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Science

Modeling

Today’s title is not referring to the kind of activity intended to make you buy clothes. Instead I want to talk about representations trying to make you understand and/or buy into complex concepts. Think this is going to be boring? Think again! It provides a glimpse of science and will all relate to art. It will also be long. And personal. Consider it your reward, dear brave and zany readers, or punishment. Your pick.

Friderike Heuer Moonlight (2020)

My artist talk for my new montage series, now on exhibition at the Newport Visual Arts Center until April 25, was shut down because of sensible enforcement of social distancing in our coronavirus world. I figured I’ll write about the work instead (in more depth than a 10 minute presentation) and want to give credit to a brilliant short essay I read some years back that influenced my thinking. The author, philosopher James Nguyen, explained in ways even we lesser mortals can understand – he ain’t one of us, just check his education and employment history, we will hear more from this young man – how we can get a grip on complex, complicated issues by finding models that explain them in simpler ways. “All” it takes is a bit of creativity in coming up with the right model and play with it.

Friderike Heuer On the Town (2020)

As an example he used the complex issue of figuring out how fake news spread in our societies and applied a model derived from epidemiology (a full three years, by the way, before we all tuned into that field in our desire to understand the spread of the coronavirus.) You can think of the dispersion of fake news as a virus that is infecting the population and apply to it medical models that track how diseases spread, for example the susceptible, infected, recovered (SIR) model, to reinterpret it. The people who buy into fake news are infected, the ones who now ignore it are immune (recovered) and then there are the masses who are susceptible to it. The SIR model predicts that we can modulate the spread by lowering the proportion of people who are susceptible, slowing down the rate or speed with which the news/virus is dispersed, and increase the rate at which those who started to believe the news/got sick now recover. The right proportion of these three factors (low, low, high) will lead to herd immunity, helping us to tackle an epidemic.

Nguyen points out that just as this scientific approach aims to represent a target, artists attempt to represent a subject. Reasoning about and constructing representations helps us to grasp new perspectives and to learn about the world. “In this sense art and science share a common core; the human ability to construct and interact with representations in order to learn about what it is that they represent.”

Friderike Heuer The Cranes (2020)

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Fast forward to last summer when I visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts for the first time. It is a terrific institution, providing tons of sensory experience (walk through the replica of a whale’s heart; board a whaling ship built to scale with every last detail), lots of education about the economics, politics and environmental issues historically associated with the whaling trade, and enticing exhibits of scrimshaw and macramé crafts, tools and weapons used during the expeditions. The museum offers replicas of the living quarters of those who benefitted from the the craze for oil derived from the blubber of whales, oil that burnt bright and without scent or smoke, and the craze for whale bones used in corsets confining women to their breathless, suffocating place. There is also plenty of information about the cruel fate of those doing the actual labor, and dying in the pursuit of profit for their masters. (I wrote about my first visit here.)

The visual art gallery in the museum exhibited some 20 or so paintings, titled The Wind is Op – Climate, Culture and Innovation in Dutch Maritime Paintings, by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters from their impressive collection. The maritime paintings and drawings from the 1500s to the 19th century differed in quality, from masterworks to “school of so and so… ” They shared, though, a clear expression of pride and admiration for the explorers, sailors and skill of the seafarers in their midst. The paintings celebrate the heroic and are in awe of maritime prowess and domination of the beasts. 

Friderike Heuer Arctic Still Life (2020)

They also provided testimony for the effects of climate change then: The ‘Little Ice Age’ between 1500 and 1600 greatly affected the character of Dutch whaling in the seventeenth century. The harsh cold that froze rivers and canals changed ocean currents, which impacted trade routes to Asia and America. It also stranded many a sperm whale on Dutch beaches, caught by shallow water, providing increased fascination with the giants for the population. The Dutch were particularly innovative in coping with these climate challenges. They built differently shaped ships adapted to arctic waters, learned to hunt from the shores and found ways to process the blubber either on ships or on shore for efficient transport in barrels sailing towards the Dutch ports.

It struck me then and there that for centuries people were not realizing what the unconstrained killing of whales would do to the species. They were aware that hunting grounds emptied out and they had to venture farther afield, but they possibly ascribed it to the experienced change in temperatures. The scientific knowledge of the possibility of extinction of a species due to overfishing (and the subsequent trickle-down effects) was not available.

Friderike Heuer Hamburg Harbor (2020)

WE, on the other hand, DO know what harms our oceans, and what needs to be done to protect those ecosystems. After all, when 2 million whales were killed in the 20thcentury in the Southern oceans alone, many countries came together to sign the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and establish a global body to manage whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC.) Its role has grown to tackle conservation issues including bycatch and entanglement, sustainable whale watching, ocean noise, pollution and debris, collisions between whales and ships as climate change impacts migration routes and global warming affects available food sources. 

