Hilarious.

Don't know how I got there, but I found my way onto this Tumblr and there beheld something truly awesome:

This Avengers cover mock-up.


It originally came from Comics Alliance, concocted by blogger Chris Sims and artist Kelly Callen.


In case you can't see it, the image shows seven Avengers --- Captain America, Thor, Nick Fury, the Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and a black-gloved redhead I think is Black Widow (hard to tell since we're just seeing the top of her head, from behind) --- all holding the worst possible gift someone could ever give them. Cap's got a pair of pink socks covered with swastikas; Fury (who has one eye) has a 3-D movie and a pair of 3-D glasses, which he is holding up to his single eye; the Hulk has a chemistry set; Iron Man has a book on running a successful business by his old enemy and competitor Obadiah Stane; Hawkeye (an archer) has a box of bullets; the Russian Black Widow has a DVD of "Rocky IV"; and Thor has a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion*.


Captain America's speech bubbles say, "ONE OF US is responsible for these horrible gifts! And nobody's leaving until I FIND OUT WHO!"


I love the look on Thor's face.


*This is especially funny because, not only is the book an argument that gods in general don't exist, but Thor in particular is one of the author's favorite examples of gods no one believes in anymore. (See this video for a collection of clips where he refers to Thor in this way.)

Calling All Amateur Botanists

I found this wildflower growing on the bank of the creek running through my backyard: 

It's got small, star-shaped white flowers with a cluster of short yellow stalks in the center; almost like a narcissus, only with very different stem and leaf structure. (See, it's got one stem, with all the leaves coming off of it, and two flowers at the top).

Its leaves are kind of weird-looking, too --- they're much larger than the flowers, longer than they are wide, with edges that I'm not sure whether to call serrated, because the "points" are so rounded. 

Here's a close-up of the flower: this picture isn't as clear as the others, because I had to move closer to the plant to take it, and the flower is growing out of a fairly steep creek bank. Thus I was in an unstable position when I took it, and wasn't really able to steady the camera. 


(I notice, though, that while the flower in that picture might be out of focus, the thorns on the stem show up beautifully. Auto-focus can be a very strange thing.)


So, does anyone know what this is?

Blog Changes in Blog Owner's Lengthy Absence

So I leave the blog unattended for a couple months, and when I come back to it I find I can't even get on it anymore! I have to download a whole new browser before I can use it.


Now that I've done that, it seems to work well enough; the post editor screen is a little different, but not by much. And on the dashboard, where you can see a list of all your posts, they have a little counter next to each post showing how many pageviews it has! I really like that feature; now I can see which topics people are most interested in seeing me write about. (Of course, the high view count for some posts may simply reflect the fact that some of my posts are more widely syndicated than others ... but still, that's more information than I had before.)

So, Feministe has a pretty interesting post (responding to this article in the New York Times) about family dinner conversations, and how they shape a person's rhetorical style.


Here's how Jill describes her family's dinnertime ritual:

Even when I go home, still, a sit-down dinner and a long discussion is non-negotiable. The TV gets turned off. We don't answer the phone. There are no cell phones allowed at the table. There isn't a structured conversation --- we just talk. And since I come from a family of political junkies, the conversation inevitably turns to politics; since I also come from a family of people who like to push boundaries and challenge each other, the conversation inevitably turns into an argument. No one yells --- we aren't a yelling family --- but voices get raised and sarcasm gets thrown around and even though we're all lefty liberals we get deep into it.

And then we clean up and we watch some CNN and we all move on with our lives. It never occurred to me that dinner-time arguments over, say, farming subsidies or the proper legal treatment of child molesters could create lasting wounds or ongoing anger. Which is maybe why it's taken me years to figure out that, in the blogosphere, you can't come at someone hard in a comment section and expect that they understand you're challenging them because you respect them and find their views interesting, and that they will respond to your challenges and heated critiques with the same, and you'll both walk away still liking each other and not thinking about it much beyond, "Well that was an interesting discussion." Most people just think you're a flame-throwing asshole. I blame my parents.

One person, in comments, mentioned how they felt like the absence of any dinnertime conversation (or, really, any conversation at all beyond the most perfunctory) while they were growing up deprived them of the chance to develop any kind of rhetorical or conversational skills.


My own experiences are like Jill's in a lot of ways: my family, too, sits down for a home-cooked meal and unstructured conversation every night, and does not really consider any subject to be taboo. Certainly not politics, which is discussed frequently. But we don't argue like Jill's family does; we're more conflict-averse, we're not very emotionally expressive (indeed, we tend to be uncomfortable with strong emotions), and, for me at least, argument is not a style of discussion that I am very good at. My mind works slowly, taking time to unfold and absorb every aspect and ramification of whatever I have just been told (besides the fact that I don't think in words and need to "translate" something into the pictorial/abstract colors-and-shapes milieu of my thoughts, and auditory-processing issues mean it takes me longer to decode spoken language than written language, so in conversation I have a particularly long lag time between hearing and understanding), and any thoughts I might have in response to whatever I've just been told also take time to form themselves. I am thus in the position of not yet knowing what I think when it is time for me to speak. I may not even know what you've just said by the time you're done saying it and waiting for me to respond. 


To accommodate this, I tend to treat discussion less as a contest between ideas than as a process of discovering what each person's ideas are. 


Because I have often found that people's ideas are interconnected in unpredictable ways (including my own), just stating what one thinks about something isn't always enough. Sometimes if you say one thing, the person you're talking to proceeds as if you had said that thing, and a whole bunch of other things you haven't said and aren't sure you even understand. I have also made these assumptions about other people, thinking that I had found a word or phrase to express a bundle of concepts and then finding that, in the other person's lexicon, that word didn't come with all the connotations it carried in my head. So I try and identify the premises I am starting from, and the premises that I and my interlocutor hold in common. From there, I will try to explain how I get to whatever proposition we're debating from those premises, and will also listen to my friend (I can pretty much only do this with friends) draw me a similar map of his or her reasoning.


What Jill's post got me to realize is that this style of conversation, which it has taken me years to develop, might not solely be an accommodation of my cognitive and communicative quirks. It might also be something I have carried with me from childhood, modeled somewhat on the kind of dinnertime conversations my family has.


