Rapture party at Three Birds this Saturday Come celebrate the upcoming Apocalypse with us this Saturday at Three Birds Tavern. And, in the unlikely event that we are still corporeal here on this material plane come 6:01, either because the Rapture did not in fact occur, or...
PZ Myers on Science and Religion PZ Myers' very entertaining talk from the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010 recently became available....
Ray Comfort Makes My Teeth Hurt Ray Comfort being interviewed on Atheist Experience on local public access television in Austin, TX. (How do you manage to sound like a blithering idiot within a minute-and-a-half of being introduced?)
Pioneer Anomaly Solved? The Pioneer Anomaly is a long-standing mystery where the solar-system-escaping Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft have been experiencing a tiny, unexplained sunward acceleration over the course of their journey
BBC and the Milgram experiment A beautiful (if disturbing) set of videos illustrating the Milgram experiments. Particularly interesting was the complete lack of empathy visible in the 19-year-old's face (though many others followed just as far in the experiments)...
I’ve got to assume that the skeptical movement is doing something right, considering how many purveyors of pseudoscience have been adopting the term “skeptic” in the last few years. Today, I found perhaps the ultimate example, a blog by a palm reader/medium called The Skeptical Psychic. A quick read through convinced me she probably isn’t either.
Speaking of the recent 3D visualization of the Mandelbrot set, here’s a really cool zoom-in on the plain, boring ol’ 2D version (maybe you can put on your Avatar glasses and see the 3D version). At the least, you should break out your bong, Doritos, Pink Floyd, and set up the laser light show, because this thing is seriously trippy.
As a reminder, the Mandelbrot set is an infinitely detailed curve surrounding the region defined by those points which, when iterated through a simple equation (zn+1 = zn2 + c) remain bounded (the black region); and where the colors in the outside region are determined by the speed at which those points escape to infinity. And when they say that the boundary of this sucker is infinitely long and infinitely complex, they ain’t kidding – this video zooms into an almost indescribably small region. I don’t know that this is the deepest penetration into the Mandelbrot set (probably not), but the scale is so mind-bogglingly huge that it’s impossible to mentally visualize: This quick voyage claims to cover 214 orders of magnitude. Now the ratio of the diameter of a proton to the diameter of the universe is 1042. Thus, if you blew a proton up to the size of the universe, and then blew a proton in that structure up to the size of the universe again, you’d have to do this five times to observe a level of detail similar to what is reached in this video. (I don’t know how they programmed this thing to hold numbers of this precision, but I’m impressed.) And at this level of depth, we can see that it is clearly just as complex as it was way back at the beginning.
People get hung up on fractals: How can a 2D curve be infinite in length, yet contained within a finite area? I think this video gives something of a glimpse of how that can be.
I can begin to see why gazing so long into infinity can be so addictive; why people calculate pi out to trillions of digits (as in the last chapter of Contact): by around eight or nine minutes into the video, the radial eightfold symmetry of the journey takes on a particularly mesmerizing quality . . . or maybe I just need to wash out my bong.
It’s the birthday of Newton, inventor of physics! He wrote daring equations; confounded his critics!
Actually, the date on the calendar when Sir Isaac was born was Christmas Day, 1642 – hence “Newtonmas.” However, England at the time was still on the Julian calendar, while most of the rest of Europe had converted to the Gregorian. Thus, it was ten days behind in its reckoning of the date at that point, and what was Jan. 4th, 1643 for Rome et al. was Dec. 25, 1642 for the Brits. (Also, it gives me an excuse for procrastinating and writing this post ten days late.)
I recently wrote about the Royal Society of London’s 350th anniversary, for which they’ve made available 60 seminal scientific articles from that span to celebrate the occasion. Over the holidays, I killed some time on and in various airplanes and airport lounges reading some of these, and I thought I’d write a little bit about one in particular: Namely, an article that was, so far as I can tell, the first one that Newton ever published, the beginning of his glorious scientific career, and one of the most impressive papers I’ve ever read.
