There’s an article in New Scientist, all about how having a high IQ doesn’t imply that you’re smart. George Bush (junior) is the token example of stupidity coupled with high IQ.

It’s true. Some of the stupidest people I’ve met are very smart on paper. And some of the smartest people I know never did well on any standardized tests, including the IQ test.

The article lists some examples of questions that even people with high IQ get wrong.

Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

Apparently, most people (smart or not) say that you don’t have enough information to tell the answer. You totally do, and the answer is “yes” regardless of Anne’s marital status, but I can see how you can be tricked here when you’re in a hurry or half asleep and you see that “not enough info” is given as one of the possible answers.

Then there are three other questions , introduced as follows:

“When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?”

NO, of course I can’t DO ANY BETTER. There are only THREE questions, how can I do BETTER than the people who GOT ALL THREE RIGHT? Duh.

Fine, let’s look at the questions.

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Five cents, and the bat costs $1.05. That’s really cheap. When was this? 1905?

2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

Apparently, it takes 5 minutes for a machine to make one widget. So, five minutes for any X number of machines to make X widgets.

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?

Well, that’s obviously the situation the day before, so 47 days.

Easy peasy.

Wait.

Something is wrong.

(See extended post, so you can have a think about it yourself before reading what I noticed.)

Two things I just found on the internet:

A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families
This actually reminded me of labs, where similar objects can have different names for different people. In this article (non-academic – a newspaper column kind of article), though, it’s about seven-year-olds who use different phrases for similar pieces of Lego.

I Wordled My Thesis
A Flickr group of Wordle clouds that people made of their thesis. Found it because someone found mine and I was invited to add it.

At orchestra rehearsal last night, I failed miserably at keeping up with the Mozart piano concerto we’re playing. I don’t really like Mozart, and we’re also playing Haydn and Shostakovich at the next concert, so I had no motivation to practice it, especially since it’s just an accompaniment. But because I really needed to pick this up, I thought I’d give it a listen. I didn’t have the front page with the exact number of the concerto, and Mozart composed quite a lot, so I leaned over to read the KV number from the conductor’s score.

KV 488

Hm, 488 did sound familiar. Maybe I have a recording of it after all.

Then I realized this morning, as soon as I woke up, that I hadn’t recognized the number as one of Mozart’s famous piano concertos, but as the excitation wavelength for Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein and FITC dye. In other words, the “green” wavelength in fluorescence microscopy…

KV 488, exciting!

Excited at 488 nm

The cat had some blood work done recently, mainly because I might at some point in the future actually find a job outside of Canada, and I’d have to take her with me.

I just picked up the official document with the results of her rabies titer. Had a bit of a giggle-fit after seeing my cat’s name with my last name on the label. “Penny Amsen” just sounds funny. It would have been funnier, of course, if it said “Fluffy Amsen”, or “Whiskers Amsen”, but I prefer people names for animals.

The test result was very good. She had to have a rabies-antibody titer over 0.5 to be allowed to travel. Pen did great, and got 3.46 .

0.5 what? 3.46 what?

The form says “IU/mL”. mL I know, but IU is strange to me. I tried to look up how it converts to something I know, but it’s weird . IU stands for “International Unit”, and it can be either volume or weight, depending on what you’re looking at. So….moles? It has to be something linear related to a molarity, but I can’t find out how to interpret it. I found this but it gives the amount of units per ampoule, and is probably about vaccines for humans, not cats.

What’s inside my cat? What does 3.46 International Units of antibody against rabies per mL Penny-blood mean? All I know is that it’s 7 times more than she needs, so she’s all set to apply for official papers should she need to travel anywhere. Still, I paid $300 for this blood test, so it bothers me that I don’t quite understand it.

Now I’m just waiting to find out where I need to take her, and also still waiting for the fur to grow back in her neck:

They shaved a spot to take the blood sample. It’s where her hair is the longest (see: lions. No, not sea lions.) and it’s taking forever to grow back. This picture was the day of the blood test, so it’s totally bald. She was so freaked out when I touched her skin there =) She has fuzzy fur there now, but still very short.

I went up and down to New York this week, and watched people watch Lab Waste

I was in a foul mood before the trip, because my web host is evil and I’m bored and grumpy about not working in general, and all kinds of other little things that just piled up. The only reason I even went to New York is that I had already paid for the bus ticket, and I had nothing better to do.

Even walking up to the Bell House I was still grumpy and considered just turning around. I didn’t need to be there, it wouldn’t matter.

