August 2009

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The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

-Thomas Hobbes

April 22, 2009

How I wonder what you are

So astronomers see this thing 12.9 billion light years away, but they don't know what it is.

They're calling it a "blob". On the one hand, I think I hear Newton turning in his grave. Blob? Seriously? But on the other hand, I like the way that word immediately communicates to the layman (and to children) that we don't know what the hell it is. Sure, Newton is dead, but science is alive. Contrary to what some would believe, you don't have to know everything to be a scientist. We're always finding stuff we don't know. And we dig that. You can just about hear how excited Dr. Masami Ouchi of the Arnegie Institution is in this quote:

"There are two possibilities: the standard scenario of galaxy formation is wrong, or this particular object is showing something unique,"

But as is often the case, this mystery has a mundane answer. I know exactly what this "blob" is:

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 24, 2008

ZOMG! Radioactive coal sludge will kill us all! (updated)

What could be worse than a reported half billion gallons of gallons of toxic ash sludge breaking a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant and flooding about 400 acres, damaging a dozen homes?

Well, how about "news" articles that misrepresent the danger by people falsely claiming that this coal slurry is more radioactive than spent nuclear fuel? Yes, several stories have linked a bad article by Scientific American from a year ago whose headline says exactly that, even though the content of the Scientific American article clearly refuted its own headline.

Ready for a quick breakdown of the facts?

1) The headline of the Scientific American article is "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste", and that is false. Anybody who bothered to read the article would find that out.

2) From that same article, "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste", and this is also false. The primary source article (link) says nothing of the kind. Please continue.

3) Again from that same Scientific American article,

In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues... estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.

This is true.

The point of McBride's research is that shielding at nuclear plants is freaking great, and very little thought is given to the trace radioactivity of coal plants. Because it's trace. Less than 1% of the coal sludge is any flavor of radioactive isotope--it's actually on the order of 10 parts per million. Meanwhile, well more than 90% of spent nuclear fuel is uranium. In other words, coal waste (including fly ash) is orders of magnitude less radioactive. If you were to mount a Geiger counter on your dashboard, you wouldn't even be able to tell when you were driving past a coal plant or a coal slurry pond.

Shame on Scientific American, and shame on ignorant, sensationalist writers who quote an article after only reading its headline or maybe a couple of intro paragraphs. The sludge spill in Tennessee is awful enough from a chemical point of view that we really don't need to sensationalize and make up nuclear problems.

22:55 UPDATE: I have emailed Rick Hind, Legislative Director of Greenpeace’s Toxics Campaign, regarding an interview he gave on the issue. While I am sure he won't enjoy being taken to task on Christmas Eve for not weakening the environmentalist argument in favor of honesty, I do hope he will give some thought to how valuable honesty is in any public campaign.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

August 30, 2008

Bug Braaaaaaaaaains!

Discover Magazine presents an article on (and I quote) Zombie Animals and the Parasites that Control Them.

The gallery of pics includes short descriptions (with links to longer articles) of the strange abilities of certain animals to gain control of others.

Examples:

The caterpillar, still alive, behaves as though controlled by the cocooned larvae. Instead of going about its usual daily business, it stands arched over the cocoons without moving away or feeding.

The caterpillar – now effectively a zombie – stays alive until the adult wasps hatch.

and,

Eventually, the crab begins to change into a new sort of creature, one that exists to serve the parasite. It can no longer do the things that would get in the way of Sacculina's growth. It stops molting and growing, which would funnel away energy from the parasite... and while other crabs mate and produce new generations, parasitized crabs simply go on eating and eating. They have been spayed by the parasite.

Personally, I am opposed to these behaviors. I find them completely immoral and unacceptable. Yech.

But they're definitely interesting enough to share with you.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 17, 2008

Better questions about climate change

I really don't care whether or not you believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. That's beside the point.

All but the fringe biblical literalists do agree that the Earth has undergone massive climate change throughout its history -- without input from mankind. Viewed locally, some of these changes have happened very quickly. So whenever I see people arguing about whether or not the science is "settled" with regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming, and whether it's really happening, I just want to knock their heads together and demand their attention long enough to ask what they think we as a species can do about any climate change, whether it's completely natural or not.

Because realistically, even if it were proven conclusively that human activity has contributed to global warming, you simply couldn't stop those practices that are blamed. All around the globe people want to live a lifestyle that is supported by those very activities that are blamed for global warming (emissions from autos, industry, cattle, etc.). They aren't going to forgo a better lifestyle across Asia and Africa just because you don't like how hot it is. While it is not moot to discuss the validity of AGW theories, or how it could be mitigated through new technology, I think it would be more productive for those who worry about climate change to address how the world could respond to changes that could not be directly stopped or mitigated through any amount of lifestyle sacrifice.

So... forget about AGW. If the oceans were to rise a meter for natural reasons, how would people respond? If ocean currents and wind patterns changed to bring lasting drought to Western Europe, what would Europeans do about it? If glaciers covered the NFC North as they did just 20,000 years ago, would we just surrender that territory without a fight? What kind of a fight would be feasible or even possible?

100,000 years ago, humans would simply have moved their homes away from the water, drought, or glacier as necessary. I suspect we might not be so blasé about it in modern times. But we don't seem to put a lot of thought into the reality that these catastrophic extremes are possible and even likely to occur in cycles in the coming millennia. Maybe that's too far away for you to care about, but stories like this one get me thinking about it quite a bit. Are we willing to be an essentially nomadic species in the long term, just so long as things seem constant within our lifetime? Aren't we too obsessed with history and archeology to just meekly accept that certain areas are habitable now but won't be forever?

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 2, 2008

Striped Iceberg

I try not to do a lot of "Oh this is so cool!" posts, but wow, this is so cool:

Those are layers of sediment embedded in an iceberg.

I find it interesting that people are so wary of doctored photographs that this would need to be covered at Snopes, but it is, and their article includes a few other pics. I can't say it caused any skepticism on my part, but it did inspire a lot of awe.

The Austrailian government's Antarctic Division has some more excellent pics of striped icebergs posted on their website, if that kind of thing floats your boat.

[wince]

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 6, 2008

Global Warming and Eating Storm Crows

Reason article on Anthropomorphic Global Warming:

Either way, both sets of satellite data show that the trend in average global temperatures for the past decade has been more or less flat.

A decade of research shows that the global warming trend is not significantly different from zero. So, as we can see, not only is there no reliable evidence of man-made global warming, now it also appears that global warming itself may be showing itself as cresting as part of natural fluctuations. What an inconvenient observation for the storm crows.

So, how are we doing with all of those knee-jerk, feel-good ethanol mandates and subsidies?

Corn Dog - The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine
Ethanol: A Tragedy in 3 Acts
UC scientist says ethanol uses more energy than it makes - A lot of fossil fuels go into producing the gas substitute
Ethanol Production Could Be Eco-Disaster, Brazil's Critics Say

Good times.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 8, 2007

The War on Government Funded Science (updated)

I love science. I hate the entitlement mentality of scientists. Below is a comment I left on an article about exactly that at The Intersection:

Why is it that this post only discusses the federal budget? Aside from the issues you raise about the DOD and the "War on Terror", I think you might address the question of where scientists can get money other than from the federal government, whose moral and legal role in supporting scientific research is always political - in other words, inherently nonobjective. Rather than wade through the murky waters of what research deserves to be funded at the expense of taxpayers who may or may not support it (or the researcher), shouldn't scientists be looking for ways to further separate ourselves from politics, e.g. by cutting the purse strings?

Well? Shouldn't we be? Bonus points to the first person to ask me whether or not I am teaching at a public (i.e. taxpayer funded) high school.

Update: (10/12 at 09:20) The best commentary I've seen on the issue comes from Scott Ott:

Criticized by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, for waging a “war on science” by limiting taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research and refusing to sign the Kyoto protocol on climate change, President George Bush today vowed to “win that war too.”

...He also said he’s committed to protecting the American taxpayer from “zealous academics whose research is so important to society that no one but government would voluntarily fund it, and Congress only does so because they’re spending someone else’s money.”

Hey, that's a great point. And they call Scrappleface a comedy site. Well, it's funny because it's true, my friends.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 31, 2007

Hurricane History

I just know I'm going to want to reference this article at some point this school year, so I figure I'll just link it here and that will make it easier to find later. A little teaser if you are wondering whether or not you would like to read the article:

Taking the last 10 years off the table, you see quite clearly that the number of storms recorded doubled not from global warming but because of the technology used to find them.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 25, 2007

For Future Reference

WaPo:

President Bush this month is giving an obscure White House office new powers over regulations affecting health, worker safety and the environment. Calling it a power grab, Democrats running Congress are intent on stopping him.

This is great news. First, it’s an attempt to block the executive branch from acting without oversight, and instead gives the power to act without oversight to legislators and their aides, which is where that power ought to be, dammit. Secondly, and more seriously, I’ll be able to refer to this post the next time a Democrat is in the White House (cough-544 days-cough) and the shoe is on the other foot. That’s always fun.

As to the details, WaPo reports that the House voted to prohibit the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422. Cutting federal spending, I suppose – so far, so good. But what is Executive Order 13422? It amends an executive order from 1993… let’s check the text:

Each agency shall identify in writing the specific market failure (such as externalities, market power, lack of information) or other specific problem that it intends to address (including, where applicable, the failures of public institutions) that warrant new agency action, as well as assess the significance of that problem, to enable assessment of whether any new regulation is warranted.

That gives me the creeps just reading it. But… I can imagine the argument that it is a damn good thing that each federal agency should have to identify in writing the specific problem it intends to address. So far, I don’t see what the Dems object to.

Unless specifically authorized by the head of the agency, no rulemaking shall commence nor be included on the Plan without the approval of the agency's Regulatory Policy Office…

The Post summarizes this as “No rulemaking can go forward without the approval of an agency's Regulatory Policy Office, to be headed by a presidential appointee.” Is it a big deal to drop the first clause? But the point about the presidential appointee is a good one. Please read “presidential appointee” as “partisan political hack”. The Right Wing would do well to imagine what their reaction to this would have been under Bill Clinton… or what it will be someday under Hillary. Why do we continually have to point this out? In fact, that’s really the bottom line regarding each and every action the Bush administration has taken to gather and centralize power. While it may be fun for some of you to cheer as Bush, Cheney, et alii thumb their noses at the Democrats, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.

PS - I am not sympathetic to the desire that some federally employed scientists have for everybody to shut up and let them do what they feel they need to do. When you fund your own research initiative, I’ll support your desire for the government to back off.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 8, 2007

Atlantis Is a Go

Raise your hand if you know the Space Shuttle Atlantis is planned to launch tonight. Keep it raised if you know what time and on what television network you can watch live coverage of it. Keep it raised if you actually plan on watching it. I’m willing to bet there aren’t too many raised hands out there except for the true (pardon the term) “space geeks.”

It’s sad if you think about it. This country used to be enamored with space and space travel. Whenever there was an accident the whole country went into mourning. Think Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia. Kids used to look up to astronauts as heroes, and wanted to grow up to be one themselves. People would travel to Cape Canaveral just to see the Shuttle launch as a vacation. I lived in Florida and we would go to the Cape for the launches quite frequently. If you have never seen one live it is quite a show, lemme tell ya. And now? Nary a peep.

