"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do [things] scientifically; they follow the forms -- you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything.... You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can't believe they know it, they haven't done the work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know, that this stuff is [wrong], and they're intimidating people."
From "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," by Richard P. Feynman
Scientists have discovered that switching a single gene in a female fruit fly will induce it to behave like a male, according to the International Herald Tribune. That seems to be a solid step down the path of establishing homosexuality as being a result of genetics. And that is not a good thing. I'm not saying it's a choice, either, nor that establishing it as a choice would be any better. Frankly, I don't care, and neither should anyone else. This is one of those damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situations. If homosexuality is proven to have a genetic cause, then social conservatives will argue it is a genetic defect. If it is proven to be a choice, then they will argue it is a depraved and degenerate practice. They can find arguments condemning it if it's caused by non-genetic biological factors, by environmental factors, or by cosmic rays and Cher. Now, I'm not saying that we should pay attention to what social conservatives think. In fact, I say quite the opposite. Arguing about whether the cause makes it acceptable is still wrong and still lets them dictate the agenda. It implicitly acknowledges that one's sexuality needs to be justified to unaffected, uninvolved parties. I say that it doesn't matter one bit where homosexuality comes from except for academic reasons. What matters is that homosexuality hurts nobody
1
and is nobody's business. Root causes are irrelevant. It just is, and that should be good enough for everybody.
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Other people's reactions to homosexuality, on the other hand, hurt a lot of people.
If you're interested in animal domestication (and let's face it, who isn't?), you should read this article (PDF) describing a Soviet/Russian experiment over 40 years to domesticate the silver fox. It turns out that domestication can happen in just a few decades when artificially selecting solely for temperament, contradicting previous ideas that held that domestication of animals in human (pre-)history spanned millennia. They also found some interesting results in how characteristics of the animals that were seemingly unrelated to temperament changed in the sample population to mirror those same characteristics in other domesticate mammals, such as floppy ears, broader faces, and changes in mating cycles. It's neat stuff.
A week or so back, The Christian Science Monitor reported:
Today's conventional hybrids command a premium price - $2,000 to $4,000 more than their nonhybrid counterparts - and their owners will recover that extra cost in about three years, assuming $3-a-gallon gasoline and 12,000 miles a year of driving, the report found.
Those numbers sounded suspicious to me, especially after I did the math myself, so I obtained the original report (bug ye not). What it actually says is (on page 15 of the PDF, page 9 of the report):
With a gasoline price of $3 per gallon, fuel for a 30-mile-per-gallon conventional vehicle driven 12,000 miles costs $1,200. A hybrid achieving 50 miles per gallon and driven the same amount uses $720 per year on gasoline.... the ... payback period for the hybrid relative to the conventional vehicle is just over seven years.
Seven years now? Wow. That's a big disparity. How did they screw that up? Simple. Reading further down the page, it says:
With battry costs at the long-term levels in Table 1, however, the picture is quite different. Assume that ... incremental costs for ... a hybrid relative to a conventional vehicle are $1,500, declining to $1,000 ion the long term... which assumes high-volume battery costs of $400 for the hybrid.... results in [a] payback period of 2.9 years.
The "long-term levels" they refer to are the cost of batteries if they are produced in much higher quantities than today. The CSM reporter took completely hypothetical cost and rate-of-return estimates and presented them as facts.
My point here isn't so much about the efficiency of hybrids as it is about bad reporting. The mistake was instantly obvious to me, and it took barely any time to prove it (most of the time was spent creating a fake account for the ACEEE site). And yet, a key fact presented in the article was still wrong and made press not only in the CSM, but as a reprint in Yahoo News and possibly other publications.
The moral is to find the primary sources when you can. Of course, the media enjoy too much their role as mediators to make that easy. Given how often they make mistakes, though, it's kind of necessary. I think this is part of why people feel disillusioned with scientists. A paper will appear in a journal describing how daily injections of a particular substance into a genetically-modified strain of mice caused tumors of the spleen to spontaneously reduce in size 38% of the time, which will turn into the headline "Cancer Cure Discovered!" This will happen in politics, too, where a bill that grants the President the power to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone he wants is called a "compromise." But I've posted enough about that subject for now, so I'll stop.