In this 13-page article, the 29-year-old Newton solves several of the most baffling and long-standing mysteries about the nature of light at the time. He did so through a very simple and straightforward application of the scientific method; through clear and simple reasoning, he was able to come up with an impressively large number of explanations. There is nothing complicated in the paper – no partial differential equations or Ricci tensors; it involves shining lights through pieces of glass and some basic algebra and geometry. This is research that a smart 7th grader should be able to conduct for a science fair today.
But part of its genius was Newton’s ability to observe the simple and deduce the profound where no one ever had before; to step back, disregard common wisdom, and tackle things simply and one step at a time. All with no equipment other than two triangular glass prisms and a window shade. From so simple a beginning, he was able to deduce that:
1.) Prisms diffract light, because circular incident beams emerge creating oblong spots.
2.) That a second prism will reverse the refraction of the first and recreate the spot of light.
3.) That these light rays traveled in perfectly straight lines.
4.) That intervening objects, reflections, or transmissions do not affect the color of this light.
5.) That single colors of light from the prism can’t be individually refracted or combined back into white light;
6.) but that the entire range of colors can. Thus, white light is composed of individual rays of different colors, and these colors are differently refractable.
7.) And the inherent color of all objects is due to their selectively reflecting one or more of the individual colors incident on them – i.e., color is not something an object adds to the light, but an inherent property of the light itself.
8.) Also, this is why rainbows exist. Explained here for the first time.
You’d think that’d be enough for one paper for most people, but
9.) he also takes a two-page sidestep to reinvent the frakking telescope! Yeah, this 29-year-old pauses to say, “Oh, by the way, this is why all existing telescopes produce colored rings around objects, and always will. But if you design them this way instead, the problem will go away.” And all large telescopes today still use this design.
10.) Oh, and another thing: There was no known way to make mirrors for this new kind of telescope of sufficient quality to make them better than the lenses, even with the color problems. That’s OK – he just takes some time off from Cambridge, because of the plague, and invents a new way to polish perfect mirrors . . . at the same time he was inventing calculus!
I’m 31, and I can barely understand the calculus this guy invented on a school break (of course, he wasn’t constantly distracted by the latest iPhone app or YouTube video).
To be fair, I should also point out that Isaac Newton was also a giant anti-skeptic: he was a religious fanatic, producing in his lifetime more writings on theology than science; a huge crank, devoting half a century to alchemical and occult pursuits; and a cantankerous old bastard that no one liked, who prossibly died a virgin. (However, to be fair to my being fair, alchemy was largely inseparable from chemistry at the time, theological pursuits were nearly universal among natural philosophers, and being a completely unlikable jerk has no bearing on whether or not you are correct.)
Anyway, happy 367th birthday, Izzy!
This label can be found in the Fiction section of your local library.
CNN recently reported on a November article from Health.com on a recent study of ginkgo biloba’s effectiveness in preventing cognitive decline. The result: it’s about as preventive against dementia as throwing salt over your shoulder is at preventing The Dark Ones from screwing with your luck (to stop Them from doing That, you have to at least slaughter a goat by the light of a harvest moon, duhhh).
This is not the first study to show ginkgo biloba’s ineffectiveness in the prevention of neurological diseases, nor, I suspect, will it be the last. Kudos go to CNN and Health.com for reporting accurately on this one. CNN, in particular, does not have a good track record on reports of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine). It was good to see them get this one right, even if they were just reprinting someone else’s article.
There were two things that struck me in the articles. The first was this quote by the principle researcher, Steven T. DeKosky, M.D.:
Even so, DeKosky says he and his colleagues were surprised to find that ginkgo failed to produce any benefit, given how long the herb has been used and how many people swear by it. “We figured that if [ginkgo] was still in use and still endorsed by people — even if it’s only your grandmother — it probably does have some basis to it,” he says.
I’m this close to starting a global campaign to include “Logical Fallacies 101″ in every science degree program. Who can name the logical fallacies that Dr. DeKosky blatantly fell into? I count three of them.
The other was this:
In the new study, people taking ginkgo were more likely than placebo users to have a bleeding-related stroke (16 events with ginkgo versus 8 with placebo). However, the results were not statistically significant and may have been due to chance.
If something isn’t statistically significant and may be due to chance then, to put it in scientific terms, shut the hell up about it! If some future study shows statistical significance, then, by all means, shout about it from the rooftops, but if it doesn’t, then there’s no place for it in a report. That may sound like I’m taking the side of the ginkgo group, but I’m not. I’m taking the side of good science and good reporting. I’m no more convinced that ginkgo causes strokes than I am that it cures memory loss. All indications are that it’s an innocuous, ineffectual herb. It doesn’t cause arteries to explode, nor is it a magic brain cure.
Want to prevent Alzheimer’s? Socialize a lot, play some sudoku, and try to figure out just what in the name of all that’s good and holy “The Phantom Menace” was actually about. The last may drive you to homicidal insanity, but you will not develop Alzheimer’s.
Maybe.
But probably not.
The Voynich manuscript, for those who don’t know, is a fascinatingly enigmatic document that has been puzzling modern puzzlers for almost a century. It is a purportedly 500-year-old manuscript written entirely in an unknown script that has resisted all efforts at decryption over the last five centuries. Its provenance is unclear at best; it has (apparently) been owned by royalty, scholars, and clergy and been lost, found, captured, sold, lost, and found again. It contains copious illustrations of the astronomical, botanical, and anatomical, the latter largely of the female variety. And of the nude variety. Its code has been attacked by myriad hobbyists, by NSA and WWII British cryptographers, and by modern computers. It presumably contains, guarded by encryption in a script of fiendish complexity, information of inestimable value. Or it may be meaningless gibberish. It may have been authored by DaVinci or Roger Bacon; or it may be a hoax.
But someone named Edith Sherwood claims to have at last at least partially broken this enigmatic code. She claims to have discovered that the glyphs are simple substitutions for Latin characters as used in medieval Italian, and that the words are anagrams of medieval Italian words using this substitution cypher.
I don’t know anything about this Dr. Sherwood, but her discussion doesn’t sound like that of an outright crank – her jargon and technique sound on the up-and-up; there is no ranting or claims of conspiracy, or suggestions that the document encodes the secrets of Atlantis. There are, however, a couple of at-least-orange flags which make this story seem doubtful, though:
Still, it’s interesting, and bears keeping an eye on – if she comes up with decipherments of large chunks of the body text of the book, it would be quite an accomplishment!
The Mandelbrot set is a famous and beautiful fractal that has been known for more than 30 years – anyone who went to college, can identify a Deadhead by smell, or ever owned a black light has probably seen a picture of one, or had a poster on their freshman dorm wall.
But apparently the 3D version has been elusive for decades.
The Mandelbrot set is really just a very crinkly (technical word) boundary on the complex plane between points which satisfy a set of equations (the interior) and points which don’t (the exterior, stretching to infinity). Being a fractal, this boundary is infinitely long (though bounding a finite area), infinitely complex, and infinitely self-similar (though never exactly repeating). The psychedelic coloration usually associated with its dorm posters are generally derived from the speed at which the values of each point diverge from the stable solution required to be within the set.
This structure is, however, ultimately 2D – not in the fractal sense, but in the sense of existing in a plane and not in a space with depth and volume and texture and shading. Apparently, it has been very difficult to find a 3D analog of the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set. (3D fractals certainly exist – the Menger sponge, Romanesco broccoli, etc. – but these are repetitively, generically self-similar; not infinitely diverse and non-repeating like the Mandelbrot set.)
This is particularly surprising given the simplicity of the generating function for the Mandelbrot set: Any complex number c, where iteratively finding zn+1=zn2+c (starting from zn=0) doesn’t explode to infinity, is in the set. (Part of the problem may stem from the fact that there is no 3D analog to the complex numbers – only 4D analogs and higher. Still, it intuitively seems that the extra space of 3D should allow something similar to the Mandelbrot set – after all, knots can only be formed in “roomy” spaces of 3D or higher.)
Well, it appears that the 3D equivalent to a Mandelbrot set (or something damned close) has finally been found. And it is amazing and gorgeous.
It’s definitely worth a click through to see all of the incredible images of this thing. (The formula for the beast certainly does appear to be appreciably more hairy, though.) And it looks to have infinite levels of unique but self-similar complexity stretching to the smallest levels:
I, for one, can’t wait to get my black light out.
On June 18, 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). LCROSS executed the goal of its mission on October 9, 2009, following and observing the planned impact of its spent booster rocket into the southern polar region of the Moon. The LCROSS probe itself impacted the same region four minutes later.
There was little fuel remaining in this rocket stage. Thus the event could be accurately described as an “impact,” or even a “crash,” though crash has a connotation of being uncontrolled, which is patently not the case here. “Bombs,” on the other hand, from what I am led to understand, explode, which is an activity of which this spent rocket stage was incapable.
Thus, NASA did not “bomb the Moon,” despite media reports to the contrary, typified below:
A new chapter in space exploration has been opened up after Nasa confirmed that their mission to bomb the Moon had found “significant quantities” of frozen water.
The author of the above story, Richard Alleyne, goes by the title “Science Correspondent.” Presumably he should know better.
But this journalistic “one small misstep” seems trivial when compared to the “one giant pseudoscientific leap” taken by Ellen Whitehurst (purveyor of such verifiably false notions as astrology, feng shui, and new age remedies) in her ill-informed babbling against LCROSS:
So, it looks like NASA’s mission to blast a hole in the surface of the south pole of the moon is continuing as previously planned and could occur any day now. NASA is sending a weapon [note: misleading word choice] to blow a five mile deep crater [note: WRONG] in the surface of that unassuming [note: Oh! Poor Moon! How I weep for thee!] orb in order to dislodge debris that may or may not hold traces of water, ice or vapor. This alleged [note: sinister plot?] water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment is believed to be an attempt at seeing whether there are any natural resources on the moon.
Now, there are some who believe that there might be an extraterrestrial base [note: and now she trots out unfounded conspiracy notions] sitting over on the dark side of the moon as well … citing eyewitness accounts given the NSA by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
[note: Wait, it gets better.]
If you want to tap into the powerful energies these autumn moons offer then wear oranges and yellows and purples. [note: WTF]
Rather than tapping into autumn moon energies with a colorful sweater, NASA’s LCROSS probe was on a mission of science.
The impact was intended to excavate lunar soil, or “regolith,” as well as some of the underlying rock beneath. This method was far cheaper and more rapid than sending some sort of automated backhoe to the Moon to perform the same task. The resulting plume of material, or “ejecta,” would be scanned by LCROSS as well as Earth-based telescopes in order to determine the chemical composition of the ejecta.
While the ejecta from the October 9 impact did not make for much a of visual show, analysis of the data did indeed confirm the presence of water in this region of the Moon which lies in permanent shadow. Any resource that would not have to be hauled up from Earth to a potential lunar base would make such a base easier and cheaper to maintain, so this discovery is a boon to any future human exploration of the Moon.
Today would have been Carl Sagan‘s 75th birthday. Among his many interests, Sagan was an outspoken advocate for skeptical inquiry, critical thinking, and the scientific method.
In the fall of 1980, I was 14. I had had a deep interest in science for literally as long as I could remember. But that fall I was one of millions treated to a voyage of scientific discovery on PBS through Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. While Cosmos is largely the story of the history of science and how it leads to our understanding of our place in the universe and the world around us, it is also a collection of lessons on critical thinking and the scientific method.
Over the course of the series, Sagan clearly and concisely demonstrated the logical and verifiable flaws in creationism, astrology, and tales of alien abduction and UFOs.
He also discussed the suppression of knowledge, by ancient Greek philosophers, by the early Christian church through its brutal murder of the mathematician Hypatia of the Library of Alexandria, and by the Inquisition against astronomer Galileo Galilei. In our present society, suppression of scientific knowledge for religio-political purposes remains an antagonistic issue.
Years later, in 1995, I had the good fortune to see Carl Sagan speak in person at the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The talk was part of a session honoring the late James Pollack, an astrophysicist and former student of Sagan’s. The talk was to be on the work Sagan and Pollack had done together on the potential for terraforming Mars, but Sagan spent the time telling stories about his former student, colleague, and friend. It was a kind and generous tribute.
Through his work and his clear elucidation of the wonder of understanding the world through science, he gave us all an immeasurable gift of enlightenment.
Thank you, Carl.