I’m not a “space geek.” I’m far from it actually. I think that it is important that we continue space exploration, but I admit I’m one of the uninformed on the goings on in the space program. Luckily I have a good friend who works in the industry, so I get all my space news and tidbits from him. Including the notification that he will be busy tonight, “because we are launching.” When he told me this last night, I had to ask him to make sure. “You mean a shuttle is being launched tomorrow?” That’s how informed I am. And I’m guessing the rest of you as well. It’s just not out in the public anymore unless something tragic happens and lives are lost. Then it becomes the argument of why are we even doing it in the first place.

So I wish all in NASA and those involved with this mission good luck and Godspeed. May everything run without a glitch and you get everything accomplished.

Edit (7:00pm CST): Launch was a success. I had a friend of mine see it live and he sent me this picture.

Posted by G-Dawg | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 10, 2007

Pesticides and Academic Achievement

I’m not sure what to make of this study that hit the airwaves today suggesting that there is a direct relationship between the date on which a baby is conceived and the child’s future academic achievement.

[Paul Winchester, M.D., Indiana University School of Medicine professor of clinical pediatrics] and colleagues linked the scores of the students in grades 3 through 10 who took the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP) examination with the month in which each student had been conceived. The researchers found that ISTEP scores for math and language were distinctly seasonal with the lowest scores received by children who had been conceived in June through August.

Okay, an achievement gap and a correlation. The next question, obviously, is about causation.

"The fetal brain begins developing soon after conception. The pesticides we use to control pests in fields and our homes and the nitrates we use to fertilize crops and even our lawns are at their highest level in the summer," said Dr. Winchester, who also directs Newborn Intensive Care Services at St. Francis Hospital in Indianapolis.

Wait. Let’s start with some skepticism. This is being reported in a very factual manner in headlines and on radio, but Dr. Winchester states very clearly that his group’s findings “do not represent absolute proof that pesticides and nitrates contribute to lower ISTEP scores”. So let’s not jump to conclusions. Dr. .Winchester does feel that the hypothesis is strongly supported and therefore a lot more research should be done, and I can understand that, but is there more reason to believe there is a direct causal relationship between pesticides and this achievement gap? I’d really like to see it. I mean, I don’t particularly want to raise my kids in an area with heavy pesticide use, but neither do I want to see weak conclusions thrown around too readily in our legislative, litigious society. This guy’s Gaia language later in the interview just doesn’t sound as objective as I would like from a scientist.

So, does this achievement gap exist outside of Indiana? Anywhere in the southern hemisphere? I don’t hear that being asked anywhere else, so I’ll ask it here.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 4, 2007

Arctic Surge?

The Weather Channel has decided to poke a little fun at the Surge/Reinforcements framing issue. Will a fresh batch of artic air be surging into the Midwest and Northeast? Is that word too hot for this cold air? I see the humor.

Political cracks aside, it’s going to be 60 degrees here in Richmond tomorrow, and no sign of the first snow of the season. Sigh.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 11, 2007

Communists, Fusion, and the Moon

In reading up on the plans China has to go to the moon and mine He-3 for future nuclear fusion reactors (thanks McQ), I found a lot of what I expected. Quick points,

1) No, silly, they don't have fusion reactors in China... yet. As I noted in the comments section at QandO, I would think any mining plans floated today and enacted around 2020 would be in expectation of viable fusion reactors sometime soon afterwards. Plan ahead.

2) Yes, China is serious about fusion power. They have some excellent research scientists and facilities. This isn't a "cold fusion discovered!" story.

3) Isn't this freaking cool? He-3 is literally just lying around up there. I mean, trips to the moon are prohibitively expensive, but that can change. You aren't thinking fourth dimensionally, Marty!

4) :A quote from Lawrence Taylor, a director of the University of Tennessee's Planetary Geosciences Institute in Knoxville

When you have a communist regime in a capitalist network, you have huge amounts of cash and the ability to direct it.

So... how many Americans view that as a good thing? Something we should strive for?

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 25, 2007

Can He Lead A Normal Life?

Gosh, little Dilbert reminds me of somebody. Can't quite put my finger on it, but it might be somebody here, or possibly here. One thing for sure, it does not remind me of myself when I was young.

A few weeks ago, Brad Warbiany wrote a piece on Engineering at The Unrepentant Individual. It was inspired by - even a response to - another piece on Engineering that was posted by Chris Byrne at The Anarchangel.

Byrne says:

Engineering is the art of HOW. How things work, how things are built, how things interact and react, how problems are solved.

Engineering is the fusion of the theoretical and empirical. Scientist understand WHY things work, technicians know THAT things work if they do certain things... but engineers understand HOW things work (and to do so must understand much of the other two), and this understanding allows them to do and build, and fix new things.

I agree completely. Engineering is a philosophy more than a career. And Science is, too. And it is possible to meld the two to some degree, but most people don't. (Being a technician is not a philosophy so much, but more of a training. Like any training, I believe anybody can learn to be a technician.)

In my life, I have been employed as a technician, and a scientist, and an engineer. I have not yet been able to determine which of the three I really am at heart. I believe I used to be more of a scientist, but developed an engineering attitude when I was in the Navy. That was done in order to get out of being a technician, by the way. I don't know that I agree with Byrne's idea that a true engineer is an engineer about all things, and I am not alone in that. There are some systems and topics I just don't find very compelling. I don't much like the inside of my computer case. I am a technician about the machine - about both the software and the hardware. How many items/systems would I have to feel this way about to be a technician at heart?

Unlike young Dilbert, I was not an engineering child prodigy. I was good enough at taking things apart, but I wasn't always so good at putting them back together. With the limited financial resoures I had at my disposal, every toy or gadget that I rendered useless was a lesson to leave well enough alone. Combine this with the manner in which my curiosity was dulled by a series of unscientific elementary school teachers, and by high school I was much more a scientist than an engineer. I wanted to know, but not do.

But perhaps I misunderstood all of those years ago. After all, my refusal to take my car apart was not because I didn't want to know how it worked. In fact, there are only two questions that make sense about a car - how does it work (Engineering) and what do I have to do in order to operate it? There is no Why? Being too poor and lazy to investigate it myself does not mean I wasn't an engineer. It means I wasn't a good engineer.

Brad Warbiany describes himself as having been "born an engineer" (and he may soon find what it is like to raise an engineer). Brad notes the Engineering philosophy drives him in his study of politics.

...every day, I look around me and try to figure out how the system works, because I can only give myself the best chance to benefit from it by understanding its workings.

Part of my writings about politics are a desire to figure out and improve the system. I don’t say government doesn’t work because we have the wrong people running it, I say government can’t work because the system has flawed incentives that cause it to fail. It doesn’t matter all that much who we elect unless the system itself changes. My recent dissatisfaction with the Republicans is largely because they promised to change the system, but instead simply said “plug me in”. Of course, understanding the “How” of a political system doesn’t necessarily allow it to be changed, because often the “How” is highly linked to ballot choices of people who refuse to even question or investigate that same “How”.

I have had thoughts along these lines before, so I loved reading Brad's article. I expect I will be making reference to it more than once. Keep an eye out.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 3, 2006

Stern Language

I like Sir Nicholas Stern. He’s got a name that lends itself quite nicely to the type of cheap wordplay that is so popular with newspapers and blogs. It really doesn’t go beyond that – I was not at all familiar with the man until last week. The head of Britain's government economic service and the former World Bank chief economist, Stern recently published a report on the economics of climate change (some highlights here and some reactions here). It’s causing quite a stir.

The Economist:

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, asked Sir Nicholas to look into the economics of climate change because he wanted some solid material to counter the argument of those who accept that global warming is happening but believe mitigating it is too expensive to be worthwhile. That view is rare these days in Europe, but common in America, where it is often infused with the belief that attempts to control greenhouse-gas emissions are part of a European socialist conspiracy to undermine the American way of life.

Sir Nicholas has tried to assess the future costs of climate change—drought in Africa, floods in Europe, hurricanes in America, rising sea levels around the world—and has set them against the costs of cutting fossil-fuel usage enough to stabilise carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. His answer to the second part of this calculation is fairly uncontroversial. The costs of switching away from carbon should not be huge because of the rise in fossil-fuel prices and the fall in alternative energy prices. Sir Nicholas reckons that the world could stabilise concentrations at a reasonable level at a cost of 1% of GDP by 2050. Many other economists have looked at the matter, and most agree with Sir Nicholas.

But Sir Nicholas dissents from the general view on the costs of climate change itself. Most economists who have looked at the matter up to now reckon that, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue on their current path, the costs of climate change would be between zero (where the benefits of warming to cold countries balances out the costs) and 3% of global output over the next 100 years. Sir Nicholas thinks they would be a massive 5-20% over the next century or two: in other words, world output could be up to a fifth lower, as a result of climate change, than it otherwise would have been.

…Sir Nicholas has received plenty of support from economists (four Nobel prize-winners have endorsed the report) and a certain amount of criticism…One complaint is that he has selected the most pessimistic research and ignored more conservative work… Another criticism is that figures on the economic costs of climate change are bound to be nonsense because they are based on a cascade of uncertainties.

But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas's central perception—that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic (such as the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by six to seven metres). Just as people spend a small slice of their incomes on buying insurance on the off-chance that their house might burn down, and nations use a slice of taxpayers' money to pay for standing armies just in case a rival power might try to invade them, so the world should invest a small proportion of its resources in trying to avert the risk of boiling the planet

Is this a fair point?

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 22, 2006

As Gay as a Seagull

The Oslo Natural History Museum opened an exhibition last week on homosexual behaviors in the animal kingdom. I swear on all that I hold sacred that this link is work safe.

The article says that homosexuality has been observed among 1,500 species, and that it is “well documented” in 500 of those species. I am not quite sure what the cutoff is for whether it is well documented.

Also, I was disappointed that there was no mention of seagulls in particular. It’s not that I have some kind of unhealthy fascination with gay seagulls or anything… it’s just that when I learned of homosexual behavior among seagulls, it was the first time I even considered that sexual preference could be something other than a conscious choice.

Okay, I know that the whole story is being begged.

I was in high school biology class – so, 1987. A student asked Mr. O’Day why people would make a stupid assertion like ‘homosexuality is not a choice, it is inherited’. It went something like this:

Student 1: But Mr. O’day, gay couples can’t procreate, so the gay gene wouldn’t get passed on, so it’s a stupid argument to try to make.

O’Day: Gay men are physically capable of having sex with a woman and fathering children – passing on those genes.

Student 1: Well, okay… but… it just can’t be natural. I mean, gay men father these babies for generations and generations? It doesn’t make sense.

Wulf: Yeah. Why would it survive natural selection? What purpose would homosexuality have?

O’Day: Perhaps homosexual men possess characteristics that are more community oriented. That would make their gene likely to be passed on over generations. I can’t say for sure, but the fact is that - morality aside - homosexuality is observed in the animal kingdom.

[blank stares]

O’Day: For example, many seagulls are gay. And it isn’t because they hang out on the coast.

I have no idea why seagulls were his example, but I remember it pretty clearly – partly because seagulls used to congregate on the soccer field, and there was one kid in class who, for the rest of that school year, would walk into class, point out the window at the gulls, and say “look at those faggots on the soccer field!” I thought it was funny the first time.
So, um, back to Oslo. No mention of seagulls in the BBC article, but it still sounds like an interesting exhibit. But of course the question comes up: Is this a proper function of government? Well, Norwegians are a bunch of socialists, so for them I suppose it is. What I find most frustrating about the USA is that this sort of thing would be opposed here for all the wrong reasons. In case you doubt my assertion:

There has been some hostility to the exhibition. An American commentator said it was an example of "propaganda invading the scientific world".

