A Mathematical Explanation Why Valentine's Day Might Not Suck

We have yet to ring in the new year, but in anticipation of other disappointing holidays to come (seriously, isn't New Years set up to be anticlimactic?), let's consider Valentine's Day. Like New Years, it's meant to be a special occasion. Valentine's Day has the added pressure to create a particularly romantic day with your partner, a sure sign that reality may not meet expectations. Or maybe you shun the cliché chocolate and roses, but then the pressure of anti-Valentine's Day can be just as great! You have to wear sweatpants so hard while you care so little because it's all just a commercial holiday anyway, right?

Today in lab, my coworkers and I discovered what might be a seasonal proof to warm your icy, disappointed heart this February 14th. Just coming off the winter solstice, we were reflecting on how day length does not grow or shrink evenly throughout the year. Rather, following a sine curve, the day length barely budges around the solstices in June and December, while it rockets upward in spring or down in fall, at the equinoxes.

Just take a look at the sweet graph I drew to explain this. The horizontal axis corresponds to the day of the year, or time. The slope of the sine curve reflects the rate at which day length changes. A steeper portion of the line corresponds to times when daylight shrinks or expands at a faster clip from day to day. The fastest rate of change occurs at the autumnal equinox (AE) and the vernal equinox (VE). The peak and trough, at the summer solstice (SS) and winter solstice (WS) are flatter, meaning the day length doesn't change as quickly. Having just experienced the winter solstice a week ago, we are, sadly, at the bottom of the graph.

Given the continuous nature of the increases in daylight, when will we subjectively experience a slow thawing from winter darkness? By the vernal equinox, the days will be as long as nights and we will clearly have sensed the earlier sunrises and later sunsets. That is three months from now though, or about 90 days. Maybe halfway to the vernal equinox, 45 days from now, we will remark to our coworkers and spouse "Hey! It's staying lighter out now, isn't it?"

45 days from today is February 15th. A little rounding in either direction and I will make the bold prediction that come Valentine's Day, February 14th, you may be alone, your partner may have disappointed you, boxed chocolate may still taste terrible and roses may still have their thorns, but you'll probably wake up that day and think, "Well, at least it's not as dark as it has been." Comforting, right? An extra hour and a half of daylight can make up for so many of life's disappointments.


(The graph on the bottom is what we would expect day length changes to look like if it was a constant increase or decrease every day of the year, simply reversing at the solstices. The brackets on the main graph show how roughly equal periods of time (distance in the horizontal direction) leads to small changes in day length near the solstices, but big swings near the equinoxes.)

Healing Through Art

Three weeks ago, a Grand Jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Witness accounts differ in the level of aggression Brown displayed toward Wilson, but he was unarmed and did not earn a death sentence by his actions.

As anticipated—and arguably egged on by a frenzied media presence and worsened by prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s timing and tone—planned demonstrations and protests quickly turned into rioting and arson along Ferguson’s roads. Cars burned alongside the infamous split-screen image of President Obama calling for calm.

Following the shooting of Vonderitt Myers in the Shaw neighborhood, a smaller epicenter of demonstrations in the previous months has been south city, where I live. Marching up and down Grand, the major thoroughfare, protests were peaceful before I went to bed Monday night. However, I woke up to news of busted windows up and down the South Grand district of shops and restaurants a block from my house. Broken glass is not comparable to unequally applied justice or racial inequities or ongoing mistrust between police and the communities they serve. But it does represent fractured communities, scare people away from our neighborhood, and distract from efforts to make progress on issues brought up by Brown’s death.

So I was lifted up as the neighborhood associations in south city put out a call for materials and volunteers to decorate the plywood that covered broken windows and protected whole ones from further damage. Hundreds of artists and neighbors came to paint the plywood boards, turning a symbol of broken communities into uplifting messages of healing and community. Rather than exist for a week or more as a boarded up ghost town, South Grand was transformed into an impromptu art walk.

I walked around to snap pictures and thank the people who were painting. I was waiting to join a community meeting at the new pocket park on Grand where local leaders and aldermen would speak and neighbors would chalk messages of love for St. Louis. Here are the pictures I took.

The boards are starting to come down. It is peaceful at night in my neighborhood now. But that should not be permission to look away and ignore what Brown’s death has brought to the forefront. I do not believe that we need to break our communities to have them heal stronger, like a bone. But I do know that to let these problems fester unaddressed will lead to further heartache and greater problems in the future. So let us move forward and heal not just the symptoms but the underlying rot so we can have stronger and healthier communities.

