Climate fight

There's a fight going on between a couple of blogs, Real Climate and Climate Science. In the current salvo, we have Real Climate's Misinformation:

More importantly, however, the author of the weblog makes the statement that the following climate metrics “are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago” ;

1. “rising sea levels”

NOT TRUE; e.g. see the University of Colorado at Boulder Sea Level Change analysis.

Sea level has actually flattened since 2006.

2. “the increase of heat stored in the ocean”

NOT TRUE; see

Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions.

Their has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003.

3. “shrinking Arctic sea ice”

NOT TRUE; see the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly from the University of Illinois Cyrosphere Today website. Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.

These climate metrics might again start following the predictions of the models. However, until and unless they do, the authors of the Copenhagen Congress Synthesis Report and the author of the Real Climate weblog are erroneously communicating the reality of the how the climate system is actually behaving.

Real Climate, in turn, responds that the cessations are too short in duration to be taken as a real change in the trend – a "one swallow does not make a summer" argument.

IBD Health Care Series

Link to the series on health care at Investor's Business Daily.

CanadaCare, Infant Mortality, and the US

From the June 30 Investor's Business Daily editorial:

Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus. As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive. Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S. In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth. A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length. In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.

Investigators' dirty tricks

The "don't talk to the police" post at Randy Cassingham's blog continues to generate comments. Most recently, someone has posted a link to THE LITTLE KNOWN “DIRTY TRICKS” OF DCFS/CPS/DSS THAT ARE HIDDEN FROM VIEW.

DIRTY TRICK #1

DCFS/CPS/DSS will PRETEND to help you, when in actuality they are gathering evidence against you.

DIRTY TRICK #2

DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get you to talk. In plain English, SHUT UP! EVERYTHING you say will be twisted and used against you in a court of law. Be pleasant but firm. Don’t fall into their trap.

DIRTY TRICK #3

There are those workers in DCFS/CPS/DSS that will abuse and traumatize you and your children themselves. Those caretakers who have had children “yanked” out of their home by an unscrupulous DCFS/CPS/DSS agent or have been shoved out of the way as they enter to talk to the children privately know the indignity of the process.

DIRTY TRICK #4

The DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get one parent to say incriminating things about the other and if this doesn’t happen then they will twist and turn your words to fit their case.

DIRTY TRICK # 5

The DCFS/CPS/DSS will try to get your children to make damaging disclosures about you using manipulation, coercion and fear.

DIRTY TRICK #6

DCFS/CPS/DSS will always try to make sure that you do not get any help on the legal issues surrounding your case.

Artificial primordial soup?

A group in the Netherlands is working on a computer simulation called the EvoGrid. It is intended to simulate the chemical reactions in a "primordial soup" and determine whether life could result therein from unguided chemical reactions.

Source

With a laundry list of basic physical properties entered into the starting parameters, the simulation would allow artificial nature to take its course. Interactions and connections between particles should occur, and ever higher levels of complexity may arise from the most basic elements.

Much like SETI@home's screen saver, which enables computers at home to search for signals of extraterrestrial life within volumes of astrophysical data, the Evogrid is conceived to have volunteer computers become part of an interconnected grid for maximum processing capacity.  Damer hopes to eventually get a million computers hooked into the grid. 

These computers would receive data from the EvoGrid simulation engine. The simulation would essentially consist of a vast virtual ocean of interacting numbers that would model the time before complex life forms emerged. To know whether self-organization is occurring, the program would look for persistent patterns within the data. 

The EvoGrid Project Web Site

 

Free medical care

 At Real Clear Politics, John Stossel has  a piece about the Canadian health care system.

"People line up for care, some of them die. That's what happens," says Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of "The Cure". He liked Canada's government health care until he started treating patients.

....

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it's much worse in Canada. If you're sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

"We can't send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. "Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are."

....

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery "elective."

"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.

It's true that America's partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

"[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment," Dr. Gratzer says.

"Literally we're surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You've got to pay a price for that type of advancement."

Canada and England don't pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care -- forever.

Government monopolies don't innovate. Profit seekers do.

....

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology -- CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn't have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn't been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

Well, to be fair, I'm sure that's not entirely true.  You might get help there if you chirp or hiss.

