Protozoans Against Intelligent Design

Protozoans Against Intelligent Design

by Ronald Bailey on 1/21/10

The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology has just published a very nice paper showing how the details of protist evolution "dispel the myths of intelligent design." Generally, protists are "unicellular eukaryotes that either exist as independent cells, or if they occur in colonies, do not show differentiation into tissues." Think amoebae or foraminifera.

Biologists Mark Farmer and Andrea Habura address various ID claims and show how the evolution of protists disprove them. The first such claim is that the Cambrian explosion 545 million years ago cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution - it was too fast. Farmer and Habura point out that protistan evolution had begun well before then and provided the genomic diversity from which multicellular organisms arose.

The second claim is that no one has ever seen the development of a new species -- that is, a new species that becomes genetically isolated from its parent species. Again turning to protists, Farmer and Habura cite the example of just such a speciation event in which amoebae became symbiotically dependent upon infecting bacteria. If the symbotically dependent amoebae subsequently tried to interbreed with the parent stock, the parent stock died of the bacterial infection. Thus the two became genetically isolated.

Thirdly, IDers also argue that the fossil record does not show transitional species, therefore there is no evidence of one species evolving into another. Farmer and Habura explain that the exquisitely detailed fossil record of protists does exhibit just such intermediate forms.

Fourthly, the two biologists deal with the claim that nature exhibits biochemical changes that simply are too impossibly complex to occur without a designer. They specifically refute ID proponent Michael Behe's argument that the malaria parasite's resistance to chloroquine is too complex to have arisen through natural selection.

Farmer and Habura conclude:

A detailed understanding of protistan biology, therefore, offers scientists and lay persons alike the ability to address current attacks on evolutionary theory, and to refute the claims of ID creationists who insist on invoking supernatural explanations to account for observable phenomena.

Go here to read their excellent article. I also cannot pass up the opportunity to suggest clicking on the youtube mash up of my talk "Attack of the Super Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators" which I delivered during a debate with IDers from the Discovery Institute.

Via Tree of Life blog.

Administrative Costs

Less is not always more -- from Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Is Waterboarding Torture?

Marc Thiessen argues the issue with CNN's Amanpour.

Haiti, Poverty and Earthquakes

Deals with the Devil, if by "Devil" you mean corrupt government.

Haiti, Poverty and Earthquakes

by Ronald Bailey

That poverty made Haiti's recent earthquake devastating is a media truism. But what makes poverty? Haiti's annual per capita income (purchasing power parity) is $1,300. The World Bank issued a fascinating report, Where is the Wealth of Nations?, that tries to quantify the tangible assets (farming, forestry, infrastructure, mining, industry) and intangible assets (courts, education, honest bureaucrats, free press) each country has. It turns out that nearly three-quarters of the world's wealth is intangible, that is, wealth is largely embodied in our social and political institutions, not in physical items.

For example, on average Americans enjoy access to about $418,000 in intangible wealth and total wealth of $512,000. In contrast, on average Haitians have access to only about $6,800 in intangible wealth and $8,200 in total wealth.

So one way to account of Haitian poverty is to look at the effectiveness of that country's institutions. The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators rate the quality of variety of institutions in each country on a scale of 1 to 100 - 100 being the best. How does Haiti do?

Voice and Accountability (free press and democracy): 27 (U.S. 86)

Political Stability/No Violence: 11 (U.S. 68)

Government Effectiveness: 9 (U.S. 93)

Regulatory Quality: 19 (U.S. 93)

Rule of Law: 6 (U.S. 92)

Control of Corruption: 7 (U.S. 92)

Go here for my Wall Street Journal op/ed on the intangible wealth of nations. See also my advice to tyrants on how to keep their subjects impoverished here.

More on Signature in the Cell

In this piece, Jeffrey Shallit focuses on "The Dishonesty Factor" in the book -- claims made in the book that are just plain false.

More on Signature in the Cell

by admin@talkreason.org (Shallit, Jeffrey ); on 1/19/10

In the continuation of his critical review of S. Meyer's opus Signature in the Cell, Professor Shallit shows that Meyer, as is typical of Discovery institute pseudo-scientists and quasi-philosophers, does not shy away from direct falsehoods and misrepresentations of facts, along with a shameless praise for the convincingly refuted output by Dembski, Wells and other Discovery institute's "luminaries."

Google just can't seem to figure out how to fix the bug that censors negative suggestions about Islam

Robert Spencer has noticed some strange behavior at Google. Google just can't seem to figure out how to fix the bug that censors negative suggestions about Islam -- Day 13 - Jihad Watch.

Try it yourself. Go to Google, type in "Christianity is" (without the quotes) and you'll see a host of suggestions for completing the sentence, including "Christianity is not a religion", "Christianity is false", "Christianity is a cult" and many others.

Same for Judaism, Hinduism, Wicca, Scientology, Catholicism, religion, and atheism.

Now try it for "Islam is".

Go ahead, I'll wait.

....

Nothing, right?

Lots of suggestions for "Islam", but as soon as you tack on the "is", the suggestion list is empty.

Same thing, by the way, with "Jainism is", and "Wahabism is".

Some of these computer bugs can be most frustrating.

Creationist Information Theory

At Talk.Reason, Jeffrey Shallit looks at what he calls Stephen Meyer's Bogus Information Theory.

In contrast to Shannon and Kolmogorov information, Creationist information has no particular definition.

Securing your laptop from Customs

Bruce Schneier has some suggestions for people who are very nervous about being forced to give their laptop password to Customs: Laptop Security while Crossing Borders.

Last year, I wrote about the increasing propensity for governments, including the U.S. and Great Britain, to search the contents of people's laptops at customs. What we know is still based on anecdote, as no country has clarified the rules about what their customs officers are and are not allowed to do, and what rights people have.

Companies and individuals have dealt with this problem in several ways, from keeping sensitive data off laptops traveling internationally, to storing the data -- encrypted, of course -- on websites and then downloading it at the destination. I have never liked either solution. I do a lot of work on the road, and need to carry all sorts of data with me all the time. It's a lot of data, and downloading it can take a long time. Also, I like to work on long international flights.

There's another solution, one that works with whole-disk encryption products like PGP Disk (I'm on PGP's advisory board), TrueCrypt, and BitLocker: Encrypt the data to a key you don't know.
....
tep One: Before you board your plane, add another key to your whole-disk encryption (it'll probably mean adding another "user") -- and make it random. By "random," I mean really random: Pound the keyboard for a while, like a monkey trying to write Shakespeare. Don't make it memorable. Don't even try to memorize it.

Step Two: Send that new random key to someone you trust. Make sure the trusted recipient has it, and make sure it works. You won't be able to recover your hard drive without it.

Step Three: Burn, shred, delete or otherwise destroy all copies of that new random key. Forget it. If it was sufficiently random and non-memorable, this should be easy.

Step Four: Board your plane normally and use your computer for the whole flight.

Step Five: Before you land, delete the key you normally use.

At this point, you will not be able to boot your computer. The only key remaining is the one you forgot in Step Three. There's no need to lie to the customs official, which in itself is often a crime; you can even show him a copy of this article if he doesn't believe you.

Step Six: When you're safely through customs, get that random key back from your confidant, boot your computer and re-add the key you normally use to access your hard drive.

And that's it.
....
This is by no means a magic get-through-customs-easily card. Your computer might be impounded, and you might be taken to court and compelled to reveal who has the random key.

