For part 3, click here.

Here is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the greatest writer and polymath in German history:

And here is John de Lancie, the actor best known as “Q” from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Eerie, no?

I’m a huge fan of The Avengers (the comic book team).  Always have been.  If you don’t know, The Avengers were assembled from Marvel’s B-list of heroes in an attempt to create some buzz for them.

The roster has changed over the decades, but the bigger names have tended to be Ironman, Thor, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, Antman/Giantman and the Wasp.  Other members have included Hawkeye, the Vision, the Black Widow, the Scarlet Witch, Wonderman, Tigra and the Black Panther.  Even Wolverine and Spider-man have made appearances in the past.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  There’s a live action movie due out in a year or two, which I am totally excited for.  However, I am always more of a fan of animated superhero shenanigans than I am of live action films.  Currently, there’s a great Avengers cartoon out called “Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes”.

The theme song for the cartoon is classic 1980s nonsense.  But somehow it works.  This is it:

Now, while searching for it, I stumbled upon another good childhood memory: the Avengers espionage TV show from the 1960s! Now this is a good theme song:

If you’re a child of that era, as I am, you may recall an update to that classic series in the late 60s and early1970s, which was partly set in Toronto! Here’s the very era-specific theme from The New Avengers:

As a kid, waiting for the theme music was the best part of watching the show. This was the era before downloadable music and even before ubiquitous cassette tapes and home recording equipment! I remember actually writing down, in musical notation, the hooks from my favourite TV theme songs, just so I’d remember them when it came time for humming!

Clyde Tombaugh, circa 1930

As we are all now aware, the former 9th planet in the system of Sol, Pluto, has been demoted to “dwarf planet” or large Kuiper belt object.  Pluto was discovered by a jovial and very young astronomer in 1930, named Clyde Tombaugh, using an exhausting tecnique of visually appraising telescope plates for minute and almost imperceptible changes upon serial exposures.

Only the truly geeky amongst you will also be aware that in 2006 NASA launched a spacecraft called “New Horizons“, which is scheduled for a rendezvous with Pluto in the summer of 2015.  This is a terribly exciting mission for a number of reasons.  First, it will be the first time we’ve ever had any sort of reliable visual image of Pluto.  Even with the Hubble space telescope, Pluto appears as a blurry mess of pixels.  Who knows what it really looks like?

Second, this will be our first view of the mysterious Kuiper belt, this vast stretch of matter at the outskirts of the solar system which may nonetheless be the source of the organic materials from which all life on Earth was formed.

And third, the New Horizons spacecraft contains a special cargo: the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who died in the late 90s, mercifully before his discovery was demoted.  It’s not the first time human remains have ended up in space. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was among the first to have his remains blasted into orbit, in something now called “space burial“.  And one of the discoverers of the Shoemaker-Levy comet, Eugene Shoemaker, actually has his ashes scattered on the surface of the Moon!  It was dropped by the Lunar Prospector probe in 1999.

Tombaugh’s burial, though, really is a remarkable thought.  What would he have thought if we had told his 23 year old self in 1930 that this impossibly distant, almost theoretical “planet” that he had just discovered would one day be the location of his mortal remains?  What a heady idea.

Actually, New Horizons will not be dropping Tombaugh’s remains on Pluto.  Instead, it will keep them as the probe swings out to penetrate the Oort cloud and, eventually, emerge into interstellar space.  So Clyde Tombaugh will be the first human being to have an aspect of his physical body transported to the stars.

It will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the probe ever gets anywhere near another solar system, though.  By then, humanity may be long extinct.  But imagine for a second if an advanced alien technology finds the probe in the very distant future.  Maybe they have a way of extracting long destroyed genetic material from cremated ashes.  And maybe they can reconstitute a whole person from this material.

Clyde Tombaugh will then be the real Buck Rogers: born in 1907, yet the last surviving human being, living hundreds of thousands of years in the future with space aliens light years away.  Interestingly, Tombaugh was a lifelong UFO buff, and while alive was one of the most prominent astronomers to have publicly claimed to have seen UFOs.

