Arbitrary Friday: Danger Edition

People often think of scientists as men in lab coats and wire rim glasses living lives of quiet desperation. While the quiet desperation is true in most cases, the idea of scientists as nerdy milquetoasts has remained pretty well embedded in our cultural consciousness (see, for instance, the execrable TV show "Big Bang Theory" for countless examples), in spite of a plethora of counterexamples. Richard Feynman was of course famous for his womanizing, lock picking, adventure seeking, and numerous practical jokes. The late great David Schramm was a 240 pound red haired demon who climbed mountains and tragically died at the fairly young age of 52 while flying his own single engine airplane. But, even apart from the famous and infamous, scientists that I know are generally a sensitive, artistic, and adventurous lot. They play piano, banjo, and rugby, they dance the salsa, they climb mountains, and that's just counting the people in my lab.

On the other hand, scientists are, by and large, a careful lot. They calculate, they consider, they assess risk, and they eschew it in most cases. I grew up in a Jewish household in the suburbs, where danger seemed to be all around, where taking the bus to the mall seemed fraught with opportunities for death and dismemberment, and where even a jungle gym presented terrifying, murderous possibilities.

But, lately, I've definitely taken a turn for the more dangerous. For starters, as bland as it seems, moving to California was an adventure for me in a lot of ways. I was moving far from my family, far from any of my friends, to a place I had never lived, with a lot of distinct cultural differences, and with very little context to guide me. And, in a lot of ways, my Grand California Adventure has been a fantastic success. I've taken all sorts of risks and experienced all sorts of new things (some of which are not really appropriate for discussion here.) But, I have also definitely started to incorporate danger into my life in more tangible ways.

About six months after moving here, for instance, I finally went and bought my first motorcycle, a 1997 Harley 883 Sportster (which you will find pictured to the right.) Hardly the most dangerous motorcycle in the world (it has trouble getting above 80 miles an hour), but a significant departure for me. Of course, I didn't just go out and buy it: I started even before I moved by taking a course from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, and simultaneously studying up on motorcycles, riding, and what kind of bike I should get as a beginner bike. (Motorcycles for Dummies suggested the Sportster as a good intro bike, and I've been happy with it in that respect, although I'm starting to feel like it may be time to get something with a bit more oomph, that handles a bit more solidly.) Which is to say, I didn't plunge into it with abandon: I carefully selected and pursued my choice of danger, and mitigated the unecessary risk.

Not long after that, I was driving up to San Francisco, and passed by Fort Funston. All of a suddent, I realized that hang gliding was not just something that people did in movies: I was in California! There were mountains! If you had the desire (and the money!), you could fly. And so I got myself a block of lessons, and, well, the rest is history:


So, the question I ask myself is: why? Why live dangerously? My parents certainly ask me that. Is it just to impress the babes? (I hope not.) Is it because I'm some sort of thrill junkie? Honestly, I don't feel like the risks I'm taking are that unreasonable in a visceral sense, even if they are statistically more likely to result in me dying in a horrible accident than if I were to not pursue them. Therein, though, lies the answer, I think. William Gurstelle, and author and recent guest poster on BoingBoing, was discussing his new book, Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. He hypothesizes that "the golden third", living in ways that are more dangerous than average, but still short of making pipe bombs out of match heads, is correlated with overall happiness and contentment. Fair enough, it seems like I'm toeing that line. But, still: why? Why does it make me happy? Why do it?

I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that there is an element of control involved, or, more precisely, lack of control. Most of us spend a lot of time exercising control over our lives, and, as discussed above, scientists want to control everything. (Even our experiments are sometimes called "controls"!) But sometimes, it pays to let go of that. It pays to intentionally step out over the ledge and look over. Because, not everything in life can be controlled. And if you spend all of your time in your bubble of control, in your circumscribed safe space, then what the hell are you going to do when the shit hits the fan? How are you going to cope? How are you going to deal when you're not in control? I've gotten into near accidents on my motorcycle; I've had the wind shove my glider around and nearly lost control; and it's pretty damn scary. But, your blood gets pumping, and your heart takes over, and you learn a little lesson about yourself, and how you react, and you internalize that. Flying is fun! But sometimes you crash, and in life, the decisions with the most importance almost never happen when you're in control, they happen when things are flying off the handle, and you don't have the time for sober reflection.

Total internal pedantry

Glancing over some new articles on single molecule stuff, I came across the following curious title:
"Ultrastable combined atomic force and total internal fluorescence microscope." Surely, this had to be a mistake, but no, the article actually uses the term "total internal fluorescence". Now, certainly, I have been accused of being a pedantic word nerd at times, but this construction really irks me. For those of you still scratching your head, the correct term is "total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy", or even just "total internal reflection microscopy." But, the the term "total internal" refers to the reflected excitation light, not the fluorescence emission. "Total internal reflection" (TIR) is actually a quite common phenomenon in physics and has applications far beyond fluorescence microscopy (for instance, fiber optics are based on TIR.) "Total internal fluorescence" on the other hand seems like it would be useless: the fluorescence is totally internal, and never gets out, so what's the signal?

Just to make sure I wasn't smoking crack, though, I checked around the intergoogles a bit. On Pubmed, for instance:
"total internal reflection fluorescence": 629 hits
"total internal fluorescence": 11 hits

But, this hit in particular startled me. It lists in the references:

E. Sund and D. Axelrod, “Actin dynamics at the living cell submembrane imaged by total internal fluorescence photobleaching,” Biophys. J. 79, 1655–1669 (2000).

