No-one knows whether or not a neutral-tasting nutrient-sludge diet leads to enormous weight loss
February 15, 2023
I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt.
I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy. But what’s really been absorbing me recently is a series of twenty long, detailed posts under the banner “A Chemical Hunger“, in which the author contests that the principle cause of the modern obesity epidemic is chemically-induced changes to the “lipostat” that tells our bodies what level of mass to maintain.
I highly recommend that you read the first post in this series, “Mysteries“, and see what you think. If you want to read on after that, fine; but even if you stop there, you’ll still have read something fascinating, counter-intuitive, well referenced and (I think) pretty convincing.
Anyway. The post that fascinates me right now is one of the digressions: “Interlude B: The Nutrient Sludge Diet“. In this post, the author tells us about “a 1965 study in which volunteers received all their food from a ‘feeding machine’ that pumped a ‘liquid formula diet’ through a ‘dispensing syringe-type pump which delivers a predetermined volume of formula through the mouthpiece'”, but they were at liberty to choose how many hits of this neutral-tasting sludge they took.
This study had an absolutely sensational outcome: among the participants with healthy body-weight, the amount of nutrient sludge that they chose to feed themselves was almost exactly equal in caloric content to their diets before the experiment. But the grossly obese participants (weighing about 400 lb = 180 kg), chose to feed themselves a tiny proportion of their usual intake — about one tenth — and lost an astonishing amount of weight. All without feeling hunger.
Please do read the Slime Mold Time Mold write-up for the details. But I will let you in right now on the study’s very very significant flaw. The sample-size was two. That is, two obese participants, plus a control-group of two healthy-weight individuals. And clearly whatever conclusion we can draw from a study of that size is merely anecdotal, having no statistical power worth mentioning.
And now we come to the truly astonishing part of this. It seems no-one has tried to replicate this study with a decent-sized sample. The blog says:
If this works, why hasn’t someone replicated it by now? It would be pretty easy to run a RCT where you fed more than five obese people nutrient sludge ad libitum for a couple weeks, so this means either it doesn’t work as described, or it does work and for some reason no one has tried it. Given how huge the rewards for this finding would be, we’re going to go with the “it doesn’t work” explanation.
In a comment, I asked:
OK, I’ll bite. Why hasn’t anyone tried to replicate the astounding and potentially valuable findings of these studies? It beggars belief that it’s not been tried, and multiple times. Do you think it has been tried, but the results weren’t published because they were unimpressive? That would be an appalling waste.
The blog author replied:
Our guess is that it simple hasn’t been tried! Academia likes to pretend that research is one-and-done, and rarely checks things once they’re in the literature. We agree, someone should try to replicate!
I’m sort of at a loss for words here. How can it possibly be that, 58 years after a pilot study that potentially offers a silver bullet to the problem of obesity, no-one has bothered to check whether it works? I mean, the initial study is so old that Revolver hadn’t been released. Yet it seems to have just lain there, unloved, as the Beatles moved on through Sergeant Pepper, the White Album, Abbey Road et al., broke up, pursued their various solo projects, died (50% of the sample) and watched popular music devolve into whatever the heck it is now.
Why aren’t obesity researchers all over this?
I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.
To try this out, I asked OpenAI Chat this question: “What are the contenders for the title of Biggest Dinosaur, and what is the basis for their various claims?” I picked that because I know a bit about the answer, and in fact wrote an answer myself back in 2015.
Here’s what it came up with:
There are several contenders for the title of “biggest dinosaur,” and their claims are based on different pieces of evidence. The most commonly cited contenders are:
- Argentinosaurus: This is considered to be one of the largest known dinosaurs, with estimates of its length ranging from 110-130 feet (33-40 meters) and a weight of around 100-110 tons. Its size is based on a few fragmented bones, including vertebrae and limb bones, which were found in Argentina.
- Brachiosaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 85 feet (26 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on several well-preserved specimens that have been found in North America, including a nearly complete skeleton.
- Puertasaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 85-100 feet (26-30 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on a few bones, including a femur, that were found in Argentina.
- Supersaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 110-125 feet (33-38 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on a single specimen, a set of vertebrae, that was found in the US.
- Diplodocus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 90-115 feet (27-35 meters) long and weighed around 20-40 tons. Its size is based on several well-preserved specimens that have been found in North America.
It’s worth noting that the size of these dinosaurs is approximate and there’s still debate among paleontologists. Also, the weight of these dinosaurs is based on estimations, not real measurements.
At first glance this is a decent answer. It’s certainly better than just saying “Argentinosaurus weighed 100 tons”. But if you know your sauropods, you’ll immediately recognise that this answer is riddled with inaccuracies:
- The Argentinosaurus entry is actually pretty good, although I’ve never seen a 110 ton mass estimate and modern estimates tend to be rather lower than the specified range.
- The Brachiosaurus mass estimate is way off, two or three times as high as it should be.
- More importantly, no remotely complete Brachiosaurus specimen has ever been described, and size estimates are based primarily on its Tanzanian relative Giraffatitan.
- There is no known femur of Puertasaurus. (When I corrected the AI on this, it told me instead that there is a pubis known. There is not.)
- Supersaurus is not based on a single specimen, and both of the main specimens that have been described contain plenty of appendicular material.
- The Diplodocus length estimate is a bit inflated, but otherwise not bad. But it’s not clear what it’s doing in a list of five biggest dinosaurs.
- The answer omits some very strong contenders, including Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan.
- It doesn’t really address the second part of my question — e.g. Supersaurus has a good claim to be longer, but not heaviest; the converse is likely true for Argentinosaurus.
Now here is the real problem: the LLM does well enough to fool people. If it was nonsense from start to end, there would be nothing to fear here, but the plausibility of the answers and the authoritative tone in which they are given lends the many mistakes a credibility that they do not deserve.
Having seen this sort-of-convincing-but-very-wrong reply in a field that I know something about, I would be very very cautious about trusting an LLM to teach me about a field I don’t already know. I’m guessing its replies about space flight, quantum physics and Medieval French literature are going to be similarly flawed (but also, worryingly, similarly convincing to those such as myself who don’t know better.)
There is a very fundamental reason for all these mistakes: as I implied above, LLMs do not understand anything. They just know what phrases occur close to other phrases. They can do amazing things with that one trick, and I can see them being useful as discovery tools. But we’ll go badly wrong when we start trusting them as anything more than a bright but ignorant kid offering suggestions.
So for all the talk of AI having taken huge leaps forward in the last couple of years, I don’t think any such thing has happened. We’ve just got much better at generating plausible text. But there’s no advance in actual understanding.
On the poignancy and intimacy of history
April 4, 2022
I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus.) It’s a fascinating process: more of a history project than a scientific one. It’s throwing up all sorts of things. Here’s one.
In 1992, the year after the mount went up, S. O. Landry gave a talk at the annual meeting of American Zoologist about this mount. I don’t even remember now where I saw a reference to this, or how I found it, but the untitled abstract is on JSTOR, as part of the society’s abstracts volume. Here it is, in its entirety:
I thought he’d made some good points, so I wanted to figure out whether he’d ever gone on from this 31-year-old abstract and published a paper about it.