But once I was inside there was a bar and random nice people who recommended beer to me (I didn’t know 90% of the strange local beers on the draft list) so my mood slowly changed, and only went uphill from there. Once the doors opened, though, I was a bit skeptical about the many chairs they put out for the screening. Nine tiny films, many of which were already online – why would people even show up for that on a Tuesday night?

But the place was packed very quickly. I picked a seat near the side, so I could look at the audience and see how they reacted. I found Alexis and introduced myself, and heard that there were filmmakers for three of the films present, so we would do a little Q&A at the end.

So many people

Here’s the introduction to the films:

The films were all very different. There were documentaries, fictional stories, music videos, and animations from all areas of science. Sabbi – who I didn’t find until after the screening – said she was going to blog about the first film of the night, “Naming Pluto”, so I’ll skip that. My own favourite was MEPE , which was a funny detective story about a biologist who stole different species of animals to study a protein, and the detective who solved the case. (Here it is online , but it’s in French and this version doesn’t have subtitles.)

The crowd pleaser was PCR Rap , and Zach was also in attendance. I met him at the question round, and then again on the train back.

I got so nervous when Lab Waste came on. The people sitting near me didn’t know that I made it, so I could observe their honest reactions. Lab Waste was one of the few serious films of the evening so it didn’t get any laughs (and this audience was in stitches about Sir Patrick Moore in another film, so the treshold for laughing was quite low…) but I got applause and some cheers at the end =)

At the end of the nine films that were on the program, we got to see two bonus films. One was a Bulgarian 1974 futuristic vision of 2000, involving robots and communism and outer space. The other bonus film was Ginger, about the genetics of red hair, and that was awesome because I know all about pigmentation genetics and the red hair mutation is seriously cool, but also because it had Jenny in it! Yay! I tried to take a picture, but in a typical 21st-century mishap I accidentally took a video. As soon as I realized that, it just captured the audience laughing, so I left it on video:

After all the screenings, there was a Q&A, where I met the other film makers who were present: Zach of PCR Rap, and Daniel and Aron of the Moth and the Firefly . Unlike Zach and I, who made our videos in between lab work, Daniel and Aron were proper film makers. They had screened the Moth and the Firefly at other festivals, but they had never had such a big audience as at ISFF. Eep! The Q&A was fun. I told the backstory of how I was inspired to make Lab Waste after attending some screenings about garbage at HotDocs (Toronto documentary festival) last year, and then going to the lab an hour later to throw out all those pre-wrapped pipettes. There were a few HotDocs fans in the audience, judging from the whoops when I mentioned it =)

And when that was done, I finally saw Sabbi and we had a drink with Alexis at the bar. They’re planning a London version of the festival for next year, so those of you who are there should definitely go to that.

Normally I would post this kind of stuff on easternblot but I’m having huge problems with my host right now. Whenever I try to update the site, they block my IP and now I can’t reach my own site from house and from two major UofT libraries. I found out that I was being blocked by contacting the people where the traceroute timed out every single time. They were the people who actually own the servers, they rent out space to resellers, and they were very friendly and helpful but can’t unblock me without the reseller’s permission. I just paid for another year of hosting, too, and can’t get the money back if I can’t contact them (which I can’t!) so I’m thoroughly annoyed by all this. I’m looking for a new host, but since I’m out of town for two days I’ll leave it until I get back.

Meanwhile, I figured: why not post the pretty things I found for easternblot on Expression Patterns for a while. After all, Nature Network is free, and the tech support has a face and name and actually talks back when something is wrong. And NPG doesn’t block my IP address when I try to post. That’s another major advantage. Makes things a lot easier.

So after all that information that you didn’t care much about, here’s some more interesting – and prettier – information.

Information is Beautiful makes infographics from information they spend a long time looking up in far less accessible places. Here is the most recent ,“How Safe is the HPV Vaccine?”. It’s pretty big, so it’s in the extended entry. Click below to see the whole post (if you don’t yet)

The Imagine Science Film Festival kicks off today in New York. I’ll miss most of the event, but since I have absolutely nothing better to do than sitting on an overnight bus, I’ve decided to go there on Tuesday to attend the “Quirky Science Shorts” event. Lab Waste is screening there, together with eight other shorts.

If you’re in the area, do drop by. That night’s screening is free and doesn’t require any registration.

