Laurence Horn, a linguist (and Larry to his friends), wrote the book on negation, A Natural History of Negation. On the Barnes & Noble entry for Horn's magnum opus appears the following "Booknews": "An exquisite natural history of this unique cephalopod by a paleontologist (who overmodestly professes limited zoological training)." This was noted by Mark Liberman on Language Log back in 2003, but, wonderfully, remains intact to this day.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Linguistics humor
A stacked relative clause construction (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT. A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:Lifted from Charles Fillmore's contribution to Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday, via John Lawler.It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Lite-Brite phrenology
"If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it?" -from Matt Hutson's blog. (The title is from his blog, too.)
Hutson had an article in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday, in their "Year in Ideas" issue, in which he discussed the term neurorealism (which means, roughly, "swallowing an fMRI scan whole"), which was coined by biomedical ethicist Eric Racine (and his colleagues) in an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Racine et al. defined three terms that could use some more exposure:
neurorealism - how coverage of fMRI investigations can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public
neuroessentialism - how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain (see also neurobollocks)
neuropolicy - attempts to use fMRI results to promote political and personal agendas
Try to work these into everyday conversation.
(Via Language Log!)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Especially stupid religious "science"
You cannot make this shit up. (I'm on the grading side of exams, and finding stupidity on the Web seems far more interesting than ever.)
Chuck Missler explains the Peanut Butter Theory of Evolution:
Missler is not kidding. On his website, he explains: "Every time you open a fresh, new jar of some food item, and don't find evidence of "new life," you have conducted an empirical experiment which refutes the common superstition which continues to be promoted by the orthodox witch doctors of biogenesis: that life occurred without the involvement of a master designer." If you don't understand the sophisticated theorizing behind such a view, you are beyond help.
And, although the video below is old, I'd never seen it before. In it, Ray Comfort, alongside the chuckling chucklehead Kirk Cameron, explains his idiocy to us. In particular, he shows us why the existence of a banana is an atheist's nightmare:
How can anyone conceivably take these people seriously? Does anyone?
Bush = lying motherf*cker
George W. Bush on December 4, 2007, responding to a reporter's question about when he knew about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003: "And it wasn't until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public." (Taken directly from the White House transcript.)
But Bush had been briefed, in August.
Yeah, I know I'm about a week behind on this, but maybe a few more people should know about this.
The accuracy of the NIE report is under dispute (see the Time link above), but this doesn't change the fact that (once again), that Bush is demonstrably a liar.
According to my calendar, we have 405 very long days until we are rid of Bush.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Texas science educator pushed out for advocating science
"Intelligent design" (i.e., creationism; let's call it what it is) is a very bad idea. It's not a scientific theory; it's transparently religion masquerading (very badly) as science.
But, despite the awesomely-bad science that intelligent design represents, this doesn't mean that political pressures can't generate even greater levels of stupidity, and quite probably illegal behavior.
The Texas science curriculum director, Chris Comer, recently was all but forced to resign from her position after she forwarded an e-mail about a talk by the co-author (Barbara Forrest) of a book entitled Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse. According to a November 29 article in the Austin American-Statesman, Comer was put on adminstrative leave in October shortly after she forwarded an e-mail about Forrest's talk to "several individuals and a few online communities." This apparently was a violation of a directive (see the disciplinary memo sent re: Comer; it reeks of weaselly legalese) given to Comer that stated that she was not to "communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the [Texas Education A]gency in any way that might compromise the integrity of the [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] development and revision process." The TEKS revision is apparently an overhaul of the Texas school system curriculum that's ongoing. And Comer's mistake was to intentionally or accidentally endorse the idea that creationism in the guise of intelligent design is horseshit; her position within the TEA requires that she, as a representative of the agency, remain neutral about creationism and not provide (back to the memo here) "guidance or opinions about instructional methodology."
There were other dressed-up complaints in the memo about Comer's "insubordination", but these too smell like they came from lawyers who were trying to protect the TEA from a wrongful termination lawsuit. But it's clear what happened here: Comer was fired because she incidentally endorsed the (truthful) equation "creationism = not science" and this is not popular or acceptable in a conservative state like Texas.