But the purpose of this protocol isn't to prevent all that; it's just to deny any possible access to your computer to customs. You might be delayed. You might have your computer seized. (This will cost you any work you did on the flight, but -- honestly -- at that point that's the least of your troubles.) You might be turned back or sent home. But when you're back home, you have access to your corporate management, your personal attorneys, your wits after a good night's sleep, and all the rights you normally have in whatever country you're now in.

Inside the world of the interrogators

At National Review Online, Marc A. Thiessen talks with some of the Real Jack Bauers.

Sitting across the table from me were several CIA officials, including two men I will call Harry and Sam (not their real names), I didn’t know anything about the individuals before me except that they were with the CIA and knowledgeable about the interrogation program.
....
They explained, for example, that there is a difference between “interrogation” and “de-briefing.” Interrogation is not how we got information from the terrorists; it is the process by which we overcome the terrorists’ resistance and secure their cooperation — sometimes with the help of enhanced interrogation techniques.

Once the terrorist agreed to cooperate, I was told, the interrogation stopped and “de-briefing” began, as the terrorists were questioned by CIA analysts, using non-aggressive techniques to extract information that could help disrupt attacks.

The interrogation process was usually brief, they said. According to declassified documents, on average “the actual use of interrogation techniques covers a period of three to seven days, but can vary upwards to 15 days based on the resilience” of the terrorist in custody.

Most detainees, they told me, did not undergo it at all. Two-thirds of those brought into the CIA program did not require the use of any enhanced interrogation techniques. Just the experience of being brought into CIA custody — the “capture shock,” arrival at a sterile location, the isolation, the fact that they did not know where they were, and that no one else knew they were there — was enough to convince most of them to cooperate.

Others, like KSM, demonstrated extraordinary resistance. But even KSM’s interrogation did not take long before he moved into debriefing. He had been captured in early March, they said, and before the end of the month he had already provided information on a plot to fly airplanes into London’s Heathrow airport.

As they described the information the CIA had gotten from KSM and others, I slowly realized that these men were not simply describing what others in the agency had done; I was sitting face to face with the individuals who had actually questioned terrorists at the CIA’s black sites and gotten the information they were describing to me themselves.

Harry, it turned out, had interrogated KSM. He explained that interrogations involved strict oversight. There was no freelancing allowed — every technique had to be approved in advance by headquarters, and any deviation from the meticulously developed interrogation plan would lead to the immediate removal of the interrogator.

Harry said the average age of CIA interrogators was 43 and that each interrogator received 250 hours of training before being allowed to come in contact with a terrorist. And even after that, he said, they had to complete another 20 hours working together with an experienced interrogator before they could lead an interrogation on their own. Contrary to the claims later made by some critics, such as FBI agent Ali Soufan, the CIA did not send a bunch of inexperienced people to question high-value detainees.

Harry explained that the interrogations were not violent, as some imagined. He said that the interrogators’ credo was to use “the least coercive method necessary” and that “each of us is put through the measures so we can feel it.” He added: “It is very respectful. The detainee knows that we are not there to gratuitously inflict pain. He knows what he needs to do to stop. We see each other as professional adversaries in war.” (Indeed, Mike Hayden told me years later that KSM referred to Harry as “emir” — a title of great respect in the jihadist ranks.)
....
Soufan, the FBI agent and CIA critic, has written: “When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them. . . . That means the information you’re getting is useless.”

What this statement reveals is that Soufan knows nothing about how the CIA actually employed enhanced interrogation techniques. In an interview for my book, former national-security adviser Steve Hadley explained to me, “The interrogation techniques were not to elicit information. So the whole argument that people tell you lies under torture misses the point.” Hadley said the purpose of the techniques was to “bring them to the point where they are willing to cooperate, and once they are willing to cooperate, then the techniques stop and you do all the things the FBI agents say you ought to do to build trust and all the rest.”
....
the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “You must do this for all the brothers.” The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.

So in response to those who say torture doesn't work -- if you call waterboarding torture, then refusing to torture doesn't work.

A deal with the devil

Pat Robertson has made the news by calling the suffering in Haiti the result of a deal with the Devil.

If we assume any of this can be taken metaphorically, maybe there is a deal with the devil to the extent that the people of Haiti are throwing their support behind kleptocrat dictators and renouncing policies that would have promoted wealth on the island. As James Peron points out at The Freeman, poverty kills.

The earthquake in Haiti was a magnitude of 7.0. According to Wikipedia, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in San Francisco was either 7.0 or 6.9 depending on which scale is used. In other words, the intensities were fairly similar. Haiti is devastated. If the New York Times is correct, the death toll could be in the tens of thousands. The death toll in the 1989 quake was 63, if you include indirect deaths due the quake.

The difference is wealth. San Francisco is one of the wealthiest areas in our part of the world, while Haiti is the poorest. Poverty makes natural disasters worse. Wealth mitigates natural disasters.

Climategate: Cleaning out the in-box

Following are links to articles about global warming / climate change.

First, Merv at Prarie Pundit looks at a piece that appeared on Real Clear Politics:

More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the "trick" consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature "proxies" from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward "hockey stick" slope.

Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It's a basic rule of science that you don't just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.

The fraud at the core of the Globo warming crowd is what caused them to try to reframe their issue as "Climate Change." This was a more amorphous term that would make it easier for them to explain anomalies, but that was still not enough. They had to cook the books.

Tracinski is right about the expenditures at stake in this debate, but it overlooks the loss of freedom that is also at stake. The globo warmers are control freaks who want to use this manufactured "crisis" to control every aspect of our lives. The totalitarian polices they want to impose would make the communist blush.

From Samizdata:

Why the fuss is because of the vast, globe-spanning policy conclusions that have been plucked from these in themselves rather minor deceptions. The fraud revealed isn't just in the fiddling of some numbers. There is also the faking of that precious scientific consensus that has so dominated public and official thinking about climate and climate policy during the last decade. The world is being sold a gigantic economic and political upheaval, backed by the claim that all this scientific rough-and-tumble, this slightly dodgy infighting, was in fact a blandly uniform scientific consensus. And the "scientists" (who more and more now look like politicos who have barged their way into science) are the engineers of this political fraud, not just the contrivers of the scientific opinions around which they have assembled their bogus consensus.

One of the more feeble responses that have so far been put forward by The Green Mob is that these emails were stolen, so it's wrong to talk about them. But this is not a private matter in any meaningful sense. This is not people being filmed doing weird things to one another in their own bed, in their own property. This is public policy of the most public sort. The vast wealth that The Green Global Government is trying to transfer from those creating it to those wanting to gobble it up (many of the gobblers being themselves), is taxed wealth. The money paying for this corrupted climate "research" is tax money. The issues at stake are matters of earth-shaping public policy. Millions upon millions will be tipped into impoverishment by these grand plans. If that isn't a "public interest" defence for the leaker or hacker or whatever, then I don't know what is.
....
Getting back to the matter of why this is all so important, these revelations will echo around the world not only because they are part of an absolutely gigantic global story, but also because of the peculiar nature of the Global Warming debate.