If indeed he ends up being humanity’s sole representative in the galactic commons, from what I’ve read about the man, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.

I am an unabashed fan of mixed martial arts, as evidenced by my many posts on the topic.  A big part of the success of the UFC, in my opinion, is the very intelligent commentary of one Mr Joe Rogan.  In fact, one of my favourite time-killing past times is watching various Joe Rogan commentaries on YouTube.  The man knows his stuff.

Another fantastic MMA commentator is Ariel Helwani, whose entire career is on the internet, but who is a much better sports broadcaster and interviewer than pretty much anyone I can think of on mainstream television.

Here are two clips of Helwani interviewing Rogan, backstage at one of Rogan’s comedy shows:

And I just love this ten minute rant of Joe Rogan talking about Brock Lesnar.  If you’re an MMA fan, you’ll love it, too:

In other news, this past week I was interviewed by Rashi Khilnani of Radio Canada International’s “Indo Canadian Report“, on the topic of reproductive tourism and surrogate motherhood in India.  To access the show, click here.

Also, I’m a little late on linking to this, but over at Skiffy, I have a review up of the first season of the fantastic new British series Sherlock.

So Lost is over.  For my review of the finale, visit Skiffy.ca.  I also finally managed to get my review of the Battlestar Galatica finale done, a year later. If you missed Lost, here’s a summary of the show as performed by cats:

And for those of you who did not like the ending, here’s a more believable version.  (It’s an animated GIF, in case it’s not working on your browser.)

On a more serious note, if you really didn’t understand the show (and really, how attention impaired are you people?) here’s an excellent summary by some British kid:

Like it?  He also does politics.

In other news, everyone on Facebook has been getting a kick out of this video of a baby sloth orphanage.

In even more other news, here are some interesting photos I took recently.  First up is a hoola hoop thing I found in Pacific Mall last weekend.  Notice that it’s “easy to use” and “potable”!  Useful if you’re stranded on a deserted island or a lifeboat or something.

Next up is a photo I snapped in the men’s room of a building on the campus of the University of Ottawa.  No, I’m not in the habit of taking photos in public bathrooms.   Note, however, the sign above the urinals posted by Ottawa Public Health.  It reads, “Ottawa’s health is in your hands.”

Next is a photo I snapped on the beaches of Toronto’s East End last weekend.  Apparently, it’s illegal to bring both personal fireworks and your family to the beach.  This place is for lonely, childless singles only:

Lastly, R.I.P. Gary Coleman.  He was my age!  Yeesh!

The slow migration of all my websites to a self-hosted regime continues unabated.  Most important, my science-fiction site, Skiffy.ca has moved.  The permalinks from the old site have not migrated over yet, but all the contents and comments have moved.  Not that you will have noticed.

In other news, I found this freaky article about a pimp named Allen E. Brown.  The best part of the story is Brown’s excellent hair style:

Clearly, his problem is that his antenna is not extended, preventing receipt of instructions from the mothership.  But then I started wondering, what other freaky hairstyles can I find out there in the wonderful, wacky Interwebs.  Through the magic of Google, I give you these:

Everyone’s favourite cyborg, Professor Stephen Hawking, is in a bit of trouble with the media.  Apparently, he thinks that if we were to have contact with an advanced alien species, we would suffer for it.  Therefore, he argues, we should avoid contact with potential non-terrestrial intelligence.

I don’t know why he gets shit for articulating this belief.  He is not the first to do so.  In fact, if one applies the rational model of decision theory, it is hard to escape the conclusion that things will necessarily go badly for homo sapiens in the great cosmic blind date.

Hawking’s proclamation reminds me of the way in which I conceptualize this discussion, as a dialectic between two poles.  On one end is the pacifist optimism of Carl Sagan, my boyhood hero.  On the other end is the cold, calculating, almost neo-liberal harshness of Charles Pellegrino, whose books I discussed in this Podium article (reproduced on Skiffy.ca).

