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The deadline for nominating works for a Prix Aurora Award is fast approaching. Today is the day when mail-in ballots must be postmarked by, and the deadline for online nominations is February 15.
The Aurora Awards, for the best Canadian works of science fiction and fantasy, are nominated and voted on by fans. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident can nominate up to three works or individuals in a range of categories in both English and French. The five works with the most nominations go on the final ballot and are voted on by members of CanVention, the annual national SF convention. It costs nothing to nominate but there is a fee for voting on the final ballot. The mail-in and on-line nomination forms are here.
My novel Marseguro (DAW Books) won the Aurora Award for best long-form work in English last year, and its sequel, Terra Insegura, is eligible this year. You can read the first two chapters of Terra Insegura (or listen to me read them) online here.
If you consider my work worthy of a nomination this year, and you’re a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, I hope you’ll take the time to do so. But I hope you’ll also take the time to nominate others. There’s a partial list of other eligible work at the Canadian SF database.
Remember, nominating is free! And it only takes a couple of minutes.
“Spray-on liquid glass” sounds like a product you’d see advertised at two o’clock in the morning in an infomercial.
It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.”
Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal name, which is “SiO2 ultra-thin layering,” but that’s hard to type, so I’m going to stick with “spray-on liquid glass.”
Besides, that’s exactly what it is: an extremely thin layer of glass that can be sprayed onto…well, just about anything.
Though it was invented in Turkey, the patent for spray-on liquid glass is held by the German company Nanopool.
It consists of almost pure silicon dioxide, a.k.a. silica, extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on what kind of surface is to be coated: the water-based versions are good for absorbent surfaces such as stone, wood and fabrics, while the ethanol-based versions are suitable for metal, glass, plastic and painted surfaces. There are no other additives: a bottle of liquid glass contains only water or ethanol, and molecules of silica. And not too surprisingly (since silica is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust), the coating is non-toxic and environmentally harmless.
The glass binds to the surface through quantum forces that come into play at the extremely small scale of these tiny glass particles. The coating is only about 100 nanometers thick–that’s only 1/500th the width of a human hair.
An article in the June, 2009, issue of the U.K. magazine Cleanroom Technology has a pretty complete list of the coating’s benefits.
First of all, it’s flexible, meaning it can be used to coat, not just hard surfaces like countertops and sinks, but fabric, conveyor belts, medical devices such as endoscopes, and more.
It’s highly durable, able to withstand tens of thousands of cleaning cycles, and heat tolerant, unaffected by temperatures as low as -150 C and as high as 450 C. It also resists both acid and alkaline substances.
It doesn’t kill bacteria, but it also doesn’t provide them with a friendly surface to attach themselves to and multiply. Wash a coated surface with hot water, and the bacteria are wiped away more effectively than you can achieve with bleach on an uncoated surface (as tests in an Austrian cheese-packaging plant have proven).
It’s so thin that it’s invisible to the human eye and can’t be felt; while it’s slippery at the micro level, at the macro level (our level), it isn’t. In fact, since bacteria can be so easily cleaned off of it, a coated shower floor would probably be less slippery, because of the lack of bacteria-produced biofilms.
The stuff is easy to apply: even large areas such as floors, walls and windows can be coated with it in minutes, and no special equipment is needed. And finally (and even more amazingly), it’s cheap: the cost to cover a square metre ranges from about 40 cents to $1.80.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Surely it must be full of little tiny glass particles that are going to get into our lungs and cause asbestos-fibre like problems?
Nope. The coating contains no discrete or potentially harmful engineered nanoparticles.
Spray-on liquid glass is already available in Germany for domestic use, for about $8.50 a bottle. In the home, it could conceivably make existing cleaning products obsolete, since hot water would do the job chemicals are doing now. It could be used in the oven, bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and on almost any other surface, and the coating is expected to last about a year with normal use.
Outside, the uses are endless. A silk shirt coated with it would shrug off a spilled glass of red wine. Stone coated with it could be more easily cleaned of graffiti. Seeds sprayed with it are protected from fungal and bacterial attacks and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds. Wood treated with it has survived undamaged after being buried in a termite mound for nine months.
A Lancashire hospital has had “very promising” results using it as a coating for everything from equipment to medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.
It sounds amazing.