(Obviously, it couldn't be an exact copy of my family's conversational style, or I wouldn't have had to develop it, but I do feel that what I have jerry-rigged together for myself probably has roots in how my family communicates. It's an adapted version, but I am starting to see some shared features).


Anyway, if you were going to describe my family in terms of what kind of people they are (like Jill describes her family as political junkies), you'd probably call us science nerds. As much as we talk about politics, it's not the thing we talk about most. Most of our dinnertime conversation is of a technical nature, drawing on whatever field each of us is trained in (electromagnetics, chemistry, biology, medicine). Because we are not all trained in the same things, we often have to include a lot of background information leading up to whatever it is we want to discuss. (When my siblings and I were children, this was almost always our dad explaining something about electromagnetics, but now that I have my own body of knowledge and experience, I will sometimes find myself holding forth about chemistry or biochemistry). So my family tends to explain rather than argue, because many of the things we talk about require explanation before they can be discussed in any depth. 


I think now that habit, as much as my needing to slow conversations down and check repeatedly to make sure everyone is on the same page, has predisposed me to prefer a collaborative, expository conversational style to an adversarial, argumentative one, and to feel myself disadvantaged when I do find myself in the middle of an actual debate.     

Magical Thinking about Food

This appeared in an ad insert for Hy-Vee (a grocery-store chain, if you didn't know) bundled in with the Kansas City Star on Wednesday; the text says "Kiwi fruit is a 'good sweeper' that assists to sweep off the unwanted substances and toxins out of your body. Kiwi also has a perfect NuVal score."

What I thought was weird about the ad copy was this idea that some foods have this incredible power to remove "toxins" from your body. It's not that I'd never seen that before, but previously I'd only ever seen it in contexts much fringier than an advertisement for a supermarket chain.

I have other thoughts about this odd and superstitious notion --- for one, I suspect that the fear it speaks to, the fear of things getting into one's body without one's knowledge and doing horrible things once they're in there, is very old --- but they're not in order and I haven't done any research yet, so I will wait and deal with them in another post. For now, I'm just going to point out this apparent crossover of an idea common in New Age circles into the mainstream.

Everything Old Is New Again

I recently inherited a copy of a book I've wanted to read for a long time: Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

(I've wanted to read this book for a long time because when I was a teenager two things happened: I came to the understanding that what I really wanted to do with my life was be a scientist, preferably in some flavor of biology; and there was a periodic eruption of anti-evolution crusading here in Kansas. That those two things happened so close together made me especially eager to find out why people were so hostile to evolution, and later I figured the answer must lie somewhere in American history, as this seems to be a particularly American bit of unreasonableness.)

Anyway, I got my hands on one of my uncles' old copy of this book (it's from 1966! The physical book is that old! Isn't that neat?), and am now reading it.

It's hugely interesting, and I might review it here if I can organize my thoughts about it sufficiently to do so, but right now I want to point out one particular thing that astonished me.

What astonished me was that a strain of magical thinking that I had thought mostly emerged in recent decades, and whose roots must lie in the 1960s counterculture-derived New Age movement, is really a whole lot older:

As late nineteenth-century America became more secular, traditional religion became infused with, and in the end to some degree displaced by, a curious cult of religious practicality. If we accept the evidence of a long history of best-selling handbooks, from Russell H. Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds" to the works of Norman Vincent Peale, this cult has had millions of devotees. It has become, by all internal evidence and everything we know about its readership, one of the leading faiths of the American middle class. It is, as I hope to show, a rather drastically altered descendant of the older self-help literature, but it affords, in any case, striking evidence of the broad diffusion in American life of the practical motif. Modern inspirational literature takes its stand firmly with the world: what it has to offer is practical. "Christianity," writes Norman Vincent Peale, "is entirely practical. It is astounding how defeated persons can be changed into victorious individuals when they actually utilize their religious faith as a workable instrument."
...
Modern inspirational literature builds upon the old self-help tradition and bears a general resemblance to it, but it also has major differences. In the old self-help system, faith led to character and character to a successful manipulation of the world; in the new system, faith leads directly to a capacity for self-manipulation, which is believed to be the key to health, wealth, popularity, or peace of mind. On the surface, this may seem to indicate a turning away from the secular goals of the older self-help books, but it actually represents a turning away from their grasp of reality, for it embodies a blurring of the distinction between the realms of the world and the spirit. In the old literature these realms interacted; in the new they become vaguely fused. ...

It is what Raymond Fosdick calls "power for daily living" that the success writers purport to give. In the nineteenth century the primary promise of success writers was that religion would bring wealth. Since the early 1930's there has been a growing emphasis on the promise of mental or physical health; inspirational writing has been infused with safe borrowings from psychiatry and has taken on a faint coloration from the existential anxieties of the past twenty years. Although success literature has given way to a literature of inspiration, its goals remain largely everyday practical goals. For more than a generation, the metaphorical language of this writing has been infiltrated and coarsened by terms taken from business, technology, and advertising; one often gets the sense that the spiritual life can be promoted by good copy and achieved like technological progress by systematic progressive means. Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, in their illuminating study of the themes of inspirational books, have spoken of this as "spiritual technology." One success writer tells us that "God is a twenty-four-hour station. All you need to do is plug in." Another that "religious practice is an exact science that ... follows spiritual laws as truly as radio follows its laws." ... "Conduct the affairs of your soul in a businesslike way," exhorts Emmet Fox. Prayer is conceived as a usable instrument. "A man," says Glenn Clark, "who learns and practices the laws of prayer correctly should be able to golf better, do business better, work better, love better, serve better." "Learn to pray scientifically," commands Norman Vincent Peale. "Employ tested and proven methods. Avoid slipshod praying."

... What the inspirational writers mean ... is that you can will your goals and mobilize God to help you release fabulous energies. Fabulous indeed they are: "There is enough power in you," says Norman Vincent Peale in an alarming passage, "to blow the city of New York to rubble. That, and nothing less, is what advanced physics tells us." Faith can release these forces, and then one can overcome any obstacle.

All of the stuff about instrumental faith --- faith that was supposed to make good things happen for you in this world, particularly to bring you riches --- rang some bells for me, as I'd read about something called the Prosperity Gospel that pretty much said the same thing, but was held to be a recent development coming out of the megachurches.