There are all kinds of schemes for replacing gasoline, from corn-based ethanol to algae producing biodiesel. Me, I'm putting my money on genetic engineering. See, all those other things require some kind of industrial infrastructure. They're all multi-stage processes. You have to harvest the corn and process it, or build your vats, etc. It's all just too much work.
I figure genetic engineering will make it easy. Imagine an acorn. Toss a bunch of them into a field. Come back 5 years later and find a forest. Hook up a network of hoses like tapping a sugar maple and drop the end into a 55-gallon drum. Drip drip drip you get bio-diesel. The trees aren't a product of evolution, so they don't need to waste their time with things like seeds. Nor do they need the diesel for themselves, so we can suck it all out. We can design them to grow like weeds for 5 years, and then stop dead, so the majority of their photosynthetic potential can go into sweet sweet biodiesel. Splice some algae genes and tweak their photosynthesis. To be user friendly, you make them sprout a spout when they're mature, so you don't even need to tap them, just hook up the hose.
This is probably not the most efficient way of producing energy from a chemical perspective. That's not what to optimize for. What you want to minimize is human effort. There's basically no investment of human effort after the acorns are produced. Nor is there any new technology needed to burn biodiesel, unlike ethanol (a little bit) or hydrogen (a lot). It doesn't need fancy batteries, because diesel is sort of a battery anyway. It's carbon neutral and way better environmentally than most of the ways we produce energy today. Just imagine driving up to a tree to fill up when your Hummer is running dry.
Credit where credit's due. This is not an idea original to me; I got it from the gasoline mangroves in the short story Appeals Court by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.
One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.
As much as I like that quote, it's worth reading the whole thing. This should help you understand why science fiction isn't just interesting, it's important.
I just saw the deserts episode of "Planet Earth." Wow. Maybe I've just forgotten what nature documentaries are like, but it was really great. My friend tells me it's even better in HD, which I'm too cheap for. I highly recommend watching. There were so many "holy crap" moments.
A very, very, very dedicated entymologist has devised a pain scale for insect stings. Now there's an objective reference for how much pain you feel. Too bad scorpions and spiders aren't on there; I'd like to know exactly how much it would have hurt had I gotten up close to that giant spider I saw crossing the road the other day (from my car! from 30 feet away! it was huge!).
A trip into Wikipedia brought me to the brown recluse spider, considered one most dangerous due to the potency of its venom. In discussing a number of bite treatments, the article noted, "None of these treatments have been subjected to controlled, randomized trials to conclusively show benefit." Indeed. I imagine it would be hard to find volunteers.
I saw a pair of these birds in my neighbor's yard this morning:
I also made a
larger collage of several images
that's too heavy to post on the front page. They're clearly some kind of wading bird; unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any shots of them in flight; they have impressive wingspans. I'd guess they were about 18 inches tall standing fully upright. I'm not sure how clearly you can see some of the details; they have a reddish orange rim around their eyes and a thin white crest. I've never seen them before, so I'm guessing they're non-local migrants.
John and I figured out that the unknown birds I saw yesterday are juvenile Yellow-crowned Night Herons. We initially thought it might be a Green Heron (which isn't very green). Austin is squarely in their range, while we're at the periphery of the Yellow-crowned Night Heron's range, but it seems like a pretty solid match. Maybe that's why they looked lost.
Iusedthewisdomofcrowds to help with the identification. I kind of feel obligated to get a Flickr account and upload my pictures now.
NASA has a cool map showing solar eclipses and where they will be visible over the next 17 years. I think the asterisk indicates the point directly under the sun at totality. It looks like Austin will get a brush in about 17 years, though we may have to drive to see it; the map's resolution makes it unclear. Then there's one that will come close to Beijing just a week before the 2008 Summer Olympics. Then there's one in 2 years that's going to start just west of Bombay, passing a little to the north of it; I think the odds of my being in India then are rather low. Oh well; I can catch a fragment of the total lunar eclipse coming next month, assuming I'm willing to wake up at 6 AM, or the one in 3 years late at night.
