All posts in category Science

A links post, like in the olden days

Biswapriya Purkayastha, alias “Bill the Butcher,” creator of Raghead the Fiendly Neighborhood Terrorist, posted this ravishingly beautiful prose poem on his blog last week. Maybe the opening will hook you into following the link and reading the whole thing:

I was lost in the forest at night, alone, and I called to my ghost; and at last, my ghost came to me.

I asked my ghost, “Why, when I was lost and I was calling, did you take so long to come? I have been wandering alone and blind through the dark, and I could have harmed this body beyond repair.”

And my ghost settled before me like mist on the ground, and reached out to touch me.

“I was gone far,” it said, “looking along the paths of the forest, and the things that dwell therein.”

“And what did you see?” I asked my ghost, and saw that it still hung away from me, as though reluctant to come home to my body.

“I saw pain and hunger,” the ghost said. “I felt death and the terror of many small scuttling things. And I saw on the fringes of the forest, villages; but the villages lay empty, burned by fire and disease until the living fled and the ghosts of the dead, unable to bear the loneliness, fled after them.”

“What else?” I asked, for I knew the ghost had more to tell; it was my ghost, and it had dwelt within me since the moment I was born.

“And I saw on this path, before us, five images in the shape of women; but women they were not.” The ghost paused, and I could feel it look away into the jungle with its eyeless eyes. “They had skulls for faces, and were clad in robes made of the night. And the first of them had a flame in her hand, for she was the spirit of passion and the heat of vengeance, and she would burn you to ashes if she found you; not because she would want to, but because it is her nature.”

“And the second?” asked I.

It just gets better from there, it really is a gorgeous bit of writing.

It’s certainly at the opposite extreme from the sort of thing I encounter that sometimes makes my daily habit of looking at things on the internet feel like this:

2016-04-04-PLTM300

I am very fond of this installment of The Periodic Table of Videos. My favorite moment comes when the Prof says, “I’ve no idea how this sample got to London. It was brought to me in London, in Max’s bag.”

At The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs worries about the extent to which Americans have taken up, as a favored hobby, hatred for those whose political views differ from theirs.  He recommends pieces in this topic by blogger Scott Alexander (an essay that made its way into the DNA of Weird Sun Twitter,) journalist Lynn Vavreck, and scholars Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood.

The “Archdruid,” alias John Michael Greer, is occasionally brilliant; this essay about “The End of Ordinary Politics” builds on his theory that the distinction between hourly wages and salaried employment marks a class division that explains much of American social life, and that the US political elite has little comprehension of or curiosity about the economic interests of wage laborers. The Archdruid holds that the kind of partisan hostility that Alan Jacobs, Scott Alexander, and others lament is largely explicable as the result of tactics representatives of the salaried classes deploy to keep wage laborers off the political radar:

I’m thinking here, among many other examples along the same lines, of a revealing article earlier this year from a reporter who attended a feminist conference on sexism in the workplace. All the talk there was about how women in the salary class could improve their own prospects for promotion and the like. It so happened that the reporter’s sister works in a wage-class job, and she quite sensibly inquired whether the conference might spare a little time to discuss ways to improve prospects for women who don’t happen to belong to the salary class. Those of my readers who have seen discussions of this kind know exactly what happened next: a bit of visible discomfort, a few vaguely approving comments, and then a resumption of the previous subjects as though no one had made so embarrassing a suggestion.

It’s typical of the taboo that surrounds class prejudice in today’s industrial nations that not even the reporter mentioned the two most obvious points about this interchange. The first, of course, is that the line the feminists at the event drew between those women whose troubles with sexism were of interest to them, and those whose problems didn’t concern them in the least, was a class line. The second is that the women at the event had perfectly valid, if perfectly selfish, reasons for drawing that line. In order to improve the conditions of workers in those wage class industries that employ large numbers of women, after all, the women at the conference would themselves have had to pay more each month for daycare, hairstyling, fashionable clothing, and the like. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the slogans of an earlier era liked to claim, but it’s clearly not powerful enough to convince women in the salary class to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of women who don’t happen to share their privileged status.

To give the women at the conference credit, though, at least they didn’t start shouting about some other hot-button issue in the hope of distracting attention from an awkward question. That was the second thing relevant to my post that started happening the week after it went up. All at once, much of the American left responded to the rise of Donald Trump by insisting at the top of their lungs that the only reason, the only possible reason, that anyone at all supports the Trump campaign is that Trump is a racist and so are all his supporters.

The Archdruid isn’t a Trump supporter and does not deny that Mr Trump’s appeal is at least partly racial, but he focuses on the questions of economic status that have drawn so many white wage-earners to that particular loudmouthed landlord when they might have chosen to throw their lot in with any of a number of other race-baiting demagogues.

Speaking of Scott Alexander, here’s a bit of speculation from him about where religions come from. These paragraphs are from the middle of it:

If we were to ask the same New Guinea tribe to follow Jewish food taboos one week and American food taboos the next, I’m not sure they’d be able to identify one code as any stricter or weirder than the other. They might have some questions about the meat/milk thing, but maybe they’d also wonder why cheeseburgers are great for dinner but ridiculous for breakfast.

People get worked up over all of the weird purity laws and dress codes in Leviticus, but it’s important to realize how strict our own purity laws are. The ancient Jews would have found it ridiculous that men have to shave and bathe every day if they want to be considered for the best jobs. One must not piss anywhere other than a toilet; this is an abomination (but you would be shocked how many of the supposedly strait-laced Japanese will go in an alley if there’s no restroom nearby). I have been yelled at for going to work without a tie and for tying my tie in the wrong pattern; wearing sweatpants to work is right out. And once again, this gets even longer if you you let the more modern/rational rules onto the list – Leviticus has a lot to say about dwellings with fungus in them, but I recently learned to my distress that landlord/tenant law has a lot more.

