Playground Anthropology 101

In fifth grade, our class made little "autograph books" that we passed around and wrote little messages in to each other at the end of the year. Everyone had to sign everyone else's book per the teacher's mandate.

I still have that autograph book. A picture of the front cover appears below (It says "Yearbook" on the cover even though it wasn't really a yearbook, per se.):



That's supposed to be me, I guess, sitting at a desk. (Note the antennae -- this was drawn during my "perhaps I'm really a space alien" phase.)

One thing that still fills me with incredulity when I look at it is the number of notes admonishing me for my lack of interest in New Kids On the Block (a popular boy band in the late 1980s and early 1990s):







Someone else (a boy who once smacked me in the head with a metal baseball bat and generally gave me a hard time whenever he had the chance) wrote, "HOPE YOU FALL AND BREAK YOUR FACE, GEEK".



That was disturbing, to be sure, but somehow I found the repeated disdain of my tastes (disguised in most cases as chirpy "suggestions") just as unnerving.

Other than those, I mostly got the generic "Have A Great Summer", though the school psychologist did write, "I hope to see a happier girl in September!"



So, why am I posting this? Well, there's been plenty in the news over the past few months about bulling, about inclusion (or lack thereof) for autistic children, and generally about the constant struggle between those who already benefit from the status quo and those who don't.

I've not had the words to comment on specific news stories (and plenty of people wrote about most of them, expressing what needs to be said more articulately than I would have) for some reason, but I have been paying attention. And every time I see something like, say, what happened to Alex Barton (an autistic kindergartener who was "voted out" of his class by his teacher and classmates), I can't help but wonder when people are going to wake up about bullying.

Mind you, I still stand by my blog title despite the continued presence of bullying -- existence IS wonderful, and that is not something any bully can take away from me or anyone else who has known joy. Fifth and sixth grade were awful in a lot of ways, but I have never in my life not loved life!

However, I did have a feeling sometimes that I now see as a sign of something very wrong in the world, something which still proliferates in schools and playgrounds and other places. And that is the feeling that one is somehow undeserving of life or joy even if one knows where and how to find it.

Mind you, I do not spend all my time dwelling on slights from nearly twenty years ago now, and I do not write this with bitterness right now -- but it is still important, I think, to bring this kind of thing up.

Some of the bullying I experienced growing up was blatant and obvious (being smacked in the head with a bat, being chased and pelted with sticks and rocks, having my hair pulled out, being hit by rulers, being flicked in the eye with handkerchiefs, etc.).

However, some of it was a lot less obvious, at least to outside observers. And one of the prevailing themes in the "less obvious" abuse seemed to be the relentless insinuation that I somehow brought everything I "got" upon myself simply by being who I was. Essentially, I was given "conditions" for evading harassment: if only I'd "get over Star Wars" (and start to like New Kids on the Block!), I would become more acceptable. If only I convinced my parents to buy expensive brand sneakers, I would not be picked on for my shoes (my K-mart hiking boots weren't exactly a fashion hit, even though I quite liked them myself and was not ashamed of them at all). If only I would use proper slang, and not sound like I "read the dictionary for fun". Etc. Etc. Etc.

The net result of all this was that I spent years being ashamed to exist. When I felt and took joy in things (particularly in things I'd been told were grounds for harassment by other kids, or "unhealthy" by adults, such as my Star Wars obsession), it was a furtive joy. It has actually only been since graduating from college, really, that I've come to reconnect with the kind of joy I knew before bullying, and before people started trying to mark out some of my strongest traits as pathological nuisances or character flaws.

Certainly, I did have some bad habits and areas that I did benefit from being helped in while growing up -- I am not unhappy, for instance, that I was taught how to do things like brush my hair and wash my face properly when I was in junior high. It was still wrong for people to bully me on the basis of my self-care difficulties, but I want to make it clear that I am by no means against assisting people with obvious areas of real struggle (see bev's excellent post at Asperger Square 8 for more on this kind of thing).