Science and the Right

 Dafydd at Big Lizards has some comments on why Republicans have trouble winning on issues like:

Cap and Trade -- rather, Cripple and Tax

The expansion of nuclear power generation

The EPA's attempt to outlaw CO₂ (and now NO₂ as well; hat tip to Hugh Hewitt)

Missile defense, both theater and strategic

Nationalization of major industries

Nationalization of health care to a single-payer, government-controlled system

The promiscuous proliferation of "endangered species" that are, in fact, not endangered

First, each of these controversies is a wedge issue by which Republicans and conservatives can oust Democrats and liberals from Congress -- and potentially from la Casa Blanca, as well.

Second, each is fundamentally a scientific question, from climate science, to nuclear physics, to aeronautics and cybernetics, to the optimal pursuit of medical research, to economic science, to the biological sciences.

And most important, for each of these wedge issues, the Right can only win if it is more credible when speaking about scientific matters.

It's not good enough merely to be no less credible than, on a par with the Left -- in this case, a "tie" in rationalism goes to whoever is best at slinging emotional arguments; and in that arena, the Left always has the home-field advantage.

All of which leads me, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to the hubris-flaw of conservatives; and that is, of course, the squirrely refusal of so many prominent conservatives to accept the findings of a century and a half of evolutionary biology.

 

That intellectual blind spot torpedoes conservative credibilty on a host of other scientific issues:

(Snipped.  Read the original blog post.)

The scientific evidence for evolution by variation/mutation and natural selection is overwhelming; and no respected, peer-review-published scientist in the field of biology disputes the fundamentals of the discipline. (Everyone disputes the details; that's the very nature of science.) The unanimity is so stark that the nutters at the creationist Discovery Institute are reduced to babbling about conspiracy theories to "silence dissent," a facile and convenient claim most recently pushed by noted actor, conservative columnist, and evolutionary biologist (I made up that last one) Ben Stein.

But for purely religious reasons, conservatives who are also believing Christians -- which is a huge subset -- plus some politically conservative Jews, have an irreducible simplicity as a core axiom: That evolutionary theory, which they call "Darwinism," is false. They reason backwards from this axiom to declare invalid any experiment, observation, or conclusion that supports it. And in the process, they fatally damage their own credibility to argue any case that depends upon the ability to reason logically or to understand basic scientific principles. Or even the scientific method itself.

Worse, they even damage my credibility, due to guilt by association; and I'm bloody sick of it. Every time I argue science with a liberal, I must spend the first 500 words defending myself from the false charge of rejecting evolution -- and the next 2,000 words mitigating the damage from the same charge -- but more true this time -- leveled against the Right in general.

....

Evolution is the great counterexample cited to prove that the Right is no more rational than the Left. Thanks; the rest of us really appreciate being lumped together with Ben Stein and Michael Medved.

(This post was, of course, driven by my annoyance at Medved presenting yet another knucklehead railing against "Darwinism," citing the Discovery Institute's all-purpose catechism of "irreducible complexity"... that mutable charge that shifts from biological system to biological system, always one step ahead of the very reduction of complexity it claims cannot occur.)

Will on Health Care

 George Will in the Washington Post:

Most Americans do want different health care: They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices. Americans spent much less on health care in 1960 (5 percent of gross domestic product as opposed to 18 percent now). They also spent much less -- nothing, in fact -- on computers, cellphones, and cable and satellite television.

....

Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health-care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health-care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said that they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

....

As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president's reforms will result in health-care "rationing." Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed -- by price or by politics. The conservative's task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.

Regarding reform, conservatives are accused of being a party of "no." Fine. That is an indispensable word in politics because most new ideas are false and mischievous. Furthermore, the First Amendment's lovely first five words ("Congress shall make no law") set the negative tone of the Bill of Rights, which is a list of government behaviors, from establishing religion to conducting unreasonable searches, to which the Constitution says: No.

"The Backgammon Effect"

John Steele Gordon at Commentary Magazine discusses the "backgammon effect" as it applies to climate change arguments.

But why is the Nobel-Prize-winning economist so exercised about global warming as to be reduced to name calling instead of examining the data? Why are so many climate scientists and liberal politicians so certain of the data on global warming that they think the debate is over?

