Liquid Dunes

I was just explaining to my nephew how air and water can get waves in them and behave like fluids. This is a picture that looks, at first glance to be liquid streaming off a wet surface. It is actually a satellite photo of Mars, showing a series of dunes trailing off a rock formation, like drips of water.

The picture is from the April 21, 2009 Astronomy Picture of the Day. See the whole archives of pictures at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

The photo is titled Flowing Barchan Sand Dunes on Mars. I did not know what Barchan meant, so I ended up pursuing the subject and other sand dune terms through multiple references in Wikipedia. What's cool about it is that the dunes that are made from fine sand and constant winds have this strange horseshoe crab, cylon spaceship shape. Not only is the shape cool, but the movement is, too. Apparently, small dunes can overtake larger ones, and when they do, the small one hits, disappears, and then re-emerges out of the other side of the bigger slower dune. The little dune does not actually move through the big dune, it actually breaks up and reforms on the downwind side, but it looks like it moves through.

Following the links, you can learn about Megabarchans, solitons, and cresentic, star, dome, parabolic, and seif dunes. You probably did not suspect that so much thought went into naming something that we consider to be just sand.

The Boy Who Cried Flu

A friend of mine made a comment about the swine flu scare being crazy and overblown. I replied that you never know, it could turn out to be serious. Apparently, I have insulted my friend and I he believes I should be wearing a tin foil hat because I'm that crazy.

My point is that you can't tell in the early stages of some types of situations that it's going to be a crisis. You don't know when you're in a drought, a depression, a serious wildfire, or a pandemic when it starts - in the early stages. You don't know if it can be defined as such until it develops to its full potential. Yet that's the best time to fight any of these problems.

Many people are scorning the attention to the flu in Mexico. I work with a nurse that was indignantly telling me that a 1918 pandemic couldn't happen today because we are too well prepared and much more knowledgable. She's only right if we do take emerging pandemic threats seriously early on. It's a strange paradox. People that say we've got the situation under control and are telling us not to react when the reaction is what keeps the situation under control. Before anyone compares this to our reaction to terrorism, I would emphasize that the reaction has to be measured, effective, precise, and targeted, which is not what our reaction to terrorism was. Plus, terrorism is not a pandemic, it's a small group of people that commit acts and are then too spent to immediately go on to the next attack.

I saw a preliminary report that said that 1700 people in Mexico caught this new strain of flu and 100 people died. That's over 5% which is as bad as the 1918 pandemic. If this flu erupts in a similar fashion to the 1918 pandemic, and 20% of the population came down with it and 5% of them died, that's 1% of the population or 3 million people in the U.S. That 1000 times as bad as 9/11 and look at all the money and political reaction we spent on that. [Note inserted later: many of those early reported deaths were later found not to be the emerging Swine Flu strain.]

Some people say that there are more people killed in cars than by the flu, but that's not right. There are about 36,000 people killed in the U.S. each year by the flu and around 40,000 by auto accidents. So a pandemic would be about 80 times worse than a normal year's flu or car accident deaths. The annual flu death rate is 12 times worse than 9/11.

Imagine 60 million dying worldwide. The impact of that would not be trivial. In my mind, we need to be spending more on science to help with preparedness against emerging pandemics. We do not yet have a quick way to manufacture flu vaccine, only a slow method involving hundreds of thousands of chicken eggs. We need to be able to get the genetic sequence of the disease and be able to crank out truckloads of vaccine extremely quickly. This would take technology we do not now possess and capital we are reluctant to spend on health.

We hear a little bit of panic each year about a pandemic. It was SARS and Avian flu in the last few years, and then there was a cluster of deaths in Colorado of regular flu last year. For each one of those examples, someone was reporting "this could be the big one". We've learned to discount these warnings. However, given that there isn't much we can do to prevent a pandemic once it spreads, it is important to jump on potential epidemics early in order to prevent them from being lethal pandemics. This is one warning you can't ignore.

Raw Footage

I recently was sent a video about Gravity Waves.

It's from a Science at Nasa website http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/19mar_grits.htm that highlights lots of scientific phenomenon

I had not seen the video before, because I listen to the program as a podcast and rarely look at the site. I remembered hearing about gravity waves, and a search of my podcasts in iTunes pulled up the Science at Nasa podcast. I checked the Nasa site feed and was surprised to find the same video.

They say these gravity waves might be related to tornado formation. I had seen time lapse photos of clouds before, where they look like waves on the ocean. In school, in my Mechanical Engineering courses, like Fluid Dynamics, they talked about gasses and liquids as both being "fluids". That always seemed odd to me. Gas didn't seem like a fluid to me, but many of the same equations applied. The video really shows what they are talking about. The air/cloud interface is like the surface of a pond with the gravity waves being the ripples working their way across

That brings up the subject of being sensitive to the world around you. There are many details in life that are right in front of us that most people ignore. If you are attuned to the world, you'll see many amazing things that are invisible right under our noses. That's why I like science, it explains so many things

The problem with being sensitive and open to what's in the world around you is that it also makes you unprotected and raw. The more aware and in tune you are, the more bad and nasty things you'll see too. It's like the superhero stories where the person has all these great powers, but it brings lots of crappy hassles and pain to them too. The more you care, the more you hurt, but also, the more you feel and the richer you live. I think it's worth it. It also explains rock stars like Kurt Cobain, who was tapped into something incredible, but in the end it consumed him.

Video Credit: Iowa Environmental Mesonet Webcam.

Defenseless

I've been listening to a lot of biology classes online lately.

I know you don't get as much from it as a student that is going to class, seeing what is written on the board and having a book full of detailed descriptions and illustrations, but I manage to pick up a few things and I find that I really enjoy learning about biology.

When I was a Senior in High School and I dreamed about what I would do for a living, I wanted to go to college and study Genetic Engineering. That was 1981 and no on offered majors in Genetic Engineering.

I also wanted to go into the Air Force, become a fighter pilot, and then later become a space shuttle pilot, but that was back when we expected that by 2010 there would be multiple space stations and the start of colonies on the moon. Maybe I was born about 40 years too early.

I listen to the unfolding research and cutting edge of genetic science and I wonder what direction it will take and what the future will look like once we figure out all the mysteries that we don't understand now and apply them for better or worse on the world. Hopefully, our decisions will improve humanity and life on the planet, but that's not a sure thing, yet. The stakes for a mistake of unlucky proportions could be colossal.

I keep thinking about viruses. I wonder if in the past, viruses were instrumental in huge leaps forward in evolutionary change. If you are a huge fan of the X-Men comic books (I'm not, but I know the basic story), then you already are familiar with a story that involves a sudden change in evolution. I wonder if, rather than the Darwinian theory that changes come slowly over aeons with small gradual changes and random mutations, if it is possible that viruses have developed at critical times in history that have re-written the genetic character of whole species. They could have done this by inserting genes into a species DNA at an exact point and in an exact manner that suddenly conferred the host with some new function that made it better, that improved its life and abilities. We are so used to thinking that cancers and diseases have negative effects, and that their presence arises randomly to do this damage, how far fetched is it that they might make improvements occasionally, too?

Once we understand how things like this happen, the next step is for us to take a shot at doing it ourselves. Why not take the very viruses and bacteria that attack us and make them positive for us? I think that the fact that they are so virulent and infectious is the first big clue that they are important. If we can figure out how they do what they do that hurts us we might be able to turn it into something that helps us.

What if we could tweak the cold virus so that it infects you, and then your lungs are coated with a protein that makes them more efficient at absorbing oxygen or less susceptible to losing moisture and dehydrating the person? A therapeutically designed microbe could then reinfect the population and improve humanity across the globe.

