Elsewhere on the Interweb (12/5/07)

Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction:

Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics.

Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive" it under some reasonable-sounding assumptions. However, those reasonable-sounding assumptions are typically not true of the real world. Using only time-symmetric laws of physics, you can't derive time-asymmetric macroscopic behavior (as pointed out in the "reversibility objections" of Lohschmidt and Zermelo back in the time of Boltzmann and Gibbs); every trajectory is precisely as likely as its time-reverse, so there can't be any overall preference for one direction of time over the other. The usual "derivations" of the second law, if taken at face value, could equally well be used to predict that the entropy must be higher in the past -- an inevitable answer, if one has recourse only to reversible dynamics. But the entropy was lower in the past, and to understand that empirical feature of the universe we have to think about cosmology.

Orac takes David Kirby to the mat for his book Evidence of Harm, still asserting the link between vaccination and autism:

I'm not aware of any scientist who insists that autism is "purely a genetic disorder with no known 'cause' and probably no cure." (It's tempting to point out to Kirby that if an order is genetic it has a cause, but I'll refrain. No I won't.) It likely is, however, largely genetic, a different thing. As for whether or not there is a "cure," it's impossible to know if there is a "cure" if we don't understand the cause yet. As for the autism "tsunami" (can one imagine a more offensive term?), there is plenty of evidence that, yes indeed Mr. Kirby, it is primarily due to increased awareness and broadening of the diagnostic criteria, as one major study by Paul Shattuck showed last year. He then goes on to crow about how all of us presumably blind, dishonest, or pig-headed scientists who have looked at the evidence from multiple large, well designed epidemiological studies and concluded that neither the mercury that used to be in vaccines as part of the thimerosal preservative nor the vaccines themselves are associated with autism.

Whoops. I guess Iran really isn't pursuing nuclear weapons:

IT REPRESENTS a remarkable change of opinion. Just two years ago the consensus view of America's 16 intelligence agencies was tough and unambiguous: Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure." The fact that Iran then, in 2006, overtly restarted nuclear enrichment--the process to make nuclear fuel which can also be used to make fissile material for bombs--in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions only increased the sense of alarm. Speculation has since grown that America might take matters into its own hands and bomb Iran. George Bush said in a recent speech that an Iranian bomb could contribute to "world war three". Dick Cheney, the hawkish vice-president, gave warning of "serious consequences" if Iran did not suspend uranium enrichment.

Yet on Monday December 3rd the intelligence agencies revamped their view of Iran's nuclear-weapons programme. In a new official estimate released that day, the National Intelligence Council states frankly that "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its weapons programme." A few sentences later it states with "moderate confidence" that "Tehran had not restarted its nuclear-weapons programme as of mid-2007." The weapons programme is defined as relating to weapons design, weaponisation work and covert uranium work. It also concludes that Iran is susceptible to outside diplomatic pressure and scrutiny, which together were responsible for the halt in the weapons programme in 2003. The Democrats have promptly called for a "surge of diplomacy" towards Iran.

Cafe Hayek explains why health care collectivization -- or my generally the logic that "I am going to tell you how to live because I am paying" -- brings us all into conflict:

If you are obliged to subsidize the costs of my behavior, then you clearly have an interest in restricting any of my behaviors that might potentially raise the costs you bear as my subsidizer.

But a question: if the proponents of greater collectivization of health-care provision not only recognize this fact but cite it as a justification for restricting personal freedoms that would otherwise be no one else's business, it seems to follow that these proponents of collectivization of health-care provision would recognize also that the problem is so general that it indicts the very idea of collectivization of health-care provision.

In response to a post showing interspecies parenting, Kate at Anterior Commissure is skeptical:

Depending on the species, maternally responsive individuals (i.e. lactating, parturient females) are typically in a highly anxiolytic state; given recent exposure to their offspring, they are less fearful of threatening situations, novel stimuli, and intruders. If you'd present one of these maternally responsive individuals with offspring of a different species, you'd have the best chance of seeing the female act maternally - truly maternally - toward the offspring. A series of very early studies (1954-6) by Frank Beach showed that maternal female rats will pick up and retrieve rabbit and other small non-rodent offspring and bring them back to their nest for care...though not as fast or frequently as their own offspring. While I have no doubts about the strength of maternal motivation - it's my dissertation research - I question its translatability to other species.

I'm not so sure about non-maternally primed animals.

Read the whole thing.