Bee Policy

Unquiescing briefly to mention a creature

2007-03-20T17:40:00.000-05:00

I really will try to start updating again someday.

Meanwhile, the pelagic sea slug wins for best sea creature, and also for sea creature that looks most like a star-nosed mole while still actually being a sea creature.

As if you needed another reason to love Vancouver

2007-02-16T10:03:00.000-05:00

Besides being picturesque, temperate, clean, charming, and Canadian, it's also the home of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.

If you are "possibly possessed of supernatural powers," "not in the business of total world domination," "committed to the constant and diligent presentation of science stories, be it to editors, producers, directors, educators, relatives and/or friends of various ilk, in an effort to lessen the gap that is this thing we call public scientific literacy," and "into badges," go check whether you qualify for the "I'm pretty confident around an open flame" badge, the "destroyer of quackery" badge, the "I can be a prick when it comes to science" badge, or perhaps the "I've touched human internal organs with my own hands" badge.

The Scouts are a creation of the Science Creative Quarterly, which seems to be something like a cross between McSweeney's and AIR. If you support their version of the truth, perhaps you can start your own Scout chapter.

If I'm not posting, whatever will you read?

2007-01-16T08:52:00.000-05:00

God, I know, right? Been a while. I remember there being a poll on ScienceBlogs about how people managed to do their high-level scientific or academic work and still blog all the time, and I wish I could remember what anyone said, because it appears that I can't do it. Not that I'm doing high-level scientific or academic work, but I am employed, unlike in the early and prolific days of this blog.

I actually do have a few posts in the mental pipeline -- we'll see if they ever get out! -- but for now I wanted to unquiesce to point everyone towards a resource that is still current: Bora at A Blog Around the Clock has put out an anthology of the best science blogging so far. Knowing the sources he had to draw on, it is almost undoubtedly excellent, and it's not too expensive either.

We'll see if I can convert my "sitting around on the computer doing nothing and trying to recover from a full work day" time into "sitting around on the computer BLOGGING and trying to recover from a full work day" time, but meanwhile, check out Bora's anthology, the contents of which are almost certainly more enlightening than anything I could produce.

Bad logic meets good science

2006-10-09T11:03:00.000-05:00

Mostly I keep Truth Tables and Bee Policy relatively separate -- what does logic have to do with science anyway, right? But I've just posted a critique of a New York Times op-ed that is relevant to recent discussion about women in science, and the Right's inability to deconstruct. ("Critique" is perhaps flattering -- it's more of a rant.) Bee Policy readers who don't normally keep up with my other blog may find it interesting.

Beer + science + your mom = awesome

2006-09-27T14:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, not your mom. My mom. But the formula stands, and that means that local geeks and nerds should get their butts to Bar Pilar on October 2nd for Café Scientifique. (I know, it's Yom Kippur. I have to skip yoga, too, so we all make sacrifices.) Come for the science, stay for the themed cocktails -- unless you're Nick, in which case science will have to suffice.

This is organized by Matt, the publicity director at my press, and my mom is one of the speakers, so take note stalkers: I will be there. Even if you're not a stalker, though, there is plenty of fun and edification to be had. From Matt's description:

Science used to be exciting. Or at least some of its characters were. People used to crowd smoky taverns and coffee houses passionately squabbling over the science and politics of the day. Discourse was a main course, while ideas and opinions were the ingredients in these exchanges. In this grand tradition, we cordially invite you to the first program in a semi-monthly series of the Café Scientifique, Washington DC. This inaugural program will feature four science authors in what we're calling "speed reading." The audience will be divided into four smaller groups, and spend ten minutes with each author and rotate, in a round robin fashion, for a two hour period. The object is to promote spirited scientific discourse in a non-scientific environment, and, of course, to have some fun.

I think it's going to be a blast. We'll have string theory critic Peter Woit, whose Not Even Wrong got written up in the New Yorker this week; Mike Stebbins of Sex Drugs & DNA; our own author John Whitfield, who plays Indonesian gamelan and whose In the Beat of a Heart explains why it's so easy for an elephant to overdose on LSD; and of course my mom, with her book on the history of in vitro fertilization and how it relates to current public opinion about cloning.

Click here to see the invite, get more information including time and address, and RSVP.

Be quiet, Louann Brizendine

2006-09-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

Apropos of my last post, I was a little disturbed to read a huge article about this new book The Female Brain in Sunday's WaPo. Like any book of slightly distorted science that plays into popular stereotypes, this one is destined for bestsellerdom, and Brizendine's publisher is clearly trying to get its money's worth; I'd like to shake the hand of her publicist, preferably with a joy buzzer, for landing this ad in article's clothing. (In fairness to the Post, the article's author expresses a fair dollop of skepticism, but the piece also includes some factoids that I recognize as being right off a press release.)

The problem? Well, first, it's probably not all factual. The Boston Globe has started the critique by pointing out that Brizendine got one of her statistics from self-help rather than science, and that probably won't be the last objection. I haven't read the book, but I'm skeptical of anything that makes cut-and-dried claims about neural functioning and architecture. It's more or less inevitable, at this point in our understanding of the brain, that most such claims will turn out to be exaggerated or at least controversial.

But more importantly, this just isn't the time. It doesn't matter how accurate it is to say "male and female brains have fundamental differences at the physical level" -- and of course it is to some degree accurate, though probably not to the degree Brizendine claims. No matter how many minor differences one finds, on average, between male and female brains, it is not going to have nearly the explanatory power of socialization. The inability to deconstruct, the inability to see how "just the way things are" breaks down to just the way things have been, is a fundamental characteristic of the kind of narrow-minded, selfish, blindered individuals we have running the country right now. This is not the time to encourage this particular brand of ignorance with essentializing pop-sci. What you end up with is a bunch of right-wingers who not only can't deconstruct, but now think they have convenient scientific evidence that says they don't need to.

Remember "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"? Those who don't know how history contributes to present attitudes and beliefs are doomed to rule from a soundproofed box of essentialism and prejudice, and we shouldn't be giving them excuses to stay there. Cautious data on the relationship between hormones, chromosomes, neurotransmitters, and brain structures? Sure. Excitable pop-sci aiming to crack the bestseller list by playing into prejudice? Not right now, thanks.

Girls, science, and Girls Doing Science

2006-09-22T10:12:00.000-05:00

I haven't been very assiduous about keeping up with blogs, since I'm sort of doing two jobs right now; when I was just doing writing/research/legwork for the marketing team, I had some free time at work, but now my free time is taken up with managing the bookstore. But I did read Janet's post about women in science (and why there aren't more). (Janet's post was sparked by a heated debate/flamewar between Chad Orzel and Zuska, which I have not read yet, because secondary sources imply that it would exceed my preprandial vituperation tolerance.) Having seen the accusations of privilege and hysteria flow freely, I think this is a good time for a long-gestating post on women, scientists, women scientists, little girls' birthday parties, academic attrition, and how we're going about some bits all wrong.

No better time, in fact, because on my desk is a prepublication copy of Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, a new Academies report developed with the aid of (among others) our beloved Ruth Simmons. (No Smith alumna from the Ruth era is immune to a deep and feverish admiration for our erstwhile president.) In other words, we have some very solid and authoritative evidence that we are not living in a Larry Summers fantasy world, where only the best thinkers get into science and those just don't happen to be ladies. The people who worked on this report (and it should be mentioned that they are almost all women) have examined socialization, cognition, and evolutionary biology in their search for explanations and recommendations. This is not some kind of hallucination caused by a wandering uterus.

