The Razor

I read and subscribe to the New Scientist because I consider myself an amateur scientist of sorts and like to keep abreast of everything from dung beetles navigating by the Milky Way (seriously, the idea of these critters wearing tiny hats to block their view of the sky warms my heart and contrary to what you might think, increases my support of such esoteric research) to the idea that our reality is a computer simulation. But New Scientist still manages to drive me crazy and to the keyboard where I bang out letters to the editor in complete futility. Science should be a non-partisan effort, and scientists should reflect the political leanings of the general population as a whole, but it doesn’t and they don’t. Scientists are inevitably leftists, and New Scientist is about as left wing as Mother Jones, the only difference being that latter doesn’t claim to be non-partisan while New Scientist believes it is and that those of us on the Right who point out it’s leftward bias are “anti-science.”

So imagine my surprise at reading the leader of this issue of New Scientist, “Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source.”

Berezow and Campbell further claim that progressives who endorse unscientific ideas get a “free pass” from the scientific community. The suspicion must be that this is because scientists themselves lean towards the left, as does the media that covers them. (Both friends and critics of New Scientist tell us we lean in that direction.)

NewScientist then prints Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell’s oped, “Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason,” in which they point out that today’s liberals are not liberal in the Lockian sense but social authoritarians. “Unlike conservative authoritarians, however, they are not concerned with banning “immoral” things like sex, drugs and rock and roll. They instead seek dominion over issues such as food, the environment and education. And they claim that their policies are based on science, even when they are not.”

This has dangerous implications as when the Left champions the anti-vaccine movement that has killed unvaccinated children, and its war against GM foods has contributed to malnourishment and premature death in the Third World. And don’t get me started about Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” which killed millions indirectly through malaria by banning DDT.

As Berezow and Campbell note, “But conservatives don’t have a monopoly on unscientific policies. Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.”

I always get a Generation X irony-high whenever global warming alarmists equate the anthropogenic cause of global warming hypothesis to evolution, as if the former idea is as proven as the latter theory, then try to paint AGW deniers like myself using the same brush as they do creationists. Of course that doesn’t stop them from exhibiting the same anti-science attitudes towards fracking, where science backs the safety of the practice against concerted and deeply entrenched Green opposition, the result of which is that Germany is about to blow it’s CO2 emissions sky-high by resorting to coal to replace nuclear instead of clean burning natural gas. Oh, and if you didn’t know it, fracking is why the USA is on track to meet CO2 goals unlike the anti-fracking Europeans. I’m even so sure of the safety of the practice I’d welcome it on my property where we rely upon a freshwater well for our drinking water. Unfortunately there’s no natural gas in these parts (now gold? Maybe…)

So why are scientists lefties? The terminology used by Berezow and Campbell provides a hint. “Social Authoritarians” implies a more realistic and nuanced view of one’s political belief system, showing the dichotomies between authoritarianism and libertarianism, and socialism/capitalism aka “Left” and “Right” as shown in the diagram below.

In this view the Moral Majority and the environmental movement would appear in the upper right and left quadrants, both showing a keen affinity for authoritarianism. While the current Chinese government calls itself Communist, is is far more neo-liberal or Capitalist than it will admit. In fact one could make the case that is much more capitalist at this moment than the USA, and certainly more than Europe.

Scientists often are employed by large institutions in government, healthcare or academia. These institutions tend to fall on the upper side of the chart towards Authoritarianism. The bottom of the chart is sparser for a reason: it is the area where individualists, entrepreneurs, artists and philosophers live and these tend to fly under the radar. But for scientists there isn’t much money or opportunity on the bottom of the chart. The days of the experimenter or the Amateur Scientist are for the most part gone although the ideal lives on today with amateur astronomers who do much of the heavy lifting in their field including the tracking of near-earth objects. The recent approach of asteroid DA14 had NASA using live feeds from amateur run telescopes in Australia for example. But most of the jobs for scientists today are with large institutions who can afford the equipment and relatively high salaries scientists demand, and that can only be found in the upper half of the chart. When you add in the fact that scientists today are highly educated, and academia itself is an authoritarian institution with deep ties to Communist and Leftist ideals, it should be no surprise that scientists find themselves in the upper left quadrant of the matrix.

Is this a good thing for Science as a whole? Berezow and Campbell don’t think so and neither does the New Scientist. It’s candor surprised me, but I don’t expect it to let go of the bias and the dogma that compels it to support large, authoritarian schemes to find solutions to problems from Global Warming to Cancer any time soon. Still it was refreshing, and I hope that more than a few readers realizes that Science ultimately should be a non-partisan effort. But I’m not holding my breath…

Growing up in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s was like living in a musical desert. St. Louis had a pop music station, a hard rock station, a classical music station, a black music station, a country music station and a smattering of adult contemporary stations playing Air Supply and Captain and Tenille. That was about it. If your tastes varied from that menu, then you were pretty much on your own. There was a single college radio station run by Washington University, and most of its programming was devoted to classical music and jazz. But for an hour or two a week it played what was then called new wave and punk rock. The show was called Pipeline, and on that show I was exposed to a veritable smorgasbord of alternative genres, from the punk rock of the Sex Pistols to the synthpop of Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. The first time I ever heard Madonna was on that station, and Pipeline provided a taste of The Specials, Siouxie and the Banshees and the Cure that sent one scurrying to the local record stores like Vintage Vinyl, West End Wax and Euclid Records to buy what was heard or even something similar recommended by one of the knowledgeable hipsters behind the counter.