In short, Sagan’s argument was that any civilization that managed to master the economics, politics and technologies needed to achieve sustained interstellar travel must have also solved its indigenous social issues.  For, he argued, if one is constantly diverting resources to address preventable concerns, such as wars, then one can never become a multi-planetary civilization.  Therefore, when we finally venture forth into interstellar space, we will have become a truly peaceful society.  By that same logic, any aliens we encounter must also necessarily be pacifistic.

Do remember that Sagan presented his many ideas mostly during the 1970s, when the Cold War was fierce and foremost on everyone’s mind.  Hope was in desperate need, and Sagan often saw it as his duty to provide such hope from the podium of science.

Pellegrino, arguing from another era –the post-Society era of crumbling empires, multipolar uncertainties and a global return to warlordism– had another take.  He argued essentially three things:

1. Vegetarians don’t become top dog.  In other words, the dominant species on any planet will likely be a predatory species well bred in the arts of conflict.
2. When push comes to shove, any rational party (i.e., the aliens) will always consider their own needs above ours.
3. They will assume the same of us.

With those three assumptions, Pellegrino concluded that any meeting of any two interstellar species will eventually become violent.

Pellegrino added to his argument the likely development of “the big gun,” a weapon of such awesomeness that its theoretical existence is sufficient cause to ratchet up the tension levels.  Pellegrino’s “big gun” is the relativistic missile.  Imagine, if you will, a ship the size of a space shuttle.  One could accelerate this ship to high relativistic velocities, of the order of 99.999% the speed of light, using foreseeable technology, such as an ion impulse drive (which was successfully tested on NASA’s Deep Space One mission).  You’d have to leave the engine running for many centuries to achieve such a speed, but we are dealing with immense distances and times here, so that is not a problem.

Now imagine such a ship, traveling at such a speed, colliding with an inhabited world the size of the Earth.  It is conceivable that 100% of the ship’s mass would be instantaneously converted to energy, according to Einstein’s famous theorem.  That amount of energy would, Pellegrino argues, be sufficient to destroy all life on the target planet.

Okay, so the big gun sucks.  So what?  Well, a relativistic missile is moving at almost the speed of light.  This means that by the time you see it, it’s already here.  There is therefore no conceivable defense against such an attack.  This is not a failing of technology, that can be overcome with more research.  Rather, it is an immutable fact presented to us by the laws of physics.   (Just accept the argument; I know there are science fiction solutions having to do with subspace or hyperspace or whatever, but those constructs currently don’t play well with mainstream physics.)

Lastly, since the relativistic missiles need to be launched centuries in advance, it’s best to launch earlier rather than later.

So, given that any interstellar species could build such a thing, and that there is no possible defense against it, and that its result is complete genocide….  well, you do the math.  Pellegrino concludes that if we were to ever meet an interstellar species, we must launch first, because we cannot tolerate the risk that they might launch first.

He uses this reasoning to explain why the skies are silent, why the SETI project has failed to find any sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life: anyone who was foolish enough to broadcast was summarily terminated.  The universe might be teeming with civilizations clever enough to know to stay silent, and they have the good sense to hide from us and from each other.  Civilizations, it seems, were meant to never know of each other’s existences.  Our only choices are aloneness or summary destruction.

And remember: we’ve been broadcasting for about a century now.  For all we know, relativistic missiles have already been launched in our direction.

Have a nice day.

I recently posted the following Jimmy Carter speech to my Facebook page:

It’s rather prescient, no?At the other end of the spectrum is this oft-linked Ronald Reagan speech warning of the “evils” of socialized medicine:

I don’t doubt Reagan’s sincerity. But it is instructive to note the Right’s philosophical objection to socialized medicine, at least according to Reagan. It’s twofold: (1) if you can’t afford it, you don’t deserve it; and (2) it’s the beginning of telling doctors where to work, and that ain’t American.

Interestingly, I think few today –other than many doctors themselves– would object to legislating where and to whom doctors must provide service. In Canada, we are almost there, with an incredibly polarization of services leaving rural and remote regions almost completely unserviced. The market has no solution for such disparities.