I got into some of my feelings about patriarchy and male privilege in my comment on Janet's post, so I'm not going to recap that here. (The short version is "I agree with Janet"; the slightly longer short version is "male privilege exists, and no matter how personally benign you are, nothing's going to change until you acknowledge that male privilege exists.") It does bear repeating, however, that the crisis of women in the sciences is not one that's constrained to the sciences; rather, more than anything else it is a symptom of a larger problem. I've been thinking a lot lately about why I didn't get into science -- read Philip Larkin's "On Being Twenty-Six" if you wonder why -- and in my own experience, it had nothing to do with discouraging teachers or administrators or advisors or even fellow students. I had a great physics teacher in high school and another in college, for instance, and both thought quite highly of me. But somehow, even with my childhood fascination with dinosaurs and rocks and stars and the brain, even while going to a math/science magnet for high school and part of junior high, even while suddenly realizing during my high school geology exam that I was enjoying taking an exam, it just never occurred to me that I could be a scientist. The thought never crossed my mind. Even if I had been seriously considering it, I certainly took every less-than-success -- poor grades in chemistry, for instance -- as evidence that I wasn't smart enough, while successes went basically unnoticed. I wasn't brilliant in science, especially compared to some of the other magnet kids, but I assumed that not being brilliant meant not being good enough. I got an 89 on my physics final, so why would I ever imagine that I could succeed? But it wasn't a matter of having my dreams shattered; it was a matter of it never dawning on me that I could have the dream in the first place.

We'll still have a "pipeline problem" if we get science careers onto girls' radar. There will still be massive attrition at every level, just like there is all over academia, for the simple reason that women are socialized to give up. You may bounce in your playpen listening to 5000 Sesame Street muppets sing to you about how you can do anything you want, but from kindergarten through menopause, everything else in your life will tell you to back down from competition. That's my theory, anyway, and as with any theory, there are ways in which it's insufficient -- the girliest of girls, for instance, the absolute wet dreams of the patriarchy, are pushed to compete as hard as possible (for spots on a corps de ballet, say). In both cases, though, the sense is that if you can't dominate, you shouldn't play. ("Little Miss Sunshine," among its other merits, gives a great illustration of this phenomenon.) So there's an attrition problem, and there will be an attrition problem until there is absolute gender equality, which probably means "until men can give birth." (Episode 2.6 of "Red Dwarf," among its other merits, gives a great illustration of this phenomenon.) Plus, of course, there are absolutely still teachers who don't take girls seriously as science or math students, and who drive women out of these disciplines before they're even old enough to choose a career path. But the attrition problem doesn't even matter if girls don't think of science as a realistic choice from day one.

I've been heartened recently to hear tales of some girls who love science the way little girls usually love ponies. Dr. Free-Ride's kids never fail to make me optimistic about the new generation -- not only do they love all of science's grossnesses and weirdnesses and explanatory power, but they don't think there's anything particularly remarkable about reading up on cephalopods instead of dressing up Barbie. And yesterday a woman came into the bookstore to exchange some Giant Microbes -- her fifth grader had requested a science-themed birthday party, and she was giving them out as favors, but she had accidentally picked up a "gonorrhea" and a "mononucleosis" and thought they might be inappropriate. I like a little girl who wants a science-themed party. But these kids are remarkable because they are still exceptions.

And so the question is, how do you make girls think of science as something they can do? And even more difficult, how do you do it so it sticks, so that it's stronger than all of the negative socialization they'll get from other sources? Feminist Press, with help from the NSF, is hoping that all it takes is the right kid of book; they are offering grant money for writing books that will bring girls to science, books that kids will read voluntarily but that will teach them something and get them interested in the field. In theory, this is a nice idea (we tried it too, for all the good it did), but look closely at the description of one of the types of proposals they're requesting:

We envision a book or a collection of short stories, each one about a real girl who has the potential to become a superstar in her field – a field that usually is not associated with science and mathematics. Each already will have been identified by teachers and coaches as having such potential – think of Shannon Miller in gymnastics at 12 years old or the Williams sisters in tennis at fourteen. Each girl we write about will have a dream to excel in her chosen field, and each will require years of commitment and hard work, as well as knowledge of certain aspects of science and math, to achieve her dream.

For example, a young gymnast of great potential benefits from knowing the physics of motion, of bodies moving in a circle, and the concept of moment of inertia. A future champion skater understands about leaping against the force of gravity, the motion of her center of mass, and the properties of ice. A young ballerina has knowledge about forces, balance and the physics of jumping; a young jazz dancer knows about skeletal structure, metabolism and quick twitch muscles. Consider a highly promising young actor who knows about lighting, cosmetology, nutrition and voice; or, a talented young filmmaker who understands acoustics, optics and lighting. Another example might be a girl who excels in video game design and knows a great deal about computers and mathematics.

Gymnastics. Tennis. Dance. Skating. Acting. What do they have in common? They encourage poor body image, they trade on looks even more than ability, and they require you to wear extremely short skirts (except for gymnastics, where you don't get a skirt, and acting, where if you're good enough you can eventually put on a longer one). Frequently they involve sequins. They are, in short, Girl Things -- the things little girls are supposed to want to do, supposed to excel at. If you don't, you're a failure, and if you do... well, just ask a recovering ballerina what happens then. These are the most vicious, ruthless chop shops for girls' senses of self-esteem and self-reliance... and Feminist Press is suggesting we use them as hooks to get girls into science? Even The Science of Makeup or The Science of Perfume or The Science of Shoes would be less offensive. (Might be cool, too, especially perfume.) My boss and I looked at this CFP and decided to start a girl's magazine, with photos of hunky scientists and pieces on the chemistry of acne cream (I suggested we call it TIGR Beat). A joke... but not as much of a joke as "How I Used Science To Get Into The Kirov."

Where, in Feminist Press' list, are the girls who want to be scientists? Far from calling for a solution to the problem, this CFP just throws the problem into sharper relief. The problem isn't that girls aren't exposed to science; the problem is that they are prevailed upon to be Girls Doing Science. It's the same problem I used to have with English scholarship -- women scholars won't be treated equally until we can stop being Women Scholars and just be scholars. We don't have to write about feminist theory just because of our chromosomes and reproductive organs. And girls don't have to be coaxed into science via skating costumes and lipstick. That turns science into just another way to fulfill a patriarchal fantasy. But science is, on its own merits, cool. Don't tell me there's no way to sell kids on its sheer coolness.

What is that way? Well shit, I don't know, guys. I have some ideas, but I grew up in the American patriarchy same as y'all, and I don't have the market cornered on unclouded perspective. I do think that's the goal, though, and that it's a reachable goal, and that the compromise goal -- to sneak science into the Approved Girl Activities -- is more harmful than helpful. Got an idea of how? Apply for Femist Press' NSF grant... and send them a big, world-weary raspberry from me.

A discovery ripe for misinterpretation

2006-09-08T09:40:00.000-05:00

Stop the presses, fire the judges, dig up Terri Schiavo, and burn your living will: They've found brain activity in a vegetative patient. It's a great day for real Americans, which means people who like to send youngsters to war and deny children medical care with one hand, whilst championing the full rich lives of cell clusters and the brain-dead with the other.

Being serious for a second: These are very interesting results, seeming to indicate a more profound version of locked-in syndrome that is possible even with extensive damage to higher brain functions. And it gives us a new way to evaluate whether patients are really "brain-dead" (honestly I'm kind of surprised that fMRI isn't a standard test... is it? Shouldn't it be?), and a reminder that we need to. But interpreting this finding to mean that vegetative patients are aware of their surroundings would be a dangerous overstatement. For one thing, we have data from one case here, and the researchers -- in typical science-minded, non-mouth-frothing fashion -- advocate caution in interpreting such scant information:

Both Naccache and Owen emphasize that it is important not to generalize from this single patient to most other vegetative-state patients. "This is unlikely the case for all vegetative patients," Owen said. "It’s such a heterogeneous group; they all have brain injuries of different types."