Haha… no kidding. An American said that? I find that hard to believe. We all know how Americans like to keep their science separate from their social agendas.

Petter Bockman, a zoologist who helped put the show together, admitted that "there is a political motive".

Thanks for clearing that up, Petter. Incidentally, it wasn’t that long ago that gay rights activists were protesting plans to test the sexual orientation of penguins which had engaged in homosexual activity. BBC story here. That was rather ridiculous, imho. At the time, I refrained from making comparisons between zoos and prisons. It is a less natural environment, and therefore provides less insight. Besides, it would be in poor taste to note the similarities between this image and this one.

Adding some female penguins to that zoo was just fine. Let’s at least make an effort to keep our science separate from our social agendas after all.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 15, 2006

Richard Dawkins and the War Between Science and Religion

I have some thoughts to share regarding this interview of Richard Dawkins in Salon. Let’s start with the very first clause in the very first sentence:

In the roiling debate between science and religion, it would be hard to exaggerate the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins.

There ought not to be any debate between science and religion, as I have discussed before (see here). So, right off the bat this is striking me as unnecessary sensationalism – publicity for its own sake. And while I like Dawkins’ work (what I have read of it), he is a celebrity, and possibly susceptible to the same foibles as any other celebrity. All press is good press, no? I know better than to judge an entire article by the first clause, but I also remember the importance of an opening sentence (casual blog entries such as this one excepted, of course).

Still in the intro to the interview:

Dawkins' latest book turns to his more recent passions. In "The God Delusion," Dawkins fulminates against religious moderates as well as fundamentalists. He argues that the existence of God is itself a scientific conjecture, one that doesn't hold up to the evidence.

I think it is interesting to consider the existence of God to be a scientific conjecture, but in reality it is a belief that far precedes scientific thought. It certainly isn’t a hypothesis, as it cannot be falsified by experiment. It is extra-scientific. Besides, while it doesn’t hold up to the evidence, it would be horrendously wrong to imply that this makes it false. Atoms existed long before we could prove that they do. I won’t belabor the point with more examples.

Thankfully, Dawkins does make the point that most self-avowed atheists fail to make: He isn’t really an atheist.

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

To be a vehement atheist is to have faith, ironically, and to assert more than one actually knows.

Of course, the comparison of the God of Abraham to the Flying Spaghetti Monster fails on account of the number of people who claim to have witnessed each. Even as a severe agnostic, I allow for a greater possibility of a god that vaguely resembles the one described in Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, since so many sincere and rational people claim to have a personal experience with this kind of entity. Maybe they know something that I don’t. Unlike Dawkins, I humbly hold that as an explanation of more than zero percent likelihood. I don’t arrogantly write it off as hallucinations and dreams – he does this without evidence, take note.

But the part of the interview that really rankles me is when he gets into atheists being more intelligent than theists. Putting aside the anecdotal evidence of this or that genius who believes or believed in God, Dawkins seems to make some statements that he has no business making. For example:

The one meta-analysis of this that I know of was published in Mensa Magazine. It looked at 43 studies on the relationship between educational level or IQ and religion. And in 39 out of 43 -- that's all but four -- there is a correlation between IQ/education and atheism. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist. Or the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist.

Dawkins says that it’s a correlation, but then he speaks about it as a causation. Could it be that atheists are more likely to seek an education? I certainly wouldn’t find that hard to fathom. But more importantly, who exactly will be persuaded by this argument? Dawkins says that one of his goals is to persuade people to his point of view, but I just can’t imagine that if I were a religious man, I would want to read about how my religion indicates that I am probably a bit dim and ignorant. [shrug] Perhaps this simply means that I am not his target audience. But I don’t understand this pressing need of his to force a decision between science and religion. Plenty of people – of varying degrees of intelligence and education – are able to have both a scientific philosophy and a religious faith. Dawkins’ attack of the moderate just seems unnecessary and unhelpful. Late in the interview (bottom of page 3), Dawkins says:

Well, I don't relish confrontation for its own sake. I don't spoil for a fight. I'd much rather have an amicable discussion. But I am a professional academic, and professional academics are used to arguing about all sorts of things. And we argue in a robust way, bringing forth evidence where we can and using our skills of argument to use that evidence. So I may come across as passionate. But that doesn't mean I go out of my way to have confrontations in an aggressive way. I don't.

I have to ask; is the best way to start an amicable discussion… to title your book The God Delusion? Real non-confrontational, Richard.

Furthermore, when asked what is so bad about religion, he selectively speaks to what is bad about some of the organized, hierarchical religions, especially with regard to their political influence. It is here where he paints with the broadest brush. He says that religion is bad because:
- it encourages one to believe falsehoods,
- it encourages one to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all,
- it actively discourages people from scientific explanations for the world and for life,
- some religions teach that blasphemers and apostates should be killed,

But it is the politics, not the faith itself that is the problem. Dawkins skims right over that distinction and blasts all religion as bad. The fact is that most religious beliefs are similar to most secular beliefs in that they only become dangerous when they are permitted to govern the lives of those who do not actively consent to such. For example, your religious faith is no more dangerous to me than is the commune where my cousin lives – until the government sanctions that religious faith or that communist philosophy as a system by which I must abide.

Of course, Dawkins has no problem imposing his beliefs on others. He calls it child abuse for parents to teach their religious faith as anything more than one choice among many. This completely neglects the reality that religious faiths all have exactly one thing in common: they do not view themselves as but one choice among many. They all consider their own doctrines to be correct, and others to be varying degrees of incorrect. Dawkins is no different, except that while my parents may have worried that I would burn in flames for all eternity for having the wrong beliefs, Dawkins only worries that I would contribute to the evils of the world through the duration of my short life. Oh, and my parents based their concerns on personal spiritual/religious experiences that they held, whereas Dawkins bases his concerns on personal spiritual/religious experiences that he does not hold – a null set.

It’s a ridiculous argument and expectation.

Now, having said all of that, I should note that I agree completely with this exchange:

Salon: But it seems to me the big "why" questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?

Dawkins: It's not a question that deserves an answer.

But that’s a personal preference. There are people who will choose to ponder this question, and it is not illegitimate for them to do so if it pleases them. It is simply illegitimate to expect scientists to attempt to make any answer. We cannot. That’s not a failing of science – it’s just not what science is for. And furthermore, for scientists who are agnostic on religion, we simply don’t care about the question.
Dawkins says that there are certain “core questions”, like;

how did the universe begin? Where do the laws of physics come from? Where does life come from? Why, after billions of years, did life originate on this planet and then start evolving?

But that’s also a personal preference. It is no more natural to ask these questions than, Why are we here? and What is our purpose in life? I know plenty of people of good intellect who simply don’t care about these questions.

Where I disagree with Dawkins is that I don’t see where he or anybody else gets off judging the absolute legitimacy of these questions or the people who ask them. The issue is whether science is a legitimate way to attempt an answer. And, for each of us of course, whether we have a personal interest in using our time and energy pursuing the questions.

Dawkins has a fanaticism that does not seem to have any rational, scientific basis. His hatred of religion is evident in his language.

The science lobby, which is very important in the United States, wants those sensible religious people -- the theologians, the bishops, the clergymen who believe in evolution -- on their side. And the way to get those sensible religious people on your side is to say there is no conflict between science and religion. We all believe in evolution, whether we're religious or not. Therefore, because we need to get the mainstream orthodox religious people on our side, we've got to concede to them their fundamental belief in God, thereby -- in my view -- losing the war in order to win the battle for evolution.

What war? What is the inherent conflict between science and religion? Dawkins asserts that there is one, but he hasn’t convinced me that it is necessary to have one. I don’t believe it exists. It can’t be measured and reproduced. Shall we write it off as hallucinations and dreams on his part?

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August 26, 2006

Inquiring Minds

Yesterday, my son said that he would point his yellow National Geographic junior binoculars at the moon “and see if those dark spots really are mountains”. Unfortunately, we are just past the New Moon, so he was not able to perform his observation. Give him a couple of weeks. Oh, and those binoculars are not powerful enough to see much of anything. But still, consider the implications of his thought process. This five year old has had a Galilean breakthrough on his own. Technology and natural, childlike inquisitiveness are what drive science. And these in turn drive technology. Which means that I will soon be purchasing a starter telescope on eBay.

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August 24, 2006

Pluto Demoted

There are now eight planets in our solar system.

After much debate, astronomers of the International Astronomical Union today demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet.

"Dwarf planet" is defined as "any round object that has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite."

Makes sense to me. Pluto was only originally classified as a planet after its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 because it was thought to be similar in size to Earth. It's actually about one-fifth the diameter of Earth.

August 15, 2006

NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery

Well, they announced that they will announce it, anyway.

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

[...]

Shortly before the start of the briefing, images and graphics about the research will be posted at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/

Briefing participants:
- Maxim Markevitch, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
- Doug Clowe, postdoctoral fellow, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
- Sean Carroll, assistant professor of physics, University of Chicago, Ill.

A video file about the discovery will air on NASA TV at noon, Aug. 21.

Audio of the event will be streamed live on the Web at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

That's all they're giving us so far, but it sounds intriguing. I'll be watching.

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August 9, 2006

ZooBank

I wrote about ZooBank in March:

...a group called the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) at London's Natural History Museum has begun planning a definitive, open-access, web-based catalogue of species - the comprehensive, peer-reviewed Wikipedia of all living things scientists have discovered. The project is called ZooBank.

Today, "Peter" left a message on the article. It reads,
We have launched ZooBank today (www.zoobank.org).

What a great tool for biologists of all stripes. I had to share.

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July 21, 2006

Anthropomorphizing the Weather

Accuweather’s Katrina Voss makes an interesting observation:

Oddly, modern technology may have rejuvenated the primeval practice of anthropomorphizing weather.

Some cultural habits are so hard to kick.

I don’t really have anything to add on this topic. I just found the naming of hurricanes to be a fascinating way to bring a train of thought around to the fact that life in a technological age does not in any way require us to be more rational than our ancient forbears.

The Accuweather blogs are a good read if you like meteorology - which we do. (thanks, R*)

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July 18, 2006

Exceeding Infinity

As a scientist and technophile, I am all about the research into and application of alternative energy sources. Those who know me will not be surprised that I am on record here, here, and especially here saying what shouldn’t need to be said – that finding alternative energy sources is beyond the proper purview of our government, and should be dealt with by the market, even if that means that some investors get rich (horrors!).

As a scientist and proponent of alternative energy sources, it really drives me nuts to see some of the things people have to say about the topic. For example, Michael Kanellos, Editor at large for CNET News, covered the comments of Rice University chemistry professor and Nobel laureate Richard Smalley in 2004. Dr. Smalley of course calls for more government money to be spent on energy sources. I wish Kanellos had quoted Smalley more extensively, so I would know exactly where to lay blame over some of the comments in the article, such as:

If the government doesn't start funding energy research, future generations might end up living in dark, nanotech scientist says.

…and…

Wind, wave and hydrothermal power have mostly been tapped.

tapped? TAPPED?

I can’t believe that such a statement would have to be refuted, but if it must be, then consider what the U.S. Department of Energy has to say on the subject (emphasis mine):

Sources of renewable energy are either continuously resupplied by the sun or tap inexhaustible resources. They include solar, geothermal, biomass, wind, and hydropower resources.

Specifically if you click on the link for geothermal, you get the following (again, emphasis mine):

In the United States, most geothermal resources are concentrated in the West, but geothermal heat pumps can be used nearly anywhere.

