Armchair Musings

The tagline on my old blog was "Observation are gold; hypotheses, silver; and conclusions, bronze."  This reflects my philosophy, that observation is the fundamental source of all knowledge.  The father you go from your raw observations, the more likely you are to make a mistake. To illustrate: When I was about 14, one day my sister came to me and asked me if I could take some links out of her bicycle chain.   For some perverse reason, I had this habit of trying to make a lesson out of everything for my little sisters.   I knew that it was possible to remove links, but I also knew that it…
All day we've been hearing about the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11/2002.  We've heard especially from the families of victims, and from the workers who continue to have health problems.  Some of you probably even listened to our President talk about 9/11. Often we hear that 9/11 changed everything.  Personally, I do not think it is true.  Yes, it changed everything for the families of the victims, and for the workers who are having health problems.  But I don't think it changed the course of history.   We were going to attack Iraq regardless.  We were going to see a shift in the…
A couple of days ago, I heard this href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5746173">interview on NPR, with Steve Inskeep.  Inskeep was interviewing href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/01/ap/national/mainD8JRRH080.shtml">Spc. Mark Wilkerson, just before he turned himself in for having gone AWOL. Wilkerson served one tour of duty in Iraq, but refused to go back.  He sought  CO status, but was told it would take a long time before his status would be reviewed.  Apparently, he was told to go ahead with his redeployment, and they would let him know later…
There is nothing mystical about the act of understanding.  Sometimes it may seem like it, when one has an Aha! moment, or when understanding emerges in the context of meditation or spiritual reflection, but there really is nothing supernatural about it. Understanding, after all, is merely an act of description.  It arises from the collation of observations.   To understand something is to be able to describe that thing on all pertinent levels of abstraction.  In the case of mental illness, that means description on levels from the molecular to the sociocultural.  At least at this time.  It…
In Part I, I gave a brief review of an article in Scientific American, entitled href="http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945">The Expert Mind.  The article described the outcome of research into the mental processes of expert chess players.  The motivation for the research is to find out how expertise works, to see if there is a systematic way to develop expertise in a variety of fields. Perhaps the most important finding in this endeavor is that experts have developed, through a great deal of practice, an excellent capacity for pattern…
Scientific American has an article in which the author reviews research into the expertise of chess players.  He ponders the questions of what makes an expert player an expert, how is the problem-solving strategy of an expert different from that of a novice, and is there a way to train people to be experts? What makes this interesting is not so much the questions regarding chess, in particular; rather, what is interesting is the question of how generalizable the findings are.  The people who study this question are really interested in the the latter.  They consider chess to be the…
This is no big surprise, although I did not expect the magnitude of the effect: href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/bsj-vaw080806.php">Violence at work significantly boosts clinical depression risk Work-related violence and threats and the risk of depression and stress disorders Employees subjected to real or threatened violence at work run a major risk of becoming clinically depressed, indicates research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The magnitude of the risk was in direct proportion to the amount of workplace violence experienced, the…
About 15 years ago, I was giving a lecture on psychiatric medication to a group of MSW students.  One student asked a question that was intended to be provocative.  She asked, "how can you justify giving medication to treat a problem that is obviously psychological in origin, like posttraumatic stress disorder?" What she was referring to, was a paradigm that was commonly held at the time.  Specifically, there was this notion that some problems were psychological, and others were biological, in origin.  It was thought, by some, that there was a clear distinction between the two kinds of…
I am at a coffee shop in a far away town, and I have things to do.  So I am not going to write about this extensively at the moment.  Still, while looking for something else, I encountered this abstract.  The title was odd enough to get my attention. href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16504418&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Psychiatric agriculture: systemic nutritional modification and mental health in the developing world. Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1234-9. Epub 2006 Feb 28. London DS, Stoll AL…
When I finished residency, I took a position at a University clinic north of town.  In order to get there, I had to cross a bridge over a river.  I drove over that bridge about 100 times before the first snowfall. On the first snowy day, while driving over the bridge, I noticed a sign.  The sign warned that the bridge could be icy.  Prior to that first snowy day, I had not noticed the sign.   Fast-forward to the present day.  A title="Quirky Outtakes" href="http://quirkynomads.com/wpt/">thoughtful reader sent a suggestion that I write about the subject of title="Wikipedia link"…