Once again, if we made our poor New Guinea tribe follow Jewish purity laws one week and American purity laws the next, they would probably end up equally confused and angry both times.

So when we think of America as a perfectly natural secular culture, and Jews as following some kind of superstitious draconian law code, we’re just saying that our laws feel natural and obvious, but their laws feel like an outside imposition. And I think if a time-traveling King Solomon showed up at our doorstep, he would recognize American civil religion as a religion much quicker than he would recognize Christianity as one. Christianity would look like a barbaric mystery cult that had gotten too big for its britches; American civil religion would look like home.

Insofar as this isn’t obvious to schoolchildren learning about ancient religion, it’s because the only thing one ever hears about ancient religion is the crazy mythologies. But I think American culture shows lots of signs of trying to form a crazy mythology, only to be stymied by modernity-specific factors. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many historians around to tell us exactly how things really happened. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we have too many scientists around to tell us where the rain and the lightning really come from. We can’t have crazy mythologies because we’re only two hundred-odd years old and these things take time. And most of all, we can’t have crazy mythologies because Christianity is already sitting around occupying that spot.

I have a weakness for maps that purport to describe what people are like in various locales, such as this one, which I saw here and which comes from this article:

 

by acilius on April 14, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Comics, Demography, Politics, Quick Links, Science
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on April 14, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/04/14/a-links-post-like-in-the-olden-days/

Here’s everything

Two new visual representations have been catching people’s attention today. Each, in its own way, offers a view of all the matter in the known universe.

One is the periodic table of elements, now with four additional elements, completing the seventh row:

periodictb_webelementscom

And the other is this picture by Pablo Carlos Budassi:

logarhitmic_radial_photo_of_the_universe_by_pablo_budassi_9mfk

by acilius on January 4, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Science, Weird Pictures
Tagged

Posted by acilius on January 4, 2016

https://losthunderlads.com/2016/01/04/heres-everything/

Does the Shroud of Turin disprove the Gospels?

More than meets the eye?

In April, I noticed a post on Rod Dreher‘s blog about the Shroud of Turin.  Mr Dreher had been impressed by a book, Finding Jesus: Faith. Fact. Forgery: Six Holy Objects That Tell the Remarkable Story of the Gospels, by David Gibson and Michael McKinley, a companion volume to the CNN series of the same awkwardly punctuated name.  The other day, I saw that the Reverend Mr Dwight Longenecker, a former Anglican priest turned Roman Catholic, had also posted about the shroud, quoting at length from an article at National Geographic in which the shroud’s puzzling nature is explored.

I will take the liberty of reproducing the bits in which Messrs. Dreher and Longenecker quote the scientific results which they find most exciting.  From Mr Dreher:

The one artifact in the book that really cannot be explained satisfactorily is the Shroud of Turin. Watch a CNN clip about it here. Gibson and McKinley write that the 1988 radiocarbon tests that demonstrated the Shroud was a medieval fake turned out to have been made not from the original shroud, but by an edge that had been patched onto the shroud in the 14th century. “Subsequent experiments cast further doubts on a medieval origin for the burial cloth,” they write.

Then, in recent years, the pace of revelations picked up. In 2011, scientists at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development found that the markings on the shroud could have been created only by a “blinding flash of light.” Other, new experiments detected the ancient version of a “death certificate” on the shroud, while a recent study showed that the blood patterns on this “Man of Sorrows” indicated he was crucified on a Y-shaped cross — not the traditional T-shaped one that is the central icon of Christian art, and so central to Western civilization.

The authors say that “of all the Jesus relics in existence, [the shroud] is the best documented.” We know that the existence of a shroud-like burial cloth for Jesus is written about in the Gospels, having been purchased by Joseph of Arimathea. Jewish burial practices of the day are consistent with the image of the man on the shroud. Shroud debunkers allege that it was not mentioned in writings until the Middle Ages, but that is not true. St. Jerome writes about it in the fourth century. There is other historical evidence that Christians in the early church were aware of the shroud, and written accounts of it being displayed in the Christian East. Evidence strongly suggests turned up in medieval France as Crusader loot after Western Christian armies sacked Constantinople. In 1207, the authors write, a Catholic translator for the newly seated Latin patriarch of Athens wrote about how French knights robbed “the treasury of the Great Palace, where the holy objects had been kept,” and how he personally saw, with his own eyes, the burial linens of Jesus.

Scientifically, the tests on the shroud have produced remarkable results. Detailed analysis of the image showed that there is a three-dimensional quality to it, not observable to the naked eye, and that could not have been produced by painting. The stains on the shroud come not from paint, but human blood, and their patterning indicate that the man of the shroud suffered a savage flogging consistent with what the Gospels say Jesus endured before crucifixion.

The shroud depicts a crucifixion victim nailed to the cross through his wrists — this, even though Christian art shows Jesus nailed through his hands. We now know that the crucified had to have been nailed through their wrists, because nailing them through their hands would have been insufficient to support the weight of the body on the cross.

Scientists have found pollen on the shroud that can only have come from plants around Jerusalem — plants in bloom in the spring, in the season of Passover, when Jesus died. Particles from limestone tombs found in the Jerusalem area were discovered embedded in the shroud. More recently, detailed medical analysis confirms that the man of the shroud suffered precisely what the Gospels say Jesus suffered.