It is also possible that you could simply figure out what the virus or bacteria is doing that is harmful and turn that function off. Then when you infect the population with the harmless strain, it populates the host (person) and keeps the unhelpful strain away by out competing it and crowding it out.

Imagine using HIV to boost the immune system or tuberculosis to improve lung function. What if E. coli could be made benevolent and it's presence kept bad strains in food from being able to make any headway in your body.

The downside is that these changes could blow up into a worse problem than the disease it is supposed to conquer. I know we have a bad track record with introducing large animal species to control pests, when the invasive species usually proves to not only leave the pest alone, but to inflict some kind of unexpected damage on the habitat it invades. This could be similar to that. What if something we introduce mutates and becomes a worse disease than its natural ancestor ever was? There are definite risks to this idea, but amazing rewards also.

If we live long enough, we'll see whether these bioengineered therapeutical agents are brought into our lives and whether they prove to be a savior or a threat.

Leap of Faith

What do you call evidence of things not seen?

I recently listened to a story on This American Life that got me to thinking. There was a news report about the football coach from a religious school. His team was going to play a team from some juvenile prison school. He made all the parents of his team members memorize the names of the players on the other team, and they cheered for them. They set up a spirit line for the other team and gave them the experience of being the beloved home team for one night. That story was touching, focusing on students who were really down on their luck and how this was the first time anyone ever treated them in such a welcome way.

A woman heard the story and sent the coach an email where she praises the coach and mentions in passing that she is a fallen Catholic. He immediately contacts her, picks her out of hundreds of responses he got from the publicity that came from the story being aired on the news. He contacts this fallen women and tries to convince her to regain her faith. She was willing to, and hoped he could say something that made sense. They spoke, but he wasn't convincing to her. All the supports and arguments he voiced to convert her back to faith fell flat. At one point, you could hear her make a sound of dismay when he stated that Hitler was following Darwinism in his quest to wipe out the Jews. The comment was that any time someone uses Hitler in an argument, they automatically lose the argument.

It made me realize that he was struggling to lead someone step by step to the conclusion that he came to in a single leap. His own faith had come when he lept over the facts and accepted the conclusion. Since he was an evangelist, and working hard to convert people and spread the faith, he spent a lot of time trying to pursuade people to come to the same conclusion he had. It made me realize that later, after his initial leap of faith, he had to backfill the "facts" to support his faith. So now, when he tries to get someone to follow him, he tries to get them to cross over all the ground between no faith and faith. This doesn't work because between faith and no faith is a chasm. It requires a leap to get across. Religious people arguments would have people walking on something as insubstantial as air to get to their point. I know they sometimes get people to take the leap with them, but often they try to lead them across the void and fail miserably.

I was discussing this with my wife, and she remarked that the non-religious community, science, can't answer the questions religion tries to answer. I don't think it usually tries, but I take her point. Religion wants to answer the question of where did we come from and why are we here, is there a supreme being and what happens when you're gone? Science doesn't claim to have these answers. I find it interesting that different religions come up with different answers. The Buddists think we get recycled, and in a real sense, we do. Our bodies decompose and find their way into other lives later, as raw materials. Each religion has their own myths and ways of explaining the deep unknowable mysteries of life and death. But they have no real proof. They point to books that may have been wrong when written, or altered since written. They make statements that are not verifiable. Science, on the other hand, wants to be able to prove things by filling in all steps from ignorance to understanding. Sometimes you leap in science, but only to get to the conclusion faster, and then you have to go back and fill in the steps. Sometimes you leap in science and either find out that you leapt into thin air and your idea is unsupported, or that it takes years for people to find the proofs to fill in the steps of how to get there.

Time Compression

I was listening to the History of Rome podcast (which can also be seen on his blog at:
http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/

I noticed that when we reached the era when Caesar came to prominence that we were suddenly spending much more time to go over much less years. It was as if history was on fast forward through the "normal" years and slowed way down for the important parts.