Basically, the Global Warming debate has been a gigantic exercise in argument from authority. In debates like this one the great mass of onlookers are being told that they must take some particular judgement on trust, because the experts are all agreed about it. The science is settled. All the scientists agree. Who are you to criticise? What do you know about climate science? Who indeed? What indeed?
....
...Last night on Channel 4 news, a long-gray-haired scientist type was interviewed by the young chap in a suit fronting the show. All that Professor Long-Gray-Hair could think of to say was that if his good friend Phil Jones had done what his good friend Phil Jones is now being accused all over the planet of having done, well, er, that would be very silly - scientist, tampering with evidence, reputation, most precious resource, blah blah - therefore Phil Jones, er, can't have done it. In other words, Professor Long-Gray-Hair was himself resorting to the Argument From Authority. Scientists just don't do that sort of thing! Not one shred of an argument was heard from Professor Long-Gray-Hair to the effect that, if you study the actual evidence, you will find that Phil Jones did not in fact do what he is accused of. I know about his observations and experiments, I've looked at the data, I know this guy, he does not lie, he does not cheat, it all adds up. Nothing like that. Not one shred of expertise was presented, in a form that might have exonerated Phil Jones. Had Professor Long-Gray-Hair simply broken down in tears and cried: "I don't know I don't know I don't know it's all too horrible to think about ... waaaaaargh!!!", he could not have made a worse impression....

Jonah Goldberg has his take at The Corner:

This should be considered not merely a scientific scandal but an enormous journalistic scandal. The elite press treats skepticism about global warming as a mental defect. It uses a form of the No True Scotsman fallacy to delegitimize people who dissent from the (manufactured) "consensus." Dissent is scientifically unserious, therefore dissenting scientist A is unserious. There's no way to break in. The moment someone disagrees with the "consensus" they disqualify themselves from criticizing the consensus. That's not how science is supposed to work. Skeptics who've received a tote bag from some oil company are branded as shills, but scientists who live off of climate-change-obsessed foundations or congressional fiefdoms are objective, call-it-like-they-see-it truth seekers. Question these folks and you get a Bill Murrayesque, "Back off, man. We're scientists."

An even larger reason this is a journalistic scandal is that governments want to spend — literally — trillions of dollars on climate change. Industries want to make billions off it. The poor will be hurt. Economies wrenched apart. And journalistic skepticism is almost nowhere to be found. If you know people in the "skeptic community" (for want of a better term) or even just normal, honest scientists, the observation that federal and foundation funding and groupthink is driving, or at least distorting, the climate debate is commonplace. But it's given almost no oxygen in the elite press, because they are in on it.

Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy quotes George Monbiot as saying:

The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Adler then notes:

The hack or unauthorized disclosure of these documents may have been illegal (unless protected by the UK’s whistleblower law). Yet the documents themselves also provide evidence of illegal activity by several climate researchers.

Monbiot is quick to note that the leaked documents do not disprove global warming nor discredit the wealth of evidence that human activity contributes to cliamte change. They do, however, suggest that some specific claims and data sets will need to be reanalyzed.

Der Spiegel has a piece on the accuracy of climate modeling.

"Give me ten parameters, and I'll simulate an elephant for you. Give me one more, and he'll wag his tail." The saying sums up the problem with many models. Models allow you demonstrate anything and everything, as long as there are enough knobs to turn. The real test of how good a model really is comes when you compare it to reality.

But when it comes to climate change, researchers are faced with a practically insoluble problem: We won't know for sure until the end of the century whether climate predictions for the year 2100 are correct or not. But with climate scientists around the world warning of the dangerous consequences of climate change, it becomes apparent that we can hardly afford to wait that long.

Card skimmers

Brian Krebs writes at Krebs on Security about card skimmers. These devices copy the electronic information from debit and ATM cards, have pinhole cameras to watch the user put in a PIN number, and save all the info for their owners.

You won't know your card has been cloned until you start losing money from your account.

Government, citizens and business

Bookworm cites one of her friends on the difference between government power and the power corporations wield over people. A perfect statement about the balance of power between government, citizens and business:

Think about what government is. It’s a giant corporation, with incredible powers… Confiscatory taxation. The power to create and enforce laws, giving it complete control over your life, liberty, and property. Military and police powers and personnel to enforce its will. The ONLY thing standing in its way in trampling every right and freedom under the boot of whatever the little kings and queens in Washington DC believe is best is our Constitution. I don’t fetishize that, but it’s a literal truth — the only thing that maintains our freedoms is the extent to which citizens take their rights seriously. It is absolutely critical to our actual personal well-being that we vigilantly limit the size and power of govt. Because it is so much more powerful and dangerous than any corporation, by 1000x.

Against that in your theory are business corporations, which have basically zero power over consumers or citizens. They can offer services and hope people buy. That’s it. The only way they have any more power than that is when they make corrupt deals with government, to put the power of government behind them. It happens all the time, and it’s bad. Both sides are at fault; they are often the same people. I happen to have some direct insight into corruption of that kind in Treasury, for example, and it’s disgusting, and incredibly expensive to all of us, enriching a few. But the problem occurs when we let government act without transparency, and take powers it does not rightfully have. The current health care bill makes that much much worse, with a horrible system imposed on businesses and individuals, preventing other better systems from evolving. It is much worse than nothing, and is unconstitutional. It would be much better to remove the existing government constraints on real and effective competition.

I will say that government does have a real role in preventing corporations from harming people by usurping common property… i.e. by polluting, or selling secretly unsafe products. So entities like the EPA, the FDIC, and the FDA make perfect sense, and there are others as well, that implement our social compact, governing our common resources while enabling the maximum possible freedom. I’m a big fan of National Parks — setting aside national treasures from the potential for harm — and similarly a fan of the national highway system and the Internet. As long as those initiatives or research efforts are approved by voters in simple proposals — we are willing to pay X as a common tax-funded program because it is a wise infrastructure investment that is better commonly owned than privately owned, and it would be hard to get private investment on that scale. But of course we properly let private alternatives evolve too — toll roads, private networks, alternate currencies, etc. — and these private innovations often work better. I believe the role of govt in all cases is to establish standards, and then let private business and individuals operate as much as possible, limiting it’s own scope, powers, and need for taxation as much as possible.

Monogamy and Polyamory

G. Tracy Mehan, III looks at monogamy and polyamory in Cultures Monogamous and Polyamorous at The American Spectator.

Monogamy versus polyamory. Fagan describes this great divide in an article in the latest issue of Touchstone which is based on a talk (PDF) he gave this past August to the World Congress of Families in Amsterdam. His description of these contending worldviews is clinical, yet bracing in its implications for the fate of the family, the culture and American society as a whole.

Fagan embraces a broad definition of polyamory, which a popular dictionary defines as the state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time. It is derived from the Greek, poly or many, and the Latin, amor or love. Clearly, Fagan's definition includes a whole range of liberated sexual practices such as homosexuality, although some gay advocates reject the association.
....
Fagan is not a timid soul. He fearlessly describes, in excruciating detail, the profound differences and assumptions that differentiate the cultures of monogamy and polyamory. In addition to the obvious case of religion in the public square, they part ways on the very concept of freedom. The former emphasizes "the freedom to be good," that is monogamous and faithful. The latter promotes "freedom from any constraints upon sexual behavior."

Monogamy seeks objective truth and norms. Polyamory is relativist in its moral orientation. The one promotes a limited constitutional state because it assumes self-imposed restraint and self-discipline. The other relies on social welfare programs "to rescue its adherents from the effects of its form of sexuality."

On children, abortion, the role of the traditional family and the responsibility of fathers as well as mothers, these cultures reflect antithetical views.