Friderike Heuer Plastics (2020)

Yet several countries have recently left the organization to take up whaling again, with potentially dire consequences. On a larger scale, all of us, as consumers of plastics and other pollutants that end up in the waters, endanger existing whale populations. In our relentless addiction to the amenities provided by fossil fuel consumption, furthermore, we do little to mitigate climate change that affects maritime biological systems, with feedback loops into weather systems, with feedback loops, for that matter, into how disease spreads and creates pandemics.

Friderike Heuer The Heron (2020)

Clearly we are not heeding the warnings coming from the experts, just like the people of Nineveh, in biblical times, did not open their arms to a – reluctant to begin with – prophet named Jonah, the very one supposed to have been swallowed by a whale. Postcards from Nineveh, then, is the title of my exhibit, riffing on what my work is trying to represent as a reminder of a complex problem – sometimes naive, sometimes willful ignorance affecting environmental protection.

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So how do you represent the dangers of inaction? For one, you can point to a subject where practically everyone knows how horribly things can go and have gone wrong: people are aware of what has happened to whales. Limitless pursuit of fishing for profit brought several whale species to the brink of extinction across the centuries. Some are still fighting for their survival, like the North Atlantic right whale, others, like the grey whale, are now recovering due to organized intervention. This purpose was served by using excerpts from all the New Bedford whaling art that I photographed, mostly taking snippets with my iPhone. Here is a better example from the museum’s website.

Parts of this painting were used in the montage The Cranes above and Stranded (1) below.

Secondly, you have to represent what is at risk. For me nothing spells that out better than looking at the beauty of nature as we know it, with the implication how it can and will be lost if we don’t change course. The landscapes and seascapes from my photographs originate predominantly in the Pacific Northwest, along the Washington side of the Columbia river and the Oregon coast. There are also nature images from New Mexico, and Germany. Weaving the two elements together, what we know of the past (whaling disaster) and know as the present (the gift that is our landscape, still mostly intact) represents the intersection of human behavior, driven by either lack of knowledge or unwillingness to convert what we know into action.

Friderike Heuer Stranded (2) (2020)

Thirdly, who will be our prophet given the tendency to minimize scientific input either through absence of science education or willful dissing and curtailing of the discipline? Art has to step in and alert us to the issues, and perhaps help persuade us to engage. This aspect is represented by my photographs of art institutions and art, taken across the last decade, from the art museum in my hometown of Hamburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Wien, Museum Hundertwasser, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Tacoma Glass Museum, the Philharmonic Concert hall in Los Angeles, the National Museum in Kraków, to the exhibition halls of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISDY) and Montreal’s Arsenal Gallery which resides in a converted shipyard and TOHU, the circus arts organization.

Friderike Heuer Hamburger Kunsthalle (2020)

Friderike Heuer Waiting (2020) (Barnes Foundation)
Friderike Heuer The Starlings (2020) (Tacoma Museum of Glass, Bridge Sculpture)

Friderike Heuer Pacific Sights (2020) (LA Philharmonic Hall)
Friderike Heuer The Mirror (2020) (RISDY, the slats reminded me of the corsets)
Friderike Heuer Still Life with Sea Shell (2020) (Arsenal Gallery Montreal)

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Good photographers introduce us to their vision of what is in front of our eyes. The way they represent something is by means of selecting a specific perspective, capturing a certain mood, structuring their composition – in the end, though, they depict. Photographs show a world that exists, however subjectively perceived.

Photomontages, on the other hand, convey something that is constructed, giving the artist the leeway to represent possibilities, anomalies, products of imagination, just like painters do. By combining, manipulating, and altering photographs they create something that cannot be found in reality and yet conveys a sense of alternate reality, of imagined recourse. The way they come about in my own case is not me sitting with a checklist of the aspects of the model discussed above in front of my computer program that helps me create these works. I am loosely guided by the original thoughts about representation, and use only things I photographed myself, but the rest unfolds organically and often in ways that surprise myself.

Take, for example, this image, Reminiscence, an invitation to look at the past.

Friderike Heuer, Reminiscence (2020)

The Dutch landscape, painted centuries ago, is one I saw every summer as a child. I lived in Holland for a year as a young child, and then for a decade at the German side of the border with Holland, and our summers were spent at the North Sea, with boats like the old ones depicted still occasionally appearing in the seascape of the 1950s. The figure is a self portrait of a Finnish photographer I greatly admire, Eliana Brotherus. I photographed her work in Vienna, 2 years ago. She herself linked to the past in her portrait series by appropriating the landscape, stance and coat of Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter of the romantic period, and she reminded me of pictures of myself when still young. I intended to make the figure transparent to represent how the past seeps through into the present, guiding us forwards or holding us back, who knows. When I looked at the image, though, all it reminded me of was how thin skinned I am – both porous for the onslaught of information that I seek every day, visually and otherwise, but also for absorbing the emotional currents around me, strained and otherwise, often forcing me to withdraw. It bubbled up into the montage, unintended.