And then there is the matter of the Sudarium of Oviedo. I knew that the Sudarium existed, but I did not know until reading Finding Jesus that it had been used to validate claims for the Turin shroud as the burial cloth of the Nazarene.

From Mr Longenecker:

After my visit I am more convinced than ever not only that the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Christ, but that the mysterious image was produced by a blast of radiance from the resurrection. Those who wish to research the shroud can find scholarly and popular articles here and here. The most interesting thing about the shroud is the more scientific research is done the more the claims to authenticity accumulate. Not only is the image on the shroud that of a crucified man, but a particular crucified man.

He wore a crown of thorns. His legs were not broken. His face was punched. His side was pierced in a way consistent with a Roman spear. His back shows the marks of a severe flogging consistent with the flagellum used by the Romans. In other words, all the wounds match those not just of any crucified man, but those unique to Jesus of Nazareth.

Other details match in an extraordinary way. Fabric experts acknowledge that the particular linen cloth matches that used in the first century by wealthy individuals. The chemical traces on the cloth match the herbs and spices that were known to be used for Jewish burials in Roman times. Pollen from the shroud matches that present in Jerusalem in the first century. New scientific dating techniques counter the 1988 carbon 14 dating which identified a medieval date and they date the shroud to the first century.

Most mysterious is the image itself. In 1978 a team of American researchers were finally given access to the shroud. They ran a whole series of tests covering the range of scientific disciplines. Their analyses found no sign of artificial pigments and they concluded, “The Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist.” What formed the image? The scientists were stumped and admitted that “no combination of physical, chemical, biological or medical circumstances” could adequately account for the image.

Di Lazzaro and his colleagues at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) experimented for five years, using modern excimer lasers to train short bursts of ultraviolet light on raw linen, in an effort to simulate the image’s coloration.So what formed the image? The best description is that it is an extremely delicate singe marking. Italian physicist Paolo Di Lazzaro concedes in an article for National Geographic that every scientific attempt to replicate it in a lab has failed. “Its precise hue is highly unusual, and the color’s penetration into the fabric is extremely thin, less than 0.7 micrometers (0.000028 inches), one-thirtieth the diameter of an individual fiber in a single 200-fiber linen thread.”

They came tantalizingly close to replicating the image’s distinctive color on a few square centimeters of fabric. However, they were unable to match all the physical and chemical characteristics of the shroud image, and reproducing a whole human figure was far beyond them. De Lazzaro explained that the ultraviolet light necessary to reproduce the image of the crucified man “exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.” The time for such a burst would be shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and the intensity of the ultra violet light would have to be around several billion watts.”

The scientists shrug and say the only explanation lies beyond the realm of twenty-first century technoscience. In other words, the extraordinary burst of ultra violet light is not only beyond the ability and technology of a medieval forger. It is beyond the ability and technology of the best twenty-first century scientists.

What could explain all of this?  If no known technological process could have produced the image on the shroud, and the only unknown technological processes that could have produced it would be the result either of the greatest design fluke in history or of contact with visitors from outer space, perhaps we should discard the forgery hypothesis and turn next to a search for a natural process that could have produced the image.  There may in fact be such a process.  Lightning is an extremely energetic and poorly understood phenomenon; it was only in 2009 that it was discovered that lightning often produces significant amounts of antimatter in the upper atmosphere.  No one had expected to find this, and no one can explain it.  Bursts of ultraviolet radiation are a lot less exotic than appearances of antimatter, and so would be significantly less surprising as phenomena associated with lightning.

So, perhaps at some point in the middle decades of the first century CE in or near the city of Jerusalem the body of a man who had been scourged, jabbed in the side with a spear, mounted on a cross, fastened to that cross with nails through his wrists and feet, and subjected to a group of small puncture wounds on the forehead was wrapped in the shroud that has been on display in Turin for the last several centuries.  Before that man’s body was buried or entombed, it was struck by lightning, producing a burst of ultraviolet rays that created the image on the shroud.  This event, occurring in an urban area and centering on the body of a man whose gruesome death a crowd would have witnessed at most a few hours before, would certainly have been very much discussed.  One must suppose that people would try to find religious significance in it, and that in the course of those discussions many people would claim, whether truthfully or not, to have been associated with the man during his lifetime.

Perhaps the whole story of Jesus, as it has come down to us, grew from the reactions to this event.  Or perhaps the story of Jesus as we have it represents the conflation of several stories.  It is difficult to imagine that the man whose image is preserved in the shroud is not the man whose crucifixion is described in the Gospels, but not so difficult to imagine that stories about another man, who was also crucified in Jerusalem around the same time and who was well-known locally before his crucifixion as the leader of a new religious movement, would be combined with the story of the man whose crucifixion was followed by the spectacular event of a lightning bolt and the transformation of his burial cloth into the object we now see in Turin.

Nowhere in the New Testament does it say that Jesus’ body was struck by lightning after it was removed from the cross.  If the image on the shroud turns out to have been created by lightning, the evidence connecting it with first-century Jerusalem, the fact that its appearance in first-century Jerusalem would certainly have caused great excitement there, and the similarity of the wounds the man had to the wounds the Gospels attribute to Jesus makes that silence a tremendous obstacle to accepting the historicity of the Gospels, I would say a far bigger obstacle than any of the gaps or discrepancies of detail that New Testament scholars have yet uncovered.

