This morning, I wake at 4 and can’t go back to sleep. By 5, I am up, with my dog. As I stand outside in the chill and he pads around in the dark, I decide to make brownies.

I had baked a successful batch of them at my brother’s house in Toronto not long ago. While my nephews were tucked into bed, and Derek was working, my sister-in-law and I made them our unhealthy dinner, washed down with red wine.

One morning, Derek woke up early with his three boys and, hearing them through the walls, I woke up too. Usually, my laying still is like a jack-in-the-box wound steadily tighter: I leap up as soon as I remember something I forgot, need or want to do. But in Derek’s guest room, I lay there, easily, happily, listening to him talking to his sons, and I imagined a version of my own life had I stayed in that city, stuck with that boyfriend, and staked out a little front yard in Toronto’s leafy streets. It’s a nice life.
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Wish it weren’t so, but I fear my lasting memory of many trips to Prince William Sound will be of hunched-over workers with toothbrushes, trying to scrub black tar from shivering birds and sea-worn rocks in the Alaska spring of 1989.

All the images were staggering: The birds looked lost and stunned, their coats of warmth matted black, their wings greased by hydrocarbons that would eventually kill most of them. The inlets of that most Edenic of sheltered seas had a sickening sheen, with a smell that made you nauseated and stayed with you through sleepless nights. Harder still was the sight of fishermen — tough, independent, weather-callused men — weeping for their loss.

Agence France-Presse Cleanup workers scrubbed rocks on an oil-covered beach in Prince William Sound after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

But what stayed with me were those hundreds of workers with toothbrushes. They would labor all day, and maybe clean a rock or two — Sisyphus on the sound. After a while it was all public relations theater paid for by Exxon, whose tanker went aground and spilled at least 11 millions gallons into one of the richest marine cornucopias in the world.

Here now is the sad replay in the Gulf of Mexico, with that life-killing choreography. Then, as today, an oil company deployed booms and dispersants, tried to buy off fishermen with quicky legal settlements, and made resolute promises about restoration and doing the right thing.
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Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images On May 2, President Obama met with local fishermen in Venice, La., about how the oil spill will affect their harvest.

David Brooks: Gail, would you mind if I praised Barack Obama today? I thought not. I’m feeling grateful to the prez these days because we happen to be in the middle of a bunch of midsized crises. There’s the oil spill in the Gulf (which is verging on a big crisis, I guess). There’s the Times Square bomber. There are various floods in Tennessee and elsewhere. The European Union is falling apart over the Greek debt crisis, and so on and so on.

It seems to me that Obama is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He is calm, cool and collected.

Gail Collins: Please, feel free to applaud the president as much as you like. But I’m sorry I can’t return the favor when it comes to the Republicans. Read more…

The lights go down. The room fills with music — a pulsating hip-hop rhythm. And then, over the music, you hear the voice of Richard Dawkins reading a passage from “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin: “Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction. For only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.”

Baba Brinkman.

So begins one of the most astonishing, and brilliant, lectures on evolution I’ve ever seen: “The Rap Guide to Evolution,” by Baba Brinkman.

Brinkman, a burly Canadian from Vancouver, is a latter-day wandering minstrel, a self-styled “rap troubadour,” with a master’s degree in English and a history of tree-planting (according to his Web site, he has personally planted more than one million trees). His guide to evolution grew out of a correspondence with Mark Pallen, an evolutionary biologist and rap enthusiast at the University of Birmingham, in Britain; the result, as Brinkman tells us, is “the only hip-hop show to have been peer-reviewed.”
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Remember the episode of “The Twilight Zone” where the earthlings discover only too late that a book brandished by extraterrestrial visitors, titled “To Serve Man,” is not, in fact, a philanthropic manifesto — but, sadly, a cookbook?

Even after watching this show as a kid, I didn’t give serious thought to the possibility of space aliens turning us into toast. But then last week Stephen Hawking made news by weighing in on the subject: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” And Hawking knows a thing or two about outer space!

Assessing Hawking’s conjecture may seem hopeless. Doesn’t discerning the motivations of aliens who show no sign of existing amount to the most untethered thought experiment ever?
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The placebo effect is, potentially, one of the most powerful forces in medicine. The challenge is to harness that power in a reliable and systematic way.

First, what is the placebo effect?

It’s the improvement in health that some patients experience because of the feeling that they are receiving medical care. A classic example comes from drug trials. Suppose patients are randomly divided into three groups: those who get no treatment, those who get the drug that’s being tested, and those who get the placebo treatment — typically a pill that looks and tastes like the drug, but doesn’t contain it, or any other active ingredient.

