INTERESTING TIMES

 If times were ever interesting, these are getting right up there.  In America, the Executive Branch sent an attack mob to the Legislative Branch of our government.  Marched them right down the avenue from the White House and up the Capitol steps.  One week ago.  That mob overwhelmed all barriers and invaded the Capitol through the windows, during a session.  The building was under lockdown for hours, with our representatives hidden in a subterranean chamber.  You can see the patriot invasion on youtube.  According to potus his mob looked "low class".  But then later he pronounced "we love you" to the same crew.

Then today the president is impeached for the second time.  How interesting.  Twice. May that be followed by a Senate trial and prompt Removal.  

The inauguration is planned to be a "hard target" so attacks may divert to state capitols which are considered "soft".  White supremacists have been booted to the backroads of the internet and are developing clandestine communications to sort out their next grand move.  They would enjoy a chance to kick some ass; a race war would do nicely.

The Executive Branch has been subverting the Judicial Branch by filling benches with sympathetic judges, but it is still a very separate Branch of power.  Lawyers and especially judges tend to be smart and willful and develop their own thinking rather than adopting half-baked ideology.  They see the obvious bogusness of the Big Lie.  The election wasn't stolen.  Those Attorney Generals, all 17 of them that signed on to a Texas lawsuit trying to flip the election, they aren't stupid.  They have been corrupted.  They must be getting rich.  Or have their nuts in a vise.  Or both.  Barr is probably still trying to get his nuts out.

Oh yeah and the pandemic.  Isn't that interesting?  What fascinates me the most is how utterly ignorant most people are about how the body works, and how a virus works, and why some people live and some die from the same virus.  The TERRAIN matters, my friends.  If your organs are sick, you can be weakened and susceptible without knowing it.  Science is really cool, too, it explains so much.

Ignorance about our government and institutions is also prevalent.  Broad ignorance is the terrain on which half-baked ideologies grow.  The difference is education.  But our schools have gotten as lazy as our Capitol defenses.  Believing that America truly is the greatest nation on earth has led to complacency and then denial.  What?  No problems here, we say, but the world knows better.  America was a great experiment in government, still is as of this moment. 

There is the possibility that Trump will function like a vaccine.  Just a tiny dose, well four long years.  Maybe that will autocrat-proof America.  Or maybe the booster shot will be worse.  And on top of that there is the possibility that this Republic will fail.  Trump tried to bring down this government and to date has failed.

Interesting, huh.

I attended the May 12 meeting not really expecting much, but the program was excellent, both informative and amusing.  The speaker was Andrew Greenberg, and the subject was the Oregon Satellite Project and STEM Education.  Specifically he taught us a thing of two about space, orbits and nanosatellites.  I wanted to share just a few factoids that I got from him with you.

Andrew is adjunct faculty at PSU and helps students build rockets and satellites, in addition to his day job  He had recently done an OMSI science pub about the same subject, so he was well prepared and practiced. The OreSat mission is to use an actual satellite project to bring STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math) to all Oregon high schools and to study cirrus clouds.

The Von Karman line is an arbitrary line dividing outer space from not space.  It is 100km above the surface of the earth.  Some balloons fly at 30km above the earth.  Cirrus clouds are the highest clouds and they are about 12km up.

There are three main layers of orbits, labelled LEO (low earth orbit), MEO (medium), and GEO (geostationary earth orbit).  Geostationary satellites have to be highest up and go the fastest to maintain their position relative to the surface of the planet.  Satellites cruise at around 200km from the earth, and they have to go really fast (8km/second or 17,500 miles per hour) to keep from falling back to the earth.  

