A fun item from the Dilbert Blog: On the Other Hand.

In case you missed it in the links for Podcast 24, this video for the Boards of Canada song “Dayvan Cowboy” is my idea of a music video.

Update: The balloon jump footage is of Joseph Kittinger’s record-breaking jump in 1960 as part of Project Excelsior.

I also came across this other video set to the same piece of music. In this one, you get to ride aboard the left solid rocket booster during a shuttle launch, including liftoff, SRB separation, and splashdown. Fun!

It’s a weird paradox of my life: I’ve lived under some of the darkest skies in the country (at 9,000 feet in the Eastern Sierra), as well as under some of the brightest (in Los Angeles). And while I’ve been an amateur astronomer for most of my adult life, spanning both those times, my interest in stargazing has waxed and waned in inverse (and perverse) relationship with the darkness of the sky under which I’ve lived. That is, I’ve been more interested in looking at the sky at precisely those times when it was least visible, and vice versa.

I think this says something about human nature. Or at least about my nature.

Anyway, the above YouTube clip from Ant 220 of Pinky’s Ant Farm expresses quite succinctly and profoundly how I feel about the sky. Highly recommended.

Interesting article from the New York Times’ Benedict Carey: Magical Thinking: Why Do People Cling to Odd Rituals?

Children exhibit a form of magical thinking by about 18 months, when they begin to create imaginary worlds while playing. By age 3, most know the difference between fantasy and reality, though they usually still believe (with adult encouragement) in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. By age 8, and sometimes earlier, they have mostly pruned away these beliefs, and the line between magic and reality is about as clear to them as it is for adults.

Unless they’re the current US president, in which case they continue to make speeches manifesting their magical beliefs all the way to the age of 60…

Jack Hitt has an interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine: 13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. It does a good job of explaining the way that rare-bird sightings are treated in the world of high-stakes birding.

Soon after the original declaration of the discovery was made last April, controversy broke out, and it quickly got nasty. The ugliness derives from something deep in the heart of birding. Most people think of birding as either a science worthy of a word like “ornithology” or a harmless hobby pursued by rubber-faced old men in porkpie hats. But the act of birding, ultimately, is an act of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, “I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree,” even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don’t have yellow wingtips and don’t cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, the story of a niche told in a vivid language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.

Claiming to have seen rare birds requires a more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur’s depth of knowledge. Saying “I saw an ivory-bill’s long black neck and white trailing feathers” requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.

If you don’t pull it off, then people presume that you are lying or stupid. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your ability as a birder — to trust you, to believe you.

Hitt tells a subtle tale himself about the people who have claimed to see an Ivory-billed recently, offering damning details about their long-held desire to see the bird and their association with the fringe elements of the cryptozoology set. As I’ve described in comments at Tom Nelson’s Ivory-bill Skeptic blog, I don’t think the case against the Ivory-billed’s rediscovery is anywhere near as strong as skeptics have been making out. But this article by Hitt does a good job of explaining why that skepticism exists.

Some interesting followup links to my earlier story on bird-identification expert David Sibley’s problems with the claims for rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:

• The Debate over the Ivory-billed Woodpecker - a short account by Sibley of how he came to his current disbelieving position. Actually pretty revealing, in my view. It makes his change of heart sound like an emotional reaction to his failure to see the bird himself during a trip to the southern woods.
• Ivory-billed questions and Pileated v. Ivory-billed: Sibley’s story. Another weblogger interested in the controversy.
• Goodbye, beautiful dream. Grrlscientist’s skeptical take on the Ivory-billed’s continued existence. See the comments, especially, for some really interesting discussion.
• Sibley’s science paper on ivory-billed woodpeckers. Bootstrap Analysis’s weblog entry, likewise skeptical.
• Laura’s bird info page: Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Umpteen links on the rediscovery.
• Ivory-billed Woodpecker information. Sibley’s own page on the woodpecker, including a link to his field guide addendum illustrating the bird.
• The Luneau video (largish QuickTime movie). Can’t enjoy the debate without watching the Zapruder film yourself.

The New York Times has a brief article on the latest news regarding the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Is Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Alive? A Debate Emerges.

Basically, David Sibley, author of the best field guide to North American birds, has a brief item in the current issue of Science questioning the validity of claims for recent sightings of the bird in Arkansas (Comment on “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America”).

