Science

In the comments to my post on Onsager, Maynard Handley explains why he finds himself somewhat unsympathetic, as Onsager apparently did not expend the effort necessary to make himself understood by others.

You, the author of the paper, have a responsibility to make your ideas comprehensible. If the first method you choose to explain them fails, then you listen to what people say about where they lost all track of understanding and write a new paper—- with NEW explanations, not the same explanations that failed last time only renumbered. … [This is] not something that is drilled into young scientists; that it is YOUR responsibility to make your ideas clear to others, not their responsibility to try to figure out what you are talking about. As science grows ever larger and ever more complex, I think it is time for all scientists to be much more explicit and much more ruthless on this point.

Whether this is really a fair criticism of Onsager, I couldn’t say, but the general point is true, important, and a perfect hook for the next thing I wanted to post about.

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A staple of bad movies and trashy novels about scientists (i.e., the kind I read) is the neglected genius whose ideas are rejected with incomprehension by the scientific establishment during his life, because they are simply Too Far Ahead Of His Time to be grasped by lesser mortals, only for the scientific community to rediscover these insights decades later. This sort of thing can make for entertaining fiction (if dreary self-mythologization), but it simply doesn’t happen all that often in real life, especially not when the hero is a part of the establishment, and indeed a much-honored one. It certainly doesn’t show up, with documentary evidence, in the staid, reliable pages of Reviews of Modern Physics. Nonetheless:

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Two of my more public-spirited fellow citizens have recently identified looming threats to our own Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

1. Our beloved junior senator, Rick Santorum (via Pharyngula):
   

   Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.

   I, for one, will be happier voting on Mr. Santorum’s re-election in November, knowing that my ballot will play a part in the age-old struggle between utilitarian materialism and deontological idealism, as well as the sagas of human-canine relations and Old Corruption.

2. Our beloved linguistics professor, Mark Liberman:
   

   More than a third of all Pennsylvanians are native speakers of a language other than English — and many of them have not even tried to learn English since immigrating, or at least prefer to carry out their daily lives in another language, living together in neighborhoods where their native language dominates. Some people worry that the majority status of English is critically endangered. 25 years ago, a major political figure warned that these “aliens … will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion”, and so far, his prediction seems to be right on the money.

   And let’s not forget what they’ve done to our cooking!

First off, I should thank Henry and the rest of the Timberites for the kind invitation to guest-post, and that very warm introduction. In exchange, I’m going to blog more or less as I usually would, only here. This means some big bricks of posts about “complex systems”, so called, which is or was my scientific field, more or less; and also any miscellaneous outrages which catch my eye this week. Mounting my usual hobby-horses on this stage is a poor exchange for their generosity, but mounting hobby-horses is why I started blogging in the first place, and anyway I’m big on conscienceless nomothetic exploitation of cooperators.

Today I want to talk (below the fold) about some recent work in the statistical mechanics of disordered systems, which might help explain how our sense organs work, and actually involves some good uses of the self-organized criticality and power laws; tomorrow or the day after I’ll get to the smoldering question of “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have Better Econophysics?”

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What does my brother have to do with Bigelow Aerospace, asks internet legend Gary Farber. (I posted here about the sucessful launch of a 1/3 scale prototype for Bigelow’s inflatable modules, meant to be connected into a space station. You can read more about it here at Space.com.) Well, long ago Ben decided he wanted to be a space lawyer. And we all supported him. Sort of. Supported him in a way where you’re like “riiiight, cool idea, man.” And, to be frank, we said lots of things like “‘I space object, space your honor!’ ‘Space overruled!!'” John unhelpfully suggested that Ben, perhaps clad in a Nehru jacket-ed suit and boots, could someday be part of a thrilling, 2001-like scene in which he would toss a metallic capsule containing a scroll of papers at someone against the majestically rotating background of a space station, and then when the guy caught it say “you’re seeeerved!” But then he got into Penn Law, and that was pretty cool. And he went to GW for a one-year program in Space Policy. And now he’s assistant to the general counsel at Bigelow! They need lawyers to negotiate with other companies, and with the governments of the US and Russia, and to organize insurance, and make sure they are complying with the various regulations governing the export of missile technology. Also, to make sure the lasers they have pointed at James Bond’s crotch are up to code. A picture of Ben is in space right now, inside the module, which is pretty much the definition of awesome. He’s obviously on track to be the first person in our family to go into space. I hope that our descendents will pour a 40 out onto the frozen methane of Triton in his honor, where it will crackle into amber shards. It’s actually really one of my main goals in life to go into space before I die, and see the earth from orbit. I don’t care if I’m an old lady squandering my children’s inheritance on some 16 hour tourist flight so I can see what vomit looks like in 0g, I’m going. When I was a kid my dad told me that I had to grow up and “invent Waring Drive, to take mankind to the stars.” (Stoned people can be super-inspiring, if you’re 7.) It hasn’t worked out so far, but Violet’s got unusual mathematical aptitude for a 2-year-old (that is, she can count to 10 and knows how to read the numbers 1-5, and can rotate non-bilaterally-symmetrical shapes to get them into the shape sorter. Once numbers get higher than 13, though, she is less likely to “go on in the same way” reliably). Holbo Drive? It’s not as catchy, but I guess I can live with it.

