Smooth Pebbles

This Blog Has Moved

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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:03 AM •

Farewell to Seed SciBlog -- and Why I Don't Blog So Much Lately

Category: Culture of science

A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore.

With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home on Seed's Scienceblogs and return to my own, quieter venue You can find my blog at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I expect to post a few times a month. But in light of how little I've posted here lately, Seed and I have amiably agreed that I should surrender this space here, as my sparse approach to blogging doesn't seem to match well with a blog site so busy. I should note this truly was a mutual decision, which we both arrived at more or less simultaneously, and Seed has been graceful and gracious about the whole thing.

Why so few posts? The proximate reason is that I've been extremely busy with magazine assignments, a book proposal, managing and editing Mind Matters , the expert-written review site I founded at the Scientific American web site, pulling far less than my share in raising my splendid kids, and, praise God summer has returned, playing baseball on Sundays.

Underlying that, to be quite honest, are increasing doubts about the wisdom of me spending time blogging. I have often found it fun, and a couple times blogging led me to stories I wouldn't otherwise have discovered or developed. But -- for me, anyway -- blogging has not proven a productive or deeply engaging way to write about science or the other things I care and know about enough to write about. For subjects with depth, the form feels too ephemeral (and doesn't pay well enough) to warrant extensive effort. For subjects with little depth ... well, why bother? I can see the attraction to the small-talk aspect of blogging, just as I can see the attraction to cocktail parties. But who has the time? Was a time I had the time, or thought I did. Now I don't feel I do.

I say this recognizing that some -- the other full-time writers who blog here on SB leap most quickly to mind -- find none of this a problem, find no conflict between blogging and doing solid, admirably accomlished and serious work. Carl Zimmer, Jonah Lehrer, and Chris Mooney jump most immediately to my mind because they're fellow writers, and I greatly admire all of their work -- great serious stuff both on the blog and in print, splendidly diverting well-look-at-this-will-ya pieces on the blog, whole books of great depth and seriousness and import. Somehow they make the time to post posts that are well worth reading, that seem to enrich their own perspectives as much as they do the content of this site and blogdom, and (I trust and hope) still devote as much attention as they need and want to what I think of more lasting work, i.e., the stuff requiring ink. [I can hear the cyber-howls coming already ...) The Web is a better, more interesting, and more truly informing place for their efforts. Ditto on most of the material by the scientists-who-blog on SB; I mention the writers here because they face the same choices I do but meet them differently. It apepars they mix it successfully -- even if it means, for Carl at least, often doing so at 3 in the morning. (Such is life with two young kids; this I know well.)

So it works for them -- seems too, anyway, and I hope appearances here do not deceive. Yet somehow, for the most part, it doesn't work for me. My time has never felt more finite, and there inevitably seems something either more pressing or more lastingly valuable to devote it to: a story due, a book to develop, a child to read to, a son's baseball game to attend, a pile of books to read before I die: the hope and desire, as reader and writer, to create the sort of experience so clearly had by the man in Wayne Booth's painting (held by me above), titled "Man Reading."

I had hoped, frankly, to find time to write a longer and more thoughtful exploration of this dilemma -- that is, why I don't find such an immediate and accessible way to communicate with readers more irresistible and valuable, why I don't make time for it in the way we make time for the things we value most -- but ... well, I just didn't manage to make or find the time. Suffice to say that while I'm glad there are people blogging -- and the best of my compatriots here at SB are doing some of the best blogging out there -- I can't seem to value my own blogging (as a way of spending my time or creating work) quite valuable enough to hike above other things that are already getting too little attention.

So farewell to SB for now, at least as a spot to place my own blog, and best of luck to the others here: Do keep up the good work. I can now slacken my blogging pace -- or accept my already slackened pace -- with less guilt.

I do figure to post now and then, though without any quota external or in. So please come visit me now and then at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I will likely post a few times a month, or at my general website, http://daviddobbs.net, where you can find my magazine storie (I'm working on one for the Times Magazine now) and books.