For another, the results indicate brain response, which is not necessarily equivalent to awareness or consciousness. Unlike, say, Terri Schiavo, it appears that this particular patient (who, incidentally, was in her vegetative state for only five months, a fraction of the time Schiavo was out) had some detectable brain activity. We don't know that this activity was conscious and voluntary. We don't know that it wasn't, either, but again the researchers urge caution:

Using fMRI technology, the researchers noticed activity in the language-processing regions of her brain when words were spoken to her, specifically with sentences containing ambiguous words such as "creek/creak".

These responses are thought to be relatively automatic and have been elicited from other unconscious subjects.

Unsurprisingly, however, if you look at the blogs linking to the Washington Post article, you'll see that people are already hard at work misinterpreting these new findings. Somehow, "one woman's brain responded to stimuli" becomes "people in vegetative states are alive in a very complete sense," or "Terri Schiavo judges should step down," or "never let the pull the plug on you." A few things strike me as bitter, ironic, and slightly repulsive about these misguided responses, at least a few of which seem wilfully ignorant. First, it should be funny (if it weren't so sad) that the people latching on to this brain response as a symbol of total awareness are probably the same ones who believe that there's a "hard problem" of consciousness, that consciousness cannot be explained through brain function alone. They would probably think me a heretic for believing that consciousness can arise from neural activity -- and yet they take any neural activity as a sufficient, not just a necessary, sign of consciousness.

Second, and this is an old and non-specific one, I'm getting so weary of people misunderstanding science and then claiming that their misunderstood version proves that science doesn't know everything. I don't have much else to say about this particularly off-putting move. I just don't live in the same world as these people; they live in worlds of their own creation. I wish we therefore didn't have to share resources and physical space, but there you go.

And third, the most sanctimonious religious folks just seem so terrified of death. Am I really to believe that these people would rather have themselves or their loved ones live with no physical agency, being breathed for and eaten for and evacuated for, so that they could cling to their meagre ability to imagine playing tennis when told to? Rather than go to their heavenly reward? Really? I mean, I guess I can believe that the real caricature Republicans, the rich white guys who should be ashamed of themselves but don't know enough to be so, might want their wives to live that way. As long as the baby equipment still worked, and they got another wife for cleaning. But would they want it for themselves, when the alternative is presumably to get their harp and wings?

Now, that said, if that brain activity implies consciousness and ego identity, then yes, I'd rather be alive than dead. But I don't believe in heaven; I believe in consciousness or not consciousness, and I am in no rush to get to the latter. It just shows that the attempted palliative of Life After Death doesn't work as well as it is supposed to against perhaps the most driving force of human nature: fear of not-being. It reminds me of a line from my favorite play, which I'm going to see tonight:

Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off -- I'm going to stuff you in this box now, would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking -- well, at least I'm not dead!

Get used to it, folks, because if the wrong people latch on to this new data, they could fix it so that you get to do nothing but think "at least I'm not dead" for a good long time.

Plutonic serenade

2006-08-28T13:44:00.001-05:00

The inimitable Jonathan Coulton has penned a touching tribute to Pluto, narrated by the non-planet's moon Charon:

Let them shuffle the numbers
Watch them come and go
We’re the ones who are out here
Out past the edge of what they know
We can only be who we are
It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand

It's really very sweet, which is something it's easy to forget Coulton's good at; more usually, he is good at making my officemate think I'm crazy because of my hysterical cackling. I challenge you to, for instance, watch the "Flickr" video with a straight face (hint: you can't), but it's also pretty tough to read the "I'm Your Moon" lyrics without choking up a little.

If, y'know, you like Pluto.

Thanks for playing, Pluto

2006-08-24T09:05:00.000-05:00

Well, Pluto, you had a good run. But if we let you into the club, we'd have to start letting everyone in, and then it's not a very good club, is it? So you'll have to give back your monogrammed jacket, hand in your badge and gun, or whatever it is that former planets do when they shuffle sadly out of the kids' songs, mnemonic devices, and orreries of the world.

I have to say, I feel kind of bad for Pluto. It's not because of the stupid cartoon dog! It's because when I went to college, everybody had an imposter complex -- everyone thought she was secretly an admissions mistake -- and that has never really stopped for me. Imagine the shame and indignity of knowing for hundreds of years that you're not really a planet, that you can't really hang with the cool kids, that you're just there by mistake until someone notices... and then imagine them actually noticing and calling you on it. Mortifying! I mean, you think Pluto didn't know it couldn't really cut it as a planet? You think it wasn't waiting for the other shoe to drop?

The answer, of course, is no, it did not know, because it is a large chunk of rock and ice. But I have a well-documented problem with anthropomorphism, so please leave me to my grief.

Goodbye, Pluto. I suppose My Very Eager Mother will now Just Serve Us Nectarines, or Napkins, or Nickelback. I'll miss you and the irregular orbit that turned out to be your tragic flaw.

More on dark matter

2006-08-23T09:50:00.000-05:00

I blogged a rather hurried apology to dark matter yesterday, but today I read Boing Boing's collection of links, none of them to the somewhat science-eliding Post article. Here's the original NASA press release, and a writeup in New Scientist. The Post and New Scientist articles were obviously both drawn from the press release, but the latter is clearer on the science.

Also highly recommended is Mark's post on Good Math, Bad Math, about how the dark matter hypothesis and its apparent confirmation hinge upon the use of solid math in physics. Mark offers a lucid explanation of the data, plus a video, plus some insightful comments on math:

As I always say, one of the ways to recognize a crackpot theory in physics is by the lack of math. For an example, you can look at the electric universe folks. They have a theory, and they make predictions: but because there's no math, the predictions are vague, and there's no good way of really testing them, because there's no quantifiable way of making a precise prediction - because there's no math. So they can make predictions like "the stardust experiment will get bigger particles than they expect"; but they can't tell you how big.

I remember being charmed by Tom Siegfried's Strange Matters when we published it the last time I worked at NAP, because it was all about doing cosmology by interpreting numbers, but I hadn't thought very deeply about the mutual interreliance of math and physics. (When I defend math, it's usually only as far as math I can actually do -- i.e. explaining to people why algebra is critical knowledge.) This is an excellent explanation of why the really high-level math, the stuff that some of us might think is too lofty and theoretical, is actually an inalienable component of any decent explanation of the universe.

I'm sorry I called you an epicycle

2006-08-22T19:00:00.000-05:00

It appears that I owe dark matter an apology. I may be a physicist only by osmosis, but I'm a science historian by (undergraduate) training, so I've studied the fall of a lot of good-seeming ideas. I figured dark matter was just this year's epicycle; it seemed so inelegant to invent a new substance just because the numbers didn't work out. Even though I know that a lot of cosmic phenomena were discovered with number-crunching, I was much more prepared to believe that gravity operates differently under certain conditions. (After all, it's different at the very small level -- why not at the very large level?)

But now there's this front-page article from the Post:

After studying data from a long-ago collision of two giant clusters of galaxies, researchers now say they are certain dark matter does exist and plays a central role in creating and defining gravity throughout the universe.

While the scientists are still not sure exactly what dark matter is, since they have yet to identify it in a laboratory, they said that the workings of the universe cannot be explained without it.

