Win Ben Stein's mind

[Apparently, I had written this back in December 2008 and neglected to publish it. Posting now (05.29.2010) with original post date and time.]

Roger Ebert has posted an essay, Win Ben Stein's mind, to his Journal in response to criticism that he hadn't written a review of Ben Stein's film Expelled!

Here are a couple of excerpts from Ebert's post:

Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.

Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could use the money. Which do you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. You choose (B).

Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You have lost. Outraged, you file suit against the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Design, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an alternative theory to (A).

Your rights have been violated. You're at wit's end. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope.
...
You release your film "eXpelled."As you fully expect from all your experience, it is rejected almost unanimously by the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnwers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution's elite."

Again, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one fell stroke.

It's a long post, but well worth reading in its entirety!

M&Ms prove Darwin was right

Ok, so the (anonymous) M&M entry submitted to Roger Ebert's blog was copied/stolen from a 1996 listserv post signed by Emil Huston of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Ebert has added an attribution, and it's still an important piece of research (and in an easier-to-read format on Ebert's site).

We are a banana republic...

... with nukes.
After the House failed to pass the bailout package, on Monday afternoon Paul Krugman posted a blog entry titled OK, we are a banana republic in which he quotes himself from an earlier post:

So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.

And just because it's interesting, roll back the clock three years to his column of 8 August 2005, That Hissing Sound

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

And speaking of "Dow 36,000" (and returning back to the future):

And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled “an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders” to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.” Enough said.

Ebert update (3 of 3): Creationism Q&A

Another Ebert commentary, this time, the seriously funny Creationism: Your questions answered. (I guess it's just seriously, uh, serious if you really believe men walked the earth with dinosaurs.)

Ebert update (2 of 3): Movie rating systems

Roger Ebert's Journal entry, You give out too many stars, wherein Ebert discusses stars, thumbs, and the "Little Man" of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ebert update (1 of 3): Lost parts of "Metropolis" found

In a commentary posted 4 August, Roger Ebert writes:

It is the most sensational find in recent film history. A nearly-complete print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) has been discovered in Buenos Aires, 80 years after it was thought a quarter of the film was lost forever. Called by many the most important of German films, one of the landmarks of silent Expressionism, its plot had several loose ends that will now be repaired.

Qualifications

What's all the ruckus over John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate? As this article in the Anchorage Daily News quotes Alaskan State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez: "She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
And before running for governor, Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK (pop. 8,471 per 2005 census estimate). We did, after all, once elect a ticket with Dan Quayle as vice president.

Addendum [09.03.2008]: Yes, the "bikini picture" is Photoshopped.

Pentagon: Iraq War a 'major debacle'

A McClatchy article from 17 April 2008 reports:

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
...
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.

We're number one!

A USA Today article reports that Lexington-Fayette County ranks number 1 in per capita carbon emissions according a report out of the Brookings Institution. Other cities in the top 10 include: Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, St. Louis, and Knoxville. On the other hand, among the cities with the lowest (per capita) carbon emissions include: LA, New York, San Jose, and San Francisco.

The counter-intuitive rankings are because (as the article summarizes), "Sprawling, car-dependent metropolitan areas with low-cost electricity emit more carbon dioxide per capita than densely populated cities with extensive mass transit systems where electricity is more expensive."

Here's a quick link to the Brookings report tables and supporting material (PDF).

She only grows stronger and more powerful

Here's a story of stunning political correctness. In May, Rachael Ray appeared in an ad for Dunkin' Donuts wearing a "black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design." Conservative bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, saw something far more sinister: they likened the scarf to a keffiyeh, the type typically worn by Muslim extremists, calling it “jihadi chic” and saying the ads “casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the keffiyeh, via Rachael Ray.”

The backlash was swift and the story soon went viral. A New York Times blog wondering if doughnuts have replaced social security as the undisputed "third rail" of American politics. For more laughs, there's the YouTube video, “Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist” (This story comes up about halfway through, but the rest of the video is pretty funny, too.)

Rachael's critics and enemies would do well to heed Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and food writer, who has warned against her “strange and terrible powers,” and has earlier said: “Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful.”

Full disclosure: I have a thing for Rachael Ray.

KySpace

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander has landed on the north polar region of Mars and transmitted photos.
Kentucky has its own space program, albeit on a scale smaller than NASA, but nevertheless a leader in developing "CubeSat" technology. The annual KySat (to be renamed KySpace) conference was held 07 May in Lexington. The keynote speaker was Jeffrey Manber; here is KySpace blogger Wayne Hall's post on the Manber talk; here's his full coverage of the Kentucky Space Conference '08.

Distractibility not necessarily a disability

Being easily distracted, or, as I now prefer to think of it, having a "broad attention span" may be tied to creativity and wisdom. A New York Times article reports on studies analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson [Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book] and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

I cannot comment on my degree of original thinking, but others have certainly noted in me (both personally and professionally) "a reduced ability to filter and set priorities"!

Ebertfest 2008: "The real deal in brown paper wrapping"

As film exhibition in North America crowds itself ever more narrowly into predictable commercial fodder for an undemanding audience, we applaud those brave, free spirits who still hold faith with the unlimited potential of the cinema. - Roger Ebert


Here's the (somewhat belated) wrapup on the 10th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival.

Roger Ebert himself was "in exile," having broken his hip at the rehab center in Florida while trying to get himself in shape to attend. Having not yet regained the capacity for speech, Ebert has begun a blog/journal; here are his two Ebertfest entries: Ebertfest in Exile and Ebertfest in Exile II (or, why Ebert wants Joe vs. the Volcano, "a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it" at his Festival). The best reader comment I saw posted was this one: "Will you PLEASE stay put? Or by 2013, the festival will be hosted by your brain in a vat."

And links to the Ebertfest 10 Photo Blog and Lisa Rosman's Festival Blog, The Broad View.

The festival traditionally opens Wednesday night with a 70-mm film, and this year was Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.