But back to Carter. It’s not a popular view, but I’ve always held that Carter was a great man who let his good soul get in the way of being a great President. He did what was right, not what his electorate wanted of him. Some would argue that doing what is right is what makes a great leader; others would argue that serving the needs of the people is what defines greatness. I do know, though, that many of Carter’s beliefs and predictions are only now being appreciated. The speech above references a real crisis of energy that is only now being taken seriously. In other speeches, he chastises citizens’ greed and wastefulness –a stark contrast to today’s leaders who toady to the electorate and insist that we are good and right when we clearly are not.

Carter came two generations too early. His manner and approach are sorely needed today.

I’m a bit worried about ol’ Jimmy. I haven’t seen him in the news of late, and he is pushing 90, after all. It will be a sad day indeed when President Carter shuffles off this mortal coil. Let’s hope it’s later rather than sooner.

In Other News

The nominees for the 2010 Hugo Awards were announced this week. If you don’t know, the Hugos are the premier science fiction awards, the Pulitzer for the nerd set, if you will. I won’t mention the novels or short stories, since few of you have heard of them. Rather, let’s look at the dramatic entries, bot long and short form.

Nominees for the long form (i.e., movies) include Avatar, Moon, District 9, Star Trek and Up.

I reviewed Star Trek here. It’s a fine action movie. But it’s neither science fiction nor clever. If it wins, I am through with the Hugos.

I reviewed Avatar here. It’s genuine science fiction, though heavily derivative and hardly worthy of an award that celebrates originality. If it wins, I won’t be through with the Hugos, but I will lose a hefty amount of respect for them.

Up is an excellent, moving and entertaining little film. But is it science fiction? I really don’t think so.

That leaves Moon and District 9. I must admit to not having seen Moon. I hear it’s quite good. But from what little I know of its plot, I question whether it’s actually science fiction. An astronaut on the moon is not particularly far-fetched. That leaves the sole option for winner being District 9.

Now, on to the short form, The nominees are an episode of Dollhouse, and episode of FlashForward and three episodes of Doctor Who. All are very good choices, though we can all wonder how Lost or Fringe didn’t make the list.

More baffling, however, is how this past year’s true masterpiece of TV science fiction failed to make the Hugo short list. I’m talking about Torchwood: Children of Earth, which I reviewed here.

I don’t use the word “masterpiece” lightly. It’s a difficult accomplishment to manage in a general public prime-time TV format, especially within the confines of an existing TV show with existing characters and relationships. But Children of Earth is that good, it really is. Not only is it pure science fiction –something the actual nominees dance around– but it’s poignant, heartbreaking, terrifying and exhilirating.

A big raspberry to the Hugo people for omitting Children of Earth. As compensation, let’s inaugurate the first annual Skiffy.ca TV award for the best science fiction dramatic short form. I hereby award it, without hesitation, to Russell Davies for his –wait for it– masterpiece in Torchwood: Children of Earth.

As some of you are aware, I’m the new editor of the national newsletter of the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB). The first issue with me as editor was just published this morning. The newsletter is only available to paying members, but I am reproducing the first feature article here:

—

Nothing To Do With Skin
By Raywat Deonandan

I remember well the first time I saw an epidemiologist on a movie or TV show. It was the creepy 1995 John Carpenter remake of the classic British horror flick, Village of the Damned. In the film, Christopher Reeve heroically tries to understand why all of his town’s children are blonde and demonic and possibly alien. At one point, the entire town goes unconscious simultaneously, long enough to attract the attention of the CDC (Centres for Disease Control), who send an epidemiologist to investigate.

A sveldt Kirstie Alley plays Dr. Susan Verner, a tough no-nonsense outbreak investigator who arrives –get this—brandishing a badge and a gun and leading a battalion of policemen. Ahhh, thought I, this is the career for me! Aliens, guns, badges, excitement, action… why doesn’t every young person want to be an epidemiologist?

A more serious portrayal of the outbreak investigation aspect of epidemiology was presented in the 1995 film, Outbreak, in which Dustin Hoffman played a military epidemiologist studying a new, weaponized type of haemorrhagic fever. He not only carried a gun, but also had a helicopter! The famous stills from the film include Hoffman in the biocontainment “spacesuit” that so many lay people now falsely associate with epidemiology. I’ve been trying to buy one on eBay ever since.

