Etiquette Advice

Far be it from me to offer advice on etiquette.  I'm blunt, crass and occasionally unreasonable.  I've improved quite a bit from my twenties, though ("Let's think about that a little more before we implement it" vs. "That's a really stupid idea", for example).  And occasionally I ask for advice, like I'm about to do.  Yes, believe it or not I really don't know everything.  That's not a job requirement for blogging.  Which is a good thing, or the number of blogs would soon plummet to zero and there wouldn't be anybody around to argue with.

Here's my issue.  Let's say you're at a lecture.  I'm not an engineer, but I'm going to say it was a lecture about engineering, and let's say you're an engineer.  It's a really good presentation and you're very interested until about halfway through, for no reason you can tell, the presenter says something that's completely wrong.

I'm not just talking about matter of opinion wrong.  I'm not even talking Wrong on the Internet, which is a whole nother thing.  I'm talking scientifically wrong.  I'm talking the equivalent of an engineering lecturer saying that, just incidentally, E does not equal MC squared, it equals RB cubed.  (RB cubed. RB cubed. Hm, I'm getting hungry.)  Or, to be a little less esoteric, let's say the engineering presenter just told everybody that sound travels faster than light.  Which is, by the way, completely untrue, and has been scientifically disproven any number of times.

(It's also obvious.  Try sending a friend of yours about a football field away with a pair of cymbals and have your friend play the cymbals.  If you're watching, you will clearly see that the cymbals come together a second or two before you hear the clash. Why? Because light, which involves things you can see, travels faster than sound, which involves things you can hear.  And if you have a friend that is good-natured enough to play cymbals on a football field with you just so you can prove a point, then, hang onto that person.  Such friends are rare.)

What's more is how the lecturer announced this piece of laws-of-physics-bending news.  Not merely "Here's a fact," but, "Here's a fact that everyone else on the planet (or at least all engineers) already know.  You people are the only people on earth who don't already know this, and I'm doing you the great favor of telling you, so be grateful, already."

Let's say that after you get over being surprised, you look around to see how your fellow engineers are taking this bit of news.  You expect that most of them will look skeptical or be frowning.  Instead, they're all earnestly writing this down.  Well, why not.  Somebody has just said that black is white, that freedom is slavery, that peace is war, and nobody knew this before.  What's worse, the guy to your left says, "Man, this is fascinating.  I never knew half this stuff."

Okay, end of hypothetical and time for the question.  What do you do?

Seriously, is it ever okay to interrupt a lecturer?  Should I have held up my hand, like a polite elementary-school student, and then, after being duly called on, should I have said, "I'm sorry, ma'am, but you're wrong"?  Should I have brought up all the scientific evidence to the contrary (Google on a cell phone is a wonderful thing) and engaged her in a debate?  Should I have waited for a break, then approached the lectern (hopefully without getting tackled by security) and told her privately that she's mistaken and hope she corrects herself?  Or what, exactly?  What do you do?

I know what I did do, which is to say, nothing.  I sat there and watched my fellow engineers (okay, they weren't really engineers) take notes on this scientifically incorrect point and nod sagely as though they'd been handed a great truth. And I've been feeling bad about it ever since.  I mean, this is forty or fifty people that are now walking around with a completely incorrect concept about how the world works.  Who knows how much trouble it will cause them in the future? but on the other hand, I can pretty much guarantee that if  I had interrupted said lecturer, everybody there would remember nothing about sound being faster than light but everything about some fat chick interrupting the speaker about something scientific and, I don't know, a pair of cymbals and a football field.

Would that have been a good thing?  I have no clue.

So anyway, if there is a Miss Manners among us, or if some arcane book of etiquette actually covers this particular situation, I'd be golden if one of y'all would let me know.  In the meantime, I remain silent in the face of physics-changing factual errors.  Cheers.

Glasses, Horror, Particle Physics and Book o'the Decade

It's official: We are living in the Jetsons era.  I still don't have a flying car (Detroit's working on it, right after they finish filing for bankruptcy) but I have just done something unprecedented in the lives of modern human beings.  I have ordered glasses through the Internet.  Not sunglasses but actual glasses.