The use of wave power and oceanic thermal gradients is so undeveloped that it doesn’t even get mentioned in the DoE page above.

Not only are these resources far from “tapped” in the way the word is used in the CNET article, the technologies for harnessing these resources are constantly becoming more efficient and affordable.

What was Mr. Kanellos thinking? Did he simply report accurately what Dr. Smalley actually said? If so, he is still guilty of not looking into the facts of the situation. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt in some way, but I don’t see how I can. The nature and potential of renewable resources is covered in elementary, middle, and high school. It’s easy to look up. It’s even common sense – how could solar power or wind power be “tapped”?

And I haven't even touched the ridiculous scare-mongering suggestion that our children will not know electricity if we don't do something.

Suggestions? I might have to file this one under “inexplicable” until I hear from Mr. Kanellos on the matter. Perhaps he has already clarified these remarks somewhere, but I haven't seen it.

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July 11, 2006

Nothing so Green as Algae

How about a new technology that would reduce harmful emissions from factories – wouldn’t that be great? GreenFuel Technologies thinks they have just such a development... from a certain kind of algae.

40% less CO2; 86% less nitrous oxide.

…the algae is harvested daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel for automobiles.

"You want to do good for the environment, of course, but we're not forcing people to do it for that reason — and that's the key," says the founder of GreenFuel Technologies, in Cambridge, Mass. "We're showing them how they can help the environment and make money at the same time."

(USA Today ran this article back in January, and I just never commented on it.)

What’s that? A market solution? Without government mandating algae on all smokestacks? As should be obvious, if it is a good idea, private industry will work toward it. Sure enough,

Venture capital investments in clean technologies last year reached an all-time high of $1.6 billion in North America… In the fourth quarter of 2005 alone, green technologies or "cleantech", made up 10% of all North American venture capital investment…

In reality, cleantech is still too long-term to be a great venture capital investment (VC represents only about 3% of cleantech investment for reasons discussed here). The industry is going to use government money to get off the ground either way, and I don’t see that there is much sense in small-government libertarians fighting it. But it is becoming less and less reasonable to argue about whether or not smokestack pollutants are melting the ice shelves. We can squabble over the meaning of the word “consensus”, but the reality is that there is a demand for green technologies, and industry is moving to meet that demand. The best thing for you to do now is decide whether you want government to facilitate these investments, or over-regulate and stifle them... and advocate accordingly.

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July 3, 2006

Is NASA An Industrial Subsidy In Disguise?

With regard to the NASA budget, Kip Esquire of A Stitch in Haste yesterday brought up a post from the archives, noting that "one of the stickier wickets for some libertarians is the issue of government-funded space exploration."

This is an issue which Rammage and I have discussed many times (in person and in email - don't bother searching). I would like to point readers to an excellent point/counterpoint discussion, here. Enjoy!

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June 29, 2006

Supreme Court to visit EPA Rules on CO2

The United States Supreme Court today agreed to hear a case involving the federal regulation of greenhouse gas pollutants.

In 1999, various environmental groups filed an administrative petition requesting that EPA set motor vehicle emission standards for greenhouse gases. The EPA denied that petition in August 2003, saying that it had no statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. At that time, EPA also said it would not regulate greenhouse gas emissions even if it had the authority to do so under the Clean Air Act.

In October 2003, [Massachusetts] and 29 other parties challenged that ruling in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit [and lost].

This March, Massachusetts and 28 other parties filed a petition for certiorari requesting Supreme Court review. Today, the Supreme Court agreed to review the federal appeals court case.

(story here)

As the Tacoma Tribune notes, the decision could determine how the nation addresses global warming.

I expect many on the right to stick with arguments that the Earth is not warming (false) or that it is only warming because of non-human activities (false) like the fact that the sun is shining brighter (true) and that this ruling could make it illegal to exhale (false and only mildy humorous even the first time, after which the comment has no humor value unless followed by a blast of secondhand cigarette smoke), but that doesn't help the debate. The question is, Has Congress already mandated that the EPA regulate the emissions of CO2? If so, then the EPA seems to be in the wrong in deciding not to do so.

And that does appear to be the case, says the National Resources Defense Council. As reported here, they note the wording of the Clean Air Act:

As evidence, the council cites Section 103, subsection (g) of the act, which states, in part, that federal officials should develop nonregulatory strategies and technologies for preventing or reducing "multiple air pollutants, including sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, heavy metals, PM-10 (particulate matter), carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, from stationary sources, including fossil fuel power plants."

But the EPA says that the word "nonregulatory" in the above passage is the key to the whole issue. If Congress has not given them the power to regulate these emissions, it doesn't matter how detrimental anybody believes them to be. That seems pretty clear to me, but the split decisions in the lower courts make me wonder how exactly this will play out, both when this case is heard in October and over the next several years. I'll be holding my breath. [rimshot]

The other states involved in the case are California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

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June 12, 2006

Robotic Touch

Attention, Science geeks.

So far, robots have a very poorly developed sense of touch. But researchers are taking steps in the right direction in the quest to build a robotic fingertip. If you haven't yet heard about the research that Drs. Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf, at the University of Nebraska, published in the most recent issue of Science, then you need to check it out. If you don't have access to Science, then check out Scientific American or listen to the story on NPR.

Using a self assembled electroluminescent thin film that glows in response to applied pressure, Dr. Saraf's team has built what should be the precursor to robotic skin.

The thin film consists of layers of gold and semiconducting nanoparticles that are produced out of solution, so the sensor can be built to conform to complex shapes, such as those on robotic appendages or surgical instruments.

A more detailed explanation from Nature (I believe this requires subscription):

The film is about 100 nanometres (100 x 10-9 metres) thick, roughly 1,000 times thinner than standard office paper. It is built like a sandwich of alternating layers of gold and cadmium sulphide nanoparticles, each separated by insulating polymer sheets just 2 or 3 nanometres thick.

The whole device is hooked up to electrodes that allow a current to flow through the film. When pressed onto a surface, the stress distorts the layers so that electrons can more easily hop across the insulating polymer layers and hit the cadmium sulphide particles. This makes the particles glow — the greater the stress, the more light they emit. A camera then measures the strength of the glow, which relates directly to the pressure felt by different parts of the film.

Of course, using a camera to detect the different levels of pressure may seem pretty impractical when trying to develop a robot skin. But obviously, fiber optics can transmit this information to a processing center (a novel approach). At that point, it would seem like a great idea to look into grafting this stuff onto humans with injuries. Years away, I know. Decades. But it could be done.

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June 7, 2006

Top Ten Ways to Destroy Earth

Want to destroy the Earth? Look no further! Just follow the link below.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy...

Having shamelessly quoted most of this article, I'll take a second here to say, I personally believe that some of the things man is doing and has done, have indeed affected the Earth adversely, contrary to the gist of the quote above. But I think the linked article is interesting nonetheless.

Click here, if you dare.

Image: LiveScience

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May 31, 2006

German Army Gets Wings

A new parachute system, developed by German firms ESG Elektroniksystem-und Logistik and Dräger Aerospace, will allow soldiers to fly laterally up to 125 miles after jumping, making it possible for aircraft to drop parachutists into an area of operations without flying into dangerous airspace. (Although, if I was a parachutist, I think I'd rather be inside a plane over dangerous airspace than outside. Hrm.)

The system is comprised of a parachute, modular carbon fiber wings, and turbojets.

Parts of the system have been in use by the German army since 2003.

"The new wing will...reduce the impact of wind conditions on the jumper and allow operatives to travel up to 40 kilometers carrying loads of around 100 kilograms." --Peter Felstead, Jane's Defence Weekly

No mention of the U.S. Army adopting the technology. I guess we're going to let the Germans play around with it for a while first.

Now where's my flying car? It's 2006 for goodness sake...

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May 30, 2006

Mars Rovers to get Smarter

Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will soon get a software upgrade allowing them to make "intelligent decisions" on which pictures to send back to Earth for study of Martian clouds and dust devils (see photo).

JPL's Rebecca Castano explains, "The idea now is to collect as much data as the instrument can, analyze them onboard for features of specific interest, and then down-link only the data that have the highest priority."

NASA plans to build and launch increasingly autonomous robotic craft in the future, to allow human scientists to spend more time studying interesting data and less time sifting through mountains of data to find it.

Source: BBC

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May 18, 2006

Video into Thin Air

IO2 Technology has released the M2i, a "virtual touchscreen heliodisplay."

Exactly what is a virtual touchscreen heliodisplay, you ask? It's a touchscreen video display that projects video into thin air.

The bottom frame of the image hover[s] a few inches from the Heliodisplay and project[s] up to 28 inches (71cm) into the air at the highest point... The interactive M2i allows desktop navigation in a PC environment such that floating images or video can be manipulated supporting a 'virtual' touchscreen enabling cursor control.

The projector works by projecting video onto a sheet of "transformed air." No word on how exactly the air is transformed. The image quality is not perfect, and for some reason they have chosen a 4:3 aspect ratio, but this is a really cool first step.

See photos, and a movie of the M2i in action, here.

Source: EverythingUSB
Photo: IO2 Technology

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May 17, 2006

Potentially Life-friendly Planet Discovered

Astronomers will announce in the May 18th issue of Nature that, using the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-meter La Silla telescope in Chile, they have discovered the first known planetary system that contains three Neptune-mass planets, the outermost of which is in the star's life-friendly "habitable zone" (the relatively small zone around the star where liquid water could exist).

This multi-planet system, orbiting the star known as HD69830, 41 light-years away from Earth, is unique in that it contains no Jupiter-sized gas giant planet.

Judging from their orbits, the two inner planets are most likely rocky worlds like Mercury. The outermost of the three planets is suspected to have a solid rock/ice core surrounded by a thick gas atmosphere.

The three planets have masses of 10, 12, and 18 times that of the Earth, respectively, and rapidly orbit their star in 9, 31, and 197 Earth days.

Source: Space.com
Artist's Conception: European Southern Observatory

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May 9, 2006

Back Off, Man. I'm a Scientist.

Women are generally able to tell by looking at a man whether or not he is husband material. So says a team of scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Chicago. Shocking research, or ridiculous?

...an interest in children was linked to long-term partnership potential while women were attracted to men with higher testosterone levels as short-term romantic mates.

(story by Reuters, AP)

The more they perceived the men as liking kids, the more likely they could see having a longer-term relationship.

Isn't modern science grand? The preferences of 29 female college students provided the basis of this stunning conclusion. They had the young women thumb through headshots of male grad students, which were then cross referenced with the testosterone levels of those men, and their reaction to photos of babies. Or, they could have watched Friends.

I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't be so worked up over this. But whenever I see a team of scientists report something like this, I have to wonder a few things. Who funded the research? Who felt this was the best way to spend their research time? And, Have these people no shame? They remind me of something that, as a scientist, I don't like to be associated with.

There is a scene in this movie where Sigourney Weaver says to Bill Murray "You know, you don’t act like a scientist... You're more like a game show host."

I don't have any problem with this research being done. In fact, I don't have an inherent problem with people searching for UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster or the theory of Atlantis.

I do have a problem with the fact that this is considered appropriate for graduate students, Reuters, and AP, showing up at the top of the Yahoo! Science News. This is what science is good for? No wonder students, parents, administrators and even my fellow science teachers behave as though science education is peripheral to everyday life - "a matter of using math to complicate what should be easy to understand."