PS: If you want to comment on this, best place will likely be the new address, as Seed/SB will eventually remove this link.)

Thanks for reading, and -- and Mr. Keillor says -- be well and do good work.

Best,

David Dobbs
Montpelier, Vermont

Posted by David Dobbs at 3:21 PM • 2 Comments

Big Pharma, the play -- I'm not making this up

Category: Brains and minds

From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.

As the PLOS Biology review notes,

Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded marketing blitz through the eyes of its masterminds, unwitting (and complicit) abettors, and victims through her portrayal of an advertising executive, a physician, and women and children who are prescribed heavily marketed antidepressants.

A primary target of the pharmaceutical industry, physicians receive not just advertising materials but office visits from drug representatives. Berry's physician, depicted as a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry, gratefully accepts the free drug samples, the free lunches, and the pharmaceutical industry–sponsored trips to tropical islands. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry woos physicians with educational dinners, honoraria for participating in conference calls, consulting fees for participating in speakers' bureaus, research funding, and payments to write scientific publications. And physicians act as agents of the pharmaceutical industry in many ways, such as giving talks that favor a company's product, participating in clinical trials that increase physicians' exposure to a new drugs or new indications for old drugs, and publishing research articles that are financed and, in fact, written by pharmaceutical company employees [1].

It's an ugly picture, and despite all the attention it's received, most Americans are unaware how deeply American medicine is influenced by Big Pharma's marketing efforts.

A play about this is certainly no wierder than advertisements about drugs. Just more unexpected.

Posted by David Dobbs at 11:21 AM •

The Scientist : Brain Cell Video

Category: Brains and minds

Here's a pretty picture worth a look: a spinning 3-D view of populations of new neurons in a rat hippocampus. Check it out at

The Scientist : Brain Cell Video

Needs a fast connection, so take a pass if you're using dial-up.

Posted by David Dobbs at 11:26 AM • 3 Comments

Christopher Hitchens' War on Iraq, Funny Women, and Reason

Category: Culture of science

Maybe it sounded good at the editorial meeting: Have Christopher Hitchens, supposedly funny, clearly chauvinistic, write about Why Women Aren't Funny. And so we gots, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens -- who seems ever more a boorish drunk rather than a quick-witted friend of the vine; an intellectual bully who refuses to admit (regarding his support of the Iraq War) that he Got It Wrong; a one-time thoughtful leftist who finds himself stuck in the same dunce corner with the determinedly unthoughtful George W. Bush -- trying to legitimize a mix of half-baked 'conventional wisdom' and overtired chauvinism by wrapping them up with a few threads of sketchy evo/devo research findings. The result is a piece about humor, sex, and science that is unfunny, off-putting, and -- in instructive ways -- far from scientific.

Why are women [Hitchens asks], who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

He's got me. I don't know the answer, and I really do not know what Hitchens is talking about. It soon becomes clear that he doesn't, either. Perhaps we're supposed to surrender to Hitchens' combination of wit, smarm, and smarts in much the way -- so we're to believe -- unnumbered women have succumbed to those alleged charms in person:

The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter--I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight--well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

I might find this a little less nauseating if I hadn't seen, in Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of Hitchens, how Hitchens treats women when he'd rather dominate them (as he plainly sees charm and sex) via another route. The profile isn't online, but Ezra Klein summarized this part of it nicely at his blog:

Parker relates a dinner party attended by Hitchens and his wife. Relaxed occasion, Hitchens and some women are shooting the shit over Gavin Newsome's good looks and Iranian politics, when one of the attendees makes a "passing but sympathetic remark" about Howard Dean, saying he felt Dean was unfairly maligned by the media. Hitchen's reply:

Dean was "a raving nut bag," [Hitchens said]...then he corrected himself: "A raving, sinister, demagogic nutbag...I and a few other people saw that he should be destroyed.