The authors of the original Science article on the rediscovery have a response in the same issue (Response to Comment on “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America”).

Basically, Sibley’s all wet. If you read his (and his co-authors’) criticisms, and the original authors’ response, he really just flat-out loses the argument.

Since Sibley is in some ways the leading expert in the country on bird identification, his criticism is getting a lot of attention. But speaking as someone who’s been involved, at least peripherally, in the world of obsessive birders for more than 30 years, I’ve got my own take on what’s going on here.

Basically, Sibley represents the extreme example of something that turned me off from competitive birding (and yeah, for a certain type of person it actually is a competition) a long time ago. Really obsessive birders tend to be skeptical of claims made by anyone less expert than themselves. Being better at finding and identifying “good” birds (by which they mean, rarities, either birds that are locally rare because they are occurring outside their normal range, or absolute rarities, because there just aren’t very many of them) is how they measure their status, and in that scheme of things, the Ivory-Bill really is the holy grail. For someone like Sibley, the fact that he hasn’t personally seen and identified an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, while someone else claims to have done so, represents a significant challenge to his sense of self-worth.

This is the same thing that annoys me about certain way-committed skeptics of the paranormal. You can be wrong by being too skeptical, just as you can be wrong by being too credulous. Being skeptical to the point of error isn’t a virtue; you’re still wrong. That’s the trap Sibley has fallen into here.

Interesting piece from the NYT about James E. Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, who’s crying foul about agency higher-ups trying to keep him from spreading the word about what the data show about global warming: Climate expert says NASA tried to silence him.

Interesting write-up from John Quiggan at Crooked Timber: The end of the global warming debate. I especially liked this part:

Finally, the evidence has mounted up that, with a handful of exceptions, “sceptics” are not, as they claim, fearless seekers after scientific truth, but ideological partisans and paid advocates, presenting dishonest arguments for a predetermined party-line conclusion. Even three years ago, sites like Tech Central Station, and writers like Ross McKitrick were taken seriously by many. Now, anyone with access to Google can discover that they have no credibility. Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science which I plan to review soon, gives chapter and verse and the whole network of thinktanks, politicians and tame scientists who have popularised GW contrarianism, Intelligent Design and so on.

There’s a process to doing good science, and it’s very much not the same thing as selling your a priori opinions as Truth. As with the evolution debate that took place in the 1800s, the scientific community has looked at the evidence and reached a consensus. Those who want to continue arguing that particular issue aren’t doing science.

Speaking of annoying pedantry, don’t get me started on the Drake Equation. But I do recommend reading this smallish interview from Forbes with SETI maven Frank Drake: Frank Drake On ambiguity.

I especially liked this part:

There’s another picture on the Voyager record, which in retrospect was a big mistake. It shows a woman in the grocery store buying groceries, and she’s eating some grapes. That picture was there to show where we get food and how we eat. But what we didn’t even notice was that in that same picture, on an upper shelf, there are some toy trucks. They look just like real, full-size trucks that appear in some of the other pictures. It can give the false impression that you buy baby trucks in the grocery store, and you feed them, and they grow into big trucks. That doesn’t make sense at all to us, but it could totally confuse the extraterrestrials.

Which prompted the following observation by me in Ishar:

You say, “yeah. ET’s gonna be _pissed_ when he arrives in his invasion fleet, ready to establish overlordship, and he gets on all communications frequencies, and the first thing out of his mouth is, “ATTENTION ALL TRUCKS OF PLANET EARTH! THE LIFE YOU HAVE KNOWN IS ENDED! THE NEW ORDER HAS BEGUN!”, and all the humans will be, like, snickering and shit.”

You quote, “WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT? WE ARE PREPARED TO OFFER YOU MANY, MANY GRAPES!”

This is, after all, the thing that always cracks me up about SETI, and the Drake equation, and suchlike speculation: It always ends up being more about the limits of our own imagination than about what’s actually out there (or not).

There are indeed many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Even when we do our best to fill in the empty spaces, we end up being more quaint than insightful, at least with the benefit of hindsight.

Like many people, I was impressed by Steven J. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics. By taking a non-ideological, fact-based approach to some burning questions of the day, Levitt is able to make some very interesting discoveries.

