Question Scientific Authority

I'll take science over religious authority.

Re Earth-like Planets: There might be a whole lot of earth-like planets. But whether we think or we suspect they are there is not really a relavent. What is relavent is how far away they might be and whether or not we will ever be able to traverse those distances. The Milky Way Galaxie is rather large, and the Universe larger, from our short-lived human perspective.

Re Describing the New Madrid Earthquake: A more useful comment would be that the Richter Scale represents the energy released in an earthquake and by itself cannot be taken as the best predicter of earthquake damage. The Modified Mercali Scale (I am not sure of the spelling) can serve this purpose. And with this scale, the New Madrid earhquake can be classified.

I'm intimidated. The only reason I'm still typing is the reassurance that, even if I'm an expert, it is okay to be wrong. I was in an earthquake once -- trust me, getting out of the shower is NOT where you want to be -- but never have visited another solar system. I wasted all morning in a pointless meeting, which resumes momentarily, and at which we will in theory make the decisions that should have been made this morning, mainly about what experts to consult. Now I'm not sure I even need to go. Thanks, Joel,

Reposted from the tail end of the previous Boodle, and fixed a small SCC:

Tim, for that much money ($160k), I'd hope they could have a bigger slice of you (or a functional equivalent) for an entire year.

An Earth year, not a Plutonian year.

As far as the 9th planet's status goes, let me quote Sentator Pluto Plutarsky and friends from the film "Astronomer House":

Sidereal-Day: War's over, man. Dr. Ekers dropped the big one from Prague on his way out the door.
Pluto: Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the French IUD bombed Pluto? Hell no!
[aside]Charon: French IUD?
[aside]Moon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Pluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...
[thinks hard]
Pluto: the tough get goin' and publish! Who's with me? Let's go!
[runs out, yelling, alone; then returns]
Pluto: What the f*** happened to the Astronomers I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? "Ooh, we're afraid to go into a crazy orbit with you Pluto, we might get in trouble, or made into a 'dwarf planet'." Well, just kiss the seat of my astronomical observations from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Dr. Wormer, he's a dead man! Dr. Marmalard, dead! Dr. Niedermeyer...
Charon: Dead! Pluto's right. Psychotic and an unreliable observer, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional press and science that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.
Pluto: We're just the scientists to do it.
SI-Day: Let's do it.
Pluto: LET'S DO IT!

[All, running to the bar] YAAAAAAAAA!

bc

Test comment, this is a test comment.

Hmm. We're not going to have to go to some other solar system to find a Hot Earth.

We're making one right here on New Venus, home of the four-armed six-legged hermaphroditic fish.

bc

I can submit a test comment, but not this:
Still catching up from the last Boodle. TBG, Cassandra, I hope today is better.

Pat, thank you for inspiring all of us to share our skies. You've helped us to look around us a little more closely. From the variety and beauty of the descriptions, I think we were just waiting for an excuse to take in and describe the natural beauty around us.

Did you analyse the methodology used to arrive at the conclusions? What parts of them did you find unscientific and likely to lead to incorrect conclusions?

Or was it just easier to dismiss them out of hand, praise the God de jour, and go back to watching reality TV?

Scientists at Penn State are known to eat peanut butter ice cream from the university's creamery and local apples(it's an ag school, after all). Would scientists who consume mango milkshakes come to the same conclusions?

Could Joel's comment about wanting to see aliens surfing monster waves be a consequence of seeing the truly scary surfing photo illustrating William Finnegan's story in the New Yorker a few weeks ago?

Joel... you wanted color photos?

Here ya go... da proof:

http://www.substanza.com/images/alien_goes_to_the_beach.jpg

Re the 1811 earthquakes, sure we weren't there with a siesmometer, so we don't "know", but WE CAN GET A PRETTY GOOD IDEA. From newspaper accounts we know the geographic extent and intensity of the damage, we know the physical properties of the soil over that area, we know how energy waves attenuate in that kind of soil, we know what kind of force it takes to carry its intensity over that distance to do that kind of damage, and we can relate that to other recent earthquakes for which we do have measurements. So Joel is wrong that "maybe" it was an 8.5 and "maybe" it was a 2 ("hey, we just don't know"), no Joel, it's not a "maybe", it really "probably" was an 8.5. If Joel would have read a little deeper into that UT site to the source articles he would find that out.

Scientists don't just pull these numbers out of the air. They have a lot more data and a lot more reasoned thought behind their conclusions than a guy that ignores that data and says "hey man, you weren't there, so you don't know." Yeah, we don't, but we have a pretty darned good idea.

Ask and you shall receive...
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2006/09/exotic_earths.php#more

We really do think this, in that it is based on our current best understanding. which is different from our previous understanding, but ultimately the only way to know is to look.

I would be remiss if I neglected to bring up the Silver Surfer and or Joe Satriani's instrumental "Surfing with the Alien".

bc

from Wikipedia:
The seismometer was first invented by Zhang Heng in China in 132 AD.

But do they have earthquakes on these earth-like planets? Anyway, great piece about Einstein. Joel, you know your physics history and quantum theory WAY more than most newspaper guys!

A scientist by training, I put at least as much faith in the Method as the next guy (or gal). But Joel is absolutely right, in public discussion "science" sometimes takes on a cult-like veil of infallibility. I was just reading the other day that someone "proved" that tall people are smarter. I think the article was a classic case of reading too much into results that probably aren't reflecting what the researchers wanted them to.

Joel's pandering to the scientific illerati is unconscionable.
I am dumber for reading him.

bc;

I much prefer "Summer Song," since we have yet to reach the Autumnal Equinox.

:-)

To Bluestar -

You're dumb all right.

People new to this blog should know that we pander to the scientific literati, not the illiterati. We are all about science here. We view science as a candle in the dark. I don't need any drive-by lectures, thank you. I think that even scientists sometimes in the thrill of announcing discoveries overstate the degree of certainty. This may be then exaggerated by journalists. No?

Joel,

Don't be glib. You don't know the history of seismometers. I've studied the history of seismometers.

Ben writes:

From newspaper accounts we know the geographic extent and intensity of the damage, we know the physical properties of the soil over that area, we know how energy waves attenuate in that kind of soil, we know what kind of force it takes to carry its intensity over that distance to do that kind of damage, and we can relate that to other recent earthquakes for which we do have measurements. So Joel is wrong that "maybe" it was an 8.5 and "maybe" it was a 2 ("hey, we just don't know"), no Joel, it's not a "maybe", it really "probably" was an 8.5.

Ben, what would be wrong with hedging that number a bit more given that so much of the data comes from, as you put it, "newspaper reports" -- talk about sources lacking in credibility! Oh, wait, oops, forgot where I work. Seriously, New Madrid, circa 1811, was not exactly a teeming metropolis. Nor was St. Louis or Memphis in that day. I know of at least one USGS geologist who thinks the earthquake wasn't as strong as supposed, citing claims that there wasn't much shaking away from the riverbeds. I hate to see 8.5 turn into a hard number just because the Internet says so!

JA, the scientists have to "sell" their projects to the sponsors. Being a little more assertive than the data strictly supports boost the "glam factor" of the story in most cases and makes the sponsors happy. I do not blame the guys doing it, it's part of the game. If the scientific illeterati believe that the New Madrid was exactly 8.5 on the R-scale that's too bad for them. Mudge can give us the exact Mercali scale number of that particular event; he was there.

Sure, it's important to remember that because something comes from an expert, that doesn't necessarily make it true. It's also important to remember that just because someone gets published regularly by the Washington Post, that doesn't make them intelligent.

Considering there are literally trillions of stars, with trillions of planets surrounding some of them, the Vegas odds would be that there are, in fact, microbes, bacteria or some other more advanced form of life somewhere. But, all this talk of numbers and biology, I think, is confusing Mr. Achenbach. He requires more proof before he's going to toss his hat in this ring. Let's just leave the argument in a place that is much more provable and quantitative: God created everything. Nice job undermining an already beat down scientific community AchenBush.

Joel - I'm shocked. Or do I mean thrilled.
I can't believe you'd say journalists exaggerate.

I think you're spinning "think" to be synonymous with "know"...

We do not as of right now, know very much about extrasolar terrestrial planets (the exception being the PSR1257 planets, which and arguably one or two "hot super-Earths", but the data we do have constrains what systems may be out there. The primary caveat is the selection effects on our observations and how well we understand them.
The "zeroth level" understanding of dynamics of "hot Jupiters", which are the planetary systems we mostly know about, is that habitable terrestrial planets would be destroyed or ejected in them.
A more careful analysis shows that is not true, terrestrial planets may survive and persist in these systems, and to the extent we understand the physics, we can quantify the probability of this, and speculate on what their detailed physical nature might be.
Therefore we ought to look, to see what is really there.
We claim that some of the "hot Jupiter" systems are good candidates to look at for habitable planets, and we predict which ones we think are the best bet.
We may be wrong, that is the point - it is a falsifiable prediction.
And we throw in the usual baggage of speculation, because we can.

Joel, you know full well that when a scientist makes an educated guest like that he is hedging. He says "likely" -- that means his confidence level is greater than 50%.

Of course we should question authority, but not in an flippant fashion. This article seems proof that the search for Intelligent life on Earth is still ongoing.

Joel,

I have to agree with Bluestar. Your position is an absurdist pandering to the illiterati. Of course scientists are human, and sometimes (science) idiots put out information before it has been suitably tested, and of course then the media runs with it. But there are very strong systems in place that help to control that (peer review, not to mention the loss of respect and possibly job and career that poor science publically stated can cause). Does some stuff that come out from scientists later get proven wrong? Of course, all the time, that's the scientific method at work. Is it less likely than in almost any other field of human endeavor, including silly and rather ignorant blogs like this? You bet.

Words like "Maybe" and "Probably" imply the uncertanity Achenbush was whinning didn't exist. He needs to read more carefully and understand the subject matter better. Also, the study of past earthquakes is a well-established field with lots of prooven methods. The insinuation that 8.5 is a random guess is way off base. It apparently comes from someone who likes the megaphone but not the responsibilty.

Most of us have this vision of the omniscient "Scientist." You know, like Mr. Spock, or those guys in white lab coats who show up in old science fiction movies. (Heck, some of us grew up desperately wanting to be one of those guys.) The dirty little secret of modern science, however, is that specialization rules. The more specialized you are, the greater the chance that you can dominate your field. This means that unless a scientific question happens to fall within the prohibitively narrow range of one's expertise, a Trained Scientist probably has less to contribute than anybody else with active ganglia.

Another holdover from those old movies (almost as alarming as our cultural fetish with Theremin music) is confidence in The Computer. Look, I work with computers and computer models every day. They are no better than the underlying assumptions, many of which are little more than guesses. The old chestnut "Garbage In Garbage Out" is alive and well. Computer models are tools for establishing sensitivities to underlying assumptions, and little more.

Also keep in mind that many really smart technically astute scientific guys can also be awfully stupid. (I know this. I have lived among them. They have accepted me as their own.) Scientists are just as susceptibly to the logical foibles of human psychology as anyone else. Maybe even more so, since Real Smart Guys are sometimes extremely adept at maintaining the intricate mental contortions needed for effective self-delusion.

Finally, realize that scientists sometime do not always have a good handle on judgment. Sure, they can do Rocket Science, with its well-defined parameters and exact mathematical relationships, but can they really judge the intangibles of real-world problems? I assert many cannot. Heck I have it on extremely good authority that some can't even reliably sort laundry.

Gee whillickers, are we above the fold?

"If you try to inflict an incovenient definition on the culture, the culture will simply ignore you. "

Science Tim said this a long time ago, and I think it applies to this kit (and also to the whole Pluto-not-a-planet affair). It might seem reasonable to assign a value of 8.5, it might be commonly accepted, but that does not mean it was.

Its a nice theory, and a nice supposition, but only Mudge really knows the truth.

I can't tell if the writer of this blog is being sarcastic, or has a very poor understanding of how science is done. He won't buy into the idea of earth-like planets until he sees alien surfers? Granted, I don't know what data are out there that would prove the existence of earth-like planets, but I'm also not willing to dismiss it so quickly.

Scientists infer all kinds of things without "seeing" them. 50 years after Watson & Crick demonstrated that DNA is a double helix, there is no living human who has ever seen the double helical nature of DNA. No one has ever seen an enzyme, but we have mountains of evidence that they exist. No one has ever seen gravity, yet we have proof of its effects. This idea of "until I see it it's not true" is the kind of anti-intellectualism one expects from the Discovery Institute, not from a Washington Post blogger...

Even if this is a silly and ignorant blog, we try to speak, er, write in a civil manner, rather than trade personal barbs. I think of it as more courtesy than, say, pandering.

Re planets being hospitable and similar to earth: have we discovered such a planet? It's an honest question. I can't recall that we have. All the dozens of laptops have produced is that there is the possibility that maybe out of a gazillion planets, there might be some like ours. The burden of proof is on the scientists who claim that there are, or there could be such planets. Not to put words in your mouth Joel, but I think that's what you're saying. There is only speculation, no emperical data...yet. If substantive reports come out, great. Until then, expressing skepticism is not "ignorant" or "silly."

Are science and religion really that juxtaposed against each other? I've always viewed science as a way to explore and discover more about God's creation. The complexities of physics, biology, and other fields don't cause me skepticism, but appreciation for a Designer. Go for it, call me a religious nut, but for me, and for many Christians, science is a means of understanding God.

Steinn that's very helpful and I've posted your comment to the main blog item so people can read it.

I am sure it IS good science. Which I said in the main item. But I also think the subject of ET life is particularly rife with speculation and unscientific thought.

For those of you new to the party (gjm), Achenbach has a reasonable grasp on the topic of life on other planets:

http://www.amazon.com/Captured-Aliens-Search-Large-Universe/dp/0684848562/sr=8-1/qid=1157660224/ref=sr_1_1/104-3943822-1400724?ie=UTF8&s=books

Just sayin'.

bc

Absence of evidence is NOT Evidence of Absence... AND Just because I can't PROVE to you that flying pink elephants don't exist does NOT mean that they DO in fact exist.

So...

You can say authoritatively NOTHING about that which you have no direct evidence for...one way or the other.

Theories are all we have when looking for something we THINK might exist. Theories about planets with water don't seem that crazy to me.

At what point does someone get to quote Joel quoting Sagan in Captured By Aliens saying "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."?

I just did. Okay.

Contributor "What" made the point:

"Considering there are literally trillions of stars, with trillions of planets surrounding some of them, the Vegas odds would be that there are, in fact, microbes, bacteria or some other more advanced form of life somewhere."

Which is pretty much the same thing I heard and wondered about back when the first Star Trek came out. I don't disagree with the thought. But around the time of the first Star Trek movie I got old enough to consider another aspect.

