a mountain, and you’re a little confused. It’s nice and all, but you don’t really see what all the fuss is about. And hey, it’s not difficult at all. Anyone can do this!

Even if you don’t fall prey to this sort of false equivocation, you’re still missing out on a lot. Yes, it takes time to climb mountains, and it can be very, very hard. But the feeling of awe and accomplish you get when you reach the summit and look at the world beneath you makes it all worth it. You understand what it’s like to climb a mountain in a much more profound way, and your relationship with the universe has forever been altered.

That’s what it’s like to learn physics without math.

The relative death tolls of suicide and masturbation

In the US, deaths from male masturbation outnumber deaths from female suicides. Apparently “thirty percent of suicides by males between age 12 and 20 are attributed to auto erotic asphyxiation, and that number is possibly low. Considering the fact that family members usually find the bodies, and have been known to clean up the evidence and report the incident as a suicide its difficult to pinpoint the number”. Since the suicide death rate is 3-10 times higher among males than among females, more males die from only autoerotic asphyxiation than females do from suicide. That is all. Sources: http://www.familyfirstaid.org/suicide.html http://voices.yahoo.com/auto-erotic-asphyxiation-today-3467267.html?cat=7

Misunderstanding the Flynn Effect

http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence

The main point that the article seems to be trying to get across is that because IQ scores have risen over time, IQ can’t be genetic in origin. Yes, scores on a g-loaded test rose. Environmental  improvements are almost certainly the cause of this. However, no one claims that IQ is a purely genetic phenomenon, that wouldn’t make sense. Of course environment effects IQ! If we lived in a world where half of all babies had their heads beaten with hammers, I would expect that the average raw performance on IQ tests would be a good deal lower and much more a result of environment than other factors.  The claim is that the variance observed in IQ in modern societies is largely heritable (read: a product of genetic and epigenetic variation). The heritability of IQ (or rather, the variance of IQ attributable to genotype) is still extremely high.

I also don’t really buy the explanations they suggest for the Flynn Effect. Are they really trying to say that schooling is responsible for the improvements? That just doesn’t make sense. Had the Flynn effect been observed before compulsory education showing up, then there might have been something to it. Practice effects have long been known to exist in IQ testing. If you give a Raven’s style pencil-and-paper IQ test to someone who’s never had any sort of test before, then taking their score at face value might be misleading. Of course, that’s not what the article was looking at. They’re looking at young adults in the 1960s. Nearly all of those kids would have had plenty of experience with tests.

They also suggest the increasing demand for abstract thinking as a driver of the Flynn effect. This argument sort of reminds of Steven Johnson’s novel-but-unconvincing idea that rising IQs are a result of the growing complexity of popular culture. These sorts of arguments are a bit better, and there may very well be something to them. Honestly, I don’t know. That being said, it’s not like this reason is anymore convincing than others that have been proposed. Lead levels (known to be associated with childhood IQ drops) in the environment have fallen. Infections in childhood can stunt brain development, so improvements in healthcare for infants, as revealed by the much reduced infant mortality rate, are another possible source of this rise. People may also just be better nourished. There’s lots of stuff at work that the article doesn’t give the proper attention to.

And finally there’s the IQ-doesn’t-matter thing. That’s just empirically not true. It predicts tons of useful stuff.