Hitchens then recalls a time when Dean spoke against mandatory parental notification laws by telling of 12-year-old child who'd come to his office seeking an abortion. The baby was her father's. But Dean hadn't told the authorities of the incident, and it seemed that it may have happened to someone else, or been exaggerated, or something. Hitchens uses this to brand Dean a "pathological liar," and when some at the table protest, Hitchens turns his shotgun full of crazy on the assembled:

"Fine, now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you've told me all I need to know. I'm not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I'm telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There's nothing you wouldn't make an excuse for. You know what? I wouldn't want you on my side. I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud , and you say 'That's O.K.' Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I'm telling you what I think are standards and you say, 'What standards? It's fine, he's against the Iraq War.' Fuck. Off. You're MoveOn.org. Any liar will do. He's anti-Bush. Fuck off...Save it sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that's all the difference -- I hope -- in the world."

This was at, mind you, a dinner party.

Worth noting that this tirade was directed not at just the table (as Klein's blog suggests) but at one woman in particular. Nothing would do but for Hitchens to utterly humiliate her, and if he couldn't do it with reason then he was happy to simply shout her down. In service of "destroying" the one leading presidential candidate of 2004 who had the guts to call the Iraq War a mistake, Hitchens is glad to first grab a clumsy apocryphal anecdote and then, wielding it and his celebrity like a club, simply beat down, with a series of Fuck Off's and insults. those who differ. Aparently he wasn't feeling funny that night.Think carefully before you invite this man to a dinner party.

What does this have to do with Hitchens' lame essay on the supposed lack of female humor? Hitchens' ire at his dinner-party companion -- like his uninformed and absurdly overblown hatred of Dean, his disdain for those who would question his support of the war, and (as Klein describes) his bizarre conviction that some people want the Iraq war to go badly just so he (Hitchens) will look bad -- seems to rise from an anger at finding himself so profoundly wrong about Iraq.

Nobody likes being wrong; least of all a man of Hitchens' intelligence, prominence, and vanity. In this case he compounds the problem, however, by sticking to his guns and failing to revisit the evidence. Hitchens, like many, was profoundly wrong about Iraq because -- for reasons more personal and ideological than intellectual -- he profoundly misread the evidence for war back before we got in this mess.

It's troubling to see him now apply, in this gimpy essay about why women aren't funny, the same prejudicial reasoning to issues of science. He employs any number of tired rhetorical tactics, starting by skipping over the essay's most central and necessary assumption -- that women aren't as funny as men and don't see humor as readily as men do -- by simply saying "Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about." Having insisted on blind acceptance of his central primise, he throws out a bunch of prejudices and stereotypes we're supposed to take as fact or insight.

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with--and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. (Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch.) Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

Men are savage, desperate hunters who must laugh to survive their trials; women are innocents -- or maybe it's saints, or maybe it's vessels of purity -- blessed, the tender dears, with the luxury of being serious.

I'm pained to say that he eventually attributes this "womanly seriousness" to women's concern with bearing children. "For women," Hitchens opines, "the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling [child-bearing] that is no laughing matter." (He works his way there via Nietzsche and Kipling. Such learning!) That, atop the sketchy findings from the humor-perception study he cites, is supposed to close the deal -- and if it doesn't, well, as Stanley Kowalski said, So what:

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise.

"If I am correct about this, which I am, then...". Here's the heart of Hitchens' argument, and, sadly, the place from which this smart and talented man now seems content to write. We're supposed to believe him because his prejudicial selection of facts seems to support his argument, and if we don't buy it -- if it turns out the facts don't support the argument -- then we're supposed to believe him anyway, presumably because he's charismatic, spins a good story, and will simply shout you down if need be.

This may be an invigorating place to write from. But in the realm of war, sex, or science, little good can come from it. It's the same place, of course, from which Hitchens and others supported and launched the war, the place from which George W. Bush seeks to rule, and the place from which the very ideas of reason, evidence, and empiricism -- the principles that are supposed to drive law, if not government, and which are supposed to define science -- is daily assaulted.