The lead story in the book is based on a paper of Levitt’s that shows a strong correlation between legalized abortion and a falling crime rate 15 years later. I encourage you to get the book, but in the meantime, the abortion part of it is well-summarized by sci-fi author, neo-fascist, and amusing semi-wingnut Orson Scott Card: Freakonomics or you have to find the facts before you can face them.

(Side note: Janus/Onan brought this fun Kuro5hin item about Card to my attention: Orson Scott Card has always been an asshat. Makes the interesting case that Card did not actually write, or at least did not write all of, Ender’s Game.)

You’ve probably heard about how former education czar, moral virtues expert, and gambling addict Bill Bennett recently filed the serial numbers off Levitt’s argument and mentioned it in passing in a slightly less-pleasant form, in which he pointed out that you could lower the crime rate in the country by aborting all the black babies. Rogers Cadenhead summarizes some of the aftermath at Workbench: Bill Bennett’s reproducible error. As with the Broussard fact-checking I helped along, it’s an interesting example of how stuff in the real media can resonate with a particular crowd in the blogosphere, then echo back, amplified, into the mainstream consciousness.

Finally, no excursion into wingnuttery would be complete without an Ann Coulter moment. Two of them, in this case.

First, Aaron/Hiro pointed out the other day that with the exception of its occasional gratuitous liberal-bashing, this item by Coulter, in which she attacks Harriet Miers as a legal lightweight (let’s not forget, Coulter owns the category of women using a sketchy background as a legal scholar as a springboard to greatness), is actually more or less sane: This is what ‘advice and consent’ means.

Second, restoring my faith in her essential inability to make a coherent, honest argument twice in a row, Coulter has attacked the aforementioned Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, as debunked at MediaMatters: Coulter falsely accused Freakonomics co-author of defending Roe v. Wade, claimed that Lott debunked his original study on abortion and crime.

Courtesy of Doc Searls, who despite his odd persistence in remaining within the Dave Winer Reality-Distortion Field, and his failure to appreciate the degree of duplicity evidenced by Aaron Broussard’s second Meet the Press appearance, is still a pretty cool guy, and is a neighbor, anyway, comes word of this: Google Answers: Weather; freak heat wave in Santa Barbara, CA, around the year 1900.

Doc (and I) were noticing how hot it got around here yesterday with the Santa Ana winds we were experiencing. But it turns out yesterday’s 101 (or whatever it got up to) was nothing; in a freak “simoon” condition that took place on June 17, 1859, Santa Barbara experienced temperatures of 133 degrees fahrenheit (!) for several hours, before the sea breeze kicked in and the temperature dropped back to the 70s.

“Birds,” we are told, “plummeted dead from the sky.” Wild.

An interesting-to-me article from Nature, as summarized in Newsday, shows that research subjects asked to lie exhibit a telltale MRI signature. Lying, it turns out, is harder than telling the truth: Study: Your brain can’t handle the lies.

I liked this part:

Testing an act of deception is tricky, [Dr. Daniel Langleben, an assistant professor of psychiatry] added. His first study involved instructing participants to lie. But he realized he needed to create a test that added secrecy to the mix. “Otherwise it’s more like theater than deception,” he explained.

In his latest study, two playing cards were given to volunteers and Langleben told them to pick one and offered them money to deny having it once inside the scanner. Moments later, the scientist hooking them up to the scanner told them to tell the truth. Then, the volunteer, choosing between conflicting instructions, answered questions about the cards while brain activity was recorded.

Another essay by a prominent scientist and science popularizer, this one by arch-nemesis of Creationists everywhere, Richard Dawkins: Viruses of the mind.

In this 1993 essay, which helped establish the field of memetics, Dawkins attempts to answer a question that obviously bugs him: why do people persist in believing silly religious myths?

A beautiful child close to me, six and the apple of her father’s eye, believes that Thomas the Tank Engine really exists. She believes in Father Christmas, and when she grows up her ambition is to be a tooth fairy. She and her school-friends believe the solemn word of respected adults that tooth fairies and Father Christmas really exist. This little girl is of an age to believe whatever you tell her. If you tell her about witches changing princes into frogs she will believe you. If you tell her that bad children roast forever in hell she will have nightmares. I have just discovered that without her father’s consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?