All the other problems fade pretty quickly once you start thinking of the Gospels as what they originally were, a collection of liturgical resources more akin to a hymnal than to a biographical study.  The Gospels are series of pericopes, distinct passages designed to be read aloud or recited at particular moments in worship services.  No doubt these pericopes took shape gradually in the worship services Christians conducted in the decades between Jesus’ death and the production of the first written versions of the Gospels.  It is hardly surprising that the Gospels diverge in various details and leave out many things a modern reader might like to know.  To the extent that those divergences and gaps show us anything, they show us only that there are certain things we care about that the late first century Church didn’t care about at all and that the fourth century Church didn’t care about sufficiently to do anything about them at the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE.)

However, if the body of the man whose crucifixion was described in the Gospels was struck by lightning before it could be buried or entombed, and if that lightning strike created the image we see on the Shroud of Turin, that is something we can be sure everyone in Jerusalem would have cared about and would have talked about for years. If that did happen and it isn’t recorded or even hinted at anywhere in the New Testament, we must ask whether any of the authors of the New Testament had any connection with Jesus at all, and if not whether their accounts are reliable at any point.  Surely anyone who was in Jerusalem that day, or who had talked about the events of the day with people who were there, would have known about such an extraordinary occurrence.  And surely anyone who goes to the lengths the authors of the New Testament do to stress the point that extraordinary occurrences tended to happen when Jesus was around would have been highly motivated to make note of it had a lightning strike hit his body and emblazoned his image on his shroud.  If the Gospels and the liturgies for which they were prepared grew up among people who were so remote from Jesus and his inner circle that such an event could have taken place without their knowledge, then there isn’t much left for Christians to believe.

So, for Christians, there seems to be a great deal at stake in the question of what precisely the Shroud of Turin is.  If the recent studies of it are all wrong, if the researchers have been led astray by their religious biases and it is after all a forgery from the Middle Ages, then the crisis is averted.  If the studies hold up, and if the image does prove to be the result of a lightning strike, do Christians have a way out?

Maybe they do.  I can think of two reasons why something so important might deliberately be left out of the New Testament.  First, it could be that the Church, subject as it was to persecution, did not want to attract its enemies’ attention to the existence of so precious a relic.  Second, since the shroud is a single object, it must be kept in a single location owned by a single authority.  Yet by the time of the very earliest writings in the New Testament, the Church was already composed of multiple autonomous groups bound together by goodwill and the habit of imitation rather than a unity of command-and-control structures (see 1 Thessalonians 2:17-3:3,) and the Gospels explicitly state that Jesus endorsed this decentralized organizational model (Mark 9:30-39, Luke 9:46-50.)*  Whichever group had the shroud in its possession would be in a unique position to claim to be The Church, as indeed the Roman Catholic Church has for some time been pleased to do.  So, other groups would be leery of such claims, and the group that had safekeeping of the shroud would be tactless to make too much of that fact.  A document originating from a group other than the one that had custody of the shroud would therefore be unlikely to call its own authority into question by dwelling on the shroud, while a document originating from the group that did have custody of it, if the group meant to invite other, independent groups to make liturgical use of the document, would not be much likelier to dwell on it.

If the shroud is the shroud of someone else, and it is simply a fantastic coincidence that the body of another man, crucified in the same city in the same century with the same wounds as Jesus was struck by lightning and that that lightning created the image we see on the Shroud of Turin, then I believe Christians must hope that someday a scrap of paper will surface from some lost first-century document mentioning that coincidence, and saying that people marveled at the fact that in one city in one lifetime two crucified men were the center of fantastic events that took place after their deaths.  Perhaps such a hypothetical scrap would go on to say that the shroud had fallen into the hands of some gang of heretics who were using it to prop up their claim to be The Church, and that orthodox Christians, embarrassed by this gross blasphemy, tried to pass it over in silence.  Failing the appearance of such a scrap, if we should learn that the shroud was someone else’s, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the crucifixion stories in the Gospels are retellings of that man’s crucifixion, not the crucifixion of Jesus.  In that case, everything about Jesus before and after the crucifixion narratives would also fall to pieces.

Now, this idea of mine about lightning is just a hypothesis.  Subsequent examination may prove that a lightning strike could not have caused the image to appear.  Tests may also confirm the results that seem to rule out a forgery.  And our knowledge of nature may advance to the point where we can be confident that no other natural phenomenon could have produced the image.  Should that day come, we would be left to choose between, on the one hand, a miraculous explanation such as a burst of ultraviolet radiation accompanying the Resurrection, and on the other a science-fiction explanation involving either incautious visitors from outer space or mischievous time travelers from the far future.  We aren’t there yet, and devotees of the Shroud of Turin should be aware that the road that may someday lead us there may also, for all science can now tell us, lead us to the very last place they would ever want us to find ourselves.

*Matthew 7:22-23 limits the application of these verses to the ecclesiological question by excluding them from the question of salvation.  That is to say, the fact that people welcome the lowly and cast out demons in Jesus’ name shows that their acts are the acts of the Church, but it does not by itself show that those people will not ultimately be damned.

by acilius on August 12, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in religion, Science
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by acilius on August 12, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/08/12/does-the-shroud-of-turin-disprove-the-gospels/

Solar System Mnemonics

Adding Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris- but where’s Sedna? Should be “Expelliamus, sucka!”

With Pluto so much in the news lately, I’ve been thinking about the old mnemonic device for memorizing a Solar System made up of the nine planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto: “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.”  When the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to non-planet status in 2006 (those bastards!,) you started hearing “My very educated mother just served us nachos.”