What if you multiplied that huge number of potential planets by the really small probability that everything went exactly right in a long series of events over millions of years such that, starting with dust, you ended up with semi-intelligent creatures typing their thoughts on a newspaper's blog? I'll bet there's a dissertaion in there somewhere.

I'm betting that the result of that calculation is 42. But that's just a guess.

Wow. Scientists take umbrage almost as heartily as the French. What does this tell us? (a) Scientists missed the humorous intent of the piece, as written in English, or have no sense of humor. (b) The French misunderstood Joel's sense of humor, translated, or have no sense of humor. Therefore: (c) Scientists are French, (d) Scientists have no sense of humor, and/or (e) Scientists don't read English.

I'm pretty sure that's how they taught it in Logic back at school, along with reeling, writhing and fainting in coils. Time to faint away.

Here's something I wrote about Carl Sagan some years ago:

"A scientist needs evidence. Faith is not part of the game. The axiom applies in matters both great and small. Sagan's professional achievement may have been his ability to stick to science and resist the incredible allure of sentimental thinking. He had wanted to tap into the life force of the cosmos, to be part of a galactic community, but he didn't want to be Percival Lowell. He won that battle. He was a scientist to the end."

gjm writes: "I can't tell if the writer of this blog is being sarcastic, or has a very poor understanding of how science is done. He won't buy into the idea of earth-like planets until he sees alien surfers?"

I was being silly, of course, but I have to confess that when it comes to Earthlike planets my standard of proof would be pretty high. Not that I don't think they're out there. I assume there are. Why wouldn't there be? What happens here could happen elsewhere and it's a really big universe. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- you know the drill.

I did it too. Couldn't stop myself.

In defence of the article on planets, the key point is this:

"Scientists had previously assumed that as Hot Jupiters plowed through proto-planetary material on their inward migrations toward parent stars, all the surrounding material would be "vacuumed up" or ejected from the system, he said. "The new models indicate these early ideas were probably wrong," said Raymond."

Let's not get our dander up too much. In the immortal words from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "It's only a model".

Ivansmom if you had taught my logic course I think I would have done a lot better.

SonofCarl you're exactly right: This research is a corrective on previous assumptions that Hot Jupiters would sweep clean the habitable zone of a star. So it's all good. I just wonder how many people will hear of this story and think: They've found habitable planets. Of course that could be our fault in the media.

God help us if French scientists read this Kit.

Dangnabit! Somebody call Mudge and get the definitive answer on the New Madrid earthquake! Here we are with a question of cosmological importance that only he can answer, and he's in Savannah, of all places!

Besides, I really, really want to know.

Okay, so to give the earth-like planets business a bit more context, I read the article. I confess, I didn't understand all of it (I am not an astrophysicist). They started, like all good scientists, with a question.

This is my (likely flawed) understanding of their paper: At this point, we've discovered around 200 non-earth planets. A large number of them are really big, and really close to the star that they orbit. This conflicts with our understanding of how large planets form (that they form in the outer, cooler parts of a solar system). This means one of several things: our understanding of planet formation is wrong, these planets are somehow extraordinary due to the fact that our current planet surveys can only find huge planets, or the planets formed in the outer part of their solar systems and migrated to the center. They favour this third possibility, and use computer modelling of planets that form in the outer parts of the solar system and examine how they could move through a solar system to be so close to their sun. They find, that if this were to happen, that some proportion of them would develop into "earth-like" planets (their estimate is around 1/3). So, they are not concluding that earth-like planets exist, but rather concluding that the existence of earth-like planets is a feature of their model, and that if we find earth-like planets, it will be proof that their model (of planets forming in the outer reaches of the solar system and migrating closer) is true.

It's a bit disingenuous to say that they are claiming to have proven the existence of earth-like planets. They are predicting that once we have the instruments capable of looking, that earth-like planets will be found, and that they will be found at a particular frequency that will support (or disprove) their model. This is computational cosmology, no different from theoretical physics. They sit down with their computers, make some predictions, and look to see if the data support them.

Hi, team, sorry am way behind and this one is too good (and too dense) just to skim. Will curl up with the laptop and a cup of tea when I get home (German shepherd occasionally does the nose-flip to get my hands off the keyboard and on to his knobby head for some scratching, but at least he's not always trying to drag me into some windowless conference room for meetings).

In the meantime . . . TBG, I was so sorry to read about your dad. It was a pleasure to meet you at the last BPH, and I will keep you, and him, and your family in my thoughts and prayers.

More later.

Joel, you're going to have to quit writing so fast and well if I am ever to keep up. Between this, and now round-the-clock Law & Order on cable, I really need to quit this time-wasting "work" thing.

It's *always* the media's fault, Joel.

Unless I'm involved, of course. In that case the blame inevitably and squarely lands on me.

Just ask Mrs. Martooni.

tangent, that's an excellent topic for this Boodle.

I recently read "Quantum Questions", a collection of philisophical, mystical, and spiritual writings by many of the major physicists (Einstein, Heisenberg, Eddington, Jeans, Planck, etc.) of the 20th century, edited by philosopher Ken Wilber.

Typically, the scientist/writers are spiritual and some quite religious, but they point to the idea that good science requires hypotheses that are founded on fact (as best as it can be established, anyway), and requires being receptive to new ideas and facts, but also to the possibility that experimentation may prove one's theory wrong.

They also posit that religion(s) (and mysticism) are about faith, intuition, and spirituality, and as such, beyond scientific proof, or even the need for it.

They caution against mixing science with religion or mysticism, as tempting as quantum mechanics and other sciences make it, claiming that doing so can lead to biased perceptions in both areas.

Even though I do not agree with everything in the book, I found it an engrossing read. And I found Eddington to be LOL funny. Well, LOL witty, anyway.

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Questions-Mystical-Writings-Physicists/dp/1570627681/sr=1-1/qid=1157661090/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-3943822-1400724?ie=UTF8&s=books

bc

And I suppose my thoughts about the dizzying ascent of Katie Couric will now, alas, also have to go unexpressed. All my sweetness wasted on the desert air . . .

:-)

Joel, don't worry about that. Even science illiterates, among whom I hold distinguished membership, would not conclude from the article that habitable planets had been found (or proven, or whatever).

ivansmom gets Comment Of The Day. The display of illogic was milk-snorting funny, but the Lewis Carrol allusion was worth 42 bonus points. But what do I know? I'm an engineer not a lawyer and my strengths are ambition, distraction, uglification and derision

The Achenblog is on the home page, which explains the sudden appearance of numerous cranky posts and posters.

Mr. Dr. Sigurdsson is the only one of my ilk -- practicing professional astronomers -- that I have detected from the comments. Most scientists perceive that they work in an obscure and highly nuanced territory and therefore view a misunderstanding or misstatement of their work as forgivable error, then try to correct the error. People who show up to call you stupid are not in that category.

You will note that Joel, jokingly, expresses strong skepticism and demands a powerful test of the statistical claim that there may be numerous Earth-like planets out there. This is what any fellow scientist would demand. The principal lesson that I take from the study is that we should look more carefully at Hot Jupiter systems, instead of writing them off as unworthy targets for a Terrestrial Planet Finder mission (if it ever gets built). That's perfectly reasonable. Sigurdsson and co. are stating that the conventional wisdom must likewise be considered less certain than we had imagined.

JA is not arguing that we should ignore the results of Sigurdsson et al.'s work, he is saying that it should not be taken as gospel truth. Coming from someone who has done the careful reporting that is behind "Captured By Aliens," this is a strong message. The best parts of CBA, to me, are those where Joel comes out from behind the metaphoric lectern to interact with us and with the interview subjects as a person. The scene in which he gamely participates with a group of women who believe they are actually aliens in some sense ("Starseeds"), hunting all over a construction site for some danged alien thing, was really moving. These people are desperate to prop up a fairly absurd system of rationalization. They don't need another excuse to retreat further from reality. JA is encouraging healthy skepticism among persons to whom skepticism does not come naturally.

ivansmom -- you took the words right outa my keyboard. I was thinking that gjm *must* be French. Loved your logic.

I'm still trying to find some habitability on this planet (such as it is). And trailer trash, I agree with you -- would rather have scientific authority, as fluid as it is (the scientific method of reasoning and all that), than so-called religious "authority". And I'm whole-heartedly willing to go with the ebbing and flowing of the scientific bases of discoveries -- now you see 'em and now you don't. It's life, folks. You want absolutism, find your dreams somewhere else.

Look Space Fans, even though the Drake Equation is an Equation, and therefore all Scientific and like, it still has a bunch of assumptions in it. And because it is a multiplicative equation, just one nasty zero and that's all she wrote.

Thanks, ScienceTim, but let's face it, I'm just a hothead on the ET issue. I am purple-faced and apoplectic. My default position is raving lunacy. I am sure it's all good science and good modeling etc. Actually I just got my dander up and my hackles raised and so on when I read the opening line of the press release: "More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside Earth's solar system may harbor Earth-like planets, many covered in deep oceans with potential for life..." There's nothing inaccurate about it, it just props a lot of stuff on that little word "may"...

tim - you beat me to the punch! i saw all the umbrage and just had to check and YES! lo and behold, there's mr. bossman and his fly-away hair on the washpost home page...

does this mean i hafta pick up my toys and stop peeing on the hydrants?

And on the subject of the New Madrid earthquake:

Every time that an earthquake wreaks some havoc, the subject of the silliness of the Richter scale comes up in the American Geophysical Union newsletter. Pretty much, the story goes that Richter invented an approximately logarithmic scale for the energy released in an earthquake in order to summarize comparisons for the newspapers. It is only modestly related to the destructiveness of the earthquake. It is poorly defined and hard to measure in any firm quantitative way. It was created purely to cater to a desire for an authoritative voice to sound authoritative in comparing earthquakes. Earthquakes already are hard to define with any single numerical value of any import, so the quest for a Richter magnitude for the New Madrid earthquake is a bit silly, and a definitive numerical value is even sillier. I venture to say that that was the point. There is no doubt that it was a major earthquake. The skepticism arises concerning the spurious precision of assigning a specific Richter magnitude, without expressed uncertainty. "Probably" does not address the range of possible values centered around the most-probable value.

That said: my impression was that the New Madrid earthquake was retroactively interpreted based on things like land motion, subsidence, and other quantitative stuff. There still are fence lines where the horizontal displacement is plainly observable (I've seen pictures). Newspaper reports furnish some additional information, especially related to the range of perceptible detection, but I think that the amount of damage is not a critical factor in estimating the magnitude of the 'quake. After all, there was a lot of sub-code building in St. Louis and elsewhere back in 1811-12. I seriously doubt that there even WAS a code.

Umbrage? Perhaps...

But I think that JA's original post of suggesting that we "Question Scientific Authority" is metaphorically akin to telling a child to stop playing with matches while outside in a hurricane. Though playing with matches may result in getting burned, it's hardly the concern of the day... I don't think there is any major worry that average Americans are taking science and scientists too seriously. I think it quite likely, however, that they don't take it seriously enough...

I was thinking that earlier myself, bc.

But then I got busy making Alien Surfer Dude (hmm... think I could get a job at Reuters?) and forgot all about it.

I can tell you exactly how much energy was released in the New Madrid earthquakes: precisely enough to have all of the effects that they did.

I don't remember: is Thursday taken.

As in "Scientific Umbrage Thursday"?

bc

Eggsactly, bc. Science is for "how" and faith is for "why." Two separate questions, although one can certainly meditate on the beauty of each.

gjm,

That's the kind of metaphor we love around here. We turn all the Haters into Boodlers. Just ask SuperFrenchy. Come back sometime when we are discussing something truly silly. Like politics. Or the French.

For the benefit of anyone new to the Achenblog, one of the regular posters was actually present at the 1811 New Madrid earthquake. For a fine account of the untold (okay, previously untold) history surrounding that event, read Curmudgeon's post at March 24, 12:45 a.m. at this link:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2006/03/predicting_the_next_big_earthq.html

"50 years after Watson & Crick demonstrated that DNA is a double helix, there is no living human who has ever seen the double helical nature of DNA. No one has ever seen an enzyme, but we have mountains of evidence that they exist."

Actually people have seen the double helix-- through the prism of technology. Gim needs to learn about electron microscopy, mass spectroscopy in all its forms, as well as 1-2 years or so of chemistry to really figure out why we consider the photos and spectrograms and so on "as good as seeing". Also, we're now creating gene chips and studying the properties of DNA as a "wire" for electric transfer.

And I personally have seen DNA strands when distilling DNA... more like macrostrands of chromosomes, but still... and then did gel electrophoresis. No doubt for me. I've used purified enzymes in solution that certainly looked visible enough to me. Every time I look at my steak I'm seeing protein which is what enzymes are. We can computer-model that stuff to explain the properties and predict propertie from the structure and verify that.

Pretty good for "invisible" stuff.

Right now, our tools for detecting planets are nowhere that good.

Right now we couldn't tell if a star had a brown dwarf or a huge super-Jupiter orbiting it, or 50 earth-like planets and a couple gas giants. Our tools aren't that good and it may take years and years of observation to puzzle out the data pointing to an earth double even looking at stars we KNOW have planets.

Did you know about Cruithne?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html

And there are theories about a Nemesis to our sun.

By the way, here's a good summary of the Nemesis theory, off-the-wall though it is.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/mathscience/2006-01-19-sun-nemesis_x.htm

It's intended to explain the mystery of Pluto's orbit, doncha know?

To tie up my blindingly obvious point in a big pink bow and some delicate tinking silver bells- if we can't even say what's in our own solar system, how can we be sure of other solar systems?

I'm not sure what's more intellectually disingenuous: the unfettered belief in aliens peddled by Hollywood, or the fact that you openly misrepresent an article asserting that there are more habitable planets out there than previously thought as asserting instead that there are many--or even ANY--planets inhabited by aliens.

Perhaps if you'd bothered to read the article, you would've caught this portion: "There are a lot of evolutionary steps in between the formation of such planets in other systems and the presence of life forms looking back at us."

Mars is a habitable planet, but is uninhabited. The distinction should be obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of logic and the basic mechanics of grammar.

I expect the scientific literati to be both logical and functionally literate at the same time. Doubly so on both counts for a self-described 'journalist' who writes to that audience. Perhaps I expect too much...

Wilbrod - that's exactly the point I was trying to make. That without *seeing* DNA, we have all the mountains of evidence pointing to its properties from mass spectrometry, electron microscopy, old-style density centrifugation experiments, electrostatic properties, etc, etc. That one need not *see* planets to infer that they exist. In fact, many of the ~200 planets that we know about are inferred from the wobble of the star that they orbit, yet I think the astronomers among us have few doubts as to their existence... Science doesn't work that way. We will never see an electron (they're smaller than the wavelength of light, after all) yet we've had little doubt as to their existence for nearly 100 years...

