Some interesting Fails

I’d love to know the story here:

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And this is just plain bizarre

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Note the crucifix. Someone is going to need big-time therapy.

Beat the Thunderstorms

Workout notes 20 mile walk in 4:32; I’ve done better but I’ve done worse. I was 2:10 at the half way point but suffered from some cramping/pain behind my right knee (upper calf, lower hamstring area); that isn’t unusual given the weather changes going on. I thought about doing more on the treadmill but decided against it; after all this is my first pure 20 mile walk in a while (I’ve ran 10, walked 10 recently). Also, this is 8 minutes slower than my “run 10, walk 10″ last week, and this week’s course was tougher.

Science, skepticism and society:

Remember someone in the State Legislature in Oklahoma introducing a resolution to condemn Richard Dawkins? Well Dawkins drew a loud supportive crowd and:

Humor and Social Commentary

Previously I had posted this Zack Hill cartoon:

This is today’s follow up:

Friday Evening Quips (6 March 2009)

We have great weather at the moment (68 F, sunny), but with this being Illinois, that is going to change very quickly. I sure hope that I can get outside for at least some of my training this weekend, even if only for an hour or two. I’ll go out in the rain, but not in a heavy thunderstorm.

Science and Society
President Obama will remove the federal money ban on stem cell research.

Bad Science Analogies: It is all the worse when the user doesn’t know that they are bad analogies.

From The Tao of Physics to What the Bleep Do We Know?, quantum mechanics has been a favorite target for wildly misguided cultural appropriations. That’s hardly surprising; quantum mechanics is hard, and not many physicists understand it at a deep level. The only interesting argument is whether “not many” in that sentence should be replaced by “no.”

Yesterday I stumbled across two invocations of quantum mechanics in very different contexts. First, via 3quarksdaily, historian John Lukacs muses on the centrality of our nature as human beings to our ability to apprehend and understand the world.

All of this happened during and after three-quarters of a century when physicists, inventing and dependent on more and more powerful machines, have found more and more smaller and smaller particles of matter, affixing them with all kinds of names. Until now, well into the 21st century, it is (or should be) more and more likely that not only A Basic Theory of Everything but also the smallest Basic Unit of Matter will and can never be found. Why? Because these particles are produced by scientists, human beings themselves.

Every piece of matter—just as every number—is endlessly, infinitely divisible because of the human mind. Some scientists will admit this. Others won’t.

It goes on like that at great length; it was hard to choose a representative excerpt. Basically, Lukacs is making a mistake resembling that which I accused Paul Davies of some time back — demanding that properties of as-yet-known physical theories conform to some cherished metaphysical presuppositions. In reality, the fact that scientists built the apparatuses that produce elementary particles doesn’t tell us anything at all about whether a Theory of Everything is an attainable goal. It may or may not be, but our status as conscious human beings doesn’t have anything to say about it.

Professor Moran at Sandwalk comments on a recent popular-science article about human evolution:

This is a follow-up to my earlier posting about the latest issue of Discover magazine [Ascent of Darwinism]. I want to discuss another article in that issue: “Are We Still Evolving” by Kathleen McAuliffe. The title of the web version is: They Don’t Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To.

In a minute we’ll look at the quality of science journalism in this article, but first a little background.

The point of the article is that human evolution may have accelerated enormously in the past 40,000 years. The idea is based almost entirely on a few papers by John Hawks and his colleagues. What they did was to look at various polymorphisms in the human genome. The most common variants are single nucleotide mutations (single nucleotide polymorphism = SNP = “Snips”). Some people will have one tpe of variant while other people will have another. Almost all of these variants are neutral—they have no visible or functional effect—but some of them will affect fitness. [...]

The work is controversial. Many people are skeptical of both the result and the explanation. The general consensus among evolutionary biologists is “wait and see.” They treat this as a preliminary result because they are well aware of the technical problems and how easy it is to score false positives. The technology is not foolproof.

Evolutionary biologists are not surprised by the claim that humans are evolving. The textbooks are full of examples of recent human evolution by both natural selection and random genetic drift. Besides, the evidence is all around us—you only have to look at the different appearance of people in Africa, Asia, and Europe to see the obvious. We also have the well-studied examples of human migration out of Africa and of coalescence to identify Mitochondria Eve. This is more evidence of recent human evolution.

