E.S.S.D. -- Two card monte

E.S.S.D. -- Experiments someone (else) should do

This is the first in my list of experiments I think someone should do. The idea is that one of my unemployed friends might see this, think "hey, that'd be a neat project," and then do it, simultaneously satisfying my curiosity and turning that person into a slightly useful member of society. Either that, or somebody looking for a neat science fair project might be looking for something original. As far as I know, the answers to the E.S.S.D. questions will be unknown, or I won't be sure if the method will work.

Title: Two card monte
Field: psychology
Difficulty: as hard as you want
Importance to science: probably none

Introduction: Here's one of my favourite magic tricks. I have two cards.


One is the 3 of spades.

The other is the queen of hearts.

Now, I show you these cards a couple of times, then slowly take the 3 and put it behind my back. I ask you what card went behind my back. You, of course, say the 3, but when I take it out, it's the queen. And I show you again that I have only two cards.

If you look closely at those pictures, you'll probably figure out what I'm doing. But here's the thing. To some people, I can do this trick 40 times, and they won't get it. They just get increasingly baffled and amazed. Other people, maybe 1 in 50, pick up the trick right away.

So what causes some people to figure it out immediately, while others never do? I have done this trick for hundreds of people. Maybe a thousand, or two thousand. And my observation is that the people who figure it out are most often "grabby" people. Small children, mostly, but also adults who have an impulse to reach out and grab the cards as soon as I pull them out. Most people aren't rude enough to actually grab the cards, but I can tell immediately by the twitch of a hand that this trick will probably not work on that person.

So if you haven't figured it out yet, look at the first picture again, and imagine yourself touching the 3. Then look at the second picture.

So that's the experiment. Does actually touching the object change how the viewer perceives it? Does just the thought of touching it change it? You could show this trick to three samples of people who have never seen it. One group is instructed to touch the card before they are turned over. One is instructed to think about touching it. One, the control group, gets no instructions. (Maybe a post-trick questionnaire could separate those in the control group who thought about touching it from those who didn't.) You'd need a consistent way of presenting the trick... a robot or a video. Maybe do it five times, and see if it takes certain groups longer to figure it out. Control for age, sex, et cetera.

There could be some genuine psychological principles in this. But at the very least, it'd make for a difficult experimental design that would be fun to do. There are all sorts of possibilities for playing with statistics. And you'd get to trick a lot of people, all in the name of science.

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Leonid meteor shower!

The Leonid meteor shower is on now! Sadly, it is overcast and snowing here, but maybe if you live somewhere good, you can see it? I believe the peak is somewhere around tomorrow night, but obviously it should be good for a few days.

They are expecting near the peak something like a dozen per hour (sadly, not the five hundred per hour that the Facebook event reports). The excellently-named Fluxtimator can give you details.

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AWoS vol. 1, no. 4 -- Sex, more from LCROSS, a speech gene, curing people with HIV

Rabbits get functional artificial penises

I don't know how much I want to write about this one. Let's just say that with a lack of permanent consequences, John Bobbit-like incidents could end up being more common. An argument against advancing science if I've ever heard one.

Okay, so the implications are important. We're now able to go into a lab, grow tissue that otherwise wouldn't regrow, and implant it into you. They did it with bladders. They've figured out how to do with with hearts (using a neat cartilage shell). Pretty soon, any organ you need with be grown for you. Organ donors won't be a thing of the past, exactly, but they'll only be necessary for emergency purposes. Even then, I can envision hospitals keeping a few samples of each organ in the incubator at all times, just in case.

So yes, not only is there a decent chance that you're not going to die, ever--except perhaps through some horrible meeting with the front end of a moving truck--but if you survive that accident and your penis gets damaged, they can fix it too.

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More from LCROSS

There is water on the Moon.

Not very much water, mind, but it's enough to get people excited. There are implications for one day putting a colony/research station up there: if there is water, then we don't have to drag our own up there.