Based on the surname, initials and affiliation, I searched here and there, and turned up a few bits and pieces. I learned that he was a Professor of Biology at SUNY at Binghamton, specialising in hystricomorph rodents. I found out that his wife Helen died in 2007 after 57 years’ marriage. (That’s not just idle curiosity: it’s how I discovered that his first name was Stuart.) I found a photograph of him, taken in 1975, with Assemblyman James L. Tallon, and learned in the process that his middle name was Omer. I found that he was at one time the Graduate Dean at SUNY Binghamton, and opposed the 1972 rise in tuition fees from $800 per year to $1200–$1500. I learned that his BS was from Harvard College and his Ph.D from UC Berkeley, and that he is still listed as a professor emeritus at SUNY Binghamton. I discovered that he “pooh-poohs the idea that young students’ minds are “tabula rasas” – blank slates”. I know that in 1966 he translated C. C. Robin’s Voyage to the Interior of Louisiana from its original French. I learned that he was born in 1924 and died in 2015 at the age of 90, and served in the Battle of the Bulge. More troublingly, I discovered that his father, also named Stuart Omer Landry, was known for writing racist tracts for the Pelican Publishing Company, but that he himself rose above that heritage and became known for his progressive politics.
I don’t know what to make of any of this. It seems that he never published anything substantive about Barosaurus, so in that sense, I have lost interest in him. But isn’t it strange that in trying to answer the simple question “Did the S. O. Landry who wrote an abstract about rearing Barosaurus write anything else on the subject?” has wound up opening the book of someone’s life like this?
And how strange that someone with 90 years of rich, complex life and numerous academic achievements should be, to me, just the guy who wrote an untitled abstract about Barosaurus that one time.
Off-topic: your gonads are innervated by your cranial nerves
January 24, 2020
Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation.
This isn’t new to science, it’s just one of the cool little quirks of human and comparative anatomy that more people should be aware of.
Quick-quick background: autonomic (unconscious, involuntary) innervation of the body comes in two flavors, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic nerves mostly handle the fight-or-flight response, parasympathetics are feed-breed-and-read. You could also think of them as the “oh crap emergency” and “hum-drum housekeeping” branches of the nervous system. Sympathetic nerves to the whole body are derived from the spinal cord between T1 and L2, and parasympathetics come from certain cranial nerves and from the sacral part of the spinal cord. If a refresher on all of this would be handy, please see this.
The most awesome nerve in the body is cranial nerve X, the vagus nerve. “Vagus” means “wandering” in Latin; it’s the same root from which we get ‘vagabond’ and ‘vagrant’. As the name implies, the nerve gets around–various branches innervate just about all your viscera from the soft palate at the back of your mouth to the first half of your large intestine. And, as stated in the title of the post, your gonads.
That’s actually pretty weird, even for a nerve from your skull that innervates most of your digestive tract. The reason why it’s weird is that your embryonic hindgut (descending colon, sigmoid colon, and rectum) and most of your pelvic viscera and reproductive system get their parasympathetic innervation from the pelvic splanchnic nerves. The gonads are buried in all of that, and they may get some pelvic splanchnic innervation as well, but they also get innervated by the vagus nerves. (Note for fellow arch-pedants: yes, I know there’s evidence that the pelvic splanchnics should technically be considered sympathetic, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole right now.)
Like most of the weird stuff that goes on in our bodies, the reason why the gonads get vagal innervation is developmental. The gonads actually start developing pretty high up in the abdomen, not far below the diaphragm, and their nerve and blood supply are established at that point. High in the abdomen is firmly in vagus nerve territory, so the gonads get vagal innervation. Then later the gonads descend, in both sexes, and they drag their nerves and blood vessels along with them, which is why the gonadal vessels in both sexes come off the aorta near or with what end up being the renal arteries. (Kidneys do the opposite thing, developing down low and then climbing the aorta, swapping arteries as they go, but that’s a story for another day.) In males the testes take the final leap through the abdominal wall to descend into the scrotum, but ovaries descend almost as far, from up by the diaphragm down to the bowl of the pelvis, or at least to its rim. (Most of the time: just as males can have undescended testes, females can have incompletely-descended ovaries; they turn up now and then in the anatomy lab.)
Incidentally, fellas, this is why you feel sick to your stomach when you get kicked in the groin–the nerves to your testicles come out of the same plexus that serves your stomach and most of your intestines, and the pain fibers go back the same way.
For some super-interesting work on determining gonadal innervation using viral tracing, see Gerendai et al. (2005, 2009). I may quote some choice passages down in the comments.