I was also somewhat reminded of The Secret (an appalling bit of woo popularized in a mega-best-selling book from 2006, where if you want something badly enough, "the universe" will bring it to you --- poor, innocent quantum mechanics is horribly abused in attempts to explain how this supposedly works) by the mentions of willing what you want into being, particularly in a long paragraph following the passage I quoted, where Hofstadter describes a nineteenth-century quasi-spiritual movement called the New Thought, which apparently held that "... one could have whatever one wishes by 'sending out a requisition to the great subconscious'." That nailed it down for me; except for what they call the mysterious, all-pervading cosmic sugar daddy, the Handbook of New Thought and The Secret might well be interchangeable*.

I also got a chuckle out of the throwaway reference to "advanced physics" in the last Norman Vincent Peale quote. I suppose that, back then, the physics that people misused to justify their magical thinking was either electromagnetics (those newfangled radio and TV waves!) or nuclear fission (I imagine this is where the bizarre comment about New York is coming from --- all that energy, lurking inside atoms! Never mind that only a few elements are fissile, and even then only under a very specific set of conditions; it's not like common household objects will explode if you look at them while thinking explodey thoughts), while today, of course, it's quantum mechanics.

*Apparently this is only news to me, as Wikipedia mentions the New Thought on its page for New Age philosophy, and their page for prosperity theology mentions both New Thought and the mid-20th-century writers that Hofstadter was talking about.

"I Don't Care If They Hit You; You're Not Supposed to Hit Back!"

(Photo by Allison Long, for the Kansas City Star)

A recent article in the Kansas City Star covered a group with a different sort of anti-bullying campaign: it's a boxing-based fitness class just for teenagers who've been bullied or whose friends have been bullied.

It's called Fight Club, and in general I think it's awesome. It sounds, in a lot of ways, like exactly what I needed in middle school.

There's only one thing that bothers me about the program: it's not an actual self-defense class. The article stresses that the kids taking the class are encouraged not to fight back against their abusers, and that the boxing serves more as an outlet for emotions than as practical training:

It's not a self-defense class. Holly Reynolds, the woman who started the program, can't call it that for legal reasons. It's not about fighting, either, though Reynolds gave it the same name as the 1999 Brad Pitt movie about underground fight clubs.

This Fight Club is about getting fit, feeling strong and fighting the good fight, she said.

These teens don't spar with each other. They spar with their feelings.

It's not that the things the classes do offer --- improved physical fitness, confidence, an emotional outlet, a roomful of other people who are having the same experiences as you, along with adult trainers and mentors who are clearly on your side --- aren't also hugely important; I just worry that explicitly discouraging these kids from fighting back if they're assaulted undermines what the program is supposed to do. It's supposed to give you confidence and enable you to stand up for yourself or your friends; how can you do that if you freeze up once the confrontation escalates?

We have a serious problem in mainstream American culture, in that we tend to put all the blame on victims of violence --- especially certain kinds of violence. If you were raped, you must've done something to draw attention to yourself, or gone somewhere you shouldn't have, or trusted someone you shouldn't have trusted. To use some philosophical terminology, the rapist may have been the immediate or proximate cause, but you were the ultimate cause of your own rape.

It's the same with bullying, whether of children in school or of adults in the workplace or in their communities. If one or more people decide to harass you, stalk you, follow you around in groups yelling things at you, try to scare you, subject you to unwanted, gross and insulting sexual advances, physically attack you or vandalize your property, it's bad, but you must've done something to make them choose you as their target.

And with school bullying, adults tend to tell children very stupid, unhelpful things when those children ask for help, like, "Just ignore them; they'll go away if you don't respond." (More victim-blaming: you're only being bullied because you let them get a rise out of you!) They also hold victims of bullying to a much higher moral standard than the bullies themselves: no matter how in-your-face, menacing or even violent they get, if you hit them back, you're just as bad as they are. They ignore bullying until it does turn into a physical fight, and when that happens, they act as if all combatants are equally at fault*.

So, against that kind of cultural backdrop, I don't think it's doing the kids any favors to try and convince them they don't want to hit the people who are abusing them. Of course they do. Telling them they don't, when they know perfectly well that they do, would (I think) just work to undermine any impression you've made of being the rare adult who understands what they're going through.

Don't get the wrong idea; I know teaching kids self-defense won't magically enable every one of them to win a fight with a bully (especially those who are bullied by a whole pack of people), and I know it's not fair to expect victims of bullying to solve the problem on their own. In my ideal school environment, teachers and bystanders would play a much more active role in defusing incidents of bullying; I just think physical self-defense is also a tool kids need to be given, without shaming or second-guessing them when they use it.

*That happens to grown women, too, when they try to defend themselves against rape or domestic abuse.

Signal Transduction in Autism

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: A study published this past summer analyzed tissue extracts from 20 donated brains, half (10) of which came from autistic donors. Half (5) of those people had histories of regression --- that is, they started out developing normally, speaking and everything, but then they lost some of the skills they had gained.

The brain tissue extracts were analyzed using a technique I describe in the main body of this post, that tests for the presence of a certain enzyme (protein kinase A, here) by giving it an opportunity to react with a sort of dummy peptide that can't really do anything except sit there and let the enzyme (and only that enzyme) act on it, and then introducing antibodies that will "tag" the altered peptides with an enzyme that will change a solution's color under certain conditions. This allowed the researchers to measure the relative activity of the enzyme across subjects or across brain regions; a similar measure, but using antibodies to the enzyme itself, rather than to its product, was used to measure the amount of enzyme present in each extract.

Using this method, the researchers found differences in protein kinase A activity and expression only in the frontal lobes, and only between the autism-with-regression subgroup of the autism group and both the controls and the rest of the autism group.

Protein kinase A is involved in intracellular signaling; it's one of the signal-boosting enzymes that helps the cell react quickly to changes in its environment. It modifies other proteins, affecting their activity. Some of its targets are proteins involved in neurotransmission (signaling between brain and nerve cells) and long-term potentiation (reinforcing those connections between neurons that are frequently used). It's this latter process that the study authors think may be disrupted in regressive autism.
_____________________________________________________

SFARI News posted some time ago on a study published on August 31 in PLoS ONE, comparing the amount of a certain enzyme present in tissue extracts from different regions of the brain between deceased subjects with and without autism who had donated their brains to the National Institute of Child Heath and Development Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders.