But of course the Solar System isn’t just the planets.  It’s the Sun and everything that orbits the Sun, which can be subdivided into the six categories Sun, Rocky Inner Planets, Asteroids, Gas Giants, Kuiper Belt Objects, and Oort Cloud.  So, to remember S R A G K O, I propose the mnemonic device “Some randy astronomers give kinky orgies.”  It may not be quite as family-friendly as “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas,” but the whole point of a mnemonic device is to be memorable, and it certainly is memorable.

Also, the topic of the outer Solar System reminds me of a grudge I have against one point of astronomical nomenclature.  Not the decision nine years ago to reclassify Pluto as something other than a planet- that’s been discussed enough- but the name “Hills Cloud” for the inner part of the Oort Cloud.  Since the real boundary of the Solar System is the Hill Sphere, the boundary beyond which objects in freefall do not tend to go into orbit around the Sun, I urge astronomers to find some other way to honor Professor Jack G. Hills than by naming a part of the outer Solar System after him.

by acilius on July 15, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Science
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on July 15, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/07/15/solar-system-mnemonics/

Want to buy some real estate on Venus?

I just saw this video on io9:

I’ve recently been rereading some of Arthur Clarke’s science fiction stories, so I was primed and ready for this topic.  Here’s the comment I offered on the post:

Step one would be to establish orbiting stations around Venus, with artificial gravity produced in centrifuges.  On these stations, we would carry out step two, the genetic engineering and then the deployment of some kind of plant that would take the form of tiny particles that would float in the clouds of Venus. Even if these plants were too small to do much individually, they could be the basis of a future ecosystem if they could temporarily link together to absorb CO2, conduct photosynthesis, and reproduce.  Those linkages would be brief, broken well before their weight caused them to sink very far into the atmosphere.

Step three would be to create and deploy a series of larger creatures that would feed on these microscopic plants, and step four to create and deploy smaller creatures that would be symbiotic with the larger creatures.  From there, the ecosystem of the cloud tops would begin to evolve on its own; in step five, we would supervise and direct that evolution to produce food and other useful products for future floating cities, while also sequestering as much carbon and sulfur as possible in order to expand the habitable regions of the atmosphere.      ​

All of those preliminaries would take generations, probably centuries. And all the while, the orbiting stations would be growing in population and complexity. So by the time we got around to building habitations in the atmosphere, it would be an open question of why we would bother.  You talk about surfacism; decades ago, Gerard K. O’Neill derided planetism, and predicted that “The High Frontier” of human settlement in space would be on stations with artificial gravity, not on planets where gravity is fixed at levels lethal to human life. I suspect O’Neill will turn out to have been right, and that the prime spot for stations will be inside the orbit of Mercury, where solar power is at its most abundant.  But it would still be nice to turn the clouds of Venus into a huge farm of some kind.

So I envision a future in which the majority of the human race will live in a collection of huge, solar-powered cylinders clustered near to the Sun, each spinning at a rate giving it an interior surface gravity equal to that under which their ancestors evolved on Earth.  Presumably the interior surface areas of this collection of cylinders will be vastly greater than that of the Earth.  I’m not at all sure this is a desirable future; if the Earth isn’t enough for humanity, then it’s unlikely that anything larger than the Earth will be.  Rather than the peaceful age of abundance foreseen by Clarke, O’Neill, and others, the settlement of space may well be a new age of conflict among grasping, covetous powers.  But it does seem likelier than settlement of any planetary body, either on its surface or in its atmosphere.

by acilius on March 5, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Science
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on March 5, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/03/05/want-to-buy-some-real-estate-on-venus/

If there is a point in a task when an interruption will result in disaster, assume that you will be interrupted at that point

Suppose a man hasn’t shaved in a very long time.  He decides to get rid of his facial hair, so he digs out his old electric shaver.  This is the only shaving tool he has, and it is not in good shape.  Still, it starts when he plugs it in.

So he goes to work.  Even though the shaver is clearly damaged and his whiskers are very long, it’s getting the job done.  He shaves his face first.  Then he shaves the top of his neck.  Then he shaves a path down the middle of his throat.  Then it breaks.  There’s no fixing it, and there’s no one else in the house he can ask to go buy him a replacement.

He goers to the store himself.  In the olden days, this would have been a potential embarrassment, if by some chance he had seen someone he knew.  Still, it would have been between him and that person.  The most the person could have done to make it worse was to describe it to other people, and the description would be less likely to call a visual image to mind than to raise the question of what happened.  The answer to that question would dissipate the embarrassment pretty quickly.

That was in the olden days.  Now people carry camera phones and post to social media.  So, our guy could end up like this:

I don’t know who this guy is, and have no idea how he came to look like that.  But the story above is the only explanation I can think of that doesn’t involve a lifestyle commitment to Seussical the Musical.  And it makes me glad that I shave my neck first.  Indeed, I sometimes think of the adage “If there is a point in a task when interruption will result in disaster, assume that you will be interrupted at that point” as Neckbeard’s Law.