What I am against is the widespread social acceptance of making people feel guilty for existing, and for presuming it's okay to harass them until they become more in line with a particular vision of what someone of their age/gender/etc. is "supposed" to look like. Even if it appears to "work", the person may lose many of their paths to joy and toward areas where they may find and develop their strengths. There are ways to help and work with and befriend people -- and to share your own joys with them -- without negating them as individuals. And these ways need to be explored early and often. Considering how many kids seem to have absorbed the "different people are broken versions of me" attitude by age 10 or earlier, it's clear that something that needs to happen isn't quite happening yet to the degree it ought to be.

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NOTE: I am fully aware that even the people who seemed the most "mean" growing up were (and are) people, and that for all I know, they've grown up into people who wouldn't bully a fly.

Hence, my intent in writing about childhood incidents is not to reduce any of my former classmates (or teachers, for that matter) into two-dimensional "characters" in my life's narrative -- that would not be fair to them, or me, or anyone else really, because people are never two-dimensional in real life. And besides, I don't think they were actually "villains" -- just kids caught up in a ridiculously cut-throat social environment, and (occasionally) teachers who didn't have a clue how to interpret kids like me or determine what was actually motivating us in our actions.

But just because stuff like that does tend to "fall out" of certain environments and historical contexts, doesn't mean it (or people's actions in the midst of those environments) cannot be pointed out and criticized. It is very difficult, after all, to work toward positive change without characterizing the obstacles in its way.

Hourglass II Blog Carnival Is Up!

The Hourglass II (August 2008) Biogerontology Blog Carnival is up at Ouroboros - Research in the biology of aging as of today.

Visit the links from Ouroboros to read all about such fascinating topics as the role of the endocrine system in aging, specifically-targeted cancer therapies reconfigured to attack sensecent cells, the relevance of cancer treatment developments to longevity medicine prospects, and cognitive training metrics. My own entry on goldfish care and longevity is also included, as I actually managed to get my submission in on time this month. :P

Anyway, for those readers interested in longevity, biogerontology, and everything in between, the Hourglass carnival is a good place to whet your appetite.

I will actually be hosting Hourglass IV here at Existence is Wonderful on October 14, so if you're one who enjoys learning and writing about longevity (whether from a scientific, philosophical, or even just a curiosity standpoint), please consider submitting a post!

EDIT: Of course there will be a September Hourglass carnival as well -- it will be hosted by Alvaro of SharpBrains. Watch for it!

The Tale of the Goldfish: Or, What I Learned from Nigel

Nigel joined my household on Christmas 2005. At that point in time he was only about an inch and a half long, and probably no more than a month old. My parents had given him to me thinking I might like to keep a fish at work on my desk, however, I decided to keep him home since I would not be able to feed him on weekends if I left him at work (and I doubted fish tanks would be allowed in the office to begin with).

Nigel - 3 months old

Two and a half years later, Nigel is still with us. He spends his days swimming merrily about in the tank, coming up with new and exciting ways to tear up the aquarium greenery while I'm at work. He's also responsive and interesting to watch in ways I admit I didn't anticipate seeing in a goldfish -- he always swims to the top of the tank as soon as I enter the kitchen in the morning, anticipating food, and when I've got my hand in the tank fixing the plants he's managed to uproot, he comes up and whacks me with his tail!

Anyway, the reason I've introduced Nigel here is not just because he's a really cool fish, but because he's a living example of (a) how seemingly "simple" factors can greatly affect longevity, and (b) how it is very easy for these factors to remain unknown until luck or circumstances bring them to light.

Nigel, 2.5 years old

Right on the first day I got Nigel, I told myself, "I am going to keep this fish alive as long as I possibly can". However, I almost lost him within the first 24 hours.

My parents had kept small tropical fish before that apparently do reasonably well in smallish tanks, and they didn't know a whole lot about goldfish either, so they'd gotten me a small tank for Nigel -- its capacity couldn't have been more than about a half gallon. When I first put Nigel into than tank, he'd seemed more or less happy, but by the next morning, I found him sitting practically motionless at the bottom! Even more frightening, his fins were turning black. Needless to say, a trip to the pet store for supplies (and hopefully some good advice) was definitely in order.

At the pet store, I explained the situation as best I could to the resident aquatic expert. My suspicions were confirmed: Nigel was indeed dying in the small tank. The motionlessness was due to lack of adequate oxygen, and the fin-blackening was due to ammonia buildup in the water (as goldfish excrete a lot of ammonia). In order to save Nigel, I needed to get him into a bigger tank as soon as possible.