I won't try to make an estimate as to the quality of the tools used to look for non-solar planets. That's not my area of expertise...

gjm: /I don't think there is any major worry that average Americans are taking science and scientists too seriously. I think it quite likely, however, that they don't take it seriously enough...//

Indeed... 25% of Americans think the sun goes around the earth, only 40% believe in evolution and 13% know what a molecule is.

And 92% believe in God, so asking for evidence before believing something is not exactly something they routinely do.

But what do I know, as a humorless Frenchie?

Superfrenchie, that's just typical. You're totally ignoring the fact that we now think there is a new class of ocean-covered, and possibly habitable, planets in solar systems unlike our own, where possibly alien creatures, which could theoretically be wearing red party dresses, may be planning to consume of all humanity with or without ketchup, even as I write this.

Actually, 99% of detected extrasolar planets were detected from the parent star's wobble (assuming that the 200 known-planet number is authoritative, which I know it isn't in my heart of hearts. But I'm lazy). Anyway: 1 initial detection by transit occultation; 1 (nonrepeatable) detection by gravitational lensing; approximately 198 detections by reflex motion detected as radial velocity variation.

Anyway, I read some of the press release (not all, or even most; it was way too long). Note that it was a press release, not a news article. That means that the researchers had the opportunity to vet every word -- no excuses about being misstated or taken out of context. The release opens up by making some very extraordinary claims. As Joel notes, they are hanging an awful lot on that 'may' in the first sentence. 'May' suggests that there is one point of significant wiggle room in the following sentence. In fact, there is a whole chain of increasingly speculative claims. Sure, those wonderful oceanic planets 'may' exist. But what tiny fraction of the results turn up with such a desirable description of a planet? As the very angry Josh Harris notes, the details are available later in the press release. Mr. Harris chooses to castigate Joel for not being sufficiently astute to perceive these important qualifications. I suspect Joel noticed that fact, but was making a professional critique of the exaggerated claims under which the announcement was made, surely intended to make an anti-scientific public sit up and take notice. What Joel criticized (I think rightly) was the mistaken impression that the public would read that whole darn encyclopedia and catch the qualifications and weasel words. In the real world, you know that nothing beyond the title and first sentence will make it into anyone's consciousness. This press release strikes me as a well-intentioned but fatally flawed effort to get the public to take an interest in science. Instead, the public will fasten onto the opening claims, and believe that to be the whole import of the story.

Joel, If you're clever enough to realize that earthquakes behave differently under different surface conditions don't you think the seismologists also took that into consideration when coming up with an estimate? Besides, you're reading someones synopsis of probably a much longer paper explaining how the estimate was derived. Although, I do agree with you that an estimate of 8.5 does suggest a level of accuracy that probably doesn't exist but then the original papers this is based on may have been a bit less 'sure' of this number.

Joel, I had to laugh at you questioning a newspaper's credibility. And you had the nerve to say "oops". Hope your boss didn't see that one.

SF... Are you implying that the sun does NOT go around the earth? Next thing, you'll be telling us the moon is made of rocks and not cheese.

You French-type people have some strange ideas.

Hi, cowtown.

Just a reminder that I will, if life lasts, post the booklist tomorrow. And it will be lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng. I've been bragging on you folks, and telling everyone the wonderful kindness you're doing for the kids. Of course, I throw in the name WashPost, and everyone's eyes get so big. I am so excited, and I know the kids are going to love it. Good night and sweet dreams.

In one of the links (the Cruithne link), the work of the French mathematican Lagrange is cited. Presumably he did his work in la grange.

The point, Gjm is that the burden of proof has yet to be met. The value of a model is that it has predictive power.

If you model an orbit of a planet, then you should be able to predict that you will see it in so-and-so spot at a so-and-so date and time. If the planet is there as predicted, it supports the model. This is in fact how Einstein's theory of special relativity was proven-- it explained Mercury's orbit better than Newtonian gravity calculations.

Models are fine, but it's not PROOF... yet. Watson and Crick knew DNA existed, they had the mass spectrometry evidence that it was a helix of some sort. Coming up with the double helix explained all the factors and automatically suggested how the molecule might replicate itself. Further mass spectrometry and other studies showed the model was supported by evidence.

Of course, DNA does also exist in triple and quadraplexes at various times, usually during replication.

Yeah, there's no reason to doubt that there are habitable planets out there.

There are innumerable suns out there the same generation and composition as our sun, Sol. We simply don't know if our solar system is typical of those suns yet. That we have discovered some super giants and many binary sun systems do suggest that the variety of possibility might be greater than we could imagine from our own solar system.

*waving madly at CowTown*

martooni, don't forget the French-type people were able to thoroughly vex King Arthur...

:-)

In science, the modus operandi is to state a claim/hypothesis and then try to tear it down. One of the reasons that many scientists have rightly earned a reputation as lousy teachers is that they do this in the classroom, too. You do not teach someone a new thing by first convincing them to assume something that you know to be false. The false notion stays in the head, with all the counter-evidence filling the role of 'picky details'. Yes, you CAN teach people this way; but that doesn't mean that it is an effective way to teach. The reason we do it this way in the actual practice of science is that we have no other choice. There is a reason why it takes a long time for a truly new idea to become accepted into the canon -- because we have to spend a decade shaking free of the old ideas, first. It is a good way to confirm that only really solid ideas make it into the canon, but it is a bad way to guarantee universal scientific literacy with the material of which we already are confident.

Joel,

Thank you so much for your article. I would not believe anything the so-called scientists wrote now, unless Jesus came back again, and pinched me on the face.

I have always known that god created a trillion light year Universe, just to fool us into thinking that we are not alone.

And the next thing you know, someone might believe in Global Warming. Thank God, at the rate we are going in the Middle East, and thanks to Bush/Jesus, we will never have to know whether or not that was true.

Thank Jesus, but mainly, than George W. Bush!

John N.

My point in my 6:30 post, which I forgot to mention, is that the press release does the naughty thing in teaching -- it makes the extraordinary claim, then picks it apart with many details. "THIS INCREDIBLE THING IS CERTAINLY POSSIBLE!" it proclaims, "(but not very likely -- let's discuss why not)." The press release does not say anything untrue, but it hopes to rope in readers by making a false impression, which is corrected only in the details. In a loose nontechnical interpretation of the language, the article clearly is claiming that there are inhabited watery worlds throughout the galaxy. Technical readers will read it in Science and get the nuanced version. But who did the authors think would be reading their press release?

Having been a minor player on one single obscure press release, I can attest that the temptation to exaggerate is very, very strong. You really WANT to say something clear and unqualified, then regain your virginity by including all the qualifications at the end. BUt it doesn't work that way.

Some of these posts accuse Joel of fostering an unreasonable suspicion of Science as if he were an acolyte for the self-serving skepticism of the religious right. The irony of this leaves me all flustered and woozy. A close reading of article clearly shows it is an indictment of speculation garbed in the language of science. It is speculation, not the scientific method that is being criticized.

Yes, they sure did, Scotty.

Threatened him with flatulence too, iirc.

SciTim, that must have been a very interesting press release to work on.

Yes, we issued our press release and then wondered if the press would call us back for another date.

They never did.

Of course, I won't believe in gravity either until I can see it; or magnetic fields; or quarks; or....... All these theories were put here by God to test our faith in His command to us to be ignorant.

All those are labels for phenemona guided by His Noodly Appendage, Christopher K.

Been on vacation this week and I'm trying to get caught up. So I'll only make one comment from the last boodle:

My sympathies to both Cassandra and TBG for the sad news they posted. My thoughts are with you and your friends and families.

bc
Thanks for posting about "Quantum Questions." It has been added to my ever-growing book list.

superfrenchie
just wondering, where did you get those stats from? Only 40% of Americans believe in evolution? Not trying to be snarky, just curious; I thought it would have been higher.

Christopher K: I'm not aware of coming across God's command for us to be ignorant. Could you enlighten me?

Just got back from dinner: it was homecooked, which doesn't mean much, until one has eaten at my school's cafeteria, in which case, a homecooked meal generates roughly the same excitement of discovering life on another planet.

I forget-- what's his fart joke, NAME I mean... that guy Weingarten, when is he coming back for chatological humor?

That cover story gambit sounds fishy to me.

tangent: //just wondering, where did you get those stats from? Only 40% of Americans believe in evolution?//

And let me add that: out of 34 countries surveyed, only Turkey does worse:

http://tinyurl.com/rh4mt

What's really interesting is that a lot of the countries that are more 'secular' = 'believing in scientific deduction' = 'believing in evolution' have essentially state-sponsored religion: Ireland, England, etc. I have seen it noted before that state endorsement of religiosity (such as the prayer in schools that the religious right so desires) is very effective in making people STOP believing in it.

Now, stop distracting me, you people. I have work to do!

So, you are a Republican!

Look, this is the real world. Academics have to publish or they perish. Magazines have to sell copies and ads. Tabloids demand sensationalism. Who's gonna' be interested in an article that 'speculates there might be a whole lotta planets out there somewhere and some of them might be a little bit like earth and maybe just one or two might even be habitable . . .' Who's gonna' read THAT?!
We want instant gratification! Aren't the twin pillars of life egregious consumption and instant gratification (although some teen types complain it takes too long)?
Save those 'mights' and 'maybe's'. We want to know that, yes, there are a kazillion planets out there and alot of 'em are like earth and alot of those are no doubt habitable . . . and the headline at Murdoch Media reads "WE'RE NOT ALONE!!!'
(The retraction/correction will be in the next issue in a place where you'll never find it.)

Ahem. All I can say is that American has 300 million people and this sample "representing America" relies on only 1484 replies, and there is no clear indication that the sample was designed to be broad enough to rule out any kind of skew. Even Turkey had a broader sample and it's a smaller country.

I am so sick of the religious nuts - sorry, the religion of science nuts going all ballistic and self-righteous anytime someone casts doubt on the validity of "scientific" claims. If you don't have the patience to get off yer freakin' high horse and explain your science, you shouldn't be surprised when us ignorant, unwashed masses commit the unforgivable sin of actually doubting the theory.

Sorry, but I am unwilling to unequivocally "trust" anything ANYBODY says.

Finally, I find it hilarious that somehow having a dozen PC's run equations day and night for eight months has ANY RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER!

Talk about ignorance.

Wilbrod: //Ahem. All I can say is that American has 300 million people and this sample "representing America" relies on only 1484 replies, and there is no clear indication that the sample was designed to be broad enough to rule out any kind of skew.//

Ahem. Statistics 101. The population size of a country does not matter for survey purposes. A poll with a random sample of 1,000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population.

If you double the size, you get a 2% margin of error, that's it.

http://tinyurl.com/rlacl

Joel,

I agree that the scientific method is the most reliable epistomology for determining truth. And you are ignoring a lot of science. Seismographic calculations are calibrated against geological phenomena within faults. Such analysis indicates that the New Madrid event was probably close to 8.5. Does anyone claim to know with certainty that it was exactly 8.5? No. You make too big a deal of this. I'd recommend that you learn more science before passing yourself off as being a scientist. Being a reporter who knows some science and writes about science, doesn't actually qualify one to BE a scientist.

Regarding Pluto, so we discover new information. That changes our model. Copernicus and Newton changed previous models. Einstein changed Newton's model. Welcome to the structures of Scientific Revolutions. So guess what? Pluto doesn't really qualify as a planet. Likewise, Europe doesn't really qualify as a continent either, AND, as it turns out, the earth isn't flat. Quite a few were burned at the stake for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the physical universe. The inquisitors weren't very pleased about that. People have to get used to the fact that what they previously thought of as truth, isn't as black and white as they had thought. In a word (actually three): Get over it.

Science Tim: //What's really interesting is that a lot of the countries that are more 'secular' = 'believing in scientific deduction' = 'believing in evolution' have essentially state-sponsored religion: Ireland, England, etc.//

Ireland has state-sponsored religion?

As far as I recall, it hasn't been so for more than a 100 years.

And I would add that if there is a country that comes very close to having "essentially state-sponsored religion", it would be the United States.

Witness all the references to God in public life, but also speeches like this from one of your Supremes, about how he decides court cases:

http://tinyurl.com/mk8l

At any rate, I just realized: Ireland is not in the "evolution" survey. At the top is Iceland, not Ireland.

Northern Ireland would have been included as part of the UK.

Sorry, Ireland IS included. It's #15, pretty far from the top of countries who believe in evolution.

I probably have gone too far, but Ireland has rather a reputation for a variety of restrictive laws that clearly trace to specific Cathoilc dogmas.

The United States has an accepted public language that acknowledges existence of the divine, but does little to define that property. No specific religious dogma holds sway over American secular or legal life. While there are references to 'God' in the singular, which nominally embraces only monotheism, it can easily be read as a mere metaphor. Monotheism is palatable to something like 75% or more of the world's religious persons outside of India and China (estimating hand-wavingly). Yes, India and China are a large frazction of the world -- but on the other hand, we are outside of those countries right now. We have done away with either compulsory or 'voluntary' prayer and a variety of other mandated activities that were examples of required religiosity. The tension in our society is that it bugs a lot of folks that I am not required to practice the forms of their (majority) religion. The United States, by having no formal requirement to display religiosity, has replaced it with informal requirements. I admit that. Whereas places with formal requirements seem to largely disregard the tenets of religion in private life. It's enough to make you vote for prayer in schools! England, for sure, has a political personage (inherited role is beside the point) as head of the religion. That is certainly enough to make a joke out of religion.

Ireland is far from the top, but it's still pretty far up there compared to us. I didn't want to venture even as far as I went with England and Ireland, regarding the other nations near the top; I know little-to-nothing about their religious life.

Anyway, it was a mild point; I'm not married to it. I yield the field.

Wilbrod did not doubt the survey on the basis of the sample size, specifically, except that you have to wonder how they selected their samples when you get many more respondents out of a much smaller country. It suggests a selection bias at work. His stated concern was that there was no information to provide even an inkling of assurance that the sample actually was random. A telephone survey, for instance, ignores many poor people without phones, and ignores people who are very busy (or consider themselves busy). A man-on-the-street survey ignores people (like me) who spend all the time in an office or at home. A mail survey is subject to self-selection effects based on level of interest -- anti-evolutionists are more likely to opine than evolutionists, who consider that the battle should already have been won by something more potent than mere opinion. On something as important as determining whether a country is willfully stupid, it seems that a high standard of care is necessary to assure a truly unbiased sample population.

I'm another astronomer/astrophysicist (pick your favorite) who occasionally lurks on this mess of a blog, although I can't understand how any of the regular commenters get any work done. Must be drinking some special variety of coffee, or sticking it to the jerks in upper management.

I was sort of annoyed by the tone of Mr. A's original post. As has already been emphasized, we don't just pull data out of our asses, which it's obvious Mr. A understands. I just don't think you did the best job of conveying that this time. Regrettably there is a world of difference between the tone and quality of press releases and actual papers, which scientists don't always try to solve. We tend to be mediocre writers and teachers anyway as Mr. A must know.

ScienceTim: //The United States, by having no formal requirement to display religiosity, has replaced it with informal requirements.//

We pretty much agree.

My test for a country being "essentially" a theocracy would be this: can you be elected its president if you do not state clearly that you believe in God. Or even refuse to answer the question.

I'm afraid the answer to that for the United States is a resounding 'No'. In fact, it goes further. If I am not mistaken, there isn't a single member of Congress who does not state a religion in his/her bio.

Joel Achenbach: //I am pretty sure that seismometers didn't exist)//

Hum. For a post that argues against educated guesses...

The seismometer was first invented by Zhang Heng in China in 132 AD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Heng

But maybe I just did not get that it was humor... (I'm a humorless Frenchie, remember?)

"...which included a link to a University of Texas site with factoids on earthquakes..."

Hey -- a factoid is not a 'fact'. The -oid suffix means having the appearance of but not being, as in humanoid. A factoid is a false statement that many take to be a fact because it is repeated so often. Is this what you meant?

ScienceTim wrote:
"In science, the modus operandi is to state a claim/hypothesis and then try to tear it down."

Where I come from science is the tedious process of experimentation, checking your conditions and assumptions for some level of accuracy, developing a claim/hypothesis based on the experimentation, then writing a paper laying everything out for all to see. Others who believe that it might be real try to repeat it. They check your experiments, conditions, assumptions, etc and possibly improve on your work and write their own papers for all to see. Science marches forward with the claim gaining validity as more scientists repeat the work and gain confidence, or it dies as scientists cannot repeat the work or find flaws in those conditions and assumptions (like cold fusion :^). I don't know any scientist that works on something they do not believe is possibly true. But scientists who work on something and find it is not true will write a paper and that will end that idea.

We all have seen how hard this process can be. Just remember back to high school science class. Maybe it was chemistry and everyone followed the lab instructions but everyone got slightly different results. The teacher probably averaged the results and got close to what it should have been. But imagine if the teacher had no idea what the answer was. Does the variety of answers show a problem? Can the results be averaged? Why does the variation occur? When it comes to predicting past earthquake strength a lot of data goes into the determination and that 8.5 is an average, and it probably has some percent variation. Nothing is certain when predicting things long past.

So now some scientists have stated that earthlike planets exist and Archenbach does not believe it. Belief is not a scientific statement. The question is what assumptins did these guys use and what factors did their program consider? I have heard of a theory concerning the inflation the universe went through in its first few seconds. There is debate among the experts. If the inflation was small then the universe is not much bigger than what we can see. If it was large as some have calculated it means the universe is so large that simple statistics can be used to prove not only that earthlike planets exist, but planets exactly like earth, with every stone in the same place, and people exactly like each of us typing on a computer keyboard to Archenbach's blog exist. Its all in those assumptions and theories based on observation.

But I have to disagree with Archenbach here. Water worlds should not be that unusual. Water is everywhere in the universe. In clouds where stars are being made, water is a major component. We see lots of water on earth, water in venus's atmosphere, dried rivers on Mars, etc... I'd be surprised if we did not find water worlds as our instruments keep getting better and better. Science will march on and prove Archenbach's should at least take the scientific method with a little more trust.

One thing to consider. Before the first atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico no one had ever seen one explode or anything like it explode. The science and math pointed to an explosion of a certain size but they added a safety measure and sat in bunkers far enough away based on those calculations. Turned out the explosion was just about what they predicted. And they didn't even have decent computers back then. You should have a little more faith in science because science refuses to rely on faith.

ScienceTim: //Wilbrod did not doubt the survey on the basis of the sample size, specifically, except that you have to wonder how they selected their samples when you get many more respondents out of a much smaller country. It suggests a selection bias at work.//

OK, but this one has 2,000 respondents for the US, and the number is... 42%:

http://tinyurl.com/nl735

I wonder the same thing, Planets, but not all of us are in the same time zone, and given the Achenrift, I doubt all postings are even chronologically correct anymore.

Except mine today-- I AM posting after work hours.

The Wikipedia item on seismometers was mentioned earlier today, and acknowledged by JA. In any case, it was kind of a joke. Regardless of whether seismometers existed in 1811-12, I have never heard anyone mention the use of seismographic data with respect to the New Madrid earthquake.

I believe that 'factoid' has come to mean, in the common vernacular, a very small bit of factual information of questionable provenance. 'Factlet' might be a better term. The '-oid' might be justified, however, by the fact (!) that the so-called 'factoid' often is quoted without any context, explanation, or interpretation, and thus may not mean what it is being used to mean.

I'm just killing some time here, while my colleague reads over my work...

ScienceTim: //The Wikipedia item on seismometers was mentioned earlier today, and acknowledged by JA.//

Ah, sorry. My bad.

Actually Superfrenchie, you misread it slightly.

"Almost half, 48 percent, said they believed humans have evolved over time. Some of those people, 26 percent of all those polled, said they believe evolution occurred through natural selection, and another 18 percent of all those polled, said evolution was guided by a supreme being."

The more accurate answer is 28% believe in HUMAN evolution through natural selection, and 18% believe in divinely guided evolution of HUMANS, compromising between faith and science.

This sounds far more plausible than 40% of Americans to me.

Looks like the poll made a mistake in not asking people what they thought evolution meant and asking about humans specifically.

An amazing number of religious conservatives (almost all creationists for instance), will admit evolution of "kinds" (dogs from wolves, various species of bears, etc.) but absolutely refuse to discuss the possibility humans are related to apes.

If you carefully defined evolution as "do you think all the species of bears came from a common ancestor", etc., especially sharing pictures of the species in question, you could possibly get a 75% or higher agreement rate.

It'd be interesting to see what 75% of people in Iceland really believe evolution to be, for instance. Or the French, hmm?

Tell me about your academic preparation in evolution that you obtained as part of your education in France, Superfrenchie.

I'd be very interested to hear about it and what your understanding of evolution is. The hot buttons and the debate there is likely very different than it has been in America.

Wilbrod: // Tell me about your academic preparation in evolution that you obtained as part of your education in France, Superfrenchie.//

Well, Darwin and stuff...

But I really don't think the high numbers in the US are due to education, or the lack of it. As far as I know, all public schools teach evolution, don't they?

What happened I think is that public school education has to compete against Sunday school education, and the more confortable theory, the one in which you don't really die at the end of your life, wins the contest.

In a secular country such as France where a large majority of its citizens do not attend church in the first place, that competition does not take place.

Even the billions of galaxies and trillions of stars don't offer even a remote probability of life. If it was even remotely probable, then scientists should surely have been able to successfully create life from scratch. So many people have mentioned water as if it implies life or even has the remote possibility of supporting life on its own. Life is so extremely difficult to create that mankind has yet to succeed in doing it.

And even having created it, can it be sustained? Can we maintain favorable conditions for even 10 years to assure continuous propagation. We struggle to help pandas avoid extinction. What makes us think that the chaotic conditions of billions of years ago could support life? And what makes us think that chaos would fail to extinguish that life after a billion years of harsh conditions?

Does science dictate that the universe tends toward order?

According to this poll, 55% of Americans think God created humans in their present form.

For Bush voters, it's 67%...

http://tinyurl.com/6cohb

Archenbach?!!! he he he

You're right. SETI is an enormous waste of time and money.
REALLY intelligent beings know it'd take too long to communicate with, never mind travel to, us. What sort of intelligent person would wait (to travel to us) or spend (to reach us) hundreds of years?

"The roots of [the apparent rift between science and religion] are very deep . . . it probably goes back to a conviction that some of the books of the scriptures, like the Book of Genesis, which deals with beginnings, is actually telling us about the origins of the world. Now, in fact, any biblical scholar will tell you -- and this is not news -- that the Book of Genesis was never meant to be about the origins of the world. But many churchmen believed that in the Book of Genesis you had actual live news, like CNN, about the beginnings of creation, and therefore you had many people down through the ages, like the famous Archbishop James Usher in Ireland in 1650, who calculated all the ages of the patriarchs . . . and worked out to his own satisfaction that the creation of the world occurred in the year 4004 B.C. on the 17th of September at 9 o'clock in the morning."

-- Miceal Ledwith, Ph.D., in the film "What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole"

Sully, I think you misunderstand me, or perhaps I have spoken poorly. I do not claim that a scientist begins an investigation by assuming something intentionally false. Many scientists will try to teach something this way, however: lots of science guys will try to challenge false notions about seasons by demonstrating that seasons are not created by variation of orbital distance, rather than starting out with showing that seasons are created by obliquity. I've heard this cited as actually reinforcing the bogus notion that the scientist meant to discredit, instead of sweeping it away in the glare of truth.

No notion of the scientific method as a cut and dried procedure is accurate, of course. When you consider a scientist who starts from data, however, you still can assign phases of the classic scientific method -- after all, those data would not exist, nor would they be examined, if the scientist did not start out with a hypothesis by which to decide what data to collect and by which to interpret whether the data have something interesting to show. Just because the hypothesis is not overtly stated nor written anywhere, doesn't mean that there is no hypothesis. If I expect uniform data and they're highly variable, then I've learned something; if I expect variable data, and they're uniform, then I've learned something else. If I get exactly what I expected, then I haven't learned much; certainly, my results are expectation-driven, not data-driven.

Time to go get some rest. My work is doen for the night.

Meanwhile, in the White House:

/*/Soon after Rove moved into his new office in the West Wing, previously occupied by Hillary Clinton, he invited three top Catholic priests to conduct a ceremony to purge the room of evil spirits. "It was an actual liturgical ceremony," says participant Deal Hudson. "We sat at the table, we prayed. A priest said a series of prayers, including a blessing."/*/

Extract from the book 'The Architect', about Karl Rove.

http://tinyurl.com/l8xo6

>ticklishturtletoe "Even the billions of galaxies and trillions of stars don't offer even a remote probability of life."

Hi There

New baby panda!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/06/AR2006090602281.html

Failed in science in high school, did we ?

Seti is not searching for a signal directed at us. It's searching for signals that have "leaked out". It's the ultimate NSA progamme.

*sigh* Okay, so I'm not leaving yet.

SETI is not an enormous waste of time and money. At worst, it is a tiny waste of time and money, when you compare it to all the other things on which money is wasted. The amount may be large compared to our personal finances, but it is trivial compared to other large projects. A few million a year, at most. For about the cost of running an elementary school, we can conduct a global program that has the potential to revolutionize our entire concept of humanity's place in the universe.

No serious person thinks that SETI is about two-way communication between anybody. The hope is that somebody decided to send out a very loud signal, purely as proof that they exist. Ever shouted to hear your echo? Happens all the time. The question is, how big a 'hope' is it? Serious thought has gone into this, in order to evaluate what sample of stars must be carefully tested so that failure to detect anything becomes meaningful. With generous estimations, you need to examine something in the vicinity of millions of suitable stars before failure to detect anything becomes statistically discouraging. One of the outcomes of the work that started this thread is that the word "suitable" needs an expanded definition.

A false description of SETI that I have seen numerous times is that SETI assumes that the aliens are there, and just needs more time to find them. This may be what motivates the SETI researchers, but it is not what designs the experiment. The null hypothesis in SETI research is the assumption that there is NOT someone out there transmitting. We can then estimate the probability that the null hypothesis is wrong, from which we can deduce what level of statistical test is required in order to provisionally accept the hypothesis ("ain't nobody there, with 99.73% confidence") versus falsifying the hypothesis ("I found somebody!"). The stated opinion among SETI researchers is that we are in the bare infancy of really testing the null hypothesis.

If there were 10 SETI-capable civilizations whose signals were arriving at Earth right now, we would need to examine continuously something on the order of 30 billion stars in order to have a reasonable chance of detection -- we can't use an omnidirectional receiver for such signals, we need a directed radio-telescope, so you don't get the signal unless you point in the right direction. In order to reasonably rule out the concept of 10 such civilizations, you would need to examine something like 90 billion stars and find no signal from any of them. Even so, that leaves wiggle room for the possibility of a smaller number of SETI-capable civilizations. At some point, however, the probability of disproving the null hypothesis becomes so small that it's not worth trying. We aren't there, yet.

if i were to move into rove's office, i'd sure want the priests to come over and say some prayers...

Seti is running on my 'puter right now.

ticklishturtletoe asked:
"Does science dictate that the universe tends toward order?"

I'll leave it to Science Tim or other qualified professionals to explain the Laws of Thermodynamics in the context of the latest in cosmology.

First, I would think we need an agreement on what life actually is. It may be obvious to you but it isn't to me. We have found life in places once thought inhospitable, deep in the Earth's rocks under crushing pressures and high temperatures, at deep water superheated vents. We know sunlight is unnecessary, or oxygen. Life can be sulfer based. What seems to be most common among all life is some form of DNA that acts as the reproduction instructions without which it couldn't be called life. Still, I don't know if DNA is a sufficient condition for life. In fact, one interesting question is what is the most primitive DNA we know about and just how primitive is it? As I recall, the protein that causes Mad Cow disease is not life but sure acts like it is in terms of infection and reproduction.

DNA, at least as we know it, encodes instructions using 4 proteins in a double stranded helical chain. This limits our search to those environments in which DNA and its proteins are survivable. Unless of course the Universe has seen fit to create some alternative chemistry to accomplish the same thing; i.e. reproduction. Perhaps something that works in liquid methane, which apparently occurs with some frequency.

Achenemesis asks: "Failed in science in high school, did we ?"

Actually, I got an A in the class and a 5 on my AP test, so I did ok in high school. Can't speak for Achenbach, but I'm one of the least schooled people on the blog, so I would have to assume he, and ScienceTim, et al. do have an inkling of what they are talking about, and probabaly did ok in high school.

Sitting in a Long Island hotel room, getting ready to go to the American Museum of Natural History tomorrow to look at fossil horses. Since I just drove 11 hours, I'll make a few disjointed, marginally intelligable comments.