But it also still sounds like a 2 a.m. infomercial product.
I guess time will tell.
For years, we’ve been turning crops such as corn, wheat and sugar beets into fuel, using yeast to convert sugar into alcohol.
But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.
(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)
A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?
There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.
A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.
One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”
That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.
The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.
E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.
The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.
Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.
Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.
There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.
There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.
Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.
Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.
As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”
What do you think?
…has already shown up online, even though it won’t appear in print until tomorrow. This is the first time I’ve seen something I’ve written pop up that far ahead of the ink-on-paper version, though maybe I just haven’t noticed until now.
The review begins:
I confess that I went into the opening night performance of Marion Bridge at Globe Theatre feeling skeptical.
The premise, after all, sounds like the set-up to a joke: “A nun, an actress and a soap-opera addict walk into a kitchen …”
Not only that, the fact the three are sisters home together — in Cape Breton, no less — for the first time in years because their mother is dying made me fear I faced a turgid evening of stereotypical CanLit dysfunctional-family angst.
But thanks to Daniel MacIvor’s sharp writing, unexpected story twists, and above all top-notch performances, Marion Bridge won me over.
Parents (I don’t think I’m giving away any parental secrets here) worry about peer pressure–not least because parents remember how much their behavior was influenced by peers when they were young.
The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing.
As the Bible puts it, “Evil companions corrupt good morals.” And other kinds of companions can have other effects.
For instance, an analysis of 12,067 people that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 revealed that you are more likely to be obese if your best friend is obese. (Overstuffed siblings or spouses also makes a difference, but the greatest negative effect comes from fat friends.)
To a certain extent, it seems, obesity is a kind of societal disease, rather like the mysterious fainting disorders Victorian women seemed to be heir to, or the bizarre disorder koro, which in South China convinces men that their genitals are shrinking inward and they will die once they disappear.
Which they don’t, of course, but the affliction is real even if the symptoms are imagined.
High anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia are also contagious, and if you believe all these things are being foisted upon us by a secret government agency, perhaps you have fallen prey to another contagious state of mind, paranoia.
But not all social contagions are bad.
Back around Christmas of 2008 I wrote a column on the discovery that happiness is contagious, spreading rather like influenza. It seemed a particularly fitting column for the holiday season…and the newest research along those lines seems particularly fitting for a post-holiday column, because now comes word that self-control is also contagious.
At the University of Georgia, psychology professor Michelle vanDellen and colleagues were able to measure the effect in the laboratory, through a variety of studies over two years.
In one, they randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. They found that those thinking about a friend with good self-control squeezed a handgrip (a standard method of measuring self-control, since you have to force yourself to keep squeezing it as your hand gets more and more tired) longer than those who were asked to think about a friend who had poor self-control.
In a second test, 71 volunteers were again randomly assigned to either watch other people exert self-control by choosing to eat a carrot rather than a cookie when presented with both options, or fail to exert self-control by eating a cookie rather than a carrot. The mere act of watching those acts of good and bad self-control altered the volunteers’ performances on a later test of self-control.
In a third experiment, 42 volunteers were randomly assigned to list friends with both good and bad self-control. Then, as they were working their way through a computerized test designed to measure self-restraint, the computer would flash, for just 10 milliseconds–too fast to be read, but enough to bring the names to mind–the names of those friends. Volunteers who were flashed the name of a self-disciplined friend did better on the test than those who were flashed the name of a non-self-disciplined friend.
VanDellen believes that the influence is great enough that hanging around with friends who exhibit self-control could help us keep from eating an extra high-calorie snack at a party, or drive us to go to the gym for a workout at the end of a hard day at work. It’s only a nudge, but sometimes a nudge is all that’s needed.
And just why are we so susceptible to peer pressure?
Because we’re primates, and, as science writer Meredith F. Small puts it, “A primate’s day is all about everyone else.”
Chimpanzees and other primates spend all their time touching each other, keeping track of each other, and building interpersonal relationships…and in a very real sense, so do we. We are constantly influenced by those around us…and influence them, in turn.
Rather alarming, if you ask me. I think I’ll just sit in my office from now on and not talk to anyone.
I wouldn’t want to catch anything.
