Archive for June, 2017

EXPLAINING ECLIPSES: MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

June 20, 2017

“Without music, my life would be a lot less enjoyable.  Without science, my life would have ended a long time ago.”   My letter published in Newsweek, many years ago.

It’s a honor to know that I think the same way Neil deGrasse Tyson does about both the night sky and about society’s tacit approval of math illiteracy.

I have spoken to several groups about the upcoming solar eclipse.  Oddly, the largest number to whom I have spoken was not an group of adults but children at “a little school” (the teacher’s comment, not mine) in eastern Oregon.  In an hour, I spoke to all grades, about 100 students, and then in another hour spent time with about fifteen in a class, showing them how to make a solar filter on their own.  The other talks have had fewer than twenty, sometimes under ten.  Last week, I spoke at the LIONS meeting, and despite the microphone’s being near the speaker at one point, making a god-awful noise, one man was asleep right in front of me within 5 minutes after I began.

My solar eclipse talks have been short:  It’s worth seeing totality; protect your eyes and drive safely to and from the event; if you are a first timer, don’t waste precious seconds trying to take a picture.  Then I answer questions, and if the Sun is shining, have people look at it through solar filters.

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Students at Prairie City school in Oregon view the Sun.  The total eclipse will last 2m6s there.

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Howard Elementary 5th graders in Eugene.

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Eastern Oregon, 1 hour after leaving Prairie City. My payment for the talk.

I’ve stayed away from the math explaining why a total solar eclipse occurs.  Much of it isn’t complicated, but people don’t like numbers.  On the 2006 eclipse tour to Libya, there were several eclipse talks, and I asked the editor of one of the astronomy magazines why he didn’t discuss the Saros cycle in detail.  His answer was short, “People don’t like to look at numbers.”

While perhaps readers don’t like to look at numbers, perhaps they might learn something interesting by viewing 6 of them.

223 Synodic periods (common lunar cycle we know)=6585.32 days: The Moon has to be new for a solar eclipse to occur.  That lines up the three bodies in one plane.

239 Anomalistic (from perigee, closest approach, to perigee)=6585.54 days; the Moon must be within a few days of its closest point in order to appear to have the same apparent size (we call it angular size) as the Sun. Too far away, and the Moon will appear smaller, “inside” the Sun, a ring or annular eclipse.

242 Draconic (crossing the plane of the Earth’s orbit)=6585.36 days; the Moon must cross the plane of the Earth’s orbit when new in addition to being the right distance from Earth for a total solar eclipse to occur.  Crossing the plane lines up the three bodies in a plane perpendicular to the synodic.

Divide 6585 days by 365.25 days in a year and one gets 18 years 10.3 days, meaning that eclipses repeat.  The 18 year Saros cycle means that eclipses recur, shifted a third of the way around the world, which is what the decimal 0.3 shows, but the same general path occurs on the Earth.  Ancient people without computers knew this, and they didn’t know the math we know today, an impressive feat.

While these cycles aren’t exact, they are so close that an eclipse “family” will continue for some 70 eclipses, give or take about three.  That makes a family last 1200-1400 years before the small changes in many cycles finally fail to allow an eclipse to occur.  I think the resonance of these cycles might be part of the Musica Universalis, the Music of the Spheres, an idea dating at least to Pythagoreas, yes, that guy, that music was part of the movement of the celestial bodies.  If those three cycles aren’t beautiful, one has amaurosis mathematica, math blindness.

It’s not OK to use “I’m not good at math” to explain away inability to calculate basic things in life.  When I taught statistics to adults, I once made the comment that I didn’t care for a lot of jazz, and the class hammered me.  Wow, one would think I was born with a major defect.  I think the idea of people jamming is neat, playing off each other, finding the right beat, the right chord, the right sense; that is special.  I can’t do that, but I appreciate those who can.  What bothers me about math is that people use “not being good” as proud excuses to explain away issues, rather than concerns that they might be losing money, being conned, or missing out on something special in the world.  Without jazz, my life would be less full; without math, I would not have practiced medicine or even gone to college.

