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This Man Memorized a 60,000-Word Poem Using Deep Encoding - Facts So Romantic
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Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill. “Of man’s first disobedience…” In 1992, at the age of 58, Basinger decided to memorize Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem, as a form of mental activity while he was working out at the gym. An actor, he’d memorized shorter poems before, and he wanted to see how much of the epic he could remember. “As I finished each book,” he wrote, “I began to perform it and keep it alive in repertory while committing the next to memory.”LuciferPhotograph by Felipe Gabaldón / FlickrThe 12 books of Paradise Lost contain over 60,000 words; it took Basinger about 3,000 hours to learn them by rote. He did so by reciting the piece, line-by-line out loud, for about an hour a day for (...)

How Brain Waves Surf Sound Waves to Process Speech - Facts So Romantic
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Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Decades ago, the noted computational neuroscientist David Marr observed that “trying to understand perception by understanding neurons is like trying to understand a bird’s flight by understanding only feathers.”PixabayWhen he talks about where his fields of neuroscience and neuropsychology have taken a wrong turn, David Poeppel of New York University doesn’t mince words. “There’s an orgy of data but very little understanding,” he said to a packed room at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in February. He decried the “epistemological sterility” of experiments that do piecework measurements of the brain’s wiring in the laboratory but are divorced from any guiding theories about behaviors and (...)

Lavatory Laboratory - Issue 60: Searches
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Our humble toilet has shaped civilization. Starting in 19th-century Britain, it spread throughout the industrialized world, eliminated recurring cholera epidemics, and contributed to the doubling of lifespans. But its spread was not universal. Dozens of countries could not afford to build the sewer system that toilets rely on, leaving a present-day 2.5 billion people subject to preventable plagues considered history in the industrialized world. Every year, this sewage shortcoming translates into the deaths of about 1.5 million children under 5 from diarrheal diseases. Annually, 100,000 people die from cholera. Efforts to invest in sewer systems have stalled in several low-income nations, and now there is a growing sentiment that the answer to today’s sanitation dilemmas should not (...)

Are Suicide Bombings Really Driven by Ideology? - Issue 60: Searches
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Harvey Whitehouse doesn’t like how New Atheists like Richard Dawkins make religion out to be a mere “set of propositions” amounting to a “failed science.” In a 2013 YouTube video, Whitehouse—the director of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford—strolls through a park and says, “Clearly religion is not just that.”1 The point of religion is not to produce a rational understanding of nature, according to Whitehouse. It is “more about building cohesion and cooperation in groups, among other things,” he recently told Nautilus. He does realize that, taken literally, religious tales are implausible or just plain wrong, “and that can be irritating to people like Dawkins.” But the reason people “dig their heels in” against Dawkinsian criticism of their (...)

Why New Antibiotics Are So Hard to Find - Issue 60: Searches
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An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type 2 diabetes. What is surprising is that meropenem, a broad spectrum antibiotic, and vancomycin, known as the antibiotic of last resort, have absolutely no effect. The doctors know something bad is going on. But, even expecting the worst, the test results surprise them. The man’s foot is infected with not one, but three different bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Acinetobacter lwoffii. Each is multi-drug resistant. The hospital, located in Brazil, simply doesn’t have the resources to deal with the situation. The patient is transferred to a larger hospital, but enough damage has already been done to his foot to require amputation. ACTION (...)

The Case Against Geniuses - Facts So Romantic
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The notion of genius as a capability a person can possess has come under attack recently in several ways.Pxhere / Public DomainOnce you’re called a “genius,” what’s left? Super genius? No, getting called a “genius” is the final accolade, the last laudatory label for anyone. At least that’s how several members of Mensa, an organization of those who’ve scored in the 98th percentile on an IQ test, see it. “I don’t look at myself as a genius,” LaRae Bakerink, a business consultant and a Mensa member, said. “I think that’s because I see things other people have done, things they have created, discovered, or invented, and I look at those people in awe, because that’s not a capability I have.”Yet the notion of genius as a capability a person can possess has come under attack recently in several ways. Megan (...)