The enzyme in question is protein kinase A, which plays a hugely important role in the cell, helping mediate a process called signal transduction, through which the cell is able to react to its changing environment, or to signals from other cells. In signal transduction, a molecule from outside the cell (usually a hormone) attaches to a receptor outside the cell and causes the receptor to change shape, thus altering the part of the receptor that's inside the cell and triggering a chain reaction of changes in enzymatic activity within the cell.

Protein kinase A participates in one particular signaling pathway: the one involving a class of receptors called G proteins, which are actually clusters of several smaller proteins that split apart whenever something attaches to its extracellular binding site. The now-mobile subunits then go on to do other things in the cell, most importantly to activate* an enzyme responsible for turning adenosine monophosphate (AMP) into cyclic AMP, which works as a signaling molecule inside the cell.

(Here is a cartoon from Nature Publishing Group's Scitable website illustrating that splitting apart of the G protein after a signaling molecule binds to its associated receptor; I adapted the image somewhat to make it less busy)

(Cyclic AMP)

Cyclic AMP is part of a class of molecules called "second messengers," which are small molecules that can bind to, and either activate or inhibit, a wide range of enzymes. Also, the enzymes responsible for making these molecules are regulated by receptors on the surface of the cell, so that when a signaling molecule binds to the receptor, the enzyme gets switched on (in the case of adenylyl cyclase, which is what turns regular AMP into cAMP) and starts churning out second-messenger molecules, which then go on to tinker with their target enzymes. In this way --- by coupling receptor binding with synthesis of these second-messenger molecules --- the cell can amplify the signal it receives, allowing it to react more quickly to changes in its environment.(Cartoon showing signal transduction using cyclic AMP as a second messenger, taken from this community college's Anatomy & Physiology II webpage. You can see how a hormone binding to its receptor frees up the receptor-coupled G protein to exchange its GDP for GTP and then go off and --- depending on the hormone --- either activate or inhibit adenylyl cyclase, which either starts or stops churning out cAMP, which goes on to do lots of different things, like activating enzymes, telling the cell to secrete various things, opening ion channels, etc. The only thing I don't like about this cartoon is that it only shows one cAMP molecule as the output of all the running around happening in the cell membrane, when really cAMP is being continuously produced by every active adenylyl cyclase. So, what that looks like, relative to the amount of hormone coming to the cell from outside, is more like this other cartoon, down below) (See, look at the arrows coming out of that yellowish triangle. One arrow splits into five, then 25, then more than you can clearly see. This table from the Memorial University of Newfoundland's cell biology webpage lists the number of molecules affected by each step in a cAMP-dependent signaling pathway, from the one molecule changed when a single molecule of hormone binds to its receptor, to the 10,000 molecules changed by the time adenylyl cyclase starts producing cAMP).

Anyway, protein kinase A is one of the enzymes activated by cAMP binding to it, and it is also mostly a regulatory enzyme --- that is, it activates or deactivates other enzymes. Protein kinase A does that by transferring a phosphate group from ATP (a small molecule made up of a sugar, a nucleotide base and three phosphate groups) to certain amino acid residues on any of its target proteins.

What kinds of proteins does protein kinase A regulate? Well, that depends on what kind of cell all this is taking place in. Every cell in the body contains a complete human genome; the differences between cell types are differences in which genes are expressed --- i.e., which proteins are present. So each cell type is going to have a different mix of proteins whose activity needs to be coordinated.

Some of its targets are proteins expressed in almost every cell type: these include a histone, one of a large family of proteins whose function is to condense chromosomal DNA that is not actively being transcribed or replicated; transcription factors (most notably, from the CREB family); a metabolic enzyme involved in storing energy for later use; ion channels; and other kinases (enzymes that alter the activity of other proteins by transferring phosphate groups onto them from ATP).

Although protein kinase A performs specialized functions in just about every cell type, I'm only going to talk about what it does in the brain, since that is the cell type relevant to this post. There, in addition to the stuff mentioned above, protein kinase A 1) helps regulate the synthesis of a common precursor to a variety of neurotransmitters, 2) helps form synapses by guiding the specialized proteins that allow the membranous sacs that deliver neurotransmitters from one neuron to the next toward the tip of the developing axon, and 3) with another protein kinase, regulates the ion-channel activity of the NMDA receptor, which is involved in strengthening the more frequently-used conntections between neurons. There may be more, but this is what I've been able to find.

For all that background information, the experiment I'm going to describe is actually pretty simple: like I said above, the researchers took tissue samples from five different regions of donated brains from autistic and non-autistic subjects, homogenized them (basically, ran them through a blender) and tested each sample for protein kinase A activity. The test they used is called the ELISA (for Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay --- see why people would rather call it Eliza?), which is a plastic plate covered with small circular wells (0.7 cm across by 1 cm deep) with, in this case, short peptides containing either serine or threonine (the two amino acids to which protein kinase A can attach a phosphate group), anchored to the bottom. (ELISA is most often used to test for the presence of antibodies --- that's how HIV testing is done --- so for that, the thing stuck to the bottom of the well would be the antigen to which whatever antibody you're testing for responds). They added their brain tissue extracts one by one to each well, along with a small amount of ATP dissolved in water (for the protein kinase to "borrow" phosphate groups from), then waited an hour and a half before emptying out the wells (the substrates, which were permanently affixed to the bottoms of the wells, would stay, along with, presumably, any phosphate groups that had been attached to them during the previous 90 minutes) and introducing an antibody specifically designed to bond with the phosphorylated form of the substrate peptide. Next, they washed the wells out thoroughly (to weed out everything that was not chemically bonded to the fixed substrates) and added a second antibody, chosen for its ability to bind to the first antibody, and which was also attached to an enzyme known for producing dramatic color changes as a side effect of its interaction with certain organic molecules. (A solution containing the molecule in question was also added, so that the wells in which the greatest proportion of the well-bottom peptides had been phosphorylated, and thus had the whole antibody rigmarole sticking off of them, would have the deepest color. There is even a way to measure color --- a device that can measure the degree to which something absorbs light at a given wavelength --- so that you don't have to rely on just your eyes to tell you whether this well or that one is a darker shade of yellow).

They used a somewhat similar technique, called Western blotting, to compare the amount of active protein kinase A between groups for each brain region. They injected their tissue samples from each of the different brain regions into a polyacrylamide gel, and ran an electric current through the gel to get the proteins to move through it. Since the gel resists having things move through it, different size proteins will travel through it at different rates. After a while, most of the proteins will separate themselves into bands along the gel, by size. Once this happened, the researchers transferred the proteins to a nitrocellulose membrane, and added antibodies specific to the catalytic (active) subunit of protein kinase A. Just like with the ELISA, there was also a secondary antibody coupled to a color-producing enzyme.

One thing that's a bit unusual in this study is that the researchers divided their brains from autistic donors into two groups, based on the developmental history of the donors. They had a "regressive autism" group, whose members started out developing typically but then lost some of the skills they'd acquired: speech was the most common skill that was lost, but some of the donors in this category also lost social skills and interest in social interaction. There was also a "non-regressive autism" group, whose members were delayed in language and social development from birth.

Subtyping autism is an increasingly popular thing for researchers to do, since "autism" is such a broad, flexible category that encompasses people with a very wide range of developmental and medical histories. It makes sense that researchers would want to subdivide this large, diverse group further to make sure they're comparing apples to apples when they look at different studies of "the autistic brain" or "the autistic immune system" or whatever.

The thing that's strange about subtyping in this study is that the number of brains being looked at is already so small. Each big group (autism, both regressive and not, and controls) had samples from ten people in it, and the researchers couldn't always get a sample from every point of interest on every brain, so sometimes the number of samples in a given category (brain region + donor neurotype) was less than ten; the smallest n for any category was 7. But that means that, with subtyping, the biggest n possible for either autism subgroup is 5, which looks more like a case study than a comparison across populations. But then, histological studies of donated brains always have to deal with smaller sample sizes, since there isn't exactly a superabundance of donated brains, and I guess if you have big differences among your subjects, you might as well sort them into subcategories, even if your subcategories are tiny.

At some point in this post I should probably mention the results of this study I've gone to such lengths to describe. The authors only found differences in protein kinase A activity in one region --- the frontal cortex --- and this difference was largest between one subgroup of the autistic group --- the autism-with-regression subgroup --- and both the non-regressive autism subgroup and the control group. The regressive autism subgroup had maybe a little less than half the PKA activity of the controls and the non-regressive autism subgroup (those two groups did not differ). Taken as a whole, the autism group had about 35% less PKA activity in the frontal-lobe samples than the control group.

The results were similar for the Western blot; the only region that showed any differences in PKA expression was the frontal lobe, and again, it was only the regressive autism subgroup that differed. Tissue extracts from that group had siginificantly less PKA in them than extracts from either the control group or the non-regressive autism subgroup; the unified autism group did not differ from the control group.

The researchers also looked for a correlation between their measure of PKA activity and various possible confounding factors, like how long each donor had been dead, the age of the donors when they died, whether they had any history of seizures, and what medications they were taking; they didn't find any relationship between any of these things and either outcome variable. Their measure of PKA expression also involved measuring how much of another protein was present in each tissue extract, both because that protein is about the same size as PKA, and thus cannot be separated from it using electrophoresis, and also to have a protein whose expression is not expected to vary across groups with which to compare relative amounts of the protein that is expected to vary.

Here is a picture of the Western blot showing both PKA (top row) and the other protein, a structural protein called beta-actin (bottom row), from all tissue samples:(Figure 2A, in Ji et al., 2011 - samples from autistic donors are on the left, and subdivided into non-regressive and regressive subtypes. Controls are on the right. You can see that, in the bottom row, the blobs are all approximately the same size, indicating expression of beta-actin is more or less the same across groups. You can also see that the blobs in the top row are a lot thinner - one space has nothing at all in it - in the regressive autism group than they are in either the non-regressive autism group or the control group. It looks like PKA expression is a bit more variable within the control group than beta-actin is, though.)

So, for a couple of reasons --- the extreme smallness of sample size, and also the degree of variation in PKA expression within the control group --- I am a bit skeptical as to whether this finding will hold up. It definitely needs to be tested a few more times, with bigger donor pools.

Leaving that aside, though --- what are the implications of this finding, should it be substantiated? The study authors refer to earlier literature that describes a role for cAMP signaling pathways in both brain development (obviously germane to a study about developmental disability) and long-term memory formation and learning (relevant to the question of how people can lose skills they once had). But it's not clear yet exactly what that role is; if you search for "protein kinase a brain" on BioNOT (a database of negative experimental results), you find an article claiming to find no difference in PKA activity between tissue samples taken from donors with Alzheimer's disease and those taken from healthy donors. So that complicates things a bit, as Alzheimer's is, even more than regressive autism, characterized by a loss of learned skills and memories.

Sources:
Ji, L., Chauhan, V., Flory, M., & Chauhan, A. (2011). Brain Region–Specific Decrease in the Activity and Expression of Protein Kinase A in the Frontal Cortex of Regressive Autism PLoS ONE, 6 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023751

*What does it mean to activate an enzyme? Well, an enzyme is a kind of protein, and like all proteins, it has a range of three-dimensional configurations** it can assume, and only some of these possible shapes leave the binding site for the molecule the enzyme acts upon freely accessible. So when an enzyme is in one of those arrangements, and molecules of its particular substrate can just drift along and come into contact with the binding site(s), that's when the enzyme can be considered active. Binding of a phosphate group or some other small molecule at a different binding site will usually trigger a shape change; that is how enzymes can be activated or deactivated by other enzymes.

**I have this idea that proteins are called proteins just because of this shape-changing ability they have, in which they resemble the mythical Proteus.

Link Roundup: What I've Been Reading

I'm working on a post that has surprised me with how long it's taken to write; it's a researchy post, but it's only dealing with one article, and the experiment that article describes is a fairly simple one. I thought I'd be able to knock it off in a day or two, but instead I find I keep having to provide more and more background information about the methods the researchers used, and the enzyme they're studying, and the physiological processes that enzyme participates in.

(This experience has led me to reflect on the particular nature of the language used in the "Methods" sections of biomedical research articles; it's clear as day if you know what they're talking about, but it's a sort of shorthand, with as much precise meaning as possible crammed into the smallest possible space, which makes it all but impenetrable to someone not versed in those techniques. I think I might have to post about that, too ...)