If I could learn to play the piano, and I did learn, I think that it is appropriate to say that others should learn to do basic math and like it. An astronomer the other night at the Club spoke how he taught basic astronomy to students without using math.  Everybody thought that was great, including me, until I thought about it a little.  Why leave out math?  By doing that, one fails to show why math is important.  One fails to listen to the Music of the Spheres.  What’s so wrong about showing the difference between an ellipse and a circle, between a parabola and a hyperbola?  You’ve got a satellite dish, and that is a parabola. These four conics all have a square or a quadratic term present, and quadratics are essential to understand energy of motion, gravity, projectiles, tides, how the solar system works, why we should wear seat belts and not drive too quickly around curves.

Maybe if we understood math a little better, we’d realize the number e, yes, there is a number e, used in a variety of places, including continuously compounding interest.

$1 at 8% for nine years, compounded each year $1(1+.08)^9=$1.99; we make interest on interest.

Compound twice a year, it is (1+(.08/2))^18 or1.04^18= $2.025.

We can compound daily (1+(.04/365))^365*18=$2.0543.

We can continuously compound, infinitely, and 1+(.08/n)^nt=e^(.08t)=e^(0.64)=$2.0544; notice where the 0.08 goes.

This infinitely number of compounding times sadly doesn’t give us infinite riches but approaches a limit given by the number e, the exponential.  Interestingly, it is far easier to calculate continuous compounding than it is daily compounding.

Note the close resonance of the product (multiplication) of the interest rate in per cent times the number of years it takes to double money.  That product is 72. In other words, 8 per cent interest  means that debt, money, population will double in 9 years, 72/8.  At 24% credit card interest, debt doubles in 72/24=3 years.  One student once asked me why we learned the formula for compound interest.  When I explained to him how with punching 5 keys on a calculator, he could find that the tripling time of money at 8% interest was just under 14 years, he was stunned.  Divide 110 by the interest rate.

Yes, beautiful, essential, interesting numbers.  Enjoy the eclipse.  Enjoy the knowledge that three cycles are coming together in August the way they did on 20 July 1963, 54 years and 32 days from when I saw this same eclipse family, canoeing in Canada’s Algonquin Park, where I saw the reflection of the solar crescent in Dickson Lake.

Thrice 18 years 10.3 days.

 

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MURDERS SHOULDN’T COUNT AS DEATHS

June 2, 2017

Jonah Goldberg, conservative columnist, wrote yesterday how government intervention into American medicine would be no panacea.  He cited that while Australia had 3 years’ longevity on average more than Americans, Denmark had only a year and a half.  Then he took issue with the average.  At my age, an extra three years looks good.

Goldberg compared Summit County, CO with Pine Ridge, SD, showing about a 20 year difference in life expectancy, commenting that lifestyles have a lot more to do with the discrepancy than having insurance.  Of course, lifestyles affect longevity.  Native Americans have a high rate of unemployment, diabetes, and alcohol/other drug abuse, but their medical care is not as good as mainstream America.  Yes, they have the Indian Health Service, which I have been a part of, not Mr. Goldberg, and I can attest on reservations the IHS is not staffed nearly as well as it is in, say, Anchorage or Phoenix.  The anecdote fit Mr. Goldberg’s case, however, so it stayed.

He then went on to say a study by a member of the Hoover Institution (on War, Revolution, and Peace, the full name of which he did not mention, and I think is relevant) said while America was ranked 19th of 29 in life expectancy, if we “removed fatal car crashes and murders” we would rank first.

Wow.  If we didn’t count cancer, we’d blow away the field.  This reminded me of a cardiac surgeon I once spoke to, back when my hospital had one of the highest cardiac surgery death rates in the country, ostensibly because we did sicker patients.  Why we operated on them when others didn’t was never explained.  Anyway, one day a surgeon told me most of his fatal outcomes were “non coronary.”  I was speechless, because to me, as a neurologist, the patient had an operation and the patient died.  Period. Very end. Don’t dress up a pig.  Given that the Republican leadership has steadfastly refused to fund studies by the CDC to help us learn from and deal with firearm violence, I hardly think murders should be removed from the count, especially since we rank 99th in the world by rate per million, a third more than Uzbekistan, and four times that of Australia, which did do something about firearms, and eleven times that of Japan.  Imagine, Uzbekistan has a lower murder rate than the US.

Then Mr. Goldberg trod where he had no business treading.  He quoted the Medicaid study in Oregon, where several years ago, extra money allowed more people access to Medicaid via a lottery, which made an ideal study group (comparison of like groups with only presence or absence of insurance as a variable).  Mr. Goldberg stated that with the exception of depression, having health insurance produced no significant improvement in health.  Many of the outcome variables tracked, such as treatment of hypertension, diabetes, PAP smears, colonoscopies, and smoking cessation treatment will require years to determine whether access to affordable medical care will in fact make a difference in longevity.  Mr. Goldberg would do well to show some patience; health care doesn’t file quarterly earnings statements. People who haven’t been able to afford a doctor aren’t going to suddenly feel great when they finally can.  Still, increased health related quality of life and happiness was measurable, and that increased significantly along with a decrease in depression scores.  People sleep better at night when they know they can see a doctor without becoming bankrupt should they fall ill.

Depression is not a minor disease.  A major depressive disorder afflicts up to 25% of all women during their lifetime and 10-15% of men.  I treated thousands of people with depression during my medical career.  The disorder has protean manifestations; it is not a matter of someone’s  being down in the dumps.  Depression is a cause of appetite disorders and subsequent obesity or severe weight loss.  It affects energy level and productivity.  It may present as chronic pain.  Sleep disturbances are present in most depressed people; lack of good sleep is a major health problem today. The immune system is affected. Depression is a major cause of significant memory disorder, often masquerading as dementia; indeed, my father’s depression looked like dementia, and my mother’s dementia presented as depression. Moods are affected, and depression is a significant cause of sexual dysfunction.  These six: S-A-E-Me-Mo-Sex were written on my medical records in the upper right hand corner as soon as I saw a person with many somatic complaints that didn’t fit neatly into a neurological container.  In the ‘80s, I risked patient anger when I diagnosed depression.  People assumed I thought they were crazy, rather than having a chemical disturbance in their brain that was potentially treatable.  Today, we know better, but suicide by firearm is more common than murder by firearm, and depression remains a major cause of the former.

Goldberg concluded by stating that while the Affordable Care Act was correlated with the decline in America’s life expectancy in 2016, he said that some people were helped, quickly adding that there was no evidence that government run medical care did any good.  Mind you, Goldberg wasn’t blaming the ACA, although he didn’t refer to it by that term, which I find annoying.

Mr. Goldberg didn’t mention that the number of bankruptcies fell in half from 1.5 million to under 780,000 from 2010 to 2016, long after the bankruptcy law was tightened.  Some wrote: “bankruptcies disappeared ‘overnight’ with the advent of the ACA.”

I think it is entirely fair to have a reasonable debate on the role of government in medical care.  Let us, however, have a debate based on all the facts, not cherry picked ones. I resent Goldberg’s using his anecdotes then claiming the ACA was anecdotally helpful.  That is galling.  The ACA probably prevented 4 million bankruptcies so far, bringing peace of mind to millions.  Market based care, “choice,” the word used when it doesn’t involve a woman, and lifestyle changes are not the answer.  People need to be able to access basic medical care without financial hardship.  We need to catch illnesses early, and we need to screen for medical conditions, like cancer and yes, depression.

It’s time for the Congressional Budget Office to put a price tag on peace of mind, not declaring bankruptcy, and the long range value of early screening for disease.  Until then, I state that a good night’s sleep without worry about medical care is worth $100/night.  I’m open to negotiation, but it must have a dollar value.  We’re in America.

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