The latest Flavor-of-the-Month at the New York State Education Department is called "credit recovery." Here's a quote from NYSED's proposal regarding this provision:
"Sometimes students may come close to passing a course and may have deficiencies only in certain clearly defined areas of knowledge and skill. In those cases, it may not be necessary for the student to retake the entire course. Instead, the student might be permitted to make up those deficiencies, master the appropriate standards, and receive credit. Of course, this should only be allowed under carefully controlled conditions to ensure that the student does receive the opportunity to learn and does meet the required standards... In order to receive credit, the student must receive equivalent, intensive instruction in the deficiency areas of the course by a teacher certified in the subject area... The provisions above do not require specific seat time requirements for the make-up opportunity since the opportunity must be tailored to the individual student’s need. There is precedent for allowing a reduced amount of seat time in the context of summer school."
I find this troubling. The concept of credit recovery may be well-meaning -- although cynics, present company excepted of course, make a plausible case that the only impetus for this provision was to boost graduation rates. But however well-intentioned the policy is, its implementation is considerably problematic.
Consider, for example, a student who is failing my Regents (Introductory) Biology class. Let's say that this student has reached April, currently has an average of 31%, and suddenly has the realization that he's headed toward failing for the year. Under the provisions of credit recovery, I could be required to give him an opportunity to make up the work that he'd failed, so that he'd have a chance of passing for the year.
While the provision as drafted by NYSED states that he should receive "equivalent, intensive instruction," practically speaking, there is no way to do that. The school district has neither the funds nor the facilities to hire another teacher to go back and reteach this kid; the duties would necessarily fall on me, as the subject teacher. During what time would I do this? I already teach a full schedule - in fact, in my case, I am a section over the contractual limit. Further, could this provision require that I put together activities that he'd missed, failed, or simply not turned in - including labs? Lab activities almost always require the preparation of chemicals, equipment, and supplies, which would all have to be redone for the sake of a single kid. I believe that under this provision, teachers could be required to do exactly that.
Of course, in practice, that's not what would happen. Besides labs, what about activities that can't be replicated, such as in-class discussions, group activities, and so on? Between the time constraints and the simple impossibility of recreating a curriculum, sometimes months after it was initially presented, teachers will inevitably be forced into developing worksheets, problem sets, and other "seat work." In other words -- whether or not we feel it's justified or even educationally sound -- we'll be in the situation of being coerced by state mandate to provide inferior delivery of instruction just so students can receive credit.
Lest you think that this is just a case of yours truly being a hysterical alarmist, there are places in the state where this is already being done, and it's playing out exactly this way. A teacher at Jamaica High School (New York City School District) quipped, "You shouldn't drive by our school with your window rolled down, because someone will toss a diploma in." Students there were being awarded credit for an entire course they'd failed by showing up for nine hours, total, during winter and spring break.
It's a case where everyone loses; the school districts' feet are being held to the fire by NYSED to develop some kind of policy, but at the same time they have no money to hire additional staff, and the current staff are already stretched to the limit. The kids figure out very quickly how to game the system -- you can take a whole year off, fail a course, and then get credit for putting in nine hours of busy work the following year. Tell me that won't be taken advantage of.
Myself, I have a philosophical problem with this, and one that goes deeper than the practical issue of how to implement the policy fairly. My feeling is that there's nothing inherently wrong with failing at something; it's a sign that you need to get your ass in gear and work harder the next time. If you're learning to ride a horse, and you fall off, the only thing that can fix your problem is getting back up on the horse and figuring out what you did that led to your falling off, and making sure you don't do that again. What credit recovery does is a little like your trainer saying, "Oh, you fell off? Well, no problem. Get up on this merry-go-round horse for a few minutes, and we'll all pretend that you can ride."
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The circle game
Yesterday, the news carried reports of an eye-opening first-ever event, an occurrence which some were attributing to supernatural forces, others calling a Sign of the End Times, and most scientists dismissing as a hoax: Ann Coulter said something nice about a Democrat.
No, not really, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe that that had happened. What actually occurred is that the country of Indonesia had its first recorded crop circle. And, predictably, the alien-invasion crowd immediately converged upon the spot, claiming that this was conclusive proof at last.
Villagers in Sleman, Yogyakarta, woke last Sunday morning to find that a rice field had been adorned with a pattern of circles and triangles seventy meters in diameter. The stalks were flattened in the "combed-down" fashion typical of earlier crop circles, and the symmetrical pattern soon became a magnet for gawkers.
(Check out a photograph of the circle here.)
The Jakarta Post quotes a local, Cahyo Utomo, as saying, "I think they were left by an alien spacecraft, like I saw on TV."