I think it is a case of the "backgammon effect." In backgammon, the players move their pieces according to the dictates of a pair of dice. A single bad throw of the dice can convert a near-certain winner into a near-certain loser. Being human, players sometimes misread the dice and misplay accordingly. They get a six-four, for instance, but play a six-three. The opponent, if he is paying attention, points out the error,  it's corrected, and the game goes on.

Interestingly, the player who misreads the dice and thus misplays almost always does so to his own advantage. Is he cheating? Not at all. He is simply misperceiving the real world because his self-interest leads him to do so. He wants a six-three and so he sees one in a six-four. It's as simple as that.

You could also call it the "miscounted change effect" -- when a clerk gives a customer the wrong amount of change by accident, it's usually an undercount. This also isn't conscious cheating -- it's merely that the penalties for coming up short at the end of the day are more severe than for coming up with excess cash in your cash drawer.  As a result, it makes sense to guard against handing back too much money more stringently than against handing back too little.  Besides, if you hand back too little, the customer is usually more than happy to help you get it right.  Fewer customers mention it when they get handed too much money.

Canada Care

Ed Morrissey comments on the state of care in Canada.

My friend Michael Stickings links to a story of bureaucratic outrages involving an acutely ill premature baby, but only focuses on one particular outrage while excusing the other.  Because Canada does not have the capacity to deal with the demand for neo-natal intensive care for premature births, the single-payer system sent the critically ill child to the United States for treatment.  Unfortunately, the parents do not have passports which are now required for crossing the border, and the US refuses to allow them into the country without them...

...Well, it's impossible to look at this situation without seeing the relative merits of the American and Canadian systems.  First, the child would have gotten care in the US, too, regardless of insurance status.  People get emergency care regardless in this country.  There is a difference between health insurance and access to care that some people elide for purposes of political argument.  No one gets turned away from emergency care for lack of ability to pay.

But why wasn't there a NICU bed for the child in the entire nation of Canada?  The government of Canada won't pay for more.  They don't exist to expand supply to meet demand; their single-payer system exists to ration care as a cost-saving mechanism.  In a free-market system, supply expands to meet demand, which is why Canada could subcontract out to a US hospital for capacity.  Michael writes that paragraph as if it was mere luck that an NICU bed happened to be open in the US, but that's a function of the system, and not luck.  These parents are separated from their child at the moment through the fault of Canada's government and not the US.

Day at the Museum

In this case, it's a day at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

In one of the largest gatherings of critics since the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky opened two years ago, six dozen paleontologists in the area for a conference this week took a field trip to get a glimpse of the marketing tactics used by the other side of the evolution debate.

Paleontologists spend their careers studying evolution, and here they were visiting a place where nearly every room is dedicated to disproving it through Creationism, a fundamentalist Christian belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible that contends God created the universe just a few thousand years ago.

"The real purpose of the museum visit is to give some of my colleagues an opportunity to sense how they're being portrayed," said Arnold Miller, a professor of paleontology at the University of Cincinnati, which is hosting the conference. "They're being demonized, I feel, in this museum as people who are responsible for all the ills of society."

....

David Menton, a cell biology professor and researcher with Answers In Genesis, which founded the museum, made no apologies for the fact that the museum's teachings are rooted in the Old Testament. He insists they rely on largely the same facts scientists use, just with a starting point millions of years later. Anything before that can't really be proven by science anyway, he says.

"I've spent enough of my professional life in science that I know science being compatible with religion is not the sort of thing that keeps scientists up at night," Menton said. "There's a lot of scientists out there that rather applaud that idea."

He defended the displays that argue people and dinosaurs are contemporaries, including one at the museum entrance that show two young girls playing in a field near a dinosaur.

"I'm not saying dinosaurs and man frequently hobnobbed," Menton said. "I live on Earth at the same time as grizzly bears, but if I could stay as far away from grizzly bears, that suits me fine."

The critique of scientists even extends to the gift shop, where among the DVDs for sale is one entitled, "The Cure for a Culture in Crisis: It doesn't take a Ph.D."

It all had Wednesday's visitors shaking their heads.

