Jesus is God’s atomic bomb
Proudest papa that ever was
Jesus is God’s, His atomic bomb
Shook the grave, causing death to rise
Yes, God shook the grave, child
Put old death on a rock
Through trials and tribulation
Lord when it was done
That’s why I know Jesus
Yes, is my God, His atomic bomb

Yikes! Did anyone actually sing this in church?

Other songs depict now-forgotten aspects of the nuclear revolution like uranium prospecting, or the tension of US-Soviet relations. And, like all else in pop music, the atom bomb is a sexual metaphor: Sheldon Allman’s “Radioactive Mama” promises “we’ll reach critical mass tonight”; the Five Stars’ Atom Bomb Baby is “just the way I want her to be / A million times hotter than TNT.”

In most of these songs, tongue-in-cheek or not, the nuclear imagery feels a little naive or dated. Decades later, Fluke’s 1996 single “Atom Bomb” (one of my favorite workout songs) would capture the new, no-longer-unique place of the atom bomb in popular music: the object of affection’s 22-megaton atom bomb is simply one in a long litany of scientific, political, and supernatural weapons including poison gas, submarines, monorails, a president, and a shopping mall.

I’d love to see a sequel to Conelrad’s list representing atomic music through the present day – is there such a list out there? Let me know if so. In the meantime, consider browsing away your Friday afternoon with the Atomic Platters. If only the now-scarce collection of recordings didn’t cost almost as much as uranium!

Slate recently had a story by Seth Stevenson on Oregon mapmaker David Imus, who spent thousands of hours painstakingly crafting a two-dimensional wall map of the US. While yet another schoolroom wall map might sound like a complete nonstory, Imus’ Essential Geography of the United States is, in some eyes, a work of art. Imus didn’t use the automated software commonly used in mapmaking. Instead, he selected, sized, colored and tweaked everything himself, eyeballing details like a monk illustrating an illuminated manuscript. The result is a map that was so grossly inefficient to produce, it’s unique in modern society:

Anybody can download databases of highways, airports, and cities, and then slap a crude map together with the aid of a plotter. What separates a great map from a terrible one is choosing which data to use and how best to present it. . .

. . . the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. (source)

As a result, Imus has received a flood of praise. His website boasts endorsements like “I have seen Imus at work. He is both scientist and artist, raising the art of map making to an all-new level.” (Bob Welch, Eugene, Ore. Register-Guard) or “Like a beautifully illustrated manuscript, the map engages both sides of the human brain.” (writer Barry Lopez). I have no idea who Bob and Barry are (nor do I know David Imus) but those are the sort of soundbites that get BioE’s attention. They’re also the sorts of things you often hear about good data visualization and informational design, which elicits a little skepticism, but in this case the Cartography and Geographic Information Society gave Imus their “Best in Show” award. In other words, his work resonates with the general public, but also within the community of technically skilled mapmakers. As Seth Stevenson wrote in Slate,

Other mapmakers I spoke with marveled at the handcrafted beauty of the thing. (One guy reminisced about a Soviet map from the 1970s that used different colors for freshwater and saltwater lakes. He said Imus’ map achieves that level of specificity.) This is an example of heartfelt, artisanal cartography coming from a pro at the top of his game.

While the differences between Imus’ map (snapshot at the top of the post) and those familiar schoolroom National Geographic maps may seem too subtle for the inexperienced eye, Imus is betting we will be affected by those differences, and that they’ll improve the flow of information from map to mind. He’s made a pdf devoted to the educational goals of the project – goals like getting a 2D map to elicit a more intuitive appreciation of the US’ varied topography, or manipulating the density of town names to convey a better sense of population density in different regions.