I’m a full-time writer, but not, alas, a fabulously wealthy and/or successful one. James Cameron isn’t bugging me about film rights; Oprah isn’t plugging me on TV; fans aren’t lugging great stacks of my books around, chasing me for autographs.
It’s easy, when you’re one of the little guys in any creative field, be it fashion, books, movies or music, to envy the runaway successes and wonder what, for example, Stephenie Meyer’s got that you ain’t got. Are her books, objectively, truly so much better than everyone else’s? Or, more to the point, than mine?
Probably not, suggests recent research: in fact, runaway successes are runaway successes in part because they’re runaway successes…and efforts to figure out what “the next big thing” will be are largely wasted, because there’s no way to know.
That’s because people simply don’t make decisions as independently as we like to think.
A recent research project at Columbia University, led by Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik, showed just how big an impact social influence can have on the popularity of something.
Through a website called Music Lab, the two registered more than 14,000 participants for their study. These participants were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of.
Some participants were only shown the names of the songs and bands. Others also saw how many times other participants had already downloaded the songs. Those who could see how often songs were downloaded were further split into eight separate “social-influence worlds”: they could only see the number of downloads a song received from other members of their “world.” This allowed the popularity of songs to evolve independently, eight times over.
If people made their choices completely independently, the scientists predicted, the most successful songs would draw about the same market share among both the participants who saw only band and song names and those who also saw how often the songs had been downloaded. As well, they predicted, the same songs, the “best songs,” would become hits in all eight social-influence worlds.
Instead, the most popular songs were much more popular, and the least popular songs less popular, in the social-influence worlds than in the independent group. Not only that, different songs became hits in each of the separate worlds.
This is where the idea of “cumulative advantage” comes in. Initially, all the songs were equal. But random choice by the participants soon meant that some songs were downloaded more than others. And once that happened, more participants started downloading them than the other songs, because they thought there must be a reason for their popularity–even though that popularity arose mostly by chance.
It may offer some slight solace to those who cling to their belief that they can’t be swayed by mass opinion that perceived quality did play some role in popularity. When downloads across all eight social-influence worlds were added together, songs the participants rated as higher in quality–“good” songs–had higher market share on average than “bad” ones. But the effect was miniscule. One song squarely in the middle of the quality rankings was number one in one social-influence world and number 40 in another one.
Or, as Watts put it in his New York Times article about his research, “A song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50-percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.”
All of this indicates that things don’t become popular solely because they meet some previously unsuspected public desire or somehow match up with the public’s changing tastes. Instead, things become popular almost by chance, and then their very popularity changes the public’s taste. The market, in other words, influences itself.
Or, as the publisher of Lynne Truss’s bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves put it when asked to explain its success, “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
I’m not entirely convinced, so I’d like all my readers to help me conduct an experiment. I’d like each of you to go out and buy a dozen–better yet, two dozen–better yet, 100!–copies of my science fiction books Marseguro and Terra Insegura, just to see if we can artificially drive them to the top of the bestseller charts.
I’ll compile the royalties…um, I mean, the results…and report back just as soon as I can.
Well, if Oprah and Cameron will quit pestering me long enough, that is.
…is in today’s Regina Leader Post. It begins:
The 18th-century French poet Jacques Delille famously noted that while we can choose our friends, “Fate chooses our relatives.”
More than one family has fractured because siblings discover they have nothing in common with each other … which is exactly what has happened to the family in Marion Bridge, Globe Theatre’s next mainstage production, running Jan. 20 to Feb. 6.
Written by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, Marion Bridge is set in Cape Breton, where the three MacKeigan sisters have come together to care for their dying mother.
Aside from their last names, they have nothing in common. Theresa (Laura Condlin) is a nun. Agnes (Liz Gilroy) is a struggling actor.
And then there’s the soap opera-obsessed youngest, Louise, played by Judy Wensel, a recent graduate of the University of Regina’s drama department.
“She’s the only sister who still lives in the home where they all grew up,” Wensel explains. “She feels a bit of frustration. They’re in her space. But over the course of the play they find some common ground and they become sisters again. They lost sight of how family is important, and by the end of it they discover that again.”
Music today is ubiquitous, both in public spaces like malls, elevators and offices and in the very private space between an individual’s ears, courtesy of personal music players.
But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.
Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?
Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.
As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”
“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”
This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.
It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).
Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.
The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”
Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.
To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)
All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.
Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”
Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.
Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.
Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.
Are you a freelance writer in Saskatchewan (or at least knowledgeable about Saskatchewan)? Then it could be I’ve got work for you.
Here’s the release I’ve been sending out today seeking additional writers for the magazines I edit, Fine Lifestyles Regina and the about-to-launch Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon:
***
Edward Willett, editor of Fine Lifestyles Regina, continues to seek freelance writers to work on the magazine, and is now also seeking writers for Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon, a sister publication launching this spring.
He’s looking for two kinds of writing: features (longer stories not tied to a particular advertiser) and advertorial (typically business profiles; these are part of a an advertising package purchased by a client and subject to the client’s approval).
On the feature side, he’ll be looking for or assigning lead articles for each of these sections:
- Wheels
- Style
- Dining, Entertainment and Arts
- Sports, Recreation and Leisure
- Health and Wellness
- House, Home and Property
- Business, Financial and Legal
Feature articles are typically about 1,275 words. Advertorial can vary, but typically runs either 425 words (one page) or 850 (two pages) with only a few going longer.
Rates start at 10 cents a word, but can rise with experience. The magazine also pays $25 per photo used.
For features, the magazines buy one-time print rights and non-exclusive web rights (the magazine appears in facsimile online). Although most stories will be specific to one of the two cities, those with a more general focus may run in both magazines. Advertorial is work-for-hire: the magazine buys all rights.
Past issues of Fine Lifestyles Regina can be viewed at http://www.finelifestylesregina.com/keyw
ord/Magazine/.
***
If you’re interested, you can contact me at edward(at)edwardwillett.com.
You can view the most recent issue of the magazine I edit, Fine Lifestyles Regina, in its entirety online.
I recommend pages 124 and 125, which is where you’ll find the new wine column my wife and I are co-writing, “The Willetts on Wine.”
I’m also going to be editing the new sister publication, Fine Lifestyles Saskatoon, launching this spring.
(As we approach the release of the next issue, I’ll post “The Willetts on Wine” and my cover-story interview with ex-NHL player Mike Sillinger on this blog, as well.)
“Bleak and beautiful” is a nice phrase. Even nicer when it’s applied to my DAW SF novel Marseguro, which is what happened today in Strange Horizon’s review of 2009 by its corps of reviewers…one of whom is my fellow DAW author Kari Sperring (author of Living With Ghosts), who said this:
The Hugos were rather predictable, but the Canadian Prix Aurora went to Edward Willett’s bleak and beautiful Marseguro, a novel which has not received the attention and acclaim it deserves.
I would never be so forward as to apply the phrase “bleak and beautiful” to my own work, but it’s nice to know Kari feels that way about it!
As for the part about Marseguro not receiving the attention and acclaim it deserves, well…every writer feels that way about his or her work, so I’d be obviously lying if I didn’t say I agreed with her about that! : )
Blogger Shaun M. Duke, who really liked Terra Insegura, has chosen its cover, by Stephan Martiniere, as the winner of his award for best cover of 2009.
I agree with him, of course. It really is a terrific cover. Shaun writes:
The artwork for Terra Insegura is stunning, as are all of Martiniere’s paintings. A big plus is the cover actually matches what is in the book. What more can I say? Just look at it!
However, I must take issue with some of Shaun’s other comments in his list of awards for 2009, particularly the notion that you should refuse to buy books from someone whose opinions you disagree with, a position Shaun espouses with regard to John C. Wright and Orson Scott Card.
Buy or don’t buy books because you like or don’t like them, not because you do or don’t like something the author said. (Same thing holds for movies and music. Lots of great actors, musicians and artists are awful, awful people…but their work is still tremendous and still capable of offering value to the viewer or listener.)
In my own case, I don’t agree with anyone about everything–and the more strongly someone expresses an opinion the more likely I am to want to argue with it. Many, many writers whose work I enjoy hold political opinions I find ludicrous, annoying, and potentially harmful to society if held by enough people, but so what? Their work, as committed to the page, stands or falls on its own merits, as far as I’m concerned.
I suspect Shaun wouldn’t agree with many of my opinions (I’m a liberally progressive libertarian conservative, or possibly a conservatively progressive liberal libertarian, if you must know), but he likes my books. That’s because I mostly keep political opinions to myself, or only share them with very close friends, and as a result he’s probably unaware of all the things we disagree on.
Why don’t I talk about politics more? Because the waters of political discourse are poisonous, soul-sucking whirlpools today. Express a strong opinion on either side of any contoversial topic, and invite a deluge of nasty emails, personal attacks, and name-calling. And to what end? You’ll change no one’s mind, and (if you’re a writer) you’re likely to alienate potential readers.
I’d like readers of all political persuasions to read my books. They can disagree with them, hate them, love them, whatever–but I want that decision to be made based on what’s in the books, not what I might have posted elsewhere on, say, abortion, gun control, gay rights, or the abysmal record of this or that politician.
I’m glad there are plenty of writers who don’t share my reticence and are willing to jump into political discussion with both feet. I enjoy reading many of them. But I don’t plan to be one of them any time soon…and I don’t plan to boycott anyone for their expression of opinion, no matter how much I might personally disagree with it, either.
Put on a few extra pounds over Christmas? Wonder why you feel compelled to eat half a box of chocolates half an hour after finishing your second plate of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy? Feel a little guilty?
Well, new research offers clues to one of the most baffling aspects of the eternal battle of the bulge: why we keep eating even when we’re full.
Short version: blame your brain.
When you’re hungry, food looks more appealing than when you’re not: hence the old adage about never shopping on an empty stomach.
Previous research has suggested that ghrelin, a hormone the body produces when it’s short of calories, may act on the brain to trigger this behavior. Now new research suggests that this same hormone–increased levels of which have also been linked to the pleasurable feelings people get from alcohol or cocaine–may also come into play to trigger overeating.
Or, as Dr. Jeffrey Zigman, assistant professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern, puts it, “There may be situations where we are driven to seek out and eat very rewarding foods, even if we’re full, for no other reason than our brain tells us to.”
Rewards, in psychiatric terms, are things which make us feel better: they’re pleasurable, they motivate us to work to obtain them, and they even help reorganize our memory so we remember how to get them.
To discover why people who are already stuffed with food nevertheless go ahead and order a massive dessert, Dr. Zigman and colleagues conducted two tests.
First, they evaluated whether fully sated mice preferred a room where they had previously found high-fat food over one that had only offered ordinary bland mouse-chow. They found that when they gave the mice ghrelin, they strongly preferred the high-fat room. Those that were not given ghrelin showed no preference.
That appears to indicate that, thanks to ghrelin, the mice remembered how much they had enjoyed the high-fat food and where to get it. Even though the room was now empty, they still associated it with something rewarding.
Blocking the action of ghrelin reduced the amount of time the mice spent in the high-fat room.
In the second test, the researchers watched to see how long mice would continue to stick their noses into a hole to receive a pellet of high-fat food. The animals that received ghrelin did so far longer than their non-ghrelinated cousins.
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “I am not a mouse. I am a human being!”
Well, sure, but there’s a reason mice are always being used as medical stand-ins for humans in laboratory tests: we have the same type of brain-cell connections, the same type of hormones, and the pleasure centers of our brains are similarly structured.
Does this let you completely off the overeating hook? No, because we are capable of resisting these kinds of urges: we do it all the time, or else we’d never get anything else accomplished. So even though the dessert looks tempting, you don’t have to eat it…but it does take a conscious effort, and sometimes that’s in short supply.
Brian Wansink, a behaviorial scientist at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, has listed a few strategies to avoid giving in to ghrelin’s urges and eating unconsciously.
For one, use smaller plates and serving bowls. The bigger the plate is, the larger the servings tend to be, 25 to 28 percent larger on average.
Also, don’t watch TV while you eat. When your conscious mind is distracted, your unconscious mind takes over. People watching TV typically eat 40 percent more food.
And finally, don’t go back for seconds. People at a buffet who put everything they’re going to eat on their first plate, dessert included, eat 14 percent less than those who put smaller portions on their plate, then go back for more.
I know, I know. For this Christmas, all this information is too little, too late.
But it’s almost New Year’s, a time for regret and resolution.
And if you fall off of the eating-less wagon in a few weeks…well, tell everyone you can’t help it, you have a hormonal condition.
The fault lies in our ghrelin, not ourselves, that we are gluttons.
