This morning in shul I was playing with Aliza in the kids room, and she brought over “Hanukkah ABCs” for me to read. I obliged and was promptly met with the following:

A if for Antiochus, the Syrian king who….

Say what? Antiochus was a Seleucid Greek, not a Syrian. I don’t think there even was a place called Syria at that time. I also remembered back to my younger days – ancient history isn’t really taught at the elementary school level, and I remember never being really sure who exactly it was that the Maccabees fought against. Was it the Greeks? The Syrians? The Romans? The Borg? To that end, I now provide you with a very short answer to the question of just who was it that the Maccabees fought, and how it fit into the larger historical context of the time.

Alexander the Great was a Macedonian Greek who conquered a huge empire – from mainland Greece to the edge of India. When he died in 323 BCE, he had no obvious successor. After a few decades of fighting amongst the various attempted successors, his empire eventually fell out into four stable pieces – The Ptolemies, Seleucids, Pergamon, and Macedon. (map here). For our purposes the Ptolemies and Seleucids are the most important ones. The Ptolemies controlled modern day Egypt and parts of Africa, and the Seleucids controlled the area made up of modern day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. These two powers did fight numerous wars with each other, with Judea caught in the middle. Antiochus III was the Seleucid king who conquered Judea, and was actually a pretty nice guy to the Jews. It was his son, Antiochus IV, who ultimately outlawed Jewish ritual and tried to force the worship of Greek gods in the temple. This angered the Maccabees, and the whole Hanukkah story occurs. As a postscript to the story, the Seleucid empire didn’t have too much longer to live, and just a few decades later it’s power was negligible, although they continued in independence until Pompey the great decided to turn them into a Roman republic in 63 BCE.

The main issue of course is Antiochus. He was part of a line of Seleucid kings. The Seleucid empire was clearly Hellenistic, and was a direct descendant of Alexander the great. Calling anyone at that time a Syrian seems to be a bit of s stretch as Syria is a far more modern construct. I really have no idea how the whole Syrian thing crept into the elementary school curriculum. (Subversive anti-Syrian propaganda perhaps? :-)). The Jews were fighting against one of the Hellenistic Greek empires that existed at that time.

update: In the comments Yehuda points out that Herodotus used the term Syrian as early as 5th cent BCE, so my initial comments above may have been somewhat overstated. Thanks for the correction.

Every so often Google maps and streetview find some of the most interesting things. They are usually posted to the internet, and then removed from Google within minutes (killjoys). This one however, may be one of the best ever. (Google already took it down, but you can see remnants from here and here and the original people took screenshots).

It is frequently alleged that American’s don’t understand math, and our constant failure to grasp health related statistics is usually held up as a primary example. I am of the belief that it is not our ability to grasp the math that is at fault, but the inability to accurately present the data that gets the public in trouble. Take, for example, the hysterical (and somewhat politically motivated) backlash against the new breast cancer screening recommendations. Even as someone who is deliberately and delightfully unaware of the political BS that surrounds me, I couldn’t help but hear misty-eyed women on the radio claim that “I am not a number” and “the mammogram saved my life”. (This is why I hate politics – in politics one individual’s anecdotal evidence carry more weight than a scientific study thousands of times larger). Nowhere however did I hear a single piece of science or math. The rate of cancer in the population, the false positive and false negative rate of mammograms, and other basic facts where all missing from the reporting. When I set about to find these number on the Internet a few hours ago, it took a shockingly long time because almost no media source bothered to cover it. (Instead I got lot of emotions – relief, anger, shock, ecstasy, disbelief, sadness, etc.). What follows is my attempt to do what the media should have – explain why this decision was made using that little thing we like to call “evidence”.

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The old advice for women was to begin getting annual screening mammograms (regardless of personal risk) at 40. Since the new advice is to start at 50, I will be focusing on women in the 40-50 range. The odds of a women in her 40s getting breast cancer are 1 in 69, or 1.45%.¹ (This number includes those in high risk groups). Mammograms, as I found out, are shockingly inaccurate. False positive rates over the course of 10 mammograms (so, a women who followed the old advice in her 40s), has been shown to be 56%.² To put that shockingly bad number in perspective, flipping a coin once yields only a 50% false positive rate. So what does this tell us – if 69 women get mammograms over their 40s, one of them will develop cancer. Of the other 68, 38 of them will have something detected on a mammogram, despite not having cancer. (68 * .56 = 38.08). That means if you have something detected on a mammogram in your 40s, you still only have a 1/39 chance of actually having cancer. This is why, in a recent UK trial showed “there was a reduction in breast-cancer mortality… which did not reach statistical significance.”³

