A Few Remarks 23 January 2009

Personal note: so far I’ve been pleased with the students; this semester they seem energetic and interested.

Humor: Ok, have some fun at the expense of these morons. Basically, they were supposed to be getting a 1,700 dollar check but the bank screwed up the decimal point and gave them 170,000 dollars instead.

These Christians thought that they “had a gift from god” and therefore took the money and went away.

On another note: some right wing morons can’t bring themselves to admit that Obama won an impressive victory (in terms of electoral votes and percentage of the popular vote); it was even more impressive outside of the south and Appalachian areas.

Here is what those wingnuts said:

President Obama received the votes of 65 million Americans, which translates to only about 22 percent of the American population. In 2004, George W. Bush received the votes of 62 million Americans, which translated into about 21 percent of the American population. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t remember the media talking about the nation having united around its president then.

In 2008, 235 million Americans did not vote for Barack Obama (roughly equal to the combined populations of 47 states).

Yep, and my daughter was one of them. Oh wait….she was 14. The article that I linked to goes on to point out that Ronald Reagan’s landslides look far less impressive when you apply the above “standard” to his victory.

I suppose that the tendency to whine is built into wingnut DNA?

Barack Obama, good and bad.

Good: Obama appears to be listening to others but does have a firmness about him:

President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning – but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

The exchange arose as top House and Senate Republicans expressed concern to the president about the amount of spending in the package. They also raised red flags about a refundable tax credit that returns money to those who don’t pay income taxes, the sources said.

The Republicans stressed that they want to include more middle class tax cuts in the package, citing their proposal to cut the two lowest tax rates — 15 percent and 10 percent — to ten percent and five percent, rather than issue the refundable credit Obama wants.

At another point in the meeting, sources said Obama told the group: “This is a grave situation facing the country.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama would hold another economic meeting in the White House Saturday for a “broader group.” [...]

Or, more cheekily: video.

Bad. I admit that I don’t like this:

The week, President Obama announced that lobbyists wouldn’t be allowed in his administration and nominated a defense lobbyist to be deputy Secretary of Defense.

The rule, and it’s an inspiring rule, is that lobbyists can’t work for agencies they’ve lobbied in the last two years. The nominee is William J. Lynn, who was working for Raytheon until late last Thursday. Since then, of course, he’s had his memory scrubbed clean with a powerful amnesia agent — not unlike the one in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind — and now he doesn’t even know what Raytheon does.

It’s like he was never Senior Vice President of Government Operations and Strategy at all.

Obama announced that the revolving door between government and lobbying would be slammed shut — wait, can you slam a revolving door? — “for as long as I am president.” And broke the pledge while he was saying it.

Talk about hitting the ground running. That’s fast.

An anonymous senior White House official explains:

When you set very tough rules, you need to have a mechanism for the occasional exception. We wanted to be really tough, but at the same time we didn’t want to hamstring the new administration or turn the town upside down.

In other words, you can’t let what you say get in the way of what you do.

Obama should have said that his “no lobbyists” was a strong guideline that might be broken from time to time.

Science Scientists have made a major step toward making quantum information systems a reality:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2009) — For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.

Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance. That capability is necessary for workable quantum information systems because they will require memory storage at both the sending and receiving ends of the transmission. [...]

Science and Apologists for Religion

These thoughts by PZ Myers are well worth reading:

Somebody is going to have to declare Jerry Coyne an official member of the “New Atheist” club and send him the fancy hat and instructions for the secret handshake. He has a substantial piece in The New Republic that is both a review of two recent books by theistic scientists, Karl Giberson (who really detests me) and Ken Miller, and a definite warning shot across the bows of those who believe science and religion can be reconciled.

First, let’s consider the reviews of the two books — they’re less interesting, not because they’re poorly done, but because Coyne’s opinion is almost identical to mine. The main point is that both books shine when they’re taking on the misconceptions of the creationists, but are weak and unconvincing whenever they move on to religious apologetics. [....]

I do have one quibble with the article. In it, Coyne defines four common traits of all creationists.

But regardless of their views, all creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God’s image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called “irreducible complexity.” This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God.