Besides the witch-huntery aspect of this, what's most disturbing about this (although hardly surprising) is that some politicos in Texas believe that neutrality in the realm of science means that creationism is to be taken seriously as science. But it is not neutral to have creationism being taught in a science class; it is an positive endorsement of its scientific status, which is woefully lacking, and always will be.
UPDATE: The NY Times published an op-ed piece about this story this morning (Dec. 4). The conclusion: "We can only hope that adherents of a sound science education can save Texas from a retreat into the darker ages."
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Mindreaders redux; Nature slaps the NY Times!
The journal Nature has published an editorial slapping the New York Times for its incredibly stupid decision to run advertising posing as (really shoddy) science on its op-ed page a few Sundays back (see here for more, and here for the original "op-ed" piece). In Nature's editorial is a rebuke for some aspects of cognitive and affective neuroscience research that deserves quoting:
[H]ow do you find out what people are feeling? ... Apparently just asking them was simply not good enough. So how did [the researchers] uncover the innermost thoughts of their 20 subjects? The[y] used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the subjects' brains while they viewed images of political candidates ... A group of cognitive neuroscientists was swift to object to its conclusions — which veer close to a modern-day phrenology.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Hubristic Neuroscience (or, Mindreaders!)
Oh, barf.
On Sunday (Nov. 11), the New York Times published an op-ed piece written by a team of neuroscientists, led by a researcher named Marco Iacoboni from UCLA, and including a couple of folks from a company called FKF Applied Research. In this wildly overstated piece, they described a study in which people viewed pictures of political candidates and watched video clips of speeches made by these candidates. While doing all of this, their brain activity was measured in an fMRI tube. In the article, the authors made a variety of amazing claims about how activity in certain brain regions corresponds in an apparently one-to-one manner with emotional states. I had no idea that brain-reading was such a precise science! An example of this kind of bunkum: "When viewing images of [Hillary Clinton], these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton." Whoa. I think these folks are trying to doing some more-traditional mind-reading here, along with that of the neuroscientific variety.
Thankfully, many folks have called out the Times and the researchers, including Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania, the bloggers at Mind Hacks, and Daniel Engber at Slate, among others. This is not the first time that Iacoboni and his colleagues from FKF have pulled off these kinds of shenanigans, bypassing any kind of peer review to present wild claims to a credulous public about what neuroscientists can do: In early 2006, Iacoboni and friends scanned the brains of subjects who were watching Super Bowl commercials. The results of this study were disseminated widely ("instant science" - that is, not peer-reviewed, nor up to snuff for publication in a scientific journal) on Edge.com and to the press (see here, for example). What a waste.
I've done my part here. I just want to make sure that at least a few more people are aware of the crap being perpetrated by some in the scientific community.
P.S. I discovered that the Times yesterday published a letter to the editor expressing displeasure with the Times and the researchers, signed by a group of top neuroscientists. The heart of the matter: "As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region. This is so because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible."
Singular "their" and deep anaphors
On Language Log today, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum posted an interesting question that's worth pondering (my boldfacing below is simply to highlight a separate, interesting observation):
My gut sense is that this is a similar situation to the one highlighted in a paper entitled "Comprehending Conceptual Anaphors" (Gernsbacher, 1991, in the journal Language and Cognitive Processes; large PDF link) by psychologist Morton Gernsbacher about what she called conceptual anaphors, which are illustrated nicely by the sentences, I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them. Gernsbacher argued that a pronoun like this is not, strictly speaking, referring to the word margarita in the first sentence, but is instead referring to the concept of margaritas. In this case, it's a so-called deep anaphor because it finds its referent not in the surface form (that is, the words themselves) of an utterance, but in the meaning of an utterance. I think that the driver example posted by Pullum is nearly analogous to the margarita example. Consider the following variant of the king example that doesn't sound too bad to my ears:Compare the following two sentences:
- Do not speak to the driver or distract their attention without good cause.
