14 Nov 09 (am)

I am getting ready to hike 3-4 hours at McNaughton Park…hmmm..maybe 5?

Posts

Posts

Here is Jon Stewart watching Sean Hannity’s apology.

Hat tip to Sister Norma Jean.

Politics

Yes, we can afford to spend enough stimulus to reduce unemployment.

You might hear about Republican lead filibusters of judicial nominees. Remember that these people were offering “principled” opposition to filibusters when they were in power.

Science
Here is a map which shows the geographic spread of the swine flu (Nate Silver).

Quackery

You’ve seen stuff like this (can you count the number of basic mistakes this woman makes in her talk?)

(no, we humans don’t have an infinitesimal amount of mass; what this quack means is that the volume of atoms consist of mostly space).

You sometimes see quackery talked about in the mainstream media as well:

The opposition to science doesn’t seem to know any party bounds. On the right, global-warming skepticism is the rule, evolution a minority ‘opinion’, and if WorldNetDaily is to be believed, soy turns your kids gay.

On the left, we’ve now got the Huffington Post, recently lending their voice to Deepak Chopra, who in his latest contributions to the site expounded his philosophy of the mind (or whatever you want to call it), apparently seeking to justify it in quantum mechanics. Which gives it unwarranted legitimacy and worse, spreads disinformation about the science. Being somewhat qualified to rebut this, I thought I would try.

* BluePlatypus’s diary :: ::
*

Now it’s far from the first time the Huffington Post has gone off promoting bad science, pseudoscience or outright crankery, having for instance lent its voice to Jim Carrey (in his latest role as an immunologist) preaching the ‘dangers’ of vaccines. I’m not the only one around here who seems to think they’ve grown increasingly sensationalist as well as anti-science (although this is more in the realm of ‘bad science’). [...]

This is the one quantum-mechanical property that’s relevant to this discussion, which is that in quantum mechanics, things can exist in several states at once. (called a superposition) Objects don’t have definite locations; rather they’re ‘smeared out’ over space. The lighter they are, and the faster they move, the more ‘smeared out’ they can be. (those who’ve read about QM before know I’m referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle)

But if a measurement is carried out on the object, it will have a certain value. Which is part of the ‘weirdness’. QM cannot predict what value will be measured, but it can predict the probability of all the possible measurement results. It can predict the average of a large number of measurements. For instance, the electron of a hydrogen atom is most likely to be 53 picometers away from the nucleus. But a single measurement could give any result from zero to infinity.

Heavier, bigger, things on the other hand, get less and less ‘smeared out’, and you end up with the ‘classical’ situation, where things assume definite values for their location and speed and other things.

Chopra (and many, many others) misinterprets what ‘measurement’ means here, assuming that it has something to do with human activity, drawing not only the erroneous conclusion that human (or sentient) perception is what’s meant by ‘measurement’, but indeed that things don’t even exist if they’re not being ‘measured’. Stating: “In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.”

This is a basic misconception which has been debunked repeatedly (no doubt several times a week on physics newsgroups and message boards). Quantum mechanical measurements have nothing to do with ‘measurement’ per se, and especially not with human activity. It’s also at the basis of the Schrödinger’s cat ‘paradox’, as well as many of the early confusion about quantum mechanics.

In short, it’s a process known as decoherence. It’s not fully understood yet (although a lot of progress has been made since the early days and early confusion of QM). Decoherence is the process whereby quantum systems go from a superposition of different states to a single, definite state, through interactions with their environment. It’s ‘locked’ into this state because there’s an increase in entropy (disorder) associated with that change, making it irreversible (2nd law). It’s not fully understood yet, but it certainly doesn’t resemble the Berkleyian idea Chopra seems to have adopted.

This is an excellent article; if you like science and debunking quackery, read it!

13 November 09 (later am)

Workout 2650 set: 500 of back/free (about 9:50), 500 of side/free (about 9:40), 20 x 50 on the 0:50 (mostly 47, a couple of 48s, a couple of 46s), fins: 100 back, fly, back, fly, drill, then 3 x 50 paddle.

The 20 x 50 on the 50 set wasn’t quite as comfortable as I’d like though I did get a tiny bit of rest each time.

Social Sometimes, it is time to move on even if you like your sweetie:

My ex-girlfriend truly believes 2012 is the end of the world. She bet me 50 dollars that the world would end in 2012. I explained to her if the world is going to end, then there’s no way I could pay her. I either win the bet, or we’re all dead. With a frustrated look on her face, she doubled the bet to 100 dollars.
-Thomas, UCSD

Science evolutionary trees of life are checked and cross checked by many methods, including homology (body structure) and by genetic markers. Here is but one example. In other words, there is evidence; this isn’t just “if the rules of science applied, what would we get best-guess” type of conjecture.

Politics Is it time for Democrats to panic? “Concern for getting results” might be the order of the day. I see some bluedogs losing seats but the bottom line is that our tent is too darned big to begin with.

Religion In Cincinnati: threats have made a bill board company move an atheist billboard.

But in Chicago, groups have protested against the atheist billboards (satire)

Really: why would a sign that says “you can be good without god” threaten anyone? I’m sorry, but when religious types claim that they are “persecuted” they mean either

1. “I won’t be given a captive audience” or
2. “It is wrong that people will actually say that they don’t believe the way that I do; they should just shut up about it” or…even worse…
3. “Smart people openly disagree with me and that hurts my feelings”.

13 November early am

At one time, there was supposed to be a teacher shortage. Now there is a teacher glut…except for one subject area:

Since last fall, school systems, state education agencies, technical schools and colleges have shed about 125,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the same time, many teachers who had planned to retire or switch jobs are staying on because of the recession, and many people who have been laid off in other fields are trying to carve out second careers as teachers or applying to work as substitutes to make ends meet.

In Texas, the Round Rock school district had more than 5,000 applications for 322 teacher openings this year and saw its pool of subs almost double to 1,200, about 2 1/2 times as many as it needs even on a particularly bad day during flu season, said spokeswoman Joylynn Occhiuzzi.

“It is a tougher job market, and you get applicants that you might not normally have because of the economy,” she said. [...]

But the nationwide demand for teachers in 60 out of 61 subjects has declined from a year earlier, according to an annual report issued this week by the American Association for Employment in Education. Only one subject — math — was listed as having an extreme shortage of teachers. In recent years, more than a dozen subjects had extreme shortages.

Emphasis mine.

Smoking: didn’t fall in 2008; it was a slight rise (though I haven’t checked to see if it was a statistically insignificant rise.)

Is this a trend or is this due to changing demographics? I’d have to see the data with cross-tabs.

Learn to Speak Tea Bag

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Carly for California

“Carly for California” has an ad on Daily Kos.

But there is no reference to the fact that she is a Republican on her front page; it isn’t all that easy to find.

Why is that?

November 12 09 (noon)

I got my swim in (2650 yards, or 1.5 miles). 10 x 100 on the 2 to warm up; my times dropped from 1:50 to 1:40 with the same effort. Then 4 x 250 on the 4:20 (17:11 for the “broken 1000″); I got about 10 seconds rest on each repetition. That is slower than I’d like.

Then I cooled down with off strokes, drills, paddles, etc. My legs cramped up a bit from this morning’s elliptical workout.

Other posts
This is a very moving diary of President Obama visiting Arlington National Cemetery with several photos.

12 November 09 (am)

Workout notes 5 miles on the stepper; then yoga class. I haven’t decided if I will try to sneak in a quick “drill” swim session over lunch. Injury: not even apparent, even when in “child pose” (where the knee is bent deeply).

Posts
Of course, you know that the Fort Hood killings would bring out the “we are too darned PC to watch those Muslims” crowd:

“Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan. [...]