This is true for the vast majority of creationists, but it isn’t quite universal. I know a few atheist creationists, and they are just as incoherent as the necessary conflict between the two terms in that phrase implies. They do exist, however. There is a subset of creationists who are more like radical denialists: they reject evolution because the majority of scientists accept it, or in some cases because they are so egotistical that they reject anything they didn’t think of first, or because they have some other wild hypothesis that they have seized upon, or because, frankly, they’re nuts. Coyne’s generalization may be accurate in 99% of all cases, and is certainly true for the leadership of the creationist movements in the US, but saying “all” opens up the idea to trivial refutation when the DI makes a sweep of the local insane asylums or trots out David Berlinski to pontificate supinely.

I should also point out that there are atheists who reject evolution because, well, they don’t understand it at all and, in their minds, anything that doesn’t make sense to them must be false.

If Philosophers ran attack ads…

(hat tip: 3 quarks daily)

23 January 2009

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; stretching. I warmed up with 1000 free (9:05/8:26 for 17:31). I then did 1000 in 16:25 (4:06/8:12/12:18; that was good, even pacing…if slow). Then I did 10 x (25 drill, 25 free) with fins, 5 x 100 fist on the 1:50, 5 x 100 (25 fly, 75 free) on the 2, alternate 100 paddle, 100 free for 500 (8:53).

I felt good today; though the pool got really crowded again I did have a lane to myself for about 2500 yards.

Other stuff The Texas School Board had a hard time with creationism. Here is some of the testimony from the evolution side. Hat tip to Millard Fillmore’s bathtub, which also reported that the creationists lost this latest battle.

Animal Camouflage Surf to the Conservation Report to see if you can spot this animal. I had trouble at first until I realized that I was looking for the wrong size of animal.

Obama Administration Hillary Clinton makes an address. Hope is on the way!

Town Meeting and other topics….

Local Politics Barbara and I went to a town hall meeting given by IL-92 (State) House Representative Jehan Gordon and State Senator David Koehler (IL-46 (State)).

First, Senator Koehler started by admitting that the Democrats have collectively screwed up and need to get their act together.

Then they basically let us ask questions; Koehler talked about the process of impeachment; since he is part of the tribunal he is not allowed to discuss what he is thinking about in terms of outcome. He said that there are two issues: should the Governor be removed from office and, if so, should he ever be allowed to serve in a State of Illinois office again.

They talked about taxes (of course) and how they want to get our educational system less dependent on property taxes in exchange for raising income taxes; there might be some resistance to that as some more affluent districts would see a more equitable system as one that takes money from them and gives it to the poorer districts.

Funding for local programs (e. g., Boy’s and Girl’s clubs, local entities to encourage small businesses) were discussed, as was the funding for community college programs and for state parks

There were a few folks there who didn’t seem to understand that some issues were really state issues and others were county/city/township issues; in some cases the legislator can solicit permission for a local entity to raise a particular type of tax, but the state legislator really isn’t in a position to tell them what to do.

Also I noticed that Rep. Gordon seemed to go the way of Katherine Harris in terms of attire; she wore the tightest pants I’d ever seen on a legislator.

Update The Peoria Journal Star had an article. Reading this article reminded me of something else Senator Koehler said: he said that we might need a “one time tax hike” to enable the state to pay off its bills. Koehler noted that the State isn’t allowed to run a deficit in the way that the Federal government does:

Representatives from some social service agencies raised concerns about getting state payments they’re owed.

Even if it requires a one-time tax increase, Koehler said the state will pay its bills.

“We’ve got to catch up and then we’ve got to be disciplined not to get sloppy again. The whole system is broken at this point and we’re going to fix it,” he said.

National Politics
Obama’s saying that we are a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and non-believers didn’t sit well with some of the religious woos. Follow the link to Right Wing Watch so you can laugh at their paranoia!

Science:

Steven Chu (Secretary of Energy) addressed our major national labs on what he expects out of the Department of Energy. This is a link to the post at Cosmic Variance; it is non-technical and well worth reading.

Reading this put me in a very good mood.

Evolution
This P. Z. Myers post explains a bit about evolution, natural selection and how the existence of genes does not totally determine the development of an organism.

sually, Begley is reasonably good on science, but her latest piece is one big collection of misconceptions. It reflects a poor understanding of the science and of history, in that it confuses long-standing recognition of the importance of environmental factors in gene expression with a sudden reinstatement of Lamarckian inheritance, and it simply isn’t — she’s missed the point of the science and she has caricatured Lamarck.

