It has always been a mystery to me how and why people
develop the interests in life that they do.
I mentioned this puzzle a few years ago.
Further evidence of my lack of understanding emerged this summer. In the process of decluttering, I brought up
from the basement two very large brandy snifters (not really for brandy, more
for filling with shells or marbles or whatever, probably two-gallon capacity or
more). I intended to get rid of
them.
Elliott eyed the snifters and asked what I was going to
do with them. I said probably donate
them to Goodwill. He promptly took
possession and said he wanted to create terrariums. I thought that a perfectly fine idea, so we
went to Bachman's and got the plants and charcoal and pebbles and soil. Every day during the weeks after which he
planted them, Elliott kept an eye on them like a parent keeps an eye on a
child.
A
week later he bought 3 more glass containers and a couple of days later we had
to visit Bachman's again. Somehow I
created a monster just by trying to get rid of stuff in the basement. This venture is from someone who has never
once shown any interest in gardening or plants of any kind. Who knows?
* * *
OK,
I admit this falls in the category of slightly goofy, but I read a short
research summary that addresses a problem universal to those in the
industrialized world. Perhaps you have
heard or read Richard Armour's famous little poem (often attributed to Ogden
Nash):
Shake and shake the catsup bottle.
None will come, and then a lot'll.
It turns out that there is a research field, rheology, "the branch of physics concerned with the flow and change of
shape of matter," that includes ketchup.
A faculty friend of mine in Mechanical Engineering explained some of
this.
Rheology,
essentially the flow of thick materials, is a branch of fluid mechanics, so
right in the domain of mechanical engineering. But, rheology also covers flow of mud and silt
so also in the sweet spot of some branches of civil engineering. And, rheology also covers plate tectonics so
in the sweet spot of some geologists. But, [it is] also about flow of some plastics
so naturally falls in the sweet spot of some chemical engineers. Safest to say it is a branch of fluid
mechanics.
Another
phrase for the materials covered by rheology is non-Newtonian fluids. The reason is that fluids whose properties are
fixed were studied by Newton and are therefore called Newtonian fluids. Newton did not study ketchup (as far as we
know), which is a fluid whose flow properties change when you push on it, and
therefore is a non-Newtonian fluid.
I
had to do a little exploring to figure this out, and found a wonderful
explanation.
You
have to pull the trigger on a water pistol to get the water to squirt out. To
make the water to come out faster, you have to pull the trigger harder. Fluids
resist flow. This phenomenon is known as viscosity.
Newton
devised a simple model for fluid flow that could be used to relate how hard you
have to pull the trigger to how fast the liquid will squirt out of the pistol.
. . . Fluids like water and gasoline
behave according to Newton's model, and are called Newtonian fluids.
But
ketchup, blood, yogurt, gravy, pie fillings, mud, and cornstarch paste DON'T
follow the model. They're non-Newtonian fluids because doubling the speed that
the layers slide past each other does not double the resisting force. It may
less than double (like ketchup), or it may more than double (as in the case of
quicksand and gravy). That's why stirring gravy thickens it, and why struggling
in quicksand will make it even harder to escape.
For
some fluids (like mud, or snow) you can push and get no flow at all—until you
push hard enough, and the substance begins to flow like a normal liquid. This
is what causes mudslides and avalanches.
The
phenomenon is known as suspension viscosity.
It holds the material together at no or low force, "but once it
yields to a force and starts to flow, the viscosity decreases the faster it
flows. . . . At very high velocities,
the suspension viscosity can be similar to water." Hence, "then a lot'll"!
Ketchup,
one learns, "prefers to be in the bottle because it is technically a
solid, not a liquid." Water flows
out of the bottle because it is liquid; ketchup does not. Ketchup is a bunch of tiny pieces of tomato
that touch and create a substance that is a solid, which resists movement. As a solid, it only moves when force is
applied, which is why we have to whack the bottle to get the ketchup out. (The scientists at Heinz have determined that
the optimal flow speed for ketchup is 0.028 MPH.) To get the optimal amount of force, I learned
that one tips the bottle at a 45-degree angle and taps it until the ketchup
begins to flow. Science verifying
everyday experience!
It's
amusing that ketchup has been a focus of rheological research, but as you can
imagine, there are a multitude of applications of this field that affect our
daily lives in ways far more important than the flow of ketchup, such as in
"paint and industrial applications like sewage
treatment and mining."