For me, the most interesting discussions came from directors Ang Lee (following the screening of Hulk) and Paul Schrader (following the screening of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters).
Lee indicated that Hulk was largely driven by issues between him and his father. See Lisa Rosman's post, Angsty Lee (and his Hulk). And while the military had no issues with Sam Elliott's portrayal of General Ross, there was a big issue with the fact that they didn't win! (As Lee said, what would be the point of the film if, in the end, Hulk was defeated?)

When a representative of Fuji, one of the primary financial backers of Paul Schrader's Mishima, told the (Japanese) man who had in turn promised their backing to Schrader, the man told the Fuji representative he would have no option but to "protect my family." Apparently this was a coded way of saying that, unable to deliver on his promise, he would be forced to kill himself. (Unspoken was the implication that this, in turn, would guarantee that no Japanese would do business with Fuji.) Fuji came through with the money, though they still officially deny any involvement. And the film has had virtually no distribution in Japan, all of which led Schrader to describe Mishima as "a film financed by no one, seen by no one." His view is that life doesn't have problems (which would imply solutions); rather, it has conundrums (to be explored). He also said that "Christianity, whatever you want to say about it, is a blood cult."

In her final post, Ms Rosman says her happiest surprise of this year's festival was Bill Forsyth's Housekeeping, and goes on to say about her flight from Champaign to NYC:

And on the final leg to NYC, Forsyth and I talked and talked and talked. Apparently hangovers aid my powers of comprehension. I’m glad. He is the essence of Ebertfest: The real deal in brown paper wrapping.

Expelled (once and for all)

In this third (and, let's hope, last) post in this series, I'm including links to four articles in eSkeptic debunking claims made in Ben Stein's new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

• Expelled Exposed, Part 1: Ben Stein’s Blunder (by Michael Shermer)
  
• Expelled Exposed, Part 2: The Richard Sternberg Affair (by Ed Brayton)
• RichardDawkins.net: Open Letter from Richard Dawkins
• video parody: Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed
  

Anticipating success with their feature film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft and Walt Ruloff have already leaked a teaser trailer for the film’s sequel. Their “teach the controversy” slogan seemed to work well in getting the general public to believe that Intelligent Design is a viable alternative scientific theory to Evolution, so the team has moved on to promoting other theories that they feel are being suppressed by the scientific community. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed tells of how Sex Theory has thrived unchallenged in the ivory towers of academia, as the explanation for how new babies are created. Proponents of Stork Theory claim that “Big Sex” has been suppressing their claim that babies are delivered by storks. Furthermore, Stork Theory proponents warn of the serious moral dangers posed by teaching children that sex has a function. They point out that evil dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao all believed in Sex Theory, and they may have even had sex themselves.

There is also a late-breaking new development in the controversy, a new theory called Avian Transportation Theory.

Unlike the original Stork Theory, the modern, sophisticated “Avian Transportation Theory” (ATT) merely points out that there are gaps in the orthodox Sex Theory, and that current sonogram imaging is unreliable. Moreover ATT does not specify that babies are necessarily brought by storks but by “large birds unspecified” (although many individual ATT theorists PRIVATELY believe it is a stork).

WATCH the spoof

Here's a quick link to the YouTube version:

Note: Btw, I really do enjoy Ben Stein's Everybody's Business column in the the Sunday New York Times Business section.

Expelled for Real

Christine Comer was the Director of Science for the Texas Education Agency for nine years, until she was forced to resign for failing to remain neutral on creationism.
Watch the video.

A random (the first three, at the time I happen to be looking) sampling of responses on youTube is fascinating:

• if there is no such thing as intelligent design then explain a redwood tree or how a whale starts out as a simple protein molecule. evolution sucks and so do evolutionists. [So all of biology (along with chemistry, physics, geology, astonomy) can be replaced with "The Flying Spaghetti Monster did it."]
  
• Thanks state coerced schooling. Thanks to your one size fits all we got yet another power struggle on our hands! [Not sure if this comment is supportive or critical; but my understanding is that in the U.S. curricula are determined by thousands of individual school boards; very decentralized, compared with other countries?]
  
• intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism - you don't have to be religious to consider ID. [Of course it's not! Creationism requires your god; ID is satisfied by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.] Richard Dawkins belives in intelligent design [I strongly expect this will come as quite a surprise to Mr. Dawkins!]
  

PZ Meyers expelled from Expelled!

PZ Meyers, author the popular Pharyngula blog on ScienceBlogs, relates how he was expelled from a screening of the creationist propaganda movie Expelled back in March. It's an amusing story!

A recent post on Pharyngula discusses how David Bolinsky, creator of the Inner Life of the Cell video, accuses Expelled of theft.

In another of the ScienceBlogs, Afarensis, the post Expelled Bungles it Again discusses how, in "masterpiece of framing strategy" the film, in its effort to link Darwinism to Nazis and the Holocaust, includes an interview with an anti-Semite. "Unfortunately, the guy [Maciej Giertych] is a creationist and signer of the [Discovery Institute's] 'Dissent from Darwin' list." For more on this, check out another of the ScienceBlogs, Stranger Fruit, by John M. Lynch, and his post Expelled: Now with added anti-Semitism.

For a comprehensive listing of links to reviews and news coverage, see the Resources link on

Men Who Explain Things

Just this Tomgram post from Rebecca Solnit, titled The Archipelago of Arrogance.

The Butterfly Effect (Edward N. Lorenz)

Edward Lorenz, best known for the notion of the "butterfly effect," died last Wednesday. From the New York Times obituary:

In discovering “deterministic chaos,” Dr. Lorenz established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said a committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences.
...
As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.

The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.

At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.

Even though his model was vastly simplified, Dr. Lorenz realized that this meant perfect weather prediction was a fantasy.

A perfect forecast would require not only a perfect model, but also perfect knowledge of wind, temperature, humidity and other conditions everywhere around the world at one moment of time. Even a small discrepancy could lead to completely different weather.

