Politics
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2012The Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo censors searches for the names of places where there are protests (currently Shenzhen). You could write a script that searches for the main Chinese cities on Weibo and plots the ones that are censored on a map. Presto, a dynamic map of Chinese political unrest! With data supplied by the Chinese government, no less. Who will do it first?
Update same day: Daniel Becking points to the highly informative web site Blocked On Weibo. It has a wide remit. The most recent entry explains why the two characters for "pantyhose" are blocked.
oracknows | September 10, 2012One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)—or, as it's now more commonly called, "integrative medicine"—so problematic is prior plausibility. It's also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not being open-minded. I like to joke about this whole concept by saying that it's good to be open-minded but not so open-minded that your brains fall out. In other words, the main difference between science-based medicine (SBM) and evidence-…
illconsidered | September 7, 2012(click here for a higher resolution image)
While thinking about the image above from EarthTrack.net a "sign this pettition" request from Avaaz.org landed in my mail box. (Fair warning, I have not checked this out very carefully. Please do say so in the comments if this issue is being misrepresented). Read below:
Climate change is accelerating, but there’s a massive ray of hope: clean energy is booming, producing nearly 20% of the world's electricity! Incredibly, the US and EU are threatening to stifle this breakthrough -- but together we can stop them.
In the last decade the Chinese…
stoat | September 7, 2012...inquires a commenter in the Obama and Romney on GW post. Well, its a reasonable question. This would be Owen Paterson who the FT calls a "known climate change sceptic", although it isn't clear to me quite why. The Graun doesn't like OP. The first piece of evidence is Paterson is on the record as describing wind farms as "clearly a massive waste of consumers' money". Now allow me to point out the obvious: deciding that you don't believe in GW because it implies govt action, and you don't like govt action, is illogical, captain. Deciding that GW is wrong because you don't like windfarms is…
stoat | September 7, 2012From The Top American Science Questions: 2012. Which starts with:
"Whenever the people are well-informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "they can be trusted with their own government."
Well, that's you yanks totally f*ck*d then, ha ha. Not that we're any better off. still, at least we manage to believe in evolution and we're not a pile of religious fanatics :-).
So anyway, enough random insults, what do Da Man and Dah Challenger haz to say?
First off, lets look at the question
Climate Change. The Earth’s climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these…
illconsidered | September 4, 2012Most of you will have heard by now of Mitt Romney's convention chuckle at the expense of the global biosphere, of which you and your family are of a part:
"President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family."
(Full text is here)
Bill McKibben's tweet in response is pretty perfect: "On some other planet, apparently". Planet3.0 has a lengthier and very good exposition on what underlies the success of such a mockery.
My only thought on what Dan has written is that all us concerned individuals in the greater blogosphere…
stoat | September 1, 2012At last, playing to the crowd: an attack on Paul Ryan. Via CIP comes the news that Ryan has been lying about his marathon times: he claimed sub-three, but never ran sub-four. The folk at runners world weren't impressed. I too find it implausible that anyone could possibly get their PB that wrong if they care about running at all. Mine is 3:54, from memory. Was I correct? Yes, though that was only back in April.
But it looks like I still have a way to go before I work my way up the celeb lists. Bush Jr has 3:44 which is quite respectable. Matthew Parris has an astonishing 2:32 according to…
catdynamics | August 31, 2012Anyone want to buy some telescopes?
Heavily used.
Free to a good home.
The NSF has issued a preliminary response to the NSF Astronomy Portfolio Review.
Game on.
NSF MPS/AST Response to Portfolio Review Report (pdf)
This is a 4 page response from NSF Astronomy Division Director Ulvestad to the Portfolio Review, from August 31st 2012.
Implementation is pending current budget negotiations for next fiscal year budget and plan.
Implementation requires acting by end of 2013.
Small Grants: "...Given the constrained budget scenarios and the explicitly higher-priority recommendation for AAG and…
stoat | August 30, 2012 mt quotes Ray Pierrehumbert: "The most explicit statement of Ryan’s climate change views appears in this 2009 op-ed, and since he still features it on his official website, we can take it as an indication of his beliefs..." writing in Slate. Some of what Ryan writes is indeed std.denialist_lies:
The CRU e-mail scandal reveals a perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion. The e-mail scandal has not only forced the resignation of a number of discredited scientists... rant, rant, rant...
which self-condemns Ryan as a fool. But...…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2012As you know, I recently wrote a book describing my experiences in attending creationist conferences. Over a period of several years I attended one such event after another, often spending many hours a day listening to vicious, ignorant nonsense.
I mention this to establish my high tolerance for right-wing stupidity. Why, then, do I find it impossible to watch the Republican convention?
Happily, Paul Krugman has summed it all up perfectly:
The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.
Negative:
The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they…
oracknows | August 28, 2012If there's one thing that practitioners of pseudoscientific medicine crave more than anything else, it's respectability. Believing that science-based medicine is corrupt and that their woo is as good or better, they delude themselves into thinking that they can function as well or better than primary care doctors practice and therefore should be given the same privileges that physicians are granted. To them, it makes sense. On any objective basis, however, it does not. The reason is simple. The two most common "disciplines" that seek the same scope of practice as primary care doctors are…
denialism | August 24, 2012Timothy Egan nails it, the Republican caucus is composed of crackpots and cranks.
Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.
On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates…
denialism | August 22, 2012Everyone has heard about Akin's comments about "legitimate rape" and the push now coming from the GOP to get him out of the race. But is this really fair or ideal? The problem with removing Akin from the race over this is that his gaffe was not just one exposing his scientific ignorance, but because it was a Kinsley gaffe. That is, it's a gaffe because it unintentionally revealed the truth.
I'm not saying that his medieval medical hypothesis has any scientific validity, he is after all just parroting pro-life misinformation spread to attack scientific data about the frequency of pregnancy…
kbonham | August 21, 2012A mini furor erupted this weekend, when republican Senate nominee Todd Akin defended his position of denying abortions even to victims of rape, because in the case of "legitimate rape," women have biological defenses that prevent pregnancy:
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
The liberal blogosphere went nuts, and the story was picked up by all the national media outlets, and even Mitt Romney decided…
gregladen | August 19, 2012... goes down, compared to other forms of insemination, because "the female body has ways to shut that down." That's according to Missouri Congressman Todd Akin. But this only works, according to him, if the rape is "legitimate." From this we can easily develop a sort of Witch Hunt method to determine if a woman accusing a man of rape was actually, "legitimately" raped or if she's faking it. If she becomes pregnant from the rape, the rape did not happen.
Is this clear?
OK, now that we have that straight, allow me to bring out this one piece of data I thought I'd never have use of. It is a…
choofnagle | August 16, 2012In his non-book-review of Garret Keizer's new book, Privacy, "Reason" Magazine correspondent includes this ill-informed quip on privacy:
With regard to modern commerce, Mr. Keizer grumps: "We would do well to ask if the capitalist economy and its obsessions with smart marketing and technological innovation cannot become as intrusive as any authoritarian state." Actually, no. If consumers become sufficiently annoyed with mercantile snooping and excessive marketing, they can take their business to competitors who are more respectful of privacy. Not so with the citizens of an intrusive state.…
oracknows | August 15, 2012It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Well, not really, although it has been a while since I've discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become famous because her family had managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds with the help of some U.K. celebrities. Burzynski, as regular readers will recall, became a frequent topic on this blog last fall after one of his lackeys decided to issue vacuous legal threats…
jrosenhouse | August 15, 2012One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can.
Creationists are especially unscrupulous about exploiting this fact about mathematics. At one creationist conference I attended, the speaker went on for close to an hour spouting the sheerest nonsense about information theory and probability. He received a standing ovation for his troubles. Another time, in a small,…