Forget “Earth-Like”—We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets - Facts So Romantic
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Artist’s conception of a hot Eyeball planet. The permanent day side is sun-baked and dry. The permanent night side is covered with ice. In between lies a thin habitat: the ring of life.Illustration by Beau.TheConsortiumImagine a habitable planet orbiting a distant star. You’re probably picturing a variation of Earth. Maybe it’s a little cloudier, or covered in oceans. Maybe the mountains are a little higher. Maybe the trees are red instead of green. Maybe there are scantily clad natives…OK, let’s stop there. That image may very well be completely off-base. There is good reason to think that the first potentially life-bearing worlds that are now being detected around other stars (see here for example) probably look very different than Earth. Rather, these planets are more likely to look (...)

What’s Worse: Unwanted Mutations or Unwanted Humans? - Facts So Romantic
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Three of the rare Przewalski’s horses that now roam the area near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Photograph by Sergey GaschakAfter a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility melted down and then exploded, killing 31 workers at the plant. The accident spewed massive amounts of radioactive material into the surrounding area, forcing a mass evacuation of the nearby villages. Many wild animals died from the direct toxicity of the radiation and almost 1,000 acres of the Red Forest—named for the unusual color its trees turned after the disaster—died within months. The most radioactive human settlements were bulldozed and buried. (See the related story about the most radioactive part of the nuclear plant: (...)

Are Healthcare Metrics Hurting Healthcare? - Facts So Romantic
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Performance metrics are supposed to financially incentivize hospitals to improve the healthcare system. And this is exactly where the trouble starts. The list of misapplied performance metrics could go on and on.Photograph by Luis Molinero / ShutterstockIn 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart pointed out that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law, as it came to be known, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in regulatory affairs, like healthcare. Making healthcare better requires metrics which can be measured and assessed. But measuring the right metric is sometimes the wrong choice.In order to quantify and characterize health and healthcare, hospitals and government agencies collect massive amounts of data. Typically, this data is gathered by (...)

My Own Personal Nothingness - Issue 60: Searches
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“Nothing will come of nothing.”(William Shakespeare, King Lear) “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, The Misery of Man Without God) “The… ‘luminiferous ether’ will prove to be superfluous as the view to be developed here will eliminate [the condition of] absolute rest in space.”(Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) My most vivid encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at (...)

The Popular Creation Story of Astronomy Is Wrong - Issue 60: Searches
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In the early years of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler argued that the universe contained thousands of mighty bodies, bodies so huge that they could be universes themselves. These giant bodies, said Kepler, testified to the immense power of, as well as the personal tastes of, an omnipotent Creator God. The giant bodies were the stars, and they were arrayed around the sun, the universe’s comparatively tiny central body, itself orbited by its retinue of still tinier planets. This strange view of the universe held by Kepler, the innovative astronomer who set the stage for Isaac Newton and the advent of modern physics by freeing astronomy from the perfect circles of Aristotle and working out the elliptical nature of orbital motion, was held by a number of early supporters of Nicolaus (...)

How NASA’s Mission to Pluto Was Nearly Lost - Issue 60: Searches
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On the Saturday afternoon of July 4, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons Pluto mission leader Alan Stern was in his office near the project Mission Control Center, working, when his cell phone rang. He was aware of the Independence Day holiday but was much more focused on the fact that the date was “Pluto flyby minus 10 days.” New Horizons, the spacecraft mission that had been the central focus of his career for 14 years, was now just 10 days from its targeted encounter with the most distant planet ever explored. Immersed in work that afternoon, Alan was busy preparing for the flyby. He was used to operating on little sleep during this final approach phase of the mission, but that day he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and gone into their Mission Operations Center (MOC) for the upload of the (...)

5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion - Facts So Romantic
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The Licorne (“Unicorn”) thermonuclear test; Fangataufa, French Polynesia; 1970Photograph courtesy of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization / FlickrAfter most of the world’s nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear (...)

