 I like science. He does too. That's Ethan Allen. I'm Jay Fidel. I'm the, what am I, the host guest, guest host, and he's the host guest, okay? We both like science. This is likable science on a given Friday, and there's some interesting things to talk about worth ruminating about. So we live, we live in a time that, you know, that we hope passes quickly. We live in a sort of transitional time, and I hope it's better at the end. And you know, one of the things, of course, is the midterm elections. And Ethan has found, you know, this is so important, that some scientists were elected to Congress, to the House. Yes, indeed. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, what this means, where they came from, why they ran, why people voted for them, whether they have the hutzpah, you know, to actually fight out the good fighting over science in Congress, and get us out of the 12th century, hopefully soon. Ethan, welcome to your show. Well, thank you, Jay. Good to be here. Always fun to talk to you, and I love the intersection of politics and science. You bet. This is what we're doing, yeah. Let me just say up front, you know, I don't think that having scientists in politics is like a silver bullet. I think you could say it's a necessary condition for good government. It's not sufficient for good government, you know. So many of the decisions that we're facing now have science components to them. I mean, obviously things like climate change, energy policies, all have huge amounts of science, but even other sort of seemingly non-scientific issues, like immigration, right, that is being held up as a huge threat to our country, and yet the social scientists who study immigration point out that countries that have had relatively open immigration policies have typically done better. Their economies thrive. Their standard of living goes up as compared to countries that really try to isolate themselves and close their borders. So again, a huge array of issues really actually do have science underlying them, and we need scientists, and now we've got some. On your point of social science, I just want to add one thing. I think everybody in Congress ought to be an expert in something. I think they can't all be political, I don't want to say hacks. They can't be political agents. They have to be expert in something so they can make a contribution. And one of the interesting points I saw on a link that I got in the mail on immigration is this. It's the whole Marshall Plan kind of mentality. We are so concerned about a caravan that wants to come here for jobs and a better life. They come from failed states. What the United States should be doing beyond immigration is to reach out to help failed states. And if that means revitalizing United Nations and its various, you know, eliminationary organizations, then that's what they should do, just like the Marshall Plan. If you want to stop, you know, the migrant problem in Europe, go to Africa, go to the Middle East and make life better for people. Rebuild their countries. So shoot some help down to Honduras, Guatemala, get rid of the gangs. They build their local economies, and people will stop leaving, right? Yeah. It's as simple as that. It's rather like sort of prenatal care. You know, it's much cheaper to invest a dollar in prenatal care than to invest $1,000 taking care of somebody who doesn't get the proper prenatal and postnatal care, right? So if somebody who is a scientist or a social scientist or a doctor in the case of medicine is willing to run and work, you know, with that environment, then vote for him. You know, we need to fill—or her. Or her. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm pleased with experts of every kind. We do. And it was pointed out in one of these articles that, you know, scientists, by their very training and their very nature, are problem solvers. That's what they do. That's what—how they think is like, there's an issue. We've got to solve this problem. You know, if you're a scientist or an engineer or a doctor, you're working on that mindset all the time. And that's—yeah, our Congress is facing a lot of problems. And basically we need people in there who are much more concerned with solving the problem than simply ground-standing and making themselves look good or, you know, doing what's politically expedient or whatever. Right. Right. And that may not be consistent with what's happened before. But also, you know, I mean, scientists are not necessarily advocates. I mean, sometimes that's a weakness, you know, in the training, I think. So we've got to find scientists, candidates, who are willing to advocate for science as well as just know about it. One of the reasons why I wanted to get this whole show, this likable science show going is to bring scientists on in general to talk in accessible terms about what it is I do and why it's interesting, why it's worth supporting, why the average person on the street should care about their science because that's what it's all about. Science is not isolated. It's not some arcane discipline that sits off by itself and is immune to the rest of the world. It is shaped and emerges from a culture in society and then it in turn influences that society. It should be fully part of the process. That means being deeply involved in politics. But yes, scientists are not well trained. It's admirable what you're doing, by the way. And we take you when you had a panel to this effect at the East West Center in a scientist symposium. And that's what we've got to do. And you were you were really offering some great advice that day. Thank you. You know, the EcoDays was a great symposium, getting scientists to hone their communication skills, learn how to talk to news media in ways that are going to grab people's attention. It's