If you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks (or the Astrodome perhaps), you may not have heard that the issue of “Intelligent design” is going to court next week. Today I saw one of the most interesting and rational commentaries on the subject to date, from a Presbyterian Pastor whose encouraging his parish to attend a class titled: “Evolution for Christians“.

I agree that science and religion answer very different kinds of questions, so I worry about the doors of science classrooms being opened to intelligent design … I would be very upset if the biology teachers at Robinson Secondary School, where my children are students, departed from the mechanics of mitosis and began to bring their Mormon or Methodist or Muslim beliefs into discussions of why God chose to create cells.

I also really like the comments from a psychology professor in his parish…

“intelligent design theorists don’t scientifically establish divine creation at all — they merely try to represent scientific problems as evidence of scientific inadequacy.” They assume, for instance, that since the human eye is marvelously complex, and since scientists cannot map a complete evolutionary path for it, then it must be a product of an intelligent designer. But the eye actually shows many signs of having evolved, including a number of defects that no intelligent designer would ever include — light receptors in the back of the eye, for example, behind blood vessels that obstruct the view. “Accusing a God of [designing] such a thing seems rather insulting, actually,”

And while we’re on the subject of Evolution, those who are interested should acquire some Charles Darwin Has A Posse stickers and plaster them all over God’s big blue bowling ball. There’s no better time then now.

From 3quarksdaily, Abbas Raza talks about the role aesthetics play when scientists seek explanations: Francis Crick’s beautiful mistake.

Eugene Volokh takes a stray line from a Michael Shermer piece on Intelligent Design and runs with it: Is evolution a threat to religious belief? And PZ Myers of Pharyngula responds: Volokh’s question.

I could while away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head, I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.

I’ve just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and it’s had me thinking about the non-neurological component of intelligence.

Dawkins’ book is a journey backwards through our ancestors, cast as a pilgrimage to the “Canterbury” of the remotest common ancestor shared by all life on earth. It’s an interesting journey, in part because of the way it emphasizes the literal truth of the notion that all life is related. Reading the book puts you in the position of imagining what it was actually like to be a pre-human hominid, a shrew-like early mammal, a proto-vertebrate, a worm, an amoeba, a bacterium.

In the ‘later’ (that is to say, earlier) stages of that journey, you’re inhabiting a body that doesn’t have much in the way of a brain. And yet, despite their lack of big cerebral cortexes and the resulting large vocabularies that would let them do things like post rambling conceptual pieces on their weblogs, “simpler” organisms seem to have some pretty interesting abilities that are analogous to what we like to think of as the characteristically “human” manifestation of intelligence.

I also just finished reading Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature. Narby writes in his book about Martin Giurfa of the Centre of Animal Cognition Research in France, who, along with four co-authors, published The concept of ’sameness’ and ‘difference’ in an insect. In Giurfa’s experiment, bees were trained to enter a simple Y-shaped maze that had been marked at the entrance with a particular color. Inside the maze was a branching point where the bee was required to choose between two paths. One path, which led to the food reward, was marked with the same color that had been used at the entrance to the maze, while the other was marked with a different color. Bees learned to choose the correct path, and continued to do so when a different kind of marker (black and white stripes oriented in various directions) was substituted for the colored markers. When the experimental conditions were reversed, rewarding bees for choosing the inner passage marked with a symbol that was different than the entrance symbol, the bees again learned to choose the correct path. “Thus,” write Giurfa et al., “not only can bees learn specific objects and their physical parameters, but they can also master abstract inter-relationships, such as sameness and difference.”

Narby also talks about slime molds, which in part of their life cycle resemble huge colonial assemblages of one-celled individuals who have fused their cytoplasm into a single enormous (well, by unicellular standards) cell containing thousand of nuclei. Narby visited Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki, whose studies have shown that slime molds can “solve” a simple maze, arranging their bodies to lie along the shortest path between two food items placed in opposite corners (see Slime mould solves maze puzzle).

Plants, too, manifest something that could arguably be called intelligence. We hyperactive denizens of kingdom Animalia aren’t really wired to notice it, but on longer time scales plants adapt and respond to their environment, and research has shown that they actually respond surprisingly quickly (albeit in ways not easily visible) to outside stimuli of various kinds — all without benefit of brains, or even individual nerve cells.