It's sometimes an uphill struggle to be taken seriously, imo. I could probably do a study on it, if I wasn't such a stiff scientific type.

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May 4, 2006

Linux-operated Flash-frozen Fresh Ice Cream

Now this is cool. (No pun intended, but if the snowshoe fits...)

MooBella, a nine-employee company in Taunton, Massachusetts, has developed a machine no larger than a Coke vending machine that instantly makes a scoop of ice cream from fresh ingredients stored within.

Conventional ice cream is made by slowly whipping air into a cream base. MooBella's machine instantly injects air into the ice cream as it's flash-frozen.

The dairy ingredients are sealed in sterile plastic containers, with no need for refrigeration. The machine includes "mix-ins" such as chocolate chips and crushed cookies. It's run on a Linux operating system, and features an LCD display on the front, where customers can create their own custom flavors from a base of twelve.

MooBella is in talks with Starbucks, which could, practically overnight, become the world's largest ice cream chain.

Other targeted locations include airports, movie theaters, and hotel lobbies.

I can't wait for this one to catch on! Anyone seen one of these yet?

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April 26, 2006

Coal is the Energy Source of the Future?

Most interest in "alternative" energy (i.e. non-petroleum based) focuses on solar, wind, or biomass. Anywhere but coal. But GreatPoint Energy is looking to make methane from coal - cleanly and cheaply. It sounds too good to be true. Founder Andrew Perlman:

If you can take the most highly used fuel source in the US, that's extremely dirty, and convert it into a fuel that burns very cleanly, then you actually do have an impact on people's lives and people's health...

NPR story here. As is often the case, the story does not spend much time on the fact that changing the fuel source for our electrical generators is a totally different issue from our automobile dependence on petroleum. Electric cars would be our best bet, but consumers have yet to jump on that option. I don't know that cleaner coal derivatives would matter to most people. But I still find alternative fuel sources (both autos and electric) completely fascinating, and worthy of investigation and discussion.

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April 14, 2006

Representative Brad Miller on Government Science

DailyKos today features Representative Brad Miller (D--North Carolina), who sits on the House Committee on Science. He discusses the politics of science, and accusations that the current administration uses intimidation and the withholding of research grants to silence scientists whose research does not give the conclusions that certain politicians want. (see here).

We're looking for instances of stacked advisory panels, edited reports, researchers who appear to have been blacklisted for coming to politically inconvenient conclusions, grants pulled because the research was going in the wrong direction, reports not published or released, and on and on--you'll know it when you see it.

Excellent, Representative Miller. The House Committee on Science should be very concerned with even the appearance of impropriety when it comes to the relationship between elected officials, bureaucrats, and supposedly objective and independent scientists. Of course, I would expect all investigation to be non-partisan, or at least equitably bi-partisan, to make sure that the watcher of watchers is not playing political games. It might prove useful to have scientists start recording the instances of intimidation and grant withholding - so it is not anecdotal evidence. Did this happen under Clinton? Bush 41? Reagan? I am quite certain it did, but if we don't have very good data on it, then we can't make very good conclusions.

From DarkSyde, who interviews Rep. Miller:

The stories and rumors keep coming: The Bush-Cheney White House, enabled by the Rubber-Stamp Republican Congress, stands accused of reaching deep into tax supported public science organizations and oversight boards and engaging in suppression of any facts or data which their political funding base finds inconvenient. These are our organizations. They are funded by our tax dollars and often times charged with assessing matters of grave importance to each and every one of us. Rep. Miller is determined to return them to their rightful owners: We the People.

It is almost tiresome to again make the libertarian point that it is the tax dollar itself that should be returned to its rightful owner. A call for less government in science will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, as NOAA, NASA and the like are not the social welfare programs on which most libertarians like to focus. They're full of neat stuff, and have cool websites and press releases.

Representative Miller:

We should be able to rely on impartial scientific research in a variety of policy areas. And we should be able to depend on traditional peer review to reveal any bias or other flaws. Scientific research needs to inform our policy choices, not justify policy decisions already made.

It is impossible to respond intelligently to this without sounding like a cynic. So be it. Representative Miller is right - we should be able to rely on impartial scientific research. And little children should always have loving parents and plenty of food. But that isn't the real world. Scientists have agendas. Grant review boards have agendas. The president and his administration have an agenda. Representative Miller has an agenda. Often the most enlightening aspect of a scientific article or discovery is to see who funded it. And so long as the funding comes from the federal government, there are strings attached. Strings people will try to pull in order to support their particular vision.

Perhaps it would be best if the scientists stuck to science, and let the politicians handle the politics. As was noted on this blog a couple of months ago, the two just don't mix well.

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March 19, 2006

Sierra Club on the Cutting Edge

The Sierra Club is using cutting edge Google Earth technology to stay atop the cutting edge of annoying. Hearing the words "Bush Administration," the folks at the Sierra Club went into panic mode and determined that the proposed 800,000 acres of federal land that would be sold to fund rural schools can't possibly be trusted in the hands of the eco-unfriendly and unwashed private sector.

Fearing the "slippery slope" of power being taken away from the federal government, the Sierra Club has created a Google Earth "kmz" file to depict the parcels of land across the country that are slated for sale.

To sign the petition to keep United States land where it belongs, in the hands of the federal government, go here.

Previous: The Unbridled Hypocrisy of the Sierra Club

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March 16, 2006

Bionanotechnology

There are many aspects of science that have delved into the range of the near-atomic in recent years. Nanotechnology is the term for things on the scale of billionth of a meter - literally, only a few atoms across. While my personal exposure to nano-research is surface structures and electrical engineering, I find medical the research fascinating. For example, the BBC reported earlier this week on researchers using a nano-scaffolding of synthetic peptides to bridge the gap in severed nerves - restoring vision to blind hamsters.

Aside from this being good news for the hamsters, it is very promising for humans - repairing nerve damage is a big deal. Said the lead researcher, "Eventually what we would look at is trying to reconnect disconnected parts of the brain during stroke and trauma."

Nanotech is one of the hottest buzzwords in science, and it has moved past the stage of being seen as just hype. The researchers who line up for the government grants are actually producing things left and right, in a field that is too new to appear in textbooks. The graph below was published three years ago (by The Economist), and from what I see, the trends have kept going up.

But there appears to me to be a PR problem with nanotech. It is not a medical field, or a mechanical field, but a study of scale that exists in every aspect of engineering. Researchers vie for funds by field, not by product size - at least, traditionally. Federal funds are authorized according to what subjects are considered valuable, not by how big the results are. Yet anybody who is able to say that they could make something on the nanoscale is eligible for funds, even if that doesn't really make sense, and is not compelling research without the "nano" prefix. I know - I've done it.

This won't matter, however, in the coming blitz of nanoscale. There are two barriers to that blitz, and they are not-so-nano. But once they are breached, the current flow of cash will seem like a trickle, as researchers bathe in money and produce breakthrough after breakthrough.

The first is interfacing carbon to silicon. As The Economist article from three years ago noted,

It does no good to have a fuel cell made of carbon nanotubes if it cannot communicate when it is about to run out of fuel.

The integration of nanotubes into silicon-based computers will be a huge leap for every technology, and it will be almost an afterthought to fuse a wire to a nervous system at that point - with all of the implications that brings, it is a wonder it is not a more protested topic.

The second barrier to the blitz of nanotechnology is the manufacture of nanodevices. It is not just a matter of building small machines to build small machines - the laws of physics are just plain different at that scale, and there is a certain level of uncertainty - literally. This is where the medical field seems to have a distinct advantage over engineering fields. Creating sythetic peptides is just advanced pharmacological engineering, and self-replication is billions of years old for carbon-based structures. Medical advances like the un-blinded hamsters are going to come more quickly than any other nano-field could hope for. Researchers are trying to mimic many of the processes of living organisms - for example, photosynthesis. Surely we could come up with a use for a product that is higly efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. It was suggested in a paper last year that an efficiency of 70% might be attainable with the use of certain nanocrystals.

How about a little cloud on my silver lining? There are naysayers who fear that nanotechnology is just another way for mankind to destroy the planet and play god. They will try to control the federal funding, cutting off researchers in various important fields. After all, there is no such thing as a scientific development that cannot be fought over for political reasons. For example, the EPA just announced today $5 billion in research into the effects of nanoparticles on the environment.

Hopefully, this field will be recognized as too promising to confine to federal funding.

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February 18, 2006

Science and the Government

Part of the problem with government funded science is that money is the rudder of scientific research. If scientific research is funded by a private individual, organization, or corporation, then the aims of the research are plain, and scientists know ahead of time what they are in for. But with government funding, researchers often believe that they should be given free rein to seek "truth", and the public believes that their findings represent "truth", and often fail to view the findings with the skepticism that true science demands.
Furthermore, the findings of these scientists do not belong to them individually, and accusations of silencing by the government are not hard to find - especially when research is begun under one administration and ends under another. And, in some cases, those accusations might be true... and that might or might not be done with good reason, which makes the situation even more mucked up. The whole enterprise of science becomes a political battleground - something that irks scientists who feel entitled to the funding and the findings.

Consider NASA's budgetary balancing act. The agency is being asked to retire the shuttle fleet and bring on a new generation of launch vehicle over the next decade (see previous), and in order to afford doing so, they are cutting funds to other projects. From the Hampton Roads Daily Press:

Leaders of the House Science Committee launched a bipartisan assault on President Bush's proposed budget for NASA on Thursday, saying the plan makes troubling cuts in aeronautics and science programs to finance a manned mission to the moon and Mars.

Two years after Bush announced his plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020, the initiative is triggering wrenching changes within NASA that are raising alarms in Congress.

NASA's 2007 budget calls for a 30.4 percent increase in space exploration systems over the current year's spending level. Much of that money would go to develop a Crew Exploration Vehicle to replace the aging fleet of space shuttles.

But to finance that increase with relatively little new money next year, NASA would have to cut spending on aeronautics research by 18 percent. Langley Research Center in Hampton, which specializes in aeronautics, is expecting a budget cut of about $50 million next year.

While science programs would get a modest funding boost of 1.5 percent next year, lawmakers complained that a new five-year plan calls for a $3.1 billion cut compared with last year's projections. The magnitude of that cut, aides said, could affect things as varied as the Mars robotic exploration programs, advanced telescopes to find planets around distant stars, and programs to observe phenomena such as black holes.

"I am extremely uneasy about this budget, and I am in a quandary at this point about what to do about it," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., the committee chairman, who summoned NASA Administrator Michael Griffin to Capitol Hill to discuss the spending plan.

"This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science and perhaps even worse still for aeronautics."

We are apparently of the belief that space science would not exist if it were not for NASA, and a cut in NASA science expenditures will lead us back to the dark ages. The answer, I suppose, is more funding - because government spending isn't yet enough, right?

From the Charlottesville Observer:

We're glad concerned NASA scientists and officials have decided to speak out. And we hope President Bush and his political advisers learn a lesson from this whole, ugly affair: Trying to muzzle scientists whose findings are politically inconvenient is a terrible idea. And it usually doesn't work, either.

This is true, but this also assumes that the muzzling is wholly a matter of dirty politicians trying to impose religion over Truth. That is not a safe generalization, even if you believe it to be the case here.

The AP reports that the House Science Committee on Thursday demanded more transparency and scientific openness. It is a noble demand, but it is simply unrealistic. The immediate issue is very offensive; a NASA PR officer resigned...

...after he was accused of trying to limit reporters' access to a noted NASA climate scientist and insisting that a Web designer insert the word "theory" with any mention of the Big Bang.