Some of you are probably already convinced once you realize that a positive mammogram in your 40s still means you have only a 3% chance of having cancer. However there are a lot of people in this country who seem to think that an infinite number of medical tests for everyone is a good idea with no repercussions. While I cannot find the mortality rate for unnecessary surgery or a biopsy, suffice it to say that they are greater than zero. In a 10 year retrospective study, 631 mammogram false positives resulted in 128 unnecessary biopsies and 1 hospitalization for complications during the unnecessary biopsy.² All procedures have risks, and increasing the number of unnecessary procedures also increases the amount of harm that they will cause. Studies have also shown incredibly high levels of anxiety, morbidity, and other forms of mental distress stemming from false positive mammograms.^1,2 One study even showed that 17% of women with a false positive mammogram reported it affected their daily activities months after the fact.⁴

Lest I accidentally convince you that mammograms are completely useless, you should know that mammograms become more effective with age as the breasts age and become less dense. Also since age is still the number one indicator in whether or not a woman will develop breast cancer, their usefulness does increase with age.⁵ This is why the new advice is still to have regular screenings from age 50 and onward.

Sources:

1. Screening for Breast Cancer: An Update for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Agency for Health Research Quality, November 2009
2. Elmore JG, Barton MB, Moceri VM, Polk S, Arena PJ, Fletcher SW. Ten-year risk of false positive screening mammograms and clinical breast examinations. N Engl J Med. 1998;338:1089-96.
3. Moss SM, Cuckle H, Evans A, Johns L, Waller M, Bobrow L; Trial Management Group. Effect of mammographic screening from age 40 years on breast cancer mortality at 10 years’ follow-up: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet 2006;368:2053-60.
4. Lerman C, Trock B, Rimer BK, Boyce A, Jepson C, Engstrom PF. Psychological and behavioral implications of abnormal mammograms. Annals of Internal Medicine 1991;114:657-661.
5. Adams, Jill U., Getting to the facts in the debate on mammograms, The Los Angeles Times, Nov 23, 2009

Now tell me honestly – does treating you like an adult and showing you the numbers make you more or less inclined to listen to the new guidance?

Terrorism is thankfully a rare occurrence. This may be one of the reasons why we Americans are so bad at reacting to terrorism – from random acts of violence against Muslims, Sheiks, and other in the aftermath of September 11th, to the completely useless department of homeland security, which only serves to perpetuate bureaucracy we just haven’t gotten it right. Researcher have apparently showed that we also react by reducing our overall level of trust – one of the things which helps maintain an orderly and functional society.

One way that public opinion shifts is toward increased expressions of distrust. In some ways this strategy has been actively promoted by our political leaders. The Bush administration repeatedly reminded the public to keep eyes and ears open to help identify dangerous persons. A strategy of vigilance has also been endorsed by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

Nonetheless, the breadth of increased distrust that the public puts into practice is striking. Individuals threatened by terrorism become less trusting of others, even their own neighbors. Other studies have shown that they become less supportive of the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. In addition, we found that such effects extend to immigrants and, as well, to a group entirely remote from the subject of terrorism: gay Americans. The specter of terrorist threat creates ruptures in our social fabric, some of which may be justified as necessary tactics in the fight against terrorism and others that simply cannot.

The biggest problem of course is that the people we allow to have the loudest voice on this matter are those with a vested interest in convincing us that terrorism is real and recurrent – politicians, consultants, and others who make money by scaring us. The more they talk, the more we react. The more we react, the more we distrust each other, the more money we spend, and more economic costs and time delays we endure, and the more we damage society. We have done more to damage the fabric of our society than Bin-Laden ever did. To quote from Bruce Schneier, Refuse to be terrorized!

When you buy a new electronic device, the only thing worse than
getting instruction poorly translated from Chinese by a non-English
speaker, is having your instructions NOT translated from Chinese by a
non-English speaker.

I just learned this today about quarks. From Death by black hole:

You’ll never catch a quark all by itself; it will always be clutching onto other quarks nearby. In fact, the force that keeps two (or more) of them together actually grows stronger the more you separate them – as if they were attached by some sort of subnuclear rubber band. Separate the quarks enough, the rubber band snaps and the stored energy summons E=mc² to create a new quark at each end, leaving you back where you started.

Note to the world: If you have something to say which can easily be summed up in a short paragraph with little additional value coming from image or video, do not, under any circumstances, put that text to sound and create a slow playing youtube video. Why is it that you feel there is so much value added simply by adding something to youtube (rather than, say, a simple email), that all emails have started to become nothing more than youtube links? Please rediscover the long lost art of typing and stop making me sit through your stupid youtube videos.