Or, as a different example, several of the montages ended up representing some aspects of colonial invasion of this continent, not necessarily tied to whaling but to maritime prowess that led to the endangering or extinction related to our own species, the humans, ways of life and languages of First Nations.

Friderike Heuer Confluence (2020) (Columbia River Channel)
Friderike Heuer Stranded (1) (2020) (New Mexico at Kasha-Katuwe National Monument)

One thing I was certain about, though, was that I did not want to lecture with a sledgehammer. I picked a rather small format for the montages, so they don’t overwhelm, but beckon for intimate interaction, inviting the viewer to come close to see the details. I wanted to give the Dutch and Flemish painters of yore a platform to celebrate their artistic achievements and importance to our understanding of history. And I wanted my own work to be beautiful to reach people’s minds, more so than disquieting, although I seem to be unable to avoid the latter completely regardless of what topic I tackle.

Friderike Heuer The Wish (2020)

Now all we need is someone to review the work to see if it actually accomplishes what I set out to do: to remind us that we cannot simply interfere with nature without consequences, or keep up our behavior blind to what is required to protect what we love. Send me a postcard!

PS: True gratitude to my fellow photographers and friends Ken Hochfeld, who printed and framed and critiqued everything you see here, and Dale Schreiner who helped me to sequence the series – his habitual role in all of my exhibitions. A thank you also to Tom Webb who runs the VAC in Newport and invited me to show and hung it in the upstairs gallery. And a shoutout to Steve and Barbara Blair who photographed the work during a visit this weekend – I still have not seen it in real life in the gallery!

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The Matilda Effect

In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter published a paper that evaluated systematic, sex-based bias against women scientists and their work both in a historical and a contemporary context. She named that bias the Matilda effect after suffragist and feminist critic Matilda J. Gage of New York, who in the late nineteenth century both experienced and articulated this phenomenon. Both the historian and her subject are fascinating personalities, but I want to concentrate on Rossiter’s work here, because it provided a lot of stimulation for social psychology research that has confirmed her notions in experimental settings of gender bias and science. (My source is a terrific essay in the Smithsonian from last year.)

Rossiter was one of the few female grad students in History of Science at Yale in the 1960s and wondered why no-one would ever teach about female scientists, Marie Curie excepted. Her curiosity set her on a path devoted for all of her professional life, to excavate all those women scientists who had been relegated to the dustbin or excluded or simply stricken from the record. Equally important, she investigated the mechanisms by which male domination in STEM fields continues to flourish.

Her three books (the first published in 1982) on the topic began with this introduction: “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place,’ in science (and thus their invisibility to even experienced historians of science) was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” (Here is the most recent volume:Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972.)

Her work emphasized that women CAN do the work by providing countless examples of what women had accomplished; her writings eventually led to a program by the National Science Foundation funding efforts to increase “the representation and advancement of women in engineering and academic science degrees.” She also showed how often male scientists either received or more often took credit for the work done by their female colleagues. Misplaced credit has had enormous consequences, both for the betrayed women but also for STEM fields as a whole who underestimate, curb or exclude the potential contributions by scientists not male.

One of the things not considered by Rossiter in her decades of writing and research is the role played by sexual harassment in the STEM fields. Her archival sources used to stitch together the picture of women in science across the centuries were simply mute on that point. We do, however, have more information for our own time: A year and a half ago the National Academy of Science published a book with stunning statistics (Sexual Harassment of Women Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine(2018.) Here are some of the numbers:

-Women in STEM endure the highest rate of sexual harassment of any profession outside of the military.
– Nearly 50 percent of women in science, and 58 percent of women in academia, report experiencing sexual harassment, including 43 percent of female STEM graduate students.
– 90 percent of women who report sexual misconduct experience retaliation.

No wonder then that so many drop out of the programs altogether.

What fascinates me is the effect that a singular curiosity – first Gage’s then Rossiter’s preoccupation with the disappeared women scientists – can lead to a real shift in how a society approaches a subject. Whether it is NSF funding, or social science research, or simply writers who start being hooked on the topic and investigate themselves – our view is changed forever and to the better. And speaking of writers, here is a fun book with portraits of women scientists – the link leads you to two of the 52 short biographies presented:

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science and the World

Music is also nifty today: Kronos Quartet’s cellist Jeffrey Zeigler performs works of 8 contemporary composers who created a piece related to a specific scientist. The full album can be found on Spotify – Sounds of Science (Jeffrey Zeigler.) Here is one track. And another (by Yuka C. Honda, composing for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson who died in January. And another (Felipe Pérez Santiago composing for Jill Tarter, an American astronomer looking for extraterrestrial life.)

Photographs of diverse works at the Venice Biennale 2015.

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Fowl to the Rescue

And in the let’s see how can we rescue the mood for the weekend – department, here is a glimmer of hope for locus-infested Pakistan: 100 000 ducks. Courtesy of China, no less.