But even if the educational benefit were marginal, the map has a certain artisanal cred that’s increasingly scarce. An era of increased technology has sparked new appreciation for the old-fashioned techniques of letterpress, letter-writing, calligraphy, photography, etc. – even handwritten letters seem unusual today. And while we all use technology to assist us, we appreciate work in which the artist/designer has taken interstitial default choices back from the machine. That’s increasingly hard to do, especially with mass-market tools. As you probably have experienced, Microsoft Word automatically formats and “corrects” your document willy-nilly, as if it knows better than you do what you are trying to say; I always turn its more paternalistic functions off. But there are some standardized technologies to which I capitulate, allowing my work to conform to the technology and its defaults, instead of vice versa (like when I used to size paintings just small enough to fit on my flatbed scanner). We may not pay attention to how we let our tools make certain choices for us, but we do – and Imus’ work is an example of the difference it makes when you take those choices back.

Origami human torso with organs (via David Ng)

In situ pencil lead carvings – the best way you never thought of to keep yourself busy during a boring class (via Miles Cannon)

Surprisingly accurate turn-of-the-century space landscapes (iO9)

Mountains and rivers of the world, 1823 (Retronaut)

And a snarky look at how Sumerians had intellectual property all figured out (also via Miles):

The main way Sumerians protected the integrity of their data was through curses. This may seem laughable to a modern audience, but I don’t think we’re so different. Does you expect the FBI to actually raid your house if you copy that VHS tape?

Lunation, a group-curated show, opens today at Brooklyn’s Observatory:

Artists and scientists have always been attracted to the moon. . . Our closest celestial neighbor, the earth’s little sister, the moon creates the tides and illuminates the woods at night. For centuries, humanity believed the moon provided a key into the invisible realm: it called out the beast within us, freeing us to act as wolves, to run, to dance, to chant—and sometimes (as in Duncan Jones’ Moon) to split in two, to find our double, our changeling moon-self.

Is the moon home to life? Today we know it isn’t, but even as of 1830, speculation was rampant that the moon was inhabited by Christianized bat-people who worshiped in great ziggurats. (See The Sun and the Moon by Observatory alumnus Matthew Goodman for details.) Still, life comes to the moon. We know the moon contains frozen water, and we dream of using it as our jumping-off point for visiting even more alien vistas. . .

I’ve read the Sun and the Moon, and it’s a great book; any show that draws inspiration from it is one I’d like to see. And how great is the exhibition poster?

Reception, 7pm Saturday January 7, at Observatory.

Although I like the short very much, I’m also a little sad at the way Coldplay’s “The Scientist” has become shorthand for post-industrial regret. Science does not have to equate with cold, sterile industrialization, or with exploitative factory CAFOs. As my boyfriend pointed out, the film could be set to the Dandy Warhols’ upbeat “I am a Scientist” and end with the farmer not simply razing his bleak industrial farmscape, but rather transforming it into a funky steampunk green energy solar windmill complex, freeing him from dependence on the petroleum-powered grid while he flies around his farm in a custom dirigible inflated and powered by agricultural waste.

Alas, it was not to be.

Regardless, I have to admit Coldplay’s lyrics (which aren’t really about science anyway) work well here, and the animation is adorable. Nice work, Johnny Kelly (and Willie Nelson). A look behind the scenes reveals that it’s actually stop-motion animation, not digital – which means many adorable pig models, including extra-tiny pigs for the distant hills. Awww.

See more windows (huge images) at their blog. The last window in particular is Snow Queen-esque (think Narnia); the metal bird themed window seems very Yeatsian. Truly, upscale holiday window displays have become our modern wonder cabinets. . .

Via my friend Sylvia; photograph by Ricky Zehavi from the BG blog. You can see more of BG’s window details on their Google+ profile, if you can’t stop by in person.