Another great figure from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988), this time showing the path of vagal sensory fibers from the periphery to the brain (and again omitting the reproductive tract). Note the nucleus solitarius in the medulla oblongata, where vagal sensory fibers travel first on their way to the brain.
As is often the case in biology, things get stranger still. In females it’s not just the ovaries that are innervated by the vagus nerve, but part of the cervix and vagina as well. This was hypothesized by Komisaruk et al. (1997), based on the fact that some women with complete spinal cord injuries (‘complete’ here meaning ‘spinal cord cut all the way through’) could still experience genital sensation. It was confirmed by Komisaruk et al. (2004), who found that women with complete transection of the spinal cord could achieve orgasm from vaginal stimulation. Their fMRI study showed that the posterior part of the nucleus solitarius in the brainstem–which receives sensory fibers from the vagus nerve–was active in the process. I assume that there is some esoteric bit of embryology that explains how vagus fibers end up in the vagina, probably something to do with the mesonephric ducts. But I don’t know what that is off the top of my head, so I’ll have to go hit the books (again).
If you dig the diagrams I’ve used here, definitely go track down a copy of Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). There are newer versions of the same book that have full-color illustrations, but I think the single-color-nerve-on-black-and-white figures from the 1988 version are cleaner and more readable. It’s not just a good book on the cranial nerves, it’s a master class on clear visual presentation of complicated material. Unfortunately it is not cheap; even used paperback copies start around $40 unless you get lucky. UPDATE: However, through the generosity of Dr. Wilson-Pauwels, the illustrations and captions from the 2013 3rd edition are freely available for teaching purposes at this link. Go avail yourself of this phenomenal resource!
Anyway, the moral of the story is that, male or female, you have nerve fibers that exit your skull through the jugular foramen, pass down your neck behind your carotid arteries, follow your esophagus and stomach to the networks of nerves that run your guts, and run as impossibly slender fibers on the surfaces of the blood vessels that go to your testes or ovaries and vagina. You run your ‘nads from your brain, not just by way of the spinal cord but also by nerves that come straight out of your friggin’ head. Have fun with that thought.
References
- Gerendai, I., Banczerowski, P. and Halász, B. 2005. Functional significance of the innervation of the gonads. Endocrine 28(3): 309-318.
- Gerendai, I., Tóth, I.E., Boldogkői, Z. and Halász, B. 2009. Recent findings on the organization of central nervous system structures involved in the innervation of endocrine glands and other organs; observations obtained by the transneuronal viral double-labeling technique. Endocrine 36(2): 179-188.
- Komisaruk, B.R., Gerdes, C.A. and Whipple, B., 1997. Complete’spinal cord injury does not block perceptual responses to genital self-stimulation in women. Archives of Neurology, 54(12): 1513-1520.
- Komisaruk, B.R., Whipple, B., Crawford, A., Grimes, S., Liu, W.C., Kalnin, A. and Mosier, K. 2004. Brain activation during vaginocervical self-stimulation and orgasm in women with complete spinal cord injury: fMRI evidence of mediation by the vagus nerves. Brain Research 1024(1-2): 77-88.
- Wilson-Pauwels, L., Akesson, E.J. and Stewart, P.A. 1988. Cranial Nerves: Anatomy and Clinical Comments. Toronto: BC Decker.
Off-topic: what will happen to my tungsten cube?
February 26, 2018
In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo argues that you should get rid of everything in your life that doesn’t “spark joy”. I have accepted that I will never achieve Kondo-level simplicity, because too many things spark joy: a brass dinosaur my grandmother gave me when I was a kid, a worn penguin tibia I picked up on a beach in Uruguay, an Oklahoma rose rock, the alligator head Vicki brought me from New Orleans, an armadillo skull I found in the woods once, a sliced geode, an ammonite…the list goes on. Every area I have control over becomes, if not a cabinet of curiosities, at least a semi-organized array of curiosities.