One of the researchers is quoted as saying that "we now have direct proof" of dark matter, which of course I have to object to on a philosophical level. And unfortunately, whether it's a matter of reporting quality or experimental complexity, I can't quite tell what this all-important data was or why this constituted a risky test. One University of Maryland scientist is quoted as saying that "proof" of dark matter particles would require "grabbing them in the laboratory, not just inferring that their effects can be the only possible explanation for an observation before the alternatives have actually been checked," and I think that's more than fair. At least until I find a better explanation of the data, there's still room for skepticism.

But personally, I feel less skeptical now that there's some observation involved. Not that there wasn't observation before, but what we were observing was gaps and inconsistencies, and we made a very good guess about what caused them. Now, it appears, there's evidence. Mind you, said evidence is rather confusingly presented ("The super-hot gases have qualities that typically would have become the seat of any new gravitational fields, cosmologists say, but instead they went with the stars") but it's a far cry from "well, the orbits would work out a lot better if we put in some extra circles and moved the center point." It's starting to look like I won't get to see the rules of gravity rewritten in my lifetime.

On the flip side, though, this presents a great opportunity to market our new book on the subject!

String theory Zen

2006-08-17T12:12:00.000-05:00

I'm currently entering reviews of our books into the database, working against a six-month backlog. Nobody here can believe that they originally intended to have me on for only three weeks -- there's just so much to do. Anyway, this is meant to be a boring task but I find it really interesting and relaxing, especially compared to the other things I'm working on. For one thing, since I'm in publicity, the only time I get to hear about potential scientific objections or qualifications to our trade books is when expert reviewers bring them up. (This is particularly true since I'm the token Science Nerd on the marketing staff.) Plus, I get to flip through publications I can't afford to subscribe to, and see what's up.

Now, I'm working out of a huge box -- Dan and I moved our dishes in one exactly like it -- full of muddled papers. Like I said, we haven't had the manpower to get to this stuff for months. So occasionally a magazine will show up that turns out not to have any of our books in it, and I just kind of poke through it quickly and see what interests me. This is how I ended up reading a more or less positive though somewhat snarky review of Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape in a January Times Book Review section. The book is about string theory, and is amusingly illustrated with a collage picture of stars, a measuring tape (?), and dental floss. I'm not saying I understand string theory, but wow, the artist sure doesn't. (And why should s/he, really.)

The review is written by Discover editor Corey Powell, who is reportedly a great guy and certainly knows plenty about science. One of us is wrong on something, though, because I found myself very puzzled by part of the piece. Powell writes:

Furthermore, it is inevitable that we would find ourselves in a universe well-suited to life, since life can arise only in those types of universes. This circular-sounding argument -- that the universe we inhabit is fine-tuned for human biology because otherwise we would not be here to see it -- is known as the Anthropic Principle and is reviled by many cosmologists as a piece of vacuous sophistry.

Now, I think I'm confused. Is this the Anthropic Principle? (Wikipedia and her internet consorts are of little help on this one, I'm afraid.) Because I always thought the Anthropic Principle was something more like "the universe is this way because that's how humans need it to be to survive" -- a clearly absurd argument -- rather than "of course the universe is such that we can survive, else we would not have survived to ask about it." It seems more akin to the argument that humans have their specific traits (including, perhaps, the desire to believe in a designer!), not because they were made that way, but because the traits they have either were more adaptive than other traits, or came along with adaptive traits, or were sufficiently adaptive to remain. The inevitability, in other words, is in hindsight, not in design.

The pro-design argument hinging on the fact that "If gravity were slightly stronger than it is, for instance, stars would burn out quickly and collapse into black holes; if gravity were a touch weaker, stars would never have formed in the first place" (Powell) actually seems absurd to me for exactly the reason Powell is calling the Anthropic Principle -- and I hardly want to go on record saying I support the Anthropic Principle, so I'd like to get this cleared up! Is it, in fact, sophistry to say that the reason the universe operates on such principles that life on earth can exist is that, should any other circumstances have arisen, we'd hardly be any the wiser? Am I being insufficiently philosophically rigorous here? Am I unknowingly espousing a belief that amounts to intelligent design, or -- much less egregiously -- that demonstrates a vast ignorance of tricky cosmological theories?

I guess what I'm wondering is, if a universe can't support life, and no life evolves to notice, does it make a sound? And should it make a universe that can (and does) support life any more or less plausible to the life in question?

Having your faith and eating it too

2006-08-02T13:58:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I got my first actual religious dissenter in the comments. She is, by all appearances, a well-meaning young lady who happens to think that the Big Bang is "fake" (a usage I'm not familiar with -- unless she means the evidence was planted, or fabricated? And if so, by whom?). Anyway, I really do have some less controversial posts in the pipeline, but I want to take a moment to address why I think religion and science can coexist.

Now, as it happens, I was raised secular humanist, and at this point I consider myself an atheist. However, to me, the question of whether there is a God is a lot less important than the question of how the universe works (and, to the best of our knowledge, why it works that way). If we can agree on that -- and there's no reason we shouldn't be able to, since all of science's claims are testable and there's nobody more interested in genuine conflicting evidence than a scientist -- then religious differences should be wholly moot. After all, by the time we really find out who's right, it's too late to change our minds anyway. Personally I don't believe in God because I think that's what Occam's Razor dictates; given observation and experimentation, there's no need for us to multiply causes by postulating a supernatural hand behind every phenomenon. Beyond parsimony, though, there's no real difference between "F=ma" and "F=ma because God made it that way." The important thing is that F=ma. (If your religion is so strict that you must disagree with F=ma, please don't drive.)

My problem with religion, as it seems to be practiced by many Christians and undoubtedly by religious groups with less power and influence as well, is that it appears to be tantamount to intellectual stagnation. Let me explain why that should worry people who aren't intellectuals. In order to declare unilaterally that science must be wrong because the Bible is right, a religious person has to assume that God did not intend the human race to learn anything beyond what he (for lack of a beter pronoun) told us in our cultural childhood. Not only does this seem cruel and contradictory, but it commits the (common) error of telling a supposedly omniscient and ineffable deity what he does and does not expect of his creation. Effectively, it dismisses the entire development of civilization -- which one might imagine an omnipotent creator having some kind of hand in -- in favor of asserting a limited and limiting God, one who does not intend any development or change over his creation's lifespan. This limiting God might be psychologically easier to deal with, since he basically just tells everybody the rules one time and that's it, but he is a creation of the intellectually lazy. The God that monotheists purportedly worship is not thus to be second-guessed.

Listen: there are practical problems with believing that the Bible is the precise word of God, problems involving -- at the very least -- translation through several languages. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all dictation and translation went smoothly, and that the Bible as we have it in our respective native languages today is more or less exactly what God transmitted to his faithful scribes (credited and uncredited), two thousand plus years ago. Now, no matter how you slice it, that's pretty far in the past. If we go the parodically-fundamentalist route and claim that the world was created in 4004 BCE, the human race has had a whopping third of our development since the New Testament events occurred. If we choose to date the dawn of civilization back to when humans started wearing shoes, it's a much tinier percentage, but that seems like a pretty loose definition of "civilization." A quick Wikipedia search has the earliest possible evidence of agriculture showing up in the 10th century BCE, the Mesolithic period, so I'm going to go with that: on a very conservative estimate, human civilization has gone through about 20 percent of its development since the events of the New Testament, and much more since the Old Testament was written down. Add to this the fact that key events in human development may be happening at an exponentially increasing rate, and you have a very simple conclusion: We've changed since then.