becoming a bigger thing now. It's a very good trend. Well, how about talking to the news media now about the actual scientists who were elected on Tuesday of this week to the House of Representatives? That would be really exciting to know who they are. We need to watch them and encourage them. Right. Well, you can go on, of course, and there's actually a number of sources to find out who they are. And whether you're in Illinois or Nevada or where else, Pennsylvania, all these different around around the country, different districts voted these various people in. And they are pediatricians, they're veterinarians, they're physicists, they're nuclear engineers. I mean, it's a wide array of people. Interestingly, virtually all of them are Democrats. One Republican scientist got elected. There's actually now a PAC, a support group, basically, called 314 that supports scientists running for office. And actually helps them out, raises money for them, you know, helps them produce good materials that are going to be accessible. So happy that happened. And yeah. But you know, it's more than just that they bring their own expertise and serve on the right committees. So those committees, you know, have a better appreciation of their own subject matter. It's that they are scientists and they can appreciate science and evidence-based thinking. You said my math phrase there. Data, all that. And so they can they can tell the rest of Congress what's important. And, you know, I mean, I had a conversation with a journalist not too long ago, and he said to me, Jay, what is the most important issue in our lives? And I had to think about it. But then he shared the answer. And the answer is global warming. Because if we don't do something about it, it's going to kill billions of people in the not too distant future. Oh, yeah, no, every if you talk to people who actually study it, the predictions they are making five years ago are now way outdated and their predictions of the the timeline of the danger is much sooner. The extent of the danger is much greater and seemingly across virtually all of the people who are studying climate change. That's that's the big take home message is oops, we were underestimating it before we were saying it was too far in the future and we're saying it was too little. Now we're beginning to see it more clearly. We're seeing it coming much faster and much larger. And yeah, it's facts are already being felt around the world and they're only going to get worse and worse and worse in coming few years. Yeah. So while, you know, Trump's press conferences and other machinations suck up all the oxygen from the media, what we really need to hear about is the is the is the detail on climate change and how it is coming at us. And what can we do? Can we efficiently rebuild our society to deal with it? And having scientists in Congress could help. I'm not saying it will help in the White House, but it could help at least in Congress. Right. So I mean, a nice example of that was the hurricane that hit the Florida Panhandle a while ago and it hit pretty right on that little town of Mexico Beach. Yeah. And I don't know if you saw that photo of the whole area level of stuff. This one house home setting that house had been built by scientific and engineering principles to be nice and sturdy and resistant. It was well, well, had a good solid foundation, deeply embedded, was raised up above flood levels, was solidly constructed, had a roof that didn't have too much overhangs. I wasn't going to catch the wind and lift off. And that house survived untouched. What everything around was amazing. The photograph shows the whole neighborhood is flattening. The one house on the water is standing virtually untouched. Yeah. Yeah. And by the same token, we had a show over the solar farms in Puerto Rico a year ago. And they used one contractor and one kinds of fastener on one side of the farm and another on the other side of the farm. It's happening more than one farm, by the way. And one side was destroyed right down to the, you know, supports into the ground. The other side was done better with the right kind of fasteners and practice construction practices. And it still stood. And in fact, it's still functioning. It was never offline. It was amazing what the difference could be if you do it right. Right. Exactly. This is, you know, good by people who use good evidence-based thinking as you were saying earlier and say, hey, you know, this, we've seen this material stands up better. This way of constructing a solar panel home, whatever, is more solid, more secure. Yes, maybe it costs 10% more. But when you get a situation like that, like a natural disaster, it's often time is well worth it, you know. Do we have any idea about whether the scientists who ran for office ran for office because they wanted to change the way the government deals with science? Of course, I mean, I have not spoken to any of them individually, but the impression I get from reading what they've said is many of them ran because in part they felt there was a real need to bring some science and some scientific training into our legislators and into our legislative bodies. There's need for evidence-based thinking, need for people who look at a situation with a sort of skeptical eye and say, huh, why are we doing it this way? What's going to happen if we do this? What versus what's going to happen if we do that? You know, let's analyze this rather than just saying, I'm going to go with my gut. I like this one. So we're going this way. Yeah, or I'm corrupt. Yeah. Represents some special interest who like to make more profit. Yeah, and scientists are not immune from that. There have been very unfortunate cases of scientists who have been, you know, have lavished trips and gifts