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Disappointed in Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff has long been one of my favorite writers. He is a consistent civil libertarian with a love for and long history with jazz, so there is much to admire. But on the Terri Schiavo case, he has swallowed the nonsense coming from the right hook, line and sinker. In his latest column, he writes: She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists. Utter nonsense. There are two who claim she is not in a PVS, Hammesfahr and Cheshire.…

Steven Pinker on Lawrence Summers' Heresy

Steven Pinker, in my opinion one of the dozen or so most brilliant thinkers on the planet, has an article in the New Republic about the brouhaha over Lawrence Summers' remarks on possible non-discriminatory causes of the differential success of men and women in science. In the midst of an enormous amount of emotion-laden overreaction, I think Pinker strikes the right chord of rationality when he says, "To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable…

The Alabama Anti-Gay Books Bill

I found the actual text of the bill proposed by Alabama Representative Gerald Allen, the runaway winner of last month's Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly the Idiot of the Month award). It's pretty ridiculous stuff, and it goes even further than I thought. It even prohibits public universities and colleges in Alabama from using any public money to purchase any books that even recognize homosexuality: No public funds or public facilities shall be used by any state agency, public school, public library, or public college or university for the purchase, production, or promotion of printed or…

Child abuse? Or not?

A 7-year old boy is traveling around the country, standing on street corners and preaching hellfire at passers-by (you can hear him in a recording, too). He's part of a caravan of Baptists making an expedition up to the land of the Yankees to tell us all we're going to hell. Is this abuse? The poor kid is wasting time on the Bible and haranguing random people at the behest of his parents. Oh, excuse me, at the behest of God. The evangelical Baptist couple nurtured his talents with Bible readings in the womb and bought Samuel his first guitar at age four, said his mother. They read the Bible…

Jesus made him do it

It wasn't that long ago that we got to hear lots of wailing about how secular/liberal values led to the Virginia Tech massacre (although, to be fair, most of the wailing was of the "god works in mysterious ways" sort). We had Chuck Norris blaming the "secular progressive agenda". Though one can point to Cho's own psychotic behavior and our graphic slasher media as potential contributors to his deplorable murder spree, we must also hesitate to consider how we as a society are possibly contributing to the growth of these academic killing fields. I believe those who wield the baton of the…

The Meaninglessness of "Darwinism"

ID advocates love to use the term "Darwinism" rather than "evolution" or "evolutionary theory", a tendency that has always grated on my nerves. We don't do this with any other theory. We don't talk about "Einsteinism" instead of the theory of relativity or "Wegenerism" rather than plate tectonics. Why the focus on "Darwinism"? I submit it is because "Darwinism" is simply a codeword that they can use to mean whatever they want. They know that the average person has so little understanding of the scientific ideas that they don't distinguish between evolution and the big bang, for example. In…

Bolton Appointment is Unconstitutional

Marty Lederman has an essay on Jack Balkin's page arguing that the recess appointment of John Bolton as our Ambassador to the UN is unconstitutional, as are almost all such appointments made not just by Bush but by Clinton and most presidents before him. I fully agree with him. Lederman authored several briefs for a case brought against the recess appointment of Judge William Pryor and his briefs are right on the money, in my view. The Recess Appointments clause says that the President "shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting…

Initial Thoughts on Roberts Nomination

Given a night to sleep on it and a bit more research, here are my initial thoughts on the nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court. First, let me note that there are different meanings to the word "conservative" in this context. Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Michael McConnell and Alan Keyes are all labelled "conservatives", yet there are wide differences among them on such basic issues as the role of the Declaration of Independence in constitutional interpretation, the importance of stare decisis, and whether legislative history is relevant to interpreting a statute.…

Kelo Abuse: That Didn't Take Long

The Institute for Justice is asking the Supreme Court to rehear the Kelo case, arguing that in just the few weeks since the decision was handed down, much has changed that should make them reconsider their decision. It's a desperate move, not likely to succeed, but they have a point about what has happened in the last 3 weeks: As the petition points out as the first basis for the rehearing, the floodgates to eminent domain abuse have already begun to swing open. "Justice O'Connor predicted a world in which a Motel 6 can be taken for a Ritz-Carlton, and homes for a shopping mall," said Dana…

Roy Moore's Authoritarian Madness

From a concurring opinion written by Roy Moore in a custody case in 2002. In this case, the father had been accused of abusing his children and the mother was petitioning the court for custody. The fact that the mother was now a lesbian was not at issue in the case, only the question of whether the father had been abusive toward the children. But Roy Moore could not help but rant on endlessly in a concurring opinion about the evils of homosexuality, writing in part: To disfavor practicing homosexuals in custody matters is not invidious discrimination, nor is it legislating personal morality…

Elements Of Life Discovered Everywhere In The Milky Way (Synopsis)

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." -Douglas Adams If you want to know how many and what type of chemical elements are present in a star system, you need to make a dizzying, intricate array of observations. You need to break up the light from the star into…

Democracy vs. Meritocracy: how science doesn't care about your vote (Synopsis)

"The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units." -Heber Curtis, 1920 In many different areas of life, we settle disagreements by popular vote. But in science, we know better; regardless of whether people accept the conclusions or not, the Universe simply is the way it is, and it’s up to us to listen to the evidence to uncover scientific truths. It often happens, however, that everyone can agree on the pieces of evidence, yet disagree…

New York Times gives evolution a day

The NY Times has pulled out all the stops today and has dedicated their entire science section to the subject of evolution. They've got pieces by some of the best science journalists around, like Carl Zimmer, Cornelia Dean (although in this case, it's a lot of nattering on about how the soul fits into evolution—not recommended), and Natalie Angier, and they've also drafted a few scientists. There's a video of Sean Carroll summarizing evo-devo, and perhaps the most interesting article of them all is by Douglas Erwin, in which he speculates about whether the new ideas percolating throughout the…

Brains are plastic, not hardwired

Cosma Shalizi has written a two part dialog that is amazingly well in line with my own thoughts on the subject of the heritability of intelligence: g is a statistical artifact, we have brains that evolved for plasticity, not specificity, and that while many behavioral traits have a heritable component, it's not anything like what the naive extremists among the cognitive science crowd think. There are no genes that specify what you will name your dog — in fact, most of the genes associated with the brain have very wide patterns of expression and functions that are not neatly tied to behaviors…

The Art of the Non-Response

Rusty Lopez has responded - kind of - to my post about the absurdity of the anti-stem cell research position. He seems to have perfected the presuppositional boogie, that curious theological tap dance whereby one never actually engages the position being taken, preferring meta-debate to debate. He never addresses, or even attempts to address, any of the factual claims I made. For instance, I argued that since the leftover blastocysts from IVF would be destroyed anyway, not allowing stem cell research does not, in fact, save a single life. But it does, of course, have a great potential to cost…

Reason #4,928,114 to Love the Sports Guy

From his new column answering email feedback: Q: I was watching "Seinfeld" the other night and wondered: How many dates do you think it took to sleep with Elaine? I say third date and you're in. I think she would go all the way on the second date, but she probably would think that's a little slutty, especially for a woman of her educational background. --Heath, Hoboken, N.J. SG: I'm going with two dates ... one if she had enough to drink. She was the best. You know how women watch chick flicks because they want guys to be like Jerry Maguire or the guy Richard Gere played in Pretty Woman --…

The Incompetence of the Democratic Party

Nick Gillespie from Reason's Hit and Run blog has an interesting post about the hullaballoo surrounding John Kerry's military service and he finishes with this statement: You've got to hand it to the Democrats. They enter a presidential race against a guy who clearly worked to evade active service in Vietnam and manage to nominate a multiply decorated vet whose service record somehow becomes the focus of attention. Yes, there is an orchestrated attempt by the GOP to throw questions onto Kerry (a process he's abetted with his changing Cambodian story, among other things). But if anybody is…

Perception vs Reality in Iraq

Well it took less than a day to find out what any perceptive person knew anyway, that the turnover in power from the US to the interim Iraqi government is purely symbolic, a paper move only. Only the breathtakingly naive would view it as anything other than that, and here's a perfect example of why: Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges' order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops. US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva…

What do you want to be when you grow up?

David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they'd gone into some different field … and here are my answers. 1. What's your current scientific specialty? Developmental biology. 2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it? I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and…

Horowitz and History

David Horowitz, who has made a career and likely a fortune as well out of his conversion from left-wing nutcase to right-wing nutcase (a giant step sideways, in my book), has a blog. It includes this little gem, about the death of Archibald Cox: Archibald Cox died over the weekend. Cox was a spear-carrier for the Kennedys who led the only real political coup in the last half century when the Kennedy clan toppled Richard Nixon in the infamous Watergate episode. Eight of the 11 special prosecutors were men who had worked for the Kennedys. The agenda was to reverse the 1972 election and deliver…

Gift This, Not That: Coloring the Universe vs. The Hubble Cosmos (Synopsis)

“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.” -Seneca If you love what's out there in the Universe -- the science, the…

They Predicted Cooling in the 1970's

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: The alarmists were predicting the onset of an Ice Age in the 70's, now it's too much warming! Why should we believe them? Answer: It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970's but a very cursory comparison of then and now reveals a huge difference. Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions solidly behind the warning that…

Climate is Always Changing

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Climate has always changed, why are we worried now and why does it have to be humans fault? Answer: Yes, climate has varied in the past and it has varied for many different reasons, some better understood than others. The present day climate change is very well understood and is different. Simply noting that something happened before without humans does not in any logical way show that humans are not causing it today. For example, we see…

Libertarian Gave Senate to Democrats?