Info:
Quirky Science Shorts
Tuesday October 20
Starts at 8PM according to the ISFF site and 7:30 according to the Bell House site.
(I don’t know which order the films are in)
Location: The Bell House
149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

This is the full blurb from the Bell House site:

“Calling all brainiacs and cinemaniacs…The Imagine Science Film Festival teams up with the Secret Science Club for A NIGHT OF QUIRKY SHORT FILMS, featuring Techno Noir, Animation, Documentary & Music Video. Now in its second year, the Imagine Science Film Festival invites film-makers to submit narrative films with a scientific or technological theme, and films that have a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a lead character. This year, the juried festival attracted hundreds of international entries, and we’ll be showing some of the strangest and best at the Bell House, featuring subjects like madness and molecules, time travel and trans-species friendships, and the dwarf planet Pluto. Check out the following films from the USA, UK, Israel, France, Canada, and the Kuiper Belt: Naming Pluto, Animated Minds, The Moth and the Firefly, PCR Rap, Lab Waste, The Exquisite Corpse of Science, A Micrometer from Here, Natural Selection, and more. Alexis Gambis, the festival’s founder and artistic director, will be on-hand to answer your brainiest questions!

Before & After

—Groove to tunes from our mixology lab

—Vote for your favorite film as part of the Imagine Science Film Festival’s “People’s Choice” award

—Imbibe the wide-angle cocktail of the night, the Digital Zoom

—Pick up some science swag from the film festival’s generous sponsors

--Participate in our “Sketchy Science” drawing contest. We’ll provide the paper. You draw a scientastic picture.

See, it will be fun.

October is crazy. Not only is the science/art thing at York still ongoing until the end of this week, there are three interesting multi-day science-related events in this part of Ontario in the next few weeks. There’s pretty much nothing the rest of the year, of course, and one of these should really have known about one of the others being on the exact same days. (I’ve wanted a central science calendar for this part of the world for so long, I am this close to angrily setting something up myself. But it would be totally empty until next October anyway, so who cares…)

This is what’s on the calendar:

October 15-25 – Quantum to Cosmos Festival in Waterloo
The speakers list includes Stephen Hawking, as well as a few friends of mine, so I really want to go. They also have music on the program, so you’d think I’d be all over it, right?

Oh, but wait.

There is also this:

October 28-30 – Canadian Science Policy Conference
I know some of the organizers. They’ve been working on this for a while, and it looks really good. Support from important people, money from organizations that still had some to give, program about all aspects of science policy and regulation in Canada. I’d love to go.

But on the exact same days, a few blocks away, is this:

October 28-30 – Gairdner Awards lectures
The 50th anniversary of the Gairdner Awards. The Gairdners are awards for research in medical sciences. A not insignificant number of Gairdner Awardees either has a Nobel Prize, or will one day be nominated for the Nobel. And since a lot of the speakers are current or former Gairdner winners, the place is packed with Nobel Laureates.

So, where to go? What to see? I have all the time in the world these days, so what’s holding me back?

Money. My monthly income is about 1/5 of my monthly rent right now due to a range of issues best left undisclosed (although you’re free to know that Service Canada’s “service” is like a Higgs Boson: on paper I should really have employment insurance, but I have yet to detect it.)

The Q2C festival has ticketed events that are either sold out (the free ones) or expensive. Besides, it’s far away and costs money to get there.
The science policy conference costs $500 for unaffiliated community members if registering now. It’s free for media, but I’m assuming that requires a media pass.
The Gairdners are free.

So, have fun talking physics or policy. I’ll be listening to Oliver Smithies, Elizabeth Blackburn, Sydney Brenner, and other Nobel Laureates.

For free.

What bugs me is not that there are costs. I fully understand that it’s impossible to find enough external funding to hold big events like that. It’s also not entirely that I can’t afford admission or transportation to these events – that’s temporary. It’s a combination of the two: if science is to be accessible, so accessible that your events are open to the public, and engaging the wider community, then why is it seemingly only accessible to those who can afford it?
I am feeling somewhat out of the loop by not being able to go to two events where I know some organizers and/or participants. And I don’t think I really am out of the loop. I can only imagine trying to start networking and attending relevant events on a low budget. (I’m just on a break now, I’ll be back.)

But Q2C does have a solution: all their events are recorded and can be watched online through a webcast after the event. So I, and you, and anyone else rich enough afford a fancy computer and fast internet, can watch the webcasts once the conference kicks off later this week. It’s still not the same as being there and meeting people, of course.

Meanwhile, my entire conference “budget” for the fall is probably going towards cheap bus tickets to New York, so I can see my own movie. Oddly, it’s still cheaper than it would have been to take the bus to Waterloo for Q2C, which is much closer. That’s North American transportation for you.

Last week I wrote about the lecture I attended at York University. On Thursday I went to the art exhibit, Ambi-valent Objects , which was part of the same program. It’s on until October 16, if you want to go there and have a look.