Narby visits with Scottish scientist Tony Trewavas, who has been making waves in recent years by publishing studies describing what he refers to as “plant intelligence”. (See Root and branch intelligence and Aspects of plant intelligence.) For example, Trewavas talks about earlier research by CK Kelly showing that dodder, a parasitic plant that takes the form of bright orange twining tendrils (and which I happened to be checking out a couple of days ago while taking a hike in the Caprinteria salt marsh with my son), can quickly discriminate between a “good” host and a poor one, “choosing” in a matter of an hour or two how much of its resources to devote to a particular new host plant.

All of which brings me to the item I actually wanted to talk about when I started this posting: Scientists experiment with ‘trust’ hormone. It’s an article describing recent research into how the hormone oxytocin, which I’m mainly familiar with from its medical use in stimulating contractions during childbirth, can render people more trusting.

Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature located deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.

For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes. In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.

Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It’s a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing.

In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior - and specifically whether it stimulates trust.

The article goes on to describe how researchers dosed experimental subjects with oxytocin, then had them play a simple investment game that revealed the level of trust they were willing to extend to a randomly assigned trading partner. Those who got the hormone were dramatically more trusting.

Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging. “Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects,” Fehr said, “we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects.”

I’m sure there’s more to learn about how the brain is involved in all this, but I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that it necessarily plays the most important role. Brains are a relatively recent innovation. For most of our collective history of living on the planet we haven’t had them — yet we’ve been intelligently negotiating our environment the whole time, presumably through the same sorts of complex chemical interactions that underlie the “intelligent” behavior of our distant relatives, the slime molds and dodder plants.

Okay. Done rambling for now.

I’ve had this kicking around in my post-to-lies folder for a while. It’s a short interview with Jane Goodall: Animals and us: Close encounters

What is the most human-like behaviour you saw in chimpanzees?

Chimps can be deliberately deceptive. For example, when we wanted the young males to get the bananas, the big males would come and take them all, so we took to hiding some of the bananas up in the trees. One day a young male called Figan suddenly looked up into a tree and there was a banana nobody else had seen. He glanced over at three older males grooming. Chimps follow each other’s gaze, and if the males had noticed where Figan had been looking they would have immediately taken the banana, and if he had tried to get it quickly they would have attacked him. I think he knew if he stayed there he wouldn’t be able to resist looking, so he went out of sight. The moment they left, he came back to fetch it.

I very much recommend the whole thing.

I’m not sure if this would fascinate me as much if I didn’t already have lying to oneself on my mind, but I do, and it does. From the upcoming issue of Scientific American, as excerpted on their web site: Natural-born liars.

But why would we filter information? Considered from a biological perspective, this notion presents a problem. The idea that we have an evolved tendency to deprive ourselves of information sounds wildly implausible, self-defeating and biologically disadvantageous. But once again we can find a clue from Mark Twain, who bequeathed to us an amazingly insightful explanation. “When a person cannot deceive himself,” he wrote, “the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.” Self-deception is advantageous because it helps us lie to others more convincingly. Concealing the truth from ourselves conceals it from others.

In the early 1970s biologist Robert L. Trivers, now at Rutgers University, put scientific flesh on Twain’s insight. Trivers made the case that our flair for self-deception might be a solution to an adaptive problem that repeatedly faced ancestral humans when they attempted to deceive one another. Deception can be a risky business. In the tribal, hunter-gatherer bands that were presumably the standard social environment in which our hominid ancestors lived, being caught red-handed in an act of deception could result in social ostracism or banishment from the community, to become hyena bait. Because our ancestors were socially savvy, highly intelligent primates, there came a point when they became aware of these dangers and learned to be self-conscious liars.

This awareness created a brand-new problem. Uncomfortable, jittery liars are bad liars. Like Pinocchio, they give themselves away by involuntary, nonverbal behaviors. A good deal of experimental evidence indicates that humans are remarkably adept at making inferences about one another’s mental states on the basis of even minimal exposure to nonverbal information. As Freud once commented, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” In an effort to quell our rising anxiety, we may automatically raise the pitch of our voice, blush, break out into the proverbial cold sweat, scratch our nose or make small movements with our feet as though barely squelching an impulse to flee.

