He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The seas’ black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

p.185.

Not my genre generally. For how wildly popular he is I’ve never read any Cormac McCarthy before this.

My friend, I’ve made it,
sorry for the wait,
it’s a long way
up the narrow stairs to your room
from the night outside with no moon,
so intelligent and lonely we are,
I’m happy to see you.

And you, you’re a reflection
in the open window.
I’m wide-eyed
and I can’t shut up.
God, it’s so easy
to lose it all in this place.

There’s no more sleep left.
I grow thin
in the green light,
so we have bagels from the dumpster
on a cellophane blue plate,
with cream cheese and
gobs of fresh strawberry jam.

The old wood floor sways, under you,
then the fiddle, then the blues.
A quick swig of whiskey, and
from somewhere far off the 3am faint
smell of cigarette smoke.

Hey, what do you say,
let’s go for a drive.
I’m not bluffing, and you’re not shy,
just lettin’ the buzz go by,
just losing time again.

Listen, I’m starting to really like those trees
outside your window, and

rumor has it, the sun sets real low
over the west coast.
But while these folks are sleeping
huge stars are spinning,
and by daybreak,
we’re well on our way
sober and stumbling.

-Lulu Liu

————————————————————–

I wrote this for my junior lab partner. Spent a lot of late nights with this guy.

Anyways we were lost. And it was a happy occasion, so my parents, not naturally apt to socialize with strangers, stopped to ask for directions. We were in Harvard Square, and we’ve passed this intersection 3 times now, my dad explained out the driver’s side window to someone I couldn’t immediately see. We can’t take Massachusetts Avenue, he said, it’s going the wrong way, we need to go that way on it, we’re trying to go to MIT.

Stranger looked in the car. It was an older man, if I remember correctly. Looked to the back with all the stuff and smiled. “Go to school there?” he asked. Of me, apparently.

Um. Yeah. Orientation. I said. (I think. It made me nervous back then to talk to just about anybody.)

“Great. That’s great, ” He had the biggest smile on his face.

“I’m really proud of you,” the old man said, inexplicably. “You want to go this way and take Mt. Auburn, it joins up with Mass Ave in a few blocks.”

Thank you, thank you, my dad said. He waved as he pulled away from the curb; he beamed the whole rest of the way.

A few months later, we discovered the Cambridge St. exit off 90 over to Memorial Drive and we never went through Harvard Square again.

Now they are exhausted by my moving. Now I am exhausted by it too.

But back then, I was in one place, they were in many. My dad moved to Dartmouth in New Hampshire for work. My mom left New Haven for Maryland. Then my dad moved into a place back on Prospect St. He worries that my mom is home alone. All the driving. All the driving. When I started applying to graduate school, this winter, six years later, he joked that he was also applying. For work, at NIH or maybe another lab in the DC area. “We’ll see who gets the good news first,” he laughed.

Then he sold the house. Then I won.

Summer before college we
looked for outcroppings
of rhyolite;
a rock
glass-like, that
has been known to
come alive
by earth’s heat and
walk slowly
across the land.

We picked
at the valley floor
with sticks
parted tall grass
while the cool slopes
on either side grew
like trees overhead.

Floods raze the land,
you said, waving
a bent stick at a stream
that was
not quite a river,
only a tame curve visible.
And I thought
such a biblical way of
starting over;
of course
there’s nothing to find here.

Then where?

We knew
what we would see.
Record of a
red hot earth
before the path and
chattering trees,
and the wailing births
of the geologists who
predicted a war
preceding any
in our human history.

Even before the visiting
glaciers that
aligned these mountains,
and the grass that spouted upward
in thin, green shoots
and finally covered the valley floor
like a bandage.

And long
before the two of us–
arms swinging
with each higher step,
stinking
from August sweat
and clumsy
with the weight of our bodies
–cast our two
impressive grey shadows
briefly
against a bulging sky.

“It’s starting to rain.”