Back in August, I had the great good fortune and honour to win the Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English for my novel Marseguro (that’s me holding it at left, alongside my editor and publisher, Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books). The Prix Aurora Awards honour the best of Canadian science fiction and fantasy from the previous year. In 2010, the Aurora Awards will be handed out at Key-Con in Winnipeg in May…and nominations have just opened.
Any Canadian citizen, whether or not they live in Canada, or any permanent resident of Canada may nominate for the Prix Aurora Awards. The categories have been re-named slightly and are now Best Novel In English, Best Novel In French, Best Short-Form Work In English, Best Short-Form Work In French, Best Work In English (Other), Best Work In French (Other), Artistic Achievement, Fan Achievement (Fanzine), Fan Achievement (Organizational), and Fan Achievement (Other).
My novel Terra Insegura, sequel to Marseguro, is eligible this year in the Best Novel in English category, and I’d be honored if you think it worthy of nomination, but whether you do or not, if you read Canadian science fiction and fantasy, I hope you’ll consider nominating your favorite works from the past year.
You can do so online or via printed-and-mailed PDF form, here.
With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore
’Twas the nocturnal time of the preceding day
To the day we call Christmas (which is, by the way,
Just a modern twist on the eons-old fight
To use feast and fire to end winter’s night).
And all through our dwelling (a.k.a. the house),
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
(Mus musculus—really a terrible pest,
But even a pest needs a bit of a rest.)
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there
(Though that old-fashioned chimney’s so energy-poor
That next year I’m making him use the front door!).
Our genetic descendants lay snug in their beds,
While sucrose-based snack foods danced jigs in their heads,
And mamma in her kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap
(You wear hats to bed when you lack central heat;
It helps keep you warm from your head to your feet),
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
(I’m not really jumpy, but a noise in the night
Sets off animal instincts to flee or to fight.)
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash
(Well, not really flew, it was more like a dash—
And my wife didn’t wake even after the crash).
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave a luster of midday to objects below
(Which makes sense, since the moon gets its glow from the sun,
Which means moonlight and sunlight in one sense are one!);
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer
(Rangifer tarandus, you could call them, too—
Here in Canada we know them as caribou).
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.
(St. Nick is the patron of Russia, you know;
He was born fifteen hundred or more years ago!)
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came
(As fast as a peregrine diving on game),
And since his old sleigh had no window or door,
He shouted their names o’er the slipstream’s loud roar:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!”
(An interesting mixture of names old and new—
Astronomy-biology-mythology stew!)
“To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall!
Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky
(That’s ’cause air piles up when it meets with a wall,
And the leaves, weighing little, rise too, and don’t fall),
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys—and St. Nicholas too.
And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof
(Not to mention the cracking of each little shingle:
Reindeer weigh quite a lot, as does dear Mr. Kringle!).
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
(I can only assume, since his legs didn’t crack,
That friction ’twixt him and the bricks held him back.)
He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot
(And since so much creosote blackened his hide,
I no longer fear carbon mono-oxide);
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedlar just opening his pack.
His eyes, how they twinkled (reflecting the light)!
His dimples, how merry (one to left, one to right)!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry
(I thought for a sec he’d been drinking my sherry);
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
(And did you know that white hair is not really white?
It looks white because it’s transparent to light.)
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
(We must forgive Santa this unhealthy sin;
He was born before all of the studies were in.)
He had a broad face and a little round belly
That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
(It’s amazing, you know, that he’s lived for so long,
What with all of the things that he eats that are wrong!)
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed, when I saw him, in spite of myself.
(Laughter benefits heart, lungs and brain, it’s been said;
Maybe laughter’s why cheerful old Santa’s not dead!)
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
(Body language, to Santa, is nothing unique;
He speaks every language, from Zulu to Greek.)
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
(Apparently Nick spends his off-season time
At a school in Nepal, where he’s learned how to climb.)
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle
(Its surface is large, but it’s so very light,
That the slightest of breezes can make it take flight);
But I heard him exclaim, as he vanished away,
With his anti-grav reindeer and miniature sleigh,
“Though I may not be real, in the physical sense,
“Though I may not have mass, and I may not be dense,
“Though it’s true, scientifically, this isn’t right,
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”
It’s almost Christmas, and Christmas means food: turkey, dressing, candy canes, oranges, cranberries, chocolate, and, of course, pizza.