"In the culture of monogamy, men are anchored in their families and tied to their children and wives, through the free and deliberate focus of their sexuality," says Fagan. "In the culture of polyamory, which treasures sexual freedom or license, such sexual constraint by men (or women) is not expected, nor, in fact, is any attempt to foster such constraint acceptable, for that would be the antithesis of the main project of the culture of polyamory, women are anchors, while men can drift (or be cast adrift) as desired, and they do so in very large numbers."

Ironically, the culture of polyamory aggressively fosters the kind of male feminists justly decry: the sexually and physically harassing, the abusing and abandoning male. "Being the natural cost of its defining project, these and related dysfunctions justify and necessitate more safety nets," says Fagan.

Despite the costs and social pathologies fostered by the culture of polyamory, it thrives by controlling the commanding heights of the culture and public policy: childhood education, sex education, and adolescent health programs. This, argues Fagan, allows it to reach into traditional culture, gradually dismantling it and gaining "converts":

In a polemical vein, one could say the polyamorists "snatch" children away from their parents and from the culture of monogamy just as the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth century raided boys from Christian nations to train them as their own elite warriors, the Janissaries.

The culture of polyamory jealously guards these positions of strength. Fagan notes how the rise of abstinence education in the United States, essentially education in monogamy, galvanized a ferocious counter-attack resulting in cutbacks in federal funding. The resistance to home schooling in Europe displays some of the same animosity.

California on trial

It has been said that if elections actually had the power to change anything, they'd be illegal. 

Now, from the Ruth Institute:

Advocates of same sex marriage are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, they believe they only have to accept elections when they agree with the outcome of the elections.  This trial itself is not just a trial of Proposition 8. The voters of California themselves are on trial, for having the temerity to vote in favor of natural marriage.  When Ted Olson calls the campaign managers of Prop 8 to the witness stand, he is, in effect, calling the voters of California on to the stand. It is every person who voted yes on 8 who is on trial here. Make no mistake about that.  

Perhaps now you can see why I chose the quotation from Eric Voegelin for the opening of this column. Let me give you the full quotation, without the elipses, and note that Dr. Voegelin wrote this in 1938.

They (the theorists of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, both drawing on the vocabulary of German Romanticism) reject the political determination of will by the people– again especially in the German theory, where the Fuhrer is the only carrier of the people's will. In the teaching on the plebiscite, the idea that the act of voting is an act of national will is decisively rejected.  The plebiscite is to express and enforce the concordance between the objective will of the people embodied in the Fuhrer and the subjective convictions of the people. The plebiscite is a declaration of loyalty to the Fuhrer, not an announcement of an individual's will. … The god speaks only to the Fuhrer, and the people are informed of his will through the mediation of the Fuhrer. (66-7)

Voting invalid unless it conforms to the "national will:" this is not the kind of political system we want to live under. 

Not Pat Robertson

It seems Danny Glover also believes the earthquake in Haiti is retribution for human sins:

Actor Danny Glover believes that the Haitian earthquake was caused by climate change and global warming:

Says Glover: "When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I'm sayin'?" His obscene opinion would be bigger news if Glover had – in the manner of others – idiotically blamed a less-fashionable deity.

The Market for Chronic Care

The Market for Chronic Care

I have argued before that, but for third-party payers, a market for chronic care would have developed long ago. What do entrepreneurs do in every other market? They find people with unmet needs and figure out low-cost ways of solving their problems. Yet with a large and growing number of uninsured and a growing number of people with high-deductible insurance, markets for chronic care may develop anyway.

In several cities, Walgreens is offering pharmacist consultation to diabetics. (The service is free now, but there may be charges later; and, in any event, Walgreens is selling them drugs.) If it works, the program may expand to asthma, high cholesterol and obesity.

Pat Robertson Speaks -- alas

This take, by Michael Laprarie at Wizbang, is well worth reading, both for the history lesson and the multiculturism.

Robertson's clumsy reference is to Dutty Boukman, a Haitian voodoo priest who prophesied on August 22, 1791 that a group of slaves would lead a revolt and free the French slaves on Saint-Domingue. Along with an African priestess, Boukman galvanized his prophecy by performing several voodoo rituals including the sacrifice of a pig. A few days later, the Haitian Revolution began. Boukman was subsequently caught and beheaded by the French, who displayed his severed head in an attempt to convince the slaves that Boukman did not possess supernatural powers. But Boukman's legacy among the Haitian people remains strong even to this day, and so does the persistent belief that Boukman's voodoo curse still haunts the island.

....

How a Westerner understands this I think largely depends on how he understands God and spiritual forces. There are still many Christians today from fundamentalist or apostolic backgrounds who strongly believe in "spirit warfare"; that is, they believe that heavenly forces (angels) and satanic forces (demons) are perpetually engaged in the kind of warfare described in Revelation 12. ...

....

Seventy nine year old Pat Robertson is an old-school Southern Baptist. He undoubtedly believes that the voodoo practiced by the island's inhabitants, particularly the sacrifice that Dutty Boukman made to the forces of evil over 200 years ago, are shameful to God, and have caused God to choose to withhold His divine protection from the people of Haiti, even though He loves them just as he loves all of us. That's pretty Old Testament-sounding stuff, reminiscent of how the Prophets explained the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah and the exile of the Jewish people into the land of Babylon. To our modern ears, it sounds cruel and illogical.

 

But at the same time Robertson urges charity toward the Haitian people. He doesn't hate them, and hopes that their destruction will bring about their repentance -- the same effect that the Babylonian exile had on the children of Israel. Robertson's Operation Blessing is already preparing to devote the majority of its resources to provide immediate aid to the people of Haiti.

 

For the record I don't follow John MacArthur and Pat Robertson's reasoning about why bad things happen to good people. (You can read my somewhat lengthy explanation, posted at my personal blog a couple of years ago, if you wish.) But it bothers me when other people put words in their mouths and accuse them of hoping for the destruction of people they supposedly don't like. And as Mary Katherine Ham noted yesterday (with tongue placed firmly in cheek), "employing [the] Reid standard, should we not look at Robertson's record of helping disaster victims & absolve him of 'inartful' comments?"

 

Pants On the Ground!

Pants On the Ground!

With all the sadness in the world today, just watch this and smile. And get ya pants off the ground!

"You call yourself a cool cat, looking like a fool. Walking down town with your pants on the ground."

Here's another version with some additional lyrics.

Sunspots and climate

From American Thinker:

The Climategate crowd successfully worked to obscure the connection between solar activity and climate. The leaked CRU e-mails reveal how.

In 2003, two Harvard-Smithsonian Professors, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, published a peer-reviewed paper in the scientific journal Climate Research which identified solar activity as a major influence on Earth's climate. This paper also concluded that the twentieth century was not the warmest, nor was it the century with the most extreme weather over the past thousand years. These two scientists reviewed more than two hundred sources of data. The paper specifically examined climate variations observed to coincide with solar variations. One of the more notable correlations cited in this paper is the well-documented coincidence of the Little Ice Age and a solar quiet period, known as the Maunder Minimum, from A.D. 1300 to A.D. 1900. Soon and Baliunas asserted that the lack of solar activity resulted in cooler temperatures across the globe. The evidence they compiled also indicated that as the sun became more active global temperatures began to rise and the Little Ice Age ended.

....