I’ve searched for this adage online, but have so far found nothing.  There are a number of books with “Murphy’s Law” in their titles; perhaps one of those books would have a form of it.  And I find that there is a field called “Interruption Science” which consists entirely of studies about what happens when people are interrupted during tasks.  So if I wanted to christen it “Acilius’ Law” and gain worldwide fame, I’d start by looking in journals that publish research in Interruption Science and, if I couldn’t find any article there in which the adage was already named for someone else, proceed on to those Murphy’s Law collections.

by acilius on January 30, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Science, Technology, Weird Pictures
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on January 30, 2015

https://losthunderlads.com/2015/01/30/if-there-is-a-point-in-a-task-when-an-interruption-will-result-in-disaster-assume-that-you-will-be-interrupted-at-that-point/

Our old Science links page

I’ve been trimming down the links pages connected to this site; the idea of a links page is hopelessly old-fashioned, and neither I nor anyone else was using most of them. But I’ve been copying them into posts, as a way of recording what they looked like.  So, here’s what our list of Science links looked like when it was finally deleted:

(more…)

by acilius on July 13, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Old Links Pages, Quick Links, Science

Posted by acilius on July 13, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/07/13/our-old-science-links-page/

The “two separate languages” of neuroscience and psychology

In yesterday’s New York Times, Gary Marcus wrote an op-ed called “The Trouble With Brain Science.”  Writing of big-ticket research projects underway in brain science on both sides of the Atlantic, Professor Marcus writes:

Biology isn’t elegant the way physics appears to be. The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another. No overarching theory of neuroscience could predict, for example, that the cerebellum (which is involved in timing and motor control) would have vastly more neurons than the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with our advanced intelligence).

But biological complexity is only part of the challenge in figuring out what kind of theory of the brain we’re seeking. What we are really looking for is a bridge, some way of connecting two separate scientific languages — those of neuroscience and psychology.

 

Such bridges don’t come easily or often, maybe once in a generation, but when they do arrive, they can change everything. An example is the discovery of DNA, which allowed us to understand how genetic information could be represented and replicated in a physical structure. In one stroke, this bridge transformed biology from a mystery — in which the physical basis of life was almost entirely unknown — into a tractable if challenging set of problems, such as sequencing genes, working out the proteins that they encode and discerning the circumstances that govern their distribution in the body.

Neuroscience awaits a similar breakthrough. We know that there must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe those laws. We don’t know, for example, whether our memories for individual words inhere in individual neurons or in sets of neurons, or in what way sets of neurons might underwrite our memories for words, if in fact they do.

The problem with both of the big brain projects is that too few of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent are devoted to spanning this conceptual chasm. Both projects are making important contributions: the European effort is helping build infrastructure for data integration; the American project is emphasizing the development of state-of-the-art tools for collecting new kinds of data. But as anyone in a field richer in data than theory (like weather forecasting) can tell you, amassing data is only a start.

The success of both the Human Brain Project and the Brain Initiative will ultimately rest not just on the data to be collected but also on what can be done with those data once they are collected. On that, too little has been said.

I’m a bit leery of this.  Professor Marcus’ bridge-building and lawful relations sound like aliases for reductionism.  Say we don’t reduce psychology to neuroscience- say we can never reduce psychology to neuroscience.  So what?  Gödel proved that we will never be able to reduce arithmetic to logic, that arithmetic needs concepts that cannot be derived from rules of logic.  Gödel did not thereby give warrant to mysticism or undermine the rationality of arithmetic, since the only concepts in that category are perfectly mundane.  Just because there is no “lawful relation” between the concept of set and the procedure of modus ponens does not make arithmetic any the less a rational pursuit.

So if it turns out that there is no “lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought,” it does not necessarily follow that psychologist will have to conclude that the phenomena their discipline studies derive from supernatural influences, or that they will have to become magicians, or anything so dramatic as that.  It may just be that the two fields of study will have to plod along as they currently do, operating quite independent of each other despite their superficial similarities.  Of course, it may not turn out that this is the case- perhaps some day one field will be reduced to the other.  But science has nothing to fear should this reduction prove impossible.

by acilius on July 12, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Science
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Posted by acilius on July 12, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/07/12/the-two-separate-languages-of-neuroscience-and-psychology/

Science and the argument from authority

Back when the earth was young and I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine named Philip told me with great satisfaction that the chemistry professor who had agreed to be his advisor was the world’s foremost authority on the reaction which he planned to study.  Later in that same conversation, I mentioned something about authority in science.  “Oh, authority counts for nothing in science!” Philip earnestly assured me.

Well, I said, “nothing” is a rarity.  Perhaps there is some small residue of authority in science.  No, no, Philip insisted, there was absolutely no place for appeals to authority in scientific discourse.

I produced a hypothetical example.  Say he was working on the reaction which so interested him.  After all these years I don’t remember what it was called, unfortunately.  And say his new advisor, Professor Whatever His Name Was, were to amble into the lab, look over his shoulder, furrow his brow, and after a few moments say “I can’t put my finger on it, but I think you’re doing something wrong.”

“I’d be devastated!” Philip exclaimed.  “I don’t suppose you’d rest until you’d figured out what it was that was bothering him, even if it meant a series of sleepless nights?”  “I wouldn’t, no,” Philip agreed.

“Whereas, if someone like me, who knows as little as a person can about chemistry, were to make a similarly vague remark, you’d ignore it completely.”  “I sure would,” said Philip.

“So, Professor Whatever His Name Is has earned the authority to set you working frantically to check and recheck your work, while I have earned no such authority.”  Philip agreed that this was the case, and that to a certain extent, therefore, authority was a meaningful concept in the practice of science.

I bring up this story, not only because it gave me a rare opportunity to play the role of Socrates in a real-life Platonic dialogue, but because it seems timely.  Monday afternoon, io9 published a link to an undated essay by Jason Mitchell, Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.  Professor Mitchell’s essay, titled “On the emptiness of failed replications,”   argues that there are many reasons why an attempt to replicate the results of a published study might fail to do so, and that such failures should often, even usually, not be used as a reason for setting aside the original claims.  Professor Mitchell’s argument has at its heart an appeal to authority.  He writes:

Science is a tough place to make a living.  Our experiments fail much of the time, and even the best scientists meet with a steady drum of rejections from journals, grant panels, and search committees.  On the occasions that our work does succeed, we expect others to criticize it mercilessly, in public and often in our presence.  For most us, our reward is simply the work itself, in adding our incremental bit to the sum of human knowledge and hoping that our ideas might manage, even if just, to influence future scholars of the mind.  It takes courage and grit and enormous fortitude to volunteer for a life of this kind.

