Book: How to enjoy quasi-science by 10-fold (Japanese)

There are many quasi-science statements and theories, such as "blood type reflects character", "Moon landing was made-up", or "water, consciousness and intent".


According to this book, to avoid getting fooled by quasi-science, you need to;

1) check the source of the story
2) watch who is endorsing the story (professionals and specialists?)
3) watch the "key words" ("wave" or "higher dimension" sound suspicious)
4) listen to rebuttals
5) check the numbers (calculate it yourself)
6) ask whether it is rational or makes sense
7) experiment (if it's not too costly, do it yourself)
8) doubt your own senses (don't trust your senses too much...they can be tricked)
9) distinguish fact and wish (quasi-science appeals to your wishful thinking)
10) have correct knowledge for science (junior-high level)

These 10 guidelines sound quite rational.

This is an era when baseless internet search results or lying people can fool you and many others. Look what happened in England after false propaganda and misinformation went rampant. Shame.

Information literacy is more important than ever.

Book: "Tango for Teachers: the Tango matrix" by Alexandru Eugen Cristea

This book will choose readers. The book itself is not very long (134 pages) and you probably can read through it quickly. But how much you will get out of the reading, and how much you can use the knowledge in the book, will vary depending on the knowledge held by the reader.

The title "Tango for Teachers" may be an appropriate title.


Appreciation for an art depends on the learner's level. For example, if you are learning 4th grade math, you won't comprehend nor appreciate high school-level math. A  high school math learner is unlikely to enjoy grad-school material.

It is the same for Tango.



[Following is my translation, and not necessarily what they exactly wrote.] 


This book actually tells you simple concepts, distilled from the experiences by the authors.

And the central concept they are trying to tell you is the Tango matrix.

What is the Tango matrix?

As Tango being a social-origin partner dance and a highly improvisational dance, every time you dance Argentine Tango, you will be challenged with a question; "With this partner, music, occasion, and current you, how do you construct/dance this Tango?"


We can see other people's answers (dances) to the challenging question. And we make judgement, "they dance like beginner" or "They are advanced" etc.


Come to think of it, how do we make that judgement?

We see how the dancers construct/dance the Tango.


And their concept of "the Tango matrix" is their version of explanation as to how the judgement is made.



Tango dancing is made with various elements, movements, options, etc that dancers can choose at a moment.

And the elements, movements, options, etc, each comes with a difficulty level that we can perceive.

In short, advanced dancer's Tango uses lots of these "difficult or impressive" elements.movements, options etc. They come back to back to back, not with much "easy fillers".

The way they see Tango is a series of a unit they can choose to use. When they use many units with "difficult" or "advanced" level in their Tango, and if they are executed well, connected well, and flow well, the Tango looks advanced.

(To be fair, the concepts they included as the "unit" are many more.)


Well, how many social dancers actually have given a thought on how they construct the dance, beyond weaving patterns? 

If you do not enjoy translating a concept to your dance, you may not get much out of this book.

If you do, this book should be interesting and may turn out to be useful.


It was an intriguing book for sure. 

[The book cover]

The grant has been submitted. The revised manuscript also has been submitted and I got an automated acknowledgement email. I have a day to prepare for a seminar. And I got a revision for a review article. Oh, my.

Science: Revising a manuscript

When we write a manuscript to publish a scientific project, we send it to a journal. The editorial office determine whether they will send it to a few specialist reviewers (or, reject it outright).

Once the manuscript is sent to reviewers and the editors get the review results, the editors determine whether they accept it for publication, or ask the authors to revise, either major or minor revision (or reject it).

Most of the time, "accept" at the original form do not happen. All the manuscripts I ever submitted went through one or two revisions before they were accepted for publication. That is how it works.


On March we submitted a research manuscript for a journal, and they requested us to do a major revision on May. So we have been working on doing suggested experiments, generating the data, reformatting the figures, and working on the manuscript.


A postdoctoral researcher whom I have been working with for the project dropped off the data required for revising the manuscript on Friday. I spent some time to work on the manuscript on Saturday. Now we should be able to address all the issues pointed out by the reviewers, provide point-to-point response in a rebuttal letter, and the revised manuscript should include all the response.


One thing I noticed for this revision is that they are enforcing stricter policies for scientific rigor and reproducibility, and requesting us to include information involved, such as statements for animal randomization or blinding and clarification for statistics and sample numbers.