Update: It turns out Ray Comfort* is a demonstrable liar. (OK, this is no surprise: he’s been a demonstrable liar on many issues for years. But here’s a nice, concrete example that he’s a demonstrable liar on this particular issue.) In addition to being disingenuous and despicable, turns out he’s also an intellectually dishonest plagiarist. Apparently, What Would Jesus Do? is copy and paste the text of a Darwin biography directly into your introduction, without appropriate citation.
Actually, this situation is even worse than what I was going to blame him for: I had assumed that the various stories I’d seen about this were all referring to the same instance of plagiarism. As it turns out, don’t give a guy like Comfort the benefit of the doubt: There are two separate issues of plagiarism in the first five pages of his introduction! He lifts an entire timeline of Darwin’s life into his book with a citation at the very end, suggesting that only the last statement is being cited, rather than a two-page hunk of text copied verbatim. And he appears to have lifted the preceding biographical essay nearly entire without any citation whatsoever!
And unsurprisingly, what changes there are in the copied text tend to be insulting to Darwin: Changing “in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation” to “young Charles showed less interest in studying than in hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation”; “In 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood” to “In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood”; etc. So, in the entire first five pages – and there’s an entire page of illustration – it looks like he might have written half a page himself.
(Just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism, thanks to PZ Myers for covering this. 
)
In other evolutionary update news, check out this week’s Scientific American Podcast, with several concrete examples that one can use to smack people like Comfort upside the head, including the evolution of lactose digestion in adult humans, evolution of malaria resistance through non-ideal means, and NOVA’s new three-part series on human evolution, “Becoming Human” (part one, covering ~7-2 million years ago, was pretty good!)
*For those of you who don’t regularly follow Comfort, his partner-in-stupid is Kirk Cameron. Yes, that Kirk Cameron. No, seriously. No, for real seriously. I know – Reality has just Poe’s Law‘ed itself.
Starving, exhausted, lobotomized fish in a nearly-empty barrel.
Creationist nut-bag Ray atheists’-nightmare banana-fetishist Comfort has had the audacity (bad judgement? misfortune?) to go mano a stupido with actual scientist and non-crazy-person Dr. Eugenie Scott in a resent set of essays on the US News & World Report Blog. (Dragon*Con-ers may remember Dr. Scott from Skeptrack this year.) Comfort starts out . . . strong? Well, he starts out . . . and gets knocked down, but he gets up again (you’re never going to keep him down!) – oh wait, yes you are. And Dr. Scott does so handily.
Comfort’s arguments really are almost indescribably bad (he says, immediately before going on to attempt to describe them). Fallatious arguments abound: ad hominems, quotes out of context, straw men, special pleading, moving the goalposts, non sequiturs, appeal to consequences (hell, it takes him all of five paragraphs to smack into Godwin’s Law!). These essays, and everything Comfort has ever done, frankly, are such a mess of ignorance, mischaracterisation, and misinformation that they pretty much devolve to the level of Gish Gallop: he gives so much bad, innaccurate data so fast that’s wrong on so many levels, that a step-by-step refutation becomes impossible in the allotted space. For instance, here is his “argument” that evolution is wrong because of the problem of the evolution of sex:
[E]volution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.
This argument is so blitheringly stupid, and is wrong on so many (basic) levels that even having it postulated in a “serious” debate makes my eyes bleed. Fortunately, it also makes him sound like a raving loon.
The sad thing is that people like Comfort, who is at best a complete idiot, and at worst an outright liar, are given such prominent stages from which to present their arguments, as if they weren’t definitively refuted long ago. Of course debate of contentious issues should be fostered in the public arena, but you don’t see them giving Time Cube Guy a chance to debate his position on ABC’s Nightline. Why? Because he is clearly nuts, and any rational person can see that his arguments are ridiculous. It’s about time to start treating Ray Comfort the same way.
For a cogent and thoroughly watchable discussion of “Why Evolution Is True” (and a pallet-cleanser to get all the Comfort out of your system), check out this recent lecture Jerry Coyle at the AAI conference in Californina:
Particularly nice was his inclusion of the excellent transitional fossil record of whales, which Comfort claims is completely missing – something that further shows that he is either completely out of his depth, or is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.