So we should take note when the targets of replication efforts complain about how they are being treated.  These are people who have thrived in a profession that alternates between quiet rejection and blistering criticism, and who have held up admirably under the weight of earlier scientific challenges.  They are not crybabies.  What they are is justifiably upset at having their integrity questioned.  Academia tolerates a lot of bad behavior—absent-minded wackiness and self-serving grandiosity top the list—but misrepresenting one’s data is the unforgivable cardinal sin of science.  Anyone engaged in such misconduct has stepped outside the community of scientists and surrendered his claim on the truth.  He is, as such, a heretic, and the field must move quickly to excommunicate him from the fold.  Few of us would remain silent in the face of such charges.

Because it cuts at the very core of our professional identities, questioning a colleague’s scientific intentions is therefore an extraordinary claim.  That such accusations might not be expressed directly hardly matters; as social psychologists, we should know better that innuendo and intimation can be every bit as powerful as direct accusation.  Like all extraordinary claims, insinuations about others’ scientific integrity should require extraordinary evidence.  Failures to replicate do not even remotely make this grade, since they most often result from mere ordinary human failing.  Replicators not only appear blind to these basic aspects of scientific practice, but unworried about how their claims affect the targets of their efforts. One senses either a profound naiveté or a chilling mean-spiritedness at work, neither of which will improve social psychology.

What my friend Philip and I agreed on those many years ago was that science had an advantage over other forms of inquiry because, while it does have its authorities, those authorities are always open to challenge.  It may be very likely, in my hypothetical example, that Professor Whatever His Name Was could not immediately explain why Philip’s procedure was wrong simply because organic chemistry is a very complex field and he could only vaguely remember the most relevant point until he had gone through the whole experiment in detail.  However, Philip himself or any other competent researcher who checked over his work in the same way would come to the same results as would Professor Whatever His Name Was, if not as quickly or in as clever a manner as Professor Whatever His Name Was may well have done.  Science therefore promises, not to slay authority, but to tame it.  Scientists can earn authority and use it guide their colleagues without inflicting fatal damage on their fields every time they make a mistake, because there is a system for identifying and correcting the mistakes even of the most august figures.

Professor Mitchell is therefore not wrong to protest that one ought to be mindful of the reputations scientists have earned, and circumspect about impugning those reputations, however indirectly.  On the other hand, his strictures against using replication as a standard for the reliability of scientific claims go so far as to raise the question of how a scientist who has accumulated an impressive set of credentials could ever be proven wrong.  It is therefore not surprising that the io9 posting of Professor Mitchell’s essay has sparked a ferocious response from readers accusing him of threatening to ruin science for everyone.  Indeed, the headline on that posting was “If You Love Science, This Will Make You Lose Your Shit,” the tag io9 editor Annalee Newitz added to the post was “HOLY CRAP WTF,” and it is illustrated with this gif:

To io9’s credit, the comments include some thoughtful and nuanced replies, as for example this one from a sociologist explaining why she believes both that her discipline represents an important source of knowledge and that it is misleading to use the word “science” to describe it.

I’d also mention a response to Professor Mitchell’s essay by Discover’s famously pseudonymous “Neuroskeptic.”  Neuroskeptic praises Professor Mitchell for identifying a naivete in those who are quick to regard a failure to replicate as proof positive that the original finding was flawed, but goes on to argue that Professor Mitchell himself exhibits a similar naivete in defending the opposite habit:

Whereas the replication movement sees a failure to find a significant effect as evidence that the effect being investigated is non-existent, Mitchell denies this, saying that we have no way of knowing if the null result is genuine or in error: “when an experiment fails, we can only wallow in uncertainty” about what it means. But if we do find an effect, it’s a different story: “we can celebrate that the phenomenon survived these all-too-frequent shortcomings [experimenter errors].”

And here’s the problem. Implicit in Mitchell’s argument is the idea that experimenter error (or what I call ‘silly mistakes’) is a one-way street: errors can make positive results null, but not vice versa.

Unfortunately, this is just not true. Three years ago, I wrote about these kinds of mistakes and recounted my own personal cautionary tale. Mine was aspreadsheet error, one even sillier than the examples Mitchell gave. But in my case the silly mistake created a significant finding, rather than obscuring one.

There are many documented cases of this happening and (scary thought) probably many others that we don’t know about. Yet the existence of these errors is the fatal spanner in the works of Mitchell’s whole case. If positive results can be erroneous too, if errors are (as it were) a neutral force, neither the advocates nor the skeptics of a particular claim can cry ‘experimenter error!’ to silence their opponents.

The phrase “spreadsheet error” may remind politically-oriented readers of the Reinhart-Rogoff Affair, a spreadsheet error underlying a 2010 paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.  That paper had a significant impact on policymaking in the USA and elsewhere before the error was exposed in 2013.

