In Response to C. S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis Reasoning on Atheism

‎"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
—C.S. LewisThe Case for Christianity, p. 32.

Suppose there was an intelligence behind the universe, a creative mind. In that case, something may have designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. 

It is only because the atoms inside my skull are arranged just so that gives me the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my thinking to be my own? 

It’s like a machine ever stamping out the same metal parts, never able to vary from its predetermined task. 

But if my thinking is not my own, of course there is no argument, about anything, for I am only what I was made to be, and incapable of being otherwise.

And therefore I cannot believe in God, or anything else. I am incapable that act. I have no reason. I have no thought. Belief ceases to have meaning. 

The point being, something independent of God must exist, some "jug of spilled milk" that has splashed itself into a map of my life, or I am nothing more than a mindless automaton. 

Take THAT, presuppositional apologetics!

Madison as Hell

"An activist judge stubbornly insists that Wisconsin's legal system must be obeyed, even if Republicans disagree with it."

Or see it at Colbert Nation.

Wisconsin's Tuesday non-partisan elections are turning out to be anything but. The intensity and nastiness of 3rd party television advertising cannot be understated. I'm getting really tired of one sided calling the other stupid, ignorant, dirty, rabid, wicked, sleezy, anti-American, Communist, [re]tards, {inset ad hominem here}, scum, more ad hominem, disgusting, cruel, thug*, brutes, etc. etc..** Opinions aside, this language is uncalled for in any civilized discussion. If you cannot be bothered to think of an opponent as a real, thinking person with honest opinions, then you may not be qualified to be part of a civilized discussion.

* There seems to be a particular agenda to push this word, because it is showing up everywhere. It ain't random!

** These words culled from the comments at a site with decidedly one-sided opinions, but I'm pretty sure there are people on both sides speaking of/to each other like this.

Statistics Fail

image found here. source?

History suggests that if you rescale, shift, and truncate two time series, it's usually quite easy to make them look very similar. This does not mean anything at all, it's simply fishing***. The graphic is suggesting that the US is following Japan into economic deflation, which would be bad. However, this is showing a subset of inflation data (food and energy*) compared on an annual percent change scale* which is shifted by 12.5 years** and truncated before 1989/2001**, and suggesting they are somehow the same. Yeah, right.

* possibly arbitrary.
** almost certainly arbitrary.
*** Statistical jargon alert: "Fishing" is a word for the practice of looking at your data in so many different ways that you eventually find an association simply by chance, and then reporting that association as if it was what you were looking for in the first place. See also: bullshit, cheating, lying, multiple comparisons.

Found on NYT, but the source of the graphic is not clear. I sure as hell wouldn't put my name on it.
[Hat-Tip]

Anti-Anti-Science Chatbot

Have you ever participated in a near endless online discussion with someone who has their own definition of science and reason?

AND

Do you happen to have some computer programming skills?

If you answered yes to those, it may have occurred to you to write an automated program to automate replies to bad arguments. I have certainly thought about it more than once, but I don't have the right set of programming skills to carry this off very well, nor do I have the time for that sort of fun. Fortunately, someone else does.

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents 

of Anti-Science Nonsense

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.

Now before this turns into the wrong argument, this post isn't about AGW one way or the other, or any specific point of disagreement. Solving real problems requires than people communicate honestly with one another, and automated replies do nothing to create real communication. Someone will create an "auto-bot" sending automated messages to tie up the "anti-bots" (assuming this hasn't happened already), and anti-anti-bots to tie-up the anti-bots and ... ... you get the idea. Pretty soon people won't be in the loop at all, and people just won't communicate.

The XKCD webcomic recently presented a different take on a similar problem with SPAM. If you have enough bots creating comments, and all comments must pass a filter of being "Constructive and Helpful", you effectively filter out all the people who are not capable of constructive comments as well. MFA.

XKCD: Constructive

In the comments on the Chatbot article, someone starts slinging the words "ad hominem" around without really knowing what it means. This might be another good response to program into the Chatbot.

Data Science, Science Data

Image Nature News

The latest Nature News has an article titled Computational Science: ... Error, describing the increasing difficulty scientists face as the computer programming required for research becomes more and more complex. I face a similar prob in my work. Much of the work I do requires a fair amount of database management as a precursor to the analysis. Most of this is basic SAS programming, with some tricky bits here and there, but it is all within reach of my programming skills. Most researchers don't have my programming skills (and with a BS in CoSci, many statisticians don't have my programming skills), which is one of the reasons they might come in for statistical help in the first place. Database management is an important skill for an applied statistician, but it is not my primary skill ("Dammit Jim, I've a statistician, not a bricklayer").

