Karen Sandler

Category: Cool Science

  • Physics Professor Extraordinaire

    I just found out that my favorite physics professor–actually, my favorite college professor, period–passed away last July. Dr. James Imai was instrumental in me changing my minor from English to physics. He was a fantastic lecturer and as astounding as it may sound to non-science folks, he made physics fun.

    I entered California State College, Dominguez Hills in 1974 as a junior, planning to major in math and minor in English. Only one or two quarters into my first year there, I took a class with Dr. Imai and fell in love with physics. He had a way of using real world examples to illustrate physics principles and somehow injected humor into every physics lecture.

    For instance, in one of my first year physics classes, he escorted the class out to the parking lot to demonstrate how one would hotwire a car. He explained to us how we could wire in a switch that would interrupt the usual pathway a car thief would use to steal the car. You’d turn off the switch to break the circuit so the car couldn’t be hotwired. He also recommended that you dirty up the wires you use for the switch installation so the car thief wouldn’t notice it. I thought it was pretty hysterical at the time that he was teaching all these young, impressionable college students how to steal cars.

    He also assigned a very entertaining weekly homework assignment starring the fictional character Joe Whizz. These were page-long word problems in which Joe had some kind of adventure that would illustrate a physics principle. In one I remember, Joe went camping with his good buddy, Neighbor Jones. Near where Joe and his buddy camped, there were some large boulders in which small, natural pools had been carved out. Joe wanted to heat the water in the pools so he could do some hot-tubbing. He decided to put some handy 2-kg stones into the campfire to heat them, then put the stones into the water until the water reached the necessary temperature. We had to figure out how many heated stones it would take to warm the water to the desired temperature.

    What was pretty cool about Dr. Imai is that although he kind of talked a macho game, it was me and my friend Peggy that he seemed to take under his wing. When we complained that the wives of Joe Blow and his buddy were always on the sidelines in the Joe Blow stories, Dr. Imai came up with a homework problem in which the wives were the heroines of the story.

    My favorite memory is how Dr. Imai taught me and Peggy how to cook hot dogs using a “suicide cord” (kids, I do not recommend you try this at home!). We took an ordinary lamp cord, cut off at one end and with a plug on the other. We split the cord into two for maybe 6-8 inches. We then stripped the cut ends to expose the metal wire within. Those metal wires were each wrapped around a 10-penny nail (near the head of the nail). With the cord unplugged we poked the nails through either end of a hot dog. We then plugged in the cord and voila! the electrical current cooked the hot dog. Peggy and I actually started a modest hot dog concession in the physics lab, selling hot dogs and soda to students and TAs.

    Dr. Imai and I kept in touch off and on in the years since I graduated. I still have the wedding gift he gave me thirty years ago (at left). More recently, he requested some of my romance novels both for a friend of his and himself. As best I can tell, we last corresponded in December 2010, when I told him about my new granddaughter. I also mentioned that I would have a science fiction book, Tankborn, coming out. He said in response, “as you may recollect, science fiction is one of my favorite subject areas. I take it that TANKBORN is your chosen title. You can put me down for an order of a copy.”

    Now I know he died months before Tankborn came out in September 2011. I wish now that I could have sent him an advance copy. I would have been so proud to know he’d read it.

    If you want to know more about Dr. James Imai, do a Google search. He was a remarkable man.

    Note: Thanks to Leslie Ogg, Dr. Imai’s longtime companion, for the correction on Joe’s last name and for his buddy’s name.

  • Gender Bias in Children’s Books?

    There’s been some discussion on Twitter (and I imagine elsewhere) about a recently released study revealing gender inequality in children’s literature. The study looked at nearly 6000 children’s books published from 1900 to 2000. They discovered that even in children’s books featuring animals, a significant majority of the central characters are male. At most a third of the books contain female characters at all while 100% include male characters. Take a look at the article for more statistics.

    Assuming there’s no funny business in the counting of characters’ genders, it seems indisputable that there are more male characters than female in children’s literature. Where I think the study gets mushy is in the conclusions the authors say that the data led them to. For instance, they point out that mothers and children read gender into even gender neutral animal characters. The article mentions “research on reader interpretations” to support readers’ gender assignment of gender-neutral characters, but nothing is cited. So I do wonder about that.

    The other issue that raised a red flag for me was the conclusion drawn by the authors as to the impact of this gender inequality in children’s books. They state that this will lead to a presumption that “women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys” and that it amounts to the “symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery.” That second statement in particular sounds like an overly dramatic leap too far to me. In any case, I’d like to see other studies that support their contention.

    I’m no scientist (although I like to write about them). I didn’t do the study, haven’t read it in its entirety. I know often what appears in a short article such as the one I’ve linked to includes material taken out of context and the issues I have with the conclusions may be explored in greater depth in the original study.

    And although I can’t speak for every little girl out there, I can speak for myself. As a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, I probably read some very gender biased books. Did I feel that women had a less important role in society as a consequence? Did I feel symbolically annihilated? Hell, no.

    If I read a book that featured a boy as the main character, that omitted female characters entirely even, I don’t know that I ever even noticed. I became that main character anyway, lived his adventure, imagined myself as him. I was Tom Sawyer, not Becky Thatcher. I was Black Beauty, not poor doomed Ginger.

    Later, in my late teens when I started noticing women’s minuscule roles in books (mainly science fiction by that point), I was irritated and ticked off that the author either omitted or limited their female characters. I certainly wasn’t traumatized by it. It’s one reason I have almost entirely stopped reading adult SF written by men. Because the women authors know how to create worlds with as many interesting powerful women as men.

    I know there are certainly girls/women out there who felt different than I did growing up. Who read those male-dominated books and felt smaller. But I bet there are others like me who don’t give a damn if the author wrote the character as male. They see themselves in that story, doing all those fun and exciting things that boy/male character is doing. They’re strong girls, they’re smart girls, they’re adventurous girls. And if the character doesn’t look like them, they will damn well just re-write the story so they do.

  • Phantom Limbs

    As I’ve mentioned before, I share my home with three cats. The oldest, Casper, who turns 14 this year, has always been a grump. As he’s moved into his golden years, he’s become even more of a sour puss. He just does not like to be Messed With.

    On Casper’s list of activities that humans must not do to his person:

    1. Brushing, combing or otherwise grooming his fur
    2. Attempting in any way to remove snarls from his coat
    3. Petting past the shoulders
    4. Trimming his nails
    5. Removing him from anywhere he has curled up to nap, including your lap

    Should a human attempt any of these activities, Casper will give a warning growl that will grow in volume and gusto. If the human persists, Casper will bring out the big guns–his claws and teeth. He has excellent aim.

    Several months ago I made the mistake of trying to shave a snarl off Casper’s chest with my horse clippers. Casper snagged the back of my right hand with his claw, hit a vein and a nerve. Lots of blood and part of my hand and pinkie finger are still numb.

    I thought of my minor injury as I was listening to an interview with medical doctor and behavioral neurologist V. S. Ramachandran. Dr. Ramachandran has, among other things, worked with people experiencing phantom limb pain. It turns out there are particular parts of the brain associated with sensation in particular parts of the body. An arm might be removed, but those parts of the brain continue to “report” the sensations that the arm was feeling.

    In one particular case, a patient felt as though his missing left hand was gripped into a tight fist, with the fingernails digging into his palm. He was in constant pain, with no way to find relief. How do you relax a hand that is no longer there?

    Dr. Ramachandran devised a simple therapy to help the patient. He set up a box with a mirror inside, and positioned the patient so that the right hand was reflected in the mirror. The reflection then made it look like the left hand was still there. The patient watched in the mirror as he opened and closed his right hand in an attempt to trick his brain into thinking he’d relaxed his left. It took a number of sessions, but he was eventually pain-free. Such an elegant and simple treatment. The human brain is an amazing instrument.