I hate to see such a place given over to celebrity pontificators to write about science. Hitchens on Unfunny Women! Bolstered by science from top institutions! Maybe it sounded good at some poin. Alas, the results may reek of vanity, but they are hardly, in any sense of the word, fair.

Posted by David Dobbs at 7:31 AM • 7 Comments

Paths to Enrichment: How Better Digs & Fatherhood Enrich the Brain

Category: Brains and minds

At this week's Mind Matters (the expert-written blog seminar I edit for sciam.com), Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania ponder how stimulating environments (read: better digs) and (of all things) fatherhood can build brains and make you smarter, at least if you're a marmoset.

The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner house and soon after had another kid. The marmoset in me should be a lot smarter than it was a while back. Whether it is ... well, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to tell.

But this is fascinating stuff, and I recommend it highly. My intro to the posts (from the Mind Matters site) is below, or you can go straight there from here.

That the brain undergoes physical changes in response to life's experiences seems at once glaringly obvious and endlessly surprising. How could we possibly adapt to different situations if our brains stayed the same? Yet it's still easy to find actual descriptions of these changes arresting and almost alarming. Changes you can count or measure -- changes in number and length of dendrites, creation of new neurons -- seem too finite, too ... well, insubstantial to account for the subtle alterations in thought, behavior and knowledge with which we respond to change.

Thus the fascination of studies like the two discussed here. Both come from the lab of Liz Gould at Princeton, a "power house," as one researcher recently put it, of research on how positive changes in experience or environment ("enrichment," in the neurojargon) affect the brain. (For a good profile of Gould and her work, see this article by Jonah Lehrer.) One shows that the neuronal benefits of enriched lab environments found many times in rodents are seen in marmosets as well -- a finding unsurprising, given the record in rodent studies, but significant for showing this dynamic carries over to primates, bringing it closer to our human home, as it were. The other paper shows that new marmoset fathers undergo similar brain changes, That is new -- and to addled parents too tired to think, a bit surprising. As our commenters explain, both papers carry some interesting and in some cases interesting implications. Here to explore them are psychologists Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania.

Join them, and us, in an enriching discussion.

Posted by David Dobbs at 4:01 PM •

Naptime! Read this and have a coronary ... or take a nap. It's your decision.

Category: Medicine

Kuroda Seiki, "A Nap," 1894. from Kuroda Memorial Hall online

I love midday naps, and before I had kids and all time evaporated, I used to take 2 or 3 a week: Kick back the recliner, shut 'em for 20-30 minutes, and wake up a new man. Worked for Churchill during the war, so why not for me? Like a run or a good night's sleep, it was an investment of time that made me both happier and more productive. Yet, stupidly, few of us take them these days.

Why not? We can't afford the time. Or so we think. The study below suggests that perhaps you may well get the time back, in spades, by living longer. Sleep when you're dead? Sleep now, maybe you'll live longer.

Gotta go look at my eyelids.

This from a press release from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Midday Napping (Siesta) Associated With Reduced Risk of Heart-Related Death

CHICAGO - Among Greek adults, taking regular midday naps is associated with reduced risk of death from heart disease over a six-year period, especially among working men, according to a report in the February 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Some evidence suggests that in countries where siestas are common, rates of death from heart disease tend to be lower.  However, the few studies that have assessed the potential relationship have not controlled for other factors that may influence heart disease risk, such as physical activity and age, according to background information in the article.

Androniki Naska, Ph.D., University of Athens Medical School, Greece, and colleagues studied 23,681 Greek men and women ages 20 to 86 who did not have a history of heart disease or any other severe condition when they enrolled in the study between 1994 and 1999.  At the beginning of the study, participants were asked if they took midday naps, and if so, how often and for how long at a time.  They also reported their level of physical activity and dietary habits over the previous year.