Alternatively, we may attempt to rigidly control the tone of our voice and, in an effort to suppress telltale stray movements, raise suspicion by our stiff, wooden bearing. In any case, we sabotage our own efforts to deceive. Nowadays a used-car salesman can hide his shifty eyes behind dark sunglasses, but this cover was not available during the Pleistocene epoch. Some other solution was required.

Natural selection appears to have cracked the Pinocchio problem by endowing us with the ability to lie to ourselves. Fooling ourselves allows us to selfishly manipulate others around us while remaining conveniently innocent of our own shady agendas.

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ book The Ancestor’s Tale lately, and it’s fun stuff. I encourage you to track down a copy. In the meantime, here’s an essay Dawkins recently wrote for the Sunday Times of London: Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant.

The whole creationism/evolution debate provides an interesting test-case of the objectivity I’m striving for in the post-manifesto lies.com. It helps clarify something that I think people (including some in the mainstream media) sometimes forget: Balance isn’t objectivity, and objectivity isn’t balance.

Back during the 2004 presidential campaign, there was a brief flurry of weblogger comment, both for and against, regarding a memo from ABC News director Mark Halperin, who wrote:

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.

This led to Kevin Drum’s doing an actual comparison of the two candidates’ lies, on the basis of which he ended up concluding that “deception seems to be central to George Bush’s campaign while it’s basically peripheral to John Kerry’s.”

It’s a similar story with the evolution/creationism “debate.” The people who seriously examined this question 150 years ago fairly quickly reached a consensus that evolutionary explanations were superior to creationist ones. And evolution didn’t win because of some a priori bias; it was fiercely resisted, and only won because compelling evidence from scientific research in many different fields converged to corroborate it.

I recently took Michael Williams’ Master of None weblog out of my blogroll. More than anything else, it was Williams’ periodic postings attacking evolutionary theory and touting Intelligent Design proponents like Stephen Meyer that caused me to yank him. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be troubled to do the research required to identify such nonsense as nonsense, you don’t deserve a seat at the table.

There are many real mysteries in the world, and evolutionary explanations of human origins do not provide all the answers. Also, everyone’s judgement is clouded by bias, by the desire to pick out the confirming bits in the matrix of evidence and ignore the disconfirming bits as representing mere noise in the data. But that does not mean all explanations are equal. They’re not. And a respect for the diversity of human backgrounds and viewpoints doesn’t mean I need to give all opinions equal weight.

Creationist explanations of human origins represent a precious legacy from our ancestors. They embody unique insights preserved and passed on through thousands of years of written and oral tradition. They should not be ignored; they should be reflected on, cherished, and revered. They have important things to teach us.

But they’re not science. And just because some people choose to pretend that they are doesn’t mean I have to go along.

Some enterprising students at MIT submitted an academic paper to the upcoming World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), and the paper was accepted for presentation at the conference. There’s only one problem: The paper itself was a computer-generated stream of gibberish and random buzzphrases, with no actual meaningful content. From CNN: MIT students pull prank on conference.

This is probably the weirdest thing I have ever seen on the net. This makes people’s net sex fantasies seem boring and inevitable. I mean just the combination of…this guy is insane. Without further ado, The recording technology of Middle Earth.

Another in a continuing series of lies.com items about new and improved ways to tell when someone’s lying: It’s written all over your face.

Link via Boing Boing, which likewise spotted the resemblance to one of the great opening scenes (well, almost) in movie history:

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.

I hadn’t noticed that Ernst Mayr died a couple of weeks ago: Ernst Mayr, 100, premier evolutionary biologist.

Continuing the topic of human origins (and continuing my recent obsession with Michael Williams), I have to wonder: why do arguments like this bother me? Key human characteristics.

Interesting discussion by Paul Waldman of a recent Gallup survey on Americans’ attitudes re: evolution and Biblical infallibility: Meanwhile, back in the reality-based community.

Some science for your weekend, courtesy of some daring folk who decided to see if running really skanky vodka through a Brita water filter would make it taste better: Oh my god it burns!

(This ran at Slashdot, which I used to make a point never to link to, or to use as the source of lies.com items, since I figured that everybody reads Slashdot already, right? But then I stopped reading it (years ago, actually) so now I’ve decided it’s fair game.)

