One final exam left

One final yet to grade; I’ve got to finish it off today!

Workout notes yoga class (I lead it), then 5 miles of easy walking.
I noticed that there were tons of birds; mostly swifts. They were just darting around like butterflies.

What was really unusual is that there were several large hawks in the area. Yeah, I know; this area has lots of bunnies. But what I noticed is that the hawks were hunting near the edge of the water. We do have lots of carp in the river.

Humor

Science and society

How do conservatives and liberals differ when it comes to attitudes about climate change?

This interesting statistical study shows that uneducated liberals don’t differ that much with uneducated conservatives when it comes to having an opinion on climate change (is human activity a major factor?). However there is a vast difference between educated conservatives and educated liberals.

Brandon Keim writes,

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now. . . . The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

That strikes me [Keim] as deeply weird. I don’t even have a snarky quip, much less an explanation.

This does seem a bit weird: you might think that college grads are more likely to go with the scientific consensus on global warming, or you might think that college grads would be more skeptical, but it seems funny that it would go one way for Democrats and the other for Republicans.

Things become clearer when I looked at the graph [...]

Go to the article to see the graphs and to read the conclusion.

A free book on Secularism and Science in the 21’st Century: download here.

Here is an interesting discussion between Richard Dawkins and Jaron Lanier:

When zoologist Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was published 20 years ago, it practically snuffed out many readers’ belief in God and in their own importance, for it described in stunning and terrifying detail a world where all life was merely the conveyor belt for the gene. Its mission: to replicate itself. DNA was the fundamental and irreducible unit of life that spun itself endlessly into the incredible diversity of flora and fauna. Everything we hold most dear–acts of love, altruism, the painterly beauty of the peacock’s tail, the birth of a newborn–could, according to Dawkins, be explained by the gene’s attempt to survive, and to hitch a ride on the fittest organism possible, the one most likely to mate and reproduce. Darwinian natural selection was Dawkins’ ruling theme. The gene looked like the most purely selfish entity one could imagine, but it was more like the Terminator–just programmed to survive.

Since that time, Dawkins, who was recently appointed the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has elaborated on his elegant if chilling theory in the books The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and most recently, Climbing Mount Improbable. As Dawkins once stated, `Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’ Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, Dawkins is one of those rare scientists who have captured the popular imagination. And his particular world view has profoundly influenced our interpretation of nature, business, love, medicine, and life itself. Even ideas, says Dawkins, are like genes. The fundamental unit of meaning, which he calls the meme, may be able to infect us like the renegade DNA of viruses. Does this mean that Nazism was just a powerful meme, an epidemic of one nasty, highly infectious idea?

Of late there has been an outcry against Darwin and Dawkins. Last summer, when Commentary magazine published an essay, The Deniable Darwin, by David Berlinski, it elicited a flurry of letters–from scientists, businessmen, lawyers, chemists, biologists–so thick that the published ones alone ran 37 pages. As one reader wrote, `You have fired a shot in what is becoming a great moral revolution, and it will be heard around the world.’

To get to the heart of that revolution, we decided to host a debate between Dawkins and the man who coined the term virtual reality, Jaron Lanier. Lanier is a computer scientist and musician, a visiting scholar at the Columbia University department of computer science, a visiting artist at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a provocative thinker on evolution, morality, and ideas. Lanier and Dawkins met last year at the New York City home of John Brockman, a writer who holds salons on science and culture.

Lanier sees himself as a Darwinist who has no basic quarrel with evolutionary theory, but who doesn’t believe it’s the only or most apt metaphor for our lives. According to Lanier, natural selection is only part of the human story, and we are more than just the accidental result of a stream of digital information encoded in our genes. In fact, what’s best about us and civilization may be our ability to thwart evolution. –Jill Neimark

The discussion follows. The topics discussed are: how it is good and moral to counteract the effects of evolution and “why are male testicles outside the body”.

Cosmology: a “young” supernova has been found; this star exploded at about the time of the US Civil War.

Genes and intelligence: a study ferrets out the genes that control cognitive ability. It is somewhat technical and of the form: people who did better on tests X, Y, Z showed variation “a” on gene “g” and those who did worse showed variation “b” on gene “g”.