The point of this is not to blow my own horn, but that I have a set of skills for managing databases that is nearly independent of my statistical knowledge. The Nature News article points out the problems with programming skills, but the same problem exist with database skills: Some researchers don't understand the basics of recording data in an organized manner, and disorganized data can lead to as many problems as disorganized programming.

It is not too unusual for researchers to bring me data (typically in a spreadsheet), and sometime I spot specific problems that could be error in how they collected and recorded the data. This is fairly important, because if the data is wrong then my analysis will be too. Sometimes I can fix these errors for them, other times I have to have the researcher fix the problems, because it requires medical knowledge and familiarity with (or access to) the original data source to make the correction. Once these bugs have been ironed out, all it well and I do my statistical thing.

There is another sort of error though, and it is much more subtle. These are the errors in the data that don't really look like errors. When someone brings me their data and there is nothing obviously wrong, I probably don't question it, and proceed with the analysis. There are some common ways this might happen: cut & paste errors, "bad" sorts that scramble the data, inconsistency in data entry, all simple mistakes. Sometimes evidence of these errors shows up during my database management prep work or during the analysis itself. Obviously if a mistake is found, it gets fixed. However, if my experience with finding errors in the late stages of analysis is any indicator, then if seem likely that some of these errors are never found. The "garbage-in, garbage-out" principle applies, and some of the analyses I've produced were likely garbage, because the data was garbage.

The good news is this sort of error is unlikely to contribute much to the larger of body of scientific knowledge. By the nature of statistics (and with an assumption of some randomness) these subtle errors are unlikely to produce significant results, less likely to be in agreement with other published studies, and certainly unlikely to be verified by follow-up studies. The bad news is that some simple, perhaps even careless mistakes can ruin months or even years of research effort, which is a waste of effort.

Finally, this brings me that other set of skills: teaching. Whenever I have the opportunity to work with people who are starting off on new research projects, I try to teach the basic data-skills, the do's and don'ts, to help them get good data and do good research. Not everyone is interested in spreadsheets and databases, but it is not too hard to convince researchers that a little extra effort up front to get good data will pay dividends down the road when it comes to publications. It certainly pays me dividends when it comes to actually doing the statistical analysis - my primary skill - rather than spending hours (or days, or weeks) trying to track down what went wrong with the data, or unknowingly analyzing junk data.

Second Verse: The Census Will Be Wrong

This is a follow-on to my post of three days ago: The Census Will Be Wrong. We Could Fix it. My friend Matt sort of set me off with his comments - I think he likes to do that :-)  - and my "longer response" has turned into a post of it's own, and inspired another yet to come.

Matt writes: I think the author underplays the risk of political/agenda hijinks... The first thing that came to my mind when I read this was that craptastic Lancet paper about civilian deaths in Iraq. Perception is reality, and statistics have gotten a bad rap from a few bad actors. Them's the breaks.

First of all, this is by no means a flame aimed at my friend, and anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight. This is intended to be my professional opinion with some lightly researched examples to illustrate the problem.

1. The current census "head count" is known to be flawed (1), and both Democrats and Republicans attempt to take advantage of this (1). 
2. The mathematics of statistical resampling are apolitical. It's simple a better way to do it, and less subject to error and bias.
3. Statistical resampling is a simple concept wrapped in a lot of boring math. The basic idea is to go back re-check some of the original counts, and fix them.
4. The Lancet surveys of war casualties in Iraq is arguably flawed, but a flawed paper in no way invalidates a field of mathematics, or for that matter even the methods of that paper. By way of equally flawed logic, we should abandon all automobiles because Chrysler made the "K" car (That last bit makes more sense than I thought it would.).
5. The Lancet paper is, if anything, an example that of a study that would benefit from resampling. At a glance - and that's literally all I've given it - the war causalities estimates may suffer more from a lack of precision than a lack of accuracy.

There seems to be a common thread here that many people just don't get what statistics can really tell us. Part of that problem is the growing pains of a fairly recent area of mathematics working it's way into a culture already stressed with information overload. Another part of the problem is that statistics have been poorly taught, frightening students with the math and failing to convey the meaning behind it.

That last sentence expresses one of my original motivation for this blog: to hell with the math, I want people to understand the meaning. Keeping with this theme, my next post will be about the statistical meaning of Accuracy, Precision, and Bias.

Here are some odds and ends I dugs up while researching this post:
-Article about 1999 Supreme Court decision on statistical resampling.
-The 1999 Supreme Court decision on statistical resampling.
-There are some additional comments on the blog of Jordan S. Ellenberg, author of the Washington Post Op-Ed.
-Unrelated Census Hijinx

The census will be wrong. We could fix it.

