Category: The Dish

Recent research into solitary thinking found that a significant percentage of subjects preferred to suffer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. In a follow-up, Tom Jacobs notes that men were disproportionately likely to give themselves a jolt when faced with boredom:

Amazingly, 67 percent of the men – that is, 12 of 18 – gave themselves at least one shock during this period of thought and reflection. Only 25 percent of the women self-administered the jolt – still a high number when you consider there is physical discomfort involved. “The gender difference is probably due to the tendency of men to be higher in sensation-seeking,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, Lauren Hitchings gives critics of the study a fair hearing:

[T]he results may have been partly down to the artificial set up. For a start, the very nature of letting your mind wander is that it drifts off on its own. Sitting in an experimental setting with an electric-shock generator might not be a fair representation. The set-up, especially the fact that participants were told to sit still, may have made people feel distracted and uncomfortable, says Jonathan Schooler, who studies the wandering mind at the University of California in Santa Barbara. But he does think there is a need to better understand those people who didn’t struggle with the task. After all, much has been made of the benefits of allowing the mind to wander – for instance, it can help to generate creative insights.

John Timmer zooms out:

[T]he results may indicate that, although we complain that we’re persecuted by things like smartphones and the constant barrage of e-mail, we actually may relish the distractions they bring. And, in terms of even broader perspectives, the study brings to mind a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”

David Biello profiles Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist who devised a scheme to use plankton to help cool the earth:

Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one species of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus. This species was not even discovered until the 1980s: it is so tiny that millions can fit into a single drop of water and no one had produced a sieve small enough to catch it. The oxygen made by these tiny marine plants dwarfs that produced by the Amazon rainforest and the rest of the world’s woodlands combined. By taking in CO2 and exhaling oxygen, these tiny creatures serve as the planet’s lungs, whose steady breathing is limited only by nutrition.

Just as land plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements to thrive, missing nutrients restrain planktons’ growth. Add enough of those missing elements – via dust blown off a continent or fertiliser run-off from farm fields – and the oceans will produce blooms that can be seen from space. Many of these plankton pastures are held back by iron shortages, especially in places that are largely cut off from continental dust and dirt. With access to more iron, the plankton would proliferate and siphon more and more planet-heating CO2 from the atmosphere.

In an experiment in 2004, Smetacek’s ideas worked. He and his crew “fertilized” part of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, and the plankton bloomed with remarkable results:

For two weeks, he was able to induce carbon to fall to the sea floor at the highest rate ever observed – some 34 times faster than normal. Just as marine and terrestrial plants sucked up CO2 from Carboniferous or Jurassic skies only to be buried and cooked with geologic heat and pressure into coal, gas and oil, these modern microbes helped pull back some of the CO2 released when we burned their ancestors to make electricity, or to propel hulks of metal over tarred roads. This marine tinkering could help buffer the ever-increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, concentrations that have touched 400 parts-per-million, levels never before experienced in the hundreds of thousands of years that our clever species, Homo sapiens, has existed. Smetacek has given us the blueprints for a man-made portal for our pollution, a column of plankton running between the atmosphere and the deep ocean.

Further experiments, however, were halted due to protests from environmentalists. Update from a reader:

O for crying out loud!   The articles describing Smetacek’s experiments came out in 2012. Environmentalists called for more study in 2008, and that’s what they got.  You think we should just launch a huge plan to dump tons of iron sulfide over the Southern Ocean without studying it seriously first?  And one of the papers resulting from the experiment is titled:  “Iron fertilization enhanced net community production but not downward particle flux during the Southern Ocean iron fertilization experiment LOHAFEX“. From the abstract:

Our data thus indicate intense flux attenuation between 100 and 200 m, and probably between the mixed layer and 100 m. We attribute the lack of fertilization-induced export to silicon limitation of diatoms and reprocessing of sinking particles by detritus feeders. Our data are consistent with the view that nitrate-rich but silicate-deficient waters are not poised for enhanced particle export upon iron addition.

From the conclusion:

Our results add further evidence to support the idea that Fe fertilization does not necessarily stimulate POC export and sequestration under Si limitation in the Southern Ocean. Zooplankton community composition and activity under the mixed layer may strongly regulate the export by reprocessing sinking particles and altering the particle size distribution.

Things are not as simple as Martin hoped, back in 1988.

(Image via the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This true-color image captures a phytoplankton bloom in the Ross Sea on January 22, 2011, as viewed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Bright greens of plant-life have replaced the deep blues of open ocean water)

Adding to the theme of a recent thread, a reader wants to see more “feminists against dwelling on trauma, triggering”:

Here’s an essay by a famous queer feminist (Jack Halberstam, formerly Judith) that is getting a lot of positive attention on Facebook and Twitter that I think you should read. It’s an updated argument similar to the one Wendy Brown made in her very popular 1995 academic book, States of Injury, arguing that left identity politics should be very cautious about grounding itself in past harms. (We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and the argument against framing ourselves as victims is a very well known and widely embraced one – on feminist terms – and has been at least as long as I’ve been in academia. I’m a tenured Women’s Studies professor at a major research university now.)

Anyway, I think it might make a difference to see that arguments like this are popular (though still contested, of course, which is fine) and that feminist and queer scholars have a long tradition of querying the political and theoretical consequences of claiming victimization.

From Halberstam’s essay:

Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco:

“Trannyshack,” and arguments ensued about whether the word “tranny” should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is “angered by this trifling bullshit.” Bond reminded readers that many people are “delighted to be trannies” and not delighted to be shamed into silence by the “word police.” Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!

In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a “roman.” In a brave “coming out” speech, he says: “I’m not a roman mum, I’m a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I’m kosher mum, I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!