Well, far be it from me to contradict Mr. Utomo or his television, but it's already been demonstrated that crop circles can be made fairly quickly by a couple of guys with nothing more than a board, a spotting scope, and some rope; a couple of old English dudes, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, even demonstrated back in 1991 how they had made a few themselves. Shortly after that, a couple of high school kids in Hungary were actually arrested for crop damage after making one, and a guy named Matt Ridley published an article in none other than Scientific American describing how he'd made several single-handed. You'd think that at that point, people would go, "Oh. Humans make these. I see now. How silly of me to think it was aliens."
You'd be wrong.
Since Bower and Chorley confessed on the BBC back in '91, the crop circle phenomenon has exploded, and the theories about what is making them have progressively gotten wilder and wilder. The most prosaic-minded theorists -- and this isn't saying much -- suggest that they're caused by some sort of localized, extremely symmetrical weather phenomenon. Basically, what they describe is sort of an OCD tornado. From there, the hypotheses sail on out into the void, and include visitations by aliens, signs left by secret societies as messages to other, even more secret societies, and (my personal favorite) attempts at communication with humans by Mother Earth herself.
My problem with all of these explanations, besides the obvious one that even writing them down makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it, is that if crop circles represent some sort of communique -- whether from aliens, the Illuminati, or Gaia -- they're a pretty obscure communique. Some of them are quite beautiful -- in fact, I've got a photograph of a crop circle as the desktop background of my computer at school, much to the wry amusement of my students. However, if they mean anything, it certainly isn't immediately obvious what that might be.
My general thought is, if aliens were trying to announce their presence, there are more direct ways to do it. Landing a spaceship in Times Square, for example, would certainly do the trick. Why a highly-developed, technological race would take the time and trouble to fly across the light years of interstellar vacuum, and then get to Earth, flatten a bunch of cornstalks, and fly away, I have no idea.
In any case, the woo-woos have been so stirred up by this incident that officials in Indonesia were prompted to take action -- the Indonesian National Atomic Energy Agency was so flooded by phone calls demanding that they investigate the site that they reluctantly sent someone out with a Geiger counter, which (surprise!) didn't register anything. Once again, what you'd hope would be the response -- "Oh, okay, I guess it wasn't an atomic-powered alien spacecraft" -- didn't happen. Most folks seemed to say, "Wow! Those aliens sure are pretty tricky, to come and go and leave no traces of radiation!"
Anyhow, as with all of these events, sooner or later the hype will fade, and the woo-woos will return to their crystal-lined, pyramid-shaped houses, and all will quiet down until the next time some college kids get into a field with a board and some rope. Maybe eventually, people will begin to see that these really are human-generated pranks, and not of paranormal origin, and will begin to take a more skeptical view of these sorts of things. Or maybe Ann Coulter will say something nice about a Democrat. Given a choice, I'd put my money on the latter happening first.
No, not really, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe that that had happened. What actually occurred is that the country of Indonesia had its first recorded crop circle. And, predictably, the alien-invasion crowd immediately converged upon the spot, claiming that this was conclusive proof at last.
Villagers in Sleman, Yogyakarta, woke last Sunday morning to find that a rice field had been adorned with a pattern of circles and triangles seventy meters in diameter. The stalks were flattened in the "combed-down" fashion typical of earlier crop circles, and the symmetrical pattern soon became a magnet for gawkers.
(Check out a photograph of the circle here.)
The Jakarta Post quotes a local, Cahyo Utomo, as saying, "I think they were left by an alien spacecraft, like I saw on TV."
Well, far be it from me to contradict Mr. Utomo or his television, but it's already been demonstrated that crop circles can be made fairly quickly by a couple of guys with nothing more than a board, a spotting scope, and some rope; a couple of old English dudes, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, even demonstrated back in 1991 how they had made a few themselves. Shortly after that, a couple of high school kids in Hungary were actually arrested for crop damage after making one, and a guy named Matt Ridley published an article in none other than Scientific American describing how he'd made several single-handed. You'd think that at that point, people would go, "Oh. Humans make these. I see now. How silly of me to think it was aliens."
You'd be wrong.
Since Bower and Chorley confessed on the BBC back in '91, the crop circle phenomenon has exploded, and the theories about what is making them have progressively gotten wilder and wilder. The most prosaic-minded theorists -- and this isn't saying much -- suggest that they're caused by some sort of localized, extremely symmetrical weather phenomenon. Basically, what they describe is sort of an OCD tornado. From there, the hypotheses sail on out into the void, and include visitations by aliens, signs left by secret societies as messages to other, even more secret societies, and (my personal favorite) attempts at communication with humans by Mother Earth herself.
My problem with all of these explanations, besides the obvious one that even writing them down makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it, is that if crop circles represent some sort of communique -- whether from aliens, the Illuminati, or Gaia -- they're a pretty obscure communique. Some of them are quite beautiful -- in fact, I've got a photograph of a crop circle as the desktop background of my computer at school, much to the wry amusement of my students. However, if they mean anything, it certainly isn't immediately obvious what that might be.