Sample:

In their sample, the L1RAPL1 of 332 children (50:50 male to female), aged 5-14 years old, was screened. The genotype of each child’s L1RAPL1 variant was identified using PCR. In the population, roughly 90% were heterozygotic in the DXS1218 microsattelite variant of L1RAPL1 . Microsattelites are simple repeats of nucleotides in a sequence of DNA, I outlined one way they for here. The other microsattelite, DXS9896 was present as heterzygotic alleles in 87% of the kids.

Two SNPs are also looked at. 89% of the kids had an A nucleotide in the rs6526806 SNP, where the other 11% had a G. 42% of the kids had one version of the rs12847959 SNP, the other 58% had another version. The authors did not mention what effect these polymorphisms had on the gene, but did indicate they all fall in the intron of the gene — a non-coding region that is spliced out.

The kids were asked to take several cognitive tests that tested their memory, concentration, perception, and verbal abilities. Three of the polymorphisms listed above had effects on memory and concentration. Those that had longer DXS1218 microsattelite variants had lower IQ scores. Similarly, kids with longer DXS9896 mircosattelites also had lower IQ scores. One of the SNPs, rs12847959 showed that individuals that had the CC genotype in the SNP had higher IQ scores compared to those that had the CG genotype. The p-values for all were pretty strict, suggesting that the differences are statistically significant.

Follow that? In all seriousness, this is a fascinating area of research; what do the genes say about an individual’s capacity to learn, say, music, language, mathematics, science, or to relate to others? Of course, things are complicated, as there are genes that affect certain characteristics, genes that interact with other genes, and tons of other stuff. You can’t become an expert by reading a couple of pop science books.

Yes, I know, people get afraid of such research because they fear conclusions that might say “Mexicans tend to be dumber than others” (I say “Mexican” because I have that heritage).

No fears here; this is looking at individuals, not at groups. Also, these problems are far from easy to get a grip on; results will never be as simple as, say, do a swab, get it analyzed and find out that, yes, you are a moron.

History: remember reading about Jamestown? What were your impressions? Edge of the American West has a nice summary article.

On this day in 1607, 104 British colonists founded Jamestown, the first continuous English settlement in North America. From the beginning, the colony was a disaster. Jamestown lay next to a malarial swamp; the colonists dumped their trash into a nearby river, causing an outbreak of dysentery and typhus; and they were, by all accounts, too lazy to put in crops for food during that first spring and summer they spent in America.

Disease and hunger took a heavy toll on Jamestown; by the end of the first year, approximately half of the colonists had died. Only the arrival of reinforcements, some 350 additional settlers, including Jamestown’s first women, prevented the endeavor from failing outright. And then the real problems began. The winter of 1609, long known as the “starving time,” left only 65 colonists alive in the spring of 1610. By 1616, more than 75% of the settlers who had arrived in Jamestown were dead. The Chamber of Commerce struggled to spin the carnage as opportunity. [...]

So, there you have it: the taproot of American history. A story motivated by greed and marked by incompetence, punctuated by strained gender relations and the violent dispossession of Indians, and only salvaged because of the exploitation of the labor of people of African descent. Oh, and I forgot one thing: the roots of democracy. In 1619, again, the same year that traders began importing African slaves into the colony, Virginians established the House of Burgesses, the first elected assembly in colonial America. Ours is a nation founded on a series of such painful ironies.

In between is a brief summary written by a historian. Enjoy!

Politics

Full Edwards endorsement speech.

Statistical Polls: a nice summary article of what the terms mean and what the implications are.

Republicans: are not happy with their recent losses in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. Some want heads to roll.

Hillary Clinton: why does she hang on? Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and who has endorsed Barack Obama, weighs in. His conclusion isn’t all that different from the other standard ones out there.

Barack Obama: gets an assist from George W. Bush: Bush attempts to attack Obama!

The president did not name Obama or any other Democrat, but White House aides privately acknowledged the remarks were aimed at the presidential candidate and others in his party. Former President Jimmy Carter has called for talks with Hamas.

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said at Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said in remarks to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The remarks seemed to be a not-so-subtle attempt to continue to raise doubts about Obama with Jewish Americans. Those doubts were earlier stoked by Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2008 presidential election, when he recently charged that Obama is the favored candidate of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, which the U.S. government has listed as a terrorist group.

Please spread it wide: Bush doesn’t like Obama but likes McCain!

This video has choppy editing but shows some not so nice snippets from this campaign: