Mega-Cruise Ships

Of course, my immediate thought upon learning that the Oasis of the Seas has a twin sister being built in Finland was "so twice as many people can get food poisoning..." This is, of course, hyperbole, as the number of passengers of cruise vessels that get sick per year is very small. Nevertheless, occasionally some food on a cruise ship goes bad and everyone on board eats it and gets sick. The ship pulls into the nearest port and unloads hundreds of passengers into the local medical system.
But if Oasis of the Seas, or her sister ship Allure of the Seas, were to suddenly have a passenger-wide food poisoning epidemic, could the medical facilities at some watering-hole Caribbean island support that many patients? The Oasis is designed to hold 8,300 people including crew.
This problem might solve itself, really, as the Oasis and Allure are so massive, so gigantic, that they might not be able to pull into harbor of many islands in the Caribbean, and would therefore be forced to enter larger ports where higher-capacity medical care is available.

But as the "Oasis class" fleet grows from one to two, ask the question I asked before: how long before a single individual buys one to stroke their wealthy egos? With the price tag in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion the Oasis class ships aren't impossibly expensive, and with Royal Caribbean having trouble maintaining stock value, the scenario where a multi-billionaire buys one is becoming more and more plausible every day. Maybe the global economy needs to recover first, but I humbly submit that it will happen.


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Quote for the Day, Tsavo Edition

"The researchers did note that their study covers only the number of people eaten, while the number killed may have been higher. They said the death toll may have been as high as 75."

Here.


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Yet another quiet hurricane season is coming and going

Back in 2008, I wrote (and linked Easterbrook) that 2008 and 2007 were forecast as "above average" hurricane seasons, and people that know stuff about hurricanes told us to prepare for several major Category 5 hurricanes. As we are all aware, this did not happen. And now that August - October, the peak Atlantic hurricane season is over, I feel we should all take stock of the bizarre fact that since Katrina, the United States has not had a major destructive hurricane other than Ike in 2008.

So why has it been so calm out there in the Atlantic? I'm sure there are Climate Change experts that gnash their teeth at the lack of hurricanes; many scientist predict that increasing ocean temperatures will increase evaporation of water...which will in turn increase hurricane strength. This year, there wasn't even a named Atlantic storm until mid-August.

Colorado State University's Dr. William Gray, a perennial overachiever, predicted in 2006 17 named storms with 5 major hurricanes; there were 10 named storms with 2 major hurricanes. In 2007, the CSU team predicted 17 named storms with 5 major hurricanes, there were actually 15 named storms and only 2 major hurricanes. In 2008 the guru at CSU finally appeared to calm down, he predicted an "active" season with 13 named storms and 3 major hurricanes, instead there were 16 named storms and 5 major hurricanes. Maybe they should stick with what works! For 2009, they went back to panic mode, and predicted 14 named storms, with 3 major hurricanes. So far, with less than a month left in Atlantic Hurricane Season, there have been only 8 named storms, and 2 major hurricanes.

It's almost as if these people don't know what they're doing!


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Deep Thought on the Apocalypse, "V" Edition

When the aliens arrive with their giant intergalactic drill to suck the iron ore out of the core of our planet for their intergalactic smelting factory, our pleas of mercy are heard. They pause what they are doing, and for a few weeks, careful negotiations between the humans and the alien race, who calls themselves "the baybea" are held. It is tentatively agreed that the aliens will instead take the moon, and for now spare the planet. That is, until an alien finds a Youtube video of Republican bobbleheads shrieking "Drill Baby Drill" and misunderstands completely.


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Art Education

Longtime readers and personal friends of TAE know that Mrs. TAE is finishing up her studies to be a Middle School Art Teacher. Regardless of that, TAE has always had a tender spot in his heart for The Arts. Although I scoff at Pollock (mostly for the satisfaction of watching my wife twitch violently), there are so many painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, actors, and singers who have captured the free, random firings of the human mind - the side of the brain I so often have no ability to use - and turn it into an amazing expression of what I consider to be the shining gift of our species: our ability to create and enjoy activities that have no obvious evolutionary benefit. How many species of creatures on this planet hold concerts? How many go to art museums simply to stare at walls? Our species is bizarre. But I digress.
Jonah Lehrer points to and then expands upon this article by Posner and Patoine in which the authors argue that the while quantifiable results have potential gains for normal education (and by normal education I mean "core curriculum"), they hurt Arts education that does not have clear quantifiable results on a multiple-choice exam. However, Posner and Patoine point to some solid, trackable numbers emerging that defends the necessity of The Arts:

In 2004, E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga published results from a randomized, controlled study showing that the IQ scores of 72 children who were enrolled in a yearlong music training program increased significantly compared with 36 children who received no training and 36 children who took drama lessons. (The IQ scores of children taking drama lessons did not increase, but these children did improve more than the other groups on ratings of selected social skills.)

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in March 2009, researchers Ellen Winner of Boston College, Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard University and their colleagues at McGill University used neuroimaging scans to examine brain changes in young children who underwent a four-year-long music training program, compared with a control group of children who did not receive music training.⁴ In the first round of testing, after 15 months, the researchers found structural changes in brain circuits involved in music processing in the children who received training. They did not find the same changes in the control group. The scientists also found improvements in musically relevant motor and auditory skills, a phenomenon called "near transfer." In this case, the improvements did not transfer to measures of cognition less related to music—termed "far transfer." We do not know why far transfer to IQ, for example, was found in the Schellenberg study and not in this one.

