Monday, 26 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Thursday, 5 February 2009 by bbbeard.

Our newly-minted Secretary of Energy says that unless we do something about global warming, there will be no agriculture in California a hundred years from now.

Is this claim part of the IPCC predictions, or is this an independent assessment by a laser guy? Okay, that’s a bit unfair, inasmuch as Steve Chu has been involved in climate change lobbying for a number of years. But it seems only inches short of the wilder “Earth has a fever” brand of climate zealotry. Is this really science “restored to its rightful place“? Or is this some guardian of a partisan viewpoint trying to spread the gospel? Plus ça change….

But I still find it baffling that people think they can project not only what climate will be like in 100 years, but also technology. Imagine someone in 1909 proposing drastic government-mandated restrictions on electricity production because numerical models indicate that coal reserves need to be conserved for use on steamships and railroads… or that the major capitals of the world should begin a phased depopulation because horse dung will be choking the streets of 2009….

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Friday, 16 January 2009 by lukemeister.

NASA held an interesting press conference yesterday about the discovery of localized emissions of methane from Mars. The discovery of Martian methane, using both ground-based telescopes and a spacecraft orbiting Mars, was reported in 2003, but the detections weren’t certain. Now high-resolution infrared spectra taken by Michael Mumma at NASA/Goddard and colleagues, reported online in Science, seems to provide definitive measurements. The CH₄ appears to arise from three regions near or within Arabia Terra, Nili Fossae, and Syrtis Major. The most intriguing observation in the new study is that the atmospheric abundance of methane dropped by a factor of two between 2003 (northern summer on Mars) and 2006 (vernal equinox on Mars), possibly suggesting a seasonal cycle. Methane has a lifetime of centuries against destruction by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so there must be another sink, possibly involving reactions with perchlorate or peroxide in the Martian soil.

On Earth most methane is generally thought to originate biologically, although it can also be produced through serpentinization, which involves the reaction of minerals like olivine and pyroxene with water and carbon dioxide. Both biological and abiological origins for Mars’ methane are in play. If martian microbes exist, their metabolism might resemble that of organisms found at 3 km depth in a gold mine in South Africa. Even if Martian methane originates abiologically, the new observations seem to imply that Mars shows a surprisingly high level of geological activity, as serpentinization on Earth is associated with hydrothermal systems.

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Saturday, 27 December 2008 by bbbeard.

Well, Aurora Guy seems to think the appointment of John Holdren as Science Advisor is a step in the right direction. I have to say I have my doubts. Several articles have popped up in the last week discussing Holdren’s relation to Paul Ehrlich (of Population Bomb infamy). Now, I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for statements I made thirty-five years ago. But the articles raise some issues that I hope Dr. Holdren will clarify during his confirmation hearings, including recent statements he has made praising Ehrlich’s views.

John Tierney has been pointed in his criticism (”Flawed Science Advice for Obama?“, “Science Adviser’s Unsustainable Bet (and Mine)“). He details the story of the famous Simon-Ehrlich futures wager. In the picture he paints, Holdren is an opinionated ass:

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney also discusses the shabby jihad against Bjørn Lomborg undertaken — with Holdren’s contribution — in the pages of Scientific American, once a fine publication.

From the pages of the Atlantic, Ross Douthat takes Holdren to task for recent praise of The Population Bomb.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a “key insight” about population growth in Ehrlich’s book that’s anodyne enough to qualify as “elementary” and irrefutable. But there’s a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other “triage” methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Maybe Tierney and Douthat qualify as right-wing zealots in someone’s book. But I have a sinking feeling that science has not been liberated from politics by the coming of the Messiah. But scientists with a different political bias may be happy for awhile… fair’s fair.

Now, from my perspective, I associate The Pop Bomb with the Club of Rome and the fiasco of Limits to Growth. Of course, the Club of Rome has ignored its record of failures and moved on to climate change. Is anyone surprised? After all, if you have a perfectly good (pfft) planetary system dynamic model, already shown to exhibit divergent behavior on command, why not apply it to climate?

But seriously, I think that there is much to learn from the efforts to make the World3 model reflect reality. Lesson #1 is that it is relatively easy to generate divergent behavior when stabilizing feedback loops are left out of the model. It is reported, for example, that World3 has no implementation of economic substitution for resources as they become scarcer. Anyone familiar with standard microeconomic theory should understand this is a major defect — and also understand why there is no generalized model for substitution even today. Substitution is really hard to predict. If chestnut blight makes wood more expensive, people use… what, instead? Plastic for ladles, metal for building frames, electrons for newsprint — raising the price of all these goods, pushing consumption (and innovation) in a thousand different directions. None of this is in World3.

Likewise: anyone care to link to a list of flaws in general circulation models?

What do World3 and GCMs have in common? Beautifully complex models, nicely filigreed predictions, none have been validated. I wouldn’t design a car with such a model, much less make macroeconomic decisions with them.

So where does Malthus stand these days? Have I repudiated “Malthus was Right”? No, not so much. The Reverend was a man of great insight. To be continued in a future blog post….

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Friday, 19 December 2008 by aurora_guy.

It’s only natural this time of year to kind of recap recent events in one way or another.  I’d like to know what you think are the most important developments related to science and/or medicine in 2008, and why.

My picks:

#1. The election.  I already get a sense of shifts in policy tones, which will impact alternative energy development and space exploration.  Obama’s energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a physicist for all occasions, demonstrated by his industrial experience (former head of the quantum electronics group at Bell Labs for many years and director at NVIDIA since 2004) as well as running Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since August 2004. I recently discovered Dr. Chu serves as director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which focuses on educational, social, and environmental issues.  The question remains, of course, about whether or not his leadership can get a seriously dysfunctional agency back on track.  There’s a lot of inertia to overcome.

John Holdren, another physicist, is rumored to be top pick for science advisor.  This clearly strengthens the upcoming administration’s ostensible commitment to alternative energy and reducing human impact on the environment.  Dr. Holdren, a specialist in energy and technology policy and nuclear proliferation, also runs the Woods Hole Research Center, which has a lot to say about climate change.

NASA seems to be sweating the transition, but I have little doubt it’s for good reason.  The back-to-the-moon-and-onto-Mars projects are about to run into major funding problems.  Manned space exploration is all fine and dandy, but it is a hugely expensive endeavor.  In today’s economy, an era when other important (unmanned) space-related projects lack talent and/or money, manned space seems a luxury, a sensible space science policy would cut back on the latter.  We shall see how much.  I predict continued political pressure to fund big manned-space programs in the US, since China made quite a spectacle over their first space walk a few months back.

#2. I have to confess I am torn here.  I get all tingly over exo-planets, Mars polar scrapings, and dark energy.  However, after much teeth-gnashing, I decided to give my vote to Jon Miller, a professor from Michigan State University, who has been tracking scientific literacy for two decades.  Although his work covers quite a long time, he did get a fair amount of press in 2008.  His latest survey placed the US second of 33 countries in rankings of adult scientific literacy. Sweden is first with a rate of 38%, and the US is right around 25%.  By Dr. Miller’s definition, a person considered “scientifically literate” can read and comprehend, at least on a basic level, most of the articles written at a level of, say, the NY Times weekly science section.

The research shows that the strongest single predictor of scientific literacy in the US is having participated in a college science course.  This argues in favor of retaining or strengthening general education requirements that include science courses for non-science majors.

The news is actually a bit depressing to me, since it does mean the vast majority of people in this country are scientifically illiterate.  More and more important policy decisions seem to depend on a basic knowledge of scientific principles, whether it’s climate change or the teaching of creationism in the schools.  Such a disparity in the general population means it’s easy for politicians to handily dismiss scientific arguments inconsistent with their economic or religious interests, and the majority of Americans would have no rational basis to disagree or to demand change.

#3.  I thought there was a lot of interesting medical-related news in 2008, not the least of which were promising results from malaria vaccine trials in Africa.  Malaria is a huge and deadly problem across vast regions of the globe.  Nearly a million people per year die of the disease.