How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions - Facts So Romantic
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The architecture of social media exploits our sense of right and wrong, reaping profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous outrage.Photograph by Kitja Kitja / ShutterstockA few years ago, Justine Sacco, then the senior director of corporate communications at the holding company InterActiveCorp, tweeted about the nuisances of air-travel during a long, multi-leg journey from New York to South Africa. She started with sardonic observations—one about a smelly passenger at JFK Airport, another about London’s peculiar food and predictably inclement weather. Then came this one, shortly before her final flight: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”As she settled in to sleep, she had good reason to expect that that tweet would fade away into the hectic (...)

Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick - Facts So Romantic
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Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, mumbling displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs.Photograph by Everett Collection / ShutterstockMany of us have been taught that pronouncing vowels indistinctly and dropping consonants are symptoms of slovenly speech, if not outright disregard for the English language. The Irish playwright St. John Ervine viewed such habits as evidence that some speakers are “weaklings too languid and emasculated to speak their noble language with any vigor.” If that’s so, then we are swimming in a sea of linguistic wimpiness; Keith Johnson found that speakers relaxed or dropped sounds in more than 60 percent of words spoken in conversation. Happily, the science of (...)

Will Robot Surgeons Ever Be Creative? - Facts So Romantic
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The idea that a surgical robot could ever substitute for the real thing is “a real stretch,” says Ken Goldberg, a distinguished U.C. Berkeley roboticist and researcher.Photograph by Elnur / ShutterstockYou die at the beginning of Mass Effect 2. It’s 2183, and you—Commander Shepard—have just saved every space-faring species in the Milky Way from an extra-galactic threat. You’re on a scouting run for any remaining foes when an unfamiliar vessel somehow intercepts your course and attacks. In the resulting explosion, you’re flung into the void, drifting as you struggle to breathe. The military logs you as “killed in action.”But of course, a deceased protagonist does not a sequel make. Your corpse is soon found and brought back to life. Much of the work seems automated. Robot arms bearing scalpels (...)

Dear iPhone—It Was Just Physical, and Now It’s Over - Facts So Romantic
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I can’t count the number of times I pulled out my phone just for the feeling of unlocking the screen and swiping through applications, whether out of comfort—like a baby sucking her thumb—or boredom—like a teenager at school, tapping his fingers on a desk.Photograph by cunaplus / ShutterstockAs a kid, I’d sometimes try to imagine what life would be like without a particular sense or part of my body, like with questions from the Would You Rather? game. Would you rather be deaf or blind? Would you rather have no legs or no arms? I’d try to erase the sound of my mom’s piano playing, the sight of the ground growing smaller as I soared on the tree swing in my backyard, or the feeling of playing basketball so hard my lungs might explode, but I just couldn’t. How could life go on without these (...)

Explaining the Unexplainable - Issue 60: Searches
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During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Voltaire called superstition a “mad daughter” and likened it to astrology. The leading thinkers of the time espoused reason and sought to explain the world through the scientific method. Today, we take a certain pride in approaching the world analytically. When faced with a confusing event, we search for its cause and effect. If we can determine why one action follows another, we can explain why it happened and when it might recur in the future. This makes the outcome reliable.The fact is that any of us can become superstitious given the right circumstances. You included.Take batters in baseball. Many sports fans believe that batting in professional baseball is the most difficult task in sports. Even the best batters only manage to get a (...)

How Posture Makes Us Human - Issue 60: Searches
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The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture. Best known of the ancient commentators is Plato, who, according to legend, is claimed to have seen the human as bipedal and featherless. To describe humans as “featherless” sounds odder to modern ears than does the functional association of bipedalism and intelligence, but Plato sees the absence of bodily covering as a move away from the base toward the human, for he is quite aware that the other bipedal animal is the bird. Greek thought gives the bird a middle role between the human and the gods, since birds are connected to the gods through their use in divination. Responding to Plato’s contorted definition of man, Diogenes of Sinope, known as the (...)