Anyway, while I've been working on that I've also been reading blogs, and this is what's impressed me recently:

s. e. smith has written an indispensable post at Tiger Beatdown about Hillary Adams, the brave and resourceful young woman with cerebral palsy who filmed her abusive father (who is, horrifyingly, a family court judge) beating her back when she lived with him, and has just recently posted the footage on YouTube. s. e.'s post focuses on the elevated rates of abuse children with disabilities face, and cultural factors that allow that abuse to go on, even when people know it's going on.

Kassiane guest-posted at The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism about how important it is for caregivers to take "no" seriously and respect their charges' boundaries, physical and otherwise.

This blog post by the Dean of Health Sciences at Queen's University in Ontario mentions a paper given at a conference by recent sociology Ph.D. Elise Paradis about the use of the word "epidemic" to describe chronic, non-infectious diseases and conditions, particularly obesity. Paradis considers ways in which this terminology is misleading and stigmatizes obese people. The paper doesn't seem to be in print anywhere, but it looks like it will be soon.

Emily at The Biology Files has a list of things that have been proposed as causes or risk factors for autism. It's droll, and seeing them all side by side (even just the ones that are actively under consideration today, leaving out the ones that have been debunked) makes you marvel that there are still some people who are not autistic.

For My New Reader

I just had someone contact me on Etsy to tell me they loved the blog, and to ask for suggestions on further reading.

I rattled off a few of my favorite bloggers, but also suggested to the person that they check out various aggregator sites (and, I'd like to add, blog carnivals) to look around and see what most appeals to them there.

So, here you go, Olin.

Blog Aggregator Sites
Autism Blogs Directory (mostly personal blogs by autistic people or parents of autistic children)
AutismBlog.org
Autismo
The Autism Hub (not as big as it used to be, but still going)
wrtAUTISM (has a lot of research-oriented blogs)

Blog Carnivals
Autistics Speaking Day
Blog Against Disablism Day (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006)

Also, if any of you have any ideas for blogs, websites etc. that you consider Essential Reading, feel free to mention it in comments!

Autistic Artist: Justin Canha

An article in the New York Times from a few weeks ago profiled a young man named Justin Canha, who is a very interesting person. He loves to draw, and would like to be an animator or illustrator one day.

The article was about his struggles to find a job and live independently, and the "transition to adulthood" program* that is helping him to do that, but it also mentioned his art, and included a link to his website, where you can see a whole lot of his work, which includes charcoal and pastel drawings, comic strips and Flash animations.

I really like his "Carnivorous Plants" series; they look eerie and alien, but are beautifully colored. The drawings look representational and abstract at the same time, which is an effect I find mesmerizing.

Here are a few of my favorites:

*One thing that stood out to me, reading the article, was how intensively micromanaged his life seems to be! I notice this a lot about the lives of autistic people younger than I am, who have had behavioral therapy throughout their childhoods. I don't doubt that it's helping him learn to navigate the world, and I'm sure graduates of such programs end up better equipped for it than I am (maybe - one blogger has described behavioral therapy as taking away her ability to make decisions on her own, without "rules" to go by), but damn, if that were my life, with someone telling me how to spend every minute of every day, and getting on my case if I wanted to engage in "activities not directly related to finding a job"? I'd be a walking powder keg of fury. I don't respond well to control. I suspect that a large part of the reason I don't have a huge anger problem today is that I am used to having my boundaries respected; I don't feel like I have to explode and destroy things in order to be heard.

Did You Know ...

(T. S. Eliot, wearing a white rose)

One of my favorite poets, T. S. Eliot, apparently wore a white rose in his lapel to show loyalty to Richard III (whom he is supposed to have called the last legitimate English king, per this article in The New Yorker about him) and the house of York, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field (when Richard was killed).

From this, and from the fact that the Song of Ice and Fire is (very loosely) based on the events of the Wars of the Roses, I conclude that, if he were alive today and would condescend to read science fiction or fantasy (which is probably a greater leap than bringing him back from the dead --- the man was a humongous literary snob), he would probably be a Stark fan. :)

Winter is coming!

Simon Baron-Cohen Responds to Criticism from an Autistic Blogger - Part II

Now, I'd like to focus on the first two points in Simon Baron-Cohen's response to Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg, where he addresses her argument that autistic people's generally heightened perceptual sensitivity, and our lack of any sort of filtering mechanism, tends to make us more empathic, not less.

She says:

Many of us experience such a high degree of empathy that we are constantly putting ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to see all sides in any controversy or conflict. Many of our problems with sensory and emotional overload derive from an excess of this ability, not a deficit.

He replies:

1. Rachel challenges whether people with autism have 'theory of mind' difficulties and instead argues that people with autism have high degrees of empathy.

This is however hard to reconcile with the scientific evidence. Literally dozens of studies from around the world have documented the theory of mind difficulties in autism. And the empathy difficulties are also well documented and widely replicated, both on performance tests (e.g., emotion-recognition tests from the face and voice) and on self-report measures (such as the Empathy Quotient or EQ).

Consider the latter, where 81% of people with autism score less than 30/80 on the EQ, by their own self-report, whilst only 12% of people without autism score at this low level. These results are mirrored when parents complete the EQ about their children, in many independent samples. So, whilst some people believe that theory of mind and empathy difficulties in autism are mythical, the results of many independent scientific studies suggest otherwise.
...
2. Rachel challenges whether people with autism have difficulty knowing when they have hurt others, and wishes I had not stated that children with Asperger syndrome (AS) are delayed in being able to figure out what might hurt another person. Indeed, she finds my statement hurtful.

As a working scientist, all I can do is summarize the empirical evidence. An example is the Faux Pas Test, where children are asked to identify if anyone said anything they shouldn't have said, whilst listening to short audio recorded stories. Children with AS as a group on average scored significantly lower than children without AS, despite being older than the comparison group. Indeed, the design of this experiment allowed us to estimate the size of the developmental delay in AS, since the 12 year old children with AS performed more like typical 9 year olds. So, although Rachel may not like hearing these results, this is what the science finds.

I am not Rachel, but it seems to me like she wasn't denying the existence of those results at all; just saying that those results don't tell us much of anything about what the autistic people in the various studies were actually thinking that led them to do the test "wrong." We know that autistic people don't interpret social situations the same way non-autistic people do; what we don't know is how autistic people do interpret them.

