Workout notes It was too sunny and pretty to stay inside, so I ran 3.5 miles at the Forrest Park Nature Center (41:33, which is actually slightly faster than average but 3 minutes off my best) then hiked 2.5 more miles as a cool down. I sure like that place. I’ve taken photos (at other times) which are available here.
Topics for the day
NBA:
The playoffs are exciting. Last night I watched the Lakers versus the Nuggets; this time the Nuggets won by 3 points.
Science
Climate Change Crock: once again, Republicans take the lead in spewing out nonsense:
In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.
Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.
Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.
Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., has co-written a paper that will detail next week the latest fossil discovery in Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, online journal.
This was a big discovery. But unfortunately, it wasn’t publicized in a scientifically honest way:
This is too hyper and sensationalistic. Many scientists objected to this (example)
On Tuesday, the world met “Ida” — a 47-million-year-old primate fossil touted as a “REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING,” according to a press release. The media went berserk. Google News now lists more than 750 articles relating to little ol’ Darwinius masillae — and the search engine itself even changed the lettering on its logo yesterday. At a press conference earlier this week, the study’s lead author, Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo, variously called the fossil the holy grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology. Next week, a two-hour documentary will air on the History Channel — brazenly called “The Link” — and a book of the same name has already hit bookstores.
All this has led many to cry foul about how the finding — published Tuesday (May 19) in PLoS ONE — is being sold. The Scientist spoke with Matthew Nisbet, a communications specialist at American University in Washington, DC, who studies the intersections between science, media, and politics, to discuss how the promotion of this one discovery really has changed everything in the realm of science communications.
The Scientist: How unusual is this amount of media attention for a single study?
Matthew Nisbet: This single study may have gotten more attention across multiple media platforms than any study in recent history. You may have to go back to the announcement that Raelians had cloned a human child, or the cold fusion announcement back in the early 1990s [to find a comparable media response]. Those are in part unfair comparisons because neither one of those studies was peer reviewed. The big difference this time is that this study is peer reviewed in a major journal.
TS: Have the authors of this study crossed the line into overselling and hype?
MN: It’s a difficult balance in order to generate wider attention. You have to use language and metaphors that are non-traditional in how science is communicated. On the other hand, whether it’s a fossil find or a pharmaceutical drug, you don’t want to use metaphors that oversell the impact or promise of the discovery. The risk with that is that you undermine credibility and trust with the public.
Follow the link to read the rest.
Of course, more evidence (like this) will not shake loose any of the creationists from their positions; Edward Current has a humorous take on this:
Science, religion and society
Why are people so quick to assign “agency” to any noticed pattern anyway? (e. g., posit a reason for some observed pattern or order). The reason may well be evolutionary:
The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.
But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.
The outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, made a contribution at the end of Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ installation that was at once touching, funny, serious and extreme. He said, rather controversially perhaps, that a lack of faith is ‘the greatest of evils.’ He blamed atheism for war and destruction, and implied it was a greater evil even than sin itself. Read the report running as a page lead in today’s paper. Bess Twiston-Davies wrote a nice At Your Service for online.
Admittedly, he was criticized by other clerics from his own church. But there it is again: “belief” is considered an intrinsic good and a lack thereof is considered evil. That is what I call stupid.
We witness many people who proudly declare that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years after the domestication of dogs, 5,000 years after the founding of Jericho and contemporaneous with the invention of the plow. They cling to these beliefs despite contradictions with history, let alone physics, geology and biology, because they believe the Bible is a literal history and science text. We find much to ridicule in these peculiarly unreal ideas.
We live in a world where the majority of the population are quite convinced that they have a direct pipeline to an omnipotent, omniscient being who has told them exactly how to live and what is right and wrong, and has spelled out his divine will in holy books. Unfortunately, there are many holy books, and they all disagree with each other, and of all these multitudes claiming possession of such a potent source of information, we similarly see widespread disagreement. This god seems to be an exceptionally unreliable oracle — most of what he has supposedly said is wrong. We atheists do take glee in pointing out God’s lack of consistency, which I’m sure Allen finds irritating.
Contrary to Allen’s claim that we aren’t interested in criticizing the important elements of religious belief, we are: We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We’re pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does. It wouldn’t be a place almost entirely inimical to our existence, with a history that reveals our existence was a fortunate result of a long chain of accidents tuned by natural selection. Most of the arguments we’ve heard that try to reconcile god and science seem to make God a subtle, invisible, undetectable ghost who at best tickles the occasional subatomic particle when no one is looking. It seems rather obvious to us that if his works are undetectable, you have no grounds for telling us what he’s been up to.