An old box of stuff I unwrapped over the holidays. The human skull and allosaur claw are casts, all the other natural history items are real.
There are a couple of objects in my collection that give me more pleasure than any of the rest. One is a piece of shrapnel from the Sikhote-Alin meteorite – more about that another time, perhaps (done). The other is a 1.5″ tungsten cube.
I got the tungsten cube because of an answer on Quora to the question, “What is the most beautifully satisfying physics-based desk toy?” As the anonymous author of this particular answer wrote:
Some philistines may not consider this a proper “toy”, but I’ve had one for a year or so and am still crazy about it and have zero regret about purchasing it despite its high cost. It doesn’t do anything other than be way heavier than it seems possible for something that size to be. I think it’s mind-boggling and entertaining just to pick it up, hold it, savor its surreally strong attraction to the center of the earth, and think about gravity, matter, fundamental forces, etc.
The next time I got a nice chunk of fun money, I got the pair of 1.5″ tungsten and aluminum cubes sold by Midwest Tungsten Service. And a couple of years on, I gotta say, that purchase has probably given the best return of enjoyment per dollar of anything I’ve ever bought. For two reasons.
First, there’s the tactile enjoyment of picking up the tungsten cube. It is shockingly heavy. Pure tungsten has a specific gravity of 19.25. This cube is an alloy of 95% tungsten, 3.5% nickel, and 1.5% iron, called MT-18F by Midwest Tungsten. According to the fact sheet provided with the cube, “The addition of these alloying elements improves both the ductility and machinability of these alloys over non-alloyed tungsten, which can be brittle.” The addition of those other elements brings the cube’s density down to 18 g/cm^3. By comparison, steel is 8.05 and lead is 11.35. So even the alloyed cube still has a density more than half again that of lead. The 1.5″ cube has a mass of almost exactly 1 kg.
Even knowing, intellectually, how heavy the tungsten cube is, it’s still a kick in the brainpan every time I pick it up. It feels unreasonably, unnaturally heavy. It’s uncanny, like something out of a comic book, like it’s being pulled downward with the same force I normally associate with strong magnets.
The second reason why the cube is so great is the thoughts that it inspires. Pure tungsten has a melting point of 3422 °C (6192 °F). The W-Ni-Fe alloy, like other tungsten heavy alloys, “will begin to form a liquid phase when heated in excess of ~1450 °C (2642 °F)”, according to the Tungsten Heavy Alloy Design Manual (link). According to this page, most room fires max out at about 1200 °C, and according to this page, the temperatures of most magmas are 700-1300 °C (~1300-2400 °F). W-Ni-Fe alloy is also extremely hard, with a Vickers hardness of 262 kgf/mm² (about 8.5 Mohs; regular steel is 4-4.5 and hardened steel is 7.5-8). The only harder substances are things like corundum; carbides of silicon, titanium, and tungsten; boron; and diamond.
So, seriously, what is going to destroy this cube? Burn down the house, and it will survive. Toss it into lava or magma, and it will sink to the bottom – even into the upper mantle – and sit comfortably, 150°C or more below its melting point. If I owned beachfront property it would be cool to put the cube on a pebbly part of the beach and leave it there for a few years and see how – or if – it would erode. I know it can shatter if hit hard enough, but I imagine if it was just rolling around in the surf with some pebbles, the tungsten cube would wear down the pebbles and not vice versa. (It occurs to me that this could be tested with a small cube and a rock tumbler – I’ll let you know if I ever perform that experiment.)
My youngest brother, Ryan, designs drill bits for the oil industry, and then goes out to the drill sites to see how they wear down. His job is basically getting industrial diamond, tungsten carbide, and hardened steel to play well together at 1100 rpm. I wrote to get his profession opinion on the survivability of the tungsten cube.