"Faith is one thing," said Mark Terry, a high school science teacher from Seattle, "but when it comes to their science statements, they're completely off the wall."

Climate and Carbon Dioxide

Googling on "CO2 lags warming" turns up a number of links, including this one at New Scientist: Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

About this myth, New Scientist says:

Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been 800 years or more.

That sounds like confirmation of the "myth". What gives?

Well, the "myth" part is that this lag is actually meaningful.

Sometimes a house gets warmer even when the central heating is turned off. Does this prove that its central heating does not work? Of course not. Perhaps it's a hot day outside, or the oven's been left on for hours.

Just as there's more than one way to heat a house, so there's more than one way to heat a planet.

Granted. But if it's a hot day outside, the temperature inside the house goes up, and then you turn on the central heating, you'd expect the temperature to climb faster. The interesting question is, how much of this do we see?

What seems to have happened at the end of the recent ice ages is that some factor - most probably orbital changes - caused a rise in temperature. This led to an increase in CO2, resulting in further warming that caused more CO2 to be released and so on: a positive feedback that amplified a small change in temperature. At some point, the shrinking of the ice sheets further amplified the warming.

Models suggest that rising greenhouse gases, including CO2, explains about 40% of the warming as the ice ages ended. The figure is uncertain because it depends on how the extent of ice coverage changed over time, and there is no way to pin this down precisely.

One of the biggest problems with the whole global warming argument is trying to pin down the physics of the system so that projections actually match reality. For example, a number of people assume the various climate feedback loops are all positive, and we'll get runaway warming.

Finally, if higher temperatures lead to more CO2 and more CO2 leads to higher temperatures, why doesn't this positive feedback lead to a runaway greenhouse effect? There are various limiting factors that kick in, the most important being that infrared radiation emitted by Earth increases exponentially with temperature, so as long as some infrared can escape from the atmosphere, at some point heat loss catches up with heat retention.

Too much equality for same-sex couples?

From the Brisbane Times:

July 1 should be a day of celebration for the nation's same sex couples, when their relationships will become formally recognised under many federal laws.

But many gay and lesbian Australians are finding that equality comes at a price - literally.

From next Wednesday, when the law starts to recognise de facto gay couples, Centrelink will also begin taking into account gay partner's incomes when considering eligibility for benefits.

....

Ray Mackereth, publisher of Q News, a Brisbane-based gay and lesbian newspaper, said suddenly foisting equality on people who'd been discriminated against their entire lives didn't seem fair.

He said for many years elderly gay people had missed out on family tax benefits, medicare benefits, partner benefits or family assistance.

"Despite having paid higher taxes all their lives and not being recognised as a same sex couple, now they're going to receive less money in their retirement when their planning was done many years ago," Mr Mackereth said.

At the very least, they should be able to opt out of being considered married. 

If they don't, or if they decide to get married, I don't see how their situation is any different from opposite-sex couples who choose to marry at particular times of life.

Stick Figure Science

There was a contest, and the winning entries are here.

Peter Hitchens on Murder (among other things)

Why it's so hard to compare apples with apples on the subject.

Which brings me alongside Mr Hadley's responses to my most recent posting. But before I board his vessel with cutlass aloft, a few reactions are necessary to comments on my Sunday column. Mr Brant asserts that murder has not substantially increased since the abolition of the death penalty. Several points here: Can he please cite his sources? Is he referring to homicide as a whole? If he is using 'murder' as his definition, is he aware that the definition of 'murder' alters according to the legal punishment of that crime? For instance, when we still had a death penalty, but after it was weakened by the Homicide Act of 1957 many killers attempted to avoid the noose by pleading 'diminished responsibility' and so being sentenced for manslaughter. After this weakening, convictions for murder rose slightly, but not spectacularly (from 32 in 1956 to 51 in 1961) . But convictions for 'manslaughter due to diminished responsibility', most of which would probably have been prosecuted and sentenced as murder before 1957, climbed from 11 to 41 between 1957 and 1964. Add them to the murder figures, and you get quite a significant jump.