David Boaz had an article on Monday on the Fox News website suggesting that libertarians could be a key voting block in deciding the outcome of the election. Turns out he was right. He wrote: Libertarians -- people who cringe at intrusive government, high taxes, nation-building and politicians telling them how to behave -- could turn out to be the key swing voters in Tuesday's contentious midterm election. And, in an unusual development, that might not bode well for Republicans this time around. A number of political scientists and libertarian pundits say that libertarian voters who sided…

DeVos Caught Lying

Hardly a surprise, but still pretty funny. He claimed that his high school football coach started him at quarterback because of his leadership skills. His coach says, "I did?" DeVos recounts a conversation he had with then-head varsity football coach Frank Rosengren: "He and I took a walk right behind this building (the old gym). It was a warm day and I remember he told me, 'Dick, I am going to start you because you have leadership skills and the team responds to your leadership.' " DeVos went on to say: "That was a great encouragement to me. Those words were very important to me. Someone I…

Article on the UC Lawsuit

The Sacramento Bee has an article about the upcoming trial over the University of California's rejection of certain courses from a Christian school for credit in their admissions process. I reviewed the biology textbook when the suit was first filed and there is no question that it should be rejected for credit by any serious school. You cannot pretend to seriously be teaching science when you claim, without evidence, that virtually everything taught in modern science is wrong and that anything that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible must be wrong regardless of the evidence. It…

More Worldnutdaily Hypocrisy About Rev. Moon

This morning's Worldnutdaily includes a prominent front page headline, Kerry Silent on Beijing Photo. The headline links to an article in Insight Magazine about John Kerry taking a privately sponsored trip to promote trade in China in the late 1990s. Hardly unusual, of course, and the president's own brother Neil has been taking such trips (and getting hookers sent to his room while doing it). But the implication is, of course, "Kerry in bed with godless commies". But here's what is so funny about this. Remember that Joseph Farah, the owner of Worldnutdaily, just a few weeks ago was telling…

Report on Improving Science Education

The National Science Board has released a draft report for public comment titled "A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System." You can dowload the PDF of the report from that page, and email any comments to: NSB_STEMaction@nsf.gov. I've only skimmed the report, so I won't be sending comments in any time soon, but if I were to make a snap suggestion, it would be that they re-order their suggestions to reflect the usefulness of the recommendations. They have a helpful one-sentence summary of their two "…

Olive Earth

I know, it's "Live Earth," but they've got this giant blue-green circle at the left of their logo, which makes it look like an illuminated initial capital... So, the latest charity rock specatcle is scheduled to start tonight. I can't say I've been paying any attention-- I only noticed it today because the New York Times had a feature article about the event that somehow slipped into the "Science" RSS feed. I'm pretty ambivalent about the giant charity rock spectacle. Of course, as a good child of the 80's, I remember the Live Aid shows, but I can't say I was all that invested in those,…

Would You Like Something to Read?

We're out of town for the weekend visiting family, so if you usually depend on this blog for entertainment, you'll need to find something else to do. How about a good book or two? You can't decide what to read? Well, the Internet is here to provide suggestions. You might, for example, think about the list of most significant SF books that was compiled by the SF Book Club. It's the usual mix of influential and popular and has been making the rounds in LiveJournaldom, where it has come in for some criticism. Not in the mood for genre fiction? Well, Discover has put together a list of the…

Defying the Nobel Prize Jinx

I'm lecturing to our first-year seminar today about Bose-Einstein Condensation, using slides that haven't been updated since 2002. Given the pace of research in the field, that's a little crazy, so I spent a good while last night looking at pretty pictures on the Ketterle group web site, among others, so I can report on the latest and greatest developments, or at least that subset of the latest and greatest that I think I can boil down to one slide targeted at college frosh. Coincidentally, the AIP news feed is also highlighting recent results from the Ketterle group, citing three new results…

An Appreciation

Easterbrook on Tiki Barber: At this point Tiki Barber, TTNY ("The Toast of New York"), should replace Brett Favre as the most admired player in the NFL, and as the one who exemplifies the best of football culture. This guy plays amazingly well -- last night when the Giants needed power running, he even did that. Barber has played at a high level for a long time. He never complains, refuses to blame others and never whines about his contract. He's well-read and well-informed. He radiates the fact that he knows football is just entertainment, that there are a thousand things in the world that…

For Small Values of "Real"

Over at Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta takes a look at the myth of the "real world". A colleague tried to defend a zero-tolerance attendance policy by saying, "If she had a job and missed a meeting, she'd be fired." That's not really how it works, though: We have people who don't show up to class, people who cancel class for no good reason, and people who don't show up for mandatory meetings, and they (all without tenure!) still work here. My friends with Real Jobs have griped about enough incompetent fools that they've worked with, that I don't think that zero-tolerance firing is in wide…

Ready for Some (Division III) Football

The preceding comments about my alumni oganization were brought on by a bunch of factors-- the arrival of a Maryland alumni publication this week, the update-your-information questionnaire from the Society of Alumni, a visiting speaker last week who was two years behind me at Williams. Probably the biggest was the fact that this is Union's Homecoming, which also means I'm off to spend most of the afternoon on campus, watching football and rugby, and talking to whatever students, parents, and recent alumni I encounter. This is one of those small-college things that I think is actually fairly…

Nice Music Library, It'd Be a Pity If Anything Happened to It...

Henry Farrell thinks he sees a parallel between music critics and the Mafia: I think that there's a similar problem in the relationship between music artists and music consumers, in which critics play a key brokerage role, just as the Mafia does in a rather different sphere of commercial relations. Critics serve to guarantee to the public that certain artists, certain music, is 'good' (there are a whole bunch of sociological questions about what constitutes 'good' in this sense that I don't want to get into). But they also want to preserve their own role as critical intermediaries and…

How Others See Our Arguments

Over at Evolution Blog, Jason Rosenhouse looks at the String Theory argument through the New Yorker's article about Woit and Smolin, and draws a parallel with his own field: As an outsider looking in, I would want to know how physicists respond to these charges. After all, creationists level precisely the same charges against university biology departments (that they are ruled by dogmatic Darwinists yada yada). And in that context I know the charge is bogus. I suspect the same is true here. Physicists are not receiving professorships at prestigious institutions merely for expressing their…

A Very new kid on the block!

Hello again, it has not even been a day yet, but I feel that I should quick post something. Some of the comments from my previous blog have pointed out interesting ideas as to the correlation between protein folding and memory storage. Proteins inside neurons would work well in storing and possibly managing information, but they don't work quickly enough and I suppose it would be fairly difficult to research proteins in the hundreds of thousands of specialized neurons. I was also informed that much of the "protein hypothesis" is old news that was torpedoed in the 60's for the "synapse…

Why, Yes, I Am Ready for Some Football

The NFL season starts in earnest today, and it's about damn time. Granted, the early afternoon offerings on our local cable system-- Jets/Titans and Eagles/Texans-- probably don't really qualify as "football," and the late afternoon Cowboys/Jaguars game is interesting only insofar as either Terrell Owens or Bill Parcells might explode at any moment, but it's the principle of the thing. Also, they serve as a useful warm-up for the real attraction of the day, namely this evening's Manning Bowl pitting my Giants and quarterback Eli Manning against the Colts, quarterbacked by his older brother…

How to Find People to Talk To

So, you're interested in discussing politics or religion or other Deep Issues with other people. What do you do? You could go on the Internet, but you end up talking to, like, freaky physics professors and stuff, so you'd prefer to talk to real people face to face. You could randomly approach strangers, ask their political affiliation, and refuse to talk to Republicans or Democrats, but that's kind of weird. So what's a would-be conversationalist to do? Inside Higher Ed has a suggestion: tie an orange rag to your backpack: Shruti Chaganti, an undergraduate at James Madison University, loves…

He's an Overachiever, Baby!

Having gotten a fair number of visits via the search string "Jim Boeheim's Wife" (and once or twice "Jim Boeheim's Hot Wife," presumably by people who are looking for something more salacious than me griping about how inappropriate it is for Dick Vitale to talk about her attractiveness all the goddamn time), I would be remiss in my duties if I were to pass up commenting on the New York Times article headlined "Boeheim and Wife Lead Crusade Against Cancer". As you might guess, it's about their fundraising efforts for Coaches vs. Cancer, which have a personal basis: For Boeheim, 62, the fight…

When Honor Codes Go Bad

I'm currently on a committee that's investigating whether to switch to an honor code system for academic honesty issues, and possibly social violations as well. This is about as much fun as it sounds like. For those not up on the internal practices of academia, schools with honor codes require students to sign a pledge promising to behave in accordance with community standards, and are expected to hold to that on their own honor. This is a popular system among snooty private colleges-- Williams has an academic honor code, which is part of why I was tapped for this committee-- and a few larger…

Goals

I want to see ample funding for scientific research, or failing that, at least adequate funding for scientific research. Good experiments should not have to go begging for research funding. I want to see funding priorities set on scientific criteria, based on what projects and programs have the best chance of improving our knowledge of the universe. Research funding should not be redirected for ideological reasons, or to benefit politically connected contractors. I want to see research scientists protected against undue infringemetns on their academic freedom to research topics of their…

Timing Is Everything

Let me be the millionth person to link to the Washington Post article about the busking virtuoso. Let me also agree with Kevin Drum about the reasons nobody listened: Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn't yell at them. Weingarten mentions this, with appropriately high-toned references to Kant and Hume, but somehow seems to think that, in the end, this really shouldn't matter much. There should have been throngs of culture lovers surrounding Bell anyway. It's as if he normally lives on Mars and dropped by Earth for a few minutes…

Science Showdown: Orbit Region First Round

Announcing the first round games of the Orbit Region of the 2007 Science Showdown: These games match central physics concepts against one another, in a bid to determine the greatest physics idea, which will eventually face and humiliate ideas from other fields of science. I'll be announcing the winners on Friday, but ehre's your chance to contribute: The eight first-round match-ups are shown in the graphic above: Which do you think should win? Leave your votes in the comments, and help determine the outcomes. The games: 1) Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation vs. 16) Newton's Second Law of…

Ficlets

John Scalzi is announcing the launch of a new "collaborative short fiction" site, Ficlets: What does "collaborative short fiction" mean in this case? Simple: You, as a writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come to Ficlets to read what you've written, and to comment on your piece. If they want to, they can also write a "sequel" to your story or story fragment, carrying the story forward from where you left it. Or, alternately, they can write a "prequel," explaining how you got to where you are in the story…

Steven Spielberg, call the special effects department right away

Feathers only rarely fossilize, so the distribution of feathers in dinosaurs is difficult to determine. Sometimes feathers mark the bones, though, and bones do preserve well. Here's an example: the forearm of a Velociraptor retains an array of small bony bumps evenly spaced along its length. What could they be? In the photo below is the homologous bone of a turkey vulture, showing similar bumps. They are quill knobs, or places where a ligament anchors the root of a secondary feather directly to the bone. Their presence is an indicator of the presence of a large feather — something more than a…

New Limits on Constancy

There's a press release on EurekAlert about new measurements limiting the change in the fine structure constant from the Time and Frequency division of NIST in Boulder: Some astronomical and geological studies suggest there might have been very small changes in the values of fundamental constants over billions of years, although the results have been inconsistent and controversial. If fundamental constants are changing, the present-day rates of change are too small to be measured using conventional methods. However, a new comparison of NIST's cesium fountain and mercury ion clocks, scheduled…

Dorky Poll: Favorite Calculational Shortcut

I'm giving an exam at 9:00 this morning-- neither snow, nor more snow, nor blowing snow, nor single-digit temperatures shall stay the progress of shaping young minds. Anyway, to keep things lively while I'm proctoring the test, here's a poll question inspired by the exam: What's your favorite calculational shortcut? Today's test is on basic quantum mechanics-- photoelectric effect, Compton effect, the Bohr model of hydrogen, and simple solutions of the Schrödinger equation-- and as such, features a lot of problems that are made easier by knowing some shortcut or another. Sometimes, these are…

There is a difference

Josh talks about the difference between teaching about ID and teaching ID. There is a huge difference that the Discovery Institute does not seem to understand. I am opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. It's an absurd idea that is unsupported by any evidence — it has not earned a place in the curriculum as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. The propaganda novels that the DI has tried to peddle in the past, Of Pandas and People and their new one, Explore Evolution, do not belong in the classroom. They are badly written, and incompetently push completely false ideas as valid…

Props to Student Life

Over at Slaves of Academe, Oso Raro rants about student life professionals. The Dean Dad offers a defense of student life offices on procedural grounds (which is how I found the original piece). It's hard to judge how much of the original rant is humorous exaggeration. There are some reasonable elements to his critique of student life programs, but there's a lot of dumb stuff in there, from the classic "back in my day" lament to the suggestion that what we really need is for faculty to do the things that student life people do now. As much as my eyes roll at the thought of mandatory diversity…