NASA has a research satellite that was just launched May 5 this year.  It's the InSight mission and it intends to land on the surface of Mars.  The rocket that launched InSight also launched the first two CubeSats, which are small satellites that can be designed individually then connected together.  The high schoolers in Oregon are designing their own CubeSat, which NASA will launch!  They didn't expect to get awarded the opportunity to launch the satellite when they applied, but NASA called their bluff and now they're working on it.  All the software is open source.  The 2U (two unit) CubeSats from Oregon will get "hucked" from the space station into its orbit. It will stay aloft for 6-12 months, or maybe longer if they get lucky. 

The OreSat is scheduled to be deployed in fall 2019.  For the sake of the high schoolers, he's calling the OreSat a "400km selfie stick", because each time it flies over Oregon the high schoolers will be able to receive a packet of information from it, including a picture of their location.  

Then Andrew explained what he means when he says "Space Sucks".  Quite literally it sucks because it is a vacuum.  It speeds up the outgassing from any material that can, challenges welders to prevent leaks, and makes it tricky to keep anything at a reasonable temperature because it gets cold on the dark side and screaming hot in the sun.  The radiation from space does harm to transistors.  Solar cells are only ~30% efficient meaning it's not easy to power systems on satellites, and if they fail, they have to reboot without a mechanic coming to fix them.  "Watchdog systems" monitor the functions of the satellite and attempt to make things right before there is a system failure.

He also mentioned Planet Lab Doves, which are privately owned satellites that basically remap the earth's surface every day.  Exciting stuff.

Anyway, this talk was just a taste of what is happening.  Satellite technology is moving fast and the very first satellite put into orbit by anyone in the state of Oregon will be built by high school and college kids.  That's a fun way to approach STEM education.

I was registered and attempted to attend some of it. I have never been to this event before, and it was free for me because I work for the University that hosted it. The keynote talk was Friday night, and the speaker was intriguing and beautiful, but it was held in Radelet Hall which holds about 200 people, but has air exchange sufficient for about 20. When I went in the room was very warm already, and the talk was just beginning. The O2 content had to be low, because I immediately felt sleeply. Perhaps all those young brains can withstand a high CO2 environment for 2 hours to get the wisdom, but I cannot. The University should improve the ventilation systems for that space, as it has no windows to open and doors only on one side.  It is stuffy even with a small crowd.

I hung out near the back door long enough to hear the theme of Ola Obasi's talk which was Deconstructing Reductionism. The theme continued to resonate from the entire gathering. I went to Paul Bergner's talk because his was a name that I have long heard in herbalist circles. I had no conscious expectation, but his appearance surprised me. Most famous herbalists are gaunt and woodsy looking, and he had a pot belly on a stocky frame and a collared shirt that made him look like a gas station attendant. Bergner was perhaps a little surprised at the turnout, for he was in a room that held 40 and there were 60 of us in there. I was stationed near the door because that is my rule when inside the academic building which is an old masonry structure that is likely to crumble in a quake. They're planning to replace it but that's years out.

Bergner talked a bit about how science is applied to herbal medicine. "A scientific trial is like a serial killer" he said, "because it kills the complexity of the herb." He said that all botanical science falls into one of two groups, 1. pharmaceutical companies prospecting for useful constituents, and 2. supplement manufacturers shoring up the plausibility of their formulations. In other words, the profit motive is always at hand. When Big Pharma finds a useful constituent, they extract or synthesize it and sell it as a drug. They are always looking for another blockbuster drug. When supplement companies conduct their own studies, they are usually trying to prove that one of their products works for a particular condition. In both groups the tendency is to bury negative results and exaggerate positive ones in order to generate sales and profits. It is no wonder that herbalists in general have a bad attitude about science when it is said to be reductionistic and corrupt.

What I hope that the herbalists will integrate is the fact that each one of those studies that does give us a result--this plant has that constituent which has such and such an effect--gives us an evidence base upon which we can build a case for herbal medicine. Sure, the studies are not done for our benefit. But we can learn from that and build upon it, even while keeping close the traditional knowledge upon which the studies are built. If we know from all that corrupt research that Scutellaria baicalensis lowers inflammation in the liver and the brain, awesome! We can use it for those purposes, and extrapolate that it might help with inflammation systemically. We can also remember all the indications for that herb in ancient Chinese and western eclectic traditions, and extrapolate beyond what the science says as to what the herb in its fullness (and not just one constituent) might do.