These are just trials on the vaccine, so I’ll have to split my vote here and also go with the body of research related to developing sources of stem cells and therapies derived from them.  While embryonic stem cell research remains somewhat controversial, non-embryonic stem cells were in the news a lot in 2008.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at University of Tübingen in Germany reported in Nature they harvested samples from testicles to form stem cells.  The team took spermatogonial cells, which normally mature into sperm, and used a series of chemicals to turn them into various cell types like skin, bone, muscle, and neurons.

Scientific American recently featured the work of Shinya Yamanaka .  Dr. Yamanaka “led one of two teams that showed that normal human skin cells can be genetically reprogrammed into the equivalent of stem cells. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) seem to be essentially identical to embryonic stem cells and possess the ability to become any cell.”

Multiple methods of creating stem cells — as well as understanding their similarities and differences — go a long way towards developing treatment of serious injuries and illnesses.  Although a bone marrow transplant is a well known stem cell therapy for some cancers and blood disorders, in theory, any condition in which there is tissue degeneration can be a potential candidate for such therapies. Potential applications include treatment of Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophies, and liver diseases.  In addition, retinal regeneration with stem cells isolated from the eyes can lead to a possible cure for damaged or diseased eyes and may one day help reverse blindness. This is exciting stuff!

Your turn.

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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 by bbbeard.

The big news we’ve all been tracking this summer and fall, of course, is the disconcerting lack of sunspots. This is correlated BTW with a dramatic drop in solar wind pressure.

But now it looks like Cycle 24 might finally be starting:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07nov_signsoflife.htm

A concern has nagged the climatology community that the fluctuation in solar activity represented by Cycle 23 has contributed to the muting of the global warming signal, at least relative to the GCMs employed by the modelers. It will be interesting to see if Cycle 24 does continue the recent trend of less active solar disturbances, and whether there is a correlation with cooler climatology on Earth. As always, correlation is not causation — but it’s food for thought and model fodder.

It might also be informative to hear the perspective from our Arctic Circle friends, who actually know something about solar physics. And about ice.

UPDATE: Nice big sunspot image from 12 Nov 2008 located here.

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Saturday, 8 November 2008 by bbbeard.

Now that the nasty Republican war on science is over, scientists at last feel free to post pictures like these.

Great job, all you planetary scientists out there!

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Tuesday, 21 October 2008 by bbbeard.

The worlds in question being politics, economics, and science: Bjørn Lomborg’s think tank is busy setting global priorities.

CVM examined the partisan correlates of scientific skepticism in his post “The Politics of Science“. He wrote

Obviously Republicans are much more likely to question the scientific consensus about global warming and its causes than are Democrats…. My guess is that Republicans have a sense that academics, including scientists, are generally Democratic and have liberal leanings. This is actually correct.

Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is something of a bête noire in environmental extremist circles, so despite the occasional Congressional hearing you won’t likely see many Democrat congressmen listening. But because his worldview is rational and economic, he has been embraced by partisans on the right. I suppose this is one of the ironies of our time, since Lomborg is unabashedly leftist in orientation, supporting “a strong welfare state”, “strong redistribution from taxes” and so forth. In the ReasonOnline interview, he says

I’m trying to recapture much of what the left stood for-when we believed in progress, when we believed that scientific understanding could lead us ahead and not just rely on tradition. I think that’s the original sort of background for the left. Unfortunately, I find that a fair amount of the left has turned towards a romanticized view of the world.

But the mere fact that Lomborg has been unwilling to endorse the hysteria about global warming means that conservatives give his views a fair hearing. I wonder how CVM might explain this phenomenon in terms of the “left=smart=AGW-is-gospel” theory.

I should explain that I have long held an “economic view” of the environment. That is, a clean environment is not a political right like freedom of speech, but rather an economic good that is procured in greater extent as affluence increases. (This makes it a “normal good” in the jargon of economists.) I should also explain that I have long held the view that “conservation is conservative” – that is, “Waste not, want not” is a Puritan credo that political conservatives embrace and is entirely consistent with stewardship of resources. These statements strike me as obvious and unexceptional beliefs, but I have noticed that some folks on the left have more absolutist, not to mention megalomaniacal, beliefs about the environment.

Lomborg’s main contribution, I think, has been to focus attention where it belongs, which is: what is the best way to expend limited resources to ameliorate global problems? This is an economic question, which naturally infuriates those who take a quasi-religious view of environmental issues.

