Original VSI Blog Post from 2013
“Hidden world” books are very very popular. Everything from The Spiderwick Chronicles to The Dresden Files to Fringe to every mainstream superhero comic ever says that the world we live in is just one of many, either existing in parallel to ours or intersecting with ours in special, magical places. This idea gets support from the ongoing scientific process, which is constantly revealing just how little we know about our world. It also appeals to some of us emotionally, those of us who hate arrogance, those of us who are happy to find out that we are small and that the world is big and mysterious, that we haven’t exhausted all the possibilities for adventure.
So when I hear from some plucky young assistant professor (who looks so young that I assumed he was a postdoc) that there may be a whole new parallel stream of information passing through cells in the form of self-replicating RNA molecules, my first emotional reaction, much like my first emotional reaction to reading about psychic abilities, is “Wouldn’t that be cool? How would that work?” It doesn’t have anything to do with evidence. It’s just an expression of my personality. As long as I know that, as long as I’m conscious of it, I can adjust my expectations and push myself to demand that evidence.
Many other scientists – maybe most other scientists – seem to have the opposite reaction. Their knee-jerk judgement is to reject everything. This may be just the normal human hypocritical bias against inconvenient information, or it may be something more. Either way, this tendency is reinforced by scientific training. Where my training went against my natural enthusiasm, helping to balance it out, scientific training seems to exaggerate their biases (that’s what I tell myself, anyway). What I’m saying is that the scientific community in general is conservative. Which is why I laugh so hard when I hear some pundit saying that there’s no evidence for global warming (just as a f’rinstance). You know how hard it is to convince a bunch of scientists of something they don’t want to hear?!?
So when this kid (let’s call him Chris Waters) stands up in front of a bunch of scientists and says, “Hey, guys, I may have found some evidence that DNA doesn’t contain all the genetic information. There may be some self-copying RNAs that noone has noticed. They might be important.” I have some sympathy for him. I don’t necessarily believe him. Oh, no. However, an internal practice talk is a little like a role-playing game or a science fiction story. There’s a partial, temporary suspension of disbelief, at least until he’s through with his tale. Then some mental Hacky Sack during the Q&A period, just kicking the idea around to see what happens, to see how long we can keep it in the air. Then comes the inevitable, climactic, “Nice job, but you have a lot more work to do.”
You see, there’s a certain rhythm to these things, a certain ritual pace that must be respected if we really want to crush his spirit – which we all do, obviously.
References from Today's Episode:
BEACON channel on YouTube. The Chris Waters talk is not one of those posted, for those practice-talk reasons that I mentioned during the episode. I completely agree with the policy of allowing the speakers to choose whether their talks are posted. It's important to have a safe space to practice. I always make sure that when I'm pushing my guests to speculate outside their comfort zones, I label it as such.
Joshua Martin's page at NESCent
Elric of Melnibone (MEL-ni-bo-NAY), the albino sorcerer/swordsman, the most famous incarnation of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion, who embodies the Balance between the forces of Order and Chaos.
Probability lectures from the Khan Academy
My earlier posts on diffusion and entropy:
Updates from Summer 2023
There are a surprising number of Joshua Martins with PhDs. As of this moment, I have not been able to track him down.
Chris Waters, on the other hand, was pretty easy to find. He has stayed put at Michigan State and built a tidy little team of a dozen+ people (that’s what academic labs almost universally call their serfs apprentices, “people”). They study the molecular details of cholera, a bacterium that has has caused many millions of people to shit themselves to death.
Why one of those signal transduction proteins is represented as a hot dog with a flagellum, I do not know. Scientists are weird.
Dietary Indiscretions
Not as weird as competitive eaters, though. You might think,
"Nobody is going to get funded for a randomized, controlled trial where you say, 'Hey, I'm going to quadruple your stomach size and see what happens to you,' because there's no reason to do that type of thing from a medical perspective,"
but you would be wrong. Not only has there been a peer-reviewed study by radiologists watching a gorger pound hot dogs in front of an x-ray machine,
Levine MS, Spencer G, Alavi A, Metz DC. Competitive speed eating: truth and consequences. AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2007 Sep;189(3):681-6. doi: 10.2214/AJR.07.2342. PMID: 17715117.
that study has been cited by newer modeling work
Smoliga JM. Modelling the maximal active consumption rate and its plasticity in humans-perspectives from hot dog eating competitions. Biol Lett. 2020 Jul;16(7):20200096. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0096. Epub 2020 Jul 15. PMID: 32673544; PMCID: PMC7423035.
and by a British study showing that people are ten times more likely to visit the emergency room with a blocked esophagus following these events.
Shuja A, Winston DM, Rahman AU, Mitty RD, Jaber BL, Keo T. Esophageal food impaction during cultural holidays and national athletic events. Gastroenterol Rep (Oxf). 2017 Feb;5(1):43-46. doi: 10.1093/gastro/gow041. Epub 2016 Dec 23. PMID: 28011862; PMCID: PMC5444255.
By the way, I love the phrase “dietary indiscretions,” from the abstract of that last paper. So British, though in fact all of the authors appear to be Americans.
Meanwhile . . .
The Witcher Returns
I actually liked the original short stories much more than Ciri saga, so although I did plow through season 3, it was revisiting season 1 that gave me more pleasure. The very first episode, with Renfri the vengeful hot-girl bandit chief, might be my favorite one.
The actress / model who played Renfri, Emma Appleton (possibly the most British name ever) stars in another series currently on Netflix, a post-WW2 spy drama called Traitors, where the real villains of the Cold War are men.
My Adventures with Superman
This is a straight-up anime, visually and tonally. Big buff farm boy Clark Kent and metrosexual conspiracy theorist Jimmy Olsen are roommates and junior interns at The Daily Planet, which is actually printed on paper. Lois Lane is senior intern, by like six months, and lords this fact over them constantly. There’s some action, but after watching the two-part pilot, this seems like a comedy.
I wonder if they’ll do Ambush Bug, who creator Keith Giffen supposedly pitched as “Bugs Bunny as a super-villain.” I always hated both Marvel’s Deadpool (Wade Wilson, who was a parody of DC’s Slade Wilson, the Terminator) and DC’s Lobo (who was a tit-for-tat parody of Marvel’s Wolverine), but Giffen had a lighter touch. Well, sometimes. He also re-booted my old Steve Ditko favorite the Creeper as being permanently tripping in Secret Origins #18.
Coincidentally, Slade Wilson (of Rivia?) appears in MAwS as the maximally trope-tastic anime version of himself, with creepy pale bangs down over one eye.
That’s not going to go well.
VSI Episode 58