This is sort of a professional pet peeve among statisticians, and the issue comes up with every census;

Jordan Ellenberg writes: Opponents say that statistical adjustment would violate the constitutional requirement of an "actual enumeration" of the population. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 1998 that the Constitution's language was "arguably incompatible . . . with gross statistical estimates." The sampling adjustment is indeed an estimate of the population -- but so is the unadjusted number, which estimates that the number of Americans missed is zero! To choose the raw count is to be wrong on purpose in order to avoid being wrong by accident.

Emphasis added. There are demonstrably better statistical methods to perform census estimates, and they should be used.

The census will be wrong. We could fix it.

[Hat Tip 2 Terence Tao]

You Can't Trust Science!

I get it - I get the whole Atheism versus Religion thing. In matters related to science, the atheists generally have it right, and it's not too hard to find someone who is: A) a kook, and B) religious, that is sadly wrong on a given scientific matter. I'm cool with that.

There one thing that bugs me though; this video offers a good example of a bad argument. It is an error to say that because religion has little to offer in terms of scientific thought and progress, it has nothing to offer at all. Religion has a lot to offer*, just not in the realm of science and technology. There are valid criticisms of religion, but criticizing religion for not being scientific is just silly.

Likewise, atheism may be entirely agreeable to scientific thought, but it is the scientific thought and not the atheism that creates progress and technology. Giving atheism credit for science and technology is equally silly.

All I'm saying is that science and religion have to be appreciated on their own merits. And if you just want to see the boobs, they appear at 3:20 into the video. ;-)

* I won't go into what religion offers and/or what it has accomplished, because that is a matter of individual beliefs, and your mileage may vary. I won't get into that argument.

[Hat Tip to One Good Move]

Intelligent Anagrams

I like Anagrams.
I like poking fun at Intelligent Design.
I like it when good things go together.

Discovery Institute --> Service Nutty Idiots
Discovery Institute --> It Sired Nutty Voices

Irreducible Complexity --> Extol Imbecilic Prudery
Irreducible Complexity --> Proudly Exert Imbecilic
Irreducible Complexity --> Dourly Imbecilic Expert

Answers in Genesis--> Seesawing Sinner
Answers in Genesis--> Sneering Ass Swine
Answers in Genesis--> Sneering Ass Wines
Answers in Genesis--> Sinners in Sewage
Answers in Genesis--> Ninnies Asses Grew
Answers in Genesis--> Insane Sewer Signs

Brought to you with the services of the Internet Anagram Server at Wordsmith.Org.

Smoking Lettuce, Redux

An anonymous commenter replied to a video and comments I posted last June (see Smoking Lettuce). My posting has been lax lately, so the reply gets a whole post to itself. 

To briefly summarize, Representative Steve Buyer thinks smoking lettuce is the same as smoking cigarettes. I copied a statement from Buyer's web site stating that the FDA is under-funded and over-stressed and that they have no business trying to regulate a risky product; I agree to the first point and strongly disagree with the second. Oh ... and I might have implied that Representative Buyer is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But enough summarizing, you can read the original post if you must, let's get on to Anon's comment:

Anonymous said...

...Was he right? About the lettuce?

Well, actually, in the problems he outlined (Cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems) he was right - you WOULD have similar problems. Now, in terms of the 'good stuff' - doubtful. Lettuce obviously wouldn't have whatever it is in tobacco that makes people keep smoking it (though I couldn't profess to know, in that I find smoking repulsive).

His point about the FDA? Yeah, it's overburdened and trying to sink its roots into nooks and crannies whenever it can. And when it tries regulating something that is already known to be dangerous - cigarettes - then it means your money is being spent insuring the 'safety' of a product that is KNOWN to be dangerous. How stupid can you get?!

And in the real world that most people don't like thinking about, the increased price on ciarettes as a result of the regulation would inflate the prices of legal smokes. So smokers get their cheaper cigs from elsewhere with less regulation - and the LEGAL distributors suffer, through no fault but the government's.

So yeah, what's up with Steve? Must be smoking lettuce or something.

Hello Anon,
Thanks for stopping by to comment. I suspect you have a certain political inclination on this, which is fine, but I think your concerns on this issue are misplaced.

You may indeed have similar problems with smoking lettuce, but I doubt there will ever be a serious study on the effects. However, I am certain that tobacco is naturally higher in aromatic hydrocarbons, tars, and has a number of ingredients artificially added (like formaldehyde). Aside from the smoke, chewing tobacco also has links to diseases such as oral cancer, and I am reasonable sure that you can chew lettuce all you want with no particular risk of cancer. So I can't prove that smoking lettuce is safer than smoking tobacco, but I strongly suspect it is true.