Me:
I’m having a hard time thinking of some natural or accidental process that would destroy it. Volcano, asteroid, and A-bomb are all I’ve come up with. [This was before I’d looked up the temperature of magma.] Like, if it just got left out in the rain and the sun forever, would it corrode? Ever? How long could it be sitting there as a recognizable cube – a century, a millennium, 100,000 years?
Ryan (in an email with permission to cite):
I don’t have much experience with straight tungsten but WC [tungsten carbide] should fare better corrosion wise, it takes some pretty exotic stuff to corrode it. Now cobalt has a melting point of 2700F so if the WC got that hot the cobalt binder would melt, desintering the WC and breaking it down. However that’s way hotter than your average house fire.
Barring any natural disasters, acts of God, or man-made intervention, I would think you could set that thing on the ground somewhere and it would be just fine for a long, long time.
Fun fact #1: Pure tungsten oxidizes in air, so I imagine that’s one of the reasons they added the nickel in the MT-18F.
Fun fact #2: Ni and Co have very similar melting points. [Meaning that my W-Ni-Fe cube will desinter at about the same temp as tungsten carbide, which uses cobalt instead of nickel as the binder.]
My desk at work. Aquilops and sea otter skulls on the left are casts, the ichthyosaur is a 3D print, and everything else is real and mostly collected and prepped by me. That’s the aluminum cube in the back on the far left. The tungsten cube sits on my side of the desk, where I can play with it.
Now, I have a lot of things that I hope will outlive me, including a lot of old books and reprints. And a lot of that stuff is pretty durable, including the aforementioned meteorite chunk. But there is a big difference between holding a century-old monograph and hoping that the people who come after me will care for it, and holding the tungsten cube and knowing that it will most certainly survive for centuries or millennia, unless someone attempts to destroy it, deliberately and with a non-trivial expenditure of effort.
And that’s why I’m writing about the tungsten cube here on what is normally my fossil blog. I am surrounded by objects that represent time – developmental time for bones, geologic time for fossils and minerals, astronomical time for meteorites – but these are almost all natural products that embody the past. The tungsten cube is a human product, and in its sheer durability – and survivability – it embodies the future. It will exist in future iterations of this world that I can’t imagine. That’s a breathtaking thought.
If you’re thinking about getting a chunk of tungsten, I strongly recommend the 1.5″ cube set. A few months after picking it up, I got a 0.5″ cube of the same stuff, just to see what it would be like. It’s heavy for its size, but it’s not heavy enough to be shocking. The visceral reaction is more “huh” than “WOW!!”
It’s worth getting the set because the aluminum cube is also entertaining and it’s worth the small additional outlay (as of this writing, $133 for the 1.5″ tungsten cube alone, and $159 for the pair). The aluminum cube has a mass of 0.15 kg, exactly 15% that of the tungsten cube. I have visitors pick up the aluminum cube first. It’s funny, I guess a lot of folks haven’t had a chance to play with solid chunks of metal firsthand because they’ll pick up the aluminum cube and say, “Wow, that’s heavier than I expected.” At that point I just smile. The tungsten cube blows people away, every time. Heck, it blows me away every time, and I’ve been playing with it for two years. Highly recommended.
For a full line of cubes, spheres, and tops, check out Midwest Tungsten Service (link). Many of their products are also available on Amazon.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few sauropod-themed mugs, most of them designed by myself and relating to papers that I’ve been involved with. Here are most of them (plus a bonus):
From left to right (and in chronological order):
- The Sauroposeidon mug that Matt made back in 2000 or so.
- The first one I created myself: an Archbishop mug, showing the posterior dorsal vertebra pair D?8-9 — foolishly, in monochrome.
- Xenoposeidon, of course, created in celebration of its publication.
- The whole of my dissertation, printed very very small.
- The introductory here’s-what-sauropod-necks-are-like illustration from our 2011 paper on why those necks were not sexually selected.
Not pictured: the Brontomerus mug. I made three of these: one each for the three authors of the paper. I’m not sure where mine has gone — I don’t think I’ve seen it for a long time. (If Matt still has his, maybe he can add a photo to this post.)