Seems “the Brights”:http://www.the-brights.net/ is are back in the blogs. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/Majikthise?m=51 provides an unconvincing defense. One of my first posts on CT was about The Brights and I’ve reproduced it below the fold. I don’t find it plausible that the “Bright” label should be offensive to religious believers, nor am I “uptight” (in Lindsay’s words) about it. Rather, while the term denotes a set of beliefs I’d broadly subscribe to, it connotes a bunch of dweebs in anoraks.
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After telling us that we shouldn’t worry about global warming because the _Denver Tribune_ predicted climate change in 1874, David Kopel “leaps to the defence”:http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_4747222,00.html of noted loon, William Gray, in his weekly column for the _Rocky Mountain News_.

bq. … former Vice President Al Gore claims that scientific skeptics of global warming are merely being paid off by big oil companies. But in fact, Colorado’s most prominent skeptic is Colorado State University professor of atmospheric science William Gray, who has directly harmed his own financial interests by speaking out … [a]s detailed in a major profile in The Washington Post, … while the Boulder Daily Camera reprinted the story of Colorado’s controversial scientist, The Denver Post – which has access to Washington Post articles – did not. … The News and The Denver Post do recognize Gray as an expert on atmospheric science, and have published dozens and dozens stories citing his hurricane forecasts and analysis … Yet in the News and Post combined, one can find only a few paragraphs even mentioning Gray’s analysis of global warming. … by little noting the evidence presented of eminent experts such as William Gray, the papers are presenting a skewed and misleading perspective on the scientific data.

Kopel curiously fails to mention Gray’s insights into the politics of global warming, which receive prominent mention in the aforementioned “article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305.html.

bq. Gray has his own conspiracy theory. He has made a list of 15 reasons for the global warming hysteria. The list includes the need to come up with an enemy after the end of the Cold War, and the desire among scientists, government leaders and environmentalists to find a political cause that would enable them to “organize, propagandize, force conformity and exercise political influence. Big world government could best lead (and control) us to a better world!” Gray admits that he has a dark take on human nature: “I have a demonic view on this.”

Cue the black helicopters (perhaps, given the subject at hand, to the music from “Thus Spake Zarathustra”)

In short, Kopel’s entirely correct in his claim that it isn’t only hacks who deny the mounting evidence for global warming. It’s cranks too.

“Tim Lambert”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/you_call_it_lying_cei_calls_it.php finds “Iain Murray”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTVlODk1YWJlMmRlMGY2ZmI4ZDI2MmNlODJhNjA2YmM engaged in a contemptible bit of smearing. Previously, the CEI “falsely claimed”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/cei_exaggerates_by_a_factor_of.php that Al Gore was producing 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person in the course of his daily activities, given his heavy use of air travel. This estimate turns out to be way, way off. In addition, it now turns out that Gore is trying to make his promotional tour carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets, presumably from organizations like “TerraPass”:http://www.terrapass.com/. Murray’s response?

bq. Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning. The new aristocracy; there’s no other way to describe it.

Purchasing carbon offsets is of course a “market-based”:http://www.terrapass.com/faq.html#13 solution to the externalities associated with individual use of cars and air travel and so on. You’d think that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review would be in favor of that sort of thing. But if Gore is doing it, then it must be the purest form of aristocratic statist elitism.

Back in the day, Murray was the sort of person you could “have a reasonable disagreement with”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/09/19/crime-and-punishment-part-3/. But then he went to work for CEI and he went rapidly downhill. Because he had to follow the CEI line, he began to make “stupid mistakes”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/10/the-cost-of-emission-control/, “bad arguments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/29/uncertain-science/ and “unsupportable smears”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/11/04/annals-of-premature-accusations/. His trajectory is a good illustration of the principle that being paid to follow a certain political line regardless of what the evidence says will turn you into a hack. Taking empty pot-shots at Al Gore is just the latest step down the ladder.