See the rest of the pictures after the break.

Biology, Everywhere

Electron Micrograph of Pollen

Biology is everywhere.

I needed to drop off some Arabidopsis plants with Robyn Roth, an electron microscopist in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the Washington University Medical School. She is helping us peer inside pollen that is chilled instantly in liquid helium--just four degrees above absolute zero--so that the living cell is frozen in time. That way, we can see how pollen is structured before it has a chance to touch water and reanimate.


Walking through the lab, brimming with tanks of liquid nitrogen, potent solvents and specialized tools for dissecting fixed samples, I noticed the phone on the wall. Sitting innocuously in the middle of this equipment that allows us to peer inside (once) living cells was a simple pattern, a right-handed helix from the coiled phone cord.

DNA. The famous, infamous, structure of the repository of life's information. The 1962 Nobel Prize. The perfectly obvious, in hindsight, mechanism for both replicating itself and for translating the information from the four bases, A, T, C, G, into the building blocks of proteins, three letters at a time. The right-handed double helix is all of these things.

And today, it's how the phone cord coiled on itself. I pointed this out to Robyn and then we both went on with our days, where our work pushes just a little bit further into understanding all of what this simple and beautiful structure can create in every living thing around us.

Pollen in the Windy City

The view from outside the lab

I went to Chicago to figure out how pollen senses the world around it.

My colleagues and I want to understand how plants sense and respond to mechanical force. One might think that we have this figured out for all kinds of creatures, but really we don’t. We kind of have no idea how animal nerves sense touch. We think we have a good idea of how hearing works, but we could end up being quite wrong.

In plants, we know even less. Plants are really sensitive to gravity, touch, and all kinds of forces, we just don’t have a good idea of how they really perceive them and change their behavior appropriately. One way to do this is to use an ion channel that opens and closes based on pressure: a mechanosensitive ion channel.

That’s how hearing works, converting air pressure into electricity through an ion channel. A pressure wave—sound—in air enters the ear and bends a molecular lever so that an ion channel opens. Instantly, charged particles can flow through the channel, millions of them every second, and zzzp this makes a little electrical pulse that our brains can decode into sound. That is a mechanosensitive ion channel at work, and there is one in pollen and we do not know why.

My plants packed into my car for the trip

(We always think of electrical impulses as the workings of nerves. The cool thing is, even without nerves, these signals can be interpreted by cells and used to change behavior. Ions also play a big role in controlling how water flows, and we think that is what might be happening in my pollen.)

My pollen has a protein that looks like a mechanosensitive ion channel, but we don’t really know if it functions like that. So, I went to Chicago to find out.

Dr. Paul Malchow has equipment we don’t, namely an electrode that is extremely sensitive and can distinguish between different ions. By using a putty that only lets individual ions through—hydrogen, calcium, chloride, or the like—the voltage that the electrode measures near a cell can be linked directly to the concentration of ions there. The tool I brought along was a mutant plant, one that’s missing our potential ion channel. So, if I can see a difference in the flow of ions near pollen grains with and without this channel, we’d have good evidence that this channel is functional and can control how ions flow around pollen.

An electrode measuring ions near pollen

Does that tell us how pollen senses the world around it? No, not exactly. It’s just a small piece of the puzzle that we rearrange and try to piece together every week. If the channel does work like we expect, then we can try to figure out what forces it responds to in pollen, why ion flow is so important. If it is a dud, then we have to think harder about why pollen has this imposter ion channel at all, and what exactly it’s doing, and whether that has anything to do with mechanical force. We just don’t know. I don’t even have the answer from the electrode data yet, that alone can be hard to interpret.  

That may sound unsatisfying. It can certainly be frustrating. But it’s never boring, because every week my mentor and I reconsider everything we think we know about our pollen, about the evolution of these channels, about what pollen needs to respond to in order to be successful. It’s a little arcane, but it’s just a tiny piece of the puzzle for figuring out how plants respond so elegantly to the world they inhabit, twisting and turning to find nutrients and light, avoiding herbivores and pests. Playing a part in painting this picture of how plants are themselves really is satisfying.

So I went to Chicago, largely ignoring this beautiful city to huddle in a cold laboratory watching videos of pollen being prodded with electrodes. Happily.

Distilling the Discussion of Climate Change

Speaking science is hard. There’s a lot that goes into it. How do scientists, journalists, or other communicators get across the scientific process, facts, models and predictions? In a way that doesn’t put everyone to sleep? Persuasively, even? Science is a process that goes on for years and decades, and a particular subject area may need to be condensed down to 15 minutes, if we’re being generous.