(Bonus: on the right hand side, the world’s only DRINK TEA YOU MORONS mug. I made it as a gift for my son Matthew, who is a huge fan of Bob The Angry Flower (as am I). It’s based on this this strip.)
Lookback time – my new article in Sky & Telescope
November 2, 2016
I’ve been writing for Sky & Telescope, the American astronomy magazine, for a year now. My first feature article was published last December (details here), my second came out this April (ditto), and my latest is in the current (December 2016) issue, which should be hitting newsstands this week. I’ve also been writing the “Binocular Highlight” column since June.
My latest feature article, “Twelve Steps to Infinity”, is my favorite thing I’ve ever written about astronomy, and maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written, period.* I’m posting about it here because the concept should be interesting to all students of the past: the speed of light is finite, so when we look out into space, we are also looking back in time. We see the moon as it was 1.28 seconds ago, the sun as it was 8.3 minutes ago, Jupiter anywhere from 33 minutes to over an hour ago, depending on whether we’re on the same side of the sun or not, and Neptune after four hours – at that distance, our 16-light-minute swing around the sun hardly makes a difference. Most of the stars visible to the naked eye are within 2000 light years, which is 2% or less of the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. With binoculars or a small telescope you can track down numerous external galaxies and see them as they appeared tens of millions of years ago. One of my favorite observations is seeing the light of the quasar 3C 273, which started traveling 2.4 billion years ago, when our single-celled ancestors were gearing up for the Great Oxygenation Event. (If you’d like to replicate that feat yourself, you can get a very capable, “lifetime” telescope for a little over a hundred bucks. I recommend the Orion SkyScanner 100 – see this and this for more information.)
Our place in the Milky Way, from a talk I put together on the same subject.
My new Sky & Tel article doesn’t go nearly that far back – in fact, I don’t even make it out of the Cenozoic. But the concept scales all the way out, so if a particular event in Phanerozoic history is near to your heart, there is probably a star, nebula, cluster, or galaxy whose light left at the right time, which you could observe with binoculars or a small telescope (although the distribution is gappy between half a million and 30 million light years, where there just aren’t that many nearby galaxies). The Messier and Caldwell catalogs are good places to start, and there are hordes of online resources (many funded by your tax dollars by way of NASA) you can use to find a match. If I get really motivated I might post a table of easily-observed celestial objects and their lookback times. In the meantime, if you have a date in mind, leave it in a comment and I’ll find something temporally close for you to go look at.
Lots of people provided assistance and inspiration. Steve Sittig, who runs the Hefner Observatory at the Webb Schools here in Claremont, helped me refine the idea through numerous conversations, and did a trial observing run with me last autumn. Fellow paleontologists Alan Shabel and Thierra Nalley guided me on hominid history (needless to say, any remaining errors are mine). My editor at Sky & Telescope, S.N. Johnson-Roehr, made numerous small improvements, and the S&T art department made the article even more beautiful than I had hoped. Finally, the little plesiadapiforms at the end of the piece are there thanks to Pat Holroyd, who introduced me to them when I was at Berkeley. Many thanks, folks!
* Other contenders: my favorite paleo thing is the RLN paper, and my favorite thing I’ve written about myself is this essay. And that’s quite enough navel-gazing for one post!
The central irony of life in academia
November 10, 2015
Hey, look, there goes my future!
One thing that always bemuses me is the near-absolute serendipity of the academic job market. To get into research careers takes at least a decade of very deliberate, directed work, and then at the end you basically toss your diploma into a whirlwind and see where it lands. After all of that careful planning, almost all of us end up where we do based on the random (to us) set of jobs available in the narrow window in which we’re searching.