I came home from the store that night with a 5 gallon tank, filter cartridges, a transfer net, two plants, and a nice big bag of gravel. That tank (and the 12 gallon I eventually replaced it with) had a filter pump as well, which would help circulate the water, removing waste and debris and helping oxygenate the water. I put Nigel into the 5 gallon tank a bit sooner than the instructions called for (you're supposed to let the aquarium "settle" first so that you're less likely to shock the fish), which was something of a risk, but at that point I knew he'd definitely die if I left him in the tiny tank any longer. Happily, he perked up immediately once in the larger tank, and within about a week, all the black had disappeared from his fins.

Relieved at Nigel's recovery, I went to the Internet to look up information on maximum goldfish lifespans. I recalled some friends of the family when I was growing up having two very large, very pale goldfish that were supposedly around 20 years old, but I'd presumed that to be an anomaly and possibly a record-breaking one. However, what I found was nothing less than shocking -- not only did goldfish commonly live 20 or more years when cared for correctly, but that some members of the carp family (e.g. koi) could live to be over two hundred years!

There's no way to tell, of course, how long Nigel will ultimately live -- but it's certainly going to be a lot longer than if I'd not had ready access to accurate information about goldfish physiology and care. Fish are also a lot more interesting than many people give them credit for, and in fact, some fish (which I wrote about in my article A Menagerie of Longevity a while back) could very well be the ultimate longevity champions of the animal kingdom. This is wonderful for them, but unfortunately doesn't tell us much about what interventions might pave the way for similar levels of longevity in warm-blooded primates such as ourselves. However, the situation still makes an interesting analogy.

The point Nigel's brush with death (and subsequent robust health following improvements to his tank setup) brought home for me was that animals and their surrounding environments are systems. In many respects, Nigel, the water in the tank, the aquarium plants, the filter, and the "bio-wheel" (a rotating filter element populated with "friendly" bacteria) can be viewed as a kind of super-organism.

Humans are also "super-organisms" in this sense, scaling from our internal environment which contains numerous symbiotic microorganisms (along with mechanical devices such as muscles and valves), up through our external environment which contains the air we breathe, the foods we eat, the water we drink, etc. And like goldfish and all other animals, we are limited and vulnerable in various ways on account of the very same mechanisms that allow us to live in the first place.

Our metabolic processes permit us to take in needed energy to support our bodies over time, and yet, these processes create byproducts (such as Advanced Glycation End products) that contribute toward unpleasant, serious, and even fatal disease later in life.

Our immune systems "police" our bodies to prevent destructive invaders from destroying us from within, and yet, over time, shifts in the percentages and raw numbers of certain immune cells make it more and more difficult to fight off infection.

Our circulatory systems are obviously wonderful and amazing mechanisms in being able to last as long as they usually do while sending blood, nutrients, and oxygen all over our bodies -- but like all physical mechanisms, they are subject to mechanical fatigue and other hazards of long-term operation.

Many people use the word "aging" as a shorthand not just for the mere process of getting older (which is not only inevitable for everything in existence, but something to celebrate -- "getting older", after all, means "experiencing more life"!), but for the physical degeneration that occurs as metabolic, immune, and mechanical side effects take hold as a person ages.

Personally I find this dual use of the word "aging" terribly confusing, and would prefer to allocate a term like "age-related damage", but regardless of what terminology you prefer, it is undeniable that older organisms are more vulnerable than younger organisms in particular ways.

No matter how diligent we are in eating well, visiting the doctor, getting enough exercise, etc., there's still a whole lot of room for error to creep in. The sheer level of diligence required to maintain "optimum" health is beyond many people's capacity -- not because they are "weak-willed" but because there are so many things that don't even show up on medical scans until they're already causing problems.

So while it must be acknowledged that biological organisms have built-in vulnerabilities (without which they might not be able to exist in the first place, considering how delicately intertwined with life-sustaining processes these vulnerabilities are), it also makes sense to look at how older organisms might be spared some of the vulnerabilities they currently deal with.

When I think about present-day human medicine, it looks a lot to me like we're all like goldfish being kept in tiny bowls -- bowls which are, perhaps, emptied and replenished regularly, but still too small and improperly configured to permit optimum health over long stretches of time. Because of this, many of us don't end up reaching even the supposed species maximum (barring future developments) of 120, let alone much older ages.

