19 May (afternoon)

Professional I spent the better part of an afternoon refereeing 4.5 pages of an 8 page mathematics paper. I’ll remember this the next time I am tempted to write in a sloppy manner. The author is talking about interesting stuff, but his/her writing and notation are so sloppy and imprecise that I am tempted to blow the rest of it off.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight lays out why spending cuts aren’t always the wisest way to go:

Although it is extremely hard to cut existing programs, it is easier to avoid launching new ones. But much of the new spending proposed by the president is for public investments with high rates of return. Failure to make these investments will actually make us poorer. For instance, if the government borrowed a trillion dollars at 4 percent and invested the money in projects with an annual return of 7 percent, we’d actually be richer each year by $30 billion than if we hadn’t made those investments. And because investment in the public sphere has been neglected for decades, there are thousands of shovel-ready projects with extremely high rates of return.

A specific example: Because a handful of low-clearance bottlenecks currently make it impossible to ship double-decker cargo containers along the northeast rail corridor, these containers must be carried by trucks. The result is bumper-to-bumper truck traffic along I-95, which has diverted a growing volume of truck traffic 200 miles west onto I-81. According to one study, the cost of eliminating the rail bottlenecks would be $6 billion, and the benefits would be more than $12 billion, not even counting the value of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Failure to make investments like that would not be a smart move.

Religion and society
There is an excellent “line by line” skeptic’s guide to the Bible here. Note: this wouldn’t be news for any “lay Bible scholar” who accepts modern Biblical scholarship (e. g., most educated mainstream Christians and Jews who are interested in the Bible) but it does expose the absurdity of literal interpretation and fundamentalism.

Spiritual Experiences This is a very interesting article on the brain chemistry of so-called “spiritual experiences” (e. g., what part of the brain is activated and how such activation can be induced by drugs).

Skeptics and rational leaning believers alike might find this interesting.

Why I despise superstition This is the harm that “faith” (faith that some deity intervenes in the material world) can cause:

A one-time friend of a mother accused of homicide for praying while her daughter died says the mother believed that people get sick because they are sinning.

Althea Wormgoor took the witness stand Tuesday in the second day of the trial of Leilani Neumann. She is charged with second-degree reckless homicide in her daughter Madeline’s March 23, 2008, death in rural Weston.

Wormgoor testified that just before the girl died, Neumann put her arms in the air in prayer and praised God for being able to heal diabetes and cancer and make the girl 10 times better in the future.

Wormgoor says Neumann prayed that God was going to show his power in healing the child.

Silly Facebook is cracking down on “fake” facebook accounts. The trouble is, they are throwing off some people that have honest accounts but “fake sounding” names.

Silly part II I sometimes make cracks (oh, bad pun) about checking out the spandex clad ladies at running and walking races. But at least I am not this bad: video is NSFW, though it shows no nudity. (for the curious, the video was shot at a road race and shows close up of female spandex wrapped rear ends and is set to music).

No, I didn’t take the video; I got there by looking for “fast walking” on youtube as, well, I am interested in walking fast.

19 May 2009 (morning)

Workout notes yoga, then 8 miles of easy running on the East Peoria trail (41:11 out, 37:33 back, to the 4 mile mark on the pavement). Beautiful day, breezy, cool. I felt better after the first 2 miles.

Snark and other things

Paul Krugman
Dr. Krugman had a couple of interesting posts. One was on health care; it may be the case that we might end up with a health care plan that is more similar to the one that Hillary Clinton was pushing for rather than the one that President Obama campaigned on. Obama had thought that if we could get costs down, people would want to buy into the insurance program. Many, myself included, thought that this would be an easier sell politically, though at the time I said that I was ambivalent on this issue, though I thought that Obama’s plan was more viable on political grounds. But evidently a plan that is more similar to the one that Clinton campaigned on appears to be closer to what we will end up with.

Dr. Krugman backed the Clinton plan, but is being classy about it:

Actually, I don’t care who gets credit, as long as we actually get universal health care.

But Dr. Krugman’s bite is reserved for the Republicans!

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? [...]

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Now you know where I get my disdain and contempt for conservatism.

Scientists I hang around with mathematicians at work, but in my day to day life I encounter many non-technically inclined people. I don’t get along with them very well; it is almost as if I have to walk on egg shells around them.