Otherwise known as Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. Daniela Lamas investigates the fortunes of the medical process that “siphons blood out of the body and runs it through a machine that temporarily assumes the lung’s work—oxygen in, carbon dioxide out—and gives the injured lung time to heal,” avoiding the problems associated with respirators. The backstory:

Building on the principles of the heart-lung bypass machine used in cardiac surgeries, the first ECMO machines for lung failure came about in the nineteen-seventies. In an early, publicized case, a young man in California was dying after having injured his lung severely. His doctors put him on ECMO—the machine was the size of a car—for three days. He survived and his story was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1972. The ensuing enthusiasm led to a medical trial in the seventies with the goal to test whether patients with lung failure did better with ECMO or with a respirator alone. In both groups, more than ninety per cent of patients died. The excitement about ECMO for adults with lung failure “fell back to earth,” Daniel Brodie, who directs the medical ECMO program at Columbia University Medical Center, told me.

But lately there’s been an ECMO “revival” – aided by much improved technology – and it began with a butt augmentation gone awry:

In the fall of 2008, a twenty-seven-year-old woman was admitted to the Allen Hospital after receiving silicone injections to enhance her buttocks. The silicone had leaked into her vessels and travelled to her lungs, causing massive bleeding. Even with a respirator at its highest settings forcing air into her lungs, she was, literally, drowning in her own blood. The doctor caring for the young woman called Brodie, who suggested ECMO. “By all accounts, she was surely going to die. We felt we had nothing to lose by trying, and everything to gain,” Brodie said. She survived. “When it worked, even we were a bit surprised. That one case may not have changed a lot of minds, but it certainly opened them up to the ever-so-faint possibility this wasn’t crazy.”

Then, in 2009, the H1N1 virus swept the globe and left some previously healthy people with severely injured lungs—a condition called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome. For patients whose oxygen levels still teetered despite the highest settings on the respirator, doctors started turning to ECMO. In the same year, a smaller ECMO apparatus that could get patients up and walking—older versions required patients to remain supine and sedated—won approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The coincidental timing—a new pandemic, a new machine—“opened the floodgates,” said Jose Garcia, a cardiac surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We’re redefining death, to the point that somebody we thought for sure was dead two or three years ago, well, they’re not dead anymore.”

World War I began 100 years ago this month. Beinart marks the anniversary by remembering how the war spurred a major crackdown on civil liberties. He uses that history to consider how war changes the national psyche:

The problem is that the unity war breeds come at the expense of those Americans who become associated—either because of their political views or their religion, race or ethnicity—with the enemy. To avoid becoming targets of the fanatical patriotism that World War I sparked, many German Americans changed their last names. Unable to so easily conceal their ancestry, Japanese Americans during World War II were interned. For many Muslim Americans, 9/12 and the days that followed were marked not by fidelity to the “the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created” but by the government’s violation of those principles, as it surveilled and harassed vast numbers of Muslims purely because of their religion or country of origin. Since then, America’s invasion of two majority Muslim countries has fueled the paranoia that has led national politicians to warn that Sharia law is infecting the United States and local bigots to challenge the building of mosques.

As [progressive philosopher John] Dewey foresaw, wars do empower the state, a power that, in theory, could be used to redress social ills. But in the real world, argued Dewey’s protégé-turned-accuser Randolph Bourne, using war powers to achieve domestic reform is like using a firehose to fill a water glass. “War,” wrote Bourne, “is just that absolute situation … which speedily outstrips the power of intelligent and creative control.”

In another meditation on WWI, John M. Cooper insists that Wilson was right to send the US into WWI:

Wilson’s failure to educate the public about his design for peace and his permissiveness toward repression of civil liberties deservedly remain blots on his historical reputation.  But his greatest failings, particularly in shaping the peace settlement and in bringing the United States into a collective security system, stemmed from bad luck. His worst misfortune came when he suffered a massive stroke just after a belated and foreshortened speaking tour to sell the public on the League of Nations.  It left him a broken man, whose impaired judgment turned him into a major element in the spiteful stalemate that kept the America out of the League of Nations.

Would things have been different if Wilson had not decided to go to war in 1917? Yes, because Germany would almost certainly have won by the end of that year. Military disasters in Russia and Italy, grievous shipping losses inflicted by the submarines, and an untenable financial situation (the British had run out of credit in the U.S. to sustain their massive war orders), and no prospect of American troops eventually coming to their rescue—all these added up to a recipe for Allied defeat. Europe dominated by a victorious Germany would almost certainly have been more benign than the Nazi-conquered continent following the Fall of France in 1940. But how much more benign? The settlement imposed on the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 leaves the question open. Likewise, what impact would such a victory have had on the long march toward the end of colonialism that began with the League of Nations mandate system?

Michael Kazin disagrees with Cooper:

The consequences of the victory won by the U.S. and its allies led, in part, to an even greater tragedy. As Wilson feared, the punitive settlement made in Paris did not last. The president may have won Senate approval for the peace treaty, if he had accepted some of the reservations which Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and his supporters demanded. But American membership in the League of Nations would likely not have stopped the rise of fascism, Nazism, or the Communist International—which, together, sowed the seeds of the Second World War. The terrible irony is that U.S. entry into World War I probably made that next and far bloodier global conflict more likely.

As the historian John Coogan has written, “It was the genius of Woodrow Wilson which recognized that a lasting peace must be ‘a peace without victory.’ It was the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson that his own unneutrality would be a major factor in bringing about the decisive Allied victory that made a healing peace impossible.”

(Photo: Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench, first day on the Somme, 1916. Via Wikipedia.)