Why does this matter? Well, God may have transmitted the Bible, but he was transmitting it to people who just didn't know very much. They didn't know very much in comparison to us, and they certainly didn't know very much in comparison to him. Why would we think that he could have managed -- that he would have even tried -- to explain the full range of potential knowledge? Imagine, as an illustration, trying to explain the plot of Hamlet to a six-year-old. I've done it, so I can tell you from experience that it involves simplifications, omissions, and recasting with words and ideas that they can understand. In no way does this change Hamlet itself, or assure that they can't read it when they get older. One shouldn't be constrained to simplifications meant for a child. I'm no theologian, but isn't God meant to be a good and loving teacher? I can't imagine even a bad teacher who would expect a high school student to operate on elementary-school knowledge. Let's say that in fifth grade you learn that the types of matter are solid, liquid, and gas. Then in ninth grade, they tell you that there's also plasma, which isn't exactly any of these. Do you refuse to acknowledge the existence of plasma because you weren't told about it when you were ten? Would a good teacher, counselor, or parent suggest that you do so?

Theology isn't easy, but dogma is. That's the point of dogma. I grew up with a consistent sort of background radiation of science knowledge, so I don't think that being generally informed about science is so tough, but I daresay it's a lot harder to read and think than it is to not read and think. So science is harder than dogma, and maybe it's very tempting to believe you can go the easy way and live out of a single book that you probably haven't even read all the way through, secure in the knowledge that there's nothing to know besides what's already written down. But the way I see it, if you believe in God, then insistently clinging to what he told humanity when we were young and stupid is ungrateful. It underestimates God and shows a lack of respect for his creation. It implies, contrary to what that very same Bible says, that he put us here to learn nothing and to grow not at all. It actively rejects what he's been telling us as we've grown, in favor of what he said when we were young. It won't do its homework; it wants bedtime stories.

I know several good Christians, by which I mean that they're good people and also that they try to actually follow Christ's tenets of love and tolerance. (This is in contrast to the most vocal and hateful Christians that we all have to deal with.) I know good Muslims too, and good Jews, and good pagans -- all of these religions boil down to "don't be a jerk," after all. I know lots of good atheists, since we have to be decent because we think decency is the way to go, rather than because we were told to or because we fear punishment. (I know atheists who don't believe in decency too, of course.) And I have no problems with the religious beliefs of my religious friends. At the most extreme, we find our differences interesting but pity each other secretly; more often, we agree on most things, including the fact that my lack of faith in no way impinges on their faith or vice versa. In fact, most often, I don't even know my friends' religious commitments. I mention this by way of pedigree: I want to establish that I have never told anyone to change their beliefs, or mocked them for their faith. I mock people, but I mock them for their actions -- particularly when they claim religion as an excuse for acting in a way their God, as originally described, would never approve of. Obviously, telling Bobby Henderson that you hope he dies is one of those ways. I believe that rejecting science is one, too.

All of it

2006-08-02T09:40:00.000-05:00

We sell this shirt in the NAP bookstore, where I am working for half of today (making three times what I used to make for working in a bookstore, so I can't really complain). The bookstore manager told me that people ask what it is all the time, so I wrote it down and brought it home to Dan, who confirmed that it was F=ma written in the most obscure way possible. (The marketing people didn't seem to get why that was funny... but then, that's what they need me for.) A guy came in today and was delighted that I could tell him what it was and could recognize some of the symbols, but he too wasn't sure exactly what formulation of F=ma he was looking at (he said the acceleration of the Earth was in there somewhere).

Eventually, since this is the National Academies, a prominent physicist will undoubtedly come in and recognize it at a glance. Meanwhile, though, Dan explained volume integrals and R-double-dot, but we're otherwise stumped. Can anyone help unpack the equation?

Making the baby spaghetti cry

2006-07-31T22:35:00.000-05:00

I'll ruin the lingering aftereffects of yoga if I read any more of this, but anyone who's hankering for a good dose of misguided internet idiocy should check out the Flying Spaghetti Monster hate mail. In addition to presenting a shining cross-section of the type of Christians who make Christians look bad (i.e. the "you don't agree with me so I hope you die and rot" type), it includes several gems of insular anti-scientific ignorance.

A sampling:

"It has not been proven that the earth existed before humans, this is a belief based on data." (This is my number one favorite. "That's not proof, it's just a predictive explanation based on overwhelming evidence!")

"is it because the devil is telling you that you're so undeserving for God's grace that you can't admit guilt in any way?" (Can't you get a perfect picture of the girl who wrote this just from reading it? It's a sad picture, involving bad skin and early pregnancy.)

"If Darwinism can be taught in schools, ID should be too, students have the right to hear ALL the theories. Stop pretending like FSMism is a real theory." ("Students have the right to hear all theories I like.")

"you are a stupid little guy with no girlfriend, so you're depressed. writing about your fake, gay loving man whore god. to get attention. all its gonna get you is a foot so far up your a** your gonna have ingrown toenails growin out your ears."

"It's all faith, sir, and you well know that there is no science or philosophy that can substantiate your claims to the origins of life, because we were NOT there to witness it. But we WERE there to witness Christ and his death." (Er... define "we.")

"if you have a holy bible king james version then i want to ask you to turn to genesis 1:1 in the beginning god created the heaven and earth. now where in the bible dose it say that spaghetti monsters created to earth" (Seriously, Bobby. Did you get this from the Bible, or what? Because if it's in the Bible you need to cite your sources!)

"people like you are scum, I hope you die by the hands of some sick perverted guy who will skullfuck you and then use your skin to make lampshades." (Real Christian of you, buddy.)

"your a fuckin faggot and burn in hell. if i knew you personally id slit your throat and watch you suffer as i laugh and do a fat cocaine like off of your dead body. I would then light you on fire, light my cigerette off of the ashes, smoke weed with the fire and piss on the ashes. then i would take your ashes roll them into a blunt and smoke them." (Seriously, I'm a better Christian than these guys, and I'm an atheist.)

"I'ts sad so many people believe in this ridiculous religion. Oh wait, maybe I shouldn't say believe, because I don't they any of them would be willing to die for 'FSMism' or evolution either for that matter." (Not only is this person not getting the joke, which is expected, but they have the weirdest interpretation of the word "belief" I've ever seen. I mean, I believe that bran muffins are full of fiber... am I supposed to be willing to die for that?)

"Fuck you and the flying spaghetti monster. Postmodernism is a self defeating concept. Read Josh McDowell's book for a good overview of what life is truly about you dumbass humanist...I'm still having problems teaching my dog 2+2=4. I hope to someday prove Darwinian philosophy and be able to have my dog recite Shakespeare to me. Then I will believe Evolution is true...Retarded people...like Bobby Henderson....will burn in hell unless you give your life to Jesus Christ." (This one was so good that I had to quote multiple parts, but that last two ellipses are in the original. Some kind of... stylistic... thing. This comment is particularly good because the author subsequently started threatening a libel suit, then claimed his account had been broken into, presumably after someone explained to him that a reprint of something you actually wrote does not constitute libel.)

Luckily, there are a few redeeming moments, such as Charlie's letter, which actually took me in for about three seconds:
"So let me explain this to you nice and slow; the Bible is the answer, it is what is to be differed to at all times; the Bible is 100% true- it says so in the Bible. Now, as far as science goes, who the hell do you think your are to call Intelligent Design "illegitimate science," technically, evolution is the only scientific theory yes; and technically, midgets are people... So we aren't to concerned with technicalities are we?"

Wow, okay, emergency savasana time.

Free books for bloggers?

2006-07-28T22:29:00.000-05:00

I am temporarily doing some publicity work for my old press, which means I have the capacity to send people review copies if they really are going to review them. One of the nice things about working for the National Academies Press, especially in publicity, is that Academies reports really are definitive -- I don't have to make anything up about how important they are, because we really are pretty much the preëminent organization for objectively evaluating a situation and generating nonpartisan science policy advice. It's no hardship to hawk books that are genuinely important. (The trade books all seem really good this season, too, though we've had one or two missteps in the past.)