The idea is that the “no treatment” group shows how many people would have gotten better by themselves; the “placebo” group shows any effect of participating in medical rituals (like taking pills); the “drug” group shows any effect of the drug over and above the effect of medical rituals. Simple.

Or not. Different studies of the placebo effect report wildly different results. One survey of 117 trials of two ulcer drugs found that, depending on the trial, patients in the placebo group had anywhere from zero to a 100 percent recovery rate.

The drugs also varied in their effectiveness from one trial to the next; sometimes patients on the placebo did better than those on the drug. Intriguingly, the results varied from country to country, with Brazilians showing no placebo effect and Germans having a strong one. Why? No one knows, but it doesn’t appear to be because of anything inherently German: trials of drugs for hypertension found a weaker placebo effect in Germany than in other countries.

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Also, when is a menorah a menorah, and when is a crèche a crèche, and when are the Ten Commandments directives given to the Jews by God on Mt. Sinai? These questions, which might seem peculiar in the real world, are perfectly ordinary in the wild and wacky world of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, where in one case (Lynch v. Donnelly, 1984) the Supreme Court declared, with a straight judicial face, that a display featuring the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wise men conveyed a secular, not a religious message.

In the latest chapter of this odd project of saving religion by emptying it of its content, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a plurality in Salazar v. Buono, ordered a district court to reconsider a ruling that Congress had impermissibly promoted religion by devising a plan designed to prevent the removal of a cross standing in the Mojave National Preserve. The cross had originally been erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to commemorate American soldiers who had died in World War I. In 2002, Frank Buono, a retired Park Service employee, filed suit alleging a violation of the Establishment Clause and “sought an injunction requiring the government to remove the cross.”
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Sometimes I can’t tell why I’m exhausted. Is it from the 100-plus miles per week I run to prepare my body for the grueling demands of a 26.2 mile race? Or is it from the insomnia that pulls me out of bed at 3 a.m. to pound out a 20 miler on the treadmill at a 24-hour fitness club before most people have eaten breakfast? It’s hard to say.

Courtesy of Tera Moody The author running at the 2008 Olympic Trials Marathon in Boston.

Sleep deprivation makes my life a bit more difficult and puts obstacles between me and my goal of making the 2012 United States Olympic team in the marathon. But I sometimes think that there is a part of it that actually helps prepare my body for the demands of a long-distance race.

There is no doubt that sleep benefits physical performance. During rest the body repairs damaged muscle tissue and replenishes glucose stores so an athlete can train again the following day. Sleep deprivation has been linked to increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol, depression, injuries, and illness. Elite runners know the benefits of sleep and try to get as much as possible, often sleeping 8 to 10 hours per night with a long nap in between workouts. Read more…

My wife and I have different sleeping styles — and our mattress shows it.  She hoards the pillows, thrashes around all night long, and barely dents the mattress, while I lie on my back, mummy-like, molding a cavernous depression into my side of the bed.

Bed manufacturers recommend flipping your mattress periodically, probably with people like me in mind.  But what’s the best system?  How exactly are you supposed to flip it to get the most even wear out of it?

Brian Hayes explores this problem in the title essay of his recent book, “Group Theory in the Bedroom.”  Double entendres aside, the “group” in question here is a collection of mathematical actions — all the possible ways you could flip, rotate or overturn the mattress so that it still fits neatly on the bed frame.

By looking into mattress math in some detail, I hope to give you a feeling for group theory more generally.  It’s one of the most versatile parts of mathematics. It underlies everything from the choreography of contra dancing and the fundamental laws of particle physics, to the mosaics of the Alhambra and their chaotic counterparts like this image.

Michael Field

As these examples suggest, group theory bridges the arts and sciences.   It addresses something the two cultures share — an abiding fascination with symmetry.  Yet because it encompasses such a wide range of phenomena, group theory is necessarily abstract.  It distills symmetry to its essence.
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Prohibition ended 77 years ago, yet Americans have still not kicked the habit of trying to fix social problems by banning things.

Half a century ago, the target was true-crime novels and magazines, those filled with “pictures or stories of criminal deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime,” in the words of a New York statute that made it a crime to print, sell or even to give away such matter. Nineteen other states had similar laws. The Supreme Court declared in 1948 that the statutes violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, prompting a passionate dissent from Justice Felix Frankfurter. The former Harvard Law School professor complained that the majority was thwarting the states’ effort “to solve what is perhaps the most persistent, intractable, elusive and demanding of all problems in society — the problem of crime and, more particularly, of its prevention.”

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