Some water fleas sport a spiny helmet that deters predators; others, with identical DNA sequences, have bare heads. What differs between the two is not their genes but their mothers’ experiences. If mom had a run-in with predators, her offspring have helmets, an effect one wag called “bite the mother, fight the daughter.” If mom lived her life unthreatened, her offspring have no helmets. Same DNA, different traits. Somehow, the experience of the mother, not only her DNA sequences, has been transmitted to her offspring.

Begley goes on to argue that this phenomenon points toward some sort of Lamarkian like inheritance of traits. This, of course, is false:

Stressed and unstressed mothers switch on different genes in their offspring epigenetically, which lead to the expression of different morphology. It’s very cool stuff, but evolutionary biologists are about as shocked by this as they are by the idea that malnourished mothers have underweight babies. That environmental influences can have multi-generational effects, and that developmental programs can cue off of the history of the germ line, is not a new idea, especially among developmental biologists.

This is just wrong on evolution:

Water fleas pop out helmets immediately if mom lived in a world of predators; by Darwin’s lights, a population of helmeted fleas would take many generations to emerge through random variation and natural selection.

It misses the whole point. The population of water fleas have a genetic attribute that allows the formation of spines under one set of conditions, and suppresses them under others.

I recommend checking out the post itself.

Of course, the teaching of evolution is still under attack. This link is to a Conservation Report article; they also have some interesting cartoons posted. This is one of them (which I posted some time ago; there are others as well)

Education It is no secret that there is grade inflation in many departments in many universities. Rate Your Students has a snippet of the article here. Here is what I find amusing:

More students at the University of Minnesota get A’s in classes than get C’s, D’s or F’s combined, according to a Pioneer Press review of grades.

The examination of marks handed out at the state’s leading university between fall 2004 and spring 2007 also found that in lower-level courses, more than 70 percent of students get either an A or a B.

School officials say the top-heavy grading is the result of smarter students.

That is absolutely false in my courses; if I gave the same exams that I gave in 1992-1993, the students would flunk in truckloads (though my current “A” students would still have done well). I think that there is a difference between those students in technical disciplines and those in other ones.

World Events: this article is quite thoughtful:

This brings us to the heart of a terrible thought. It is difficult for Westerners — and I include all of us, from every spectrum of the political rainbow — to recognize the essential humanity of the Palestinian people.

Andrew Sullivan touched on this problem recently in his Daily Dish blog, bringing attention to Glenn Greenwald’s powerful arguments about the inability of many Western liberals to fully identify with the Palestinians in the same way they do the Israelis. Sullivan puts the problem like this:

A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as “coercive interrogation” only when Americans do it to Muslims.

Greenwald, going a little bit further, argues that:

If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings: as “barbarians” — just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats — then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer. For people who think that way, arguments about “proportionality” won’t even begin to resonate — such concepts can’t even be understood — because the core premise, that excessive civilian deaths are horrible and should be avoided at all costs, isn’t accepted. Why should a superior, civilized, peaceful society allow the welfare of violent, hateful barbarians to interfere with its objectives? How can the deaths or suffering of thousands of barbarians ever be weighed against the death of even a single civilized person?

The tragedy of the Palestinian people is that their suffering, somehow, by some horrible underlying logic, does not rate as equal.

The more I’ve come to see the dilemma in this light, the more the footage of carnage in Gaza has become impossibly heartrending to watch. A terrible dialectic is at play. As the Palestinians are battered to bits they rush, with camera in hand, to the scenes of devastation and to the hospitals where the wounded are being carried. They want to show the world. “Look,” they are saying, “we are human beings, just like everyone else. If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But the footage they capture gets perverted as it is conveyed. We see it on the other side as a chaos of bodies and activity that, while upsetting, is almost too kinetic. More tragically, the people sticking cameras into the scenes of injured children and families begin to look lewd. “Well,” we say, secretly in the dark whisperings of our private thoughts, “that’s no way to act.” The very attempt by everyday Palestinians to express their common humanity, to show their essential vulnerability, begins to look to us like opportunism, like the uncouth acts of a people fundamentally different from us. Barbarians.

Personally, I think that it more natural that we identify with Israel because, let’s face it, if I were forced at gunpoint to live in the Middle East, I’d choose Israel. But that doesn’t excuse what they are doing.

But on the other hand, what Israel is doing is, well, perhaps a bit too similar to what we’ve done to others?