You need to read this

This was published over at the Science-Based Medicine blog a few months ago and caught my attention thanks to today's blog post over there. It's a droll account of how the nonsense that is 'Complementary and Alternative Medicine' managed to sell itself not just to the public but to the medical establishment to the point that it gets written about in medical journals and taken seriously by people who should know better.

What is particularly interesting to me in this is the use of language to effect this coup. Change language and you change perception indeed.

Well, Jeff, quackery is a pejorative term. Some time ago we recognized that words raise emotions and mental pictures. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised by them, so we tried to eliminate quackery. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised when one discusses acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and healing at a distance as if they were quackery when we made claims. For a century, most people just could not allow for the possibility that these things really work.

 

So over time we recognized that we had to do something about our language. That would be the first step in enabling the thought revolution that is upon us, and changing the paradigm in medicine and science. We simply changed the adjectives, and gave alternate names to the methods, added a few phrases to eliminate negative reactions, and shifted the negative terms to descriptions of the Medical Establishment (and, note the caps in that one.)

And along with that, we took advantage of a shift in perception, to be sure that the public would adopt a non-judgmental attitude. Of course, we had to wait decades for that attitude to mature to the point that they would be willing to give our claims a hearing, whereas just thirty years ago they would have dismissed the claims out of hand.Not only did we get that non-judgmental mind-set, but with it, a strong negative reaction to a description that contained an opinion or one that used any kind of loaded language to describe an underdog - no matter how true or justified that language happened to be. Fortunately for us, a wave of change spread across the intelligentsia, especially in the universities and the literary community, reinforced by the press.


Thoughts inevitably turn to Orwell, but also to Deborah Tannen, Francis Wheen, Barbara Ehrenreich and many others who've been trying, each with the tools at their disposal, to point out that what we're doing is tantamount to, as my brother put it, 'shooting ourselves in the foot while being chased by a steamroller.'

Food around the world

What the World Eats, Part I is a photo essay documenting what 15 different families around the world eat during an average week. It's from the book Hungry Planet, which features many more families and apparently deals in some detail with their lives and their relationship with food. It doesn't sound like it'll be all that interesting, until you start looking at the pictures. Even with very little text accompanying them, they speak volumes.

Fourteen Passive Aggressive Appetizers

Having people over that you'd really rather not? Or just feeling a teensy bit, you know, vindictive? Trust the New Yorker to be able to tell you what to do:

4. Blend fresh crabmeat with diced avocado, scallions, and a dollop of mayonnaise for a canapé topping so delicious that it will take your guests a full minute to realize that they’re eating it off dog biscuits. Once they catch on, act mortified and stammer that you must have “mixed up the boxes,” until everyone calms down. Then start crying because the biscuits remind you that today marks exactly eight weeks since you had to put down Buster, and you just miss him so much.

...

6. For a taste of the U.K., fry up mini-servings of fish-and-chips. Take it to the next level by wrapping them in small pieces of newspaper, which, oddly enough, all seem to be printed with unfavorable reviews of Jeff ’s novel.

Science and Literature

In his article May 11 article for the Boston Globe titled Measure for Measure, Johnathan Gottschall writes:

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.


Something that frustrates me no end about literary theory is its lack of understanding of the sciences, particularly when it purports to draw from them. Witness theorists who present their musings as meaningless mathematical formulae or draw on an at best limited understanding of physics. Nevertheless, these theorists manage to impress, because they most often happen to be addressing people who have no interest in either mathematics or physics (or biology or chemistry) and who are therefore happy to take their word for it because the theories in question are interesting and seem to make sense in context.

The other frustrating thing about literary theory is precisely its irrelevance to anything outside literary theory. Certainly it enhances the reading of literature and provides new and startling ways to conceive of the world created by literature and, given that literature is often seen as a reflection of real life, the world itself. But while it contains ideas and philosophies and suggestions that are a joy and a challenge to explore, it ultimately doubles back on itself without actually providing answers and students are left right where they started.

At the same time, it irritates me when the science bloggers I read make offhand, dismissive comments about the humanities and those who study them, saying things like "Even the arts students understand that intelligent design is bogus."* No we're not scientists, but why does that automatically make us the morons of academia? ID is a shoddily presented argument. You need only basic reason to see that, not deep scientific knowledge.