My vision of future medicine, on the other hand, is one that more closely resembles a large, optimally configured tank with filter mechanisms, plenty of plants, and some level of automation to correct for human error (analagous to how the filter pump consistently circulates water, reducing the need for frequent manual water changes, which can be easily forgotten or put off by distracted humans).

There's a technical aspect to this, of course -- scientists and doctors will need to develop and test the actual mechanisms, which will require both laboratory and creative resources. But there is also a socioeconomic/infrastructure aspect to consider, and I actually see this aspect as being the more difficult of the two to realize.

While medicine can do some amazing things these days (consider how many more people now survive cancer than used to, and how many heart patients would probably be dead if not for pacemaker technology), the best medicine is not accessible (physically or financially) to everyone, and there are a lot of odd political and other "soft" factors acting as "hard" walls between many and the healthcare they need.

This might be a pipe dream, but I would love to see life-sustaining healthcare (for people of all ages, including the very old) considered on par with things like food and water -- that is, not "luxuries", but as necessities.

Returning to the goldfish analogy again, what might my concept of Nigel's life possibilities have been if I'd not had access to the information I did? If I'd not learned that the blackening of his fins was due to ammonia poisoning, I might have presumed he'd simply come preloaded with some weird fish disease. If I'd not learned that goldfish needed more oxygen in their water than, say, betta fish (who can actually gulp air using their labyrinth organ), I might have presumed Nigel was just extremely laid-back when I saw him sitting at the bottom of the tank. And if, Darwin forbid, he'd died the day after moving in with me, I might have gone on thinking that goldfish were just "delicate" and not all that long-lived to begin with except in rare, exceptional cases.

Now imagine I'd learned a little bit about goldfish care (but not a lot), and decided to try swapping out lots of water every day from his small, nonfiltered tank in order to keep his environment fresh. If I was lucky, Nigel might have still gone on to live a long life, but more than likely, he'd have ended up another statistic in the "goldfish are small, short-lived creatures" data pool. I might not have even gone on to research very long-lived fish as I have now, or learned that it is actually common for well-kept goldfish to live 20 years or more.

In short, in the absence of the plentiful, scientifically accurate information I happily had access to, I might have gone on thinking that short lifespans were intrinsic properties of goldfish, rather than the robust, long-lived creatures they actually are when properly cared for.

I don't know to what degree this analogy actually applies to humans, but it certainly seems worth running the experiment!

Rise of the Robocars!

Jamais Cascio at Open the Future recently posted (along with his own commentary) a link to an essay by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Brad Templeton: The Implications of Robot Cars and Taxis.

As one of the seemingly few non-driving Americans out there, and as someone who finds robotics in general pretty fascinating, I'm tremendously interested in the promises, prospects, and particulars of robotic vehicles. Though perhaps not as high on the list of "things I'd like to see in my lifetime" as, say, drastic improvements in social justice, effective longevity medicine, and widespread scientific literacy, robotic cars are definitely somewhere on said list. Not only could they benefit the environment (by automating certain common driving tasks and making them more efficient, thereby saving fuel), they could potentially provide new options for those today who cannot drive regular automobiles, as well as drastically reduce traffic injuries and fatalities across the population.

Anyway, Templeton's essay is definitely worth a read. He points out, quite rightly, that it was only a few years ago when the very idea of self-driving cars was considered pure science fiction. Now, given the impressive (and improving) performance of the autonomous vehicles in the DARPA Grand Challenge (a military-sponsored contest in which teams competed to create cars that could navigate a track without a human driver), more and more people are beginning to seriously consider robot cars as a potential reality for civilian applications.

Templeton also emphasizes what I often see as a much-neglected truth about automobile safety these days: that is, driving isn't particularly safe for anyone, not just those of us whose perceptual systems are optimized for activities other than driving:

Car accidents kill about 45,000 people every year in the USA, and a million around the world. They injure and maim millions more, and tear apart many more lives with grief, for these are all premature deaths, often among the young.

Consider that number in context. That's just a bit fewer than the numbers who die of Alzheimer's and Influenza, and more than the death toll of kidney disease, infections and suicide. It's double the death toll of liver disease and hypertension and nearly triple that of homicide. It's more than most individual diseases and cancers.