Seriously, I don't know if they had a parade when this service first became available but if they didn't, they should have.  The only thing worse than shopping for glasses is shopping for shoes.  (And no, I've never successfully ordered shoes from the Internet, but if SAS ever makes them available, it'll be time to break out the credit card.)  By the time I've eliminated all the frames that won't work with my prescription and all the ones that are butt-ugly, I'm usually stuck with one, maybe two choices, both of which make me look like a librarian.  And there's nothing wrong with looking like a librarian if you are one, but I'm not one.  The last pair of glasses I got new made my boss's boss call me "Darth Vader" for a week.  (Or was that the temporary shades I had to sport because I had posterior iritis?  I forget.)  Anyway, I was able to pick out a nice pair with plastic frames and springs, with a scratchproof coating (I've had bad experiences with those, but hey, try and try again) and UV protection for only about $150.00.  That's cheap, when we're talking about glasses.  I believe my last pair was about $250.

Anyway, that's one of the danger of ice storms: Online shopping.  Never mind traffic accidents and frostbite and ice-laden trees crashing through your roof: Beware Amazon.com.  You can't leave your house without risking a fall on your butt (I've fallen twice now) so you stay in your house, and if you have a credit card and an Internet connection, the siren call of merchandising is hard to ignore.  Especially this time of year, when you must express your love for your fellow beings through lots and lots of commerce.  If Christmas gifts were good enough for Baby Jesus, they're good enough for everybody else on the planet.  So bring it on.  Let's go to Wal-Mart and get Maced over a cheap Blu-Ray player.

That said, however, I also bought a book for my Nook.  (I love my Nook.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love my Nook?  I love my Nook.)  Barnes & Noble shells out a free Nook book every Friday, and often they're not that interesting but sometimes they are (ie, Kameron Hurley's "God's War," which, at least for me, created a monster). Last week's selection wasn't particularly interesting, so I bought a different one: Edge by Koji Suzuki.

Koji-san is known as the "Stephen King of Japan," but that's kind of a misnomer.  His books are scary but they're suspenseful first and, if I may say so, cerebral.  Koji-san is responsible for Ringu, remade in the U.S. as The Ring and starring Naomi Watts--one of my top five horror films and one which scared the pants off me, broke my heart and scared the pants off me again. (And there I was outside the theater, just after midnight, waddlin' around with a broken heart and no pants.)  So naturally I would be curious about Edge.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a rather clunky translation.  I'm of the opinion that if you're translating something from Language A to Language B, Language B better be your native language, and you ought to be able to write a little, too.  Because seriously: "Life in the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve." (Page 356.) Is that even a sentence?  Given the fact that one of the main characters is a publisher who specializes in translations, the clunky language is doubly ironic.

Apart from that, though, this is a hard book to put down.  It starts off slowly, like Japanese books sort of always do, but then it picks up speed until you're struggling to keep up with it, turning pages as fast as possible.  (Or clicking pages, in my case).  Mathematicians across the world are discovering that, inexplicably, the value of pi has changed.  The value of pi, by the way, is used for calculating everything from the radius of a circle to the mirrors on the Hubble Space Telescope.  If pi has changed, then there's something fundamentally wrong at the quantum level.  And it doesn't help that large numbers of people--from whole families to about a hundred people visiting a public garden--are disappearing without a trace. Throw in weird phenomena like a giant chasm suddenly opening in the earth in California and you can see how we might have a serious problem.  But what is that problem?  How did it start?  Where did it come from? What's going to happen? And on a planet where the only thing we've been able to do at the quantum level is start a nuclear chain reaction, how in hell are we supposed to fix it?

Truth to be told, we've done quite a bit of research at the quantum level (which is all about subatomic particles and how they move around and behave; not only are they unpredictable but they seem to move when they know you're watching them).  We know, for example, that since atoms are mostly empty space, it should be theoretically possible to put your hand through a solid wall.  The fact that for the most part, we can't is one of the great mysteries of physics.  And get this:  All these subatomic particles moving around seem to create time itself, and time theoretically should move backward as well as forward on its trek.  So why don't we have memories of the future?  Well, I'd posit that some of us do, and at the end of Edge, it seems that some of us not only remember the future, but act on it.  And about that I'll say no more because Edge has not just one but two twist endings.  I'm not the easiest person to surprise, but I never saw either of them coming.

So anyway, Edge by Koji Suzuki.  Book o' the Decade.  Check it out. And stay warm.

Newton's First Law of Seat Belts

Meters swum today: None. Got home at half past midnight.
Playing in the background: Enya, "Shepherd Moons"



Last night I saw my second-favorite astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, speak at UT Arlington. Yes, I realize not everybody has a favorite astrophysicist, much less two. Yes, I admit that I like Michio Kaku one nano more than Tyson because he figure skates. Am I shallow? Maybe. But anyway: It was such a treat to see Dr. Tyson live - and in cowboy boots, no less! I've read a couple of his books, seen him on TV a number of times, and as Dr. Tyson himself points out, there's only one astrophysicist per million people on Earth, so go see one speak whenever you can. And ask lots of questions!


Dr. Tyson's presentation was a departure from astrophysics, kind of, into a rather more earthly dilemma. As Americans, we pride ourselves on being the world leaders in math and science. However, and this is a quote, "We Americans have a fundamental disconnect between the country we think we are and the country we actually are." During the 50s and 60s, with Russia as our enemy and innovation seen primarily as a way to win wars, America was indeed the world leader. Since then, however, we've been losing ground - or rather, standing still as other countries pass us by. Tyson presented an unsettling picture of the decisions we've made in this regard and their consequences. He hasn't written a book about this yet, but his good friend Carl Sagan has. It's called The Demon Haunted World. Go get it, read it, and then come back to this blog post. Done? Good. We move on.


First, for those who don't actually believe that Americans are falling behind in math and science, Tyson presented some compelling evidence. Best example: Buildings in America, millions of them, that don't have a 13th floor. We have somehow agreed with each other to mislabel elevator buttons and lie about the actual height of our buildings because some people, who have no credible reason for this, are afraid of the number 13. Second best example: Actual headlines from various newspapers with obvious math errors. "Half Of Schools In District Below Average, Study Says." "FAA: 80% Of Airplane Crash Survivors Read Safety Sheet." Well, the first one's obvious. The second one's just meaningless, unless you can also state with a certainty that a lesser percentage of crash non-survivors read the safety sheet. Which you can't because they're dead. Oh, and here's my favorite: Slightly less than half of Americans don't "believe" in evolution. Um, hello? If I don't believe in gravity, will I float away?


Second, Tyson presented some of the consequences of our decision to cede the math and science innovations to Europe and China. Hurricane Katrina destroying New Orleans, for example. News flash, the hurricane didn't destroy New Orleans. The hurricane was over and gone. The failure of the levees destroyed New Orleans. Bad engineering destroyed New Orleans. Another example: The bridge on I-35 falling into the river. Tyson had a slide of this disaster, and he said, "I look at this and ask myself what country I'm living in." Probably the most poignant example, though, is all the stuff we're losing as a result. The opportunity to name new things. The economic progress that comes from new technology (witness the explosion of jobs to manufacture, and work on, computers since the 1970s.) The ability to defend ourselves against technologically superior enemies. We could very well descience ourselves out of existence.


I think everybody was pretty impressed with his talk, though I was a bit disheartened at one of the questions during the Q&A session (he called it "voir dire"). She asked if we should be afraid of bad things happening in the year 2012 or was it all a hoax. He said, "It's all a hoax. Next question." In all seriousness, though, he pointed out that the dreaded alignment of the center of our galaxy, the moon and the earth that will happen on December 21, 2012, which is supposed to be very very bad, happens every frick'n year on December 21. Too bad nobody asked me the question; I'd have said, "Oh, yeah, it'll be just like the Y2K thing. You probably remember, civilization came to a screeching halt, all our technology failed us, there was rioting in the streets, people were starving and that's why we're all living in grass huts now." (But Dr. Tyson may be my sarcasm equal. He should surpass me now that I'm trying to dampen the snarkitude.)


As far as science for the public, though, I've never seen anybody get across complex principles as easily as Dr. Tyson. He explained Newton's First Law of Motion as it relates to seat belts. Most people who refuse to wear seat belts have never had a course in physics. If they had, they'd know that when the car hits a brick wall and stops dead, their bodies - which, without the seat belt, are not attached to the car - keep going forward until they smash through the windshield. Why? Because objects in motion tend to want to continue to be in motion. Until they're stopped by a brick wall. Or a windshield. Which hurts. Have you ever run your face into a brick wall? Probably not. The fastest a human being can run - an Olympic sprinter, say - is about 23 miles an hour. So what happens if you hit your face into a brick wall at, say, 35 miles an hour? It's not pretty. Physics may save lives, people. Glory be to particles!