In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were “legal” and produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”
He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”
In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”
A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think the techniques disrupted any attacks. [...]
• Cheney said the Bush administration “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.”
The former vice president didn’t point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9/11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan.
• Cheney denied there was any connection between the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on “a few sadistic guards … in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency.”
However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ’a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.”
(3 of 5)
• Cheney said that “only detainees of the highest intelligence value” were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda operative to be captured after 9/11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in 9/11.
The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods “was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda,” Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.
• Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.
Cheney made no mention of Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with Al Qaeda, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.
A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.
• Cheney accused Obama of “the selective release” of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
(4 of 5)
“I’ve formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained,” Cheney said. “Last week, that request was formally rejected.”
However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.
• Cheney said that only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy Newspapers investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to U.S. officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005, that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in January 2004.
Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania.
In January 2007, the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.
• Cheney slammed Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.
The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush’s second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back,” Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007, interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. “So we need help in closing Guantanamo.”
(5 of 5)
• Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9/11, the Bush team had to take into account “dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.”
Cheney didn’t explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with Al Qaeda, a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.
The late Iraqi dictator’s association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.
The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9/11 said Hussein’s regime “has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President (George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait.”
A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that although Hussein supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad, at least until Hussein had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no “direct operational link” with Al Qaeda. [...]
• Cheney said that “only detainees of the highest intelligence value” were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda operative to be captured after 9/11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in 9/11.
The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods “was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda,” Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.
• Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.
Cheney made no mention of Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with Al Qaeda, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.
A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail. [...]
Four points. One: There was little danger of an actual terrorist attack:
Authorities said the four men have long been under investigation and there was little danger they could actually have carried out their plan, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported.
[...]
In their efforts to acquire weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.
The investigation had been under way for about a year.
“They never got anywhere close to being able to do anything,” one official told NBC News. “Still, it’s good to have guys like this off the street.”
Of course, politicians are using this incident to peddle more fear:
“This was a very serious threat that could have cost many, many lives if it had gone through,” Representative Peter T. King, Republican from Long Island, said in an interview with WPIX-TV. “It would have been a horrible, damaging tragedy. There’s a real threat from homegrown terrorists and also from jailhouse converts.”
Two, they were caught by traditional investigation and intelligence. Not airport security. Not warrantless eavesdropping. But old fashioned investigation and intelligence. This is what works. This is what keeps us safe. Here’s an essay I wrote in 2004 that says exactly that.
The only effective way to deal with terrorists is through old-fashioned police and intelligence work — discovering plans before they’re implemented and then going after the plotters themselves.
To keep track of my training. I train for ultramarathons (I usually walk these) and sometimes do running races, bicycle rides and open water swims for variety. My best ultra accomplishment was walking 101 miles in 24 hours in 2004. There was a time when I could run a sub 40 minute 10K (did that once), but that was another lifetime ago; these a days 24 27-28 minutes for a 5K would be more like it. I also have an off and on interest in yoga.
From time to time, I post what I am thinking about mathematically
I often post links to science articles, especially articles about cosmology and evolution.
I am very sympathetic to the “new atheist” movement, though some might consider me to be an agnostic. I reject any notion of a deity that interferes with physical events, but remain agnostic to the idea that there might be something “grand and wonderful” (Dawkins’ phrase) outside of our current spacetime continuum.
I am a liberal Democrat who thinks that the current social atmosphere is tilted way too far toward the interests of big business, and I reject the idea that a “free market” cures all ills, though pure socialism doesn’t work either. I am also a believer in the freedom of speech, including speech that I might not like. Also, I’ve been involved (to a moderate degree) with political campaigns, ranging from City Council races up to Presidential races.
Since being targeted by neo-nazis, I’ve started to identify with the anti-racist and the anti-fa movements.
I like to post photos of trips and vacations.
I sometimes blog about boxing matches and football games.
Ollie is a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.
The above refers to me; the below refers to Barbara (my wife)
Barbara's Liberal Identity:
Barbara is a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. She believes in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
Created by OnePlusYouBlog Roll Notes
As of March 20, 2010, I went through my longer blogroll and deleted links that no longer work. Be advised that some blogs have not been updated and others have been moved, but you can get to the new address via the old one.
I've read and visited all of these sites at one time or another. However, I've decided to post a separate list of those blogs which I read regularly (some daily, others periodically).
My list of my regular reads
Humor