paid for, you know, I mean, scientists are people. So I'm going to be interested and go back and see how they, they passion their campaigns. Right. Because if they were saying, you know, elect me, I'm going to bring science and rationality into an otherwise irrational body, that would be interesting. And then if that were the case or even partly the case, then to look at the voters. Right. And I guess most of these guys were Democrats, except for the one Republican I mentioned. And the voters voted for them presumably on that basis and wanted the scientific rationality in the Congress. Yeah. And now many of them are pushing issues like health care and saying, you know, let's not lose our health care. You know, let's be sure we keep good coverage for people with preexisting conditions, blah, blah, blah. Others were looking at issues like climate change and basically saying, come on, you know, let's, let's, let's open our eyes and pay attention to this as a real and significant problem that is facing us indeed by, by the judgment of many people, that is, that is the big problem facing the globe, you know, it's certainly a challenge if we don't meet it. So how many were there? Do you have just roughly how many were there? I believe there are nine sort of professional scientists use that term fairly well, who are now in their number of them are women and number of them are fairly young, which is great because hopefully they'll be in there for some years and be able to rise to seniority levels and some of them may turn into good politicians too and be able to get reelected. Maybe that's one of the positive upshots of an otherwise negative experience here to find that people want to have experience, they want to have scientists in Congress. You would hope, you would hope that some of these people will look at like redistricting. There was an issue which would seem again to be divorce some science and yet when you look at some of these odd districts that have been done, you've got to say why are they making these really funky, strange, twisted gerrymandering districts, right? There's got to be a rational way to make districts. You could say let's base them on counties, let's base them on x distance from centers of population. There's a number of rational ways you could decide how to make your districts, but it's not by drawing lines carefully to exclude certain groups and include certain groups. That's not rational unless, I mean, it's simply political, right, to make sure all other people are in the outside of the right boundaries, you know, which is a nasty Machiavellian kind of thing to do. Awful. And it's a huge step backward. And I like to think, I mean, my degree of optimism has actually shrunk over the past year, but I like to think that there's a bright side here somewhere. And maybe it is that people, the electorate in general, appreciate a rational legislator instead of one who's corrupt or belongs, he's in the pocket of someone else. You know, critical thinking and high ideals and values, that's what we need to see. And we have to get back to it because I think really we lost it. Yeah. Yeah. I really think we need to rediscover that. And, you know, rebuild our culture of hope. You know, I mean, Thomas Jefferson was advocate of education because he understood that for democracy to run well, you need to have educated populace. You can't have a populace who is being led around like sheep, basically, or democracy falls apart. Yeah. So it's not just science, it's education. Education is people who appreciate the government, appreciate rationality. Right. And that's what we should be shooting for. Yeah. So, you know, the duty of the citizen is to find a candidate like that. Yeah. And again, I mean, we have this democratic system, we have set up with these three different branches of government, all sort of setting up, set up rather differently and sort of balancing each other out. It's a great system. It really has tremendous strengths to it. And when people try to subvert that and turn it all into sort of run by one branch of the other, others being subservient to it, you know, that's, that's appalling. This is America's greatest test. So let's, let's take a moment and think about that offline. Okay. And then we come back and talk about some other science that has popped up this week. That's worthy of mention. Okay. Thank you, Ethan. We'll be right back. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech, Hawaii, called Konnichiwa, Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's law across the sea. Law across the sea is on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaiiania, all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. We like science and science is likable. Rationality is likable. I guess the bottom line. So Ethan Allen and me were talking about science today. We talked about all the scientists who were elected to Congress on Tuesday. That was fabulous. But there's more. Can we talk about, you know, the gut reaction? Let's call it finding out what's in your gut. This is a Stanford piece that you sent me. It was a very interesting piece. Sure. It was a nice, a nice example. So we all know that basically hospitals are dangerous places. You go into hospitals and you acquire these infections and get very sick and many people die and really it certainly is true that a lot of people who go into hospitals then after they're in the hospital develop these infections. And for years we have thought indeed we have sort of known these infections are because well there's lots of sick people in the hospitals that are sneezing, they're coughing, they're blowing germs around. People aren't always washing their hands, hospital staff maybe aren't quite as careful as they should be. You know, so there's a thousand