My general thought is, if aliens were trying to announce their presence, there are more direct ways to do it. Landing a spaceship in Times Square, for example, would certainly do the trick. Why a highly-developed, technological race would take the time and trouble to fly across the light years of interstellar vacuum, and then get to Earth, flatten a bunch of cornstalks, and fly away, I have no idea.
In any case, the woo-woos have been so stirred up by this incident that officials in Indonesia were prompted to take action -- the Indonesian National Atomic Energy Agency was so flooded by phone calls demanding that they investigate the site that they reluctantly sent someone out with a Geiger counter, which (surprise!) didn't register anything. Once again, what you'd hope would be the response -- "Oh, okay, I guess it wasn't an atomic-powered alien spacecraft" -- didn't happen. Most folks seemed to say, "Wow! Those aliens sure are pretty tricky, to come and go and leave no traces of radiation!"
Anyhow, as with all of these events, sooner or later the hype will fade, and the woo-woos will return to their crystal-lined, pyramid-shaped houses, and all will quiet down until the next time some college kids get into a field with a board and some rope. Maybe eventually, people will begin to see that these really are human-generated pranks, and not of paranormal origin, and will begin to take a more skeptical view of these sorts of things. Or maybe Ann Coulter will say something nice about a Democrat. Given a choice, I'd put my money on the latter happening first.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
When the volcano blows
The latest from the "News That Isn't Actually News" department is: We are all going to be killed in a massive eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano! It could happen tomorrow! Giant ash clouds! Searing bursts of gas vaporizing the entire state of Wyoming! We should prepare for the worst! Or at least run about, making flailing arm gestures, writing overhyped articles and webpages, and overusing exclamation points!
For some reason, recently this non-story seems to be all over the news. I've seen more than one reference to this geologic hotspot just in the last couple of days, usually accompanied by photos of the geysers and hot springs, or (in one case) by a photo of Yellowstone Lake, captioned, "It SEEMS peaceful... but hidden beneath its pristine beauty is a RED HOT MAGMA CHAMBER JUST WAITING TO BLOW."
Well, yeah, okay, technically I have to admit that they're correct. The Yellowstone Supervolcano is a pretty scary place. The last time it erupted, about 640,000 years ago, it produced about two thousand times the volume of ash that Mt. St. Helens did. It is reasonable to find the prospect of this happening again terrifying. The direct damage from the blast, the secondary damage from the ash cloud, and the climate changes which would ensue, would be devastation on a level humanity has never seen before. (The eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which killed 71,000 people directly and led to the "Year Without a Summer," in which there were hard freezes in July across Europe and North America, would be a mere firecracker by comparison.)
However, the hysterical tone of some of these articles, which imply that we're "overdue for an eruption" of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, is completely unwarranted. For example, one source I read stated that the ground was rising over the magma chamber at "a rate of three inches a year," and "new geysers were forming," and that this was indicative that an eruption was imminent. This is ridiculous, as this source conveniently omitted mention of the fact that some areas over the magma chamber are actually subsiding; and in any volcanically active area, new geysers form frequently, and others cease to flow, and this isn't indicative of anything other than the area is experiencing movement of magma -- which we already knew, because that's what "volcanically active" means.
The whole idea of "overdue for an eruption" implies that volcanoes erupt on some kind of schedule, which is nonsense. The three known eruptions of the Yellowstone Supervolcano occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago -- gaps of 800,000 and 660,000 years, respectively. Even presuming that there was some kind of pattern, we're still 20,000 years shy of the previous gap, and 160,000 years shy of the longer one. But, of course, a headline that says, "Massive Volcano Could Erupt Now or 160,000 Years From Now!" doesn't make people read any further.
And I'm not even going to go into the websites that claim that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is connected to (1) the 2012 lunacy, (2) the prophecies from Revelations, (3) conspiracy theories, or (4) all of the above. If you Google "Yellowstone Supervolcano" you can find plenty of those sites for yourselves, but if you read them you have to promise me you'll try your best not to find them plausible.
In any case, if you have a vacation planned to Yellowstone, it's probably a bit premature to cancel it. With apologies to Jimmy Buffett, I don't know where I'm-a-gonna go when the volcano blows, because chances are I'll be dead and gone before anyone has to worry about it.
For some reason, recently this non-story seems to be all over the news. I've seen more than one reference to this geologic hotspot just in the last couple of days, usually accompanied by photos of the geysers and hot springs, or (in one case) by a photo of Yellowstone Lake, captioned, "It SEEMS peaceful... but hidden beneath its pristine beauty is a RED HOT MAGMA CHAMBER JUST WAITING TO BLOW."
Well, yeah, okay, technically I have to admit that they're correct. The Yellowstone Supervolcano is a pretty scary place. The last time it erupted, about 640,000 years ago, it produced about two thousand times the volume of ash that Mt. St. Helens did. It is reasonable to find the prospect of this happening again terrifying. The direct damage from the blast, the secondary damage from the ash cloud, and the climate changes which would ensue, would be devastation on a level humanity has never seen before. (The eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which killed 71,000 people directly and led to the "Year Without a Summer," in which there were hard freezes in July across Europe and North America, would be a mere firecracker by comparison.)
However, the hysterical tone of some of these articles, which imply that we're "overdue for an eruption" of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, is completely unwarranted. For example, one source I read stated that the ground was rising over the magma chamber at "a rate of three inches a year," and "new geysers were forming," and that this was indicative that an eruption was imminent. This is ridiculous, as this source conveniently omitted mention of the fact that some areas over the magma chamber are actually subsiding; and in any volcanically active area, new geysers form frequently, and others cease to flow, and this isn't indicative of anything other than the area is experiencing movement of magma -- which we already knew, because that's what "volcanically active" means.
The whole idea of "overdue for an eruption" implies that volcanoes erupt on some kind of schedule, which is nonsense. The three known eruptions of the Yellowstone Supervolcano occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago -- gaps of 800,000 and 660,000 years, respectively. Even presuming that there was some kind of pattern, we're still 20,000 years shy of the previous gap, and 160,000 years shy of the longer one. But, of course, a headline that says, "Massive Volcano Could Erupt Now or 160,000 Years From Now!" doesn't make people read any further.
And I'm not even going to go into the websites that claim that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is connected to (1) the 2012 lunacy, (2) the prophecies from Revelations, (3) conspiracy theories, or (4) all of the above. If you Google "Yellowstone Supervolcano" you can find plenty of those sites for yourselves, but if you read them you have to promise me you'll try your best not to find them plausible.
In any case, if you have a vacation planned to Yellowstone, it's probably a bit premature to cancel it. With apologies to Jimmy Buffett, I don't know where I'm-a-gonna go when the volcano blows, because chances are I'll be dead and gone before anyone has to worry about it.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Alone again, naturally
Today's London Telegraph features a story in which Dr. Howard Smith, senior astrophysicist at Harvard University, has stated that alien life is almost certainly impossible based upon the conditions on the exoplanets so far discovered.
"We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different than our own," Smith was quoted as saying. "They are very hostile to life as we know it."
So according to Smith, we're... all alone. *cue sad music*
Hang on a second. I think, Dr. Smith, that we may not want to resign ourselves to being Lost in Space quite yet.
We have, at last check, found about five hundred exoplanets. Most of them are of the "hot Jupiter" variety -- large, probably gaseous planets, orbiting very close to their sun. The reason that we've preferentially found those has nothing to do with their being likely to be more common in the universe; it's that they're easier to find, because they create a greater gravitational perturbation of the star they orbit. Small, rocky worlds, such as the Earth, are harder to detect, although we're beginning to be quite good at that, too. When the data from NASA's Kepler satellite is released in a few weeks, it is expected to include information about hundreds of additional, newly-discovered exoplanets.
However, there's a far bigger problem with Dr. Smith's statement than this.
I must say that I would not have expected a prominent scientist to make quite such a catastrophically faulty inference. In order to make an inference, you're supposed to take into account a very important factor -- what your sample size is. Dr. Smith's mistake is analogous to someone going through my house, and finding that I own twelve flutes, recorders, tinwhistles, and so on, and concluding that that there must be 80 billion wind instruments on the planet Earth.
"Wait," you might be saying. "That's a bad comparison -- no one would be so foolish as to take a sample size of One Person and extrapolate it to all 6.7 billion people on Earth."
Okay, fine. Point made. Let's see how Dr. Smith's inference compares to that one.
There are something on the order of a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, and each of those has maybe a billion stars. (This information is from Cornell's astrophysics faq website, if you're wondering about my sources.) This means that there are potentially one hundred billion billion -- that's ten followed by twenty zeroes -- stars in the observable universe...
... and we've surveyed about a thousand of them.
So Dr. Smith's sample size is a thousand, out of a hundred billion billion. This comes to not one out of 6.7 billion, which was the sample size in my ridiculous inference about wind instruments, but one out of one hundred million billion.
There are so many stars in the universe that if we surveyed one star system every second of every day; 365 days a year; no time off for holidays; no potty breaks, for cryin' out loud -- it would take one hundred trillion years to finish.
And Dr. Smith thinks a thousand stars is an adequate sample size to conclude that we're alone in the universe? Oh, the pain, the pain...!
It's a little like my climbing on to my roof, and looking around, and saying, "No wombats in my back yard! No wombats in my neighbor's yard! In fact, no wombats anywhere to be seen! I guess wombats don't exist."
I know it's tempting to draw conclusions quickly; patience is not a notable human trait. However, a mark of a skeptical mind is the willingness to suspend belief and disbelief -- to be completely comfortable with saying, perhaps indefinitely, "the jury's still out on this one." I am frequently asked by students if I "believe" in various things -- UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, god... and my usual answer is, "I neither believe in, nor disbelieve in, anything for which I have no concrete evidence of any kind. If you want, however, we can discuss how likely I think those things are."
All of which brings me to a comment I've made before; the world would be a far better place if people had more facts and fewer beliefs.
"We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different than our own," Smith was quoted as saying. "They are very hostile to life as we know it."
So according to Smith, we're... all alone. *cue sad music*
Hang on a second. I think, Dr. Smith, that we may not want to resign ourselves to being Lost in Space quite yet.
We have, at last check, found about five hundred exoplanets. Most of them are of the "hot Jupiter" variety -- large, probably gaseous planets, orbiting very close to their sun. The reason that we've preferentially found those has nothing to do with their being likely to be more common in the universe; it's that they're easier to find, because they create a greater gravitational perturbation of the star they orbit. Small, rocky worlds, such as the Earth, are harder to detect, although we're beginning to be quite good at that, too. When the data from NASA's Kepler satellite is released in a few weeks, it is expected to include information about hundreds of additional, newly-discovered exoplanets.
However, there's a far bigger problem with Dr. Smith's statement than this.
I must say that I would not have expected a prominent scientist to make quite such a catastrophically faulty inference. In order to make an inference, you're supposed to take into account a very important factor -- what your sample size is. Dr. Smith's mistake is analogous to someone going through my house, and finding that I own twelve flutes, recorders, tinwhistles, and so on, and concluding that that there must be 80 billion wind instruments on the planet Earth.
"Wait," you might be saying. "That's a bad comparison -- no one would be so foolish as to take a sample size of One Person and extrapolate it to all 6.7 billion people on Earth."
Okay, fine. Point made. Let's see how Dr. Smith's inference compares to that one.
There are something on the order of a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, and each of those has maybe a billion stars. (This information is from Cornell's astrophysics faq website, if you're wondering about my sources.) This means that there are potentially one hundred billion billion -- that's ten followed by twenty zeroes -- stars in the observable universe...
... and we've surveyed about a thousand of them.
So Dr. Smith's sample size is a thousand, out of a hundred billion billion. This comes to not one out of 6.7 billion, which was the sample size in my ridiculous inference about wind instruments, but one out of one hundred million billion.
There are so many stars in the universe that if we surveyed one star system every second of every day; 365 days a year; no time off for holidays; no potty breaks, for cryin' out loud -- it would take one hundred trillion years to finish.
And Dr. Smith thinks a thousand stars is an adequate sample size to conclude that we're alone in the universe? Oh, the pain, the pain...!
It's a little like my climbing on to my roof, and looking around, and saying, "No wombats in my back yard! No wombats in my neighbor's yard! In fact, no wombats anywhere to be seen! I guess wombats don't exist."
I know it's tempting to draw conclusions quickly; patience is not a notable human trait. However, a mark of a skeptical mind is the willingness to suspend belief and disbelief -- to be completely comfortable with saying, perhaps indefinitely, "the jury's still out on this one." I am frequently asked by students if I "believe" in various things -- UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, god... and my usual answer is, "I neither believe in, nor disbelieve in, anything for which I have no concrete evidence of any kind. If you want, however, we can discuss how likely I think those things are."
All of which brings me to a comment I've made before; the world would be a far better place if people had more facts and fewer beliefs.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Even if we're just dining in the dark
Last night, Carol and I participated in an event called "Dark Dining." The sixty participants were blindfolded, and then led in groups into a dining room, seated, and served a five-course meal. At no time were we allowed to remove our blindfolds, and in fact at the conclusion we were led out of the room in groups back to the room where we started -- never to see the place where we ate dinner (unless at some time in the future, we cheat and go back there).
The whole idea was to heighten our sensory experience by depriving us of one of our senses, the one that in fact we require the least in order to enjoy a good meal. You might think that it would have been a messy affair, but to my knowledge there was not a single spill the whole evening. We did look kind of silly, however, to judge by a photograph taken by one of the wait staff:
Some of my impressions:
1) The thing I found the most disorienting was not having any idea of the physical space I was in. My sense of hearing is quite good and by the middle of the evening I was fairly certain that we were in a long, narrow room, but it was a very weird feeling not having any real sense of where I was, or where I was in relation to the objects and other people in the room. I did figure out that I was at the end of the table -- I suspected it fairly quickly by the pattern of sounds, but I didn't want to reach out my hand to find out and gut punch someone.
2) My sense of taste is really quite inaccurate. The big shocker of the night was dessert, which took me several bites to identify as chocolate. My first sense was that it was something a little sweet and a little bitter, but I believe that one of my neighbors said "chocolate" before I had decided that was what it was. This makes me wonder to what extent the visual sense does contribute to your sense of taste, priming the brain for what it will be experiencing.
3) It's almost impossible to turn off the brain's determination to create visual images. Terry and Kornelia, our dining companions across the table, were complete strangers to us, and Carol and I both found ourselves creating strong visual impressions of them despite having exactly zero hard evidence to go on. Need I add that neither of our mental images were even close?
4) It's really, really difficult to eat pot roast when you can't see what you're doing. The best technique is to spear a big piece and gnaw, caveman-style, chunks off of it. I figured, "what the hell, no one can see me but the wait staff, and they're probably used to this sort of thing."
5) My wife has a warped sense of humor. At several points, we were supposed to stop talking and listen to some music, and during that time the wait staff would do things like brush a hand across our shoulders, fan us with something, or walk around clinking glasses -- all to make us more aware of our other senses. So the next time the music played, Carol touched the back of my neck, and I thought, "ah, the wait staff is up to their tricks again." Then she stuck her finger in my ear. I have to admit, her aim was impeccable. Either that, or I have big ears.
All of this put my in mind of the Ganzfeld Experiments, done in the 1930s by psychologist Wolfgang Metzger. He had his subjects blindfolded and placed in sensory deprivation, or (in one variation) staring at a field of uniform color (the "ganzfeld," German for "complete field," of the name). In all cases, subjects reported heightened awareness, their electroencephalogram outputs changed, and some subjects hallucinated. (One wonders if those subjects thought a finger was being put into their ears.) The Ganzfeld Experiments were extended in the late 1970s by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem, who reported that subjects in sensory deprivation were capable of telepathy -- a finding that has been called seriously into question by skeptics, but remains an intriguing claim of what is supposedly "the strongest quantifiable evidence of telepathy to date."
Be that as it may, it was a fascinating evening, and one which forced me to slow down (physically and mentally) and really focus on what I was experiencing. And the food and wine was delicious. If you're interested in finding out more, or seeing if there's a dark dining experience near you, here's a link to the Dark Dining Project. Give it a try -- it'll be an unforgettable evening.
The whole idea was to heighten our sensory experience by depriving us of one of our senses, the one that in fact we require the least in order to enjoy a good meal. You might think that it would have been a messy affair, but to my knowledge there was not a single spill the whole evening. We did look kind of silly, however, to judge by a photograph taken by one of the wait staff:
Some of my impressions:
1) The thing I found the most disorienting was not having any idea of the physical space I was in. My sense of hearing is quite good and by the middle of the evening I was fairly certain that we were in a long, narrow room, but it was a very weird feeling not having any real sense of where I was, or where I was in relation to the objects and other people in the room. I did figure out that I was at the end of the table -- I suspected it fairly quickly by the pattern of sounds, but I didn't want to reach out my hand to find out and gut punch someone.
2) My sense of taste is really quite inaccurate. The big shocker of the night was dessert, which took me several bites to identify as chocolate. My first sense was that it was something a little sweet and a little bitter, but I believe that one of my neighbors said "chocolate" before I had decided that was what it was. This makes me wonder to what extent the visual sense does contribute to your sense of taste, priming the brain for what it will be experiencing.
3) It's almost impossible to turn off the brain's determination to create visual images. Terry and Kornelia, our dining companions across the table, were complete strangers to us, and Carol and I both found ourselves creating strong visual impressions of them despite having exactly zero hard evidence to go on. Need I add that neither of our mental images were even close?
4) It's really, really difficult to eat pot roast when you can't see what you're doing. The best technique is to spear a big piece and gnaw, caveman-style, chunks off of it. I figured, "what the hell, no one can see me but the wait staff, and they're probably used to this sort of thing."
5) My wife has a warped sense of humor. At several points, we were supposed to stop talking and listen to some music, and during that time the wait staff would do things like brush a hand across our shoulders, fan us with something, or walk around clinking glasses -- all to make us more aware of our other senses. So the next time the music played, Carol touched the back of my neck, and I thought, "ah, the wait staff is up to their tricks again." Then she stuck her finger in my ear. I have to admit, her aim was impeccable. Either that, or I have big ears.
All of this put my in mind of the Ganzfeld Experiments, done in the 1930s by psychologist Wolfgang Metzger. He had his subjects blindfolded and placed in sensory deprivation, or (in one variation) staring at a field of uniform color (the "ganzfeld," German for "complete field," of the name). In all cases, subjects reported heightened awareness, their electroencephalogram outputs changed, and some subjects hallucinated. (One wonders if those subjects thought a finger was being put into their ears.) The Ganzfeld Experiments were extended in the late 1970s by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem, who reported that subjects in sensory deprivation were capable of telepathy -- a finding that has been called seriously into question by skeptics, but remains an intriguing claim of what is supposedly "the strongest quantifiable evidence of telepathy to date."
Be that as it may, it was a fascinating evening, and one which forced me to slow down (physically and mentally) and really focus on what I was experiencing. And the food and wine was delicious. If you're interested in finding out more, or seeing if there's a dark dining experience near you, here's a link to the Dark Dining Project. Give it a try -- it'll be an unforgettable evening.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Haute wackiness
I am probably identifying myself as a philistine by saying this, but I just have to ask:
Are modern haute couture clothing designers kidding? Or what?
I was sitting at my computer this morning, reading the news, and I happened to notice a photograph (under "This Week in Photos") of a woman who appeared to be encased in a giant pot-scrubber. I clicked on the link, and was brought here. (Do click through the slides, although you might want to be aware that a few of them border on the Not Safe For Work, not only because some of them involve a lot of skin showing, but because you will probably laugh out loud and attract the attention of your boss.)
My overall impressions:
"Haute couture" must (contrary to my knowledge of French) mean "clothing that no one in his or her right mind would ever dream of wearing in public, for fear of being arrested for (1) indecent exposure, (2) striking an innocent bystander with a protruding garment part, (3) looking completely ridiculous, or (4) all of the above." Several of the models in the photographs look like they went to the Princess Amidala School of Design -- encase yourself in folds of starched cloth to the point that it becomes almost impossible to walk, and layer on the makeup with a mortar trowel. Others go for the minimalist approach; one of them is clothed in a tight fitting, brightly colored knit body-sock, but makes up for it by wearing an enormous, comical-looking sombrero. The male models, on the other hand, look like escapees from an Alternative Lifestyles Parade in San Francisco, and favor extremely tight, Speedo-style thongs that would leave most guys singing soprano. I also noticed that many of these models look extremely sullen. Now that I come to think of it, if I were forced to wear clothes like that, and then appear in public and have my photograph taken, I'd look sullen, too.
Then, I wondered: how much does this clothing cost? So I did some research, and I found out that the average haute couture outfit costs $20,000. That's right; it will set you back twenty grand, or more, for you to look either like an alien hooker or a Village People wannabee. With apologies to Billy Joel; you can't dress wacky till you spend a lot of money.
I have to wonder, country-boy uncultured hillbilly that I am; is this all some kind of massive joke? I wonder if Christian Dior and all of the other haute couture designers sit around with their design committees late at night, swigging Absolut straight from the bottle and saying, "Hey! I know! We could make a dress out of an old refrigerator carton! Just cut a hole in the top for her head, and two holes in the sides for her arms! She could wear an orange traffic cone on her head! Let's charge $30,000 for that one!" And then they all laugh like goons.
It may well be that I'm missing something here. I'm as much of a connoisseur of the female form as the next red-blooded male, so it leaves me a little mystified when I look at a shapely woman strutting her stuff and my only reaction is, "Huh?" It could be that you have to be at a certain level of sophistication, of savoir faire, to appreciate this sort of thing.
But no matter how hard I try, I can't imagine finding giant pot scrubbers and sombreros sexy.
Are modern haute couture clothing designers kidding? Or what?
I was sitting at my computer this morning, reading the news, and I happened to notice a photograph (under "This Week in Photos") of a woman who appeared to be encased in a giant pot-scrubber. I clicked on the link, and was brought here. (Do click through the slides, although you might want to be aware that a few of them border on the Not Safe For Work, not only because some of them involve a lot of skin showing, but because you will probably laugh out loud and attract the attention of your boss.)
My overall impressions:
"Haute couture" must (contrary to my knowledge of French) mean "clothing that no one in his or her right mind would ever dream of wearing in public, for fear of being arrested for (1) indecent exposure, (2) striking an innocent bystander with a protruding garment part, (3) looking completely ridiculous, or (4) all of the above." Several of the models in the photographs look like they went to the Princess Amidala School of Design -- encase yourself in folds of starched cloth to the point that it becomes almost impossible to walk, and layer on the makeup with a mortar trowel. Others go for the minimalist approach; one of them is clothed in a tight fitting, brightly colored knit body-sock, but makes up for it by wearing an enormous, comical-looking sombrero. The male models, on the other hand, look like escapees from an Alternative Lifestyles Parade in San Francisco, and favor extremely tight, Speedo-style thongs that would leave most guys singing soprano. I also noticed that many of these models look extremely sullen. Now that I come to think of it, if I were forced to wear clothes like that, and then appear in public and have my photograph taken, I'd look sullen, too.
Then, I wondered: how much does this clothing cost? So I did some research, and I found out that the average haute couture outfit costs $20,000. That's right; it will set you back twenty grand, or more, for you to look either like an alien hooker or a Village People wannabee. With apologies to Billy Joel; you can't dress wacky till you spend a lot of money.
I have to wonder, country-boy uncultured hillbilly that I am; is this all some kind of massive joke? I wonder if Christian Dior and all of the other haute couture designers sit around with their design committees late at night, swigging Absolut straight from the bottle and saying, "Hey! I know! We could make a dress out of an old refrigerator carton! Just cut a hole in the top for her head, and two holes in the sides for her arms! She could wear an orange traffic cone on her head! Let's charge $30,000 for that one!" And then they all laugh like goons.