Lomborg is director of Denmark’s national Environmental Assessment Institute. In 2004, and again in 2008, the EAI convened meetings of prominent economists dubbed the “Copenhagen Consensus Conference” (not to be confused with the Copenhagen interpretation). The question the cognoscenti ponder is how best to allocate a hypothetical multi-billion-dollar budget to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

In 2004, the CCC put the mitigation of AIDS and malaria high on its priority list. The Bush administration had already begun a massive increase in AIDS funding to the third world, but it is rumored that the CCC report was influential in getting the administration to push for malaria funding as well. These recommendations are reflected in Bush administration priorities. (However, politics being what it is, NPR has criticized the initiative.) The fact that  CCC economists, among others, estimate that Al-Gore-style carbon-reduction projects, and in particular the Kyoto Protocol, have poor benefit-cost ratios, may also help explain why CO2 mitigation is not a higher priority with the current administration.

In an ideal world, I suppose, there would be some political benefit to making such important life-saving investments as malaria and AIDS mitigation. But unfortunately, we live in a world where the political class is obsessed with tanning beds and plumbing licensure requirements. The Left (even leftist scientists, apparently) is also obsessed with the idea that Bush is the Worst President Ever™, and saving African kids doesn’t fit their narrative.

So I despair that politics will ever allow us to set priorities rationally. And this despair is of a piece with my belief that there is little value in mixing politics and science.

One of the conclusions the CCC appears to have reached this year is that supplying micronutrient supplements to children in the developing world is probably one of the best investments that can be made. I can map out contradictory scenarios about the political battle over such funding. The more likely one, I think, is that the Democrats will see little advantage to helping reduce Third World disease, and will once again engage in class warfare, portraying any such initiative as corporate welfare for Big Pharma. But I could be wrong.

An interesting aspect of the CCC report is their treatment of terrorism, which they considered in a separate category from “Conflicts“. [Small-world note: Daniel Arce, co-author of the CCC challenge paper on terrorism, was my next-door neighbor from 2002-2007 – indeed, his son and mine were in the same Boy Scout Troop.] The authors acknowledge that terrorism is distinct from the other CCC challenges, in large part because the cost-benefit ratios are “adverse”, in the sense that terrorist attacks to date have taken relatively few lives, and suppression or opposition measures are extremely expensive. But one has to wonder whether any economic analysis is worth a bucket of warm spit when it aims to address an existential threat like the one posed by the followers of Hitler, Marx, or Sayyid Qutb. Consider what the world would look like had Franklin Roosevelt decided the invasion of Europe or Japan was too costly, and that surrender to Hitler and Tojo had a better benefit-cost ratio. Of course, Al Gore thinks the internal combustion engine is an existential threat, too, so the debate continues.

UPDATE: As usual, ahead of the curve. Sir Bob Geldof is lavishing praise on the Bush administration for its aid to Africa:

“It’s no small legacy,” he added, and Bush has “set the bar quite high” for Barack Obama or John McCain.

Instapundit commented:

The press will tell the story eventually. But not until after the election.

UPDATE2:

While we’re on the subject of partisanship and science, I thought I’d point out Bill Maher’s peculiar feelings about vaccines. Larry King interviewed him back in 2005 and explored his worldview, which resulted in this exchange:

KING: You wouldn’t say the Salk vaccine was a bad idea.

MAHER: That’s somewhat of a different case, yes.

KING: Polio was eliminated.

MAHER: Yes but, you know, there are many books out that will — that will — and I’m not well enough versed on it to talk about it that will indicate that there are other reasons why it was. And a lot of diseases that have been they say, whoa, this was eliminated because of a vaccine, they find out well no actually the country got toilets and that’s what happened.

You can also read his opinion that flu vaccines are just another way for Big Pharma to con us out of our paychecks. So it seems like Bill Maher doesn’t think vaccines had much to do with eliminating polio.  Funny, I thought he was a liberal.

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Thursday, 25 September 2008 by bbbeard.

Enough politics. Some NASA guys have found some peculiar, really large regions in the early universe that appear to be receding. The hook is that whatever is pulling on them appears to be farther away than the edge of the observable universe. Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky has dubbed this phenomenon ‘dark flow’, heedless of political correctness in our current season of electoral insanity.