And while we're on common misconceptions, why are scientists so often cast as drones lacking all imagination? The rigors of method notwithstanding, I can't see a scientist as anything but imaginative. What is the development of a hypothesis if not a creative act?

We seem to be stuck in this very high-school perception that the arts=flaky vs. science=nerdy. Gottschall argues that this is simply unnecessary:

Above all, these changes would require looking with fresh eyes on the landscape of academic disciplines, and noticing something surprising: The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it.


I think he's absolutely right. If we all actually bothered to get to know each other, I think we would all realize that we are, at heart, all knowledge-obsessed geeks.

*This quote is illustrative only. It reflects only the tone of various statements littering the web, not the actual content.

Mountains in the clouds

If you've known me any length of time and if we have ever spoken about Nepal, I have probably told you about that moment when you look out the airplane window and realize that those white things out there aren't clouds but the snow-capped tops of the Himalayas. At eye level. Next to the tin can you're flying in.
Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Now do you see what I mean?

(Photo courtesy of David Merin.)

So much for misanthropy

The Discovery Channel has a beautiful new ad out. Given the crap that's happening in the world - and is likely to keep happening - it's actually quite refreshing to take a moment to look at this little planet of ours in a positive light.

Is it just me though or is that an orca and not a great white? Anyway - I love the arachnid guy. And Stephen Hawking joining in is just cool.

The Onion gets it right...again

I strongly suspect that all the real news is to be found in comedy and that the stuff passed off as straight news is actually a huge joke. Anyway, this made me giggle.

Novelists Strike Fails To Affect Nation Whatsoever
Nor has America's economy seen any adverse effects whatsoever, as consumers easily adjust to the sudden cessation of any bold new sprawling works of fiction or taut psychological character studies.

"There's a novelists strike?" Ames, IA consumer Carl Hailes said. "That's terrible. When is it scheduled to begin?"

The strike kicked off last fall...

Things you didn't know you didn't know

The Bad Astronomer's at it again with a great post called Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Milky Way Galaxy. I actually did know a few of those things, but certainly not all. I can do little more than look at stuff like this in absolute wonder. We know so much and yet everything we learn simply points to how much we have yet to find out. If there's anything I feel any sort of reverence for, it's that spirit of inquiry that makes us explore everything from galaxies to the tiniest, microscopic organisms that inhabit our world, just to find out what makes them tick.

Thursday music

I walked into the Deep Dish, a cafe at uni, the other day and had a bit of a twilight-zone moment when I hear Joe Dassin's 'Et si tu n'existais pas' playing. I don't sing very loudly, but the lady at the counter noticed and, after a chat, offered to lend me the CD - a 'best of' collection - if I could make her a copy too. Since then, I've been listening to it non-stop. I haven't heard most of these songs in at least 20 years, but I actually remember most of them. This week's song, then, is one of my favorites off that CD. It's not the best of recordings and not much of a video at all, but that's ok because the song is the point. It's called 'Ca m'avance a quoi?'

It's been weird

This past week or so has been pretty full-on, at least for me, what with meeting what felt like at least a million new people, getting 'orientated', getting in touch with my supervisor, wading through readings for classes, and being generally buzzed from the whole thing. I'm glad I had a quiet, fun weekend because the coming weeks look like they'll be a teensy bit stressful, if mostly in a good way.

My parents are leaving Tokyo tomorrow. They landed in Ankara on March 3 1974 and will arrive in Islamabad, appropriately enough, on March 3, 2008. It's been a pretty good run. Their stuff has been sent ahead and they're wrapping up their last-minute packing, interspersed with last-minute calls, last-minute visits, and last-minute last-minute stuff. I spoke to my father earlier today and, though Tokyo was the first posting we didn't 'do' together at all, the feeling was exactly the same as it's always been. Usually, once the place we've called home for one to four years is completely cleaned out, one or the other of us inevitably says, "It's all gone." Not in a despairing sort of way - after all, 'it' is now making its way to wherever we're going next - but it's still a feeling of emptiness. It's the statement that allows us that little bit of time we need to say goodbye to yet another life before we head off towards the next adventure. Today, when my father said it over the phone, I knew he wasn't just telling me but allowing himself to let go of this place that has been his home for the last few years. And, oddly, I had the same slightly choked up, slightly teary response I always do. I'm not sad - I visited them all of once and didn't know the place so leaving it doesn't mean much to me - but today, I'm there with my parents as they pack the last of their life in Japan up and walk onto the plane that will take them 'home'.