See also this comment in the associated Slashdot discussion re: trying to do the same thing with human urine: Speaking of filters…

Salon persists in chewing on the story of what Bush had under his jacket in the first presidential debate. In today’s installment, they interview a JPL scientist who does image analysis for a living, and who took footage from the debate and analyzed it using the same techniques he would use on some murky photos of Titan. His conclusion: There’s definitely something under Bush’s jacket. And it’s not fabric wrinkles. NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate.

Winston Smith of Philosraptor muses on what it all means: Bush’s wire, or: Does this tinfoil make me look fat?

Folks like Craig, presumably, will laugh this off. But I think they’re wrong to do so. The fact that an explanation strikes one as ludicrous on its face is not, in and of itself, a particularly powerful argument. If there’s one thing that the history of human knowledge teaches, it’s that apparent absurdity does not make something untrue.

Let’s look at some of the absurd things people have had a good chuckle over in the past: The earth is spherical in shape. It orbits the sun. Human beings are descended from ape-like ancestors. Heavier-than-air flying machines can form the basis of a viable transportion system. Human beings can journey to the moon and back. Adolf Hitler is a threat to world peace. Arab terrorists might fly hijacked airliners into buildings. The sanctions and weapons inspection program has succeeded in degrading Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of WMD.

Laughter is not a particularly effective means of discerning truth. Just the opposite, in fact: It often serves as a last-ditch defense against information that challenges one’s preconceptions. It’s not an argument. It’s a de facto declaration that no argument is necessary; that the very idea of whatever is under consideration is inherently ludicrous. It’s an abdication of reason.

Which is fine. Everyone needs a little chuckle now and then. That’s why I watch and enjoy The Daily Show, for example. But I don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because something makes for a good laugh when Jon Stewart mocks it on the show means that the thing he’s mocking actually deserves to be mocked. You need to do some actual analysis of the underlying data if you want to make that judgement with confidence.

So with Bush’s bulge. Laugh all you want. But there’s something under there. And it’s not fabric wrinkles. Nor does it look much like a bullet-proof vest, as some Bush defenders have apparently taken refuge in believing. He and his people have systematically dogded the question of what it is, offering only jokes (”It’s a radio for receiving instructions from his alien overlords! Ha, ha, ha!”) and obvious lies (”It’s a poorly tailored shirt”).

So what is it? Laughing at it doesn’t make it go away, as much as your subconscious might wish that it did. At this point, I think the idea that it was a clandestine receiver to prompt him with answers really is the most-rational explanation. And I’d say the burden is on those who disagree to either offer an explanation that better explains the available data, or to admit that they’re not being rational.

Coudal Partners, via Boing Boing (again! again with the Boing Boing!) offers this cool Ethan Mitchell version of the NASA plane crash film set to electronica: Crash ballet.

People can convince themselves of anything. And I’m not even talking about those confidently predicting a Bush landslide. No, I mean this guy: Hollow earth theory…

If you could give me a clear, repeatable proof for the Copernican world, a solid, convex earth, I would cancel my home page and turn to something else.

Please, take your time to think about the world-view here given. With it I show that satellite photos can also prove the inside world-view (geocosmos), since the same optical laws are valid in either case.

I had been studying physics at the University of Stuttgart for two semesters or one year.

Several experiments such as the rectilineator, plumb line tests, motion of light experiments by Prof. Allais, etc., convinced me that we live on the inside surface of a hollow sphere.

I especially like the diagrams.

A fun illustration from an old magazine article: How a “home computer” could look in the year 2004….

Damn. Now I want a dual steering wheel for my Powerbook.

Update: See Snopes for the definitive debunking.

Interesting little email exchange between a non-US scientist and an American physics journal, in which the former declines to review a manuscript for the latter in light of the US role in putting science to evil uses: Interchange of letters between Prof. Daniel Amit and an American scientific journal.

Link courtesy of Radically Inept.

I hadn’t heard anything about strangelets (tiny, superdense, hypothetical objects) before, but according to this two-year-old article, Earth may occasionally be getting pummeled by them: Earth punctured by tiny cosmic missiles.

I like stories like this because they remind me how weird and unexpected reality frequently turns out to be. I mean, if I read this story on April 1, I’d be pretty sure it was a hoax. But it appears to be legit.