It's not surprising that we slow down and describe certain epic parts of history in greater detail. The Civil War, WWII, and other big events in history take up a lot of space in history texts, while the entire Victorian Age gets a mere mention.

How much of our lives are like that? Aren't there entire years where almost nothing of import happened and it's over before you know it. Compare that to times of great fun or great tragedy and the time seems to fill up like a snake swallowing an egg. It makes you wonder what would happen if you lived "forever". Would your life expand and compress like a slinky? I'm willing to find out.

Asimov's credo

I read Issac Asimov's Foundation series years ago, but there was one idea that stuck with me. The setting was the far future. The Galactic Empire was in a period of decline, allowing it's science and technology to slowly erode and collapse. The Foundation was the one spot in the Galaxy where science and advances were continuing to move forward. In an exchange between a man from the Foundation and a "researcher" from the Empire, the researcher explained that the way to figure things out was to read multiple source materials and decide what is right from your own opinion. When asked whether it made sense to do some original research, he acted like this was a strange question.

Sometimes, I look around and I think that this is the state we are in today. Whether it is our ease at accepting nutty stories we get emailed to us, or the sheer amount of misinformation that we repeat, we are prone to this way of thinking.

In the Foundation series, the ones that stopped questioning stagnated down to helplessness and obscurity. The ones that kept up their research and questioning had comfortable lives and made interesting discoveries.

It's not just a science fiction story, it reflects real life.

Vetting the Experts

I'm tired and impatient at the degree of scientific ignorance you see in the world today. It's not just science, it's also prevalent in politics and historical data today. No one understands the facts and no one takes the time to do the research to figure out what the facts are. What we do instead is lazily let other "experts" do the research and present the results for us.

We're all very busy people, and I can sympathize that most people don't have the time, patience, or inclination to deeply inform themselves, but the problem is that we rely on a select few people to preform this function for us. It brings up the question of who is checking to make sure the so-called "experts" know what the hell they are talking about.

We need something like Snopes.com for experts. Something that goes over the criteria and vouches for someones ability to speak intelligently and authoritatively about a subject. If you get the expert seal of approval, people should trust what you say, if not, shut the hell up.

The problem here is the same as all these wacky emails that get sent around, without a shred of truth to them. Sometimes it's mistaken source material, sometimes it's drawing the wrong conclusion from a set of facts, and sometimes it's just bad information. When I get a stupid sounding email, I check Snopes and reply back to my aunt and tell her that it's not true that Muslims have taken over Britain's education system, or that Captain Kangaroo was a Green Beret. Most people don't bother to check before the forward ridiculous tripe.

The problem is that people already think they are listening to experts, their own experts. Sometimes, the expert is their minister. Their minister is telling them to forget about all this evolution, the bible says the planet is 6,000 years old, so the scientists must be wrong. The problem here is that the bible doesn't say the earth is 6,000 years old, biblical scholars from hundreds of years ago pored over the bible and estimated that the earth had to be that old to get back to Genesis. The bible does not have one answer on page 213 that says "the earth is 6,000 years old". So the "experts" don't even know what they are talking about even if you accept the infallibility of their source material.

I am amazed that people accept the word of their experts, political leaders, over climate scientists. I am amazed that people go on believing against all proof to the contrary.

The earth is 4 billion years old, evolution is a fact, and man is causing global warming. These facts are not subject to debate, they are indisputable.

Just because someone calls themselves an expert, doesn't make it so. We need to check the credentials of the people that are making public pronouncements, and if we find that they are not qualified to give an informed analysis on the subject, we should politely tell them to shut the hell up.

Thomas Pynchon has a great quotation from Gravity's Rainbow: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

If they can get you listening to the wrong "experts", you won't check the facts to find out what the real story is.