But not every issue of scientific openness or censorship will be this cut and dry, and government would be well served to stick to research that has direct and legitimate use by government agencies, most notably the military.

To emphasize my point, I direct readers to this article: NASA and NOAA Open Science Policies Not Matched at EPA.

Despite public concerns about Bush administration political interference with science, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is requiring prior headquarters approval for all communications by its scientists with the media, according to an agency email released Thursday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national association of government workers in natural science agencies.

The scientists quoted in this article sound very reasonable - how come NASA and NOAA scientists are told to engage the public in open dialogue, but EPA scientists have to go through their PR department? But the fact of the matter is that every interview that starts with "I work at the EPA..." is one that purports (implicitly or explicitly) to be an official statement of the agency, the government, and the scientific community. The agency is absolutely correct to have a level of oversight in this - the most liberal policy should be one of uncensored access to EPA scientists, but with the agency made fully aware of all interviews and speeches, and able to denounce, deny, or fire the scientist, depending on the content of the comments. It is wholly inappropriate to allow individual scientists (who after all have political agendas of their own) to represent an agency and the people of the United States, without any supervision.

(This article is cross-posted at WulfTheTeacher)

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February 12, 2006

Darwin Was Not an Atheist

In recent days, there has been much talk of how important it is for moderate Muslims to step up and denounce the extremists who have made hay of the now-infamous Danish cartoons. Of course, this is good advice for moderates on every issue, because conflicts are only made worse when it is left to extremists to define the debate.

For example, it is important for Christians in the United States to weigh in on the questions of Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Darwinism. It is not appropriate to allow this issue to be shaped by the zealots. Good news was reported in the Chicago Tribune today toward that end:

Nearly 450 Christian churches around the country plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science... "Evolution Sunday" has drawn participation from a variety of denominational and non-denominational churches, including Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Congregationalist, United Church of Christ, Baptist and a host of community churches...

I have written previously about the fact that most Christians can find their faith compatible with Darwin's theories. I have also urged scientists not to fear discussions of Creationism or Intelligent Design, so long as they are not taught as science.

Today's events evolved (ba-dump-bump) from The Clergy Letter Project, begun by Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Since its inception in 2004, the project has drawn 10,000 Christian clerics to sign a letter that concludes, "We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."

Says Zimmerman:

The first part was to demonstrate to the American public that the shrill fundamentalist voices that were demanding that people had to choose between religion and science were simply wrong. The second part was to demonstrate that those fundamentalist leaders that keep standing up and shouting that you can't accept modern science were not speaking for the majority of Christian leaders in this country.

If the silent majority would speak up and express itself in the face of zealots and extremists, I strongly believe that most issues of religion conflicting with secular values would dry up. Bravo to Dr. Zimmerman, and all of the clerics who participated in the letter or in today's programs.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

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February 7, 2006

The Future of Space

(Cross-posted at Wulf The Teacher)

Last week saw the anniversaries of three separate NASA disasters that weigh heavily on the future of spaceflight. It is inherently dangerous to strap oneself in at the top of a rocket and travel at the speeds necessary to achieve orbit. It is expected that NASA is doing everything it can to mitigate those dangers. But it is not enough to fix the O-rings and launch away.

When the family car breaks down too many times and repair costs stack up, many people face the quandary of paying the maintenance costs or putting the money toward a new automobile.
But at NASA, officials are trying to keep space shuttles far older than most cars on the road today going until at least the end of the decade, while hurrying to build and fly a new reusable passenger launch vehicle to replace the shuttles. All this, under a virtually flat budget.
Most experts say the agency really has no great options for reliably putting astronauts or large sophisticated cargoes into space over the next 10 years or so.

(story by Lee Bowman, here)

The fact is that the nature of spaceflight over the last 30 years has been relatively boring for the public, who funds space flight but probably does not understand why – especially in the post-Cold War era. Are we racing anybody at this point? Well, maybe China, but I don’t think most Americans actually see it that way.
(Incidentally, I recently found that the Chinese astronauts are called “taikonauts”. See previous.)

Due to safety concerns about the shuttle fleet, we are actually now in a position of having to rely on the Russians, despite our victories over them in the original Space Race and Cold War. Soyuz flights are the only way to replenish the ISS with crew and supplies, and new components for the ISS are not able to be delivered as long as the shuttles sit grounded. Too large to be taken on Soyuz, they highlight our inability to fulfill our promises regarding ISS.

The situation chafes partners like the European and Japanese space agencies, each with sophisticated modules that cost more than $1 billion to build gathering dust until they can hitch a ride.

It may be that the vehicle itself isn’t the biggest problem, since the vehicle is designed around the larger goal. Why are we in space at all? Is it to have an ISS, or to have manned missions and eventually a base on the moon, and Mars?

John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said human spaceflight had never recovered from the decision to build the program around the shuttles and then the International Space Station, maintained mainly by shuttles.
"NASA is attempting now to recover from 35 years that in many ways were a dead end," Logsdon said. "That was not NASA's mistake, but the country's, the national leadership's."
It took two disasters -- the Challenger and then the Columbia -- to shock the White House and Congress into trying to redirect the program, Logsdon said.

(from NYT story carried here)
So what about the next generation of American spacecraft? What is it, when will we see it, and will it be any good?

Current plans have the shuttles flying through 2010 to finish building the ISS, with new lunar-capable vehicles coming on line by 2014. Projected dates vary, but it seems hard to avoid a gap in flight coverage of at least three years. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has recently confirmed that the agency expects roughly 18 more flights out of the shuttle program (no definitive word on whether any will involve repairs to the popular Hubble Telescope), but the cost of these flights precludes other projects and expenditures, including R&D.
From Space.com:

That means other projects have to be canceled, cut back or postponed in order to free money for the shuttle's last missions. A steady trickle of reports in recent months indicate several space science and aeronautics projects are being cancelled or pushed back.

Well, it turns out the next generation of vehicle didn’t need that much R&D. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is planned to make use of shuttle booster rockets (Solid Rocket Boosters, “SRB”) along with a variant of the shuttle’s huge External Tank. Unmanned and heavy lift missions are being planned with the same concept, with the ability to use extended-length SRBs for more thrust as needed. The general interchangeability of systems is expected to reduce costs, as is the fact that the systems are familiar and already in production.
From SpaceRef.com:

Fairly early in the analysis, planners determined that a new hybrid booster had no particular benefit over a launcher developed from either EELV or shuttle-derived designs. They also determined that cost effectiveness could be achieved if the launch vehicles chosen for CEV systems could yield a higher flight rate by multiple government users, such as the national security community.
According to sources familiar with the launcher section of the so-called 60 Day Study, the future U.S. manned and heavy lift launch vehicle architecture will be based on two configurations of shuttle-derived vehicles.
Cargo vehicle studies using Space Shuttle ET and SRB hardware focused on two major variants: so-called "side-mounted" and "in-line". Side-mount designs hang cargo and/or crew off the side of a large external fuel tank as is currently done with the space shuttle. In-line designs place the cargo (or crew) directly atop a lower first stage as did Saturn launch vehicles.

Manned missions to the moon or to Mars would essentially make use of shuttle components with an Apollo Saturn-style module on top. The interchangeability scenarios shown in the image here practically scream “toy”, but are looking more and more realistic.

In the end, the two ET-derivatives; a side-mount vs. a stacked in-line produced better safety margins for the CEV aboard the in-line mold line.

One of the more interesting developments (read about it at (another article from Space.com)
is the fact that NASA is planning to use engines

fueled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and methane...
While methane is a less efficient propellant than liquid hydrogen, it is easier to store for long stretches and is readily available on Mars, making it possible for NASA to meet future propellant needs by taking advantage of martian resources.

The use of an Apollo-style module is also desirable with regard to escape options for the crew.

For the CEV crew to escape a launch abort, only the part of the CEV containing the flight crew would be explosively detached from the remainder of the CEV/launcher. This approximates, by comparison, the Apollo launch escape philosophy wherein the Command Module was separated from the remaining Service Module part of the Apollo spacecraft.

Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that it is the function of the United States government to involve itself with missions to the moon and Mars, or even to the ISS. There is renewed interest and even excitement in spaceflight these days, but much of it is in the private sector, with plans to begin space tourism within the next two years.

Within the next two years, billionaire businessman Richard Branson promises to begin suborbital flights from a planned launch pad in New Mexico… Branson has reportedly already sold tickets for future space trips – for $200,000 each – despite the fact he does not yet have a spaceship to market.
The commercial space race kicked off last year when a small company based in the Mojave Desert successfully flew the first privately built aircraft – SpaceShipOne –70 miles above Earth to the edge of space twice in less than a week. The company, Scaled Composites LLC, collected the $10 million Ansari X Prize and captured the imaginations of those who dream of space travel. The company is building SpaceShipTwo and has an agreement with Branson’s company to design a commercial space vehicle for as many as nine passengers.
Congress has decided not to regulate such flights until the industry matures. For the X Prize flights, Scaled Composites received a commercial launch license, the same one a defense contractor needs to launch a rocket.

(Virginia Pilot story here)

But what is the point of going to space? Other than, of course, because it is there. Should this be the interest of the government, or of private agencies? What is the legitimate function of the government, anyway? There are certainly good arguments for government involvment in spaceflight, but they aren't often made... probably because the right questions aren't often asked. (follow-up coming soon...)

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January 25, 2006

Gulf War Syndrome 15 years later

Fifteen years ago this month, the first Gulf War began. Shortly thereafter, US troops began experiencing a "mystery illness" that still has not been identified - just labeled. Roughly a quarter of deployed vets complained of the symptoms that came to be known as "chronic multisymptom illness" (CMI). Listen here to a story that aired on NPR last week on the fact that veterans still show symptoms, and scientists still can't figure out exactly what or why.

As the story notes, many critics have claimed that "Gulf War Syndrome" is not real - they attributed it to war time stress. In November, an article in the American Journal of Epidemiology noted:

CMI continues to be substantially more prevalent among deployed veterans than among nondeployed veterans 10 years after Gulf War I, but it manifests similarly in both groups. It is likely to be a common, persistent problem among veterans returning from the current Gulf War.

But troops serving in Iraq today are not experiencing the same problems after all, despite the greater level of stress in this deployment (longer period, multiple tours of duty, higher casualty rate, insurgent attacks, etc.). There is of course disagreement about why this is the case, but hopefully we will find out.
Listen to Joseph Shapiro's follow-up story on NPR here.

UPDATE: I am not exactly sure what to make of this:

Veterans of the first Persian Gulf War suffering from medically unexplained fatigue associated with Gulf War Syndrome may have a genetic predisposition for developing the condition, geneticists at the University at Buffalo have found.

If true, this is fascinating research with huge implications.

Their research, involving healthy veterans and veterans with severe and chronic fatigue, as well as non-veterans with chronic fatigue syndrome, showed that affected veterans, in comparison with healthy controls, had an increased frequency of a nonbeneficial genetic variant in a gene involved in the production of angiotension-converting-enzyme (ACE), an enzyme important in the control of blood pressure and electrolyte balance.
Unexpectedly, the nonbeneficial variant was less common among non-veterans with symptoms identical to those of Gulf War Syndrome, indicating that the genetic variant rendered the carriers more susceptible to triggers present in the Gulf-War environment.
Results were reported in the July issue of Muscle and Nerve.

The PI is Georgirene Vladutiu, Ph.D., UB professor of pediatrics, neurology and pathology. She also directs the Robert Guthrie Biochemical Genetics Laboratory at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo and specializes in the laboratory diagnosis of metabolic muscle diseases.
A couple of comments from her:

"Soldiers serving now are exposed to different environmental triggers. In addition, our sample is small. We need to prove or disprove these findings in a larger group of veterans from different theaters of war."

"If the results show a specific association only in veterans of the first Gulf War, then there was likely an environmental factor, such as one or more chemical exposures that, combined with variations in the ACE gene, predisposed certain individuals to the development of medically unexplained chronic fatigue."

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January 2, 2006

Stem Cell Fraud

In the wake of the reports that a South Korean research scientist had faked his results has come a deluge of questions about scientific integrity and the value of peer review. The implication has been that peer review should have caught the fraud before publication. What good is science if it sometimes publishes things and then later takes it back?

This attitude demonstrates a misunderstanding of peer review and of science itself.

Science is not a club or a church. Science does not issue edicts or statements of truth in the way many seem to imagine. Just because a researcher has published some work does not mean that it comes with a stamp of veracity that all scientists sign on to.

BizzyBlog (and others) have come to terms with this during the course of this scandal, but have now raised a second concern (which I find completely legitimate): the effect of using taxpayer money to support researchers in uncertain scientific fields, such as stem cell research. If public money is spent without full understanding and disclosure, our public trust has been violated.

BizzyBlog's suggestion:

So the next time you hear the term “peer-reviewed,” I would substitute these words: “passed the smell test (maybe, and if the person submitting the work is ethical and conducted his/her work conscientiously and honorably).”
Given the ever-larger dollars, very often tax dollars, that are based on the reliability of scientific work, standards must be raised, even if it costs money up-front (auditors, if you will) to raise them, and even if scientists’ egos are bruised in the process.

Given that federal funds are being used I see the author's point, although I am too libertarian to support federal funds for stem cells or most other scientific research anyway. But even with federal expenditures in the field, these audits are not necessary if we all understand how science works, and what "peer review" actually means. BizzyBlog now outlines a December 30 WSJ article by Thomas Stossel, American Cancer Society Professor at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the division of hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who sums it up nicely:

If reporters understood that journals are magazines, not Holy Scripture, we might not be witnessing ever more onerous regulations inhibiting interactions between academic and industry science.

Also, Dr. Walter Witschey, director of the Science Museum of Virginia, has written an article (here) that hopes to explain the process of peer review for those who do not understand it. In layman's terms. I highly recomment it if you have never submitted a paper for publication in a scientific journal.

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December 20, 2005

State Funding Stem Cell Research

New Jersey has become the first state to use public money to fund human stem cell research. The state announced $5 million in grants Friday to be split among 17 projects, the New York Times reported. Only three involve human embryonic stem cells, with others studying animals or using adult stem cells... "The grants we have awarded today are based on science, not politics, and have been conceived by some of the brightest minds and best institutions in our state," acting Gov. Richard J. Codey said in a statement. "This funding will hopefully set the stage for a new era in medical treatments that will ease the suffering of millions and ultimately save lives."

(from physorg)

As a libertarian, I do not want to see this funded by the state. But in all honesty, the scientist in me is much more excited by the fact that the state is not trying to block stem cell research. In fact, my soon-to-be-ex-governor Mark Warner was complaining about Congress's anti-research stance just last week.

Congress, Warner said, has put too much emphasis on issues like the Terri Schiavo case, while blocking stem-cell research...

I would really rather not see federal money spent on this, but the current reality of scientific research on controversial issues like this one is that either the government funds it or bans it. Given that choice, which would you prefer?

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Intelligent Design Finally Ruled Unscientific by Courts

"Intelligent Design" is a pretty vague concept. Its proponents feel it is scientific, despite the fact that it makes no falsifiable predictions and is therefore clearly not a scientific theory. It would get tossed out of any 4th grade science fair. Now, this doesn't make it untrue - a lot of things that would get tossed out of any 4th grade science fair still have value. But the measure of truth regarding Intelligent Design cannot be determined by science - it must be determined by faith, which means it does not belong in the curriculum. Today, a federal judge finally spelled it out for the ID camp (who will now return to the drawing board instead of "getting it" - EdWonk agrees, and wishes SCOTUS could settle it once and for all).

It is amazing to me that a court actually had to say this. Intelligent Design should never be taught in a science classroom as science, period. There is no reasonable way around this position. Having said that, I will still feel the need to bring it up in my science classroom again next year, as I have explained in the past at AtlasBlogged (Science is Not Afraid and ID in my Classroom?).

Some interesting reading on the subject can be found here (Jay W. Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez, pro-ID, interesting approach but wrong) and here (Charles Krauthammer against ID, Nail-On-The-Head Award). Both articles appeared in the Philadephia Inquirer and act as a little bit of point/counter point for the interested reader who just doesn't know where to stand.

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December 15, 2005

SUV-Haunted World: What Would Carl Sagan Say About Today's Environmentalism

Scientists are now saying that global warming may cause global cooling, or, in some cases, the next ice age. I find this particularly interesting that now, whether the global temperatures rise or fall, SUVs can be blamed either way. In fact, there now appears to be no way to avoid a run-away greenhouse effect or the next ice age, other than the immediate and unmitigated outlawing of all SUVs.

As someone who considers himself a big fan of scientists, the scientific method, and the epistemology of science, I am little embarrassed how, seemingly most, scientists are conducting themselves in the area of environmentalism these days. I often wonder what my scientific hero, Carl Sagan, would have written about today’s fervor over global warming and the impacts that humans are having on the earth.

I know that Sagan was an early voice in calling attention to the hole developing in the ozone layer. In one of his books, (Demon Haunted World?) Sagan even went so far to say that authors Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin, of the seminal paper on discovering the Antarctic ozone depletion, should have statues erected in their honor. Or perhaps he just said their names should be recognized by every grade school student, I don’t remember. The point is, he was quick to leap to conclusions. And generally speaking, we want our scientists to be very slow leapers.

But Carl Sagan was an exceptionally reasonable man. Despite his petty snub by the National Academy of Sciences, Sagan always impressed me by how he was continually evolving in his beliefs, and how he was capable of overcoming the homogeneous mind-set of progressive Western academia. For example, for years he had been an opponent of laboratory animal testing. However, he later admitted, after he had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia and been forced to receive a bone marrow transplant, that without the benefit of animal testing he would have died (sooner).

After Sagan’s death on December 20th, 1996, I joined a Carl Sagan email list, and enjoyed corresponding with other Sagan fans. I left the list about 4 or 5 years later, after it was overrun by leftist apostles who viewed Sagan, ironically enough, as their environmental evangelist. Minus the moonbats, I miss those Sagan list discussions, as I miss reading Sagan himself.

I often wonder what his take would be on the global warming hysteria today. No other subject seems to elicit such myopia in the scientific community, or garners such a backlash towards opposing views, as global warming [See: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg's controversial “The Environmental Skeptic.”] Standing up to anything short of global annihilation is a guarantee of censure in the collegiate circuit, or perhaps denial of membership into the National Academy of Sciences.

Would Carl Sagan be the candle in the dark today, urging caution upon scientists before jumping to conclusions about the cause of global warming? Would he be a voice of temperance in the gale of panic? I would like to believe that he'd have thrown his hands up by the time the global-warming-induced ice age talk arose. Surely he would recognize that the scientific community has played judge, jury, and executioner to the SUV, regardless – nay, in spite of – any evidence before them. Their behavior in global warming specifically and environmentalism in general, has been anything but scientific. And I don’t think Carl Sagan would have approved, regardless of what the Nobel Laureates at the NAS bloviate.

But, any guesses on my part towards Sagan’s stance on today’s environmentalist movement are just that: guesses. I really don’t know what he’d say. But the lesson that I have learned since Carl Sagan’s departure is a sad one: the scientific community that I came to know and love is just as susceptible to the political whims and pressures as any other group, perhaps even moreso because of their shackles to government grants.

In the end, all I know for certain is that the earth’s climate will likely rise, fall, or stay the same. And, undoubtedly, SUVs will be to blame.

Previous: Environmentalists are Primitivists in Faux Sheep's Clothing

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December 10, 2005

the 22 Greatest Scientific Breakthroughs of the 20th century

In his new book, "The Discoveries," novelist and physicist Alan Lightman offers his list of the 22 greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, devoting a chapter to each and reprinting the scientific papers in which they were presented. The list of 22 is provided here by the Boston Globe, or you can expand this article with the link three lines down...

So... what are the odds we manage to teach all of this stuff to our children before awarding them diplomas? I may have found a specific goal for this year's classes.

1. THE QUANTUM - Max Planck (1900)
2. HORMONES - William Bayliss and Ernest Starling (1902)
3. THE PARTICLE NATURE OF LIGHT - Albert Einstein (1905)
4. SPECIAL RELATIVITY - Albert Einstein (1905)
5. THE NUCLEUS OF THE ATOM - Ernest Rutherford (1911)
6. THE SIZE OF THE COSMOS - Henrietta Leavitt (1912)
7. THE ARRANGEMENT OF ATOMS IN SOLID MATTER - W. Friedrich, P. Knipping, and M. von Laue (1912)
8. THE QUANTUM ATOM - Niels Bohr (1913)
9. THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NERVES - Otto Loewi (1921)
10. THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE - Werner Heisenberg (1927)
11. THE CHEMICAL BOND - Linus Pauling (1928)
12. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE - Edwin Hubble (1929)
13. ANTIBIOTICS - Alexander Fleming (1929)
14. THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION OF ENERGY IN LIVING ORGANISMS - Hans Krebs and W. A. Johnson (1937)
15. NUCLEAR FISSION - Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (1939); and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (1939)
16. THE MOVABILITY OF GENES - Barbara McClintock (1948)
17. THE STRUCTURE OF DNA - James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick (1953); and Rosalind E. Franklin and R. G. Gosling (1953)
18. THE STRUCTURE OF PROTEINS - Max F. Perutz, M. G. Rossmann, Ann F. Cullis, Hilary Muirhead, Georg Will, and A. C. T. North (1960)
19. RADIO WAVES FROM THE BIG BANG - Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson (1965); and Robert H. Dicke, P. James E. Peebles, Peter G. Roll, and David T. Wilkinson (1965)
20. A UNIFIED THEORY OF FORCES - Steven Weinberg (1967)
21. QUARKS - M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, H. W. Kendall, E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, L. W. Mo, and R. E. Taylor (1969)
22. THE CREATION OF ALTERED FORMS OF LIFE - David A. Jackson, Robert H. Symons, and Paul Berg (1972)

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October 1, 2005

Soyuz Launches With Civilian Tourist

Today, American Gregory Olsen became the third "space tourist" to visit the International Space Station - a $20 million dollar trip for the 59 year old technology entrepreneur.
The Soyuz TMA-7 crew also includes NASA astronaut William McArthur and cosmonaut Valery Tokarev. They launched from Baikonur Space Centre in Kazakhstan this morning, and are scheduled to return October 11.

Here's to Capitalism! Thank goodness for Dennis Tito and all who follow. Thank goodness for Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan. Space flight is not just for governments any more.

FloridaToday has a Launch Journal, available here.

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September 30, 2005

Environmentalists are Primitivists in Faux Sheep's Clothing

Last week, Wulf sent me this from Captain's Blog, regarding a student-funded department at UConn sending "some of the University's finest hippies to D.C. to join with about 5,000 others to call for a freeze on the oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska."

Below is my off-the-cuff response.