Once the death penalty ceased to operate at all, this process continued. The distinction moved elsewhere. Rather than trying to avoid being hanged, the accused's lawyers sought to avoid a 'life' sentence. And the prosecution, mindful of prison overcrowding and the high cost of jury trials,has joined in (the affronted relatives of victims sometimes write to me about the resulting injustice). What has tended to happen in subsequent years is that many more cases which would once have been charged and prosecuted as murder were reduced (for speed and cheapness) to charges of manslaughter. So, many cases whose actual nature would have had them classified as murder in, say, 1955, will have been recorded as manslaughter in post 1965 Britain. It is very difficult, given the fluid boundary between the two, to establish numbers.

Then, as the 1948 Royal Commission on the subject rightly pointed out, one must always be careful with direct before and after comparisons. Generally, countries which abolish the death penalty have suspended it or restricted it for a long period before the moment of abolition. (Most of the American states which claim to have the death penalty for political purposes never actually execute anyone, which also tends to confuse the matter, and those which do only execute after immense delays, by which time the murderer has often forgotten what he did, and so that many sentenced murderers actually die of natural causes on Death Row, making 'comparisons' between 'death penalty' and 'non-death-penalty' states virtually meaningless).

In Britain's case, the 1957 Homicide Act, which prevented the execution of gang members who had participated in a homicidal crime, and enshrined the 'diminished responsibility' defence, effectively eviscerated the death penalty although it wasn't formally abolished for another seven years. Britain never executed many murderers in modern times (the highest tally in the post-war period was 18 in 1951) but by the time abolition came, the annual total of hangings rarely rose above two. A serious comparison of pre and post abolition should therefore track the whole period between 1945 and now, and examine in detail many of the homicides nowadays classified as 'manslaughter'.

It should also, as I have rather often pointed out, recognise that trauma surgery has hugely improved since 1964, and that many homicidal assaults, which would undoubtedly have resulted in death 45 years ago, now do not do so. This is not because of the criminals being gentler, or lacking the intent (or callous heedlessness of the consequences of their savagery) which lead to death. A clue as to how many such 'hidden murders' now take place is offered by the growth in attempted murder cases, which rose between 1976 and 1996 from 155 to 634. In the same period instances of 'wounding to endanger life' rose from 5,885 to 10,445. All these figures, and a careful examination of this superficially persuasive but in fact worthless part of the abolitionist case, are to be found in the chapter 'Cruel and Unusual' of my reviled book 'A Brief History of Crime'. Any decent library will find it for you. The issue is also addressed in another chapter 'Out of the Barrel of a Gun', which shows that two post-war suspensions of the death penalty (one in 1948 and the other in 1955-57) caused by Parliamentary debates on abolition, correlate with two substantial but temporary increases in the incidence of armed and violent crime (the form of crime which death penalty supporters argue is deterred by capital punishment). In both cases the figures fell again after the suspension ended, only to increase, and carry on increasing evermore, after final abolition.

Liz Throws a hissy fit

Elizabeth Becton doesn't like being called "Liz".

She really, really, really doesn't like it.

If you want to score a meeting with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), know this: His scheduler/office manager, Elizabeth Becton, is to be addressed by her full name — not Liz or any other variant.

An executive assistant at McBee Strategic recently learned this the hard way. A few weeks ago, the assistant e-mailed Becton seeking a meeting with McDermott and a client, JPMorgan Chase. Days later, the assistant checked back in and unfortunately began the e-mail with "Hi Liz." 

Becton curtly replied, "Who is Liz?"

When the assistant wrote back with an apology, Becton turned up the heat. "I do not go by Liz. Where did you get your information?" she asked. 

The back-and-forth went on for 19 e-mails, with the assistant apologizing six times if she had "offended" Becton, while Becton lectured about name-calling.

A while ago, I decided to adopt as a policy that you get one apology per minor offense.  If that's not sufficient, that becomes your problem.  Now this isn't for something major like a broken bone or a wrecked car, but if you take offense over a mode of address, and refuse to accept an apology, I have to conclude it's because you enjoy taking offense.

 

I'm more than happy to oblige.

Dinosaurs give us the finger

An item that recently made the news was a finding that "proved" birds did not descend from dinosaurs.  Since the Conspiracy to Boost Evolution At All Costs neglected to spike this data, science has had to rely on finding more data.  In this case, reported at the blog The Panda's Thumb, scientists have found a fossil "caught in the act" of evolving, which seems to resolve the question.