For young adults 15-34, of course, who do not fall nearly so often to heart disease or Alzheimer's, it the leading cause of death among the established categories.

Cars make life a lot more convenient for a lot of people, though -- to the point where I think many lose sight of the risks involved, or consider that they have to accept these risks because they don't have any other viable transportation options. Now, of course there's no guarantee that robot cars would be safer for the mere fact of being robotic, but it is definitely true that a well-designed robotic vehicle might very well be able to avoid some common areas of egregious human error. Templeton notes:

[The fact that the cost of accidents is arguably the single largest component of the per-mile cost of driving a vehicle] is important because to be accepted, robocars must have a dramatically lower rate of accidents -- as close to zero as possible. While no software system can every be truly free of bugs, because a "crash" here has a literal as well as metaphorical meaning, teams must work particularly hard. In addition, these technologies will arrive incrementally, in the form of "crash-resistant" cars which are still mostly driven by people.

The essay goes on to discuss the potential cost savings of robot cars, the areas where such cars might first be deployed, the attributes of today's vehicles that might suggest we're moving in the direction of "smarter" vehicles, etc. Check it out if you're curious about such things -- regardless of whether you agree with all the premises and conclusions, it's a good, comprehensive collection of thoughts on the subject of robotic vehicles.

Personally, when I think about what it might take to get robot cars deployed and put to use, I think not only in terms of the cars themselves but of the infrastructure they'd inhabit. A while back, I commented on a really neat article from a 1968 Mechanix Illustrated piece that attempted to describe the world of 2008 (which we now inhabit). I've long loved reading retro-futurist stuff (ever since I found a pile of ancient Science Digests in my great-grandmother's basement as a youngster), not only because it can be highly amusing, but because it can provide interesting insights into what the priorities and biases were in the past.

Anyway, the Mechanix Illustrated piece was particularly fascinating in that it ended up juxtaposing several eerily accurate predictions with several that just sound silly, to an even greater degree than I normally see in articles along similar lines. After reading it, I got to thinking about what characterized the accurate predictions vs. the inaccurate ones, and the main thing that came to mind was that it seems to be a lot easier to predict advances in communication and commerce than in large-scale infrastructure.

In other words, the article's description of television-telephone systems that allow families to shop for products from their own homes sounds a heck of a lot like Amazon.com and their ilk, but its description of gigantic super-domes over cities and special roads populated entirely by fast-moving autonomous vehicles sounds frankly kitschy given how 2008 actually ended up looking.

Much of 2008's urban/suburban landscape looks very similar to 1968's these days (at least based on pictures I've seen; I wasn't born until 1978) -- we've still got asphalt-paved roads, internal combustion vehicles everywhere, houses with peaked, shingled roofs and brown carpeting, etc. Sure, people are dressing differently these days, cars have different contours, and shopping malls are looking shinier, but most of that is essentially "window dressing" and fashion as opposed to unheard-of developments hastening a move toward crystal spires and togas.

Most of the things that might actually count as "revolutionary" developments (as usual, keeping in mind that over half the world still lacks flush toilets) remain subtle, even furtive: cellular towers blending inconspicuously along stretches of freeway alongside silos and power poles, blue CAT-5 cable stuffed and strung like bundles of blue spaghetti behind pithy office ceilings outfitted with flickery fluorescents, tiny computers nestled in purses and pockets. Certainly at least some lives, and much of the communication and commerce infrastructure have changed very much since 1968 -- but the physical landscape, and the ways in which we get around from place to place, really haven't.

Nevertheless, I definitely don't think we're going to need "domed, evenly climatized cities" (which don't sound like much fun anyway) in order to have robot cars, but things are definitely going to need to change rather a lot in urban and suburban areas before robot cars can really make the splash they ought to in order to enter common use.

Initially, this might mean something like "automated valet" services (which Templeton mentions) that will park your "smart" car in a garage when you arrive at your destination, and I can see something like this happening with something resembling existing infrastructure (in some parts of the world/country). Later on, though, we're going to run up against the matter of where people will want to live vs. where they want to shop, eat, go to school, work, etc. -- and that might entail larger re-builds of roadways and other current routes to support greater automation.

I definitely look forward to following further developments in this area!