Dr. Lorenz published his findings in 1963. “The paper he wrote in 1963 is a masterpiece of clarity of exposition about why weather is unpredictable,” said J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

The following year, Dr. Lorenz published another paper that described how a small twiddling of parameters in a model could produce vastly different behavior, transforming regular, periodic events into a seemingly random chaotic pattern.

At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, he gave a talk with a title that captured the essence of his ideas: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

The last Titan (John A. Wheeler)

John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist who gave black holes their name, died last Sunday.
From Dennis Overbye's New York Times obituary:

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”
...
Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Bryce DeWitt, of the University of Texas in Austin, called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.
...
At a conference in New York in 1967, Dr. Wheeler, seizing on a suggestion shouted from the audience, hit on the name “black hole” to dramatize this dire possibility for a star and for physics.

The black hole “teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.” (Its co-author is Kenneth Ford, a former student and a retired director of the American Institute of Physics.)

One for the ages (Arthur C. Clarke)

In his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end.

The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up.

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

[From Dennis Overbye's essay, A Boys Life, Guided by the Voice of Cosmic Wonder]

Arthur C. Clarke died last month. Based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel, he and Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies

To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'' There were many other walkouts, and some restlessness at the film's slow pace (Kubrick immediately cut about 17 minutes, including a pod sequence that essentially repeated another one).

The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.

What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.
...
Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. “2001: A Space Odyssey'' is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.

[Update 2008.05.15 I discovered that Roger Ebert has posted a journal entry, Arthur C. Clarke: Star hero.]

In a post (Arthur C. Clarke: A Techno-Optimist With Climate Concerns) on his Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin takes the occasion of Clarke's death for "pausing for a moment to take note of the power of imagination, and fiction, in helping humans step back from the daily rush and examine our predicament and possibilities from a distance."

SPACE.com carried this tribute, and The Planetary Society has an article, including a 1983 essay by Carl Sagan, In Praise of Arthur C. Clarke which he closes by writing

I may have been of some little help to Arthur over the years, for example, with the end of the movie “2001”; and the ideas in such stories as “A Meeting with Medusa.” But what Arthur has done for me is vastly greater. Through his non-fiction books and his science fiction stories and novels, his invention of the communications satellite, his defense of reason against the clamors of superstition, his work in more finely honing the British Interplanetary Society, and through his classic motion picture, Arthur has done an enormous global service in preparing the climate for a serious presence beyond the Earth. I hope that the governments of our epoch will have the sense to continue making Arthur’s dream—shared by so many of us—a reality.

Dave Itzkoff's essay, The Fuzzier Crystal Ball, discusses the future of science-fiction after Arthur C. Clarke.

And Dennis Overbye's essay carries this postscript:

*By the normal conventions of this paper, by the way, I should be calling him Mr. Clarke or Sir Arthur, on second reference. But there has always been an exception for people who “belong to the ages,” and Arthur C. Clarke has always belonged to the ages.

"Nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster"

A. O. Scott writes something of an homage to Roger Ebert in today's New York Times. In an April 1 letter to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times Ebert announced his return to (written) criticism, following the 10th Annual Roger Ebert Film Festival. (Although cancer free, Ebert's latest surgery -- his third -- failed to restore his ability to speak.)

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

It is this print corpus that will sustain Mr. Ebert’s reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment. His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do.

I'm back

After a brief hiatus (for work on the Osprey nest cam, kitchen remodeling, and taxes, among other things) I'm back in the saddle again; I'll be posting several items that have come up in the last few weeks.

Gmail Custom Time

Today Google announced Gmail Custom Time. This seems like an extremely powerful (and useful) tool, especially to chonologically challenged people like me ;-).

The butterfly effect

Satellite images posted on a NASA Web site show evidence of fresh clear-cutting by illegal loggers in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico, inside the reserve's "core zone" where logging is prohibited according to the Presidential decree that established the preserve in 2000. I saw this in a New York Times article by Andrew Revkin, who also writes about it (and why we should plant milkweed in our gardens) in this post on his Dot Earth blog.
A 2004 article gives more background, and lays out the familiar dialectic:

The illegal logging, peasant leaders say, is driven by a surging demand for wood; by the crushing poverty of the Indians who live in communal cooperatives, called ''ejidos''; and by the lingering resentment over the government's decision 18 years ago to turn the precious forests into a reserve for insects that their people refer to as ''worms.''

Indeed, the mud-smeared men of San Luis spoke with contempt for a society they say cares more about the butterflies than about their families. This land belongs to them, they said, and they would not surrender their rights to a presidential decree, much less forsake the needs of their children for bugs.

''Everyone worries about the butterflies,'' said one illegal logger, the brim of his baseball cap pulled to his nose to hide his face. ''What about us?''
...
From the day the government established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, peasants here have lived at odds with the government, and the deforestation turned fast and turbulent.

Mexico had given this land to peasants from the spoils of the revolution. With the creation of the reserve in 1986, the peasants accused the government of taking their land away.

The people of San Cristóbal, at the southern edge of the butterfly reserve, burned down their trees, rather than cede control to the government. Fourteen years later, the Mexican government expanded the reserve to more than 132,000 acres from 45,000 acres, offering peasants who live in extreme poverty few economic incentives to save their trees. The tensions, and deforestation, spread.

Now, as the demand for wood grows in factories, construction companies and fruit packing plants, middlemen have moved into the forests offering good money for timber -- about five times the average daily wage for a 60-year-old pine -- and peasants have decided to do business.

''What was once a problem of poverty and a necessity to survive has turned into a crime of greed,'' Mr. Lichtinger said, speaking of the logging in the butterfly reserve. ''There is no way to get the mafias to submit to the law.''

Governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel said, ''If we tell people they cannot exploit their forests, and walk away, then we condemn them to dying of hunger, or we force them to become involved in illegal logging.''

The governor said the growing tensions in the butterfly reserve were one result of a three-year-old crackdown against industries around the area that buy illegal wood. Some 100 sawmills had been closed or fined, he said, and 159 people had been arrested, most of them poor workers.