Anyway, I may be a bad blogger and a worse blog-reader right now -- first I was too bummed about unemployment, then as soon as I got a job I started getting up so early and working so hard that I sleep in all my free time! -- but I still think science blogging is Where It's At. I can't think of a better place to promote useful books (especially ones that are actually readable for free online) than in a community of scientists who read and respect one another. So if you spot something you'd like to review, let me know, and I can send it along. I already wrote to Dr. Free-Ride about some books I thought she'd like, and I bet Bora would be interested in the new trade book about sleep. All it requires from you is that you read it, and if you like it, link it and let me know that you linked it. (If you don't like it, I'm still interested.)

I don't want to directly approach too many bloggers, because I don't want to be perceived as some kind of hard-seller. The appeal of this job for me is that I get to believe in the books I'm promoting, and beyond that, that it doesn't even matter if I believe in them -- they're kinda definitive either way. So my goal is not to go all PR on your collective buttocks, but just to make this stuff available. It's a temporary job so this isn't particularly advancing me in any way, but basically I'd just love to see NAP books getting exposure on the blogosphere. Shoot me a note at firstname dot lastname at gmail if you see a report you'd like to review.

Trespassers Will

2006-07-16T23:21:00.001-05:00

The job search has been unfruitful and frustrating, a lot more frustrating than a job search needs to be even in the current economy, so I haven't felt up to posting. (I'm having a hard time even staying informed -- even Daily Show is too depressing right now, and forget reading science blogs. I can't sustain liberal rage and self-pity.) Thank goodness, then, for the BP Kongsberg Underwater Image Competition, and the cutest damn Helicocranchia pfefferi -- "piglet squid" -- that a girl could possibly want:

The other photos are gorgeous too, and definitely worth checking out. This, combined with the fact that everyone who doesn't think I'm underqualified thinks I'm overqualified, definitely contributes to my desire to do a career 180. Anyone want a photographer or something?

The internet ruins Senate naptime

2006-07-06T21:25:00.000-05:00

On Iowahawk, guest blogger Sen. Ted Stevens follows up his recent explanation of the dangers of net neutrality by explaining how the internet can bring chaos into your home or office. Basically, it's very simple. When the tubes are full of cream cheese and movie stars, you can't get your talkies and the internet will turn down the thermostat. This is Onion-caliber work.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all the celluloid clogging the internets on the way to the Western Union, and by the time the Internet-o-gram boy got the to my office it was already Senate nap time so he just shoved it under my door. This is what happens when you rely on internets, and when our young internet delivery boys start smoking the marijuana and lose all sense of responsibilty.

And when my aides woke me up for this vote, do you know what I realized? The internet had sneakily rearranged my office furniture, and I was unable to find my spectacles and pill organizer.

Seriously, people, stop the madness. The tubes are delicate, and we must stop clogging them with zoot suit lotharios. The internet is not a truck. It's NOT a TRUCK!

Is science a sandwich?

2006-07-06T13:38:00.000-05:00

I got into an argument recently about whether, if Einstein hadn't described the theory of relativity when he did, someone else would have inevitably done so at some later point. The claim had been made that "what Einstein did was find something that was already there. Like a sandwich. Now sure, Relativity is a really well hidden sandwich, but if it is true, and it could be found, it would have been eventually." The discussion got pretty repetitive after a while, with the other party just sort of reiterating his point (which I'd already established I didn't agree with!) instead of arguing it, but since it taps into some of my most strongly-held philosophies about science, I thought it was worth giving the digested version of my points here. I also realized that I'd written a paper back in undergrad (!) that dealt with some of what I was trying to say, so I've cribbed liberally from my own work in this post.

For starters, I think it’s important to debunk the idea that science consists of discovering things that are already there, as though the Actual Rules of the Universe were just out there waiting for someone clear-sighted enough to perceive them. Don’t worry, I’m not going all Parmenides; there may be something out there, and our science may closely approximate it. But in no case can we interact with truth directly without using science as an interpretive tool. In effect, truth is a theoretical entity, something it seems reasonable to believe in but with which we cannot interact. It is more useful, then, to talk about the verifiable qualities of a theory –- how well it predicts, how well it explains –- than to question whether it "describes reality." If science amounted to drawing a complete map of a well-defined territory, then we could critique a scientific theory on the basis of how well it accords with reality. But to launch such a critique, we would need access to the territory. Instead, we must (and do) treat science as our best means of navigating a territory we cannot see. And it’s foolish to imagine that there’s only one way to do this, or any significant difference between the best version of one method and the best version of another. Very good echolocation versus very good feelers? The distinction is minimal.

To imagine that all scientific discoveries thus far would have inevitably been made, changing only the order, assumes that there is a way that science must look. This assumption isn't justified if you view science (as I do) as "the best explanations we can manage" rather than "an explanatory system that is coextensive with reality." Of course we always try to get theories that have more predictive value, but we can do that in a number of ways; there's no "true" version of science. And since a lot of discoveries are predicated on others, changing the timing could change a great number of things. For instance, we might have discovered relativity without Einstein, but we might just as easily have come up with a theory that worked equally well but wasn’t exactly the same. In fact, given that the scientific context would be so different -– imagine getting through the early 20th century without relativity, if you can cope with counterfactuals! Imagine, just for starters, the state of technology! –- it’s reasonable to assume that this other theory wouldn’t look exactly the same. It would give us another method of navigating the unseen territory. The only way we could imagine that 1950s relativity would look exactly like 1910s relativity would be if we assume that science is purely a process of discovering things that are Really Out There, of making our map look more like some verifiably existent landscape.

Saying that "science is developing towards an understanding of the world" is like saying “the human race is evolving towards an organism that is well-adapted to its environment." It is understood that the evolution is not complete, but also that there is no one thing that "complete" would mean, no one thing that this well-adapted organism must look like. There is no reason to imagine that the current state of the species represents the only way we could have adapted to the environment on Earth. Why must the smelling mechanism be on the face? Why round pupils, and not oval (like a cat) or rectangular (like a goat)? What’s so maladaptive about a tail, or feather-like plumes on the head? They’re not as harmful as an appendix, that’s for sure, and yet we’ve got one of those. The human race could have had any number of different traits without significant harm, and there are any number of ways in which we could have achieved the useful traits we have today (for instance, it’s important to have jointed limbs, but why must the joints only go one way? Why one ball-and-socket and one hinge per limb?). We are adapted to our environment because we evolved this way, but we didn’t evolve this way because it was the only way we could have ended up adapted to our environment. To say so is effectively to say that there is a blueprint for an effective human race (not necessarily that there is a designer, mind you, but that there is only one good design). Either evolution is teleological, or it could have happened differently.

It’s easy to look at some of the hypotheticals I’ve been posing and to say, for instance, "well, pretty much all mammals have one ball-and-socket and one hinge joint per limb." This is important. Because we evolved from other mammals, we retained certain characteristics of those animals that were useful or at least not maladaptive. A change somewhere far back in the game -– maybe Tiktaalik grew an extra leg, for no really good reason except that there was no reason not to -– might have altered all subsequent development. Make it two extra legs, actually, because symmetry is useful. Natural selection would then select among six-legged forms, not four-legged ones, and subsequent developments would be based on that model. It would be pretty far-fetched to imagine that you could somehow get a bipedal human out of that! And yet we would have evolved based on exactly the same processes.

