Science After Sunclipse

Matthew Linkletter, a Board of Directors member of Maine’s School Administrative District 59, has been trying to squelch science education in his district. How? By throwing creationist canards at his listeners and banking on their ignorance. Reports a local Kennebec newspaper,

Linkletter suggested during last week’s SAD 59 board meeting that the board discuss evolution, the “Big Bang Theory” and other studies he believes should be deleted from the curriculum. […] Linkletter said he wants the best science for SAD 59 students, who should “be armed with the truth.” They should be able to explain the origins of life according to evolution if it is taught in the schools, he said.

“Nobody has the answer to the origins of life. It’s a philosophical question.”

OK, stop right there. First of all, the origin of life is not a “philosophical question,” but one which we can approach scientifically, and indeed have already learned a great deal about. Second, the open questions which remain about abiogenesis do not impair our ability to understand what has happened since then, in the later evolutionary history of life, any more than our limited knowledge of how humans discovered fire or invented writing affects historians’ ability to know about the American Revolution. Finally, the Big Bang is a theory like gravity is a theory — so go away now, won’t you, and try to brush up on your own science education before ruining other people’s?

Unfortunately, others are chiming in against the cause of knowledge and fact:
Continue reading ‘Antiscience in Maine’

Several bills have died recently in the Alabama State Legislature. According to an AP wire report, one of them would have “protected teachers from being fired for giving personal opinion while teaching controversial subjects like evolution.” In other words, the “Academic Freedom Act,” whose purpose really was to protect the teaching of creationism, has croaked. Let’s celebrate!

Oh, wait. Another bill which died would have “repealed the state’s ban on sex toys.”

Darn! The Darwinist agenda has been foiled once again!

(Tip a’ the fedora to Sensuous Curmudgeon.)

Today, John Timmer posted on the ‘tubes a brief summary of current debates in evolutionary biology, as unfolded at a recent Rockefeller University symposium. Timmer takes the position, and PZ Myers agrees, that these controversies don’t belong in the high-school curriculum. They require too much background knowledge to understand, and if the students haven’t spent time learning the basic principles, they’ll be sunk. On these specific points, I’d tend to agree; however, other debates might provide “teachable moments.” If trying to build lesson plans around the questions currently rocking the symposia is going too far, what about the problems which have been wrapped up in the last ten years or so? For example, in a post-Bullet Cluster world, a high-school physics class could well include some talk of dark matter.
Continue reading ‘Survey: Teachable Controversies’

Via Imaginary Potential comes Sidney Coleman’s lecture on how quantum mechanics differs from classical and what that whole “collapsing the wave function” business is all about. The lecture is geared to those who have a working familiarity with first-term quantum physics: the Schrödinger Equation, spin operators and such.

The video quality is not always quite good enough to capture what’s written on the transparencies, but the audio makes up for it.

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have been trying to clarify the different meanings of the term “Open Access.” Recently, these two advocates of the OA cause issued a joint statement which began as follows:

The term “open access” is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, “OA” literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, “OA” literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

Suber and Harnad proposed using “weak OA” to describe the former kind, literature which is “price-barrier-free,” and “strong OA” for the latter, “permission-barrier-free” variety. Shortly thereafter, however, people got flustered and pointed out that “weak OA” is unnecessarily pejorative. After all, even lowering price barriers is a good thing, and there’s no reason to make life harder for the people trying to do that. Better terminology is needed. This is a chance for all you aspiring wordanistas to lead your very own revolution! (Given the audience which finds OA issues of interest, your revolution will be well-blogged, but not televised.) Can you come up with a better alternative than the current options like “Basic OA” versus “Full OA”?

Hopefully, whatever terms we end up using to denote these gradations in scale will be more illuminating than the ones employed by the US Post Office. Every time I walk in to post something, I find myself befuddled by Express, Priority and First-Class designations: which one is actually the fastest and the most expensive? When each term is tarted up to sound as exciting as possible, their ability to indicate a scale of any kind is ruined.

What? You mean I can fill up a blog post without any content of my own?

T. Ryan Gregory has a typically excellent essay on his first experience doing scientific research. Students must learn important lessons about how science actually gets done, and probably the most important of those is, as he says, “whatever they try to do in the lab will not work the first time.” Now, if only that had been explained to me when I made my first bumbling measurements of junction magnetoresistance, during that summer program so many years ago. . . .

Elsewhere on the Network, Jeff Medkeff finds that in the free market of credibility, the Libertarian National Convention has been out-competed. Meanwhile, Steve Novella, after smacking down Michael Egnor for the Nth time, takes a break and debunks the wishful thinking known as “Brain Gym.”

Finally, on a more somber note, Ron Brown at The Frame Problem has done yeoman service putting together the first CarnivUL of The fraudless, documenting the first great Stand Alone Complex of our time.

Juan A. Bonachela, Haye Hinrichsen, Miguel A. Munoz, “Entropy estimates of small data sets” J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 41 (2008). arXiv: 0804.4561.

Estimating entropies from limited data series is known to be a non-trivial task. Naive estimations are plagued with both systematic (bias) and statistical errors. Here, we present a new “balanced estimator” for entropy functionals (Shannon, Rényi and Tsallis) specially devised to provide a compromise between low bias and small statistical errors, for short data series. This new estimator out-performs other currently available ones when the data sets are small and the probabilities of the possible outputs of the random variable are not close to zero. Otherwise, other well-known estimators remain a better choice. The potential range of applicability of this estimator is quite broad specially for biological and digital data series.

As an exercise, discuss the relation of this approach to the coincidence-based methods of Ma, Bialas et al.

No doubt they rose up early to observe
The rite of May, and hearing our intent,
Came here in grace our solemnity. […]
Good morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past:
Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV, 1)

Today is the first day of May. On this day, Americans join together like good Communists from other countries to affirm their commitment to an ideology of Authority. Gaelic pagans of old (and wiki-pagans of the modern age) celebrate the day as Beltane, and indeed, the attitude of begging personal intercession from nature spirits intimately concerned with human reproductive business has not entirely left the occasion.

It is a day for scratching a spiritual itch.

And what could be more spiritual or more sublime than geeking out with a crowd of like- but not identical-minded folk about the difference between book and film, the interplay of text and subtext, about science fiction as art? It’s a fitting time to explore, with Jeremy Bruno, why Jurassic Park is not a pro-science movie. How better to sharpen the joy of æsthetic contemplation than to indulge our primate appetites and join together against a common enemy? We are gyptians, meeting in the hall of the Gyptian King — otherwise known as a blog comment thread — to test the weaknesses of the Magisterium, who stand against freedom and reason, and who are played in this episode by Michael Crichton.

Come, join us!

National Poetry Month is almost over — and we’ve survived! To honor the occasion, here is Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U. S. and A.

FLAMES

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.

So, I emerged from my burrow wherein I had been writing my Serious Essay on the history of classical mechanics, and I discovered that Premise Media, the producers of the Expelled movie, had sent out a whiny and cranky e-mail pleading that people take groups to see their little flick. (I didn’t get the e-mail, just as I wasn’t invited to their Potemkin press conference back in March, but I’m not jealous, ’cause I received much better things in the mail recently, which I’ll be writing about soon, Isis willing.) UprightAlice points out that the message really does sound like it was composed by Mad Lib.
Continue reading ‘Expelled: The Party Game!’

Both T. Ryan Gregory and Abbie Smith have moved into new digs. In the former case, the move was voluntary, while in the latter, it appears to have been a choice expedited by the mysterious vanishing of her old site. Update your blaggregators, and say hello to them both!

I’m actually somewhat skeeved that the old ERV site upped its chucks and huffed the æther. Last summer, before Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution had turned out to be a complete flop, I had started compiling a list of debunkings, several of which resided at the old ERV. Hopefully those pages can get pulled from the various archives and republished at the new site.

Other stuff of note which I’ve seen lately in my local neighborhood of Network nodes:

Both Isabel Lugo and Brian Switek have discussed the relative roles of concrete examples and abstract reasoning in mathematics education. Elsewhere, Glennda Chui points us to a description of an “ILC Fan Club” in Tokyo. Which is better: that the International Linear Collider has a fan club, or that it meets in a bar basement? Two weeks ago, the ILC Fan Club hosted an all-women panel discussion on gender equality, an area in which physics has plenty of problems still to solve.

We fret a lot these days about how to “communicate science with the public,” but reading about the “Accelerator Ladies’ Night” reminded me, in an odd way, that while science is a global enterprise, the public to which we’re trying to communicate is divided into all the diverse cultures of the human species. Consider the analogy which novelist Aya Kaida proposed for explaining neutrino experiments:

Some experiments, like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, have measured particles zinging our way from the Sun. Other investigations produce neutrinos here on Earth; for example, K2K uses the proton synchrotron at the KEK facility in Tsukuba to make a beam of neutrinos, which is fired toward the Super-Kamiokande detector in Kamioka, 250 kilometers away. By measuring the neutrinos which arrive at Super-K, physicists can figure out what happened to them en route. Aya Kaida says that the neutrinos in the K2K beam are “cultivated fishes,” while the ones from the Sun are “wild.”

Vive la différence! In the U. S. and A., we might speak of animals “raised on a farm” versus “caught in the wild,” but when it comes to fish, I’m not sure we care. By and large, it’s not a distinction to which we are sensitive, and a person explaining neutrino research would reach for a different analogy. While the physics is the same everywhere on this spinning world of ours, its encounters with culture vary in all the ways we maddening mammals are able to differ.

Finally, David Guarrera, a string theory Ph.D. student at the Institvte, has posted the first in a series of essays on false vacua. Happy reading!

My friend Brian just sent this video to his martial-arts class, with the comment, “This is why we don’t break bricks.”

(It’s nice to have friends. Without them, how would we ever find Internet video clips?)

I have serious stuff to talk about — honest! I mean, I’ve got, like, two book reviews in the pipeline, three essays addressing points that didn’t quite fit into those reviews, and the follow-ups to my “Physics and the Brain” post. But it’s the weekend, so instead of any of that, here’s “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats.”

Thanks to Mollishka.

Online polls are not scientific. To state the matter more precisely, a poll on a website which is open to the entire Network and has only minimal measures to guard against repeat voting measures the people who were motivated to respond, not a representative sample of the population. Of course, it’s just like a creationist — beg pardon, a cdesign proponentsist — to rely upon a pseudoscientific tool for spurious validation of his pre-established beliefs. It is also in the nature of things that, on the Network, such attempts will backfire.

To wit, consider the poll on the Expelled! movie’s MySpace page. The question was asked, “Do you think the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in our education system?” The Evil Darwinismistic Conspiracy was alerted to the poll at 10:36 AM Eastern Time, and less than five hours later, this is where the results stand:
Continue reading ‘Basing Hopes on Pseudoscience’

This is Jay Davis, reviewing the movie Expelled! in the Real Detroit Weekly (23 April 2008).

Proponents of ID are fond of saying that it’s not the same as creationism (read: creationism sans the talking snake and the magic rib). But if ID isn’t creationism, then oral sex isn’t sexual relations.

Davis suggests that if we start teaching Intelligent Design in the schools, we should also teach Deliberate Motion as an alternative to classical mechanics (planets move because of “an Intelligent Mover pushing them around,” don’t ya know?). While we’re at it, the germ “theory” of disease is just a theory, so we should embrace the controversy and present it alongside “Divine Retribution theory.” Commenters at Orac’s site have already pointed out that while promoting Expelled!, Ben Stein has made remarks which sound more than a little like “Deliberate Motion.” For example,

Assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from?

And, come to think of it, Michael Behe’s dystheistic view of Intelligent Design is basically a Divine Retribution theory of disease. He concedes that drug resistance could have evolved, although his understanding of it is spectacularly bad, and his attempts to use it as an “edge of evolution” are irredeemably flawed. But while the malaria parasite’s resistance to medications could possibly have evolved, Behe says, malaria itself was intelligently designed.

Oh, and before I vanish back into my silent retreat, I should add that Skeptic’s Circle #85 is now online at Andrea’s Buzzing About.

Hmmm. It appears that I get to spend this week working on something which is not this website. However, it’s not in my nature to leave whatever readers I’ve got without something else to read, and fortunately for me, the Internets have delivered some juicy material recently. Two books are in the works, and you, Gentle Reader, have a chance to contribute to both of them.

Both are mathematical in nature. The one geared to a more general audience is Jason Rosenhouse’s big book on the Monty Hall Problem. He’s finished the first draft, and is gathering feedback on the first chapter. Go, read the PDF, and offer your comments!
Continue reading ‘Open Books’