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 What are you reading?â€Â
“Spent, by Geoffrey Miller. It’s a book I’m going to review on easternblot. It’s about the psychology of consumerism.â€Â
“Oh, wow, I need to read that.â€Â
A week later, I was reading Spent on my lunch break, in a student study lounge. It wasn’t very busy, because exams were just over and summer classes hadn’t started yet. A girl handed me a piece of paper, and explained she was doing a very quick study – it would only take me a minute. I indulged her and took the paper. It was a short questionnaire about what you would do if you were standing in line at the post office for more than 30 minutes, waiting to mail a package, and someone offered to take you to the front of the line in exchange for $3. Would you pay the three dollars or keep waiting? When the student came back to pick up my filled out questionnaire, I showed her what I was reading: “It’s so funny you gave me this, because just a minute ago I was reading about a study where participants had to choose between spending money now or saving it for later, and how it was related to what situations they were in.†I flipped two pages back in Spent and showed her the relevant section in the chapter Flaunting Fitness. “Cool!â€Â, she said, and took note of the title and author.
(What did I answer on the questionnaire? I said I’d pay the $3, because I figured that 30 minutes of my time is worth more than $3. I didn’t know it at the time, but that very same concept of translating time to how much you could earn if you spent that time working is mentioned in a later chapter of Spent.)
A few days after that, I overheard my colleagues talking and laughing about how surgeons always drive a particular car. I rolled out of my office on my desk chair, Spent in hand, and read out loud part of the section How Car Choices Reveal The Central Six Traits where Miller lists what type of people drive what type of car. I work with intelligent and conscientious introverts, according to the list.
So, do I recommend Spent? Apparently I do – I recommended it a couple of times before even finishing it. I do want to point out a warning that Miller gives the reader in the introduction: if you’re used to reading marketing books about consumer studies, Spent might seem too slow-paced, and if you’re used to scientific papers, it might seem too subjective and disjointed. The main idea of the book is an attempt to explain our consumerist culture through the eye of evolutionary biology. How does what we purchase (cars, clothes, university educations) function to express who we are to others? The last section of the book gives some suggestions on how to change our consumer lifestyle, both to better reflect our personalities as well as to reduce rampant and pointless consumerism in a sensible way. (For example, Miller suggest taxing products on how much damage they lead to: average cost of deaths per bullet, average cost of transportation and road repair per imported food product, etc.) The appended Exercises for the Reader contain activities like going to the mall and observing people objectively, or playing Sims 2 for a couple of weeks.
Miller’s writing style is funny and perceptive, but also a bit controversial at times. Whether you agree with his ideas or not, the book should be a fun read. He expects most of his readers to be highly educated middle class consumers, and that’s probably an apt assumption. Luckily for him, most people who buy and read books (or this review) automatically fall in that very category…
Welcome to the future! I am posting this from my iPod. That reminds me: last week a review went up on LabLit.com for a book I found at BMV this past summer. Its a textbook for high school kids about science in literature. The book is from 1994 and hilariously outdated. I dont feel like repeating everything I already wrote about it – especially considering Im typing this on a tiny touch screen – so just read the review
[update: links don't work from the iPhone app. I had to fix that manually.]
I watched the pilot episode of Better Off Ted a while ago, and have no intentions of watching any more of it.
Better Off Ted is a show about a guy called Ted who manages a R&D company that will make life better. The “scientific advances” the company works on are the ones that people thought of as “futuristic” way back in the 1960s. (In the future people can grow an extra arm! In the future men can be pregnant!) In the pilot episode there is talk of weaponizing pumpkins, and one of the scientists gets frozen (for science!) and accidentally thawed when the tank falls over. Wait, it gets worse: the latter event was one of the main plot points.
Yes, it’s a comedy. No, it’s not funny.
Honestly, don’t bother.
Funny or not, you may be wondering whether (aside from the absurd research goals) the scientific life was represented at least somewhat realistically. After all, in a show about science you’ve got to do something right, right? Surely they’d show a proper lab, and not one filled with random objects and coloured liquids? You all know how I feel about coloured liquids…
Haha! No, it’s horrible. The coloured liquids are helpfully indicated with red arrows:
Take special note of the elaborate distillation equipment to the right, with the green liquid in it.
Sure, just leave your pipette sticking in the orange Kool-aid just the way the prop department set it up. Where’s your pipetter? What are those ping pong balls and plants for?
Argh!
 HotDocs is in full swing, and I saw BLAST! last night.
It was great, so I’m going to start out by mentioning that there is a second screening at HotDocs on Saturday April 26, at 4:30 PM at the Royal. (Tickets through the HotDocs box office.) They also signed a contract with the Discovery Channel, the BBC, and something in Sweden, so it will be aired on television too.