The artworks were created by teams of people with different background. Many people’s favourite was “Mental Fabric”: a giant printout of text from Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the TV show) on which you could paste diamonds cut out of anatomy images onto diamonds that were printed in a mathematical pattern on top of the textbook printout. It represented the different ways in which we process information.

One of the other projects was a fragmented (stroboscopic) film of people dancing, inspired by bees. The film was projected in two rooms: the blacked out portions of one film were shown in the other room. But you could still follow the film, and it looked like the same film two times, even though there were black frames in different locations in either version.

Other artwork included a rhizome knitting installation, kaleidoscopes with insects in it, and a projection of visual interpretations of real-time high-energy subatomic particles.

Pictures:

Dolores learning about the math/anatomy project

Me, being interactive under artist’s supervision.

Nadia looking through a kaleidoscope

Rhizomes/knitting project.

“There’s always a danger of falling in love with your model” said Richard Wingate of King’s College London, in the question round of last week’s plenary lectures about art and science at York University .

He was the one scientist among the three speakers, and the kind of models he was referring to were scientific ideas – not people who pose for art. But it was just another example of a theme explored both by himself and speaker Martha Fleming, who is also based at King’s College. When artists and scientists – or any two disciplines for that matter – collaborate and communicate, you run into some interesting differences in terminology. (In yesterday’s blog post , I mentioned how a “paper” is interpreted differently in the sciences and the humanities, for example.)

Wingate and Fleming both highlighted the word “artifact” as a word that means something entirely different in science and other fields. In anthropology and archeology, an artifact is interesting: a spear point used by early humans is an artifact. In cell biology, an artifact is a thing that’s not real. Wingate showed a microscope image of a neuron with dots in the background. The dots are not part of the neuron, they’re artifacts. They’re part of the picture, but not relevant to how the neuron functions. Knowing what’s real and what’s artifact is important. He showed two old drawings, done by Golgi and Cajal. They both drew exactly what they saw from a microscope image of a mesh of brain neurons, but what Golgi interpreted as artifacts of the image turned out to be the actual gaps between individual cells. Cajal did draw the gaps. They both saw the same thing, but, Wingate explained, they had different archetypes in their head of what the brain should look like, and that’s what made the difference in the final drawings. (They did, eventually, share a Nobel Prize )

Wingate collaborates with artist Andrew Carnie, and that collaboration has helped the way he looks at scientific images. He has become very aware of the difference between a depiction of a neuron or a brain area and the way it actually is. For example, composite microscope images are a “hyper-realized version” of the real thing. All the parts are in focus in a 3D composite of confocal images, but you never really see everything in focus in reality.

The other two speakers were both artists. Nell Tenhaaf is Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University – one of the sponsoring departments of the event. She showed some of her own, science-inspired work. A lot of “collaborations” between art and science are merely that: art inspired by science, or science explained through art. The goal of the lectures was to highlight where collaboration can be more than just inspiration, and in her case that came with a project she undertook with computer scientists. In that collaboration they found that there are overlapping problems that occur both in computer science and in art, such as interface design. Those problems can be solved from both angles.

Martha Fleming gave some practical advice for interdisciplinary collaborations, and emphasized funding sources: Even a badly-funded lab has much more money than any artist could ever dream of having. Scientists secure funding before they start their experiments; artists are used to getting paid after the product is finished (if at all). Finding a source of funding for interdisciplinary projects has always been hard, in any interdisciplinary collaboration, because funding agencies have very specific guidelines of what they will fund, and many interdisciplinary projects fall outside of all conventional boundaries.

According to Fleming, interdisciplinary fields are born because people believe in them, and take risks. So is science and art a collaboration worth of risks, or are the fields too far apart? At the beginning of her presentation, Fleming did a bit of performance art herself that very clearly demonstrated the similarities between the fields. She started by explaining the Large Hadron Collider, with a video fragment from the BBC about the machine. Then she read a further, more detailed explanation of what the LHC is, how it had to be very precisely designed, with all the parts working well together to create one fine-tuned giant machine. Playing in the background, on screen, were the opening minutes of “Der Lauf Der Dinge” (The Way Things Go – trailer ). This famous art film shows an incredibly fine-tuned, perfect, elaborate, Rube Goldberg machine, with all the parts precisely designed to work together – just like the LHC. “Science and art”, said Fleming, “have similar ambitions: to explore the world as we know it.”

From October 5 to 16, Ambi-Valent Objects , a collection of art works on the overlap between science and art, is exhibited at York University as part of this same “Art meets Science” project. I’ll be at the opening reception on October 8 (Thursday), and anyone interested in coming along or meeting me there should drop me a line, either here or by e-mail or on the Toronto forum