Cost of a gallon of gas, $4; cost of a war...priceless

In a 28 Feb. news conference, President Bush learned that gas prices were pushing $4/gallon.

Peter Maer of CBS News Radio asked: "What's your advice to the average American who is hurting now, facing the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing ... "

"Wait, what did you just say?" the president interrupted. "You're predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?"

Maer responded: "A number of analysts are predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline."

Bush's rejoinder: "Oh, yeah? That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."

The president, once known for his common-guy skills, sounded eerily like his father, who in 1992 seemed amazed to discover that supermarkets had bar-code scanners.

The $4-a-gallon forecasts were reported widely in newspapers and on TV in the past week. The White House press secretary took a question about $4 gas at her Wednesday media briefing. A poll last month found that nearly three-quarters of Americans expect $4-a-gallon gas.

The president, however, had difficulty grasping the possibility, even after Maer told him.

"You just said the price of gasoline may be up to $4 a gallon — or some expert told you that," Bush repeated. "That creates a lot of uncertainty."
...
At a Shell service station in San Mateo, Calif., the price of a gallon of regular had already reached $4.29, well above the California average of $3.42, as measured by AAA.

---

In other reality-based cost news, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz has co-authored (with Linda Bilmes) a new book in which they estimate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion -- with the final tally likely to exceed that.

"It's much more like five trillion," Stiglitz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. "We were trying to make Americans understand how expensive this war was so we didn't want to quibble about a dime here or a dime there."
...
"This war is the first war ever that's been totally financed by borrowing, by deficits,'' said Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York. "Because we haven't raised taxes, because we've tried to pretend this war is for free, we've been skimping on our treatment of veterans."

The estimate drew criticism: Senator Sam Brownback (R, TX) said the number ignores the price the U.S. would pay if Iraq became a terrorist state. [I would argue that, in fact, this is the price the U.S. has paid to create a terrorist state in Iraq.] And a White House spokesman criticized Stiglitz, saying the war on terrorism is, well, priceless:

"People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9-11," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz's research.

"It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"

Now, maybe the book makes the political/moral judgment that $3 trillion spent on Iraq is wrong, but so far, the criticisms seem to be that there has been a cost accounting done at all -- and for saying that this is the first time we've waged a war without any effort at financing it. Again, I would argue that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq -- which had no WMDs and no link to Al Qaeda -- has had little, if anything, to do with preventing "attacks on the homeland."

---

And (I am not making this up) Karl Rove claims that

If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy.

Er, isn't the fact that we've effectively turned Iraq over to the control of Iran one of the few uncontested facts of the American-sponsored "regime change" in Iraq?

It depends on what your "capable" PC is capable of?

In the case of "Windows Vista Capable" it's apparently a little murky...and, according to a U.S. District Judge, open to a class-action suit. It's unclear whether the Microsoft executives who criticized Vista will be joining the suit.

Boys seek girls for...companionship(!?)

Apparently, loneliness can drive boys to seek companionship with girls, as well as with the robotic reptiles mentioned in my earlier post. An article reporting on work of psychology researchers at SUNY Oswego asks if the stereotype of teenage boys, driven by testosterone to the single-minded pursuit of sex, may be "telling us less about teenage males and more about a culture that seems to have consistently low expectations of its boys?" The researchers collected data from 105 10th-grade boys (average age 16). When asked to note their reasons for pursuing a relationship (with girls -- most of the boys self-identified as heterosexual) the top answer (marked by 80%) was "I really liked the person." The next-most-popular answers (tied) were physical attraction and getting to know someone better.
Perhaps needless to say, some people are dubious, particularly "former teenage boys."

Such skepticism about boys in their teens isn’t surprising, say researchers, but it reveals more about what’s going on in the minds of adults, than of teenagers.

“Grown men often deny how dependent they are on women,” said Michael G. Thompson, a psychologist specializing in children and families and co-author of the book “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.” “The idea that you could pine for a girl, and be devastated by a girl makes an adult man uncomfortable. It reminds them of how profoundly attached they get to women.”

None of this is to say that teen boys aren’t interested in sex. Of course they are. But adolescence can often be a lonely time, and for many boys, girls represent needed companionship, Dr. Thompson said.

“Many boys are yearning to talk to somebody, but they can’t talk to their boy friends because it’s all teasing and a lot of competitiveness,” he said. “For many boys who have been a little bit lonely in the boy group, finally meeting a girl and talking to her is a huge relief.”

But the widespread skepticism about teenage boys is worrisome, some psychologists say, because it may mean that boys ultimately will fulfill our low expectations of them.

You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out

Warren Buffet's annual Shareholder Letter (PDF format) was issued last Monday. This year's letter begins with a two-paragraph summary of Berkshire Hathaway's performance, and then Buffet immediately remarks on the housing bubble:

Some major financial institutions have, however, experienced staggering problems because they engaged in the “weakened lending practices” I described in last year’s letter. John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, aptly dissected the recent behavior of many lenders: “It is interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine.”

You may recall a 2003 Silicon Valley bumper sticker that implored, “Please, God, Just One More Bubble.” Unfortunately, this wish was promptly granted, as just about all Americans came to believe that house prices would forever rise. That conviction made a borrower’s income and cash equity seem unimportant to lenders, who shoveled out money, confident that HPA – house price appreciation – would cure all problems. Today, our country is experiencing widespread pain because of that erroneous belief. As house prices fall, a huge amount of financial folly is being exposed. You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.

The following are other topics Buffet addresses in this year's letter:

On the weakening dollar

When the dollar falls, it both makes our products cheaper for foreigners to buy and their products more expensive for U.S. citizens. That’s why a falling currency is supposed to cure a trade deficit. Indeed, the U.S. deficit has undoubtedly been tempered by the large drop in the dollar. But ponder this: In 2002 when the Euro averaged 94.6¢, our trade deficit with Germany (the fifth largest of our trading partners) was $36 billion, whereas in 2007, with the Euro averaging $1.37, our deficit with Germany was up to $45 billion. Similarly, the Canadian dollar averaged 64¢ in 2002 and 93¢ in 2007. Yet our trade deficit with Canada rose as well, from $50 billion in 2002 to $64 billion in 2007. So far, at least, a plunging dollar has not done much to bring our trade activity into balance.