(Armour
also penned a similar piece about that other great condiment:
Nothing attracts / the mustard from wieners /
as much as the slacks / just back from the
cleaners.)
* * *
While
on the subject of food, three unimportant observations.
1. I have finally decided, after 6½ decades of
life, that I really do not like the flavor of thyme, except perhaps in
microscopic amounts. I made a few dishes
during the year with thyme in them and realized I didn't like it. My point here is not so much my particular
taste in spices, it's that I find it amusing that it took me six decades to
learn something that is a rather mundane part of life. The encouraging part of the story is that I
can still learn.
2. I find it funny that containers of table salt
carry an expiration date. What I can
learn from apparently reputable sources on the web confirms my common-sense
understanding: salt does not
expire. For pete's sake, it sits in the
earth for thousands of years. (Of course,
if it gets damp or is contaminated with other material, it may become unusable,
but kept dry and sealed, it lasts forever.)
3. It really is true that science does not care
what you believe; the laws of physics will operate irrespective of what you
think. I proved this early in the year. I had a large refrigerated crockpot full of
leftover chicken stew. I transferred the
leftovers to a smaller container and put the crockpot in the sink to soak
before cleaning it. I ran warm water in
it. Within a minute I heard a
"crack" and the crockpot had a neat break line right through the
middle. I know that hot water on cold
glass will break it, but I learned that even warm water on cold glass does it
in. I really wanted to go buy another
crockpot. Said Gary never.
My
mother-in-law shortly thereafter gave me a new crockpot. In keeping with the times, of course, it has
digital controls, unlike my old one, which had a knob one turned to "low,"
"high," "keep warm," or "off."
* * *
There
are parts of a conservative political philosophy that I can respect (even while
disagreeing) and parts that I can even agree with. Washington
Post columnist Michael Gerson captured some of my own sentiments in an
opinion piece last December (2016). He
began by bemoaning the fact that conservatism, in his view, is "at its
nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith." He thus immediately split the Republican
party from conservatism. A wise
judgment.
To
the extent Gerson accurately defines conservatism, I don't buy all of it—but
parts that I might or might not endorse depend on definitions. For instance, he maintains that conservatism
favors limited government. What's
"limited"? Does it include
national health insurance? Free public
education through college? Mandatory
parental leave for child birth or adoption?
Mandatory wage levels? If it
does, then I favor limited government, too.
I suspect, however, that several of those are transpontine for
conservatives.
On
the matter of human nature, Gerson argues that "conservatives believe that human beings are fallible
and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness. They (actually, we) tend to
become swaggering dictators in realms where we can act with impunity—a motor
vehicle department office, a hostile traffic stop, a country under personal
rule." What conservatives maybe,
and Republicans certainly, fail to recognize is that those same
characteristics—ambition, passion and selfishness [sic, no Oxford comma]—inhere
in the people who lead the corporate world as well as the political. In the corporate arena, however, government
constraints—anti-trust, pollution, tax, etc.—are vilified by the political
right. I think conservatives aren't
always certain about how to contend with rampant private sector abuses that
harm people as well as the body politic.
"Conservatives
believe that finite and fallen creatures are often wrong. . . . All of us have
things to learn, even from our political opponents. The truth is out there, but
it is generally broken into pieces and scattered across the human experience.
We only reassemble it through listening and civil communication." The term "fallen" carries a
religious connotation that I can't accept, but the general sentiment is one
that's hard to disagree with. As Madison
famously wrote in the Federalist #51,
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external
nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
"And
conservatives believe that a just society depends on the moral striving of
finite and fallen creatures who treat each other with a respect and decency
that laws can encourage but not enforce."
I'm not sure that it's accurate to say that laws cannot enforce respect
and decency. It can be argued that
behavior follows the law; when hate speech is outlawed, people will be less
likely to indulge in it. Laws against
segregation in public facilities is but one example.
"In the
midst of all our justified skepticism, we can never be skeptical of this: that the reason for politics is to honor the
equal value of every life, beginning with the weakest and most
vulnerable." If that's true, then
conservatives ought to be vigorous supporters of early childhood education and
the availability of health care for parents and children, especially the
latter.
Gerson uses lofty
language, but as one friend of mine commented, "he seems to be describing
a conservatism that is both laudable and absent in most conservatives I have
met." Another wrote that while Gerson's views are ones he "can
understand and often support, . . .
apparently those folks have no place in the new Republican Party.
Rapacious capitalists and Top Brass seem to be the model GOP leaders of the
moment." At the time I composed
these paragraphs, there appeared an article (which I couldn't find later)
articulating the same thought: the plans
and policies of the current leadership in GOP Washington have little or nothing
to do with a thoughtful conservative's view of what a government should do (or
not).
Conservatives, it
seems to me, ignore the sentence in Madison's Federalist that immediately
precedes the more famous one: "But
what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human
nature?" When one contemplates
human nature as exemplified in social organizations, the need for government is
immediately apparent. Ronald Reagan
really got things backward when he declared that government is the problem, not
the solution. In light of what people in
the sugar, tobacco, oil, and auto industries alone have done over the last 50
years, one trembles at the thought that they would have more freedom to do what
they choose. The health care and drug
industry record has a few pock marks in it as well. Human nature, embodied in corporate behavior,
for example, indeed needs government.
While governments can do bad, and even evil (it isn't hard to think of
instances in American history—Native Americans, for example—much less history
from around the world—Nazi Germany, for example), given a stable civil
government like the U.S. has had for the decades since World War II, the evil
it commits seems to me far less than the evil that has been attempted by the
private sector. So also for France,
Germany, Britain, Australia, Japan, etc.
The idea of government protecting its citizens from themselves seems to
be lost on conservativism.
I'm really not,
at heart, all that radical a human being, at least in my life and habits. No surprise there, I'm sure, to anyone who
knows me. I don't want a revolution
because revolutions have a way of eating their offspring and doing a lot of
harm besides. It would not be good for
my children and it wouldn't likely be much good for most children. But the way "conservatism" has been
embodied in American politics pushes me hard to the left. If there really were a compassionate
conservatism, it might be something I could live with. But it may fall in the same category as
unicorns.
* * *
When
Krystin was in the hospital at one point, the attending physician asked her
what her pain level was—and used various adjectives. I expressed surprise that he didn't use the
ubiquitous 1-10 scale that I've seen in every doctor's office for at least a
couple of decades. He explained that at
this (the University) hospital, at least, they no longer used that scale. They discovered that one person's
"3" on the scale might be another person's "8"; one person
might say pain was an excruciating 9 but they could continue to function while
another might say their pain was a 3—but they were completely disabled from
doing anything. So instead they now try
to use different adjectives.
A British writer by the name of John Henry Walsh wrote a
piece about the measurement (or lack thereof) of pain. After relating a story about a prolonged
painful medical experience his wife had gone through, he said that
several
questions came into my head. Chief among
them was: Can anyone in the medical
profession talk about pain with any authority?
From the family doctor to the surgeon, their remarks and suggestions
seemed tentative, generalized, unknowing — and potentially dangerous: Was it right for the doctor to tell my wife
that her level of pain didn’t sound like appendicitis when the doctor didn’t
know whether she had a high or low pain threshold? Should he have advised her to stay in bed and
risk her appendix exploding into peritonitis?
How could surgeons predict that patients would feel only ‘discomfort’
after such an operation when she felt agony — an agony that was aggravated by
fear that the operation had been a failure?"
I
can personally relate to the last sentence.
When I had spinal column surgery in 1992 (to remove a calcium build up
that was pinching nerves), the physician told me that taking a bone spur from
my hip (to replace the disk they would need to remove to get at the calcium
build up) would cause "some discomfort." "Some discomfort" indeed. Rarely has a two-word phrase in English been
so abused. I've never felt such
agonizing pain as when I moved my leg after the surgery; doing so sent spasms
of teeth-gritting pain up and down my entire body that caused me involuntarily
to cry out. Obviously I've never
experienced childbirth, but from the descriptions I've heard, my post-op pain
must have come close.
Walsh went on to wonder "if there were any agreed
words that would help a doctor understand the pain felt by a
patient." He recalled his father, a
physician, describing the range of pain descriptors his patients had used. "Few of them, he told me, corresponded
to the symptoms listed in a medical textbook. So how should he proceed? By guesswork and
aspirin?"
There
seemed to be a chasm of understanding in human discussions of pain. I wanted to find out how the medical
profession apprehends pain – the language it uses for something that’s
invisible to the naked eye, that can’t be measured except by asking for the
sufferer’s subjective description, and that can be treated only by the use of
opium derivatives that go back to the Middle Ages.