We need both. We need the subjective and the objective. Science does not have to be reductionistic. I suppose there are scientists that will say that everything is reducible to chemistry and physics. But there are just as many scientists who will tell you that we just don't know everything that is out there, and there could be surprises. The fact that we just don't know is not a rational reason to believe in nonsense, but it is a reason to stay humble and reject reductionism. Everything is more complex than we know. When we find out one detail about something through the scientific process, we know one tiny piece in a very big puzzle. Nobody knows how complicated things are better than scientists.

Berner's talk was officially about herbal pairings (and triplets). To him this means pairs of herbs with complimentary actions which he can see no contraindications for giving together, and no situations in which he would want one and not the other. One of the pairs he mentioned was dandelion and Oregon grape, aka taraxacum and mahonia. In general his pairings have a function so that he can grab that mixture off the shelf and add it to a more complex formulation, saving time in the formulation process.

I tried to go to a couple of other lectures but ended up walking out. One speaker's voice was practically sedating--though I imagine some in his audience might have been hypnotized. Social justice is a major theme for this group, and there was a lot of talk about finding our roots so that we could extract ourselves from the white supremacy paradigm.  I imagine the goal would be to begin to operate as a conglomeration of cooperative and complimentary minorities; a modern civil society. I appreciate this message, and I do not need to sit through another 2 hour lecture in which someone recites their entire lineage and teaches us their family traditions. I am fully aware that there is great variety in human life. And I have been quite educted enough about the advantages I have in this society because of my pale skin tone and heterosexuality. Berate me no more, instead go out into the world and be awesome. Run for office and help us bring nuance back to government. Model your own kind of success.

After I left the lectures I went home and processed my own herbs. I learn more from handling the plants than I do from lay-level herbal lectures. It makes me appreciate the difference between CE and not.  At least continuing education classes allow for the possibility that we might actually talk about how to treat a condition, because we have licenses that allow us to practice medicine. I believe I need to offer an herbal class, and I'm sorting out a topic.  Probably herbs for the mind, perhaps herbs for the aging mind.  The kiddos won't be interested yet but I'm interested.

Creationism gets treated by religious people as if it were a viable theoretical alternative to Evolution.  They do this in spite of the fact that evolution is broadly accepted by educated people world wide.  Evolution is obviously working on species today, and it is visible to any person with minimal powers of observation and exposure to the natural world.  Darwin was one such person.  Creationism is a myth, a dogma.  It is based on nothing other than a nice fictional book, and promoted by a whole lot of people who need a simple and colorul story to tell about how the world came to be.  Every culture, language and religion has its own creation story.  Creation stories can be spectacular and we love them.  But this does not make them theories in the scientific forum.  This does not make them true.  This just makes them good fiction.

As a student of nonverbal communication, I'm always fascinated when a new tidbit comes along.  It appears that there is one more universal microexpression to add to the current list of seven, and that is the "not" face, or the face that says "I don't agree".  It isn't completely unique, instead it borrows from the expressions of digust, anger and contempt.  The other four previously identified microexpressions are fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness. Here's a good explanation of all of this.

This factoid from the documentary on netflix called (Dis)Honesty.  It's about a scientist and his experiments about lying.  He (and others) have found that about 80% of Americans at least believe that they are above average, and this is diplomatically called the Optimism Bias.  So 80% of us believe that we are smarter than average.  Better drivers, lovers, cooks.  You get the idea.

If 50% actually are above average, and 30% more think they are when they are not, then we are surrounded by blowhards, egotists, optimists of the ickiest kind.  I guess the other 20% knows that they are below average or thinks that they are even if they are above average.