There’s been much talk recently of sovereign wealth funds and how they are buying large pieces of American businesses. This is our doing, not some nefarious plot by foreign governments. Our trade equation guarantees massive foreign investment in the U.S. When we force-feed $2 billion daily to the rest of the world, they must invest in something here. Why should we complain when they choose stocks over bonds?

Our country’s weakening currency is not the fault of OPEC, China, etc. Other developed countries rely on imported oil and compete against Chinese imports just as we do. In developing a sensible trade policy, the U.S. should not single out countries to punish or industries to protect. Nor should we take actions likely to evoke retaliatory behavior that will reduce America’s exports, true trade that benefits both our country and the rest of the world.

Our legislators should recognize, however, that the current imbalances are unsustainable and should therefore adopt policies that will materially reduce them sooner rather than later. Otherwise our $2 billion daily of force-fed dollars to the rest of the world may produce global indigestion of an unpleasant sort. (For other comments about the unsustainability of our trade deficits, see Alan Greenspan’s comments on November 19, 2004, the Federal Open Market Committee’s minutes of June 29, 2004, and Ben Bernanke’s statement on September 11, 2007.)

On corporate accounting ethics (Or, the lack thereof)
Buffet doesn't believe America's CEOs have offered much evidence that they're willing and able to resist on their own the temptation to "juice earnings":

Former Senator Alan Simpson famously said: “Those who travel the high road in Washington need not fear heavy traffic.” If he had sought truly deserted streets, however, the Senator should have looked to Corporate America’s accounting.

An important referendum on which road businesses prefer occurred in 1994. America’s CEOs had just strong-armed the U.S. Senate into ordering the Financial Accounting Standards Board to shut up, by a vote that was 88-9. Before that rebuke the FASB had shown the audacity – by unanimous agreement, no less – to tell corporate chieftains that the stock options they were being awarded represented a form of compensation and that their value should be recorded as an expense.

After the senators voted, the FASB – now educated on accounting principles by the Senate’s 88 closet CPAs – decreed that companies could choose between two methods of reporting on options. The preferred treatment would be to expense their value, but it would also be allowable for companies to ignore the expense as long as their options were issued at market value.

A moment of truth had now arrived for America’s CEOs, and their reaction was not a pretty sight. During the next six years, exactly two of the 500 companies in the S&P chose the preferred route. CEOs of the rest opted for the low road, thereby ignoring a large and obvious expense in order to report higher “earnings.” I’m sure some of them also felt that if they opted for expensing, their directors might in future years think twice before approving the mega-grants the managers longed for.

On Dow 2,000,000 (Not!)
Another accounting choice Buffet highlights is the investment-return assumption a company uses in calculating pension expense.

It will come as no surprise that many companies continue to choose an assumption that allows them to report less-than-solid “earnings.” For the 363 companies in the S&P that have pension plans, this assumption in 2006 averaged 8%. Let’s look at the chances of that being achieved.

The average holdings of bonds and cash for all pension funds is about 28%, and on these assets returns can be expected to be no more than 5%. Higher yields, of course, are obtainable but they carry with them a risk of commensurate (or greater) loss.

This means that the remaining 72% of assets – which are mostly in equities, either held directly or through vehicles such as hedge funds or private-equity investments – must earn 9.2% in order for the fund overall to achieve the postulated 8%. And that return must be delivered after all fees, which are now far higher than they have ever been.

How realistic is this expectation? Let’s revisit some data I mentioned two years ago: During the 20th Century, the Dow advanced from 66 to 11,497. This gain, though it appears huge, shrinks to 5.3% when compounded annually. An investor who owned the Dow throughout the century would also have received generous dividends for much of the period, but only about 2% or so in the final years. It was a wonderful century.

Think now about this century. For investors to merely match that 5.3% market-value gain, the Dow – recently below 13,000 – would need to close at about 2,000,000 on December 31, 2099. We are now eight years into this century, and we have racked up less than 2,000 of the 1,988,000 Dow points the market needed to travel in this hundred years to equal the 5.3% of the last.

It’s amusing that commentators regularly hyperventilate at the prospect of the Dow crossing an even number of thousands, such as 14,000 or 15,000. If they keep reacting that way, a 5.3% annual gain for the century will mean they experience at least 1,986 seizures during the next 92 years. While anything is possible, does anyone really believe this is the most likely outcome?

Dividends continue to run about 2%. Even if stocks were to average the 5.3% annual appreciation of the 1900s, the equity portion of plan assets – allowing for expenses of .5% – would produce no more
than 7% or so. And .5% may well understate costs, given the presence of layers of consultants and high- priced managers (“helpers”).

And this leads to Buffet's comments concerning what has been called the Lake Wobegon Effect as it applies to investors, or...

On why investors overall must be average (minus costs); passive (index) investors must be average (minus low costs); and active investors must be average (minus high costs).

Naturally, everyone expects to be above average. And those helpers – bless their hearts – will certainly encourage their clients in this belief. But, as a class, the helper-aided group must be below average. The reason is simple: 1) Investors, overall, will necessarily earn an average return, minus costs they incur; 2) Passive and index investors, through their very inactivity, will earn that average minus costs that are very low; 3) With that group earning average returns, so must the remaining group – the active investors. But this group will incur high transaction, management, and advisory costs. Therefore, the active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group – the “know-nothings” – must win.

On Dow 24,000,000 (Not!) Or, Financial Advisers in Wonderland

I should mention that people who expect to earn 10% annually from equities during this century – envisioning that 2% of that will come from dividends and 8% from price appreciation – are implicitly forecasting a level of about 24,000,000 on the Dow by 2100. If your adviser talks to you about double- digit returns from equities, explain this math to him – not that it will faze him. Many helpers are apparently direct descendants of the queen in Alice in Wonderland, who said: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Beware the glib helper who fills your head with fantasies while he fills his pockets with fees.