(OK, maybe pizza is not the most traditional of foods, but it’s still a popular holiday choice, so humor me.)
Pizzas normally come pre-sliced. The question is, and I’m sure you’ve asked yourself this a lot, “How do we eat this pre-sliced pizza in a way that ensures nobody gets an unfair share?”
That’s the question, as New Scientist reported on December 11, that Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann kept asking themselves when they used to share pizza for lunch at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. They kept getting into discussions about the mathematics of slicing it up while the pizza itself congealed on their plates.
Here’s the problem that bothered them: If the waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but all the cuts from edge to edge cross at a single point, and the angles between all the adjacent cuts are identical, will two people taking turns eating adjacent pieces get equal shares by the time they’ve worked their way around the whole pizza…and if not, who will get more?
Like I said, it’s a problem that has baffled most of us at some time or other…hasn’t it?
Well, whether it has or hasn’t, it baffled them, and after years of work, the two mathematicians have arrived at the solution that works in all cases.
It’s that “all cases” that makes it special. It’s fairly easy to see that if a pizza is sliced just once, and the cut doesn’t pass right through the centre, the piece that includes the centre is larger and hence the person who eats it gets more.
A pizza cut twice, into four parts, works the same way: whomever eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. After that, as long as there are an even number of cuts and the diners alternate taking pieces, they end up with the same amount of pizza each.
But if there are an odd number of cuts, things get more complicated. If you cut the pizza with 3, 7, 11, 15… cuts, and no cut goes through the centre, then whomever gets the slice that includes the centre gets more pizza. But if you use 5, 9, 13, 17… cuts, then the person who gets the centre ends up with less.
There’s been a “pizza theorem” that postulates this since the late 1960s (naturally). The problem has been rigorously proving it.
That’s what Mabry and Deiermann achieved. First they came up with elegant solutions to the “three-cut problem” and the “five-cut problem.” They thought they could just proceed from there, but things got messy (sorry) as they cut the pizza more times, or, as New Scientist puts it, “the solution still included a complicated set of sums of algebraic series involving tricky powers of trigonometric functions,” summed up more succinctly as “ugly.”
So Mabry and Deiermann continued to work on it. For 11 more years. (Well, they did other things, too, but they kept revisiting it from time to time.)
The breakthrough came in 2006. Mabry was on a vacation in southern Germany, where, he says, “I had a nice hotel room, a nice cool environment, and no computer…I started thinking about it again and that’s when it all started working.” He rewrote the algebra in more elegant form, discovered there were some simple-looking sums in the middle of it, went searching to see if anyone had already worked them out, and discovered a 1999 paper that referenced a mathematical statement from 1979 that showed them what they needed to do to flesh out the proof.
If that seems like a lot of work for a trivial problem, just consider the important practical applications of it:
OK, there aren’t any. But, says Mabry, “It’s a funny thing about some mathematicians. We often don’t care if the results have applications because the results themselves are so pretty.”
Which makes this a better Christmas topic than you might have thought when I first mentioned pizza. Christmas is, among many other things, a celebration of beauty.
You may not be able to hang a mathematical proof on your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful in its own way.
In his New Works gallery on his website, Hugo Award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere has included the cover of my DAW SF novel Terra Insegura, minus the text (title, my name, DAW logo) that clutters up the actual book. It’s a stunner! And I literally got a chill looking at it when I realized for the very first time that, down at the very bottom, there are human skulls littering the spaceport pavement…
The Winter 2009/2010 issue of Fine Lifestyles Regina magazine is out, all 260 full-colour glossy pages of it. This is the second issue I’ve edited, and I also wrote several articles for it, including the cover story, an interview with just-retired NHL player Mike Sillinger, a Regina native who’s now moved back to the city with his family. As I did with the Premier Brad Wall interview from the last issue, I’ll post that to my blog once we’re getting close to the next issue.
Also included in this issue: the first ever wine column by my wife and I, called “The Willetts on Wine.” (And, yes, that is the name of our sadly inactive wine blog, but now that we’ve got this column, I’ll have to see about firing that up again on its own site.)