Did you dream of being curator at Museum X, or professor at University Y? Well, tough, those jobs went to Dr. Graduated-Two-Years-Sooner and Lucky Nature Paper, PhD, and they’re not retiring for three or four decades. Or maybe your dream job comes open right after you, your spouse, and your kids get settled in at your new acceptable-but-not-quite-dream job. Uproot or stay the course? Or what would be your dream job finally comes open but they’re looking for new junior faculty and you just got tenure at Tolerable State U.
This drastic mismatch between carefulness of preparation and randomness of outcome was present even pre-2008. The craptastic academic job market since then has only whetted the central irony’s keen edge. Getting grants and getting jobs is now basically a lottery. I’m not saying that good jobs don’t go to good people – they almost always do – but there are a lot of good people in jobs they never imagined having. And, sadly, plenty of good people who are now working outside of the field they prepared for because of the vicissitudes of the job market. A handful of years sooner or later and they might be sitting pretty.
This is on my mind because I recently had lunch with a physician friend from work and he was talking about applying for jobs as a doctor. “The first thing everyone tells you,” he said, “is decide what part of the country you want to live in first, then apply for the jobs that are there.” Doctors can do that because there are more than 800,000 of them active in the US. Paleontologists are mighty rarified by comparison – it’s hard to say how many of us there are, but probably not more than 2000 active in vert paleo. So the usual advice for budding biologists and paleontologists is exactly opposite that for physicians: “Forget about living where you want. Go wherever the job is and make the best of it.”
Oddly enough, I don’t remember this ever coming up in grad school. It’s something Vicki and I figured out at the end, as we started the process of applying for positions. There are alternate universes where we are at Marshall (they offered us both jobs, but not as attractive as UC Merced at the time), or at Northern Arizona (which is bittersweet because we have totally fallen in love with Flagstaff just in the past three years), or other places. If I were choosing a job site based on everything other than the institution, I’d spring for somewhere in Arizona or the intermountain west in a heartbeat.
But with all that said, we are happy here. It’s funny, when we got the job offers down here I thought, “LA? Crap, there goes the outdoor part of my life.” But Claremont has lots of parks, it’s tucked up against the San Gabriels and I can get into the mountains in 30 minutes, or out to the desert in 90. I’m spending more time outdoors than I have since I was a kid growing up in rural Oklahoma.
So I’m not complaining about my personal situation. Vicki and I both landed on our feet – and the fact that we both managed to stick the landing at the same institution is little short of miraculous. But we still had to step into the job market hurricane to get here.
If you’re a grad student and you’re reading this, I didn’t write it to freak you out. Just to let you know that it’s coming, and there are things you can do to improve your chances. Be aggressively curious. Write. Publish. Give good talks (and give lots of talks so you can become good at it). Broaden your skill set – if you’re going into paleo, knowing how to teach human anatomy probably doubles or triples the number of available jobs at any one time, even if many of them are not the jobs you’ve been dreaming of.
Then, at the end, pour yourself one stiff drink and cast your fortune to the winds.
Good luck.
Baby box turtles, and the ghost of editors past
March 22, 2015
We adopted a couple of 6-week-old box turtles today.
They are Three-Toed Box Turtles, Terrapene carolina triunguis, and they are insanely adorable.
This one seemed oddly familiar…had I encountered it before?
UPDATE: The last few images here are an homage to Mike’s Gilmore sequence from slide 96 in our 2012 SVPCA talk on Apatosarus minimus (link). I would have linked to it sooner, but I couldn’t find the right blog post. Because there wasn’t one. Memory!
Remember how my better half, Dr. Vicki Wedel, edited a book about blunt force trauma, called Broken Bones?
If you live in SoCal and you’d like to get a copy, or get your copy signed, then you’re in luck. Vicki will be one of a dozen local authors signing books at the San Bernardino County Museum this coming Sunday, May 18. There will be books for sale if you don’t yet own the titles you want. Noted paleontologist and skeptic Don Prothero will be giving the keynote address and signing copies of his new book, Reality Check. If you’re in the area, come on by. Details here:
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
