Real WMDs (Or, Ignorance is Bliss)

In an online commentary, Building a Nation of Know-Nothings, Timothy Egan uses John McCain's primary victory against "the flat-earth wing of his party" as the launching point to discuss the rather depressing trend in the Republican party to pander to imbeciles. (Okay, he was more delicate, referring to people with "head[s] stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler.") He writes,

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush. 


Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.


Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The source of this "knowledge" is "the media" - in fact, a "lamestream media" all its own.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.


So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:


“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”


Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. [More specifically, http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html -jwj]
...
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?


But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.


It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

IdeaFestival 2010

The IdeaFestival will be held 29 September - 2 October at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, KY.  Here's a quick link to this year's program.

Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading global innovators and thinkers to discuss and celebrate imagination, new perspectives and transformational ideas.
The IdeaFestival provides a unique stage to explore the cross-cutting nature of innovation involving a range of diverse disciplines, while supplying the creative tools needed to “see”, synthesize and apply this knowledge in new, dynamic ways.

Highly efficient solar cells from quantum dots

The 22 August 2010 edition of Texas Science reports on research by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin suggesting that conventional solar cell efficiency could be more than doubled, from the current limit of 30% to more than 60% using semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots to capture the energy from "hot electrons."

The maximum efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is about 31 percent. That’s because much of the energy from sunlight hitting a solar cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of so-called “hot electrons,” is lost as heat.
If the higher energy sunlight, or more specifically the hot electrons, could be captured, solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency could be increased theoretically to as high as 66 percent.

 “If we take the hot electrons out, we can do work with them,” says Zhu. “The demonstration of this hot electron transfer establishes that a highly efficient hot carrier solar cell is not just a theoretical concept, but an experimental possibility.”

Captured in a Flash: The Insect Photos of John Abbott

Very cool slide show of insects around Texas, captured in motion by Dr. John Abbott using high speed flash photography.

To see more of his images, visit www.flickr.com/abbottnaturephotography.

Planck telescope image "a thing of beauty"

The first full-sky image from the European Space Agency (ESA) Planck telescope has been released, and "It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Planck, launched in May 2009, occupies an observing position more than one million km from Earth on its "night side." (Technically, Planck's operational orbit is around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2.)

The detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument have an operational temperature of -273.05°C, only 0.1°C above absolute zero - the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our Universe. Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck’s detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light released by the universe only 380 000 yrs after the Big Bang, by measuring its temperature across the sky. Specifically, Planck will look for evidence of "inflation," the faster-than-light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe experienced in its first, fleeting moments. Theory predicts this event ought to be "imprinted" in the CMB and its detail should be retrievable with sufficiently sensitive instruments.

For more information on the Planck mission, visit the ESA - Planck Web site.

For something extra cool, visit the Chromoscope site, which lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Update (2010-07-09) Uncovered this article (PDF, subscription required) in Science describing the Planck mission. Planck is the third to study the CMB, following the earlier COBE (1992) and WMAP (2003) satellites. From the Science article:

Planck will chart the temperature variations in CMB with 10 times WMAP's sensitivity and three times its angular resolution. The microwaves are also polarized so that the electric fields in waves coming from any particular spot in the sky wiggle in a definite direction—just as ordinary light waves reflected from a pond are polarized so they oscillate horizontally as they zip into your eye. WMAP sketched the polarization of the CMB; Planck will render it in great detail.

Planck will be far more sophisticated than its predecessors. WMAP sampled microwaves at five frequencies; Planck will monitor nine of them over a range 12 times wider. WMAP cooled its detectors by exposing them to the frigidity of space; some of Planck's detectors must be cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero with a liquid-helium refrigerator. As WMAP did, Planck will circle the sun in synchrony with Earth, hovering at the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2 .

. . .
But the prize quarry for Planck researchers is the B modes. These features are swirls in the CMB polarization mapped across the sky, and spotting them would essentially clinch the case for the mind-bending theory of inflation.

The notion that the universe briefly expanded at faster than light speed might seem absurd, but it solves some thorny problems in cosmology, including a big one posed by the CMB itself. The temperature of background radiation is almost exactly the same—2.725 kelvin—all over the sky. That's perplexing because the distant reaches of the universe in opposite directions are so far apart that not even light has had time to travel between them. So they could not have interacted and should have no reason to have reached so nearly the same temperature. Inflation solves this problem by positing that opposite ends of the universe were cheek-by-jowl until the sudden expansion pulled them very far apart.

Although inflation fits the facts so far, researchers do not yet have direct proof that it occurred. The B modes would provide that. Current theory predicts that inflation should have generated gravitational waves and that those waves should have left lingering swirls in the polarization of the CMB.

John Wooden (1910 - 2010)

John Wooden died last Friday at the age of 99. From the New York Times obituary:

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

In An Appreciation, Harvey Araton writes

Wooden won a record 10 national titles, including seven straight from 1967 through 1973. His teams reached 12 Final Fours, and they won 88 straight games between 1971 and 1974. He had supreme talent, including the most dominant centers of the era, Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton.