Why? Well, this is the kind of discourse that I am comfortable with:

Yesterday, I tore into a reeking pile of creationist bogosity by Peter Heck. This morning, he sends me email.

Dr. Myers,

Someone sent me a nasty email that included a link to your blog. I found it a pretty thorough shallacking! Not that I’m opposed to that. If I put arguments out in front of people, [...]

This is a rather disingenuous reply; he wasn’t just shellacked, he was exposed as a dishonest fraud who knew nothing at all about the subject he was critiquing. I didn’t just criticize a few niggling errors in his article, I ripped it apart from stem to stern and pointed out that he was ignorant and unscholarly…and now he comes back and offers the feeble excuse that he had three biologists look it over? Who were these biologists, and why didn’t they point out that the article was nothing but a crudely hacked together raft of creationist fallacies?

[...]
When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they’ve got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

Heck was merely flaunting the tedious ignorance of creationists, which is no longer ever surprising. He was also making a dishonest pretense to knowledge, which is also not surprising, and is one reason to never, ever trust anyone who claims to be a creationist — it’s a synonym for lying, stupid fraud. I don’t even trust his letter. Does anyone really believe that he will regard the series of arguments he made in his article as “hacked up”? I would bet that he’ll be thumping the same old lies again next time he preaches in front of his fellow phonies.

I recommend reading the whole article; it describes how the swine flu is an example of evolution in action. But what I wanted to highlight was the clarity and the straight forwardness in the speech and writing of scientists. There is none of the phoniness and sugar coating that one often sees in non scientific circles.

Religion and Woos

Friendly Atheist found that this was amusing:

God did it. Gee, let me tell you when I’ll believe that “god did it”: if I were to go out and, say, win the New York Marathon, then I’ll believe that some deity did it.

But in all honesty, this doesn’t upset me. After all, I don’t give up an evening to watch Dwight Howard give a physics lecture. I enjoy watching him play basketball because he is very good at it. And yes, he has one of the most impressive physiques I’ve ever seen.

If you want to know what I find troubling, go here. I hold the Secretary of Defense of the United States to a much higher standard in this area.

Some leftist criticism of President Obama

Workout notes Yesterday 2200 yard swim; it was unremarkable and designed to kick out the soreness. I haven’t practiced enough fast walking to have NOT been sore after a hard effort marathon.

Today I’ll do some light jogging and maybe something with my yoga teacher? We’ll see.

Education
The Boston Globe is reporting that elementary school teachers in Massachusetts don’t have the basic skills in mathematics to be able to effectively teach it. Duh.

MALDEN – Nearly three-quarters of the aspiring elementary school teachers who took the state’s licensing exam this year failed the new math section, according to results being released today that focus on the subject for the first time.

Education leaders said the high failure rate reflects what they feared, that too many elementary classroom and special education teachers do not have a strong background in math and are in many ways responsible for poor student achievement in the subject, even in middle and high schools.

Elementary school teachers, including those in charge of first-grade classrooms, are considered the front line of math instruction, providing the building blocks of computation and mathematical reasoning that students must master before tackling algebra, trigonometry, and calculus later in their academic lives.

Previously, elementary school teachers could potentially receive a state license without answering a single math question correctly on the general curriculum exam. That’s because math was folded in with the other subjects – language arts, history, social science, science, and child development – to generate an overall score. Now math is scored separately as a subtest of that exam.

This is not a shock. But if you want to be amused, read some of the reader comments, such as this one:

As a retired elementary classroom teacher I can verify the results of these tests. Many elementary classroom teachers were weak math students when they were in school and want nothing to do with teaching math in their classrooms. All they want to do all day long is teach reading. Many are math phobics, avoiding it like the plague. Sadly, they then pass this mindset to some of their students.

It was almost comical. Every time we got a raise they’d all come running down to my room asking how much more money they would be making next year because they had no clue how to do percentages. NO CLUE! And they were certified teachers. Science was just as bad. They wanted nothing to do with it either. Now, if you think this is bad and Massachusetts is at the vanguard of public education in this country, imagine what the teachers from say, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. must belike.

The sad situation is that elementary education now attracts too many poor students. Yes, there are some good ones, but I don’t see them as being the majority.