    I’d like to think it’s superior to the cat brain. But when I consider how the feline set keep us at their beck and call, petting and pampering, feeding them delicacies and providing warm soft places to sleep, I’m not so sure which of us is the genius.

  • Hablando en español

    I have been studying Spanish for a long, long time. For decades, if you start counting from the third grade when I was first exposed to el caballo, el gato, and el perro. In elementary school, we would watch a fifteen minute Spanish lesson on TV, where the teacher would bate, bate chocolate and sing Dos y dos son cuatro, cuatro y dos son seis… (which I just learned comes from a song by Stanley Lucero).

    I took Spanish all through high school, skipped it entirely in college (oddly, there was no foreign language requirement for my BA), then took classes here and there since then, some private, some not. I have a killer accent, probably because I started studying so young, but unless I’m kind of dumped into a situation where I have to speak only Spanish (like when I went to Mexico), I have to think really hard to say what I want to say.

    I bring this up because I just read about an interesting study where it was discovered that bilingual 8-month-old babies are better able to distinguish between two languages, even if they don’t speak either language. Better still, babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual “boost” that will improve their thinking throughout their lives. Babies not exposed to a second language don’t have the same visual discrimination skills as bilingual babies do.

    Bilingual babies are apparently able to notice variances in how the face moves when a person is speaking one language versus another. Watching a muted video of people speaking French and English, for example, they could see differences in how the lips moved, how the jaw opened and closed and other facial changes. They’d get bored if a language they’d already been exposed to was repeated, but perk up if it was a new-to-them language.

    What’s also interesting about this is that learning a new language when you’re older is one way that’s supposed to fend off dementia. Bilingual Alzheimer’s patients are, on average, four to five years older. That is, being bilingual, they’re staving off the Alzheimer’s a few years longer.

    So, I’m going to keep studying español. Maintain those brain cells best I can. And speak Spanish to my beautiful granddaughter every chance I get.

  • Galactic Sweet Tooth

    I love sweets. Candy is number one, rich dense stuff like dark chocolate, nut-free fudge, See’s bordeaux chocolates (love those sprinkles). I adore Junior Mints and Peppermint Patties, Kit Kat bars, 3 Musketeers (which used to come as three bars, chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla) and Milky Way.

    Next on the treat food chain is ice cream, any chocolate or caramel-type variety (again sans nuts, although pecans in pralines & cream and walnuts in rocky road are acceptable). The ice cream must be topped with lots of gooey topping (chocolate, caramel or butterscotch). A little whipped topping and a cherry are okay, but not required.

    Then come fudge brownies and chocolate fudge cake, preferably frosted with a nice ganache. I also adore lemon bars and lemon cake and just about any kind of pudding. I’m a bit ambivalent about cookies, although a chewy, fresh-baked chocolate chip is pretty yummy.

    Yeah, kind of ridiculous. Luckily I have some self-control, which keeps me from eating a Halloween bag’s worth every day as I might like. I eat a piece of chocolate here, a bowl of ice cream there, then exercise like crazy to keep the sweets from jumping directly on my hips. I really try hard not to gobble up everything in sight.

    Not so the Milky Way (the galaxy, not the candy bar). Apparently, that monstrously big collection of stars has been gobbling up other galaxies in the neighborhood. Astronomers have discovered stars within the Milky Way that all have similar speeds and chemical compositions, which indicates they originally came from a common source. This Science News article describes how the Aquarius star stream within the Milky Way is fairly compactly grouped, which indicates the stars were gulped down by Milky Way somewhat recently. They haven’t yet had time to stretch out, although the Milky Way’s gravity is stretching Aquarius like taffy. There are other star streams that astronomers have identified as well, which were consumed by greedy Milky Way billions of years ago.

    So maybe I don’t feel so bad about my sweet tooth. At least I’m not munching up galaxies like the Milky Way does. I’ve got way more self-control than that.

    Of course, if the galaxies were made of chocolate, it might be a different story entirely.