- *Do not speak to the king or distract their attention without good cause.
Example 1 is closely modeled on a sign found behind the driver's cab on route 29 Lothian Buses in Edinburgh. It is clearly grammatical and acceptable. (Prescriptivists might object to it, but as you know, singular antecedents for forms of the pronoun they are attested in the finest English authors since Middle English times; the prescriptivists just haven't paid attention to the evidence of literary usage.) Example 2 contrasts in only one word, yet is clearly ungrammatical (or strikingly unacceptable at the very least). Why? What is the difference between driver and king that is responsible for the contrast?
George W. Bush acts like a king, but at least most of them haven't seemed so childish.How does that sound to you? Using king so that it refers to a class rather than an individual seems to make all the difference. I think in Pullum's driver example, the sign is meant to be able to refer to any driver who happens to be present, whereas in the king example the referent of king is a particular person.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Creation Museum = Comedy Gold!
The blogger John Scalzi recently visited The Creation Museum (I refuse to link to this nonsense) and posted on Flickr some of the pictures he took. The captions that have been added since are hilarious. A taste (that's a woman and a young girl engaged in some kind of activity whilst a wave of water, visible through the window in their Flinstones-esque dwelling, rushes toward them, presumably to wash away their sin, or some such bullshit):
One caption: Those girls are obviously playing some early form of Dungeons and Dragons.
What an enormous source of comedy this "museum" is. Check out this awesome saddled dinosaur that can be viewed (and, I assume, sat upon) at the CM:
Almost every day you can read or hear about how U.S. students (and adults) are far behind much of the developed world in math and science. Is it any wonder why?
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Atheist loses mind, becomes theist
In the New York Times Magazine on Sunday (November 4) there appeared a lengthy article about Antony Flew, a professor of philosophy who taught at a variety of universities in the U.K. I'd heard of Flew a few times, probably because he was a favorite son among atheists (i.e., I can't place precisely where I'd heard of him). As the NYT Magazine article makes clear, he rose to fame in the atheist world initially because of his essay, "Theology and Falsification," in which he makes a clean little argument (1055 words, according to MS Word) about why the existence of some kind of deity can neither be proved nor disproved.
Anyhow, a few years ago, Flew announced that he was more a less a theist, an event which caused quite an uproar among folks who follow these sorts of things. And this fall, a book that Flew is the co-author of, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, is being released. The article in the NYT Magazine makes it pretty clear that Flew has been subtly (but not apparently maliciously) manipulated by a number of Christian scholars (some in the sciences, some in the humanties). Further, his co-authorship of the book in question is likened to that of a star athlete who has a ghostwriter pen an autobiography. Worse than all of this, it appears that Flew is sinking slowly into dementia, and is being used by these Christians to advance their agenda via a very weird appeal to an authority they would never have considered an ally while his mind was sharp.
Very sad.
(Via Metafilter, like so much else that's good on the Web.)
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Why should an atheist be angry? Let me count the ways ...
A blogger named Greta Christina posted on October 15 a long and rambling but interesting and entertaining list of reasons why atheists might be angry. There are of course some reasons that are good, some less so, some undeniably true, some on a little shakier ground, but since she did the hard work, I thought I'd give her list a little more publicity.
My favorite part of the list is about one of the most incoherent (to me) aspects of faith: prayer. An extended quote seems worthwhile:
I'm angry that so many believers treat prayer as a sort of cosmic shopping list for God. I'm angry that believers pray to win sporting events, poker hands, beauty pageants, and more. As if they were the center of the universe, as if God gives a shit about who wins the NCAA Final Four -- and as if the other teams/ players/ contestants weren't praying just as hard.
I'm especially angry that so many believers treat prayer as a cosmic shopping list when it comes to health and illness. I'm angry that this belief leads to the revolting conclusion that God deliberately makes people sick so they’ll pray to him to get better. And I'm angry that they foist this belief on sick and dying children -- in essence teaching them that, if they don't get better, it's their fault. That they didn't pray hard enough, or they didn't pray right, or God just doesn't love them enough.