The stuff that keeps people smoking tobacco is nicotine, also naturally occurring, except that the tobacco companies strictly control the "dose" of nicotine delivered much in the same way that pharmaceutical companies control the dose of other drugs. If I recall, was the FDA's basis for the regulation of tobacco; tobacco may be naturally grown, but cigarettes are produced to the tolerances of prescription drug, are highly habit forming, are a serious health risk, and are marketed to kids. Now nicotine itself, addictive properties aside, isn't especially harmful, but it keeps their customers locked in a nearly unbreakable habit, and exposing themselves to the other harmful properties over-and-over again, sometimes for life ... and often a rather shorter and less healthy life. Tobacco companies know darn well that if someone starts smoking as a teenager they are much more likely to stay a smoker for life, and generally have a long history of bad behavior when it comes to making a few bucks for themselves. Industries that behave badly deserve the regulations they get.

I will agree that the FDA is over-stressed and under-resourced. I absolutely disagree that controlling a highly addictive drug with dangerous side effects is beyond their jurisdiction. You don't have to look too hard on the FDA site to find something that we know is dangerous and needs to be regulated. We know that high-traffic intersections can be dangerous, right? And since everybody knows this, we can just take down all those silly useless stop signs and traffic lights. Right??  No???

I don't know what to make of Anon's comment about taxes on cigarettes, which are already very heavily taxed already. I worry these taxes tend to be an extra burden on the poor, but I have no sympathy for those in the business of distributing cigarettes. If the distributors don't like it, then there are plenty of other products they can make money distributing.

So to wrap this up; No, Steve Buyer was not right ... about the lettuce.

Addendum: TBA

Science is Flattening

Science is Flattening, at least that what the Flat Earth Society would have us believe. 
 

John Lynch links to this Guardian article about the resurgence of the FES, which is actually a very fair and open treatment of the topic. Here is a tidbit from the front page of the Flat Earth Wiki:

Throughout the years it has become a duty of each Flat Earth Society member, to meet the common Round Earther in the open, avowed, and unyielding rebellion; to declare that his reign of error and confusion is over; and that henceforth, like a falling dynasty, he must shrink and disappear, leaving the throne and the kingdom of science and philosophy to those awakening intellects whose numbers are constantly increasing, and whose march is rapid and irresistible. The soldiers of truth and reason of the Flat Earth Society have drawn the sword, and ere another generation has been educated and grown to maturity, will have forced the usurpers to abdicate. Like the decayed and crumbling trees of an ancient forest, rent and shattered by wind and storm, the hypothetical philosophies, which have hitherto cumbered the civilized world, are unable to resist the elements of experimental and logical criticism; and sooner or later must succumb to their assaults. The axe is uplifted for a final stroke - it is about to fall upon the primitive sphere of the earth, and the blow will surely “cut the cumberer down!”

The FES is nothing if not ambitious. Their Wiki contains a number of interesting explanations of common arguments against the Flat Earth hypothesis, of which I shall present a few:

On High Altitude Photography

Most amateur pictures of the earth are not doctored. Flat Earth Theory holds that there is elliptical curvature from the edge of space, one hundred miles in altitude. Any photograph showing a curved elliptical horizon from very high altitudes poses no affront to FE.
...
Curvature results from the fact that on a flat earth we are looking down at the circular spotlight of the sun. A circle is always curved in two dimensions. When looking down at the circular area of the sun's light upon the earth we see elliptical curvature.

On Occam's Razor

Occam's Razor asks us which explanation makes the least number of assumptions. The explanation which makes the least number of assumptions is the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor works in favor of the Flat Earth Theory. Several examples exist below.

What's the simplest explanation; that my experience of existing upon a plane wherever I go and whatever I do is a massive illusion, that my eyes are constantly deceiving me and that I am actually looking at the enormous sphere of the earth spinning through space at tens of thousands of miles an hour, whirling in perpetual epicycles around the universe; or is the simplest explanation that my eyes are not playing tricks on me and that the earth is exactly as it appears?
...
When I walk off the edge of a chair and go into free fall while observing the surface of the earth carefully the earth appears to accelerate up towards me. What's the simplest explanation; that there exists hypothetical undiscovered Graviton particles emanating from the earth which allows them to accelerate my body towards the surface through unexplained quantum effects; or is the simplest explanation that this mysterious highly theoretical mechanism does not exist and the earth has just accelerated upwards towards me exactly as I've observed?

On Undersea Cables 

Q. If a cable company put down a cable its length would have to be longer than predicted (by round earth geometry) if the world were flat. If somebody put down a bunch of cables and found that they were longer than they'd expected, wouldn't they tell somebody?

A. But the cables are always longer than expected. It's just explained by underwater currents, soil irregularity, winds and errors in placement, et cetera. And somewhere in that is lost a mistake caused by a slight misunderstanding of the Earth's shape

This last one is actually quite testable. All it would take is a bit of data about undersea topography, the chord length between points on a sphere, and the actual amount of undersea cable laid down. I wonder if anyone in the FES has bothered?

[Coincidentally, the beautiful image on the left is currently on my computer desktop.]












On The Burden of Proof

Q. Isn't the burden of proof on you to prove it?

A. No. You're the one claiming that NASA can send men to the moon, robots to mars, and space ships into the solar system. We're not claiming those things.
...
You're the one making all of these fantastic claims. You're the one claiming that earth orbit exists, government contractors can land man on the moon, send robots to mars, and that we can do all of these amazing never before done things.

The burden is on you to prove these things to us. You're the one making the claim. The simplest explanation is that NASA really can't do all of that stuff.

If two people are having a debate, should the burden of proof rest on the shoulders of the person who make the most complicated claim, or should the burden of proof rest on the shoulders of the person who makes the simplest and easily observable claim?

In a discussion on the existence of ghosts should the burden of proof be on the group mumbling "just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist," or should the burden of proof be on skeptics to prove that ghosts *don't* exist?
...
The burden of proof is always on the claimant and never on the skeptic. The burden of proof is on you.

I'll answer that. You don't get to be a skeptic just because you do or don't believe in something. Skepticism requires honest understanding of the facts; it requires credible hypotheses; it requires evidence that rises above a reasonable threshold of crackpottery. It is not the burden of the skeptic to explain to every crackpot why the pot is cracked. Indeed, answering an irrational query with rational arguments can be something of a fool's errand. That doesn't mean the skeptics shouldn't try, just that the skeptic is not responsible for the willful irrationality of the crackpot.

Deniers != Skeptics

Author David Brin has a nice essay up about the difference between Deniers and Skeptics of Human Generated Climate Change. Here's an intro:

Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics"

What factors would distinguish a rational, pro-science "skeptic" - who has honest questions about the HGCC consensus - from members of a Denier Movement who think a winter snowstorm means there's ni net-warming of the planet?

Is such a distinction anything more than polemical trickery?

Well, in fact, it happens that I know some people who do qualify as climate change "skeptics." Several are fellow science fiction authors or engineers, and you can quickly tell that they are vigorous, contrary minds, motivated more by curiosity than partisan rigor. One who I could name is the famed physicist Freeman Dyson.

(In fact, if truth be told, there are some aspects of HGCC that I feel I want clarified -- that seem to be poorly-justified, so far. I am an ornery, contrarian question-asker, of the first water!)

After extensive discussions with such folk, I found a set of distinct characteristics that separate thoughtful Skeptics from your run of the mill, knee-jerk Denier dogma puppet.

Here's the first one:

The first, second, and last, can be found at Contrary Brin.

In Search of the Mother Troll

I was reading an article at Smithsonian.com:

Evolution in the Deepest River in the World

which I found quite interesting. What really caught my attention though was the comments. Third comment to appear was this:

evolution is a biggest HOAX in world history

... and I think the commenter might be fairly called a Creationist. I won't mince words though, this commenter is a troll. There are probably hundreds of replies now and several trolls getting batted about by smart people who seem to enjoy a good game of Whack-A-Mole. More power to them. My interest was in how the Creationists trolls appeared seemingly on cue, as if they were being actively organized and sent off to do battle against "the evil that is evolution".

"Do they really do that?" I thought. "Well, duh!", I answered, "And stop talking to yourself too."

Of course these people are organized, either at their churches or at various sources around the internet, and all I need to do is search around until I dig some up. So I searched, and I found a likely candidate; a forum post titled Help! need help debating an evolutionist! at a site called Chistianforums.com. Just the sort of place where I might find a seething den of Creationist scheming to troll any public forum that dares to publish about science and evolution. The original poster (OP) asked for help ...

[outdoor_engineer] I have an ongoing debate with a kid at school about evolution.
He's presenting some pretty good arguments and he's kicking my butt, can anyone help?!

... and with a little prodding OP provided details of the argument:

It is a long, drawn out logic style argument, I'll go through it step by step:
First he said that there are two different types of claims:
faith claims: those which could not be falsified by observation or experiment even in principle.
(i.e. god exists)

-and-

science claims: those which can be falsified by observation or experiment
(i.e. the earth is roughly spherical in shape)
This seemed perfectly rational, so I agreed.

he asked if I would agree that only science claims should be taught in science class. After some hemming and hawwing I agreed.

then the argument went like this:

faith based claims are those that which cannot be falsified.
faith based claims should not be taught in science class.
Creationism / ID can incorporate any evidence by saying "God made it that way"
Therefore creationism / ID cannot be falsified
Therefore creationism / ID should not be taught in science class.

He got me, Where did I go wrong? where's the flaw in his logic that I can't see?

This OP kid is up against a good argument, but this is where things started to go wrong. I was expecting the first reply to an irrational screed, but what came next was this:

[Mallon] There is no flaw in his argument. He's right.

Why do you think creationism should be taught in science class?

Huh? What?! This was supposed to be an investigative post about where trolls come from - where they live, what they plan, how they organize. I wanted to blog about that. I intended to blog about that. WHAT'S GOING ON???  How can my seething den of rabid Creationism be filled with educated, thinking, rational people. This is horrible! My first attempt is an utter failure.

But what a wonderful way to fail.

If your read the thread you will see a number of rational people writing similar comments, but a real troll does finally show up on page 2, who writes ...

[Calypsis4] I'll give you some help, young person.

1. Evolution does not exist in the first place because if it did it would be a violation of natural law. (a) the law of Biogenesis...life must generate from life. It cannot generate from non-living matter and no one has ever observed such a thing occur in nature. (2) Entropy keeps non-living matter from developing into living organisms and entropy keeps living organisms from becoming a different kind of organism. (3) the fossil record reveals that living organisms began abruptly, highly complex and no transitional forms. [...]

2. God meant what He said through Moses and the creation in Genesis and there is no historical reason not to believe the account he gave us. Even the ten commandments affirm the six day creation account (Exodus 20:11). Secondly, the Lord Jesus Christ affirmed the six day creation account (Mark 10:6 & 13:19). All of His disciples taught that the creation was true and that Adam and Eve were real people.

3. Evolution is nowhere taught in the Bible. It is a fairy tale.
[emphasis added]

Pity this poor troll, for he is about to get body-slammed:

[pgp protector]
1) Evolution has nothing to do with Biogenesis, please learn what the theory states.

2) Genesis only works that way if you read it as 100% literal, and that also makes God a deceiver (God made the Earth look old, but told us it's young).

3) computers programing is nowhere taught in the Bible. Please stop using the internet.
[emphasis added]

I laughed. I howled. My wife wondered what the heck I found so funny. The troll introduces some fun and it turns into a rollicking good 8 flaming pages of Young Earth Creatroll versus Theistic Evolutionists. Darned sharp TE's too - I could learn something from them. I also learned that this forum has "darker" corners, which might be the lair of the trolls I seek. My search has just begun.

Diesel Exhaust is a Weighty Matter

Scientific American has this online article -

Idle Moments Turn into Tons of Air Pollutants at Schools

- the point of which is to point out the enormous amounts of pollutants produced by idling truck engines, and that New York City has a law regarding this that really ought to be enforced. I have little doubt that this really is a significant source of pollutions, but this statement made me raise my eyebrows:

"Idling buses, cars and trucks may not seem like a big deal, but in New York City they spew out as much pollution as nine million diesel trucks driving from the Bronx to Staten Island, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s roughly 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 940 tons of nitrogen oxide, 24 tons of soot particles, and 6,400 tons of carbon monoxide each year"

Can that be right? That's a lot of trucks making the trip. I'm a statistician, and I wonder about such things like the accuracy of statistics like this. Watching TV on a Friday night, I started doing so some Googling and back-of-the-envelope calculations during the commercials.

The claim of the article: 130,000 + 940 + 24 + 6,400 = 137364 of pollutants released each year, that's 274,728,000 pounds. The distance between the Bronx and Staten Island is 33.9 miles (so says Google Maps), and in 9 million trips that works out to 305,100,000 miles. 274,728,000 pounds divided by 305,100,000 miles is 0.9 pounds of pollutants per mile.

The Economy of Diesel trucks: The average big diesel truck pulling a load gets about 5.5 miles per gallon of fuel (so says Wiki Answers), or 0.182 gallons of diesel per mile. Diesel weighs about 7.2 pounds per gallon (in cold weather yet, so says faqs.org), so 0.182 gallons/mile times 7.2 lbs/gallon is about 1.31 pounds of diesel per mile driven.

Now 0.9 lbs/mile of pollutants divided by 1.31 ponds per mile of diesel work out to 0.6873, or about 70% of the total mass of the diesel fuel converted to pollution. At this point, I ran into difficulty finding a source for the actual composition of diesel exhaust. 70% might be reasonable; after all, the mass of the fuel has to go somewhere.

But wait, I've made a mistake - most of the 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide is oxygen, without looking up the molecular weights of carbon and oxygen, AT LEAST two-thirds of that mass is coming from the atmosphere and not the diesel fuel. 70% now seems more reasonable.