Locusts had three uninterrupted exceptional breeding cycles due to the 2018/19 cyclone season that brought deluges to the Arab peninsula. They are now swarming into East Africa and South Asia, threatening already scarce food supplies and leading to states of emergency.

Sending hungry fowl is not new – in 2000, a 700,000-strong army of ducks and chickens was used to gain control over swarms of locusts that devoured over 3.8 million hectares of crops and grassland. As it turns out, ducks were more efficient than chickens at guzzling down the devastating pests, they stayed in group and did not disappear randomly into the landscape like their little headless friends…

So: 100,000 ducks are awaiting deployment along some 3,000 miles from the eastern province of Zhejiang to Pakistan, which shares a border with the Xinjiang province.

Quack. Quack. Let’s hope they have insatiable appetites.

Musical topic today is not for the faint of heart but for those who want to faint from laughing. The larger than life persona behind The Homosexual Necrophilica Duck Opera is duck guy Kees Moeliker, Director of the Museum for Natural History Rotterdam. He won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for his paper of the same name as the opera. The video has him introduce the work and then presents the miniature opera.

Let no-one ever accuse me of not trying to widen our horizons, musical and otherwise….

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Urban Green Spaces

Add a third person to the list of those actually managing to make me reluctantly listen to podcasts – next to my Beloved and my son, I now owe some gratitude to Gordon Caron, a dear friend who yesterday sent a link to an NPR program, HUMANKIND.

The program features Mike Houck from the Urban Greenspaces Institute at Portland State University, who launched the Urban Naturalist program at the Audubon Society many years ago, and helped form the Metro Parks and Nature program.  He also serves on the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission; The Intertwine Alliance board of directors; and The Nature of Cities board.

Houck’s central focus, other than acknowledging and preparing for climate change, concerns the integration of natural spaces into built environments, cities and the like. He feels strongly that we should not just preserve the pristine wild, a priority of so many other environmental organizations, but ensure immediate encounters with nature on a daily basis. Providing easy access, in other words, to nature where people live, whether it is San Francisco, LA, Chicago or Portland, every day, not just on vacation. “How can a child care for the survival of the condor, if s/he has never known a wren,” is something he cites in the conversation with Humankind’s broadcaster, Freudberg.

He urges that we need to protect urban green spaces and (re)build them, including metropolitan wildlife preserves. It will make people engage in nature, come to love and thus protect it, reap health benefits and even financial advantages, since property close to natural areas are increasing in value. Indirectly that protects rural and more pristine areas as well, because people will reside in livable cities and not expand beyond the urban growth boundary, parceling up the country side (and using the car to drive to work….)

One of the urban nature preserves he is keen on is Oaks Bottom, my regular Tuesday haunt as readers of this blog (particularly those who I cherish as my coffeecup coven) are well aware of. (iPhone photographs are from yesterday! Original introduction here.) The 160 acre wetland was filled with rubble from building the freeway and once used as a landfill.

Black cottonwood and ash forest only partially obstruct the view to the downtown skyline. Yesterday I saw a bald eagle (there is a pair nesting close by)

a barred owl (!)

and once again the little kingfisher from last week, although too far away to get in view with the phone in one hand, an impatient leashed pointer on the other…

S/he is on top of the stick jutting out on top from the pile.

In the podcast you hear Houck’s voice get all excited when he reports, live, all the kinds of critters he is seeing. Map that marveling onto my face, and you got me pinned Tuesday mornings. The podcast is worth a listen.

So is today’s music: Schumann’s Wald Szenen (Forest Scenes.) I chose not the perennial version by Richter, but a faster one by Kadouch. If you ignore his theatrics, it’s really a lovely interpretation. Just close your eyes.

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Migration (3)

Happy sloths. Happy storks. Happy Cows. Unhappy whales. At least some of them. (And yes, you only get the jokes if you regularly read the blog when it resorts to the to be continued mode….)

This week was devoted to looking more closely at nature and in particular at migration. Whales, of course, are among the most familiar species doing an annual trek, and we would be remiss not to mention some of the scientific findings around their existence. (I wrote a bit about them last year here.)

So why describe them as unhappy? Well, several of their kind are severely endangered, and not just because the whale oil industry of yore pursued them to the brink of extinction.

Take right wales, for example, who once roamed the Atlantic and whose numbers are dwindling. In the last 10 years the number of calves born to them have dropped tremendously. And when a calf is born it rests for some 5 months with the mother at the ocean’s surface – completely at risk to be stricken by shipping vessels, or caught in fishing gear. Mariners cannot detect them with listening devices, to avoid collisions, because the instinctual behavior is NOT to make sounds, to avoid natural predators. Between declining fertility and rising accident mortality, they are at risk of extinction. Only 400-500 of them remain in the Atlantic and fewer than 100 in the Pacific.