And I get angry when other believers insist that the cosmic shopping list isn't what religion and prayer are really about; that their own sophisticated theology is the true understanding of God. I get angry when believers insist that the shopping list is a straw man, an outmoded form of religion and prayer that nobody takes seriously, and it's absurd for atheists to criticize it.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Teach for America's budget
Recently I got a FedEx "letter" from Teach for America. In it were five copies of this:
And five copies of this:
The copies were not on particularly high-quality paper, nor were the copies of particularly good quality. There weren't any instructions on what to do with them (though it's obvious). What I can't figure out is why they were sent using such an expensive method. It probably cost upward of $10 to send these flyers. Flyers. To post. On bulletin boards. Around school. Amidst flyers for roommates, study abroad, and other sundry solicitations.
Is this worth FedEx'ing?
I know only a little about Teach for America, but this little episode makes me wonder about just how well-organized an outfit this is. Maybe they could save some of the money they use for these mailing costs and donate it to a local Boys & Girls Club.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
The Baby Bee Bright blight
Last night, while watching a Scrubs rerun, I saw a commercial for a product called Baby Bee Bright. (you can see the commercial here; according to the BBB website, this ad campaign was launched this month). The product allows one to attach a CD player with "fetal speakers" around the abdomen of a pregnant woman, using "an adjustable maternity belt". There is a "fetal microphone" that can be connected to the CD player that transmits sound through speakers that are just inches from the womb. It's very cute. It can be purchased for "4 easy payments of $24.95 plus $6 S&H" (but the fetal microphone is "free"!).
The voiceover during the commercial is very carefully worded: "Research shows cognitive development begins in the womb and Baby Bee Bright gives you everything you need to get started." During the voiceover, the words Increase IQ, Language Skills, and Reading Comprehension (!) float across the screen. Clearly the desired inference in the viewer is that this product will help a fetus develop these skills even before birth. But this is implied and never directly claimed. There are some direct claims. One is "Now you can strengthen [the parent-baby] bond before the baby is born," which is almost tautologically true - there's little doubt the act of talking to one's fetus can enhance feelings of bonding on the part of the parent. It probably works when we talk to plants, photographs, and pets, too. Another stronger claim is that "Studies show babies arrive feeling safer and calmer knowing your voice, dad's voice, even the voice of grandparents." I have no idea if this is true, but the "calmer" part of it certainly strains credulity.
The BBB website is much less circumspect in its claims about this product. The entry page to the site is accompanied by a voiceover that claims that vocabulary and IQ are positively correlated with exposure to words and music while in the womb ("the more [fetuses] hear, the greater their vocabulary and IQ"). The BBB website has a helpful "Research" link. Clicking it reveals the source of this very direct claim, a speech pathologist named Dorothy Dougherty. Dougherty's specialty appears to be helping children (and adults) who have articulation problems. So far as I can establish, she does not do research on prenatal language exposure, nor has she helped any fetuses with their poor articulation. She has, however, written a couple of books about talking to babies (note: not to fetuses; shouldn't the plural be feti?), and likely stands to make some moolah if there's a way to generate an uptick in sales of her books. (Reading the reviews of her books on Amazon.com is a happy thing. Parents are amazed at the way their children acquire language when they follow the tips in Dougherty's book! I think I will write a book that provides tips to parents of their nearly-pubescent children to help their children grow taller, such as the Bobby Brady tested hanging from a chin-up bar technique. Except in cases of dwarfism, it's guaranteed to work. Your child will get taller! I can imagine the testimonials now ... "Mr. Levine's tip to feed my child a nutritious diet works like a charm. Little Julie got 6" taller over the summer. I don't know what we would've done without this book!")