The solar correlation became a lightning rod. More than a dozen e-mails from the Jones Gang discuss how to discredit Soon and Baliunas. Ultimately, the gang decide to compile a new paper to counter the conclusion made by Soon and Baliunas, as detailed in an e-mail from Dr. Scott Rutherford dated the 12 March 2003. Dr. Rutherford does not go head-to-head with the data presented in the Climate Research paper, but he seemingly wishes to "cook" other data to counter the honest work of Soon and Baliunas, as stated by the following:

 

First, I'd be willing to handle the data and the plotting/mapping. Second, regarding Mike's suggestions, if we use different reference periods for the reconstructions and the models we need to be extremely careful about the differences. Not having seen what this will look like, I suggest that we start with the same instrumental reference period for both (1xxx xxxx xxxx). If you are willing to send me your series please send the raw (i.e. unfiltered) series. That way I can treat them all the same. We can then decide how we want to display the results.

 

Menu Labeling, Meet Digital Gastronomy

Holy S**T! It's a food-jet printer!

Menu Labeling, Meet Digital Gastronomy

There are a lot of problems with requiring that restaurants include calorie counts on their menus and placards. But one of the biggest is that it's very difficult get accurate measurements day to day, chef to chef, and dish to dish. If the rest of the nation goes the way of the Big Apple—and it looks like it might, thanks to some provisions hidden in the health care bill—and gets tough on menu boards, restaurateurs are going to need some technological help with the compliance. Food testing is expensive and time consuming. But what about food synthesis?

Behold a new project from MIT's Fluid Interface Group, Cornucopia:

Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.

Cornucopia's cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user's favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia's chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head.

And here's the part New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and molecular gastronomist Ferran Adrià will both love:

This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but it also allows the user to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.

Note to Michael Pollan: Your grandmother certainly wouldn't recognize this.

Via John Inderdohnen

Move the UN to Dubai

The emirate of Dubai has completed the tallest building in the world -- half a mile high.

Joel Kotkin and Robert J. Cristiano at Forbes Magazine suggest we move the UN to Dubai.

Let's spell out the logic. The United Nations is a pain in the butt. It pays no taxes and annoys hard-working New Yorkers with its sloth, pretensions and cavalier disregard for traffic laws. The place is a sinkhole dominated by anti-American, anti-Semitic and authoritarian fantasies. It is far from the elegant crown jewel that celebrated the U.S.'s global ascendancy after the Second World War.

Today the U.N. building is a mostly empty shell--water dripping through its roof, asbestos lining its ceiling and an erratic heating and cooling system have forced most UN workers to new facilities. The building is in the midst of a $1.87 billion overhaul--of which the U.S., which could use the cash for myriad other things, would be on the hook for $437 million.

And the U.N. may be leaving anyway. A relocation committee has recommended that the organization move temporarily to Singapore by 2015. It will be hard to vacate Asia again for New York, which is far away from the bulk of the world's largest population centers.

....

Let's look a bit longer term. Right now there's 33.6 million square feet of mostly state-of-the-art office space in Dubai. More than 8 million square feet is vacant with millions more in the pipeline. There's a great airport--as opposed to that aerial dumpster, JFK--that is hours closer to the emerging economic powers of the new century, notably the oil states, India and China. The workforce is skilled and open to foreigners, since the vast majority are foreigners. In Dubai 83% of the 2.2 million residents are from somewhere else. Talk about cosmopolitan.

....

Bringing the United Nations to Dubai makes sense. New York gets rid of one of its worst welfare cheats, and Dubai finds new tenants to fill its vacant towers. Dubai has already built something that looks the part of a 21st-century world capital. Let it get a cast appropriate for its glittering set.

Why Whole Body Scanners Won't Work

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/whole-body-imaging/

The TSA already subjects your carry-on bags to X-ray scanning that penetrates the “skin” to show what’s beneath. Yet screeners routinely fail to discern the guns, knives, and other contraband their monitors show. Sometimes undercover federal investigators are smuggling those weapons to test screeners; other times, passengers who’ve forgotten the pistol or ammunition in their knapsack turn themselves in when they reach their gate. Expecting screeners who overlook the hunting knife beside a paperback novel to find the explosives taped near a woman’s… Well, let’s just say the distractions of whole-body imaging are considerably greater than anything in the average carry-on.

There’s a far simpler, constitutional, and less offensive way to protect aviation than photographing two million passengers in their birthday suits each day: Free the airlines from the federal government’s stranglehold on security. Let each company determine what works best for its routes, customers, and specific risks. Does anyone seriously believe that politicians and bureaucrats know more about securing planes than pilots and executives who’ve spent their lives in the industry? Even baggage handlers could give Congress a lesson in preventing terrorists from hiding bombs in checked luggage – yet the Feds dictate to them instead.

Full Body Scanners

I was wondering when it would happen.
There's an obvious question whenever you bathe a body in radiation -- what are the health effects, if any?
From the "Big Government" blog:

Are Total Body Scanners Safe? The Jury Is Still Out

....

The TSA website represents the full body scanner as a safe method of screening. However, not only are we giving up our privacy, we are also playing Russian roulette with our safety. It is important to note:

1. No long term safety tests have been conducted on these scanners

2. The energy produced by T-rays gives off heat and lies close to the laser range.
Because of this, there is a question about how safe these machines would be in the hands of individuals who may not be as well trained as a radiology technician. (Theoretically there may be damage associated with prolonged thermal exposure.)

3. Alexandrov et al. at Los Alamos National Laboratory theorized that the thermal energy given off by T-rays can damage DNA by unwinding or unzipping the double helix strands of DNA. This could possibly lead to mutations as the DNA attempts to repair itself.

It is clear that the rush to deploy these machines may put the public at unacceptable risk. The questions about safety for pregnant women, children, and the possibility of increased cancer risk need to be answered before these machines are put into place. It simply is not clear whether the risks are outweighed by the stated benefits.

Infrared lasers are much safer than visible light lasers for a couple of reasons.  Being invisible, the eye is less likely to try and focus on them, so much less chance of burning the retina.  Also, the infrared wavelengths don't penetrate the eye quite as well as visible light does.

When I was in college, the going theory was that microwaves did their damage by heating tissue.  As long as the power level was low enough that you didn't cause too much heating, microwaves did no long-term damage.  But then again, there were Russian scientists who claimed microwaves could cause behavioral problems at levels a tenth of a percent of what US science considered safe.  We seem to have quit arguing over microwaves, possibly because shielding has improved, but other forms of radiation, including cell phone transmissions, are hotly contested.

In any event, once people start speculating about the health effects of millimeter wave radiation  -- um excuse me, make that *RAY-DEE-AAAAYYYY-SHUN* -- I suspect we won't have to worry about invasions of privacy.  They won't get FDA approval.

Creationism and ID

From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Biological Design in Classrooms.

Although evolutionary biology is replete with explanations for complex biological structures, scientists concerned about evolution education have been forced to confront "intelligent design" (ID), which rejects a natural origin for biological complexity. The content of ID is a subset of the claims made by the older "creation science" movement. Both creationist views contend that highly complex biological adaptations and even organisms categorically cannot result from natural causes but require a supernatural creative agent. Historically, ID arose from efforts to produce a form of creationism that would be less vulnerable to legal challenges and that would not overtly rely upon biblical literalism. Scientists do not use ID to explain nature, but because it has support from outside the scientific community, ID is nonetheless contributing substantially to a long-standing assault on the integrity of science education.