Sei whales? Endangered. Blue whales? Endangered. Sperm and fin whales? Vulnerable. Any tidbits that can distract us from getting too depressed by these facts? The tongue of a blue whale alone is equivalent to the weight of an elephant! They migrate from the polar and subarctic regions in summer to the tropical and subtropical waters in winter, some of them are over 150 years old – which means they actually were alive during commercial whaling times and might remember being hunted by whalers. Autopsies on dead sperm whales revealed up to 65 pounds of plastic in their stomachs, leading to blockage and causing lethal peritonitis. Ok, not helping with the depression, is it.

I can do better. Humpback whales are thriving after coming close to extinction! Scientists stress the role of proper management for the recovery (details here) but also warn that the food for which whales and so many other marine animals compete, namely Krill, is strongly affected by global warming, getting increasingly scarce. If more whales feed on it, there’s less to go around for the ones lower in the food chain….

Ok, I give up. All these facts are part of why I currently have turned to working on an art series that uses (partial) 17th century dutch paintings of traditional whaling expeditions, combined with my photographs of contemporary Northwest landscapes and birds, as an example of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation to both nature and humankind. Today’s images are the latest examples in that endeavor, I had, after all, promised some art as well.

And here is a tone poem by Alan Hovhaness performed by the Seattle symphony.

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Migration (2)

Yesterday I introduced the happy sloths of Panama. Today, let’s turn to happy cows. Doing whatever cows do in the Bavarian country side, they were unperturbed when a flock of large, strange white birds descended, alit on their backs and began nit-picking bovine fleece. Maybe there is something stronger than alkaloid compounds in the Bavarian water. In any case, it was enough of a strange sight that a young birder-in-training rushed to the relevant experts trying to find out what on earth had just happened.

It was a flock of unfamiliar cattle egrets who had made a wrong turn during their migration.

Some decades later, our observant youngster Martin Wikelski has become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, after teaching stints that included years at Princeton. He is still interested in birds, and now in general migration patterns as indicators of disease spread, disaster detection, and global change. He is spearheading ICARUS, (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) a program connected to the International Space Station as a tracking site for interacting animal migrations, installed last summer. (Equally impressive, in my book, is of course the fact that this guy lists adventurer in first place on his CV, scientific grandeur notwithstanding.)

He stuck with birds, but cows have not disappeared either. They are currently part of a research program that has fitted sensor-studded radio transmitters in quake-prone regions around the world to various birds and mammals, trying to pick up earthquake warnings from changes in the animals behavior and physiology (a controversial project, one might add, with geologists not convinced that animal behavior changes around the timing of an earth quake. But that will be obviously explored now.)

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What do we know about migration, though? Take one short minute and check out this video, which shows you the flow of movement across the globe. It is astounding.

We know that they move and where they move, at least for some of the species. We do not quite understand why they move such huge distances and, when finding a place that is perfectly suited, regularly leave it nonetheless to make the long trek back home. Home being not just a general area, but a specific tree in a specific forest, a distinct chimney, church tower or other nesting sites. Sometimes the specificity is encoded across generations, so that some butterflies return to exact places where their great-grand parents came from, not more immediate forbears.

We know that migration serves not just the migratory animal populations, but others along their routes, who feed on the carcasses of those who didn’t make it, or live on lands fertilized by the droppings, or cleared of pests, insects that are devoured by the birds in flight (swallows, or more precisely, swifts, fly for six months (!) non-stop, and are eating insects en route and apparently sleeping while flying as well…)

We cannot yet explain why migration happens to such far away places as the Amazon, when Ft. Lauderdale is just around the corner, equally warm and comfy, say… and why distances increased across the millennia. And in particular we have not yet figured out why on average each species follows its particular migratory routes, but then there are always outliers, who do not comform.

Leave it to our intrepid ecologist and adventurer to follow exactly these non-conforming individuals, trying to figure out if it was disease that stopped them, or external forces or something else altogether. Pursuing a stork he had named Hansi, he jets to Turkey, awaits once-daily radio transmissions to narrow the distance to the subject, and eventually finds Hansi perfectly happy and healthy gorging on frogs in some field near the Syrian border.

The hypothesis is that natural selection programs some section of the progeny to wander farther afield. That innovative individual will be important for the species to thrive, to survive when aggregate flows are threatened by disaster, by pathogens, or by obstacles put in their way by human activities. (This reminds me of a nasty fight going on between two factions of German environmentalists right now. Some want to erect wind turbines to curb carbon emissions, others fight against them to protect wetlands and birds. The laughing third is of course the oil and coal industry.)

We’ll see what the research data will reveal. In the meantime I decided to pull some hang-gliding photographs from the archives in Wikelski’s honor. He reports that he has become an avid hang glider in order to explore how it must feel to be a bird (his words.) Well, he won’t be up there for 6 months at a time…… and I also hope he is never the parent of a kid who does this – cost me many an anxious moment in my lifetime. Then again, it also took me on some pretty spectacular hikes, like the one shown here at Silverstar Mt.,WA.