Another testimonial on the BBB website comes from " Dr. Philip De Fina, Director of Neuropsychological Research at the NYU Brain Research Laboratories and faculty member of the NYU School of Medicine," who claimed, "A product like Baby Bee Bright may enhance this early development and subsequently redefine the concept of early intervention. Baby Bee Brightis a brilliant product that may ultimately be linked to improved listening skills and may even impact future reading comprehension abilities."Besides the utter emptiness of this claim, there is the appeal to authority of Dr. De Fina's affiliations. However, he is not currently listed as being on the faculty or staff of the NYU Brain Research Laboratories (and he certainly isn't the director; the co-directors are Drs. E. Roy John and Leslie S. Prichep), nor has he co-authored any of their publications between 2000 and 2006. He is or was affiliated with NYU at some point. The only thing I know for sure is that Dr. De Fina is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of the International Brain Research Foundation. The IBRF's goal is to "cure disorders of consciousness," which seems tangential (at best) to what BBB is supposed to be good for.
There are two somewhat more-substantive research-related claims on the BBB website that are allegedly about prenatal learning. One is linked with following label: Study: Parents can help babies get rhythm. The link leads to a press-release-ish description of an experiment by Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University. Dr. Trainor is a extremely impressively-published researcher (and I mean wow - these are very good journals), with an ambitious research program. However, none of her research appears to be about prenatal learning.
The second more-substantive research-related claim is based on a press release from the University of Leicester. According to the press release, a study by Dr. Alexandra Lamont demonstrated that babies remember sounds they heard in the womb, and recognize them up to at least age one. The press release is from 2001. Dr. Lamont's current appointment appears to be at the Keele University School of Psychology. Among her "selected publications" there is nothing about the research from the press release. The only reference to this research is to a BBC-produced series called Child of our Time. Unfortunately, without a UK IP address (or some kind of subscription), one cannot view past episodes online. Anyhow, it appears that Dr. Lamont has not (yet?) published this research. Nevertheless, there are studies that show that infants' exposure to external stimuli experienced while they were in the womb has a later influence on their (very simple) behavior (see, for example, the research of Barbara Kisilevsky or Anthony DeCasper), so this is not an outlandish claim. But it does not in any way demonstrate an increased rate of cognitive development of any kind.
The larger issue here is whether parents-to-be should be coughing up $100 to purchase a device that they think will speed up their soon-to-be-born offspring's cognitive development. Every peer-reviewed article I read and skimmed today while putting this together suggests that the jury is still out. No, no, that's too soft a conclusion. The state of the science is this: There's no evidence at all that devices like Baby Bee Bright enhance an infant's development. There's likely no harm at all in buying this sort of thing, if one has cash to burn. But this kind of advertising may induce a sense in some parents-to-be that if they don't buy this kind of gadget, their child will fall behind (Baby Bee Dull). And nothing could be further from the truth.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Friday, October 05, 2007
A Dan "Crockus" Hodgins update
Mark Liberman at Language Log has finally posted a bit of a follow-up on Dan Hodgins, the inventor of the crockus. One of Liberman's correspondents sent him a scan of one of Hodgins' presentation slides; it is presented in all its glory at right. The follow-up post is mostly about how very wrong the information on this slide is (and it's even about a real brain part this time!), but perhaps the best part of the post is Liberman's summary judgment of Hodgins: Hodgins himself is a pathetic figure, worth debunking only as an example of the charlatanry that apparently can flourish these days in the demi-monde of pseudoscience that the education industry calls "professional development". Amen to that. One can only hope that Hodgins is seriously questioned by someone with just enough incredulity at his next presentation.
Liberman and other bloggers have taken especial aim at Hodgins and his ilk (e.g., The Gurian Institute) for their overemphasis on small sex differences, which, when they exist at all, are usually differences in the mean value of some measure (e.g., corpus callosum size, variously measured) that are incorrectly extrapolated into categorical differences. This is a hairy statistical issue, because the difference between the means of two populations of scores is one of the first places that researchers look to decide if the two populations are different. 
Whereas different means do suggest different populations, the amount of overlap between even clearly different populations is sometimes enormous, and taking the difference between the means as more important than the overlap, and even as an indication that the populations should be treated differently, isn't always a reasonable leap. What's more important about the two distributions at right, that the means (the blue and purplish vertical lines) are different, or that they overlap (the gray area) a lot?