Car Talk, like most forms of technology and media, offers advantages and conveniences that supplement those trainee-patient-teacher interactions. First, podcasting makes the lessons of reasoning available anytime, anywhere to the student. Second, in a given afternoon in clinic or admitting cycle on the wards, we are pleased to have the student see one or two undifferentiated cases where their own thinking and that of their teachers can be put to the test. Car Talk presents six or more problem-solving encounters in one hour each week. Finally, the disentanglement from medical facts allows the student of reasoning to observe the process rather than obsess over the content (consider if this were a medical call-in show Body Talk: “My husband makes this terrible noise . . . ”). (source)

I once showed an episode of House, MD to my Introduction to the Natural Sciences class as an illustration of the scientific method (we discussed how it both was and wasn’t a fair representation of science — mostly it wasn’t. Nor, incidentally, was the Sherlock Holmes story we read). Obviously, the irascible, manipulative, drug-seeking Dr. House is not a model I wanted my pre-med students to emulate. But the thing about House that charms and fascinates (and that I wanted my students to notice) is his delight in intellectual curiosity. He takes childlike pleasure in figuring things out; it’s the one aspect of his life which is self-sustaining, in which he needs neither a drug nor a crutch. And that curiosity is at least one characteristic of Dr. House that we should hope physicians do cultivate — because curiosity is essential to keep investigators (in science, law enforcement, or medicine) motivated in the face of puzzlement and frequent failure.

So there’s one reason to admire Dr. House — even if only one. But there’s also a big problem with using Click and Clack as a model for diagnosis. It’s a problem we have totally failed to grapple with as a society: the skyrocketing cost of diagnosis and treatment. Click and Clack can be honest with a caller that their twenty-year-old car, nearing 250K miles, is simply not worth further diagnosis/treatment. It’s often easier and cheaper to simply replace the car, and it’s to their credit that they say so. But a physician obviously can’t make the same financial tradeoff for a patient.

House, M.D. has the opposite problem: Dr. House avoids the issue by ignoring cost completely. Practicing in a fully equipped teaching hospital, with special dispensation for his professional eccentricities, House routinely tests for obscure, vanishingly unlikely conditions using invasive, expensive assays. (In some early episodes, House butted heads with a hospital chairman who was concerned with cost overruns. However, the chairman was capricious and overbearing, using money as leverage rather than grappling with genuine cost-benefit analyses for the good of patients.)

Ignoring money and probability makes good tv — a patient’s quotidian symptoms are more interesting really produced by brain-eating Ecuadorian parasitic fly larvae, or something equally unlikely, and it’s even better if House discovers the parasite using a maverick test that has a 50/50 chance of breaking the hospital’s multi-million dollar MRI! But all this is grossly (pun intended) unrealistic, and not obviously so. People can readily appreciate that Dr. House is obnoxious and misanthropic and has no bedside manner. It’s not like you have to tell medical students he’s a bad model (and if you do, maybe they shouldn’t be medical students). But most people don’t really think about how expensive all those tests are, or the skyrocketing costs of medical care in general — until they are forced to.

Real patients and doctors (and medical administrators) do have to grapple with cost, including assessing how important accurate diagnosis is in the larger context (will it change the treatment plan? will it require invasive, dangerous tests?). This process isn’t as simple as determining whether the cost of repair outweighs Bluebook value. So while we’re on the whole topic of medical education, it would be nice to have something that modeled for doctors and patients how to discuss, with sensitivity and honesty, how to end invasive, bankruptcy-inducing treatments with little hope of success, or how to weigh a slightly improved duration of life vs. severely impaired quality of life. Unfortunately, if there were such a television show, it would probably be called “Death Panel!” and be pulled off the air amid much outrage. Sigh.

In the meantime, perhaps medical students should be assigned reading by Atul Gawande. Gawande’s influential 2009 New Yorker article on health care costs observed that

nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes.

To make matters worse, Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed. (source)

Health care, like other goods, is unfairly and inefficiently distributed. Recognizing that problem doesn’t mean you must embrace any particular political solution — it just means you understand that cost plays a significant role in medical care, even when neither doctor nor patient brings it up. Click and Clack aren’t afraid to discuss cost, often quite bluntly. Dr. House isn’t concerned with cost at all. But there should be a middle ground — both for policymakers and for individual patients making choices for their families. I have yet to see a successful model for that.

Delightful.

From the New York Times review of the Grolier Club exhibition “Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale.” See a brief slideshow of the exhibition here.