I love this guy.

I only wish that Captain's Blog mentioned that this balmy, pristine wilderness was only turned into a national wildlife refuge after ruminations of oil drilling started.

[ANWR] is a barren, tundra wasteland, latitudinally equivalent to Siberia. Anyone that does .000012 seconds of research can figure that out. [Drilling causes] no environmental damage. Of course, you're talking to the wrong person. I'd be just as happy planting derricks and a refinery in Key West.

My take on this is that it's never been about the environment. It's about primitivism.

You can't find a better (better = greener) place in the U.S. to drill for oil than ANWR, and yet, the left is up-in-arms about it. Environmentalism isn't about saving the earth. It's about a longing for primitivism (and ultimately, collectivism). As such, no energy source, renewable or otherwise, is a good energy source. They don't care where the oil comes from, just that it's evil. And cars are evil. And everyone should be required, by law, to ride their bikes to work in the morning. Where the oil is obtained to lube the bike chain, I'm not sure.

Primitivism.

This realization hit me like a ton of bricks. It first came to me when I read that the environmentalists were protesting windmills for various reasons: birds, blight, noise, Quixote-charging, whatever. That was my "eureka" moment. It's not about how you produce the power, it's the fact that we rely on power at all.

On the bright side, if we do revert to primitivism as the environmentaluddites yearn, and are forced to give up the Internet, computers, television, electricity, and so forth, then at least the Daily Show/Kos and Atrios should go away, too.

Maybe.

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September 25, 2005

Hurricane Irony

Due to Hurricane Rita, our writer G-Dawg has evacuated to the east coast of Florida. In any other year, one might suppose G-Dawg to be absolutely insane. Actually, one would be wrong. Florida's east coast is usually spared landfall from the storms, with none hitting north of about Port St. Lucie between 1899-1999.

NOAA keeps a nice Archive of Past Hurricane Seasons, if you are interested in details.

Still, evacuating to Florida? It just sounds silly. Hopefully G-Dawg will be back to Texas soon - Rita is now a Depression and is just about petered out and it never got close to Brownsville.

Houston residents are being told not to come back just yet, but The Brownsville Herald is more concerned with the anti-war protestors who peacefully disturb the peace, for peace. Barely a mention of the storm.

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September 8, 2005

The Unbridled Hypocrisy of the Sierra Club

At 11:42AM EDT, the Sierra Club was displaying this notice on the front page of their website:

In the aftermath of 9/11, and now Hurricane Katrina, Americans are left to wonder whether the federal government can be trusted to take steps to protect human health and safety in the event of catastrophe. In an update to its 2004 report, "Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero," the Sierra Club finds the federal government's emergency management plans woefully inadequate.

Earlier today Michelle Malkin pointed out a National Review article about the now-infamous Mississippi River levees.

In his article, Greens vs. Levees, John Berlau writes that the Sierra Club "was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees."

And why was the Sierra Club suing the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the fortification of the levees?

For the birds and the bears, of course.

The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.”

At the time of this writing, 11:43pm EDT, the Sierra Club has removed their indictment, presumably from the attention elicited from the Berlau article and the subsequent Malkin advertising. However, their Ground Zero report concludes,

The unmistakable conclusion that must be drawn is that America remains at risk not only from terrorist attacks and natural disasters, but also from our own federal government’s unwillingness to put public health and safety first in its response to such national emergencies.

And who will hold the Sierra Club responsible for their unwillingness to put public health and safety before the Louisiana black bear?

Their unbridled hyprocrisy knows no bounds.

Read John Berlau's article.

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September 4, 2005

"Environment Killing" Hybrids May Be Responsible for Global Cooling

According to The Guardian, scientists are predicting "the planet will cool over the next decade." If this trend continues, this "Global Cooling" could mean that our planet is on the brink of a new ice age - a catastophe of epic proportions that threatens life worldwide.

A new ice age would be devastating to the world we know. The glaciation of North America alone would displace hundreds of millions of Americans, and make a dozen U.S. states virtually uninhabitable. According to Wikipedia, this glaciation could even change the tilt of the earth's axis.

This matter is so dire, so very important to the survival of our species, that we do not have time to gather evidence or test our theories. We can't afford to delay response. The time for action is now. We must have an absolute and immediate ban of all hybrid vehicles, with their higher fuel efficiency and lowered precious greenhouse gas emissions. Tax breaks must be issued for all driving SUVs and trucks. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases must be stimulated through technological, social, political and economic mechanisms at any cost or burden.

Here are some ways that you can help:

Chop down a tree
Turn up your air conditioning
Eschew carpooling
Switch to coal heating
Write your senator asking for economic sanctions on countries that adhere to Kyoto Protocol
Tell a friend who cares about the earth as much as you

Only by working together, and caring for our planet and the environment can we divert the dangers of global cooling.

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August 30, 2005

Katrina and the World Economy

Katrina has been downgraded to a Depression... but would it be more accurate to classify it as a Recession?

The world economy runs on oil, and that is the crux of the problem Katrina has left those of us who are lucky enough not to live in the area affected by the storm. If you are not currently fighting flooding, loss of power, looting, chaos, and picking through your neighborhood for your belongings and loved ones, you still will not go unaffected.

About half of the gasoline used in the USA comes from the refineries along the Gulf coast. We don't know yet how much damage was done to these refineries or the port facilities on the Gulf, but the nation's emergency reserves are unprocessed crude oil, which will do us no good for running our cars. That's an immediate concern.

Still, sustained by the oil industry has helped boost crude to over $70 per barrell. The impact of higher oil prices on the American economy could be terrible.

From the Economist (emphasis mine):

As a rule of thumb, every $10 sustained increase in the price of a barrel of oil is estimated to result in a loss of something like half a percentage point of GDP. In a research report from Merrill Lynch, David Rosenberg, an analyst, calculates that every one-cent rise in the price of a gallon of petrol takes $1.3 billion out of consumers’ pockets, which could trim as much as a full percentage point off consumer spending this winter. Some economists are worried that if there are extensive shutdowns of oil and gas production, this could push the economy to the brink of recession.

And of course, it is a global economy. A hit in the States will be felt around the world, where industrialized nations are already struggling due to the $70 per barrell oil on which their economies also run.

The outlook?

Well... what's worse than category 5?

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August 26, 2005

Intelligent Design in my Classroom?

I have been asked a lot of questions by friends, coworkers, and people who have read my previous article on Intelligent Design (Science is Not Afraid). I have been happy to expand on the topic for anyone interested, and will continue to do so.

I would like to direct readers to another blog that picked up the topic and discussed the Atlas Blogged article. I have written a comment on Ian's blog that may help to clarify my position for some readers and I reiterate that I welcome discussion on the topic, here, there, or anywhere else... including my classroom, as time permits.

August 25, 2005

Katrina and the Waves

Tropical Storm Katrina is currently located 70 miles east of Fort Lauderdale. The storm is expected to reach hurricane strength before hitting Florida within the next 24 hours.

I am watching this hurricane season with great interest. I am a meteorology buff, in all honesty. My friends and family who live in Florida seem less enamored with storms than I am. I have been reading up on global warming forecasts and controversies, and will probably share my conclusions soon. In the meantime, I am hoping Florida weathers this well.

UPDATE: That's a mean left turn Katrina took...

You poor people in the projected path - the media is guessing the hurricane will be a cat 3 or maybe cat 4 when it makes landfall again.

I lived in central Florida for a year and a half, and I did not like it. I have never been to a part of the state where I would consider living. But I have no schadenfreude. Good luck to everybody on the Gulf Coast.

8/28 UPDATE: Cat 5 and barrelling down on the Big Easy. Mayor C. Ray Nagin'

We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared. The storm surge will most likely topple our levee system.

According to the AP:

Estimates have been made of tens of thousands of deaths from flooding that could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a 30-foot-deep toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, and waste from ruined septic systems.

If I lived in New Orleans, I think I would be more worried about the political fallout than the storm itself. I am just not seeing tens of thousands of flooding deaths tomorrow, but tens of thousands of fingers will be pointed, and everybody will want to get their fingers into the pie. I'm sorry to be cynical, but I call it like I see it.

8/29 UPDATE: And here we go... it's political. First, it is Bush's fault. Next it will be about oil prices... especially if President Bush either does or does not tap the national emergency crude oil stockpile. Standing by for more on that.

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August 23, 2005

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New "Intelligent Falling" Theory

I used to find the Onion amusing. Very amusing. They've definitely gone downhill in the last ~5 years, but I'll give them ^5 for this gem.

Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.

I don't guess I will be mentioning this in class this fall.

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August 19, 2005

Science is Not Afraid

The whole point of a scientific outlook is to seek knowledge and share it with others. The strength of science is that it is not dogmatic – it cannot be overcome or defeated by the truth, because the truth is more important than any scientific theory. When confronted with the truth, a scientist will accept and incorporate it, and grow from it. A scientist can only be wrong if he considers his knowledge in a field to be definite, absolute, and beyond growth. Except for then, a scientist’s knowledge is only incomplete – not wrong. True scientists desire to have their beliefs challenged, because every challenge brings us more knowledge.

As such, no scientist should fear Creationism or Intelligent Design being explained in schools. Yet the scientific community is in an uproar over comments made a couple of weeks ago by President Bush on this topic.

Some of it is just hatred of Republicans. CNN actually covered it without sensationalism, though I guess AP deserves the credit. This article seems to have run in MSNBC and several other places, not just CNN.

Antonia Cortese of the American Federation of Teachers said Bush’s “misinformed comments… signal a huge step backward for science education.” She compared Bush’s comments to advocating “that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth.” She is very upset.

Intelligent design does not belong in the science classroom because it is not science… Intelligent design has been repudiated by every respected scientific organization in the nation, including the National Academies, the AAAS, and the NSTA.

Oh, Mrs. Cortese! That’s exactly why this needs to be taught in the classroom. I will come back to that in a moment.

But if you want an analysis that will knock your socks off, Edna DeVore, Director of Education and Public Outreach for SETI Institute, has written a great article about the current furor over President Bush’s remarks. That crazy scientist, she actually goes back to the interview and examines what was said, and what was not said.

What does she find? (I have added emphasis)

There is an ongoing debate over intelligent design vs. evolution, at least in the media and in politics. There is not a debate in the greater scientific community about the validity of evolution. Further, the vast majority of scientists do not consider intelligent design as a viable alternative to evolution…

She quotes Dr. Marvin Cohen, President of the American Physical Society, as saying

President Bush does not regard intelligent design as science. If such things are to be taught in the public schools, they belong in a course on comparative religion…

On this last point, I completely disagree with Drs. Cohen and DeVore. I am a science educator, and I want it in the classroom for comparison. I have taught children from Head Start science to university physics, and I am currently a high school physics teacher, and I have seen that one of the best ways to explain any theory and its historical significance is usually through contrast and comparison. We must explain what other beliefs exist to explain an observation, and why one is better than another, or why certain beliefs should not be considered scientific by the students. If you don’t tell them what “Intelligent Design” means, they won’t ever know why they should not believe it. I have found that to actually give more credibility to a belief - if you simply say "that's beyond the scope of this course", you do not challenge the weaknesses of the belief, and you do not show the student why the belief is not scientifically valid.

We have to let a student make the final evaluation on their own, but they cannot make that informed decision unless the facts are laid out for them to evaluate. If they are not given all of the information, they are not being taught science – they are being taught dogma, and they are being taught that dogma is just an alternative to science, as opposed to a hinderance.

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