It wasn’t until I moved to San Diego that I could tune into a radio station that played music I liked, and even that came from south of the border, 91X based in Tijuana. Things actually got worse when I landed in the Philadelphia area. Philly didn’t even have a classical station, and the rock stations could often be found playing the exact same song at the same time. There was little variety in that market, so as soon as I could afford it I purchased a CD player and pretty much never looked back. Today I have switched to MP3s loaded on a USB stick, 16 GB of everything from the hard-rock of The Cult to seizure inducing Skinny Puppy mixed in with lots of electronic dance music from DJs like Christopher Lawrence, John 00 Fleming, and DJ Apsara.

Several months ago The Kid introduced me to Pandora. For those who don’t know, Pandora is internet radio that plays music based on the selection of a particular band one likes. As I understand it, Pandora then plays songs by similar bands or bands liked by listeners who share interest in the band. For example, I have a Frankie Goes to Hollywood “channel” (I’m too old to be embarrassed). It loads up and might start with the band’s greatest hit, Relax, but then might follow with a song from The Fixx or Duran Duran, bands that are also liked by 80’s nostalgia freaks like me. I have several stations for African music, ska, industrial, techno, and hard rock. Pandora is streamed to my smartphone across Verizon’s 3G network, and I connect my phone to the car stereo. It’s like having your very own radio station but one for any particular mood you find yourself in.

It is a customized radio experience, and it is one of the ways I know I’m living in the 21st century. 30 years ago I couldn’t have even conceived of such a thing, but here it is, and what’s even crazier is it’s free. It’s paid for through advertisements targeted at the demographic of people who like a particular artist, so I end up getting a lot of Home Depot and Over 50 Singles ads directed at me.

Congress of course is still stuck in the 20th century, and tries to regulate internet radio in ways favorable to Clear Channel, the dominant force in dinosaur radio. But once you hear new music that appeals to you on your very own radio station, why would you go back to listening to dinosaur radio where you only hear what the record labels pay to be played? It doesn’t matter what your tastes in music are, or even your taste in music at this moment, Pandora and it’s competitor Spotify, will provide you with music. Welcome to the future.

Awhile back I wrote about the logistical challenge and potential profits of mining the moon. It’s nice to learn the idea has fallen on much more fertile ground. Google’s founders have teamed up with James Cameron and a bunch of other liberal billionaires to form a mining company with plans to mine asteroids.

Freakin’ cool.

Space enthusiasts have struggled to get their bearings after the demise of the Apollo program and the disappointment of the shuttle program. They’ve had to content themselves with government funded missions with increasing costs and decreasing utility as taxpayers have demanded Apollo-like bang for pennies of what the program costs.

It’s well past time the exploration of space became the prerogative of private enterprise, and if it takes flaming liberals like Sergey Brin, Larry Page and James Cameron to do it, so be it.

James Delingpole lays out the case against anthropogenic global warming hysteria and other environmentalist dogma’s in his book, “Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future.” He writes about his experience in this article in The Daily Mail.

“As someone who loves long walks in unspoilt countryside and who wants a brighter future for his children, I’m sickened by the way environmental activists tar anyone who disagrees with them as a selfish, polluting, anti-science ‘denier’.

The real deniers are those ideological greens who refuse to look at hard evidence (not just pie-in-the-sky computer models which are no more accurate than the suspect data fed into them) and won’t accept that their well-intentioned schemes to make our world a better place are in fact making it uglier, poorer and less free.”

Rachel Carson and her ilk have blood on their hands. Millions of Africans and south Asians died because of their fear-mongering in the West. It’s a dirty secret that isn’t discussed by the mainstream environmental movement. In fact it’s a shame but it seems those who care about the environment aren’t associated with environmental groups anymore because even the Sierra Club and other so-called moderate organizations have been hijacked by zealots.

Imagine a private spacecraft launched from near the equator. It’s mission? To visit the moon, land on it, gather a kilogram of moon rocks and dust, then send that payload back to earth where it eventually reenters the atmosphere and is captured. Why do it? Why does anyone do anything these days: to make money. In 2003 NASA estimated 285 grams of moon rocks as being worth $1 million. That’s roughly $3,500 a gram. Would it be possible to make it to the moon and back with a kilo of the stuff for less than it’s value of $3.5 million? If not, how much of the lunar soil would make it worthwhile? Who knows, after the success of Discovery Channel shows like Gold Rush maybe they’d make a show out of it.

The mission could be broken down into the following stages: launch, travel to the moon, orbiting the moon, descent to the moon, landing on the moon, soil acquisition and storage, lift-off from the moon, return journey to Earth, atmospheric reentry, final collection. 10 stages – a nice round number.

1. Launch – Piggy back on an existing launch of a larger satellite, assuming that the entire vehicle could ride as a microsatellite weighing less than 100 kg. I assume this would be the bulk of the investment outlay.
2. Travel to moon – Disposable stage to send payload on its way to moon. Propellent could be conserved to lower launch weight in exchange for lengthening the mission. Six months there/six months return seems reasonable. But how to track the rocket both to and from the moon without a world-wide network of receivers?
3. Lunar orbit – It would be nice to skip this stage completely.
4. Descent – Since the moon has little atmosphere to speak of, parachutes could not be deployed. Therefore it seems the mission would have to rely upon rockets at some point to slow descent. That adds weight to the launch.
5. Lunar landing – Since humans aren’t on board a feather-like landing isn’t necessary. A controlled crash landing at some survivable speed would be preferred.
6. Soil acquisition and storage – It would be nice to combine soil acquisition somehow with the landing – say by having the craft land on an open ice cream scoop with a door that snaps shut once the craft has embedded in the soil. Alsoa sensor that confirms the payload isn’t empty would be critical. The last thing we would want to do is send back an empty craft.
7. Lunar ascent – Escape velocity of the moon is 2,400m/s. It’s significantly less than the earth’s of 11,200m/s but even that speed would be a challenge. Since my physics skills are laughable I can’t calculate what it would take to lift a 100kg craft off the the moon’s surface. I expect it’s more than I think.
8. Return to Earth – Anything that made it this far would probably generate world-wide headlines.
9. Atmospheric reentry – The heat shield would most likely have to survive the crash-landing on the moon. If the heat shield was opposite the soil collector (e.g. on “top” of the craft) the craft would have to orient itself to the proper trajectory to avoid becoming an expensive flaming shooting star across the sky.
10. Cargo collection – Would there be enough precision to insure the payload is returned to earth where it can be easily retrieved – such as the American desert southwest?

Which if any of these stages could be combined? For example, would the ship have to go into orbit around the moon before it dropped down to the surface or could we plot a course that would essentially crash it onto the moon’s surface? The Apollo mission relied upon two docking maneuvers. Would it be possible to simplify the mission to avoid these complex actions? That would entail sending the heat shield used for reentry into earth’s atmosphere on the last leg of the journey to the moon’s surface and back.

So you launch your spacecraft to the moon and a year or so later you pick up a parachute package containing 2.2 lbs of moon rocks and dust outside of Albuquerque. The next thing would be to parcel the dust into 100mg vials and sell them on eBay for $600 a pop. Larger specimens would go for less, of course. How soon would it take for the feds to arrive at your door arresting you for violating some international space treaty or federal law that wasn’t written with this mission in mind but that some governmental bureaucrat wants to throw at you? So on top of eBay and Paypal fees, be sure to add high power federal attorneys. Oh, and those profits? Rest assured that Obama and crew demonize you as being part of the 1% with enough balls to do something that no one has ever thought of.

 

Sometimes I’m a little slow about these things, so please ignore this post if you are already familiar with Google Reader . Up until last week I wasn’t familiar with that little app from Google, and as an avid blogger I did things the old fashioned way: I typed out or bookmarked the URLs of my favorite websites. Inevitably I would focus more on the aggregators  like Instapundit or Drudge, but I wanted something more personal – like an opinion section of my own newspaper. I also wanted to expand my universe of the blogs I followed. I’ve been writing this journal for almost 10 years and during that time I’ve found some very good blogs – but inevitably something new and shiny distracts me and I forget them. The Internet fat-tail enough, and I’ve gotten tired of the usual suspects quoted by Glenn Reynolds. After searching around for RSS readers, I discovered Google Reader – and it’s exactly what I needed.

Simply sign in to your Gmail account, then type the URL of your favorite blog. It then does the rest. It even has an app for Android, so following your favorite blogger is easy – even if she only posts once in Blue Moon, come that day her post will appear in your own personalized “opinion section.” Welcome to the 2000’s! Now if we could only get Bush back into the White House somehow…

There are sexy planes like this graceful-looking machine.

And then there’s the Warthog.

Dave Weinbaum pays homage to the A-10, the ugliest plane in our arsenal that everybody loves.

This is the first I’ve written about the earthquake that hit the Tohoku region of Japan on Friday. It’s not because I haven’t been thinking about it – it’s always in the back of my mind thanks to my history and ties to that country. It’s more because writing is a synthesis of ideas, and as the magnitude of the disaster grows with each passing hour, there aren’t many ideas to be had. What more can be said about a wall of water that wipes away an entire city, leaving behind such indelible images as a house on fire floating out to sea or ocean freighters floating through neighborhoods? This is the kind of disaster that sticks in your throat and leaves you at a loss for words, and after decades of writing I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to forget the words and simply let yourself experience the event. Writing about it and understanding it will come later.

Here are some points that I can muster as the disaster continues to unfold.

1. I’m already seeing articles out there wondering why the Japanese aren’t killing each other over bottles of water and blankets. This is a common reaction by outsiders who marvel at the social harmony exhibited by the Japanese, especially during times of stress.

The Japanese are unique in the world. They are unlike any other nationality or ethnicity (in fact they should be thought as the latter, not the former. Japanese nationality is by blood, and it’s nearly impossible for a foreigner to get it unless you are a sumo wrestler). There aren’t riots and looting in Japan because the individualism and selfishness that drives those actions have been repressed for centuries out of the Japanese. While this social trait seems exemplary at a time of disaster, it also underlies the high Japanese suicide rate (and declining birth rate), the lack of entrepreneurship or creative thinking shown by young Japanese, and even the reason the Japanese treated conquered peoples and POWs so viciously during World War 2.

To us “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” is a cliche but in Japan it’s a way of life. Japanese society is a pressure cooker that forces people to conform to the norms set by the group. Those that can’t be pressured occasionally leave or more often drift towards the edges of society where the Yakuza and other criminal elements flourish. Most drown their frustrations in alcohol; some even take their own lives. In a disaster Group-think and collective action is good, but the history of Japan is filled with bad ideas that were put into action without anyone defying the group and saying “No.” The Rape of Nanking. The treatment of POWs during World War 2 as exemplified by the Bataan Death March. The sex slaves euphemistically called “comfort women.” Unit 731 experiments on Chinese and POWs.

There is nothing we can learn from the docile and calm reaction of the Japanese to this disaster, and kicking ourselves for not being more like them is a pointless exercise. What we should learn from their behavior is to get relief supplies to those in need within 48 hours no matter what obstacles are in the way. It’s only after the first 48 hours that law and order in our society begins to fray.

2. The Japanese government is weak and incapable of operating effectively in this crisis. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995 I met people who walked from Kyoto and Osaka into Kobe along deserted railroad tracks carrying backpacks of food and water into the devastated city because the central government hadn’t acted. The government needs to be pushed aside (at least in deed if not thought) by the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF). The JSDF has a history of mounting relief operations, and has only gotten better since the Kobe quake. In 1995 the Japanese central government refused aid from foreign countries including the United States which had aircraft carriers and fully-staffed ships hospitals at its disposal in the area. This was an act of nationalist pride by the government, and the citizenry paid the price. Here again the JSDF has worked closely with the United States armed forces and can access aid offered by the US military much faster than that offered through non-government and diplomatic channels. Although the scope of this disaster is unprecedented, the JSDF is in the best position to lead the relief effort – NOT the politicians in the Diet (and especially not PM Kan).

3. We need a sober and non-biased assessment of our nuclear power plants. I am a strong proponent of nuclear power even as three nuclear reactors are in the process of meltdown. The immediate reaction of the anti-nuke crowd will be “See? We told you so!” and advocates of nuclear power will be on the defensive. Neither Japan in microcosm nor Modern Society as a whole can ignore nuclear power. To paraphrase Professor David Mackay, author of “Sustainable Energy: Without All the Hot Air,” it’s not a choice between wind, or solar, or coal, or nuclear – we need all of them. Our species is a voracious consumer of power, and our demand is going to continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future. Nuclear power will remain an important contributor to our power needs, but we must learn from this disaster to determine what went wrong and how we could redesign reactors to withstand even greater disasters in the future. We need to move away from the outright rejection of nuclear power and replace it with a model where engineers learn from past mistakes to improve designs. When the first passenger airliners crashed there were outcries that air travel was too dangerous. But instead of chucking air travel into the dustbin because it was too dangerous we learned from each aircraft disaster to reach a point where we are today when a downed aircraft anywhere in the world makes news because it is such a rare event. The same can happen with nuclear power if a) The anti-nuke lobby isn’t allowed to kill the technology and b) The pro-nuclear lobby is willing to allow engineers to design safer reactors and the public accepts them.

4. We 21st century humans have proven time and again that we cannot predict how bad the worst natural disaster can be. Just off the top of my head I think I’ve heard over the past 38 years the flooding of the Mississippi River referred to as “once in a century floods” no less than four times. Natural events are always stronger than we think they can be, as if Mother Nature consciously resists our pathetic attempts at controlling her by binding her with worst-case predictions. When we design anything that is meant to resist natural forces we should make it so that it “fails gracefully” – not to resist the worst earthquakes or hurricanes we can imagine. Why? Because rest assured, there will be always be worse hurricanes and earthquakes than we can imagine, regardless of whether Global Warming is happening or not. It is better that we control how and when a system fails than to do the impossible: make a system 100% robust.

I have no doubt that the Japanese will survive this calamity and my gut tells me that their nation will be that much better for it. In the meantime all I can do is watch, and hope that the tens of thousands missing are found alive and that relief reaches even the most isolated village as soon as possible. The Japanese people gave me much while I lived among them, and I wish I could do more to give back to them now in their time of need than ask that you to consider a donation to the American Red Cross.

I was changing classes at the Lakefront campus of Loyola. A television had been wheeled out and stood in a corridor showing the explosion over and over. I haven’t forgotten the loss I felt as an American that day with the reminder that exploration is not without hazard, that the roads we drive and the paths we take without a care today were built with the sweat of men and paid for with their blood.

High Flight – by John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

That’s what General James N. Mattis, Joint Forces Commander in Afghanistan has to say about the Microsoft presentation software. The Daily Mail reports that many in the military agree with Mattis. Another general, Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, banned the software while on duty in Iraq, saying “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” he told the New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

I’ve believed for a long time that another commonly used Microsoft product, Project, a project management tool, is just as bad. The software forces project managers to fit their projects into an artificial paradigm at the core of the software that is created by software engineers. This paradigm is based on the thinking of software engineers instead of project managers but forces the latter to conform the engineer’s idea of what good project management requires instead of the other way around.

Similarly, my examination of electronic health records (EHR or electronic medical records EMR) systems finds that many of the systems are not organically derived from the practice of medicine but are built around accounting or database requirements, with the needs of medical professionals only added later. This creates software that a software engineer or account might feel comfortable with and intuitively understand, but that feels clunky and counter-intuitive to a medical professional.

I keep telling myself that the unwinding of the greatest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man is proof of the power of Science, that no matter how hard conspirators try to hide it, eventually the Truth comes out. As an anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptic (not a climate change denier – I don’t deny that climate changes; a basic understanding of natural history is enough to prove that) I’ve been relieved to see reality justify my faith in Science on the topic. But I’m wondering how much damage the AGW alarmists have caused.

We’re not talking about the failures of one man but of rationality itself as an entire generation of intelligent, educated, and hardworking people were fooled into perpetuating what is at heart not a simple mistake but a bald lie. As the supposed scientific evidence for that lie falls one domino after another I’m beginning to wonder where the domino chain will end and how scientists will rebuild the trust squandered by the politicization of their discipline. Those of us who grew up on a steady diet of Isaac Asimov always believed that a world run by scientists would be a better world than we have today, that the banishment of irrationality by those steeped in the tools of logic could lead us into a Golden Age.

What we believers ignored was the dark side of science, the venality of faculty meetings, the anonymous character assassinations in journal refereeing, the naked power present from faculty advisors forcing their graduate students to work on their own pet projects and ignoring the needs of their charges all the way up the food chain to science committees advising presidents and prime ministers. The global warming alarmists have made it impossible for us to ignore the dark side of science, and in so doing all science becomes suspect.

The issue is not that science changes. Science itself is dynamic, and to reflect that change scientists must never forget John Maynard Keynes’s statement to a questioner who claimed his position on monetary policy flip-flopped during the Depression: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Each should strive to keep an open mind, but balance that need with healthy skepticism. When that skepticism is lost, and as in the case of anthropogenic global warming used as a pejorative, scientists debase their own discipline and become no better than the propagandists and politicians they believe themselves better than.

The CIA claimed that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The claim was used to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but those weapons were never found. Two years ago the CIA claimed that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Yet even Iran’s sympathizers in the IAEA say that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. How can we trust the CIA anymore? Since bad information is worse than no information it would be better for the CIA to be disbanded after its 60 year run and replaced by a more effective intelligence tool.

It’s interesting to note that the CIA’s recent mistakes stem from its increasing politicization (the intelligence leaks that undermined the Bush administration’s foreign policy) just as the global warming alarmists have exchanged the laboratories and lecture halls for UN negotiating tables and Congressional hearings.

The trouble is that we can replace the CIA but it’s nearly impossible to replace the alarmists. We can embarrass them and cause a few resignations here or there but for the most part we’re stuck with them for the foreseeable future. They will just continue to politicize science and people will tune them out just as they tune out other political voices. And in the end when there is truly an emergency that scientists agree on – say a future collision of an asteroid with the earth for example – they will be ignored.

It’s rare these days to see the term “global warming” preceded or followed by the the term “consensus” as if this word alone makes global warming unassailable. Besides being a fallacy the usage of a subjective term “consensus” to describe a scientific hypothesis merely suggests its weak underpinnings. We don’t talk about the consensus of Newtonian physics or the quantum physics consensus. We don’t have to appeal to popularity in order to prove these ideas. We have solid experimental evidence supporting them. Historically science has had numerous agreements on principles and ideas that were later proven wrong. Steady state universe consensus? Wrong. The consensus supporting the geosyncline theory of that explained sea animal fossils on mountain tops? Replaced by plate tectonics.

Science isn’t about perfection. The people who believed that the stars and planets moved through ether weren’t fools or bad scientists. Their work advanced Science until it reached a point where a new idea explained the universe better than existing ones; in the case of the ether theory, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s not as important to be right than it is to be methodical and skeptical of one’s evidence and results. This is a basic tenet of science that today’s climate scientists have lost. These people should be stripped of the term “scientist” to protect the reputation of scientists who don’t fall victim to fads.

Like many people I have been messing around with social networking on Facebook. It’s kind of fun finding out what your old friends have been doing, and keeping in contact with current friends is much easier through built in messaging and chat programs. But I’m beginning to wonder what the limits of the technology are, and whether we’re already having our faces pushed into them.

Facebook is like masturbation. It feels good while you’re doing it, but it leaves you feeling empty afterward. Most of the chatter is inane. Does anyone really care what I’m thinking most of the time? Hell, I don’t care about what I’m thinking most of the time so why would anyone else? The applications are time wasters, and the quizzes make those found in Cosmo look like GRE, LSAT and MCAT prep questions by comparison. Join a group or become a fan of something and your inbox will never be the same. You’ve just allowed a tide of spam to wash into your inbox that sends your crackberry vibrating like a sex toy in a porn movie.

If you’re looking for meaningful conversation, good luck. The level of discourse seems to be inversely proportional to the weight of the subject. Mention the weather or clothing and people will respond with footnoted and well-considered treatises. Say something about politics or religion and the comments become shallower than Britney Spears’s gene pool.

It encourages shallow commentary by the 420 character (85 word) post limit. That’s 3x longer than Twitter’s 140 character limit and makes Twitter look two dimensional by comparison. Still, that limit is too short when we have something interesting to say, and too long when we don’t.

There’s a reason why we lose contact with old friends: we’ve changed and so have they. I believe it’s a conceit on our part to expect that we still have something meaningful to say beyond reminiscing about the past. Relationships have natural lifespans; some last decades while others last only days or weeks. Most fall somewhere in between, but Facebook doesn’t recognize this. It assumes that everyone we met and befriended in our lives is exactly the way they were when we met them, and worse, that we haven’t changed either.

For most of its history, Science has always made room for amateurs or non-science professionals. However the 20th Century pushed these scientists to the edges in favor of professional chemists, physicists and biologists using advanced tools at large well-funded laboratories, leading the authors of a 1996 paper to write “Modern science can no longer be done by gifted amateurs with a magnifying glass, copper wires, and jars filled with alcohol.” Writer, teacher and amateur scientist Forest M. Mimms III has published numerous scientific articles in publications like Science and Nature and disagrees, “The term amateur can have a pejorative ring. But in science it retains the meaning of its French root amour, love, for amateurs do science because it’s what they love to do. Without remuneration or reward, enthusiastic amateurs survey birds, tag butterflies, measure sunlight, and study transient solar eclipse phenomena. Others count sunspots, discover comets, monitor variable stars, and invent instruments.”

More importantly is a deep understanding and appreciation of the Scientific Method and its application in our daily lives. One doesn’t have to have beakers boiling away in their basement to apply the method to everyday problems. Science is a powerful tool; one could argue it’s the most powerful tool ever invented.

Skepticism plays an integral role in Science. In a sense it begins with the null hypothesis that attempts to prove the claim under investigation is not true until proven otherwise. The purpose of the null hypothesis is to weed out biased results.

One could say that it’s easier for an amateur scientist to be mislead by the media. In response, the amateur scientist could state that working alone she is less likely to be mislead by group think and the unwillingness to voice a contrary opinion in the corporate setting. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree with the opinions of his peers or his superiors? In a professional setting one exchanges autonomy in exchange for support: a paycheck, equipment, peers. How easy is it for a scientist to disagree in this environment? Go back even further. How difficult is it to dissent in college or graduate school when from your advisors decide whether you advance in your field or not?

The amateur scientist has the freedom to think and dissent if necessary, whereas the professional scientist has been indoctrinated throughout his entire career to accept the validity of a theory on faith. Express disagreement at any step along the way and forget tenure, hiring or the next promotion.

That’s why I find the emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia troubling. These emails show a clear pattern of intellectual character assassination against anyone who is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. Instead of a healthy clash of ideas supported by evidence we have “scientists” acting more like medieval inquisitors to prevent the publication of arguments and evidence that question the current scientific orthodoxy. I

The emails support what global warming skeptics have said all along – that theories and evidence that undermined AGW were being buried, hidden and in some cases outright destroyed in order to shore up AGW. In an exchange between Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, Jones writes, “”If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone” and, “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]?” All this to hide the fact that the earth has been cooling over the past decade instead of heating up as the models predicted.

Add the inability of AGW to be disproven (if global temperatures rise – it’s due to anthropogenic global warming. If they fall as they have been doing for the past ten years, it’s due to anthropogenic global warming), and it’s easy to see how James Delingpole at the Daily Telegraph calls the emails the “final nail in the coffin of ‘anthropogenic global warming’,” and what Andrew Bolt calls the greatest scandal in modern science.