The same is true of science; a change in scientific history might have had a profound effect on our current theories, but it would not mean that we didn’t end up with the most useful theories possible based on the history we had. That’s how science works: as Bas Van Fraasen said, "Do not ask why the mouse runs from its enemy. Species which did not cope with their natural enemies no longer exist. That is why there are only ones who do." Only scientific theories with the best predictive and explanatory power, based on what we know, can survive – but that doesn’t mean that the theories we subscribe to now are the only useful theories we could have developed, any more than the evolutionary need to flee predators means that a mouse couldn’t have had pointy ears.

Viewing science as an evolutionary process makes it clear that we cannot logically conceive of science as aiming for truth, any more that we can consider an individual species to be aiming for a completely evolved form. More importantly for the current debate, we cannot assume that the current state of either science or species represents an inevitable conclusion. The goal is to be adapted and to be adaptable, not to accord with an inaccessible Truth or an invisible Design. There is more than one way to do this, and any change in path would have altered background and context so much that we might end up with something completely alien to what we know now (but, importantly, still about equal in adaptiveness/usefulness!). To claim otherwise, to claim that any scientific advance that’s been made so far would have been made eventually by someone regardless of altered time or background, is to claim that there is only one thing that science can be.

Global warming lacks a mustache

2006-07-03T14:50:00.000-05:00

For complicated reasons, I suspect that this editorial was emailed to me by accident, but it's a pretty thought-provoking and worthwhile read nonetheless. The author, Harvard psych professor Daniel Gilbert, examines the reasons why people find the (small) threat of terrorism to be a much more serious cause for concern than the (huge) threat of climate change. Check out this great lede:

No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

It's a catchily-written article, and most of the factors that the author describes are very sensible. For instance, global warming doesn't have a human face; it lacks agency, so we don't fear it the way we fear something backed up by a conscious desire to harm. (In fact global warming does have a face, and it's the face of big business and American government -- but if you try to address the agency behind the change, people accuse you of tinfoil-hat moonbatism, so fair enough.) We're also undermotivated because global warming is a future threat, not an immediate one. And then there's the classic "frog in the boiling water" explanation: if change happens gradually enough, you don't notice. It's too bad about that frog analogy, which Gilbert wisely does not invoke (Al Gore did, but acquitted himself by plucking the cartoon frog out of the water at the last moment and putting it on a little beach chair, hurrah!). I don't even know if it's true that you can boil a frog in this manner, and regardless, it pushes the whole thing into the realm of cliche -- which is a serious problem, because this is a serious blind spot:

Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he'd return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem.

Very easy to say "oh, the storms are no worse than last year." Kind of a shocker when you realize that last year was also part of a long and hideous decline.

I've got a few quibbles with the article. First, it doesn't say anything we don't already know -- similar to critiques of An Inconvenient Truth, though I think that particular preaching would have pretty good reception outside the choir, if we could just get non-choirboys to listen to it. Second, there's the fact that it purports to contrast responses to terrorism with responses to global climate change, but still uses the argument that "people are quick to respond to clear and present danger"; the contrast here is muddy at best, now that even the Gov has finally given up on pretending that terrorists will blow up Peoria tomorrow. But most particularly, I have a problem with Gilbert's constant use of the second person plural. In addition to the points above, Gilbert argues that global warming is treated as a non-issue because it doesn't offend our sensibilities:

The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.

Sorry, but I just saw An Inconvenient Truth last week, and I am morally offended. (I would have been morally offended earlier if I knew how acute and profound the problem was.) Inaction, in this case, is an idea I find indecent and repulsive. I think a lot of us do. And there are certainly people of whom it can be said that global warming "doesn't violate [their] moral sensibilities," but damned if I'm going to be lumped in with them.

Of course, I realize that there's no delicate way to change that "we" to a "they" in this particular editorial, and I suppose I'm conflating "global warming" with "inaction about global warming" (though really, inaction is a cause and a facilitator, to the degree that they're not substantively different). But I think we should encourage this to become an issue about which people are morally outraged. There may not be a moral outrage perpetrated on people we know right now, and that's a legitimate mental block, but there are grievous outrages perpetrated on people not far in the future, people we might even live to see. (Actually, there are moral outrages perpetrated on people right now -- the people whose homes and families have been destroyed by unusually violent weather patterns -- but those people are poor and usually nonwhite, so we can't expect them to motivate the current administration.)

Basically, here's what I'm trying to say. First, read the article, because it's amusing. Second, evolve. Gilbert gives an accurate portrayal of the inherent cognitive biases that allow us to have skewed views of danger. This is how human minds work, okay. But another way that human minds work is that they don't have to be constrained by "how human minds work." Rise above it. Fear the agency behind inaction, since there's no agency behind the thing itself. Notice gradual change. Comprehend non-immediate threats. And get outraged at all of it.

Footnote about that frog in An Inconvenient Truth: seriously, you do not know how glad I was that the frog got rescued. That made the film for me. I am keenly sensitive about the fates of vaguely anthropomorphic animals. Dan's gotten to be an expert at saying "the whale/bunny/lemur/axolotl was fine, it got rescued" as soon as he hears the distinctive "animal in jeopardy" wail. There are meat-eaters who defend themselves by saying that they know what's involved in slaughtering animals and they find it to be ennobling or natural or whatever. Not me. If I lived on a farm I would never eat meat again.

Making eyes at each other

2006-06-29T15:44:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I was at a restaurant with a friend, and we were getting routinely ignored by the waitstaff. So I proceeded to stare intently at the back of the waiter's neck. He came over in a jiffy.

My friend, of course, wanted to know how I did that. The answer, in all likelihood, is that it was a probability bias -- a sort of variation on the gambler's fallacy, in which the guy was statistically likely to attend to us within a certain time frame, and my staring only produced the illusion of causality. That's not what I said, because people get a little grumpy when I'm constantly deflating their cognitive biases. But the explanation I offered is also true: humans are uniquely capable of knowing when people are looking at them, because the whites of our eyes (the sclera) are so distinct from the pupils and irises. In other words, it's really easy to tell whether a human eye is looking directly at you or slightly askance. You can't tell this with, for instance, a cat eye, which is almost all iris (see image). Other primates' eyes work this way too, but our whites are whiter and our brights are brighter. In short, humans can signal more with simple eye redirection than can any other creature.

What do we signal? Well, submission, when the eyes are cast down. Where a dog might make an elaborate show of submission, we barely need to move the rest of our bodies. The eyes have it. We can also signal fear; seeing an eye with an unusually large proportion of white (i.e., an eye open wide in terror) triggers responses in the amygdala, passing on the "danger" signal. Even if the eye images are shown for subliminally brief periods, you end up with amygdala activation. This can indicate danger ahead, or that the person is anxious about something -- maybe worried about being caught in a lie. And we process these interpretations without even noticing it.

And, as it now turns out, a direct gaze -- just a different proportion and direction of pupils and whites -- can make people more honest... even if the eyes aren't real.

Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, put up new price lists each week in their psychology department coffee room. Prices were unchanged, but each week there was a photocopied picture at the top of the list, measuring 15 by 3 centimetres, of either flowers or the eyes of real faces. The faces varied but the eyes always looked directly at the observer.

In weeks with eyes on the list, staff paid 2.76 times as much for their drinks as in weeks with flowers.

Of course everybody, even New Scientist, is jumping in with the Big Brother jokes, and you have to admit, this experiment implies that that iconic poster would have been pretty effective in assuring compliance among the masses. Likewise, perhaps, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. I see it, though, as a paean to our sclera, perhaps the most underrated part of the visible eye. We get colored contacts because we want our eyes to be more striking, or maybe because we want to look like vampires and cats. We worry -- well, some of us worry -- about finding eye makeup that will play up our eye color. We maintain a mythology of Carries and Clarks Kent, whose prom dates don't think they're beautiful (or whose populace doesn't think they're super) until the glasses come off and the irises are in view. But it's in the sclera that our powers of communication lie.