Monday, October 01, 2007
A roller coaster in the sky
I have a fear of flying, and have suffered from this all of my adult life, dating back to well before I ever actually got on an airplane for the first time, at age 28 (in 1995). To the best of my 
ability to recollect, this dates back to the sensational coverage (which would probably seem quaint by contemporary standards of journalism) on local news stations in Chicago (where I lived from 1975 to 1995) of the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 after taking off from O'Hare airport in 1979; this is still the deadliest single-aircraft accident in US history, with 273 people losing their lives. I still remember Jim Tilmon, one of the on-air meteorologists in Chicago (probably with the NBC affiliate at the time), who also happened to be a commercial pilot, describing the accident to the anchors, turning a model plane on its side (see the picture above) to demonstrate how the plane crashed when its left wing stalled after a series of mechanical and structural failures occurred following the loss of the left-wing engine during takeoff. Horrible shit.
Anyhow, despite my fear, I have managed to take many dozens of trips by airplanes (totaling over 100 flights) in the past 12 years, even getting to Europe three times. My fear has its peaks and valleys. It has been lowest when I've had what might be considered flooding therapy, such as when I took five or six trips within two months in late winter 2001. It's also low when it's looked like I might not be able to get home, such as one night at O'Hare when I missed my connecting flight to Northwest Arkansas (XNA), but managed to get re-booked from American to United (or vice versa), ran through the airport to find my gate, and got on board just before they closed the door. I was too happy to be on board and headed home to see my girlfriend Cari to focus on my usual fears.
My fears tend to shift over time, and now are firstly focused on weather, and secondly on the tight turns and close-to-the-ground turbulence from wind that sometimes accompany landings. At other times, I've not liked takeoff, and clear-air turbulence bothered me. Then there are the noise changes associated with the engines. Et cetera. If it's part of the typical basket of fears associated with flying, I've sampled it and found it to my liking at one time or another. But nowadays it's weather first and foremost, because I've been pretty lucky to avoid flying in crappy weather. I felt like I was due to cash in on some perversion of the Gambler's Fallacy. It turned out I was right.
Yesterday (30 Sept) I was in State College, PA, on the last day of a weekend visiting Cari. My flights back were from State College to Cincinnati (CVG), and then from CVG to XNA. I knew from a few days earlier that the weather forecast included a slight chance of thunderstorms in northwest Arkansas. However, the forecast discussion (the National Weather Service publishes these for weather geeks) as of Saturday (29 Sept) morning said "NOT OVERLY IMPRESSED WITH RAIN CHANCES SUNDAY INTO MONDAY." A later discussion sounded similar skepticism about there being enough moisture to induce much action.
Before heading to the airport late yesterday afternoon, I took one last look at the weather forecast and saw that the NWS had issued a severe thunderstorm watch for northeast Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas, among other locations. Also, a line of thunderstorms had developed that extended from central Missouri down into north central Oklahoma. I didn't have time to look at animated radar images and thus to do the mental calculations needed to figure out when these would get into northwest Arkansas. So I got on the plane in Cincinnati knowing that it was possible that my second flight would be less-than-smooth.
The first flight was remarkably smooth, which, in hindsight, is no consolation at all. Once in the terminal in Cincinnati, I checked the northwest Arkansas radar on my cell phone and the storms had clearly intensified and extended west to about Tulsa, and still had yet to arrive at XNA. Desperately trying to do mental calculations to figure out when we'd arrive and when the storms would arrive, I thought that the flight path would have to either cross the storms or go around them (via Tulsa).