The magazine is being delivered this week to various locations around the city. Keep your eyes open for it! At some point, it will also show up in facsimile form at the Fine Lifestyles Regina website.
Specifically, I’ve sold The Singing Water, a modern-day YA fantasy with Arthurian elements, set mostly in Saskatchewan, to Montreal’s Lobster Press, a Canadian publisher of award-winning children’s books. Best of all, they’re planning to bring out the entire five-book series I’ve got planned, collectively entitled Excalibur Reforged.
The Singing Water is scheduled to kick things off next fall; which means my first couple of months of 2010 will be spent on revising it.
I’m very excited to be returning to YA fantasy and looking forward to working with Lobster Press.
With this sale, I’ll have at least five books coming out next year: my history of Saskatchewan surveyors, my biographies of Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol for Enslow Publishers, Magebane, my first adult fantasy under my Lee Arthur Chane nom de plume, for DAW, and The Singing Water.
Whew! Hope my typing fingers hold out.
Time to re-roast an old chestnut, a column I wrote several years that has become fresh in my mind due to the successful completion last night of Operation Dress-the-Tree (to be followed in a few weeks, of course, by Operation Curse-the-Tree as the needle-shedding skeleton is hauled out to the alley).
Is there scientific interest to be found in ol’ Tannenbaum? Indeed there is!
Consider, for instance a Christmas tree’s incredible capacity to “drink” water. A tree may slurp up six or seven litres when you first put it up, and as much as a litre or two a day thereafter. This seems like strange behavior for something that’s dead.
But of course, the tree doesn’t realize that it’s dead. As far as it’s concerned, it’s still alive, but increasingly thirsty. The roots that used to bring so much water into the tree (because of their vast surface area) don’t seem to be functioning any more. The tree has to make do with the tubes inside the trunk itself, and they can’t bring in enough water to keep the tree alive. It will eventually dry out and die, but in the meantime, however, it does its best to meet the water demands of its needles.
All of which is shameless anthropomorphizing: it’s really a very passive process. Trees draw water up into themselves because of evaporation. The needles constantly lose water to the relatively dry atmosphere. The cells in those needles contain large cavities called vacuoles, designed to hold water. As water evaporates out of the cell, the cell draws more water into the vacuole from other cells deeper inside the tree. Eventually this leads to the tubules, like tiny pipelines, in the trunk.
Even a completely dead tree with no needles left could draw some water up into itself by an even more passive process called capillarity, the tendency of water to “crawl” into tiny spaces. Water molecules attract each other and are attracted to other substances. If you stick a fine glass tube into a supply of water, the water will crawl up the tube; the leading edge of the water is attracted to the glass and it pulls the rest of the water up along with it. The water will climb to the height at which the molecular attraction exactly balances the force of gravity. The thinner the tube, the higher the water will travel. (This property of water is also why paper towels are able to soak up the water you spilled on the floor while trying to fill the Christmas tree stand.)
The Christmas tree probably originated in medieval Germany, and by the early 1800s had spread all over Northern Europe. Prince Albert of Saxony, Queen Victoria’s husband, brought the custom to England in 1841, and other German immigrants (albeit less distinguished) brought it to North America, where it caught on quickly.
Around 40 million trees are harvested every year in the U.S. and Canada, mostly from Christmas tree farms. A small to medium tree farm will harvest 10,000 trees. In total, some of the multinational giants harvest up to a million trees annually on plantations from North Carolina to Nova Scotia..
Nature rarely produces a perfect Christmas tree without some help. Trees can suddenly develop gaps or unsightly branches, so Christmas tree growers prune their trees every June from the age of three on, and cut off the bottom branches to give the trees “handles” long enough for tree stands.
Mature trees are usually cut in mid-November, then shipped, so the earlier you get your Christmas tree and get it into water, the fresher it’s likely to be.
The National Christmas Tree Association suggests three ways to test for freshness. First, bend a few needles and branches; they should both be springy. Then slip a few centimetres of a branch through your fingers. If the tree’s fresh, the needles should stay in place.
Finally, lift the tree and bang its trunk on the ground. If it’s fresh, it should only lose some brown inside needles and very few green outside ones.
Just be sure to conduct this final test before you decorate. The tinkling sound of expensive ornaments crashing to the floor is apparently not a reliable indicator of freshness.