Blogger Alex Tingle has made enterprising use of Google Maps by designing “an overlay that shows the effects of the sea level rising”:http://flood.firetree.net/ . You can choose your level (up to 14m) and the map will show if a given bit of land would be underwater, and you can toggle between a map view (with placenames) and a satellite view, and you can zoom in and out. Of course, there are “lots of caveats”:http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/ since he’s ignored tides and flood defences, the data may be less that 100% accurate, etc. Still, it’s an entertaining and instructive bit of coding. I’m happy to report that my own house will remain dry (though I’ll be dead long before we get to 14m, anyway).

Following our seminar on The Republican War on Science I heard from John Mangels, science writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who pointed me to this series of reports (free registration required) on Dr Thomas Butler, an infectious disease researcher who (apparently mistakenly) reported missing 30 vials of plague bacteria, and ended up being railroaded into prison by an FBI determined to get a conviction even after it became apparent that the events they were supposedly investigating had never occurred.

It’s an amazing story, which as Mangels says is a metaphor for the clash between science and the Bush administration, and between fear and reason in the post-9/11 world. Much of is the kind of thing that can happen anywhere once the wheels of criminal investigation are set turning.

I was struck, though, by one particularly American feature of the story – the crucial role of the polygraph or “lie detector”. This method is (literally) a piece of witchdoctor magic, tricked out with enough electronic gadgetry to impress the class of believers in technology, as opposed to science, we discussed in the seminar. This group plays a much bigger role in the US than elsewhere, which may be why the polygraph is taken seriously only in the US.

“Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is ‘both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod.'” (NY Times link)

It seems to me there is a missed opportunity in not calling them ichthyopods. Because then you could riff on Daniel Dennett – the whole ‘no skyhooks’ thing. You could pen an attack on ID: ‘ichthyopod crane and the headless horseman of natural selection.’ Something like that. (I suppose an ichthyopod would really be an organism with fish for feet. But, then again, so would a fishapod. Come to think of it, suppose we find an organism with the number four attached to the ends of its legs. What are we going to call it? Not a tetrapod, surely. A problem. Speaking of four, google only gives us four hits for ‘ichthyopod’, as of today. If you are feeling lucky, you see this.)

Following up Kieran’s post quoting Douglas Adams’ line that “You may think it’s a long way down the street to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space” I thought I’d try to work out the scale of comparison that is, in some sense directly available to us and compare it to the scale of the universe. (I’m bound to make a mistake here, but what are comments threads for if not to fix these things).

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“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119570 in comments on _Making Light_

Won’t change their minds [creationists] . They’ll say it’s a fake.

So maybe that means they won’t have to deal with it; but they’re just begging to have their kids suffer a catastrophic loss of faith when they discover that it’s demonstrably not a fake. You can only go so far in inculcating denial. Beyond that, the person has to want to deny the evidence.

bq. Or that it was put there by God to test our Faith.

God Almighty is infinite truth and light, but the God we deal with here on earth is lying to us? Doesn’t that make them some unpleasant variety of Gnostic?

Also, could they please explain what other apparently solid data is eligible to be dismissed in that fashion? Yes? And how they can tell the difference? One step past that point in any direction, they’ll fall into _”some parts of creation are More Real than others”_ : a muddy, fetid philosophical swamp that breeds errors by the swarm.

_”What do we know, and how do we know that we know it?”_ : There’s a reason it’s a classic.

bq. Or worse, it was put there by the Foul Deceiver to undermine said Faith.

Ooooookay, so Satan is a creative force, and had a hand in the creation of the world? That can’t be anything but Manichaeanism: a recurrent Christian heresy, explicitly rejected as doctrine by all the major denominations.

There’s your real problem with Creationism: it’s incompatible with Christianity.

Update: as Teresa points out in comments, I should make it clear that she’s responding to an earlier comment by “Serge”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119561.

AP:

NEW YORK – In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

The study looked at complication rates within 30 days of heart bypass surgery and compared three groups of about 600 each: “those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.”

Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

A kind of reverse placebo, I guess.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him….

Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”

No, it’s designed to study the natural. Like, for example, whether prayer can help recovery from bypass surgery.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the abstract in the American Heart Journal. The full text is behind a pay wall.