Nature is full of complex biological adaptations such as the camera eye, the bird wing, the bacterial flagellum, the mammalian immune system, or the complex traps of orchid flowers. Evolutionary biology continues to make progress in explaining such fascinating structures through the scientific process of positing natural explanations and testing them against the natural world. Nevertheless, in recent years scientists have been forced to confront a resurgence of opposition to evolution in the political realm of public education. This new antievolutionism is called "intelligent design" (ID). Its proponents allege that it is a revolutionary new scientific explanation for complex adaptations, that it is purely secular and definitely not creationism, and that it is therefore pedagogically and legally appropriate for public school biology classrooms. However, an analysis of ID shows that in both content and history, it is a subset of an earlier antievolution movement known as creation science.

Kipling

The New Readers' Guide to the works of Rudyard Kipling

The US Military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe.

Cleaning out the inbox.

Davids Medienkritik: SPIEGEL ONLINE: "The US Military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe."

After years of calling Iraq a disaster, debacle and quagmire, SPIEGEL ONLINE has decided to declare the following:

"The US military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe."

This all stems from last week's Der SPIEGEL magazine cover feature article by Ullrich Fichtner: An enormous, fascinating and remarkably honest report on the complex situation in Iraq. (The first link above in bolded-italics leads to the English translation of that report.) SPIEGEL ONLINE is also publishing Fichtner's report that US troops are in a remarkably good mood and have high morale. That also flies directly in the face of past SPIEGEL reporting that consistently depicted US troops as demoralized, depressed, defeated, prone to suicide and suffering from low morale.

As a long-time observer of the publication, my first reaction to reading this on SPIEGEL ONLINE was: Are they on drugs?! - this directly contradicts everything they've reported for the past four years! My second reaction was: Have they finally gotten off the drugs?! Maybe reality is finally starting to sink in!

The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage - Newsweek.com

In Newsweek, Ted Olson offers what he calls The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage.

Moth study backs classic 'test case' for Darwin's theory

It was a classic experiment in the 1950s. Release moths of two different types in different environments -- unpolluted and polluted, and see which ones are subject to predation in which environments. Well, it's a bit more involved than that, and people have raised methodological issues with the original study, issues echoed with occasional accuracy in "Icons of Evolution".

Now researchers have re-done the experiment, fixing the problems identified with the original experiment. It retains its iconic status. Moth study backs classic "test case" for Darwin"s theory. Source: The Independent.

For more than a century it has been cited as the quintessential example of Darwinism in action. It was the story of the peppered moth and how its two forms had struggled for supremacy in the polluted woodlands of industrial Britain.

Every biology textbook on evolution included the example of the black and peppered forms of the moth, Biston betularia. The relative numbers of these two forms were supposed to be affected by predatory birds being able to pick off selectively either the black or peppered variety, depending on whether they rested on polluted or unpolluted trees.

It became the most widely cited example of Darwinian natural selection and how it affected the balance between two competing genes controlling the coloration of an organism. Then the doubts began to emerge.

Critics suggested that the key experiments on the peppered moth in the 1950s were flawed. Some went as far as to suggest the research was fraudulent, with the implication that the school textbooks were feeding children a lie.

Creationists smelt blood. The story of the peppered moth became a story of how Darwinism itself was flawed - with its best known example being based on fiddled data.
....
In a seminal description of his results to a scientific conference this week in Sweden, Professor Majerus gave a resounding vote of confidence in the peppered month story. He found unequivocal evidence that birds were indeed responsible for the lower numbers of the black carbonaria forms of the moth. It was a complete vindication of the peppered month story, he told the meeting.

"I conclude that differential bird predation here is a major factor responsible for the decline of carbonaria frequency in Cambridge between 2001 and 2007," Professor Majerus said.

"If the rise and fall of the peppered moth is one of the most visually impacting and easily understood examples of Darwinian evolution in action, it should be taught. It provides after all the proof of evolution," he said.
....
Professor Majerus compiled enough visual sightings of birds eating peppered moths in his garden over the seven years to show that the black form was significantly more likely to be eaten than the peppered.

A statistical analysis of the results revealed a clear example of Darwinian natural selection in action.

"The peppered moth story is easy to understand, because it involves things that we are familiar with: vision and predation and birds and moths and pollution and camouflage and lunch and death," he said. "That is why the anti-evolution lobby attacks the peppered moth story. They are frightened that too many people will be able to understand."

Natural selection in action

The peppered moth comes in two distinct, genetic varieties: the black, melanic form (carbonaria) and the mottled form (typica). Against the background of a lichen-covered tree growing in unpolluted countryside, the typica form is well camouflaged. But in polluted areas where lichens do not grow, it is the melanic form that is difficult to see.

The Victorian naturalist J W Tutt noted that 98 per cent of peppered moths caught near Manchester at the end of the 19th century were the melanic variety. He was the first to suggest that it was the result of higher predation of typica by birds. With cleaner air in the late 20th century, it was the turn of the melanic form to suffer from bird predation. Now it is the typica form that is more common in most areas of Britain.

AC Grayling - Origin of the specious

AC Grayling looks at a defense of Intelligent Design at Origin of the specious

Fuller describes Intelligent Design (ID) theory as the project of establishing “by the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence” that the world and life in it were purposefully designed by an intelligent agency competent to the task of creating a universe. Call this Point 1.

Fuller claims that ID is “behind the scientific revolution that has been under way in the West since the 17th century” because the motivating belief behind scientific enquiry is that “nature is so constructed” that it can be understood because – as St Augustine taught us – man is made in the image of God and is therefore capable of understanding the universe. Call this Point 2.

Fuller claims that there is no such thing as a “scientific consensus” anyway, and that it is false that evolutionary theory is the cumulative result of progress in scientific enquiry. Call this Point 3.

Fuller claims that science results from religion, that “no plausible alternative has yet been offered to justify the pursuit of science as a search for the ultimate systematic understanding of reality” other than belief in a divine personal creator, and that “atheism has done precious little for science.” Call this Point 4.

On Point 1: no, ID theory is not a project that proceeds on “the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence.” It starts from a fixed conclusion, and looks for evidence to support it.
....
On Point 2: from a thousand years before St Augustine, Thales and the Pre-Socratics and Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and Epicureans were thinking in recognisably scientific and proto-scientific ways about the nature and functioning of the universe, on the assumption that human intelligence is competent to understand the workings of nature, which observation abundantly suggests are regular and ordered – it needs no gods to point out how spring returns after every winter, and the crops grow again as they did before, and so manifestly on. Not only did people emphatically not have to wait for St Augustine to discover that they could enquire thus, without invoking supernaturalistic beliefs of any sort, but it is indeed a mark of the thought of Thales and his successors that they did not start from such beliefs, but began their thinking from observation and reason.
....
Now as to Point 3, about the alleged absence of a “scientific consensus” and the “mistake” of thinking that evolutionary theory is a success story of cumulative enquiry. The latter we can pass over briefly. Let us allow the cumulative confirmation of evolutionary theory to speak for itself, thus leaving Lyell’s geology, Darwin’s observations of the finches of the Galapagos, Mendel’s peas, the combination of genetic theory and understanding of selection both natural and artificial, the fossil record, comparative anatomy and physiology, and a mass of observation, experiment and discovery, to one side (nothing cumulative and progressive about this, eh?), and just remark that Fuller – as with everything else he tries to discuss in this book – must really do a lot more homework.