What's especially interesting about it is that it catches an evolutionary hypothesis in the act, and is another genuine transitional fossil. The hypothesis is about how fingers were modified over time to produce the patterns we see in dinosaurs and birds.

Birds have greatly reduced digits, but when we examine them embryologically, we can see precisely what has happened: they've lost the outermost digits, the thumb (I) and pinky (V), and retain the forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger (II-IV), which have been reduced and fused together. This is called Bilateral Digit Reduction, BDR, because they've lost digits from the medial and lateral sides, leaving the middle set intact.

Dinosaurs, when examined anatomically, seem to have a different pattern: they have a thumb (I), forefinger (II) and middle finger (III), and have lost the lateral two digits, the ring and pinky finger (IV-V). This arrangement has been advanced as evidence that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, since they have different bones in their hands, and getting from one pattern to the other is complicated and difficult and very unlikely.

The alternative hypothesis is that there is no conflict, and that dinosaurs actually underwent BDR and their digits are II-III-IV…but that what has also happened is a frame shift in digit identities. So dinosaurs actually have three digits, which are the index, middle, and ring finger, but they've undergone a subtle shift in morphology so that their forefinger develops as a thumb, and so forth.

Now we could resolve all this easily if only the physicists would get to work and build that time machine so we could go back to the Mesozoic and study dinosaur embryology, but they're too busy playing with strings and quanta and dark matter to do the important experiments, so we've got to settle for another plan: find intermediate forms in the fossil record. That's where Limusaurus steps in.

Limusaurus has a thumb, a tiny vestigial nubbin, and has lost its pinky completely. This is a (I)-II-III-IV pattern, and is evidence of bilateral digit reduction in a basal ceratosaur. In addition, the forefinger has become very robust, and while still distinctly a digit II, has been caught in the early stages of a transformation into a saurian first digit. It's evidence in support of the dinosaurian II-III-IV hypothesis and the frameshift in digit identity! It's almost as good as having a time machine.

Give me a blog!

John Stossel (famous for his "Give Me a Break" segments) has a blog at ABC.  His most recent post to date:

Jacob Sullum has a nice column in this month's Reason magazine debunking the idea that guns purchased in the US fuel the drug violence in Mexico.

  

"Making it harder for Americans to buy guns is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The persistence of the drug traffickers' main business, which consists of transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can block the flow of guns to the cartels."

  

He also argues, as I have, that conservatives who oppose gun control should also oppose the drug war. A war on drugs inevitably becomes a war on guns.

Enjoy!

 .........................Karl

Gitmo files

Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard suggests we not take the interviews with people just released from Gitmo at face value.  At the very least, their testimony has not been consistent.

 

On Sunday night, CNN ran part of an interview with a Uighur named Khalil Abdul Nasser. Until just a few days ago, Nasser was detained at Guantanamo. Nasser's transfer to Bermuda, along with three of his fellow Uighurs, has caused a storm of controversy on the tiny resort island. So, Nasser wanted to quell any doubts about his innocence.

Regarding allegations that he attended a terrorist training camp, Nasser (speaking through a translator) said: "This is not true, because I have never been in any kind of training camp."

....

[Nasser] did not always dispute this. During his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT) at

Gitmo, Nasser freely admitted that he once trained at the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement's (ETIM's) Tora Bora training camp.

The transcript of Nasser's CSRT session at Gitmo, who was then known by his alias, Abdul Helil Mamut, is readily available on the New York Times's web site. (See here.) A U.S. military tribunal alleged: "The Detainee arrived at the Uighur Tora Bora training camp on 17 June 2001." Nasser responded, "That's correct. The name Tora Bora is used in the accusation, but it is not correct." (He later claimed he may have arrived earlier in June of 2001.)

Other Uighur detainees held at Gitmo, like Nasser, said they were not familiar with the name Tora Bora. It may be that the camp was not known to them as the "Tora Bora training camp," as described by the government. But, that is clearly where they were. Their descriptions of the camp match it precisely and, as described below, Nasser admitted he was in the Tora Bora mountains during the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign in 2001. Nasser also admitted he was at the Tora Bora facility, after initially disputing its name.