This is an archived post from October 2005. It is one of my more whimsical entries, but it does have aserious intent. The recent National Geographic film, title="Official movie website" href="http://wip.warnerbros.com/marchofthepenguins/">March of the Penguins, has generated a tremendous amount of controversy: an avalanche of deconstructionism that surely was not intended by its creator.  It seems that the controversy started when Micheal Medved claimed, in an NYT href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/13peng.html?ei=5090&en=36efde9c1de3fa22&ex=1284264000&adxnnl…
This week's Ask-a-ScienceBlogger question is: If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?... Hmmm.  I am not going to answer that question, exactly.  Instead, I will rephrase it, and answer the question that I would like to be asked. If you could practice science in any time and place in history, for  while, then come back to the present day, where are when would you pick? I would like to have been around during the turn of the last two centuries, in central Europe, as an associate of title="Wikipedia link" href="Sigmund…
Coturnix href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/07/the_perils_of_polls.php">picked up on an href="http://www.newsobserver.com/662/story/462624.html">interesting study, which shows that "Simply asking college students who are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the behavior."  It is a finding that makes researchers nervous, presumably because they do not want to encourage such behavior. It turns out that the effect was only seen in those persons who already were inclined to use drugs.  It seems doubtful that participating in the survey…
A friend and colleague of mine drives around in a cute little VW bug powered by biodiesel.  There's a peace sign on the front of it, which helps it get better mileage.  But peace sign or not, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether biofuels are worth anything. In this post, I provide a little amateur analysis of the whole topic of biofuels, and comment on the most recent study of the potential benefits. The controversy stems from the fact that it takes a lot of energy to plant, transport, harvest, and process the crops needed to produce biofuels.  Some analyses indicated that…
Even though electronic music is all the rage these days, people are still figuring out new ways to make music without digital intervention. Samuel Gaudet and Claude Gauthier, mathematicians at the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, have developed the href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060603/fob7.asp">tritare.  This is like a guitar, but the strings branch in a Y-shape.  This results in the production of nonharmonic overtones, something typically heard only from percussion instruments. Meanwhile, at NYU, violinist rel="tag">Mari Kimura has figured out how to produce…
What do the following have in common: heliocentrism, evolution, Freudian psychology, and neuroscience?  And what does this have to do with the controversy about whether nonhuman creatures have emotions? Pure Pedantry href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/06/post_7.php">Do mice have empathy? Small Gray Matters href="http://www.smallgraymatters.com/2006/07/02/the-science-of-empathy-sociology-of-affective-neuroscience/">The science of empathy & sociology of affective neuroscience The authors of those blog posts engage in informed speculation about the existence of…
It's funny how these things work out sometimes.  I was reading an article on the Christian Science Monitor website, about simmering controversies regarding the religious views of our founding fathers (in the USA).  As I was reading it, it occurred to me that it might be a good topic for a Skeptic's Circle post.  Yesterday, I had seen a href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/07/last_call_for_submissions_to_t_1.php">call for papers posted on Orac's site.  So I went there to find out who is hosting this time, and saw that Orac had already posted on the same topic that I was…
A long time ago, href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/about.php">Grrlscientist href="http://girlscientist.blogspot.com/2005/06/le-scholar-oblige-another-book-meme.html">tagged me with a meme.  So long ago, in fact, that ScienceBlogs did not even exist.  So it may as well have been in a galaxy far, far, away.   It was a book meme.  There were questions like "how many books do you own."  I finished counting several weeks later, and started to write it out.  Then the file was lost in an unfortunate incident that we do not need to discuss here.   I never got back to…
What makes a good science teacher? That is the new ask-a-scienceblogger question. I am sure that there has been a lot of research into this, none of which I have read. That is why this post is categorized as an "armchair musing." I'm going to answer this in a roundabout fashion. Studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy have been done, to try to isolate the variables that predict a successful outcome.  Factors such as age, level of training, gender, gender matching (whether the patient and the therapist are the same gender), patient perceptions, therapeutic perspective, years of…
Moose, Isle Royale National Park National Park Service Photo, presumed to be in public domain Sometimes I am talking to people about how they feel about taking psychiatric medication.  Commonly, they say something like this: "I would rather be able to do it myself," or, "I don't like being dependent on something." Indeed, in American culture (and many others, presumably) independence is highly valued.  It is romanticized.  It is considered to be one of the nobler of virtues.  It is something to boast about.   "I don't need anyone" is a common refrain among the boastful.   Isle Royale…