Over an average of 6.32 years of follow-up, 792 participants died, including 133 who died from heart disease.  After the researchers factored in other cardiovascular risk factors, individuals who took naps of any frequency and duration had a 34 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not take midday naps. Systematic nappers, those who took a siesta for 30 minutes or more at least three times per week, had a 37 percent lower risk of heart-related death. 

Among working men, those who took midday naps either occasionally or systematically had a 64 percent lower risk of death from heart disease during the study than those who did not nap, while non-working men who napped had a 36 percent reduction in risk.  "We were unable to undertake a similar analysis among women because there were only six deaths among working women," the authors write.

"We interpret our findings as indicating that among healthy adults, siesta, possibly on account of stress-releasing consequences, may reduce coronary mortality," they continue.  The fact that the association was stronger in working men, who likely face job-related stress, than non-working men is compatible with this hypothesis, they write.

"This is an important finding because the siesta habit is common in many parts of the world, including the Mediterranean region and Central America," the authors conclude.

Posted by David Dobbs at 12:44 PM •

The Frontal Cortex : Betting on Awareness

Category: Brains and minds

I had half-written a post drawing attention to a fascinating new paper on consciousness ... when I discovered that Jonah Lehrer had beat me to it. I won't try to improve on his offering about this truly clever and fascinating paper, which covers some Oliver Sacks-like ground gracefully Check it out at:

The Frontal Cortex : Betting on Awareness:

Posted by David Dobbs at 2:31 PM •

Who You Gonna Call -- W or Lucky Jack? Deliberating Decision-Making

Category: Brains and minds

The Decider

The Decisive

I finally got a chance to write about Patrick O'Brian's splendid Aubrey-Maturin novels. Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of those Dickensically rich novels, provides a model of decision-making relevant to the paper reviewed in this week's Mind Matters,, the weekly blog seminar on mind and brain I edit at sciam.com. This week's topic is whether big, complicated decisions -- buying a car, going to war -- can be reliably made with little deliberation. The paper under review argues that you can. Our Mind Matters reviewers, psychologists Alex Haslam and George Loewenstein, differ decisively.

And I get to write about Lucky Jack. The opening of my intro is below -- but you should really go read the entire post, which illuminates the richness of the fast-growing discipline of decision science -- yet another aspect of the folly of a more famous Decider, George W. Bush.

Here again is the link to the Mind Matters post.

Below, my intro to same:

Introduction to Mind Matters No. 3 Big Decisions: Gut or Head? Hmm....

One of the many pleasures of reading Patrick O'Brian's splendid Aubrey-Maturin novels, in which the Royal Navy's Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon, naturalist, and spy Stephen Maturin navigate challenges nautical, military, medical, musical and philosophical during the Napoleonic era, is witnessing Captain Aubrey's nearly flawless decisiveness. (At sea, anyway; on land he is one long blunder.) Whether the question regards putting on more sail, engaging a seemingly superior foe, or forestalling mutiny, Aubrey -- Lucky Jack, to his friends -- seems to always make the right call.

It was not until I read the paper under review here, however, that I recognized what may be Lucky Jack's greatest gift in the decisions department: Aubrey possesses an uncanny instinct for knowing when he can make a vital decision quickly, with little or no thought, and when he needs to proceed more deliberatively.

This question -- to deliberate or not to deliberate -- is explored is the study taken up this week, On Making the Right Choice:
The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect. Our reviewers, psychologist Alex Haslam and economist George Loewenstein, offer decisive opinions about the paper's strengths and weaknesses, and their deliberations illuminate both the possibilities and the difficulties of the fast-growing discipline of decision science. Whom you most agree with is something you'll have to decide -- once, that is, you've decided how much to think about it.

Posted by David Dobbs at 12:57 PM • 2 Comments

Now that's one superanimated cell

Category: Nota Bene

Now we know what Harvard's doing with all that money.

Here's an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell's inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don't think I'd try it with dial-up.

But this is some serious eye candy. Wish I knew what half the stuff was.

Posted by David Dobbs at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments