End of the Workday 10 February 2010

The wife has to work late, and so it is time for some blogging!

We’ll start with some interesting videos (via PZ Myers):

This lampoons a creationist movie:

The placebo effect, well explained:

President Obama: sometimes people are a bit too quick to jump on him. Here is why I say this:

Arianna’s screaming, bright red headline:

OBAMA: I DON’T ‘BEGRUDGE’ BIG BANK CEOS FOR THEIR MASSIVE BONUSES

What Obama said:

I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.

Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney et. al. : it sure appears that she is running; so how does the primary math look for her? Nate Silver takes a look at her, and at other Republican hopefuls. But remember 4 years ago, not many were taking Barack Obama seriously, myself included.

My guess: the Republican nominee will be someone who isn’t on our radar screen at the moment.

Science, philosophy and all that Jerry Coyne’s latest post really hits home; I’ve had a discussion on facebook (a somewhat painful experience) and was frustrated that people really don’t know the difference between a suggested scientific model (which can be tested for utility, refined falsified) and just making stuff up:

Can the lucubrations of philosophers and journalists manqué get any sillier than this? A scientist’s confidence that he or she is on the right track is not the same religion’s absolute belief in the verity of propositions that can’t be supported empirically. And, of course, none of these scientific “leaps of faith” are accepted by scientists as true until they’re vetted by scientific experiment or observation. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, for example, wasn’t widely accepted as a true theory until Eddington demonstrated the bending of light around stars during an eclipse in 1919. In what way does this equate to a believer’s assertion that Jesus died for his sins because that believer simply knows that it’s so?

Now Vernon seems to know that something is amiss here. After all, he notes that “revelation purports to come from God and is untestable, two characteristics that the scientist would certainly reject.” But he then implies that revelations have their own sort of “truth,” for they “make sense to people”, who “test [these relations] against their lives, that it can account for the evidence of their experience.” But is that the same as testing the theory of relativity? Certainly not, for those revelations that are “tested” against people’s experience, and “make sense” to them, conflict among people of different faiths!

AMEN. Or…RAMEN….or something.

Seriously: I wish I could post the relevant parts of the discussion but it goes something like this: “ok, how did it happen?” Me: ” I don’t know”. Them: “oh, so you are giving up? What if Einstein did that?”. Me: “Einstein came up with a falsifiable conjecture”. They can’t seem to get that; they confuse Einstein using his mind and mathematics to come up with a model (which WAS published prior to be verified by experiment) with just making stuff up. They don’t seem to get the point that what Einstein came up with WAS subject to verification or falsification. They also confuse “intuition” with the need to have one’s result verified.

Once, my intuition told me that a certain mathematical conjecture was true. But I spent 2 years trying to prove it but couldn’t…it turns out that what I was trying to prove was false. Happily I published the counterexample. Of course, that was a mathematical result and not a scientific one.

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