Walsh described the procedure that clinics use, called
the McGill Pain Questionnaire.
"The patient listens as a list of ‘pain descriptors’ is read out
and has to say whether each word describes their pain — and, if so, to rate the
intensity of the feeling. The clinicians then look at the questionnaire and put
check marks in the appropriate places. This
gives the clinician a number, or a percentage figure, to work with in
assessing, later, whether a treatment has brought the patient’s pain down (or
up)." This isn't an approach I've
ever encountered in a doctor visit.
Walsh
also notes that "a more recent variant is the National Initiative on Pain
Control’s Pain Quality Assessment Scale (PQAS), in which patients are asked to
indicate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how "intense" — or
"sharp", "hot", "dull", "cold",
"sensitive", "tender", "itchy", etc. — their pain
has been over the past week." This
isn't quite the 1-10 scale that my physicians have used. Walsh aptly observes that
the
trouble with this approach is the imprecision of that scale of 1 to 10, where a
10 would be "the most intense pain sensation imaginable". How does a patient ‘imagine’ the worst pain
ever and give their own pain a number?
Middle-class British men who have never been in a war zone may find it
hard to imagine anything more agonizing than toothache or a tennis injury. Women who have experienced childbirth may,
after that experience, rate everything else as a mild 3 or 4.
So Walsh talked with a faculty member studying pain; the
guy doesn't like numbers. "There
are lots of problems that come with trying to measure pain. . . . I think the
obsession with numbers is an oversimplification. Pain is not unidimensional. It
doesn’t just come with scale — a lot or a little — it comes with other
baggage: how threatening it is, how
emotionally disturbing, how it affects your ability to concentrate." In the course of a long article, Walsh
essentially—whether intentionally or not—demonstrates that there's no reliable
and consistent way to measure pain. This
despite tremendous advances in brain research and neuroimaging techniques.
So what's the state of the world of pain definition? The most recent update, from the
International Association for the Study of Pain (7000 members, clinicians and
researchers, in 133 countries) in 2012, defines it as "An unpleasant
sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue
damage, or described in terms of such damage." The note accompanying the definition
amplifies it; here is part of the note.
The
inability to communicate verbally does not negate the possibility that an
individual is experiencing pain and is in need of appropriate pain-relieving
treatment. Pain is always subjective. Each individual learns the application of the
word through experiences related to injury in early life. Biologists recognize
that those stimuli which cause pain are liable to damage tissue. Accordingly, pain is that experience we
associate with actual or potential tissue damage. It is unquestionably a
sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and
therefore also an emotional experience. . . .
Many people report pain in the absence of tissue damage or any likely
pathophysiological cause; usually this happens for psychological reasons. There is usually no way to distinguish their
experience from that due to tissue damage if we take the subjective report. If
they regard their experience as pain, and if they report it in the same ways as
pain caused by tissue damage, it should be accepted as pain.
Wikipedia,
always useful for this kind of exploration, helps. Pain may be a physical phenomenon but
emotional state is part of it. There are
situations that had never occurred to me.
If someone suffers pain along with trauma (serious injury or affliction),
a recurrence of the pain will typically provoke the original emotional trauma
as well. In the case of two people who
receive a similar injury, if one of them associates great emotional stress with
it while the other does not, the former will feel more intense pain. "Modern research has gathered
considerable amounts of evidence that support the theory that pain is not only
a physical phenomenon but rather a biopsychosocial phenomenon, encompassing
culture, nociceptive stimuli, and the environment in the experience and
perception of pain."
I
would have to delve far more deeply into the literature than I want to in order
to discover the most recent views about the measurement of pain in
patients. I'm not quite that interested,
but I will be curious to learn what the nurse or physician asks me the next
time I'm in their office and I have pain.
Then
there's this little research note I came across, which I did not explore
further.
Prostaglandins
been linked to the sensory perception of pain, but their role in the emotional
response to pain is unclear. A new study has demonstrated that the aversive
effects of inflammatory pain are driven by prostaglandin signaling specifically
on serotonin-producing neurons in the brainstem.
* * *
I found this an interesting
datum. Researchers (including one from
the University of Minnesota) found that "while Americans with higher incomes tend to spend
more time alone, [and] when they do socialize, they do so more with their
friends. Meanwhile, the social
interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around
family members and neighbors."
The implications?