The “consensus” point requires a bit more attention. Fuller’s claim here is the open-a-gap technique; if scientists disagree about something, if there is no consensus among them, perhaps you can slip an alternative – a god or two? a bit of putative intelligent design? – into the gap. But Fuller really is in a muddle here. He says there is no scientific consensus (in general? or only on a case-by-case basis in regard to some cutting-edge, currently researched problem?) but nevertheless that there is a “scientific orthodoxy” which, if you do not sign up to it, excludes you from access to its structures – presumably, to jobs and funding in science.

Do we spend too little?

Short answer: Hell no.

A longer answer is offered by Charlotte Allen at the Mises Institute: Keep Your Self-Righteous Fingers Off My Processed Food

The latest cheerleader for higher prices is Ellen Ruppel Shell, a professor of science journalism at Boston University who has just published a book titled Cheap. It's not a guide to bargain-hunting. The theme of Shell's book, subtitled The High Cost of Discount Culture, is "America's dangerous liaison with Cheap."

Shell's argument goes like this: shopping at discount stores, factory outlets, and, of course, Wal-Mart (no work of social criticism is complete without a drive-by shooting aimed at that chain) exploits Chinese factory workers (who would much rather be back on the collective farm, wearing their Mao suits) and degrades the environment because much of the low-price junk wears out and ends up in landfills.
....
In an online debate with the Atlantic's economics writer, Megan McArdle, Shell observes with disapproval that, when prices are adjusted for inflation, Americans today spend "40% less on clothes, 20% less on food, more than 50% less on appliances, about 25% less on owning and maintaining a car" than they did during the early 1970s. Over that same period, Census Bureau tables show, US median household income rose by at least 18% in constant dollars — despite the much-lamented (by Shell and others) decampment of "once-flourishing" manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. That's why even America's poorest people nowadays can afford automobiles, cell phones, and TVs.

Yet a significant number of social critics wish they couldn't. Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst — cited approvingly by Shell — has argued for higher clothing prices and steep taxes on fossil fuels in the name of various social and green causes, even though, as he conceded in a January article in the Nation, the latter measure would "impose higher energy prices on businesses and individuals."

The most zealous of the spend-more crowd, however, are the food intellectuals who salivated, as it were, at a steep rise in the cost of groceries earlier this year, including such basics as milk and eggs. Some people might worry about the effect on recession-hit families of a 17% increase in the price of milk. Not Alice Waters, the food-activist owner of Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant, who shudders at the thought of sampling so much as a strawberry that hasn't been nourished by organic compost and picked that morning at a nearby farm — and she thinks everyone else in America should shudder too. "Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes," Waters airily informed the New York Times in April.
....
Those who think that there is something wrong with owning more than two pairs of sneakers or that exquisite fastidiousness about what you put into your mouth equals virtue need to be teleported back to, say, the Depression itself. Then, privation was in earnest and few people had telephones, much less cell phones.

Read some 1930s memoirs: Back then, people who couldn't afford "quality" furniture slept on mattresses on the floor and hammered together makeshift tables out of orange crates. They went barefoot during the summer and sewed their children's clothes out of (nonorganic) flour sacks. That was what "cheap" meant then — not today's plethora of affordable goods, which the social critics would like to take away from us.

People who want to support organic local farmers and craftsmen producing one-off hand-crafted chairs are welcome to do so. People who can't afford the higher prices are better off because they can buy servicable equivalents for something they can afford.

Searching for the earliest forms of life

The earliest ancestor of living things may have been a rock.

From the New Scientist:

If Martin is right, the last common ancestor of life on Earth was a sophisticated entity in terms of its genes and proteins, and was powered by proton currents rather than fermentation. Yet at the same time, its bounding membranes were apparently different to anything found today. It was life, but not as we know it.

If life did evolve in alkaline hydrothermal vents, it might have happened something like this:

1. Water percolated down into newly formed rock under the seafloor, where it reacted with minerals such as olivine, producing a warm alkaline fluid rich in hydrogen, sulphides and other chemicals - a process called serpentinisation. This hot fluid welled up at alkaline hydrothermal vents like those at the Lost City, a vent system discovered near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 2000.

2. Unlike today's seas, the early ocean was acidic and rich in dissolved iron. When upwelling hydrothermal fluids reacted with this primordial seawater, they produced carbonate rocks riddled with tiny pores and a "foam" of iron-sulphur bubbles.

3. Inside the iron-sulphur bubbles, hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide, forming simple organic molecules such as methane, formate and acetate. Some of these reactions were catalysed by the iron-sulphur minerals. Similar iron-sulphur catalysts are still found at the heart of many proteins today.

4. The electrochemical gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic seawater leads to the spontaneous formation of acetyl phosphate and pyrophospate, which act just like adenosine triphosphate or ATP, the chemical that powers living cells. These molecules drove the formation of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – and nucleotides, the building blocks for RNA and DNA.

5. Thermal currents and diffusion within the vent pores concentrated larger molecules like nucleotides, driving the formation of RNA and DNA – and providing an ideal setting for their evolution into the world of DNA and proteins. Evolution got under way, with sets of molecules capable of producing more of themselves starting to dominate.

6. Fatty molecules coated the iron-sulphur froth and spontaneously formed cell-like bubbles. Some of these bubbles would have enclosed self-replicating sets of molecules – the first organic cells. The earliest protocells may have been elusive entities, though, often dissolving and reforming as they circulated within the vents.

7. The evolution of an enzyme called pyrophosphatase, which catalyses the production of pyrophosphate, allowed the protocells to extract more energy from the gradient between the alkaline vent fluid and the acidic ocean. This ancient enzyme is still found in many bacteria and archaea, the first two branches on the tree of life.

8. Some protocells started using ATP as well as acetyl phosphate and pyrophosphate. The production of ATP using energy from the electrochemical gradient is perfected with the evolution of the enzyme ATP synthase, found within all life today.

9. Protocells further from the main vent axis, where the natural electrochemical gradient is weaker, started to generate their own gradient by pumping protons across their membranes, using the energy released when carbon dioxide reacts with hydrogen. This reaction yields only a small amount of energy, not enough to make ATP. By repeating the reaction and storing the energy in the form of an electrochemical gradient, however, protocells "saved up" enough energy for ATP production.

10. Once protocells could generate their own electrochemical gradient, they were no longer tied to the vents. Cells left the vents on two separate occasions, with one exodus giving rise to bacteria and the other to archaea.

IQ vs Common Sense

Bruce G Charlton looks at why very intelligent people are seen as lacking common sense.

...my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

There's lots more at the link.

How MassCare messed up health care

Wendy Button writes at Politics Daily that thanks to having moved to Massachusetts, she can no longer afford health insurance. "Universal Coverage" isn't working.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven't changed. I didn't stop writing and become a stunt double. I don't smoke. I drink a little and every once in a while a little more than I should. I have a Newfoundland dog. I am only 41. There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code -- to a state with universal health care.

Massachusetts has enacted many of the necessary reforms being talked about in Washington. There is a mandate for all residents to get insurance, a law to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, an automatic enrollment requirement, and insurance companies are no longer allowed to cap coverage or drop people when they get sick because they forgot to include a sprained ankle back in 1989 on their application.
....
I want health care reform. I need it, but I want Washington to start over. It doesn't make me "un-American" or "astroturf" or "racist." I'm a critic because what Washington is talking about doing has made health insurance unaffordable in Massachusetts.

