Scientific Knowledge

Jerry Coyne laments the lack of it here.

Here is the source article:

Things like this

and this

doesn’t help.

Humor, Boxing and Searching….

Humor
Gas really is high; you get charged for even holding the pump out, even if you aren’t pumping anything! (via Fail Blog)

Boxing: Vitali Klitschko vs. Odlanier Solis
Here is the whole fight:

Don’t blink.

Fans are screaming bloody murder:

But, as it turned out Saturday night in Germany, Solis was exposed in a one round, one punch Ko by Vitali, aka “Dr. Ironfist.” A right hand floored the chubby Cubano and when he got off the floor, he acted as though his legs were wobbly.

Maybe his pins were shaky or maybe Solis wanted no more incoming fire from VK. Vitali himself seemed to be the angriest person in the arena in Cologne, where 19,000 paying fans turned up, at the three minute duration of this mismatch.

Here’s acerbic Kevin Mitchell (Guardian), from ringside:

“Solis and Klitschko clearly are beasts from different parts of the forest.

“Klitschko, although half a foot taller and nearly 10 years older than the challenger, weighed in less than three pounds heavier than him, testimony to his discipline and Solis’s lack of it – although he whipped himself into decent shape for this fight to get down to 246.9, the lightest of his career.

“It was Solis’s 10th and possibly last contest in Germany. He was nearly a stone lighter than his last outing in December, when he laboured to beat the 40-year-old Ray Austin on disqualification in the 10th round of a quite farcical eliminator for this title shot.

“The 30-year-old Cuban has lunched on some poor fare since his professional debut in Hamburg in 2007, a year after he defected. Six fights ago, in October, 2008, he was fed Chauncy Welliver, a 27-year-old native American Indian, heritage he left at the door when he described himself as “The Fat Dorky White Guy”. Paunchy Chauncy lasted nine of the 12 rounds, yet, astoundingly, was the reserve candidate for Wladimir Klitschko when the WBO and IBF champion was negotiating with Dereck Chisora – and Solis was being nudged up the ratings.

“If further evidence is needed of the parlous state of heavyweight boxing, I can’t help you. It is nights such as this that do not just give the business a bad name but make dedicated fans wonder why they bother.”

Yes, Solis does have some knee damage:

The 30-year-old Cuban was taken to hospital, where a scan revealed tears to his anterior cruciate ligament and external meniscus, as well as cartilage damage in his right knee.

The crowd in Cologne was disappointed by the 179-second bout. The fans booed and whistled for several minutes after it ended.

Klitschko said he’s “sorry for the spectators. I don’t fight for me, I fight for them.”

The 39-year-old Ukrainian had delivered a right to Solis’ left temple, when the Cuban wobbled back and fell on his back before clutching his knee.

It was Solis’ first defeat in 18 pro fights. Klitschko improved to 42-2.

I don’t know what to make of it; yes, I know all too well that knees can go. But Solis clearly was not in shape for this fight.

Searching
Frankly, I hope that she has to look for a good long while before finding what she is looking for:

20 March 2011

14 mile walk; slow (3:38); I did the above course plus a 3 mile out and back. The last uphill bit (2.6 miles?) took 38:57. Yeah, I was slow, but at first I was really worried that this was only 13 miles; then I realized that I added a Springdale loop. It was breezy to windy and I started right after the rain ended.

Posts

Japan
Here is a stirring video of some personal rescues in Japan.

Nuclear technology and “economic locks”: sometimes a technology can get locked in economically even though there might be some technically better alternatives out there. Note that the US Navy went with the light water reactor design due to size.

Evolution: Punctuated Equilibria (via Sandwalk, where Professor Moran is responding to comments)

Economics Paul Krugman says that Elizabeth Warren is right; so the Obama administration ought not to distance itself from her. Though he picked her to set up the new Consumer Protection agency Republicans are attacking her. But so what? When have the Republicans been right about anything?

Religion and Science
New atheists are like the tea-party?

Because, of course, the New Atheists are philosophically unsophisticated:

Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

No, we don’t have to show that Kuhn and Foucault are wrong about the nature of science. All we have to show—and have shown—is that religion and science use different and incompatible ways to “understand” the universe, and that the religious way isn’t really a way of understanding at all. All we have to show is that there is only one science, which is practiced by researchers of all creeds and nationalities, but that there are elebenty gazillion religions, all of which disagree about their “truths.” All we have to show is that religious “truths”, like resurrection and parthenogenetic humans, violate scientific ones. All we have to show is that we know a lot more about physics and biology than we did 200 years ago, but don’t know a jot and tittle more about the nature of supposed gods. And all we have to show is that faith is considered a virtue in religion, but a vice in science. We’ve already shown these forms of incompatibility. QED.