I don’t expect the theory to die so easily. There is too much money behind the current orthodoxy, and worse, an entire generation of scientists have been raised to not question anthropogenic global warming. Fighting money and faith… Well I’m confident that in the end Truth will win out but before it does trillions of dollars will be wasted on solutions to a problem built on a shaky scientific foundation.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming theory points out the danger of professional science straying from the path of legitimate scientific inquiry into faith and orthodoxy. Science needs the amateur scientist and the skepticism and freedom of thought he or she brings now more than ever.

Update: Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.

Update #2:
While packing for our move to North Carolina I found the Wife’s data books from her master’s research in Japan – a small boxed brick of penciled in data books.  That data was used for her degree resulted in several published papers. Not that the data was ever lost; I knew pretty much where it was at all times. I even know where all the Statistica, Excel, and other data files are on my home office network for that work, as well as her more important chimpanzee research that netted her her doctorate. Even though those files haven’t been touched in a decade they are backed up and stored. Why? Because you don’t throw out data.

Unless you believe in AGW - then it’s okay evidently.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Science isn’t supposed to be this sloppy which is why I would hesitate calling the University of East Anglia personnel “scientists.” I believe “charlatans” and “hucksters” would be better terms.

Update #3:
Christopher Booker at the Daily Telegraph calls ClimateGate the “worst scientific scandal of our generation.” What I find particularly troubling is that by injecting science into politics, as AGW believers have done, they are also creating one of the worst political scandals of our generation.

Update #4:
Investors Business Daily takes issue with the lack of ClimateGate coverage by the mainstream media:

So the dominant media no longer check the growth of government, especially when government is poised to impinge on our freedoms.

Rather, they feed public perceptions in a propagandistic loop. Those fearless watchdogs of the press? Gone.

They’ve been gone for awhile – at least since becoming propagandists for Obama. Given the press’s infatuation with Leftist icons like Mao, Che, and Stalin (the New York Times was propagandizing about Comrade Josef almost sixty years ago) and adoration of collective action, it’s not a surprise. Thankfully there is the Internet – which they haven’t shut down. Yet.

Update #5:
Wired magazine explains how scientists screw up and some eventually overcome their own biases to make discoveries.

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

We visited with our elderly neighbors tonight. After a dinner of home-made potato soup and grilled cheese, the woman wanted to show us some pictures of her bunnies. As she was flipping through a photo album, she was narrating the subjects. “Here’s our chickens. Here’s our bunny rabbits. Here’s the space shuttle exploding. Here’s Pumpkin as a puppy…”

We stopped her and she pulled out the snapshot of the Challenger disaster. She had an entire series of the launch taken from a church parking lot – about a dozen snapshots all with the church’s cross in the foreground starting with the shuttle in its first seconds of flight and ending with the falling debris and unforgettable crazy spirals made by the solid fuel rocket boosters.

It turns out she once lived near Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and rarely missed a launch until she left Florida and moved back to North Carolina. She was there that day and witnessed first hand the event that I saw on a television screen in college.

I asked her how people reacted, and she acted it out for me. There were gasps followed by shouts of “it’s exploded!” to cries of “no, no, no.” She said that her prayer group held hands as the rockets continued their crazy spiral and the shuttle’s remains rained down on the sea and prayed for the families of the astronauts.

We then went back to her pictures of baby goats and chickens, but I won’t be forgetting those snapshots anytime soon.

I’m a child of two parents who survived the Great Depression. During that time my parents struggled to make ends meet, and it wasn’t until the mid-1950’s that my father made enough to feed his family of 5 children without worry. By the time I appeared on the scene a decade later they had a car, owned their own home, and saved enough to send my brother to college. But the Depression had left its mark in everything they did.

They couldn’t throw anything away until it was completely exhausted. Nothing was disposable. Objects were treated with respect to keep them in good condition. Broken things were mended. They saved just about everything. String. Paper. Rubber bands. I remember that my father came home from his job with some broken wrought iron chairs, bolted them together and they became our outdoor patio set. One was missing a leg, and my father cut a 2×2 down to fit in its place. In his eyes the chair was completely functional again, but in mine it was an iron chair with one wooden leg.

Consequently I grew up frugal myself.  Although the Wife has tempered this somewhat I find it difficult to the point of embarrassment to buy anything that is not on sale. Over the past decade I have used the Internet to find the best products at the lowest prices, and would buy everything on the web if I could.  But I’ve begun to question my own consumption pattern.

I like to read in bed and because the Wife is sensitive to light, I have bought numerous battery operated reading lights – all made in China. No matter what brands I purchase or how much I spend, within a couple of months the lights break and I’m left using a flashlight to read in bed until I go out and buy another. A reading light is quite a simple device consisting of a battery, LED, and wires all linked together in a circuit. This circuit is then encased in plastic, metal or a combination of the two. Although simple, these lights break within a few months. Sometimes the cases break, other times the soldering fails somewhere in the circuit. I try to repair them but the repairs inevitably fail after a few weeks. Over the past 5 years alone I have probably spent $150 on reading lights.

After reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppell Shell I now understand that my frustration is the result of the replacement of quality goods by shoddy ones made in China in order to maximize profit and minimize expense. In essence well-made lasting goods have been replaced by disposable goods that fall apart almost as soon as they are purchased. This exchange of shoddy for quality has happened as Americans have pursued low price at the expense of all else. We save money in the short term by pursuing low prices but lose much in the process including long lasting quality goods and decent paying jobs.

Shell writes for the Atlantic and is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Throughout the book I searched for Shell’s anti-capitalist bias, but didn’t find it anywhere. Instead she writes “Trade is and must be free,” and believes that regulation and unionization is not the answer to our obsession with low prices. She quotes Adam Smith liberally and suggests that Smith himself would not be pleased with the junk on the shelves of America’s superstores. She writes that Smith advocated a system whereby workers earned a decent wage to purchase a decent life, and supporting that system were Smith’s heroes – consumers buying the goods and services made by the workers at fair prices. These prices weren’t inflated: the consumer received a quality product that performed the job it was intended to do.

Shell discusses the usual suspects – Wal-mart, dollar stores and discount chain stores – but she zeroes in on Ikea as a firm that has built a mythos around itself to shield it from the fact that it uses illegally harvested hardwoods from the Russian Far East and Asia (Ikea is the third largest consumer of wood in the world), and sources production to some of the lowest paying companies on the planet. Shell cites a table that sells for $69. A master craftsman admitted that he couldn’t buy the wood for that price, let alone build the table. Ikea headquarters exudes an aura of cultishness that is more reminiscent of Scientology than of a business. There workers design products that are meant to be made and ship cheaply – not to be comfortable. The products are given cutesy names that slaps a “happy face” onto what in essence is a soulless product.

While every move by American giant like Wal-mart is subjected to scrutiny by environmentally minded intelligentsia, she notes that Ikea is given a pass:

Wal-mart’s relentless march toward world retail domination provokes scathing exposes in books, articles, and documentaries. But most media responses to Ikea verge on the hagiographic, swallowing whole the well-polished rags-to-riches story the company wrote for itself.

Everything Ikea does is geared towards lowering its costs.  Ikea’s store placement outside of cities and away from public transit, as well as its refusal to deliver makes its customers drive to it is a conscious decision by the firm to minimize the cost per square foot of its stores by buying cheap land. It ships disassembled products to save on shipping and on manufacturing. It regularly squeezes its suppliers, thereby preventing workers in some of the poorest places on the planet from getting better wages while encouraging environmental abuses.

Shell’s criticism of Ikea hits home because I’ve bought from there. In fact the table that I’m writing on is from Ikea. Its wood grain is quite dense, unlike that from plantation farmed trees. Of course only its legs are wood; it’s top is wood veneer and already shows signs of wear after just three years. Did the legs come from illegally logged old-growth forest in Siberia or Indonesia? How environmentally friendly can this table be if it is already falling apart after 3 years and will need replacement in another year or two? It’s not friendly to the environment – but it is to Ikea’s profits if I’m stupid enough to go there and buy another table. No, it’s replacement will be a nice, well-worn American table from a second-hand shop.

Shell makes a convincing case that America’s love affair with shoddy goods is bad for the environment and living standards abroad. Unfortunately she could have made a better case that shopping at Wal-mart and Ikea leads to lower living standards at home. Shell mentions a worker in furniture manufacturing who was laid off by an American furniture maker and picked up by Ikea – at much lower wages and benefits. However families who shop at Wal-mart save roughly $2700 a year on their purchases, and since Wal-mart caters to the lower demographics the savings is a significant part of the demographic’s income. Shell argues that this savings is less than the family would have made had Wal-mart and the discount chains not driven jobs abroad, and because the jobs are gone forever Wal-mart consumers are locked into a decreasing standard of living that no amount of savings can justify.

Shell’s work is heavily footnoted but because the footnotes aren’t referenced in the text, I ended up reading them on their own after finishing the book. This is a small quibble with an otherwise fine and thought provoking book, but it would have made her arguments even stronger had the footnotes been referenced.

Shell’s writing style is easy to read and her ideas are well supported and researched. Her conclusion that it is up to Americans to recognize that things that fall apart quickly – like reading lamps – don’t provide good value in the long run leaves the decision whether or not to improve the situation up to us.

She believes that we need to educate ourselves on the products we consume – where they come from, how they are made, and what we consume is in line with our values. If we are comfortable buying cheap crap that falls apart, sending our dollars to the Chinese government that funds oppressive regimes in the Sudan, Burma and North Korea, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. She discusses the movement towards buying locally grown farm produce and second hand goods. While the people dismissed as “frugalistas” by Robert Novak are more than likely politically liberal, Shell’s presentation shows that the issue does not have to be a polarizing one. Rod Dreher proved in his book “Crunchy Cons” how it was possible to care about conserving the environment and eating healthier while at the same time upholding conservative values of a strong America and small government.

Making tables disposable may boost Ikea’s profits, but in the long run we spend more, degrade the environment and prop up regimes that we should be undermining instead. That’s something that Greens and Conservatives can agree on.