If Washington won't go for a simple clean move to a system like Medicare for All, then it needs to do one reform, one new law, at a time -- not with a 1,000 page bill where strange things can hide. Line up the 80 percent of things we agree on and vote one at a time to change pre-existing conditions, cut that $500 billion in Medicare's "waste, fraud, and abuse," create meaningful lawsuit reform, and add some real competition to insurance companies whether it's a public option or a pilot exchange program. Show the country that this is possible with lower premiums and more efficiency and then go for the tough stuff. Critics like me want something done right because we actually are up the creek without a paddle.

Building a brain

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1240410/The-real-Frankenstein-experiment-One-mans-mission-create-living-mind-inside-machine.html

Eventually, computers will be built with the power to hold a virtual copy of a human brain.  In theory, this copy should be able to do anything a real human brain can do -- think, feel, worry about the state of its soul.   Will the copy behave the way a "real" brain does?

Yes or no, the answer to that question will be astonishing.

Making toasting cool

Crumbs... toast the future and watch your bread brown to perfection
By Rob Lyons
Last updated at 12:28 PM on 05th January 2010

The days of breakfast ruined by burnt toast became a thing of the past yesterday as the world's first see-through toaster went on sale.

Engineers have spent 15 years perfecting the £160 Magimix Vision Toaster, which has double insulated clear glass on both sides giving a panoramic view of each slice as it cooks.

The hurdle was finding a way to cook the bread in the toaster without using traditional metal elements which obscured the bread.

Magimix solved the problem by placing this metal plates behind long life quartz elements in the corners of the toaster which deflect heat evenly across the bread.

Engineers have spent 15 years perfecting the £160 Magimix Vision Toaster, which has double insulated clear glass on both sides

Now hungry users can watch as they brown baguettes, crumpets, buns and teacakes to perfection and take them out at just before they become too crispy.

After years of testing and creating five versions of the product, Magimix finally settled on a finished version of the toaster which made the toast look like it was hovering last year.

It has been initially launched at five John Lewis stores in the UK this month, and is expected to be rolled out across other stores nationwide later this year.

Magimix Managing Director Simon Kinder, said the company could have rushed the product into production four years ago but held off because they wanted it to be perfect

how to solve differential equations

at WikiHow

http://www.wikihow.com/Solve-Differential-Equations

Heating Homes to 451°F

Pensioners in Britain are burning books to keep warm.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: 'Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.'

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

That's 25p for a kilogram of coal, and 10p for a kilogram of books.
I'm sure there are large quantities of creationist books that can be shipped over. 

Health care: The States’ Failed Experiments

Peter Suderman looks at how health care reforms similar to Obamacare have worked when tried in the individual states. The States’ Failed Experiments.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously envisioned the states serving as laboratories, trying “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” On health care, that’s just what they’ve done. Like participants in a national science fair, state governments have tested variants on most of the major health care reforms Congress is considering. The results include dramatically higher premiums in the individual market, spiraling public costs, and reduced access to care. In other words, the reforms have failed.
....
Despite these state-level failures, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing a slate of similar reforms. Unlike most high school science fair participants, they seem unaware that the point of doing experiments is to identify what actually works. Instead, they’ve identified what doesn’t—and decided to do it again.

Climate, Geoengineering, and Revealed Preferences

Glenn Reynolds has said of the climate change debate what I say about any number of issues: I'll believe it's a crisis when they start acting like it's a crisis.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens looks at people's response to suggestions on dealing with a warming earth inFreaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics - WSJ.com.

Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.

No, a cheap, easy solution that doesn't disrupt society or the economy just won't do it for them.

But when it comes to the religion of global warming—the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion—Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, "less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations." They observe that "not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity." They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.

But perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions. Hence world hunger was largely conquered not by a massive effort at population control, but by the development of new and sturdier strains of wheat and rice. Hence infection and mortality rates in hospitals declined dramatically as doctors began to appreciate the need to wash their hands.

A drowning man, it's said, will clutch at any straw. If we were really drowning in global warming, it seems to me the experts would grasp at any possible solution. Instead, it seems as if the experts are drowning in human prosperity, and are grasping at climate change in order to "solve" the problem of too much prosperity.

A Dark Matter Breakthrough?

From the Wall Street Journal: A Dark Matter Breakthrough?

Beginning in the 1970s, evidence began to accumulate that there was much more mass out there than meets the eye. Scientists, mostly by observing the speed of rotation of our galaxy, estimated that there was perhaps 10 times as much dark matter as visible material.

At around the same time, independent computer calculations following the possible gravitational formation of galaxies supported this idea. The calculations suggested that only some new type of material that didn't interact as normal matter does could account for the structures we see.

Meanwhile, in the completely separate field of elementary particle physics, my colleagues and I had concluded that in order to understand what we see, it is quite likely that a host of new elementary particles may exist at a scale beyond what accelerators at the time could detect. This is one of the reasons there is such excitement about the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Last month, it finally began to produce collisions, and it might eventually directly produce these new particles.

Practical Joke in Chief?

Years ago, I read a piece in which the inventors of the "C" programming language announced the language was devised as a practical joke, only people never got it.

Now, Michael Avitablile at Wizbang cites Sasha Baron Cohen claiming Barack Obama was a hoax candidate. Sacha Baron Cohen Admits: Obama A Big Practical Joke.

"The trouble with political jokes is they get elected."

Climategate investigated at the Daily Mail

We have a special investigation at the London Daily Mail. SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Climate change emails row deepens - and Russians admit they DID send them.

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.
....
Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, could in no sense be described as a climate change sceptic, let alone a ‘denier’.

'Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action,’ he said. ‘But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.’

Pielke’s verdict on the scandal is damning.

‘These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look.

'They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics.

‘They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.’

Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline’.
....
Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’

However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling.

Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.
....
Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.
....
Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

Openness in climate science

From Reason Magazine: David Harsanyi discusses the trials and tribulations of attempts to get access to information from the climate researchers in his article: Hide the Decline.

In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government.

Or, at least, he should.

When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at The National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics and other evildoers had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context.

To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information Act request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help contextualize what they've been talking about.

Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on these innocuous comments by Trenberth: "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't"; "we are (not) close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter."

How to chill the planet

In the Wall Street Journal, Robert Watson And Mohamed El-Ashry look at A Fast, Cheap Way to Cool the Planet. Because of its long residence time in the atmosphere, cutting carbon dioxide has a fairly slow response time. If we cut methane, however, it will clear from the atmosphere much more quickly, and so the planet's response time will be much faster.

Sometimes called the "other greenhouse gas," methane is responsible for 75% as much warming as carbon dioxide measured over any given 20 years. Unlike carbon dioxide, which remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane lasts only a decade but packs a powerful punch while it's there.

Methane's short life makes it especially interesting in the short run, given the pace of climate change. If we need to suppress temperature quickly in order to preserve glaciers, reducing methane can make an immediate impact. Compared to the massive requirements necessary to reduce CO2, cutting methane requires only modest investment. Where we stop methane emissions, cooling follows within a decade, not centuries. That could make the difference for many fragile systems on the brink.
....
Captured methane gas can be used as a clean energy source, contributing to energy security and diversification as well as reducing damaging black carbon (soot) and CO2 emissions. Solving the methane problem will lead to a higher quality of life by cleaning up city and agricultural wastes and odors, and curbing air pollution from dirty stoves and local industries. It will also create local jobs in construction and operation of methane-abating equipment.

Methane comes from a variety of sources: landfills, sewage streams, coal mines, oil and gas drilling operations, agricultural wastes, and cattle farms. For most of these sources, relatively cheap "end of pipe" technologies are available to collect methane and convert it to useful energy rather than venting it to the atmosphere.