Some companies have pension plans in Europe as well as in the U.S. and, in their accounting, almost all assume that the U.S. plans will earn more than the non-U.S. plans. This discrepancy is puzzling: Why should these companies not put their U.S. managers in charge of the non-U.S. pension assets and let them work their magic on these assets as well? I’ve never seen this puzzle explained. But the auditors and actuaries who are charged with vetting the return assumptions seem to have no problem with it.

Note: All of Buffet's shareholder letters (PDF format) may be found here.

eReptile can cure loneliness

And speaking of reptiles, there's Pleo, the robotic pet that won't soil your carpet as described in this San Francisco Chronicle article.

Carnegie Mellon University robotics Professor Illah Nourbakhsh has thought about why humans form attachments to what they clearly understand to be artificial constructs. It happens all the time, not just to people who buy Pleos, he said. It's the same impulse that drives some children to choose a favorite blanket or makes grown-ups unwilling to get rid of objects that hold special memories - like the dune buggy that may be sitting up on blocks in the backyard today but which once kicked up its share of sand.

Nourbakhsh said such objects, by their mere existence, evoke feelings of comfort or memories of fun. The human-Pleo connection is different, he said. The Pleo can perform certain actions - it rolls its eyes and makes cooing sounds - which allows it to trigger associations in the mind of sympathetic observers. Pet or baby lovers may link the Pleo to memories or emotions important to them, he said, creating a new bond in the heart of the beholder.

Funny thing is, the person may know exactly what sort of mind trick they're playing on themselves and yet still feel satisfied with the quid pro quo between human and machine. That is certainly the case with Robert Oschler, a self-employed computer programmer from Florida who said he spends too much time alone, would love the companionship of a woman, pet or plant but admits being too absent-minded to care for real living things.

"I killed a cactus," said Oschler, who believes that Pleo's simple behaviors - it squirms and moans if he ignores it for too long - trick his subconscious into thinking that he isn't really alone.

The birds and the bees, but not always the lizards and fish

Playing off ideas from two previous posts (genomics and rat courtship), this offering is a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece discussing how Kimodo dragons at the Wichita Zoo have recently hatched eggs, despite the absence of a male of the species for more than 10 years. Parthenogenesis (actual virgin birth, producing genetic clones) has been observed in other species of lizards, and fish. And the point of the piece is that reproductive strategies in nature run along a wide continuum -- there is no single "natural" way to do it. Indeed, "almost anything goes."

Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”

Oil prices, incarcerations at all-time high; Dollar at all-time low

Oil futures set an all-time record of $103.95/bbl this morning on the New York Mercantile Exchange, topping the inflation-adjusted price of $103.76/bbl set in April 1980 (at what was then $39.50/bbl).

Meanwhile, the dollar fell to a record low of $1.5274 against the Euro.

But on another high, the U.S. now has more than 1 in 100 adults behind bars. Kentucky (+12%), New Hampshire (+6.6%), and Iowa (+6.1%) led the nation in growing prison populations during 2007.

Year of the Rat

While in San Francisco, I had the chance to watch the Chinese New Year parade as it passed along Geary St. (From my hotel window, since it was raining, and a bit chilly.)

Read more in this San Francisco Chronicle story, along with a photo gallery.

Another Chronicle story contained several little-known rat facts. For example, male rats make better lap pets, since they're content to just sit and have their ears scratched. (Females are more curious, and like to play and explore.) And, be wary of letting your male and female rats play together, since "rats can complete the courting ritual and the whole romantic relationship in about two seconds."

The Chinese Year of the Rat actually began on 7 February.

SALT: Craig Venter

Last Monday evening I was in San Francisco to hear J. Craig Venter talk on "Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention." (The talk was sponsored by The Long Now Foundation as part of their Seminars About Long Term Thinking, or SALT series). Here are my notes (with a minor amount of editing, including tracking down some links):

• Venter sees our knowledge of DNA as being both

1. Gathering (Reading)
2. Using (Writing)

• We humans differ from one other in our DNA by 1% - 3%, which is more than had been previous thought. (We differ from chimps by 4% - 5%.)
• The first human diploid (i.e., both chromosome pairs) genome sequence (called "HuRef") was published by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in the open access journal PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science).
  
• Microbes make up about one-half(!) of the Earth's biomass.

• In 2003, the JCVI did "shotgun sequencing" of microbes in the Sargasso Sea (published in Science).
• According to Venter, biologists had told him they would find no life, since there are no nutrients available. However, it turns out that these microbes contain proteorhodopsin, which allows them to convert sunlight into energy! (Note: this is not photosynthesis.)
• Interestingly, these are essentially the same sort of photoreceptor cells found in the human retina, but performing a different function.
  
• Even more interesting, different microbes have adapted to their environments by evolving sensitivity to different wavelengths: blue, in the Sargasso Sea; green in coastal areas.
  

• In 2004, JCVI launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition.
• For every 200 miles, the team found that 85% of the organisms sampled are unique!

• Each of us humans is a "microbiome" teeming with bacteria and viruses.
  
• During a single hour indoors, each of us comes in contact with 10,000 bacteria, and 100K viruses!
  

• As to the writing of genetic information, two Qs:
1. Can the chemistry permit synthesizing?
   
2. Can we boot it up?

• In January, JVCI announced the creation of the first synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium JVCI-1.0. (See my earlier post.) The genome has more than a half-million base pairs, and was created by assembling a series of overlapping segments of increasing length: starting at 50 base pairs (bp); then 5-7kbp; then 24kbp; then 72kbp; then 144kbp; and finally, the entire 582,970 base pair genome.

• The JCVI team has demonstrated that it is possible to take the genome from one species and (via use of restriction enzymes which cut apart the host DNA) have it take over and reproduce itself in another -- literally changing one species into another. "True identity theft," Venter remarked. "The software makes its own hardware."
  