Even more interesting, I think, is the detection of hydrocarbons. They ought to be common in space, forming on the surfaces of the dust grains that get blown out by exploding stars. A few chemical signatures of organic molecules have been detected out in space, but it's hard to say just how much is out there. The dark craters of the Moon, however, act as a sort of trap for all the crud that floats through our solar system, and the detection of hydrocarbons in there means that there must be more floating all around us in space.

It will be interesting to see if the experts can draw any conclusions about hydrocarbons in space from this data. After all, if organic molecules are abundant in space (and it appears that they are), then maybe that will mean life is commonplace throughout the Universe.

Hey, the Moon has oil on it! No wonder the USA bombed it! This particular mission only cost half a billion, though... a far better investment than other, similar endeavours.

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A speech gene

Well, sort of. There have been reports in the newspapers about the discovery of a language gene in humans. The truth about FOXP2 is way more interesting. A single change in a single nucleotide... well, read for yourself.

This could be corrected, perhaps, through gene therapy. If only there were a way to insert the proper genes....

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Curing people with HIV

No, not curing people who have HIV, but using HIV to cure people (with other diseases).

The reason diseases like HIV and hepatitis B are so bad is that they are caused by a type of virus called a retrovirus. What this means is that the virus actually inserts its own genetic code into the genes of the organism it is infecting. With influenza, for instance, your body eventually kills the invading viruses, and then it is gone. But with retroviruses, even after your immune system has killed the viruses, the code for making more stays inside your cells, meaning that you will infect yourself over and over again.

However, medical science can take advantage of this! Researchers are now using a part of the HIV virus (the insert-into-genes part) to insert genes for making an enzyme called ALD to break down certain fatty acids into patients with a disease also called ALD (which is, of course, caused by an inability to break down fatty acids). This isn't a completely new idea, but it's one of the first major successes I've read about.

The usual method for curing this is bone marrow transplants. Unfortunately, marrow is hard to come by, and because it's intimately involved in the immune system, the body tends to reject it. Inserting new genes gets around these problems.

This bodes well for the future! One can imagine that maybe diabetes will be cured in a similar way, or anemia, or pretty much any other chronic disease. Remember how a few weeks ago they were curing Parkinson's with gene therapy? Remember how five paragraphs ago they discovered what was causing speech problems in certain people?

(Also, maybe we'll one day be able to change our eye colour on the fly, by inserting the right genes in there. Awesome.)

For more on this specific study, read the article linked from this section's title. It's very well written, far better than I can do. But as you read it, think of how far the implications reach....

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That's all I have for this week. In the coming days, expect descriptions of a couple of experiments that someone should do, and maybe a little writeup on a chemist who is unknown today, but was one of the greatest in his time. Also, I might translate this into regular English for you, because it's actually pretty neat. (That issue of JPC A has no fewer than ten articles I really want to read, so I might get too distracted....)
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Back after three weeks!

After a longish absence, AWoS is back. If you are interested in excuses and/or mysterious explosions, read on.

Basically, three weeks ago I dropped my laptop, upon which was all my work, research, and so forth. I picked it up, stood, and for whatever reason opened my hands. The hard drive is mostly functional, but it seems that there is an enormous section of the disk that can no longer be read or written. That enormous section included the boot sector and most of Windows.

In this way, that computer can not be started until I can afford a new hard drive.

But I have a desktop machine. The trouble is that it didn't work for several months until earlier this week. (I hadn't had time to diagnose it.) Over the past few years, I have occasionally heard an enormous popping sound/small explosion right next to me as I worked. At first I thought it was a faulty outlet, but that turned out not to be. Then I thought that my shelves might be collapsing. Nope.

When I finally went to fix my desktop machine, I discovered why.



Capacitor plague! There are eight--count 'em, eight--faulty capacitors on my video card. This is probably not good. (On the other hand, I'm impressed that it still ran with seven of them gone.)

Anyway, I am currently running with an old (ca. 2000) video card that is good enough, and will be posting regularly again! I have a bunch of special features planned, so get ready!
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