The authors didn’t say so, but a reviewer wondered whether "this dynamic could lead to a decline in
civic engagement." On the one hand,
orientation to friends rather than relatives and neighbors could lead people to
be less involved in their communities, but there are plenty of other data
demonstrating segregation by income in cities, so chances are the friends are
also neighbors—or from equally-situated neighborhoods. The reporter concluded that "at a time when Americans are becoming more
economically stratified, it’s worrying that the highest earners might be less
likely to have a sense of what’s going on outside of their own peer groups."
I suspect that’s been going on for a long time already. The people who go to "Friends of the
Minnesota Orchestra" events are not typically socializing with the people
who frequent soup kitchens.
In our case, I guess we have "higher incomes," at least
compared to the average in the U.S., and it’s true that we spend more time with
friends than with family—and since our only good friends who were also
neighbors moved to Florida, we never spend time with neighbors. It seems to me they err in suggesting that
those with higher incomes might not care about their community. Some, perhaps, pay no attention to their
surrounds, but virtually everyone I know in the Twin Cities—people who are on
the liberal end of the political spectrum, it must be acknowledged—is vitally
concerned about the entire population, including recent immigrants and those
who are not so well off. The extent to
which my affluent friends actually engage with the community varies, of course,
but all of them support public policies that extend the social safety net to
those around them in our metropolitan area.
* * *
Sometimes
there are academic studies that make my day.
One of them in early 2017 found that there is a link between swearing
and honesty. The study came out of the
University of Cambridge in England but the researchers, psychologists, were
also from the Netherlands, the U.S., and Hong Kong. "Frankly, we do give a
damn: The relationship between profanity
and honesty."
Associated with anger or crudeness,
often inappropriate, profanity "can have another, more positive
connotation. . . . People who frequently
curse are being more honest." Or,
at least, "less likely to be associated with lying and
deception." The article reporting
the research defines profanity more broadly than I would, as "language
that contains sexual references, blasphemy or other vulgar terms." I tend to limit profanity to aspects of
religion, use vulgarity when the term(s) involves bodily functions and other
rude mental images, and apply obscenity to cases that involve sexual
activities. In any case, however
defined, it's "usually related to the expression of emotions such as
anger, frustration or surprise."
Certainly seems right!
Both dishonesty and profanity are
seen as deviant and "often viewed as evidence of low moral
standards." To the extent that's
true in the case of profanity, I know almost no one who has high moral
standards—but I don't believe it.
However, on the contrary, the researchers suggest, "profanity can
be positively associated with honesty.
It is often used to express unfiltered feelings and
sincerity." Donald Trump used swear
words and was seen by some as "more genuine." I have to think that's right as well. One of the co-authors said that "the
relationship between profanity and dishonesty is a tricky one. Swearing is often inappropriate but it can
also be evidence that someone is telling you their honest opinion. Just as they aren't filtering their language
to be more palatable, they're also not filtering their views."
To gather data, the researchers
first administered a survey to 276 people to ask about the swear words they use
and administered lie-detector tests to the subjects to determine if they were
being truthful about what they wrote (we'll set aside for now the large
methodological problems with lie detectors).
The people who wrote down more swear words were not as likely to be
lying about their use. Then the
researchers went to 75,000 U.S. Facebook users and analyzed the use of swear
words in online interactions. "The
research found that those who used more profanity were also more likely to use
language patterns that have been shown in previous research to be related to
honesty." They also looked at
geographic distribution of use of swear words; people in the northeast are more
likely to use them than people in the south.
I'm not sure if that surprises me or not. But if you want to cuss, people will assume
you're being honest.
*
* *
The original costs of the construction of our house in
1931. Plumbing at $315 seems right—it's
about what I pay every time the plumber shows up. Unfortunately, the new garage we built a few
years ago cost more than $150. I know
that my great aunt and uncle paid $4000 for the house in 1940. They didn't like having a mortgage, so paid
it all off the second or third year.
* * *
Speaking
of noses, Cyrano de Bergerac by
Edmond Rostand, 1897, Act 1, Scene 4:
CYRANO:
'Tis enormous!
Old Flathead, empty-headed
meddler, know
That I am proud possessing
such appendice.
'Tis well known, a big nose
is indicative
Of a soul affable, and kind,
and courteous,
Liberal, brave, just like
myself, and such
As you can never dare to
dream yourself,
Rascal contemptible!
Thanks to a friend for pointing this out to me.
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