So, evolutionary biologists aren’t the least bit surprised by evidence of human evolution but they’re skeptical of this particular study because it claims recent accelerated human evolution. The paper isn’t that exciting to most people who know about evolution.

The popular press had a fit, aided and abetted by the PR departments at several universities and, more recently, by a newly published book: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

This brings us to the article in Discover. The author, Kathleen McAuliffe, is a freelance writer who specializes in science and medicine. She has an M.A. in natural science. She just won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship “to continue her research into human evolution from the Stone Age to the present.”

Here’s how the article begins ….

For decades the consensus view—among the public as well as the world’s preeminent biologists—has been that human evolution is over. Since modern Homo sapiens emerged 50,000 years ago, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed. “There have been no biological changes. Everything we’ve called culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” This view has become so entrenched that it is practically doctrine. Even the founders of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, signed on to the notion that our brains were mostly sculpted during the long period when we were hunter-gatherers and have changed little since. “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” they wrote in a background piece on the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

I think this is wrong. I do not believe that the consensus among the world’s preeminent evolutionary biologists is that human evolution is over.

The article goes on.
True, technical articles in hard core journals are hard to understand, but at least they aren’t sensationalistic.

Humor: From the Fail Blog:

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Society: Point/sort of counter point
Someone wrote an interesting point lamenting the fact that Bristol Palin’s opinions on “abstinence only” sex education carries more weight with the public than mountains of rigorous evidence:

The Palin Kid recently started her 16th minute of fame with an interview on Fox TV saying, of all things, that her mother’s Neanderthal view of sex and abstinence is “not realistic at all.” The popular media are eating it up: through this wise child who isn’t old enough to drink legally, and who apparently doesn’t know a condom from a pineapple, People, USA Today, CNN and others have discovered that abstinence training does not work. After all, here’s a white, middle-class teen who was trained to avoid sex—and she didn’t!

For years, scientists across America have been saying the exact same thing—not as some charming tale of a lovable kid who creates a lovable kid, but with crystal-clear numbers, logic, predictions, and proof. The data is overwhelming: abstinence programs succeed in getting kids to promise abstinence, but they fail in getting kids to actually abstain. They’re theatre. They’re religion masquerading as education.

By and large, the media have yawned. By and large, the advocates for this failed public policy have said the numbers don’t matter. Science doesn’t matter. Feeling and belief matter. It’s how our country was run for 8 years: feeling and belief (also known as superstition) mattered more than anything, certainly more than science.

The media have colluded with this repulsive development. There should be a headline every single day: “Abstinence training STILL ineffective.”

Instead, we’re told that if you want the real “facts” about teen sexuality, teen pregnancy, and sex education, forget the experts. Forget the Guttmacher Institute, forget SIECUS, forget Doug Kirby. Don’t bother with science.

Instead, just ask this kid, whose mother still believes that other people’s babies come from immorality.

But the counter point: “hey, it is what it is, good for Bristol and let’s use it“.

Politics
Claire McCaskill calls the Republicans on their hypocrisy:

Larry Krugman: takes President Obama to task for not making real changes in the area of banking policy:

In his column today, Nobel laureate economist and intermittent critic of the Obama administration, accuses the President and his economic team of “dithering” in their approach to the financial crisis. Writes Krugman:

Many analysts agree. But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Krugman then goes on to explain this “holding pattern.” He calls the administration out for presenting vague and inchoate proposals aimed at settling investors’ nerves. When each new plan is shot down by “informed commentators”, the administration simply replaces the old plan with a new one, which is actually just a slight variation of its predecessor — and so goes the cycle.

Krugman then goes on to discuss “zombie banks” and suggests that the administration is in denial as to the full extent of the crisis:

So why has this zombie idea — it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back — taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable.

More Rush Limbaugh
Michael Moore explains why he isn’t the “Rush Limbaugh of the left”.

Of course there is the fact that Moore is a director rather than a daily talk show host; Moore seems to be more interesting in getting movement on a large policy (health care, out of Iraq) than worrying about an individual politician failing or even a party.

Limbaugh: predicts that Teddy Kennedy will be dead before health care reform is passed.

If I were as fat as Limbaugh, I wouldn’t be making predictions about anyone else’s demise.

A DCCC video lampooning the tendency for Republicans to suck up to Limbaugh:

Political Humor: Leave Limbaugh Alone!

For those who don’t get it, here is the original: