My last grant proposal was rejected, and one comment involved the writing.  I’d written the proposal simply, with colloquial language, because I’ve been coming to believe that it’s clearer and reads better.  My next novel shouldn’t be as complicated to parse for the non-scientist, but I’m not sure that applies to my next proposal.  There’s a culture among some large fraction of scientists that seems to think the more complicated language reflects more sophisticated thinking and a better project.  I’m not at all sure that this is the case, and think we’d be as well served, or better, by flying to DC for a day to give five minute pitches.  It would be quicker and cheaper, in terms of the time spent, and I don’t think we’d end up with worse projects.

But I wanted to comment on a new rule I’m seeing this year.  It says:

NASA’s appropriation from Congress includes this restriction: “None of the funds made available by this [law] may be used for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company unless such activities are specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of enactment of this division.”

Basically Congress doesn’t want to fund any projects involving China in any way.  As a scientist who sees the benefits of international collaboration, and as someone who anticipates publishing my work in public venues where anyone can see it — including Chinese scientists — this doesn’t make sense to me.  I mean, I do have a Chinese collaborator who’s a good friend and a good guy, but I guess he won’t be involved in this project at all if we’re funded.  It’s a shame because he could have really helped and made it better for the good of the field and the USA.  I mean, why not get Chinese people to help us do our projects?  We already get them to manufacture all our shit, from cheap plastic toys to iphones.

Well, the proposal is due Friday.  Yesterday I received a box in the mail containing Diablo III.  I will not install or play the game until Friday night at the earliest, after the proposal is submitted.  Then this weekend I can play and collaborate with Chinese players, congressional interns, and NASA engineers, to kill Diablo in a virtual world.

Makes more sense than the real world, sometimes.

Share/Bookmark

I used to be a fan of the old Superman movies (the first and second anyway), but their full of inexplicable dumb stuff, and spawned super stupid sequels.  I mean, the time travel thing at the end of the first, without consequences, was a cop out.  The bizarre special powers at the end of Superman 2 like the giant plastic “S” chest emblem.  WTF?

Something similar with the Tim Burton Batman movies, for me, although more of a case of now seeing a Burton movie than a Batman movie, and failure to stand up to the Nolan version.

And the fact is the special effects are better today.  The financial successes have led to more money and talent making superhero movies than ever before.  So I give you:

1. Perhaps a little flavor of the month, but let’s put Avengers at the top and start there.

2. The Dark Knight.

3. Watchmen.

4. Spider-man 2.

5. X-Men 2.

6. X-Men: First Class.

7. Spider-man.

8. Iron Man.

9. Kick-Ass.

10. Hellboy.

I hope I will have to revise my list after the summer is over and we have new Batman and Spiderman movies.

Share/Bookmark

On the science as a methodology front, via slashdot links (thanks Jon!), concerns about positive bias and how many published results could be erroneous.  The basic issue is one I’ve discussed before.  Basically, if we don’t publish every study we do, whether or not it looks interesting or important, we end up with a lot of studies being published that will, by chance, not reflect reality, some fraction of the time.  Basically, we just report the coin flips that come up with unlikely but predictable patters, and not the patterns that seem less remarkable.  With science such a big enterprise these days, with so many people and such high stakes, this is important and we’ll have to learn how to deal with it.  Two simple ways I’ve advocated for are to have journals for null results and for repeating studies (with low thresholds for publication).  Less fame, but important for the integrity of science.

A boost for quantum reality.  Quantum.

Space weather warning.  Basically, New Orleans is not ready for a direct hit from a major hurricane.  That’s a metaphor, by the way.

Why so many vampire stories are weak.  Sturgeon’s law plus the fact that there are too many vampire stories?  And when are we going to have more relevant stories, like dieting vampires?  And vampires having problems controlling their vampire pets?  And vampires in eternal-life crisis hooking up with girls much younger than them?  Oh, sorry, they’re all that last one recently…

Avengers Assemble!  A bunch of Avengers stories, some stupid, some cool.  Joss Whedon not going to stop being Joss Whedon after Avengers success.  Although I think he is going to start being Ron Howard (check out that pic!).  Or maybe James Cameron as Avengers is on track to break Avatar record.  That wouldn’t be enough money to repair Manhattan after the events of the Avengers movie (although within the range of a government “bailout”).   Then there’s the damage to the feelings of various special interest communities like the adopted, Indians, and sort of even the Pentagon which feared looking subordinate to SHIELD.  You can also check out the Avengers in high school, FILM CRITIC HULK’S REVIEW, and the story about Avengers 2 in the works (duh!).

On Leonard Nimoy’s return to Fringe.  Sorry if that headline is a spoiler.

Grandmaster Susan Polgar moving to Webster University (St. Louis, my old hometown) to lead chess team there.  That would have been an April Fool’s Day joke on me back in high school, but the truth is stranger than fiction at times.

Mayim Bialik, geek girl wonder (formerly “Blossom” and currently “Amy Farrah Fowler” on Big Bang Theory, neuroscience PhD holder), is unfortunately something a science denier on vaccines, apparently.  Say it ain’t so, indeed!  Seems like a lot of her bias is toward the insidious “natural is good” meme.  A lot of times natural is good, which is what makes it insidious, but if that’s the case why not get rid of all our science and technology?  Fire, medicine, and electricity are “unnatural.”  Disease, poisons, and dying from exposure are natural.

Why you should hunt bigfoot in Texas.  For the obvious (to me!) reason.

Pulsars as interstellar GPS system.  Activate long range sensors!

How about if I juxtapose the story So You’re a Cyborg with Sex robots: the Future of Prostitution.  Ignite any story ideas?

Let’s finish with some alien science fiction stuff.  Are we alone in the universe?  Basically suggesting some exoplanets that can support life.  Then, a nice bit of biological alien building with How to create a scientifically plausible alien life form.  Now, I’m looking forward to Prometheus and Ridley Scott’s return to space, but with the ancient astronaut story angle I’m concerned about the scientific plausibility.  We’ll see.

And, I love the optimism, could we build the starship (really planetship) Enterprise within 20 years?

And, by the way, stop being so pessimistic science fiction writers!

Share/Bookmark

Now, there are criticisms of the Big Bang from other quarters, primarily young Earth creationists (YECs) who think the universe is only a few thousand years old and not nearly 14 billion.  Their criticisms are total jokes compared to Van Flandern’s.  These sorts of people prefer to spend their time attacking other fields like geology and its technique of radioactive dating, but especially evolution.

One of the worst websites for that is Answers in Gensis (AiG), which is a huge joke, scientficially speaking, but one that fundamentalists don’t get and don’t laugh at.  There are many websites out there dedicated to calling AiG on their shit, like this one or this one.  Again, I’ve seen this science denying nonsense going back 20 years to my days reading Usenet, and I particularly like the newsgroup talk.origins FAQ list as a reply.

So we have deniers who are motivated by their own egos and contraryness, those who are motivated by their untenable religious beliefs that are in conflict with science, and we have a few others still.  Some people have biases built on their politics and/or their economic interests.  Couple those attitudes with confirmation bias, and we have motivation for denial of anthropogenic climate change (AKA global warming).  Libertarians, Republicans with a hate-on for Al Gore, and business interests like Big Oil (e.g. Koch Industries), who don’t want government regulation or taxes, or who just don’t want to believe anything that liberals believe…these guys are another variation of denier, and many of them also denied the association between smoking and lung cancer.  They like to present themselves as intelligent skeptics, but they’re usually some combination of mendacious and/or ignorant.  One egregious example of a denier webiste that butchers many basic and accepted scientific ideas is junk science.  I posted a nice compliation of denier talking points and replies a few weeks ago, and repeat the link to skepticalscience here.  What’s shocking to me is that there 173 (!!!) common denier “refutations” to global warming and they’re almost all trivially wrong.

There’s also the anti-vaccine science deniers, who seem primarily to be concerned but ignorant parents jumping on another bandwagon, perhaps with some conspiracy theorists mixed in.  Here’s one nice reply.

There are other kinds of woo out there, generally not actively anti-science but they do contribute to ignorance and a general anti-science environment: astrology, reincarnation, talking with the dead, flat Earth belief, other religious nonsense and superstition.  They’re easier to debunk, if that’s even necessary, as they tend to be fringe issues few make political.  They’re harmful, too, especially since they’re tolerated as being relatively harmless, but they undermine a reality-based world view.

Did I miss any other major area of science denial currently making the rounds?

Share/Bookmark

But more seriously, marriage vs. civil unions was another case of separate and not equal.  This move is just another in a long chain of events taking place over centuries moving to make our nation’s Jeffersonian values of equality for all consistent with our actual ideas day to day, and behavior and laws.  The issue of race and slavery took a civil war, and a massive effort in the civil rights movement.  It took over a century for women to get the vote in the U.S.  Gay rights is the next step.  It’s happening fast now and we’re at the tipping point.

The Star Trek future is happening.  The franchise always looked beyond the current divisive issues to equality for all.  First interracial kiss.  Racially diverse crew.  Lots of story themes humanizing the other, using the strengths of science fiction.

I’d like to bring up my own evolution and the role of writers and our entertainment.  I’m not sure how much individuals lead the culture, or the culture leads individuals, but probably some of both.  I’ve personally always been in favor of equal rights for all.  However, twenty years ago I recall arguing in a writing group that gay characters should not be used unless that was a point of the story.  My position at that time was that to many audiences the fact that a character was gay risked overshadowing the story.  It would potentially be distracting to too many readers as a story about a gay character rather than a story about a character who happened to be gay.

I haven’t felt that way in many years, and neither do more and more Americans.

Skilled writers can get away with anything, and a number of authors have pulled off gay characters over the years where it was very much not an issue, very successfully.   Joe Haldeman’s protagonist in “Feedback,” and J. K. Rowling’s Dumbledore, for instance.  We’ve had years of popular TV shows like “Will and Grace” and “Glee” and others to humanize and familiarize gay people to America.  I’ve been enjoying the tv show “Smash” this season, which has three-dimensional characters who happen to be gay rather than gay characters.  That’s the way it ought to be.

Again, I feel we’re at the tipping point and much more of the public is willing to accept people for who they are and not define them by their race, gender, sexuality, or religious belief.  We’ve got a black president.  I’d be happy to see a gay president.  I’d be giddy to see an openly atheist president.

We’ve still got a ways to go to get to the Star Trek future, but we’re on our way.  Make it so.

Share/Bookmark

We as a society don’t need these shows.  And the record industry, the culinary world, the art community, special effects houses, and casting directors, don’t need shows like these to find talent.  But these shows are a lot of fun and manage to create excitement and launch the careers of some talented people.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Now, I’m the first to recognize that making a similar tv show for writers would likely be boring, even for avid readers who put down their books to turn on their televisions.  It might work for screenplay writing, if the stories were dramatized, but that’s a hard sell, too, and would involve a lot more than writing.

The closest we in the science fiction community have are probably writing contests, with Writers of the Future probably being the most visible.  Enough big name writers have been published by that contest that seeing the credit means something to me.  It’s of course still possible to break through selling stories or novels to publishers directly and competing with established writers like they already compete with each other, but there’s often no extra launch to such a career that a reality show, or a well respected contest, can bring to a winner.

I attended the Clarion West workshop in 1994.  There were 20 of us then, and we each wrote a story every week, and we got about four per day to read and critique.  While it wasn’t set up as a competition, there was an energy associated with the stories from week to week.  You saw some participants get better and better, some rise and fall, some take daring experiments, and over the weeks you figured out what people were about thematically and stylistically.  It was almost like watching one of these reality shows, except we all got to win at the end.

Writing, like a lot of other professions, as much as some are loathe to admit it, is a competition.  You have to beat out other writers for slots in magazines and with publishers.  I like to think that a good enough story will always find a home somewhere, and that now with ebooks there’s always a home, but all writers compete for a reader’s limited time.

I don’t know if there’s a large enough audience, but I would get a huge kick out of a competition for new writers styled after one of these reality shows.  We start with some number that is whittled down by votes and/or purchases of their weekly (or monthly) efforts.  It could be funded by purchases of electronic versions of the stories, which could be sold based on a sample and a teaser.  That would likely be a workable model for a non-profit like Clarion West that doesn’t have a lot of money to put up.  Another possibility would be for a venue like Tor.com to develop and feature new writers, offering publication.

Every week would have a common theme and a word count limit (which could increase as the number in the competition dwindled).  Robots one week, alternate history the next, then first contact stories.

I think it would be great fun!

I don’t have time or resources to make this happen, although I have an idea I might be able to get NASA or NSF money for this if I enforced themes in astronomy and hard science.  Set stories on a particular exoplanet, in interplanetary, interstellar , or intergalactic space, illustration of conservation of angular momentum, themes/premises like that.  NASA has been cutting back on money for innovative public outreach, but it could still happen.

I do actually have a NASA research proposal to work on, deadline looming at the end of next week, and I best return my focus there for now.

Share/Bookmark

And here’s some good and bad journalism.  Guess which is which.  Wind farms causing global warming.  Wind farms not causing global warming.  Hint: the second story came out after a spate of bad stories like the one at the first link.

Back to more serious things…like the Avengers movie, which was really pretty damn good!  First, if you haven’t seen it, you should know that there’s an end scene after the credits.  No, after the first set of credits and the first extra bonus scene, and after the second set of credits.  So stay late if you want a little laugh.  And Scarlett Johansson wants to make a Black Widow movie.   From what I’ve seen so far, it could be great and it wouldn’t be hard to top Elektra or Catwoman.  Superhero movie fans will go see a movie with a female lead if it doesn’t suck!  And how about Ant-Man (and the Wasp?) in the Avengers sequel?  Cracked tells us why it sucks to be Ant-Man, unfortunately.  Finally, Five Ways the Avengers Bend the Laws of Physics.  Only five?  Not the best article, in my opinion, but a starting place for analytical thought about superheroes if you want to go down that dangerous path.

Analytical thought can weaken faith and induce doubt in the religious.  Duh!  But things that seem to be obvious need to checked out scientifically, because our intuition is far from perfect, and the analytically inclined realize that!  Another way to derail the many religious off their hate train, and get them to reduce their intuitive distrust of those analytically thinking atheists is to remind them that atheists are still watched by secular authorities, if not a god.

Oh, and here’s a winner from the intuitive woo-spouting mindless writer that lacks analytical thinking entirely: Darwin was wrong: why we need to update our model of evolution.  Warning for anyone who knows anything about evolution or science in general: it’s not pretty, and includes abuses of quantum mechanics to support a new age god consciousness.

Game of Thrones is a great story and TV show.  But what’s with those screwed up seasons?  How might they be explained scientifically?

Hmm…should I grow a bat-stache?

Really cool video graphically showing exoplanets discovered via transits (thanks Rachel!):

Share/Bookmark

Now, I’ve been a fan of the Avengers for a very long time, since the late 1970s or so.  You get imprinted on what you see first, and to me the core Avengers are Vision and the Scarlett Witch, Wasp and Ant-Man/Giant-Man/Yellowjacket, Black Panther, Hawkeye, the Beast, and some combination of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor.  The last three characters having their own titles with conflicting storylines meant that sometimes they couldn’t be used in the Avengers (e.g. because Captain America is going on a cross-country soul-searching journey for months, Thor is fighting in some other realm, Iron Man is in rehab, etc.).

At that time I was about 10-11, and into archery.  I was also into drawing, the more complicated a superhero costume the better.  Finally, my favorite color is purple.  That gives us:

So, I’m kind of miffed that while Hawkeye is in the new movie, he’s got a politically correct costume that won’t put off mass audiences.  They didn’t dare do that with the more iconic Captain America.  Personally, I think they needed another mask in there to keep Captain America from standing out like a guy in a silly costume.

I also loved the idea that Hawkeye was tough and even without superpowers could hold his own beside Thor and Ironman.  One of my favorite issues was this one:

In it, Hawkeye is the last one standing and saves the day because he’s been underestimated.  You don’t underestimte a hero, powers or not.

And I believe that’s a lesson I learned that has served me well in my own writing, as well as life more generally.  You can’t value a person only by virtue of their “powers.”  A person in a wheelchair, short on walking powers, can be a very effective and powerful person.  A gun neutralizes a big strong man, and can be wielded by a physically weak person.  Some physically imposing people are insecure and shy, while the little guy is sometimes the right choice for leader.  And the other thing I learned from Hawkeye, and liked about him, was that even if you’re not born with great ability (e.g. being a god of Thunder) or bestowed it by chance (e.g., Captain America’s super soldier serum), you can train your natural talents to where you can stand proudly beside them.

(And I’ll just ignore the fact that Hawkeye was originally an Iron Man villain — he was a hero by the time I started reading the Avengers — but there’s probably a good lesson in that as well.)

Who is your favorite?

Share/Bookmark

Dr. Maestripieri’s most intriguing chapter is entitled “Cooperate in the Spotlight, Compete in the Dark.” He describes how people, like monkeys, can be angels of generosity when all eyes are on them, but devils of spite in private. Famously, the citizens of New York City turned to crime when the lights went out in the blackout of July 13, 1977-not because they were evil but because the cost-benefit calculus was altered by the darkness.

Dr. Maestripieri then offers a fascinating analysis of the conundrum of peer review in science. Peer review is asymmetric: The author’s name is known, but the reviewers remain anonymous. This is to prevent reciprocal cooperation (or “pal review”): I’ll be nice about your paper if you’re nice about mine.

In this it partly works, though academics often drop private hints to each other to show that they have done review favors. But peer review is plagued by the opposite problem-spiteful criticism to prevent competitors from getting funded or published. Like criminals in a blackout, anonymous reviewers, in the book’s words, “loot the intellectual property of the authors whose work they review” (by delaying publication while pinching the ideas for their own projects) and “damage or destroy the reviewed authors’ property” (by denying their competitors grants and publications).

Studies show that peer reviewers are motivated by tribal as well as individual rivalry. Says Dr. Maestripieri: “I am a Monkey-Man, and when I submit a grant application for peer review, I am terrified that it might fall into the hands of the Rat-People. They want to exterminate all of us…(because our animals are cooler than theirs).”

His answer (and it applies to far more fields than science) is total transparency with the help of the Internet. The more light you shine, the less crime primates commit. Once everybody can see who’s reviewing whose papers and grant applications, then not only will spite decline, but so will nepotism and reciprocity. Anonymity alters the cost-benefit balance in favor of competition; transparency alters it in favor of cooperation.

I’m a little concerned, however, that junior referees will hesistate to point out problems on papers authored by more senior scientists.  I mean, I’m in favor of cooperation and constructive reviews, but we might get reviewers trying to suck up to more senior people, or junior referees declining to review papers at all.  That’s not healthy either.  I think I like my suggestions better, although I’m torn if the question is simply whether anonymity is better than transparency.  In any event, I’d like referees evaulated and those evaluations used by editors whether the reviewers are anonymous or not.

Share/Bookmark

I recently had an exchange with a student who queried me about why they had not been admitted into our graduate program. I won’t name names, or say where they were from, or their gender, and I won’t quote this person verbatim, but I do want to share the story.

The application was okay but not great in terms of the usual things like grades and standardized test scores. Some strengths, some weaknesses, but probably admittable. Compared with other applicants, the research experience was somewhat lacking. No published papers, even as a co-author, and not much evidence for promise in research. What there was sounded potentially problematic: a statement about problems with the foundations in the big bang theory and an ensuing review of steady state models, tired light theories, the plasma universe, etc.

I teach cosmology and my colleague on the admissions committee this year is an observational cosmologist. To us, the foundations of the big bang are compelling, especially compared to the alternatives that are ruled out by many observations. The microwave background radiation and the abundances of light elements, in particular, are immediate and clear predictions of the big bang that other models struggle mightily with. Also huge problems for some alternatives, but natural for the big bang, are the Lyman alpha forest, quasar host galaxies, time dilation of supernova light curves…etc., etc., etc.

There are other elements of cosmology, not foundational to whether the general big bang picture (that of a universe finite in time and hotter and denser in the past) is correct, which may be problematic or speculative. That’s good! Those are areas for continued research! But none of them rise to anything close to a level of “crisis” for the big bang framework, or have driven any significant number of cosmologists to the infinitely more problematic alternatives.

I don’t mind a few people working on alternatives or poking at the big bang. Scientists do that, and it’s usually a good thing, but when they lose perspective it can be bad. It’s worse when they drag young impressionable students into it. Chances are way against anyone overturning a paradigm as solid as the big bang, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics… Those endeavors are probably best suited to more senior people who have a lot of experience with the theory and observations and who can really see if things add up to a crisis. Yeah, there are stories of young geniuses doing this sort of thing, but science is ultra specialized now with so much to learn, and even before that was the case, most hot shots did not overturn paradigms.

Anyway, I’m making a short story long here. I let the student know that their research background was weaker than that of other applicants, and that in particular we didn’t feel that the big bang was in crisis, implicitly suggesting that there were better areas of inquiry. I’m probably too honest for my own good.

Paraphrasing the reply, the student thanked me for the rejection (!), as they were not interested in working with simple scientists who could not think outside the box, especially when the crisis was obvious to them and so many cosmologists in the world. Who? Halton Arp and his couple of buddies who haven’t died yet? The obvious crisis was never spelled out, or even suggested, so I don’t know if it is something I’d recognize as an issue or something I’m already aware of and dismissed as unsupported.

In any event, an undergraduate student who thinks like this is either a budding young crank already primed to tilt at windmills or a genius who can publish papers pointing out the crisis without taking a cosmology class from me. In fact, I shudder to think of having a student like this in class, not because I’m afraid of controversy, but because the vast majority of information in my class is extremely not controversial, and it would likely disrupt the experience of my other students. I’m guessing. When I get to inflation, I point it out as an excellent solution to some concerns but as still somewhat speculative. Is that a crisis? I don’t think so. It’s sure not a reason to jump to tired light or steady state models, which are either disproven or so modified as to be contrived and useless.

The student’s reply on its own sounds like an obnoxious crank reply mixed with some classic sour grapes. At face value, it’s funny, thanking us for the rejection and accusing us of being simple-minded for something that is very well supported with decades of arguments and observations far from simple. On the other hand, it did sound like the student had a iconoclastic crank advisor who did them no favors by setting them on this path. Save the way out of the box stuff for after you have tenure, and when you do, take the risks on yourself and don’t foist them on your students. Most likely you’re wrong and in the worst case you also ruin a promising young career. The equivalents in the arts and humanities would be having your student research Holocaust denial, or teaching them to write in some obscure vernacular before they’ve mastered grammar and elements of good style. I think I originally meant this post to be amusing, which it is in a way, but it’s sad, too.

Share/Bookmark

I want to pick on one section, however, because I think it is revealing and relevant to topics I write about here regularly.  I missed the kerfuffle when it happened, but since Penn brings it up again, it’s fair game and topical now.

Apparently at one of the recent conferences called The Amazing Meeting (which I’d like to attend some day), Penn was asked whether or not he believed in global warming.  What happened next is a bit of a he said, she said, he being Penn and she being Sharon Begley.  I think a fair assessment, after reading both accounts, is that Penn hemmed and hawed for a while, sniping at Al Gore along the way, but basically said that he hadn’t studied the issue carefully and didn’t know.  Begely took him to task for his answer, perhaps more than was appropriate, but I think she missed the point or at least failed to articulate the real problem at the heart of Penn’s answer.

First, let me say, that when you don’t know something, “I don’t know” is a great answer.  Smart people have trouble saying those three little words even when they’re the best answer.

They weren’t the best answer for Penn, and they’re not a fair answer to this question for anyone who has intellectual integrity and respect for science.

