Tripping with Popular Scientists

. . . or, How to Make Carl Sagan Sound Like Kermit the Frog:

Another video with Kermit and Stephen Hawking here, plus more content at the Symphony of Science website (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily)

In Praise of Tramadol

Tom Barnett has a post praising the non-narcotic painkiller, and I must wholeheartedly concur with his opinion:

Started it yesterday and it was like flipping a switch from screwed-up to normal: ate normal, got tired normal, slept normal (no weird dreams), felt hungry in a normal way when I got up (no nausea), and felt rested when I got up (instead of just plain scared). In short, a drug that truly promotes recovery instead of just holding the line on pain. The downside is minor: the slightest fuzz that is very easy for me to navigate and punch through as required for thinking (like a semi-bad allergy late-afternoon).

Non-narcotic, centrally-acting analgesic, Tramadol goes by many names.

It's calling card: it mimics the actions of opioids (they call it a "stripped down version" synthetic version of Codeine) but, in chemical terms, does not belong to that class.

What I know: it masks the pain very effectively and produces a mild sense of euphoria but something way short of the fuzzy elevation you get with the codeine derivatives. And the side-effect of depressed breathing is negligible--for me at least, whereas it was profound for the Vicoden/Percocet/etc. Ditto for any itchiness, constipation, etc.--all too mild to mention.

I only wish I had had it from the start. Would have made for a much easier weekend.

Apart from the obvious hesitation instilled in me by the fact that I'm not a physician, this really is the kind of medication that makes me want to run out and recommend it to anyone who is experiencing a similar level of pain. Because of nerve pain created by my bone disease, I've pretty much taken every opioid out there at one time or another, though never for very long before it became clear that the pain was preferable to the nausea, numbness, and mental fog that those medications create. I expected similar effects (or the ineffectiveness of most non-opioids) from Tramadol, but the results have been entirely different. 

First, the pain is *gone*---not just blunted, but gone, which is incredible. Second, for the five months that I've been taking it, it hasn't caused any nausea or numbness. Unlike Barnett's experience, the mental fuzziness and depressed breathing have been appreciable, but not so great as to make me even consider giving up a medication that works so well that I can actually walk around and even go running without pain for a few hours a day (I only take one dose because I worry about my body becoming habituated to it over time, which it is beginning to). If anyone is looking for a non-narcotic alternative to Vicoden, Codeine, etc., I highly recommend considering this medication.

Passage of the Day

From Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) by Thomas Hardy, an instant reminder of why Hardy is awesome:

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

(The image above is of fields in South West England, or "Wessex." Thomas Hardy revived the use of the ancient Saxon name for this area by making Wessex the fictionalized setting of his novels. h/t: Social Biking Blog)

Passage of the Day

From Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard, how the sciences-humanities (or Enlightenment-Romanticism) divide can turn academics into chauvanistic idiots:

VALENTINE: (Casually) Well, it's all trivial anyway.

BERNARD: What is?

VALENTINE: Who wrote what when . . . 

BERNARD: Trivial?

VALENTINE: Personalities.

BERNARD: I'm sorry---did you say trivial?

VALENTINE: It's a technical term.

BERNARD: Not where I come from, it isn't.

VALENTINE: The questions you're asking don't matter, you see. It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific Progress. Knowledge.

BERNARD: Really? Why?

VALENTINE: Why what?

BERNARD: Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?

VALENTINE: Is he serious?

HANNAH: No, he's trivial. Bernard ---

VALENTINE: (Interrupting, to BERNARD) Do yourself a favour, you're on a loser.

BERNARD: Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A greater philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars---big bangs, black holes---who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?

. . . If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.'

Valentine doesn't make much of a reply, but I came across this section of an interview with a newly tenured physicist in Anna Neumann's new book Professing to Learn that I think will serve the purpose. Actually, since this physicist recognizes the shared analytical mission of academics, his argument is more conciliatory than Valentine's would be:

I think physics . . . like any truly analytical discipline . . . is a study of the human mind. It's the study of what it means to be who you are. It's a study of your own person. And so by looking out there, I'm looking in here. And physics, to me, is an unbelievably precise and efficient and beautiful---incredibly beautiful---way of studying myself. And of studying others, other humans. . . To me, that's what it's all about. 

And it's similar with mathematics, and similar with philosophy. With philosophy, it's very explicit---you're asking questions about the human condition after all---and about the whole range of human emotions. With mathematics, you're studying conceptual structures . . . [and t]hough you're not studying the full range of human emotion, you're at least studying things which are in your head . . .  But physics [is] about things out [there]. But after all, we're made of those same things . . . [so] those things that we see out there, fundamentally replicate themselves in here [within oneself] . . . In studying the things out there, you're led to mathematical and philosophical ideas that, again, address the human condition. And truthfully, any focused thought [in any discipline] will address the human condition ---any rigorous focused thought.