Thanks to Bravo for the link.

Nifty little item from Pharyngula, in which a group of scientists attempt to verify the claims of a prominent astrologer: Scientific bias and the Void-Of-Course Moon.

One more item in a very long list: Bush ejects two from bioethics panel. What do you do when prominent scientists on your advisory panel tell you your policies are a bad idea from a scientific perspective? Fire them, and replace them with less-prominent scientists who agree with you. Problem solved!

Except, of course, for this: Science, by definition, is all about understanding reality as it is, not as you would have it be. Once you start intentionally stacking the deck to allow “your” side to “win,” it’s no longer science. It’s make-believe.

Maybe if you’re the kind of president who doesn’t read much, and got a C average in school, and was more interested in partying than studying, you don’t mind having a make-believe science panel. But see, it’s a problem. Because the president needs science advisors, and he needs them to be honest scientists, not just puppets chosen to repeat back the positions he’s already decided will work best for him politically. Because science, for all its imperfections, is the best tool we have for understanding the non-obvious aspects of the universe. And it’s important to have that perspective when you’re making decisions that will have a direct and lasting impact on a good chunk of the planet’s population.

This economics prof named Tyler Cowen at George Mason University seems to have a thing about lying. Anyway, he has lots of interesting postings at the Marginal Revolution weblog on various aspects of the phenomenon. Like this one: No baby, you really ARE beautiful. It’s about some nifty little goodies that will do real-time voice analysis to help you figure out, among other things, whether the special someone whispering sweet Valentine’s Day nothings to you really means it.

Thanks to reader Rick for the link.

Michael Crichton has always kind of struck me as a pompous dork, an example writ large of “I’m a trained medical doctor, therefore I am qualified to mock the opinions of anyone churlish enough to disagree with me on any subject whatsoever” egotism. But the lecture he recently gave at Caltech is still pretty interesting: Aliens cause global warming.

From CheesburgerBrown of Kuro5hin comes this thought-provoking piece: Traffic zoology. I’d comment on what it means, except I’m so busy linking to things I don’t have time to actually read them. So go read it for me, and tell me what I think about it, okay? Thanks.

The good folks at Science News have a little blurb about “two researchers who actually took the time to contemplate” whether or not there was anyway to delay death while falling into a blackhole. Their solution is a Blackhole LIfe Preserver — which would look just like a life preserver you’d find on a boat, except it needs to be the mass of a large asteroid. Assuming you wear this thing arround your waist, and point your feet (or your head) straight at the blackhole while falling, the gravity the life preserve exerts on you will counteract teh forces of the blackhole and prolonging your life a little while (about 0.09 second) — allowing you to fall a little closer to the hole before rips you to pieces. The whole process has the added bonus of making you get shredded faster once you are torn atom from atom, so you will suffer less. Thank goodness for that.

The article doesn’t mention how exactly you are supposed to go about the process of putting on a life preserver that ways as much as an asteroid — so your milage may very.

(Props to my buddy dave who showed me this article durring our commuting)

This story is just hard core weird: Little Alexia Myronenko was spending the night with her family in a tent outside her grandmothers house in Oregon, when a tree near the tent was struck by lightning. The juice went into the tree, and then through the tree’s roots, which were close enough to the surface of the ground that she was electrocuted — straight through her pillow, in her ear and out her thigh. She’s alive, and appears to be doing ok. Aparently the rest of her family was unharmed because of the insulation provided by their air mattresses — Alexia had rolled off of hers in her sleep.
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Ok, I admit — that was a deliberately inflamatory headline … but that doesn’t make it false. A recent study from Ohio State University points out that… some reported gender differences [of sexual behavior] might show up because women don’t always answer surveys honestly, but give answers they believe are expected of them. In this new study, some groups of men & women were surveyed about their sexual history, and others were asked the exact same questions durring a (fake) polygraph test. The average answers from the guys didn’t vary much — but the average answers from the women differed significantly: from 2.6 partners to 4.4.

Another item from Kuro5hin, this one dealing with the root cause of the recent tragic event in the Santa Monica farmer’s market: Pedal error: A brief refresher. Not really “science”, exactly, but I thought it was interesting and didn’t know how else to catego