reasons why these patients are getting these infections, right? But it turns out now they have, they have tools where they can trace the bacterial sort of heritage that's making you sick. They can pull these bacteria out of your bloodstream and say these ones are really, they're going to this class or this group or this sub group and they're not this other group. It's probably a DNA analysis of the bacteria. Yeah, very, very detailed. And what they have found is a lot of these cases of hospital acquired infections are actually from the patient themselves. They're bacteria that normally live harmlessly indeed probably helpfully in the patient's guts doing good things in there and they somehow gotten into the bloodstream which is not where they belong and now they're running amok in the blood stream but it's not somebody else's bacteria, it is the bacteria from the patient themselves. Now this is catching in other words, so it comes from my gut, it gets on my body and on my skin I guess, it infects me. Does it go to infect the next guy or the health worker? Well, what the study says is the odds are the guy in the next bed is probably getting sick from their own from their own bacteria much more likely than from yours, you're going to spread to them. Yeah, the dangers are not really that we're spreading, we're spreading germs around that for some reason is not yet clear. The dangers are really something about the hospital state itself is causing it whether it's surgeries or. So we have, this is a really interesting question so we have the study from Stanford which has a big medical school as I recall and they found to some degree of certainty that this dangerous bacteria that you wind up getting affected by in the hospital is your own, from your own gut. OK, so then the question becomes how and when it's triggered when you go to the hospital, it doesn't happen at home. Right, that's the puzzling part. It's what about the hospital state that so they need to figure out in the next article what triggers it in a hospital or any house because it's happening around the country. Sure. What what happens in the hospital, the hospital experience. But I mean it's very similar to what happens when you take a species that has lives in one environment and you move it across the world into some new environment and sometimes they absolutely go crazy and go berserk and start taking over everything. Right. They're called invasive species and it's sort of the same thing. And your gut is its own little ecosystem where you're back to your happy living controlled in some nice way. And for some reason they get transported in your bloodstream it's a foreign environment and there's nothing in there that can really stop them and control them and then they run amok. You know. So I mean really I mean so you have to examine what is the difference between the environment in the hospital and out of the hospital. And I mean I you know we sat down. We don't have time right now we sat down. We would make a list of all the things that happen in a hospital as don't happen outside. We figure it out. Right. Is it the food. Is it some tests that people start doing. It's the jello. It's the jello. We can believe it could be the surgery right. Surgery is the obvious thing if people undergoing surgery are bleeding if they're opening up their guts and things you know you can understand. Hey that could happen by time. Yeah. Yeah. Well that seems like an obvious one if you open up the gut. Right. Then it'll be interesting to see and they follow through is it mainly people have got surgery. Basically this is happening to. Yeah. I don't I don't they've got a big enough population to tell that. Yeah. So how big a problem is this. How how important is it for you know the medical community to solve this problem and answer that question. Well it's it's it's a nontrivial problem. If you stay in a hospital for more than about two weeks three weeks the odds are pretty damn good that you're going to get an infection. I know Marissa we're talking about well not necessarily this is the resistance. Right. Right. But it's a hospital. An infection. Right. And something like 40 to 50 percent of those it turns out are your own your own infection. Basically you you you've brought on yourself in some way. You know even without answering the question I wonder if there's something can be done to neutralize those bacteria in advance. Yeah. You know just assuming they're going to get out and get on your right. Right. Can you tamp down the gut bacteria to a lower level. So there's fewer of them so I can't. So if you were getting out that's an immunology. Oh yeah. Very much you know it's a hot hot. So we're going to see more on this I think. Yes. Doctors researchers will want to know. But it's a cute example I think of how science is actually sort of self correcting because people do watch data. They pay attention to evidence and they realize like oops despite our belief that the story show is this way that they're getting these infections from someone else. It turns out when we look closely. Nope we see they're getting these things out of the box. No. Yeah. But you say that self correcting and it looks on itself. This has been going on a long time Ethan we only figured it out now. Hey I didn't say it was quick. OK let's move on. OK. Let's move to Samsung. Samsung announced yesterday or was it today that they had a folding phone a screen on the phone is folding. How do you do that and why do you want it. Well I mean the answer of the why is pretty good sort of because if you can't you can't put a screen that's this big in your pocket right unless you can fold it up something. I mean OK. Bigger screens are better they're easier for people to read you can put more information on them. There's a thousand