A short time after the shootings at Fort Hood, President Obama asked us not to jump to conclusions. To many Americans, this was a grating request, of a piece with the political correctness that was responsible–it has emerged–for the hands-off treatment by the Army of Maj. Hasan.

Uh, maybe it is a good idea to not jump to conclusions because we are often wrong when we do?

Abstract
An in-depth look at coverage of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Excerpt: “Seldom have so many been so wrong — so quickly. In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. “The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,” declared CBS News’ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). “The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,” ABC’s John McWethy proclaimed the same day.

“`It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,’ wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,” declared the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen.”

I suppose that with the Right Wing, it is ok to look for extremists in the military, so long as they aren’t of the right wing variety.

Fox News
Kudos to Sean Hannity for admitting to a “mistake”:

Speaking of Fox News: Paul Krugman points out that “pro-business” doesn’t mean “pro Republican”:

Clearly, the Fox Business crew is having a very hard time. They bill themselves as being truly pro-business — not like those leftists at CNBC. But they aren’t really pro-business; they’re pro-Republican. They’d like you to believe that it’s the same thing; but there’s this awkward fact that markets have, you know, gone up under Obama.

And this isn’t just a phenomenon of the last few months. Look back at stock returns under recent presidents, which is easy using a clever gadget at Political Calculations. Taking real, dividend-inclusive annual returns on the S&P 500, I get:

Reagan: 10.08%
Bush I: 10.16%
Clinton: 14.35%
Bush II: minus 5.81%

Tax-hiking Democrats are supposed to be terrible for business; I mean, Norman Podhoretz whines that Jews should be conservatives because Republican policies are better for the economy. But the data just refuse to say that —

But really, that is a good definition of “conservative” isn’t it: believing what you believe regardless of what the data says? That is probably why so many are creationists, believe in religious miracles, supported President George W. Bush, etc.

World Events:
Afghanistan Evidently President Obama is taking control of the situation:

From here.

Academia: I’ve been blessed with excellent students for 2009 (spring and fall). But that isn’t always the case; I’ve sometimes had encounters with students like these.

And, in all honesty, sometimes professors can be stupid, ignorant jerks and do some very immoral, stupid things. This incident was also talked about here.

A New Entry to ESPN’s Bottom Ten College Football teams…

Check in out Go to the list and scroll down to number 5.

This reminds me of the final Notre Dame game of the 1970 regular season: ND came in undefeated and in the top 3 but they had a USC team to play; one that had played terribly the week before and got blown out by UCLA.

ND ended up playing horribly and lost 38-28; subsequently they went to the Cotton Bowl and knocked off undefeated Texas 24-11. Joe Theisman was their quarterback.

Anyway, ND got an honorary mention in the “bottom 10″ after that game…my dad remarked “he (the list maker) must be a disappointed ND fan”.

11 November 09 (am)

My gut is still a bit bloated; I am going to have to look at getting a different type of yogurt.

Still I swam ok; 500 (8:52), 5 x 100 (25 front kick, 75 free) on the 2 (1:46-1:53), 5 x 100 (25 3g, 75 free) on the 2 (1:43-1:47), 12 x 50 on the :50 (46-48 each; ran out of gas), then 400 with fins of various (back/free, some fly), 3 x 50 with paddles.

I might do some stair stepper tonight after work.

Religion and Science
It is well known that the elite scientists are mostly atheist or agnostic (93 percent). But the word “scientist” is thrown around and sometimes refers to those who haven’t done original peer reviewed research.

If one loosens the definition a bit one can get different results:

A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.

Still there is a difference. But who are the scientists in this survey?

Well, get a load of this:

13 percent don’t accept evolution??? (note: this wasn’t about the relative importance of “natural selection”, “genetic drift” and the like).

Evidently they count people at the Discovery Institute as “scientists”.

Stewart mocks Hannity for inflating Bachman rally attendance, trying to pass 9-12 rally footage off as Bachmann rally footage | Media Matters for America

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