My experiences on press releases and talking to media people--when I do what comes naturally, and say things like "might be..." or "I suspect..." or "I'm not sure, but..." one of two things usually happen: 1) my provisional statements get edited out, or 2) the article gets cancelled altogether. I've literally read articles and not been able to tell that I was the person they were quoting until I saw or heard my name. Even with my own museum's PR staff, there is a lot of eye-rolling when they talk to a curator, and we insist on seeing the the releases before they go out to verify their accuracy. You can't trust those media people--right, Joel ? :-)

It's amusing, except that getting grant money and support for research depends in large part on your ability to publisize it to someone (to NSF, or educators, or the public, or Discovery Channel, or somebody). Those who sell out the best get the most support to do more research--they get grants, get tenure, get published.

Much more disturbing to me is that some scientific journals are the same way. In many paleo journals, and in my opinion in "Science" and "Nature", expressing any degree of uncertainty in a manuscript results in an automatic rejection. It's not good science, but there it is. In paleontology, that's why so much of the real work gets done informally, at conferences--that's when you can honestly lay out the strengths and weaknesses of your ideas, not in a publication.

That said, I'm suspicious of any results based purely on computer models. I view models as simply a tool to tell you what kinds of things to look for in nature or in the lab--not as valid conclusions in their own right. IMHO, a computer model, without observational evidence to support it, is just a video game.

Ditto to everything ScienceTim said at 5:25 about earthquakes, with one addition: remember that the Richter Scale is logarithmic scale. So if the possible range is, say, 7.5 to 9.5, you're talking about a possible variation of 2 orders of magnitude (in terms of energy released). I suspect (based on little more than a lack of sleep) that the margin of error in this research was much less than an order of magnitude, so that they would have been saying something like "between 8.45 and 8.55". And I suspect that would never make it into print that way.

In paleontology, we always face the same issue when talking about ages. I work on a site near Richmond at which we have narrowed the age of the fossils to between approximately 14.5 million years and 12 million years, with 14 million the most likely based on our current data. Invariably, when talking to the press, or writing a popular article, that is how I state the age. Yet it has NEVER appeared that way in print--it is always stated as "14 million years" (unless they get it completely wrong--14,000 years, 40 million years, etc.).

Superfrenchie said: "As far as I know, all public schools teach evolution, don't they?"

Guess again--every state (except sometimes Kansas) has evolution as a required part of the curriculum--although usually only a very minor part (1 week), only in high school biology. However, in my and Mrs. D.'s experience dealing with public schools (all in the South), only once have we ever seen evolution taught by anyone (other than the two of us)--at a high school in rural Louisiana. (Two exceptions--we both were taught evolution in high school (New York for Mrs. D. and Virginia for me)--but in my case, only in AP Biology at a Virginia Governor's School for Science and Technology.) Below the high school level, most teachers I know have no more knowledge about evolution than the general public (and MANY don't believe in it). In high schools, the teachers tend to know a little more about evolution and science in general. But many don't teach evolution (or teach it only very briefly) because they don't want the hassle for students and parents (and sometimes administrators). Another reason not to teach it--even though evolution is a (minor) part of Virginia's high school biology curriculum, over the last few years there have been almost no questions about evolution on VA's Standards of Learning tests.

Not sure I said everything I wanted, but I'm falling asleep, and my train to Manhattan leave at 7:18 am. Joel, hope you enjoy the paleontology discussion.

Ohhh, one thing I forgot--Joel's complaints are exactly what drives me crazy about much (most?) of the research supporting human-induced global warming (including computer models). The fact that I agree with most of that research is beside the point--the presentation, and sometimes the procedure itself, is often very shoddy--especially with regard to rejection of alternative theories.

tangent, you are wise beyond your years.

Dooley, fossil horses! (I miss Nani, too.) I was intrigued by your reference to fossil penguins the other day - never thought about those.

Annie, don't hesitate to comment about whatever you want. There is no such thing as off topic here!

This has become a very depressing time of year for me. My manager's manager didn't help when he gave a presentation on where my company is going with IT support (outsourcing, cost cutting, going to heck in a handbasket were the themes). All I need is about 10 more years of gainful employment...wish it wasn't seeming like a crapshoot...

Good morning, friends. I can't sleep, don't know why. I guess I'm like a little kid, excited. I'm not going to post the list in this kit, but if there is another kit, I will post it there. I'm still trying to get it together. There are so many books. One could just wrap up in books, like wrapping up in a blanket.

Hope to walk this morning, weather permitting. My daughter and the g-daughter left yesterday, kind of missing them.

Interesting discussions here concerning science and the methods used in science. Never thought I'd see the words science and faith used together in one sentence, but it happened on the Achenblog. I get the distinct impression that some have taken umbrage at Joel's kit, but I find it quite funny, the part I understand, suffice it to say science is not my thing. I believe in science, believe it has a place in our society and our lives. I believe in God and His Son, Jesus, and still I believe it is okay to believe in science, because my thinking is that it's just men trying to unravel God's creations and his mysteries. The problem for me is when men deny God, and His Son, Jesus. And I know some will find this thinking idiotic, but that is what I believe, and I am going to stick with it.

Have a good day, folks. It's Friday, and the weekend is coming. Please know that God loves you so much more than you can imagine through Him that died for all, Jesus Christ.

TBG, hope your dad is okay, my prayers are still with you and family.

ticklishturtletoe: //Does science dictate that the universe tends toward order?//

The science is urgently needed to clean up both my desk and my bedroom!

Cassandra, I hope you eventually got some sleep. Thanks for thinking and praying for my dad. And thanks to everyone else, too. It makes me feel good to know that there are folks around the world who have Dad in their radar somehow.

Things are the same: pretty bad. They tell us that the next day or two are crucial. We discovered when my mom was sick that doctors will not use the word "die." But yesterday they kept using the words "worst-case scenario" to mean death.

We tried to explain to the doctors that we don't think death is the worst-case scenario. It's very hard to come to that conclusion, but we are all in agreement--and we know my dad's wishes--and that makes it a little easier.

And if he doesn't die, we'll figure out what to do next. We've done it before.

// I get the distinct impression that some have taken umbrage at Joel's kit, but I find it quite funny//

This "taking umbrage" thing in this blog leaves me a bit puzzled.

Apparently, every time Joel receives any criticism for something he has written, this is the word that is used. It is usually followed by calling the person taking umbrage "humorless".

I ought to know, that's what I was called pretty much on my first sentence in this blog.

Since then, I have realized that the 2 are even synonymous: "taking umbrage" IS "being humorless".

So let me get this straight: when Joel gets it wrong, it was just humor, and when we criticize him, we just didn't get it?

To illustrate, let me go back to Ivansmom's comment at 4:30pm yesterday:

// Wow. Scientists take umbrage almost as heartily as the French. What does this tell us? (a) Scientists missed the humorous intent of the piece, as written in English, or have no sense of humor. (b) The French misunderstood Joel's sense of humor, translated, or have no sense of humor. Therefore: (c) Scientists are French, (d) Scientists have no sense of humor, and/or (e) Scientists don't read English.//

Apparently, everybody thought that this was brilliant reasoning, and quite humorous on its own. Personally, I found it bordering on moronic. But remember, I'm humorless to begin with.

Now, I wasn't around when "the French" reportedly took "umbrage" at the "Café" post. From what I gather, they objected to being portrayed in a stereotypical manner. I certainly was around for the "Road Treep" piece: many people were telling Joel that he simply got it wrong on the central fact of the piece: whether it was possible to take a last-minute, non-planned road trip in France. I personally brought up the fact that the illustration for the post was a car that has not been seen on French roads for decades.

The piece was published in the Travel section, for goodness sake. Isn't it reasonable to expect the travel facts to be accurate, just as we would expect the facts in this science post to be accurate? Is it too much to ask for something to be both humorous AND accurate? And if facts prove to be inaccurate, could we be allowed to criticize them without being called "humorless"?

Incidentally, would anybody call any other nationality or ethnicity a humorless bunch if they were to criticize stereotypes written about them: say, for example "Mexicans have no sense of humor" or "Jews have no sense of humor", or "blacks have no sense of humor"? Looks like Francophobia is alive and well!

SF, your umbrage killed the boodle. This is a Category 1 boodling error. I've done it too, many times. You have to suppress the umbrage as you feel it rising in your gorge and your hackles.

superfrenchie - Look, humor, especially ironic humor, is always based upon exaggeration. By definition it gets things wrong. When I tell people that my son is so poorly organized that I fear he will misplace his head, I do not expect a slew of people to accuse me of total ignorance of the fundamentals of gross anatomy and being hateful towards my offspring. Yet, to those of use who have followed Joel's work for years, this is what the tone of many of these responses are like.

Also, as a group we try, usually, to maintain a sense of decorum that avoids what we feel are personal attacks. Further we try not to make snap assumptions about a writer's motivation or alleged biases. Take Ivansmom comments. First of all, I found it very clever and illustrative of the fallacious syllogisms often used by sloppy thinkers. Second, even if I didn't, I would never be so rude as to refer to it as "moronic." Third, I would never presume to characterize it as anti-French, both because I interpret it in the context of previous Gallic attacks on Joel, as well as an appreciation for the kindness and intelligence shown in previous writings.

So, yes, we do get a bit irritated at "drive-by attacks" who neither understand the context of this blog, nor bother to read the blog carefully enough to appreciate the nuances. And yes, sometimes these responses can get a little testy and defensive.

But then, what do I know. I'm just an excitable Italian.

First of all, Superfrenchie, "taking umbrage" is one of our dorky in-jokes. I think people just generally like the way it sounds--it's our version of "monter sur le grand cheval." We are aware of the potential absurdity of it, and taking umbrage does NOT preclude having a sense of humor. Even Joel takes umbrage on rare occasions, as in, "I don't need any drive-by lectures, thank you."

At the same time, there is legitimate, non-humorous umbrage, in which case the phrase is a code for what you are talking about in your comment: "Your joke (or comment) is offensive to ME." We have quite a few minorities represented here on Achenblog. And we have people who are sensitive, not to say touchy, about certain subjects. If you read all the comments (that would only take about 2,000 hours) you'll see numerous instances where people expressed an objection couched in a group identification. "As a woman, that comment is offensive to me"--that sort of thing.

I think that is perfectly legitimate, and valuable. Your view of francophobia is much different from the majority on this blog, it is abundantly clear. Some people will never understand what you are talking about, and continue to be in denial. But keep making your point, in a good natured way, and you will be doing a service, to both France and America. Vive l'amitié!

TBG - best thoughts to you and your Dad.

RD,

I was just going to post something about how you Eye-talians should put down your pasta and start thinking more like Greeks (throw plates and yell 'Opa!'), but decided it might cause too much drive-by umbrage.

Then you go and say something nice.

Thanks, btw.

Achenbach: //SF, your umbrage killed the boodle. This is a Category 1 boodling error.//

Do I take that to mean that I am not to take umbrage at taking umbrage?

Or is my taking umbrage at you taking umbrage at me taking umbrage at taking umbrage getting a bit too difficult to follow?

Shadowy world, this umbrage thing...

I'm of the opinion that computer modelling is one of many tools available to scientists seeking to prove a hypothesis or add evidence in support of a theory. Occasionally, the modelling contradicts what is accepted as theory, leading to new hypotheses and subsequent application of the scientific method to prove of disprove them. As consumers of science news, among other types of news, we have a collective responsibility to be skeptical. Thus, use the power of the computer to do your own literature search seeking evidence in support of , or that which refutes, these statements documented in the news. Read the primary sources, in particular, and understand them to the best of your ability. Only then, IMHO, would one be in a better position to cast stones as you please. SciTim, kudos to you for well constructed arguements over the past couple of days.

TBG: I hope things are going as well as possible for you and your family.

Two words synonymous with scientific skepticism,and the hope for a better future: cold fusion. This evening, being a Friday, those words may change to cold gin.

One of the points I made earlier is that really smart scientists can be amazingly self-delusional. Check out the credentials of some of these people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701669.html

Of course, I am clearly part of the conspiracy.

Apres j'ai monter sur mon grand cheval, it occurred to me that the last time I took umbrage, I had a little left over at the end. I'd like to offer it up here to anyone who's a little short.
Merci beaucoup, et voici le mouton Anglo-Francais.

RDP, talk about the extremes of "questioning scientific authority"...

*SIGH*

OMYGOD!! I just Achenrifted myself!!!

*fainting*

:-)

Is anyone else so totally unsurprised that a certain someone not held in the highest of Boodlesteem thinks there's nothing wrong with ABC's 9/11 "docudrama?"

*SIGHHHH*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

SF, the main reason I read and occasionally comment here is that the regular contributors are not only very smart (way smarter than I) but also very creative and funny. A lot of other blogs I have lurked on have an overabundance of mean spirited, ill-mannered commenters who seem to have little sense of humor and take things way too personally. The people here seem to me like very intelligent, very witty friends, something some of us don't have enough of in 'real' life. They are also mostly anonymous in their ethnic backgrounds, which allows us to read comments and make comments minus any subliminal judgments which might occur in a face to face conversation. I may not want to be best friends with everyone here, but I certainly would always be open minded and polite to them all.

I am not surprised, I find it strange that a docudrama is being done at all, the whole situation was so awful that any attempt at fictionalizing it in anyway bothers me. At the same time on the CNN website they are advertising that they will be reprising their realtime coverage from 9/11 - not sure about anyone else but that creeps me out (not exactly elequently put but only way I can think of to describe it right now).

TBG I am thinking of you.

Thanks, dmd... it's a dance we've both been to before. I appreciate everyone's comments, thoughts and prayers.

And I believe that "creeps me out" is a beautifullly elegant -- and eloquent --expression.

(I guess that means I'm not one of the "very smart" regular contributors that Bad Sneakers was talking about.)

Yes you are, TBG. Still thinkin' boutcha, too.

:-)

Joel, in my excitement to post the names of books, I did not ask your permission to do this. Sorry. If it is okay with you, which kit would you prefer I post, this one or is there one coming up?

Did not look at the movie on ABC. Too soon for me to look at that tragedy, still fresh in my mind. I don't believe it should be fictionalized, facts are needed, not more lies. We want to tell children and adults the truth, as much as possible. I volunteered at the school after 9/11 because I thought the children might be afraid, and I felt that more adults around might make them feel safer.

Pat, this morning at the lake there was an opening the sky where one could see Carolina blue, just a small space, surrounded by white clouds, all of this enclosed with a mixture of just grays. The lake was not mirrored this morning, but had ripples from a gentle breeze flowing across it. By the time I got home everything was that dull gray, not even tints of any other color, just gray. I hope we see some blues today.

TBG, I have come to realize that there are many things in life worse than death. Chief among them are being helpless and a burden to one's children. May your father recover quickly, or, if that's not possible, may he die peacefully. My thoughts are prayers are with you.

I've read some about this docudrama, and I am more than a little familiar with the 9/11 report. The problem with the whole docudrama thing is the same problem I have with television news. It omits so many details and over-simplifies. Yes, it is a matter of record that there were many opportunities to potentially kill UBL prior to 9/11. Yes, some were spiked by the administration as being too risky. Some were spike by lawyers who considered them illegal. Was this the wrong decision? There is a school of thought that says that if UBL were killed this would have just incited AQ to undertake more terroritst acts. Who knows? Further, at the time decision makers weren't thinking about a 9/11, they were concerned with the integrity of the law and civilian deaths. They wanted to avoid headlines like "Clinton Administration Supports Illegal Killings of Civilians by CIA."

Bad Sneakers: //I certainly would always be open minded and polite to them all.//

I know I'm not on my own blog, but for the record, my personal rule of frankness is this: attack the blogger's argument as strongly as you want, leave the blogger alone.

In other words: "your argument is idiotic" is fine, "you're an idiot" is not.

Exceptions: public personalities. "Bush is an idiot" is OK as long as he is quoted saying: "We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job. That's what I'm telling you", or "Chirac is a moron" as long as a picture of him with Mugabe is linked.

I just wonder about taking responsibility for what's happening on your watch. Clinton wasn't President when 9/11 happened, George Bush was, and still is. We can all cry, well that was happening when I cried in the world, but I'm told by reliable authority that I will not be asked about what you did, but only what I did. Does anyone say the buck stops here anymore? It just seems that people want power, but don't want to accept what goes along with that power. There is good and there is bad, and we all know this, no matter our circumstances or station in this life.

Superfrenchie, perhaps you were unfamiliar with the classical example of abused logic; I don't remember the precise classic form, but it's something like "Aristotle floats in liquid methane. A duck floats in liquid methane. Therefore, Aristotle is a duck. Also, dead. Liquid methane is cold, you know."

So, yes, it was a joke. (In case you were wondering -- yes, I wrote the above paragraph in an allegedly humorous vein, as well) Ivansmom assumed that you had been here long enough by now to accept a bit of gentle ribbing with respect to the heartfelt cause that brought you here in the first place. Perhaps not.

With respect to the inaccuracies in Joel's road treep column (are we still on that topic?): I am assuming that Joel did not lie to us about the events in his trip. Perhaps that is a big assumption. Assuming that he did not lie, then what inaccuracies are you talking about? He reported on his, personal, experiences on his, personal, trip, taken in the individual idiosyncratic way that he did it. He did not generalize his own experience; rather, he generalized a received conventional wisdom and contrasted it with his personal experience. He said, very specifically, that if you took a trip in France in the consciously ill-informed and unprepared way that he did it, you might anticipate similar results. He did not claim that he had carefully researched the best way to make a road-trip in France and that this was the appalling result, and he stated as much quite clearly -- in the sub-head, in the introduction, and in practically every other part of the article. He frequently notes in that article the things that he could have done more intelligently, the opportunities for greater success that he passed by, and so forth. Travel writing in which you unironically extoll how brilliantly you did everything, and all the wise choices that you made, may have its place. But it's not funny, and it's certainly not appealing to those who prefer an experience of life that is personally distinctive, rather than canned and Disneyesque.

And if you're still nursing a grudge about the Citroën DS in the illustration: Jeez, man, get over it. He didn't draw the picture, he didn't pick the illustration, he didn't claim to have driven in a Citroën DS. We've debated that ridiculously tiny topic ad nauseum.

Superfrenchie, I can certainly agree with "Bush is an idiot" and I would even go so far as to call him a moron. However, I do take issue with the use of the word "moronic" to describe someone's writings on this blog. I think it is a very strong word to use, especially when it refers to a comment intended as humorous. Calling it as you see it without being unnecessarily blunt is an art that few can pull off. We can't all be Mudge. I guess my argument is more with your choice of words than with your right to right to be frank. Some less pejorative word would have made your point without being quite so "frank."

OK.. getting ready to go back to Baltimore and the shielded-from-the-outside-world "reality" known as The Hospital, but first I just want you to ponder these Google Ads I see below the Boodle...

Surplus Military Tents
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superfrenchie, your umbrage post of 8:38 a.m. Umm, yes. And no.

It was my first good laugh of the day.

Think of Achenbloggian umbrage as the doily of righteous indignation, purely decorative and not really to be taken seriously.

Here's what I get for Google ads:

Unique Home Designs
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Surplus Military Tents
Over 2,500 Tents In Stock US Mil. Surplus & Relief Goods
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hurricane katrina Webinar
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I DO like "sing up for a free webinar." Almost sounds like a Boodle comment.

:-)

Superfrenchie, Superfrenchie, of course I didn't mean YOU are humorless, any more than I meant any of Our Scientist Friends have no sense of humor. Thanks to RD, ScienceTim, and others for explaining my previous post much better than I could. I didn't, by the way, take umbrage with "moronic", probably because (a) I knew I didn't write it that way and (b) of course, you couldn't possibly mean me. Your 8:38 "umbrage" description captures it exactly.

Besides, "umbrage" is just a great word. Say it aloud a few times. It is almost up there with "chicken". Go ahead -- repeat "chicken" about 15 times. I bet you'll find it is amusing.

I have a hypothesis. Scientists don't sleep. In support of my theory, several boodlers were up all night debating the scientific method. I'm an engineer, so I don't discover scientific principles; I apply them. I like my science nice and tidy and compressed into a series of "cookbook" formulas that I can apply as necessary to individual situations. If these formulas can be expressed so that I can use a calculator with nothing more sophisticated than a square root key, so much the better.

When I see scientists arguing and squabbling over all sorts of petty things, I get very nervous about my assumption that they even know what they are talking about.

Every thermodynamics problem we did started with some form of Maxwell's Relationships and we would assume things away ('no chemical reaction' was what separated us mechanical engineers from the chemical engineers that sneered at our thermo courses) until it could be solved by "plugging and chugging". There is one right answer, or at least an optimal solution, for every problem if the right set of assumptions and limits are made.

Perhaps that is why there have only been two engineers (depending on your definition)ever elected president and neither is thought of very highly.

I was up late to meet a deadline on a proposal (12:00 noon today, Tokyo time, so 11:00 PM yesterday evening our time). I definitely over-indulge in boodling. Still, I made the deadline. Today, I am taking a sick day. Oddly, I expect to boodle less today than when I am at work and I am supposed to be doing other things. This is a painful realization.

And those two are, yellojkt?

Whoops. IMPORTANT public service announcement: do NOT repeat "chicken" several times when around others. Part of the beauty of the word is how quickly it loses all meaning and becomes a collection of pleasing sounds. If you repeat this near another person, she may assume you are calling HER a chicken or, worse, "chicken". The word will not achieve meaninglessness, your meaning may be misinterpreted, and serious damage may result.

ticklishturtletoe: //Even the billions of galaxies and trillions of stars don't offer even a remote probability of life. If it was even remotely probable, then scientists should surely have been able to successfully create life from scratch. //

Hmm... I read a very interesting paper recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Basically, they found some mutants in some insects that were resistant to a particular biological pesticide. These mutants were isolated from farmer's fields. This was a very complex mutant (having 3 changes in the protein) that is *extremely* improbable. No lab could have ever generated it, because the odds of getting it are just too low. However, scale it up a million fold (a rough guess on my part) in terms of how many acres of land are being treated with this pesticide, then the likelihood of finding something increases...

What I'm trying to say, in my own pre-morning-coffee garbled way, is that just because something has not be recreated in a lab, doesn't mean that the probability is too low for it ever to happen. It could mean that you just haven't had the time, or resources, or post-doc hands to do a big enough experiment. The universe is a very big place and has had a very long time to "try" all kinds of possibilities...

Ivansmom's display of illogic, especially in context, was the funniest thing I have read in a long time at every level including "meta". Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a fight.

It is sometimes wrong to take offense at perceived slurs. My blog was recently called as "white" as "[sex with] an Irishman". I took umbrage at the perceived slight towards the love-making skills of people of Celtic descent. The person really just meant that Irish people are very pale. Since I practically glow in the dark, I had to withdraw my umbrage.

http://livebythefoma.blogspot.com/2006/09/whitest-blogger-ever.html

And Cassandra,

If you need someone to post your booklist on the web, I would be glad too. TBG or any of the regular BPHers can forward me the file or your e-mail address off-line. I would love to see it.

Herbert Hoover graduated as part of the inaugural class of Stanford University as a mining engineer. Jimmy Carter attended Georgia Tech for one year before transferring to the Naval Academy and becoming a noo-ku-lehr submariner.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you sit with, that is not an impressive pantheon.

As a language stickler and former nuclear science technical flunky, I would like to extend the olive branch to my friends and colleagues who mispronounce the word "nuclear" as "nucular." One of the smartest guys in my field, co-author of a paper with me and all-around well-respected scientist, says "nucular." If I were to go braino-a-braino with him, he would grind me into a gooey gray mush. So, I don't pick on guys who say "nucular" and they don't get inspired to hurt me with their mighty intellectuality.

I would consider Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover as impressive enough. I have always considered democracy's greatest flaw is it tendency to elect lawyers,
no disrespect inteneded.

CNN has picked up the earth-like planet story. Is this article more sensationalistic than the original report?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/09/08/earthlike.planets.reut/index.html

I would never hurt SciTim with my mighty intell-a-cute-ibill...

What?

:-)

_________________________

Two recent signs of the Apocalypse...

Sports Illustrated actually doing a HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL preview

and

From today's WaPo...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701712.html

*SIGH*

Scotty, I think Cassandra nailed it earlier when she said doesn't anyone accept responsibility anymore.

Science Tim: //So, yes, it was a joke. (In case you were wondering -- yes, I wrote the above paragraph in an allegedly humorous vein, as well) Ivansmom assumed that you had been here long enough by now to accept a bit of gentle ribbing with respect to the heartfelt cause that brought you here in the first place. Perhaps not.//

Oh, I was the one being targeted? How was I supposed to know? it said "the French", and I've always thought that to include my family, my parents and about 60 million other people.

FWIW, it's exactly my beef with Francophobia as practiced by American bigots. It's not "Chirac is a weasel", but "the French are weasels". Or "monkeys", or "chickens", whatever animal name (speaking of beef) you may have in mind for the occasion. Strangely, rules of PCness disallow that for pretty much any other nationality or ethnicity.

Except for Canadians. And I think that is because they are part French

Superfrenchie, I figured you'd understand that my use of the French in my illogical post was dictated by the significant response of French commenters, many of whom took umbrage, to recent previous Kits. Had Joel written recently about his experiences in a country populated by any other nationality or ethnic group, and had they responded with umbrage, I would have used them instead. My intent was to compare the umbrage taken by Science Folks to the current Kit with the recent Boodle experience, which was certainly and particularly involving the French. In other words, this choice corresponded to a specific recent experience, and was not personal.

Boy, this dissecting and explaining stuff is hard.

Yellojkt, I've emailed KB, and asked if she would be so kind and do just that. I'm waiting on her reply. While waiting the boodlers can access these websites for books also. I'm trying to stay within the school's guidelines, don't want to confuse the children. Please go to:

www.seedlingpub.com and access their leveled reading site. Choose from emergent and fluid readers categories.

www.lernerclassroom.com, at this site we have different categories of books for K-3, 4-6 grades. I would love to have the science, health, and earth series. If possible the classroom sets would be wonderful.

www.scholastic.com, at this site one has picture builders, skill builders, character counts, early readers, and the list is endless. Any choice from here would be great.

And please keep in mind that we're targeting early readers or beginners, and trying to help those that are struggling with reading. Of course, we want to encourage children to go beyond what they think they can do, but we certainly want them to feel successful in whatever they strive for. I work with primary, middle school, and some junior high students.

Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, by Judy Blume
Super Fudge Judy Blume
Sarah Plain and Tall Patricia Maclachan
Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World by Margaret Pitts Walters
The Whipping Boy by Sid Flieschman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Ramona Age 8 by Beverly Cleary
Because of Winn Dixe by Kate DeCamillo, this is the fourth grade list.

Sixth Grade
The Giver Lois Lowry
The Cay Theordore Taylor
The Adventure of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
The Call of the Wild Jack London
The Adventures of Ulysses Bernard Evslin
Amos Fortune, Free Man Elizabeth Yates
Famour Story for Performance Holt, Reinhart, Winston
Local News Gary Soto
Red Scarf Girl Ji Li Jang
Journey Home Yoshiko Uchida
Myths, and Folktales Holt, Reinhart, Winston

The Library List
The Farm Book Jan Peloog
Little Black Pony Walter Farley
The Horse in Harry's Room Sud Hoff
Cowboy Slim Julie Danneberg
All the Pretty Horses Susan Jeffers
No Howling in the House Erica Farber
Dinosaur Hunters Kate McMullan
Fox Be Nimble James Marshall
Grasshopper on the Road Arnold Lobel
A Garden for Miss Mouse Micheala Muntean
No Carrots for Harry Jean Largerman
Frog and Toad Together Arnold Lobel
Pigs Pigs Gail Gibbons
Buck-Buck the Chicken Amy Ehrlich
True Blue Joan Elste
My Little Red Car Chris Demarest
Franklin's School Play Pauletter Bourgeois
Clifford's Family Norman Bridwell
Moongame Frank Ash
The Reason For a Flower Ruth Heller
Lady and the Tramp Disney
Miss Piggy's Night Out Sara Hoagland Hunter
The Great Pet Sale Mick Inkpen
Bunnies and Their Grandma Amy Ehrlich
Fievel's Big Showdown David Kirscher
Leaf Jumpers Carole Gerber
Find Nat Foster and Erickson
Daisy Rabbit's Tree House Penny Dale
Humpty Dumpty as told by Kin Eagle

Now if any of you know of good African-American stories, I would love those very much. The lists given to me contain just a few of those stories, but not many. The public library here has just a few, but I know there are so many out there even if I cannot get them here. I would love those stories as well as the above lists. And this isn't all, folks. I have another list to get from the school this morning. And please feel free to throw in your favorites. I want the children to have access to a lot of what goes on in this world, and it can all begin with books. Thanks again. When I hear from KB, there is more.

I'm part french? :-)

Kinda like clouds, eh Ivansmom? :-)

dmd,

Only collectively. Like the Borg.

dmd, as a Canadian you are about 25% French. Your 1.45 children too.

Exactly kinda like clouds, Scottynuke. I didn't want to say so, because it was a little obscure. Also, the New Scientist Friend posters for this Kit might get all upset at the notion that clouds are hard.

Cassandra, as I have emailed you, I am at your disposal and happy to do anything to help.

yellojkt, do you have logistical suggestions?

What's the best way to make it easy for people to contribute books to Cassandra's program?

[What we've done so far is have people email me for the address, and that's fine with me (email kbertocci at hotmail.com).]

Yes, I'm aware of the recent success in breeding pandas. Recently, it seems that China in particular has figured out a way to breed them with greater frequency.

That said, accidents do happen:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/08/AR2006090800442.html

Which brings me to my point: how could the most simple and most fragile forms of life survive and thrive billions of years ago. We're told that the earth was an extremely dangerous place back then. And it was like that for a very long time. Simple single-celled organisms somehow survived earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, meteor bombardments, drastic temperature fluctuations, drastic humidity fluctuations, spontaneous gas emissions -- just to name a few hazards.

It seems to me that scientists would have us take it on faith that this simple, fragile life found a way to survive, thrive, and evolve into the variety of life that we have today.

Okay, so suppose we do believe that it happened that way on earth and here we are, evolved from a single-celled organism after billions of years. Shall we also muster the faith to believe that this miraculous feat of survival has also occurred elsewhere?

//Which brings me to my point: how could the most simple and most fragile forms of life survive and thrive billions of years ago.//

Most of them didn't. Most forms of life that have ever existed are extinct.

// We're told that the earth was an extremely dangerous place back then. And it was like that for a very long time. Simple single-celled organisms somehow survived earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, meteor bombardments, drastic temperature fluctuations, drastic humidity fluctuations, spontaneous gas emissions //

When it comes to "drastic" circumstances, the simple, single-celled organisms have an enormous advantage. They're just so damn numerous. Anyone who has worked with a faulty autoclave knows this. Even if it gets up to 121degreesC (around 225F, I think?) and stays there for half an hour, if the pressure also doesn't come up, you'll end up with contaminated stuff (meaning at least one bacterial cell survived that wicked trip through the autoclave). Those simple, single-celled critters are survivors of an amazing quality compared to your average panda...

And harsh is relative. Some bacteria have a very difficult time living in an environment that is much like what you and I live in. (Oxygen is quite toxic, you know - we just happen to be very good at detoxifying it). I suspect that the early single-celled organisms would find our current environment to be quite harsh...

//It seems to me that scientists would have us take it on faith that this simple, fragile life found a way to survive, thrive, and evolve into the variety of life that we have today.//

Not faith. Proof. Ever looked at the remarkable similarity between genes in pandas and single-celled critters that survived a trip through the autoclave? It's quite striking. I work with a gene that is identical in one section in all organisms we've looked at so far. And that's just one piece of sand in the mountain of evidence...

//Okay, so suppose we do believe //

First, excise the word believe.

//Shall we also muster the faith to believe //

Okay, you can also excise the word faith. Neither of these words have any place in science. Just evidence for and evidence against.

I know that half the fun of being Canadian is poking fun at being Canadian. It unites us. Feel free to insert Canadian into any joke, at any time. No umbrage will be taken, but be aware, many jokes will fall flat, simply because Canadians are...umm, Canadian. That statement is so patently unfunny and so absolutely truthful, that it becomes the ultimate in joke.

See you gotta start with a warped sense of humour. Maybe its all the fresh clean water.

More importatnly, it's the 40th anniversary of Star Trek's first mission.

And of course, the Enterprise was led by a Canadian...

:-)

Beam me up, dr...

Comic of different sign-off suggestions for Couric

http://www.azstarnet.com/ss/2006/09/08/145613.png (registration not required)

Ah Jack, yet another Canadian.

Today, I saw a Star Trek segment in the latter part of the first hour of NBC's morning program. Since I was the one cooking this morning, I was listening with half an ear. Didn't realize that it's the 40th anniversary observation of Star Trek's debut.

As I Boodled here ages ago, it was my Aunt Carol who gave Roddenberry occasional rides to Union Station when he was an LAPD speechwriter ages ago. (Yes, the same Aunt Carol who took some of the false confessions in the "Black Dahlia" case.) More significantly, Aunt Carol and Uncle Carl socialized a great deal with Gene's brother (James???--can I find Aunt Carol's old e-mails?).

Anyhow, I popped over to one of Roddenberry's online biographies moments ago, and something new jumped out at me:

http://www.philosophysphere.com/bio.html

Less than twenty years after the Wright Brothers showed man how to fly but before Jolson sang and Garbo talked at the movies, Gene Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas [Roddenberry would learn to fly at San Antonio's own Kelly Field, not too far from us] on August 21, 1921 to Carolyn Goleman, a local girl, and Eugene Roddenberry, a native of Georgia and World War I veteran. Before Gene turned two the family moved to Los Angeles where his father became a policeman, a job he held for twenty years.

Growing up in Los Angeles Gene attended Franklin High School ...

[Both of my parents attended Franklin High School. When I was cleaning out my mother's manufactured home in Vista in summer 2002, I ran across my Dad's high school yearbook--full of signtures. I decided not to save it. MISTAKE!!!]

where he was a member of the debate team and played guitar in the family band. In the Thirties mass entertainment came in the form of radio, movies, and pulp magazines, named for the cheap pulp paper they were printed on. Gene read them avidly and listened to the radio which offered audio versions of the pulps: The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, I Love A Mystery. It was all a training ground for a young boy's imagination.

Gene's high school interest in writing was encouraged by his English teacher, Mrs. Virginia Church, herself a published author and playwright.

Just a bit more:

Papa Roddenberry's old sergeant, Bill Parker, had risen in the ranks. Eleven days after Parker was promoted to Deputy Chief, Gene was assigned to the newspaper unit where he became part of the machinery that turned the LAPD into a professional law enforcement organization.

Gene found himself writing on a daily basis: principally, press releases and later speeches for Parker when he became the Chief of Police. Parker and his staff sought to remake the LAPD internally in structure and attitude and externally in its public image.

Parker was short, balding, politically conservative to the core, a devout Catholic, and the "imperial" chief. Gene was a tall, young, good-looking, moderate Democrat, a wet-behind-the-ears policeman with limited street experience, who had, in childhood, rejected belief in the Christian god.

Despite their differences in philosophy, theology, professional rank, and virtually everything else, the two men liked each other. Binding them was Parker's knowledge of Gene as a powerful intellect, a strong respect for each other's minds, shared ethical standards, the ability to argue on an intellectual level, and their mutual desire to see law enforcement become a recognized profession.

Star Trek? Let's not forget the bald French captain, mon amis.

Superfrenchie-- "Darwin and stuff?" You're bluffing. And then you counterassert your stereotypes about an system of education you didn't live through. Sunday school education is roughly 1 hour a week, church 1 hour or so. Is it your contention that 2 hours a week is enough to undo public school education?

I also personally believe you don't know any truly fundamentalist christians. I have kin who homeschooled their children because they were overprotective and wanted their kids to grow up as christian as possible. They gave their kids picture books of dinosaurs pulling carts for humans and so on-- to promote the idea that the dinos died out in the flood in accordance with their beliefs (I guess those dinos were some wicked creatures).

Now, those children are grown. I don't know that they'll ever buy into evolution because none of them are interested in biology. I'm pretty sure a few of them believe that the universe ain't as young as they were taught and so on. They're intelligent people. But yes, they're paying for the damage the overprotective and narrow approach took. Maybe forever.

This is all due to the american approach which allows for some diversity in education, allowing you, for instance, to homeschool your kids to your set of knowledge, beliefs, and prejudices. Have at it. It's a free country.

LindaLoo: I think you have now demonstrated that the concept of "6 degrees of separation" is really viable. Next you'll probably discover that WE are related!

Except that the Bald French Captain was an Englishman.

>Not faith. Proof.
>First, excise the word believe.
>Okay, you can also excise the word faith. Neither of these words have any place in science. Just evidence for and evidence against.

Agreed, words like "believe" and "faith" have no place in science. Nor does the implication of them have any place.

You mention words like "proof" and "evidence." Scientific words to be sure, but they're missing from the explanation nonetheless.

You say that oxygen is dangerous to some life forms. Fine. I'm confident you can show me some that exist today -- if I'm too lazy to google them myself. You say that you've seen simple life forms that survive extreme temperatures. That's fine with me.

But where's the proof that the first life that appeared on this planet was this type of life? If it thrives on oxygen, how do we know that it wasn't killed by a month-long dose of sulphur gas? If oxygen is toxic to it, how do we know it didn't get a gust of it for 10 seconds longer than it could stand? How do we know that a volcano didn't simply belch out a glob of molten nickel that landed right on top of it?

With proof, you can't begin with the conclusion: we exist, therefore these simple life forms must have survived somehow.

Without proof, it's impossible to excise words like "faith" and "believe."

The geological evidence does suggest that the atmosphere was much more devoid of oxygen in the far past. Ice core samples from the poles can give us the CO2 concentrations for the past few thousand to million of years.

Also, there are chemical reactions that occur differently in reducing atmospheres than to oxidizing atmospheres, the evidence could be found by examining the oldest rocks.

Superfrenchie wrote: //My test for a country being "essentially" a theocracy would be this: can you be elected its president if you do not state clearly that you believe in God. Or even refuse to answer the question.

//I'm afraid the answer to that for the United States is a resounding 'No'. In fact, it goes further. If I am not mistaken, there isn't a single member of Congress who does not state a religion in his/her bio.//

Newsflash for you, superfrenchie: Politicians lie. If you have to go through the nuisance of actually, you know, winning an election, you will try to position yourself as trustworthy in the eyes of those people whose votes you need. This may not involve religion. In fact, it may involve seething hatred of religion. Check out the profile of the average selectman in, say, Berkeley or Madison or the Upper West Side if you do not believe this.

In this particular free society at the national level, however, voters strongly correlate character and trustworthiness with a person's ability to entertain the possibility that he is not the center of the universe.

You want to represent them? a) Share their beliefs, b) don't share them, but lie and say you do; c) don't share them, but make a persuasive argument about why that shouldn't matter.

So, SF: We have a difference of opinion. You define a "theocracy" as a society where unless you profess to share the values of a majority of the voting citizens, you can't get elected to public office.

I on the other hand define a "theocracy" as a society where unless you profess to share the values of the ruling-class minority, you get stoned to death in the local soccer stadium.

Different strokes.

I also don't think it's entirely accurate to describe France as a "secular" country when it has an already sizeable religious minority, Muslims, who are *also* the fastest-growing segment of the population.

Unless something truly dramatic happens (fertility rates among the formerly Christian increase sharply, France forcibly sterilizes or expels its Muslims), in about 50 years, France will be majority Muslim. This is absolutely, mathematically guaranteed to happen if present demographic realities continue to hold.

The only question is whether the dominant strain of Islam will embrace some notion of separation of faith and state, or whether France will become the westernmost outpost of some form of shari'a.

Seconded, dr. No umbrage will be taken. What was it Weingarten said? "Canadians are a hoot, but they don't know it." Wrong! Of course we know it.

In other news, the Pope's taking umbrage at Canada:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060908.wvatican0908/BNStory/International/home

I'm surprised he found some umbrage; I was beginning to think it was all used up. The Vatican probably has a secret stash.

hey, it's friday - can't we bring the boodle down to my intellectual level? fart jokes and movie reviews? sheesh! i'm the least scientific person i know!!

and ebtnut - didn't you see the achendictionary? lindaloo is related to EVERYONE. PERIOD. http://www.mortiifera.com/?p=67

and i wanna take some panamanian umbrage! can't anyone make any anti-panamanian jokes? how bout some half-panamanian and half-irish jokes? or, in a pinch, fat jokes will do too... i can take umbrage at those...

and for the canadians - an canadian/indian (from india) comedian... *WARNING* all must prepare to take extreme umbrage!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2579833089500205658&q=russell+peters&hl=en

Here's a good reason we have to laugh at ourselves, this article concerns the BC government and their decision to cancel the fall session of the legislature as they decided it was required.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060908.wxbclibs08/BNStory/National/home

If anyone is not familiar with BC Politics it is to say the least always interesting.

SoC as a person raised Catholic I take umbrage at the Pope taking umbrage with us.

Thanks for the explanations about us being one quarter french, it explains why I was only able to become approximately one quarter bilingual.

Hi, mo--happy Friday!

I saw a fascinating movie this weekend--it's old, I'm probably the last person in America to see it: Capturing the Friedmans. I was so mesmerized that I watched the movie and then all the special features on the dvd--the whole experience used up about 4.5 hours of my Saturday. Good thing it was a holiday weekend.

The movie, in case you haven't seen it, is a documentary about an admitted pedophile who was accused of child abuse and insisted he was not guilty of the charges. There was no physical evidence, so the case rested on the testimony of children, as interviewed by the police. Real life drama, excruciating decisions being made with a lot at stake. I thought it was an excellent film.

//You say that oxygen is dangerous to some life forms. Fine. I'm confident you can show me some that exist today -- if I'm too lazy to google them myself. //

Actually, oxygen is dangerous to *all* lifeforms. It's highly carcinogenic and highly mutagenic. It just happens some of us are better at detoxifying it than others (and as a side note, in the process of becoming good at detoxifying it, have found a use for it). By some of us, of course I mean most organisms that are visible macroscopically (trees, fish, people, lemurs).

//But where's the proof that the first life that appeared on this planet was this type of life? If it thrives on oxygen, how do we know that it wasn't killed by a month-long dose of sulphur gas? If oxygen is toxic to it, how do we know it didn't get a gust of it for 10 seconds longer than it could stand? How do we know that a volcano didn't simply belch out a glob of molten nickel that landed right on top of it?//

Well, I would say the best proof that life wasn't extinguished by a gust of sulphur is that life exists today. Any earth-sterilizing event would have had that effect. But there are very few planetary sterilizing events we can imagine (there are a few). Let's imagine a comet hitting the earth. It would likely destroy human civilization. It would likely kill most (all) mammals. But it wouldn't sterilize the earth. Most bacteria would survive. Some insects would survive.

//With proof, you can't begin with the conclusion: we exist, therefore these simple life forms must have survived somehow.//

That's true. But you *can* say that life on earth wasn't completely wiped out given that we are here. Just like I can say that life on earth wasn't eradicated yesterday, cause we're still here today. But you need the fossil record, the genetic record, embryology, molecular biology, chemistry and paleoclimatology to show that we have descended from *simpler* life forms.

//Without proof, it's impossible to excise words like "f***h" and "be***ve."//

Good thing we have mountains of evidence, so we can, in fact, excise those words. ;)

The panzer-pope taking umbrage at Canada ? We must do something right then.

Come on dmd ! Don't short-sell yourself. A quarter bilingual means you can speak half a language, your English is much better than that.

mo;

You want us to complain about a Van Halen song? What???

How's that for umbrage inducement?

:-)

kbertocci, I saw that film as well, very good but disturbing.

Congressman Dennis Kuchinich, former mayor of Cleveland, a vegan, does not disclose his religion *catholic* on his congressional website.