He also had critics, who reason that there was little competition out west and remind us that Sam Gilbert, a U.C.L.A. booster, served as friend and fixer for many a Bruin star, landing the university on probation six years after Wooden retired in 1975.

Who knows what Wooden knew or didn’t want to know? Temptation was not invented with John Calipari or Jim Calhoun, but there was one compromise Wooden absolutely refused to make.

His players never took control of the gym. Great as they were, Pauley Pavilion never became their stage to pose for the pros, and doing it the coach’s way was about more than getting a haircut.

“His skills as a coach are overlooked because everyone focuses on the talent,” Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women’s coach, whose team currently has a 78-game winning streak, wrote in an e-mail message. “He taught the game as well as anyone ever has or will.”

It must have been during the run of championships that I had occasion (I don't remember the circumstances) to attend the NCAA regional being held in Freedom Hall in Louisville. At some point in the game the public address announcer, John Tong, came on and announced (in that wonderfully distinctive voice of his): "This score just in from the West Regional. Santa Clara, 52..." At this my mind jumped ahead and assumed Santa Clara had played a slowdown, and won in an upset, probably 52 - 50. But after a pause of just the right length, Tong continued, "... UCLA, 90."

Cassini images

Here are some amazing images from the Cassini imaging team, courtesy of Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Blog last week.



Dione and Telesto
Dione, Saturn's third largest moon at 1,123 kilometers in diameter, shares the frame with Telesto, a tiny "rock," about 35 kilometers across, that orbits Saturn in the leading Lagrangian point of Tethys' orbit. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI

(Full blog post at: Dione and Telesto, close on camera but far apart in fact )




Peering through the fountains of Enceladus
Here, unmannedspaceflight.com forum member Astro0 has combined two frames captured by Cassini during its May 18 encounter with Enceladus to include both the backlit plumes and the background imagery: Titan and the rings. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / processed by Astro0/unmannedspaceflight.com

Here's Emily's annotated version:



(Full blog post at: The most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet )

Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

The Dover second revised (1957) edition of Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was one of the first books to go on my "skeptics bookshelf," and it's still there, along with Gardner's Science - Good, Bad and Bogus (Prometheus Books, 1981). Oh, and of course there's The Annotated Alice (1961).

From the New York Times obituary, by Douglas Martin:

"Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.

W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Jacob Bronowski, Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan were admirers of Mr. Gardner. Vladimir Nabokov mentioned him in his novel “Ada” as “an invented philosopher.” An asteroid is named for him.

Mr. Gardner responded that his life was not all that interesting, really. “It’s lived mainly inside my brain,” he told The Charlotte Observer in 1993.
...
Mr. Gardner, who lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., for most of the years he wrote for Scientific American, resigned from the magazine in 1981. Two years later he began a column in Skeptical Inquirer, “Notes of a Fringe Watcher,” which he continued to write until 2002. He had already begun beating this drum, debunking psuedoscience, in his book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” He helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

In The New York Review of Books in 1982, Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, called Mr. Gardner “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.”

Michael Shermer, the publishing Editor of Skeptic magazine, wrote an essay about Gardner in 2002 titled, Hermits & Cranks.

In 1952 he expanded it into a book called In the Name of Science, with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present.” Published by Putnam, the book sold so poorly that it was quickly remaindered and lay dormant until 1957, when it was republished by Dover. It has come down to us as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which is still in print and is arguably the skeptic classic of the past half a century.

Thankfully, there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat earth, a hollow earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book’s contents are relevant today, including Gardner’s discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to determine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid’s alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.
...
What I find especially valuable about Gardner’s views are his insights into the differences between science and pseudoscience. On the one extreme we have ideas that are most certainly false, “such as the dianetic view that a one-day-old embryo can make sound recordings of its mother’s conversation.” In the borderlands between the two “are theories advanced as working hypotheses, but highly debatable because of the lack of sufficient data.” Of these Gardner selects a most propitious example: “the theory that the universe is expanding.” That theory would now fall at the other extreme end of the spectrum, where lie “theories almost certainly true, such as the belief that the earth is round or that men and beasts are distant cousins.”

Geomagnetic Storm this morning!

From the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (via this post by Emily Lakdawalla in The Planetary Society blog):

A geomagnetic storm began at 05:55 AM EST Monday, April 5, 2010. Space weather storm levels reached Strong (G3) levels on the Geomagnetic Storms Space Weather Scale. The source of the storming is an Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejection associated with a weak solar flare that occurred in Active Region 1059 on April 3 at 05:54 AM EST. This is expected to be an isolated storm that should subside quickly. Other than the flare and CME erupting on April 3, this active region has not produced any significant activity. Systems that can be affected include electric power systems, spacecraft operations, high-frequency communications, GPS, and other navigation systems.

Ebertfest 2010

The schedule for 12th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival has been posted.

The Wednesday night opener is Pink Floyd The Wall in 70mm. Also looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now/Redux on the big screen.

Ebert writes about this year's festival on RogerEbert.com:

Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.

Presented by the College of Media of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival features a dozen screenings, along with lectures, guest appearances and special events. I program, produce and host the event, along with my wife Chaz. Thanks to my computer-generated voice, I plan to play a larger role onstage this year.