Climate change is the prime scientific subject in our culture today. Everyone has heard of it, most people have an opinion about it, yet it remains muddied in a haze of misinformation, hyperbole and doom. “How to talk about climate change so people will listen,” an article by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, tackles the problems of persuasion and the limits of facts in this conversation.

Unlike most non-scientists—okay, unlike most scientists too—Mann digs into a doom-and-gloom news story about sea level rise associated with climate change and reads the two journal articles that backed up the story. He found that the timeline was left out of the story: barely any effect would be seen in his lifetime or even while any descendants could remember his name, according to the predictions. An economic-moral problem at the heart of this incredibly long-term problem is how much do we value future generations, and how much should we do to help them out? “How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren…,” Mann writes. “Americans don’t even save for their own retirements! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?” The human species isn’t good at planning for the future. Can facts and scary stories overcome that limitation at all?

Every side in the debate throws a mass of data at unsuspecting lawmakers or the public, hoping to win over hearts and minds. This strategy has two weak points: the invocation of Science, and the presentation of facts. The data, Mann writes, only work well between climatologists, but “for the typical citizen they are a muddle, too abstract—too much like 10^th-grade homework—to be convincing.” Previous research on persuasion shows the limits of data for winning over the skeptical, even the neutral. Another problem is that every side claims the science is on their side, and the do-nothing crowd is all-too-happy to point out the rare dissenting scientist and then let the ‘controversy’ spin itself. “Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands,” writes Mann. Like children in the middle of feuding parents, most people are too frozen to pick a side, instead hiding their head under the pillow. Who can blame them?

Science communication comes upon this thorny problem like Sisyphus against his boulder. Progress is made—in polls, in treaties almost signed—then lost again, erased in a cloud of obfuscation and contrived debate. Because it’s not easy, because facts are insufficient, because it will take work and money to address the causes and symptoms of climate change seriously. Some environmentalists turn in frustration toward hyperbole—spitting out boldly false predictions of Malthusian starvation—and “moral blackmail” that sours the public on the whole movement.

Mann argues that to move past the confusion, we need to simplify the discussion and define quantifiable objectives. When talking about carbon, the majority comes from burning coal. And although a lot of carbon dioxide is also released by burning gasoline in personal cars, coal is burned in a much smaller number of power plants, making it easier to wrap our minds around. “No matter what your views about the impact and import of climate change,” Mann writes, “you are primarily talking about coal.” Although the most economically sound solution to producing too much carbon dioxide, an essentially global carbon tax that avoids ‘carbon haven’ countries, is still politically and practically difficult, “it is, at least, imaginable”. And that’s a step.

The Obama administration is, in fact, taking this approach. Coal emissions in the United States are now supposed to be reduced 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.  Is it enough? No. But it’s a start. And reflecting on the lessons taught by the conversation around climate change can help us think about other thorny issues where the communication of science is at the forefront. If we can begin to condense down the salient points about climate change—coal is at the forefront, and changes can be made—then we can think more clearly about simpler issues, like GMOs. Coming to a mutual understanding about what’s at stake, be it coal emissions or agricultural pesticides, can help clear away the clutter and improve both the communication of science and help society decide what to do about the issue at hand.

Agreeing to Disagree

“Disagreement agrees with me.” –Mike Pesca, The Gist

Honest opinion and in-good-faith disagreement seem rare in today’s media. Now, that statement may first conjure up the millions of blogs (ahem) that are nothing but opinions. But! I would challenge the ‘in-good-faith’ clause of many of those. The press, on the other hand, shies away from opinion in order to present an even-handed account of ‘both sides’.  (We’ll cover the value of the he-said-she-said approach to reporting another time, perhaps.)

Hence the brilliance of unleashing Mike Pesca upon the world in his new show, The Gist, on Slate. A short, daily podcast, The Gist typically covers around two topics from the personal (advice column follow ups) to the curious (the state of candy Peeps) to serious current events, like Ebola. And Pesca’s energy and, yes, opinion, permeates the show in a way I find refreshing. The ending segment, the spiel, is Pesca ranting—rant doesn’t need to be a bad word here—on the same mix of anything from the fantastic to daily minutiae.