Nasser did not say who ran the Tora Bora training camp during his CSRT session. But it is clear, based on the testimony of at least eight other Uighurs, including Hozaifa Parhat, that Abdul Haq ran the camp.

There is no real material dispute, then, that the camp was run by an al Qaeda terrorist. And Nasser lived and was trained at this camp.

A statement by the Uighur detainees' attorney and Nasser's newfound denial do not change these simple facts.

CNN, like most other news organizations, could not be bothered to do some basic fact checking of the Uighurs' story. If the news channel had, then perhaps it would not have presented their claims unchallenged.

 

 

Restoring federalism?

Big Lizards blogger Dafydd ap Hugh calls attention to a couple of laws being considered in Montana and Texas:

In May, Montana became the first state to approve the Firearms Freedom Act, which declares that guns manufactured and sold in the Big Sky State to buyers who plan to keep the weapons within the state are exempt from federal gun regulations.

According to the act's supporters, if guns bearing a "Made in Montana" stamp remain in Montana, then federal rules such as background checks, registration and dealer licensing no longer apply. But court cases have interpreted the U.S. Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause as covering anything that might affect interstate commerce -- which in practice means just about anything.

(Including, as he mentions, growing your own vegetables in your own garden.)

Two other states -- Alaska and Texas -- have had favorable votes on laws similar to Montana's, declaring that guns that stay within the state are none of the feds' business. More than a dozen others are considering such laws, and more-general declarations of state sovereignty have been introduced this year in more than 30 legislatures.

The federal courts may not respond well to these laws in the short term, but backers who acknowledge this say that regardless, they intend for the laws to change the political landscape in the long term. They hope these state laws will undercut the legitimacy of contrary federal law -- as has happened with medicinal marijuana -- and even push federal courts to bend with the popular wind.

 

Harry Jackson Jr. on Same-Sex Marriage

At townhall.com:

...Knowledgeable pro-traditional marriage advocates understand that the real danger lies with the unintended consequences of gay marriage on the next generation. Redefining marriage, redefines family, the redefinition of family changes the definition of parenting, the definition of parenting changes the dynamics of education.

....

What will the landscape of America look like if same-sex marriage is legalized across our nation? According to the writings of Dr. Stanley Kurtz, nations who have gone this way see a dramatic increase in out of wedlock births, long-term singleness, and other symptoms of the devaluation of the institution. If the American family loses the presence of its birth dad in the home, there will be several huge consequences.

Consider these statistics. Over half of Americans studied in a survey in 2001 by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government believe that the high number of single-parent families is a major cause of poverty. Studies also reveal that most Americans believe that welfare programs encourage single-parent families and teenage pregnancy.

Malcolm D. Williams in 1997, used a sample of 1,610 10-13 year-olds in a study. He found that children who learn to share significant ideas with their fathers had fewer behavior problems and developed stronger cognitive abilities than their peers.

Similar results were found in a 1995 study of 254 black adolescents living with both of their biological parents. Ninety-six percent of these boys said their fathers were their role models. In this study, only 44 percent of black adolescents who were not living with their fathers said their fathers were their role models.

The Journal of Family Psychology in 2000 reported a study of 116 African American students ages 10-13. The boys with married parents were found to have much higher levels of self esteem and a better sense of personal power and self-control compared to single-mother homes.

Repeatedly, scholarly studies focused on adolescence show that early onset of puberty in girls is a major problem. It is associated with negative psychological, social, and health problems. Depression, alcohol consumption, and higher teenage pregnancy rates are some of the results. An eight year study of girls and their families showed that a father's presence in the home, with appropriate involvement in his children's lives, contributed to later pubertal timing of the daughters in the seventh grade.

These studies and scores of others suggest what most Americans have always known: that both boys and girls, are deeply affected in both biological and psychological ways by the presence of their fathers....

And from the comments:

What is Marriage For?

The question to ask, in order to provide a solid foundation to all arguments about marriage is this:

 

What is marriage for?

 

Is it for adult companionship, pleasure, and convenience? If so, then what we have now -- marriage as a purely optional possibility, lightly entered into, lightly gotten out of, completely divorced from childbearing, and extending as a "right" to any number and/or combination of consenting adults -- is the inevitable result.