Ahead,
someone’s abandoned walking stick
had flowered
and grown leaves.
I took a drink as
we climbed
ever higher.
Over our shoulders
slowly evolving,
an always more perfect view.

-Lulu Liu

————————————————————————————-

Years ago, I took a trip to Yellowstone with a group of people just like me. It was the first time in my life I’d met anybody like me.
Anyways, I felt like posting some poems.

Could have been yours.

A lack of hobbies might have something to do with it, but this year, I took more of an interest. I worked remotely, a few hours saturday a few hours sunday, pulled into it by John here in San Jose basically. But I didn’t have a bad time. I’ve been seeing a lot of Math is Fun propaganda lately, and I feel like sticking up for physics a bit. So here’s an example of a puzzle we solved and liked.

Pesky Bugs

The puzzle is called Pesky Bugs. There’s that wav file, and there is a tag line which serves as a hint, “Bio Man even controls the insects flying around your head.”

The answer is “PLAGUE”.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Mystery Hunt Puzzle before, but they don’t exactly come with instructions. Yet when you stumble upon the right way to solve one, you usually know it. There’s a certain elegance to these puzzles that I like.

The first thing to do here is split up the signal. Someone did this and found that the wav file is actually built up by overlapping six individual frequencies. The pure tones are at 220, 440, 660, 880, 1100, and 1320 Hz. They start up simultaneously at the beginning and end one at a time.

Next, you notice sound file is not in mono. The left and right channels are different; the amplitudes of the tones varying continuously but in a seemingly random way. Once you’ve gotten this far you’ll know that the solution must involve treating these two channels individually somehow, this feature is not accidental.

At this point I IMed Chris, my Sound Physics Go-To Guy. I asked, is the amplitude of a soundwave proportional to 1/r or 1/r^2, r being the straight line distance from the source? (1/r, he said) I also asked, is the electrical signal picked up by a mic proportional to the amplitude or the intensity of the wave? (amplitude, he said, what are you doing?) The idea was that there was something peculiar about the sound in the two channels, which shifted from one to the other, and if you leaned up very close to your speakers, it sounded like something was flying around your head. We were going to figure out the trajectory of the bugs.

The extraction was basically trigonometry, with some guess work involved. If the speakers were your ears how far apart were they? We initially constrained this by requiring that the distance D between the ears was no smaller than the maximum |R1-R2| and no larger than the minimum R1+R2 (bounding all possible triangles to be formed by the three sides). But this turned out not to be very stringent. We ended up with some funny looking curves that didn’t spell anything.

This is because there was another problem. Even knowing R1 and R2 and distance D between the ears the bug’s position is only constrained to a circle in the plane perpendicular to the axis of the ears. Assuming that it travels in a plane always we are still left with two ambiguous points for the current position of the bug. (If you look at the official solutions this ambiguity was actually eliminated with one extra piece of information: doppler shift, unfortunately we didn’t notice this about the tones) In any case, our solution was to look for momentum discontinuities at the x-axis that resemble reflections and stitch those manually.

We didn’t find them though, we found these smooth curves that, though definitely not the result of randomness, again, didn’t look like much:

Then there was a breakthrough! The appearance of the curves depended heavily on our choice of D. Though the upper bound varied widely, the D lower bound for each bug (frequency) was practically identical. This meant not only was D the same for each bug (as we suspected may be the case), but each bug also went all the way around the head. Pretty soon after realizing this we got our first letter: A

Due to the reflection ambiguity, upside-down, but unmistakable. A.

Some letters were confusing on account of that.

P or b?

Some were less so.

It’s exciting to me that so much information could be extracted from seemingly so little. Yet this is the kind of thing that physicists do every day. I remember from my time at LIGO using almost exactly the same technique to triangulate the location of gravitational wave sources using the time delay between signal detections at 4 detectors located around the world. In astrophysics tiny deflections in light from faraway galaxies can be used to determine the mass distributions of foreground dark matter. And in particle physics where just about everything is invisible, not just dark matter, all kinds of crazy techniques are used to infer the position and existence of a particle.