Friday’s spiel was an argument in favor of arguments, couched in the context of debates on HBO and CNN around the very premise of Islam. Is it a bad religion or a good religion? You can, I’m sure, imagine some of the simplistic arguments on either side of that simplistic question. But Pesca was not diving into the specifics, but rather encouraging the exercise. Strip away the personal attacks and you have the basic elements of a debate. “There was a struggle over the definition of terms. There were competing assertions as to what the relevant facts were. There was a thesis offered…” Counterpoint. Counter-counterpoint.

Although Pesca cops to the increasing tendency to devolve into “shouting or bullying or baiting or clapping at the dumb parts,” he calls out for a (possibly imagined?) past when argument was intended not to make your side feel better, but to reach through the column to the undecided, even the other side. Because these are different constructions, of course. The cheerleading argument is much simpler and easier than well-framed persuasion.

I’m not sure that Pesca is imagining the supposed golden age of discourse quite right. Regardless, I would like to see his vision realized today. I think of the ongoing conversations St. Louis is having over the events in Ferguson, and now in the City as well, about black youth and police behavior. Many of my conversations are civil and respectful, with participants vulnerable enough to provide honest opinions and to be swayed by good-faith arguments and to stand comfortable in disagreement. But a fraction (and a majority online, unsurprisingly) of these conversations are sadly reduced to choir-preaching and name-calling. Disagreement is taken as evidence of treason. Even skepticism can be anathema in the wrong circles. That’s sad. Because as our society grapples not just with the inequities of race, but with our stance toward Islam, our approach to immigration, or our rights and responsibilities on the world stage, we need disagreement. The called-for ‘public debate’ after every significant moment must be both. To shut down debate is to shut out progress.

I think one thing wrong with our conceptions about disagreement is the tendency to write off opinions that are not our own far too quickly. But, as Pesca notes, “if the argument is sound, and if the disagreement is honest, then an expressed opinion doesn’t need to be subscribed to in order to be valued.” There is no debate without disagreement. No progress without debate over the facts and over our values. Let’s not squash that with conflict-aversion or simplistic name-calling. Let’s embrace it.

Unless, of course, you disagree.

Towers of Illinois

You’re driving north in Illinois. The sun set hours ago, a hundred miles back. It’s dark out. Black. Your headlights hardly cut into the inky night, barely enough to see the road in front of you. To your right, some unknown distance ahead, you see a flash of red dots, like an oilrig on the horizon, and then they’re gone. As if the rolling hills and the highway shrubs and prairie grass obscure your vision every hundred feet or so, they appear and disappear just on your periphery. But then it becomes clear, it’s not the terrain that makes them blink in and out of existence, but the lights themselves are pulsing in unison. Dozens of faceless towers announce their location for all to see, all at once, then disappear. Like the synchronous fireflies of Southeast Asia, they appear somehow sentient. As you approach closer, the pulsing red lights illuminate the towers, as blades turn slowly, silently, in the wind. Three blades, lit for a moment and towering over the landscape for miles, like the devastating, tripod creatures from Mars sent to conquer in War of the Worlds. Though unmoving, they seem, here at night, working in unison, like they could decide to uproot themselves and lumber over farmyards toward the nearest town…

Wind turbines are one of several renewable energy resources being developed as we grapple with the impacts of burning fossil fuels and climate change. The EPA, under President Obama, has set the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30% by 2050. Illinois currently receives 4.7% of its power from wind and ranks 4^th for total megawatts installed in the States. Many wind farms are on actual farms in the rural areas that you can see from the highway. Missouri generates only 1.3% of its energy from wind, with an installed capacity just an eighth that of Illinois. Ameren, my provider, plans to add 400 megawatts over time, while KCP&L currently provides about 540 megawatts in Kansas and Missouri, and Kansas ranks 3^rd in the country with 19.4% of its energy coming from wind.

These plains states have a great potential for developing wind energy as the wind famously tears through the open prairies and farmlands. Although wind energy cannot provide the constant, base supply of electricity needed at this time, it is a powerful component of a balanced energy portfolio that can help meet our national goals of curbing carbon emissions.

…You’re driving south in Illinois. The sun is up, but hidden behind a sheet of clouds that the wind pushes east. You come close, seemingly within inches, of dozens of towers, their blades turning lazily to meet the breeze. Soundless. Less eerie in the sunlight, they are still imposing. Standing evenly apart, quietly waiting for night to fall to organize. Biding their time until they can announce themselves, saying ‘Here I am!’. So that, if they ever decide to pull out of their foundations and wander, at least we’ll know where they are.

(Edit: Okay it turns out I totally unconsciously stole the idea of War of the Worlds etc. http://xkcd.com/556/)