If no less a luminary that Dan Axelrod, the GODFATHER of TIRFM, could use the term "total internal fluorescence", then clearly I was way off base. Fortunately for me, clicking through the link reveals that in fact the authors had misquoted the title of the paper! The actual title, as you might imagine, is "Actin dynamics at the living cell submembrane imaged by total internal reflection fluorescence photobleaching."



In other news, I have heard tell around the water cooler that certain Block lab associated people have been selected for various Biophysical Society awards at the 2010 meeting, but since the BPS website doesn't have any info on it, I'll keep a lid on it until a formal announcement is made.

OMG ROTFLMAO LOL NIH NCBI HIV TAR

Via boingboing: from the land up north, we get NCBIROFL.COM, a collection of published bioscience papers that are probably only slightly more absurd than your own research. Although I must point out that they're a bit behind the curve: the June 30th entry has already been widely hailed, having won the 2003 IgNobel prize in physics.

Watch Yer Mouth

I read way too many political blogs, so although only tangentially relevant, here are some interesting tidbits I read today:

First, over at Crooked Timber (one of the few blogs where I bother to read the comments), Michael Bérubé offers a writeup of some developments in free speech in higher education. He points to the case Hong v. Grant, which basically states that a university can administratively punish a professor for job-related speech which is not related to teaching or research (committee work, for instance.) Hence, this chilling letter from UC Davis to the Faculty Senate:

According to recent court rulings, your speech and behavior in job-related duties as a public employee rather than a private citizen have no First Amendment protection. This means that disciplinary action may be taken against you (including dismissal) for statements you make in the course of your employment. According to recent court rulings, your speech and behavior in job-related duties as a public employee rather than a private citizen have no First Amendment protection. This means that disciplinary action may be taken against you (including dismissal) for statements you make in the course of your employment. Any activity performed on the job falls within this purview. According to the recent court rulings, speech and actions in shared governance activities are certainly not protected...In light of the present deep economic recession and dramatic cuts under discussion at UC Davis, faculty participating in shared governance are in a position in which they may voice strong views and concerns that could lead to lawful but punitive reaction by the administration, including denial of merits and even dismissal. Given the legal and policy realities at hand, we highly recommend that you use caution, restraint, and judgment in your speech and actions in all job-related duties.

So, as Eric Rauchway put it, "If I follow the logic correctly, Hong is obliged to participate in the administration of his department. But the definition of 'actively participate in the interworkings and administration of his department' appears here to be, 'say only those things which won’t lose you a merit increase.'"

I find this particularly interesting as a scientist because we tend to think that "academic freedom" debates mostly apply to people like Ward Churchill, and not to scientists. Not so! Now you can get canned for being a loudmouth at your departmental committee meetings. And there are no shortage of loudmouths in the sciences, that's for sure.

On a completely unrelated note (except for the fact that it's about politics): The Great Paul has pointed up some very interesting legislation:

On Monday, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Pat Roberts (R-KS) introduced the “Preserving Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services (PATIENTS) Act of 2009,” a new bill prohibiting Medicare or Medicaid from using “comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.”

This really just leaves me speechless. The War on Science continues unabated. At least the Republican Party is consistent on that front.

More 3D tracking

Another entry in my ever growing docket of 3D tracking techniques: A nice paper in Nano Letters from Yale Goldman's lab on a new method of 3D single molecule tracking using a system they call "Parallax". Their data is very nice, and they manage to achieve something that I was actually trying to do in grad school: visualize 3D helical motion of myosin VI around an actin filament. The technique is very nice, and is a somewhat simpler realization of a system proposed earlier here. It utilizes a splitting of an image into two halves with slightly different optical path lengths, which causes the images to move differentially in the X-Y plane based on their localization in the Z plane. Worth a read! Their use of mirrors instead of prisms is quite clever.

Focus on Microscopes

Nature has five articles focusing (ha ha) on new types of microscopy, including Stefan Hell's STED (with brief mentions of PALM and STORM), and Sunney Xie's foray into Raman spectroscopy. They also have the gigantic (a 13 meter electron microscope) down to the tiny (the 3 cm microscope-on-a-chip). Written in conversational style, nothing too heavy. Some fun summer reading!

If I Only Had a Brain

Via the always awesome Makezine blog*, this is an interesting article promoting "The Importance of Stupidity in Research." It's worth a read. The premise is that research, actual honest-to-goodness groundbreaking research, involves a lot of flailing about in the dark and feeling stupid, and people tend not to be accustomed to that feeling, because it's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel in your classes, where you're supposed to always know the answer.

This meshes well with a truism that I've been known to spout, which is, "If it was easy to do, somebody would have done it already." At least, for really novel and groundbreaking research, that's true. I suppose there's plenty of fill-in-the-gaps type of stuff that people have to do, the sort of stuff that requires labs full of technicians and grad students using time-honored techniques and a lot of elbow grease. But I think that's almost an entirely different category of research.

On the other hand, the converse of this sentiment was expressed once by Albert Young** when I was at Princeton, and he said, "90% of physics is just not being stupid."

*Speaking of which, if you're in the bay area, you should definitely attend the Maker Faire this weekend.

**Remembering Albert's name took a Herculean effort of googling. Basically, I had to remember that he was a classmate's thesis advisor (to whom he imparted the wisdom), and then I had to find a catalog of Princeton theses and look up that classmate's thesis. Albert is now apparently at NC State in the physics department, according to the intarwebs.