I may be getting ahead of things, but it seems to me that Alan Guth must find this good news. If confirmed, this discovery is another nail in the coffin of old-Big-Bang (i.e. non-inflationary) cosmology.  The only way something beyond the backward light-cone could exist is if the universe had some period of superluminal expansion.

I might as well use this post to address a recent query from CVM regarding the musings of Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT. Dr. Tegmark is a proponent of the idea of parallel universes. I read his article in SciAm back in 2003. I have to say (1) I’m probably not competent to peer-review his technical papers, but (2) I was not impressed by the argument of an infinite universe filled with Hubble volumes, each with the same finite state space. The discovery of dark flow illustrates this problem — our Hubble volume is not closed. In technical terms, this means that there is no infrared limit to the energy a particle can have.  It has also never been obvious to me — perhaps I was asleep in 8.321 — that a finite-dimensional state space even necessarily implies a finite number of possible states. Without a finite state count, the parallel universe idea (at least in the simple “Level I” formulation that Tegmark posits) falls apart. These objections are simple enough that it seems that Tegmark would have confronted them.

Tegmark is actually a prolific and accomplished cosmologist. It is an irony of our celebrity culture that his fame is due to musings of only marginal interest to actual scientists. It’s as though Stephen Hawking were known mainly for the wheelchair… oh, wait….

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Wednesday, 24 September 2008 by aurora_guy.

Several years ago I attended a gathering of satellite industry professionals hosted by MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates in Richmond, BC.  In his opening remarks, company co-founder Dr. John MacDonald wanted us to understand the ramifications of what he termed the “data-information gap”which be believed limited the commercial viability of satellite remote sensing.  He asserted that satellite systems were “technology-pushed” rather than “user-pulled.”  He meant that new spaceborne systems had evolved primarily as a result of the interest in technology development rather than any sufficient demand from an end-user market.

Building, launching, and operating spacecraft is extraordinarily expensive.  (For example, the new GEOEYE spacecraft reportedly cost over $500 million to get up.)  Despite analysts’ long-held predictions of a burgeoning market for space-based imagery and other data sets, at the time of the gathering in Richmond, commercial ventures like Space Imaging had been struggling to make ends meet.  The missing end-users, in Dr. MacDonald’s view, were largely decision-makers; i.e., executives and senior authorities, not scientists or GIS specialists.  They had the necessary influence to make capital available for commercial space ventures of this sort.  Existing satellite systems could produce terabytes of data each day, yet there were few, if any, tools to turn this data into information useful to decision-makers.  This was the root of Dr. MacDonald’s data-information gap.  Until the gap was narrowed considerably, commercial remote sensing from space would remain economically unviable.

The gap may indeed be narrowing.  These are exciting times in the business.  Secret government agencies are no longer the sole keepers of the domain. God bless Google Earth.  If any one development of late has brought satellite remote sensing to the common person’s desktop, this has.  I even know a fur trapper using satellite weather and photos to plan his adventures in the Alaskan bush.  News organizations have been using satellite imagery regularly for several years.  Humanitarian and emergency management organizations have become much more sophisticated consumers for planning and responses.  Firefighters use products from NOAA, NASA, and USGS satellites to coordinate their efforts.  Epidemiologists can predict disease outbreaks and spread with satellite-derived products.  Community planners and developers frequently support their zoning work and business decisions using photos from space.   Satellite remote sensing is even a way for ordinary citizens to keep governments honest.  UCLA researchers recently published an interesting analysis using Air Force weather satellite data to conclude the troop surge in Iraq may not have contributed as much to the decrease in violence in Baghdad as ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods had done.

The gap is narrowing, but it’s far from gone.  Many advancements are in the pipeline, and the evolution is bound to be quite dramatic.  As an analog, consider the Global Positioning System.  Not so long ago it was confined to military and government use, and now GPS technology is nearly ubiquitous.  Chances are good that you even carry it around every day with a cellular phone in your pocket.

We are all part of the revolution.  (Isn’t it cool to be a revolutionary?)  I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!

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