• Then there's D. radiodurans, an organism that, after absorbing 1.75 million rads of radiation -- and having its DNA blown to pieces -- is able to reassemble its genome in about 24 hours and live on.
  

• Venter said that solutions to issues such as fuels and climate are more likely to come from disruptive technologies.
• We are heading toward a future of combinatorial genomics, with the ability to construct thousands, or millions of genomes a day.

Q-A Session

• About 200 kg of material are exchanged between Earth and Mars each year.
• The space station used to vent waste into space; now, it is packed in an (aluminum?) tube and launched back into orbit (to burn up in the atmosphere). "Good shit from space!"
• Venter said that there are two common long term views of human survival:

1. Move to a new planet
2. Alter our genome to exist in a higher CO2 environment
3. Venter would add: Genetically alter the environment

• In commenting on the resistance to GMOs, Venter pointed out that agriculture has always been about mixing genes -- albeit blindly. He recalled a conversation with the leader of the German Green party, where Venter said told him, "If you ask me if I'm for or against [GMOs] I'll always come down on the "for." But, if you want to have an intelligent discussion about it, then I'll say that there were many things that should have been done differently.
  

• Near the conclusion, Venter remarked, "Eventually, science trumps ignorance."
  

Sidebar

• Stewart Brand's notes on this seminar may be found in this post at the The Long Now Foundation blog.
• The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."
• Somewhere in the middle of all this, I remembered a classic Science Fiction short story (pub. 1941), The Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon.
• See the Ethical Considerations section of the JCVI's Synthetic Bacterial Genome press release for information on how the JCVI is dealing with societal issues surrounding the synthetic genome.
  

Asteroid Tagging

The Planetary Society yesterday held a press conference and issued a press release announcing the winners of its $50,000 asteroid tagging competition. From the press release:

The Apophis Mission Design Competition invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and "tag" a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. Tagging would allow scientists to track an asteroid accurately enough to determine whether it will impact Earth, thus helping governments decide whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) co-sponsored The Planetary Society’s competition and will review the best mission designs offered. The winning designs will also be presented by The Planetary Society to other world space agencies.

The near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. (That’s close enough to be visible to the naked eye.) If it passes through a small “keyhole” as it travels by Earth, its trajectory could be diverted so that it will impact Earth in 2036. Current estimates do rate the probability of such an impact as very low.

The first place prize of $25,000 went to a U.S. team led by Spaceworks Engineering (Atlanta, GA) for their mission, named Foresight. European teams took the second and third place prizes ($10,000 and $5,000, respectively). Another $10,000 was distributed to the winners of the student competition.

The BBC News covered the announcement in this article.
[Thanks to georgef for the heads up on this one.]

The Biology that dare not speak its name

Evolution, the unifying principle of modern biology, can now be mentioned in Florida public schools! According to the AP story

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida's public school science standards for the first time will use the word ''evolution,'' although the biological concept already was being taught under code words such as ''change over time.''

The new standards, part of a set of overall science changes adopted by the State Board of Education Tuesday on a 4-3 vote, require schools to spend more class time on evolution and teach it in more detail.
. . .
Opponents of evolution denied they had a religious motive, arguing that there are flaws in the scientific theory of evolution and that students should be allowed to explore them.

As a compromise, the standards refer to evolution as a scientific theory, explaining that a theory is a well-supported and accepted explanation of nature, not simply a claim.
. . .
John Sullivan, executive director of the Florida Baptist Convention, objected to calling evolution the only fundamental concept underlying biology. He wrote in an e-mail to Education Commissioner Eric Smith that Baptists firmly believe there's evidence of a ''Creator-initiated origin of life'' but did not object to teaching evolution. He argued, though, its scientific weaknesses should be taught as well as its strengths.

Among the standard tactics used by evolution opponents is to ensure evolution is labeled as (only a) "theory" -- which they recognize in common usage to mean, your guess is as good as mine. It's encouraging that the Florida standards "compromise" explains that evolution is a theory in the scientific sense -- which is to say, it is an explanation of nature that is well supported by known facts, and makes testable predictions. That this is a social, not a scientific, issue is quite apparent from the fact that evolution opponents spend no time lobbying against the germ theory of disease, quantum theory, or relativity theory to ensure that their scientific weaknesses be taught and that the competing claim that, simply, "God does it" be presented. After all, we know that the acceleration of gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s² (32.2 ft/s²), but beyond that, any explanation is "just a theory" and, if one allows supernatural explanations, it is just as plausible that God makes apples fall.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

The 9/11 "Truthers" have apparently been harassing Michael Shermer on his book tour, due to Skeptic magazine's cover story (volume 12, number 4) investigating 9/11 conspiracy theories. (Here's a clip of Bill Maher's television show being disrupted by a "Truther.") James Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, was interviewed on the Berkeley Groks radio show and the podcast is, I think, a good summary of the investigation by Popular Mechanics into claims that 9/11 was an inside job of the Bush administration. Even Noam Chomsky finds this too much to swallow! Skeptoid offers this more succinct analysis. I'm confident that the debate will continue long after I've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad (Bobby Fischer, Part 2)

[This is an addendum to an earlier post, Bobby Fischer.]

I just ran across this post, "Was It Only a Game?" on Dick Cavett's blog. I think Cavett's essay is just a beautiful piece of writing, and together with the clip of his first interview with Fischer (sumer of 1971, prior to the Spassky match) give a more nuanced and complex (and sympathetic) impression of an earlier, quite different intellect from the later raving paranoid Fischer became.
For those who choose not to read Cavett's post, I have to at least say that Cavett closes his essay by discussing those who did not have "a good death," and includes the closing lines from an E.E.Cummings poem, with no title but referred to by its first three words: “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct”:

Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

**********
Incidentally, the title of this post is, according to Wikiquote, an "Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides."

Synthetic Bacterial Genome

I'm a little late with this, but here's the lead from the J. Craig Venter Institute press release:

ROCKVILLE, MD—January 24, 2008—A team of 17 researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has created the largest man-made DNA structure by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. This work, published online today in the journal Science by Dan Gibson, Ph.D., et al, is the second of three key steps toward the team’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism. In the next step, which is ongoing at the JCVI, the team will attempt to create a living bacterial cell based entirely on the synthetically made genome.