I learned something yesterday from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole“, (an otherwise so-so book). The mysterious “Canals on Mars” that many people actually thought for a time were real were initially “discovered” by Percival Lowell – one of the preeminent astronomers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lowell was the founder of the Lowell Observatory, which at the time boasted the best telescope in the world. Other astronomers of the time could not duplicate Lowell’s observations, but they all simply assumed it was because they did not have access to the equipment Lowell did. However as telescopes got better, Lowell’s observations were still not duplicated, and after Lowell died in 1916 the source of the canals remained a mystery. Until recently that is. A retired Optometrist from Minnesota noticed that Lowell’s setup was similar to what is commonly used when examining patients for cataracts. Combine this with the fact that Lowell was known to have high blood pressure, and Lowell was actually seeing the blood vessels in his eye! (The blood vessels cast a shadow directly on his retina). A comparison of the maps Lowell drew with the arrangement of blood vessels in the eye yield a remarkable correlation.

I spotted this sign last week at the Acme on Montgomery avenue in Lower Merion. There’s a kosher bakery in the store, which is under the supervision of the OU and the Philadelphia vaad. I’m curious if the surveillance is there for halakhic reasons (and if so, does this substitute for a mashgiach?) or is it there for security reasons? If it is the later, then it’s interesting to note that grocery stores are actually almost entirely under surveillance for market research reasons. (For example, they know which way people will turn their heads when trying to do comparison shopping – very useful for shelf placement folks). If the former reason, then is it monitored on shabbat?

The moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life (okay, not really), is here. Kosher beef jerky under the brand name…. (wait for it)… Holy cow! Kosher.

Gilad Shalit was 20 year old soldier when he was captured by Hamas, and has now been held in captivity for a little over 3 years. Recently a video was released (in exchange for several prisoners) that proved that Shalit was in fact alive. However a video showing that he is alive is a far step from “free”. Hamas still has him under lock and key, and is still making obscenely high demands. France is now also working to try and mediate, but Shalit is still in limbo. Until then, while there is certainly intelligence information about the situation in the hands of various international intelligence agencies, they aren’t going to risk the situation by tipping their hands. The details of what hapenned, how he has been treated, and his day to day activities probably won’t come out until (if?) he is released and allowed to tell the story. Until then, this is what you’d call an “incomplete story”. For some reason though, this hasn’t stopped one Israeli reporter from trying to make a buck by publishing the Gilad Shalit story. (Bad translation from google here). Isn’t it a little premature still? While I’m sure the reporter did the best research he could, the story is not yet done being written, and those that really know the facts aren’t speaking (yet). How can you in good conscience publish this?

This morning the Nobel committee awarded the Nobel prize in physics to Willard S. Boyle and George Smith for the invention of  the CCD (charge couple device), and also to Charles Kao whose research led to the creation of fiber-optics. The former two gentlemen did their research while working for Bell Labs, the now defunct research arm of the now-broken up AT&T. What didn’t make the news is that researchers at Bell Labs have now won SEVEN Nobel Prizes in Physics. Bell Labs has also been responsible for the invention, discovery of, or significant contributions to: the laser, Unix, C, C++, electron diffraction, one time pads, 5ESS switches, cell phone technology, solar cells, and the first transatlantic telephone cables. Next to the Xerox PARC, Bell Labs has probably contributed more to our current information age than any other single entity, whether government or private, ever.

Who I wonder, is the next Bell Labs or PARC? Is there any corporate entity right now that engages in the sort of research (and funds it with enough money) to generate this level of research data? The only ones that come to mind are Google and DuPont. DuPont however is slowly fading, and while Google does encourage its employees to do research and non-assigned projects, the results usually take the form of inventions and not discoveries. (Google isn’t that much different from a pharmaceutical company in this respect).

There would seem to be a benefit to not confining research to the government and the universities, capable though they might be. Sometimes a profit motive can help to produce something usable from pure research, and direct the research in practical ways. A corporation will usually make different decisions and hire different employees, ultimately doing different work than their not-for-profit counterparts. Corporations’ relatively higher pay can also attract a higher caliber of researcher, as well as ones who do not want to have to deal with tenure-related bureaucracy.

So you don’t think I’m too radical, I don’t want research to be solely the domain of the for-profit world, and that extreme is probably far less desirable than our current situation. A prudent example is the work of Karl Jansky. In 1931 Jansky was working for Bell labs, and was told to try and find ways to reduce the background noise on transatlantic telephone calls. He set up a large radio telescope in an open field to try and find the source of his background radiation. He discovered, to his great surprise, that there was radiation coming from the center of the milky way galaxy. This discovery was the beginning of the field of radio astronomy. Some have even theorized that Janksy would have also won a Nobel prize for his work had he not passed away before he could be awarded one. (The Nobel committee only awards the prize to living people). Jansky applied for further funding from Bell Labs, but they rejected his proposal as it had no practical bearing on the telephone system, and assigned him to other projects. (Time of course proved Jansky’s discoveries to be of incredible significance).

So where does society stand now? Is research for the purpose of research to be confined largely to the universities and the government, while corporations with deep pockets dabble in it, or am I just the victim of not being able to judge progress without hindsight? Can corporations continue to promote research, or are we better off with non-profits ensuring that new discoveries are not restricted by corporate profit motives?