We've got armadillos in our trousers

2006-06-29T12:58:00.000-05:00

PZ has put up an amusing repost about fish and spider penises. The findings may surprise you. I find the spider penis-analogues a little creepy -- something about translucent genitalia doesn't do it for me -- but the final conclusion about fish packages is not to be missed.

Oh Richard Feynman we love you get up

2006-06-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

While Dan made his QSOs this weekend, I read QED. Overall I found it pretty congenial, though one or two of the metaphors were actually too simplified for me -- I could understand how I was supposed to use them, but not what they actually represented. I was most struck, however, by Feynman's very matter-of-fact explanations of what physics is actually for, and what it actually does. As you know, this is knowledge that I feel is crucial, whether you're in the sciences or the humanities (and especially if you're a politician!). So I wanted to share a couple of quotes.

On page 8 in my edition:

We physicists are always checking to see if there is something the matter with the theory. That's the game, because if there is something the matter, it's interesting! But so far, we have found nothing wrong with the theory of quantum electrodynamics.

Replace "quantum electrodynamics" in that quote with, say, "evolution" -- or any other well-supported theory -- and you're left with a pretty concise, parsimonious explanation of the goals and methods of science.

My favorite quote on the subject of general science, though, is on page 10 in my edition:

Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. A little screeen comes down and you don't listen anymore. I'm going to describe to you how Nature is -- and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it. It's a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is -- absurd.

Of course, everyone reading this knows that this is the case. But Feynman was talking to people who didn't know, presumably, and I'm willing to bet that he convinced them. Do we have people doing this now? Great scientists, widely acknowledged to be great scientists, who bother to sit people down and say "here's how science works -- not just what we've discovered, but why it means something that we discovered it"? Daniel Dennett is the closest thing I can think of, and of course he's an amazing writer and thinker, but his status as a philosopher (rather than a scientist) is potentially an Achilles heel. People are more than willing to speak of him dismissively. Even the New York Times Magazine didn't give him a fucking break.

I think perhaps the problem is that great scientists are no longer widely (i.e. near-universally) acknowledged as great scientists. Certainly it's a rare scientist who has the force of personality that Feynman had, but I can't think offhand of any current scientists who enjoy "public intellectual" status. There was an article in a recent New Scientist, which I also read in the tent this weekend, complaining about "the fall of reason in the West":

The other challenge was external: a much more critical view of science adopted by the rest of society. Science revealed a darker side. Suspicions arose that it was dehumanising and the tool of dictators. Then came the atom bomb. Since the 1960s, evidence has begun to pile up that science's triumphs are poisoning the planet.

The result is a widespread western, and especially American, descent into superstition. About 40 per cent of Americans believe that Genesis accurately describes the creation. There is an apparent belief in magic that has had no parallel since the Middle Ages. The growing anti-intellectualism has no western precedent at all. We are witnessing the elevation of emotion over reason, of personal conviction over hard thinking.

...

But pause. Reflect on the inspirations for modern science: belief in God and belief in humanity, a rational world view, and optimism about humanity's place in the cosmos. Science, it seems, has disposed of much of what made it successful. It has eaten away at its thought-foundations: its contribution to human meaning, the human spirit and the non-material richness of civilisation has shrivelled.

This article gave me pause, although I didn't fully agree with all of it. Primarily, I'm not sure I accept the active voice when the authors say that "science...has disposed of much of what made it successful." I tend to think that the fault lies not with the scientists, who after all are just doing what they've always done, and more with the state of public education -- most people are being fed misinformation about science and its role, and the public education system is ill-equipped to adequately counter this misinformation, nor to stanch it at its source. But I wonder whether our side just needs a charismatic, plain-talking genius in the Feynman mold.

So... nominations?

(P.S., yes, it's a Frank O'Hara reference. My MA in English is basically useless on the job front, so I might as well get some fun out of it.)

The Internet and I are fighting

2006-06-21T09:27:00.000-05:00

So I haven't posted since last Friday, but I'll be extending my break for at least another few days. Basically, it has become impossible to ignore the fact that the internet is full of jerks, and it's stressing me out. I haven't actually been fighting with anybody (flamewars lost their novelty in the 90s), but in order to keep up with what's going on in the blogosphere, I have to deal with things like Ann Coulter's book and the Stop the ACLU dipshits -- and even though I mostly read our side's responses (like those two links), it's enough to make you want to sever relations with humanity. Then there's this spiteful old man on the eHam forums, who tried to pick a fight with Dan (and everyone else in the vicinity who suggested that an "article" should probably include some useful information). He couldn't argue on a technical level, so he got personal, which is a nasty move even though all the insinuations were untrue. Oh, and then he went on to say that anyone with a tech-class (entry-level) license was automatically unqualified to discuss any aspect of ham radio (keep in mind that I am not a ham at all and even I could tell that his article was nonsense). Not even the new Carnival of the Liberals -- which links Bee Policy and Truth Tables and is hilarious and is borne up on fluttering left-wings -- made me feel substantially better about the overall composition of cyberspace.

I've been mulling over some ideas for blog posts, including (ironically) one about emergent behavior and how it relates to internet content. But the communications morass we call the Web is so peppered with unpleasant people and vile ideas that any time I sit down at the computer, I lose my will to compose. Right now, the internet doesn't feel like a conversation in which I want to participate. I know it's a skewed and incomplete view, but in order to regain perspective, I just need to avoid everything but email and webcomics for a while.

Luckily, we're going camping this weekend, because Saturday is Field Day. This should be just the break I need -- woods, campfire (probably in one of those little campsite containers), maybe reading some New Yorker by the propane lamp... and most importantly, a very old and regimentally polite communications medium. Some hams may be jerks on the internet, but nobody's a jerk on the radio, especially not on Field Day when everyone is just trying to make as many contacts as possible. It's a very relaxing sort of communication -- you exchange callsigns, locations, and information about what kind of power source and how many transmitters you're using, and then you move on to the next person. Just "CQ Field Day, this is November Three Oscar X-ray, you're one alpha in Mike Delta Charlie, QRZ" (or even better: -.-. --.- ..-. -.. -. ...-- --- -..- .---- .- -- -.. -.-. --.- .-. --..), pretty much over and over again, allowing of course for a lot of repetition of the call sign. I can cope with that.

I might even operate a little, which you're allowed to do without a license on Field Day. I haven't had much reason to get a ham radio license, though Dan's been pushing for me to get one before they totally nix the Morse code requirement. I don't copy Morse very well, and I've never been a particular tinkerer (though I have now learned how to solder), so I didn't seriously consider it. But I can't say that I'm not craving a return to an older, more civil sort of communication.

So I'll be out of commission for at least the rest of the week. Meanwhile, if you are a tinkerer (or just interested), you should swing by a Field Day operation site. Dan and I are going to be hiding in the woods, but not all hams are so antisocial; while Field Day is technically intended as emergency communications practice, a lot of people see it as a chance to introduce amateur radio to the public. Plus, you get 100 extra points for media coverage, so a lot of local papers have been receiving press releases about area operations, and they may have blurbs. Amateur radio appears to be endless fun for people who enjoy activities like building circuits, bolting things together, and getting postcards from overseas. Even just living with a ham, I've learned all sorts of stuff about coaxial cables and how the ionosphere works. A lot of the hams on the online forums are big jerks, but a lot of people on any online forum are big jerks too. I recommend it for anyone geeky enough not to care that it's a geeky hobby. Or anyone who wants an alternative to the internet.