The Reinhart-Rogoff Affair took a prominent place in my mind, and I think it is safe to say in the minds of many other observers, as an example of just how untrustworthy the governing elites of the USA truly are.  Ever since the late 1990s, Washington and Wall Street have made a series of clownishly ill-advised decisions.  Many of these decisions were not only decried by experts at the time as likely to lead to disaster, but were in fact hugely unpopular with the general public.  In every case, the predicted disasters have come to pass, and our rulers have reacted to these disasters at first with denial, then with bewilderment, then with apparent amnesia as they propose a repetition of exactly the policies that had failed before.  When those same elites look to science for a warrant for their policies, it seems to bother them not at all when the studies they have cited are discredited.  Seeing how deadly is the entrenched ignorance of political and business elites, the idea of insulating distinguished scientists from criticism raises the prospect that they may in time come to form a class that is as detached from reality as are those who wield power in Washington and on Wall Street.  If such an event comes to pass, future Reinharts and Rogoffs can be as sloppy as they like, provided their claims serve the interests of those who hold the levers of opportunity.

by acilius on July 9, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Science
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Posted by acilius on July 9, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/07/09/science-and-the-argument-from-authority/

Scientific Arrogance

The other day, Ed Yong linked to an essay by Ethan Siegel.  Mr Siegel extols the virtues of science, both Science the process for gaining knowledge about nature and Science the body of knowledge that humans have acquired by means of that process.  Mr Siegel then quotes an interview Neil deGrasse Tyson gave to Nerdist, in which Mr Tyson expressed reservations about the value of philosophical study as part of the education of a young scientist.  In that interview, Mr Tyson and his interlocutors made some rather harsh-sounding remarks.  Take this segment, for example, as transcribed by Massimo Pigliucci:

interviewer: At a certain point it’s just futile.

dGT: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

(another) interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

dGT: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress.

[insert predictable joke by one interviewer, imitating the clapping of one hand]

dGT: How do you define clapping? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says look, I got all this world of unknown out there, I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that.

interviewer: I also felt that it was a fat load of crap, as one could define what crap is and the essential qualities that make up crap: how you grade a philosophy paper?

dGT [laughing]: Of course I think we all agree you turned out okay.

interviewer: Philosophy was a good Major for comedy, I think, because it does get you to ask a lot of ridiculous questions about things.

dGT: No, you need people to laugh at your ridiculous questions.

interviewers: It’s a bottomless pit. It just becomes nihilism.

dGT: nihilism is a kind of philosophy.

Mr Tyson’s remarks have come in for criticism from many quarters.  The post by Massimo Pigliucci from which I take the transcription above is among the most notable.

I must say that I think some of the criticism is overdone.  In context, it is clear to me that Mr Tyson and his interlocutors are thinking mainly of the training of young scientists, of what sort of learning is necessary as a background to scientific research.  In that context, it’s quite reasonable to caution against too wide a range of interests.  It would certainly not be wise to wait until one had developed a deep understanding of philosophy, history, literature, music, art, etc, before getting down to business in one’s chosen field.

It’s true that Mr Tyson’s recent fame as narrator of the remake of the television series Cosmos puts a bit of an edge on his statements; that show is an attempt to present the history of science to the general public, and to promote a particular view of the place of science in human affairs.  It would be fair to say that the makers of Cosmos, Mr Tyson among them, have exposed some of their rather sizable blind spots in the course of the project (most famously in regard to Giordano Bruno,) and a bit of time spent studying the philosophy of science may very well have served to temper the bumptious self-assurance that let them parade their howlers in worldwide television broadcasts.  And it is true, as Mr Pigliucci documents, that Mr Tyson has a history of making flip and ill-informed remarks dismissing the value of philosophy and other subjects aside from his own.  Still, the remarks from the Nerdist podcast are pretty narrow in their intended scope of application, and within that scope, having to do with apprentice scientists, I wouldn’t say that they are examples of arrogance, or that they are even wrong.

I’m reminded of a problem that has faced those who would teach Latin and ancient Greek to English speakers over the centuries.  The languages are different enough from English that it seems like a shame to start them later than early childhood.  If a student starts Latin at five and Greek at six, as was the norm for boys destined for the German Gymnasia or the English public schools in the nineteenth century, that student will likely attain a reading proficiency in the classical languages at about eight or nine years of age that a student who starts them in later life may never attain.  However, the point of learning the languages is to be able to read classical literature.  What is a nine-year-old to make of Horace or Pindar or Vergil or Sophocles or Thucydides or Tacitus?  Few of the real masterworks are intelligible as anything other than linguistic puzzles to anyone under 40.  It often happens to me that I assign such things to students who are returning to college in middle age.  They usually come to me afterward and tell me that they were surprised.  They had read them when they were in the 18-25 age bracket that includes most of my students, and hadn’t found anything of interest in them.  Rereading them later in life, the books meant a tremendous amount to them.  I trot out a very old line on these occasions, and say “It isn’t just you reading the book- the book also reads you.”  Meaning that the more life experience the reader brings, the greater the riches the reading offers.

I suppose the best thing to do would be to learn the languages in early childhood while studying mathematics and the natural sciences, to study ancient literary works for several years as specimens in the scientific study of linguistics or as aids to archaeology, and to come back to them later in life, when one can benefit from reading them on their own terms.  The same might apply to philosophy, bits of which might be slipped in to the education of those aged 25 and younger, but which ought really to be introduced systematically only to those who have already confronted in practice the sorts of crises that have spurred its development over the centuries.

Be that as it may, the concept of scientific arrogance is one that has been deftly handled by one of my favorite commentators, cartoonist Zach Weiner.  I’d recommend two Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strips on the theme, this one about emeritus disease and this one about generalized reverence for specialized expertise.

by acilius on May 19, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Science
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Posted by acilius on May 19, 2014

https://losthunderlads.com/2014/05/19/scientific-arrogance/

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