It may well be that I'm missing something here. I'm as much of a connoisseur of the female form as the next red-blooded male, so it leaves me a little mystified when I look at a shapely woman strutting her stuff and my only reaction is, "Huh?" It could be that you have to be at a certain level of sophistication, of savoir faire, to appreciate this sort of thing.
But no matter how hard I try, I can't imagine finding giant pot scrubbers and sombreros sexy.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Your lying eyes
"I'll believe it if I see it with my own eyes."
How many times have you heard someone say that? The implication, of course, is that if you see it (or hear it), that you can't get fooled. What your senses tell you, and how your brain interprets those inputs, are pretty reliable.
Enter Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, who is the master of creating illusions that do things your eyes and brain say are impossible -- and all with no trickery, no CGI, using only cardboard, glue, and other ordinary items. Take a look at this video, in which marbles seem to roll uphill -- until he turns his little structure around and shows you that it's a trick of perspective. (For those of you who usually aren't inclined to check out links in posts, this one and the others in this post are a must-see.)
The thing that makes me watch that clip over and over is how absolutely convincing it is, even when you know what's going on. Something is happening in your brain when you see his little cardboard channels and platforms from one angle that makes it impossible to interpret it any other way than that the marbles are defying gravity. "Stop it," I tell myself. "First, you know that the Law of Gravity is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and second, you know how he did this!" But my brain stubbornly refused to cooperate, preferring instead its impossible explanation of anti-gravity.
For more of Sugihara's fantastic structures, go here and here -- I find the second of these so brain-bending that it almost makes me a little seasick.
All of this vividly illustrates a point I've made before; our sensory organs and brain are easily fooled. Just as in my earlier post regarding visual/auditory conflict and the McGurk effect, there are times when our brains can't handle the sensory input they're being given, and amazingly, the brain's response is to admit defeat immediately and say, "Okay, then, I guess the world doesn't work the way I thought it did." Given how easily the brain can be tricked into giving up something it's always been sure of -- gravitation, or in the case of the last video, the properties of structures lying in a plane -- is it any wonder that skeptical people disbelieve eyewitness testimony of the paranormal?
"It was a UFO!" someone says. "I saw it!" Or, "I saw the ghost come into the room and float across the floor and finally disappear through the wall." Well, as Sugihara shows, I might believe that you saw something. But whether your brain was correctly interpreting what your eyes detected is another matter entirely. So don't get grumpy with me if I ask for hard evidence of your UFO or ghost. It's just too simple to trick the human brain -- and scientific measuring devices are a heck of a lot less easy to fool.
How many times have you heard someone say that? The implication, of course, is that if you see it (or hear it), that you can't get fooled. What your senses tell you, and how your brain interprets those inputs, are pretty reliable.
Enter Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, who is the master of creating illusions that do things your eyes and brain say are impossible -- and all with no trickery, no CGI, using only cardboard, glue, and other ordinary items. Take a look at this video, in which marbles seem to roll uphill -- until he turns his little structure around and shows you that it's a trick of perspective. (For those of you who usually aren't inclined to check out links in posts, this one and the others in this post are a must-see.)
The thing that makes me watch that clip over and over is how absolutely convincing it is, even when you know what's going on. Something is happening in your brain when you see his little cardboard channels and platforms from one angle that makes it impossible to interpret it any other way than that the marbles are defying gravity. "Stop it," I tell myself. "First, you know that the Law of Gravity is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and second, you know how he did this!" But my brain stubbornly refused to cooperate, preferring instead its impossible explanation of anti-gravity.
For more of Sugihara's fantastic structures, go here and here -- I find the second of these so brain-bending that it almost makes me a little seasick.
All of this vividly illustrates a point I've made before; our sensory organs and brain are easily fooled. Just as in my earlier post regarding visual/auditory conflict and the McGurk effect, there are times when our brains can't handle the sensory input they're being given, and amazingly, the brain's response is to admit defeat immediately and say, "Okay, then, I guess the world doesn't work the way I thought it did." Given how easily the brain can be tricked into giving up something it's always been sure of -- gravitation, or in the case of the last video, the properties of structures lying in a plane -- is it any wonder that skeptical people disbelieve eyewitness testimony of the paranormal?
"It was a UFO!" someone says. "I saw it!" Or, "I saw the ghost come into the room and float across the floor and finally disappear through the wall." Well, as Sugihara shows, I might believe that you saw something. But whether your brain was correctly interpreting what your eyes detected is another matter entirely. So don't get grumpy with me if I ask for hard evidence of your UFO or ghost. It's just too simple to trick the human brain -- and scientific measuring devices are a heck of a lot less easy to fool.
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