(The painting above is "Et in Arcadia Ego" ("I am in Arcadia too") or "The Arcadian Shepherds" by Guercino, ca. 1628.)

Zimbabwe's Currency Loses Race to the Bottom

. . . by clutching its chest and falling down dead, as Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution reports:

As we went to press with Modern Principles: Macro we kept having to add zeroes to Zimbabwe's peak hyperinflation rate and move it up the table of world leaders.  In our final revision, Zimbabwe's inflation rate had hit 79,600,000,000% per month putting Zimbabwe in second place.  We wondered whether in our  second edition Zimbabwe would overtake the all time hyperinflater, Hungary (1945-1946) at 41,900,000,000,000,000% per month, but it was not to be.  As it turned out, we went to press just as the hyperinflation peaked and Zimbabwe's currency ceased to exist as a medium of exchange.

For those who are curious as to what an economy recovering from this level of hyperinflation looks like, Sokwanele offers a slideshow presentation on the current state of the Zimbabwean economy, prepared by economist John Robertson. Among other things, it features an IMF prediction of modest GDP growth this year to be followed by 15% growth in 2010, so Zimbabweans have good reason to be hopeful about their country's near-term economic future, if not about its political future.

Better Destruction of Pumpkins through Chemistry

Happy All Hallows' Eve everyone!

Proud to Be a Californian

Via Matthew Yglesias, Schwarzenegger responds to the curses of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano with a less direct, but no less childish message of his own in his veto of the assemblyman's bill:

Passage of the Day

From Unaccustomed Earth (2008) by Jhumpa Lahiri, a perfect setting for a doomed love affair:

They decide to go north, to Volterra, a town founded by Etruscans, and it was in that austere, forbidding, solitary place that they spent their remaining days together. They went in Kaushik's car, up the coast into Tuscany, then cutting through the misted blue Maremma and the white chalk hills of the Cecina Valley, climbing and descending a thin slip of road. Volterra appeared in the distance, perched on a cliff high above the open countryside like an island surrounded by land. The rough, restrained architecture, the coats of arms and the hard dark walls, were something new for Hema. The medieval buildings were more recent than the Forum, yet Volterra felt more remote, impervious to tourists and time. Rome had hidden them, enabled them, their affair one of thousands, but here she felt singled out, exposed. She also sensed an indifference; they were among a handful of people who seemed not to belong to Volterra, and she felt that the people who lived there were waiting for them, politely but firmly, to pass on.

. . . They looked down at the ruins of a Roman ampitheatre, and over the walls at the Balze, a precipice beneath which the earth had fallen away, once claiming a church, always threatening to take more of the town. Beneath the Porta all'Arco, the Etruscan gateway, three featureless blackened heads gazed down like sentinels upon them, and upon the world they had left behind.

There's a very E.M.-Forster-like quality to this section of one of Lahiri's short stories---the description of the scenery has qualities of the 19th century sublime, restrained by a modernist sensibility that seems to keep them in proportion with human events.

(The image above is of the cliffs around Volterra, Tuscany.)

The Poetics of Dismemberment

Marine Biologist Adrian Glover describes the study and disposal of a beached Minke whale (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily):

I am standing in the back of a large lorry, my feet submerged in a pool of blood, water and oil. The truck's container is open to a grey Welsh sky, but with high-sided walls to keep the blood and us hidden from view. I shout instructions to Nick, my PhD student, over the wind and rain: "Just climb on to its back and start cutting!" He looks doubtful. Our task lies stinking before us - a nine-metre whale corpse freshly pulled from the Bristol Channel.

The process of a human being cutting into the flesh of a whale is somehow distinct from the same process with other animals. Whales always seemed to me to have a strange kinship with humans, if not for the human-like cunning that Herman Melville attributed to them, then for their human-like separation from the modes of living that are typical of other animals. Their enormous physicality places them in a different sphere of existence just as the depth of our conscious reasoning places us in another, their large flesh and limited cognition distortions of our own. To "start cutting" into a whale's bone and sinew and its abundant, yielding but intractable tissue is an act that perhaps would not be best described in terms of the sacred or profane but as a kind of encompassment, both of the person's physical self as he stands "submerged in a pool of blood, water and oil" and of his mental self as he contemplates the enormity of the task before him, the taking apart of this fleshly distortion of himself who is still kindred to him in his isolation. 

So Long Soupy