Pictures from Testimonial Tour: Harvard

Here are some pictures from a stop on AIMS' testimonial tour, and here's a Radio Free Asia article on North Korea's military bunkers along the DMZ that is based on information provided by the refugee who is currently touring. I'll be posting more of the articles that come from the refugee's interviews during this tour, but I think that it would be inappropriate for me to report directly on the information that he has provided. For context, the refugee was a general (sanja) in the Korean military and the director of a military trading company. He possesses extensive knowledge of the government's actions and organization and of conditions in the country.

Guns and Butter, or Nukes and Genetically Modified Food

Two great diavlogs on the critical issues of our time over at Bloggingheads this week:

Robert Farley and John Mueller discuss the low probability of a nuclear attack and the negative political consequences of our excessive concern with nuclear weapons.

Michael Specter and Chris Mooney discuss denialism in science--why large segments of the public express hostility toward vaccines and GMOs and how we ought to contextualize concerns about these and other technologies.

FreeRice Toolbar

The FreeRice project has a new toolbar that you can download, with every five terms you search yielding 2,500 grains of rice for the hungry---up to 5,000 grains per day. The toolbar operates through Yahoo's search engine, so if you are like me and don't particularly like the Yahoo format, just look up 10 random search terms with the toolbar and then go back to your regularly scheduled Google programming. For people who don't have as much free time as they'd like to earn rice by playing the original game, it's a fast and easy way to help feed the hungry.

Yosemite in Fall

Some photos from a day trip---yes, they were all taken in the same field, but they're still very pretty:

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!