Before taking off from CVG, one of the pilots told us that it would be a smooth flight, but that it was overcast in northwest Arkansas. Other than that, he didn't say anything about the weather. We took off early, which
I believe (in hindsight) was an effort to beat the storms to XNA. The first 75% of the flight was smooth, although very shortly after takeoff I could see flashes of lightning to the right (northwest), although for a while they were pretty distant. The flight path (at right) paralleled where the line of storms was. As we got to 120 miles out from XNA, one of the pilots said that because of the storms the ride might get bumpy, and so he turned on the seat belt sign. Other than that, he gave no indication that we were being delayed or diverted. There was a lot of lightning off to the right, but it was still reasonably smooth riding. Eventually, because of a series of small turns, I lost my mental compass and didn't know which way we were headed (in particular, whether we'd fly in from the north or the south; XNA has a 16/34 runway) as we descended and got closer to XNA. The next announcement was to get the flight attendant to prepare for arrival, and to let us know that there was "weather north of the field". This meant that the storms had yet to arrive, as they were traveling NW to SE. The descent wasn't too bumpy, but we were clearly getting closer to the "weather". We finally made a couple of right turns, I heard the landing gear drop, and I could see the runway not too far off. Visibility looked good, and any rain that was falling seemed light at worst.
What I didn't know was that just as we had made the last turn to line up with the runway, the outflow boundary from the storms was hitting XNA. According to my watch, we lined up with the runway at about 9:18 p.m. According to the Weather Underground history for XNA for yesterday,
the wind and rain started at the airport at 9:16. This was not the main storm just yet, but its gust front (see the outflow front at right). These gust fronts are a product of the downdraft of air that is associated with thunderstorms, which is usually experienced as an often-cool, rain-smelling breeze a few minutes before a thunderstorm arrives. These are very dangerous for aircraft when they are on a large or strong scale; the Wikipedia lists several airplane crashes that are attributed to strong downdrafts called microbursts.
So we were lined up to land, and descending toward the airport, unaware precisely of the weather ahead of us. As we came down over the airport access road (probably about a mile or less from the runway), low enough to read license plates and the like, the engines roared
up, the landing gear retracted, and we started ascending and turning right, hard, to turn away from the oncoming storm. This sent us up into the gust front, and into the leading edge of the storm. The image at right is from about 25 minutes after the aborted landing; XNA is near the white dot. I've never before experienced turbulence like that. It was crazier than being on a roller coaster, because the motion and bumps were in all possible directions. It was terrifying and thrilling. No one on board screamed or anything (at least not that I noticed, although I was pretty focused on myself, frankly), but there was a lot of commotion as the plane turned away from the storm, ascended rapidly, and pulled away from XNA. I think that we were out of the storm pretty quickly, but because it was cloudy, the flashing lights on the wings made it seem like there was a lot of lightning nearby, adding to the creepy effect. And there were several more minutes of serious turbulence, probably associated with the smaller storm cells southeast of the main line of storms.
We later learned that the pilot aborted landing because cockpit instrumentation indicated wind shear near the runway and that FAA rules (and quite possibly common sense) prohibit landing under the particular conditions we encountered. Given the number of accidents that have occurred because of attempted landings in such conditions, it was obviously the right thing to do, but I did not want to go around for another landing attempt, which is what I thought we were doing at first. (In December, 2003, I was on a flight that made three landing attempts at XNA on a snowy day, and each time we gave up, only to fly to Kansas City to get fuel and wait out the snow.) But we did not go around. Instead, we were told that we were headed to Little Rock to refuel, get a new flight plan approved, and to wait out the weather.
The flight to Little Rock was smooth after we pulled away from the storm. I was a nervous wreck, though, and very thirsty, having sweated for a long time, and not taken that extra bottle of water the flight attendant had offered when things were peaceful. D'oh! When we landed (around 9:45), we sat out on the tarmac while we got refueled. We weren't allowed off the plane (who knows what kind of arcane rules govern this sort of thing), and so there was a rush on the bathroom, which pretty soon became a separate source of discomfort, this of the smelly variety. After calling Cari and swearing that if they let me off the plane I'd rent a car and drive home, I checked the radar again and saw that there was a solid line of storms between Little Rock and Fayetteville. I dreaded hearing the captain tell us that we were going any time soon, because any direct path would have to go right through the storms.