(I am basing the above paragraph on what Rachel has written in this post on the Sally-Anne test for Theory of Mind, as well as her three-part series critiquing the EQ. Her post on the Sally-Anne test, in particular, is interesting because it describes an alternate thought process for a hypothetical autistic child taking the test, and coming up with reasons why Sally might look in other places than where the researcher wants her to look. What's important is that it's not that the kid in this example can't imagine Sally's point of view, it's that ze is drawing on different thought processes and experiences to arrive at different predictions for what Sally will do. The problem with the test is that it treats all wrong answers as failures to imagine Sally's mental state.)

Because I understand Prof. Baron-Cohen's need for empirical validation of these possibilities, I've even come up with an experimental design he (or anyone) could use to evaluate the two-way-street hypothesis that I've been promulgating here.

You'd have a bunch of people, half of them autistic and half of them not, and you would group them into pairs, with each pair including one autistic and one non-autistic member, both the same sex, same age and roughly similar verbal abilities, and just have them interact together for a short while, like 5-10 minutes. You would record their interaction on video, and then you would ask each person, separately, some questions about what happened between them. What they thought felt at certain points (decided on by the researchers sometime between the actual exchange and the individual Q&A sessions), what they thought the other person was thinking or feeling at certain points. You would then compare the two participants' answers to see how well they overlapped. You would also do this with autistic/autistic and NT/NT pairings, and then compare the average degree of similarity of the paired accounts across all three permutations.

This would allow you to see whether autistic people seem to understand each other better than they do NTs, or whether NTs are equally baffled by autistics.

It would also end the stalemate between Baron-Cohen's "well, the evidence says autistic people just don't understand social situations" and autistic people's self-reported experiences of both understanding other autistic people, and of having non-autistic people spectacularly fail to understand, or empathize with, them.

Simon Baron-Cohen Responds to Criticism from an Autistic Blogger - Part I

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Many autistic and feminist bloggers have criticized Simon Baron-Cohen's theories about autism and gender differences, but not very many have had him respond to their criticisms personally. Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg is one of those lucky people; she posted a critique of his E-S theory on her blog a couple years ago, and he has just now written a ten-point response to it. In this part of the post, I talk about Rachel's objection that the characterization of autistic people as poor empathizers ignores the differences between cognitive and affective empathy, and that even autistic people who lack cognitive empathy often have great capacity for affective empathy. I also talk about Baron-Cohen's response to this objection, and how his thought on empathy and autism has undergone a further evolution in the two years since Rachel wrote her post.
_________________________________________________
Sandrine (a French woman living in Turkey, who has an autistic son) at The Paris Ankara Express pointed me to this guest post by the famous autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Blogs Directory.

In his guest post, Prof. Baron-Cohen responds to criticism of his Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) theory of autism from Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg, who writes the blog Journeys with Autism and also curates a web-anthology on Autism and Empathy.

He identifies ten points that Rachel makes in her essay, and writes a paragraph (or two or three) addressing each one. They seem to be split about half and half between questioning Baron-Cohen's conception of empathy (as in, autistic people actually tend to be quite sensitive to other people's emotions, particularly distress) and questioning whether his model is actually any more descriptive, or helpful, than older "deficit" models.

(You could argue --- and many people do --- that the E-S/Extreme Male Brain theory is still a deficit model since it considers a deficit in empathizing skills to be a defining characteristic of autism; it offsets this by also including normal or superior systemizing skills as part of the definition, but if you look at most of the psychological, educational, or behavioral literature on autism, you find all sorts of articles on remediating, or sounding the depths of, autistic deficits and not very much on nurturing or characterizing autistic strengths. So the offset deficit model isn't actually offset all that much, in practice.)

Rachel's post is a response to this paper from 2009 (Rachel's post is also from 2009) spelling out what the E-S theory says about autism. The article describes the E-S theory, particularly its evolution from Baron-Cohen's earlier "mindblindness" theory of autism. He lists five things the earlier model failed to explain that he thinks the newer one does adequately explain: 1) nonsocial aspects of autism, like attention to detail, love of patterns or routines, stimming etc., 2) empathy isn't just "mind-reading", it's also feeling something for the other person, and the "mindblindness" model only deals with mind-reading, 3) autism isn't the only condition that can produce mind-blindness, 4) some studies have failed to find any differences in Theory of Mind between autistic and non-autistic subjects, and 5) autistic strengths.

Rachel responds that, no, actually the E-S theory doesn't do any better at explaining these things. She thinks he totally misreads stimming, for one thing: to her, it's not about "systemizing" at all, it's about self-calming. It's a way to handle emotions, not a form of empirical investigation.

She also takes issue with his contention that we lack both cognitive and affective empathy:

The everyday experience of many autistic people, all across the spectrum, contradicts the professor's theory. Many of us experience such a high degree of empathy that we are constantly putting ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to see all sides in any controversy or conflict. Many of our problems with sensory and emotional overload derive from an excess of this ability, not a deficit.
...
From my contact with autistic people, it's clear to me that our empathy leads many of us to constantly question the impact of our words. While I am far from perfect, choosing my words carefully may very well rank as one of my Aspie obsessions. However, the professor believes that "the typical 9-year-old can figure out what might hurt another's feelings and what might therefore be better left unspoken. Children with Asperger syndrome are delayed by around 3 years in this skill." (Baron-Cohen, 69)
...
Baron-Cohen goes on to say that, in addition to not empathizing well, we don't know how to respond to someone even after the person tells us what's wrong.

News flash: Once someone tells me how he or she feels, I don't usually have a problem with an empathetic response. Sometimes, I'll make sure that my response is welcome, out of respect for the other person's boundaries. For instance, if a person is crying, I might ask whether the person would like a hug, or whether the person would like to talk. Some people want hugs, and some people want to be left alone. I consider it courteous to ask. Once I know people fairly well, however, and I know what works for them, I simply respond. Just ask my husband, my daughter, my daughter's friends, my friends, my former co-workers, my neighbors, and all the animals I've ever helped care for in various stages of illness.

I feel like I have to back up now, because Prof. Baron-Cohen says explicitly in his response to her (he even draws a picture!) that he thinks autistic people are only impaired in cognitive empathy, and that we are just as capable of affective empathy as anybody, which is pretty close to what Rachel was saying, too.