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Migration

There’s always Panama. If we get too overwhelmed by the insanity of the contemporary world we could migrate to some island near Panama joining a troupe of exceedingly happy, permanently stoned sloths. You read that right: the moss there, and the water infused by the moss, has an alkaloid- based chemical composition that is also found in Valium…. much appreciated by an already slow-moving species.

Canada Geese, who no longer migrate

I picked up this comforting tidbit of information from a radio show that taught me a lot about migration, something I’ve been again wondering about last week when I found myself amongst hundreds of visiting white geese, Canada geese and sandhill cranes during my walks. Below is the condensed version of what I learned.

Sandhill Cranes

Questions like why does migration happen in general, and where do these birds come from or where do they go, how do they know the travel routes and/or final destinations, have been asked for 1000s of years. We have now answers for some of the questions, and are still surprisingly clueless about others.

White Geese

Aristoteles – is there any subject he didn’t tackle, ever? – suggested three possibilities to explain the disappearance of birds during the Greek winter months. One was the speculation that they traveled to other places, one was the suggestion that they might hibernate (behavior that people had observed in bats around Athens) and the third was transmutation. Wish that were true – let’s just all transmute into happier forms when we are bored with our worm pecking, grub searching existence…. let’s become sloths!

The migration hypothesis was elevated in the 17th century with the (re)invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey in the early 1600s. (He applied for a patent (!) thus outsmarting a local competitor who claimed it was his design – but that is a mystery story for another day.) Peering into the sky and seeing all those lunar hills and craters suggested perfectly sensible travel plans of birds: they go to the moon! It took until 1822 to dislodge this human projection of our own dream, when some hunting Count von So and So returned with his kill from the heaths of Northern Germany: a stork. A stork with a spear embedded in his neck, that had not prevented him from traveling North. A weapon that was, according to the consulted German luminaries in the university ethnology departments, of African origins. (You can read more about the “Pfeilstorch” here.)

Care to try flying with that thing in you for 2000 miles? At least you’re not a tern – they have a round trip of 60 000 miles!

Across the next years about 25 individual birds were collected that had somehow managed to migrate from one continent to the other with a piece of ebony poking through their necks… Mystery solved – birds migrated South. Scientific insight gained beyond the migration destination: some form of marking allows us to identify the birds and tracking their routes. Banding was born. Nowadays it comes in more sophisticated forms of transmitters and receivers. And it does not just apply to the field of ornithology, but people research the migration patterns of everything, from wildebeests, caribous, whales, to turtles and butterflies, to name a few.

More on the specifics of these patterns tomorrow. They do matter, beyond feeding into the passions of your friendly bird photographer, for our understanding of nature as a system, as it turns out.

And here is a gem sent by a friend.

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Contradictions: Science vs Science (2)

Yesterday I wrote about some reasons why people distrust or outright reject science: contradictory findings are held against the validity of the scientific enterprise, debunked studies are seen as signs of sham proceedings, problems with replicability are justifying overall doubtfulness.

Let’s look at this a bit more closely. Non-replications (which, by the way, happen mostly in the areas where the social and personality variables of are investigated,) and de-bunking are actually signs of a robust health of science, rather than the opposite. People care to get it right. Science is a cumulative enterprise that happens slowly, over time, with careful calibration. It is open to explore where things might have failed or, more likely were dependent on contextual variables that we are unable to re-create.

This is not picked up in news reporting which, for obvious purposes, goes for the latest, the flashy, the new. Nor do you read in the news each and every case of where replications succeeded – far outweighing the opposite cases, but not considered news-worthy. You have a real sampling problem here: I tell you the bad, because it sells the paper – never mind, it sells the on-line ads – but m silent on far more frequent good outcomes.

These are, alas, not the only causes for our view of science as untrustworthy. Science is often met with loud opposition, and those who oppose it know how to manipulate the general population. Think of what vested interest managed to do: if science was a threat to profit it was ignored, dissed, or its results never published. This is true for the tobacco industry, the fracking industry, the pharmaceutical industry – you probably can add considerably to this list. Threatened interests withhold science, they disparage science, they lie about science. (Here is a series of clever articles on the whole issue.)

Then there is the enlistment of “merchants of doubt,” who as willing media create “balanced” debates where, say, one scientist denying the causes and consequences of the climate crisis (or the crisis outright) is confronted with another scientist describing a different picture. Never mind that only a few scientists agree with the former and 99 % of the rest agree with the latter. Just this week 11.ooo of them urged us to change energy, food and reproduction habits or face dire consequences….

Manipulation is all too often willingly received, though, by the public and none of us is exempt. Inconvenient findings might be a threat to our worldview, or a threat to our comfort levels in living our lives, a threat to the status quo that provides longed-for stability and maintenance of status for some of us. Climate science is a good example: acknowledging the physics, the facts about greenhouse gasses, would compete with a system’s need to protect free enterprise, avoid government intervention, compete with a solar power industry overtaking the coal industry, etc.