Synopsis: BLAST! follows a team of scientists who are launching a telescope on a balloon. The telescope takes pictures of far away galaxies to get more information on the origin of the universe.
What you get when you watch the doc is:
1. Basic astrophysics. I know very little about space, but I could easily follow what they were doing. I saw in the credits that they had a science writer work with them, but all the scientists in the film were also very good at explaining what they were doing and why it was relevant. They held up very well in the Q&A after the movie too. One scene on locaion in Sweden showed Barth Netterfield explaining the project to Swedish college students, and that was nicely edited into an animated explanation of what the telescope could detect.
2. A good idea of how much work goes into these huge experiments. Usually you only hear about the successes and results of a project, but here you get to see everything that went wrong along the way. A lot of factors are out of their control – the weather, random technical difficulties – and have a huge effect on when they can launch the balloon and see their families at Christmas, as well as on the actual result of the project. I don’t want to spoil too much here, but things break, things get delayed, and things that should work don’t work so well after all. That’s pretty much a summary of every experiment ever carried out, but it’s a story rarely told outside of research, so it’s wonderful to see it on screen.
It’s not all misery: you can see their faces light up when things do work, and that’s just as much part of the story. You can say “it’s just a job”, but it’s very hard for any scientist to not have their work affect their overall mood, and especially hard if you’re far away from home with only your colleagues around you all day.
 3. Locations! The gondola that housed the telescope was equipped with solar panels that charged the electronics on board, so to take in as many hours of sun as possible, they launched the balloon near the poles. The first time in the Arctic, in north Sweden, after which the balloon crossed the Atlantic and landed in northern Canada near an Inuit village. The second time the balloon was launched at and landed in Antarctica, close to McMurdo. (There are also location shots at UPenn and UofT, but those pale in comparison to the polar regions.)
4. Some discussion about religion and science. Netterfield believes in a Christian God as long as there is no evidence against one, but doesn’t feel that his work in searching for the origin of the universe is at all at odds with that. His religion actually seemed to be the driving force behind his curiosity about how the universe came to be. Mark Devlin, when asked about his religious views, appeared to be agnostic, yet both researchers were working on the same project and asking the same questions and putting equal value into the scientific data.
5. Graduate students at work! In the big picture, these students were working on “finding the origin of the universe”, but when it actually came down to it, they were just fiddling with a tiny part of this telescope that got launched twice and might not even have gotten the data they want. It’s a scary project in terms of getting results. Plus, data analysis is a whole different story, and only briefly touched on during the film. I asked about publications in the Q&A, and learned that the group has two papers coming out before the end of this year, and a bunch of data still left to analyze. Mark Devlin said they could easily write 42 papers with the material they collected, but had to make a choice.
 All in all, BLAST! was a blast! I loved that it was so very much focused on the work, not just on the results. The film had some animations to explain basic astrophysics concepts, but it also showed what the actual measurements from the telescope looked like (just graphs and numbers) and it emphasized how much work there was still left in actually interpreting the data. There are also some great shots of scientists being either sad or happy depending on how the research went that day, and everyone being bored and irritated when they have to wait for the weather to change. That’s science in action.
The Q&A was recorded, I think, for the behind the scenes part of the BLAST! website, but that seems to require a subscription. If they put it up on a publicly accessible place I’ll link to it, because the audience asked amazing questions. It was full of science-minded folks, and the two PI’s plus three grad students were on stage to answer questions, so it was more like the Q&A of a scientific conference than that of a movie screening. The film maker, Paul Devlin (yes, the Devlins are brothers) actually only got to answer one or two questions himself. Everything else was aimed at the scientists.
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. I’m not good at it at all (yarrrr?) but I made up for it by reading a book about pirates. Pirates and scientists, to be precise.
 In The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe, the crew of a pirate ship meets Darwin on the Beagle. Darwin has trained a monkey, Mister Bobo, to behave like a perfect gentleman. The pirates accompany them to London where the evil Bishop of Oxford tries to discredit Darwin’s monkey only to assure a steady stream of visitors to the freak circus he bought. A circus where, suspiciously, it’s ladies’ night five nights a week… Dressed up as scientists dressed up as ladies, the pirates investigate the bishop’s circus and make sure Darwin and Mister Bobo get the attention they deserve.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Holding pens and rulers, and with white lab coats covering their piratical paraphernalia, the pirates followed Darwin into the Royal Society Gentlemen’s Club. There were several famous scientists present, some sitting around smoking, some engaged in animated discussion about the latest scientific topic, and some just watching the dancing girls. The smell of opium hung heavily in the air.”
My favourite part: the pirates borrow the scientists’ zeppelin. It’s several paragraphs of hilarious referrals to the Hindenburg Disaster. (”‘Be sure to check out the splendid smokers’ gallery’, he said. ‘You’ll find it affords tremendous views of the billowing bags of hydrogen gas. And help yourself to the chops which are cooking on the airship’s flaming barbecue.’“)
And yes, the book is full of anachronisms like that.
 I had a free pass to see Arctic Tale last night, so I did, but in retrospect I don’t think it was worth the trip to the suburban movie theatre. Arctic Tale is the story of a baby polar bear (Nanu) and a baby walrus (Seela) who grow up in the Arctic in a time when the winters are too short and far between for the ice they need to respectively hunt on and rest on to be fully formed.
It’s a kids movie, but I couldn’t imagine being a kid and liking it. Queen Latifah does the narration, and sounds like she’s reading to four year olds. But the story itself is too complex for that age. There were a lot of four year olds in the audience, though, and they collectively laughed at the walrus fart scene (yes, there is a “walrus fart scene”) but the whole storyline of not being able to find food when the climate conditions change went way over their head. There is probably a narrow age window of 6 to 8 where kids would still find the jokes funny and understand the issues, but there’s little appeal for anyone else. There is one enjoyable montage set in an Arctic summer, where you see a bunch of different animals swim, run, and fly around to remind people that it’s not as bare and boring as it seems up there. This scene was set to instrumental music, but some of the other montages are set to pop music with lyrics that were somehow related to the story, but music that doesn’t fit at all. Case in point: a big walrus family dancing to a segment of “We are family”.
The entire cast of the film is made up of animals, but during the end credits we see cheesy studio segments of kids reciting ways to conserve energy. The tips are all aimed at kids too (”Tell your parents to…”) but I can’t imagine any kid actually taking this advice. It might have been better to leave it out, and let them draw their own conclusions or discuss it with an adult.
As a climate change movie for kids it doesn’t really work, and as a movie for adults it doesn’t work at all. The naming of the two main characters is kind of cute, in that you can relate to them, but it’s also a dead giveaway that those two characters will survive the story. (Nanu’s frail twin brother bear remains unnamed — guess what happens to him?)
Go see it if you’re about six to eight years old and really like polar bears and/or walruses and are concerned about the environment. Otherwise: skip it. I’m rarely negative about movies, and I really like polar bears and I agree that they’re having a hard time when their seasons shift, but this was just a totally unnecessary movie. (Rotten Tomatoes agrees.)
 There is a new movie theatre in Toronto, the Brunswick Theatre, which screens predominantly socio-political documentaries. Among the movies they’re currently screening are a few science-oriented docs: “The God Delusion”, “Living Amidst The Pine Beetle”, “Big Bucks, Big Pharma”, and the BBC documentary “A War On Science”. I went to the “A War On Science” screening last Friday, and it was quite interesting. It started out with an introduction of where the Intelligent Design proponents are coming from, and for a few minutes they even seem to make some sense, until the word is given to their debunkers and it’s clear that their arguments just don’t hold up at all. For example, Behe’s “irreducible complexity” idea uses the premise that the flagellae of bacteria are only functional as 50-part machine and none of the components have a function of their own. If that was true he may have had a point, but Ken Miller easily proved that this wasn’t even true to begin with (some components do have independent functions), collapsing the whole argument.
Another part of the movie focussed on the Dover case, interviewing the concerned parents and teachers who immediately recognized ID as creationism (which isn’t allowed to be taught) and took the Dover school board to court.
There was also an interview with the head of the Vatican astronomy observatory. He explained that the scientific facts were just so overwhelming that the catholic church in general could simply not deny the validity of the arguments and has overcome any issues it had with evolution.
After all screenings, the Brunswick Theatre encourages discussion about the topic of the documentary, and last Friday’s discussion was quite lively. Interestingly, while all people present (about ten people stayed for the discussion) seemed to identify as atheist, and agreed without a doubt that evolution is real, there was a lot of disagreement on how to get this message across to proponents of ID. (It reminded a lot of the current “framing” debate in the science-blogosphere…) Discussions and opinions varied from “science is just the final answer to everything, and religious people should simply accept that there is no God the same way we accept it” to “why is this only an issue in the US?” and “what if there is a biological explanation for religion?” and “what if people need to have everything explained and they can have a “God of the Gaps” that might fill in the gaps of what we don’t currently know, but as we get more scientific knowledge the gaps will get smaller until there are no more gaps and there is no more need of a God”.
For Torontonians: “A War on Science” screens at the Brunswick Theatre Apr 21 at 4:30pm, and Apr 26 at 5pm. You can also catch the related “A God Delusion” on April 24 at 9:30pm, but that’s just Dawkins again, and “A War on Science” has Dawkins plus other people’s opinions.
The Brunswick Theatre also has all movies they screen available to borrow from them if you become a member, and since they just started up they could really use some memberships. They’re located just south of Bloor Street on Brunswick, and are tiny, but marked clearly with coloured documentary announcement flyers.
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