Posner and Patoine go on...and on. Their article is rich and compelling, and like Jonah I came away with a renewed feeling that the loss of Art Education in America will have long-term negative effects:

But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses an important benefit: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into a paragraph or a painting. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's false. Creativity, like every cognitive skill, takes practice; expressing oneself well is never easy.

Lehrer then makes an interesting point I had not considered: art is a method to teach concentration. A typical math problem may take a bright student mere seconds, a painting might take hours. Lehrer refers to this level of concentration as flow:

Finally, I think arts education, and the self-expression it encourages, can give children a tiny taste of an essential mental state: flow. First proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is a condition of complete and effortless focus, characterized by total immersion in the task at hand. We don't notice the clock, or think about what we're eating for lunch - we're just thinking about what we're doing. (Not surprisingly, people are exceedingly happy while engaged in flow activities, be it composing a poem or constructing a Legos set.)

Children have an extraordinary natural capacity for flow. (I've always loved this Auden aphorism, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play.") Unfortunately, I think most school kids never experience a taste of flow at school. Instead, they are drilled in all the usual subjects, from arithmetic to reading. The downside of this pedagogy is that it leads kids to conclude that learning is a dry and tedious pursuit, where we will always count the minutes until recess. Perhaps arts education improves our attentional system because it shows children that attention isn't always hard work. Sometimes, we want to focus, because we enjoy what we're focused on.

You mean letting kids do art might increase their focus?

What are the odds that in today's society, when kids are increasingly portrayed as spastic and diagnosis of attention deficit disorder is on the rise, the cause of this isn't just the television or video games or bad parents, but the cause is also school axing art and music and drama in order to cram more science and english down students' throats? And the scary thought here is that none of that extra science may produce better engineers, it instead may, through omission of the arts, produce bad ones.


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Anti-Vax Loons Prepare to Massively Ignore Science

Deborah Mackenzie writes for New Scientists "Short Sharp Science" blog that we must "fight the anti-vaccine brigade with science. She explains that the number of people who get side-effects, like Guillain-Barre Syndrome (which got a lot of misappropriated press coverage), are actually higher in instances of people who get the flu than are in cases of people who get the flu vaccine.

Some 40 times as many will get Guillain-Barré after flu than would have got it after flu vaccine.

But how can that be? You mean actually having the flu is worse than not having it? Who'd have thought?

But Mackenzie is making a mistake if she thinks we can fight the anti-vax lunacy with science. Clearly, science and statics mean nothing to these people, nor do logic and reason. Sometimes the only way to fight fire is with fire. So here are three foolproof arguments in favor of vaccinations that will surely not stand the test of statistics, but make compelling arguments anyway (which is the methodology of the anti-vax lobby):

1. Preliminary research shows that people who get the swine flu vaccination typically get more promotions at work.
2. A report out of Britain shows women are subconsciously more willing to have sex with men who have been vaccinated, and less willing to have sex with men who have, or have had, the real swine flu.
3. Early studies show that kids who get the swine flu vaccine score better on the SAT.

Argue these things, ignore what "scientists" or "people with factual, real evidence" argue against you, and surely you'll win the insane war against the anti-vax nutsoes!


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Wolves Suffer Mid-Life Crisis Too

At first, when I saw this headline, I thought it was a metaphor for human males. Alas, no, my sense of humor wasn't appeased, the article actually is about wolves.

Apparently wolves physical ability decreases with age. Shocking, to be sure.

But what really shocked me was when Dan MacNulty, "post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota" (which means Dr. MacNulty holds a PhD in something but is not ready to get a real job; post-docs are basically PhD students who refuse to quit their research phase of life) said "wolves are like 100 meter sprinters."

Forgive me, but when I was younger, and I loved biology and animals, I learned that wolves are high-endurance predators that rely on their endurance to run down their prey. In fact, peer-reviewed research on the very wolves Dan MacNulty is discussing in this article has shown that wolves are better predators against running prey than they are against prey that is stationary...a bison who stands its ground typically fares better than one that flees. Wolves feet are designed to help them stay up in snow, while caribou and elk cannot do so, often the wolves will literally run the caribou or elk or moose or other ungulate until the poor animal overheats and goes into lactic acid shock, then the wolves kill and feed. Videos can be seen on youtube, including a beautiful high-definition aerial shot of a wolf chasing a caribou infant for nearly a mile before the prey finally tripped and collapsed.
Other peer-reviewed research has shown that wolves who have not eaten for 14 days showed no outward muscle fatigue upon hunting. The same research discussed a wolf that chased its prey for 36 kilometers without pause.

And while most wolf hunting behavior involves sprints of 200 yards or less, this does not reflect the wolf anatomy, but rather the wolf hunting behavior. Dr. MacNulty, I deeply respect you for getting your PhD, but next time you analogize the physical performance of 2-3 year old wolves, use "marathon runners" instead of sprinters.


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