Today's Digest is a remote broadcast from the belly of the beast. I'm here at Dave and Buster's, participating in a traditional American sport. For the maniac with some time on his hands, Spain has The Running Of The Bulls, and American dads with car keys and a limber wallet can take part in The Chaperoning Of The Credulous. This is a place where Americans circulate in a somnambulist ballet, bewitched by row upon row of coin-operated video games, magic claw machines, colorful blinking lights, sirens, and mammoth TV screens that will be sporadically applauded by clumps of morbidly obese spectators. Since today's digest is all about science, I'm framing this as an experiment, where I'm investigating which will arrive first-- my tater tots, or my total nervous breakdown.
Earlier, I was lucky to be tapped for the job of lab assistant in a middle school science project. My son was measuring relative speeds and distances of baseballs that had been alternately heated, chilled, and left at room temperature. My job was to operate the stopwatch. I've always wondered what goes through the mind of a guy clocking projectiles, and it turns out that as you wait in the cold for the Head Scientist to ready baseballs for flinging, you ponder the ramifications of science in American culture.
There is a strange notion abroad in the Land of the Free, that science is more or less an arm of the Democratic Party. For many, science is an arrogant thumb in the eye of cherished beliefs, suggesting ominously that nature and even human behavior can be explained, analyzed, predicted, and manipulated by a secular reliance on fact, observation, and method. PR flacks working for an unholy alliance of corporations, religious groups, and conservative think tanks have successfully planted the idea that scientists have conspired to politicize their profession. There seems to be some evidence that scientists, like kids lobbying for permission to borrow the car, have occasionally tweaked data to fit a desired conclusion. I can speak, finally, from experience in the business of scientific investigation, and the truth ain't pretty. While heroically performing my stopwatch duty, I gradually became aware of some problems with the data. As my opposable thumb adjusted to the cold, and my observational organs grew fuzzy, I began to suspect that contra the original mission statement approved by the science teacher, we were in fact engaged in gathering data on how temperature and boredom can affect a lab assistant's reaction time.
I'm not proud of this next admission. As the dirty compromising of scientific integrity grew too obvious for me to ignore, I took the easy way out. I just kept doing my job, well aware that any whistle blowing on my part would mean I would have to stay outside longer.
And I tacitly condoned this unforgivable contamination of truth without being paid off by the DNC, or any similarly evil entity. Nor was ideology a factor; I couldn't think of any left wing principle that could be served by my duplicity. As it turns out, I never really knew what the numbers meant, anyway, as I quickly lost track of which baseballs were heated up, and which were cooled down. Even if I'd made a good faith effort to understand all of that (I hadn't), it would have been dumped from my short term memory during my labors to get the measuring tape to go back into the little metal casing. Scientists are expected to remain coldly unemotional while they do science stuff, but that's not so easy to do when you're dealing with Satan's Own Measuring Tape.
This example of a science experiment that appeared to be gathering one kind of data while actually gathering quite another reminds me of an experiment I read about where bloodstream cortisol levels were measured for comparison purposes in Americans both southern and northern. Cortisol is a hormone (it's one of the glucocorticoid hormones, in case you've been living under a rock), which is released into the human bloodstream during periods of stress, frustration, and anger. Normally, it operates in cycles; in a typical 24-hour cycle, cortisol production is at its lowest at night, and reaches its peak during trips to Costco.
The experiment in question involved telling the subjects to head down a hallway toward a room where they would take a test. A man was instructed to approach the subjects from the other direction, bumping into them lugubriously and calling them assholes. The subjects were then hooked up to science machines in order to measure their cortisol levels. Southerners measured much higher than northerners, suggesting that statistically they were much more likely to stew over an insult to their honor. I submit that if you take a guy who's struggling to feed his kids, and call him a racist, cortisol will flood his engine. Perhaps liberals expect this guy to enter into a dark night of the soul, examining his life for evidence of prejudice and hatred. That would be excellent, of course. It would be also nice if liberals, when confronted, could do this. My point is that both sides are more likely to see an insult as an affront to their honor, lobbed by a villain, than an opportunity for reflection.
At some point during the Great Baseball Experiment, my son had a bunch of baseballs heating up in a potful of water in the stove. My wife came into the room, remarking on the stench.
Me: Do you mean the stench that smells like we're boiling Gloria Vanderbilt?
My Son: Oh, because her face was like leather?
Me: Yes. Thanks, Captain!
My Son: You mean Captain Obvious, don't you?
Me: Yes.
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