 

If the current situation is not desirable then marriage must have some other purpose than merely as a pleasant possibility to facilitate companionship among adults.

 

In the traditional understanding of marriage, as practiced by every society humanity has ever produced, marriage is much more -- it is a formal, permantent, legal (and often, but not necessarily, religious), bond between male and female that serves multiple functions.

 

1. Marriage obligates both biological parents to participate in raising their offspring. This drastically reduces the number of children thrown onto the community to be supported via taxes.

 

2. Marriage obligates sexual fidelity -- harnessing biological drives and channeling them to productive rather than destructive purposes. This drives down rates of both sexually transmitted disease and the depression and other mental problems which plague the promiscuous as they continually form, destroy, and re-form relationship bonds.

 

3. As a corollary, by assuring that each child's parentage is known marriage improves the next generation's ability to find suitable, un-related mates and the raising of blood-siblings in the same household makes incestuous attraction unlikely. This is biologically healthy for the human species

 

4. Marriage ensures mutual support through the difficulties of life and the vicissitudes of fortune. Families and extended families assist each other in a myriad of ways that no other community, however well-intended, can duplicate. Friends may have other obligations. Neighbors may not even know each other. But couples, siblings, cousins, and even in-laws are there for each other because that's how families are.

 

5. Marriage provides beneficial connections to extended family groups. Few things are rarer and more remarkable than for a mere friend or acquaintance, much less a stranger, to help a young couple with the down payment for a house or a car or to provide other financial support to help set a new adult on his/her own feet. Few things could be more commonplace than for family members to do so.

 

Many people gain their first, valuable work experience that sets them on a lifetime of productive employment in a family member's business. They might not have taken a chance on a completely inexperienced stranger, but since its a nephew, a cousin, or your sister-in-law's sister-in-law the connection makes a difference. The old saying is true -- you don't just marry your spouse, you marry the family.

 

So we need to recognize that the formation of these social bonds and connections -- things far removed from mere adult companionship -- is part of what marriage is for. Indeed, in many societies, these literal or figurative tribal connections are more critical for the ordering of society than local, regional, or even national politics.

 

6.Marriage provides for the orderly transmission of both wealth and culture from one generation to the next. The first through financial support AND education while the parents live and through the inheritance of property after the parents die. The second because despite the efforts of government schools and tax policies that often force mothers into full-time jobs children still learn their values at home.

 

A child raised by his/her married, biological parents is better off by every measure of success than a child raised in any other living arrangement.

 

Marriage is not for "two adults in a loving relationship". Marriage is bigger and grander and more ambitious. Marriage is for nothing less than the perpetuation of human civilization.

 

And the social pathologies that accompany family breakdown -- whether this involves never marrying at all or uncommitted marriages resulting in serial polygamy via too-easy divorce -- prove that we need to recapture the proper understanding of marriage if the US is going to survive in any recognizable form.

 

What is deception?

From Bruce Schneier's "Crypto-Gram" newsletter:

David Livingstone Smith, University of New England, is a philosopher by training, and goes back to basics: "What are we talking about?" A theoretical definition -- "that which something has to have to fall under a term" -- of deception is difficult to define. "Cause to have a false belief," from the Oxford English Dictionary, is inadequate. "To deceive is intentionally have someone to have a false belief" also doesn't work. "Intentionally causing someone to have a false belief that the speaker knows to be false" still isn't good enough. The fundamental problem is that these are anthropocentric definitions. Deception is not unique to humans; it gives organisms an evolutionary edge. For example, the mirror orchid fools a wasp into landing on it by looking like and giving off chemicals that mimic the female wasp. This example shows that we need a broader definition of "purpose."

His formal definition: "For systems A and B, A deceives B iff A possesses some character C with proper function F, and B possesses a mechanism C* with the proper function F* of producing representations, such that the proper function of C is to cause C* to fail to perform F* by causing C* to form false representations, and C does so in virtue of performing F, and B's falsely representing enables some feature of A to perform its proper function."

NB:  "iff" in the definition above is not a misspelling.  "Iff" is logician shorthand for "if and only if".