Anyways I just really like physics and also liked this puzzle. And in my mind there are many parallels. Seeing those letters emerge (especially that gorgeous G) after all that failed effort is astonishing but there’s the feeling that somehow it must. Much like finding order in the universe.

Because I wrote it in the last two weeks, working frantic 14 hours days? Because it’s a contentious issue and the Bee is not known for sticking out its neck? Because it was too long and went through too many edits? Because I was naive and believing and unprepared to fight?

Whatever it is, I’m not going into journalism, it’s not a huge loss for me. And I would have forgotten about it if it weren’t for occasional reminders from Bee interns that I’ve kept in touch with. And if it weren’t for running into it today while looking for graduate school documents.

This is neither the original thing I wrote, nor the final edited version. It was somewhere in between, when one day I decided I would save a copy on my laptop drive and work on it at home.

TITLE

On Oct. 1, following his sentencing, Carmichael dad Kevin Harper Jr. will take his place quietly behind bars, his payment for a crime that 30 years ago did not exist. The 26-year-old was convicted in Sacramento county last month of shaking his 6-month-old baby son, Jaden Harper, to death. The involuntary manslaughter and deadly assault charges carry a minimum penalty of 25 years.

Shaken Baby Syndrome or, lately, Shaken Impact Syndrome, is believed to be responsible for up to half of all child abuse deaths. But its aggressive criminal prosecution, which has since the 1980s put thousands of parents and caretakers in jail, has been called misguided by some. Shaken baby diagnoses, once on unquestionably solid ground, has in the last ten years come under mounting scrutiny. Now, legal scholars and even some courts have joined the crowd of skeptical scientists in proclaiming the last three decades to be an unfortunate episode of scientific overreaching.

HEADING

Harper’s is, in many ways, a typical shaken baby case.

A caregiver left alone with an infant arrives at the hospital with the child in his arms. The baby is not breathing, he says, went suddenly limp, or has had a seizure. Despite doctors’ best efforts, the child rapidly deteriorates from unexplained injury. A close medical examination shows blood – blood on the surface of the brain, blood in the retina.

“They found the child had a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhages,” said Harper’s attorney Sue Karlton, two bleeding, diagnostic markers thought to be proof of shaking. There’s a third marker – swelling of the brain – that in the most severe cases, kills. Together, in law, they’re called the shaken baby triad.

A diagnosis of child abuse mandates an investigation by law enforcement. But with a shaken baby, said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Law Professor at DePaul University, the diagnosis is the case. It establishes the crime, the motive, and the identity of the perpetrator – simply the last person with the healthy child.

“Shaken Baby Syndrome is, in essence, a medical diagnosis of murder,” she writes in the Washington Law Review in 2009.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology as recently as 2004 issued guidelines stating if retinal damage takes a certain form, and is found together with bleeding and trauma in the brain, then “shaking injury can be diagnosed with confidence regardless of other circumstances.”

But how confident is confident? Legal experts say studies indicate reasonable doubt. It turns out the set of findings is more common than originally thought. But since the early 1980s, convictions have consistently been obtained and affirmed in the higher courts based on the presence of the triad, sometimes in absense of any other sign of abuse.

The Sacramento Child Abuse Prevention Center reports that since 2005, there’s been an average of one case a year in the county of a shaken baby resulting in death. Nationwide, 1500 or so infants are diagnosed annually with injuries attributed to violent shaking, Tuerkheimer estimates. And the numbers, since 1990, have been on a “sharply upward trajectory,” she writes.

Yet just decades ago, the diagnosis was unheard of. Most accounts of its history point to a seminal 1972 study by pediatric radiologist Dr. John Caffey who noted a mysterious but persistent set of clinical symptoms in a group of children. He proposed that they’d been abused. The rotational accelerations from violent shaking have torn delicate veins in the brain, he said.