Worshipping Science

I have recently heard a couple of statements, while doing business, that really got under my skin and festered. The first person, whom I've dealt with for years, and knew to be a Baptist-style Christian leaned over to me and almost whispered, conspiratorially, "Most scientists are atheists" as a comment about why evolution is not true. The second person was a regional manager for an equipment manufacturer, and we we were with a customer. For some reason, he decided to start spewing religious nonsense in the middle of our sales pitch. First, he casually mentioned that he thought it was nearing the end times, which (in my opinion) is something you should only mention when you are actually in the cult meeting, right before you start mixing the Kool-Aid. His religious leader either didn't warn him not to spew his crackpot theories to outsiders, or they are the type of cult that is trying to recruit others into the fold. He then started talking about climate change and said, "If you believe the scientists, and I don't believe scientists." I remember biting my lip at the time and thinking, "Hey, idiot! We're SELLING science to this guy. Do you want him to think we manufactured our equipment using magic?"

The problem about scientifically ignorant, brainwashed, or willfully ignorant people that spew anti-scientific dogma is that they are often not challenged when they make ridiculous statements in mixed company. Too often, people of more refined opinions or manners politely ignore outlandish pronouncements in order to keep things pleasant. If you followed Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, or Joseph Lyles they would tell you to challenge these people before their ignorance destroys society. I don't do that. Often there are good business reasons, but usually, it's just polite social convention not to make a stir, to try to get along. It's disconcerting that these people feel no such qualms when they make their bombastic statements.

But I do walk away and rehearse the argument to the bone heads that makes these statements.

Climate Change: People who consider themselves right wing or conservative feel that the other side is politicizing the issue. The feel that any attempt to fix the problem will make us less competitive and will interfere with capitalism's central tenet that it is glorious to get rich. You score bonus points if you recognize that as a quote by the former communist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping when reforming China's economy - very ironic (and never actually said by him, according to wikiquote). Regardless of the source of the rhetoric, many believe that markets must always be left alone, and regulation is so adverse to capitalistic profits that it should be branded socialist or communist and denounced. Some people just don't want to face the enormity of the problem and can't believe that something as vast as the planet could possibly be effected by man. This ignores so much history and evidence right in front of us that it's hard to understand whether the person is actively ignorant or completely oblivious. I'm 46, born in 1962, and I remember as a child when they had leaded gasoline and not catalytic converters on cars. I remember how every car on the road had a visible smoke plume coming out of the back of it. I remember how trucks and trains always belched thick clouds of smoke, and factories didn't seem productive unless there were smokestacks billowing thick clouds of pollution. I remember when the streams and rivers were so polluted that you didn't dare eat fish out of them. I remember the sky never looking very blue unless you went way out in the country, and then you really noticed it, because it was so different. We took the lead out of gas, made polluting a crime, took phosphates out of detergents (which immediately made streams and rivers have less of those foamy brown patches), and put catalytic converters on cars. Then we realized that our power plants were acidifying the atmosphere and it was coming back down in the rain as weak sulfuric acid, also known as acid rain. We created it, we're dialing it back. Next up, scientists started noticing that we were creating a hole in the ozone. CFCs, chloroflorohydrocarbons, were the culprit this time. We used these chemicals mostly in refrigeration and cooling systems, but back in the peak of their usage, we also used them as propellants in aerosol cans. I remember they used to emphasize that they were in shaving cream and underarm deodorant. The Montreal Protocol outlawed these chemicals and we're finally starting to see evidence that the trend is reversing. So we have a history of discovering and solving climate problems, which is why it is so hard for me to understand why people keep insisting that this is impossible.

I think some people think we can't survive economically without fossil fuels, and we have to keep driving forward regardless of the consequences. They are figuring that we'll adapt to this new warmer planet and they reason, "how bad can it be, really?"

I would draw their attention to Venus, if they really want to know how bad it can be. Scientists often describe the planet Venus as having an atmosphere that exhibits a "runaway greenhouse effect". It's hot enough on the surface of Venus to melt lead. There are some gasses that are no longer in the Venusian atmosphere, such as oxygen, because the temperature has boiled them off into space.

Representative John Boehner, the Republican Minority Leader recently said that "the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, is harmful to our environment, is comical". He goes on to say that every time we exhale, we release carbon dioxide. It is true that we produce carbon dioxide. No one is saying that CO2 is a carcinogen, but we are saying that CO2 in the wrong concentration is very hazardous to our atmosphere. If you don't believe that it can hurt you, why don't you let us seal you in a chamber and start filling it with CO2, and you can tell us when to stop.

I'm not even sure how to respond to the "scientists are atheists". I know that those kind of statements come when someone thinks that they are in a battle or an argument, when they really aren't. Scientists are debating reality with religious people for the hearts and minds of people. If anything, it's a fault of scientists that they don't try to argue their case, they often think that the facts are speaking for themselves. Meanwhile, religious people see this as a debate and they score points for simply putting up arguments and pushing an agenda. In the end, it's hard for me to see how this matters. The church may have put Galileo on trial for heresy and placed him on house arrest for the rest of his life, but that didn't make the sun revolve around the earth. And saying scientists are atheists does not change the fact that the earth is 4 billion years old, and mankind evolved from earlier primates.

I just don't know what to say to these people. The thought that it will all be clear to everyone 365 years from now is no consolation when we need to act now to help fix the problems of today that science has identified. I hope I never find myself in the position of ignoring the evidence because of politics or beliefs. The truth will come out in the end, I just want it to come out before the damage is irreversible.

Nature of Cancer

I was completely entranced by the April 9th, 2009 Nature Podcast. It featured Mike Stratton and the work of himself and his colleagues from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who have been doing high throughput sequencing of individual cancer cells.

There are 100 million million or 100 trillion cells in the human body. Compare that to the number of stars in the galaxy, which is 200 billion. Given that many cells and the number of mutations going on, why is it that only 1 in 3 people that develop cancer? Only a few mutations cause cancer. The types of mutated genes that you need to develop cancer would be the ones that govern biological functions that modulate cell proliferation, modulating the cell cycle, or that are involved in apotosis (cell suicide necessary to stop bad mutations from proliferating - a function that cancer has to shut down to be successful). There are also mutations in genes involved in subtle processes like cell metabolism. We don't know how many genes have to mutate to cause a cell to have cancer. It might be 5 to 20 abnormal genes. In other words, for a cell to become a cancer cell, it has to shut off cell death, turn on uncontrolled proliferation, and alter cell metabolism.

The information is in the cells and decoding is the key. There are now coming online advances in computing to track this information that will make it possible to answer these questions. If they could sequence cells from all over your body, and compare healthy cells to cancer cells, they could see what the cancer mutation is.

This is what they are working on. It's called the Cancer Genome, or the genetic code of a single cell within a cancer. If you look at one cell, you'll find a bunch of somatic mutations. If you track many cancer cells, you can track mutations going back to fertilized egg.

Figuring out which genes are active in cancer will enable us to understand information about driver mutations. We'll be able to track what mutations cause cancer to have growth advantages. We'll be able to use that knowledge to identify active cancer genes in our bodies (to find cancer outbreaks) and to craft treatments that specifically counter what is going wrong. This brings great hope in diagnosis and treatment. The speed with which these major advances in the last few years have come about means that new therapeutic solutions will not be far behind. Hopefully, there are enough researchers following this line of study finding abnormal genes and discovering what cancer weaknesses can be targeted.

Given the sources of variation in mutated genes found from studying cancer, we should also be able to look back in time and see what the host (person) was exposed to that caused the cancer. We might also be able to learn what defects in the DNA repair process may have caused the error.

We might soon craft therapies to help a specific patient. We only need to know what types of cancer genes are active in that person. We should be able to target drugs toward specific cancer traits, once we have identified them in that person. Rapid and inexpensive diagnosis will be the key, since we will need exact information from a person to pick the right drug or treatment. Within 10 years, all patients will have their cancers sequenced, that will be the common diagnostic tool, just as blood work and x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs are today.

It's a very interesting and active field.

Building a mystery

I've seen numerous examples of people that apply a religion-like faith in healing devices. One person I know will avoid going to the doctor like it was fatal, yet he wears a copper bracelet and takes about a dozen pills every day, mostly non-prescription nutriceuticals. Another person I know tried to sell me on the benefits of taking "enzymes" in pill form. She felt great and swore by them. She did not know what enzymes really were or that the body generates them. Another guy wanted to talk to me about an electronic machine that somehow put electrical currents through you and healed everything that was wrong with you. He was convinced that it worked because it was invented by a man that was nominated for a Nobel Prize (I didn't tell him that dozens of people get nominated every year and that being nominated was no measure of merit).

Most of the time, the people that approach me with the latest diet or medical device are religious people that believe in all issues of faith, but believe evolution is a lie that deceptive scientists are trying to foist on the public to destroy their faith. The other faction is a group of people that believe nonsense political theories, but think that the scientists are in cahoots with left wing liberals to destroy our way of life with a preposterous global warming fabricated scheme.

I recently began to figure out where they are coming from. Their understanding, belief, and faith depends on not understanding. They believe the kind of things that are mysterious. If you can't explain it, you have to have a leap of faith to accept it, then in must be correct.

If you can fully explain a phenomenon, the faithful believe that you must be wrong, because we can't know everything. They believe that people that have a complete explanation for something are more likely to be deluding themselves.

It's a crazy situation when you've convinced yourself that proof and logic can't be trusted, but a leap of faith is what you want to put your faith in. It's a mystery.

Delusional Nation

I recently heard a report of a study that found that when people think they are hearing advice from experts, the critical thinking portion of their brain shuts down. The way they tested people was pretty simple. They had a logic game, where they were given circumstances and asked to decide which option they wanted. The first time through, they were not helped in any way, and brain scans were being taken as they played the game. They noticed what areas of the brain were lighting up when a person was making a decision, going through a critical thinking process.

For the second round, it was almost identical, except after they presented the circumstances, they introduced an expert in the subject of the game who was supposed to advise them how to choose. This time around, when they chose, the critical thinking portion of the brain did not light up at all.

The conclusion is that when you think someone else that knows better tells you what they think you should do, then most people don't enter the normal critical thinking pattern. They aren't thinking about what they've been told and they don't analyze or process the information.

In other words, if you believe that what some expert is telling you is correct, you stop thinking for yourself at that point.

You see this in our recent financial crisis. So many experts on CNBC telling the world to buy more and more stocks and don't worry about the basic unsound premise it's all being built on. "Real Estate is the ticket! It will always go up." Never mind the fact that you're buying into it at the height of the bubble. How else can you explain why so many people get together and do the wrong thing as a group. It's like the old fable about "The Emperor Has No Clothes". It takes someone not caught up in group think to walk in fresh and realize what a mess things are in.

It's a little like the network news phenomenon. People watch the news and forget to consider that it might not be right. They believe that the people on there must be experts. They could not possibly be allowed to talk on television if they weren't correct. So if a news story misses the mark completely, no one bats an eye. This is similar to what went on leading up to the Iraq War. Convinced that Iraq was connected to 9/11 and the terrorists and that they had weapons of mass destruction, who wouldn't support the people that think we need to do something about it?

And this also brings me to religious leaders. People believe that their pastor or priest or minister or rabbi or mullah are well-read, divinely inspired experts about the faith and all matters pertaining to God. That is why so many faithful people disbelieve in anything that contradicts their religion. Their expert said so, and that's good enough for them. They somehow feel that to question their religious leader is a form of faithlessness and will not risk going to hell by entertaining any questions or doubts about what is being told.

Critical thinking is essential for being able to face the world and make decisions based on facts and reality. Having "experts" that don't know what they are talking about, or worse, that want you to believe something they themselves do not believe is delusional. And holding onto our delusions is dangerous. Sooner or later, you will collide with reality.