His thinking has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to; in that paper, he not only doesn't say that autistic people have affective empathy, but he also implies that we are deficient in both kinds of empathy --- he mentions the EQ as a measure of both affective and cognitive empathy, and also mentions that autistic people tend to score lower on the EQ than non-autistic people:

Most people regard [Theory of Mind] as just the cognitive component of empathy in that it simply involves identifying someone else's (or your own) mental states. ... [M]issing from ToM is the second component of empathy, the response element: having an appropriate emotional reaction to another person's thoughts and feelings. This is referred to as affective empathy (Davis 1994). On the Empathy Quotient (EQ), a questionnaire is filled out either by an adult about themselves or by a parent about their child, both cognitive and affective empathy are assessed. On this scale, people with autism spectrum conditions score lower than comparison groups.

So, while Rachel's objection --- yes, we do have affective empathy --- might seem redundant to someone who has read Baron-Cohen's more recent writing on the subject of empathy (his most recent book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, contrasts autistic people with psychopaths: the former group has poor cognitive empathy but normal affective empathy, while the latter has normal cognitive empathy but poor affective empathy), she is actually bringing up something that is not addressed in the text she's working with.

(I also think there is still a problem in Baron-Cohen's work with measuring empathy --- measuring it at all, much less measuring each component separately --- in that most of the tests he uses that directly measure some aspect of empathy, like the Sally-Anne test, the Faux Pas test, or the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, are measures of cognitive empathy only. The indirect measures, which are usually questionnaires, have their own problems. With any self-reported measures, there's a risk of stereotype threat, where the test takers' awareness of stereotypes about some group to which they belong biases their answers toward whatever the stereotype predicts: women/girls and members of some ethnic minorities, like African-Americans, Latin@s, or Native Americans, tend to do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their group membership, even by something as innocuous as a check-box at the top of the page for race and gender. Since autistic people are often taught from early childhood that their way of speaking, acting, feeling, or relating to other people is weird and wrong, I would not be surprised if they tended to rate themselves low on things like fitting in, participating in conversations or getting along with other people. Also, a lot of the questions on things like the EQ measure some mixture of cognitive and affective empathy; they ask about intuitively knowing what a person feels and then reacting to it, like knowing to comfort someone who is upset. There is one measure that has subscales geared just toward having intense feelings on other people's behalf, and that is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which one study found autistic people scored either very close to, or even better than, non-autistic people on all but one subscale.)

So his position on affective vs. cognitive empathy in autism has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to, and he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that in his response to her; instead, he makes it sound like that's what he was saying all along:

Rachel says "once someone tells me how he or she feels, I don't usually have a problem with an empathic response." This is exactly the point. For most people, they don't need to be told by the other person, "I am upset." They can just read this information in the other person's facial expression, vocal intonation, or 'body language', and they can make inferences about what the other person might be thinking, in the absence of being directly told. For many people with autism these non-verbal cues may be hard to read and instead they may only know how someone feels if they are told explicitly. The evidence for this again comes from many scientific studies documenting difficulties by people with autism in reading the mind in the eyes, the face, the voice, or in action (e.g., film). Rachel's own self-description seems consistent with this: "Now, I will readily admit that I cannot infer a person's mental state by reading nonverbal cues."

But I completely agree that once it is explicitly pointed out, people with autism are very capable of an empathic response. Rachel may be surprised to hear that I agree with her on this one, but it hinges on the distinction between 'cognitive' and 'affective' empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to identify another person's state of mind (not just through language) and affective empathy is the drive to respond with an appropriate emotion to another person's state of mind. A growing number of studies suggest that the empathy difficulties in autism are largely restricted to the cognitive component, whilst the affective component is often intact. For this reason, people with autism are often highly motivated not to upset others or hurt others, and are themselves upset to hear that they may have done this if it is pointed out. And once they know that someone else is upset or suffering, they are very often motivated to want to help or offer comfort.

(This seems like a really patronizing response to me. She has addressed theory of mind in other parts of her post; with the passage he's quoting, she is explicitly addressing the "emotional response" aspect of empathy. To make the point that her capacity to form an empathic emotional response is working just fine, thank you, she's describing that faculty in isolation. He ignores that context so that he can go, "Ah-ha, see, she has to be TOLD what someone is feeling!" Well, no, she doesn't always. She's just describing a particular scenario where her cognitive empathy cannot be called into question --- because she doesn't have to use it --- in order to focus on her affective empathy.)

No, I am glad he understands that we care about other people, too. I still disagree somewhat with his assessment of our difficulties with cognitive empathy; that, I think, stems as much from our being profoundly different from other people in terms of our sensory and emotional responses as it does from any objective inability to "read" other people. I think he ignores just how badly non-autistic people fail to notice the signs of our distress, or misinterpret our body language or tone of voice. I think they are just as bad at reading us as we are at reading them; it's just that because they're the majority, their failure to understand us is not as disabling as our failure to understand them.

I had more things I wanted to point out about his response to Rachel, but I've ended up spending so much time untangling this one little snag where they seem to be talking past each other that I think I will split this into multiple posts.

Cat Pic of the [variable time period]

Boots, on a wicker chair on the deck. Ben is behind the chair, visible through the space under the arm.

Boots is very assertive; if something new appears, he has to get on it, play with it, bite it, or otherwise make it his own right away. Ben and Magic are more conservative; they have to wait awhile to make sure the new thing isn't a threat before they will approach it.

Two New(ish) Necklaces

One of them really is new; I made it a few days ago, and only took pictures of it today.

Here I am, modeling it: (In that light, I have to hold the camera above my head and tilt it downward somewhat to avoid triggering the flash --- it doesn't always work. But it gives a warped impression of how big my head is compared with my neck and shoulders; here's another photo taken from a more straight-on angle: you can see that my neck is actually about the same width as my face at its broadest point. But the top photo is the only one in which I'm not making some kind of "Eek! Flash! Too bright!" face.)
I took advantage of having the camera out and wearing a purple shirt to model another necklace, one I made a while ago.
I don't think any of the pictures I took of this one really do it justice; I really like the way it turned out, with the mix of colors and the little beaded panels, but if I want to get my face in the picture, too, I can't zoom in to show the details that I think are the best thing about this necklace.

With some of my jewelry, the overall shape of it is interesting enough, or big enough, that a photo of me wearing it shows something a photo of just the necklace can't show; I guess the necklaces like the second one shown here aren't in that category.