The anti-science (anti-Darwin) forces will win

Salon.com News | The new Monkey Trial (Michelle Goldberg)

...It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans -- 65 percent, according to the poll cited above -- favor teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

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This is a long article, but overall not a bad overview. The author unfortunately omits mention of the most important anti-science figure in America. George Bush has made it clear, even back when he was first running against Gore, that he supports the anti-evolutionary forces.

I don't think Goldberg was clear enough on the misuse of the concept of "intelligent design". Intelligent design, in the broad sense, does not conflict with the idea of evolution. After all, God could have designed the universe and much else besides, and yet all of our biology might be a result of natural selection. Of course the "intelligent design" persons are not interested in this idea. They believe that God created them explicitly, in this case the "design" refers not to the design of creation, but to the "design" of humanity. I suspect, some of the ID folk would be willing to ascribe everything but humanity to be operations of natural selection. It's all about the primacy of humanity's role in the universe, and the belief that we were built in God's image.

Goldberg also fails to mention the most interesting and persistent fallacy in the thinking of the ID cult -- the fallacy of purpose. Their mathematical arguments against evolution are generally designed to show that if we were to rerun earth's history, the probability of developing anything like us is very low.

Think about it. That's only a quandry if one assumes, as they do, that we're the purpose or point of universal history. It's like someone who flips a coin a trillion times, then declares there must be a God because there's no way someone could flip another coin a trillion times and get exactly the same sequence of heads and tails.

Goldberg does mention that this is fundamentally not merely a crusade against Darwin, the positions taken by the creationist forces are fundamentally assaults on the foundations of science, attacks against reason, deduction and empiricism.

Alas, all of these arguments matter not at all.

The key paragraph, which I've excerpted above, is towards the end. 65% is a strong majority. Emphasis on strong -- among those group there are many for whom this is a "hell or heaven" issue. Weighting for this influence, it seems an overwhelming majority.

At various times in our nation's history we've shifted between a "rationalist" and a "romantic" perspective. Now the latter group is ascendant. The romantics feel that science is, like politics or the arts, a matter of opinion. This romantic group, oddly enough, includes both social conservatives and left wing intellectual deconstructionist heathens. Irrationality makes strange bedfellows.

There's not that much to be done. China may have to carry the torch of Rationalism for the 21st century. I can only hope they take good care of it. The rest of us will have to hunt around for scattered refuges of Reason in the US and resign ourselves to private schools (vouchers anyone?).

There is one final irony. The more layperson's cosmology I read, the more inclined I am to consider that some entity may have designed our universe [1]. So I think there's an interesting discussion about Intelligent Design in the cosmology/physics department. The Creationists are just barking up the wrong tree. They should be hounding physicists, not biologists.

[1] There are interesting distinctions between a created physical universe and the "our reality is a simulation" (created virtual universe), but the two have more in common than not.

Boycott God

Send a Message to God - He has gone too far this time. By Heather Mac Donald

A satirical take on the problem of evil. The blackest of humor.

Tale of a multilevel marketing scam: "Work at Home" with herbalife

Work from Home, unwelcome Herbalife Signs

Ever wonder how those "work at home" business actually work?

The big event of 2005: nanotech solar energy conversion?

CTV.ca | New plastic can better convert solar energy

TORONTO — Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an infrared-sensitive material that's five times more efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical energy than current methods...

Sargent and other researchers combined specially-designed minute particles called quantum dots, three to four nanometres across, with a polymer to make a plastic that can detect energy in the infrared....

"In fact, there's enough power from the sun hitting the Earth every day to supply all the world's needs for energy 10,000 times over,'' Sargent said in a phone interview Sunday from Boston. He is currently a visiting professor of nanotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sargent said the new plastic composite is, in layman's terms, a layer of film that "catches'' solar energy. He said the film can be applied to any device, much like paint is coated on a wall.

"We've done the same thing, but not with something that just sit there on the wall the way paint does,'' said the Ottawa native.

"We've done it to make a device which actually harnesses the power in the room in the infrared.''

The film can convert up to 30 per cent of the sun's power into usable, electrical energy. Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.

...Sargent's work was published in the online edition of Nature Materials on Sunday and will appear in its February issue.

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We'll know this is real if we see a change in oil futures. A 500% efficiency increase in solar energy production is potentially world changing.

If this is real, then the big news event of 2005, the one remembered by history students, will not be about a tsunami. I'll be watching for more detail ...

The dismal state of consumer electronics: the curse of being market driven

NYTimes.com (Pogue): Circuits Newsletter

The newest camcorders, designed to meet the needs of discriminat ... err braindead consumers have been market driven over a cliff:

... problem of manufacturers concentrating on the zoom multiple, which is what people understand, instead of the widest angle, which is just as important. The result is camcorders with horribly "zoomed in" widest angles. Once again, they put their R&D into the features that market well, not the ones that actually make a better camcorder!

You can find out a camcorder's widest angle by looking at a less often published specification: the 35mm equivalent of your camcorder's zoom. The smaller the small number is, the wider the camcorder can get when fully zoomed out, and the bigger the big number the more zoomed in it can get.

Your DCR-TRV70 has a 35mm equivalent of 52 to 520mm. The 52mm minimum is HUGE. That's why you feel like your video is zoomed in. ... (Compare that to the 28mm of the Rebel, and the 18mm measurement of some good wide-angle lenses.)

You said you were looking for a Sony camcorder, so I looked up the 35 mm equivalents of their camcorders in the TRV70's price range (of course, all of these will be replaced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show):

DCR-HC65: 46 to 460 mm
DCR-HC85: 52 to 520 mm
DCR-PC350: 45 to 450 mm (probably the best camcorder in the Sony 2004 line)
DCR-HC1000: 49 to 588 mm (stay away — far, far away!)

It may be just old age, but I feel as though in the past 6 years this trend has run amok. Vendors are "customer driven" indeed -- but the problem is, the customer is an ass!

Ok, not an ass -- just a human being overwhelmed by endless complexity and unable to make informed buying decisions. Market research shows customers care about "Zoom" -- even though it's the last thing they need for most home video work. (Do you really want to see Aunt Jennie's zit?). The engineers know the customer is being stupid, but if they give the customer what they really need, rather than what the customer thinks they need -- the engineer's company will be out of business.

This happens all over the place. The result is that people who want quality products that are intelligently designed are being forced into the professional market -- and that costs a fortune!

Unfortunately it's only going to get worse. Successful companies must be market driven. They have no choice but to deliver what the masses want -- even if it's bad for them. Hmm. Maybe I'll become a Straussian.

ConsumerReports.org: $26 per year, or $18 if you cancel first ...

Consumer Reports Customer Service Center

Differential charges are a common tactic, but you're supposed to be more subtle about than this.

ConsumerReports.org charges $4.95/mo for their online ratings service. You can upgrade at any time to the yearly fee. That's $26.00. Or you can cancel, and be offered a yearly fee of $18.

So, if you want to subscribe, sign up for month then cancel ...

On human language

Economist.com | Endangered languages

The Economist reviews the decline of human languages. Some interesting excerpts:

• 10,000 years ago, when the world had just 5m-10m people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them
• today the world has about 5 billion people and only about 6,800 distinct languages
• Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Forgotten History: Haiti and the Mau-Mau rebellion

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Though the Heavens May Fall' and 'Bury the Chains': Freed

This is the week for forgotten (in the states) history. The Economist reviewed two books on the Mau-Mau rebellion. The stupidity, cruelty and brutality of the English war on the insurgents is little known; the occupiers a better job than most in erasing their history. The Economist reviewer compares the methods of the English in Kenya to those of the US in Iraq. It's not a compliment.

The NYT reviews books on the fall of slavery that also touch on Haiti's successful slave rebellion, a rebellion that makes the American revolutionary war seem tame in comparison:

...Haitian rebellion. The sections of the book that deal with them bring to light an astounding, and forgotten, episode in Western history. Since Haiti alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13 colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. It belonged to France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the slaves were intentionally worked to death -- it was cheaper to replace them than to sustain them -- so the market for Africans was very brisk. Uprisings had long been frequent in the West Indies, but at long last rage in Haiti converged with the tactical brilliance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others and the slaves seized the island. This part of the story is familiar. But there is more.

First the British and then the French under Napoleon sent huge forces against the Haitians. The British sent a larger army against Haiti than it had dispatched to fight in the American Revolution. And it buried 60 percent of those soldiers in Haiti. The two greatest powers on earth went up against a population of half-starved, desperate people and were utterly defeated. It is no surprise that these two abysmal wars of empire have fallen out of history. One cannot read about them without concluding that the Haitian Africans contributed mightily to making the Caribbean slave system untenable.

I'm sure Toussaint L'Ouverture was a brilliant tactician, but, without knowing anything about the war, I suspect malaria and Yellow Fever were Toussaint's all-powerful allies.

Brzezinski on what it would take to "win" in Iraq

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: Defining Victory Down

Mr. Scowcroft appeared at the New America Foundation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who declared the Iraq war a moral, political and military failure. If we can't send 500,000 troops, spend $500 billion and agree to resume the draft, then the conflict should be 'terminated,' he said, adding that far from the Jeffersonian democracy Mr. Bush extols, the most we can hope for is a Shiite-controlled theocracy.

The Iraqi election that was meant to be the solution to the problem - like the installation of a new Iraqi government and the transfer of sovereignty and all the other steps that were supposed to make things better - may actually be making things worse. The election is going to expand the control of the Shiite theocrats, even beyond what their numbers would entitle them to have, because of the way the Bush team has set it up and the danger that if you're a Sunni, the vote you cast may be your last.

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In the entire history of the United States, has any president made a greater mistake? No, not the invasion of Iraq. Bushe's mistakes are the people he trusts, his rejection of contrary council, and a fundamental belief that his will is somehow favored by God. It is those things that led to the failure to secure the occupation, and now has made "winning" extraordinarily unlikely.

My only consolation is that Kerry would have had the same choice. Either admit defeat, or renew the draft.

21st century disaster response: handy to have an aircraft carrier ...

The New York Times > International > International Special > Military: Tsunami Tests U.S. Forces' Logistics, but Gives Pentagon a Chance to Show a Human Face

The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, for example, carries as much municipal infrastructure in the Indian Ocean as many American cities.

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The US has $20 billion worth of equipment in the Indian Ocean doing relief work.

An aircraft carrier makes a rather convenient platform for emergency relief. Will thought in the future turn to ways in this "dual use" capability of an aircraft carrier might be explicitly enhanced? I doubt the UN will have enough money to operate its own platform, but the American Empire could use some friends.

The Kennedy Curse? Perhaps not all curses are mythical.

NEWS.com.au | Hidden Kennedy delivered from curse (January 10, 2005)

Rosemary Kennedy wasn't brilliant. I gather, from the limited description in this story, that she might have had an average to slightly below average IQ with some focal cognitive defects and learning disabilities.[1]

She was a disappointment to her ambitious father.

At the age of 23, in 1941, her father, Joseph Kennedy, had her lobotomized -- allegedly on the advice of one or more physicians. She spent the rest of her life in an institution. Over the next 40 years all of Joseph's children, save Rosemary, died a violent death.

I knew of Rosemary, I didn't know the story of her lobotomy.

This is a tale worthy of Shakespeare. At this point in my life I don't follow the theater, but a robot could write a play around this tale. Was Joseph Kennedy a complete monster, or only a very flawed human being? Did those physicians really recommend a lobotomy? What was their relationship to the American Eugenics movement, which flourished from 1905 to 1940? What happened to them afterwards? Did they ever face a sort of justice?

Josephy Kennedy suffered for his crimes. Was his suffering just? Even for his crimes, the punishments seem excessive.

[1] Caveat: It would not be surprising, given her age, if in fact Rosemary's true disability was the onset of schizophrenia. That would also better explain the recommendation for lobotomy, in the 1940s all manner of psychosurgery was being misapplied to schizophrenia. It would be typical of the media and many writers to confuse congnitive disabilities with schizophrenia.

What do Social Security "Reform", the Iraq War, IOKIFYAR, Rumsfeld, Plato, Strauss and Nietzsche have in common?

Faughnan's Notes: Social Security talking points

What do all of these things have in common? For a hint, look here and here and here and here.

All of these programs and persons share elements of a common philosophy:

1. There is a morality for the common man, and a "higher morality" for the uber man.
2. In the "higher morality" the ends often justify the means.
3. The masses need comforting stories that will ease their lives. If they could understand the big picture they'd probably agree with the decisions, but they really can't.
4. The burden of greatness is heavy. Those who bear it deserve some special privileges, some exemptions from the rules that guide the lighthearted masses.

So there are rational, albeit debateable, reasons to invade Iraq -- even in the absence of sufficient resources to provide post-conquest stability. Likewise there are rational reasons to change the way social security is provided -- as part of a larger package that transforms the role of governmnent. I could make those arguments in a debate. I don't agree with the premises of the arguments or the extensions of the premises, but there do exist rational arguments worthy of discussion.

We never hear those discussions.

What's noteworthy about the Bush administration, and consistent with Strauss/Nietzsche/Rumsfeld/Bush morality, is that those "rational" arguments are forbidden. Speaking them aloug would reveal dangerous thoughts and concepts to the masses.

Instead we hear "stories" about social security "crises" (really, crises arising more from a transformation of government than from a demographic transition -- Japan is another story) or about Iraq being responsible for 9/11. Stories that, we now know, are often funded by covert payoffs to administration propagandists.

Nietzsche. Strauss. Plato. Great thinkers all, but not men I'd want running my country. Their moral values are now the Bush moral values.

A clever summary of the classic republican perspectives on the poor

Asymmetrical Information: Numbers that just don't add up

1. Those tricksy bastards (Dems) are wildly overstating the problems [this post];

2 A lot of the problems associated with the lower end of the income scale are a result of the stupidity of the poor (and really, what can you do with the stupid?) [this post]
;
3. Almost all Republicans have suffered through much more trying times than any of the poor have faced - and they've kept the aspidistra flying, dammit; the poor need to stop whining [this post];

4. Mercy is twice blessed because it is given; it cannot be commanded by the government. If someone has screwed up and doesn't get another chance - well, they made their own bed. That someone else, with a different background, has had a second chance (or however many chances one gets in getting from 20 to 40 as a drunk) is of no import whatsoever, and people who are envious of the latter group should have had the forethought to have better parents. Indeed, even asking that we temper our scorn for them is too much - might be a disincentive to change [drug post];

5. Of course, the poor don't need to have forethought because we keep cosseting them. If we let a few old people starve to death on the streets, they'd smarten up, work harder, and start investing; doing anything at all to help the poor merely robs them of the incentive to improve their lot [SS post];

6. Occasionally, you run across the very rare situation where it's hard to entirely blame the poor for their situation, like natural disasters. In those cases, we may give them some help. But, before doing so, it's important to note
- that they've done very little for us;
- that they are insufficiently grateful at the moment of the crisis;
- that if we're going to put aside our principles and help them, we must get credit!
[stingy post].

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Many of these are variations of a longstanding theological premise -- that poverty is God's way of showing who he disproves of.

How to get great press for free and fake out government: Intel/eBay "Rethink"

Rethink Initiative: Recycle

Wow. What a great PR move. I want to hire eBay's marketing/PR team.

They get a great press release out on their innovative program to handle all the toxic eGear we dump daily. But when you go the site, you find tons of marketese and a link to a seemingly unrelated nonprofit (Earth911) that provides a database of recyclers. Then it turns out Earth911 is a marketing effort for more Silicon Valley types. When I follow the Earth911 to my zip I get ZERO electronic recyclers and a mixture of marketing materials.

It all smells like a pathetic industry attempt to forestall California legislation with a clever PR fillip.

California -- it's time to move. Mandate recycling of eGear. The rest of America will (reluctantly) follow along.

In Gore-world, we save 100,000 from a tsunami

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Looking for the Next Tsunami

A worldwide disaster monitoring and forecasting initiative was started by Al Gore's team in the Clinton administration. It was ended, of course.

In an alternate reality Gore won in 2000. (Actually he won in our reality, but that's a different story.) In that world we have captured bin Laden and neutralized Iraq. Our warning system would have just saved about a hundred thousand people in the Indian Ocean, building more gratitude for American foresight and leadership. In that world the US is admired and respected by friends and neutrals, and feared and respected by our enemies.

In another world ...