Right on, Jerry Coyne! My guess is that people like this want their “word salad gods” to be taking seriously. There is really no need. What these people don’t understand is that we need only consider gods that interact with the universe.

And yes, there are religious scientists. But that does NOT mean that science and religion are compatible; after all, there are clergy that are pedophiles, and I don’t see pedophilia being compatible with religion either. Yes, I think that the shot taken at Francis Collins is unfair; he is a top notch scientist who happens to hold some strange beliefs.

19 March 2011 early am

Paul Krugman: come on Democrats, remember the unemployed:

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

Jobs do get mentioned now and then — and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.

It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon. But unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record.

In short, we’re well on the way to creating a permanent underclass of the jobless. Why doesn’t Washington care?

Part of the answer may be that while those who are unemployed tend to stay unemployed, those who still have jobs are feeling more secure than they did a couple of years ago. Layoffs and discharges spiked during the crisis of 2008-2009 but have fallen sharply since then, perhaps reducing the sense of urgency. Put it this way: At this point, the U.S. economy is suffering from low hiring, not high firing, so things don’t look so bad — as long as you’re willing to write off the unemployed.

Science
From here:

What if cooling in one or more of the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant were lost?

Richard Lester, chair of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, emphasizes the “very, very” unlikely possibility of that scenario. But if it were to occur, the inherent heat of the radionuclides would cause the fuel in the reactors to melt. Here’s what would happen next. [...]

DemConWatch:: Voting Against One’s Own Self Interest

Via Democratic Convention Watch

DemConWatch:: Voting Against One’s Own Self Int…, posted with vodpod

18 March 2011

Workout notes 40 minute run on the treadmill; just over 4 miles. 20 minutes steady, then 10 x {walk 1, run 1 HARD}. That 10 x 1 set just about killed me. Hours later I still feel it; I need to do this set once a week. THIS is what training feels like.

Japan Mano Singham notes that Japan has NOT experienced widespread looting nor price gouging. He says (correctly) that this should have received wider notice.

Politics I
Republicans appear to be embracing the Scott Walker approach (the Wisconsin governor). What I don’t have a feel for: how will this play out with the general public? It will certainly fire up the Democratic base for 2012; my guess is that we won’t see disinterested Democrats like we did in 2010.

Politics II
Some of my liberal friends have been lampooning Ann Coulter’s statements on radiation which are being touted as “radiation is good for you”:

(from here)

My guess is that she is talking about the hormesis effect:

A new study from the University of Toronto at Scarborough has found that low doses of radiation could have beneficial effects on health.
The findings, published in the latest issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, found that low, chronic doses of gamma radiation at 50 to 200 times background levels had beneficial effects on the stress axis and the immune axis of natural populations of meadow voles. The paper provides evidence of hormesis from the only large-scale, long-term experimental field test ever conducted on the chronic effects of gamma radiation on mammals.

Hormesis is defined as a phenomenon in which low doses of an otherwise harmful agent can result in stimulatory or beneficial effects. This phenomenon has been observed in a broad range of chemicals including alcohol and its metabolites, antibiotics, hydrocarbons, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides, as well as physical processes such as radiation exposure. The effects of hormesis have been observed in a wide range of organisms, from microbes and fungi to plants and animals. Hormetic responses are varied in form and include increased longevity; growth, reproductive and physiological responses; and metabolic effects.

“Exactly how low-level radiation causes a hormetic response remains uncertain because few laboratories have studied the pathology or physiology of mammals exposed throughout life to dose rates below those causing detrimental effects,” said Professor Rudy Boonstra of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Stress and Department of Zoology. “This study provides a potential mechanism to explain the benefical effects.”

But I should be clear here: this is just one study, and the exposure is “low level” and chronic; this is NOT a one-time dose. Think of it this way: it is true that a gradual, proper weight training program can be beneficial. But that doesn’t mean that it is a good idea to lay a one ton chunk of concrete on your chest and to try to push it off. Or: a long term gradual program can get some people to the point where they can benefit from a 20 mile run. But trying to make some 300 pound tea party member run 20 miles would be a very bad idea.

Atheism and Religion
Jerry Coyne is interested in why some people are atheists. In a nutshell, here is how I got here and why I stay here:

1. How I came to atheism: I evolved. (Yes, this is a bad metaphor…no reproduction was involved)

I was raised Catholic. In high school, I read the Bible. I was horrified; the people in the Old Testament struck me as backward, ignorant and evil. The God that they worshiped was even worse. Then I found out that “educated, sophisticated” people didn’t believe that stuff either.

Then I started to treat the ritual stuff as symbolic. Eventually, I began to understand that I was reciting stuff I neither understood “proceeds from the father and the son….sits at the right hand of the father”…what in the hell does that mean? “Transubstantiation”??? Are you kidding me? Then I dispensed with it and became a UU (Unitarian Universalist). Then I realized that UU’s embrace all sorts of BS that I can’t stomach; many are no more rational than Christians.

2. Why I stay here: there is zero evidence for the existence of any of the gods, spirits, deities, etc. that I’ve heard of. All real advances in knowledge and quality of life came from rational disciplines (e. g., science). Word salad gods (e. g. Karen Armstrong type gods) are ridiculous; it is a bit like saying “god is that what is true but can’t be proved” or other such nonsense.
As far as other gods that I haven’t heard of, especially those that don’t interact with the spacetime continuum: possible, but such debates are speculative intellectual exercises and not much more. Just making stuff up is not an answer to anything.

Sure “sophisticated” theologians can conjure up all sorts of constructs. I just say this: give me evidence where your deity interacts with our universe. If it doesn’t, then go away: I am not interested in “possible, non-interacting” deities, though I like Miranda Celeste Hale’s Holy Rabbit.

17 March 2011 PM

We are back home.
Workout notes: 1:04 (a bit more than 4 mile) walk on trails in Rochester. Not much else; the shoulder had been achy but now feels better.

16 March 2011 pm

Posts
Science
Check out some WISE telescope images; note that these images are composites of many different wave lengths.
Here is one to tease you:

There are nine more. This one is of the Tycho supernova which occurred in 1572.

More on the Japan nuclear accident: the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering department has a website that explains most of what you are hearing about.

Of course, the real issue might be the economic pressures to cut corners and underestimate risks that might be the ultimate culprit, as Robert Reich explains:

Can we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only — to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

The New York Times reports that G.E. marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.

Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)

In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.”

[...]

Don’t get me wrong. No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that’s one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It’s unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

Inevitably there’s a tradeoff. Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

Animal altruism It exists:

Entertainment
Dick Morris says “No way Obama wins in 2012″.

Sure Intrade lists the Democratic nominee at 62.1 but what the heck.

We’ll see before too long.

More entertainment:

Latin American companies know how to get a guy’s attention! (click on the image to see the full sized version at Girls in Yoga Pants).

16 March 2011 noon

Workout notes hotel treadmill: 4 mile run in 37:03; slow start (10:11 first mile), 19:46 2 mile; sped up to 6.7 mph for the next .5 miles and ran about 8:30 for the last mile.

Shoulder: has hurt (mild) for most of the trip, though I haven’t lifted weights. I haven’t iced it either and I’ve done my “band” rotator cuff exercises.

Science/Technology and nuclear power
The events in Japan has cause many to rethink nuclear power, or at least strengthened the resolve of the anti-nuclear people. Of course, every technology has its limitations and drawbacks and these reactors are 40 years old and are of 1960′s vintage in terms of design.

But nuclear power does have some issues; some of it is the uranium mining, some of it is waste disposal and some of it is, well, corruption. Let’s face it: for nuclear power to work, it must be done carefully and honestly; there is no room for cost cutting, falsifying tests or bribes to lower standards. It is my opinion that this is the reason the Navy makes it work; they are super strict and can send you to jail if you lie and cheat on nuclear tests or check-ups.

Mayo Clinic
I have no idea if the doctors will help my wife find a solution to her problem (chronic coughing); sometimes there is simply no solution to a medical problem. But at least my wife will have known that she has tried everything.

But one thing that I’ve noticed: there are hardly any black patients (I remember seeing two or three…period). I’ve seen literally hundreds of people here. This really points to the inequities in our health care system; some of our citizens are simply shut out from the best that we have.

Rush Limbaugh Mocks Japan Quake Refugees (VIDEO)

Rush Limbaugh laughed about Japanese refugees recycling after the earthquake that struck the country on his Tuesday show. A caller asked Limbaugh, “If these are the people that invented the Prius, have mastered public transportation, recycling, why did Mother Earth, Gaia if you will, hit them with this disaster?”

Rush Limbaugh Mocks Japan Quake Refugees (VIDEO), posted with vodpod