reasons why you like a big screen but you've got to have that screen be able to collapse to a small size. So it's portable. Now how you do that. You know I'm not an engineer so I'm not even going to attempt to answer how these guys are building these some minor their roll-up versions and now there's flip open versions and who knows. It's it's you know what it strikes me two things. One is I've seen it before. You've seen references as you know this roll up screen roll up monitor kind of thing. So there's not a big surprise that somebody could put it in the phone or make a phone with it. But you know what strikes me is it's more than the screen. It's more than the phone. So why can't I have a roll up monitor itself. Why can't I carry my computer around. You know the computer actual processing unit is pretty small right. And I open the roll and there's a monitor because I want. Right. You have something like a little cigar type thing you clip on your pocket and you pull out you extend it and then unroll it and suddenly you've got a screen this big and sitting in front of you with a keyboard at the bottom that you can tap on and you know or talk to instead of who wants keyboard right. They can do it on a phone. They can do it on a monitor. What does more sound like one of those commercials. There's more because the screen that's on the Samsung has to be for the marketplace a touch screen doesn't it. Right. So the roll the roll up monitor that I'm talking about which has got to follow on this also must be a touch screen monitor. Right. This pretty getting pretty sophisticated. Instead of just having a display it's also got to have sensors on it that that can track what's going on. Wow. Where it's being touched what where the motion is. And yeah. This is only the beginning. Right. Yeah. This is but there's more. There's more. So this screen has processing in it. This is not just a piece of dead cloth. This is this is actually got electronic processing going on in the screen. Right. OK. Well why why is it limited to the screen. Why isn't the whole damn thing fold up a ball and roll up a ball. Why why can't I have the whole phone be rolled up a ball indeed. Right. Ultimately will your phone be sort of part of the fabric of your screen. And all of the chips as they were on the phone. Why not. Yeah. So when I have no central phone unit you have essentially a reading device that you know. And of course the other end of it is this Bixby app they're talking about. Oh yeah. That that is apparently very clever at tracking what you've done what you want to do and learning from this and makes apparently fewer mistakes in most older versions about learning what it is you're actually actually asking it. Yeah. Well they're trying to beat Siri right on the Apple and they're making every effort up till now. I think Bixby was that good. Myself I disabled it comes on the Android and I haven't used it. But I know the potential and I know Siri and some people just swear by Siri. This is at least Samsung's version of you know jumping over Siri and being better than Siri. I mean if it all comes true I mean the theoretical the theoretical possibilities become real. It could be a great assistant for you. But there's a whole thing when you get these AI programs evolve closely in your life right is to it's almost who is teaching them the ethics they need. You know. I mean you probably saw that that funny little commercial about when they first put Siri into I think it's a Toyota commercial where Siri starts talking to the cop who's pulled the guy over and giving the cop all sorts of him around. Well we were going 47 miles an hour in the 25 mile an hour zone. Well I'm coasted through two soft sides back there and oh by the by there's some illegal fireworks in the trunk too. You know. Is Siri being your friend there. Well you know we must remember too that Siri is through the net. It doesn't live on the phone. It's connected to the whole world. Siri and every little phone is connected and it's the same thing with Bixby it's connected to the whole phone. So I can ask it an internet question. What have you and get an answer about anything from anywhere. And part of the artificial I'm sure this is artificial intelligence. Part of the artificial intelligence here not only to speak better and listen better but also to translate that inquiry into a real serious computer query and come back with serious information. The whole world that you're at your fingertips with Siri or Bixby. So I think phones are going to change. The competition is clear. The direction is clear. Foldable and brilliant beyond description for everybody within everybody's budget and global because everyone will have access will want to access to these things immediately. Scary. It does have does have a frightening size doesn't it. Yeah and then when you add President Trump's thing through Homeland Security of being able to send a message to two hundred and twenty five million phone smartphone users in this country at will on command and tell them stuff or motivate them or mobilize them on a given issue. It gets scary because our dependence gets greater and the power of the person who controls who controls the data gets greater. Did you ever read Stephen King's horror novel Cell now where everyone who's talking on a cell phone at some moment suddenly goes berserk literally some some signal gets sent with a cell phone that really drives him on these violent frenzies and so many people aren't talking to the phones who are sort of left to cope with these wild mobs. Yeah well the thing about science fiction is that science fiction is imaginable you can imagine it and anything you can imagine can come true. For example right now Ethan Allen I'm imagining that we're out of time and the show is over.