Here's the Science article.

* * * * *
Craig Venter was a participant in the 2007 Edge annual summer event: Life: What A concept. A transcript of the event has been published by Edge as a downloadable PDF. Here's the introduction to his discussion:

I have come to think of life in much more a gene-centric view than
even a genome-centric view, although it kind of oscillates. And
when we talk about the transplant work, genome-centric becomes
more important than gene-centric. From the first third of the
Sorcerer II expedition we discovered roughly 6 million new genes
that has doubled the number in the public databases when we put
them in a few months ago, and in 2008 we are likely to double that
entire number again. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the
divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene
discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if
you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can
have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet.
One question is, can we extrapolate back from this data set to
describe the most recent common ancestor. I don't necessarily buy
that there is a single ancestor. It’s counterintuitive to me. I think we
may have thousands of recent common ancestors and they are not
necessarily so common.

[Here's a video of Craig Venter giving the Richard Dimbleby lecture, A DNA-driven world.]

"[T]he natural world around us does not care what we believe."

The intersection of two earlier posts (What have you changed your mind about? and Climate 'clearly out of balance' ) leaves us with these thoughts about climate change, from two very interesting minds:
In The Irrelevance of "Probability" Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) writes

As I said, consider that belief (i.e., epistemology) and action (i.e., decision-making), the way they are practiced, are largely not consistent with one another.

Let us apply the point to the current debate on carbon emissions and climate change. Correspondents keep asking me if it the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science, and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it were shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance — leave planet earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right, or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right.

In his essay The importance of doing something now about the environment Craig Venter (Human Genome Decoder; Director, The J. Craig Venter Institute) writes

Like many or perhaps most I wanted to believe that our oceans and atmosphere were basically unlimited sinks with an endless capacity to absorb the waste products of human existence. I wanted to believe that solving the carbon fuel problem was for future generations and that the big concern was the limited supply of oil not the rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere. The data is irrefutable--carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing in our atmosphere as a result of human activity since the earliest measurements began. We know that on the order of 4.1 billion tons of carbon are being added to and staying in our atmosphere each year. We know that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are the principal contributors to the increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere. Eleven of the last twelve years rank among the warmest years since 1850. While no one knows for certain the consequences of this continuing unchecked warming, some have argued it could result in catastrophic changes, such as the disruption of the Gulf Steam which keeps the UK out of the ice age or even the possibility of the Greenland ice sheet sliding into the Atlantic Ocean. Whether or not these devastating changes occur, we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One we need to stop.
. . .
Our planet is in crisis, and we need to mobilize all of our intellectual forces to save it. One solution could lie in building a scientifically literate society in order to survive. There are those who like to believe that the future of life on Earth will continue as it has in the past, but unfortunately for humanity, the natural world around us does not care what we believe. But believing that we can do something to change our situation using our knowledge can very much affect the environment in which we live.
[Emphasis mine]

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

The feature article in the current (2008-01-30) eSkeptic email newsletter is Michael Shermer's Response to the Annual Edge.org Question “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?” Shermer's response concludes:

I have thus changed my mind about this theory of human nature in its extreme form. Human nature is more evolutionarily determined, more cognitively irrational, and more morally complex than I thought.

See the Edge Annual Question - 2008 to see read what 164 other contributers have changed their minds about, including:

• J. Craig Venter: The importance of doing something now about the environment.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Irrelevance of "Probablility"

• Ray Kurtzweil: SETI

• W. Daniel Hillis: Try the Experiment Yourself
  

The most recent Annual Questions have been: What are you optimistic about? (2007); What is your dangerous idea? (2006); What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? (2005). All of the annual questions and responses (back t0 1998) may be found at the Edge World Question Center.

"A Charge to Keep" or, "The Slipper Tongue"

A friend who heard the president's State of the Union address has drawn my attention to the 2d paragraph: "All of us were sent to Washington to carry out the people's business. That is the purpose of this body. It is the meaning of our oath. It remains our charge to keep." The emphasis is mine, and of course leads us back to this previous post about George W. Bush and his favorite painting -- which for the President depicts a Methodist circuit-rider with A Charge to Keep, but in the reality-based world apparently depicts a horse thief fleeing his captors who, "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."

[A discussion of the painting and its significance may be found on pp. 89-90 of The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg (2008, Random House).]
* * * * *
Taxes, Terrorists, and Iraq
And speaking of the State of the Union address, The New York Times published a very interesting graphic showing frequency of the words that were used in this and each of President Bush's previous State of the Union addresses. This year's winning words were: Iraq/Iraqi(s); Terror/Terrorist(s); Tax(es), with the 2d tier finding Al Qaeda and Freedom(s). Popular words from previous addresses that were missing or out of favor this year include: Health Care; (Health) insurance; Medicare; Retirement(s); Social Security.
Other notables:

• Weapons of mass destruction/murder disappeared after 2006.
• Bin Laden, not mentioned until 2006, was mentioned once this year (the same as 2007).
• Surpluses was mentioned once this year, after being absent since being mentioned more than a half-dozen times in 2001.
  

Profits

Nothing really surprising here, but I was caught simply the juxtaposition of these two stories today:

Profit Declines 31% at Gannett
"Gannett, the country's largest newspaper publisher, said on Friday that its fourth-quarter profit dropped 31 percent because of a decline in broadcasting revenue and weak newspaper ad sales."

Exxon Sets Profit Record: $40.6 Billion Last Year
"By any measure, Exxon Mobil's performance last year was a blowout."

The company's sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.
Exxon Mobil earned more than $1,287 of profit for every second of 2007.
Like most oil companies, Exxon benefited from a near doubling of oil prices, as well as higher demand for gasoline last year. Crude oil prices rose from a low of around $50 a barrel in early 2007 to almost $100 by the end of the year -- the biggest jump in oil prices in any one year.