What Penn should have said, in my opinion, was that he didn’t personally know a lot about global warming, and his own opinion was not very important, but that the scientists who study the climate have provided compelling evidence for global warming and strong support that it is caused by humans burning fossil fuels.  No one who is annoyed by Al Gore can claim not to know that!

I mean, let’s consider other questions that Penn could have been asked on topics for which he has no scientific expertise, but would have looked like an idiot saying “I don’t know.”  How about:

Q. Do you believe in evolution?

Q. Do you believe in relativity?

Q. Do you believe in vaccinating your children?

Q. Do you believe in astrology?

OK, on that last one, as a magician with experience with mentalism and cold reading, maybe he does have some expertise, but not on the scientific validity of horoscopes.  Penn makes a false analogy in his article between the questions “Do you believe in global warming?” and “Do you believe in the Holocaust?”  The latter is not a scientific issue, but some kind of smokescreen to hide behind.

He may not consciously realize it, but as Penn is a Libertarian, and Libertarians don’t like government regulations, he’s probably very biased not to believe in global warming since it might lead to new regulations.  I think that bias makes him hedge his position with “I don’t know” instead of saying, “Science, which has given us evolution, relativity, vaccines, and astronomy in place of that fucking fakery known as astrology, also tells us climate change is happening and humans are the likely cause.”

Instead, he comes across as a disingenuous asshole.  He says repeatedly in the book that he’s an asshole, but in the other stories he comes across as genuine and quite a bit better than that.  Here, an otherwise science-supporting skeptic, a TV personality with a show designed to point out Bullshit, spouts some bullshit.  He’s basically applying a different rule to global warming than I think he’s apply to these other scientific issues he’s not an expert about.

You know who else has recently done this?  Pat Robertson.  Robertson makes a confused statement in support of some science, but makes different rules for things like evolution and origins science.

You don’t get to do that without being an asshole who disrespects science, doesn’t understand science, and has strong biases to make them deny their own intellectual integrity.

It’s easy to get sucked into Penn’s energetic and profanity-laden stories and rants, but stay critical even when he doesn’t.  Our biases are with us, and they’re hard to identify from the inside.  If you’re picking out some small piece of science to object to, when you accept the rest of it, you’re being inconsistent and likely the product of not believing something that is in conflict with another belief.

Anyway, I loved the book and suggest you check it out if you like Penn the least little bit, even if he is on rare occasions unknowingly disingenuous.

Share/Bookmark

How about string theory having issues?  Well, I thought it had issues before I read this article.

Too many of the arguments in support of string theory smack of philosophy rather than physics, and in a bad way.  I sometimes say things about entire fields (philosophy, economics, journalism, social science) that sound negative when in fact I’ve got specific bad examples in mind and recognize that there is worthwhile work being done in addition to what I see as worthless crap too well tolerated.  I’ll let Lawrence Krauss apologize for me with something akin to my sentiments.

I won’t apologize for this.  Primate change.  Laugh it up, monkey boy!

15 Comic Book TV shows/movies that didn’t happen.  Click on the Daredevil/Black Widow link for a horrifying picture.

33 science fiction/fantasy movies that did happen and are coming out this summer.  33…whoa!

One of them coming a bit after summer, The Hobbit, may result in a disturbance in the force at 48 fps.

Also not coming this summer, but it should be coming, is Kick-Ass 2, which I’m looking forward to seeing!  And probably 3 as well.

And Fringe is renewed for a 13-episode season five, to tie up the series storyline(s) in 100 episodes even.  Nice!  I wish every show with multi-episode storylines got a change to plan for a series ending.

Global warming alarmist now recants.  Thing is, Lovelock didn’t have the science behind his alarmism, and now doesn’t have the science behind his change of heart.  I won’t say change of mind since he’s not using enough of it in general.  The real climatologists’ predictions have been pretty close and haven’t changed too much.

Not a huge fan of mouse studies, but exercise probably does help your brain and body and a bunch of other stuff, so just do it.  Nike.

Guy builds a sort-of working phaser! Cool!

Share/Bookmark