There is another possible error, which I don't know how to resolve. In my reading I discovered (lost the link, sorry) that idling diesel engines are relatively clean, but produce heavy pollution when under a load (you see this on the road all the time). Therefore the number of idling vehicles must be really huge to make of this difference. This is also quite possible; NYC is a BIG place, but the article does not offer any information about how many vehicles this might be.

I would assume that if NYC has a law that trucks should not idle for more than a minute, there must be some good evidence somewhere to back this up. The original claim seems to come from the Environmental Defense Fund, but I'm too tired for more digging tonight. This has been an interesting bit of fact checking, except that I ran into a wall with limited knowledge of chemistry. Maybe I should ask a Chemist?

[UPDATE, 11/01/2009]
I received this response to my question at About.Chemistry, Sean writes:

the average chemical formula for diesel is C12H23. with that said, the mass of a carbon atom is 12.01 g, and hydrogen is 1.008. so, mathematically, diesel has the molecular weight, on average of 167.304 grams per mole of fuel.
the weight of the oxygen atom is 15.99g (mostly rounded to 16g), so carbon dioxide is 44.01 grams per mole.
in general, this relates to something of the sort:
2 moles of C12H23 +  O2 gas in excess -makes-> 12moles CO2+ 12moles CO+ 23moles H2O. as the formula for the burning of the diesel, if it was a very complete and clean reaction, however, we all know that's never the case. ;.;
as for the 130,000 tons of CO2, that comes to

 117 934 016 200g of CO2

and of that gram mass, 27% is carbon, while 73% is oxygen. that's what...
31842184374 grams of carbon and 86091831826 grams of oxygen.
however, diesel is more of a blend of things and not just the carbon and hydrogen, which pretty much takes all that I have written and makes it almost useless. In my research, though, I've seen more about the fact that sulfur is present in the fuel than the carbon emissions, as that will inhibit the use of catalytic filters to scrub the exhaust clean, as in most vehicles.
also, in response to your lost link, I dug this up
http://busbuilding.com/bus-conversion/diesel-engine-idling-from-an-authority-detroit-diesel/
which says that idling is bad for diesel because it produces more exhaust via incomplete combustion.
anywho, I'm not too advanced in chemistry, so forgive me if I supplied you with random nonsense, I was trying to think of a way to equate the mass of fuel to pollutants produced, but as I can't find an exact formula for what the reactions are this is the best I think I can do. I'm hoping someone else can chime in from here and make more sense of things, and of anything, I wish you luck with your search.

Thanks Sean!

After some more digging I turned up an abstract and a paper on wind tunnel experiments (Part 1, Part 2) that are related, but none seem to be the origin of the original statistics. I might have more luck searching from work tomorrow.
-- OR --
I could ask the author of the SciAm article, Mr Brett Israel. Would that make it too easy?

[Further update 12/09/2009]
I never heard back from the author and I've pretty much given up. Sean's comment about catalytic converters is something else I had not thought of that might affect the results. So many windmills to tilt at, and so little time.

Anti-Vax Debate

Its Rationality Vs. Moronity over at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant. Mike would seem to be a very patient man.

Very Contrary

David Brin has long been one of my favorite authors, but I only recently discovered my more socio-political ramblings. I'm don't agree with all that he says (and I don't think I am supposed to), but he really make me think about think in a different way.

This post is actually an experiment in publishing from Google Sidewiki. A new service that allows you to post comments about any web page. It works, but now I'm going back and editing this monster I have created.

Now back to Brin - - -

Contrary Brin: A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war...

- - - Some highlights:

Does The New Right Even Have an Agenda Anymore?

Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun -up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine. Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.

...

No. Given their lack of any other tangible accomplishments across the last fifteen years, one must to conclude that the core agenda of Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch and their petroprince backers really is quite simple.

To find out just how far they can push "culture war" toward a repeat of 1861.

...

Alas. This is no longer even about "conservatism" anymore. Barry Goldwater lived long enough to denounce what he saw happening to his beloved movement, and things have plummeted even father, since that great man died

Nowadays, bottom-to-top -- and especially at the very top -- it is all about stupidity.

AND from the comments:

What I'm saying is that this post is sabre rattling. The red-staters will not back down because you remind them that people from blue states could defeat them as they did in the past.

...

But there is a power center that might push for such a demolition. It is foreign, VASTLY richer than Murdoch, and has openly avowed its wish for a world they control, and without us in it.

in reference to:

"http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf"
- Contrary Brin: A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (view on Google Sidewiki)

Education is Not a Placebo (My 15 Seconds of Fame)

I'm going to be FAMOUS for all of about 15 seconds. On my drive home Thursday evening I heard the following commentary on NPR's Marketplace program

Education works as a placebo effect

TYLER COWEN: There's lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine; people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.

But we're learning that placebos apply to a lot of other areas and that includes higher education. Schooling works in large part because it makes people feel they've been transformed. Think about it: college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates, but studying Walt Whitman rarely gets people a job. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity.

The educators and the administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group of higher earners. If students believe this story, many of them will then live it.

Dr. Cohen goes about the cost of prestige and status, but I pretty knew how I wanted to respond at this point. After dinner I found the Marketplace site, checked the commenting guidelines and left this comment:

I acknowledge what Dr. Cowen says about the value of confidence and self identity, but higher education is anything but a placebo. Learning itself is a critical skill which is gained through study, and that study might be biology, business, physics, physiology, zoology, or any number of other areas, including Walt Whitman. In a pinch, maybe even economics will do.
A college degree does not mean a student has mastered a subject, rather it is an indication that the student is teachable, and capable of jumping through the higher hoops of their profession.

I figured there was a good chance of this getting selected to be read on the air - because my comment was about the only one under the 150 word limit. I was right too, because I got an email from Alison Gilbert asking if I would record an edited version for broadcast on the letters segment:

Higher Education is anything but a placebo. Learning itself is a critical skill which is gained through study. That study might be biology, business, physics, physiology, zoology – even Walt Whitman. A college degree does not mean a student has mastered a subject, rather it is an indication that the student is teachable and capable of jumping through the higher hoops of their profession.

So there you have, my 15 seconds of fame broadcast for all to hear on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 9th. Tune in your radio or listen in online.

And for the record, I agree with Dr. Cohen that confidence and self image are an important part of education, and that the costs of education are getting out-of-hand. However, education is not a placebo; you just can't fake that.

[UPDATE] Here is a link to the September 8th Letter segment and text.

When Zombies Attack!

TimesOnline has some important news for us :

The attached study, he said, highlighted "a problem we should wake up to -- this paper shows only the harshest control measures would give us a chance." Just what might this terrifying new threat be?

In my eagerness for a story, I hadn't noticed that Neil had added a smiley face at the end of his email. And when I opened the attachment, I discovered a paper entitled: "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection".

Move over swine flu. The zombies are coming...

[Image LaughingSquid]

Scary stuff, but even worse, the first commenter writes ...

I would just like to comment about the example of Zombies from '28 Days Later'.

They weren't actually Zombies; In the movie they are listed as the Infected. Zombies in the traditional sense cannot starve to death while the Infected in '28 Days Later' can in fact starve as seen in the ending scene.
[emphasis added]

[RantMode=ON]
This just kills me. There is no way in which the movie 28 Days Later does not completely satisfy all aspects of the zombie movie genre. A few seconds of emaciated, and more importantly [IIRC, 'cause ain't watching that dog again] partially dismembered ZOMBIES at the end does not make it not-a-zombie=movie.
[RantMode=OFF]
[Hat Tip to the Sciencepunk]

Opposition to the Single Payer System

Environmental Roadie and Assistant Guitar Lawyer Sean Carman offers his views on health care reform domestic airport security. [Via The Huffington Post]

Why I Oppose the Single-Payer System
for Domestic Airport Security

Let me explain. There are any number of ways to ensure that passengers are prevented from bringing weapons or explosives onto domestic flights. Some advocate a "single-payer" system, in which a single entity, say, the United States government, becomes the sole source of funding for airport security. Under this plan, it would be the GOVERNMENT that organizes the provision of security services at all American airports.

That's right. GOVERNMENT employees would write the regulations dictating what items can be brought into the cabins of passenger aircraft. GOVERNMENT employees would operate the security checkpoints at America's airports. When someone walked through airport security, the person watching the metal detector to see if it registered an alarm to indicate the presence of metal in that person's pants would be a GOVERNMENT employee.

As you might begin to see, Sean isn't really talking about airport security at all. Go see what he is up to at The Huffington Post.

Save us from 12/21/2012

I guess I have not been paying attention, because I just learned that the World will end on December 21, 2012. Fortunately, Xtine is here to save us:

“I’ve known about 12/21/2012 for a good three years,” explains Minnesota native Xtine. “And I’ve been pissed off about it for a good three years. It sucks to have my birthday right before Christmas, but this end of the world prediction is the last straw.”

Xtine says she “plans to put an end to the end of the world baloney." She encourages everyone to google debunking, disproving, criticism of 2012. As much evidence as there is for the end of the world, or the ushering in of a New Golden Age, there is evidence that “a whole lotta nada” is going to happen on her birthday… again.

After reading her post, I am prepared to believe she can save us by the power of rant alone.