The Deep Time of Walden Pond - Issue 60: Searches
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A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage, although fans and detractors alike often misunderstand this. It was more an author’s workshop than a fortress of isolation, and throughout his lakeside residency he often visited family and friends in Concord and entertained guests at Walden. Ice-cutters and woodcutters, anglers and boaters, and even a noisy train were as much a part of his surroundings as the lake, woods, and wildlife. He retreated to the cabin largely in order to write in a quieter setting than he could find in town and to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not (...)

Here’s What We’ll Do in Space by 2118 - Facts So Romantic
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In a mere 60 years, we of Earth have gone from launching our first spacecraft, to exploring every planet and major moon in our solar system, to establishing an international, long-lived fleet of robotic spacecraft at the Moon and Mars. What will we do in the next 100 years? With such rapid expansion of capability, it may seem difficult to tell what the next 60 years will bring, much less the next century. But we never do anything in space without first imagining what we could do, so in that spirit, here is an attempt to predict—and nudge us into—the future. An artist’s conception of the Titan Saturn System Mission, including an orbiter, boat-like lander, and atmosphere-exploring balloon. European Space AgencySo far, almost all of our exploration of worlds beyond Earth has been through (...)

How You Can Be a Less Politically Polarizing Person - Facts So Romantic
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Partisanship doesn’t just affect moral and perceptual judgments—even cold, quantitative reasoning can’t escape its pull. A 2013 study showed that “people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs.”Image by Mushki Brichta / WikicommonsOne night last month at Union Hall, a bar in Brooklyn, I attended a show put on by the Empiricist League (“A creative community for those who believe in evidence, observation, and experiment”) called “Mind Hacking.” The event description, on Facebook, consisted of a series of questions that I, in a contrarian mood, began to answer pessimistically: “In an increasingly divided world, how can we ‘hack’ our minds to cultivate traits like compassion and trust?” You can’t. “How do partisanship (...)

Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens - Facts So Romantic
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SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the whistle repertoire of bottlenose dolphins.Illustration by Victor Habbick Visions When 12 men gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to discuss the art and science of alien hunting in 1961, the Order of the Dolphin was born. A number of the brightest minds from a range of scientific disciplines, including three Nobel laureates, a young Carl Sagan, and an eccentric neuroscientist named John Lilly—who was best known for trying to talk to dolphins—were in attendance. It was Lilly’s research that inspired the group’s name: If humans couldn’t even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit (...)

Why Did a Major Paper Ignore Evidence About Gender Stereotypes? - Facts So Romantic
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Some scientists may be motivated to support compelling narratives—social psychology has a long and checkered history that includes cherry-picking results, studies, and publications in order to advance them.Photograph by Everett Collection / ShutterstockLet’s start with a quiz.Who was more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, men or women?Who is more likely to commit a murder, men or women?Who receives higher grades in high school, boys or girls?Who is more likely to be labeled as having some sort of behavior problem in elementary school, boys or girls?The answers are, respectively: men, men, girls, boys. Is it that surprising? If you got at least one right, without resorting to flipping a mental coin, you have just demonstrated to yourself that not all beliefs (stereotypes) about (...)

How Long Until a Robot Cries? - Issue 60: Searches
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When Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. Her assistant is only good at the repetitive tasks, like sifting flour, but he makes the job more fun. Naoki is very cute, just under two feet tall. He’s white, mostly, with blue highlights, and has speakers where his ears should be. The little round circle of a mouth that gives him a surprised expression is actually a camera, and his eyes are infrared receivers and transmitters. “I just love robots,” said Lim in 2013, at the time a Ph.D. student in the Department of Intelligent Science and Technology at Kyoto University in Japan. She uses the robot from Aldebaran Robotics in Paris to explore how robots might express emotions and interact with people. When Lim plays the flute, Naoki (the Japanese characters of his (...)