There were some scandals in science in the past few years. As a response, they (e.g. NIH) are introducing new grant review criteria, emphasizing scientific rigor and reproducibility. The stricter requirement by the publisher seems to be a part of industry movement to emphasize quality in science.


Probably it will take 2 more days to finalize the manuscript for re-submission.


This is a part of the work as a scientist. We just do that.

In case you are interested in knowing how scientific publishing process works, this is a concise guide by the Nature publishing group, which is a major publisher group in the industry.  Link: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/64975067#/64975067/14

Dance: how to increase flexibility, or hot yin yoga

This entry is about a method to increase flexibility.

Flexible body moves more gracefully. Dancers should aim at improving their flexibility.

But how?


Here is a method that is a combination of warm-up and yin yoga.

You know properly warmed up body is more flexible. You can bend deeper, stretch further, and have wider range of motion.


Now, do you know yin yoga? It is a type of yoga with a main character of long-held pause or stretching on the floor.  Let's say, you are doing forward bend on the floor ("Caterpillar pause", see picture below). Your body takes a posture. Then you hold it, counting 10, 20, 30,... then you can tell, after count 15 or 30, your body, specifically the connective tissue, starts yielding and now you are bending deeper than before. You'd feel sensation, but it should not be sharp pain or anything. 

You may notice that how much power of skeletal muscles you are using to maintain your posture. In yin yoga setting, you may notice that after 30 seconds or so, your skeletal muscles tire out and begin to relax, allowing your body weight to stretch your connective tissues. It is an interesting thing to notice.



The long held minutes are a good time to quietly converse with your own body. Once you get used to yin yoga, you'd feel rushed in regular yoga.



Work on connective tissue with long held stretching, that is the core idea of the yin yoga. You do not use muscle power to pull. Instead, you use your own body weight to slowly pull connective tissue and to open joints. Since you do not use muscle and momentum, chance of injury is actually small.


After holding a posture for 2,3 or 5 minutes, you'd feel stretched, even to the point of feeling vulnerable. But as long as it is not injurious, the sensation is something you may start feeling nice, or at least something you find acceptable. And, yin yoga does work to improve your flexibility in a relatively short term, possibly in a few weeks.


Now, what happens if you properly warm up your body, then do yin yoga? Hold a posture and count for 10,20, 30, 60, 100,....3 minutes, then 5 minutes?


After the "hot yin yoga", you'd feel vulnerable sensation, because you were slowly prying your body open. But you might be surprised how much more flexible your body became after a session.

[Caterpillar pause (from wikipedia "yin yoga")] 

Just in case, I put a disclaimer here. This entry is for providing an idea purpose only. The exercise may not be for you. Like any other physical activity, be careful and talk with your doctor if needed. Do it at your own risk.

Science: Specific scientific question vs Infrastructure of science

My mind has been occupied much by a scientific project in the grant proposal I've been working on. 

But I don't fancy writing about the project in detail in a blog here. Instead, I'll write about the project in an indirect manner.



Let's say, an aspect of science is a pursuit of novelty, a quest to the unknown, and discovery of something new. Most of the time, we achieve novelty by distinguishing the known and unknown first then asking a specific scientific question.

Much efforts go into elaborating or revising the question, so that we are asking a "right" question that can be solved through current scientific methods, and that can provide something useful. 


[This is a point natural science is different from humanities and social science. In humanities and social science, the basic unit is human, which can be affected by culture, bias, education, position, and millions of other things. A truth in a mind can be utterly a false in another mind. In my opinion, for humanities researchers, their basis of the work is so changeable, it is like a quicksand. My condolences to humanities researchers.  ...I digress.]


There are many other aspects in science. Natural science too is a human activity, and there are current, "status quo" ways to do science.

But "status quo" is not always the best way. In fact, the way we do it now is a temporal state in history. Science is not as streamlined as you may think. There are many gaps in a research field that have not been patched up. In most cases, we ignore the gaps as white elephants in the room. 

But sometimes, with a progress in science and a tool that was not available but is now, we may be able to tackle the white elephant.


That is how I am seeing this project. By filling the gap and changing infrastructure, we should be able to enjoy more outcome from scientific research. 


There is an academic approach of studying and discussing a problem, and there is an entrepreneurial approach of providing a solution to a problem. In this case, I'm thinking of the latter.