Finally, around 10:30, the captain got back on board and said that we'd soon be leaving, and that we'd be making an end-run around the storms by flying west toward Oklahoma, and then coming in behind the line of
storms. He told us that it would be about a 42-minute flight, but it took 53 minutes (but who's counting?!). And we really did fly around the storm, which was enormous and beautiful. It was lit up by lightning every few seconds as we flew first south and then north of it. (Unfortunately, my camera was in the overhead compartment, and I was plastered to my seat for the duration. But it was night, and I doubt I'd have gotten good images. I keep telling myself this.) The image above (courtesy of Flight Aware) depicts our path (along with the radar image from about 30 minutes after we got back to XNA). We went about as far west as Tulsa before turning back to Arkansas. If you look closely, you can see the little loop we did to land at XNA, which seemed gratuitous to me, but I'm now more convinced than ever that pilots know exactly what they're doing, and that even in the worst weather, if you land and walk away, it was a good flight. I feel ready to take on just about anything next time I get on a plane, which will be 11 days from today. It's too early to get a good read on what the weather will be like, but I'll be looking soon enough.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
it can b rezurrection tym now plz?
The LOLcats phenomenon taken to one of its logical endpoints, at LOL Theist. Derivative, and not as consistently funny as some of the other LOLcats spinoffs or the original, but a good idea.
See also Jesus of the Week.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
My crockus is huge!
Findings from neuroscience research are occasionally abused to make claims that go well beyond what the findings support. This morning, I stumbled onto a posting on Language Log (via Metafilter) about a community college instructor named Dan Hodgins who has given at least one talk in which he discussed a brain region called the "crockus". According to what I can gather from the Language Log posts, and other related posts around the Web, Hodgins has been telling educators that the crockus is larger in males than in females, and that this size disparity apparently accounts for the tendency for males to see the big picture but miss the details, and for females to see details but miss the big picture. I'm not sure where idea of the details-versus-big-picture difference come from, or whether it's a real sex difference, but I, like others, am pretty sure that I've never heard of the crockus. I haven't taken a class that dealt with brain physiology for over 10 years, but I know my major (and many minor) brain regions.
Well, others who are more motivated than I have begun to dig into the mystery of the crockus (much of my information here is from a series of follow-up posts on Language Log, here, here, and here). Mark Liberman (one of the Language Log bloggers) got in touch with Hodgins, and learned that the crockus was apparently discovered by a Dr. Alfred Crockus from Boston Medical University Hospital. Unfortunately, Liberman has searched around and it appears that Dr. Crockus does not exist, just like his eponymous brain region. This has not, however, stopped Hodgins from making the same claim about the crockus region again, as noted in a new post on Language Log this morning.
I looked around a bit myself, and have found that Hodgins is apparently real, so this is not a prank that Liberman, along with various colleagues, is playing; Liberman has e-mailed Hodgins and gotten responses that have been vaguely helpful. Hodgins appears on several PDF documents on the Mott Community College website, which collectively give an idea of the various roles he's played there. He's listed as an Early Childhood Education faculty member. Curiously, Hodgins is not listed in the MCC directory, although this could be a personal preference (for example, University of Arkansas professors are given the option to be de-listed partially or fully from the directory). There are references to talks that Hodgins has given, and is scheduled to give (PDF file, >1MB); actually, he's got talks scheduled quite far into the future. And there's even a picture of him on one site.
I cannot speculate on Hodgins' intentions in spreading what appears to be misinformation to a likely highly-credulous audience (i.e., early-childhood educators); pretty brain pictures make for better evidence among those without neuroscience training; see here and here, too). Several folks have speculated that Hodgins may be the victim of someone pulling his leg. (Dr. Crockus!? C'mon!) Whatever the case, one can only hope that Hodgins is stopped before he misinforms again.
In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for egregious use of neuroscientific data, and let the folks at Mind Hacks know if you've got a candidate for the Dr. Alfred Crockus Award for the Misuse of Neuroscience. And keep your browers pointed toward Language Log to see how this plays out. I think that Liberman will pursue this little episode as long as it has legs, and it should be entertaining.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