That is the problem; I don’t see this as a “we aren’t preparing the teachers” problem but more of a “we are certifying teachers who lack the ability to learn the material” problem. We simply have to make teaching a more attractive job if we want to make progress, and I don’t see us as a society doing that.

Religious Labels
I was pointed to this post from the Richard Dawkins site:

Disagreement over the definition of atheist and agnostic has cluttered up various threads here, scattering confusion in its wake like a muckspreader in autumn.

The cause of the confusion is that atheists and theists have different definitions of the words agnostic and atheist, and adamantly refuse to accept the validity of each other’s definitions.

Here is a short form of the definitions from the two separate points of view.

Theist version: An atheist is certain there is no God, an agnostic is not certain.

Atheist version: An atheist believes there is no God, an agnostic doesn’t know.

The two versions are only subtly different, but a great deal of hot air has been expended on this difference. [...]

There is a reason why some theists define atheism in these terms. If they define atheists as being 100% certain of the non-existence of God, then they can claim that atheists hold their view as a faith position. This appears to make some theists more comfortable, it frames the debate in more familiar terms – a religious battle between competing faiths. Also, by widening the definition of agnostic as far as possible, I suspect that some theists feel more comfortable with the idea that these waverers may in due course return to the one true faith.

There are very few self-described atheists who conform to the theists’ definition of atheism. This is because the great majority of atheists have a scientific understanding of the world, and do not hold their atheism as a matter of faith, but rather through their understanding of the balance of evidence. They are aware that in principle some new piece of evidence might turn up tomorrow, and they leave themselves open to that possibility, no matter how unlikely they believe it to be.

Emphasis mine. True, technically, an agnostic is one who thinks that the existence of a deity is unknowable (e. g., the opposite of “gnostic”). And in my case, I reject a deity that interferes in world affairs (e. g. puts “god in the gaps”) and I deny any “singular miracles”; I have no idea if there is some grand “universal spirit” that somehow set it all up or put it into motion. To be honest, it would be kind of fun to believe in such a thing, but I have no evidence for it.

Poltics

Jesse Ventura, the voice of reason???

Liberal Criticism of Obama (and the Democrats)

Of course, President Obama is catching all sorts of flack from his base; one need only to surf to Daily Kos and take a glance. He is viewed as a “corporate sell-out”, “no different from Bush”, “closet Republican”, etc.

But there is more serious criticism of him.

Here is some criticism of him (or at least of his initial direction) on health care:

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called “single-payer” plan is the ideal, because competition among private insurers who pay health-care bills inevitably causes them to spend big bucks trying to find and market policies to healthy and younger people at relatively low risk of health problems while avoiding sicker and older people with higher risks (and rejecting those with pre-existing conditions altogether), and also contesting and litigating many claims. A single payer saves all this money and focuses on caring for sick people and preventing the healthy from becoming sick. The other advantage of a single payer is it can use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower prices from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and suppliers.

Not surprisingly, insurance and drug companies have been dead-set against a single payer for years. And they’ve so frightened the public into thinking that “single payer” means loss of choice of doctor (that’s wrong — many single payer plans in other nations allow choices of medical deliverers) that politicians no longer even mention it.
[...]

But now the Medicare-like option is being taken off the table. Insurance and drug companies have thrown their weight around the Senate. And, sadly, the White House — eager to get a bill enacted in 2009 rather than risk it during the mid-term election year of 2010 — is signaling it’s open to other approaches. What other approaches? One would create a public insurance plan run by multiple regional third-party administrators. In other words, the putative “public plan” would be broken into little pieces, none of which could exert much bargaining leverage on Big Pharma and Big Insurance. These pieces would also be so decentralized that the drug companies and private insurers could easily bully (or bribe) regional third-party administrators.

Another approach now being considered in the Senate would have states create their own insurance plans. That’s even worse: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are used to buying off state legislators and officials. They’d just continue their current practices.

A third option is to create a public plan that pays for itself and, according to the office of Senator Charles Schumer, who came up with it, “adheres to private-insurance rules.” But adhering to private insurance rules is exactly what the public plan is not supposed to do. How can it possibly discipline private insurers and get good deals from drug companies and medical providers if it adheres to the same rules that private insurers have wangled?

This isn’t a “they sky is falling” post but rather “I don’t like the direction that I am seeing” post.

We also have the debate on what to do with the people who authorized torture:

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