Though accepted widely by the medical community, nothing was heard of it for years. Then, in the autumn of 1998 a 19-year-old British au pair made it famous.

Louise Woodward was convicted in Massachusetts of the shaking death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen and sentenced to 15 years. A judge would reduce her penalty to time served, 279 days, on appeal. But the echoes of her high profile trial lingered, and the pace quickened on shaken baby prosecutions.

HEADING

“She was a normal, healthy baby,” said Scott Juceam of Hannah Rose, his daughter. “Just learning to walk. Just starting to talk.”

Hannah was found unconscious in her Roseville home on March 11, 2006 while in the care of her nanny Veronica Martinez-Salcedo. She was taken to the hospital where she never woke up.

Dr. Christopher Markus, an emergency room physician at Sutter Roseville Medical Center, was the first to see Hannah. After 35 minutes of examining the baby, Juceam said, Markus approached him and his wife, Lorena, to ask if the child had been shaken. “We’d never heard of it before that,” Juceam said.

A 2007 trial date was set for Martinez-Salcedo, who, as an illegal immigrant charged with murder and child abuse, would be held without bail. But as the family mourned and the prosecution readied its case, elsewhere, something significant was happening.

Physicians who, just a decade earlier, had been instrumental in finding guilt were disowning their own testimony. “New science” has cast doubt on almost every aspect of the shaken baby case, they said.  It turns out the shaker’s identity may be masked by a conscious interval in the child, the cause of death is no longer an absolute, and the mechanism of injury is in reality poorly understood. Quietly, and largely without notice, the old scientific consensus had shifted.

Dr. Patrick Barnes, Chief of Pediatric Neuroradiology at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital was the lead expert witness who dealt Louise Woodward her conviction. In early 2007, he was called as a witness in another shaken baby case – this time, in support of Audrey Edmunds’ petition for a new trial. Edmunds, a former Wisconsin day care provider, had by then served 10 years of an 18 year a shaken baby sentence of her own.

He was “embarassed” to recall his old testimony, he said to the judge, “(I and others) told a lie on child abuse based on old diagnostic criteria.”

In the same hearing, Dr. Robert Huntington III, a Professor of Pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came forward as well. Huntington had testified during Edmunds’ 1996 trial that the timing of the baby’s injuries made her culpable, but later saw something in his practice that would change his mind.

A little girl showed up one day at about 9 a.m. “with bruises and not looking quite right,” he recalled. All day she was a little clingy but not obviously in trouble. But middle of the night she collapsed and by the next morning she was dead. “She’d been in the hospital the whole time,” he said.  Her autopsy found all three symptoms belonging to a shaken baby.

Studies have since shown that there can be a delay of more than 72 hours between head injury and onset of symptoms in infants. “Who did it?” was a harder question to answer than originally assumed.

Then, with the fall of a 23-month-old girl, diagnostic certainty crumpled. She slipped off a playset and struck her head some two feet below on carpeted ground. Crying, but alert and talking, she walked with her grandmother to the kitchen. Five minutes later she lost consciousness; 36 hours later she died at the hospital.

There, child abuse experts found the full constellation of head injuries indicative of shaking. But before a prosecution could be initiated, the grandmother presented incontrovertible proof: the accident was caught on tape.

Dr. John Plunkett, a forensic pathologist from Minnesota, published this case study along with 17 other deadly short-distance falls in 2001, the majority with multiple witnesses. Of them, 13 had subdural bleeding, 12 had lucid intervals, and 4 out of 6 eye exams revealed bleeding in both eyes.

In all of the latter cases, there was also subdural bleeding. “At one point the notion was when you saw the triad, you knew with certainty that there was shaking,” Tuerkheimer said. “I don’t know there are any reputable pediatricians saying that any more.”

HEADING

But most contentious, at the core of the debate, is a crucial omission.

“No child has ever been witnessed to have been injured by shaking alone,” said Dr. Jan Leestma, a Chicago forensic neuropathologist.

This hole in the shaken baby case has permitted questions about its very possibility. “In the biomechanics community,” said Chris Van Ee, an impact biomechanics specialist. “I have not seen much of any support that it’s real.”

Studies show the rotational forces produced by shaking are less than those in a 1 foot fall, he said, you’ll break a baby’s neck shaking before you cause massive brain damage. “I don’t think it exists,” said Leestma.

On this point pediatricians issue their most adamant rebuttal – experience. “There are thousands of physicians in the US that agree that shaking can kill a kid and about 50 who say otherwise,” said Carole Jenny, a Professor of Pediatrics at Brown University Medical School. And 35 years of encounters with caretakers have convinced Dr. Desmond Runyan, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, of the reality of the syndrome.

Still, the American Academy of Ophthalmology clinical guidelines were updated to reflect more nuanced language. The diagnosis “shaken baby” was discouraged in favor of “abusive head trauma”. Other “explanations” were given a nod.

“The difficulty is that practice on these cases is so variable,“ said Dr. Eli Newberger, a Harvard Professor and Founder of the Child Protection Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Doctors, in general, are not well-trained in separating real cases from the many mimics, he said.

In the courts, the spectre of injustice has prompted second thoughts. For the first time, a Kentucky judge in 2006 banned testimony of shaken injury absent other evidence of abuse. And by 2007, the UK and Canada had launched large-scale reviews of child death cases, including shaken baby convictions, on account of discredited medical testimony.

HEADING

Against this backdrop of evolving science, and as courts around the world struggled to keep up, in 2007, Veronica Martinez-Salcedo’s Placer County murder trial began. Greg Avella was a juror.

“It was horrible. It was rancorous, it was contentious.”

On the prosecution’s side was a confused, grieving family; on the defense a sad-eyed nanny whose stories didn’t match. But on trial: conventional medical wisdom.

“The first jury went 10-2 for guilty,” the prosecutor Jeff Wood said. “At one point it was 11-1.”  Avella, who has five kids of his own, was that one.

“If you don’t have all the evidence, you’re throwing someone’s life away,” he said. “I couldn’t put her away they didn’t prove it to me.”

The jury hung. They would try again.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Audrey Edmunds after 10 years in jail was granted a new trial where, later, all charges would be dropped. The appellate court cited “a shift in mainstream medical opinion”.   A contentious debate had replaced a medical consensus, it said.  The shaken baby case was weakening.

A year later, Martinez-Salcedo’s second trial would end in another hung jury – but 9-3 the other way.

“Dave are you there on the internet?”
“Uh yeah I am, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Wonderful!”

This is an archived 1993 broadcast of NPR’s Science Friday– first ever to go out over the internet. And that’s the talking point:

How do you describe the Internet? Well, to say that it’s a network of over 10,000 computer networks is like describing the telephone system as billions of wires. It gives you some idea of how it’s constructed, but not what it’s used for. And that’s what we hope to do this hour, to talk about the Internet and the creative things that can be done with this massive worldwide network.

And to just illustrate one creative idea, we are broadcasting this program, TALK OF THE NATION, Science Friday is going out live on the Internet. It’s not going out as something somebody’s typing very quickly and making a transcript and sending it out on a computer. No, our actual voices on this program. Our voices are going out to computer terminals around the world where people are able to hear it coming through their computers.

There’s mention of MacIntoshes, Compuserve, “internet messages”, Dungeons and Dragons. The existence of half-a-dozen programs with graphical interfaces. There’s thoughtful discussions of dissemination of information. There’s even some fortune-telling about the future: copyright issues, misinformation and the pajamahadeen, downloading music, the promise of 64kps download capability.

It’s times like this that I am reminded of how phenomenal NPR is.