It would force us to face changing our own behavior from what we eat to if and how we travel, keep the house warm, buy clothes, you name it. Or think mandatory vaccines – g-d forbid the government infers with parents’ rights, (particularly when vaccines concern STD’s and a presumed impact on (to be deterred) sexual behavior is part of the equation.) Thus the public is perfectly happy to listen only to the data that confirm their worldview, or disparage data altogether as untrustworthy if they don’t.

This is true for the opposite side of the political spectrum as well. If you look at the left’s receptivity (or absence thereof) to data about gene manipulation, nano technology, nuclear power or factory farming you see some of the same picture. I am the first to admit my own cherry picking of data: I am following research on Alzheimers, since it is one of the things I dread most in life – loosing my brain. I am way less critical towards studies that bring me comfort, than those that don’t. Case in point: a recent finding that sleep might help to prevent the disease. Well, let’s be more precise: there is the assumption that something that happens during sleep, your brain getting washed, quite literally, with slushing waves of cerebrospinal fluid that takes the gunk in there away, is beneficial to your mental health. Tell that to this passionate sleeper.

New research from Boston University suggests that tonight while you sleep, something amazing will happen within your brain. Your neurons will go quiet. A few seconds later, blood will flow out of your head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will flow in, washing through your brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves. 

Note, this does not allow us to make causal claims, even the correlations are tenuous, there might be a third variable problem, but oh, do I like a study like this, since as a deep sleeper it ever so marginally reduces my fears. Cherry picking, as I said. You will not find me promoting studies that seem to correlate frequent use of Benadryl with Alzheimers, on the other hand, since it would require changing my allergy medication habits…..

One more thing, and then I am done with the bully pulpit:

Science matters. Doing science right matters. Policy issues should be driven by science and not by individual taste or belief or industrial greed. But there is also a case to be made for some policy issues to be independent of science, and we have to be very careful in distinguishing the two. Take, for example, the argument that has been around for a while, that discrimination against the LGTBQ population should be prohibited because science has determined that genetics play a role in who you are and as who you present. What if science turns around and we find out it is all about social construct, not genes? Is it ok to discriminate then?

The point here is that there are moral arguments that should be independent of science, no matter what scientific claims we hold true at any given point in time.

And now, if you excuse me, I am off to catch a few winks of brain washing before I consider writing on morality…. Photographs are of waves, of course.

Music, though, not a lullaby….

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Contradictions: Science vs Science (1).

Never mind magic, miracles, witchcraft, the previous topics of this week. Many people don’t believe in science either, what with all the contradictory findings and and newly debunked studies that ruled the field for decades.

Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. A glass of wine with dinner will see you happily grow old. A glass of wine with dinner will be your demise! Exercise 20 hours a week and you will live forever. Exercise 20 minutes a week and you reap the same benefits. How often do we read that some previously touted finding is now completely reversed…. why should we ever trust scientific findings?

Note that my examples, the typical examples found in popular science writing you grab in the newspaper or listen to on NPR, do not concern physics, or chemistry, where it would be technically far harder to report something and far less interesting from a human interest point of view. It would also be far more consistent and thus of little interest to announce. The wild swings we read about come from epidemiological studies, research with large groups of people about something affecting their lives based in their life styles.

This is extremely hard science to do since it does not lend itself to one of the basic demands of the scientific method: random assignment of the participants. I cannot divide a random group of 1000 or more people into two, commanding and controlling one half to forgo alcohol for 10 years, while the other is allowed to indulge, and then test for outcomes. Instead, I have to rely on a group that happens to be non-drinkers to compare to those who are. This introduces the possibility that there is something else going on with one or both of the groups that feeds into my results.

Maybe non-drinkers are poorer and thus not buying wine, so other aspects of poverty affect the (negative) outcome. Maybe abstinent people are more health-conscious, reflected in additional healthy behavior, that is really at the core of the (positive) outcome. Maybe drinkers are in general a more social bunch, and the social aspects of their lives influence (positive) outcome. Maybe drinkers have underlying depression for which they self-medicate with alcohol and that affects the (negative) outcome. You get the idea. The conclusions – alcohol is good/bad for you – might be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with your beverage of choice after all and vary from study to study since these factors crop up in different populations. I might hope to control for all of these variables, but it is more or less impossible with self-selected populations.

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Then there is the furious debate over the non-replicability of standard scientific studies and the discovery of scientific data massaging, or in worse cases, scientific fraud. I was reminded of that when I learned that a study I had taught for decades to great theatrical effect is now partially debunked. On being Sane in Insane Places by David Rosenhan came out in 1973 in the highly respected journal Science. Eight healthy participants went to local psychiatric hospitals, claiming they heard voices saying: “Hollow, empty, thud.” (Imagine my dramatic re-enactment in front of the college classroom.) The study reported that all of them were diagnosed with mental illness, in many cases schizophrenia, based on this symptom alone, and kept in hospital, up to 52 days, leaving eventually against the advisement of the doctors. A total of 2,100 pills — serious psychiatric drugs — were claimed to be prescribed to these otherwise pseudo patients.