If you want a breakdown, 4 congressmen have religion as "unspecified" according to this site.
http://www.adherents.com/adh_congress.html#109

That said, Annie is right. Politicans lie.
Ronald Reagan never went to church while he was president and his wife consulted astrologers, and he was divorced, yet he was happy to be seen as a fundamentalist christian despite having actually attended a Presbyterian church in California previously.

Again, church is 1 hour a week, and adults don't have to go to Sunday school. It's very easy for a politican to put on the facade of being moderately religious-- like most christians are, not overly obsessed with God.

Studies show that people go as kids, become irreligous in their young adult years, and only become committed to churchgoing again when they have kids themselves to give their kids a stable religious upbringing. When the parents are of different faiths (this happens a lot), the kids may be raised in one, two, or no faith.

Interestingly this 2002 article says the French may be more suspectible to cult groups because of their thirst for spirituality so lacking in the vaunted secular culture you are proud of.
http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general426.html

Also, France has 150% the suicide rate for men, and over 240% the suicide rate for women compared to USA, according to WHO statistics. That sounds like a very mentally healthy secular culture.

ticklishturtletoe wrote:
--It seems to me that scientists would have us take it on faith that this simple, fragile life found a way to survive, thrive, and evolve into the variety of life that we have today.--

Life is anything but fragile. I've been using Raid to kill a nest of wasps under my deck. Three spayings later about half of them are left. I have found that Combat Ant Bait Gel works well against kitchen ants after trying many other products and techniques that failed. And all you have to do is talk with any doctor or nurse about those germs that keep becoming resistant to antibiotics. What a lot of people fail to connect is that evolution does not happen by survival, it happens by death. Its the killing off of the weak or unfit that drives evolution, not the strong and fit surviving. Darwin should have coined the term, "death of the least fit" instead of "survival of the fittest". For evolution to occur you need to remove unfit genes from the gene pool, not simply keep good ones around. So harsh conditions drive evolution since they drive death and the removal of unfit genes. So, the harsher it gets, the quicker life adapts and then thrives, just like my Raid resistant wasps. They probably got that way after their ancestors were sprayed generation after generation by Raid and those most suseptable died leaving the more resistant so they can survive Raid and bother me.

--Okay, so suppose we do believe that it happened that way on earth and here we are, evolved from a single-celled organism after billions of years. Shall we also muster the faith to believe that this miraculous feat of survival has also occurred elsewhere?--

Well you can rely on faith and stop wondering or looking for evidence, or worse, ignore evidence. But just because we cannot develop telescopes powerful enough to see life on other planets or build spaceships to get us there and look more closely does not mean we cannot speculate in a scientific way whether the possibility exists.

First lets ask whether the components for life exist in other parts of the galaxy or universe. That's carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. Turns out they are as abundant here as elsewhere in the universe as measured by the spectrum of light coming from other stars and gas. So there is nothing special about the stuff around our little part of the solar system. Next lets see how long it too for life to form. Fossil evidence is pushing back the date of the first forms of life to close to the formation of the earth. So it may take millions of years but not billions. The relative quickness points to it happening easily, at least here on earth. Next we need to ask whether other planets exist or is the solar system unique with its planets. Looking for extrasolar planets is a relatively recent undertaking but many have already been found. It now seems that planets are expected around other suns. There is other evidence to gather and if after working on this for some time and you come up with a number, like a one in a million chance for life in any solar system, that means there are about 100,000 stars in our galaxy with life revolving around them. Multiply that by the trillions of galaxies in the universe and you have tons of life. When you understand the enormity of the universe the question should become what would prevent life from forming elsewhere when it seems to have done it on our average planet circling an average star in a relatively short amount of time, and then lasted so long, and evolved.

What I find myself asking is whether multicellular life exists elsewhere. Bacteria-like forms of life sprung up here on earth pretty quickly, but little happened for billions of years. About 4 billion years later (500 million years ago) something happened ... animal cells formed. These were very different. They had a defined nucleus holding the DNA whereas bacteria have DNA just floating about everywhere. They are much more complex and over time evolved to form multicellular forms of life. This type of life quickly evolved in during is called the Cambrian explosion where multicellular life (animals and plants) evolved in a trmendous variety. All lived in the ocean and the trilobite is one you may have heard of. I have to wonder why it took 4 billion years for this step to happen. Maybe it needed oxygen, which was being produced by algae, to become plentiful in the atmosphere. I don't know but I have concluded that if earth is typical, many planets probably have bacterial-type life but few have multicellular life like our own. Of course, that is just an educated guess on my part, not an act of faith, and I'm ready to have my mind changed by further evidence. That's science man.

Saw the "Illusionist" last Friday--and liked very much that it had such an Old World tone and feel, my enjoyment topped off by the plot twist at the end. One of Yalie Ed Norton's best roles, in my book. But I alos liked Norton's portrayal of faceless (well, face not shown) Baldwin IV (relative, if you want 600 degrees of separation) in last year's Crusades epic "Kingdom of Heaven."

Anyone planning to see today's opening "Hollywoodland" with Affleck/Lane/Brody/Hoskins? Do you all know the history of the Hollywood sign in the hills?

What fascinated me, in small part, about the "Illusionist" is that is that it was filmed in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Add to that, "Black Dahlia," opening on Sept. 15, was filmed in Bulgaria. A big movie several years ago, the Civil War period saga "Cold Mountain" with Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, and Rene Zellweger was filmed in Romania.

Maybe mo has a comment about so much Hollywood productions going overseas to former Iron Curtain countries, how it affects L.A., actors; and film workers' unions, etc.?

SCC: actors' instead of actors;

Loomis, thanks for the recommendation. I really like Ed Norton but haven't liked the movies he's been in recently. If you think the movie is worthy of him, that's good for me.

NYT seems to have this story first. This is pretty much expected, right? No surprises for anyone, right? Gee, a thought, if you could write Bush's speech, what should he say and how should he say it (considering I mentioned Roddenberry's stint as a speechwriter)?

Bush Plans Prime Time Sept. 11 Address

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 8, 2006
Filed at 1:34 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will make a prime-time address from the Oval Office on Monday to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the administration had requested network time for the address at 9:01 p.m. EDT. The address is expected to run 16 to 18 minutes, he said.

The speech will come after Bush visits each of the attack sites, in New York, Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon, where terrorist hijackers used commercial airliners as weapons to kill nearly 3,000 people.

hah! snuke - considering that song is actually written about a stripper whose name (stage, natch) was Panama... that's pretty umbrage-worthy! (according to wikipedia, that song was used in the sound deluge they used to get noriega to surrender!!)

loomis - many, many more films and tv shows than you may realize are filmed overseas and in canada! i'm somewhat ambivilent about it b/c it's cheaper for production costs (therefore, potential higher salary for cast), same labour law rights since the contract signed is U.S (just b/c they film overseas they can't shirk the US labour laws) - the only way it really effects actors jobs are in regards to extras who can be (and usually are) locals (who adhere to whatever labour laws are local since they don't sign a "contract" per say)

*shrug* i dunno - it seems like a win-win situation with many countries getting much needed income from film crews...

If I was his speechwriter I would say as little as possible about his presidency and a lot about the brave americans who died on 9/11 and how we will never forget and that we must be steadfast in iraq (lets forget about Afghanistan) as we cannot let those cowardly terrorists hide and who is not with us is against us... in other words, what worked before.

Why try anything different when the president sucks so at speechmaking?

Wilbrod,
Norton was much supported in the "Illusionist" by the well-done and credible special effects and a beautiful female co-star and love interest. His looks are much improved by his hair and beard and goatee. News coverage reposts that Norton lost a good deal of weight to play the role. Norton's weakness is his voice and lack of projection, which I know are not issues for you. Norton plays a cabinetmaker's son to a T. England's Middlesex-born Rufus Sewell does a fine job as the Austrian (Viennese) duke, but I liked Sewell better in other vehicles. That said, I'll repeat what I posted a few moments ago--I think it's one of Norton's better roles, aided much by the script, as well.

Note that this film has Yale written all over it. I think it was out local paper that ran an article about how the screen writer, Norton and co-star Paul Giamatti are all Yalies, Giamatti's dad having fomerly served as a president of Yale.

>so much Hollywood productions going overseas to former Iron Curtain countries, how it affects L.A., actors; and film workers' unions, etc.?

Knowledge is the easiest thing to arbitrage in the universe.

Um, hi. So, remember me saying a few weeks back that my college roommate was really sick? Turns out she has cancer. She told me this morning, she just found out. Hasn't told her husband or family yet, and doesn't want to until after the weekend (she's going away with her husband this weekend).

This blows, to put it mildly, and the thing that I'm having the hardest time with is not equating her situation with what's happened in my family (father died at 49 and grandfather at 26). Cancer, in my family, has meant death, and I just am at a loss right now...

Sorry.

Ouch, PLS. I'm so sorry. You must be very close. Remember, there are lots of people who do survive cancer. Try to keep a positive attitude for her, and have those babysitter and delivery service numbers handy for the weeks ahead.

Annie: //Newsflash for you, superfrenchie: Politicians lie. If you have to go through the nuisance of actually, you know, winning an election, you will try to position yourself as trustworthy in the eyes of those people whose votes you need.//

Actually, that's exactly my point. They couldn't get elected without professing their religion. Their actual personal beliefs notwithstanding.

//So, SF: We have a difference of opinion. You define a "theocracy" as a society where unless you profess to share the values of a majority of the voting citizens, you can't get elected to public office.

I on the other hand define a "theocracy" as a society where unless you profess to share the values of the ruling-class minority, you get stoned to death in the local soccer stadium.//

That's not the definition of a theocracy. And I don't define a theocracy, the dictionary does: "A government ruled by or subject to religious authority." And I did not say the US is a theocracy (I know better), I said it's as close as it gets. Read the link I gave to one of your Supremes to see how close it gets. Or look at the reason Bush gave for invading Iraq (God told him).

//The only question is whether the dominant strain of Islam will embrace some notion of separation of faith and state, or whether France will become the westernmost outpost of some form of shari'a.//

They already embrace secularism. French Muslims are the most tolerant of all Western Europe.

* 56% say that they have no problem practicing their religion in France.

* 81% consider secularism to be a "positive value" and the same number consider that there is no conflict between being integrated and being Muslim.

* 84% say they have a positive opinion of the Christian religion, which is higher than in the French population as a whole (72%)!

* 59% said they are in favor of forbidding the veil in public schools

* Just 5% said they would send their children to a private Islamic school

* 65% said they would have nothing against their own daughter marrying a non-Muslim (which is forbidden by the Koran).

See here for more, including references: http://superfrenchie.com/?p=133

They also are a lot less anti-Semite than their counterparts elsewhere. 71% view Jews favorably. It's sonly 6% points less than the US as a whole (77%) and 15% fewer than France as a whole (one of the least antisemitic country in the world despite the stereotype, substantially less than the US)

See here for more: http://pewresearch.org/obdeck/?ObDeckID=50

I posted a new kit.

Sully, I agree with you that the huge expanse of time between the origin of life on Earth and the rise of multicellular animals is an arresting fact -- for complex life to evolve you probably need a planet that's habitable for a long, long time. That said, I don't think life just twiddled its thumbs all those many eons. There were many evolutionary steps involving the rise of photosynthesis, the development of a nucleus, the development of oxygen metabolism, even multicellularity prior to the end of the Cambrian. Conceivably on another planet many of those leaps could happen sooner. We've got just one data point.

Sully writes:

"Fossil evidence is pushing back the date of the first forms of life to close to the formation of the earth."

When I wrote my book on this (published 1999)the emerging consensus was that there were signs of biological activity in rocks 3.85 billion years old, which is to say, soon after the end of the Great Bombardment. And there were the Schopf fossils dated 3.5 billion years. But just fyi, all of this is still debated -- see the Robert Hazen book "Genesis" for an account of the arguments.

Not only was the Enterprise led by a Canadian, another one kept the dang thing running.

PLS;

Please know that I'm thinking about you and your friend.

mo;

Happy to help. :-)

Superfrenchie says of France: "one of the least antisemitic country in the world despite the stereotype"

Man, what stereotype are you talking about? You keep telling us about stereotypes of France, but half of them I've never heard of. They may be self-stereotypes that are fussed about in France, or that may be popular in other countries, but we don't give a hoot about those things here.

ScienceTim: Bill O'Reilly says it on national TV.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119187,00.html

I know, consider the source. But still, the most watched show on cable tv...

And I doubt that nobody but Bill's fans have heard it.

My late contribution to the actual topic of the post: the surest sign for the existence of intelligent life in the universe is that... we have not been contacted!

Some 50 years ago, scientists, like Noel Laureate (physics) I.I. Rabi wrote about life on distant planets in other galaxies. Rabi considered the vast number of stars that could have solar systems. Nowadays that number has grown enormously thanks to our astronomical technology.

What did Rabi offer us? He simply applied laws of probability and concluded that, yes, there is life elsewhere and very likely sentient life at that.

So now, 50 some years later, what's new about the subject? It's hardly worth arguing over.

The hunt for extrasolar worlds like Earth is going to be loaded with supposition until we know for sure.

You've got to understand the situation, every planet from 51 Pegasus b, discovered in 1995 which set off this whole era of alien planet discoveries, has turned conventional wisdom absolutely on its head with regard to planet formation.

Who ever thought a planet larger than Jupiter would be found 18 times closer to a Sun-like star than Mercury is to the Sun? How did it get there? It certainly could not have formed there (this much IS certain). For those who follow exoplanet discoveries, its showing us a universe that abhors normality, that's for darned sure.

The kicker with these hot jupiters is the effect they have on the innermost portion of the accretion disk orbiting any newborn star. Initially, it was believed these things migrated inward, clearing the debris that would otherwise form terrestrial worlds like Earth, now they're not so sure, the migration may be fast enough that enough might be left behind to form planets.

Ok, so the rules are revised as new information makes the picture clearer, welcome to the discovery process.

Several star systems with known large planets in close orbit and multiple large planets spread throughout, have been demonstrated to have gaps between their orbits in which an as-yet-undiscovered world could occupy and exist in a stable configuration. I believe 55 Cancri is a key candidate, but there are others. This whole field of astronomical study is wide open. The rulebook we thought we knew has been pretty much chucked aside, and the new book is being written as the discoveries make clear that the example of a star system into which we were born didn't amount to a snowflake on the iceberg.

Relax, have a seat, sit back with some popcorn, and surf through reviews of the 200 now confirmed extrasolar planets, and marvel at the fact that this one time, being wrong wasn't a bad thing, and the process of getting it right is showing us a universe around us more fascinating than we dared dream. The only thing special about our home star system is the fact that of all those discovered, its actually a pretty boring place.