Scientists appear to have discovered a protein that can erase memory. They have not indicated they know of any way to control what gets erased, either in kind or quantity. At present, it has only been demonstrated with rats, as there are obviously enormous ethical issues there. However, there are those who have no ethical issues whatsoever.
Assuming a similar effect can be produced in humans, how long is it before a criminal gang 1 uses this to wipe out someone's memory? Maybe someone who is informing for the police? The standard tactic is to kill them, but that is messy, dangerous, illegal, and alerts the police. However, if the informant shows up at a hospital with no memory of who he is...
We don't even have a criminal category this kind of thing fits in; it's certainly an assault, but so much more, and in some ways it's a murder, but the victim is still alive. This is freaky stuff. Even if this particular research path turns out to be a dead end, it seems likely that something like this will someday be discovered/invented.
1 Or a particularly ruthless secret service, which one might consider the same thing.
Until recently, that there were both books on evolutionary biology and the philosophy of evolutionary biology. I wanted the former. With Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," I got the latter. Boy does he go on. And on. And on. He would do well to use simpler prose.
One thing he does make clear is that evolutionary biologists have worked too long and hard on evolution for the theory to fall beneath the puny slings and arrows that Creationists often deploy. Disagreement is usually on the precise mechanics; you don't see anyone arguing against gravity because scientists have yet to find a graviton. There are other disagreements, including some disbelief that such a mindless process as natural selection could yield the results we see, but those tend to be as vague and poorly articulated as the Creationists, only with something else pulling the strings.
It's unfair to criticize this book for being a mostly philosophical book rather than scientific. He certainly does go into the science, but primarily from the perspective of game theory, algorithms, and the like, rather than deploying evidence. This isn't the book to read if you want an overview of the current state of the art in evolutionary biology. It's more of a niche book, aimed at those who want to delve deeply into the more speculative and philosophical implications of evolution by natural selection. I personally found it tiring, but I guess it's the thing for those who like that sort of thing.
0684802902978-0684802909
A research team has made aluminum look like gold without any kind of tint or stain, possibly almost to the point of fooling a spectrascope (my inference). They use a laser to etch small features into the surface of the metal that alter which frequencies of light are emitted. It sounds to me kind of like the same thing as butterfly wings. This is certainly not restricted to making one metal look like another; I'll bet they could make all kinds colors and patterns once they refine the technique.
I can't be certain that these are the exact same birds, but there are two of them, they're in the same location, and they look like slightly older specimens of the same species. What's weirder, that they're the same birds or that they are two different birds that are almost exactly the same? They definitely look like the adult Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, just like they looked like juveniles last year.
Now there are four Yellow-Crowned Night Herons. Or maybe five. There's now a pair building a nest in the neighboring tree in my neighbor's yard. There are at least two that hang out in my tree; there may have been a third one chilling out in the nest in my tree; it's hard to tell from 40 feet below 1. That also makes hard to take good pictures. It looks like there's a second nest under construction in my tree. It's not clear to me whether that's another pair or whether the birds just didn't like the first nest they built. I've also been hearing curious honking squawks at night, and disturbingly large bird poops decorating my driveway and the sidewalk in front of my house.
As exciting as that is, it wasn't the only bird action around my house. We've been leaving the door from the patio to the backyard propped open so the dogs can get in and out easily. A couple of Small Brown Birds built a nest over the door in the last month. I decided to let them be. Unfortunately, Sadie didn't get the memo. One of them banged into the window, and in its post-concussive stupor was vulnerable to our fierce predator 2. I did get the bird away before she ate it, but it was dead dead dead. It got a hasty "burial in the air" (thrown over the fence). Later that day, the other dog, somewhat less fierce and less predatory (hapless, really) managed to have a go at the other one. This one survived, but it might be permanently crippled. Over the fence with that one, too. I'm going to have to see if the nest has small residents; I heard a lot of little cheeping last night while I was trying to sleep (the boy was having none of it).
1 I wonder if I need a permit from the city to build a blind on my roof...
2 She's the sweetest dog in the world if you're not a small animal. She killed a squirrel last week, too.
I have no news or analysis to add to recent reports of dangers from certain kinds of plastics used in food and beverage containers. However, I do have a linguistic contribution to make that I am rather proud of: polydeathylene.