A new book by Susan Callahan, The Great Pretender, unravels all that went wrong with the set-up and the representation of the results of this study, while at the same time examining the pitfalls of a broken mental health-care system, and acknowledging that mistaken labeling in psychiatric care is all too real. However, inventing data about it is not going to help the cause. The same seems to be the case for Phil Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Study, with criticism delivered here.

And here is one last example, a study of gender bias, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, that has been cited over 1500 times and even referenced by Justice Bader-Ginsburg in one or another dissent.

Two subsequent critics have taken apart the statistics used to arrive at these conclusion. Here is a summary report (short video clip) by Christina Hoff Sommers, who wrote on this for the Wall Street Journal implying that our mistaken efforts towards political correctness propelled this supposedly flawed paper into mainstream discourse.

My immediate reaction: why on earth would I trust an author from the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, known for her critique of contemporary feminism in her diatribes on The Factual Feminist? More on that tomorrow when Distrust in Science continues!

Photographs today echo public sentiment of science as feather weight.

Music today with a female conductor who broke the all too real glass ceiling: Marin Alsop.

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Contradictions: Divination vs Mathematics

Really, the precise formulation should be divination producing geometric art used in faith healing – too clunky a title of course. But that is exactly what Emma Kunz is about. The woman who lived in Switzerland until her death in 1963 considered herself a researcher, but is described by seemingly everyone else as a telepath, prophet and healer, whose powers of intuition (according to the website of the Emma Kunz Zentrum) “achieved successes through her advice and treatments that often edged on the limits of miracles.“

Add to that: artist. Kunz produced close to 500 large – astonishing – drawings across her lifetime, which are finally receiving the recognition they deserve – as long as crankily rational people like me blot out the knowledge of how they were conceived: by means of a divining pendulum. She had retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and was part of the the Kunsthaus Zurich’ 1999 show “Richtkräfte für das 21. Jahrhundert”, which was dedicated to her, Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner. From March 2005 to April 2006, she could be seen at the Drawing Center New York, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and finishing at the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin. In 2012, her art was displayed at the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, followed by exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, at the “La Caixa” Foundation in Barcelona and in 2013 at the Biennale in Venice.

This year, 40 of her drawings were exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery at Kew Gardens, London. You can see a video of that show and experts talking about her work here. Benches made of a special material were placed in front of her drawings and described by participating sculptor Christodoulos Panayiotou as “interrupted sculptures.” The material came from a “mystic grotto”, the place near Zürich where Kunz once found a healing powder she dubbed Aion-A in the stones, and where the current center devoted to her memory (and selling her products, including said powder) is situated. The gallery’s assumption was that seated visitors would absorb some of the healing properties of the rock (claimed to affect rheumatism and inflammation if consumed) while looking at the art.

From what I learned (a wonderfully informativeinand beautifully written essay on her life and work, Emma Kunz: Art in the Spiritual Realm, can be found here) she asked her pendulum, hung over graph paper, a specific question and then would mark the points it swung to as co-ordinates, use the next extended swings as energy lines, and eventually fill in the rest with geometric forms and fields of color in a process that sometimes took up to 48 hours non-stop, with sleep and food rejected. She was convinced that these works would be fully interpretable in their cosmological depth for people in the 21st century.

No interpretation from this here 21st century writer ignorant of transcendentalism. Admiration, though, for the beauty the drawings convey, and the passion obvious in their execution which must have involved incredible patience, acuity and steady hands. A mathematical power really seems to emanate from these geometric forms.

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As to alternative healing practices, it is interesting to follow current debates in Germany, Switzerland’s neighbor. Homeopathy, invented by Samuel Hahnemann in Germany 200 years ago, for example, was boosted by Nazis like Hess and Himmler. Industry, media and politicians all promote it to this day, you find it in any pharmacy and health insurance pays for it and the public is wildly embracing it – despite the fact that “homeopathy is neither biologically plausible nor scientifically proven to produce more than placebo effects – and therefore an expensive, potentially harmful waste of money that makes a mockery of evidence based medicine.”

So strong is the public belief in it that the German government decided not to follow the example of the French, who will cease to support payments for this treatment in 2021, so as not to create an uproar. This is even true for Germany’s Green Party, which is having a screaming debate over the nature of homeopathy (and the belief in scientific research in general, as linked to genetically altered food sources etc.) They decided to avoid having the controversial topic overshadow their national convention next week, and parked it in some expert committee. Magic (or political pragmatism) beats science. Again.

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Photographs today are from New Mexico. A group of artists there, calling themselves the Transcendental Painting Group and active at the same period as Kunz was in Europe, tried to move art into something more metaphysical, using abstraction and borrowing a bit from everywhere – the Cubist down to Kandinsky. They ignored landscape in favor of documenting their inner experiences. You get instead my own more quotidian lines.

With fitting Swiss music, alpenhorns absent.


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