And, really, this is the crux of society’s misunderstanding of our science: their conflation of epidemiology with virology and other bench sciences. We all have stories of being introduced at parties as an epidemiologist, and being met with uncomfortable silence, or worse, medical questions about skin rashes. For the last time, epidemiology and dermatology are different sciences! (I’ve been toying for some time with the idea of writing an epidemiology-for-the-masses manifesto called, “Nothing To Do With Skin”!)

A former professor of mine was once held at the US border as inspectors searched her luggage for “possible dangerous insects” after she self-identified as an epidemiologist. All the border guard could hear, apparently, was “entomology”. And I’m surprised that people don’t regularly ask me about the origins of words. (That’s an etymology joke, by the way.)

Now, Village of the Damned and Outbreak were both released over a decade ago. In the interim, we’ve seen real epidemiologists all over the mainstream media in the wake of such emergencies as the SARS outbreak, the Walkerton disaster and last Fall’s H1N1 pandemic. Surely, the media has learned some sophistication in the mean time?

Well, one of my favourite current TV shows is Fringe, which is an American science-fiction program about weird science and its intersection with crime. In one episode, someone was systematically murdering “epidemiologists” by infecting them with a virus that that grows to the size of your head. Yes, a single virus the size of your head. Leave aside the fact that such a thing would physically have to be multi-cellular, and therefore not a virus, and we’re left with the disappointing realization that once more the media has confused epidemiology with a bench science; because every murder victim on the list of “epidemiologists” turns out to actually be a virologist or microbiologist.

Yes, I know that some epidemiologists actually are lab scientists, as well. And even more epidemiologists are also physicians. But most are not, at least not in this country. So who is responsible for the failure of society to appreciate the role and contribution of the population epidemiologist? The lowly cubicle jockey with his SAS licence and penchant for odds ratios needs his day in the sun.

Our contributions are profound and dramatic, after all. It was epidemiologists who figured out how to address AIDS at the population level, long before the HIV virus was discovered. It was epidemiologists who eradicated smallpox from the face of the Earth. It’s epidemiologists who regularly figure out where governments should best apply their dwindling health care dollars, and which vaccines to manufacture, and whether something that appears serious really is serious. But you know the drill; I’m preaching to the converted here.

Maybe the responsibility is ours? Maybe we need to engage the world more openly and actively and push for our worth to be acknowledged and our function accurately portrayed? I recall fondly one of my favourite New Yorker cartoons, in which a party hostess is congratulated by her friend, “And it was so typically brilliant of you to have invited an epidemiologist.”

Well, I thought I was doing my part some years ago. I advised a script-writer for the Canadian TV show ReGenesis on some protocols for outbreak investigation and infection control, in order to make the content of the show more reflective of real life. ReGenesis is (supposedly, I’ve never watched it) about bioterrorism and the brave, shiny and young crime fighters and scientists who take on global biological evildoers.

To thank me, the writers created an extremely minor character who would be an epidemiologist and who would be named after me. This new, accurately portrayed Dr. Deonandan would only appear in one or two episodes, but would at last be a fairly representative example of Canadian epidemiology. Better yet, I was promised, she would be female and really quite attractive.

As an enterprising, self-obsessed, heterosexual man, I began to wonder whether I could engineer a new DSM diagnosis, based on me, for someone who is sexually attracted to his own fictional portrayal on television. Some sort of “trans-media narcissism”?

Imagine my disappointment when the Dr. Deonandan of TV turned out to be, not only male, and not only a physician, but a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon-epidemiologist. I’m sure such a thing does exist, and I’m sure they are superstar intellects who do extraordinary niche research. But it’s not exactly the representative portrayal of the population epidemiologist I was hoping for.

Sigh.

So what’s the lesson here? I’m not sure that there is one, except that maybe we should never expect our media to accurately portray any profession and any aspect of science. And that maybe we epidemiologists need to take a more active role in promoting the details of our work, responsibilities, skills and accomplishments to greater society.